Gregory Roberts: The Mountain Shadow

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘What is it with you and meeting hard-to-meet people?’

‘It was Karla, wasn’t it? An amateur is anyone who hasn’t learned how not to do it. Nice.’

I stopped, standing close to him.

‘Let’s make a deal,’ I said. ‘You don’t mention Karla again, to me.’

‘That’s not a deal,’ he said, smiling easily.

‘Glad you understand. We were not minding if we do have a drink, remember?’

We walked into Leopold’s beer-and-curry-scented cave. It was late afternoon, the lull before the storm of tourists, drug dealers, black marketers, racketeers, actors, students, gangsters, and good girls with an eye for bad boys squalled in through the wide arches to shout, eat, drink and chance their souls on the wet roulette of Leopold’s thirty restaurant tables.

It was Didier’s favourite time in the bar, nudging out second place, which was every other hour that the bar was open, and I found him sitting alone at his regular table, set against the back wall, with a clear view of all three entrances.

He was reading a newspaper, holding the pages at arm’s length.

‘Holy shit, Didier! A newspaper! You should warn people about a shock like that.’

I turned to the waiter, uneponymously named Sweetie, who was loitering with intent, his pink nametag loitering sideways on his jacket.

‘What’s the matter with you, Sweetie? You should’ve put a sign outside, or something.’

‘Fuck you very much,’ Sweetie replied, shifting a match from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue.

Didier tossed the newspaper aside, and hugged me.

‘You wear the sun well,’ he said.

He held me for a moment, examining me with forensic thoroughness.

‘You look like the stand-out . That is the expression? Not the star actor, but the one who takes all the punishment.’

‘The expression is stand- in , but I’ll take stand-out. Say hello to another stand-out, Naveen Adair.’

‘Ah, the detective!’ Didier said, shaking hands warmly, and running a professional eye over Naveen’s tall, athletic frame. ‘I’ve heard all about you, from my journalist friend, Kavita Singh.’

‘She covered you, too,’ Naveen replied with a smile. ‘And may I say, it’s an honour to meet the man behind all the stories.’

‘I did not expect a young man of such impeccable manners,’ Didier responded quickly, gesturing toward the chairs, and signalling to Sweetie. ‘What will you have? Beers? Sweetie! Three very chilled beers, please!’

‘Fuck you very much,’ Sweetie mumbled, his end-of-shift slippers dragging to the kitchen.

‘He’s a repellent brute,’ Didier said, watching Sweetie leave. ‘But I feel myself strangely drawn to the effortlessness of his misery.’

We were three men at the table, but we all sat in a line with our backs to the wall, facing across the scatter of tables to the wide arches, open to the street. Didier let his eyes rove around the restaurant: a castaway, scanning the horizon.

‘ Well ,’ he said, inclining his head toward me. ‘The adventure in Goa?’

I took a small package of letters wrapped in blue ribbons from my pocket, and handed it across. Didier took the bundle and cradled it in his palms for a moment, as if it were an injured bird.

‘Did you… did you have to beat him for them?’ he asked me, still staring at the letters.

‘No.’

‘Oh,’ he sighed, looking up quickly.

‘Should I have?’

‘No, of course, not,’ Didier explained, sniffing back a tear. ‘Didier could not pay for such a thing.’

‘You didn’t pay me at all.’

‘Technically, in paying nothing , I am still paying. Am I right, Naveen?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Naveen replied. ‘So, of course, I agree with everything.’

‘It’s just,’ Didier sniffed, looking at the letters, ‘I rather thought he might have put up some little fight , perhaps, to keep my love letters. Some… some show of lingering affection.’

I recalled the look of simian hatred on the face of Gustavo, Didier’s ex-lover, as he screamed curses on Didier’s genitals, and hurled the little bundle of letters into a rubbish pit below the back window of his bungalow.

I had to pierce his ear with my thumbnail to make him climb into the pit, retrieve the letters, wipe them clean and hand them to me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Affection has moved on.’

‘Well, thank you, Lin,’ Didier sighed, putting the letters in his lap as the beers arrived. ‘I would have gone down there myself to get the letters, but for that little matter of the outstanding arrest warrant in my name, in Goa.’

‘You’ve gotta keep track of these warrants, Didier,’ I said. ‘I can’t keep up. You could paper a room with my fake yellow slips. It’s wearing me out, clearing you of all charges.’

‘But there are only four outstanding arrest warrants in all of India, Lin.’

‘ Only four?’

‘At one time, it was nine. I think it must be that I am becoming… reformed ,’ Didier puffed, curling his lips at the distasteful word.

‘A slander,’ Naveen observed.

‘Why, thank you. You… are a very agreeable young man. Do you like guns?’

‘I’m not good with relationships,’ Naveen answered, finishing his beer and standing. ‘I can only bond with the gun in my hand.’

‘I can help you with that,’ Didier laughed.

‘I’ll bet you can,’ Naveen laughed back. ‘Lin, that guy in the suit, the one following the Zodiac Georges, I’ll look into it, and get back to you here.’

‘Be careful. We don’t know what this is, yet.’

‘It’s cool,’ he smiled, all fearless, immortal youth. ‘I’ll take my leave. Didier, it has been a pleasure and an honour. Goodbye.’

We watched him out into the early evening haze. Didier’s brows edged together.

‘What?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing!’ he protested.

‘What, Didier?’

‘I said nothing!’

‘I know, but I also know that look.’

‘What look ?’ he demanded, as if I’d accused him of stealing my drink.

Didier Levy was in his mid-forties. The first powder snow of winter wove spirals through his dark, curly hair. Soft, brilliantly blue irises hovered in the anemone patchwork of red veins filling the whites of his eyes, making him seem young and dissolute in the same smile: the mischievous boy still hiding inside the ruining man.

He drank any kind of alcohol, at any time of the day or night, dressed like a dandy, long after other dandies melted in the heat, smoked tailor-made joints from a bespoke cigarette case, was a professional at most crimes, the master of a few, and was openly gay, in a city where that was still an oxymoron.

I’d known him for five years, through struggles against enemies, within and without. He was brave: the kind of man who’ll face a gun with you and never run, no matter what the fall.

He was authentic. He expressed the uniqueness when what we are, is what we’re free to become. I’d known him through lost loves, alarming lust, and kneeling epiphanies, his and mine. And I’d spent enough of those long, lonely wolf nights with him to love him.

‘ That look,’ I repeated. ‘The look that says you know something that everybody else should know. The look that says I told you so , before you tell me anything at all. So tell me, before you told me so.’

Didier’s outraged expression crumbled in smiles, and fell into a laugh.

‘It is more of a told me so,’ he said. ‘I like that boy very much. More than I expected to. And more than I should, because this Naveen Adair, he has a reputation.’