The Mountain Shadow

Chapter Fifty-One

The lull that followed the storm of Lisa’s death and the massacre at the Devnani estate lasted for long, busy, peaceful weeks. I liked it. I’d seen enough storms for one year.

Diva settled into her role as a slum girl, and the slum settled into its role as host to a Diva. Neither of them had much choice: the girls in the slum were star-struck over Diva, so they formed a permanent honour guard; and the killers of Diva’s father hadn’t been identified, so Diva stayed in the safest place in the city.

The newspapers still carried the story of the massacre, and the missing heiress. A court-appointed CEO administered the group of companies owned by Diva’s father, working with the various boards of directors until the heiress could be found.

There were twenty-five thousand people in the slum, and most of them knew who Diva was. Nobody called a reporter, or tried to claim the reward. She was under the protection of the slum, and in that avalanche of huts and shoulder-width lanes she was Aanu, one

of their own. She was safe from thugs with guns or magazine deadlines.

The Georges ran a semi-permanent party and fully permanent poker game from the top floor of the Mahesh hotel. Celebrities who’d closed their windows at traffic signals, when they were poor fixtures of the city, spent more time in the penthouse parties than they did with their therapists.

When the deputy mayor broke the bank, he declared the game a municipal recreation, exempting it from prosecution under gambling laws. When the ward tax collector won a similar pot, the poker game was registered as a charity. And when the prettiest starlet in Bollywood won six hands in a row, cleaning out everyone except the bank, she made the game so hot that one Bollywood actor after another tried, and failed, to restore male pride by beating her record.

For his part, Didier applied himself to the Lost Love Bureau with surprising diligence. He rose early, something so shocking that I jumped with fright the first time I saw him bright and active at eight in the morning. Didier had always said that an hour of sunlight a day is enough for anyone, and the hour before sunset was the only sunlight worth having.

The morning version of the night person I knew was strange, at first. He was punctual. He worked. He even told jokes.

‘You know,’ Naveen said, a few weeks after the bureau had opened for business, ‘I’m so glad that you put Didier and me together. He’s a hard-working stiff, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘You’re just nostalgic.’

‘It isn’t nostalgia, if the first version is better. I don’t want Didier to get corporate on me.’

The new Didier did get corporate, and detectived seriously, and business at the bureau was brisk. He put an advertisement for the Lost Love Bureau in the biggest daily newspaper, one of Ranjit’s newspapers, offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of Ranjit, the missing owner of Ranjit Media, a Lost Love.

The notice didn’t bring any new leads, but it got everyone in town talking about the Lost Love Bureau, and it brought more than a dozen clients, each one clutching a file of photographs and police reports on missing loved ones. And when two of the missing loves were found in as many weeks, due to Didier’s street connections and Naveen’s deductive skills, the bureau attracted more clients, all of them willing to pay cash in advance.

Karla was right, of course: a market is a need, serving itself. Lost loves, forgotten or abandoned by overstretched police departments, are a constant ache in the heart, no less for the cops themselves, and a need that demands to be served. The bureau did well: lost loves were found, and reunited with the hearts that couldn’t stop searching for them.

Vinson and Rannveig dropped in at Gemini George’s parties from time to time. Vinson was happy, but never left Rannveig’s side unless she sent him away, or told him to wait somewhere.

The girl with the ice-in-a-blue-glass eyes seemed to have accepted the death of her boyfriend. She never mentioned him to me again. But while that ghost might’ve slipped away on a river of acceptance, some shadow remained in the young face. It was as if every changing expression or movement of a hand was clouded by irresolution.

Nevertheless, she looked healthy and well. And she’d taken to dressing as Karla did, in a thin sheath of salwar kameez and tight cotton leggings. It suited her, with her hair pulled back into a high ponytail. And when she smiled happily and openly, as she did from time to time, leaves of doubt parted, and a bright sky of what she could become shone through.

In the mysterious absence of Ranjit, the proprietor, Kavita Singh was promoted from banner journalist to deputy editor of the flagship newspaper. The fact that Karla had a deciding proxy vote in Ranjit Media was influential. The fact that Kavita’s columns were the most popular in the city was decisive.

Within two weeks under Kavita’s creative hand, the newspaper took a new turn, not left or right, but straight up into something else. The mood was upbeat. Bombay was a great, exciting place to live. Enough of this comparing ourselves to other places shit, she wrote in her first editorial. Open your eyes, and see how wonderful this gigantic social experiment you’re living in is, and see how much real love keeps it going.

People loved it. Sometimes, people born in a place need to have someone wake its beauty for them, and Kavita’s editorial started a fire in every Mumbaikar’s heart; a fire of pride that none of them knew they’d prepared inside themselves, until Kavita lit it. The newspaper’s circulation increased by nine per cent. Kavita was a hit.

Karla laughed, long and happily, when the civic pride campaign became a trend that tumbled into a cascade of social activities across the city. I didn’t ask her why, and she didn’t tell me.

She moved into the rooms next to mine and transformed them, during a week of deletions and deliveries. Her three rooms, a living room, a bedroom and a wardrobe corridor like mine, became a Bedouin tent.

Waves of sky-blue and white muslin, fixed from the light fittings in the centre of each room, hid the ceilings. The lights were stripped away and replaced by old railway lanterns.

She took all the furniture out of the rooms, except for the bed, and a writing table in the living room. She bought the table from the music store downstairs and had the legs sawn off, so that she could sit at it cross-legged in the middle of the floor.

She covered every linoleum inch of that floor, even the bathroom, with Turkish and Iranian carpets. They were lying on top of one another as if they’d exhausted themselves, wrestling for a place of prominence at her feet.

The balcony that looked out on Metro Junction, and connected with mine, was draped in red silk saris, softening the white heat of day to cooling troughs and stripes of crimson.

There weren’t any sleepovers, but it was okay. It was heaven, in fact: the happiest days I’d known since I’d thrown my life in a gutter of shame, nine years before.

Freedom and happiness and justice and even love are all parts of the same whole: peace, within. The first time I put fear into someone to get money for drugs, I crossed a line I’d drawn in the earth of my own life. But the shovel fell from my hand when Karla moved into the Amritsar hotel, and for a while I stopped digging graves of guilt. We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together almost every day. We did the work we had to do separately, but got together every minute we could.

When we were free, we rode all the way around the Island City. When she felt like it, Karla drove her car, with Randall helping himself to a soda in the back. We saw a couple of movies, visited friends, and went to a few parties.

But any night together, every night together, she went back to the Bedouin tent alone, locking all those locks I’d put on her door.

She was driving me crazy, of course, but in the best possible way. People differ in things like this, I know, but for me it isn’t how long you wait for something that counts, it’s the quality of the wait. And hours alone with Karla every day was a quality wait.

Sometimes, in all that quality waiting, very occasionally, I found myself thinking about punching a new air vent in the wall of my room. And sometimes, being only a metre away from her behind a connecting wall every night, twisted the guitar string pretty tight. Mind you, there was always the black market, to wind the string tighter.

Crime is a demon, Didier once said, and adrenaline is his drug of choice. Every crime, even a little crime like black market money changing, comes with a measure of adrenaline. The people you’re doing business with are at least a little dangerous, the cops are more than a little dangerous, and every crime has its own species of predator and prey.

Black market money changing was all but legal in South Bombay in those years, operating openly in every second Colaba cigarette shop. South Bombay had two hundred and ten cigarette shops, all of them licensed by the Municipal Authority and the Sanjay Company. I ran fourteen of them, bought from Didier, and sanctioned by Sanjay. It was usually a safe trade, but criminals, by definition, are violently unpredictable.

I never took Karla on my rounds. I did one round between breakfast and lunch, another after lunch, and a late-night scout of the shops before sleep. It was important for the boss to be seen.

Running a crime franchise requires a sophisticated degree of cooperation, usually bought, and clearly defined roles and rules. I provided the finesse money. The Sanjay Company defined the roles, and enforced the rules.

But every trader changing black money at the street level has his own measure of pride. Rebellion, from frustration or fear, is a constant possibility. The defection of even one of my money changers would bring swift punishment from Sanjay, but it would also cost me the franchise. Making such uprisings impossible, by keeping the shopkeepers between fear and friendship, was my job.

Crime is feudal, and when you understand that, you actually understand quite a lot of it. The Sanjay Company was the castle on the hill, with a moat full of crocodile gangsters, and Sanjay was the feudal lord. If he wanted a girl, he took her. If he wanted a man dead, he killed him.

Because I’d purchased a franchise in the bazaar, that made me a kind of robber baron, and the shopkeepers were the serfs. They had no rights but those granted by the Company.

Crime is a medieval metropolis running parallel to the shining city, complete with absolute monarchy and public executions. And as a robber baron, riding from serf to serf on my steel pony, I had the right to assert my authority.

The first skill in running a crime franchise is projecting an air of unchallengeable entitlement. If you don’t believe it yourself, no-one else on the street will. They’re too smart. You have to own it, and own it in a way that stops people thinking about challenging you.

In Bombay that involves a lot of yelling and the occasional slap, usually over trivial things, until the air is clear and your voice is the last and the loudest.

After that, it’s a matter of observation. This one chews paan, this one hates paan, this one listens to holy songs from a speaker in the shape of King Kong. This guy likes boys, this guy likes girls, this guy likes girls too much, this guy is confident when he’s alone, and this one cowers until his confederates arrive, this one drinks, thinks, smokes, chokes, peeps, talks, walks, and this one is the only one who’ll still be standing toe to toe with you, till the last thrust of the knife.

‘You hear what happened to Abhijeet?’ Francis, my Regal Circle money changer asked, when I pulled up beside him.

‘Yeah.’

Abhijeet was a street kid, hustling tourists on the strip. He’d tried to run a police roadblock too fast on a stolen scooter. He crashed into a stone bridge support, and the bridge didn’t give way.

‘Bloody little prick,’ Francis said, handing me the pick-up money. ‘He’s annoying my mind more, now that he’s dead, than he did when he was alive. And when he was alive, he was the most annoying prick in the world.’

‘He’s annoying you so much that you’re light, Francis,’ I said, checking the money he gave me.

‘What light, baba?’ he said, raising his voice loud enough for the other traders near him to hear.

I looked around at the faces on the street.

‘Don’t do this, Francis.’

‘I’m not doing anything, baba,’ he shouted. ‘You are accusing me, and -’

I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him toward an alley, a few steps away.

‘My shop!’

‘Fuck the shop.’

I shoved him into the alley.

‘Let’s do it,’ I said.

‘Let’s do what?’

‘You’re cheating me, in front of your friends. Now we can be honest, alone. Where’s the money?’

‘Baba, you -’

I slapped him.

‘I didn’t -’

I slapped him harder.

‘In my shirt,’ he said. ‘Your money is inside my shirt.’

There was a lot of money inside his shirt. I took the money he’d skimmed, and left the rest.

‘I don’t care where you get your money, Francis, so long as you don’t skim it from me. And you’ll never make a show in front of your friends again. You see that, right?’

It’s an ugly thing, raw power: ugly enough to scare away scavengers. And it’s an ugly job, sometimes, keeping street criminals in line. They need to know that reaction will always be fast and violent, and they need to fear it. If they don’t, they all turn on you, and then things get bloody.

I did the rounds until I had enough foreign money to knock on the door of the black market bank in Ballard Pier.

Black bankers aren’t criminals: they’re civilians who commit crimes. By staying on the safe side of the line, they don’t risk real prison time. They keep a low profile, when their wealth would bring them into the A-list, because the money’s more important. And they’re scrupulously apolitical: they hold black money for any party, whether in power or not.

The Sanjay Company used the black bank at Ballard Pier, and so did the Scorpions. But a lot of cops kept their loot there, and some heavy hitters in the armed services, and the politicians, of course. There was construction money, sugar baron money, oil money and slush fund money. In one way or another it was the best protected bank in town.

The bank cared for its customers in return. Whenever one of them messed up, the bank made the mess subside, for a fee. Each scandal was tagged and bagged and locked in the vault. There was more dirt in the black bank at Ballard Pier, it was said, than undeclared gold.

Everyone in town had something to gain from the bank’s invisible hand, and everyone had something to lose if the hand became a fist. The bank was so swollen with secrets and secret money that it was too crooked to fail.

For small hustlers like me, given access to a small sub-branch window, the black bank was a convenient way to hand in my US dollars and other currencies, take the equivalent in black rupees, and let the bank forward the foreign cash to the South Bombay buyers’ syndicate.

Nobody but partners with too much to lose knew who the buyers were. Some said that a wild bunch of movie producers and actors had set up the syndicate. One rumour insisted that it was a Bombay chapter of the Masonic Lodge.

Whoever they were, they were smart. They controlled eighty per cent of the black dollars in the south, made more profit than anyone in the chain, and never risked an hour behind bars.

After costs, in my small operation, I cleared twenty thousand rupees a month from the money changer operation. If I’d still been living in the slum, it would’ve made me a king. On the street, it was pin money.

Once crime starts to pay, you soon learn that the key to survival isn’t making money, it’s keeping it. Every black rupee you make has a hundred hands reaching out to take it away. And you can’t call the cops, because the cops are often the ones taking it away.

And when the cash you make comes in bundles, and you don’t have any burning desire to spend it, because you’re a rainy day kind of a guy, few decisions are more important than where you decide to keep it.

The first rule is not to put it all in one place. If things get bad, and you’ve gotta give something up, a plump reserve is a good idea. I kept some at home as escape money. I left some with Tito, Didier’s man. He gave me friend rates of two per cent. He still called it ten per cent, but only charged me two.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, when he muttered ten per cent again, out of habit. ‘My mind is angry with me.’

‘Listen, Tito, if someone comes calling, telling you that I’m tied up in a cellar somewhere, and being tortured, and uses the code 300 Spartans, just give him the money, okay?’

‘Done,’ he said. ‘For ten per cent.’

Chapter Fifty-Two

Every woman of a certain age is automatically an auntie, in India. Half-Moon Auntie, who ran a black bank in the fish market, was maybe fifty years old, and so voluptuous in her seductive powers that no man could stay more than ten minutes in her company, it was said, without proposing to her. And Half-Moon Auntie, a widow not in mourning, did everything in her considerable range of talents to make the minutes of any transaction roll into double digits.

So far, I’d always been a nine-minute guy with Half-Moon Auntie: deal done, and outta there.

‘Hi, Half-Moon Auntie,’ I said, handing a paper-wrapped bundle of rupees to her assistant clerk, sitting behind a fish counter. ‘How are you?’

She kicked a plastic chair at me. It slid to a stop at my feet. She’d done it before. She did it every time, in fact.

Decades of fish oil, soaked into the concrete, made the surface almost frictionless. It was hard to walk around. It was hard to keep standing up, in fact. It was as if the dead fish, soaked into the stone around Half-Moon Auntie’s rope bed, wanted to make us fall down. And people did, every day.

I took the chair, knowing that there was no such thing as a fast getaway from Half-Moon Auntie’s black bank.

I was sitting at the end of a very long stainless steel cutting table. It was one of several in the fish market, an area the size of a football field under waves of slanted tin and clotted skylight crests.

Work had stopped for the day, and the shouting had shrunk into a silence that was, perhaps, like the gasps of fish, drowning in our air, just as we drown in theirs.

I could hear Half-Moon Auntie swallowing. I could hear the clock on the wall ticking. I could hear Auntie’s assistant, counting the money slowly, carefully.

It was dark, but the shade was hotter than the sunny street outside. The smell had been strong enough to close my mouth, at first, but it began to settle into a low hum of fish not in the sea.

Someone started to run a hose at the far end of the market. Blood and pieces of dead things floated past in a gutter chiselled into the concrete floor.

Beside the gutter was Half-Moon Auntie, standing in her slippers, her rope bed covered by a hand-sewn quilt as silver as the fins of a mirror fish.

‘So, Shantaram,’ she said. ‘They say that a woman has your heart.’

‘That’s true, Half-Moon Auntie,’ I replied. ‘How are you doing?’

She put her arms out to her sides. Very, very slowly she lowered herself onto the rope bed, her arms extended at her sides. Then she dripped her feet out of the slippers, and her legs went into action.

I didn’t know if it was yoga or contortionism, but Half-Moon Auntie’s legs were pythons, searching for something to constrict. They moved left and right, north and south, twirling above her head and extending wide enough to ford a stream, before settling underneath her on the silver quilt, the prehensile feet tucked up against Olympian thighs.

It took about thirty seconds. If it had been a show, I would’ve applauded. But it wasn’t a show, and I wasn’t a customer.

She began to roll her shoulders.

‘So, how’s business, Half-Moon Auntie?’ I tried.

Too late. She leaned toward me slowly, arching her back to feline fluidity. Her breasts fell into view, half a moon tattooed on each globe, and she didn’t stop until the moon was full.

Her exceptionally long hair fell to the bed around her folded knees, closing a curtain on the moon, and spilling almost to the blood-stained floor.

She raised her eyes, threatening me with mysteries and things we shouldn’t know, then curled her arms backwards around her until her hands clasped her own neck, the fingers wriggling like anemones, spawning in the light of that inverted moon.

No-one can say she didn’t have her charm. But I liked her, more than I liked her famous routine.

Half-Moon Auntie was always armed, which is invariably interesting, no matter which way you look at it. She had a small automatic pistol, presented to her by the Chief Commissioner. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know the story. I knew that she’d fired it twice, both times to save someone being bullied by thugs from other areas of the city.

She read fortunes in people’s hands, and made more money as a sorceress than she did as a fisherwoman and black banker combined.

And she won the girls’ wrestling championship in the fishermen’s slum, three years in a row. It was a girls-only event, strictly cordoned off by faces of husbands and brothers and fathers, their backs to the girls who wrestled alone. No-one ever got to see it but the girls who fought until they found a champion.

I wanted to know about the event. I wanted to know the story of how the Commissioner gave her the gun. What I didn’t want was a game, with a ten-minute deadline.

‘A woman always finds a way,’ she said, straightening up, and glancing at the clock. ‘At least once, when you are with this woman who has taken your heart, you will be thinking of me, while you make love to her.’

‘See, Half-Moon Auntie, you’re wrong. That’s not gonna happen.’

‘Are you so sure?’ she asked, holding my stare.

‘Completely. With all due respect, Half-Moon Auntie, my girlfriend kicks your ass. You’re a lovely woman, and all that, but my girlfriend is a goddess. And if it comes to an actual fight, she’d kick your ass there, too. She’d beat both of us together, with change, and have us thanking her for it, after she did it. I’m crazy about her, Auntie.’

She held my stare for a couple of seconds, testing me, maybe, then slapped her thighs and laughed. I liked it so much that I laughed with her.

‘All correct,’ her assistant called out, putting my bundle of rupees in a metal bin, locking it, and logging the amount in his ledger.

‘You’re not the first to say such words,’ Half-Moon Auntie said. ‘But not many do. A few. Most of them beg for their free show, and create lies, as reasons to consult with me.’

‘To be fair to them, you put on a great show, Auntie.’

She laughed.

‘Thank you, Shantaram. That’s how the legend of my palm-reading skills began. An adulterous husband invented it, so that he could hold my hand, and watch the phases of the moon. Some of them sweat with how much they need it. Even people you know. Your friend Didier sits with me every week.’

‘I’ll bet he does,’ I laughed. ‘Why do you do it, Half-Moon Auntie?’

I suddenly realised that the question might hurt her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘It was a writer’s question, so, you know, probably unforgivably rude.’

She laughed again.

‘Shantaram, you can only ask that question, when you have the power to do it. So, when you have the power to do it, ask yourself.’

‘My girlfriend is gonna love that line.’

‘Bring her with you, next time,’ she threatened.

‘What if she crosses ten minutes, and proposes to you?’

‘Of course she will propose to me, and so will you, one day.’

‘I thought we covered that,’ I frowned, not understanding.

‘You write stories, Shantaram,’ she smiled. ‘One day you will write about me, and that will be a declaration of love. And this woman who has your heart will propose to me, out of happy love, nothing more.’

‘Isn’t every love happy love?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘There is your kind of love. You, and the few like you, who have become my dearest friends.’

‘I don’t want unhappiness in love,’ I said, frowning. ‘I don’t want unhappiness at all.’

‘I’m talking about the real thing,’ she replied. ‘The real thing is always more painful and more rewarding than anything less.’

‘That’s… very confusing,’ I said. ‘But I’m so glad we had this talk, Half-Moon Auntie. If I’ve been unwittingly rude, and you’re not gonna shoot me, please give me about two minutes’ head start. It’ll take me that long to get to the door, on this surface.’

‘Go, now, Shantaram,’ she laughed. ‘You are a VIP customer, from this day. May the Goddess keep your weapons sharp, and your enemies afraid.’

I slowly skated away from her, sliding and slipping my way across slaughter’s floor until I reached the golden arch of sunlight leading to the open market beyond.

While I scraped my boots dry, I looked back at her, doing yoga exercises on the bed.

One foot was raised high and enclosed in her palm, like a flame resting in the space above her head. Half-Moon Auntie: businesswoman, gangster and Mistress of Minutes. She was right, I thought. Karla probably would propose to her.

My third bank, my Didier reserve, was the floating poker game that Gemini George ran from their penthouse apartment.

Games that turn over a lot of money need a bank to fund the house. The house takes a percentage of the game, win or lose, but the house also plays, because the margin you win, if you play well, is always bigger than the vig paid for running the game.

The best way to keep a house bankable is to have a good dealer who knows when to fold, and another player in the game, who appears independent but is actually giving his winnings to the house.

Even with improved odds like that, it’s always possible for some golden child to walk in and break the bank. It happens. Sometimes, it happens three nights in a row.

But a golden child event is rare enough to make a well-run game pay off, five nights from seven, and Gemini George knew how to run a game.

I put money into the bank, with Didier and Gemini, and the three of us primed the pump for the poker games. My winnings, on a weekly basis, were about equal to the interest I would’ve earned on my money in a well-run fund.

Gemini had given up cheating. It was a mandatory requirement, mandated by Didier and me. We had to run a straight game, or there was no point.

And Gemini did it. He played every game for the house as straight as the bridge between fear and anger. His honesty and skill won him a lot of new friends, and won a lot of money for us.

Gemini needed the game, because his millionaire friend, as it turned out, was stingy with a dollar. Scorpio paid all the bills for the penthouse floor at the Mahesh, because it was the only place in Bombay that he felt safe, and he didn’t feel safe enough to leave the city and go somewhere else, where millionaires live in safety.

But he scanned every receipt and invoice for minute economies, and frequently found them, scraping pennies from accounts measured in thousands.

He refused to fund Gemini’s parties. Gemini told everyone to bring their own stimulants, and the parties rolled on. They were cheaper, and gaudier, and much more popular. The hotel became a place where famous people met infamous people, and every bar and restaurant was crowded.

Scorpio restricted Gemini to a limited expense account at the hotel, for food, drink, and services. He also gave him two hundred dollars in cash every week.

Gemini made two hundred dollars in cash every hour with us, in the game, and played in a trance of elegant dexterity. He was confident. He lost with a joke or a line from a song, and won without pride.

‘I thought of settin’ up a support group, a sort of AA, for people like me, who can’t stop cheatin’, Card Cheats Anonymous, you know, but the trouble is, you wouldn’t be able to trust no-one. Not when it actually came down to cards. Know what I mean?’

‘Come on, Gemini. A cynic is someone angry at his own soul, and you’re no cynic.’

He squinted on the thought.

‘I love you, mate,’ he said, smiling to himself.

‘Love you too, brother. And anyway, you did it, man. You cold-turkeyed cheating at cards, and you’re playing straight, and better than ever.’

‘Took some doin’, I tell ya,’ he shuddered. ‘I turned to books, at first. I hit Keats pretty hard and got very sad-trippy, then I got totally Kerouaced, as out of it as a drunken chimp and sayin’ the first thing that came into me addled mind. I stumbled into Fitzgerald, staggered out of Hemingway, got totally Deronda with George Eliot, stoned with Virginia Woolf, batty with Djuna Barnes and deranged with Durrell, but then I switched back to movies, and three days of Humphrey Bogart had me right as rain.’

‘Quite a support group, Gemini.’

‘Yeah. Nothin’ like writers and actors for company, is there, when you’re at the end of your rope.’

‘You got that right. I’m glad it worked out for you.’

He looked at me, lifting aside a curtain of reticence.

‘It’s a nice view, from the other side of the line, Lin. I never thought I’d say this, but it almost feels good not to cheat.’

‘That’s the spirit.’

‘You think so? It feels dodgy, sometimes, being straight. Know what I mean?’

‘Sure,’ I laughed. ‘Keep it up. You look great. An abundance of chance and a scarcity of sunlight wear very well on you, card champion. How’s it going, with Scorpio?’

‘I… ’

‘That bad, huh?’

‘He keeps to himself way too much, Lin. He’s all alone in the presidential suite, most of the time. I’m not allowed in.’

‘Not allowed in?’

‘Nobody is, except the staff. He eats most of his meals in there. I mean, if he had some lovely piece of womanhood in there with him, I’d be guardin’ the door. But he doesn’t, mate, and the two of us, Scorpio and me, we were never alone.’

‘Maybe, he just needs a time-out.’

‘We split everything, shared every mouthful of food, down to countin’ out the peanuts in a packet and sharin’ every one of ’em, even and fair. We argued about everything, all the time, but we never ate a thing without the other one there. We haven’t broke bread, so to speak, for three days. I’m worried about him, Lin.’

‘Gemini, has he thought about leaving Bombay?’

‘If he has, he doesn’t talk to me about it. Why?’

‘He’s nervous, being rich. He needs to move on, and he probably won’t move on, unless you move him on.’

‘Move him where?’

‘Anywhere that millionaires live. They tend to stick together, and they know how to look after themselves. He’ll be safe there, and you’ll get some peace of mind.’

‘I’m having enough trouble living with one millionaire. I couldn’t handle a whole suburb of them.’

‘Then take him to New Zealand. Buy a farm, near a forest.’

‘New Zealand?’

‘Beautiful country, beautiful people. Great place to vanish in.’

‘I’m so worried, Lin. You know, I actually lost a game that I should’ve won, yesterday.’

‘You played about three hundred games, yesterday.’

‘Yeah, but I’m afraid of losin’ my grip, you know? I feel so helpless to help him, and I love him, mate.’

I should’ve shut up. I couldn’t know what my suggestion would bring to the Zodiac Georges. If I had three wishes, one of them would be to know when to shut up.

‘Maybe, I don’t know, you should just get him outside. Take him for a walk around the hotel. It’d be just like old times, except with bodyguards. It might shake him awake.’

‘That’s not a bad idea,’ Gemini said thoughtfully. ‘I could trick him into it.’

‘Or invite him into it.’

‘No, I’ll have to trick him into it,’ he said. ‘I’d have to trick him into drinking water in the desert, because he’d think the CIA put it there. But I’ve got a plan.’

‘Please don’t tell me,’ I said, leaving my bundle of cash for the poker game bank, and heading for the door. ‘I’m allergic to plans.’

I should’ve worried, for my friends. I know that now. Like so many people in the city, I thought that Scorpio’s money solved all their problems. I was wrong. The money was a menace, as it often is, that threatened their friendship, and their lives.

Chapter Fifty-Three

I left the hotel and rode to the Starlight Restaurant, on Chowpatty Beach. The restaurant was an illegal pop-up on a small, appropriated stretch of beach near the beginning of the sea wall.

It had been running for three months. A movie star and a local entrepreneur had the idea to create a restaurant, as a gift to the city, on a derelict section of public beach, so they created a Goan fragment, complete with palm trees, thatched table umbrellas and sand for open toes.

The food was excellent, and the service was efficient and friendly. But the fact that it was completely illegal, and likely to close any time, added a zest so special to the flavour that the city officials charged with closing down the illegal structure waited days, for a table.

The local entrepreneur, whose eccentric, ephemeral gift to the city cost him a lot of money that he knew he’d never recover, was a friend of mine. Karla was waiting at a table he’d reserved for me.

She stood up. Light from a candle on the table lifted her face, as a gentle hand might’ve done. She kissed me, and hugged me.

She was dressed in a red cheongsam, split to the hip on one side. Her hair was pulled up in a shell of curves and waves, held in place by a poison dart from a blowgun, which she’d modified with a red jewel at the end. She was wearing red gloves. She was beautiful, and it was a beautiful night, until she said the name Concannon.

‘Come again?’

‘Concannon wrote me a letter,’ she repeated, four green queens on me.

‘And you tell me this now?’

‘The other stuff we talked about was more important.’

‘I want to read it,’ I said.

It was the wrong approach, but I was angry. Concannon got me that way.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I burned it,’ she said. ‘Can we go somewhere where I can’t blow cigarette smoke on anybody but you?’

We rode to the top of Malabar Hill and a view of the restaurant we’d left, on the strip of coast below. Lights in the curve of Marine Drive garlanded the belly of the great ocean, the Mother of all.

She blew cigarette smoke on me, for a while, and then went easy on me with two green queens.

‘What’s going on?’

‘What isn’t going on, Karla?’

We were sitting on a stone monument, high enough for a view through trees to the sea. Another couple sat in the shadows a few metres away, murmuring quietly.

Cars and motorcycles passed slowly, preparing themselves for the long, curving road skirting the city zoo, and leading steeply to Kemps Corner junction. The smell of lions in cages followed that road, and the sound of their grieving roars.

Cops passed every thirty minutes or so. Some very rich people lived nearby. A limousine slowed to a creep as it passed us. The windows were blacked out.

I moved gently against Karla, feeling her body, her weight, ready to push her aside and reach for a knife. The car passed, continuing on down Lion-Sorrow Hill.

‘Why did you burn the letter?’

‘If your body gets infected, and it’s more than your immune system can cope with, you fight it off with antibiotics. It was toxic, so I burned it in an antibiotic fire. Now it’s gone.’

‘But it’s not. It’s still inside your memory. Everything is still inside your memory. You don’t forget anything. What did the letter say?’

‘It’s already in two memories, his and mine,’ she said. ‘Why should it be in three?’

She drew in a quick breath. I knew that quick breath. It wasn’t oxygen, it was ammunition. She was getting angry, and ready to let me have it.

‘It concerns both of us,’ I said, holding up my hands. ‘I get it, that a letter’s a private thing. But this is about an enemy. You’ve gotta see that.’

‘He wrote it, hoping that I’d show it to you. It’s a trick. He’s taunting and tormenting you, not me.’

‘Exactly why I want to know what he wrote to you.’

‘Exactly why you shouldn’t. It’s enough that I tell you it wasn’t nice, and that you need to know what he’s doing. I’d never hide it from you, because you need to know, but I don’t want you to read it. You’ve gotta see that.’

I didn’t see it, and I didn’t like it. For all we knew, Concannon had a hand in Lisa’s death. He’d tried to crack my skull. I didn’t feel betrayed. I just felt left out. She’d left me out of one too many of her games and schemes.

We rode home, and kissed goodnight. It wasn’t good. I couldn’t fake it. I was unhappy and disappointed. I almost made it into my room, before she stopped me.

‘Spit the long face out,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

She was standing in the entrance to the Bedouin tent. I was standing in the entrance to my monk’s cell: the room of an ex-convict, ready to leave in a motorcycle kick.

‘Concannon’s letter,’ I said. ‘I think you should’ve shown it to me. Like this, it feels like a weird secret that I don’t want you to keep.’

‘A… secret?’ she said, looking me up and down, and tilting her head. ‘You know, I’ve got a pretty busy schedule tomorrow.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘And… the day after tomorrow.’

‘And -’

‘Then, too.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it me, who’s supposed to be angry?’

‘You’re never the one who’s supposed to be angry.’

‘Not even when I’m right?’

‘Especially not when you’re right. But you’re not right about this. And now we’re both pissed.’

‘You don’t have the right to be mad at me, Karla. Concannon’s involved with Ranjit and Lisa. Nothing about him should be secret.’

‘Why don’t we leave it at that,’ she said. ‘Before we say something we’ll regret. I’ll stay in touch. I’ll slip a note under your door, if I’m feeling low.’

She shut the door, and locked the locks.

I went to my room, but Abdullah knocked on my door a minute later, disturbing my angry pacing. He told me to get ready, and meet him on the street.

He was parked near my bike with Comanche and three others from the Company, all of them on motorcycles. I kicked my bike to life and followed Abdullah and the others south toward Flora Fountain, where we stopped to allow a water tanker to pass through an intersection, elephant-slow.

‘You don’t want to know where we are going?’ Abdullah asked me.

‘No. I’m just happy to be riding with you, man.’

He smiled, and led us through Colaba to Sassoon Dock, near the entrance to the Navy base. We parked in front of a wide, shaded entrance gate, closed for the night.

Abdullah sent a kid to buy chai. The men settled on their bikes, each with a different view of the street.

‘Fardeen was killed,’ Abdullah said.

‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon,’ I said, speaking calm words, We come from God, and to God we return, but feeling shocked and hurt.

‘Subhanahu Wa Ta’aala,’ Abdullah replied. May Allah forgive the bad deeds of the returning soul, and accept the good ones.

‘Ameen,’ I answered.

Fardeen was so polite and considerate, and such a fair arbiter of others’ disputes that we knew him as the Politician. He was a brave fighter, and a loyal friend. Everyone but Fardeen had at least one enemy within the brotherhood of the Sanjay Company. Fardeen was the only man we all loved.

If the Scorpion Company had killed Fardeen as a payback for the burning of their house, they’d picked the one man in Sanjay’s group whose death punctured every heart with a poisoned sting.

‘Was it the Scorpions?’ I asked.

The other men with Abdullah, Comanche, Shah, Ravi and Tall Tony, laughed a gasp, and it was a bitter thing.

‘They took him between Flora Fountain and Chor Bazaar,’ Shah said, rubbing an angry tear away with the heel of his hand. ‘He was on his way there, but never arrived. We found his bike in Byculla, parked on the side of the road.’

‘They took him somewhere,’ Tall Tony continued, ‘tied him up, tortured him, tattooed the outline of a fuckin’ scorpion on his chest, and stabbed him through it. Pretty safe to conclude it was them.’

Tall Tony, distinguished by his height from the other Anthony in the Company, Little Tony, spat a curse on the ground at his feet. The tattoo was a cruel twist of the knife. Fardeen was a Muslim, and he followed a tradition among some Muslims, forbidding tattoos. Marking Fardeen’s body lowered the bar: the conflict wasn’t between rival gangs, but between rival religions.

‘Holy shit,’ I said. ‘How can I help?’

They laughed again, but it was the real thing.

‘We are here to help you, Lin brother,’ Abdullah said.

‘Help me?’

They laughed again.

‘What’s up, Abdullah?’

‘There is a price on your head, Lin.’

‘It’s a limited offer,’ Comanche said. ‘One night only, twenty-four hours.’

‘Starting when?’

‘Midnight tonight to midnight tomorrow night,’ Shah said.

‘How much?’

‘One lakh,’ Ravi said. ‘A hundred thousand rupees, dude. That makes you the only man here who actually knows his market value.’

It was about six thousand dollars, in those days: enough to buy a pickup truck, in America, and enough to pick up every sneak-killer in the southern zone, in Bombay.

I thought of several men I knew, a couple of friends, in fact, who’d happily kill me for nothing, if it occurred to them, just because they liked killing people.

‘Thanks, guys,’ I said.

‘What do you want to do?’ Abdullah asked me.

‘I’ve gotta stay away from Karla,’ I said. ‘Don’t want any crossfire.’

‘Wise. Do you need anything from your home?’

Do I need anything, for being hunted to death?

I worked the street. I was always ready. I had good boots, good jeans, clean T-shirt, lucky sleeveless vest with inner pockets, American money, Indian money, two knives at my back, and a motorcycle that never let me down.

I didn’t have a gun, but I knew where to find one.

‘No, I’m good, until the clock runs down. It’s gonna be an interesting night. Thanks for the warning. I’ll see you in twenty-four hours. Allah hafiz.’

I straightened my bike from the side-stand, and prepared to kick-start.

‘Whoa, whoa!’ Tall Tony said.

‘Where the fuck you goin’?’ Ravi asked.

‘I know a place,’ I said.

‘A place?’ Abdullah frowned.

‘A place,’ I said. ‘Allah hafiz.’

‘Whoa, whoa!’ Tall Tony said.

‘What place?’ Ravi asked.

‘There’s a place I know with a way in, that everybody knows, and a way out that only I know.’

‘What the fuck?’ Comanche asked.

‘I’ll get my gun,’ I said, ‘some fruit, and a couple of beers, and retire there for twenty-four. I’ll see you guys later. I’m good.’

‘Not gonna happen,’ Ravi said, shaking his head.

‘We are forbidden by Sanjay from helping you,’ Abdullah said. ‘But in a time of crisis like this, with a Council member like Fardeen killed, many young men from outside the Company are riding the streets with Company men, patrolling the whole boundary of the south with us. Comanche has joined us, and he is retired from the Company.’

‘Damn right,’ Ravi said.

‘There is nothing to stop you riding with us,’ Abdullah continued, ‘while we make patrols. And nothing to stop you resting with us, for the next twenty-four hours, as a gesture of your support for the Sanjay Company.’

‘And if you choose to do that -’ Tall Tony said.

‘- we can’t stop you,’ Ravi finished.

‘So, come, Lin, and ride the boundary of South Bombay with us for the next twenty-four hours,’ Abdullah said, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘And offer us your protection, in this time of attacks on the Company.’

It was a nice offer, one you remember, but I didn’t feel right accepting it.

‘And suppose one of you takes a bullet for me?’ I asked. ‘How am I gonna feel about that?’

‘Suppose you take a bullet saving one of us?’ Abdullah replied, starting his bike. ‘How will you feel about that?’

The others started their bikes and we rode off together, settling into a slow speed after the bikes were warm, and cruising the streets and boulevards, two in front, three behind.

Men block things out. Men are driven by duty, and block out anything that stands in the way of their duty.

There was a new price on my head, and I had no idea who put it there, but I blocked it out, thinking only of survival. Maybe the fact that I already had a bounty on my head, offered by my own government, made it easier to block, and give myself to the boundary ride with Abdullah and the others, patrolling for surprise attacks by Scorpion Company killers.

It wasn’t the first time I’d ridden a patrol in South Bombay. Other gangs had tried to take territory in the tourist-rich peninsula. We’d ridden patrols through the night in anticipation of attacks, which sometimes came: attacks that would’ve been worse, if we hadn’t been able to respond with mobile patrols in less than thirty seconds, anywhere in the south.

Two teams of four men patrolled a four-hour shift, which was the polite limit for the motorcycles.

The dragon’s mouth of the Island City is roughly the same size as Manhattan. We cruised dozens of circuits in those hours. Fortunately, South Bombay is ravined with tiny walkways, wide enough for motorcycles. They provided a network of short cuts that shaved minutes of traffic, and offered endlessly surprising entries and exits to major arterial routes.

The times that we stopped patrolling and talked to people were as important as the time in the saddle. Every helpful whisper is a way to strike the enemy. Home ground advantage is the ace of spades, in turf wars. Attention to detail is the ace of hearts. A supportive community that likes and trusts you at least as much as they like and trust the police is the royal flush.

In fact, the cops joined in with the Sanjay Company, after Fardeen’s murder, allowing a limited amnesty for Company men to carry weapons.

The Scorpions, Didier’s sources assured him, were trying to force their way into the south with a combination of violence and religious nationalism. They felt that the cops should support their control of South Bombay, because they saw themselves as patriots, and the Sanjay Company as traitors.

The cops were under strict orders to react swiftly in matters of religious sentiment, which was a convenient excuse for Lightning Dilip. He joined with Sanjay Company men, who paid him with more than patriotic fervour, and sent his jeep patrols to hunt down Scorpions for disturbing communal harmony.

It was a tense business, during the truce, being immune from police aggression. Most of us preferred the aggression. You know where you stand, when everyone’s playing by the same rules. When the cops are the good guys, it’s time to think about another game.

It was eerie, stopping at a traffic signal and having a police jeep draw up alongside; having the cops try to smile, and even make small talk, when you’ve been beaten in the back of the same jeep, by the same cops.

At the end of our patrol, when no-one had heard or seen anything unusual, we stopped near Haji Ali’s tomb, where Tardeo met Pedder Road.

Everything south of that point was Sanjay Company territory, from sea to sea. The tomb of the saint was on neutral ground, and gangsters from all over Bombay came to the shrine peacefully, even gangs that were at war.

Abdullah left the bikes with a contact at the nearby service station, and led us on the long walk across the land bridge footpath to the small island tomb of the saint.

We’d all performed the gangster ritual before: a late-night walk to the saint’s tomb, before battle.

Haji Ali, then simply a wealthy Uzbek merchant named Ali, gave up all he had to the poor, and went on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

He travelled all of the world that a traveller could reach. It was a difficult thing to do, because it was the fifteenth century, but he went everywhere, carrying his belongings on his back, and learning everything that could be known.

A man of good taste, he settled in Bombay, and was renowned in the city and beyond for his piety. He died while on the annual Haj. The coffin carrying his body was lost at sea, but washed up, miraculously, on the shores of Bombay, where his tomb was built.

Once a day, in high season, the sea washed the path to Haji Ali’s tomb away, leaving it invisible below the menacing water. It was as if the saint sometimes said, Please, enough, and was released from the world of our sins and sorrows by a drowned path, letting him sleep in peace to restore his power as one of the great protectors of the city.

On that night, the path across the sea was dry and almost deserted. The wind was sharp, and came in ruffling bursts. We walked alone, six gangsters, toward the island tomb, moonlight throwing long shadows on a mirror of shallow tide.

The rounded rocks beneath us on either side of the wide path were exposed: black wet things clinging to the path for shelter, their backs bent to the sea.

Incense, burning in bunches as thick as a camel’s hoof, filled the air with fragrances of devotion.

I didn’t follow the ritual on the path across the sea to the island shrine. Gangsters going to war walked toward the shrine thinking of the harm they’d done in the past, prayed for forgiveness at the tomb, and walked away from the shrine ready for hell. I didn’t do it, that time.

I thought of Karla, and how angry we’d been when we’d said goodnight.

I didn’t think about who’d taken the contract out on me. The list of suspects was long, and I couldn’t shorten it by thinking about it. As it turned out, Abdullah shortened it for me, as we walked back across the sea, on the strip of stone that joined the shore.

‘You did not ask me who took out this contract on you.’

‘I thought I’d survive the twenty-four, and then find out,’ I replied.

‘Why do you not want to know now?’

‘Because, when I know, I’ll want to do something to him. And it would be better to do something to him after everybody stops trying to kill me.’

‘It was the Irishman.’

‘Concannon?’

‘Yes.’

It was my turn to laugh, and about time.

‘Good to see you keeping those spirits up,’ Ravi said, walking a pace behind us with Shah, Comanche and Tall Tony.

‘No,’ I laughed, ‘it’s not funny at all, but it’s really, really funny at the same time. I know this guy. I know Concannon. It’s his version of a practical joke. It’s a gangster joke, to see if I can make it through. That’s why the contract expires in twenty-four hours. He’s fucking with me.’

I couldn’t explain it more, because I was laughing too much, and then the guys understood, all but Abdullah, and they laughed. Every time they tried to straighten up, they reminded themselves how much they wished they’d thought of it first. Then they started exchanging the names of paranoid friends they’d love to do it to, and fell helpless again.

‘I love this guy,’ Ravi said. ‘I’ve gotta meet him. I mean, we’ll kill him, of course, but I’ve gotta meet him, before we do.’

‘Me, too,’ Tall Tony said. ‘Is this the guy Abdullah shot in the leg?’

‘The same.’

‘Twice,’ Abdullah corrected, ‘in the same leg. And now, you can see that mercy is a virtue best reserved for the virtuous, and not for a demon, like this man.’

The guys laughed harder. It was a good sign, in a way. One of our men had been murdered, a man we all loved, and I’d been threatened with murder, but we weren’t so afraid that we couldn’t laugh. The young street soldiers composed themselves under Abdullah’s stern eye, and we completed the walk to the shore.

The walk to Haji Ali’s tomb before war was an insult to the saint whose coffin rode miracle-waves back to the Island City, blessing it forever, and we knew it.

But we also knew, or willed ourselves to believe, that saints forgive what the world shuns. And we were sure in those moments of the walk, despite our sacrilege, that he knew we loved him: the eternally patient saint, who listened to our gangster prayer as he slept on the sea.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Concannon’s practical joke was a blessing, after I survived it, because it flushed assassin-minded snakes out of the long grass of Colaba’s unconformable jungle. Abdullah and Didier visited every thug who’d asked about the reward for my life, and slapped him around in case the reward was offered again.

I hunted Concannon across the city, following every slender lead. Some of the searches took me to distant suburbs, on rough roads. I spent a lot of time in the saddle, most of it thinking about him. But the Irishman was always a ghost, a rumour, an echo of a taunting laugh, and I finally had to be satisfied, for a while, that if he couldn’t be found, he wasn’t a threat.

Karla was still mad. She froze me out, and was invisible for days. I tried to stay mad at her, but couldn’t pull it off. I thought it was wrong of her to withhold the letter, especially after the writer had paid to have me killed. I felt aggrieved, but I missed her too much. Those days we spent together, connected and happy, were most of the good I knew.

You wanna know a sure sign that you’re with your soul mate? a Nigerian smuggler once told me. You just can’t stay mad at her. Am I right?

He was right, and he was wrong: soul mates can stay mad, for a while, and Karla was still mad. But at least the glacial distance meant that I didn’t have to talk about Concannon’s joke. I knew she’d heard about it. I knew she’d find it funny, and find a dozen clever ways to tease me about it.

Madame Zhou was still at large. No-one had seen or heard from her in weeks. The word acid was burning my mind, every time I thought of it. I didn’t want to pester Karla, and I didn’t care who she wanted to see. But I wanted to know that she was safe, until she decided to have breakfast with me again, so I kept a discreet watch over her, whenever time allowed.

She spent a lot of her time with Kavita Singh at the newspaper office, and at Lisa’s art gallery. I knew where she was at any time of the day or night, but I couldn’t talk to her. It was driving me crazy, and I got a little short-tempered.

My money changers were throwing bundles of money at me, instead of passing them to me. People started suggesting anger management remedies, after my third argument in as many days. They ranged from prostitutes, to drugs, to gang fighting, and ended with explosions.

‘Blowing shit up is the surest way to get a woman out of your mind,’ a friend confided. ‘I’ve blown up lots of stuff. People think it’s terrorists, but it’s just me, getting a woman out of my mind.’

I didn’t want to explode things, but I was still tetchy, and love-confused, so I consulted a professional.

‘You ever blow anything up for love?’ I asked my barber, Ahmed.

‘Recently?’ Ahmed replied.

Ahmed’s House of Style barber shop was one of the last to resist modernisation into a hairdressing salon. It had three red leather and chromium chairs. They were man-chairs, endowed with hypnotic powers, and no guy I knew could resist them for long.

The mirrors you faced, when you sat in those chairs, were covered with mug shots of previous victims, none of them happy. They were customers who’d agreed to have their photograph posted, in exchange for a free haircut. They were up there as a warning not to ask for, or accept, a free haircut at the House of Style.

Ahmed had a dark sense of humour, which is something you don’t search hard for in a barber, but Ahmed was a blood-in-the-bone democrat, and we rated him for that. He tolerated every opinion, and absolute freedom of speech was guaranteed in his barber shop. It was the only place I knew, in the whole city, where Muslims could call Hindus fanatics, and Hindus could call Muslims fanatics, and get all that stuff out of their systems without riots.

It was addictive. It was a bigotry bazaar, and customers seized it by the biased lapels. It was as though everyone in Ahmed’s House of Style was on truth serum. And all of it was forgiven and forgotten by everyone, as soon as a customer walked out into the street.

Ahmed shaved me with a razor as sharp as a Cycle Killer’s moustache. When you live on the wrong side of the legal tracks, the number of people you trust to shave you with a straight razor dwindles to not many. Ahmed was trustworthy, because he was so true to his craft that he couldn’t possibly kill me with a straight razor. It was against the barbers’ code.

If he wanted to kill me, he’d have to use one of his guns, like the gun he’d sold me a few months before, which was in Tito’s vault. Safe in the laws of his guild, I opened my throat to his honour and relaxed in absolute trust, and got myself shaved.

He wrapped my freshly skinned face in towels hot enough to force confessions. Satisfied that the punishment fit the crime, he whipped off the towels, and removed the shroud with a bullfighter’s flourish.

He brushed me off skilfully, powdered my neck where he’d shaved it, then offered me the entire range of his only aftershave, Ambrosia de Ahmed.

I was calm. I was cosseted by Ahmed’s professionalism. I was healed, and feeling serene. And I was just rubbing my face down with Ahmed’s ambrosia, when Danda walked in the door, calling me a motherfucker.

Danda: and me with aftershave.

I didn’t let him finish his tirade. I didn’t care what he called me, or why he called me it. I didn’t care what he wanted, or why he wanted it. I grabbed his shirt and slapped a cologne-wet palm at his red ear, and kept on slapping it until he broke free and ran away, taking a fair portion of my testiness with him.

I opened the door of the barber shop, and waved goodbye.

‘Allah hafiz, Ahmedbhai.’

‘Wait!’ Ahmed said, coming to join me at the door.

He turned up the collar of my sleeveless denim vest, and curled it into place.

‘That’s better.’

I walked outside and met Gemini George, on the step. He grabbed me by my carefully arranged vest.

‘Thank God, mate,’ Gemini said, coughing, panting and falling into a hug. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

‘How’d you find me?’

Gemini George knew it was a professional question.

‘A pimp, in First Pasta Lane. He’s been following you around. They say you’re acting testy. He’s been betting you won’t last another two days, without visiting a girl.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I just got cured.’

‘Good,’ he said nervously.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘It’s Scorpio,’ he replied quickly. ‘He’s gone crazy. You’ve gotta help me.’

‘Slow down. Scorpio can’t go crazy. Scorpio’s already crazy.’

‘Way, way crazier than Scorpio crazy. Twilight Zone crazy. He’s freaked out, man.’

‘Maybe we should talk about this somewhere.’

We sat in the Madras Café. We had idli sambar, followed by two rounds of strong, sweet tea. Gemini was a street guy, even though his friend was a millionaire: he ate first, and talked later.

When he sipped at his tea, washing down the last flavour of chilli and coconut, he told me the story. It began, as so many stories in India do, with a parade of saints.

The previous day there’d been a procession through the streets to venerate the memory of a local saint, who happened to be a lover of hashish. The streets were filled with devout holy men. It was the only day in the year when the cops couldn’t bust anyone for smoking, because most of the people smoking were holy men.

It was a festival designed for the Zodiac Georges, and Gemini had used it to lure Scorpio from his eagle’s nest at the Mahesh, and get out in the fresh air. It went well, at first, Gemini said. Scorpio found his street-shuffle walk again, remembering the rhythm of the road as Gemini walked beside him. He even got talkative. He began to tell his four bodyguards, hired from the hotel by the hour, about the doorways and alleyways they passed, and the adventures that he and Gemini had experienced in each one of them.

Then they turned a corner and found a sadhu, a holy man, barring their path. His hands were raised, one holding a knotted staff, and the other stained sacred red.

‘What happened?’ I asked him.

‘I said, Namaste, ji. Like to swap dope? I’ve got some Manali.’

‘Did he smoke with you?’

‘He didn’t get a chance. Before he could reply, Scorpio tried to step away, but the sadhu stopped him.’

‘What did he want?’

‘He said, Give me a thousand dollars.’

‘How much?’

‘A thousand dollars.’

‘What did Scorpio say?’

‘He said, Are you crazy?’

‘Did he have a thousand dollars in his pocket?’

‘That’s exactly what the sadhu asked him,’ Gemini said. ‘Do you have a thousand dollars in your pocket?’

‘Did he?’

‘He had twenty-five thousand on him, Lin. He showed it to me, to explain why we had to have four security guards from the hotel with us.’

‘What did Scorpio say?’

‘Scorpio, you know, he was getting angry, and he said, Nobody gives a thousand dollars to a complete stranger. I’ll give you a hundred dollars, but just so you leave me alone.’

‘Not very polite,’ I said. ‘How did the guru take it?’

‘He was calm and cool, you know, guru-like, and he said, If you gave me a thousand dollars, would you even notice its absence from your fortune?’

‘What did Scorpio say?’

‘He said, That isn’t the point.’

‘And the sadhu?’

‘He said, Your weakness is greed. And that awakening, itself, is worth a thousand dollars. I’ll remember those words, Lin, until the day I die.’

‘He had a point,’ I said.

‘That he did,’ Gemini replied, glancing at the doorway, needing a cigarette. ‘And he smiled, as he said it. I’ll never forget that smile. It was a spiritual poker face, like. And it might’ve been that smile, you know, what set Scorpio off. Just that smile.’

‘What happened?’

‘He tried to push past the holy man, and they kind of struggled. The bodyguards shouted for him to stop. Next thing, the holy man falls down, and bangs his head on the corner of a wall. It was a bad cut. There was a flap of skin missing from his forehead, above the eyebrow. The bodyguards ran to help him. I offered him my handkerchief, and told him we had to call the hotel doctor.’

Gemini stopped. He looked at the street. He wanted to be back out there, in the tide of trick and talent that had carried him so safely, for so long.

‘We’ll have a cigarette after the story, Gemini,’ I said. ‘I know you on the street, man. You walk out that door now, you’ll be gone in sixty seconds. So chase to the cut, and tell me what happened.’

‘Don’t you mean cut to the chase?’

‘Gemini.’

‘The holy man cursed him,’ Gemini said, shivering.

He was suddenly scared, and I didn’t like it, because I liked him.

‘And?’

‘That’s it.’

There’s no patience as pure as the patience we spend on loved ones, who make things harder than they need to be. I gave him a patient smile.

‘What, exactly, happened?’

‘The holy man cursed him. He said that his greed would become his murder weapon. He said that from the day his blood was spilled, Scorpio’s money was cursed, and would only bring him sorrow and regret.’

‘What happened then?’

‘The bodyguards bailed out, right there on the spot.’

‘And Scorpio?’

‘He ran away. I found him at the hotel, later.’

‘And the holy man?’

‘I waited with him. I tried to get him to come into the hotel with me. But then some more holy men came, and he told me to run, because they’d be so angry they’d kill me. So, I ran. You know how dangerous holy men are.’

‘And Scorpio thinks he’s cursed?’

‘He kind of is cursed,’ Gemini moaned. ‘I mean, the hotel staff have left our floor. They all think he’s cursed, and they won’t service his room.’

‘How are you getting on, at the hotel?’

‘Scorpio talked to the hotel, and hired new people, today. They come from Lithuania, I think. Nice people. Can’t understand a word they say. His new bodyguards are Russian. Can’t understand them either, and they’re speakin’ English, and all. He’s locked up in the penthouse suite again, but I mean really locked up, this time.’

‘Drop the poker game for a while,’ I said. ‘I’ll square it with Didier. Let’s find the sadhu, and have the curse lifted.’

I was thinking that the sadhu probably wasn’t a rich man. I was thinking that we could find him, ask him to forgive the fool who’d touched him without respect, and accept a substantial payment to lift the curse.

The sadhus I knew, and I knew quite a few, would accept the offer without hesitation. It would’ve worked. I was sure. I couldn’t know then that for Gemini, my innocent, loving friend, it would lead to rivers long forbidden, for good reason.

‘Fantastic! Lin, you’re a genius. This curse thing is rippin’ Scorpio to bits. I don’t mind tellin’ you, I’m not comfortable with it, meself. In my book, you should stand as clear of a holy man’s curse as you do from a hand grenade. I was in the spiritual radiation zone, so to speak, and I’d like this cleared up, as much as Scorp.’

‘You could ask Naveen Adair for help,’ I suggested, opening my suggesting mouth. ‘He’s running the Lost Love Bureau from the Amritsar, in the rooms next to me.’

‘Great idea! I’ll ask around, at first, and hand it to Naveen if I can’t find him. We’ll have Scorpio right as rain in no time.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Can I offer you a ride?’

He looked out through the open doorway to my bike, parked illegally at the kerb.

‘No, thanks all the same,’ he smiled. ‘Never was much of a one for motorbikes. I’ll scoot back to the hotel in a taxi. Thanks, Lin. I knew I’d feel better, if I talked to you.’

I rode through the southern boulevards, doing my rounds, being seen, and thinking of the Zodiac Georges and how happy they’d been, before an elegant emissary of Fate in a dark suit made one of them rich.

Like Scorpio, I didn’t have to stay in Bombay. I knew some parts of Africa pretty well, from my passport smuggling missions. I had contacts in Lagos and Kinshasa. They always had room in their operations for a good passport forger.

I had friends in Singapore. They’d invited me to be the white face for an Indo-Chinese currency ring. It was good money, in a safe city, where everyone left you alone if you respected the local rules, and didn’t hurt anybody.

I thought about it, often. But sooner or later, I looked away from every option. And I couldn’t decide if it was the city or the woman who wouldn’t let me go.

Solemn in the saddle, I rode to the Amritsar hotel, hoping that Karla was there. My touts had tipped me off that she’d left the art gallery an hour before. I had a peacemaker present for her.

Some friends who played in a jazz band had told me they were bringing their acoustic instruments for a jam, by the sea, on the Colaba Back Bay. It was a unique experience: her favourite gift.

‘You just missed her,’ Didier said, looking up from his cluttered desk. ‘She was here for a few minutes, only. She was not alone. She was with Taj.’

‘Who the fuck is Taj?’

‘A tall artist, rather good looking, with long black hair. He sculpted the Enkidu that stands in the entrance to Jehangir, this month. He’s very talented.’

‘Artists,’ I said, remembering the sculptor.

‘Indeed,’ Didier agreed. ‘Why do we flock to musicians and painters?’

‘It’s sexy,’ I said. ‘Painters make them take their clothes off, and musicians make them come.’

‘Artist pricks,’ Didier hissed.

‘Indeed. Did she say when she’d be back?’

‘Well… ’

‘What?’

‘Well… ’

‘Why don’t I want to know this, Didier?’

‘She said… that she will return… in two days, Lin. And I think she meant it. She took her gun. And the tall artist, Taj.’

I was quiet for a while, but I must’ve been grinding my teeth, or my knuckles, because Didier stood up and gave me a hug.

‘No matter what happens, Lin, there is always alcohol,’ he said, holding my shoulders in his straight arms. ‘Let us get majestically drunk. Do you have a preferred place of abandon?’

‘You know, Didier, you’re right. We should go anyway.’

‘Go?’

‘To see Aum Azaan, Raghav’s jazz band. They’re playing tonight. It’s an unofficial concert, on the Back Bay. I was hoping Karla would come. But let’s go anyway, and have some fun.’

‘You are singing my song, Lin,’ Didier answered gleefully. ‘But I will take a taxi, if you don’t mind.’

Chapter Fifty-Five

I rode alone to meet him at the jam, but as I cruised past the Colaba police station on my way to Cuffe Parade, I saw Arshan, standing in the middle of the road. He had a long, serrated kitchen knife in his hand. He was shouting.

I pulled the bike to a stop, and walked up to stand beside him. A crowd had begun to gather, but they were at a safe distance. So far, the cops hadn’t seen him, or they’d chosen not to respond.

‘How are you, Uncle?’ I asked, my hand close to his.

‘This coward!’ Arshan shouted. ‘He kicked my boy, and now Farzad’s in the hospital, with blood on his brain! Come out and fight me! Do you hear me, Lightning Dilip!’

‘Whoa, Arshan, take it easy, and keep your voice down.’

Nobody wins, fighting the cops head on. If you’ve got enough fire or firepower to drive some cops off, they always come back with more cops. And if you beat them, too, they come back with more cops, until you’re all dead, or very long gone. That’s what it means, to have a police force: you’ve accepted a group of people who can’t afford not to win.

That’s part of the unspoken deal they make with any city that hires them: cops put their lives on the line every day, like outlaws, and they can’t tolerate a direct attack on themselves. Cops and outlaws bite back, if anything bites them. It’s a rule. And cops always bite last.

Softly, I turned Arshan away from the centre of the road, and back onto the footpath across the street. I slipped the kitchen knife from his hand, and passed it to one of the street boys.

There was a taxi stand around the corner. I tumbled Arshan into a cab, and told the driver to wait. When I’d parked my bike in a safe spot, I called out to another street boy to watch over her until I returned. Arshan was sobbing when I returned to the cab.

I sat next to the driver, directing him to the triple-fronted mansion near Cuffe Parade. Arshan was stretched out on the back seat, his arm flung over his face. As the taxi pulled away I turned to see Lightning Dilip standing under the arch of the police station entrance, his fists on his hips.

Arshan stopped the taxi before we reached his house, saying that he had to talk to me in private. The chai shop where I sat with Concannon after the fight with the Scorpions was nearby. We sat in a sheltered spot beneath a blue plastic awning tied between trees.

Arshan drank a few breathy gulps of his tea.

‘Tell me about Farzad.’

‘He was having these headaches. I was so angry I came up here once before, to challenge Dilip, but you brought me home. The headaches got worse. Finally, we convinced him to have it checked, and they discovered a massive blood clot. It happened, they say, when he was kicked in the head.’

‘That’s tough. I’m sorry, Arshan.’

‘While they were testing him, he collapsed. They took him upstairs to the intensive care, right away. He’s been there ever since. Seventy-two hours, now, unresponsive.’

‘Unresponsive?’

‘He’s in a coma, Lin.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Bhatia hospital.’

‘It’s a good hospital,’ I said. ‘He’ll be okay.’

‘He’ll die,’ Arshan said.

‘He won’t. You won’t let him. But he’ll have nothing to live for when he gets well, if Lightning kills you. Promise me you won’t do anything like that again.’

‘I… I can’t.’

‘You can. And you must. People are depending on you.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I found it.’

‘You found what?’

‘I found the treasure.’

Bells rang somewhere: people were praying at a local temple, and ringing small, hand-held bells.

‘The treasure?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

He was staring at his own feet in a daze, the empty chai glass slipping through his fingers. I caught it as it fell, and set it on the ground.

‘Two weeks ago.’

‘The families must be thrilled, even at a sad time like this.’

‘I haven’t told them.’

‘What? You’ve gotta tell them.’

‘At first,’ he said quietly, talking to himself, ‘I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want to lose what we had. The search was… so much fun, you see. We were all so happy. I know the treasure will change us. It has to. We won’t be able to stop it. So, I kept it a secret.’

He fell silent, dancing backwards through memories of a treasure unfound.

‘And now?’

‘When Farzad got sick and he was lying in that bed, not responding to a kiss, I knew that I’d kept the secret because I was greedy. In my heart of hearts, the secret was too wonderful to share, and it gave me pleasure, for a while, to know that it was mine, alone.’

‘It’s human,’ I said. ‘And now you can make up for it, like a mensch.’

‘Don’t you see? I didn’t make any protest, when that policeman kicked Farzad, because I didn’t want anything to jeopardise the search. I sacrificed my own son, for the treasure.’

‘You didn’t kick your son in the head, Arshan. And Lightning Dilip has kicked me in the head a few times, without a blood clot. It was bad luck, and bad timing, and that’s not your fault.’

‘I was… so selfish.’

‘Well, now you can be generous, and you can afford to bring the best doctors and specialists from the whole world to Farzad’s bed. You can make him well with the treasure, Arshan.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But I think you should try. Whatever you do, you’ve gotta tell the others that you found the treasure. Every day you wait breaks a strand in their trust. You gotta do it now, Arshan, tonight.’

‘You’re right,’ he said, straightening up. ‘You’re right.’

‘Let’s get one thing straight, before you do. I don’t want any part of the treasure. I don’t want to hear about it, ever again, if that’s okay with you.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that I don’t need it, and don’t want it, and don’t want to hear about it, ever again. You see that, right?’

‘You’re a strange man, Lin,’ he said. ‘But I like you.’

I walked him to the door of his house. We could hear Anahita, on the other side of it. She’d worked up a good pestering, and let him have it before she opened the door.

‘Seven loaves I baked for Farzad’s prayers,’ the closed door shouted at us, ‘and you couldn’t get home on time!’

When she opened mid-pester and saw his face, she cried out and pulled him into a cuddle.

‘What is it?’ she gasped. ‘What’s the matter, my darling love?’

‘I have something to tell you, sweetheart,’ Arshan said, leaning on her, as he walked through the red curtains leading to the excavated dome. ‘Call everyone together.’

‘Of course, my darling,’ she said, supporting him on her shoulder as they walked.

‘I’m sorry about the loaves, dearest,’ Arshan said absently.

‘Never you mind about that, my darling.’

I let myself out. Nobody noticed. I was glad.

As I stood outside, waving down a taxi to retrieve my bike, I heard shouts and screams and happy ululations, ringing from the three-family home.

I got my bike, and paid the kid who’d watched it for me. He gave the money back, and change, which wasn’t a good thing.

He’d been using my bike as a prop, while I was away. He was a Zone-Drifter. His bing was to sit on other people’s motorcycles and in other people’s cars to do business. He’d just done a drug deal, sitting on my bike, and he was sharing the take with me. When I was with the Sanjay Company, it wouldn’t have occurred to him to use my bike for business. It was insubordinate, and he knew it. He was wondering if I knew it or not.

I grabbed the collar of his shirt, and pushed the money into his pocket.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Sid, using my bike?’

‘Things are bad on the street, just now, Linbaba! Afghans in Mohammed Ali Road, and Scorpions under the bed. A man doesn’t know where to deal his dope any more.’

‘Apologise.’

‘I’m so sorry, Linbaba.’

‘Not to me, to the motorcycle. You were supposed to look after her. Apologise.’

He leaned in toward the bike, both hands pressed together, while I held his shirt. He was a slippery one, and we both knew I’d have to ride him down rather than run him down, if he escaped.

He put his pressed palms to his forehead.

‘I’m so sorry, motorcycle-ji, for my bad manners,’ he said fervently. ‘I promise to respect you, in future.’

He reached out to stroke her, but I wouldn’t let him.

‘That’s enough. Don’t do it again.’

‘No, sir.’

‘And tell all the other Zone-Drifters to stay away from her.’

‘Yes, sir.’

I rode to the jam on the Back Bay using a route that didn’t pass Arshan’s home. I didn’t want to think about the treasure, or young Farzad, coma-roaming at the hospital. I was blue: blue enough to need jazz.

I parked beside Naveen’s bike, near the crowd of fifty or sixty university students sitting on the shore. Jazz was raising people to the same exalted high. I stood on the edge of the group, my hands in my jacket pockets. I was surfing the sounds with thoughts of Karla, knowing how much she would’ve loved it.

‘Musician pricks,’ Naveen muttered, joining me.

He was looking at Diva, who was sitting in adoration at the feet of a very talented, good-looking guitar player named Raghav. He was a nice kid, and a friend of mine, but Naveen had a point.

‘Indeed.’

Diva was unrecognisable to anyone but her friends, the rich Diva girls, who were with Didier, sitting apart from the main group on the lawns of the Back Bay.

She wore no make-up. The bindi on her forehead was a glass diamond, her earrings were brass, and her bracelets were plastic. Her clothes and sandals came from a slum shop, reflecting the latest fashion for slum girls.

It suited her, as it did all the girls in the slum. But the presence of the Diva girls, from the richer life, worried me.

‘The girls came along?’ I asked.

‘I couldn’t keep them away,’ Naveen sighed. ‘Diva says they’re sworn to secrecy. I had to let her do this. She’s been a prisoner in the slum for nearly two weeks, Lin. She needs this.’

‘I guess you’re right. And the students might not recognise her. She’s got the slum-girl thing down pretty good.’

‘You should hear her swear,’ Naveen said. ‘I wandered into a session the other day. The girls were teaching her what to say when a guy hits on you. It was very instructive. You want to hear some of it?’

‘I lived there,’ I said. ‘I know it starts with lauda lasoon, and ends with saala lukka. Please, God, don’t let Diva unload what she’s learned on me.’

‘Amen.’

‘Have the Diva girls been in the slum?’

He laughed, and I frowned, because I was asking about the security of Johnny Cigar and his family, and it wasn’t funny to me.

‘That’s funny?’

‘Yeah,’ he laughed again.

‘Why?’

‘Because if Diva’s Divas ever visit the slum, I’ve got this running bet with Didier.’

‘Once again, young detective, I why you. Why?’

He sighed, letting out some embarrassment.

‘Didier was trying to get the girls to the slum, and have a ghost story night. They were really up for it, but more scared of the slum than the ghosts. I said to Didier, the day they go to the slum, I’ll race Benicia around the loop.’

It was a significant boast. Naveen had been practising a few stunts and tricks with Colaba biker boys, and he was becoming a good rider, but racing Benicia was another matter.

She was a Spanish girl who’d lived in Bombay for a couple of years. She bought Rajasthani jewellery, and sold it to buyers from Barcelona. She was a single girl who kept to herself, and was a significant mystery because of it. But everyone knew that when she rode her vintage 350cc bike around Bombay, nobody beat Benicia.

‘You know Benicia?’

‘Not… yet.’

‘And you’re serious about the bet?’

‘Sure,’ he laughed, but then smartened up. ‘You’re not thinking of bribing the Diva girls into the slum, are you?’

‘No-one should go there,’ I said. ‘Diva’s there as a guest of Johnny and his family. Until the people who killed her father are caught, no-one should go to see her, in case they expose those people to harm.’

‘You’re… you’re right, of course,’ he said stiffly. ‘I wasn’t thinking of that. I’ll try to stop the Diva girls, but Didier might’ve already persuaded them. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s alright, Naveen. And if the Divas do visit the slum, and you get Benicia to race you, I’ll put a thousand dollars on you, kid, here and now.’

‘You mean it?’

I fished the money from my pocket, and handed it across.

‘Done,’ Naveen said, offering his hand.

‘Done,’ I said, shaking it.

‘How’s it going with Karla?’ Naveen asked.

‘Okay,’ I said, maybe convincingly. ‘How’s it going with Diva?’

‘I’m going nuts,’ he replied, very convincingly.

‘Does she know?’

‘Does she know I’m going nuts?’ he asked, professional concern darkening his face.

‘That you love her,’ I said, looking for the reaction.

The kid was good. He locked love in the cage of a clenched jaw, betraying nothing, and looked at the slum-girl Diva, clapping her hands in time to the music.

Some of the students wandered from group to group, laughing and talking. Others sat in whispered intimacy. There was some handholding, a little cuddling, and the occasional kiss. In Bombay, in those years, it was as wild as kids could get. It was also more innocent than you can reasonably expect sexually excited twenty-year-olds to be.

It was a sweet thing, the gentle love those kids shared, as their enervated minds recovered from the task of inheriting the city, while the music played, echoing softly from the tall apartment buildings nearby, where many of them lived.

They were sons and daughters of the future. They wore hip clothes, passed joints and bottles of cheap rum around, and played music near the sea. But they also got good grades, and didn’t give a damn that the group included every faith, and every caste.

They were already something that had never existed on the foreshore of the Island City, and when their turn came to run the companies and councils, they’d be navigating by different stars.

Diva’s two friends were leaning in toward Didier, clutching at him in helpless giggling. They weren’t listening to the music. Every sentence Didier whispered made them shriek into his shirt front, trying to stifle the sound.

He saw me, and excused himself from their pout.

‘What kept you?’ he asked, shaking my hand.

What kept me?

Arshan’s suicide attack on the Colaba police station, and a fabled treasure.

‘Tell you later. How you doing?’

Didier didn’t hear me. He was making a scandalous gesture to the girls.

‘How you doing, Didier?’

‘I have two very charming ladies over here, who would like to know you better than they should.’

He waved his hand as if presenting a magic trick. We looked at the girls, sitting a few metres away. They were doing something with their faces. It might’ve been smiling. I couldn’t be sure.

Whatever he’d told them about me sent them from fear to fascination, it seemed. They raised their hands, and moved them. It might’ve been waving, or they might’ve been warding me off.

They were scary-smiling again, and I couldn’t figure it out. Guys never understand what pretty girls do with their faces. They got up, quite athletically for sit-around girls, and began to slow-walk toward us, their bare toes prowling through the grass in step. They weren’t sit-around girls at all.

The Divas were dancers: dancers who danced together, and practised. They were good. That part, I understood. Guys always understand what pretty girls do with their hips.

‘If they ask you about the man you killed,’ Didier said, as the Diva girls slow-stepped across the moonlit grass, ‘I’ll take it from there.’

‘I haven’t killed anyone, Didier.’

‘You haven’t?’ he asked, dubious. ‘Why do I always think you have?’

‘Hi,’ one of the girls said.

‘Hi,’ the second girl said.

‘I’m so glad you girls are here,’ I said. ‘You’ve gotta hang around, until my wife gets back from church.’

‘Your wife?’ one girl said.

‘Church?’ the other peeped.

‘Yeah. She’s got the kids. Four under four. So glad you’re good babysitters. Those kids are demons, and we need a break.’

‘Eeeuw!’

‘Aren’t you the babysitters?’ I asked innocently. ‘Didier said you’d do Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, for twenty rupees an hour.’

‘Eeeuw!’ they said as they skipped away in step to sit with two pretty, well-dressed boys playing tabla drums with the band.

‘Now, look what you’ve done!’ Didier protested.

‘The man I killed?’ I countered. ‘You’ll take it from there?’

‘Well, Lin,’ he grumbled, ‘Didier is an artist of spin, everyone acknowledges that, but let’s face it, you don’t give me much to work with. I used a little poetic licence. If I tell people the truth, only Naveen and I will find you interesting, and I am not completely sure of Naveen.’

‘What is this? Shit on Shantaram Week? Back up, Didier. I’ve been crowded all I can take for one day.’

He couldn’t reply, because there was a sudden shout.

‘It is a fire, I believe!’

We turned to see flames, rising from a place on the coast, not far away.

‘It’s the fishermen’s colony,’ Naveen said.

‘The boats are on fire,’ I agreed.

‘Stay with Diva!’ Naveen shouted to Didier, as I ran for my bike.

‘The girls are safe with me,’ he shouted back, his arms around Diva’s Divas. ‘But please, do not get yourselves killed!’

Chapter Fifty-Six

Naveen and I rode past crowds streaming from the big slum to the fire in the next cove. We stopped the bikes in the middle of the road, next to the concrete divider. From the road, we could see the long boats burning.

It was dark, on the beach, where the fishermen lived in their shamble of huts, but the cove faced a main road with an intersecting street, and the lights made cold pictures of the burning, only twenty metres away.

The boats were already blackened, shrivelled versions of the sturdy craft they’d been. Red-rimmed mouths of glowing coals still burned on their sides.

The boats were lost, but the fire hadn’t destroyed the houses, and people were working desperately to save them.

Naveen and I tied handkerchiefs around our faces, ran across the street, and joined the bucket brigades. I filled a space between two women, taking a bucket from one, and passing it to the other. They were fast, and it wasn’t easy to keep up with them.

We could hear women and children screaming from the beach, cut off by the fire. They’d saved themselves and the children in shallow waves.

Firemen ran through the flames and smoke to help them. Firemen ran into the burning huts to save children. Firemen caught fire, their sleeves and trousers bursting into quick flames from oil and kerosene spills among the crammed huts.

One rescuer emerged from the swirling smoke close to me with a child in his arms. His own hair was burning, but he ignored it. He passed beside me, but I couldn’t break the bucket-chain, and couldn’t help him.

The smell of burnt skin went into my mind while I was passing buckets of water and stayed there, like a dead horse found in a prairie of memory.

Is there a limit to the number of horrible things you can see, and experience, in any one life? Of course, there is: the limit is one, and none.

The buckets stopped. Everyone was kneeling, or looking at the sky. It was raining. I hadn’t noticed.

I was still smelling the burnt skin, and for some reason, I was remembering the severed head, on the side of the road, in Sri Lanka. I was still in yesterday’s prairie.

It poured. The fires sizzled. Firemen broke down the most dangerous structures, and contained the fire. People danced. If I’d been in a better mood, or if Karla had been there, I’d have danced with them.

I walked back along the beach and looked up, beyond the burnt boats, to the wall of trees at the far end of the beach. Grey figures began to walk out of the smoke and the shadows.

Greg figures, ghosts or demons, were coming toward us slowly.

The insides of the boats were saturated with a hundred years of fish oil, and the smoke all around us was blue-black as they burned and smouldered.

The men who stumbled through that black fog and rain toward us were stained with it, because they’d lit the fires. They were grey with ash and smoke and dust from the trees where they’d been hiding.

Rainwater striped their faces, making them grey tigers, moving slowly through a jungle of smoke. It took me a few seconds to realise that they were Scorpions.

Hanuman, as identifiable as a flagpole, and walking with a limp, was the last man out of the shadows.

Time really does slow down, sometimes, when love and fear combine with history, even if it’s only the history of a little place like the fishermen’s cove in Colaba. Heartbeats become hammers, and you can see everything at once. You’re somewhere else, already: somewhere dead, already. And you’re never sharper, never more aware of every swirl of smoke.

I saw the Scorpions coming toward us. I saw the people, still dancing behind me. I saw kids, dogs, and elderly people sitting on the sand. I saw firemen, standing amid the huts, steam coming off their burnt uniforms.

The Scorpions were still about sixty metres away. They were carrying knives and hatchets. They’d started the fire as Act One, and were coming to close the play.

I pulled my knives from their scabbards and started jogging toward them. I didn’t know what I was doing. The most important thing, it seemed to me at that moment, was to give the people behind me time to react, and run. I was shouting. I was screaming, I guess.

By the third or fourth step I stopped thinking, and something happened to the sound. I couldn’t hear anything. Wishes, wings without birds, passed through me like spears of light.

I had a knife in each hand and I was running through a tunnel, numbed of noise. I couldn’t even hear my own breathing. It seemed to take forever, but I knew that when I was close, it would be too fast.

There was somebody jogging with me. It was Naveen, but he wasn’t running with me, he was grabbing at my vest, he was pulling me to the ground. I hit the sand so hard that the world returned, and all the shouting and screaming and sirens came on at once. Naveen was half on top of me, where we fell.

He was pointing at something. I looked along his extended arm and saw cops, a lot of cops, running hard, and firing at will. Scorpions fell, or surrendered. Lightning Dilip was already kicking one of them.

Naveen and I were still lying on the ground. He was smiling and crying and laughing, all at the same time. He had his hand on my shoulder, the grip fierce.

He loved me after that night, that Indian-Irishman, and he never let me doubt it. Sometimes, the bravest thing we ever do is the thing we never get to do. And sometimes the spark that ignites a brother’s love, in men not born brothers, is nothing more than a pure intention.

We rode circles around the area of the cove until Abdullah, Ahmed and Tall Tony arrived. I gave Abdullah what I knew, and then we headed back to the jazz jam, on the Back Bay.

The band had left, and there were only a few kids still there. They told us that Didier, a favourite with the smokers, had left the message that he’d gone back to visit someone named Johnny Cigar.

Diva sat up quickly when we made our way through the slum to her hut.

‘What are you doing, you idiot?’ she demanded.

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

‘Not you!’ she snapped. ‘The other idiot. What do you think you’re doing, fighting bloody fires? Are you out of your tiny mind?’

‘You were safe, with Didier,’ Naveen protested. ‘I was only gone an hour.’

‘And who was keeping you safe?’ she asked, advancing to poke him in the chest.

Naveen grinned happily.

‘What are you so chirpy about?’

‘You care what happens to me,’ Naveen said, wagging his finger at her defiant nose. ‘You care about me.’

‘Of course I care about you. Some fucking detective, you are.’

‘Wow,’ Naveen said.

‘That’s all you’ve got to say?’

‘Wow.’

‘If you say that again, I’ll smack you with a pot,’ Diva said. ‘Shut your mouth, and kiss me with it.’

They almost did, but there was a fierce clatter of pots and pans, and a loud clamour of voices. Somebody was coming through the slum, and making a lot of noise about it.

Naveen put Diva in Sita’s hands, ready to make an escape through the back lanes on the sea coast. Johnny Cigar, Didier, Naveen and I faced the only path leading from the main part of the slum.

We heard a voice raised above all the others, shouting in English. It was Kavita Singh. When she came into the open space in front of Diva’s hut, we saw that she was smiling, and an honour guard of women was cheering her. Diva returned with Sita to greet her.

‘Just for you,’ Kavita said, handing Diva a newspaper. ‘Today’s front page. It’ll be on the stands in a few hours, but I thought you should be the first to see it.’

Diva read the lead article, looked at the photographs of her father, handed the paper to me, and fell into Naveen’s arms.

The gang responsible for the massacre at the Devnani mansion had been captured. They’d confessed to the crime, and were in prison. It was an African-Chinese crime syndicate, handling most of the pharmaceutical pleasures flowing illegally through Bombay to Lagos.

Smashing the gang and solving the murders was a triumph, the cops said, involving officers from several countries. The temporary CEO of Devnani Industries, Rajesh Jain, appealed once again for the missing heiress to come forward, and claim her inheritance.

For Diva, the threat was gone and she was free to leave the kerosene lamps, and live in the electric world again.

‘Lin,’ Didier said. ‘Can I offer you a flask?’

He’d been talking and joking with Kavita. Her expression said that I’d interrupted her, and it tested her patience.

‘How did you know Diva was here, Kavita?’

‘You and Karla are psychically connected,’ she snarled, taking a swig from Didier’s flask. ‘You tell me.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Why don’t you just go home, Lin,’ she said. ‘You do have a home, don’t you?’

I didn’t know what she was so angry about, and I didn’t care.

‘Bye, Kavita.’

I walked out to the street, and had just started my bike when a motorcycle pulled up beside me, and someone called my name. It was Ravi, the Company street soldier who’d ridden with me on the night of the contract.

‘Abdullah sent me to find you,’ he said, remaining on his bike, his hands on the high handlebars. ‘The Scorpions killed Amir. And Farid is dead.’

‘Peace be upon them,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘The Scorpions dragged Amir out of his house, and killed him in the street.’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘Farid went crazy. He shot his way into the police cells.’

‘What happened?’

‘The cops ran, and Farid killed three Scorpions who were in the cells for the fire. That big guy, Hanuman, he saved Vishnu. He took six bullets, but he’s gone for good, the big man. The moustache guy, Danda, he’s also gone.’

‘What happened to Farid?’

‘The cops came back with a lot of guns, and killed Farid. Shot him sixty times, they say.’

‘Y’Allah.’

‘Get the fuck off the street, man. It’s cowboys and Indians out there, and I’m too Indian for this shit.’

He rode away quickly, a lone despatch courier in a militarised zone. He was scared, and angry: always a bad combination in a man.

I’d never seen Ravi scared. He was one of the calm ones, and every gang has them. But the loss of blunt-headed Amir, the first to dance when any music played, the first to start punching when the action started, and Farid the Fixer, the champion boxer, both full Sanjay Council members, scared the young gangster.

Scorpions had already died. Company men had died. More would join them in the dark red fall. Ravi was living his life one night at a time. It was war. It was the failure of everything.

I rode back to the Amritsar. I needed to sleep, and then find out what hadn’t gone crazy on the street. I needed to know how much of my business was still running, and how much was running away.

I parked the bike in the alleyway that split the hotel. I’d parked there too often, I guess, because I wasn’t paying enough attention when I wiped the bike down for the night.

I stood up, and Madame Zhou was there, very close to me. The twins were also there, one on either side of her.

There were two other men: short and thin men, with the kind of hungry in their eyes that nothing can feed. They had their hands in the pockets of the jackets. They were her acid throwers.

‘Madame,’ I said. ‘No offence, but if your acid throwers start to take their hands out of their pockets, I’m gonna go crazy. And when it’s all over, I won’t be the only one dead or burned.’

She laughed. To be sure that I knew she was laughing, perhaps, she switched on a light beneath her veil. It was a battery-powered party tube-light, curved around her neck like a necklace, inside her black lace veil.

The veil was suspended from a rigid mantilla, high over her head, made from something black and shiny: dead spiders, was my guess. The lace veil met a black taffeta dress that brushed the ground, hiding her feet.

She must’ve been in very high platform shoes, because the tiny woman was almost eye to veil with me. The light shone through the lace, illuminating her face from below.

I think it was intended to be a devastating revelation of her famous beauty. It wasn’t. She was still laughing.

‘You know, I’m tired, Madame,’ I said.

‘Your friend, Vikram, died tonight,’ she replied quickly, turning off the light.

I got it. The light wasn’t for turning on: it was for turning off. In the sudden darkness her face was a shadow, breathing.

‘Vikram?’

‘The cowboy,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’

I stared at her black-space face, angry, and thinking about her acid throwers, and Karla.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It is true,’ she said.

She cocked her head to the side a little, watching me with invisible eyes.

I was watching the acid throwers. I’d seen their victims. I knew some of them: people with faces smeared of feature, a stretched mask of skin, with holes cut for the vanished nose and mouth to breathe, and no eyes at all.

They begged along the strip, communicating through touch. Thinking about them made me angrier, which was good, because I was scared.

‘How do you know that?’

‘It is a matter of record, now,’ she replied. ‘It is a police case. He committed suicide.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘It can,’ she whispered, ‘and it is. He took a week’s supply of heroin, and he injected himself with it. There was a suicide note. I have a copy. Would you like to see it?’

‘You know, Madame, I’ve only met you twice, and I already wish I hadn’t met you the first time.’

‘I gave him the drugs,’ Madame Zhou said.

Oh, no, my mind pleaded. Please, no.

‘Cheapest murder I ever committed,’ she said. ‘I wish all the people I hate were junkies. It would make life so much easier.’

She laughed. I was breathing hard. It was a tough job keeping a close watch on four of them: five, if you counted the spider about the size of a small woman, named Madame Zhou.

The arched alleyway was dark, and empty. There was no-one on the streets.

‘He cheated me,’ she hissed, ‘and about jewellery. No-one cheats me. Especially not about jewellery. This is a warning, Shantaram. Stay away from her.’

‘Why don’t you come back, and talk to Karla about it in person? I’d like to watch.’

‘Not Karla, you fool, Kavita Singh. Stay away from Kavita.’

I drew my knives, slowly. The twins slipped clubs from their sleeves. The acid throwers shifted on the balls of their feet, ready to throw.

Madame Zhou was only a lunge away. With the right momentum, I could pick her up and throw her at the acid throwers. It was a plan. It was a plan that was a heartbeat away from happening.

‘Let’s do this,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

‘Not tonight, Shantaram,’ she said, stepping away. ‘But I’m sure that’s not the first time you’ve heard those words.’

She backed off slowly, tottering on her platforms, her dress dragging across the ground, a taffeta shadow scaring rats back into their hollows.

The acid throwers scampered away. The twins backed off in step with Madame Zhou, scowling at me.

She’d threatened Karla, and her attention had shifted to Kavita. She was gone a long time before I stopped wanting to follow them, and finish it. But enough dead: enough dead, for one night.

I went back to my rooms, drank something, smoked the last tiny piece of Lisa’s heavenly dope, danced to music for a while, and then opened my journal to write.

Farid and Amir, gone. Hanuman and Danda, gone. Boats and huts on the beach burned. And Vikram, gone. Vikram, the love-train rider: Vikram, gone.

Change is the blood of time. The world was changing, out of time, and moving beneath me like a whale, soaring for air. The chess pieces were moving themselves. Nothing was the same, and I knew that nothing would be better, for a while.

The newly dead are ancestors, too. We respect the chain of life and love when we celebrate the life, not mourn the death. We all know that, and we all say it, when loved ones leave.

But even though we know that death is the truth, and we sing stories to ourselves, the pain of loss is something we can’t deny, except by wounding tenderness.

It’s a good thing, the crying. It isn’t rational, and it can’t be. It’s a purity beyond reason. It’s the essence of what we are, and the mirror of what we’ll become. Love.

I cried for Vikram. I knew that he wasn’t murdered, but released: a soul-prisoner, on the run forever. But still I filled the empty well with dancing, and tears.

And I ranted, and I raved, and I wrote strange things that should be true in my journal. My hand ran back and forth across the pages like an animal in a cage. When my eyes blurred, and the black words I’d written seemed like the black lace of Madame Zhou’s veil, I slept in a web of bad dreams: caught, and waiting for death to creep toward me.