Shantaram (108 page)

With Didier close behind me, I made my way along the secret corridor and back to the blackened stairs.

"I owe you one, Didier," I admitted, grinning into the dark.

"Certainly you do," he replied, and then the stairs crumbled beneath us and we fell, tumbling in and through the burned and broken wood until we hit the hard floor below.

Spluttering and coughing in the cloud of charcoal dust and floating fibres, I wriggled against my fallen friend to sit upright. My neck was stiff and sore, and I'd landed on my wrist and shoulder, spraining them both, but I seemed to be intact and otherwise unbroken. Didier had landed on me, and I heard him moaning grumpily.

"Are you okay, man? Jesus, what a fall! Are you all right?"

"That's it," Didier snarled. "I'm going back up there to _shoot that woman!"

We laughed as we hobbled out of the ruined Palace together, and the laughter stayed with us in the hours that followed while we bathed our wounds and dressed them. Didier gave me a clean shirt and trousers to wear. His wardrobe was surprisingly stylish and colourful for a man who dressed in such a drab uniform at Leopold's. He explained that most of those bright new clothes had been left with him by lovers who'd never returned for them, and I thought of Karla, giving me clothes that had once belonged to her lovers. And the laughter bubbled up anew as we ate a meal together at Leopold's while Didier talked of his most recent romantic disasters. We were laughing still when Vikram Patel ran up the steps with his arms wide in an excited greeting.

"Lin!"

"Vikram!"

I stood just in time to receive his flying hug. Holding my shoulders with his arms straight, he looked me over, frowning at the cuts on my head and face.

"Fuck, man, what happened to you?" he asked. His clothes were still black, and still inspired by the cowboy dream, but they were much more subdued and subtle. That was Lettie's influence, I guessed. Although the new, inexcessive look suited him, I was relieved and comforted to see that his beloved hat still hung on his back from the cord at his throat.

"You should see the other guys," I answered, flicking a glance at Didier.

"So why didn't you tell me you're back, man?"

"I only got back today, and I've been kind of busy. How's Lettie?"

"She's great, yaar," he responded cheerily, taking a seat. "She's going into this business thing, this multi-fuckin-media thing, with Karla and her new boyfriend. It's going to be damn good."

I turned my head to look at Didier, who shrugged non-committally and then glared at Vikram with his teeth bared in fury.

"Shit, man!" Vikram apologised, clearly stricken. "I thought you knew. I thought Didier would've told you, yaar."

"Karla is back in Bombay," Didier explained, silencing Vikram with another stern frown. "She has a new man-a boyfriend, she calls him. His name is Ranjit, but he likes everyone to call him Jeet."

"He's not a bad guy," Vikram added, smiling hopefully. "I think you'll like him, Lin."

"Oh, really, Vikram!" Didier hissed, wincing for me.

"It's okay," I said, smiling at each of them in turn.

I caught the eye of our waiter and nodded to him, gesturing for a new round of drinks. We were silent until they arrived and the drinks were poured, and then, with the glasses in the air, I proposed a toast.

"To Karla!" I proposed. "May she have ten daughters, and may they all marry well!"

"To Karla!" the others echoed, clashing glasses and throwing back the drinks. We were sharing our third toast-to someone's pet dog, I think- when Mahmoud Melbaaf walked into the happy, noisy, chattering restaurant and looked at me with eyes that were still up there, on the frozen mountains of the war.

"What happened to you?" he asked quickly, looking at the cuts on my face and head when I rose to greet him.

"Nothing," I smiled.

"Who did this?" he asked more urgently.

"I had a run-in with Madame Zhou's guys," I answered, and he relaxed a little. "Why? What's up?"

"Nazeer told me you would be here," he whispered through a tight, anguished little frown. "I am happy to find you. Nazeer says to you, don't go anywhere. Don't do anything, for some days. There is a war now-a war of the gangs. They fight for Khader's power.

It is not safe. Stay away from the dundah places."

The word dundah, or business, was the slang term we used for all of Khader's black-market operations in Bombay. They'd become targets, somehow.

"What happened? What's it all about?"

"The traitor, Ghani, is dead," he replied. His voice was calm, but his eyes were hard and determined. "The men with him, his men in Khader's gang, will also die."

"Ghani?"

"Yes. Do you have money, Lin?"

"Sure," I muttered, thinking about Abdul Ghani. He was from Pakistan. That had to be it. The connections to the secret police, the Pakistan ISI, must've been his. Of course it was him.

Of course he was the traitor. Of course he was the one who'd tried to have us arrested and killed in Karachi. That's who Khaled had been talking about on the night before the battle: not Abdullah, but Ghani. Abdul Ghani...

"Do you have a place? A safe place?"

"What? Yes."

"Good," he said, shaking my hand warmly. "Then I will see you here, in three days' time, in the day, at one o'clock, Inshallah."

"Inshallah," I responded, and he walked out. His handsome head was high, in his brave, righteous step, and his back was straight.

I sat down again, avoiding the eyes of my friends until I could disguise the dread that I knew they would read in them.

"What is it?" Didier asked.

"Nothing," I lied, shaking my head and faking a smile. I reached for my glass and lifted it to clink against theirs. "Where were we?"

"We were just going to toast Ranjit's dog," Vikram recalled, grinning widely, "but I'd like to include his horse in that toast, if it's not too late."

"You do not know if he has a horse!" Didier objected.

"We don't know if he's got a dog, either," Vikram pointed out, "but that's not stopping us. To Ranjit's dog!"

"Ranjit's dog!" we all replied.

"And his horse!" Vikram added. "And his neighbour's horse!"

"Ranjit's horse!"

"And... horses... in general!"

"And to lovers, everywhere!" Didier proposed.

"And to lovers... everywhere..." I answered.

But somehow, in some way, for some reason, the love had died in me, and I suddenly realised it, and was suddenly sure. It wasn't completely over, my feeling for Karla. It never is completely over. But there was nothing of the jealousy I once would've felt for the stranger Ranjit. There was no rage against him, and no feeling of hurt inspired by her. I felt numbed and empty sitting there, as if the war, and the loss of Khaderbhai and Khaled, and the face-off with Madame Zhou and her twins had poured anaesthetic into my heart.

And there was, instead of pain, a sense of wonder-I could think of no other way to describe what I was feeling-at Abdul Ghani's treachery. And behind that almost spiritual awe there was a dull, throbbing, fatalistic dread. For even then the bloody future his betrayal had forced on us was unfolding and spilling into our lives, like the sudden blossom of a drought-forced rose in a red, falling rush to dry, unyielding earth.

____________________

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

One hour after I'd left Abdul Ghani's mansion to confront Madame Zhou, Nazeer and three of his most trusted men forced the door of the house next to Ghani's and made their way through the long basement workshop that connected the two houses. At about the time that I picked my way through the rubble of Madame Zhou's ruined Palace, Nazeer and his men, wearing black knitted masks, pushed up the trapdoor in Ghani's kitchen and entered the house.

They seized the cook, the yardman, Abdul's two servants, and the Sri Lankan counterfeiters, Villu and Krishna, and locked them in a small room in the basement. As I climbed the blackened stairs of the Palace to the attic and found Madame Zhou, Nazeer crept upstairs to Abdul's grand study and found him sitting in the wing chair, weeping and still. Then, at about the time that I uncurled the knotted fist of my revenge to pity my broken enemy, the drooling Madame, Nazeer avenged himself and Khader Khan by killing the traitor who'd betrayed us all in Pakistan.

Two men held Abdul's arms against the chair. A third man forced his head back and his eyes open. Nazeer removed his mask. Staring into Abdul's eyes, Nazeer stabbed him in the heart. Abdul must've known he had to die. He was sitting there, alone, waiting for his killers. But his scream, they say, came all the way from hell to claim him.

They rolled his body off the chair and onto the polished floor.

Then, as I struggled with Rajan and his twin in the attic across the city, Nazeer and his men used heavy cleavers to hack off Abdul's hands, his feet, and his head. They scattered the pieces of his corpse around the great house, just as Abdul Ghani had ordered the Sapna killers to do with the butchered pieces of loyal old Madjid's body. And as I left the ruined Palace, my heart free and almost at peace for the first time in too many vengeful months, Nazeer and his men released Krishna, Villu, and the servants-all deemed to have had no part in Ghani's treachery-and then left the mansion to hunt down the members of Ghani's faction, and kill them all.

"Ghani was freakin' out for a long time, yaar." Sanjay Kumar said, translating freely from Nazeer's Urdu into English. "He thought Khader had gone crazy. He thought he was, like, obsessed, you know? He got the idea that Khader was going to lose all the business and the money and the power of the council. He thought Khader was spending too much time on Afghanistan, the war, and all that. And he knew Khader had all these other missions planned - stuff in Sri Lanka and Nigeria and such like. So when he couldn't talk Khader out of it, and he couldn't get him to change, he decided to use all this Sapna business. The Sapna thing was Ghani's operation, right from the start."

"All of it?" I asked.

"Sure," Sanjay answered. "Khader and Ghani, both. But Ghani was in charge. They were using the Sapna thing, you know, to get what they wanted from the cops and the government."

"How?"

"Ghani's idea was to freak everybody out-the cops and the politicians and the other councils-with a common enemy. That was Sapna. When the Sapna guys started chopping people up all over the place, and talking about a revolution, and Sapna being the king of thieves and all that, everybody got worried. Nobody knew who was behind it. That got them to work with us, to catch the fucker, in exchange for our help. But Ghani, he was hoping to get a shot at Khader himself."

"I'm not sure he wanted that from the start," Salman Mustaan interrupted, shaking his head at his close friend to emphasise his point. "I think he started out just like always, backing Khader all the way. But that Sapna thing-that was some weird shit, man, and I think, you know, it bent his mind."

"Whatever," Sanjay continued, shrugging off the fine point. "The result's the same. Ghani has this gang-the Sapna guys-his own gang, that only answer to him. And he's killing fuckers all over the place. Most of them were people he wanted to get rid of anyway, for business reasons, which I got no problem with. So everything's going fine, yaar. The whole fuckin' city is going crazy looking for this Sapna fucker, and all Khader's traditional enemies, they're falling all over themselves to help him smuggle guns and explosives and other heavy shit through Bombay because they want him to help them find out who this Sapna is, and take him out. It's a fuckin' crazy plan, but it's working, yaar. Then, one day, a cop comes to see him. It was that Patil- you know the guy, Lin-that sub-inspector Suresh Patil. He used to work out of Colaba. And he's such a cunt, yaar."

"But a smart one," Salman muttered respectfully.

"Oh, yeah, he's smart. He's a very smart cunt. And he tells Ghani that the Sapna killers have left a clue at the scene of their latest murder, and it leads back to the Khader Khan council.

Ghani freaks out. He can see all that shit he's been doing coming right home to his doorstep. So he decides that he's got to have a sacrifice. Someone from the Khader Khan council itself, you know, right in the fuckin' heart of it all, that the Sapna guys can chop up to throw the cops off. They figured, if the cops saw one of our own guys get all chopped up, they'd have to think that Sapna was our enemy."

"And he picked Madjid," Salman concluded for him. "And it worked.

Patil was the cop in charge of the case, and he was there when they were putting the pieces of Madjid's body into carry bags. He knew how close Madjid was to Khaderbhai. Patil's dad-now there's a tough cop, yaar-had some history with Khaderbhai. He put him in jail once."

"Khaderbhai did time?" I asked, disappointed that I'd never asked the Khan myself: we'd talked about prison often enough.

"Sure," Salman laughed. "He even escaped, you know, from Arthur Road."

"You're fuckin' kidding!"

"You didn't know that, Lin?"

"No."

"It's a damn fine story, yaar," Salman stated, wagging his head enthusiastically. "You should get Nazeer to tell it some time. He was the outside man for Khader Khan during the escape. They were fuckin' wild guys, Nazeer and Khaderbhai, in those days, yaar."

Sanjay, in agreement, clapped Nazeer on the back with a hard, good-natured slap. It was almost exactly the place where Nazeer had been wounded, and I knew the slap must've hurt, but he showed no sign of pain. Instead, he studied my face. It was my first formal debriefing after Abdul Ghani's death and the end of the two-week gangster war that had cost six lives and put the power of the mafia council back in the hands of Nazeer and the Khader faction. I met his gaze, and nodded slowly.

His stern, unsmiling face softened for an instant and then quickly set in its customary severity.

"Poor old Madjid," Sanjay said, sighing heavily. "He was just a- what the fuck do you call those red things? Those fish?"

"A red herring," I said.

"Yeah, one of those herring fuckers. The cops-that Patil cunt and his guys-they decided that there wasn't any connection between Sapna and Khader's council. They knew how much Khader loved Madjid, and they started looking in other places. Ghani was off the hook, and after a while his guys started chopping fuckers up again. Business as usual."

"How did Khader feel about it?"

"About what?" Sanjay asked.

"He means about Madjid being killed," Salman cut in. "Don't you, Lin?"

"Yeah."

There was a small hesitation as all three men looked at me. Their features were set in grim and almost resentful stillness, as if I'd asked them an impolite or embarrassing question. But their eyes, lit with secrets and lies, seemed regretful and saddened.

"Khader was cool with it," Salman answered. I felt my heart stutter, murmuring its pain.

We were in the Mocambo, a restaurant and coffee bar in the Fort Area. It was clean, well serviced, and fashionably bohemian. Rich businessmen from the Fort mixed with gangsters, lawyers, and celebrities from the movies and the rapidly developing television industries. I liked the place, and I'd been glad that Sanjay had chosen it for our meeting. We'd worked our way through a big but healthy lunch and kulfi dessert, and had moved on to our second coffee. Nazeer sat at my left, with his back in a corner space, and facing the main street door. Next to him was Sanjay Kumar, the tough, young Hindu gangster from the suburb of Bandra who'd once been my training partner. He'd worked his way into a permanent position on what remained of Khader's mafia council. He was thirty years old, fit and heavy-set, with thick, dark-brown hair that he blow-dried to match the bouffant of the movie heroes. His face was handsome. Wide-apart brown eyes, set deep into the shelter of a high brow, looked out with humour and confidence over a wide nose, a smiler's mouth, and a softly rounded chin. He laughed easily, and it was always a good, warm laugh, no matter how often he provoked himself to it.

And he was generous: it was almost impossible to pay a bill in his company-not, as some thought, because he aggrandised himself with the gesture, but rather because it was his instinct to give and to share. He was also brave, and as dependable in a violent crisis as he was from day to mundane day. He was an easy man to like, and I did like him, and I had to remind myself with a little nudge of will, now and then, that he was one of the men who'd hacked off Abdul Ghani's hands and feet and head with a butcher's cleaver.

The fourth man at our table, sitting next to Sanjay, as always, was Salman, his best friend. Salman Mustaan was born in the same year as Sanjay, and had grown up with him in the bustling, crowded suburb of Bandra. He'd been a precocious child, I'd been told, who'd surprised his impoverished parents by topping every subject in every class at his junior school. His success was the more remarkable for the fact that, from the day of his fifth birthday, the boy had worked twenty hours a week with his father, plucking chickens and sweeping out at the local poultry yard.

I knew his history well, piecing it together from stories and confidences he'd shared when we'd worked out together at Abdullah's gym. When Salman had announced that he had to leave school to work longer hours in support of his family, a teacher who knew Abdel Khader Khan asked the don to intercede on his behalf. Salman became one of Khaderbhai's scholarship children- like my adviser, in the slum clinic, Doctor Hamid-and it was decided that he should be groomed toward a career as a lawyer.

Khader enrolled Salman in a Catholic college run by Jesuit priests, and every day the boy from the slum dressed in a clean, white uniform and took his place among the sons of the rich elite. It was a good education-Salman's spoken English was eloquent, and his general knowledge roved through history and geography to literature, science, and art. But there was a wildness in the boy and a restless hunger for excitement that even the strong arms and the hard canes of the Jesuits couldn't tame.

While Salman struggled with the Jesuits, Sanjay had found a job in Khaderbhai's gang. He worked as a runner, carrying messages and contraband between mafia offices throughout the city. In the first weeks of that service, Sanjay was stabbed during a fight with men from a rival gang who'd tried to rob him. The boy fought back and evaded his attackers, delivering his contraband parcel to Khader's collection centre, but his wound was serious and he took two months to recover from it. Salman, his lifelong friend, blamed himself for not being with Sanjay, and he left school immediately. He begged the Khan for permission to join his friend and work with him as a runner. Khader agreed, and from that day the boys worked together at every crime in the council's catalogue.

They were just sixteen then, at the beginning. They both turned thirty in the weeks before our meeting in the Mocambo. The wild boys had become hard men who lavished gifts on their families, and lived with a certain gaudy, aggressive cool. Although they'd supported their sisters into prestigious marriages, both men were unmarried, in a country where that was unpatriotic at the least, and sacrilegious at worst. They'd refused to marry, Salman told me, because of a shared belief or presentiment that they would die violently and they would die young. The prospect didn't frighten or worry them. They saw it as a reasonable tradeoff: excitement and power and wealth enough to provide for their families, balanced against short lives that rushed into the dead end of a knife or a gun. And when Nazeer's group won the gangster war against Ghani's group, the two friends found themselves on the new council; young mafia dons in their own right.

"I think Ghani did try to warn Khaderbhai what was in his heart,"

Salman said thoughtfully, his voice clear and his English rounded to the nearest decibel point. "He talked about that hero curse thing for a good year or so before he decided to create Sapna."

"Fuck him, yaar," Sanjay snarled. "Who the fuck was he to be giving Khaderbhai warnings? Who the fuck was he to get us all in the shit with Patil, so he had to have his guys cut up old Madjid? And then, after everything, he went and sold everybody out to the fuckin' Pakistani cops, yaar. Fuck him. If I could dig the madachudh up and kill him again, I'd do it today. I'd do it every day. It would be my fuckin' hobby, like."

"Who was the real Sapna?" I asked. "Who actually did the killings for Abdul? I remember Khader told me once, after Abdullah was killed, that he found the real Sapna. He said he killed him. Who was he? And why did he kill him, if he was working for him in the first place?"

The two younger men turned to face Nazeer. Sanjay asked him a few questions in Urdu. It was an act of respect toward the older man: they knew the facts as well as Nazeer did, but they deferred to his recollection of them and included him in the discussion. I understood most of Nazeer's reply, but I waited for Sanjay to translate.

"His name was Jeetendra. Jeetudada, they called him. He was a gun and machete guy from Delhi-side. Ghani brought him down here, with four other guys. He actually kept them in five-star hotels, like, the whole fuckin' time-two years, man! Bahinchudh!

Complaining about Khader spending money on the mujaheddin and the war and all, and meanwhile he was keeping these psycho fuckers in five-star hotels for two fuckin years!"

"Jeetudada got drunk when Abdullah was killed," Salman added. "It really got to him, you know, that everyone was saying Sapna was dead. He'd been doing the Sapna thing for nearly two years, and it had started to twist his brain. He started to believe his own - or Ghani's-bullshit."