“Belur?” said the man. He was all white teeth and cuffs, center-part hair, and oleaginous voice; the very model of a modern manager. “Rustum Belur?”
Ameera squeezed my arm — she knew how despondent I had been getting. I nodded. “I think that would be him. But as I understand it, he is no longer with your company?”
The man across the polished desk smiled and offered me an Indian cigarette. I had learned to refuse those on my first day in Calcutta . I shook my head.
“No longer with us?"’ He blew out a cloud of poisonous smoke. “That is certainly one way to put it, I suppose. He is not with anyone, eh? Not with anyone we can talk to.”
“Did he leave the area?”
“I should jolly well say so.” He coughed. “Jolly well say so. He is dead, you see — Rustum Belur was killed, four months ago. Most sad.” He smiled cheerfully. “Most sad indeed. A nice man.”
I sat there gaping, unable to think of anything at all to say. There goes another one! would not have been a socially acceptable utterance. Ameera helped out.
“Mr. Belur — how was he killed?”
Mr. Srinivasa stood up from his seat and went across to the window. “You see that building down the hill, where the cables run from over to our left? That is one of our laboratories. One night, Rustum Belur must have taken a short cut to his home — under the cable. Most irregular, of course, and we have told our employees not to do it.” He shrugged. “They will not listen — not my fault, you understand? He must have slipped and fallen across the high-voltage line. Srritt.” He rippled his hand through the air. “Twenty thousand volts. A deadly charge.
“We found him the following morning.” There was a cheerful gusto to his voice. “Fried like a maro fish. Jolly bad luck, eh?”
“Did he leave a family?” That seemed the only avenue left to us.
“Alas, no,” said Srinivasa happily. “He was not a person to mix well — not like you or me, eh?” He gave a knowing nod towards Ameera. “Mind you, he was a very intelligent man, and his visitors came from many places. But it was all work — nothing for a social life. You knew his work, eh?”
“A little.” I was ready to leave, but as I started to straighten up in my chair my body twisted to one side and dropped me heavily back to a sitting position. Srinivasa looked at me oddly.
“Are you feeling all right, Mr. Salkind?”
“Yes.” I played for time to regain control. “I was wondering just what work Mr. Belur was doing when he died. I had lost touch with him in the past year or two.”
“More of the same.” Srinivasa shrugged, but I detected in his manner that the question was not to his taste. “He was still working on the electronics-biologic interface, as he had for years. Always the claim that his big advance would be here soon. It never came.”
“The Belur Package?”
“He called it that to you?” He stubbed out his half-inch-long cigarette butt and happily accepted a new one from my packet, bought especially for our interviews. “Always the same talk, eh, always about the introsomatic chips? Jolly hard worker, but not too practical.”
I looked around us, at the evidence of past success and recent failure. It was a fair bet that Belur — “jolly hard worker” and much-visited scientist — had been the sparkplug for Bio-Electronic Systems. When he died, the operation had begun to run downhill. And Srinivasa found it hard to face that fact, like any manager who imagined the success of an organization was really his success.
“Do you have notes regarding the Belur Package?” It was my last hope, and a slim one.
“He did not keep good notes.” Srinivasa shook his head disapprovingly. “A good worker, but his habits were strange. Here late at night, then away all the next morning — jolly hard to run a lab efficiently, eh, when people will not keep regular work hours? He insisted that most of his work was better done at home.”
“He kept a lab there?”
“Not a real lab. It was in his house, equipped like a lab, but not you understand a real lab.” The expansive gesture around him at the clutter of dusty equipment suggested that Belur’s humble home efforts could not compare with the magnificence of our present surroundings. “Even though he was very rich,” he added after a second or two.
There was new irritation in his voice. An employee who was not merely of irregular habits, but rich enough to be independent, was a hard cross for a manager to bear.
“Do you think we could visit his house?” I asked. As I spoke, my stomach seemed to seethe and rise inside me. I thought for a moment that I would be sick on the spot. What was Leo trying to tell me now?
Srinivasa did not notice. He was too busy registering disdain at my request. “If you really want to, I do not see why not. It would of course take a little time to get there” — wasted time, his manner implied — “and I am afraid we are too busy here to arrange transportation.”
“We have our own driver,” said Ameera. She was much more successful than I at squelching objections. “If you could tell us how to get there…”
It was easy to see why Rustum Belur might have taken a short cut to his home. The road went around the hill in a long, winding spiral, so that half a mile on the ground, under the power cable, was stretched to more than five. As we drove steadily around the hillside, Ameera shook her head firmly.
“Very bad man. I did not like his smell.”
“You think he is evil?”
“Not evil. Stupid. He had plenty of time to come with us if he wanted to. And he could show us Belur’s workplace.”
But not, I suspected, tell us anything useful about it. Belur’s work was beyond Srinivasa’s comprehension. And beyond mine. What had he been doing?
“What are intro-so-mat-ic chips?” Ameera’s words echoed my thoughts. “He said Belur was making them.”
“I never heard of them. But ‘chips’ are what they put into computers, to control their programs.”
And I’ll bet my last penny that Leo could tell me more about them, if only we could find a way to tap his memories. I thought that, but I didn’t mention that to Ameera.
Belur’s wealth was obvious as soon as we came into sight of his house. Most of the buildings that we had passed were no more than shacks. This one was a thirty-room monstrosity, a wood and cement structure that must have been there long before the industrial park grew up around it. We drove towards it along a road of hard-packed dirt — probably impassable in the rainy season, but now as firm as concrete.
“Wait here for us.” The man nodded. Indian taxi drivers were very good at patient waiting.
We were on the eastern side of the hill, towards the town of Cuttack , and the bulk of the house stood high between us and the setting sun. I saw Ameera shiver a little as we moved into the deep shadow.
“What is the house like, Lee-yo-nel?”
I suppressed my own gut urge to go back to the car. The house wasn’t inviting, but I had come too far to back off because of some vague uneasiness. Anyway, I felt that I already knew the layout of this house.
“It’s big — very big. The place that Belur worked is near the back of the building. We have to go down a long corridor, then up a staircase.” The words came out instinctively, yet I was convinced that the description was correct.
We moved to the open front door, Ameera clutching hard on my arm. “Slowly, Lee-yo. Let me know where we are going.”
She felt the door to her left, then ran her hand slowly along the wooden panels inside the house.
While she studied that, I took another look around us. According to Srinivasa, the house was being looked after by two housekeepers until Belur’s family decided what to do with it. But there had been no sign of people, inside the house or out. That was less surprising to me here than it would have been in Europe . I had already learned the tendency of Indian staff to disappear from their duties for long periods on mysterious errands of their own.