wept and flailed and the few kids left on the opposite platform gestured and shouted abuse. As the DCP looked at them, studying the situation for leverage and clues, one of them, a young man with his face covered with a kaffiyeh even in the hot weather, showed him a finger. Then, quite clearly and still silently, he held up his other hand, showing him two fingers scissoring at each other, which he then brought to the first one, pretending to cut it off. A train headed in the opposite direction hissed to a stop on the other line, wondering faces lining the windows, then the train was gone and the young man with the kaffiyeh and all the other kids as well, and the DCP was left with the thought that his hunch had been right but Angulimala himself had escaped.
So he turned to the girl who was writhing and sweating and crying in Kapoor’s grip.
“It’s my first time, I swear. I’ve never come here before. I’ll tell you who brought me. I can’t go to jail,” she moaned. “I’ll tell you everything.”
“Of course you will, honey,” said Kapoor. “Just do me one favor. Promise me you’ll take your time.”
The girl looked at him first, speechless with fear, then at the DCP, who merely smiled and lit a cigarette. Then they too were gone down the escalator, ignoring the other riders who averted their eyes from the sight of the two men escorting the weeping girl, past the downcast guards, out to their waiting car, parked on the bank of the river of traffic that surged under the fluorescent sterile station above.
The girl, it transpired, was telling the truth. She knew only two of the others, both young women. They’d only come along because they’d been following the conversation across sites and groups of like-minded young people on the Internet. She didn’t know the young man 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?”
