Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

Poor kid , I thought, as I dressed again, but reminded myself that Naveen was never more than a call for help away. And I wondered how long it would take the Indian-Irish detective to admit that he was in love with her.

I made a no-bread sandwich of tuna fish, tomato and onion between slices of Parmesan cheese, drank two beers, and looked over Didier’s black market scams for a while.

He’d made pages of notes, with profiles on the key players, profit margins per month, salaries, and bribery payoffs. When I’d read them, I shoved the papers to the end of the bed, and picked up my journal.

There was that new short story I’d been trying to write, about happy, loving people doing happy, loving things. A love story. A fable. I tried to put a few more lines into the stream of words I’d already composed. I reread the first paragraph.

When it comes to the truth, there are two kinds of lovers: those who find truth in love, and those who find love in truth. Cleon Winters never sought the truth in anything, or anyone, because he didn’t believe in truth. But then, when he fell in love with Shanassa, truth found him, and all the lies he’d told himself became locusts, feeding on fields of doubt. When Shanassa kissed him, he fell into a coma, and was unconscious for six months, submerged in a lake of pure truth.

I persisted with the story for a while, but the characters began to change, following their own morphology, and became people I knew: Karla, Concannon, Diva.

The faces blurred, my eyes drooped, and every return to a line was another wave of will. I began to float on the sea of them, real faces and imagined.

The journal fell beside the bed. Loose pages from the notebook swirled free. The overhead fan scattered pages of my happy, loving story into Didier’s crime synopses. His pages settled on mine and mine joined his, and the wind wrote crime as love, and love as crime, as I slept.

There will be constant affirmations, Idriss had said, again and again. If they were there, I didn’t see them, even in dreams. Idriss talked of spiritual things, but the only thing that came to mind for me, in the word spiritual, was nature. I hadn’t found my connection to his tendency field, and out there on that fringe of the world, I didn’t feel that I belonged to anything but Karla.

I’d searched the faiths I could find. I learned prayers in languages I couldn’t speak, and prayed with believers whenever they invited me to join them. But I always connected to the people and the purity of their faith, rather than the religious code they followed. I often had everything in common with them, in fact, but their God.

Idriss spoke of the Divine in the language of science, and spoke of science in the language of faith. It made a strange kind of sense to me, where Khaderbhai’s lectures on cosmology only ever left me with good questions. Idriss was a journey, like every teacher, and I wanted to learn on the way, but the spiritual path I could see always led to forests, where talking stopped long enough for birds to find trees, and to oceans and rivers and deserts. And each woken beautiful day, each lived and written night, carried inside it a small, ineffaceable emptiness of questions.

I showered, drank coffee, tidied my rooms and went down to my bike, parked in the alleyway under the building. I had a breakfast meeting with Abdullah. I wanted to see him, and I was afraid to see him: afraid that friendship had faded in his eyes. So I rode and thought of Diva Devnani, the rich girl in a very poor slum, whose father was watching the sand run through his fingers. I made a note to buy her some Kerala grass and a bottle of coconut rum for when I checked on her.

When I parked my bike beside Abdullah’s, across the street from the Saurabh restaurant, I looked up slowly and reluctantly, but the eyes that met mine were as true as they’d always been. He hugged me, and we squeezed onto a small bench behind a table that gave us both a view of the door.

‘You are the subject of discussion,’ he said, as we worked our way through masala dosas and dumplings in mango sauce. ‘DaSilva made a bet that you would not live to see the end of the month.’

‘Anyone take the bet?’

‘Of course not,’ Abdullah said, between mouthfuls. ‘I beat DaSilva with a bamboo rod. He withdrew the wager.’

‘Solid.’

‘The talk from Sanjay is what counts, for now, and Sanjay wants you to live.’

‘In the way a cat wants a mouse to live?’

‘More like a tiger and a mouse,’ he replied. ‘He thinks the Scorpions are cats, and that they hate you more than DaSilva does.’

‘So, am I a target or a useful distraction, for Sanjay?’

‘The last. He does not expect that you will survive outside the Company for a long time. But you are useful, in a unique way.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘While you live, you are irritating.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t mention. In fact, I think you will probably be irritating, even after you are dead. It is a rare quality.’

‘Thanks again.’

‘Don’t mention.’

‘Where do I stand with business?’

‘He does not think you will survive long enough, to establish a business.’

‘I got that. But if I do survive, say, until the day after tomorrow, when I’d like to get started, how do I stand?’

‘Sanjay assured me that he would license you, like everyone else, but at a higher percentage.’

‘And they say mafia dons have no heart. Can I do my own passports?’

‘He does not think you will -’

‘- survive long enough. But if I do?’

‘Sanjay has said that you are banned from the passport factory. Your young man there, Farzad, came to see Sanjay personally, asking that he be permitted to learn from you privately. Sanjay said that he did not think -’

‘- I’d survive long enough, right, but he didn’t rule it out?’

‘No. He ordered Farzad not to contact you, or speak to you.’

‘And if I bought my own kit, and started modifying books?’

‘He does not think -’

‘Abdullah,’ I sighed, ‘I don’t care if Sanjay thinks I won’t last the winter. The only opinion I respect on that subject is my own. Just tell Sanjay, when you get a minute, that one of these days he might need a good passport from me himself. If he’s cool with it, I’d like to start making books. I’m good at it, and it’s an anarchist crime. See if you can get him to agree, okay?’

‘ Jarur , brother.’

It was good to hear him call me brother, but I didn’t know if he was accepting my defection from the Company, or if his disaffection was driving him closer to my renegade side of the line.

‘You will be taking over all of Didier’s enterprises?’ he asked.

‘Not all of them. I’m letting the drugs go. The Company can pick it up, if they want. Amir can have it. And the escorts, too. They can have all of Didier’s escort strings in South Bombay. I wrote off the debts, and let everyone run free. They’re out there, doing their own things. But the Company can probably negotiate them back again, I guess.’

‘It will be done before nightfall,’ he intoned, his deep voice rumbling the syllables. ‘So, without the girls and the drugs, you will have what, exactly?’

‘All Didier’s currency touts are with me. I’ve got enough to float about fifteen of the black money traders from Flora Fountain to Colaba Market, for a month. If it ticks over, I’ll do okay. On the side, I’m specialising in watches and technology. Every street guy on the strip will bring stuff to me first, before any other buyer. I think I can make that work.’

‘Watches?’ he asked, frowning sternly.

‘There’s a lot of money in collector watches.’