Shantaram (106 page)

While waiting at the cashier's desk, I caught sight of myself unexpectedly in an angled mirror that showed my face in three quarter profile. It was a face so hard and unfamiliar that it startled me to recognise it as my own. I remembered the photograph taken by shy Kishmishi, and looked again into the mirror. There was a cold impassiveness in my face-and a determination, perhaps-which hadn't even begun to gleam in the eyes that had stared so confidently into the lens of Khaled's camera. I snatched up my sunglasses and put them on. Have I changed so much? I hoped that a hot shower, and shaving off my thick beard, would soften some of the hard edges. But the real hardness was inside me, and I wasn't sure if it was simply tough and tenacious or if it was something much more cruel.

The cab driver followed my instructions and pulled up near the entrance to Leopold's. I paid him, and stood on the busy Causeway for a minute, staring at the wide doorway of the restaurant where my fated connection to Karla and Khaderbhai had really begun. Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future. People knew that once, deep within the ur-mind, the ur-imagination. You can still find those who decorate doorways, and reverently salute them, in every culture, from Ireland to Japan. I stepped up one, two steps, and reached out with my right hand to touch the doorjamb and then touch my chest, over the heart, in a salaam to fate and a homage to the dead friends and enemies who entered with me.

Didier Levy was sitting in his usual chair, commanding a view of the patrons and of the busy street beyond. He was talking to Kavita Singh. Her eyes were averted, but he looked up and saw me as I approached the table. Our eyes met and held for a second, each of us reading the other's shifting expressions like diviners finding meanings in the magic of scattered bones.

"Lin!" he shouted, hurling himself forward, flinging his arms around me, and kissing me on both cheeks.

"It's good to see you, Didier."

"Bah!" he spat, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. "If this beard is the fashion for holy warriors, I thank whatever powers protect me that I am an atheist, and a coward!"

There was a little more grey, I thought, in the mop of dark curls that brushed the collar of his jacket. The pale blue eyes were a little more tired, a little more bloodshot. Yet the wicked, leering mischief still arched his eyebrow, and the playful sneer I knew so well, and loved, was still there, curling his upper lip. He was the same man, in the same city, and it was good to be home.

"Hello, Lin," Kavita greeted me, pushing Didier aside to give me a hug.

She was beautiful. Her thick, dark brown hair was tousled and awry. Her back was straight. Her eyes were clear. And, as she held me, the casual, friendly touch of her fingers on my neck seemed like such a tender ravishment-after the blood and snow of Afghanistan-that I can still feel it, through all the years since.

"Sit down, sit down!" Didier shouted, waving to the waiters for more drinks. "Merde, I heard that you were dead, but I didn't believe it! It is so good to see you! We shall be famously drunk tonight, non?"

"No," I replied, resisting the pressure he placed on my shoulder.

The disappointment in his eyes moderated my tone, if not my mood.

"It's a little early in the day, and I have to get going. I've got... something to do."

"Very well," he yielded with a sigh. "But you must have one drink with me. It would be too uncivilised for you to leave my company without allowing me at least this little corruption of your holy warring self. After all, what is the point of a man returning from the dead, if it is not to drink strong spirits with his friends?"

"Okay," I relented, smiling at him but still standing. "One drink. I'll have a whisky. Make it a double. Is that corrupt enough for you?"

"Ah, Lin," he grinned, "Is there anyone, in this sickly sweet world of ours, who is corrupt enough for me?"

"Where there's a weak will, there's a way, Didier. We live in hope."

"But of course," he said, and we both laughed.

"I'll leave you to it," Kavita announced, leaning over to kiss my cheek. "I've got to get back to the office. Let's get together, Lin. You look... you look pretty wild. You look like a story, yaar, if ever I saw one."

"Sure," I smiled. "There's a story or two. Off the record, of course. Probably keep us going over dinner."

"I look forward to it," she said, holding my eye long enough to make sure I felt it in several places at once. She broke the contact to flash a smile at Didier. "Be nasty to someone for me, Didier. I don't want to hear that you've got all sentimental, yaar, just because Lin is back."

She walked out with my eyes on her, and when the drinks arrived Didier insisted that I sit down with him at last.

"My dear friend, you can stand to eat a meal-if you must-and you can stand to make love-if you are able-but it is impossible to stand and drink whisky. It is the act of a barbarian. A man who stands up to drink a noble alcohol like whisky, in all but a toast to some noble thing or purpose, is a beast-a man who will stop at nothing."

So we sat, and he raised his glass immediately to toast with mine.

"To the living!" he offered.

"And the dead?" I asked, my glass still on the table.

"And the dead!" he replied, his smile wide and warm.

I raised my glass in turn, clinked it against his, and threw back the double.

"Now," he said firmly, the smile discarded as swiftly as it had risen to his eyes. "What is the trouble?" "Where do you want me to start?" I scoffed.

"No, my friend. I am not talking just about the war. There is something else, something very determined in your face, and I want to know the heart of it."

I stared back at him in silence, secretly delighted to be back in the company of someone who knew me well enough to read between the frown lines.

"Come on, Lin. There is too much trouble in your eyes. What is the problem? If you want, if it is easier, you can begin by telling me what happened in Afghanistan."

"Khader's dead," I said flatly, staring at the empty glass in my hand.

"No!" he gasped, fearful and resentful, somehow, in the same quick response.

"Yes."

"No, no, no. I would hear something... The whole city would know it."

"I saw his body. I helped to drag it up the mountain to our camp.

I helped them bury him. He's dead. They're all dead. We're the only ones left from here-Nazeer, Mahmoud, and me."

"Abdel Khader... It can't be..."

Didier was ashen-faced, and the grey seemed to move even into his eyes. Stricken by the news-he looked as though someone had struck him hard on the face-he slumped in his chair and his jaw fell open. He began to slip sideways in the chair, and I was afraid that he would fall to the floor or even suffer a stroke.

"Take it easy," I said softly. "Don't go to fuckin' pieces on me, Didier. You look like shit, man. Snap out of it!"

His weary eyes drifted up to meet mine.

"There are some things, Lin, that simply cannot be. I am twelve, thirteen years in Bombay, and always there is Abdel Khader Khan ..."

He dropped his gaze again, and lapsed into a reverie so rich in thought and feeling that his head twitched and his lower lip trembled in the turbulence of it. I was worried. I'd seen men go under before. In prison, I'd watched men succumb, fragmented by fear and shame, and then slaughtered by solitude. But that was a process: it took weeks, months, or years. Didier's collapse was the work of seconds, and I was watching him crumple and fade from one heartbeat to the next.

I moved around the table and sat beside him, pulling him close to me with an arm around his shoulder.

"Didier!" I hissed in a harsh whisper. "I've got to go. Do you hear me? I came in to find out about my stuff-the stuff I left with you while I was at Nazeer's, getting off the dope. Remember?

I left my bike, my Enfield, with you. I left my passports and my money and some other stuff. Do you remember? It's very important.

I need that stuff, Didier. Do you remember?"

"Yes, but of course," he replied, coming to himself with a grumpy little shake of his jaw. "Your things are all safe. Have no fear of that. I have all your things."

"Do you still have the apartment in Merriweather Road?"

"Yes."

"Is that where my things are? Do you have my things there?"

"What?"

"For God's sake, Didier! Snap out of it! Come on. We're going to get up together and walk to your apartment. I need to shave and shower and get organised. I've got something... something important to do. I need you, man. Don't fuck up on me now!"

He blinked, and turned his head to look at me, his upper lip curling in the familiar sneer.

"What is the meaning of such a remark?" he demanded indignantly.

"Didier Levy does not fuck up on anyone! Unless, of course, it is very, very early in the morning. You know, Lin, how I hate morning people, almost as much as I hate the police. Alors, let's go!"

At Didier's apartment I shaved, showered, and changed into the new clothes. Didier insisted that I eat something. He cooked an omelette while I went through the two boxes of my belongings to find my stash of money-about nine thousand American dollars-the keys to my bike, and my best false passport. It was a Canadian book, with my photo and details inserted in it. The false tourist visa had expired. I had to renew it quickly. If anything went wrong in what I planned to do, I would need plenty of money and a good, clean book.

"Where are you going now?" Didier asked as I pushed the last forkful of food into my mouth, and stood to rinse the dishes in the sink.

"First, I have to fix up my passport," I answered him, still chewing. "Then I'm going to see Madame Zhou."

"You what?" "I'm going to deal with Madame Zhou. I'm going to clear the slate. Khaled gave..." I broke off, the words failing, and the thought of Khaled Ansari momentarily bleaching my mind with the mention of his name. It was a white blizzard of emotion storming from the last memory, the last image of him, walking away into the night and the snow. I pushed past it with an effort of will.

"Khaled gave me your note in Pakistan. Thanks for letting me know, by the way. I still don't really get it. I still don't know how she got so mad that she had to put me in jail. There was never anything personal in it, from my side. But it's personal now. Four months in Arthur Road made it personal. That's why I need the bike. I don't want to use cabs. And that's why I've got to get my passport tidied up. If the cops get in on it, I'll need a clean book to hand over."

"But you don't know? Madame Zhou was attacked last week-no, ten days ago. The mob, a mob of Sena people, they attacked her Palace and destroyed it. There was a great fire. They ran inside the building and they destroyed everything, then they put the place on fire. The building still stands. The staircases and the upstairs rooms still exist. But the place is ruined, and it will never again open. They will pull it down at some time soon. The building is finished, Lin, and so is she, La Madame."

"Is she dead?" I asked through clenched teeth.

"No. She is alive. And she is still there, so they say. But her power is destroyed. She has nothing. She is nothing. She is a beggar. Her servants are searching the streets for scraps of food to bring to her while she waits for the building to come down.

She is finished, Lin."

"Not quite. Not yet."

I moved to the door of his apartment, and he ran to join me. It was the fastest I'd ever seen him move, and I smiled at the strangeness of it.

"Please, Lin, will you not reconsider this action? We can sit here, together, and drink a bottle or two, non? You will calm down."

"I'm calm enough now," I replied, smiling at his concern for me.

"I don't know... what I'm going to do. But I have to close the door on this, Didier. I can't just... let it go. I wish I could.

But there's too much that's-I don't know-tied up in it, I guess."

I couldn't explain it to him. It was more than just revenge-I knew that-but the web of connections between Zhou, Khaderbhai, Karla, and me was so sticky with shame and secrets and betrayals that I couldn't bring myself to face it clearly or talk about it to my friend. "Bien," he sighed, reading the determination in my face. "If you must go to her, then I will come with you."

"No way-" I began, but he cut me off with a furious gesture of his hand.

"Lin! I am the one who told you of this... this horrible thing she did to you. Now I must go with you, or I will be responsible for all that happens. And you know, my friend, that I hate responsibility almost as much as I hate the police."

____________________

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Didier Levy was the worst pillion passenger I've ever known. He held on to me so tightly, and with such rigid tensity, that it was difficult to steer the bike. He howled as we approached cars, and shrieked when we sped up to pass them. On critical, sweeping turns he wriggled in terror, trying to straighten the bike from its necessary lean into the curve. Every time I stopped the bike at a traffic signal, he put both feet down to the ground to stretch his legs and moan about the cramps in his hips. Every time I accelerated away, he dragged his feet on the road and fidgeted for several seconds until he found the footrests. And when taxis or other cars ventured too close to us, he kicked out at them or waved his fist in frantic outrage. By the time we reached our destination, I calculated that the danger faced during a thirty-minute ride in fast traffic with Didier was roughly equivalent to a month under fire in Afghanistan.

I pulled up outside the factory run by my Sri Lankan friends Villu and Krishna. Something was wrong. The signs outside had changed, and the double front doors were wide open. I went up the steps and leaned inside to see that the passport workshop was gone, replaced by an assembly line producing garlands of flowers.

"There is something wrong?" Didier asked as I climbed back on the bike and kicked the starter.

"Yeah. We have to make another stop. They've moved it. I'll have to see Abdul to find out where the new workshop is."

"Alors," he whined, squeezing me as tightly as if we were sharing a parachute. "The nightmare, it goes on!"

Minutes later I left him with the bike near the entrance to Abdul Ghani's mansion. The watchman at the street door recognised me, and snapped his hand up in a theatrical salute. I put a twenty rupee note in his other hand as he opened the door, and I stepped into the cool, shadowed foyer to be greeted by two servants. They knew me well, and led me upstairs with wide, friendly smiles and a little mime-show of comments on the length of my hair and the weight I'd lost. One of the men knocked on the door of Abdul Ghani's large study, and waited with his ear to the door.

"Ao!" Ghani called from within. Come!

The servant entered, closing the door behind him, and returned a few moments later. He wagged his head at me and opened the door wide. I walked inside, and the door closed. Brilliant sunshine blazed at the high, arched windows. Shadows reached in spikes and claws across the polished floor. Abdul was sitting in a wing chair that faced the window, and only his plump hands were visible, steepled together like sausages in a butcher's window.

"So it's true."

"What's true?" I asked, walking around the chair to look at him.

I was shocked to see how the months, the nine months since I'd seen him, had aged Khader's old friend. The thick hair was grey to white, and his eyebrows were frosted with silver. The fine nose was pinched by deep lines that swept past the curve of his mouth to a sagging jaw. His lips, once the most sumptuously sensual I'd seen in Bombay, were as split and cracked as Nazeer's had been in the snow mountains. The pouches beneath his eyes drooped past the peak of his cheekbones and reminded me, with a shiver, of those that had dragged down the eyes of the madman Habib. And the eyes-the laughing, golden, amber eyes-were dull, and drained of the soaring joys and vain deceits that once had shone in his passionate life.

"You are here," he replied in the familiar Oxford accent, without looking at me. "And that is the truth. Where is Khader?"

"Abdul, I'm sorry-he's dead." I answered at once. "He... he was killed by the Russians. He was trying to reach his village, on the way back to Chaman, to deliver some horses."

Abdul clutched at his chest and sobbed like a child, mewling and moaning incoherently as the tears rolled fat and freely from his large eyes. After a few moments he recovered, and looked up at me.

"Who survived with you?" he asked, his mouth agape.

"Nazeer... and Mahmoud. And a boy named Ala-ud-Din. Only four of us." "Not Khaled? Where is Khaled?"

"He... he went out into the snow on the last night, and he never came back. The men said they heard shooting, later, from a long way off. I don't know if it was Khaled they were shooting at. I ... I don't know what happened to him."

"Then it will be Nazeer..." he muttered.

The sobbing spilled over again, and he plunged his face into his fleshy hands. I watched him uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or say. Since the moment that I'd cradled Khader's body in my arms on the snowy slope of the mountain, I'd refused to face the fact of his death. And I was still angry with Khader Khan. So long as I held that anger before me like a shield, loving Khader and grieving for him were deep and distant wonders of my heart.

So long as I was angry, I could fight off the tears and miserable longing that made Ghani so wretched. So long as I was angry, I could concentrate on the job at hand-information about Krishna, Villu, and the passport workshop. I was on the point of asking him about them when he spoke again.

"Do you know what it cost us-apart from his... his unique life - Khader's hero curse? Millions. It cost us millions to fight his war. We've been supporting it, in one way and another, for years.

You might think we could afford it. The sum is not so great, after all. But you're wrong. There is no organisation that can support such an insane hero curse as Khader's. And I couldn't change his mind. I couldn't save him. The money didn't mean anything to him, don't you see? You can't reason with a man who has no sense of money and its... its value. It's the one thing all civilised men have in common, don't you agree? If money doesn't mean anything, there is no civilisation. There is nothing."

He trailed off into indecipherable mumbles. Tears rolled into the little rivers they found on his cheeks, and dropped through the yellow light into his lap.

"Abdulbhai," I said, after a time.

"What? When? Is it now?" he asked, terror suddenly bright in his eyes. His lower lip stiffened in a cruel curve of malice I'd never seen or even imagined in him before that moment.

"Abdulbhai, I want to know where you moved the workshop. Where are Krishna and Villu? I went to the old workshop, but there's no-one there. I need some work on my book. I need to know where you moved to." The fear shrank to a pinpoint in his eyes, and they glittered with it. His mouth swelled in something like the old voluptuary smile, and he looked into my eyes with avid, hungering concentration.

"Of course you want to know," he grinned, using the palms of his hands to wipe at the tears. "It's right here, Lin, in this house.

We rebuilt the cellar, and fitted it out. There is a trapdoor in the kitchen floor. Iqbal will show you the way. The boys are working there now."

"Thanks," I said, hesitating a moment. "I've got a job to do, but ... I'll be back later tonight, or tomorrow, at the latest. I'll see you then."

"Inshallah," he said softly, turning his face to the windows once more. "Inshallah."

I went down through the house to the kitchen and lifted the heavy trapdoor. A dozen steps led into the floodlit cellar. Krishna and Villu greeted me happily, and went to work on my passport immediately. Few things excited them more than a counterfeiting challenge, and they chattered in a spirited little argument before agreeing on the best approach.

While they worked, I examined Ghani's new workshop. It was a large space-much larger than the basement of Abdul Ghani's mansion alone. I walked some thirty to fifty metres past light tables, printing machines, photocopiers, and storage cupboards. I guessed that the basement extended beneath the next large house in the street beside Ghani's. It seemed likely that they'd bought the house next door, and connected the two cellars. If that were so, I assumed, there would be another exit, leading into the neighbouring house. I was searching for it when Krishna called to tell me that my rush-jobs visa was ready. Intrigued by the new set-up beneath the houses, I promised myself that as soon as possible I would return and inspect the workshop thoroughly.

"Sorry to keep you," I muttered to Didier as I climbed back onto the bike. "It took longer than I expected. But the passport's done. We can go straight to Madame Zhou's now."

"Don't hurry, Lin," Didier sighed, clutching at me with all his strength as we moved out into the traffic. "The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly and with the eyes open."

"Karla?" I shouted over my shoulder, as the bike accelerated into the metal stream.

"Non, I think it's mine! But... but I can't be sure!" he shouted back, and we both laughed for love of her. I parked the bike in the driveway of an apartment building a block away from the Palace. We walked on the other side of the road until we passed the building by half a block, studying it for signs of activity within. The facade of the Palace seemed intact and undamaged, although metal and wooden sheets on the windows, and planks nailed across the main door, hinted at the destruction the mob had wrought inside. We turned and walked back, passing the building again and searching for an entrance.

"If she's in there, and if her servants are bringing her food, they're not coming and going through that door."

"Yes, exactly my own thought," he agreed. "There must be another way inside."

We found a narrow lane that gave access to the rear of the buildings in the street. In contrast to the proud, clean, main street, the access lane was filthy. We stepped carefully between rank, scum-covered pools of black liquid, and skirted piles of oily, unidentifiable debris. I glanced at Didier, knowing from his wretched grimace that he was calculating how many drinks it would take to rid himself of the stench that filled his nostrils.

The walls and fences on either side of the lane were made of stone, brick, and cement, patched together over many decades, and swarming with a wormy writhe of plants, mosses, and creepers.

Counting back from the corner, building by building, we found the rear of the Palace and pressed on a short wooden gate, set into a high stone wall. The gate opened at the touch, and we stepped into a spacious rear courtyard that must've been a luxurious and beautiful retreat before the mob had attacked it. Heavy clay pots had been toppled and shattered, their burdens of earth and flowers spilled in muddy confusion. Garden furniture had been smashed to kindling. Even the paving tiles were cracked in many places, as if they'd been struck with hammers.

We found a blackened door that led into the house. It was unlocked, and swung inward with a rusty creak of complaint.

"You wait here." My tone allowed no possibility of protest. "Keep watch for me. If someone comes in through that gate, slow them up, or give me a signal."

"As you say," he sighed. "Don't be too long. I don't like it here. Bonne chance."

I stepped inside. The door swung shut behind me, and I wished that I'd thought to bring a torch. It was dark, and the floor was treacherously cluttered with broken dishes, pots, pans, and other vessels strewn amid the black lumps of furniture and fallen beams. I picked my way slowly through the ground-floor kitchen and on into a long corridor that led toward the front of the big house. I passed several rooms that were burned. In one of them, the fire had been so fierce that the floor was missing, and the charred bearers showed through the gaps like the ribs of some great animal's remains.

Near the front of the house I found the stairway that I'd taken, years before, when I'd come there with Karla to save Lisa Carter.

The Compton wallpaper, once so rich in colour and texture, was scorched and peeling from the blistered walls. The stairway itself was carbonised, its carpet scorched to stringy clumps of ash. I climbed up slowly, testing each step before pressing down with my full weight. One step collapsed beneath me when I was halfway to the top, and I scrambled upward more quickly to the landing on the first floor.

On the upper level I had to pause while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few moments I could make out the gaps in the floor, and I began to inch my way around them. The fire had incinerated some parts of the house, leaving holes and blackened stumps, while sparing other parts of the house altogether. Those pristine sections were so clean, and so precisely as I remembered them, that they heightened the eerie strangeness of the place. I felt as if I was moving between the past, before the fire, and the ruined present: as if my own memories were creating those grandiose, unconsumed zones in the house.

Some way along that wide passage on the upper level my foot plunged through a papery section of floor, and in my hard reaction I drove backward into the wall behind me. The wall itself collapsed and I found myself falling, in a clumsy stumble, flaying out with my hands to find something solid to cling to amid the crumbling rubble. I landed with a thump, much more quickly than I expected, and realised at once that I was inside one of Madame Zhou's secret corridors. The wall I'd fallen through appeared to be as solid as all the others, but it was merely a plywood screen papered over with her ubiquitous Compton pattern.

I stood up and brushed myself off in a very narrow, low corridor that snaked ahead, following the shapes and corners of the rooms it circumscribed. Metal grates were set into the walls of the rooms that the secret corridor passed. Some of them were low, near the floor, and others were higher. Beneath the higher metal grates were boxed steps. From the lowest of those steps I looked into a room through the heart-shaped gaps in the metal grille. I could see the whole room beyond: the cracked mirror on the wall, the burned and collapsed bed, and the rusted metal nightstand beside it.

There were several steps above the one on which I stood, and I imagined her, Madame Zhou, crouched there on the topmost step and breathing silently while she watched, and watched.

The corridor wound through several turns, and I lost my bearings, unsure in the enshrouding darkness if I faced the front of the house or the rear. At one point the secret corridor inclined sharply. I climbed upward until the higher metal grilles disappeared, and I stumbled in the dark upon a flight of steps.

Feeling my way upward, I encountered a door. It was a small, paneled wooden door-so small and perfectly proportioned that it mightVe been furnished for a child's playhouse. I tried the doorknob. It turned easily in my hand. I pushed it open, and shrank back immediately at the inward rush of light from beyond.