Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘Oh, shit.’

‘Farid went crazy. He shot his way into the police cells.’

‘What happened?’

‘The cops ran, and Farid killed three Scorpions who were in the cells for the fire. That big guy, Hanuman, he saved Vishnu. He took six bullets, but he’s gone for good, the big man. The moustache guy, Danda, he’s also gone.’

‘What happened to Farid?’

‘The cops came back with a lot of guns, and killed Farid. Shot him sixty times, they say.’

‘ Y’Allah .’

‘Get the fuck off the street, man. It’s cowboys and Indians out there, and I’m too Indian for this shit.’

He rode away quickly, a lone despatch courier in a militarised zone. He was scared, and angry: always a bad combination in a man.

I’d never seen Ravi scared. He was one of the calm ones, and every gang has them. But the loss of blunt-headed Amir, the first to dance when any music played, the first to start punching when the action started, and Farid the Fixer, the champion boxer, both full Sanjay Council members, scared the young gangster.

Scorpions had already died. Company men had died. More would join them in the dark red fall. Ravi was living his life one night at a time. It was war. It was the failure of everything.

I rode back to the Amritsar. I needed to sleep, and then find out what hadn’t gone crazy on the street. I needed to know how much of my business was still running, and how much was running away.

I parked the bike in the alleyway that split the hotel. I’d parked there too often, I guess, because I wasn’t paying enough attention when I wiped the bike down for the night.

I stood up, and Madame Zhou was there, very close to me. The twins were also there, one on either side of her.

There were two other men: short and thin men, with the kind of hungry in their eyes that nothing can feed. They had their hands in the pockets of the jackets. They were her acid throwers.

‘Madame,’ I said. ‘No offence, but if your acid throwers start to take their hands out of their pockets, I’m gonna go crazy. And when it’s all over, I won’t be the only one dead or burned.’

She laughed. To be sure that I knew she was laughing, perhaps, she switched on a light beneath her veil. It was a battery-powered party tube-light, curved around her neck like a necklace, inside her black lace veil.

The veil was suspended from a rigid mantilla, high over her head, made from something black and shiny: dead spiders, was my guess. The lace veil met a black taffeta dress that brushed the ground, hiding her feet.

She must’ve been in very high platform shoes, because the tiny woman was almost eye to veil with me. The light shone through the lace, illuminating her face from below.

I think it was intended to be a devastating revelation of her famous beauty. It wasn’t. She was still laughing.

‘You know, I’m tired, Madame,’ I said.

‘Your friend, Vikram, died tonight,’ she replied quickly, turning off the light.

I got it. The light wasn’t for turning on: it was for turning off. In the sudden darkness her face was a shadow, breathing.

‘Vikram?’

‘The cowboy,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’

I stared at her black-space face, angry, and thinking about her acid throwers, and Karla.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It is true,’ she said.

She cocked her head to the side a little, watching me with invisible eyes.

I was watching the acid throwers. I’d seen their victims. I knew some of them: people with faces smeared of feature, a stretched mask of skin, with holes cut for the vanished nose and mouth to breathe, and no eyes at all.

They begged along the strip, communicating through touch. Thinking about them made me angrier, which was good, because I was scared.

‘How do you know that?’

‘It is a matter of record, now,’ she replied. ‘It is a police case. He committed suicide.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘It can,’ she whispered, ‘and it is. He took a week’s supply of heroin, and he injected himself with it. There was a suicide note. I have a copy. Would you like to see it?’

‘You know, Madame, I’ve only met you twice, and I already wish I hadn’t met you the first time.’

‘I gave him the drugs,’ Madame Zhou said.

Oh, no , my mind pleaded. Please, no .

‘Cheapest murder I ever committed,’ she said. ‘I wish all the people I hate were junkies. It would make life so much easier.’

She laughed. I was breathing hard. It was a tough job keeping a close watch on four of them: five, if you counted the spider about the size of a small woman, named Madame Zhou.

The arched alleyway was dark, and empty. There was no-one on the streets.

‘He cheated me,’ she hissed, ‘and about jewellery. No-one cheats me. Especially not about jewellery. This is a warning, Shantaram. Stay away from her.’

‘Why don’t you come back, and talk to Karla about it in person? I’d like to watch.’

‘Not Karla, you fool, Kavita Singh. Stay away from Kavita.’

I drew my knives, slowly. The twins slipped clubs from their sleeves. The acid throwers shifted on the balls of their feet, ready to throw.

Madame Zhou was only a lunge away. With the right momentum, I could pick her up and throw her at the acid throwers. It was a plan. It was a plan that was a heartbeat away from happening.

‘Let’s do this,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

‘Not tonight, Shantaram,’ she said, stepping away. ‘But I’m sure that’s not the first time you’ve heard those words.’

She backed off slowly, tottering on her platforms, her dress dragging across the ground, a taffeta shadow scaring rats back into their hollows.

The acid throwers scampered away. The twins backed off in step with Madame Zhou, scowling at me.

She’d threatened Karla, and her attention had shifted to Kavita. She was gone a long time before I stopped wanting to follow them, and finish it. But enough dead: enough dead, for one night.

I went back to my rooms, drank something, smoked the last tiny piece of Lisa’s heavenly dope, danced to music for a while, and then opened my journal to write.

Farid and Amir, gone. Hanuman and Danda, gone. Boats and huts on the beach burned. And Vikram, gone. Vikram, the love-train rider: Vikram, gone.

Change is the blood of time. The world was changing, out of time, and moving beneath me like a whale, soaring for air. The chess pieces were moving themselves. Nothing was the same, and I knew that nothing would be better, for a while.

The newly dead are ancestors, too. We respect the chain of life and love when we celebrate the life, not mourn the death. We all know that, and we all say it, when loved ones leave.

But even though we know that death is the truth, and we sing stories to ourselves, the pain of loss is something we can’t deny, except by wounding tenderness.

It’s a good thing, the crying. It isn’t rational, and it can’t be. It’s a purity beyond reason. It’s the essence of what we are, and the mirror of what we’ll become. Love.

I cried for Vikram. I knew that he wasn’t murdered, but released: a soul-prisoner, on the run forever. But still I filled the empty well with dancing, and tears.

And I ranted, and I raved, and I wrote strange things that should be true in my journal. My hand ran back and forth across the pages like an animal in a cage. When my eyes blurred, and the black words I’d written seemed like the black lace of Madame Zhou’s veil, I slept in a web of bad dreams: caught, and waiting for death to creep toward me.

Sin is disconnection, and nothing disconnects us from one another more completely than the great sin, war. The struggle for control of southern crime caused friends to turn on one another, enemies to strike without warning and the cops to plead for peace, because the feud was ruining business for everyone.