The Blue Bar (Blue Mumbai #1)(65)

“That still doesn’t explain why you spoke with him and not one of his team.”

“He requested me to give the contract for the interior decoration to his fiancée’s company.”

“I’m expected to believe that?”

“Whether you believe it or not is up to you, sir. I have the transaction records to prove it. She did all the interiors of my apartment—she created gold accents in all the furnishings.”

He would need to verify the legitimacy of the transactions. It would be quite easy to use interior decoration as a front for another, less legal business.

“OK, let’s say I believe you. What about your clients? They must have transferred money to your bank account, too?”

“They paid in cash.”

Of course. Black money. He glanced at Naik, who remained in position behind Shetty, a recorder peeking out of her pocket. The information might not be used as evidence, but it was important to save all of it.

“I kept half the fee. The other half went to the girls. I was honest—gave them their share without fail.”

Honest. Arnav wanted to laugh. Shetty seemed convinced of his own goodness.

Naik took over and fired off questions about the bar girls who’d been sent to this client. How many times for assignments at night. Dates. Payments. Shetty took out his phone, flipped to his notes, and began to read out loud.





CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR


BILAL

Bilal paced the muddy path that led to the old, sprawling farmhouse from the jungle. The thought of returning gave him jitters, but he couldn’t leave the boy alone. The papers spoke of the Versova case. A brief article, but it would create problems if the twenty-four-hour television news channels picked it up. Sooner or later, Bilal would have a target painted on his back, no matter where he escaped to. Either the boy or the police would get him. Meanwhile, his dead master’s soul would haunt his nightmares, as it had done the past days he’d spent trying to leave Mumbai.

Protect him, the master had said on his deathbed.

Given the master’s disdain for his son, Bilal couldn’t understand his last request to protect his boy at all costs. Bilal had promised. Had the master not picked him up, he would have been scrounging in rubbish bins for breakfast or turning into a pickpocket on crowded Mumbai trains.

The master hadn’t suffered a day of illness in his life. The sturdy forest officer’s sudden heart attack seemed suspicious, but Bilal never talked to the boy about it. What would have been the point?

Bilal would never know why the master chose to marry that little piece of ass in his middle age. He could have enjoyed her without the marriage trap. He had a boy already, so it couldn’t have been because he craved a son. He died before he could enjoy being a father to the younger son, anyway.

Unlike the master, Bilal hadn’t been fool enough to get married or have children. The boy. As close to a child as he’d ever have. What kind of parent would escape at the first hint of menace? They’d evaded capture all these years, he and the boy. Maybe they still could.

Bilal kicked at a stone, smacked the newspaper roll on the trunk of a burly semal tree. He glanced up at the farmhouse—his home since he was ten, when the master rescued him. Put food in his stomach. Taught him to read.

Left on his own, the boy would destroy himself and others. Yes, that woman in her fancy blue-sequined saree had been a monster. But someone had to stop the boy. Bilal unfurled the paper in his hand and checked the article once again. He’d messed up the cleaning job—up to him to contain the spill.





CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE


ARNAV

Arnav watched Shetty and Naik—Shetty was giving them all the information he could in a desperate bid to have his legal and not-so-legal businesses left alone. Arnav stepped into the corridor, took aside a constable, and asked him to highlight all the calls between Shetty and Taneja Estate Holdings.

His phone rang. Tara. He asked her to hold on so he could get himself somewhere more private.

On his way out, he heard a drunken man in the temporary lockup break into a Bollywood song, “Har pal yahan jee bhar jiyo, Phir kya pata, kal ho na ho.” The drunkard was a regular, so the constables let him be. He sang in a soulful, broken voice, and caused no harm. They locked him up whenever he chased pedestrians, insisting they listen to him. This was Mumbai—too many artists, not enough art lovers.

Arnav paused a moment to take in the truth of the clichéd words sung over and over again—“Live each moment down to its marrow, who knows if there is a tomorrow”—thanked the constable who appeared with a glass of orange juice, and sipped it as he limped out of the station and into the muggy air.

“I’m in an interview,” he said to Tara, pleased she’d called him. “What’s my pagli up to?”

The station’s gates opened on the main road, with its onset of evening traffic rush, the cacophony and headlights. Beside the police station, garlands of Diwali lights festooned the balconies of an apartment building, blinking in the growing dark.

“I know you left the hospital,” Tara said, “Did you eat lunch? What about your medicines?”

“My constables are behaving like a bunch of nannies.”

“We must talk. It’s important.”

Tara went on but cars honked and braked on the road behind him. He could not hear her. Searching for a quieter spot, he turned left from the gate and walked along the open-air corridor that led into the station’s backyard.