Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘You hear what happened to Abhijeet?’ Francis, my Regal Circle money changer asked, when I pulled up beside him.

‘Yeah.’

Abhijeet was a street kid, hustling tourists on the strip. He’d tried to run a police roadblock too fast on a stolen scooter. He crashed into a stone bridge support, and the bridge didn’t give way.

‘Bloody little prick,’ Francis said, handing me the pick-up money. ‘He’s annoying my mind more, now that he’s dead, than he did when he was alive. And when he was alive, he was the most annoying prick in the world.’

‘He’s annoying you so much that you’re light, Francis,’ I said, checking the money he gave me.

‘What light , baba?’ he said, raising his voice loud enough for the other traders near him to hear.

I looked around at the faces on the street.

‘Don’t do this, Francis.’

‘I’m not doing anything, baba,’ he shouted. ‘You are accusing me, and -’

I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him toward an alley, a few steps away.

‘My shop!’

‘Fuck the shop.’

I shoved him into the alley.

‘Let’s do it,’ I said.

‘Let’s do what?’

‘You’re cheating me, in front of your friends. Now we can be honest, alone. Where’s the money?’

‘Baba, you -’

I slapped him.

‘I didn’t -’

I slapped him harder.

‘In my shirt,’ he said. ‘Your money is inside my shirt.’

There was a lot of money inside his shirt. I took the money he’d skimmed, and left the rest.

‘I don’t care where you get your money, Francis, so long as you don’t skim it from me. And you’ll never make a show in front of your friends again. You see that, right?’

It’s an ugly thing, raw power: ugly enough to scare away scavengers. And it’s an ugly job, sometimes, keeping street criminals in line. They need to know that reaction will always be fast and violent, and they need to fear it. If they don’t, they all turn on you, and then things get bloody.

I did the rounds until I had enough foreign money to knock on the door of the black market bank in Ballard Pier.

Black bankers aren’t criminals: they’re civilians who commit crimes. By staying on the safe side of the line, they don’t risk real prison time. They keep a low profile, when their wealth would bring them into the A-list, because the money’s more important. And they’re scrupulously apolitical: they hold black money for any party, whether in power or not.

The Sanjay Company used the black bank at Ballard Pier, and so did the Scorpions. But a lot of cops kept their loot there, and some heavy hitters in the armed services, and the politicians, of course. There was construction money, sugar baron money, oil money and slush fund money. In one way or another it was the best protected bank in town.

The bank cared for its customers in return. Whenever one of them messed up, the bank made the mess subside, for a fee. Each scandal was tagged and bagged and locked in the vault. There was more dirt in the black bank at Ballard Pier, it was said, than undeclared gold.

Everyone in town had something to gain from the bank’s invisible hand, and everyone had something to lose if the hand became a fist. The bank was so swollen with secrets and secret money that it was too crooked to fail.

For small hustlers like me, given access to a small sub-branch window, the black bank was a convenient way to hand in my US dollars and other currencies, take the equivalent in black rupees, and let the bank forward the foreign cash to the South Bombay buyers’ syndicate.

Nobody but partners with too much to lose knew who the buyers were. Some said that a wild bunch of movie producers and actors had set up the syndicate. One rumour insisted that it was a Bombay chapter of the Masonic Lodge.

Whoever they were, they were smart. They controlled eighty per cent of the black dollars in the south, made more profit than anyone in the chain, and never risked an hour behind bars.

After costs, in my small operation, I cleared twenty thousand rupees a month from the money changer operation. If I’d still been living in the slum, it would’ve made me a king. On the street, it was pin money.

Once crime starts to pay, you soon learn that the key to survival isn’t making money, it’s keeping it. Every black rupee you make has a hundred hands reaching out to take it away. And you can’t call the cops, because the cops are often the ones taking it away.

And when the cash you make comes in bundles, and you don’t have any burning desire to spend it, because you’re a rainy day kind of a guy, few decisions are more important than where you decide to keep it.

The first rule is not to put it all in one place. If things get bad, and you’ve gotta give something up, a plump reserve is a good idea. I kept some at home as escape money. I left some with Tito, Didier’s man. He gave me friend rates of two per cent. He still called it ten per cent, but only charged me two.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, when he muttered ten per cent again, out of habit. ‘My mind is angry with me.’

‘Listen, Tito, if someone comes calling, telling you that I’m tied up in a cellar somewhere, and being tortured, and uses the code 300 Spartans , just give him the money, okay?’

‘Done,’ he said. ‘For ten per cent.’

Every woman of a certain age is automatically an auntie, in India. Half-Moon Auntie, who ran a black bank in the fish market, was maybe fifty years old, and so voluptuous in her seductive powers that no man could stay more than ten minutes in her company, it was said, without proposing to her. And Half-Moon Auntie, a widow not in mourning, did everything in her considerable range of talents to make the minutes of any transaction roll into double digits.

So far, I’d always been a nine-minute guy with Half-Moon Auntie: deal done, and outta there.

‘Hi, Half-Moon Auntie,’ I said, handing a paper-wrapped bundle of rupees to her assistant clerk, sitting behind a fish counter. ‘How are you?’

She kicked a plastic chair at me. It slid to a stop at my feet. She’d done it before. She did it every time, in fact.

Decades of fish oil, soaked into the concrete, made the surface almost frictionless. It was hard to walk around. It was hard to keep standing up, in fact. It was as if the dead fish, soaked into the stone around Half-Moon Auntie’s rope bed, wanted to make us fall down. And people did, every day.

I took the chair, knowing that there was no such thing as a fast getaway from Half-Moon Auntie’s black bank.

I was sitting at the end of a very long stainless steel cutting table. It was one of several in the fish market, an area the size of a football field under waves of slanted tin and clotted skylight crests.

Work had stopped for the day, and the shouting had shrunk into a silence that was, perhaps, like the gasps of fish, drowning in our air, just as we drown in theirs.

I could hear Half-Moon Auntie swallowing. I could hear the clock on the wall ticking. I could hear Auntie’s assistant, counting the money slowly, carefully.

It was dark, but the shade was hotter than the sunny street outside. The smell had been strong enough to close my mouth, at first, but it began to settle into a low hum of fish not in the sea.

Someone started to run a hose at the far end of the market. Blood and pieces of dead things floated past in a gutter chiselled into the concrete floor.

Beside the gutter was Half-Moon Auntie, standing in her slippers, her rope bed covered by a hand-sewn quilt as silver as the fins of a mirror fish.

‘So, Shantaram,’ she said. ‘They say that a woman has your heart.’

‘That’s true, Half-Moon Auntie,’ I replied. ‘How are you doing?’