The Mountain Shadow (30 page)

The storm was coming in fast. Lightning shocked the theatre of the sea. Heartbeats later, the first thunder smashed the clouds.

‘That’s a big storm coming in.’

‘Come here,’ she said, taking my hand.

She led me to an open space beneath the slowly turning wheel of the crimson archer. Ducking into an alcove, she fetched a basket and brought it out.

‘I paid the watchman to leave it up here for us,’ she explained, opening the basket to reveal a large blanket, a bottle of champagne, and a few glasses.

She handed me the bottle.

‘Open us up, Lin.’

While I peeled away the foil wrapper and twisted the wire tether, she spread out the blanket, holding it in place against the gathering wind with spare tiles she found on the roof.

‘You really thought this out,’ I said, popping the cork on the champagne.

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she laughed. ‘But this is a special place. When I came up here with Rish, I took a damn good look around. This is one of the only open spaces in Bombay, maybe
the
only space, where nobody can see you from any window, anywhere.’

She pulled her dress up over her head, and tossed it aside. She was naked. She picked up the glasses and held them out. I filled them. I put the bottle aside, and held my glass close to hers for a toast.

‘What shall we drink to?’

‘How ’bout getting your goddamn clothes off?’

‘Lisa,’ I said, as serious as the storm. ‘We’ve gotta talk.’

‘Yeah, we do,’ she said. ‘
After
we drink. I’ll make the toast.’

‘Okay.’

‘To fools in love.’

‘To fools in love.’

She drank her glass down quickly, and then threw it over her shoulder. It shattered against a stone buttress.

‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ she said happily.

‘You know, we should talk about –’

‘No,’ she said.

She unfastened my clothes and pulled them off. When we were both naked she picked up another glass and refilled it.

‘One more toast,’ she said, ‘then we talk.’

‘Okay. To the rain,’ I suggested. ‘Inside and out.’

‘To the rain,’ she agreed. ‘Inside and out.’

We drank.

‘Lisa –’

‘No. One more drink.’

‘You said –’

‘The last one didn’t do it.’

‘Didn’t do what?’

‘Didn’t wake the Dutchman.’

She filled the glasses again.

‘No toast this time,’ she said, drinking half her glass. ‘Bottoms up.’

We drank. A second glass shattered in the shadows. She pushed me back onto the tethered blanket, but slipped away again, her body on the sky.

‘Do you mind if I dance while we talk,’ she said, beginning to sway, the wind happy in her hair.

‘I’ll try not to object,’ I said, lying back to watch her, my hands clasped behind my head.

‘This is another anniversary, of sorts,’ she said dreamily.

‘You know, there’s a special place in hell for people who never forget birthdays or anniversaries.’

‘This is one that starts tonight, two years after the
other
one started.’

‘The other one?’

‘Us,’ she danced, twirling in a circle, her arms woven in the wind. ‘The other us, that we used to be.’

‘That we
used
to be?’

‘That we used to be.’

‘And when did we change?’

‘Tonight.’

‘We did?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the elevator, or on the stairs?’

She laughed and danced, her head moving to a beat only her arms and hips and legs could hear.

‘I’m doing a rain dance,’ she said, her hands already swimming through water. ‘It has to rain tonight.’

I glanced up at the immense disc of the archer, rotating slowly, chained to the rock of the city with steel cables. Rain. Rain means lightning. The red archer looked like a very tempting lightning rod.

‘It has to rain?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said, flopping at my feet and staring at me, her body supported on one arm. ‘And it
will
now, soon.’

She picked up the champagne bottle, took a mouthful and kissed me, trickling the wine into my mouth in the bruised blossom of a kiss. Our lips parted.

‘I want to have an open relationship,’ she said.

‘It can’t get much more open than this,’ I smiled.

‘I want to be with other people.’

‘Oh,
that
kind of open.’

‘I think you should be with other people, too. Not all the time, of course. Not if we stay together. I don’t think I’d like to see you in a permanent thing. But definitely sometimes. I could actually hook you up. I’ve got a friend who’s really hot for you. She’s so cute that I wouldn’t mind doing a threesome.’

‘
What?
’

‘It would only take a word,’ she said, staring into my eyes.

The storm was close. The wind smelled of the sea. I lifted my eyes to the sky. Pride has most of the anger, and humility most of the right. I didn’t have the right to tell her what to do, or what not to do. I didn’t even have the right to ask her. We didn’t have that kind of love.

‘I don’t have the right –’

‘I want to be with you, if you want to love me,’ she said, lying beside me, her hand on my chest. ‘But I want us to be with other people as well.’

‘You know, Lisa, you picked a pretty weird way to tell me this.’

‘Is there a way that isn’t weird?’

‘Still . . . ’

‘I didn’t know how you’d react,’ she pouted. ‘I still don’t know. I thought, if you don’t like it, this’ll be the last time we make love. And if you do like it, this’ll be the first time we make love as the new us, free to be what we want. Either way, it’s a memorable anniversary.’

We looked at one another. Our eyes began to smile.

‘You knew I’d completely love this stunt, didn’t you?’

‘Totally.’

‘The whole Air India archer thing.’

‘Totally.’

I leaned over her, smoothing the wind-strewn hair from her face.

‘You’re an amazing girl, Lisa. And I’m constantly amazed.’

She kissed me, her fingers vines around my neck.

‘You know,’ she murmured, ‘I did some research.’

‘You did?’

‘Yeah, on how often this place gets hit by lightning. Do you want to know?’

I didn’t care. I knew what was happening to us, but I didn’t know where we were going.

The storm was on us. The sky connected. Rain filled our mouths with silver. She pulled me onto her, into her, locked her feet in the small of my back, and held me inside, tight, loose, and tight again, daring me to follow.

A waterfall of wind and rain drummed on my back. I put my forehead to hers, sheltering her face with mine, our eyes only lashes apart. The monsoon, flesh-warm, poured from my head and splashed up from the ground. We pressed our mouths together, breathing into one another, sharing air.

She rolled me over onto my back, holding me inside her, flattening her long fingers across my chest, her arms stiff.

A roar of thunder smashed new rain from sodden clouds. Water poured in rivulets from her hair and her breasts, running into my open mouth. Water began to fill the roof of the building, ebbing around us in a secret sea, high above the Island City.

Her fingers clawed. Her back arched, cat-fierce. She slid her hands from my chest, down along my body. Sitting upright, she locked me inside, and turned her face to the sky, her arms out wide.

A drum began to beat: a heavy footstep in a hall of memory, my heart. We were breaking apart. In that instant it was clear: what we had was all we ever were, or could be.

Lightning painted the water around us on the roof. They turned above my head, Lisa and the storm and the wheel of Fate, and the whole world was red, blood red, even to that sea the sky, that sea the sky.

Part Four

Chapter Eighteen

R
ULING A CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE
requires an instinct for fear, a
flair for ruthless caprice, and a talent for herding your men into that lush minion-pasture between awe and envy. Running a criminal enterprise, on the other hand, is all hard work.

I woke early after the night of the red archer, feeling that an arrow had passed through me leaving a red emptiness inside. I was at my desk in the passport factory before nine.

Three hours of detailed work with Krishna and Villu brought my counterfeit passports up to date. After a call to my contact at the Bombay Municipal Corporation, asking him to deliver copies of
the permit documents for Farzad’s treasure-hunting family, I headed
to the Colaba Causeway for a working lunch.

Most of the five-, four- and three-star hotels in South Bombay were within a three-kilometre radius of the Gateway of India monument. Ninety per cent of Bombay’s tourists could be found within the same arc of the peninsula, along with ninety-five per cent of the illegal passport trade, and eighty-five per cent of the drug trafficking.

Most businesses in the south paid protection money, called
hafta
, meaning
a week
, to the Sanjay Company. The Company exempted the owners of seven restaurants and bars in the same area. The owners of those bars allowed touts, pimps, tourist guides, pickpockets, drug dealers and black market traders connected with the Sanjay Company to use their premises as convenient drop-off points for goods, documents and information.

My passport forgery and counterfeiting unit had to monitor those seven drop-off centres for usable documents. For the most part, that job fell to me. To keep enemies and potential rivals guessing, I changed the order of the bars and restaurants every day, rotating between them often enough to confuse any sense of routine.

I started, on that day, at the Trafalgar Restaurant, only a good knife’s throw from Lightning Dilip’s desk in the Colaba police station. At the door of the corner-facing restaurant, below the three steep steps leading inside, I paused to shake hands with a Memory Man named Hrishikesh.

Memory Men were a criminal sub-caste in those years: men who lacked the foolhardiness to risk prison time by actually committing crimes, but whose intelligence and prodigious memories allowed them to make a modest living, serving the fearless fools who did.

Taking up positions in high criminal traffic areas, such as the causeway, they made it their business to know the latest figures for the day’s gold prices, the current black and white market exchange rates for six major currencies, the carat price for white diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, and half-hour fluctuations in the price of every illicit drug, from cannabis to cocaine.

‘What’s up, Kesh?’ I asked, shaking his hand.

‘No problem, baba,’ he grinned, raising his eyes to the sky for a moment. ‘
Ooperwale.
’

The word he’d used was a reference to God, and one of my favourites. More often used in the singular,
Ooperwala
, it could be roughly translated as
The Person Upstairs
. Used in the plural, the term meant
The People Upstairs
.

‘
Ooperwale
,’ I replied. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Okay,’ he said, becoming serious as he launched into his iterations of the latest prices and rates.

I only needed the gold and currency exchange rates, but I let Kesh run through the whole of his repertoire. I liked him, and admired the subtle genius that allowed him to hold hundreds of facts in his current memory, adjusting them as often as three times in a single day, without a decimal point of error.