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clear to Suhasini. “And it would be the perfect bait for a person like Pandey,” she said.
    “But I can’t sacrifice the justice of thousands for my own deliverance.” She could hear the anguish in his voice, but her mind was already running ahead of her. She could see how Triloki must have planned things, how he had failed without the diary.
    “You don’t have to sacrifice anything,” she said. “You can offer to sell it to him, and he’ll come to you. He has to. The diary is political dynamite, and all he knows about you is that you are an antique collector, somebody who can be paid off with money. Triloki set things up with an inspector at Niza-muddin. I’ll make sure he’s there. You can lure Pandey with the promise of selling him the diary and then confront him. We get Pandey, and you don’t lose the diary.”
    When Arjun Singh didn’t answer right away, she said, “Mr. Singh, this is the only way,” and was surprised at the pleading in her own voice. It seemed very important to her now to complete this thing, to make sure that Triloki’s last assignment was finished properly, his penance completed.
    Maybe it seemed that way to Arjun Singh as well, because he said, “I should have trusted Triloki. I’ll trust you instead.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Singh.”
    “Please,” he replied, “please, just make this work,” and hung up.
    She looked at her phone and didn’t know what to do next. The name Rajan Pandey niggled at her, and she realized that she didn’t know how to contact him. If he was the fixer he was supposed to be, then there would be no real way to access him, not for somebody like her. On an impulse she dialed Triloki’s number on her second cell phone.
    This time it was the smooth voice that picked up. “Hello?”
    “Rajan Pandey?” she asked.
    If she hadn’t been concentrating she would have missed the hesitation, and the slight rise in the pitch of his voice, as he replied, “Sorry, you have the wrong number.”
    “No, I don’t, Mr. Pandey,” she said. “It’s you that has the wrong number. In fact, you have the wrong phone, Triloki’s.”
    “Suhasini Das,” the voice said.
    “Very good, Mr. Pandey,” she answered.
    “You aren’t inviting me to an inauguration again, are you?”
    The voice was so cool, so controlled, it made her ears burn. “No, Pandey.” And now she spoke in anger: “I’m inviting you to look at a diary.”
    “You have it?” Now he was dead serious, no jokes at all.
    “You haven’t even asked which diary,” she said.
    Laughter erupted from him, hard, cold, bitter laughter. “I know which diary,” he said. “Triloki was most … cooperative.”
    Bastard, she thought, I’ll enjoy taking you down . “Day after tomorrow. Morning, at 10 o’clock, near Hotel Rajdoot. You know where that is?”
    “Yes, I know where that is,” he said. “Where exactly?”
    “I’ll let you know,” she said, and hung up. And then she called Arjun Singh. He was both elated and panicky, but she managed to draw from him the address where he wanted to confront Pandey and the promise that he wouldn’t step out of his house until she arrived.
    She made one final call.
    “Hello, Inspector Ramdev?”
    “Who is it?”
    “This is Suhasini Das, Jaidev Triloki told me to call you.”
    “Yes, yes, he said you’d call.” Ramdev sounded far too hearty. “What’s the matter?”
    “I need your help. There’s a meeting where there will be a person turning up. He’s well connected, Triloki probably told you about him,” she said.
    “You want security?”
    “Yes,” she answered, and gave him the details. He reassured her that he would be there, and he sounded happy. Ramdev probably had no idea of how badly things had turned out for his friend Triloki, and this was no time for her to tell him.
    She spent the next day with Arjun Singh, walking the streets of Jalebi Central. She checked the place where the killing had happened so many years ago, and all the