Out on the terrace, it’s still pretty busy, but certainly less jammed than inside, probably because the interior is air-conditioned, while here, the night heat feels like something you can touch—sultry and heavy. But a breeze from the sea relieves the intense warmth a little; an ebb and flow of wind that gently touches my hair and face. Riya’s not out here either, but then, I am several minutes early. I make my way right up to the wooden railing that marks the end of the terrace and take a moment to look out at the ocean, glittering under a crisply outlined moon. The smell is not salty or fresh, but humid, with a base note of something rotten. Maybe it’s the engineer in me, but I’m getting the sense of a sanitation system and water supply network stretched to their limit in this city where tens of millions of people are crammed together with an overused infrastructure.
I pull out my phone—my current “normal” phone, the Indian number that Riya has—to check for messages, just as a hand touches my arm. I turn to find Riya behind me.
“Sorry I kept you waiting,” she says.
“No problem—I was early,” I say. Riya looks a lot more relaxed out of her suit. She’s in faded jeans and a collarless blue shirt that opens at the neck to display a silver pendant on a leather necklace. Her dark hair is pulled back, and even off duty, her face is free of makeup, which is just as well, because it probably couldn’t improve anything about her features anyway.
In her hands are two drinks—she offers one to me.
“Pomegranate soda,” she says. “Unless you want something stronger?”
“This is perfect,” I assure her, taking a sip. I kind of remember from Li’s nutrition sheets that pomegranates are a superfood, but on first gulp I’m not loving it. On my scale, it’s somewhere just above cough syrup, but at least it’s cold. Again, I find myself strangely nervous around Riya. I grip my drink, focusing on the cool touch of the glass under my fingers.
“Do you come to this bar a lot?” I ask, casting around for conversation.
“I’m not really a bar person,” Riya replies. “I like this one because of the view. I like looking out at the ocean.”
“You find it relaxing?” I suggest.
“It’s a good touchstone,” she replies. “It reminds me that life has been going on for millennia and our everyday hassles are not the big dramas we like to pretend they are. Our lives are nothing more than specks, really. Specks in time and space.”
“That’s comforting.”
She laughs. “Maybe cops shouldn’t try to be philosophers,” she says.
I watch her until she looks away.
“Listen, Jessie, I called you here because I feel something’s going on, but I’m not sure what,” she says. “I just feel . . . uneasy about what’s been happening over the past two days.”
“What has been happening?”
She frowns. “Well, first, I wanted to follow up the lead you gave me to the warehouse. But Sunil took it over and sent another team out there.”
“Did he find anything?”
“It was mostly empty—he said there was nothing much there to help our case or to relate it to the attack on Kit’s school.”
“It might be true that it was cleared out,” I tell her, thinking about the men who arrived and chased us off the premises.
“Fine,” she concedes. “But it must be linked to the school attack. Hassan gave you the warehouse address and he is clearly involved somewhere. . . .”
I acknowledge, but it’s still not enough to warrant the stress she seems to be feeling.
“Anything else bothering you?” I ask.
“Well, yes. After that, it felt like Sunil got back on track with the investigation. Because the campaign caps and shirts had Jingo’s name on them, Sunil sent me to interview Jingo Jain himself.”
That sounds like a reassuring move from Sunil, more meaningful. And yet Riya still looks disturbed.
“Did you talk to Jingo?” I ask.
“This morning,” she confirms. “It was weird.”
“Weird, how?”
“Usually, I would take someone with me, ideally Sunil. He’s senior and Jingo is a big deal in this city. But Sunil said he was busy and asked me to go ahead, alone. So I did.”
Waiting for her to continue, I feel a sense of misgiving. If Jingo laid a hand on her, or even looked at her, I’ll find his home and teach him a lesson he’ll never forget. . . .
“Jingo was expecting me. He was perfectly polite and correct,” she continues, perhaps reading the unspoken concern on my face. “I asked him a lot of questions about the attacks, about Family First. He claimed he had never heard of them before this and said many times how sad he was about the attacks.”
She stops to take a drink, delicately. I do the same but manage to sip at my soda with a graceless slurp through the straw. I hope Riya can’t hear it under the music and the chatter of people around us.
“Did you ask him about the ADS and the guy at the military base who signed them out?” I
