Shantaram (109 page)

"Stupid fuckin' name, yaar," Sanjay cut in. "It's a girl's name, Sapna. It's a fuckin' girl's name. It's like me calling myself fuckin' Lucy, or some such. What kind of a bad fucker calls himself a girl's name, yaar?"

"The kind who kills eleven people," Salman answered, "and almost gets away with it. Anyway, he got completely drunk the night Abdullah was killed and everybody was saying that Sapna was dead.

And he started shooting his mouth off, telling anyone who would listen that he was the real Sapna. They were in a bar in the President Hotel. Then he starts shouting that he was ready to tell it all-who was behind the Sapna killings, you know, and who planned it all and paid for it all."

"Fuckin' gandu," Sanjay growled, using the slang word for arsehole. "I never met one of these psycho types who wasn't a fuckin' squealer, yaar."

"Lucky for us, there were mostly foreigners in the place that night, so they didn't know what he was talking about. One of our guys was there, in the bar, and he told Jeetu to shut the fuck up. Jeetudada said he wasn't afraid of Abdel Khader Khan because he had plans for Khader, as well. He said Khader was going to end up in pieces, just like Madjid. Then he starts waving a gun around. Our guy called Khader right away. And the Khan, he went and did that one himself. He went with Nazeer and Khaled, and Farid, and Ahmed Zadeh, and young Andrew Ferreira, and some others."

"I missed that one, fuck it!" Sanjay cursed. "I wanted to fix that maakachudh from the first day, and especially after Madjid.

But I was on a job, in Goa. Anyway, Khader fixed them up."

"They found them near the car park of the President Hotel.

Jeetudada and his guys put up a fight. There was a big shoot-out.

Two of our guys got hit. One of them was Hussein-you know, he runs the numbers in Ballard Pier now. That's how he lost his arm-he took a shotgun blast, both barrels of a crowd-pleaser, a sawn-off, and it tore his arm right off his body. If Ahmed Zadeh hadn't wrapped him up and dragged him out of there, and off to hospital, he would've bled to death, right there in the car park. All four of them who were there-Jeetudada and his three guys-got wasted.

Khaderbhai put the last bullets into their heads himself. But one of those Sapna guys wasn't in the car park, and he got away. We never tracked him down. He went back to Delhi, and he disappeared from there. We haven't heard anything since."

"I liked that Ahmed Zadeh," Sanjay said quietly, dispensing what was, for him, extravagantly high praise with a little sigh of sorrowing recollection.

"Yeah," I agreed, remembering the man who'd always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd; the man who'd died with his hand clenched in mine. "He was a good guy."

Nazeer spoke again, grunting the words at us in his wrathful style as if they were threats.

"When the Pakistani cops were tipped off about Khaderbhai,"

Sanjay translated, "it was obvious that it had to be Abdul Ghani behind it."

I nodded my agreement. It was obvious. Abdul Ghani was from Pakistan. His connections there went deep, and high. He'd told me about it more than once when I'd worked for him. I wondered why I hadn't seen it at the time, when the cops raided our hotel in Pakistan. My first thought was that I'd simply liked him too much to suspect him, and that was true. More to the point, perhaps, was how flattered I'd been by his attention: Ghani had been my patron on the council, after Khader himself, and he'd invested time, energy, and affection in our friendship. And there was something else that might have distracted me in Karachi: my mind had been filled with shame and revenge-I remembered that much from the visit to the mosque when I'd sat beside Khaderbhai and Khaled to hear the Blind Singers. I remembered reading Didier's letter and deciding, in that shifting, yellow lamplight, that I would kill Madame Zhou. I remembered thinking that and then turning my head to see the love in Khader's golden eyes. Could that love and that anger have smothered something so important, something so obvious, as Ghani's treachery? And if I'd missed that, what else had I missed? "Khader wasn't supposed to make it out of Pakistan," Salman added. "Khaderbhai, Nazeer, Khaled-even you. Abdul Ghani thought it was his chance to take out the whole council in one shot-all the guys on the council who weren't with him. But Khaderbhai had his own friends in Pakistan, and they warned him, and you made it out of the trap. I think Abdul must've known he was finished from that day on. But he held his peace, and he didn't make any moves here. He was hoping, I guess, that Khader, and the whole lot of you, might be killed in the war-"

Nazeer interrupted him, impatient with the English that he despised. I thought I understood what he'd said, and I translated his words, looking to Sanjay for confirmation that my guess was correct.

"Khader told Nazeer to keep the truth about Abdul Ghani a secret.

He said that if anything happened to him in the war, Nazeer was to return to Bombay and avenge him. Was that it?"

"Yeah," Sanjay wagged his head. "You got it. And after we did that, we had to fix the rest of the guys who were on Ghani's side. There's none of them left now. They're all dead, or they got the fuck out of Bombay."

"Which brings us to the point," Salman smiled. It was a rare smile, but a good one: a tired man's smile; an unhappy man's smile; a tough man's smile. His long face was a little lopsided with one eye lower than the other by the thickness of a finger, a break in his nose that had settled crookedly, and a mouth that hitched in one corner where a fist had split the lip and a suture had pulled the skin too tightly. His short hair formed a perfectly round hairline on his brow like a dark halo that pressed down hard on his slightly jugged ears. "We want you to run the passports for a while. Krishna and Villu are very insistent. They're a little..."

"They're freaked out of their fuckin' brains," Sanjay cut in.

"They're scared stupid because guys were getting chopped all over Bombay-starting with Ghani while they were right there in the fuckin' cellar. Now the war's over, and we won, but they're still scared. We can't afford to lose them, Lin. We want you to work with them, and settle them down, like. They're asking about you all the time, and they want you to work with them. They like you, man."

I looked at each of them in turn, and settled my eyes on Nazeer.

If my understanding was correct, it was a tempting offer. The victorious Khader faction had reformed the local mafia council under old Sobhan Mahmoud. Nazeer had become a full member of the council, as had Mahmoud Melbaaf. The others included Sanjay and Salman, Farid, and three other Bombay-born dons. All of the last six spoke Marathi every bit as well as they spoke Hindi or English. That gave me a unique and very significant point of contact with them because I was the only gora any of them knew who could speak Marathi. I was the only gora any of them knew who'd been leg ironed at Arthur Road Prison. And I was one of the very few men, brown or white, who'd survived Khader's war. They liked me. They trusted me. They saw me as a valuable asset. The gangster war was over. In the new Pax Mafia that ruled their part of the city, fortunes could be made. And I needed the money. I'd been living on my savings, and I was almost broke.

"What exactly did you have in mind?" I asked Nazeer, knowing that Sanjay would reply.

"You run the books, the stamps, all the passport stuff, and the licences, permits, and credit cards," he answered quickly. "You get complete control. Just the way it was with Ghani. No fuckin' problem. Whatever you need, you get it. You take a piece of that action-I'm thinkin' about 5 per cent, but we can talk about that if you don't think it's enough, yaar."

"And you can visit the council whenever you want," Salman added.

"Sort of an observer status, if you get my meaning. What do you say?"

"You'd have to move the operation from Ghani's basement," I said quietly. "I'd never feel happy about working there, and I'm not surprised the place has got Villu and Krishna spooked."

"No problem," Sanjay laughed, slapping the table. "We're going to sell the place anyway. You know, Lin-brother, that fat fuck Ghani put the two big houses-his own one and the place next door-in his brother-in-law's name. Nothin' wrong with that-fuck, man, we all do that. But they're worth fuckin' crores, Lin. They're fuckin' mansions, baba. And then, after we sliced and diced the fat fuck, his brother-in-law decides he doesn't want to sign the places over to us. Then he gets tough, and starts talking lawyers and police. So we had to tie him up over a big dubba of acid, yaar. Then he's not tough any more. Then he can't wait to sign the places over to us. We sent Farid to do the job. He took care of it. But he got so fucked up, yaar, with the disrespect Ghani's brother-in-law showed us, and he was real angry with the madachudh for making him set up the acid barrel and all. He likes to keep things simple, our brother Farid. The whole hanging-the cunt-up-over-the-acid thing, it was all a bit-what did you call it, Salman? What was the word?"

"Tawdry," Salman suggested.

"Yeah. Taw-fuckin-dry, the whole thing. Farid, he likes to get respect, or cut to the chase and gun the motherfucker down, like.

So, angry as he is, he takes the brother-in-law's own house as well-makes him sign over his own house, just for being such a big madachudh about Ghani's houses. So now he's got nothing, that guy, and we got three houses on the market instead of one."

"It's a vicious and bloodthirsty racket, that property business,"

Salman concluded with a wry smile. "I'm moving us into it as soon as I can. We're taking over one of the big agencies. I've got Farid working on it. Okay, Lin, if you don't want to work at Ghani's place, where would you like us to set it up for you?"

"I like Tardeo," I suggested. "Somewhere near Haji Ali."

"Why Tardeo?" Sanjay asked.

"I like Tardeo. It's clean... and it's quiet. And it's near Haji Ali. I like Haji Ali. I've got kind of a sentimental connection to the place."

"Thik hain, Lin," Salman agreed. "Tardeo it is. We'll tell Farid to start looking right away. Anything else?"

"I'll need a couple of runners-guys I can trust. I'd like to pick my own men."

"Who've you got in mind?" Sanjay asked.

"You don't know them. They're outside guys. But they're both good men. Johnny Cigar and Kishore. I trust them, and I know I can rely on them."

Sanjay and Salman exchanged a glance and looked to Nazeer. He nodded.

"No problem," Salman said. "Is that it?"

"One more thing," I added, turning to Nazeer. "I want Nazeer as my contact on the council. If there's any problem, for any reason, I want to deal with Nazeer first."

Nazeer nodded again, favouring me with a little smile deep in his eyes.

I shook hands with each man in turn to seal the deal. The exchange was a little more formal and solemn than I'd expected it to be, and I had to clench my jaw to stifle a laugh. And those attitudes, their gravitas and my recusant impulse to laugh, registered the difference between us. For all that I liked Salman, Sanjay, and the others-and the truth was that I loved Nazeer, and owed him my life-the mafia was, for me, a means to an end and not an end in itself. For them, the mafia was a family, an infrangible bond that held them from minute to minute and all the way to the dying breath. Their solemnity expressed that kin-sacred obligation from eye to eye and hand to hand, but I knew they never believed it was like that for me.

They took me in and worked with me-the white guy, the wild gora who went to the war with Abdel Khader Khan-but they expected me to leave them, sooner or later, and return to the other world of my memory and my blood.

I didn't think that, and I didn't expect it, because I'd burned all the bridges that might've led me home. And although I had to stop myself from laughing at the earnestness of the little ceremony, the handshake had, in fact, formally inducted me into the ranks of professional criminals. Until that moment, the crimes I'd committed had been in the service of Khader Khan. As difficult as it is for anyone outside that world to understand, there was a sense in which I'd been able to say, with sincerity, that I'd committed them for love of him: for my own safety, certainly; but, beyond every other reason, for the father's love I'd craved from him. With Khader gone, I could've made the break completely. I could've gone... almost anywhere. I could've done ... something else. But I didn't. I joined my fate to theirs and became a gangster for nothing more than the money, and the power, and the protection that their brotherhood promised.

And it kept me busy, breaking laws for a living: so busy that I managed to hide most of what I felt from the heart that was feeling it. Everything moved quickly after that meeting at the Mocambo. Farid found new premises within a week. The two-story building, only a short walk from the floating mosque, Haji Ali, had been a records office for a branch of the Bombay Municipal Corporation. When the BMC had moved to larger, more modern offices, they'd left most of the old benches, desks, storage cupboards, and shelves behind as stock fittings. They were well suited to our needs, and I spent a week supervising a team of cleaners and labourers, who dusted and polished every surface while moving the furniture around to make way for the machinery and light-tables from Ghani's basement.

Our men loaded that specialist equipment onto a large, covered truck and delivered it to the new premises late at night. The street was unusually quiet as the heavy truck backed up to the double folding doors of our new factory. But alarm bells and the heavier clang of fire-engine bells jangled in the distance. Standing beside our truck, I looked along the deserted street in the direction of the frantic sound.

"It must be a big fire," I muttered to Sanjay, and he laughed out loud.

"Farid started a fire," Salman said, answering for his friend.

"We told him we didn't want anyone watching us move this stuff into the new place, so he started the fire as a diversion. That's why the street is so empty. Everybody who is awake has gone to the fire."

"He burned down a rival company," Sanjay laughed. "Now we are officially in the real estate business because our biggest rivals have just closed down, due to fire damage. We start our new real estate office not far from here tomorrow. And tonight, no curious fuckers are here to see us move our stuff into your new workshop.