RAM CHOPRA SIPPED his morning coffee as he scanned the newspapers. In New Delhi, the commonly accepted joke was that the Times of India and the Indian Times were read by people who ran the government; the Hindustan Times and the Daily Express were read by people who thought they ought to run the government; the Indian Express was read by the people who used to run the government. The Mail Today was read by the wives of the people who ran the government. And The Hindu was read by people who thought the government ought to be run by another government. The readers of the Delhi Times weren’t bothered about who ran the government as long as the women on page three had big tits.
Chopra was almost unique because he read them all. His routine started with the mainstream dailies published in Delhi, followed by the morning dailies from outside Delhi. The tabloids came last. They were usually vulgar but utterly delicious.
His wife and daughter were asleep, both being late risers. Usually, Chopra enjoyed the solitude of his mornings with a cup of coffee and the first cigar of the day.
But not today. The butler had just poured him a second cup of arabica plucked from the plantations of Coorg when Chopra clumsily dropped the cup. It fell to the floor, the delicate china shattering to little pieces along with the rich brew. “Bastard!” shouted Chopra, crushing the offending tabloid page in his hand and flinging it across the table.
The butler hurriedly brought a mop to clear up the mess on the floor and wondered what had set Chopra off. He noticed the tabloid that Chopra had been reading now lay in a ball on the floor. He vowed to read it later to find out what had caused his boss to detonate.
Chopra got up from the dining table and headed to his study. The butler hurriedly cleared up the coffee spill and the broken cup fragments along with the crumpled newspaper and headed back to the kitchen. He made himself a cup of tea and retrieved the balled-up tabloid pages. The news item instantly caught his eye. It was on the gossip page.
So, darlings, it’s me, back again this week with another installment of juicy chatter. News is that one of the high-and-mighty politicos of our great capital city is miffed with a powerful businessman. It seems that the politico has a sweet daughter of marriageable age and the businessman had swept her off her feet. But (gasp!) he’s had a change of heart! The princess was left standing at the altar with her father waiting to give her away. The whisper in town is that the old man is fuming at the humiliation and has vowed to avenge his family’s “honor.”
Chapter 48
THE DELHI GOLF Club dated back to the early 1930s and was home to the championship eighteen-hole Lodhi Course that was part of the Asian PGA Tour. Samir Patel played there twice a week. On Thursdays he would play with just one colleague while on Saturdays it was usually a four-ball.
He was dressed in his customary bush shirt. The only concessions he had made for the golf course were checkered pants, a sleeveless sweater, and a cap that covered the vermillion mark on his forehead. And today, as he returned to the clubhouse following his game, he was feeling very pleased with himself indeed. It was time to enjoy what he liked to call “a couple of swift libations.”
In the parking lot outside sat his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. The driver, a good man known to Patel as Babu, was well enough acquainted with his boss’s habits to know that there would be precisely three “swift libations” taking around an hour and a half, at which point his boss would stride slightly unsteadily from the clubhouse and onto the gravel of the parking lot, aglow with the morning’s golf and the afternoon’s alcohol, making more conversation than usual as he was transported back home to his luxurious, well-appointed home.
Not for the first time, Babu thought how sweet it must be to be one of the big bosses. What a life, he mused as he set his phone alarm for an hour’s time—an hour in which he planned to continue his nap.
But first, a piss.
And off he went to the course-side restrooms, unaware that he was being followed.
Indeed, he remained unaware, even as he stood at the urinal, barely hearing the restroom door open as a man in black slid in behind him. His first—and, as it turned out, his last—thought was, Why is someone standing behind me? But he never saw the man in black. He didn’t see the skewer the man held. His only sensation at the point of death was a sudden fierce pain in his left ear as the skewer was rammed hard and fast into his brain.
The man in black let the chauffeur’s body slump into his arms. He was already using a rag to staunch the flow of blood from Babu’s ear. Moments later he had maneuvered the corpse into a stall and was helping it out of its clothes.
An hour later, just as the recently deceased Babu had predicted, Samir Patel was exiting the clubhouse. An extremely happy Surgiquip chairman, he had won his game and been the recipient of exactly three celebratory drinks, and intended to spend the rest of the afternoon at home. His domestics had the afternoon off, and he planned to fill the remainder of his day slumped in a leather armchair, reading the papers, and catching up on an occasional email, knowing he had complete privacy.
Or so he hoped.
Babu stood holding the door open for him. “Thank you, Babu,” he said, hearing a slight slur in his own voice as he settled into the lush leather interior. He really shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach. The door closed. Babu took his seat in front. The central locking clicked.
In the next instant Patel knew—even in his relaxed state—that something was amiss. Babu had been his driver a long time. He knew the man’s mannerisms. He knew how his presence felt.
And he knew this wasn’t Babu.
“Hey,” he managed, but then the man in the front was swiveling in his seat and God, no, it wasn’t Babu, of course it wasn’t Babu, because this man was holding a hypodermic syringe.
He recognized the man.
“No. You” was all he managed before the hypodermic needle was jabbed just under his jaw. It was too late to throw himself toward the door in order to escape, because the sedative had already started to work.
Chapter 49
WHEN PATEL SURFACED it was to the relief of knowing that the man with the hypodermic syringe had been an illusion of the mind, for he had awoken in his own bedroom, lying on his back in bed.
“Thank God,” he whispered to himself, feeling like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. “It was just a dream,” and he went to turn over in bed and find a more comfortable position—only to realize that he couldn’t. His outflung arms were held in place, tied with rope, and when he tried to turn his head the movement was prevented by a wide band of something around his forehead. His eyeballs skittered madly in their sockets as he tried to see his legs, knowing that they, too, were strapped to the bed.
Another thing: he was naked.
He became aware of someone else in the room, moving around.
“Are you awake?” said a voice. Bright torchlight made his pupils contract.