"An old electricity substation." Dhutta led them up a short flight of stairs to another steel door, which he unlocked with a second set of keys.
"You live here?" Archie again.
"No, no, no. This is merely my workshop. I reside on the street overhead. There's access through the cellar so I never have to go outside. Come, come," he urged, stepping through the doorway.
On his previous visit, Tom had not been invited into this part of the complex, Dhutta having insisted that he wait within the gloomy confines of the anteroom they had just come from. Now he saw that the door opened onto a vast hall, the arched brick ceiling rising twenty feet above their heads. A series of lights hung down at regular intervals, their steel shades as big as umbrellas. The concrete floor had been whitewashed and covered in an uneven quilt of overlapping rugs that felt soft and warm beneath their feet.
"Tea?" asked Dhutta. "I have many different varieties from my uncle in Calcutta — Earl Grey, Darjeeling, Assam, Nilgiri… Whatever tickles your fancy. I have just boiled the kettle."
"Earl Grey," Archie replied distractedly, still taking the room in.
"Coffee. Black," said Tom, to Dhutta's obvious disapproval.
"As you wish. Please make yourselves at home."
Dhutta waved them to two battered and threadbare sofas arranged around an old tea chest on the left-hand side of the room as he darted to the sink and busied himself with mugs and milk. Tom and Archie both dropped their small overnight bags by the door and sat down.
"I must admit, I am surprised to see you, Mr. Tom. I had heard that you would no longer have need of my services."
"It's true. Archie and I have moved on."
"The business is losing all its gentlemen." Dhutta sighed. "The young people coming through have no respect."
"Things change, Raj," Tom replied.
"In the Hindu religion, we would say that you have moved on to Vanaprastha, or retirement, when you will delegate responsibility to the younger generation and perform selfless social services yourself," Dhutta said solemnly.
"And after that?" Tom asked in mock seriousness.
"Sanyas. The complete renunciation of the world for union with God."
Tom laughed. "I think I'm a few years from either of those."
Dhutta handed them their drinks and sat down opposite.
"You not having anything?" Archie asked.
"Just this." Dhutta reached behind him for a bottle of brightly colored cough mixture. Tom and Archie watched in disbelief as he unscrewed the white cap and took a long swig, emptying almost a quarter of the bottle.
"That can't be good for you," Archie observed with a frown.
"Prevention is better than cure, Mr. Archie." Dhutta nodded toward a shelf above the sink that was stacked with medi-
cine bottles full of pills and vitamins and other unidentifiable supplements, not to mention a rainbow of neon-colored syrups and liquids. "Would you like to try something?" he suggested eagerly. "Maybe for hay fever or malaria?"
"We're just here for some information," said Tom.
"Information?" Dhutta's gaze flicked regretfully from the shelf, back to Tom. "What sort of information?"
"There's something I want to show you," said Tom. "Obviously, what we're about to discuss doesn't leave this room."
"Of course."
Tom placed the walnut box on the tea chest's rough surface.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Dhutta pulled the box toward him, then hesitated before opening it, his fingers rubbing across the twelve-armed swastika on the lid.
"This?"
"No. Something inside it."
Dhutta flicked the box open, frowning when he saw it was empty. He picked it up and shook it, then examined it again. Tom eyed him with amusement, wondering how long it would take him to work out that the box had a false bottom, let alone how to get into it. But in four quick movements, Dhutta slid the various interlocking pieces of the box aside and exposed the secret drawer.
"I see you've not lost your touch," Tom said with a smile.
But Dhutta had already slid the drawer out and snatched up the key and didn't seem to be listening. He looked at them, his mustache quivering as he turned the key over between his fingers.
"Well, well!" he exclaimed. "Interesting. Very interesting. May I ask where you obtained this, Mr. Tom?" Tom arched his eyebrows and pressed his lips together, unwilling to divulge any more than he had to at this stage. Dhutta shrugged. "Not everything has changed, I see," he observed wryly.
"What do you think it's for?"
"A safe? A deposit box? Something like that. Somewhere with tip-top security."
"What about the initials? Do they mean anything to you?"
Dhutta squinted at the italic script etched into the key's rubber grip. "It looks like a V and a C," he said, shaking his head. "But that's impossible."
"Why impossible?"
"It's the logo for Volz et Compagnie, the private bank. But they do not offer safe-deposit boxes. Not anymore."
"I've never heard of them," said Tom.
"You wouldn't have, unless you had an account there." Dhutta twirled the key between his fingers. "They're based here in Zurich. Very prestigious. Very secretive. They don't advertise, don't even have a sign on their building. If they think you are suitable, they find you."
"Well, if their logo's on it, the key must have some connection with the bank," Tom insisted.
"Come, gentlemen" — Dhutta jumped up, tossing the key in the air and deftly catching it again—"I want to try something."
The hall was divided into three main areas. The smallest was the one they had just come from, a sort of makeshift sitting room on the left. Steel shelving formed a ten-foot-tall metal barricade separating this area from the rest. Dhutta led them through a gap in the shelving to his workshop area.
Several industrial metalworking machines — grinders, drills, saws, and the like — were bolted to the low workbench or freestanding, and small piles of metal shavings crunched under their feet. The shelves were full of baskets that contained further pieces of cutting and shaping and welding equipment. At the far end of the workshop area, thousands of keys dangled from huge black boards that had been screwed to the shelves. House keys, car keys, safe keys, shop keys: every possible combination of size, shape, and color glinted in the overhead light like the individual links in some enormous chain-mail shirt.
Without pausing, Dhutta led them to a gap in the next bank of shelving and through to the far end of the hall. As he walked into the third area, Tom's eyes widened. Where the workshop had been primitive and grimy, reeking of oil, this final area was a sleek, symbiotic amalgam of stainless steel and silicon.
Along the far wall were half a dozen LCD panels, each plugged into a different piece of hardware, their screens small puddles of light. In the left corner two large racks groaned and hummed under the combined weight of the computer and telecom equipment loaded on them. Scanners, printers, CD burners, and other unidentifiable pieces of electronic hardware jostled for space along the right-hand wall, their displays flashing like a Times Square billboard. Three plasma screens dominated the left-hand wall, each tuned to a different news channel; one, Tom noticed, was showing a cricket match. Dhutta caught sight of Tom's surprised expression.
"The steady march of progress," Dhutta explained with an excited sweep of his arm. "Nowadays people are preferring to place their trust in passwords and firewalls rather than springs and tumblers. But a lock is a lock, and I have to keep ahead of the game, whether the key is made from metal or from binary code."
He pulled a chair out from under the worktop and, switching on a desk lamp, examined the key carefully.