Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘How’s he mending now?’

‘Very well. He’s a living saint now.’

‘A saint, huh?’

‘Indeed. It was a miracle that he survived my shooting alone, let alone the other corrections. People believe he’s blessed. And he certainly is blessed with a new career, dispensing blessings, in fact, near a mosque in Dadar. My advice to you regarding the Irishman is to kill him, before you can’t.’

‘Look, Tuareg, I -’

‘Seriously,’ he said, leaning toward me seriously. ‘You have no idea about this man, do you?’

‘I’m always happy to learn more,’ I said, trying as hard to get straight as I’ve ever tried to get high.

‘He’s the truth.’

‘I’m not following you.’

‘He’s a truth-finder, like me.’

‘You mean he makes people tell him things, like you did.’

‘It’s not the truth that’s dangerous,’ he said, ‘it’s someone who always knows how to find it. This Irishman is such a man. I’ve seen files on him. He was very good at what he did. He’s a younger version of me, perhaps.’

He laughed again, and puffed on his hookah pipe.

‘You have no idea how much fear you can find inside yourself,’ he said after a while, ‘until someone helps you find it.’

It was a game, a psychological game, and I don’t play games. I didn’t answer. He’d called me to his house, and sooner or later I knew he’d get to the point. He gestured with his hookah pipe, urging me to smoke. I smoked.

‘In my time with Khaderbhai,’ he continued, ‘there was no-one more powerful in the Company than I was, although I never appeared at meetings. Khaderbhai knew that I could make the truth spring from any desert, like sacred waters, even from his own lips. When he knew how good I was at my job, he had only two choices – to kill me, or to use me. There is a lesson for you in that.’

He looked at me intently for a moment.

‘No advice about killing, please,’ I said quickly.

He laughed again, and gestured with the hose of the hookah.

‘Smoke!’ he commanded.

I puffed until the coals in the lotus bowl glowed like a tiny sun, drew in a deep breath, closed off the pipe again, and blew out a stream of smoke that settled in curling waves on the wall of the arched room.

‘Excellent!’ he said. ‘Never trust a man who can’t hold his hashish.’

‘Too sane?’ I offered.

‘Because hashish talks,’ he laughed. ‘So let us continue talking.’

‘Okay. Go ahead.’

‘This Irishman, his hatred is not for you. It never was. His hatred is for Abdullah. He attacks you, because he knows how much it hurts Abdullah.’

‘What do you know about it?’

‘I know that is why the Irishman went to see your girlfriend, on the night that she died.’

I couldn’t hide the shock.

‘Yes, I know about the last night of your girlfriend’s life.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Smoke again first,’ he said, gesturing at the bowl of the hookah pipe. ‘You do understand that some revelations require a trance state, to fully comprehend their import?’

Okay , I thought. Now I get it .

‘I understand, Tuareg, that you’re performing psychological experiments on me. I wish you’d include me, so we can get it over with.’

He liked to laugh, the psychoanalytic punitory, and he had a peculiar laugh, high and jagged, but it never varied in pitch or tone. No one thing was ever funnier than another, and the laugh never swelled or chuckled or changed.

The laugh, and the walk, tell you everything , Didier once said to me.

‘I do so wish that we could have at least one more interview,’ the Tuareg said. ‘You’re quite right. It was another little experiment. Forgive me.’

‘Stop with the tests, Tuareg.’

‘I will, I will,’ he laughed. ‘I have few visitors, you see, and I never leave this home, nowadays. I miss… the field experiments. Shall I continue, about the Irishman?’

‘Please do.’

‘He murdered a man, with Abdullah.’

‘He… what?’

‘More than one life was lost, in fact,’ the Tuareg said.

It couldn’t be. I didn’t want to believe it.

‘How do you know this, Tuareg?’

He frowned, hesitating on the shore of puzzlement, ready to laugh again.

‘People tell me things,’ he said.

‘Okay, you know what, Tuareg, don’t tell me any more. Abdullah will tell me the rest.’

‘Wait! Don’t be so impatient. This information was told to me, not elicited , and you need to know this about Abdullah.’

‘I won’t talk about Abdullah, if he’s not in the room. Sorry.’

‘Wonderful,’ he said softly. ‘It was just one more little test. I hope you will forgive me. I am deprived of subjects.’

‘What is this, Tuareg? You invite me into your home, and now I need a safe word just to talk to you?’

‘No, no, let me go on. There was a businessman who owed the Company protection money, and wouldn’t pay. He was making a case for extortion, in the court, and a lot of noise for Sanjay. Abdullah was with the Irishman, when they fixed the problem. It is for him to tell you what transpired there. What I can tell you, is that it was a very bad affair.’

‘What has this got to do with the girl?’

Lisa. Lisa. I couldn’t bring myself to speak her name, in the Tuareg’s hive.

‘That is something only one other knows.’

‘Something you don’t know?’

‘Something I don’t know… yet.’

He looked at me. I think he liked my company. I’m still not sure what that said about me.

‘You know what a secret is, Shantaram?’ he asked, the wriggle of his smile twitching his long grey beard.

‘Something you don’t tell me?’ I replied, hopefully.

‘A secret is a truth untold,’ he said. ‘And Abdullah has been keeping this a secret from you, and I know that, because I asked him, just yesterday.’

‘Why did you ask him?’

‘Nice question,’ he said. ‘What made you ask it?’

‘Stop it, Tuareg, please. Why did you ask him about me? Was it because this is connected to my girlfriend?’

‘This Irishman, Concannon, knows that Abdullah loves you. He thinks that Abdullah told you about the murder they committed together. That gives him two reasons to kill you. The twenty-four-hour contract on your life was not a joke. It was a serious attempt on your life. He meant to kill you, to make Abdullah suffer, and he means to kill Abdullah.’

‘I understand, Tuareg. And thanks. Where can I find him?’

He laughed again. I was hoping he’d explain the joke. I was sitting in an archway, among an infinite array of archways, and I was so levitationally stoned on the hookah pipe that my legs were jellyfish.

‘There are only two kinds of people in this world,’ he said, smiling easily for the first time, ‘those who use, and those who are used.’

I was thinking that there were probably lots of different kinds of people, and certainly more than two, but I figured that he was actually talking about something else: the reason why he’d called me to his house.

‘I’m guessing that this information is gonna cost me something,’ I said.

‘I want a favour in return, it is true,’ he said. ‘But it is one that you will be willing to grant, I believe.’

‘How willing?’

‘I want everything you know, and come to learn, about Ranjit Choudhry.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to take him into my custody, before anyone else does.’

‘Your custody?’

‘Yes, at a facility, not far away from here.’

Sometimes, Fate gives you a handful of sand, and promises that if you squeeze it hard enough, it’ll turn to gold.