investigation. But he wasn't leaving anything to chance and had his team go to phase two.
Flush had been charged with tapping the subject's phone lines and tailing him. And that very evening, assuming he could make it back to Delhi, Puri was planning to gate-crash a premarriage party Gupta was having in his apartment, to plant a couple of bugs.
Puri explained the plan to Brigadier Kapoor, but he still sounded dissatisfied.
'What about his qualifications? Have you checked on them?' he asked.
'Gupta attended Delhi University as advertised. That much is confirmed.'
'Any girly friends?'
'We did interviews with two batchmates. Both told that Gupta kept himself to himself. A very studious fellow, it seems. Didn't so much as talk to females. No reports of hanky-panky. Equally, he was strictly teetotal. Never touched so much as one drop of alcohol or bhang.'
'Other marriages?'
'We're getting on top of the registers, sir.'
'What about his time in Dubai? What was he doing there?'
'Working for a U.S. bank. I've contacted my counterpart in West Asia. A highly proficient fellow. He's asking around.'
'Any affairs?'
'With females, sir?'
'Males, females-anything?'
'No indication, sir.'
Brigadier Kapoor let out an exasperated sigh.
'Listen, Puri, I want you on the case around the clock,' he reiterated. 'Time is running short. The marriage is only three weeks away. I'm more convinced than ever that something is not right with this man. He came for tea the other day to meet my dear wife and I could see it in his eyes. As plain as day. There's something missing.
'Now,' Brigadier Kapoor carried on, after clearing his throat. 'I know a thing or two about men, Puri. When you've fought alongside them, sent them into battle, seen them felled by enemy fire and bleeding to death in front of your very eyes, you become a good judge of a man's character. This man is hiding something and I want to know what it is. I'll expect to hear from you day after.'
Munnalal lived at the far end of a long, dirty lane overhung with a rat's nest of exposed wires and crisscrossing cables. Caught within these tendrils, like bugs in a spider's web, forlorn paper kites and plastic bags floundered.
The lane and its narrower tributaries, which branched off into a seemingly endless warren, were lined with terraces of tall, narrow brick houses. Their diminutive front doors were overlaid with iron latticework and daubed with red swastikas to ward off the evil eye.
Puri had to abandon the Ambassador at the far end of the lane and proceed on foot.
He was acutely conscious of how conspicuous he appeared in such impoverished surroundings. Many of those he passed eyed him with apprehension, assuming, no doubt, that he was a plainclothes cop, government official or rich landlord.
A woman sitting on the front step of her home, picking lice from her daughters' hair, dropped her gaze when she spotted Puri drawing near. Farther on, three old men crouched on their haunches against a wall, turned, looked him up and down through narrowed eyes and then muttered surreptitious comments about him to one another.
Only the neighborhood's squealing children, who ran back and forth playing with all manner of makeshift toys-metal rims of bicycle wheels, inflated condoms-were not intimidated by the detective's official bearing. Grinning from ear to ear, they cried with outstretched hands, 'Hello, Mister! One pen!'
Fortunately, no one paid any attention to Tubelight, who led the way, walking ten steps ahead of the detective without giving any indication that they were together. Dressed in the simple garb of a laborer, he had spent the past few hours in one of the neighborhood eateries, playing teen patta with a group of local men.
Gleaning information about Munnalal, who was not well liked in the neighborhood, had proven easy. Word was that he had come into a good deal of money in the past few months and gone from driving the cars of rich sahibs to owning a Land Cruiser of his own. He hired out the vehicle in the local transport bazaar, mostly to 'domestic tourists' visiting Rajasthan from elsewhere in India.
'They say he's got a new plasma television, too,' Tubelight had told Puri when the two had rendezvoused on the edge of the Hatroi neighborhood twenty minutes earlier and the operative had reported all he'd learned. 'It's his Koh-i-noor. Spends his days sitting and staring at it.'
Cricket was Munnalal's main staple, along with Teacher's Fine Blend.
'He's completely tulli most days,' Tubelight had added. 'A heavy punter as well. Into the bookies for twenty thousand.'
The local lassi-wallah had also proven a mine of information. Over a couple of glasses of his refreshing yogurt drink, he'd told Tubelight that Munnalal was a wife beater. On a number of occasions the vendor had spotted bruises on Munnalal's wife's face and around her neck.
The man sitting on the side of the lane, selling padlocks, combs and wall posters of Hindu and Bollywood deities, had confirmed this. He'd also told Tubelight that Munnalal often fought with his neighbors. Recently there had been a dispute over a wall shared with the Gujjar family. It had resulted in a punch-up. Munnalal had put his neighbor in the hospital with a concussion and a broken arm.
'Sounds like quite a charmer, isn't it?' Puri had commented.
'Want me to keep an eye on him, Boss?' Tubelight had asked. 'See what he gets up to?'
'Such a fool will provide his own rope,' the detective had replied sagely. 'I'm going to shake his tree and see what falls to earth.'
'You're going to do a face-to-face?'
'Why not? I'm feeling sociable! Let us pay Shri Munnalal a visit. Lead the way.'
Puri soon reached the house and banged on the door. It was answered by a harried-looking woman with a bruise on her cheek, who looked him up and down suspiciously and demanded to know what he wanted.
'You're Munnalal's wife?' asked the detective in Hindi in a deep, authoritative voice.
'What of it?'
'Go tell him he has a visitor.'
'He's busy.'
'Go tell him. Don't waste my time.'
The woman hesitated for a moment and then let Puri in.
'Wait here,' she said as she went to fetch her husband.
By now Puri, who was wearing his aviator sunglasses, was standing on the edge of a small courtyard scattered with a few children's toys and bucket of wet laundry waiting to be hung on the clothesline. In one corner, a charpai leaned against the dusty wall.
TV cricket commentary blared from an open door on the other side of the enclosure. A moment later, it suddenly stopped and Puri could make out the woman's scolding voice followed by a man's. He was speaking Rajasthani, which the detective didn't understand, but his tone was suggestive of someone less than pleased at being interrupted.
A moment later Munnalal appeared at the door to inspect his visitor.
One look at Puri caused him to stand a little straighter and to thrust the bottom of his vest into the top of his loose-fitting trousers. There was no hiding the fact, however, that he was a man loath to shift from his favorite mattress. Fat-faced, with a gut spilling over his waist, he had not shaved in days. Stubble had taken root on his bloated throat like black fungus, spreading over his chin and cheeks and threatening to engulf the rest of his features. His sunken eyes were bloodshot. And his vest, which failed to contain the great bunches of hair that protruded from his armpits, was dotted with spots of grease.
Still, what Munnalal lacked in looks and appearance, he evidently made up for in shrewdness. In Puri, he instantly recognized a threat. Rather than demanding to know his visitor's identity and purpose, he turned on the charm.
'Welcome to my home, sir,' he said in Hindi with a smarmy smile.
