Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [166]
A quarter of an hour later, Shanmugham stood before his employer. Giri was in the kitchen, cutting something to pieces.
At his work desk, with the poster of the Eiffel Tower behind him, the boss was signing each page of a bundle of documents.
“Did I ask you to come up, Shanmugham?” he said without looking up. “Go down and wait for me. We have to go to Juhu immediately.”
The left-hand man did not move.
Shah looked up; he held a silver pen in his fingers.
“We just had a call, Shanmugham. Satish has been arrested. Doing the same thing with the gang. This time in Juhu.” He made a circular motion with his pen in his hand. “They sprayed some politician’s van. Giri is putting the money in the envelope. We won’t be able to keep it out of the newspapers this time.”
Shanmugham said what he had rehearsed for nearly twenty minutes in the basement: “Sir: in the matter of the murder at Vishram Society. I have been thinking about it for some time. It is not a suicide. In Vakola they say either Shah did it, or the neighbours did it. And you didn’t do it, since I didn’t do it. So the neighbours did it.”
Shah did not look up.
“The newspapers said it was suicide. Go down and wait. We must go to Juhu.”
Shanmugham spoke to the poster of the Eiffel Tower over his boss’s head.
“The police might be interested, sir, if someone told them that the people in Vishram did it. They might reopen the case. Look at the photographs of the corpse more carefully. The construction might be delayed.”
The silver pen dropped onto the table.
Shanmugham shivered; in another room, Shah’s mobile phone had begun to ring. Giri came in with the mobile phone, wiped it on his lungi, and placed it on his employer’s desk.
Shah, his eyes closed, listened to the voice on the phone.
“I am on my way. I understand. I am on my way.”
He rubbed the phone on his forearm and held it out for Giri.
Giri stood in the threshold for a minute, looking at the two men. Then he went back to the kitchen to continue cutting his bread.
Shah’s jaw began working. He started to laugh.
“Oh, you are a son of mine, Shanmugham. A real son.”
He tapped twice on his desk.
“You listen to me: there is already one body in the foundations of the Shanghai, and there’s plenty of space there for another. Do you understand?”
Shah grinned. Shanmugham understood that he had one sharp tooth, but this man had a mouth full of them.
“Do you understand?”
Shanmugham could not move. He felt his smallness in the den he had walked into: the den of real estate.
“Shanmugham. Why are you wasting my time?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Go down to the basement and wait in the car. We have to get the boy out of the police station.”
And Shanmugham went down to the basement.
At least, Shah thought, I got six good years out of this one. On the pad on his table, where he had written:
Beige marble
Grilles on windows (Fabergé egg pattern: pay up to one rupee extra per kg wrought iron. No more.)
he added:
Left-hand man
He straightened his clothes in the mirror, spat onto a finger, checked the colour of his insides, and went downstairs.
Juhu. Two half-built towers like twin phantoms behind a screen of trees, neither vanishing nor growing into clarity.
Dharmen Shah was sick of buildings.
He turned to his son and asked: “How many more times will you do this?”
“Do what?” Satish was looking out of the window of the moving car. He wore a light green shirt; his school uniform shirt, which he had changed out of, was in a plastic bundle by his feet.
“Disgrace your family name.”
The boy laughed.
“I disgrace your name?” He stared at his father. “I read the papers, Father. I saw what happened in Vakola.”
“I don’t know what you’ve read. That old teacher killed himself. He was mad.”
The boy spoke slowly. “All of us in the gang are builders’ sons. If you don’t let us do these things now,” he said, “how will we become good builders when we grow up?”
Shah saw a platinum necklace around his son’s neck; the younger generation preferred it to gold.
Satish