The Case of the Love Commandos Read Free

quiet month—as quiet as it ever got in a nation of 1.2 billion people.
    The start of June had brought a desperate call from the Khannas. The couple had arrived to take possession of their new apartment in Ecotech Park Phase 7, greater NOIDA, on a day deemed auspicious by their astrologer, only to find another family simultaneously trying to move in. Vish Puri’s task had been to track down the double-crossing real estate broker, whom he’d located in the bowels of northeast Delhi.
    Next, celebrity chef Inder Kapoor had commissioned Most Private Investigators Ltd. to find out who hacked his computer and stole his mother’s famous recipe for chilli mint marinade. Puri’s reward for identifying the culprit had been several helpings of homemade papri chaat drizzled with yogurt and tamarind chutney spiked with pomegranate, black salt and just the right amount of fiery coriander-chilli sauce.
    “Should you have need of my services, I am at your disposal night or day,” Puri had told Kapoor after finishing every last morsel.
    Then last week he’d played bagman for Mr. and Mrs. Pathak and got back their precious Roger from his kidnappers. Howthey could have brought themselves to pay the five lakh rupees was beyond him. It was a staggering amount—more than the average worker made in ten years. But what was even more shocking—“absolutely mind-blowing” in Puri’s words—was madam’s claim that she would have paid ten times that amount after receiving the “traumatizing” ransom video that showed her pooch being “tortured”—lying on a dirty concrete floor rather than a silk cushion.
    The detective almost wished he hadn’t bothered delivering the cash. He would rather have enjoyed the prospect of the kidnap gang carrying out their threat to eat Roger. And they would have done it too, given that they hailed from Nagaland, where pug kebab was considered something of a delicacy. But being “a man of his word and integrity, also,” Puri—along with his faithful team of undercover operatives—had caught the goondas by using a miniature pinscher as bait.
    June had also brought in a few standard matrimonial investigations—although with the monsoon almost upon them, India’s wedding industry had taken a honeymoon.
    And then there was the Jain Jewelry Heist.
    Puri had caught the thieves. Within seven hours of receiving the call from his client, First National Hindustan Insurance Corporation Inc.
    “These Charlies left so many of clues when they decamped with the loot, it is like following crumbs to the cookie jar,” Puri declared at the time, certain that he’d broken some kind of record.
    But then he’d hit something of a brick wall.
    Of the 2.5 crore of jewelry taken from the Jains’ multimillion-dollar luxury Delhi villa, Puri had recovered just two pairs of earrings, four bangles and a couple of hundred thousand rupees in cash.
    Delhi’s chief of police gloated, telling the baying press corpsthat “amateurs” were not up to the task. And yet the chief fared no better, soon coming to the stunning conclusion that the gang had stashed the loot at some secret location between the Jains’ palatial residence and their hideout.
    Desperate, the chief had then reverted to a “narco analysis test.” Although a violation of an individual’s rights under the Indian constitution—not to mention a form of torture according to international law—this involved injecting the accused with a truth serum and monitoring their brain patterns.
    The results were comic at best. Under the influence, the gang members, who all giggled as they “deposed,” told their interrogators that they might care to find the jewelry in a variety of different locations. These included the top of Mount Everest and up the chief’s rear passage. Yet, when sober, they strenuously denied having taken anything more than the earrings, bangles and cash.
    “That was all there was in the safe!” their leader insisted.
    In the three weeks