The Moors Last Sigh

business. I say here from the depths of my soul: that is all I am at heart, all I have ever been. My whole life has been spent in the spice trade.’
    Bail was set at one crore of rupees, in spite of the prosecution’s strenuous protests. ‘One does not send one of our city’s highest persons to the common lock-up until guilt is proved,’ said Mr Justice Kachrawala, and Abraham bowed to the bench. There were still a few places into which his arm could reach. To make bail, the title deeds to the original spice-fields of the da Gama family had to be given in surety. But Abraham walked free, back to Elephanta , back to his dying Shangri-La. And sitting alone in a darkened office next to his garden in the sky, he came to the same decision that Sammy Hazaré had made in his condemned Andheri shack: if he was to go down, he would do it with all guns blazing. On the radio and TV, Raman Fielding was crowing about the old man’s fall. ‘A pretty girl’s face on TV will not save Zogoiby now,’ he said, and then, astonishingly, burst into song. ‘ When they come big, then they fall hardia,’ he croaked. ‘ Hardia, Nadia Wadia, hardia.’ Whereupon Abraham made an unpleasant, conclusive noise and reached for the phone.
    Abraham made two telephone calls that night, and received just one. The phone company’s records afterwards showed that the first call went to a number at one of the Falkland Road whorehouses controlled by the gang-boss known as ‘Scar’. But there is no evidence that any women were sent to Abraham’s office, or to his Malabar Hill residence. It seems his message was of another sort.
    Later that night – well after midnight–Dom Minto, now over a hundred years old, was Abraham’s lone caller. There is no verbatim transcript of their conversation, but I have my father’s account of it. Abraham said that Minto had not sounded his usual cantankerous, ebullient self. He was depressed, despondent, and spoke openly about death. ‘Let it come! For me, all of existence has been a blue movie,’ Minto reportedly stated. ‘I have seen enough of what in human life is most filthy and obscene.’ The next morning, the old detective was found dead at his desk. ‘Foul play’, said the investigating officer, Inspector Singh, ‘is not suspected.’
    Abraham’s second call was to me. At his request I arrived at the deserted Cashondeliveri Tower in the deep of the night and used my pass-key to enter and operate his private elevator. What he told me in his darkened room made me less certain than the Inspector about the nature of Dom Minto’s demise. He confided that Sammy Hazaré – apparently unwilling to be seen in the vicinity of Abraham’s usual haunts – had visited Minto and sworn an oath on his mother’s head that the death of Aurora Zogoiby had been a contract killing carried out by one Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite at the behest of Raman Fielding.
    ‘But why?’ I cried. Abraham’s eyes glittered. ‘I told you about your Mummyji, boy. Have a taste and then discard unfinished, was her policy in men as well as food. But with Mainduck she bit the wrong fruit. Motive was sexual. Sexual. Sexual … revenge.’ I had never heard him sound so cruel. Obviously, the pain of Aurora’s infidelity still twisted in his gut. The barbarising pain of having to talk about it to their son.
    ‘Then how?’ I needed to know. The answer, he told me, was a small hypodermic dart in the neck, of the size used to anaesthetise smaller animals – not elephants, but wild cats, perhaps. Fired from Chowpatty Beach during the madness of Ganpati, it made her head spin, and she fell. On to the title-washed rocks. The waves must have swept the dart away; and in all that damage, nobody noticed – nobody was looking for – a tiny hole in the side of her neck.
    I had been in the VIP stand with Sammy and Fielding that day, I remembered; but Chhaggan could have been anywhere. Chhaggan, who, with Sammy, was the joint blow-pipe champion of Mainduck’s indoor Olympiads. ‘But this can’t have been a blowpipe,’ I thought aloud. ‘Much too far. And shooting up as well.’
    Abraham shrugged. ‘Then a dart-gun,’ he said. ‘Details are all in Sammy’s deposition. Minto will bring it in the morning. You know,’ he added, ‘that it will not stand up in court.’
    ‘It won’t have to,’ I answered him. ‘This matter will not be decided by any jury or judge.’
    Minto died before he could bring Sammy’s testimony to