Bad Day at the Vulture Club Read online

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He told me they had done everything within their power to find my father’s killer.’

  Chopra gave a wry smile. ‘Yet here I am.’

  ‘Yet here you are.’

  A silence passed between them as he evaluated the situation.

  The agency was busier than ever.

  Even with the help of his associate private investigator, Abbas Rangwalla – a former policeman who had served as Chopra’s deputy for two decades at the local station in Sahar – there was more work than they could presently handle. He did not need this case. He particularly did not need to tread on the toes of the Brihanmumbai police, who had only recently begun to invite him back to work on investigations they did not have the manpower to handle themselves. If it leaked out that the Zorabian family had employed a private investigator to look into Cyrus’s killing, Chopra would swiftly find himself the centre of unwelcome attention, a development he did not relish.

  And yet, there was something here that did not sit right with him.

  That a man as well-known as Cyrus Zorabian should be murdered in the city was bad enough – but in a city of twenty million the fact of a single murder was a statistical inevitability. What set this case apart was the conviction of Cyrus’s daughter that perhaps, just perhaps, those who should have followed through in investigating that death had not applied their shoulders fully to the wheel. That, somehow, they had not given of their best because the victim was a man out of favour with those at the very top of the city’s power structure.

  On the day that he had retired, Chopra had been accused by the mother of a murdered boy of not caring because they were poor. Her words had stung him deeply. He was a man for whom the notion of justice went deeper than rhetoric. If a principle was to have any value at all it had to be applied equally to rich and poor, powerful and disenfranchised: this simple truth had always been apparent to him. Did Cyrus Zorabian deserve less because he was wealthy, or because his family name commanded great influence?

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will take the case.’

  Perizaad gave a grimace of acknowledgement. ‘Buckley will give you the names of everyone the police interviewed in connection with my father’s death.’

  ‘Frankly, I would rather speak directly with the man in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘Man?’ said Perizaad archly. ‘How do you know it was not a woman?’

  Chopra raised a surprised eyebrow. ‘I—’ he began, but Perizaad took pity on him.

  ‘Buckley will arrange the meeting for you. I will also speak to the commissioner. Willingly or unwillingly he will instruct his people to give you all the cooperation you need. But I warn you: the man in question is an imbecile.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘Rao,’ said Perizaad. ‘ACP Suresh Rao. He is with the CBI.’

  Chopra’s ears rang like tolling church bells. He suddenly found it hard to breathe, as if the air had been sucked from the room.

  Rao.

  Of all the names that Perizaad Zorabian might have set forth this was the one Chopra had least expected, and would have least wished to hear. For many years, Suresh Rao had served as his commanding officer when Chopra had run the Sahar police station. Even then the man had been a two-chip thug, the sort of incompetent and congenitally corrupt policeman responsible for the terrible reputation enjoyed by the Indian police service. In the recent past Rao and Chopra had clashed when his investigations had cut across Rao’s work at the CBI, the Central Bureau of Investigation. There was little love lost between them; Chopra did not relish the prospect of crossing swords with Rao once more.

  ‘Do you know him?’ said Perizaad.

  ‘Yes,’ breathed Chopra. ‘Unfortunately, I do.’

  She squinted suspiciously at him, but declined to enquire further. ‘I will expect regular updates. If you need anything, anything at all, simply ask Buckley.’

  ‘I would like to ask you a few questions now, to flesh out some background detail.’

  She glanced at her watch, then nodded. Quickly, he went over the basics with her, covering Zorabian family history, a rundown of her father’s closest friends, an insight into the business behind their fortune. Perizaad appeared in a hurry, and he sensed that there was more to be dug out here.

  When she was done, she swept past him, then turned back at the door. Her eyes alighted on Ganesha’s backside. ‘I was informed that you seem to be wandering around with a pet elephant. I thought it might be some sort of elaborate joke. Clearly, I was wrong.’

  ‘He is not a pet,’ said Chopra stiffly. ‘His name is Ganesha.’

  ‘Ganesha,’ echoed Perizaad, as if testing out the name.

  Hearing his name spoken out loud the little elephant flapped his ears, but declined to turn and face the woman. His bottom trembled gently.

  ‘He appears to be of a somewhat nervous disposition,’ said Perizaad dryly.

  ‘He’s not normally like this,’ mumbled Chopra. ‘I’m not sure what’s got into him.’

  ‘I hope his guardian has a stronger stomach for the fight.’ She turned and left.

  Chopra glanced down at his ward. ‘Well, thanks for embarrassing us both,’ he muttered.

  Ganesha gave him a sheepish tap with his trunk, then went back to examining the intricate mosaic between his blunt-toed feet.

  Chopra swallowed his irritation. The little elephant had been increasingly distracted of late. He wondered what was going on beneath that knobbly skull, with its little cluster of short hairs.

  He was prevented from dwelling on the matter further by Buckley, returned to usher them out of the building.

  As he swung briskly along, he handed Chopra the list that Perizaad had mentioned. ‘Ms Zorabian has asked me to arrange an appointment for you with ACP Rao. I shall request that he meet with you first thing tomorrow morning at the CBI headquarters in Nariman Point. I trust that will be satisfactory.’

  At the gates, Chopra paused. ‘Perizaad said that you worked for Cyrus Zorabian for almost a decade.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ said Buckley, glancing impatiently at his watch, an elaborately expensive platinum affair, Chopra couldn’t help but notice.

  ‘In all that time did you become aware of anyone who hated him enough to want to kill him?’

  Buckley blinked from behind his spectacles. ‘The truth? No. He was not a dislikeable man. Yes, at times he did or said things that upset others, but enough to kill him? It’s unthinkable.’

  Chopra nodded, then headed back across the road towards his van, Ganesha following closely in his wake.

  The Poo2Loo campaign

  It took an hour to drive from Worli back to Sahar. Chopra’s first port of call was the restaurant.

  He had named the place after his wife – known to friends and family alike as Poppy – and it served now not only as a base of operations for the detective agency, but also as a home for Ganesha, who lived happily in a little mud wallow in the rear courtyard, beneath an ancient mango tree.

  The restaurant was also home to Irfan, the ten-year-old street urchin Chopra and Poppy had all but adopted.

  The boy had swaggered into the restaurant the previous year, pulling up his tattered shorts with his deformed left hand, flopping his mop of unkempt dark hair around as he stared Chopra down and convinced him that he would make a first-rate waiter.

  Chopra had never regretted his decision.

  Irfan – whose recently deceased father had, for years, forced him into a life of petty thievery – had proven to be an enterprising and hard-working addition to the place. He had also become firm friends with Ganesha, the pair of them as thick as thieves, and as adept at getting into trouble. Irfan worked a day shift at the restaurant. The evenings he spent playing with his elephant companion, at least on those occasions he wasn’t being smothered by Poppy’s lavish attentions.

  In the twenty-four years of their marriage, Chopra’s only regret was that he and Poppy had been unable to have c
hildren. Nevertheless, they had weathered the disappointment together, their shared adversity serving to settle their longstanding affection for one another deeper on its foundations. Yet the arrival of Ganesha and Irfan had changed things irrevocably – Poppy had found an outlet for her long-suppressed mothering instincts, and there was little Chopra could do about it except get out of the way.

  Chopra left Irfan to settle Ganesha in and arrange his evening feed, and drove home.

  Edging the van into the compound of the complex in which his apartment tower was located he discovered, to his mild shock, Poppy engaged in a heated argument in the courtyard of their building.

  Poppy and Chopra lived on the fifteenth floor of Poomalai Apartments, another of Mumbai’s ubiquitous tower blocks. As with most people in the city – those who didn’t live in the slums, at any rate – these high-rise prisons were home. Poomalai was one of three towers, all corralled inside a walled and gated compound, ostensibly guarded by young Bahadur, though, in Chopra’s opinion, a corpse might have proved more vigilant.

  A peanut bounced off his shoulder.

  He glanced up.

  A number of his neighbours were leaning over their balconies looking down on the evening’s impromptu entertainment.

  He returned his attention to the spectacle before him.

  Poppy, hands aggressively attached to hips, stood beside a technicolour poster pasted to the side of the tower. Bahadur, the scrawny security guard, was attempting to make himself invisible behind his wife’s slender form. A glue brush was clutched guiltily in his hand.

  Standing directly before the pair of them, arms folded across her narrow chest, stood Mrs Subramanium, the president of the complex’s managing committee. The old woman, resplendent in her habitual black sari – complemented by an iron-grey hairstyle that had always put Chopra in mind of India’s formidable former prime minister, Indira Gandhi – was glaring with ill-concealed anger at the poster.

  It was clear that Poppy and Mrs Subramanium were engaged in another of their frequent stand-offs.

  He sighed inwardly.

  Early on in their tenure at Poomalai, Poppy, realising that Mrs Subramanium ruled the complex with an iron hand, had set herself up to oppose the old martinet’s reign of terror. And so had begun a campaign of guerrilla warfare that had left most of the building’s hapless residents either trapped beneath the boot-heel of Mrs Subramanium’s increasingly draconian edicts, or harried into joining Poppy’s well-meaning subversions.

  He transferred his attention momentarily to the poster, in an attempt to understand the present impasse.

  The poster depicted a series of cartoons of an average-looking Indian man walking along the street, before stepping, with exaggerated disgust, into a pile of excrement. A glaring slogan, in foot-high red letters, stretched across the top of the poster: JOIN THE POO2LOO CAMPAIGN.

  Chopra had heard of the campaign – who hadn’t?

  It had been everywhere these past weeks, with its catchy theme song ‘Take the poo to the loo’. Everyone knew that public defecation was a serious problem in India, but until now no one had ever bothered to do anything about it. And then UNICEF had launched its campaign, hot on the heels of which came a wildly successful Bollywood film depicting the travails of an educated young woman marrying into a rural household without an internal lavatory.

  UNICEF claimed that millions of people defecated out in the open in India each day, delivering some fifty million kilos of solid human waste on to the nation’s streets.

  Chopra wasn’t surprised by the figures. Sometimes, it felt as if the whole country was slowly being buried under this avalanche of shit.

  Clearly, his wife – an inveterate pursuer of social causes – had decided to bring the campaign to their doorstep.

  ‘This poster is an offence to public decency,’ Mrs Subramanium was saying.

  ‘The offence,’ countered Poppy, narrowing her eyes, ‘is the disease caused by human waste.’

  ‘Look around you, Mrs Chopra,’ said the old woman. ‘There is no waste, human or otherwise, here. I do not allow it.’

  This much was true, Chopra thought. The old tyrant ran a tight ship. A man with rampant dysentery would not dare soil a single square inch of the building for fear of incurring her wrath.

  ‘But we must think of society at large,’ muttered Poppy, through gritted teeth. ‘Out there, people are defecating like there is no tomorrow, defecating all over the place, defecating left, right and centre. We must educate them. It is our duty.’

  ‘Instead of educating them, perhaps we should punish them,’ suggested Mrs Subramanium curtly. ‘A sound thrashing or a night in jail each time some incontinent loafer decided to leave their calling card on the street. I think that might be more effective than your obscene posters.’

  Sighing, Chopra waded into the fracas.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Following his evening meal, he shut himself into the small office he maintained at home. He logged on to the Internet and began to search for information on Cyrus Zorabian to add to the sketchy details he had obtained from Perizaad. A polished calabash pipe stuck out of the side of his mouth. Chopra did not smoke; the pipe was a prop, something that helped him to think. He had been a fan of Sherlock Holmes ever since he had seen Basil Rathbone playing the iconic character in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, and the pipe helped settle him into the great detective’s mental shoes. On the TV behind him India were playing cricket abroad; he turned briefly as his favourite player Sachin Tendulkar dropped a catch.

  In Chopra’s opinion, it had been a tough one.

  The Internet search returned far more than he would have liked – Zorabian was not as uncommon a name as he had supposed.

  He bent to his task, clicking through the various references, only stopping to scratch in his notebook whenever anything of significance caught his eye. Midway through, he took out his mobile phone and dialled Homi Contractor. What was the point of having a Parsee for a friend if he couldn’t pick his brain? Homi was glad to help, and his information supplemented Chopra’s own research.

  Two hours later, he sat back and examined his efforts.

  Given that they were one of the country’s pre-eminent business families, the Zorabians had managed to maintain a relatively low profile. Much of the information Chopra had found centred around Cyrus’s legendary ancestor Rustom Zorabian, a larger-than-life character whose deeds had entered the annals of both Parsee and Mumbai folklore. The line of heritage from Rustom to Cyrus was distinguished by a cadre of dependable, if unspectacular, men who had steadily grown the family business into an empire that spanned the country. The sole blip in this progression of excellence had been Cyrus’s great-great-grandfather, known to history as the ‘Mad Zorabian’, who had earned that sobriquet thanks to his numerous well-documented peccadillos, which included dressing in petticoats for formal occasions and playing bagpipes below the Gateway to India as a means of serenading incoming ships.

  Cyrus himself was an only child. His father and mother – nondescript characters by all accounts – had both died in his teenage years. He had grown up in the traditions of the Parsee community, attending a staunchly Anglo school, followed by a few years abroad in England pursuing a degree in aeronautics at Cambridge University (the article failed to clarify whether he had actually graduated), and then a return to Mumbai to take the helm of the family business.

  In 1981 he married a fellow Parsee.

  In short order, they had two children, a boy and a girl. The marriage, by all accounts, was a successful one – there were no rumours of affairs or marital strife, at least none that had made the society pages.

  Cyrus’s wife had passed from cancer six years previously.

  A year later Cyrus had made the news when he banned two Parsee priests from performing rites at Mumbai’s so-called Towers of Silence. The priests had attracted Cyrus’s ire by overseeing a number of cremations in response to the scarcity of vultures at the time. Cremation
went against the Parsee practice of excarnation, of permitting birds of carrion to consume their dead in the towers.

  Cyrus had made it clear that he would never permit such ‘modern’ practices at Doongerwadi, the site where the towers were located. The preservation of the community’s values, he had publicly stated, was paramount.

  To his surprise, Chopra found little information about Cyrus’s children, Perizaad and Darius.

  Clearly they too valued their privacy.

  A knock on the door, followed by Poppy. He smiled at her. ‘You know Mrs Subramanium isn’t going to let it go.’ Poppy had won the first round – the poster would stay, for now – but Chopra knew the old woman was smarting. No doubt they’d hear from her soon.

  ‘I know. It’s just . . . We spend so much time telling the world how incredible India is, I think we sometimes forget that for so many people it is anything but. Don’t you think it is our duty to help?’

  ‘You know that I do.’

  She put an arm around his shoulders. He smiled again, and allowed her to lead him back into the living room.

  Crime Branch showdown

  The next morning he picked Ganesha up from the restaurant, then headed south to Nariman Point and the CBI headquarters. Traffic was already snarling the streets as he drove out towards the Western Express highway, a dual carriageway that speared in a single sinuous line to the southern half of the city, and along the length of which appeared to have been compressed enough trucks, vans, cars, motorbikes, bicycles, rickshaws, taxis, bullock-carts, stray flocks of goats and the occasional suicidal pedestrian to fill the traffic lanes of most good-sized countries.

  It took almost an hour to get there.

  Having parked the van on a busy side street, he picked his way deftly through the throng of morning commuters rushing to their offices, brandishing briefcases and lunch tiffins, jabbering on mobile phones; a heaving, Brownian motion of humanity flowing along the city’s streets. The fact that a small elephant accompanied him elicited almost no interest, aside from the occasional muttered oath as Ganesha prevented a would-be titan of industry from advancing along the road.