Shantaram (71 page)

I'm gonna fix Maurizio, for lying about me. That's my business, now. You can go back to your boss, and tell him that Maurizio will get what's coming to him. But if you ever come back here, we'll kill you. Understand? You come back to Bombay, you die."

"Yeah, you fuckin' understand?" Vikram shouted at them, lashing out with a kick. "You come here and fuck with Indians, you fuckin' fuck-heads! India is finished for you! You come back here and I will personally cut off your fuckin' balls! Do you see my hat? You see the mark on my fuckin' hat, you fuckin' bahinchhud?

You put a mark on my fuckin' hat! You don't fuck with an Indian guy's hat! You don't fuck with Indian guys for any reason, hat or no hat! Not ever! And especially not, if they do wear a hat!"

I left them, and took a cab to Ulla's new apartment. She would know where Maurizio was, if anyone knew. My throat was aching, and I could hardly talk. The gun in my pocket was all I could think about. It swelled, in my mind, until it was huge: until the pattern of ridges on the handle was as large as the wale of bark on a cork tree. It was a Walther P38, one of the best semi automatic pistols ever made. It fired a 9mm round from an eight shot magazine, and in my mind I saw all eight of them punch their way into Maurizio's body. I mumbled the name, Maurizio, Maurizio, and a voice in my head, a voice that I knew very well, said, Get rid of the gun before you see him...

I knocked hard on the door of the apartment, and when Lisa opened it I brushed past her to find Ulla sitting on a couch in the lounge room. She was crying. She looked up when I entered, and I saw that her left eye was swollen, as if she'd been hit.

"Maurizio!" I said. "Where is he?"

"Lin, I can't," she sobbed. "Modena..."

"I'm not interested in Modena. I want Maurizio. Tell me where he is!"

Lisa tapped me on the arm. I turned, and noticed for the first time that she had a large kitchen knife in her hand. She jerked her head toward the nearest bedroom. I looked at Ulla, and then back to Lisa. She nodded at me, slowly.

He was hiding in a wardrobe. When I dragged him out, into the room, he pleaded with me, begging me not to hurt him. I grabbed the belt at the back of his trousers, and marched him to the door of the apartment. He screamed for help, and I hit him in the face with the pistol. He screamed again, and I hit him again, much harder.

His lips parted, and he wanted to cry out, once more, but I beat him to it, crunching the gun into the top of his head as he flinched away. He was quiet.

Lisa snarled at him, brandishing the knife.

"You're lucky I didn't put this in your guts, you son of a bitch!

If you ever hit her again, I'll kill you!"

"What did he want here?" I asked her.

"It's all about the money. Modena's got it. Ulla called Maurizio - "

She stopped, shocked by the fury she saw on my face as I glared at Ulla.

"I know, I know, she wasn't supposed to call anyone. But she did, and she told him about this place. She was supposed to meet them both, here, tonight. But Modena didn't show. It's not her fault, Lin. She didn't know Maurizio put you in it. He just told us about it, then, a minute ago. He told us he gave your name to a couple of Nigerian thugs. He put you in it, to save himself. He said he had to have the money, to get away, because they'd be after him when they were finished with you. The hero was trying to beat it out of her, where Modena is, when you got here."

"Where's the money?" I asked Ulla.

"I don't know, Lin," she cried. "Fuck the money! I didn't want it in the first place. Modena was ashamed that I was working. He doesn't understand. I rather would work on the street, and keep him safe, than have this crazy thing happen. He loves me. He loves me. He didn't have anything to do with you and the Nigerians, Lin, I swear it. That was Maurizio's idea. It's been going on for weeks now. That's what I've been so scared about.

And then tonight, Modena got hold of the money Maurizio stole- the money he stole from the Africans-and he hid it. He did it for me. He loves me, Lin. Modena loves me."

She trailed off in stuttering sobs. I turned to Lisa.

"I'm taking him with me."

"Good!" she snapped.

"Will you be okay?"

"Yeah. We're fine."

"Have you got any money?"

"Yeah. Don't worry." "I'll send Abdullah as soon as I can. Keep the doors locked, and don't let anyone in but us, okay?"

"You got it," she smiled. "Thanks, Gilbert. That's the second time you came riding to the rescue."

"Forget it."

"No. I won't forget it," she said, closing and locking the door behind us.

I wish I could say that I didn't hit him. He was big enough and strong enough to defend himself, but he had no heart for fighting, and there wasn't any victory in hitting him. He didn't fight or even struggle. He whimpered and cried and begged. I wish I could say that a stern justice and a righteous revenge for the wrong that he'd done to me had curled my hands into fists, and punched him. But I can't be sure. Even now, long years later, I can't be sure that the violence I did to him didn't come from something darker, deeper, and far less justifiable than angry retribution. The fact was that I'd been jealous of Maurizio for a long time. And in some part, some small but terrible part, I may have struck at his beauty, and not just his treachery.

On the other hand, of course, I should've killed him. When I left him, bloody and broken, near the St. George Hospital, a warning voice told me it wasn't the end of the matter. And I did hesitate, looming over his body with murder in my eyes, but I couldn't take his life. Something he'd said, when he was begging me to stop beating him, stayed my hand. He said that he'd named me, that he'd thrown me to the Nigerian thugs when he had to invent someone else who was responsible for his theft, because he was jealous of me. He was jealous of my confidence, my strength, and my friendships. He was jealous of me. And in his jealousy, he hated me. And in that, we weren't so different, Maurizio and I.

It was still with me, all of it, the next day, when the Nigerians were gone and I went to Leopold's, looking for Didier to return his unused gun. It was still with me, clotting my mind with anger, confused in regret, when I found Johnny Cigar waiting for me outside. It was still there, as I struggled to focus, and understand his words.

"It's a very bad thing," he said. "Anand Rao has killed Rasheed this morning. He cut his throat. It's the first time, Lin."

I knew what he meant. It was the first murder in our slum. It was the first time that one slum-dweller had ever killed another in the Cuffe Parade slum. There were twenty-five thousand people in those little acres, and they fought and argued and bickered all the time, but none, not one of them, had ever killed another. And in the shocked moment, I suddenly remembered Madjid. He, too, had been murdered. I'd managed, somehow, to push the thought of his death away from my waking, working mind, but it had been gnawing through the screen of my composure slowly, steadily, all the while. And it broke through then, with the news of Rasheed's death. And that other murder-the slaughter, Ghani had said-of the old gold smuggler, the mafia don, became confused with the blood that was on Anand's hands. Anand, whose name meant happy.

Anand, who'd tried to talk to me and tell me about it, who'd come to me that day in the slum for help, and found none.

I pressed my hands to my face, and ran them through my hair. The street around us was as busy and colourful as ever. The crowd at Leopold's were laughing, talking, and drinking, as they usually did. But something had changed in the world that Johnny and I knew. The innocence was lost, and nothing would ever be the same.

I heard the words tumbling over and over in my mind. Nothing is ever gonna be the same... Nothing is ever gonna be the same...

And a vision, the kind of postcard that fate sends you, flashed before my eyes. There was death in that vision. There was madness. There was fear. But it was blurred. I couldn't see it clearly. I couldn't see the detail. I didn't know if the death and madness were happening to me, or happening around me. And in a sense, I didn't care. In too many ways of shame and angry regret, I didn't care. I blinked my eyes, and cleared my swollen throat, and stepped up off the street into the music, the laughter, and the light.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

"The Indians are the Italians of Asia," Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievous grin. "It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indian in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna-they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalite. These are nations where love-amore, pyaar- makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours. It is the secret of my love for India, Lin, that my first great love was Italian."

"Where were you born, Didier?"

"Lin, my body was born in Marseilles, but my heart and my soul were born sixteen years later, in Genova."

He caught the eye of a waiter, and waved a hand lazily for another drink. He'd hardly taken a sip from the drink on the table in front of him, so I guessed that Didier was settling in for one of his longer discourses. It was two hours past noon on a cloudy Wednesday, three months after the Night of the Assassins.

The first rains of the monsoon were still a week away, but there was a sense of expectancy, a tension, that tightened every heartbeat in the city. It was as if a vast army was gathering outside the city for an irresistible assault. I liked the week before monsoon: the tension and excitement I saw in others was like the involuted, emotional disquiet that I felt almost all the time.

"My mother was a delicate and beautiful woman, the photographs of her reveal," Didier continued. "She was only eighteen years old, when I was born, and not yet twenty when she died. The influenza claimed her. But there were whispers-cruel whispers, and I heard them many times-that my father had neglected her, and was too, how do they say it, tight with his money to pay doctors when she fell ill. Whatever the case, she died before I was two years old, and I have no memory of her.

"My father was a teacher of chemistry and mathematics. He was much older than my mother when he married her. By the time I started at school, my father was the headmaster. He was a brilliant man, I was told, for only a brilliant Jew could rise to the position of headmaster in a French school. The racisme, the anti-Semitism, in and around Marseilles at that time, so soon after the war, was like a sickness. It was a guilt that pinched at them, I think. My father was a stubborn man-it is a kind of stubbornness that permits one to become a mathematician, isn't it? Perhaps mathematics is itself a kind of stubbornness, do you think?"

"Maybe," I replied, smiling. "I never thought about it that way, but maybe you're right."

"Alors, my father returned to Marseilles, after the war, and returned to the very house that he had been forced to leave when the Jew-haters took control of the town. He had fought with the Resistance, and he was wounded, in hand-to-hand fighting with the Germans. Because of that, no-one dared to challenge him. Not openly. But I am sure that his Jewish face and his Jewish pride and his beautiful young Jewish bride reminded the good citizens of Marseilles of the thousands of French Jews who were betrayed and sent to their deaths. And it was a cold triumph for him, returning to that house he had been forced out of, and to that community that had betrayed him. And that coldness claimed his heart, I believe, when my mother died. Even his touch, when I think of it now, was cold. Even his hand, when he touched me."

He paused and took a sip from his glass, replacing it slowly and carefully in the precise circle of moisture it had left on the table in front of him.

"Well then, he was a brilliant man," he continued, raising his eyes to mine with a hastily gathered smile. "And, with one exception, he was a brilliant teacher. The exception was me. I was his only failure. I had no head for science and mathematics.

They were languages I could never decipher or understand. My father responded to my stupidity with a brutal temper. His cold hand, it seemed to me when I was a child, was so large that when he struck me my whole body was shocked and bruised by the giant's hard palm and the whips of his fingers. I was afraid of him, and ashamed of my failures at school, so I played the truant very often, and fell into what the English call a bad company. I was many times in the courts, and served two years in the prisons for children before my thirteenth birthday.

At sixteen, I left my father's house, my father's city, and my father's country forever.

"By chance I came to Genova. Have you seen it? I tell you, it is the jewel in the tiara of the Ligurian coast. And one day, on the beach at Genova, I met a man who opened my life to every good and beautiful thing that there is in the world. His name was Rinaldo.

He was forty-eight years old then, when I was sixteen. His family held some ancient title, a noble line that reached to the time of Columbus. But he lived in his magnificent house on the cliffs without the pretensions of his rank. He was a scholar, the only true Renaissance man I ever met. He taught me the secrets of antiquity, the history of art, the music of poetry, and the poetry of music. He was also a beautiful man. His hair was silver and white, like the full moon, and his very sad eyes were grey.

In contrast to the brutish hands of my father, with their chilling touch, Rinaldo's hands were long, slender, warm, expressive, and he made tenderness in everything that he touched.

I learned what it is to love, with all of the mind and all of the body, and I was born in his arms."

He began to cough, and attempted to clear his throat, but the cough became a fit that wracked his body in painful spasms.

"You've got to stop smoking and drinking so much, Didier. And you've gotta do a little exercise now and then."

"Oh, please," he shuddered, stubbing out a cigarette and fishing another from the pack in front of him as the coughs subsided.

"There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call-I almost never recovered."

"Sorry," I smiled. "I don't know what came over me."

"You are forgiven," he sniffed, downing one glass of whisky as the waiter brought the next. "You know," I admonished him, "Karla says that depression only happens to people who don't know how to be sad."

"Well she is wrong!" he declared. "I am an expert in the tristesse. It is the perfect, definitive human performance. There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness. And for me it is something special; a daily meditation. Sadness is my one and my only art."

He pouted for a few moments, too peeved to proceed, but then raised his eyes to meet mine and laughed out loud.

"Have you heard from her?" he asked.

"No."

"But you know where she is?"

"No."

"She has left Goa?"

"I asked a guy I know down there, Dashrant-he owns a restaurant on the beach where she was staying-I asked him to keep an eye on her, and make sure she was okay. I called him last week, and he told me she left. He tried to talk her into staying, but she... well, you know."

Didier pursed his lips in a reflective frown. We both watched the shuffling, idling, bustling, scurrying street only two metres away, beyond the wide entrance to Leopold's.

"Et bien, don't worry yourself about Karla," Didier said at last.

"At the least, she is well protected."

I assumed that Didier meant she could take care of herself and, perhaps, that she lived under a good and lucky sign. I was wrong.

There was more to the remark than that. I should've asked him what he meant, of course. In the long years since that conversation I've asked myself a thousand times how different my life might've been if only I'd asked him what he meant by that remark. Instead, my head full of assumptions and my heart full of pride, I changed the subject.

"So... what happened?"

"Happened?" he asked, bewildered.

"What happened to you and Rinaldo in Genova?"

"Ah, yes. He loved me, and I loved him, it was true, but he made an error of the judgment. He gave my love a test. He allowed me to discover the secret place where he kept a large sum of cash. I could not resist the temptation that he offered to me. I took the money and ran away. I loved him, but I took his money, and I ran away. For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die."

"Did you ever see him again?"

"Yes. Yes, I did. Another loop of fortune brought me back to Genova, almost fifteen years later. I walked on the same boulevard of sand where he had taught me to read Rimbaud and Verlaine. And then I saw him. He was sitting with a group of men of his own age-he was more than sixty then-and they were watching two elderly men play chess. He wore a grey cardigan and a black velvet scarf, although the day was not cold. His hair was almost gone. That silver crown of hair, it was... gone. His face was all hollow spaces, and his skin was a bad mix of bad colours, as if he was recovering from a serious illness. Perhaps he was succumbing to it. I do not know. I walked on past him, averting my gaze, so that he should not recognise me. I even pretended a strange, stooping walk to disguise myself. At the last moment I glanced back at him, watching as he coughed violently into a white handkerchief. There was blood, I think, staining that white handkerchief. I walked faster and faster until I ran with the haste of a man in terror."

Once again we sat in silence and allowed our eyes to rove the passing crowds, following a man in a blue turban in one instant, and a woman in a black mask, veil, and chador the next.

"You know, Lin, I have lived what many-or most-would call a wicked life. I have done things that could put me in prison, and things that, in some nations, could see me executed. There are many things I have done that I can say, I am not proud. But there is only one act in my whole life that I can say, I am truly ashamed of it. I hurried past that great man, and I had money enough and time enough and good health enough to help him. I hurried past him, not because I felt guilty about the theft of his money. And not because I was afraid of his sickness, or the commitment it might cost me. I hurried past that good and brilliant man who loved me, and taught me how to love, simply because he was old-because he was not beautiful any more."

He drained his glass, examined its emptiness for a moment, and then placed it on the table as gently and attentively as if it was about to explode. "Merde! Let's drink, my friend!" he cried at last, but my hand stayed his, preventing him from summoning the waiter.

"I can't, Didier. I have to meet Lisa at the Sea Rock. She asked me to ride out there and meet her. I'll have to leave now, if I'm going to make it."

He clenched his jaws on something-a request, perhaps, or another confession. My hand still rested on his.

"Look, you can come, if you like. It's not a private meeting, and it's a nice ride out to Juhu."

He smiled slowly, and slid his hand out from under mine. Still staring into my eyes, he raised his hand, pointing with one finger. A waiter came to the table. Without looking at him, Didier ordered another whisky. When I paid my bill and walked out to the street, he was coughing again, hunched over one hand and clutching his glass with the other.

I'd bought a bike, an Enfield Bullet, a month before. The taste of two-wheeled adrenaline that I'd experienced in Goa had nagged at me until I finally surrendered to it, and went with Abdullah to the mechanic who serviced his bike. The mechanic, a Tamil named Hussein, loved bikes, and loved Abdullah almost as much.

The Enfield he sold to me was in perfect condition, and it never once let me down. Vikram was so impressed with it that he bought one from Hussein within a week. Sometimes we rode together, Abdullah, Vikram, and I, our three bikes side by side, and the sun in our laughing mouths.

On that afternoon when I left Didier at Leopold's I rode slowly, and gave myself time and space to think. Karla was gone from the little house on Anjuna beach. I had no idea where she might be.

Ulla told me that Karla had stopped writing to her, and I had no reason to think she was lying. So Karla was gone, and there was no way to find her. And every day I woke with a dream or a thought of her. Every night I slept with the knife of regret in my chest.

My thoughts drifted to Khaderbhai as I rode. He seemed well pleased with the niche role that I was playing in his mafia network. I supervised certain movements of smuggled gold through the domestic and international airports, exchanged sums of cash with agents at the five-star hotels and airline offices, and arranged to buy passports from foreigners. They were all jobs that a gora could perform more successfully and less obtrusively than an Indian. My conspicuousness was a strange and ironic form of camouflage. Foreigners were stared at in India. Somewhere in the five or more millennia of its history, the culture had decided to dispense with the casual, nonchalant glance. By the time I came to Bombay, the eye contact ranged from an ogling gaze to a gawping, goggle-eyed glare. There was nothing malicious in it. The staring eyes that found and followed me everywhere I went were innocent, curious, and almost always friendly. And that intense scrutiny had its benefits: for the most part, people stared at what I was, not what I did. Foreigners were stared into invisibility. So I wandered in and out of travel agencies or grand hotels, airline or business offices, followed in every step by eyes that saw me, but not the crimes I committed in the service of the great Khan.