Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

My body wanted to turn and run. Into the lift, down the stairs, away. But I was thinking. Don't make them suspicious .

'Money,' I said. 'They have to pay.'

'Get out,' the Chinese said.

'Go,' the Indian said.

I muttered quiet curses, turned back into the lift. I pressed a button, and then cursed some more.

The Indian stepped forward, put a hand on the door. 'You work for the people in the penthouse?'

'No. For Wong's Garden.'

'Your name?'

'Nisar Amir.'

'Take your glasses off.'

I was still wearing my Guccis. I put down one bag, and took them off. He scanned my face, gave me that policeman's look that riffled through thousands of remembered apradhis for a match. I didn't look away, and I tried not to hate him. I was thinking, be a delivery boy.

'Okay,' he said, and let go of the door.

A small thunk of rubber and metal hid me from them, and I collapsed back against the mirror at the back of the lift. My legs were trembling. I took the bags of food with me into the basement, holding them like shields against my chest. I got into Arvind's fancy car, and I drove away.

* * *

It took me three days to get out of Singapore, and it was difficult. I didn't know who those men were, who had found me in my penthouse. But after they searched the apartment, they had my new passports, so they had my new face. I had only two mobile phones, and three hundred and seventy-three Singapore dollars. But I could talk to my boys, and I had my intellect. I left finally in a very small rowing boat, which took me to another, bigger boat, in which I lay under slats of wood, under fish-smelling darkness. This boat took me across the Straits of Johor to another small boat, which finally dropped me off on a Malaysian beach. The next day I was in Thailand.

I was safe, but Arvind was dead. The day after my run for Chinese food, the Singapore police announced that they had found him dead, in the penthouse. He had been shot three times. Suhasini had been shot once, in the head. The children were dead too. The story, according to the Singapore authorities, was that a gun battle had taken place in the penthouse. Suhasini had opened the door to some unknown assailants, and had been killed immediately. Arvind had fired at the attackers, who had retaliated, and in the crossfire both children had perished. And then Arvind had fallen, under the volleys of the assassins.

That was it. The Singapore police expressed outrage at this unprecedented outbreak of savage gang warfare in their garden city, and announced a tightening of immigration controls. It took them four days to get through Arvind's alias, to work out who he actually was, and then the newspapers in India published front-page articles about the massacre, and theorized about the identity of the killers. They gave the credit to Suleiman Isa and his lieutenants, and praised their plan and the audacity of executing it in strict Singapore, and printed diagrams of all the rooms in the apartment, with little stick figures shooting at each other. And they asked, 'But how did Ganesh Gaitonde get away?'

I had got away, yes. But who from? It was easy to believe that it had been the boys from Dubai once more. That was too easy, too pat. I kept remembering those haircuts. Those two men in front of the lift, hadn't they held themselves like policemen, like soldiers? Maybe it wasn't Suleiman Isa who had put this hit in place, maybe it was a government. Kulkarni and his organization were very angry at me, maybe they had decided that it was time to end this particular operation, to close out this account. Maybe they had decided to finish Ganesh Gaitonde. I had run missions exactly like that for them myself, when they had gone after assets who were compromised. Retire this man, they had said, he was once ours but he is now against us. Or at least he is not with us. And I had done it, I had found some poor chutiya, in Kathmandu, in Brussels, in Kampala, and I had killed him. Whoever they had named, wherever. I had done it. And now they were after me.

No, no – I stopped myself from believing this. Don't jump to conclusions, I told myself. Don't hurt yourself like this, don't believe that your own country despises you enough to want you gone, wiped, finished. I spoke to Kulkarni three times that week, and he was always courteous, concerned about what had happened. He said he was conducting a thorough investigation at his end, and promised that information forthcoming from Singapore would be passed instantly to me. After a conversation with him, I always got off the phone feeling reassured, revived. But five minutes was all it took for me to find the subtle poison in all his honey. Yes, he was reassuring, but maybe he was setting me up for another attack. Maybe they had the observers already in place, maybe the fielding had already started, and they were about to tumble my wicket. Yes. Who had given me away in Singapore, who had the address of the penthouse, and the security codes for the building gate and the elevator, and knowledge enough to cut off the video cameras which lined every corridor? Where had the intelligence come from? Had Zoya betrayed me? Why had she missed her flight? Yes, there had been a traffic jam on the highway that day, I had checked, but why had she left so late from the set? Or was it Arvind, had he made a deal with someone, and then been betrayed himself? Had the killers been instructed to thoko their source as well, to make a clean sweep of it? It was possible. It was all possible.

Under the full Thai moon, I lay awake struggling with the possibilities. And when I rose in the morning, I was afraid. Guru-ji had said there was great danger to my life, and I knew it had not passed. Once again, after years, I started carrying a gun. After two days, I started carrying an additional pistol, strapped to my ankle. I had the world's best body armour flown in from America, and I wore it under my shirt through the day, comforted by its IIIA protection, which would hold back.44 Magnum bullets before they reached my chest, my back. I increased the number of armed sentries on the yacht, and rotated them in teams three times a day. I slept sometimes on the boat, and sometimes in various houses on land, and varied my routes. I took all possible precautions.

Meanwhile, the calamities kept coming. Bunty called one afternoon, quite subdued, not his usual cheery self at all. 'Bhai,' he said. 'I'm in a clinic.'

'What's wrong?' I imagined a dozen tragedies all at once: syphilis, bullets, his children ravaged by malaria.

'It's Pascal and Gaston. They're both in here, bhai. Both admitted.'

'What, only Gaston had diabetes, right? The other one caught it from him as well?'

This got a little laugh from him, a very small one. 'No, bhai. It's something else. They're both sick. And both the boys who went with them on the boat on that last run are also. They're all vomiting, again and again.'

He meant that trip we had made for Guru-ji's shipment, that final and very special one he had asked for. I said, 'They ate some bad fish, the stupid bastards.'

'Gaston's hair is falling out, bhai.'

'It has been for years.'

Bunty said nothing. He was very grim. That he had taken the time to go to the clinic was in itself quite unusual. He was a busy man, I made sure of that. And now he wasn't laughing, this Bunty who made jokes every day about men getting shot in the golis. Gaston's condition must indeed be serious, too serious. 'Okay,' I said, 'listen, get them good doctors. If money is needed, give it. Take care of them.'

'That's what I thought, bhai. They've been with us a long time.'

He hovered over them for the next two days, pushing the doctors to cure our friends. Meanwhile, I called Inspector Samant in Bombay and organized two encounters for him, gave him two Suleiman Isa controllers in Bombay. He killed these controllers on the same night, one after the other. The Dubai bastards hadn't claimed credit for the hit on Arvind, but I wanted them to know we weren't sleeping, that we were very capable of replying in a language they understood. The encounters gave satisfaction, especially because Samant e-mailed me morgue photographs of the dead bastards, with their heads split open by bullets. But the comfort passed quickly, and the fear maintained its steady, muffled drumbeat.