Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘Let’s call that a fine, shall we? Your knives will go to Hanuman, as a fine for that shot you took at him. Take my advice. Go now, and keep this place a secret. Don’t tell Sanjay or anyone else about it.’

‘A secret?’

‘I let you know about this place, because you can use it to contact us. If you leave a message here, it will get back to me, very quickly.’

‘Why would I wanna do that?’

‘Unless I have misjudged you, and I’m really quite good at judging characters, you may decide, one day, that you have more in common with us than you think now. And you may want to talk to us. If you’re smart, you won’t tell anyone about this address. You’ll save it, for a rainy day. But for now, for today, as the Americans say, fuck off !’

I walked with Danda to the side door, stepping through as he opened it for me. He cleared his throat noisily, and spat on the leg of my trousers before slamming the door shut.

On the ground, beside my bike, I found a scrap of paper, and used it to wipe the mess of spit from my jeans. I put the key into the ignition of the bike. I was about to kick-start the engine, when I caught sight of my battered face in the rear-view mirror. My nose wasn’t broken, for once, but both eyes were pulpy and swollen.

I kicked the bike alive, but left her in neutral gear, resting on the side-stand with the engine turning over slowly. I twitched a control lever on a panel beneath one long edge of the seat. The panel dropped down, showing my Italian stiletto knife.

I hammered on the door of the warehouse with the butt of the knife. I heard an angry voice inside as someone approached the door, cursing whoever was disturbing the peace. It was Danda. I was glad.

The door opened. Danda was swearing angrily. I grabbed at the front of his shirt, slammed him against the doorjamb, and jabbed

the stiletto against his stomach. He tried to break free, but I pushed the point deeper into his stomach until the knife spit red onto his pink shirt.

‘ Okay! Okay! Okay! ’ he shouted. ‘ Fuck! Arey, pagal hai tum? ’ Have you gone mad?

Several men began to approach me. I pressed the knife a little harder.

‘ No! No! ’ Danda shouted. ‘Get the hell back, you guys! He’s cutting me here!’

The men stopped. Without taking my eyes off Danda’s face, I spoke to Vishnu.

‘My knives,’ I mumbled, my lips as numb as the heel of a bricklayer’s hand. ‘Bring them here. Give them to me.’

Vishnu hesitated. I saw the terror in Danda’s sweat. He was more afraid of his employer’s disregard than he was of my anger.

At last, Vishnu slouched toward us with the two knives. When he handed them to me, I shoved them into the belt at the back of my trousers, holding the stiletto at Danda’s belly.

Vishnu began to tug on Danda’s shirt, wanting to pull him away from me, and back into the warehouse. I resisted, pressing the knife just a little harder against Danda’s soft stomach. A half-centimetre of the blade was inside his body. One centimetre more would penetrate an organ.

‘ Wait! Wait! ’ Danda shrieked in panic. ‘I’m bleeding! He’s gonna kill me!’

‘What do you want?’ Vishnu asked.

‘Tell me about Pakistan,’ I said.

Vishnu laughed. It was a good laugh, clear and clean. It was the kind of laugh that would’ve endeared him to me on another day, when he hadn’t introduced me to his pool furniture.

‘I like you, and I feel like killing you, at the same time,’ he said, his dark-rimmed eyes gleaming. ‘That’s a peculiar talent you’ve got.’

‘Tell me about Pakistan,’ I said.

‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’ Vishnu sighed, as his smile died. ‘We saw that you went to a Council meeting, and with your Goa trip and all, we assumed, like, that you must be knowing what’s going on. Your guys are really keeping you in the dark, my friend. That’s dangerous, for you. Not to mention a little… insulting , na ?’

‘Your man here will be in the dark any second now, if you don’t answer my question. I wanna know what this was all about. Tell me about Pakistan .’

‘If I tell you what I know, you’ll tell Sanjay,’ he replied, stifling a yawn.

There was a fine but deep scar over his right eye. He rubbed a fingertip along the cicatrice as he spoke.

‘That would give Sanjay an advantage. I can’t allow that. Let Danda go. Get on your motorcycle and go. If you kill Danda, I’ll have to kill you. He’s my cousin. And I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want to kill anyone. Not today. It’s my wife’s birthday, you know, and there’s a party.’

He shifted his gaze to stare at the sodden clouds overhead.

‘Go fast,’ he said, looking back at me. ‘We thought you knew something, but it’s obvious that you don’t. When you know more, and you want to talk, you know where to contact me. No hard feelings. These things happen. As the Americans say, I am owing one on you.’

‘Not as much as I’m owing one on you,’ I said, stepping away from Danda, and backing toward the bike.

He laughed again.

‘Let’s call this even, and start fresh and clean. Leave me a message here, when you want to get in touch. One way or another, I’ll come to know.’

Every man takes a beating in his own way. My way, in those years, was to learn everything I could about the men who beat me, and then wait for Fate to meet me halfway.

When I escaped from prison, I punched a hole in the ceiling of an office, climbed through to the roof, and escaped over the front wall in broad daylight, with my friend. The ceiling we escaped through was in the office of the Chief Security Officer, the man responsible for having my friend, and me, and dozens of other men beaten, beyond reason or law.

I’d watched him for months. I’d studied his habits and moods. And I knew the seven-minute window, every day, when he’d be out of his office, leaving the door unlocked. We stood on his desk to punch the hole to freedom. He lost his job, when we escaped, and Fate took a holiday.

I don’t like being slapped around. I wanted to know about the men who’d done it. I wanted to know everything about them.

At the second gap in the road divider I turned the bike around, and rode back the way I’d come. I parked in the shade of some trees beside a little row of shops, on the opposite side of the street from the warehouse.

I turned off the engine. Passers-by and shopkeepers stared at my bloody face, but hurried away or averted their eyes when I stared back at them. After a time, a man selling cleaning cloths for cars and motorcycles approached me. I bought one of the longest cloths, but before giving the cloth-seller his money, I asked him to run some errands for me.

In five minutes he returned with a packet of codeine tablets, some adhesive bandages, a bottle of vodka, and two clean towels.

I paid the cloth-seller, found an open drain, and washed my face with a cloth soaked in vodka, cleaning off the running wounds with dabs from the clean towel.

A barber serving clients beneath a conversation-tree offered me his mirror. I fixed it to a ribbon on the tree, and dressed the two worst cuts on my face. Finally I took the cloth-seller’s black rag, and wound it around my forehead in an Afghan turban.

The clients and friends squatting around the barber’s chair in the shade nodded and wagged varying degrees of disapproval or consolation.

I took an empty glass, poured myself a shot of vodka and drank it. Holding bottle and glass in one hand, I ripped open a packet of codeine tablets with my teeth, shook four into the glass, and half-filled it with vodka. The level of approval rose among the shaving club. When I drank the glass down and offered the men the rest of the bottle, a little cheer went up.