Chapter twenty-eight. In my first knife fight I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live

In my first knife fight I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like killing might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live, who kills just to survive, will usually come out of it on top. If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever. And killing contests with deadly weapons, unlike common fistfights, are lost and won in the reasons that remain when the blood begins to run. The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.

My first knife fight was in prison. Like most prison fights, it started trivially and ended savagely. My adversary was a fit, strong veteran of many fights. He was a stand-over man, which meant that he mugged weaker men for money and tobacco. He inspired fear in most of the men and, not burdened with judiciousness, he confused that fear with respect. I didn't respect him. I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men.

And I was tough enough. I'd grown up in a rough, working-class neighbourhood, and I'd been fighting all my life. No-one in the prison system knew that then because I wasn't a career criminal, and I had no history. I began my prison experience as a first offender. What's more, I was an intellectual, and I sounded and acted like one. Some men respected that and some ridiculed it, but none of them feared it. Nevertheless, the long prison sentence that I was serving-twenty years at hard labour for armed robberies-gave most of them pause. I was a dark horse. No one knew how I would respond to a real test, and more than a few were curious about it.

The test, when it did come, was flashing steel, and broken teeth, and eyes rolling wide and wild as a frenzied dog. He attacked me in the prison laundry, the one place not observed directly by guards patrolling catwalks between the gun towers. It was the kind of unprovoked surprise attack that's known in prison slang as a sneak-go. He was armed with a steel table knife, sharpened with endlessly malignant patience on the stone floor of his cell.

Its edge was sharp enough to shave a man or cut his throat. I'd never carried a knife or used one in my life before prison. But in there, where men were attacked and stabbed every other day, I'd followed the advice of the hard men who'd survived long years there. It's better to have a weapon and not need it, they'd told me more than once, than need it and not have it. My knife was a sharpened spike of metal about as thick as a man's finger and a little longer than a hand. The hilt was formed with packing tape, and fitted into my hand without bunching the fingers. When the fight began he didn't know that I was armed, but we both, in our separate ways, expected that it was a fight to the death. He wanted to kill me, and I was sure that I had to kill him to survive.

He made two mistakes. The first was to fight on the back foot. In the surprise of his sneak attack he'd first rushed at me and, with two slashes of the knife, he'd cut me across the chest and the forearm. He should've pressed on to finish it, hacking and tearing and stabbing at me, but he stepped back instead and waved the knife in little circles. He might've expected me to submit- most of his foes surrendered quickly, defeated by their fear of him as much as by the sight of their own blood. He might've been so sure he would win that he was simply toying with me and teasing out the thrill of the kill. Whatever the reason, he lost the advantage and he lost the fight in that first backward step.

He gave me time to drag my knife from inside my shirt and shape up to box him. I saw the surprise in his eyes, and it was my cue to counter-attack.

His second mistake was that he held the knife as if it was a sword and he was in a fencing match. A man uses an underhand grip when he expects his knife, like a gun, to do the fighting for him. But a knife isn't a gun, of course, and in a knife fight it isn't the weapon that does the fighting: it's the man. The knife is just there to help him finish it. The winning grip is a dagger hold, with the blade downward, and the fist that holds it still free to punch. That grip gives a man maximum power in the downward thrust and an extra weapon in his closed fist.

He dodged and weaved in a crouch, slashing the knife in sweeping arcs with his arms out wide. He was right-handed. I adopted a southpaw-boxing stance, the dagger in my right fist. Stepping with the right foot, and dragging the left to keep my balance, I took the fight to him. He ripped the blade at me twice and then lunged forward. I side-stepped, and punched at him with a three punch combination, right-left-right. One of them was a lucky punch. His nose broke, and his eyes watered and burned, blurring his vision. He lunged again, and tried to bring the knife in from the side. I grabbed at his wrist with my left hand, stepped into the space between his legs, and stabbed him in the chest. I was trying for the heart or a lung. It didn't hit either one, but still I rammed the spike up to the hilt into the meaty flesh beneath his collarbone. It broke the skin of his back just below the shoulder blade.

He was jammed against a section of wall between a washing machine and a clothes-dryer. Using the spike to hold him in place, and with my left hand locked to his knife-wrist, I tried to bite his face and neck, but he whipped his head from side to side so swiftly that I opted for head-butts instead. Our heads cracked together several times until one desperate, wrenching effort of his legs sent us sprawling onto the floor together. He dropped his knife in the fall, but the spike tore free from his chest. He began to drag himself toward the door of the laundry. I couldn't tell if he was trying to escape or seeking a new advantage. I didn't take a chance. My head was level with his legs. Thrashing together on the ground, I reached up and grabbed the belt of his trousers. Using it for leverage, I stabbed him in the thigh twice, and again, and again. I struck bone more than once, feeling the jarring deflection all the way up my arm. Releasing his belt, I stretched my left hand out for his knife, trying to reach it so that I could stab him with that one as well.

He didn't scream. I'll say that much for him. He shouted hard for me to stop, and he shouted that he gave up-I give up! I give up!

I give up!-but he didn't scream. I did stop, and I let him live.

I scrambled to my feet. He tried again to crawl toward the door of the laundry. I stopped him with my foot on his neck, and stomped down on the side of his head. I had to stop him. If he'd made it out of the laundry while I was there, and the prison guards saw him, I would've spent six months or more in the punishment unit. While he lay there groaning on the floor, I took off my bloody clothes and changed into a clean set. One of the prisoners who cleaned the jail was standing outside the laundry, grinning in at us through the doorway with unspiteful enjoyment. I passed him the bundle of my soiled clothes. He smuggled the bloodied clothes away in his mop-bucket, and threw them into the incinerator behind the kitchen. On my way out of the laundry I handed the weapons to another man, who buried them in the prison garden.

When I was safely away from the scene, the man who'd tried to kill me limped into the prison chief's office, and collapsed. He was taken to hospital. I never saw him again, and he never opened his mouth. I'll say that much for him, too. He was a thug and a stand-over man, and he tried to kill me for no good reason, but he wasn't an informer.

Alone in my cell, after the fight, I examined my wounds. The gash on my forearm had made a clean cut through a vein. I couldn't report it to the medical officer because that would've connected me to the fight and the wounded man. I had to hope that it would heal. There was a deep slash from my left shoulder to the centre of my chest. It was also a clean cut, and it was bleeding freely.

I burned two packets of cigarette papers all the way down to white ash in a metal bowl, and rubbed the ash into both wounds.

It was painful, but it sealed the wounds immediately and stopped the bleeding.

I never spoke of the fight to anyone, but most of the men knew about it soon enough, and they all knew that I'd survived the test. The white scar on my chest, the scar that men saw every day in the prison shower, reminded them of my willingness to fight.

It was a warning, like the bright bands of colour on the skin of a sea snake. It's still there, that scar, as long and white after all these years as it ever was. And it's still a kind of warning.

I touch it, and I see the killer pleading for his life; I remember, reflected in the fright-filled domes of his eyes, fate's mirror, the sight of the twisted, hating thing that I became in the fight.

My first knife fight wasn't my last, and as I stood over Maurizio Belcane's dead body I felt the cold, sharp memory of my own experiences of stabbing and being stabbed. He was face down in a kneeling posture, with his upper body on a corner of the couch and his legs on the floor. Beside his slackly folded right hand there was a razor-sharp stiletto resting on the carpet. A black handled carving knife was buried to the crank in his back, a little to the left of his spine and just below the shoulder blade. It was a long, wide, sharp knife. I'd seen that knife before, in Lisa's hand, the last time Maurizio had made the mistake of coming to the apartment uninvited. That was one lesson he should've learned the first time. We don't, of course. It's okay, Karla once said, because if we all learned what we should learn, the first time round, we wouldn't need love at all. Well, Maurizio had learned that lesson in the end, the hard way-face down in his own blood. He was what Didier called a fully mature man. When I'd chided Didier once for being immature, he'd told me that he was proud and delighted to be immature. The fully mature man or woman, he said, has about two seconds left to live.

Those thoughts rolled over one another in my mind like the steel balls in Captain Queeg's hand. It was the knife that did it, of course: the memory of stabbing and being stabbed. I remembered the vivid seconds every time I'd been stabbed. I remembered the knives cutting me, entering my body. I could still feel the steel blades inside me. It was like burning. It was like hate. It was like the most evil thought in the world. I shook my head and breathed in deeply, and looked at him again.

The knife might've ruptured a lung and penetrated to the heart.

Whatever it had done, it had finished him fast. His body had fallen onto the couch and, once there, he'd hardly moved at all.

I took a handful of his thick, black hair and lifted his head.

His dead eyes were half open, and his lips were pulled back slightly from his teeth in a rictal smile. There was remarkably little blood. The couch had absorbed the big spill. We've gotta get rid of the couch, I heard myself thinking. The carpet had suffered no great damage, and could be cleaned. The room was also little disturbed by the violence. A leg was broken on the coffee table, and the locks on the front door hung askew. I turned my attention to the women.

Ulla bore a cut on her face from the cheekbone almost to the chin. I cleaned the wound and pressed it together with tape all along the length of it. The cut wasn't deep, and I expected it to heal quickly, but I was sure it would leave a scar. By chance, the blade had followed the natural curve of her cheek and jaw, adding a flash of emphasis to the shape of her face. Her beauty was injured by the wound but not ravaged by it. Her eyes, however, were abnormally wide and pierced with a terror that refused to fade. There was a lungi on the arm of the couch beside her. I put it around her shoulders, and Lisa gave her a cup of hot, sweet chai. When I covered Maurizio's body with a blanket she shuddered. Her face crumpled into puckers of pain, and she cried for the first time.

Lisa was calm. She was dressed in a pullover and jeans, an outfit that only a Bombay native could wear on such a humid, still, and hot night. There was the mark of a blow around her eye and on her cheek. When Ulla was quiet again we crossed the room to stand near the door, out of her hearing. Lisa took a cigarette, bent her head to light it from my match, and then exhaled, looking directly into my face for the first time since I'd entered the apartment.

"I'm glad you came. I'm glad you're here. I couldn't help it. I had to do it, he-"

"Stop it, Lisa!" I interrupted her. The tone was harsh, but my voice was quiet and warm. "You didn't stab him. She did. I can see it in her eyes. I know the look. She's still stabbing him now, still going over it in her mind. She'll have that look for a while. You're trying to protect her, but you won't help her by lying to me."

She smiled. Under the circumstances, it was a very good smile. If we hadn't been standing next to a dead man with a knife in his heart, I'd have found it irresistible.

"What happened?"

"I don't want her to get hurt, that's all," she replied evenly.

The smile closed up in the thin, grim line of her pursed lips.

"Neither do I. What happened?"

"He busted in, slashed her up. He was crazy, out of his mind. I think he was on something. He was screaming at her, and she couldn't answer him. She was even crazier than he was. I spent an hour with her before he crashed in here. She told me about Modena. I'm not surprised she was crazy. It's... fuck, Lin, it's a bad story. She was out of her mind because of it. Anyway, he crashed through the door like a gorilla, and he slashed her. He was covered in blood-Modena's, I think. It was pretty fuckin' scary. I tried to jump him with the knife from the kitchen. He socked me pretty good in the eye and knocked me on my ass. I fell on the couch. He got on top of me, and he was just about to start on me with that switchblade of his when Ulla gave it to him in the back. He was dead in a second. I swear. A second. One second.

Just like that. He was looking at me, then he was dead. She saved my life, Lin."

"I think it's more likely that you saved hers, Lisa. If you weren't here, it would be her hugging the couch with a knife in her back."

She began to tremble and shiver. I took her in my arms and held her for a while, supporting her weight. When she was calm again, I brought her a kitchen chair and she sat down shakily. I phoned around, and found Abdullah. Explaining what had happened in as few words as possible, I told him to contact Hassaan Obikwa in the African ghetto and bring him to the apartment with a car.

Little by little, as we waited for Abdullah and Hassaan, the story emerged. Ulla was suddenly tired, but I couldn't let her sleep. Not yet. After a while she began to speak, adding a detail here and there to Lisa's account, and then gradually telling the whole story herself.

Maurizio Belcane met Sebastian Modena in Bombay, where both of them made money from the work they arranged for foreign prostitutes. Maurizio was the only son of rich Florentine parents who'd died in a plane crash when he was a child. By his own account, repeated to Ulla whenever he was drunk, he was raised with indifferent duteousness by distant relatives who'd tolerated him reluctantly in the loveless shelter of their home. At eighteen he seized the first tranche of his inheritance and fled to Cairo. By the age of twenty-five he'd squandered the fortune left to him by his parents. The remnants of his family cast him out, no less for his penury than for the many scandals that had pursued his profligate progress through the Middle East and Asia.

At twenty-seven he found himself in Bombay, brokering sex for European prostitutes.

The point man for Maurizio's operation in Bombay was the diffident, dour Spaniard, Sebastian Modena. The thirty-year-old sought out and approached wealthy Arab and Indian customers. His short, slight frame and timid manner worked to his advantage, putting the customers at ease by allaying their fears and suspicions. He took one-fifth of the cut that Maurizio claimed from the foreign girls. Ulla believed that Modena was happy enough in the unequal relationship, where he did most of the dirty work and Maurizio took most of the dirty money, because he saw himself as a pilot fish and the tall, handsome Italian as a shark.

His background was very different to Maurizio's. One of thirteen children in an Andalusian Gypsy family, Modena had grown up with a notion of himself as the runt of the litter. Schooled more in crime than in scholarship, and barely literate, he'd worked his way from swindle to grift to petty larceny across Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India. He preyed on tourists, never taking too much and never remaining too long in any one place. Then he met Maurizio, and for two years he'd pandered for the pimp, procuring clients and putting them together with the girls in Maurizio's stable.

They might've gone on in that way for much longer, but one day Maurizio walked into Leopold's with Ulla. From the first moment that their eyes met, Ulla told us, she knew that Modena was hopelessly in love with her. She encouraged him because his devotion to her was useful. She'd been purchased from Madame Zhou's Palace, and Maurizio was determined to recover his investment costs as quickly as possible. He'd instructed the smitten Modena to find work for her twice a day, every day, until the debt was repaid. Tortured by what he saw as betrayals of his own love, Modena pressed his partner to release Ulla from the obligation. Maurizio refused, ridiculing the Spaniard's affection for a working girl, and insisting that he put her to work day and night.

Ulla paused in her story when a tap at the door announced Abdullah's arrival. The tall Iranian entered silently, dressed in black like a thing made from the night itself. He greeted me with a hug and nodded gently to Lisa. She came forward and kissed him on the cheek. He lifted the blanket to look at Maurizio's body.

Nodding and turning down the corners of his mouth in professional approval of the single killing thrust, he let the blanket fall, and muttered a prayer.

"Hassaan is busy. He will be here after about one hour," he said.

"Did you tell him what I want him to do?"

"He knows," he replied, raising one eyebrow in a tight smile.

"Is it still quiet outside?"

"I checked, before I came inside. The building is quiet, and the street all around."

"There's been no reaction from the neighbours, so far. He took the door out with one kick, Lisa says, and there wasn't all that much shouting and screaming. There was loud music playing next door when I got here. It was a party or something. I don't think anyone knows about this."

"We... we have to _call someone!" Ulla shouted suddenly, standing and letting the lungi fall from her shoulders. "We should... call a doctor... call the police..."

Abdullah sprinted to her, and wrapped her in his arms with surprisingly tender compassion. He sat her down again and rocked her, murmuring reassuringly. I watched them with a little pinch of shame because I knew that I should've comforted her myself, long before that, and in just the same gentle way. But the fact was that Maurizio's death had compromised me, and I was afraid. I'd had reason enough to want him dead, and I'd beaten him with my fists for it. That was, in other words, a motive for murder.

People knew that. I was there in the room with Lisa and Ulla, and it seemed that I was helping them, responding to their call for help, but that wasn't all of it. I was also there to help myself.

I was there to make sure that no part of the sticky web of his death clung to me. And that's why there was nothing gentle in me, and all the tenderness came from an Iranian killer named Abdullah Taheri.

Ulla began to speak again. Lisa poured her a drink of vodka and lime juice. She gulped at it, and went on with her story. It took quite a while because she was nervous and afraid. She skipped important details from time to time, and she was loose with her chronology, ordering the facts as they occurred to her in the telling rather than as they'd happened. We had to ask questions and prompt her into a more sequential account, but little by little we got it all.

Modena had been the first to meet the Nigerian-the businessman who'd wanted to spend sixty thousand dollars on heroin. He introduced him to Maurizio, and too quickly, too easily, the African had parted with his money. Maurizio stole the money and planned to move on, but Modena had other ideas. He seized his chance to free Ulla and rid himself of Maurizio, the man he resented for enslaving her. He snatched the money from him, and went into hiding, prompting the Nigerian to send his hit-squad to Bombay. To distract the understandably bloodthirsty Africans while he searched for Modena, Maurizio had given them my name and told them I'd stolen their money. Abdullah and I knew the next part of that story well enough.

For all his cringing cowardice with me, and his dread that the Nigerians might return to hunt him down, Maurizio Belcane couldn't cut his losses and leave the city. He couldn't rid his heart of the killing rage he felt for Modena and the righteous lust he felt for the money they'd stolen together. For weeks he watched Ulla and followed her everywhere. He knew that, sooner or later, Modena would contact her. When the Spaniard did make that contact, Ulla went to him. Without realising it, she also led the crazed Italian to the cheap Dadar hotel where his former partner was hiding. Maurizio burst into the room, but he found Modena alone. Ulla was gone. The money was gone. Modena was ill.

Some sickness had ruined him. Ulla thought it might've been malaria. Maurizio gagged him, tied him to the sickbed, and went to work on him with the stiletto. Modena, tougher than anyone knew and taciturn to the end, refused to tell him that Ulla was hiding in an adjoining room, only footsteps away, with all the money.

"When Maurizio stopped with the knife... the cutting... and left the room, I waited for a long time," Ulla said, staring at the carpet and shivering beneath the blanket. Lisa was sitting on the floor at her feet. She gently prised the glass from Ulla's fingers, and gave her a cigarette. Ulla accepted it, but she didn't smoke. She looked into Lisa's eyes, and craned her neck around to look into Abdullah's face and then mine.

"I was so afraid," she pleaded. "I was too much afraid. After a time I went into the room, and I saw him. He was lying on the bed. There was the rag tied on his mouth. He was tied up to the bed, and he could move only his head. He was cut up all over. On his face. On his body. Everywhere. There was so much blood. So much blood. He kept looking at me, with his black eyes staring, and staring. I left him there... and I... I ran away."

"You just left him there?" Lisa gasped.

She nodded.

"You didn't even untie him?"

She nodded again.

"Jesus Christ!" Lisa spat out bitterly. She looked up, moving her anguished eyes from Abdullah's face to mine and back again. "She didn't tell me that part of it."

"Ulla, listen to me. Do you think he might still be there?" I asked.

She nodded a third time. I looked at Abdullah.

"I have a good friend in Dadar," he said. "Where is the hotel?

What is the name?"

"I don't know," she mumbled. "It's next to a market. At the back, where they throw the rubbish away. The smell is very bad. No wait, I remember, I said the name in the taxi-it is called Kabir's. That's it. That's the name. Oh, God! When I left him, I just thought... I was sure they would find him... and... and make him free. Do you think he might be on that bed until now? Do you think?" Abdullah phoned his friend, and arranged to have someone check the hotel.

"Where's the money?" I demanded.

She hesitated.

"The money, Ulla. Give it to me."

She stood up shakily, supported by Lisa, and walked into the bedroom she'd used. Moments later she returned with a travel flight bag. She handed it to me, her expression strangely contradictory-coquette and adversary in equal parts. I opened the bag and took out several bundles of American hundred-dollar bills. I counted out twenty thousand dollars, and pushed the rest back into the bag. I returned the bag to her.

"Ten thousand is for Hassaan," I declared. "Five thousand is to get you a new passport and a ticket to Germany. Five thousand is to clean up here, and set Lisa up in a new apartment on the other side of town. The rest is yours. And Modena's, if he makes it."

She wanted to reply, but a soft tap at the door announced Hassaan's arrival. The stocky, thickly muscled Nigerian entered, and greeted Abdullah and me warmly. Like the rest of us, he was acclimatised to Bombay's heat, and he wore a heavy serge jacket and bottle-green jeans with no trace of discomfort. He pulled the blanket from Maurizio's body and pinched the skin, flexed a dead arm, and sniffed at the corpse.

"I got a good plastic," he said, dumping a heavy plastic drop sheet onto the floor and unfolding it. "We got to take off all them clothes. And any of his rings and chains. Just the man, that's all we want. We'll pull the teeth later."

He paused, when I didn't reply or react, and looked up to see me staring at the two women. Their faces were stiff with dread.

"How about... you get Ulla in the shower," I said to Lisa with a grim little smile. "Have one yourself. I reckon we'll be finished here in a little while."

Lisa led Ulla into the bathroom, and ran a shower for her. We dumped Maurizio's body onto the plastic sheet and stripped it of its clothes. His skin was pallid, matt, and in some places marbled-grey. In life Maurizio was a tall, well-built man. Dead and naked he looked thinner, feebler somehow. I should've pitied him. Even if we never pity them at any other time, and in any other way, we should pity the dead when we look at them, and touch them. Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. And dead men demand prayers. The silent heart, the tumbled nave of the chest unbreathing, and the guttered candles of the eyes-they summon our prayers. Each dead man is a temple in ruins, and when our eyes walk there we should pity, we should pray.

But I didn't pity him. You got what you deserve, I thought, as we rolled his body in the plastic sheet. I felt despicable and mean souled for thinking it, but the words wormed their way through my brain like a murderous whisper working its way through an angry mob. You got what you deserve.

Hassaan had brought a laundry-style trolley basket with him. We wheeled it into the room from the corridor. Maurizio's body was beginning to stiffen up, and we were forced to crunch the legs to fit it into the basket. We wheeled and carried it down two flights of stairs unobserved, and out into the quiet street, where Hassaan's delivery van was parked. His men used the van every day to deliver fish, bread, fruit, vegetables, and kerosene to his shops in the African ghetto. We lifted the wheeled basket into the back of the van, and covered the plastic-wrapped body with loaves of bread, baskets of vegetables, and trays of fish.

"Thanks, Hassaan," I said, shaking his hand and passing him the ten thousand dollars. He stuffed the money into the front of his jacket.

"No," he rumbled in the basso voice that commanded unquestioning respect in his ghetto. "I am very happy to do this work. Now, Lin, we are even. All even."

He nodded to Abdullah and left us, walking half a block to his parked car. Raheem leaned out of the van to flash a wide smile at me before turning over the engine with a flick of his wrist. He drove away without looking back. Hassaan's car followed it a few hundred metres behind. We never heard so much as a murmur about Maurizio again. It was rumoured that Hassaan Obikwa kept a pit in the centre of his slum. Some said the pit was full of rats. Some claimed that it was filled with scuttling crabs. Others swore that he kept huge pigs in the pit. Whatever the hungry creatures were, all the whisperers agreed that they were fed from time to time with a dead man, one piece of the corpse at a time.

"Money you did spend well," Abdullah muttered, with a blank expression, as we watched the van drive away.

We returned to the apartment, and repaired the door locks so the door could be sealed shut when we all left. Abdullah phoned another contact and arranged for two reliable men to visit the apartment on the following day. Their instructions were to bring a saw, cut the couch into pieces, and remove it in rubbish sacks. They were to clean the carpet and leave the apartment in an orderly state, removing every trace of its recent occupants.

He put the phone down, and it rang at once. His contact in Dadar had news. Modena had been discovered by staff in the hotel room, and rushed to hospital. The contact had visited the hospital, and learned that the weak and wounded man had checked himself out of the ward. He was last seen speeding away in a taxi. The doctor who'd attended him doubted that he would survive the night.

"It's weird," I said when Abdullah had related the news. "I knew Modena, you know... I sort of knew him well. I saw him at Leopold's... I don't know... a hundred times. But I can't remember his voice. I can't remember what he sounded like. I can't hear his voice in my head, if you know what I mean."

"I liked him," Abdullah said.

"I'm surprised to hear you say that."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure," I replied. "He was so... so meek."

"He would have made a good soldier."

I raised my eyebrows in greater surprise. Modena wasn't just meek, it seemed to me then, he was a weak man. I couldn't imagine what Abdullah meant. I didn't know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

And when all the loose ends were cut or tied, when Ulla left the city for Germany, and Lisa moved to a new apartment, and the last questions about Modena and Maurizio and Ulla faltered, faded, and ceased, it was the mysteriously vanished Spaniard who claimed my thoughts most often. I made two double-shuffle flights to Delhi and back in the next two weeks. I followed that by flying a seventy-two hour turnaround to Kinshasa with ten new passports for Abdul Ghani's network. I tried to keep busy, tried to focus on the work, but the screen in my mind was filled too often with an image of him, Modena, tied to the bed and staring at Ulla, watching her leave him there, watching her walk away with the money. And gagged. No way to scream. And what he must've thought when she entered the room... I'm saved... And what he must've thought when he saw the terror in her face. And was there something else in her eyes: was it revulsion, or was it more terrible than that? Did she look relieved, perhaps? Did she seem glad to be rid of him? And what did he feel when she turned and walked away and left him there, and closed the door behind her?

When I was in prison I fell in love with a woman who was an actress in a popular television program. She came into the prison to teach classes in acting and theatre for our prison drama group. We clicked, as they say. She was a brilliant actress. I was a writer. She was the physical voice and gesture. I saw my words breathe and move in her. We communicated in the shorthand shared by artists everywhere in the world: rhythm, and elation.

After a time, she told me that she was in love with me. I believed her, and I still believe that it was true. For months we fed the affair with morsels of time stolen from the acting classes, and long letters that I smuggled to her through the illegal jail mail system known as the stiff-letter run.

Then trouble found me and I was thrown, literally, into the punishment unit. I don't know how the screws found out about our romance, but soon after I arrived in the punishment block they began to interrogate me about it. They were furious. They saw her affair with a prisoner, carried on for months under their noses, as a humiliating affront to their authority and, perhaps, to their manhood. They beat me with boots, fists, and batons, trying to force me to admit that she and I had been lovers. They wanted to use my confession as the basis for laying a charge against her. During one beating they held up a photograph of her. It was a smiling publicity still that they'd found in the prison drama group. They told me that all I had to do to stop the beatings was nod my head at it. Just nod your head, they said, holding the picture before my bloody face. Just nod your head, that's all you have to do, and it'll all be over.

I never admitted anything. I held her love in the vault of my heart while they tried to reach it through my skin and my bones.

Then one day, as I sat in my cell after a beating, trying to stop the blood flowing into my mouth from a chipped bone in my cheek and my broken nose, the trapdoor opened in the door of my cell. A letter fluttered in and landed on the floor. The trapdoor shut. I crawled over to the letter, and crawled back to the bed to read it. The letter was from her. It was a Dear John letter. She'd met a man, she said. He was a musician. Her friends had all urged her to break up with me because I was serving a twenty-year sentence in prison, and there was no future in it for either of us. She loved the new man, and she planned to marry him when his concert tour with the symphony orchestra was complete. She hoped I understood. She was sorry, but the letter was goodbye, goodbye forever, and she would never see me again.

Blood dripped onto the page from my broken face. The screws had read the letter, of course, before giving it to me. They laughed outside my door. They laughed. I listened to them as they tried to make a victory of that laughter, and I wondered if her new man, her musician, would stand up under torture for her. Maybe he would. You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.

And somehow, in the weeks after Maurizio's death, Modena's face, or my mind's picture of his gagged and bloody and staring face, became confused with my own memories of that love I'd lost in prison. I wasn't sure why: there didn't seem to be any special reason why Modena's fate would twist itself into the strands of my own. But it did, and I felt a darkness growing within me that was too numb for sorrow and too cold for rage.

I tried to fight it. I kept myself as busy as I could. I worked in two more Bollywood films, taking small parts-as an extra at a party and in a street scene. I met with Kavita, urging her once again to visit Anand in prison. Most afternoons, I trained at weights and boxing and karate with Abdullah. I put in a day here and there at the slum clinic. I helped Prabaker and Johnny to prepare for their weddings. I listened to Khaderbhai's lectures, and immersed myself in the books, manuscripts, parchments, and ancient faience carvings in Abdul Ghani's extensive private collection. But no work or weariness could drive the darkness from me. Little by little, the tortured Spaniard's face and silent, screaming eyes became my own remembered moment: blood falling on the page, and no sound escaping my howling mouth. They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us unscreamed. That's where loves, like elephants, drag themselves to die. It's the place where pride allows itself to cry. And in those sleep-lonely nights and think-rambled days, Modena's face was always there, staring at the door.

And while I worked and worried, Leopold's changed forever. The crowd that had coalesced there dispersed and disappeared. Karla was gone. Ulla was gone. Modena was gone, and probably dead. Maurizio was dead. Once, when I was too busy to stop for a drink, I passed the wide entrance arches and I saw no face that I knew. Yet Didier persisted at his favourite table each evening, conducting his business and accepting drinks from old friends. Gradually a new crowd collected around him with a new and different style.

Lisa Carter brought Kalpana Iyer with her for drinks one night, and the young assistant producer became a Leopold's regular.

Vikram and Lettie were in the last stages of preparation for their wedding, and they stopped for coffee, a snack, or a beer almost every day. Anwar and Dilip, two young journalists who worked with Kavita Singh, accepted her invitation to drop in and look the place over. On their first visit they found Lisa Carter, Kalpana, Kavita, and Lettie, with three German girls who'd worked for Lisa as extras on a film-seven beautiful, intelligent, vivacious young women. Anwar and Dilip were healthy, happy, unattached young men. They came to Leopold's every day and night after that.

The ambience created by the new group was different to that which had flowered around Karla Saaranen. The indelible cleverness and piercing wit that were Karla's gifts had inspired her own group of friends to a more profound discourse and a higher, thinner laughter. The new group took its more erratic tone from Didier, who combined the expressive mordancy of his sarcasm with a proclivity for the vulgar, the obscene, and the scatological. The laughter was louder, and probably more frequent, but there were no phrases that remained with me from the jokes or the jokers.

Then one night, a day after Vikram married Lettie, and a few weeks after Maurizio went into Hassaan Obikwa's pit, as I sat amongst the new group while the cawing, shrieking gulls of good humour settled on them, sending up squawks of laughter and fluttering hands, I saw Prabaker through the open arch. He waved to me, and I left the table to join him in his cab parked nearby.

"Hey, Prabu, what's up? We're celebrating Vikram's wedding! He and Lettie got married yesterday."

"Yes, Linbaba. Sorry for disturbing the newly-marriages."

"It's okay. They're not here. They've gone to London, to meet her parents. But what's up?"

"Up, Linbaba?" "Yeah, I mean what are you doing here? Tomorrow's your big day. I thought you'd be drinking it up with Johnny and the other guys at the zhopadpatti."

"After this talk only. Then I will go," he replied, fidgeting nervously with the steering wheel. Both front doors of the car were open for the breeze. It was a hot night. The streets were crowded with couples, families, and single young men trying to find a cool wind or a curiosity somewhere to distract them from the heat. The crowd who streamed along the road beside the parked cars began to eddy around Prabaker's open door, and he pulled it shut hard.

"Are you okay?"

"Oh, yes, Lin, I am very, very fine," he said. Then he looked at me. "No. Not really, baba. In fact of speaking, I am very, very bad."

"What is it?"

"Well, how to tell you this thing. Linbaba, you know I am getting a marriage to Parvati tomorrow. Do you know, baba, the first time I ever saw her my Parvati, was before six years, when she was sixteen years old only. That first time, when she first came to the zhopadpatti, before her daddy Kumar had his chai shop, she was living in a little hut with her mummy and daddy and sister, the Sita who is a marriage for Johnny Cigar. And that first day, she carried a matka of water back from the company well. She carried it on her head."

He paused, watching the aquarium of the swirling street through the windscreen of the cab. His fingernail picked at the rubber leopard's skin cover he'd laced onto his steering wheel. I gave him time.

"Anyway," he continued, "I was watching her, and she was trying to carry that heavy matka, and walk on the rough track. And that matka, it must have been a very old one, and the clay was weak, because suddenly it just broke up in pieces, and all the water spilled down on her. She cried and cried so much. I looked at her and I felt..."

He paused, looking up at the strolling street once more.

"Sorry for her?" I offered.

"No, baba. I felt..."

"Sad? You felt sad for her?"

"No, baba. I felt a erection, in my pants, you know, when the penis is getting all hard, like your thinking."

"For God's sake, Prabu! I know what an erection is!" I grumbled.

"Get on with it. What happened?"

"Nothing happened," he replied, puzzled by my irritation, and somewhat chastened. "But from that time only, I never forgot my big, big feeling for her. Now I am making a marriage, and that big, big feeling is getting bigger every day."

"I'm not sure that I like where this is going, Prabu," I muttered.

"I am asking you, Lin," he said, choking on the words. He faced me. Tears bulged and rolled from his eyes into his lap. His voice came in stuttering sobs. "She is too beautiful. I am a very short and small man. Do you think I can make a good and sexy husband?"

I told Prabaker, sitting in his cab and watching him cry, that love makes men big, and hate makes them small. I told him that my little friend was one of the biggest men I ever met because there wasn't any hate in him. I said that the better I knew him, the bigger he got, and I tried to tell him how rare that was. And I joked with him, and laughed with him until that great smile, as big as a child's biggest wish, returned to his gentle round face.

He drove away toward the bachelor party that was waiting for him in the slum, and sounded the horn triumphantly until he was out of sight.

The night that walked me, long after he left, was lonelier than most. I didn't go back to Leopold's. I walked instead along the Causeway, past my apartment, and on to Prabaker's slum at Cuffe Parade. I found the place where Tariq and I fought the vicious pack on the Night of the Wild Dogs. There was still a small pile of scrap timber and stones on the spot. I sat there, smoking the darkness, and watching the slow elegance of the slum-dwellers drifting back along the dusty track to the huddle of huts. I smiled. Thinking of Prabaker's mighty smile always made me smile reflexively as if I was looking at a happy, healthy baby. Then a vision of Modena's face flowed from the flickering lanterns and vaporous wreaths of smoke, and faded again to nothing before it was fully formed. Music started up inside the slum. A strolling group of young men quickened their pace to jog toward the stirring sound. Prabaker's bachelor party had begun. He'd invited me, but I couldn't bring myself to go. I sat near enough to hear the happiness, but far enough away not to feel it.

For years I'd told myself that love had made me strong when the prison guards tried to force me to betray the actress and our affair. Somehow, Modena had haunted the truth from me. It wasn't love for her that had kept me silent, and it wasn't a brave heart. It was stubbornness that had given me the strength to bite down; stiff-necked, bull headed stubbornness. There was nothing noble in it. And for all my contempt for the cowardice of bullies, hadn't I become a bully when I was desperate enough? When the dragon-claws of heroin sickness dug into my back I became a small man, a tiny man. I became so small that I had to use a gun. I had to point a gun at people, many of them women, to get money. To get money. How was I different, in that, to Maurizio bullying women to get money? And if they'd shot me during one of those hold-ups, if the cops had gunned me down as I'd wanted and expected at the time, my death would've aroused and deserved as little pity as that of the crazed Italian.

I stood up and stretched, looking around me and thinking of the dogs and the fight and the bravery of the little boy Tariq. When I started back toward the city, I heard a sudden eruption of happy laughter from many voices at Prabaker's party, followed by a cloudburst rattle of applause. And the music dwindled with the distance until it was as faint and diminishable as any moment of truth.

Walking through the night, alone with the city for hours, I loved her with my wandering, just as I'd done when I lived in the slum.

Near dawn I bought a newspaper, found a cafe, and ate a big breakfast, lingering over a second and then a third pot of chai.

There was an article on page three of the paper describing the miraculous gifts of the Blue Sisters, as Rasheed's widow and her sister had become known. It was a syndicated article, written by Kavita Singh and published across the country. In it she gave a brief history of their story and then related several first-hand accounts of miraculous cures that had been attributed to the mystical powers the girls exercised. One woman claimed to have been cured of tuberculosis, another insisted that her hearing had been fully restored, and an elderly man declared that his withered lungs were strong and healthy again after he merely touched a hem of their sky-blue garments. Kavita explained that the name Blue Sisters wasn't their own choice: they wore blue, always, because they woke from their comas with a shared dream about floating in the sky, and their devotees had settled on the name. The article concluded with Kavita's own account of a meeting with the girls, and her conviction that they were, beyond any doubt, special-perhaps even supernatural-beings.

I paid the bill, and borrowed a pen from the cashier to circle the article with several lines. As the streets unwound the tangled morning coil of sound, colour, and commotion, I took a cab and jounced through reckless traffic to the Arthur Road Prison. After a wait of three hours, I made my way into the visiting area. It was a single room divided down the centre by two walls of cyclone wire that were separated by an empty space of about two metres. On one side were the visitors, squeezed together and holding their places by clinging to the wire. Across the gap and behind the other wire fence were the prisoners, crushed together and also grasping at the wire to steady themselves. There were about twenty prisoners. Forty of us crowded into an equal space on the visitors' side. Every man, woman, and child in the divided room was shouting. There were so many languages-I recognised six of them, and stopped counting as a door opened on the prisoners' side. Anand entered, pushing his way through to the wire.

"Anand! Anand! Here!" I shouted.

His eyes found me, and he smiled in greeting.

"Linbaba, so good to see you!" he shouted back at me.

"You look good, man!" I called out. He did look well. I knew how hard it was to look well in that place. I knew what an effort he'd put into it, cleaning body lice from his clothes every day and washing in the worm-infested water. "You look real good!"

"Arrey, you look very fine, Lin."

I didn't look fine. I knew that. I looked worried and guilty and tired.

"I'm... a bit tired. My friend Vikram-you remember him? He got married yesterday. The day before yesterday, actually. I've been walking all night."

"How is Qasim Ali? Is he well?"

"He's well," I replied, reddening a little with shame that I didn't see the good and noble head man as often as I used to, when I'd lived in the slum. "Look! Look at this newspaper.

There's an article in it about the sisters. It mentions you. We can use this to help you. We can build up some sympathy for you, before your case comes to court."

His long, lean, handsome face darkened in a frown that drew his brows together and pressed his lips into a tight, defiant crease.

"You must not do this, Lin!" he shouted back at me. "That journalist, that Kavita Singh, she was here. I sent her away. If she comes again, I will send her away again. I do not want any help, and I will not allow any help. I want to have the punishment for what I did to Rasheed."

"But you don't understand," I insisted. "The girls are famous now. People think they're holy. People think they can work miracles. There's thousands of devotees coming to the zhopadpatti every week. When people know you were trying to help them, they'll feel sympathy for you. You'll get half the time, or even less."

I was shouting myself hoarse, trying to be heard above or within the clamouring din. It was so hot in the crush of bodies that my shirt was already soaked, and clung to my skin. Had I heard him correctly? It seemed impossible that he would reject any help that might reduce his sentence. Without that help, he was sure to serve a minimum of fifteen years. Fifteen years in this hell, I thought, staring through the wire at his frowning face. How could he refuse our help?

"Lin! No!" he cried out, louder than before. "I did that thing to Rasheed. I knew what I was doing. I knew what would happen. I sat with him for a long time, before I did it. I made a choice. I must have the punishment."

"But I have to help you. I have to _try."

"No, Lin, please! If you take this punishment away, then there will be no meaning for what I did. There will be no honour. Not for me, not for them. Can't you see it? I have earned this punishment. I have become my fate. I am begging you, as a friend.

Please do not let them write anything more about me. Write about the ladies. The sisters. Yes! But let me have the peace of my fate. Do you promise me? Linbaba? Do you swear it?"

My fingers clutched at the diamonds of the wire fence. I felt the cold rusty metal bite at the bones within my hands. The noise in that wooden room was like a wild rainstorm on the ragged rooftops of the slum. Beseeching, entreating, adoring, yearning, crying, screaming, and laughing, the hysterical choruses shouted from cage to cage.

"Swear it to me, Lin," he said, the distress reaching out to me desperately from his pleading eyes.

"Okay, okay," I answered him, struggling to let the words escape from the little prison of my throat.

"Swear it to me!"

"All right! All right! I swear it. For God's sake, I swear... I won't try to help you."

His face relaxed, and the smile returned, burning my eyes with the beauty of it. "Thank you, Linbaba!" he shouted back happily. "Please don't be thinking I am ungrateful, but I don't want you to come back here again. I don't want you to visit me. You can put some money for me, sometimes, if you think of it. But please don't come back again. This is my life now. This is my life. It will be hard for me, if you come back here. I will think about things. I thank you very much, Lin, and I wish a full happiness for you."

His hands released their hold on the wire fence. He held them together in a praying gesture of blessing, bowing his head slightly, so that I lost contact with his eyes. Without that strong grip on the fence he was at the mercy of the crowd of prisoners, and in seconds he fell back, vanishing into the bubbling wave of faces and hands at the wire. A door at the back of the room opened behind the prisoners, and I watched Anand slip through into the hot yellow light of day with his head high and his thin shoulders bravely squared.

I stepped out onto the street outside the prison. My hair was wet with sweat, and my clothes were soaked. I squinted in the sunlight and stared at the busy street, trying to force myself into its rhythm and rush, trying not to think about Anand in the long room with the overseers, with Big Rahul, with the hunger and the beatings and the filthy, swarming pests. Later that night I would be with Prabaker and Johnny Cigar, Anand's friends, while they celebrated the double wedding. Later that night, Anand would be crammed into a writhing, lice-crawling sleep with two hundred other men on a stone floor. And that would go on, and on, for fifteen years.

I took a cab to my apartment and stood under a hot shower, scorching the slither and itch of memory from my skin. Later, I phoned Chandra Mehta to make the final arrangements for the dancers I'd hired to perform at Prabaker's wedding. Then I phoned Kavita Singh, and told her that Anand wanted us to pull out of the campaign. She was relieved, I think. Her kind heart had fretted for him, and she'd feared from the first that the campaign would fail and then crush him with the weight of fallen hope. She was also glad that he'd given his blessing to her stories about the Blue Sisters. The girls fascinated her, and she'd arranged for a documentary film-maker to visit them in the slum. She wanted to talk about the project, and I heard the sparkling enthusiasm in her voice but I cut her off, promising to call again.

I went out to my little balcony, and let the sound and smell of the city settle on the skin of my bare chest. In a courtyard below, I saw three young men rehearsing the moves and steps of a dance routine they'd copied from a Bollywood film. They laughed helplessly when they messed up the moves of the party piece, and then gave a cheer when they finally danced through one whole routine without error. In another yard some women were squatting together, washing dishes with small anemones of coir rope and a long bar of coral-coloured soap. Their conversation came to me in laughing gasps and shrieks as they scandalised one another with gossip and sardonic commentaries on the peculiar habits of their neighbours' husbands. Then I looked up to see an elderly man sitting in a window opposite me. My eyes met his, and I smiled. He'd been watching me as I'd watched the others below. He wagged his head from side to side, and smiled back at me with a happy grin.

And it was all right. I dressed, and went down to the street. I made the rounds of the black-market currency collection centres, and checked in at Abdul Ghani's passport factory, and inspected the gold-smuggling ring I'd restructured in Khader's name. In three hours I committed thirty crimes or more. And I smiled when people smiled at me. When it was necessary, I gave men enough bad head, as gangsters call it, to make them draw back and lower their eyes in fear. I walked the goonda walk, and in three languages I talked the talk. I looked good. I did my job. I made money, and I was still free. But in the black room, deep in my mind, another image added itself to the secret gallery-an image of Anand, holding the palms of his hands together, as his radiant smile became a blessing and a prayer.

Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that's greater than zero. Some things, like the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening, or a flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, have such an infinitesi-mally small effect that you can't detect them. Some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you've just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery and they change your life forever.

That last image of Anand, the last time I ever saw him, had that effect on me. It wasn't compassion for him that I felt so deeply, although I did pity him as only a chained man could. It wasn't shame, although I was truly ashamed that I hadn't listened when he'd first tried to tell me about Rasheed. It was something else, something so strange that it took me years to fully comprehend. It was envy that nailed the image to my mind. I envied Anand as he turned and walked with his back straight and his head high into the long, suffering years. I envied his peace and his courage and his perfect understanding of himself. Khaderbhai once said that if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we're half way to wisdom. I hope he wasn't right about that. I hope good envy takes you further than that, because a lifetime has passed since that day at the wire, and I still envy Anand's calm communion with fate, and I long for it with all my flawed and striving heart.

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-26