Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘You did not ask me who took out this contract on you.’

‘I thought I’d survive the twenty-four, and then find out,’ I replied.

‘Why do you not want to know now?’

‘Because, when I know, I’ll want to do something to him. And it would be better to do something to him after everybody stops trying to kill me.’

‘It was the Irishman.’

‘Concannon?’

‘Yes.’

It was my turn to laugh, and about time.

‘Good to see you keeping those spirits up,’ Ravi said, walking a pace behind us with Shah, Comanche and Tall Tony.

‘No,’ I laughed, ‘it’s not funny at all, but it’s really, really funny at the same time. I know this guy. I know Concannon. It’s his version of a practical joke. It’s a gangster joke, to see if I can make it through. That’s why the contract expires in twenty-four hours. He’s fucking with me.’

I couldn’t explain it more, because I was laughing too much, and then the guys understood, all but Abdullah, and they laughed. Every time they tried to straighten up, they reminded themselves how much they wished they’d thought of it first. Then they started exchanging the names of paranoid friends they’d love to do it to, and fell helpless again.

‘I love this guy,’ Ravi said. ‘I’ve gotta meet him. I mean, we’ll kill him, of course, but I’ve gotta meet him, before we do.’

‘Me, too,’ Tall Tony said. ‘Is this the guy Abdullah shot in the leg?’

‘The same.’

‘Twice,’ Abdullah corrected, ‘in the same leg. And now, you can see that mercy is a virtue best reserved for the virtuous, and not for a demon, like this man.’

The guys laughed harder. It was a good sign, in a way. One of our men had been murdered, a man we all loved, and I’d been threatened with murder, but we weren’t so afraid that we couldn’t laugh. The young street soldiers composed themselves under Abdullah’s stern eye, and we completed the walk to the shore.

The walk to Haji Ali’s tomb before war was an insult to the saint whose coffin rode miracle-waves back to the Island City, blessing it forever, and we knew it.

But we also knew, or willed ourselves to believe, that saints forgive what the world shuns. And we were sure in those moments of the walk, despite our sacrilege, that he knew we loved him: the eternally patient saint, who listened to our gangster prayer as he slept on the sea.

Concannon’s practical joke was a blessing, after I survived it, because it flushed assassin-minded snakes out of the long grass of Colaba’s unconformable jungle. Abdullah and Didier visited every thug who’d asked about the reward for my life, and slapped him around in case the reward was offered again.

I hunted Concannon across the city, following every slender lead. Some of the searches took me to distant suburbs, on rough roads. I spent a lot of time in the saddle, most of it thinking about him. But the Irishman was always a ghost, a rumour, an echo of a taunting laugh, and I finally had to be satisfied, for a while, that if he couldn’t be found, he wasn’t a threat.

Karla was still mad. She froze me out, and was invisible for days. I tried to stay mad at her, but couldn’t pull it off. I thought it was wrong of her to withhold the letter, especially after the writer had paid to have me killed. I felt aggrieved, but I missed her too much. Those days we spent together, connected and happy, were most of the good I knew.

You wanna know a sure sign that you’re with your soul mate? a Nigerian smuggler once told me. You just can’t stay mad at her. Am I right?

He was right, and he was wrong: soul mates can stay mad, for a while, and Karla was still mad. But at least the glacial distance meant that I didn’t have to talk about Concannon’s joke. I knew she’d heard about it. I knew she’d find it funny, and find a dozen clever ways to tease me about it.

Madame Zhou was still at large. No-one had seen or heard from her in weeks. The word acid was burning my mind, every time I thought of it. I didn’t want to pester Karla, and I didn’t care who she wanted to see. But I wanted to know that she was safe, until she decided to have breakfast with me again, so I kept a discreet watch over her, whenever time allowed.

She spent a lot of her time with Kavita Singh at the newspaper office, and at Lisa’s art gallery. I knew where she was at any time of the day or night, but I couldn’t talk to her. It was driving me crazy, and I got a little short-tempered.

My money changers were throwing bundles of money at me, instead of passing them to me. People started suggesting anger management remedies, after my third argument in as many days. They ranged from prostitutes, to drugs, to gang fighting, and ended with explosions.

‘Blowing shit up is the surest way to get a woman out of your mind,’ a friend confided. ‘I’ve blown up lots of stuff. People think it’s terrorists, but it’s just me, getting a woman out of my mind.’

I didn’t want to explode things, but I was still tetchy, and love-confused, so I consulted a professional.

‘You ever blow anything up for love?’ I asked my barber, Ahmed.

‘Recently?’ Ahmed replied.

Ahmed’s House of Style barber shop was one of the last to resist modernisation into a hairdressing salon. It had three red leather and chromium chairs. They were man-chairs, endowed with hypnotic powers, and no guy I knew could resist them for long.

The mirrors you faced, when you sat in those chairs, were covered with mug shots of previous victims, none of them happy. They were customers who’d agreed to have their photograph posted, in exchange for a free haircut. They were up there as a warning not to ask for, or accept, a free haircut at the House of Style.

Ahmed had a dark sense of humour, which is something you don’t search hard for in a barber, but Ahmed was a blood-in-the-bone democrat, and we rated him for that. He tolerated every opinion, and absolute freedom of speech was guaranteed in his barber shop. It was the only place I knew, in the whole city, where Muslims could call Hindus fanatics, and Hindus could call Muslims fanatics, and get all that stuff out of their systems without riots.

It was addictive. It was a bigotry bazaar, and customers seized it by the biased lapels. It was as though everyone in Ahmed’s House of Style was on truth serum. And all of it was forgiven and forgotten by everyone, as soon as a customer walked out into the street.

Ahmed shaved me with a razor as sharp as a Cycle Killer’s moustache. When you live on the wrong side of the legal tracks, the number of people you trust to shave you with a straight razor dwindles to not many. Ahmed was trustworthy, because he was so true to his craft that he couldn’t possibly kill me with a straight razor. It was against the barbers’ code.

If he wanted to kill me, he’d have to use one of his guns, like the gun he’d sold me a few months before, which was in Tito’s vault. Safe in the laws of his guild, I opened my throat to his honour and relaxed in absolute trust, and got myself shaved.

He wrapped my freshly skinned face in towels hot enough to force confessions. Satisfied that the punishment fit the crime, he whipped off the towels, and removed the shroud with a bullfighter’s flourish.

He brushed me off skilfully, powdered my neck where he’d shaved it, then offered me the entire range of his only aftershave, Ambrosia de Ahmed .

I was calm. I was cosseted by Ahmed’s professionalism. I was healed, and feeling serene. And I was just rubbing my face down with Ahmed’s ambrosia, when Danda walked in the door, calling me a motherfucker.

Danda: and me with aftershave.

I didn’t let him finish his tirade. I didn’t care what he called me, or why he called me it. I didn’t care what he wanted, or why he wanted it. I grabbed his shirt and slapped a cologne-wet palm at his red ear, and kept on slapping it until he broke free and ran away, taking a fair portion of my testiness with him.