The Mountain Shadow (77 page)

She knew it. She saw it in my eyes, and in my breathing: the heavy breath of worry that we weren’t on the same path away from the mountain.

‘Stop thinking,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow is just like you. It’s never on time.’

The wind in moonlight, painting leaf-shadow lace on her skin. Love in all the past lives, every time we’d loved each other and lost each other: starlight on her sleeping face. There was no star in my sky that night: no light to guide me on that sea of what we were, and what we weren’t. But I didn’t care. She was asleep, in my arms, and I was already sailing home.

Part Eight

Chapter Forty-Six

I
DIDN’T THROW IN WITH
K
ARLA,
N
AVEEN AND
D
IDIER
in the Lost Love Bureau. Call me stubborn. Naveen did. Call me crazy. Didier did. Call me a free spirit. Karla didn’t. She didn’t speak to me at all. She didn’t even respond to my messages, but sent a message of her own, through Naveen, to stay away until she cooled off. I got hotter, instead, and bought Didier’s black market crime portfolio. He’d become a legitimate businessman, a partner in the Lost Love Bureau, two doors down from my own, and decided to turn his back on black business. I let his drug and callgirl rackets slide, and focused on his money changing operations. It took me a while to sort out the details. I was buying white money that had become black money, making it white again through a black bank, and figuring small weekly margins on a high daily turnover: make or break. It was like the stock market, without the lies and corruption.

When Karla finally responded, late in the second afternoon after coming down from the mountain, I raced to meet her at the sea wall in Juhu where we’d talked of Lisa, our own lost love, weeks before.

And as evening strollers passed us, smiling happily, and the sun began to fall, Karla wept and told me she wasn’t angry with me: she was troubled by Ranjit and Lisa.

‘What was Ranjit doing there with Lisa that night? What was she doing with him? Since I came back to Bombay, I can’t stop thinking about it.’

She cried into my chest, and then stopped crying, as I held her.

‘Why don’t I understand it, Shantaram?’

Karla was two beats ahead of every mind she met. The mystery tormented her, where it was just a slow burn in me; sand in the wind, for her, and sand in an hourglass with Ranjit’s name on it for me. I had to tell her to let it go, just as she’d once told me.

‘We’ll find him,’ I said. ‘And when we do, we’ll find out what happened. Until then we’ll have to stop thinking about it, or we’ll both go nuts. I mean, more nuts than we already are.’

She smiled.

‘There’s something not right,’ she said. ‘Something I should know, but don’t know. Something right there in front of me. But you’re right – if I don’t let it go, it’ll drive me crazy.’

Vermilion sunset, the last grace of the sun, washed flaws and faults from every face and form on the promenade: an ocean of evening light showing only the beautiful things we are inside.

Gentle breezes chased one another along the sea wall, playing through skirts and shirts of walkers on the way. The first few car headlights began to pass.

Pale shadows of palm leaves drifted across her face, tracing the exact curve of her neck to her lips, every time a car passed. Karla.

‘Is it your pride that won’t let you join Didier and Naveen and me?’ she asked, a harder eye turned toward me.

‘No.’

‘Pride is the only sin we can’t see in ourselves, you know.’

‘I’m not proud.’

‘The hell you’re not. But that’s okay. I like pride in a man. I like it in a woman, too. But don’t let it stop you now. We can make this work.’

‘How, Karla?’

‘We might be here a week, okay, but we might still be here three years from now. This can start to build in three months. Security is the big thing in India in the next fifty years. I’m telling you. I’ve had two years to study this, with Ranjit’s best advisors.’

‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

‘I’m always serious, when it comes to love.’

‘Love?’ I grinned, like an idiot.

‘Pay attention,’ she jabbed at me. ‘I’m talking business.’

‘Okay, I’m attentive.’

‘Money isn’t gonna flow from the rich to the poor. It’s gonna flow from the poor to the rich, faster than ever, and it’s gonna stay there. That’s so outrageously unfair that personal security can’t lose as an investment. See?’

‘In a strange way. And the detective agency?’

‘We’re a bureau, not an agency. We only take on one kind of case. Lost loves. We don’t snoop or peep or shadow. We investigate missing loved ones. That’s our way into the wider security business. We’re gonna grow, and fast.’

‘How?’

‘If we want to grow, we need to know all the main players as friends. If we find missing loved ones for them along the way, they can’t roll on us later. Plus, we get to know where all the skeletons dance.’

‘You really thought this through.’

‘Will you stop stating the obvious?’

‘Look, I follow your logic, and I see the point –’

‘Do you? This is something clean, and right. I don’t see the right on your side of the playpen.’

‘Right? We’re talking about what’s
right
, now?’

‘You know, whatever else happens on the ride, interesting stuff like success and failure and fun, the bottom line for me, now, is that it’s gotta be right, and it’s gotta make a difference, or I’m an hour yesterday.’

‘Finding lost loves?’

‘Would you prefer losing
found
loves?’

She snapped the words at me, because she thought I hadn’t taken her seriously, but I was stung.

‘Is that at me? At us?’

‘I’m not the one who’s walking away from this, Shantaram.’

‘Karla, I’m yours. But you know I can’t work with the cops.’

‘You can stay out of that part.’

‘The handing people over to the police part, or the giving evidence in court part? I can stay out of that?’

‘Didier will handle police liaison. He said he’s looking forward to an interview with the cops where he isn’t on the floor.’

‘It’s not just that. I’ve got too much at stake, Karla. I’m wanted everywhere but here, and that’s because I know who to pay. I stay on my side of the line. The cops leave me alone because I don’t sell drugs or girls, I don’t cheat anyone, I don’t beat anyone who hasn’t got it coming, I keep my mouth shut when they give me a kicking, and I pay them regularly, and well.’

‘Paradise,’ Karla said, an eyebrow perched like a mockingbird on a branch.

‘They tolerate me. But that could change, and then I’d have to run, and fast. You know that. I can’t get into anything serious, and you shouldn’t, either. I thought we understood that.’

‘I told you, I’m a silent partner,’ she said, the queens flashing at me for an instant. ‘But I can always find my voice, if you’re not in this with me.’

There was a little silence. She was daring me to say the wrong thing, I guess, and maybe I did.

‘Have you heard anything new about Ranjit?’

She looked away. I thought I’d hurt her, and I tried to change the subject.

‘How about this?’ I suggested. ‘You check out of the Taj, and move into the rooms next to mine.’

‘Next to you?’

‘I mean it, Karla. There are three rooms, with a balcony that looks out on a good street, and you said you like security.’

She thought about it, offering me two queens from the corner of her eye.

‘Are you talking sleepovers?’ she asked, knowing I’m no good at that game.

‘I’m gonna leave the sleepovers to another conversation. But I bought new locks for your doors, and installed them.’

‘
My
doors?’

‘Ah . . . yeah. If you take the rooms.’

‘You must’ve been pretty sure I was gonna say yes.’

‘Ah . . . ’

‘How many locks did you put on?’

‘You mean, on the
front
door?’

‘How many doors are we talking about?’

‘All of them. Bathroom, bedroom, balcony, all of them.’

‘O . . . kay,’ she smiled. ‘Any other surprises?’

‘I put a first aid box with a surgical suture kit in the bathroom. You can sew up a sizeable wound, if you have to.’

‘And they say romance is dead,’ she laughed.

‘And I got some other stuff.’

‘Other stuff, huh?’

‘Yeah, the neighbourhood has some great shops. I had the manager put a small refrigerator in your room, and stocked it with vodka, soda, lemons and the nastiest cheese I could find.’

‘Nice.’

‘And I taped a knife under the desk drawer. If you open it right, someone standing in the room wouldn’t see you slip it out.’

‘Won’t see me slipping it out, huh?’

‘And your bed has painted iron tubes.’

‘My bed has tubes,’ she laughed.

‘Yeah. I checked the end caps. They came unscrewed on the head-end of the bed. I put a roll of money in one, and a skinny knife in the other. Just in case.’

‘Handy.’

‘And I bought you a sitar.’

‘A sitar. What’s that for?’

‘I’m not sure. It was in the music shop downstairs, and I couldn’t resist it.’

‘You know –’

‘There’s no room service,’ I said, cutting her off. ‘But there’s a sitar store downstairs, and the manager upstairs is crazier than I am, and all in all I think it’s a good idea for you to move in with us, Karla. Are you game?’

‘Honey, for the rest of your life, I
am
the game.’

‘Do you mean it?’

‘I mean it.’

‘Good, let’s get you settled, neighbour.’

She rode back with me. We followed Randall, as he returned to the hotel. I resisted the impulse to swing the bike out and pass. It wasn’t hard. She had her left arm over my shoulder, her right arm in my lap, and her head resting on my back. I wanted to keep on riding until the bike said enough.

‘You know,’ I said, as I walked with her to a quiet corner on the steps of the Taj hotel. ‘We could just keep on riding until we’re far enough away, or the bike says enough.’

‘I have things that I have to do, Shantaram,’ she smiled. ‘And anyway, lost love is the trump card, at least for now. Our first official bureau case is Ranjit, and we’re gonna find that rodent, wherever he is.’

‘Official case?’

‘I registered us with the police, as a bureau. I fast-tracked it, using Ranjit’s man. He’s a corporator, and he was glad to see me. Since Ranjit’s disappearance, the juice has stopped flowing. When I went to see him I had all the right American fruit. He’s a nice guy, except that sometimes his face is greedier than his mind.’

It was my turn to laugh.

‘Let’s talk about it later,’ she said, pulling me to her and holding me close, shell-within-a-shell perfect.

‘Get a good night’s sleep,’ she said, beginning to pull away from me.

‘Okay . . . what?’

‘You’re gonna need all the sleep you can get,’ she said. ‘If you’re turning me down at the bureau, and going out as a freelancer.’

‘Wait a minute. I can’t come back and see you, later tonight?’

‘Certainly not,’ she said, pushing free and walking the last steps to the door. ‘And anyway, it’ll still be there, in the morning.’

‘What’ll still be there in the morning?’

‘Lust,’ she said, pausing at the door. ‘You remember Lust, don’t you, Shantaram? Pretty girl, lotta fun, no scruples?’

The door closed. I was confused again. Then I smiled again.
Dammit, Karla.

I rode back to the Amritsar hotel in a predicament, and found the manager in a quandary: his face was in a large box, labelled
Quandary Inc
.