Chapter twenty-seven

Used passports, known as books to us, the counterfeiters and smugglers who traded in them, had to be checked before they could be sold or used by black marketeers. It was always possible that the junkies, runaways, or indigent foreigners who'd sold their passports to our agents were wanted for some serious offence in their own or some other country. More than a few smugglers had been caught out in that way. They'd bought passports, changed them to suit, and set out on a mission, only to find themselves arrested at a foreign airport because the original owners were wanted for murder, or robbery, or different smuggling charges. To ensure the satisfaction of our customers and the safety of our couriers, Abdul Ghani subjected every new passport that he bought or stole to two levels of scrutiny.

A customs officer with access to a computer at Bombay's international airport provided the first filter. At a time and place of his choosing, the officer was given a sheet bearing the country of origin, passport number, and original name on each passport to be checked. A day or two later he returned the sheet with a line drawn through those that were flagged in his computer. Some of the passports were flagged because international arrest-warrants had been issued for the original owners. Some passports were flagged because suspicion attached itself to the owner: a hint of involvement in the illegal drugs or arms trade, or some political connection that made security services uneasy. Whatever the reason, flagged passports couldn't be sold on the black market or used by Ghani's couriers.

Flagged books still had their uses. It was possible to cannibalise them by pulling apart the stitching to furnish fresh pages for other, usable books. There were also other uses within India. Although foreigners had to show their passports for C-Form entries when they registered at hotels, every city had its share of places that weren't fastidiously precise about the resemblance, or lack of it, between a passport and its bearer. For those hotels, any passport did the job. Although unable to travel out of India with such a flagged passport, a man or woman could use one to move around within the country safely, and satisfy the minimum legal requirements that an obliging hotel manager had to observe.

Unflagged books that did pass the customs check were sent through a second filter at airline offices. All the major airlines kept their own lists of hot or flagged passports. Inclusion of a passport name and number on the list was prompted by anything from a bad credit rating or fraudulent dealings with an airline to any incident involving violent behaviour as a passenger on a plane. Naturally enough, when smugglers were going about the business of their crimes they were eager to avoid any but the most superficial and routine attention from airline staff, customs personnel, or police. A passport that was flagged, for any reason, was useless to them. Abdul Ghani's agents at the offices of most of the major airlines in Bombay checked the numbers and names of the passports we'd acquired, and reported those that were flagged. The clean books that passed through both filters-a little less than half of all those obtained-were sold, or used by Khader's couriers.

The clients who bought Ghani's illegal passports fell into three main categories. The first were economic refugees, people forced from their land by famine or driven to seek a better life in a new country. There were Turks wanting to work in Germany, Albanians wanting to work in Italy, Algerians wanting to work in France, and people from several Asian countries who wanted to work in Canada and the United States. A family, a group of families, and sometimes a whole village community pooled their meagre earnings to purchase one of Abdul's passports and send a favoured son to one of the promised lands. Once there, he worked to repay their loan and eventually buy new passports for other young men and women. The passports sold for anything between five and twenty-five thousand dollars. Khaderbhai's network issued about a hundred of those poverty passports every year, and his annual profit, after all the overheads, was more than a million dollars.

Political refugees made up the second category of clients. The upheavals that sent those people into exile were often violent.

They were victims of wars, and of conflicts based on community, religion, or ethnicity. Sometimes the upheaval was legislated: thousands of Hong Kong residents who weren't recognised as British citizens became potential clients, with the stroke of a pen, when Britain decided in 1984 to return its colonial possession to China in a thirteen year resolution of sovereignty. Around the world, at any one time, there were twenty million refugees living in camps and safe havens. Abdul Ghani's passport agents were never idle. A new book cost those people anywhere from ten to fifty thousand dollars.

The higher price was determined by the greater risks involved in smuggling _into war zones, and the greater demand to escape from them.

The third group of clients for Abdul's illegal books was criminals. Occasionally, those criminals were men like me- thieves, smugglers, contract killers-who needed a new identity to stay one step ahead of the police. For the most part, however, Abdul Ghani's special clients were the kind of men who were more likely to build and fill prisons than to serve time in them. They were dictators, military coup leaders, secret policemen, and bureaucrats from corrupt regimes forced to take flight when their crimes were uncovered or the regime fell. One Ugandan fugitive-a man I dealt with personally-had stolen more than a million dollars, allocated by international monetary agencies for essential service constructions, including a children's hospital.

The hospital was never built. Instead, the sick, injured, and dying children were transported to a remote camp and left to fend for themselves. At a meeting that I set up in Kinshasa, Zaire, the man paid me two hundred thousand dollars for two books-a perfect, unblemished Swiss passport, and a virgin, original Canadian passport-and travelled safely to Venezuela.

Abdul's agents in South America, Asia, and Africa established contact with embezzlers, torturers, mandarins, and martinets who'd supported fallen tyrannies. Dealing with them gave me more angry shame than anything else I ever did in Khaderbhai's service. In the young life I'd known as a free man, I was a dedicated writer of newspaper articles and pamphlets. I'd spent years researching and exposing the crimes and violations perpetrated by such men. I'd put my body on the line, supporting their victims in a hundred violent protest clashes with the police. And I still felt some of the old hatred and a choking sense of outrage when I dealt with them. But that life I'd known was gone. The revolutionary social activist had lost his ideals in heroin and crime. And I, too, was a wanted man. I, too, had a price on my head. I was a gangster, and I lived from one day to the next with only Khader's mafia council standing between me and prison torture.

So, I played my part in Ghani's network, helping mass-murderers to escape from the death sentences they'd passed on so many others and had finally earned from their countrymen in return.

But I didn't like it, and I didn't like them, and I let them know it. I drove them to the wall on every deal, taking a little solace from the rage I provoked in them. And they haggled infuriatingly, those human-rights abusers, self-righteously indignant about spending the money they'd gouged from people's mouths. But in the end, they all caved in and agreed to our terms. In the end, they paid well.

No-one else in Khaderbhai's network seemed to share my sense of outrage or my shame. There's probably no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals. In their view, all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. And in time, and in a sense, I began to share their view because I knew the experience in which it was grounded. Prison had given us an intimate acquaintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed what we'd learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.

On the other hand, the criminals in Khader's network displayed a kind of egalitarianism that would've filled communists and Gnostic Christians with admiring envy. They didn't care about the colour, creed, race, or political orientation of clients, and they didn't judge them when asking about their past. Every life, no matter how innocent or evil, reduced to only one question: How bad do you need the book? The answer established the going rate, and every customer who had the money to pay it was born again, with no history and no sin, in the moment of the deal. No client was better than any other, and none was worse.

Abdul Ghani, propelled by the purest amoral spirit of market forces, serviced the needs of generals, mercenaries, misappropriators of public funds, and murderous interrogators without a hint of censure or dismay. Their freedom brought in about two million dollars each year in clear profit. But although he wasn't ethically squeamish about the source of the income, or receiving it, Abdul Ghani was religiously superstitious about spending it. Every dollar earned in saving that poisonous clientele went to a refugee rescue program that Khaderbhai had established for Iranians and Afghans displaced by war. Every passport bought by one of the warlords or their apparatchiks bought fifty more books, identity cards, or travel documents for Iranian and Afghan refugees. Thus, in one of those psychic labyrinths that fate likes to build around greed and fear, the high prices paid by tyrants rescued many of those made wretched by tyranny.

Krishna and Villu taught me everything they knew about the passport business, and in time I began to experiment, creating new identities for myself with American, Canadian, Dutch, German, and British books. My work wasn't as good as theirs, and never would be. Good forgers are artists. Their artistic vision must encompass the deliberate creative smudge that gives each page its counterfeit authenticity, no less than the accuracy of altered or manufactured details. Each page that they create is a miniature painting, a tiny expression of their art. The precise angle of one slightly skewed stamp or the casual blurring of another are as significant to those small canvasses as the shape, position, and colour of a fallen rose might be in a grand master's portrait. The effect, no matter how skilfully achieved, is always born in the artist's intuition. And intuition can't be taught.

My skills, instead, found expression in the stories that had to be invented for every newly created book. There were often gaps of months, or even years, in the record of travel contained within the books that we got from foreigners. Some had overstayed their visas, and that lapse had to be expunged from the book before it could be used. Stamping an exit from Bombay airport before the last visa's expiry date, as if the passport holder had left the country within the life of the visa, I then set about establishing a history of movement from one country to another for every book, using the bank of exit and entry stamps that Villu had created. Little by little, I brought each book up to date, and finally supplied it with a new visa for India and an entry stamp at Bombay airport.

The chain of entries and exits that linked that lapsed time was always carefully plotted. Krishna and Villu had a library of logbooks from the major airlines, listing all of the flights in and out of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas with their departure dates and arrival times. If we put a stamp into a British book stating that the holder had arrived in Athens on July the fourth, say, we were sure that a British Airways flight had connected at Athens airport on that day. In that way, every book had a personal history of travel and experience backed up by logs, timetables, and weather details which gave the new bearer a credible personal history.

My first test of the passports I'd forged for myself was on the domestic transfer route, known as the double-shuffle. Thousands of Iranian and Afghan refugees in Bombay tried to find asylum in Canada, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere, but the governments of those countries refused to consider them. If they could land there, in those western countries, they could declare themselves to be asylum-seekers and submit to the processes of assessment that determined the merit of their applications.

Because they were political refugees and genuine asylum-seekers, the applications they launched within the nominated country were often successful. The trick was to get them into Canada, or Sweden, or some other country of choice in the first place.

The double-shuffle was the system we used. When Iranians or Afghans in Bombay tried to buy tickets to the asylum countries, they were required to show current visas for those countries. But they couldn't obtain the visas legally, and false visas were impracticable because they were immediately checked against the consular register. So I purchased a ticket to Canada or Sweden with a false visa. As a gora, a well-dressed foreigner of European appearance, I was never subjected to anything but a cursory examination. No-one ever bothered to check if my visa was genuine. The refugee I was helping then purchased a ticket for the domestic leg-from Bombay to Delhi-on the same plane. As we boarded the plane, we received boarding passes: mine was the green international boarding pass, and his was the red domestic pass. Once in the air, we swapped our boarding passes. At Delhi airport, only those with green international boarding passes were permitted to remain on board. Clutching my domestic pass, I got down at Delhi and left the refugee to continue on to Canada, or Sweden, or whatever the destination of the flight we'd chosen.

Upon arrival, he would declare himself to be an asylum-seeker, and the process of his recognition would begin. In Delhi, I would spend the night at a five-star and then purchase another ticket to repeat the process-the double-shuffle-with another refugee on the Delhi to Bombay route.

The system worked. In those years we smuggled hundreds of Iranian and Afghan doctors, engineers, architects, academics, and poets into their nominated countries. I received three thousand dollars for a double-shuffle, and for a while I did two doubles per month. After three months of internal flights from Bombay to Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, and back, Abdul Ghani sent me on my first international courier run. I carried a package of ten passports to Zaire. Using photographs of the recipients-sent from Kinshasa, the capital-Krishna and Villu had worked the passports into perfect counterfeit books. After sealing them in plastic, I taped them to my body under three layers of clothing, and flew into the steaming, well-armed mayhem of Kinshasa's international airport.

It was a dangerous mission. At that time, Zaire was a neutral no man's-land between the bloody proxy wars that raged in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo. It was the personal fiefdom of the conspicuously insane dictator Mobutu, and a percentage of the profit from every crime in the kingdom slithered into his pocket. Mobutu was a darling of the western powers because he bought every costly killing weapon they offered to sell him. If it mattered to them that Mobutu turned the weapons on trade unionists and other social reformers in his own country, they never expressed the concern publicly. Those governments hosted the dictator in lavish style at royal and presidential receptions while hundreds of men and women were being tortured to death in his prisons. The same governments were hunting me through the international police agency, Interpol, and there was no doubt in my mind that their ally would've taken great pleasure in finishing me off for them-as a bonus, so to speak-if the passport mission had gone wrong and I'd found myself arrested in his capital city.

Still, I liked the wildness of Kinshasa, a city that thrived as an open market-place for the trade in every kind of contraband, from gold and drugs to rocket launchers. The city was full of mercenaries, fugitives, criminals, black-market profiteers, and wild-eyed, bare-knuckled opportunists from all over Africa. I felt at home there, and I would've stayed longer, but within seventy-two hours I'd delivered the books and accepted one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in payment. It was Khaderbhai's money. I was anxious to hand it over. I jumped the first flight back to Bombay, and reported to Abdul Ghani.

What I gained from the mission was ten thousand American dollars, field experience, and an introduction to the African branch of Ghani's network. The network and the experience were worth the risk, it seemed to me then. The money was unimportant. I would've done the job for half the wage or less. I knew that most of the human lives in Bombay came and went much cheaper.

More than that, there was the danger. For some people, danger's a kind of drug or even an aphrodisiac. For me, living as a fugitive, living every day and every night of my life with the fear of being killed or captured, danger was something else.

Danger was one of the lances I used to kill the dragon of stress.

It helped me to sleep. When I went to dangerous places and I did dangerous things, a rush of new and different fear swept over me.

That new fear covered the dread that too often worried me awake.

When the job was done, and the new fear subsided and passed away, I drowned in an exhausted peace.

And I wasn't alone in that hunger for dangerous work. In the course of the job I met other agents, smugglers, and mercenaries whose excited eyes and adrenaline-fired reflexes matched my own.

Like me, they were all running from something: they were all afraid of something that they couldn't really forget or confront.

And only danger money, earned with reckless risk, helped them to escape for a few hours and to sleep.

A second, third, and fourth trip to Africa followed without incident. I used three different passports, departing and arriving from different Indian international airports each time and then taking domestic flights back to Bombay. The double shuffle flights between Delhi and Bombay continued. The specialist tasks that I performed with Khaled's currency dealers and some of the gold traders kept me busy-busy enough, most of the time, not to think too long and too hard of Karla.

Toward the end of the monsoon I visited the slum, and joined Qasim Ali on his daily tour of inspection. As he checked the drainage channels and ordered the repair of damaged huts, I recalled how much I'd admired and depended upon him when I'd lived there in the slum. Walking beside Qasim Ali in my new boots and black jeans, I watched the strong young men in bare feet and lungis dig and scrape with their hands, as I'd once done. I watched them shore up the retaining walls and clear the clogged drains, ensuring that the slum would remain dry to the end of the rains. And I envied them. I envied the importance of the work and their earnest devotion to it. I'd known it once, so well-that fervent and unquestioning dedication. I'd earned the smiles of pride and gratitude from the slum-dwellers when the dirty work was done. But that life was gone for me. Its virtues and its solaces beyond price were as remote and irrecoverable as the life I'd known and lost in Australia.

Perhaps sensing my sombre mood, Qasim directed us toward the open area where Prabaker and Johnny were making the first preparations for their weddings. Johnny and a dozen or so of his neighbours were erecting the frame for a shamiana, or great tent, where the wedding ceremonies would take place. Some distance away, other men were building a small stage where the couples would sit after the ceremonies and receive gifts from family members and friends.

Johnny greeted me warmly and explained that Prabaker was working in his rented taxi, and would return after sunset. Together we walked around the framed structure, examining the construction and discussing the relative merits and costs of a plastic or a cotton covering.

Inviting me to drink tea, Johnny led us to the team of stage builders. My former neighbour Jeetendra was the supervisor for the project. He seemed to have recovered from the grief that had enfeebled him for many months after his wife's death in the cholera epidemic. He wasn't so robust-the once-familiar paunch had shrunk to a tight little mound beneath his T-shirt-but his eyes were bright with hope again, and his smile wasn't forced.

His son, Satish, had grown in a rapid burst since his mother's death. When I shook hands with him, I passed a hundred-rupee note in the press of hands. He accepted it just as secretively, and slid it into the pocket of his shorts. The smile he gave me was warm, but he was still wounded by his mother's death. There was a hollowness in his eyes: a black hole of shocked grieving that swallowed all the questions and released no answers. When he returned to his work, cutting lengths of coconut-fibre rope for the men to tie around bamboo bracing poles, his young face assumed a numb expression. I knew that expression. I sometimes caught it, by chance, in the mirror: the way we look when the part of happiness that's trusting and innocent is ripped away, and we blame ourselves, rightly or wrongly, for its loss.

"You know where I got my name?" Johnny asked me as we sipped hot, delicious slum chai.

"No," I answered, smiling to match the laughter in his eyes. "You never told me."

"I was born on the footpath, near Crawford Market. My mother had a little place there, a little hut made with plastic and two poles. The plastic was tied to a wall, underneath a sign. The sign was all broken, you know, and only two bits of two different posters were still on the wall. On one side was a little bit of a movie poster with the name Johnny written on it. Beside that one, and sticking out a bit, was a poster advertising cigars with-yes, you guessed it - only the word Cigar sticking out."

"And she liked it," I continued for him, "and she-"

"Called me Johnny Cigar. Her parents, you know, they had thrown her out. And the man who was my father had dumped her, so she absolutely refused to use either of those family names for me.

And all the way through the labour, when she gave birth to me, on that footpath, she stared at those words, Johnny Cigar, and she took it as a sign, if you'll forgive the joke. She was a very, very stubborn woman."

He looked at the little stage, watching as Jeetendra, Satish, and others lifted flat pieces of plywood onto the frame to make the floor.

"It's a good name, Johnny," I said, after a while. "I like it.

And it brought you good luck."

He smiled at me, and the smile became a laugh.

"I'm just glad it wasn't an advert for laxatives or some such!" he spluttered, causing me to laugh and spray tea at him in return.

"It's taking you guys quite a while to tie the knot," I observed when we could talk again. "What's the delay?"

"Kumar, you know, he wants to play the successful businessman, and put a dowry with each of his daughters. Prabaker and I, we told him we don't believe in all that. We don't want a dowry, you know. It's kind of old fashioned, all that stuff. Mind you, Prabaker's dad is not quite of the same opinion. He sent down a list, from the village-a list of dowry gifts he has in mind. He wants a gold watch-a Seiko automatic-and a new bicycle, among other stuff. The model of bicycle he wants, the one he picked out for himself, we told him it's too big. We told him that his legs are too damn short to reach the pedals, let alone the ground, yaar, but he's crazy for that bicycle. Anyway, we're waiting for Kumar to collect all his dowry and such. The weddings are set for the last week in October, before all the Diwali and all that."

"That'll be quite a week. My friend Vikram gets married that week, too."

"You're coming to the weddings, Lin?" he asked with a small, tight frown. Johnny was a man who granted favours to others with selfless generosity. As is often the case with such men, he couldn't ask for them, or express his wishes, with anything like the same ease.

"I wouldn't miss it for the world," I replied, laughing. "I'll be there with bells on. I mean that literally-when you hear the bells ringing, you'll know I'm on my way."

When I left him, he was talking to Satish. The boy listened intently and stared into his face, his eyes as expressionless as a gravestone, and I remembered how he'd clutched at my leg on the day that Karla visited me in the slum; how he'd favoured her with a shy, sincere smile. The memory sliced into my dead heart. It's said that you can never go home again, and it's true enough, of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and you can never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.

Needing distraction, I rode my bike out to the R.K. film studios, gunning the engine and swerving too often and too fast between the cars. I'd hired eight foreigners the day before, and had sent them to Lisa. It wasn't difficult for me to find and convince foreigners to fill non-speaking roles in the Bollywood films. The same German, Swiss, Swedish, or American tourists who would've reacted with mistrust and hostility to Indian casting agents responded enthusiastically when I approached them. In the years that I'd lived in the slum and worked as a tour guide, I'd met every kind of foreign tourist. I'd developed a style in dealing with them that won their trust quickly. That style was two parts showman, two parts flatterer, and one part philanderer, combined with a hint of mischief, a sniff of condescension, and a pinch of contempt.

The work as a tour guide had also given me friendships in several key Colaba restaurants. For years I'd steered my tour parties into the Cafe Mondegar, the Picadilly, Dipty's Juice Bar, Edward the Eighth, Mezban Restaurant, Apsara Cafe, the Strand Coffee House, the Ideal, and others in the tourist beat, and encouraged them to spend their money. When I needed foreigners to fill bit parts in the Bollywood films, I trawled those cafes and restaurants. The owners, managers, and waiters always greeted me warmly. Whenever I saw a suitable group of young men and women, I approached them with the offer of a chance to work in an Indian movie. With the restaurant staff vouching for me, I usually secured their confidence and agreement within a few minutes. I then phoned Lisa Carter to arrange transport for the following day. The system worked well. In the few months since we'd started working together, Lisa was drawing casting work from the major studios and producers. Finding the most recent group-the foreigners I'd hired the day before-was our first job for the famous R.K. studio.

I was curious to see the large, prestigious studio complex, and as I rode through the entrance gates my spirits lifted to the tall grey sails of the corrugated gable roofs. For Lisa Carter, and others like her, the dream world of movies inspired an almost reverential awe. I wasn't awed by the movie world, but I wasn't immune to it either. Every time I entered the fantasy-land of a film studio, a little of the magic that makes a movie caught in my heart and lifted me, bright with surprise, from the gloomy sea that, too much and too often, my life had become.

The guards directed me to a sound stage where Lisa and her group of Germans were waiting. I'd arrived during a break in the shooting, and found Lisa serving coffee and tea to the young foreigners. They were seated at two tables-two of several that were arranged around a stage, on a set that was designed to replicate a modern nightclub. I greeted them, exchanging a few pleasantries, and then Lisa took me aside.

"How are they?" I asked her when we were alone.

"They're great," she answered happily. "They're patient and relaxed and having a good time, I think. This'll be a good shoot.

You've sent some pretty good people in the last couple weeks, Lin. The studios are real pleased. We could... you know, we could really work this into something, you and me."

"You like this, don't you?"

"Sure I do," she said, giving me a smile I could feel on the back of my head. Then her expression shifted into something more solemn, something determined-the kind of determination you find in people who do it all the hard way, without hope. She was beautiful: a California beach beauty in the carnal jungle of Bombay; a pom-pom girl who'd pulled herself out of the death-by leeches of heroin and the sybaritic suffocation of Madame Zhou's Palace. Her skin was clear and tanned. Her sky-blue eyes were radiant with resolve. Her long, curly blonde hair was pulled back from her face, and held in an elegant coiffure that complemented the decorousness of her modest, ivory-coloured pantsuit. She beat heroin, I found myself thinking, as I met her stare. She beat it.

She got off the stuff. I was suddenly aware of how brave she was, and that the courage in her- when you knew it was there, and you knew how to look for it-was as palpable and riveting as the fierce, impersonal menace in a tiger's eye.

"I like this gig," she said. "I like the people, and the work. I like the life. I think _you should like it, too."

"I like you," I smiled.

She laughed, and slipped an arm through mine, leading us in a stroll around the set.

"The movie's called Paanch Paapi," she said.

"Five kisses..."

"No. paapi, not papi. That's the play on words. Paapi means thief, and papi means kiss. So, it's really Five Thieves, but there's a joke about it being Five Kisses, as well, because it's a romantic comedy. The female lead is Kimi Katkar. I think she's gorgeous. She's not the best dancer in the world, but she's a beautiful girl. The male lead is Chunkey Pandey. He could be good, real good, if his head wasn't jammed so far up his own ass."

"While we're on the subject, have you had any more trouble with Maurizio?"

"Not a thing from him, but I'm worried about Ulla. She's been gone for a whole day and night. She took a call from Modena the night before last, and left in a hurry. It was the first time he surfaced in weeks. I haven't heard from her since, and she promised to call."

I rubbed the frown from my forehead, up through my untidy hair.

"Ulla knows what she's doing," I growled. "She's not your problem, and she's not mine. I helped her because she asked me to. Because I like her. But I'm getting tired of this Ulla Maurizio-Modena thing, you know what I mean? Did Modena say anything to her about the money?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Well, it's still missing, and so is Modena. The boys on the street have been telling me. Maurizio's going around all over the place looking for Modena. He won't give up until he finds him.

And Ulla's no better. Sixty thousand bucks-it's not all that much, but people have been killed for less. If Modena's got it, he better stay clear of Ulla while Maurizio's still after him."

"I know. I know."

Her eyes were suddenly glazed and apprehensive.

"I'm not worried about Ulla," I said more softly. "I worry about you. If Modena's back, you should stay close to Abdullah for a while. Or me."

She looked at me with her lips pressed to white rims around what she wanted to say but couldn't or wouldn't.

"Tell me about the scene," I suggested, trying to shift us from the cold, black whirlpool that Ulla's life was becoming. "What's going on in this movie?"

"It's a nightclub, or at least it's a movie version of one. The hero steals a jewel from a rich politician, I think-something like that-and he runs in here to hide. He watches the girl, Kimi, doing a big dance number, and he falls for her. When the cops show up, he hides the jewel in her wig. The rest of the movie is about how he tries to get close to her, to get the jewel back."

She paused, studying my face, and trying to read the expression in my eyes.

"It's... I guess you think it's kinda stupid."

"No, I don't," I laughed. "I like it. I like all this. In the real world, the guy would just beat her up and take his jewel back. He might even shoot her. I like the Bollywood version better."

"So do I," she said, laughing. "I love it. They put it all together from painted canvas and skinny pieces of wood and it's... it's like they're making dreams or something. I know that sounds corny, but I mean it. I love this world, Lin, and I don't want to go back to the other one."

"Hey, Lin!" a voice called out from behind me. It was Chandra Mehta, one of the producers. "You got a minute?"

I left Lisa with the German tourists and joined Chandra Mehta beneath a metal gantry that supported a complex tree of bright lights. He wore a baseball cap backwards, and the press of the tight band made his plump face seem rounder. Faded blue Levis were buttoned up under his expansive paunch, and a long kurtah shirt almost covered it from above. He was sweating in the mildly humid air of the closed set.

"Hey, man. How is it? I've been wanting to see you, yaar." His voice was breathy with conspiracy. "Let's go outside and get some air. I'm boiling my fuckin' bonus off in here, yaar."

As we strolled between the metal-domed buildings, actors in costume crossed our path, together with men carrying props and pieces of equipment. At one point, a group of nine pretty dancing girls dressed in exotic, feathered costumes passed us on their way to a sound stage. They turned my head around, forcing my body to follow it until I was walking backwards for a while. Chandra Mehta never gave them so much as a glance.

"Listen, Lin, what I wanted to talk to you about..." he said, touching my arm at the elbow as we walked. "I have this friend, you know, and he's a business fellow, with a lot of dealings in the USA. Achaa, what to say... he has a problem of his rupees to-dollars cash flow, yaar. I was kind of hoping that you... a little bird told me that you are a helpful fellow when the cash is not flowing."

"I assume this cash should be in U.S. dollars, when it's flowing correctly?"

"Yes," he smiled. "I'm very glad that you understand his problem."

"Just how badly is the flow backed up?"

"Oh, I think that about ten thousand should move things along very nicely."

I told him Khaled Ansari's current rate for U.S. dollars, and he agreed to the terms. I arranged to meet him on the set the following day. He was to have the rupees-a much larger bundle of notes than the American currency made-in a soft backpack, ready for me to collect on my bike. We shook on the deal. Mindful of the man I represented, lord Abdel Khader Khan, a man whose name would never be mentioned by Mehta or by me, I put a slightly uncomfortable pressure in the handshake. It was a tiny pain I inflicted on him, the merest twinge, but it reinforced the hard eye-contact above my amiable smile.

"Don't start this if you're going to mess it up, Chandra," I warned, as the handshake pulsed from his pinched hand to his eyes. "Nobody likes to get jerked around-my friends least of all."

"Oh, of course not, baba!" he joked, not quite smothering the blip of alarm that spiked in his eyes. "No problem. Koi baht nahi! Don't worry! I'm very grateful that you can help me, my... what to say, help my friend, with his problem, yaar."

We strolled back to the sound stage, and I found Lisa with Mehta's fellow producer, Cliff De Souza.

"Hey, man! You'll do!" Cliff said in greeting, seizing me by the arm and dragging me toward the tables on the nightclub set. I looked at Lisa, but she just raised her hands in a gesture that said You're on your own, buddy.

"What's going on, Cliff?"

"We need another guy, yaar. We need a guy, a gora, sitting between these two lovely girls."

"Oh, no you don't." I resisted him, trying to wrestle myself out of his grip without actually hurting him. We were at the table.

The two German girls stood and reached out to drag me into the seat between them. "I can't do this! I don't act! I'm camera shy!

I don't do this!"

"Na, komm' schon! H%or' auf." one of the girls said. "You are the one who told us yesterday how easy it is to do this, na?"

They were attractive women. I'd selected their group precisely because they were all healthy and attractive men and women. Their smiles were challenging me to join them. I thought about what it would mean: taking a part in a movie that about three hundred million people in ten or more countries would see while I was on the run as my country's most wanted man. It was foolish. It was dangerous.

"Oh, why the hell not," I shrugged.

Cliff and the stagehands backed away as the cast members took their places on the set. The star, Chunkey Pandey, was a handsome, athletic, young Bombay guy. I'd seen him in a few of the movies I'd watched with my Indian friends, and I was surprised to discover that he was considerably more handsome and charismatic in person than he was on the screen. A make-up assistant held up a mirror while Chunkey combed and fretted at his hair. The intensity of the gaze that he focused on the mirror was as steadfast as a surgeon's might be in the midst of a complex and critical procedure.

"You missed the best part," one of the German girls whispered to me. "It took this guy a big time to learn his dancing moves for this scene. He crapped it up quite a few many times. And every time he crapped it up, this little guy with the Spiegel... the mirror, he pops out, and we watch him, with the hair combing, all again. If they just used all that stuff of him crapping it up and combing his hair while the little guy holds the mirror, I tell you, this would be a big comedy hit."

The director of the film stood beside his cinematographer, poised with one eye to the lens of the camera, and then gave his last instructions to the lighting crew. At a signal, the director's assistant called for all-quiet on the set. The cinematographer announced that the film was rolling.

"Cue sound!" the director commanded. "_And... _action!"

Music hammered into the set from large stadium speakers. It was the loudest that I'd ever heard Indian movie music played, and I loved it. The dancers, including the star, Kimi Katkar, pranced onto the artificial stage. Working the set and the crowd of extras, Kimi sashayed across the stage and made her way from table to table, dancing and miming her number all the while. The hero joined in the dance, and then ducked under a table when the actors playing the cops arrived. The whole sequence lasted only five minutes in the film, but it took all the morning to rehearse and most of the afternoon to shoot. My first taste of show business resulted in two brief sweeps of the camera that captured my wide smile as Kimi paused, in her seductive routine, at the back of my chair.

We sent the foreign tourists home in two cabs, and Lisa rode back to town with me on the Bullet. It was a warm evening and she removed her jacket to ride, pulling the clip from her long hair.

She wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed her cheek into my back. She was a good passenger: the kind who surrenders her will in unconditional trust, and blends her body to the nuance of the rider. Through my thin white shirt I felt the press of her breasts against my back. The shirt was open in the warm wind, and her hands clung to the tight skin of my waist. I never wore a helmet on the bike. There was a helmet clipped to the back of the seat for a passenger, but she chose not to wear it. Occasionally, when we stopped for the flow of traffic or to make a turn, a gust of wind whipped her long, curly blonde hair over my shoulder and into my mouth. The perfume of verbena flowers lingered on my lips. Her thighs clung to me, gently, and with a promise or a threat of the strength they possessed. I remembered those thighs, the skin as soft as moonlight on the palm of my hand that night at Karla's house. And then, as if she was reading my thoughts or joining them, she spoke when the bike stopped at a traffic signal.

"How's the kid?"

"The kid?"

"That little kid you had with you that night, you remember, at Karla's place."

"He's fine. I saw him last week, at his uncle's. He's not so little any more. He's growing fast. He's at a private school. He doesn't like it much, but he'll do okay."

"Do you miss him?"

The signal changed and I kicked the bike into gear, twisting the throttle to send us into the intersection on the staccato throbbing of the engine's growl. I didn't answer her. Of course I missed him. He was a good kid. I missed my daughter. I missed my mother and all of my family. I missed my friends: I missed them all and I was sure, in those desperate years, that I would never see them again. Missing the people I loved was a kind of grieving for me, and it was worse, much worse, for the fact that-so far as I knew - they weren't dead. My heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones. And when I was alone in my apartment, night after night, that grieving and missing choked me. There was money in bundles on the dressing table, and there were passports freshly forged that could send me... anywhere. But there was nowhere to go: nowhere that wasn't emptied of meaning and identity and love by the vacuum of those who were missing and lost forever.

I was the fugitive. I was the vanished one. I was the one who was missing; missing in action. But inside the slipstream of my flight, they were the missing ones. Inside my exile, it was the whole world I once knew that was missing. The fugitive kind run, trying against their hearts to annihilate the past, and with it every tell-tale trace of what they were, where they came from, and those who once loved them. And they run into that extinction of themselves, to survive, but they always fail. We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.

And from the pink and purple palette of the perished evening, a blue-black night rose up around us as we rode. We plunged with the sea-wind into tunnels of light. The robe of sunset slipped from the shoulders of the city. Lisa's hands moved on my hard skin like the sea; like the surging, swarming caress of the sea.

And for a moment, as we rode together, we were one: one desire, one promise dissolving into compromise, one mouth tasting the trickle of danger and delight. And something-it might've been love, or fear-goaded me to the choice, putting whispers in the warming wind: This is as young, and as free, as you'll ever be.

"I better go."

"Don't you want a coffee or something?" she asked, her hand on the key in the door to her apartment.

"I better go."

"Kavita's really into this story you gave her, about the girls from the slum. The girls who came back from the dead. It's all she talks about. The Blue Sisters, she calls them. I don't know why she calls them that, but it's a pretty cool name."

She was making conversation, holding me there. I looked into the sky that was her eyes.

"I better go."

Two hours later, fully awake, and still feeling the press of her lips in the good-night kiss, I wasn't surprised when the phone rang.

"Can you come over right away?" she said when I answered the call.

I was silent, struggling to find a way to say no that sounded like yes.

"I've been trying to find Abdullah, but he doesn't answer," she went on, and then I heard the flattened, frightened, shell shocked drone in her voice.

"What is it? What's happened?"

"We had some trouble... there was some trouble..."

"Was it Maurizio? Are you okay?"

"He's dead," she mumbled. "I killed him."

"Is anyone there?"

"Anyone?" she repeated vaguely.

"Is anyone else there, in the apartment?"

"No. I mean, yes-Ulla's here, and him, on the floor. That's..."

"Listen!" I commanded, "Lock the door. Don't let anyone in."

"The door's busted," she murmured, her voice weakening. "He smashed the lock off the wall when he busted in here."

"Okay. Push something up against the door-a chair or something.

Keep it closed until I get there."

"Ulla's a mess. She... she's pretty upset."

"It'll be okay. Just block the door. Don't phone anyone else.

Don't speak to anyone, and don't let anyone in. Make two cups of coffee, with lots of milk and sugar-four spoons of sugar-and sit down with Ulla to drink them. Give her a stiff drink, as well, if she needs it. I'm on my way. I'll be there in ten minutes. Hang in there, and stay cool."

Riding the night, cutting into crowded streets, winding the bike into the web of lights, I felt nothing: no fear, no dread, no shiver of excitement. Red-lining a motorcycle means opening the throttle so hard, with every change of gears, that the needle on the rev-counter is twisted all the way round to the red zone of maximum revolutions. And that's what we were doing, all of us, in our different ways, Karla and Didier and Abdullah and I: we were red-lining our lives. And Lisa. And Maurizio. Twisting the needle to the red zone.

A Dutch mercenary in Kinshasa once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all.

I wished he hadn't said it to me because I knew exactly what he meant. And I rode that night, I soared that night, and the stillness in my heart was almost like being at peace.

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-26