Frederick Coin’s body was slick and marbled like a sheep’s stomach, lying in the middle of a rice paddy after the flood waters receded. The villagers were saying he’d drowned, but I wasn’t so sure. They were saying he’d been caught in the rains and drowned. It happened all the time during the monsoons, they said. True enough, but usually it happened to cows, not men. And almost never to white men.
I was working as a detective for an export firm in Calcutta at this time. Dirty job. Lots of lowlifes. This was just after the war, when a bullet wound and a sergeant’s chevron weren’t enough to get you a job back home, but overseas jobs were a cinch. An English guy I met in Paris while we were waiting to demob told me about this particular lark. The company did jute exporting: big workforce, a hundred contractors, lots of chances for parcels and money to go missing. My job was to keep an eye on the warehouse and the canteen, make sure nobody was taking a bit on the side or sneaking in where they shouldn’t be. The pay was lousy but the living was cheap. Even so, I did a little freelancing to make ends meet, helping out the local cops during my off hours, fencing some of their recovered loot from time to time. We all wore multiple hats back then, not all of them clean and bright.
Calcutta in 1920 was different than it is now. The cops were mean then. Real mean and real crooked. But they weren’t scared, not like what you see in the newsreels these days. You’d never see those guys standing around scratching their asses while some la-di-dah with a bullhorn and an Oxford accent stood on the Maidan demanding the Brits shove off. In those days they would’ve nabbed him the second he opened his beak and crammed him into a wheelbarrow. Then they’d crack a few heads into the bargain.
Not that they don’t have a point, these Maidan Napoleons. The Brits should leave. Of course they should. Take it from me: they have no more business in India than a shark in a goldfish bowl. But there they are, and while they’re there, they’re what passes for law and order. And besides, some of them are all right.
It was one of those summers when it seemed like the rains would never come, when you just sat around in your airless bungalow waiting for the push, like you’d wait around in the trenches for the barrage. Just get it over with, was the general feeling. If we die, we die, but this waiting is murder.
I was in my office going through inventory reports with my assistant Bhadrik when the thunder finally came rumbling in over the flatlands. Bhadrik was more than an assistant, really. I guess you’d call him a friend. He was a young guy, a farm kid from east of the city. Pretty useless in a fistfight, but sly as a panther and a good listener, too. When he wasn’t working for me he waited tables at the officers’ club – remember what I said about our multiple hats – and while we made our rounds of the company’s premises he’d dish out shocking tales of violence and infidelity among the colonial overlords. In return, I’d tell him tall tales about Hollywood movie stars. He wanted to become one himself one day. A movie star, I mean. I wonder why he never did.
We had finished the inventory reports and were dipping our bills into two sweating glasses of gin when the rain began rattling the windows. Ten minutes later someone knocked on the door.
“That the door?” said Bhadrik.
“Either that or it’s started raining coconuts,” I said.
The guy on the other end of the knock was a beat cop I knew named Murat. Big, jovial fella. Terrible at cards.
“Mister Philip,” he said as he came in, dripping. “Frederick Coin has gone missing.”
Everyone knew Fred Coin. He owned one of the largest plantations in Bengal. Jute, mostly, and a few acres of livestock. Some cattle, some water buffalo. You get better cheese from a buffalo, they say. The milk’s fattier.
“How long’s he been gone?” I took a sip from my glass. Coin was a cruel bastard and a skinflint to boot. I didn’t much care whether he was missing or not.
“Four days, his wife says. Ever since the false monsoon.”
Sometimes the rains would tease us, see. An afternoon of light rain and then nothing for a few days. False monsoon, they called it.
“He’s probably just come up to town to transact some business,” I said, winking at Bhadrik. Coin was a well-known patron of the chippy joints down by the river.
“His wife says he’s never gone more than a single night without telephoning. She’s offering a reward, you know.”
“Then why aren’t you fellas out combing the countryside for him?” I never knew a Bengali policeman to pass up the chance of a reward.
“We’ve tried,” said Murat. He was eyeing our gins. “For three days we’ve tried. But now the rains are here we’re all on flood duty.”
Of course. Monsoon season was like Christmas for these guys. Lots of crimes got committed under cover of the floods. Carts got toppled, gates came unhinged, homes and shops stood unattended. A thousand opportunities for the cops to come to friendly terms with the neighborhood looters. Or unfriendly terms, as the case may be.
“It’s late,” I said. “And it’s drowning weather out there. If he’s still missing in the morning we’ll ride out to Coin’s place and have a look around.”
“All right,” said Murat. He glanced again at our gins, but, receiving no encouragement, he gave a little salute and left. Through the open door it was pitch black. A void.
“I’ve got a good idea what happened,” said Bhadrik, leaning back in his seat. “A damn good idea.”
“Fine,” I said and finished off my drink. “We’ll split the reward.”
The next morning we took a train out to the village. Normally I’d have gone by horse, but the rain was heavier than a stone piano by then, and anyway I wanted to get the skinny from Bhadrik along the way. So, for the two hours it took to get there, he told me what he knew. Coin was a Dutchman. Originally aimed to make his fortune in Javanese spices, but when the bottom fell out of the pepper market he made his way to Bengal and began buying up land from the local zamindars. He now had some two hundred acres of jute, twenty acres of pastureland, and a workforce of several hundred whom he flogged regularly and paid starvation wages. “Literally starvation wages, Marlowe” Bhadrik said. “The children hunt rats to supplement their diets.” He lived in an old mansion on the Hooghly with his wife, a clergyman’s daughter from Wales. They had two daughters who were at school somewhere in Holland.
“He’s a right old buffalo, Marlowe,” said Bhadrik, wrinkling his nose. “We draw straws when he comes into the club, and the loser has to serve him. The other whites talk about him behind his back. They’re all polite enough to his face, but he always eats alone and they never invite him to play bridge unless their numbers are off. Bloody Boer, they call him, though he’s not a bloody Boer, just a bloody bore. And a bad tipper.”
Most of this I knew already. I had seen Coin a few times in the city but didn’t know him well enough to nod at him. The last time I saw him he was sitting in a rickshaw cursing the fella who was wheeling him through traffic. He was rich enough to afford a taxi, but naturally he chose to travel in a wooden cart and abuse the driver. Typical planter. Say what you want about the official Brits, at least that crowd had some sense of duty. These planters were just trying to squeeze as much cash from the dripping delta as they could get. So long as they got the juice, they didn’t care about the withered husk they left behind.
When we got to the mansion gates I dismounted and headed for the house. The rain wasn’t so bad now, and I had a good umbrella. Bhadrik went on into the village to ask if anyone knew anything about the missing master. We both knew he’d have more luck loosening the villagers’ tongues than I would. We also knew that I’d get a warmer welcome from Mrs. Coin if I didn’t try to bring an Indian into her house.
The interview with the missus was unilluminating. Coin had been gone five days, no letter, no telephone call, no history of this sort of thing. No money troubles that she was aware of, no unpaid debts, no feuds with neighbors, no more enemies than your average planter – which was to say, quite a few enemies, but none in a position to do anything about it. No quirks, no hobbies, no vendettas, no kinks. Well, maybe he had some kinks, but she didn’t mention any.
Mrs. Coin was the kind of dame you’d expect to become the wife of a man like Coin. Prim, dreary, plump. Skin the color and texture of concrete. A look of permanent exasperation. I drank one cup of too-strong joe and ate four too-soft biscuits and said goodbye no wiser about the case than when I’d said hello. But I did manage to see something of Coin’s domestic situation, and I concluded that neither he nor the missus would be inconsolable if they were never to see each other again. She was in it for the cabbage just like he was, and as far as that went she was doing just dandy.
Just as I was leaving, the rain came on heavier. “This rain,” Mrs. Coin said as she showed me to the door. “Fred does so love the rain so.”
Bhadrik was waiting for me under the portico.
“What’d you learn?” I said. “The old broad was a bust.”
“He has a dame in the village.”
“Figures.”
“She’s the wife of a tailor. Coin goes to her when the rains come. All the village men go off to chase the livestock onto high ground when the monsoon starts. The stupid beasts would drown otherwise. And while they’re out he scurries down to the tailor’s house.”
“Sounds like it’s common knowledge. The village women see him, I guess.”
“Yes.”
“And so the men also know?”
“Yes.”
“So someone killed him. The tailor?”
“Nobody knows what happened to him. The tailor especially doesn’t know what happened to him.”
“Let’s blow,” I said, unfurling my umbrella. “I need a drink.”
Four days later they found Coin’s body in a field. When word came, Bhadrik and I went back down to the village to look at it. The police had ID’d him, but they didn’t know who or what popped him. Presumed drowning, from the looks of things. The village had flooded, and it wasn’t until the waters receded that the body was found.
The cops couldn’t get the villagers to talk. All they would say was that the flood had come quickly – a small dam had burst nearby – but nobody’d seen Coin out in it.
They’d left the body in the field, hidden in the reeds like some terrible Easter egg. I looked it over for signs of injury, but there was nothing obvious. What did I know, anyway? I wasn’t a coroner. A big crowd of men was gathered in the field, and while I was examining the scene Bhadrik disappeared among them. He showed up again when I was ready to leave.
“Spill,” I said when we were alone on the road.
“Nobody knows nothing,” he said.
“Did you see the tailor?”
“Yes. He especially knows nothing.”
“They’re going to rule it a drowning, Bhadrik. Do you think they should rule it a drowning?”
“Yes. A drowning.”
“We won’t get the reward if it’s a drowning,” I said, and then I had a thought. “False monsoon. He went over to the tailor’s in the false monsoon.”
“Nobody knows nothing, Marlowe. Especially not the tailor.”
I tried to look at Bhadrik’s face, but he’d already started walking down the road.
“His wife said he loved it when it rained,” I called.
“Yes,” he called back. “He loved it and then he fell in over his head.”
great read.
Excellent!