in the kaffiyeh, didn’t know the moving forces behind the vampire-versus-lycan war, barely recognized her father when he walked into the station to collect her. He was a man of consequence, arrived in an SUV, possessed rings on all his fingers, and didn’t bother calling any of the ministers whose numbers were clearly stored in his phone. He thanked the DCP and Kapoor for rescuing his daughter, slapped her once in front of them, then embraced her and cried as well. The DCP was informed by the immigration authorities at Indira Gandhi International Airport that she left for Singapore the next night for an indefinite stay with her maternal uncle. Apparently, she was flying business class.
Records revealed that a few of the young antagonists had been unwise enough to use their metro cards to gain access to the platform. They were all roused from their scattered sleep before the night was out. Unsurprisingly, they all proved to be models of cooperation, though they added very little to the meager fund of the DCP’s knowledge. None of them knew the man in the kaffiyeh. He was known to be solitary, was a vampire, a brutal fighter among a collection of kids who were mostly dilettantes of delinquency, and barely spoke to anyone. He didn’t have a name, never corresponded over e-mail, and didn’t possess a mobile phone. He followed the conversation and came to the rumbles and that was all they knew.
Tracking an e-mail ID or even an IP address was pointless, Smita told them. “The kids these days change them like you change your clothes.”
The two detectives were in her office, their feet comfortably on chairs in front of them. There had been a surge of chatter on the Internet, she told them, and then it had all gone dead. The kids were lying low for the moment.
“You didn’t get a good look at him?”
The DCP shook his head. Nothing had set him apart from the other kids on the far platform. Only the kaffiyeh, and plenty of other kids were wearing them that year.
She turned back to her computer. “Okay. I don’t know who he is, but I have a fair idea I’ve read his posts, under various names.” One of her colleagues, who’d been monitoring their conversation, nodded too.
“I thought these kids never heard from him,” stated Kapoor.
“Most of these kids are hobbyists,” said Smita dismissively. “They’re told where to go and they show up to see what’s happening. A few of them, however, are worth keeping an eye on. This one, in particular, is a dark one. If he’s the same guy.”
“What do you know about him?”
“We know that he’s boastful. He does it under different names, but we can recognize his style,” said Smita’s colleague. “That he considers himself a vampire is pretty much spot on. He’s one of the hard core, a believer. He’s not doing it for kicks, or to fit into a crew, or because he likes the hair and the makeup. I’ve tried tracing him, following him around on the Internet. We’ve found his signature on underground vampire sites, groups that feed on each other’s blood at private parties, things like that. But he doesn’t keep the same online persona long enough for us to actually track him down.”
The DCP raised an eyebrow. “And?”
Smita picked up the thread. “We know he’s convinced there have been vampires in Delhi for hundreds of years.”
This time the DCP raised both eyebrows.
Smita and her colleague chuckled in tandem. “That’s one of the ways we recognize him. Even in that crowd, this stands out.”
“You’re an aficionado of Delhi’s history, aren’t you, sir?” said the young male officer. “What do you think?”
“I think you should tell me what else you know,” said his superior officer. “Any noise at all on the finger-snatcher?”
The two cyber-crime officers shook their heads regretfully. They’d been monitoring the chatter, which had of late become a cacophony, but there was nothing to link the vampire to the collector of fingers.
“There is one thing,” said Smita. “He’s obsessed with the Colonel.”
The DCP and Kapoor looked at each other, then at the young woman. “Who?”
“You know, that woman who parties every night. Everyone knows her and talks about her. She’s in the silly papers all the time.”
“What does he want with her?”
“Photos, for the most part. Information. Posts keep popping up on various forums, asking for either. Her address, where she’ll be that night. We’re convinced it’s him.”
The DCP still looked fogged. “If she’s always in the papers, surely he can just run a search for her images?”
“That’s the point,” said Smita with a cagey smile. “She seems to know all the photographers. The writers go on about her, describe her clothes and what she’s drinking, but there’s never a photo. Practically everyone who goes out at night has seen her. I’ve seen her. But if you only knew her through the papers, she could almost be a figment of the collective imagination of Delhi’s gossip writers.”
“A ghost,” supplied her colleague helpfully. “Or a vampire. Apparently, some of the stories say vampires can’t be photographed. He’s offered to pay for her photo. He trawls through the Facebook pages of Delhi’s nightbirds looking for camera-phone shots of the night before. He haunts the Flickr accounts of the press photographers. We think he’s even hacked the image archives of the dailies. But clearly whatever he’s found isn’t enough.”
“The Colonel,” mused the DCP. “Is that really her name?”
“That’s what the papers call her,” said Smita.
“Alright then,” said the DCP. “Where do we find her?”
“That’s easy,” said Smita’s colleague eagerly. “It’s Wednesday. She’ll be at the nightclub at the Babar Hotel.”
Smita nodded sagely.
The DCP looked at Kapoor, who nodded as well and said, “My nephew works there.”
“Would you,” the DCP formally asked Smita, “be interested in helping me with the investigation into the finger-snatcher case?”
“A table for two,” said Kapoor over the phone.
The night saw them heading toward the Babar Hotel in the DCP’s personal car. He thought that the young policewoman had hit just the right pitch with her choice of clothes, with the trousers a no-nonsense nod toward what was in effect a working dinner, while the straps on the otherwise discreetly chic blouse were meager enough to suggest that she wasn’t entirely unaware of the potential of a night out at Delhi’s current hotspot.
She asked him about Delhi’s vampires, when she felt the silence beginning to weigh. What about them? he asked back. Did the DCP believe there were such things? she replied.
He told her he’d thought about it all that day and had realized that he didn’t really know, one way or another, which surprised him.
Djinns are still invoked in Ferozeshah Kotla and in other places, he said as if to himself. There are shops in Dariba that have been empty for generations because the jewelers believe they’re cursed. There are madwomen on the Ridge and tree spirits in Mehrauli, and during the Uprising, armies dressed in green silk with their swords naked to the air were seen and then disappeared. In daylight.
“This city,” he said, gesturing out through the windows of his car at the agglomerations of squat ugly houses racing by in the land south of Safdarjung’s tomb. “It’s a giant necropolis. Entire developments raised on what used to be graveyards. Old villages gone, fields buried, their soil used for cement.”
The bare bones of householders and thieves, the spirits of lost cremation grounds, the stories of wanderers and village heads and warriors and all their women. Disinterred and then dispersed