Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘The other one?’

‘Us,’ she danced, twirling in a circle, her arms woven in the wind. ‘The other us, that we used to be.’

‘That we used to be?’

‘That we used to be.’

‘And when did we change?’

‘Tonight.’

‘We did?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the elevator, or on the stairs?’

She laughed and danced, her head moving to a beat only her arms and hips and legs could hear.

‘I’m doing a rain dance,’ she said, her hands already swimming through water. ‘It has to rain tonight.’

I glanced up at the immense disc of the archer, rotating slowly, chained to the rock of the city with steel cables. Rain. Rain means lightning. The red archer looked like a very tempting lightning rod.

‘It has to rain?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said, flopping at my feet and staring at me, her body supported on one arm. ‘And it will now, soon.’

She picked up the champagne bottle, took a mouthful and kissed me, trickling the wine into my mouth in the bruised blossom of a kiss. Our lips parted.

‘I want to have an open relationship,’ she said.

‘It can’t get much more open than this,’ I smiled.

‘I want to be with other people.’

‘Oh, that kind of open.’

‘I think you should be with other people, too. Not all the time, of course. Not if we stay together. I don’t think I’d like to see you in a permanent thing. But definitely sometimes. I could actually hook you up. I’ve got a friend who’s really hot for you. She’s so cute that I wouldn’t mind doing a threesome.’

‘ What? ’

‘It would only take a word,’ she said, staring into my eyes.

The storm was close. The wind smelled of the sea. I lifted my eyes to the sky. Pride has most of the anger, and humility most of the right. I didn’t have the right to tell her what to do, or what not to do. I didn’t even have the right to ask her. We didn’t have that kind of love.

‘I don’t have the right -’

‘I want to be with you, if you want to love me,’ she said, lying beside me, her hand on my chest. ‘But I want us to be with other people as well.’

‘You know, Lisa, you picked a pretty weird way to tell me this.’

‘Is there a way that isn’t weird?’

‘Still… ’

‘I didn’t know how you’d react,’ she pouted. ‘I still don’t know. I thought, if you don’t like it, this’ll be the last time we make love. And if you do like it, this’ll be the first time we make love as the new us, free to be what we want. Either way, it’s a memorable anniversary.’

We looked at one another. Our eyes began to smile.

‘You knew I’d completely love this stunt, didn’t you?’

‘Totally.’

‘The whole Air India archer thing.’

‘Totally.’

I leaned over her, smoothing the wind-strewn hair from her face.

‘You’re an amazing girl, Lisa. And I’m constantly amazed.’

She kissed me, her fingers vines around my neck.

‘You know,’ she murmured, ‘I did some research.’

‘You did?’

‘Yeah, on how often this place gets hit by lightning. Do you want to know?’

I didn’t care. I knew what was happening to us, but I didn’t know where we were going.

The storm was on us. The sky connected. Rain filled our mouths with silver. She pulled me onto her, into her, locked her feet in the small of my back, and held me inside, tight, loose, and tight again, daring me to follow.

A waterfall of wind and rain drummed on my back. I put my forehead to hers, sheltering her face with mine, our eyes only lashes apart. The monsoon, flesh-warm, poured from my head and splashed up from the ground. We pressed our mouths together, breathing into one another, sharing air.

She rolled me over onto my back, holding me inside her, flattening her long fingers across my chest, her arms stiff.

A roar of thunder smashed new rain from sodden clouds. Water poured in rivulets from her hair and her breasts, running into my open mouth. Water began to fill the roof of the building, ebbing around us in a secret sea, high above the Island City.

Her fingers clawed. Her back arched, cat-fierce. She slid her hands from my chest, down along my body. Sitting upright, she locked me inside, and turned her face to the sky, her arms out wide.

A drum began to beat: a heavy footstep in a hall of memory, my heart. We were breaking apart. In that instant it was clear: what we had was all we ever were, or could be.

Lightning painted the water around us on the roof. They turned above my head, Lisa and the storm and the wheel of Fate, and the whole world was red, blood red, even to that sea the sky, that sea the sky.

Ruling a criminal enterprise requires an instinct for fear, a

flair for ruthless caprice, and a talent for herding your men into that lush minion-pasture between awe and envy. Running a criminal enterprise, on the other hand, is all hard work.

I woke early after the night of the red archer, feeling that an arrow had passed through me leaving a red emptiness inside. I was at my desk in the passport factory before nine.

Three hours of detailed work with Krishna and Villu brought my counterfeit passports up to date. After a call to my contact at the Bombay Municipal Corporation, asking him to deliver copies of

the permit documents for Farzad’s treasure-hunting family, I headed

to the Colaba Causeway for a working lunch.

Most of the five-, four- and three-star hotels in South Bombay were within a three-kilometre radius of the Gateway of India monument. Ninety per cent of Bombay’s tourists could be found within the same arc of the peninsula, along with ninety-five per cent of the illegal passport trade, and eighty-five per cent of the drug trafficking.

Most businesses in the south paid protection money, called hafta , meaning a week , to the Sanjay Company. The Company exempted the owners of seven restaurants and bars in the same area. The owners of those bars allowed touts, pimps, tourist guides, pickpockets, drug dealers and black market traders connected with the Sanjay Company to use their premises as convenient drop-off points for goods, documents and information.

My passport forgery and counterfeiting unit had to monitor those seven drop-off centres for usable documents. For the most part, that job fell to me. To keep enemies and potential rivals guessing, I changed the order of the bars and restaurants every day, rotating between them often enough to confuse any sense of routine.

I started, on that day, at the Trafalgar Restaurant, only a good knife’s throw from Lightning Dilip’s desk in the Colaba police station. At the door of the corner-facing restaurant, below the three steep steps leading inside, I paused to shake hands with a Memory Man named Hrishikesh.

Memory Men were a criminal sub-caste in those years: men who lacked the foolhardiness to risk prison time by actually committing crimes, but whose intelligence and prodigious memories allowed them to make a modest living, serving the fearless fools who did.

Taking up positions in high criminal traffic areas, such as the causeway, they made it their business to know the latest figures for the day’s gold prices, the current black and white market exchange rates for six major currencies, the carat price for white diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, and half-hour fluctuations in the price of every illicit drug, from cannabis to cocaine.

‘What’s up, Kesh?’ I asked, shaking his hand.

‘No problem, baba,’ he grinned, raising his eyes to the sky for a moment. ‘ Ooperwale. ’

The word he’d used was a reference to God, and one of my favourites. More often used in the singular, Ooperwala , it could be roughly translated as The Person Upstairs . Used in the plural, the term meant The People Upstairs .