Sanyal flopped down on a bench. He was trembling once more—but with fear this time, not rage. He knew there could be no escape. In the meantime, someone must have realized there was something wrong and pulled the cord, for the train came to an unexpected halt. It wouldn’t have stopped unless the cord had been pulled. Within seconds, we could hear a confused babel. Several voices were shouting the same name: ‘Victor! Victor! Where have you gone, Victor?’ I could hear Mr Ghoshal’s voice. Victor Perumal had messed things up. He was supposed to jump on the roof of the train. Instead of doing that, he had jumped into our compartment. Feluda leant out of the door and called, ‘Mr Ghoshal! Over here!’ Mr Ghoshal arrived, looking profoundly distressed and harassed. That was hardly surprising as any hold-up in shooting such a complex scene would be liable to cause heavy losses, perhaps to the tune of thirty thousand rupees. ‘What’s the matter with you, Victor? Have you gone completely mad?’ he demanded. ‘Mr Ghoshal,’ said Feluda, ‘if anyone in your film deserves to be called jet Bahadur, it is Victor Perumal.’ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Mr Ghoshal asked. He was now looking perplexed, but perplexity was still outweighed by annoyance. ‘Besides,’ Feluda went on, ‘the role of that smuggler should have gone to this man here, not your actor called Paramesh Kapoor.’ ‘What rubbish are you talking, Mr Mitter? Who is this man?’ Mr Ghoshal glanced at Sanyal. By this time, two vehicles had appeared on the road. One was a police jeep, and the other was a police van. The jeep pulled up next to our compartment. Inspector Patwardhan climbed out of it. In reply to Mr Ghoshal’s question, Feluda walked up to Sanyal, grabbed his beard and moustache and yanked them off, before pulling off his wig and glasses. ‘I would have been delighted,’ Feluda remarked, ‘if I could remove that scent from your body, Mr Gore. Sadly, that’s something even Felu Mitter cannot do.’ ‘Laluda, who told you a film would remain incomplete if its producer was arrested?’ The question came from Mr Ghoshal. To tell the truth, Lalmohan babu hadn’t spoken at all. He was simply sitting there, looking pensive and morose. Anyone could guess that he was worried about the future of Jet Bahadur. ‘No one,’ Mr Ghoshal continued, ‘can stop our film. Gore might go to prison—or hell—or wherever—but don’t you see, he wasn’t the only producer in Bombay? There’s Chuni Pancholi; he’s been pestering me for over a year to make a film for him. I’ll get things going again, you mark my words. Even before you leave Bombay, you’ll see me shooting the film under a new banner.’

That day, however, all shooting had ground to a halt at half past one. Gore and Nimmo were arrested and handcuffed. Nanasaheb’s naulakha necklace was in police custody. Feluda had anticipated trouble during the first day’s shooting. When he’d told us in the morning that he was going out to buy cigarettes, he had actually gone to speak to Patwardhan. Gore, apparently, had spent twelve years in Calcutta. He had been not just to Don Bosco, but also to St. Xavier’s. Hence he could speak Bengali very well, although in Bombay he was heard speaking only Hindi and Marathi besides English. We were sitting on the veranda of a dak bungalow in Khandala. It was a beautiful place and there was a decided nip in the air. People from Bombay often went to Khandala for a change of air, I had heard. We had already finished the food (naan and mutton do-pyaza) we’d found in those boxes, provided by the Safari Restaurant. It was now four-thirty, so we were having tea and pakoras. Mr Ghoshal had joined us for a while, then moved to a different table where Arjun Mehrotra was seated. Mehrotra was looking a little crestfallen, perhaps because most undoubtedly, the real hero that day was Pradosh Mitter. Plenty of people from the unit— including Micky, the villain—had asked Feluda for his autograph. There was a second hero, and unquestionably that was Victor Perumal. It turned out that Feluda had spoken to him before the shooting started. ‘When you come riding down the hill and get close to the train,’ he had said, ‘keep an eye on the first-class compartment. If you see anything suspicious, come in through the door.’ Victor had seen Feluda standing with his arms raised. That had told him instantly that help was required, and he had swung into action. Strangely enough, even after a heroic act like that, Victor was quite unmoved. He was back with his men, practising kung-fu, in the little field opposite the bungalow, as if nothing had happened. ‘The thing is, you see . . .’ Lalmohan babu finally opened his mouth. But Feluda interrupted him. ‘The thing is that you are still totally in the dark, is that it?’ Lalmohan babu smiled meekly and nodded. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult to throw light on everything. But, before I do that, you must be told about Gore, and understand how he functioned. ‘The first thing to remember is that he was really a smuggler, though he was trying to pass himself off as a respectable film producer. He decided to make a film from your story. You wrote in that story that a smuggler lived in a building called Shivaji Castle. Naturally, that caused some concern. Gore wanted to find out how much you knew about the real occupants of Shivaji Castle, since he was one of them, and he was a smuggler. So he dressed as Sanyal and went to your house. But, having spoken to you, he realized that you were completely innocent and harmless, and your entire story was purely imaginary. The reference to Shivaji Castle was just a coincidence. ‘Gore felt reassured, but then it occurred to him that he could use you to transfer the stolen necklace.