The Mountain Shadow (91 page)

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.

Part Ten

Chapter Fifty-Seven

S
IN IS DISCONNECTION,
and nothing disconnects us from one another more completely than the great sin, war. The struggle for control of southern crime caused friends to turn on one another, enemies to strike without warning and the cops to plead for peace, because the feud was ruining business for everyone.

The Scorpions regrouped under Vishnu’s leadership, bringing twenty more men to Bombay from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. They were experienced street fighters, with a patriotic grudge, and within a week of their arrival they took Flora Fountain and the Fort area from the Sanjay Company.

The Sanjay Company, seeing their empire annexed piece by piece, reacted swiftly to the northern invasion: they killed their leader, not a hundred metres from his mansion.

Two-Hussein, the first soldier to fight for Khaderbhai decades before, stepped out in front of Sanjay’s car as the crime boss left his mansion. He fired his guns into the windows until Sanjay and his two Afghan guards were dead.

He renamed the Company after himself, as regicides often do, and raised the boy-king, Tariq, to a full place on the Council of the new Hussein Company. Tariq’s first act as a Council member was to call for death.
Kill them all
, the boy was widely reported to have said.
Kill them all, and take everything they have
.

It became the new motto of the Hussein Company –
Take Everything They Have
 – where once it had been
Truth and Courage
.

Sin piled upon sin until the grave burden tore the last garment of tolerance, and frayed threads of honour and faith floated away on winter winds, leaving hatred naked, for all to see.

Karla started talking to me again, but she was much busier than before: too busy to share more than one meal with me, every other day. Vikram’s suicide struck her physically for a while, it seemed to me, but maybe she was just showing me what I wouldn’t face myself.

She stopped laughing and smiling. For a time, she was the Karla I’d first met: the Karla who didn’t smile. And there were no sleepovers.

It was an endurance test designed for released convicts, or musicians. I was walking through webs of testosterone and adrenaline and pheromones, disconnected from the woman I loved and couldn’t make love to, but spoke to, every other day.

And I was still testy. But testiness was the new normal in South Bombay, and nobody noticed.

The measure of a man is the distance between his human self, minute to minute, and his devoted self. I was devoted to Karla, but the distance between us left the devoted self all alone, guarding a candle in the wind, while the human self was outside, roaming the street.

As it happened, every street in town at that time was a carnival for roamers.

Fear is a poverty of Truth, and Greed is a poverty of Faith
, Idriss said to me once. Fear and greed took turns to prowl the streets and slums of South Bombay for weeks: six long weeks of tension, pillage, profiteering, and blood in alleyways.

Hashish, marijuana, uppers, downers and flat-liners were all five times the usual price. The sharpest civil servants duly raised the price of bribery, setting off a cascade of corruption that made small fortunes for them, and doubled the ten-rupee bribe that traffic cops demanded at speed traps. Avarice made pay while the moon shone, and fear was the only constant friend on the streets.

I met a kid who’d just been recruited by the Hussein Company, and liked him, and heard that he’d been killed, an hour later. And it happened again, to another young Hussein Company fighter, a few days after that, with just a few hours between a handshake and a handful of dirt.

It hurt, both times, even though it had nothing to do with me. It made me uneasy every time I met a new street soldier, excited by war.

The Cycle Killers accepted contracts from the Hussein Company, and duly executed Scorpion Company men. Scorpions knocked Hussein men from their motorcycles. Hussein men fired-bombed a Scorpion bar.

The Scorpions robbed a bank in South Bombay and got away with it. The Hussein Company knocked over a money transport van in Scorpion territory, in revenge, and got away with it. Both gangs used the money they’d stolen in the robberies to bribe or threaten the bank officials and security guards. Without witnesses, the cases were dropped.

Every man with a gun to sell wanted three times the going price. Men who needed a gun sold their wives’ wedding jewellery to buy one. The age of hatchets and knives, which was eye to eye, passed away within a season of the winter sun, replaced by eye-for-an-eye shootings.

In a street war, any dark corner can kill you, and dark corners killed people at the rate of four a week until the violence stopped. I paid two of Comanche’s best young fighters to shadow Karla from a distance, and keep her safe during those weeks. I wanted to do it myself, but she wouldn’t let me.

As suddenly as it had started, the war for South Bombay ended in a day, with a truce between the Hussein Company and the Scorpion Company, and a sit-down between Hussein and Vishnu. Whatever they said to one another in private, the declaration they made when they left the room wasn’t just of peace, but of brotherhood and integration.

The two Companies agreed to unite as one. The name of the newly formed Company was an issue, because some Khaderbhai-Sanjay-Hussein men said that they’d shoot themselves before they’d call themselves Scorpions.

The new, combined mafia gang was named the Vishnu Company. Although he had more men, Vishnu had much less territory than Hussein, and it was decided that having the Company named after him would quell rebellion on the streets, and discourage foraging in South Bombay’s unrest by outside gangs.

Both leaders presided at Council meetings, and both acknowledged the power of the other. Places on the Council were appointed evenly between members of former gangs, and the spoils of peace were distributed fairly.

It was a complicated balance between limited trust and unlimited hatred, and to help the cooperation along, nephews and nieces from either side were sent to live with the enemy, and consolidated the truce with the pulse in their throats.

And when those hostages went to families whose task it was to care for them as if they were their own, and kill them if the truce failed, six weeks of war ended in a day, and the streets were safely unlawful again.

When peace was reimposed, I paid off the young fighters from Comanche’s gym, who’d been guarding Karla. They took the money, but told me they couldn’t work for me in future.

‘Why not?’

‘Because Karla hired us to work for her, as field agents for the Lost Love Bureau.’

‘Field agents?’

‘Yes, Linbaba. Pretty cool,
na
? I’m a field agent, investigating missing persons. It’s chained and brained, yaar. I was throwing drunks out of Manny’s bar, a few weeks ago.’

‘I
like
Manny’s bar,’ I protested.

‘I’m keeping a diary,’ his friend said. ‘I’m going to write a Bollywood movie. Cases we investigate, and stuff. Miss Karla, she’s reef, man. She’s totally reef. See you round, Lin. Thanks for the bonus!’