“There are such places there, Inspector. There are. I have talked with my friend the Minister, and he has talked with his friend in Delhi. External Affairs, Inspector. And they have consulted Consul General in Los Angeles, California. And, Inspector, it seems that in what they are calling the Golden State there are many, many ashrams. And it is in one of these that my Nirmala is being kept.”
“Kept? Sir?”
“Yes, Inspector. Kept-kept. It is a swami who is there. From India. And that girl is saying she is wanting to be there with him for ever. He is preventing her, Inspector.”
“Preventing, sir?”
“Yes, yes. And there is worse also.”
“Sir, worse?”
“Inspector, when I am sending Nirmala to California naturally I am opening a bank account for her. State Bank of India, 707 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.”
“Yes, sir. Naturally a father would do that. If he could.”
“But naturally also, Inspector, I am making it joint-account. Joint-account with me. So that I am always able to know-know what that girl is spending only.”
“Yes, sir, I see.”
“Inspector, she has cleared account. Every rupee, every dollar, Inspector. That man has got his hands on all. All. And, Inspector …”
“Yes, Mr. Shahani, sir?”
“For that girl I have arranged a first-class marriage. With the son of Mr. R. K. Ajmani, R. K. Ajmani and Co. (Private) Ltd., import-export. That boy is very, very active and their business and mine would fit together like two cooing doves only.”
The crorepati leant forward suddenly and sharply across the huge sheet of unspotted white blotting-paper in front of him.
“Inspector,” he said, hammering out each word, “tonight-tonight you will fly to California, and there you will fetch back my daughter, whatever that damn-fool private eye is saying about happy-pappy in that ashram. You will make her see reason, Inspector, if it is taking you every day of your leave-time and twice as much more. I cannot go, Inspector. What would Shahani Enterprises do if I am not here? Mrs. Shahani cannot go. Naturally, she is not speaking much English. I have no one else to go. You are going to go for me, Inspector Ghote.”
TWO
It was very, very different from Banares. Los Angeles airport’s futuristic control tower, perched like a concrete spider on four high, shell-thin arching legs, was the first piece of California that Inspector Ghote took in, his head throbbing and dazed after upon hour of hour of time-annihilating air travel.
But, he told himself, that is not something in a science-fiction magazine. It is real. It is a part of the real America, land of every sort of mechanical marvel, of space shots, of automation, of efficiency.
As he left the plane and followed his fellow passengers through the airport building, other random, equally vivid flashes impinged on him. There were tanned faces, male and female, with click-on, click-off smiles bidding him time and again “Have a nice day.” But no nice day awaited him. That he knew with inner certainty.
And there were the enormous men everywhere, great towering muscular six-footers every one, glowing with good feeding. And girls. He had found himself standing behind two of them on a moving staircase taking him he was not quite sure where. They too were so tall, and they radiated such healthiness—easy-moving limbs, morning-fresh complexions, hair tossing freely from side to side.
How would he manage among such giants of people, people from whom high-sailing confidence shone out like the bright glow from a dance of night-time fireflies? In this ashram where Nirmala Shahani had put herself, though its head might be an Indian holy man himself, perhaps an antagonist endowed with formidable mystic power, he would find her surrounded, no doubt, by Americans. Surrounded by Americans like the towering creatures on every side of him now, casually purposeful amid the hurly-burly of the airport, itself so different from the familiar, slow-paced, bureaucratic worm-windings of Santa Cruz Airport back at home. How would he be able to deal with such beings? To force, if necessary, answers out of them? To sift truth from the lies they might put before him? How could he fight such guardians away from the girl he had travelled so many thousands of miles to rescue?
Suddenly the universal sign for a men’s room caught his eye. He broke from the steadily moving file of newly-landed passengers and plunged into it to gain a few moments’ respite.
But even in this sanctuary the pressure of American life did not slacken. The whole place was relentlessly clean. It smelt, not with the familiar pungency of Bombay public lavatories but with a floweriness, an aggressive floweriness. And there was a machine for dispensing toothbrushes. Brush regularly with Aim as part of your total oral hygiene program, an advertisement on it commanded.
Aim, a toothpaste with an aim, a toothpaste with an undeviating purpose. And its use to be only part of a “total oral hygiene program.” What was an oral hygiene programme even? Would he have to have one here in California? It had not been so long since he had abandoned a simple morning mouth-scrub with a sharp-smelling twig from a neem-tree in favour just of a toothbrush and a tube of Neem dentifrice.
He picked up his bag—Why had he not made time in Bombay to get hold of something respectably smart?—braced himself and pushed his way out back into the onward-pressing stream of passengers. There was to be, it was plain, no refuge for him anywhere in California until he had wrested Ranjee Shahani’s daughter from her ashram. Not to forget as well, he cautioned himself, wresting her from the Indian swami at its head, who in all probability was exercising over her power far different from the everyday cause-and-effect wrongdoing he was accustomed to deal with in Bombay.
And what about Mr. Fred Hoskins?
Mr. Fred Hoskins, $250 a day and expenses. When Ranjee Shahani had said he would cable the private eye to tell him to assist his representative from India, the suggestion had been simultaneously very welcome and diabolically unpleasant. To be greeted in California by someone who knew the ways of that unknown territory, who would accept him as a properly authorised representative, there to carry out his task: That was something to be heartily grateful for. But in California to have always at his elbow, in the role of mere assistant and a discredited one at that, a man who in one day could pick up as much as two thousand rupees—plus expenses—it was a situation so out-of-balance it would not bear thinking about.
There was the problem, too, of how he was to recognise this powerful, and discredited, figure. There had been no time to have a photograph sent from America. There had not even been time in reply to Ranjee Shahani’s cable for a full personal description to be sent. What would a man who earned two thousand rupees a day look like? And, when you got down to it, all these Americans looked the same. Big.
Then, suddenly, there in front of him on a large sheet of brilliantly white card was his name, or what must be his name, boldly scrawled in thick black letters with a fat felt-pen. INSPECTOR GOTHE.
He swung his head up to look at the man holding the placard. The fellow was huge. Bigger, it seemed, even than most of the other men striding by with determined, easily confident, set faces. But this fellow must be at least six-foot-eight. And every part of him looked proportionately large. The hands which held the placard were like two great chunks of red meat. Of beef. The face, looking challengingly over the placard’s top, was of the same bloody, beefy colour and the hair crowning it, cropped close to a big square skull, was of an orangey-red hue like the fur of a jackal. But the most striking thing of all was the belly on which the lower edge of the stiff placard rested. It was tremendous. It hung forward over a well-cinched black leather belt like a great swinging sack of grain. Oh yes, much, much of those two thousand rupees per diem would be needed to fill that swaggering outgrowth.
Squaring his shoulders, Ghote went up to the giant figure.
“It