He made two mistakes. The first was to fight on the back foot. In the surprise of his sneak attack he’d first rushed at me and, with two slashes of the knife, he’d cut me across the chest and the forearm. He should’ve pressed on to finish it, hacking and tearing and stabbing at me, but he stepped back instead and waved the knife in little circles. He might’ve expected me to submit—most of his foes surrendered quickly, defeated by their fear of him as much as by the sight of their own blood. He might’ve been so sure he would win that he was simply toying with me and teasing out the thrill of the kill. Whatever the reason, he lost the advantage and he lost the fight in that first backward step. He gave me time to drag my knife from inside my shirt and shape up to box him. I saw the surprise in his eyes, and it was my cue to counter-attack.
His second mistake was that he held the knife as if it was a sword and he was in a fencing match. A man uses an underhand grip when he expects his knife, like a gun, to do the fighting for him. But a knife isn’t a gun, of course, and in a knife fight it isn’t the weapon that does the fighting: it’s the man. The knife is just there to help him finish it. The winning grip is a dagger hold, with the blade downward, and the fist that holds it still free to punch. That grip gives a man maximum power in the downward thrust and an extra weapon in his closed fist.
He dodged and weaved in a crouch, slashing the knife in sweeping arcs with his arms out wide. He was right-handed. I adopted a southpaw-boxing stance, the dagger in my right fist. Stepping with the right foot, and dragging the left to keep my balance, I took the fight to him. He ripped the blade at me twice and then lunged forward. I side-stepped, and punched at him with a three-punch combination, right-left-right. One of them was a lucky punch. His nose broke, and his eyes watered and burned, blurring his vision. He lunged again, and tried to bring the knife in from the side. I grabbed at his wrist with my left hand, stepped into the space between his legs, and stabbed him in the chest. I was trying for the heart or a lung. It didn’t hit either one, but still I rammed the spike up to the hilt into the meaty flesh beneath his collarbone. It broke the skin of his back just below the shoulder blade.
He was jammed against a section of wall between a washing machine and a clothes-dryer. Using the spike to hold him in place, and with my left hand locked to his knife-wrist, I tried to bite his face and neck, but he whipped his head from side to side so swiftly that I opted for head-butts instead. Our heads cracked together several times until one desperate, wrenching effort of his legs sent us sprawling onto the floor together. He dropped his knife in the fall, but the spike tore free from his chest. He began to drag himself toward the door of the laundry. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to escape or seeking a new advantage. I didn’t take a chance. My head was level with his legs. Thrashing together on the ground, I reached up and grabbed the belt of his trousers. Using it for leverage, I stabbed him in the thigh twice, and again, and again. I struck bone more than once, feeling the jarring deflection all the way up my arm. Releasing his belt, I stretched my left hand out for his knife, trying to reach it so that I could stab him with that one as well.
He didn’t scream. I’ll say that much for him. He shouted hard for me to stop, and he shouted that he gave up—I give up! I give up! I give up!—but he didn’t scream. I did stop, and I let him live. I scrambled to my feet. He tried again to crawl toward the door of the laundry. I stopped him with my foot on his neck, and stomped down on the side of his head. I had to stop him. If he’d made it out of the laundry while I was there, and the prison guards saw him, I would’ve spent six months or more in the punishment unit.
While he lay there groaning on the floor, I took off my bloody clothes and changed into a clean set. One of the prisoners who cleaned the jail was standing outside the laundry, grinning in at us through the doorway with unspiteful enjoyment. I passed him the bundle of my soiled clothes. He smuggled the bloodied clothes away in his mop-bucket, and threw them into the incinerator behind the kitchen. On my way out of the laundry I handed the weapons to another man, who buried them in the prison garden. When I was safely away from the scene, the man who’d tried to kill me limped into the prison chief’s office, and collapsed. He was taken to hospital. I never saw him again, and he never opened his mouth. I’ll say that much for him, too. He was a thug and a stand-over man, and he tried to kill me for no good reason, but he wasn’t an informer.
Alone in my cell, after the fight, I examined my wounds. The gash on my forearm had made a clean cut through a vein. I couldn’t report it to the medical officer because that would’ve connected me to the fight and the wounded man. I had to hope that it would heal. There was a deep slash from my left shoulder to the centre of my chest. It was also a clean cut, and it was bleeding freely. I burned two packets of cigarette papers all the way down to white ash in a metal bowl, and rubbed the ash into both wounds. It was painful, but it sealed the wounds immediately and stopped the bleeding.
I never spoke of the fight to anyone, but most of the men knew about it soon enough, and they all knew that I’d survived the test. The white scar on my chest, the scar that men saw every day in the prison shower, reminded them of my willingness to fight. It was a warning, like the bright bands of colour on the skin of a sea snake. It’s still there, that scar, as long and white after all these years as it ever was. And it’s still a kind of warning. I touch it, and I see the killer pleading for his life; I remember, reflected in the fright-filled domes of his eyes, fate’s mirror, the sight of the twisted, hating thing that I became in the fight.
My first knife fight wasn’t my last, and as I stood over Maurizio Belcane’s dead body I felt the cold, sharp memory of my own experiences of stabbing and being stabbed. He was face down in a kneeling posture, with his upper body on a corner of the couch and his legs on the floor. Beside his slackly folded right hand there was a razor-sharp stiletto resting on the carpet. A black-handled carving knife was buried to the crank in his back, a little to the left of his spine and just below the shoulder blade. It was a long, wide, sharp knife. I’d seen that knife before, in Lisa’s hand, the last time Maurizio had made the mistake of coming to the apartment uninvited. That was one lesson he should’ve learned the first time. We don’t, of course. It’s okay, Karla once said, because if we all learned what we should learn, the first time round, we wouldn’t need love at all. Well, Maurizio had learned that lesson in the end, the hard way—face down in his own blood. He was what Didier called a fully mature man. When I’d chided Didier once for being immature, he’d told me that he was proud and delighted to be immature. The fully mature man or woman, he said, has about two seconds left to live.
Those thoughts rolled over one another in my mind like the steel balls in Captain Queeg’s hand. It was the knife that did it, of course: the memory of stabbing and being stabbed. I remembered the vivid seconds every time I’d been stabbed. I remembered the knives cutting me, entering my body. I could still feel the steel blades inside me. It was like burning. It was like hate. It was like the most evil thought in the world. I shook my head and breathed in deeply, and looked at him again.
The knife might’ve ruptured a lung and penetrated to the heart. Whatever it had done, it had finished him fast. His body had fallen onto the couch and, once there, he’d hardly moved at all. I took a handful of his thick, black hair and lifted his head. His dead eyes were half open, and his lips were pulled back slightly from his teeth in a rictal smile. There was remarkably little blood. The couch had absorbed the big spill. We’ve gotta get rid of the couch, I heard myself thinking. The carpet had suffered no great damage, and could be cleaned. The room was also little disturbed by the violence. A leg was broken on the coffee table, and the locks on the front door hung askew. I turned my attention to the women.
Ulla bore a cut on her face from the cheekbone almost to the chin. I cleaned the wound and pressed it together with tape all along the length of it. The cut wasn’t deep, and I expected it to heal quickly, but I was sure it would leave a scar. By chance, th
e blade had followed the natural curve of her cheek and jaw, adding a flash of emphasis to the shape of her face. Her beauty was injured by the wound but not ravaged by it. Her eyes, however, were abnormally wide and pierced with a terror that refused to fade. There was a lungi on the arm of the couch beside her. I put it around her shoulders, and Lisa gave her a cup of hot, sweet chai. When I covered Maurizio’s body with a blanket she shuddered. Her face crumpled into puckers of pain, and she cried for the first time.
Lisa was calm. She was dressed in a pullover and jeans, an outfit that only a Bombay native could wear on such a humid, still, and hot night. There was the mark of a blow around her eye and on her cheek. When Ulla was quiet again we crossed the room to stand near the door, out of her hearing. Lisa took a cigarette, bent her head to light it from my match, and then exhaled, looking directly into my face for the first time since I’d entered the apartment.
‘I’m glad you came. I’m glad you’re here. I couldn’t help it. I had to do it, he —’
‘Stop it, Lisa!’ I interrupted her. The tone was harsh, but my voice was quiet and warm. ‘You didn’t stab him. She did. I can see it in her eyes. I know the look. She’s still stabbing him now, still going over it in her mind. She’ll have that look for a while. You’re trying to protect her, but you won’t help her by lying to me.’
She smiled. Under the circumstances, it was a very good smile. If we hadn’t been standing next to a dead man with a knife in his heart, I’d have found it irresistible.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t want her to get hurt, that’s all,’ she replied evenly. The smile closed up in the thin, grim line of her pursed lips.
‘Neither do I. What happened?’
‘He busted in, slashed her up. He was crazy, out of his mind. I think he was on something. He was screaming at her, and she couldn’t answer him. She was even crazier than he was. I spent an hour with her before he crashed in here. She told me about Modena. I’m not surprised she was crazy. It’s … fuck, Lin, it’s a bad story. She was out of her mind because of it. Anyway, he crashed through the door like a gorilla, and he slashed her. He was covered in blood—Modena’s, I think. It was pretty fuckin’ scary. I tried to jump him with the knife from the kitchen. He socked me pretty good in the eye and knocked me on my ass. I fell on the couch. He got on top of me, and he was just about to start on me with that switchblade of his when Ulla gave it to him in the back. He was dead in a second. I swear. A second. One second. Just like that. He was looking at me, then he was dead. She saved my life, Lin.’
‘I think it’s more likely that you saved hers, Lisa. If you weren’t here, it would be her hugging the couch with a knife in her back.’
She began to tremble and shiver. I took her in my arms and held her for a while, supporting her weight. When she was calm again, I brought her a kitchen chair and she sat down shakily. I phoned around, and found Abdullah. Explaining what had happened in as few words as possible, I told him to contact Hassaan Obikwa in the African ghetto and bring him to the apartment with a car.
Little by little, as we waited for Abdullah and Hassaan, the story emerged. Ulla was suddenly tired, but I couldn’t let her sleep. Not yet. After a while she began to speak, adding a detail here and there to Lisa’s account, and then gradually telling the whole story herself.
Maurizio Belcane met Sebastian Modena in Bombay, where both of them made money from the work they arranged for foreign prostitutes. Maurizio was the only son of rich Florentine parents who’d died in a plane crash when he was a child. By his own account, repeated to Ulla whenever he was drunk, he was raised with indifferent duteousness by distant relatives who’d tolerated him reluctantly in the loveless shelter of their home. At eighteen he seized the first tranche of his inheritance and fled to Cairo. By the age of twenty-five he’d squandered the fortune left to him by his parents. The remnants of his family cast him out, no less for his penury than for the many scandals that had pursued his profligate progress through the Middle East and Asia. At twenty-seven he found himself in Bombay, brokering sex for European prostitutes.
The point man for Maurizio’s operation in Bombay was the diffident, dour Spaniard, Sebastian Modena. The thirty-year-old sought out and approached wealthy Arab and Indian customers. His short, slight frame and timid manner worked to his advantage, putting the customers at ease by allaying their fears and suspicions. He took one-fifth of the cut that Maurizio claimed from the foreign girls. Ulla believed that Modena was happy enough in the unequal relationship, where he did most of the dirty work and Maurizio took most of the dirty money, because he saw himself as a pilot fish and the tall, handsome Italian as a shark.
His background was very different to Maurizio’s. One of thirteen children in an Andalusian Gypsy family, Modena had grown up with a notion of himself as the runt of the litter. Schooled more in crime than in scholarship, and barely literate, he’d worked his way from swindle to grift to petty larceny across Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India. He preyed on tourists, never taking too much and never remaining too long in any one place. Then he met Maurizio, and for two years he’d pandered for the pimp, procuring clients and putting them together with the girls in Maurizio’s stable.
They might’ve gone on in that way for much longer, but one day Maurizio walked into Leopold’s with Ulla. From the first moment that their eyes met, Ulla told us, she knew that Modena was hopelessly in love with her. She encouraged him because his devotion to her was useful. She’d been purchased from Madame Zhou’s Palace, and Maurizio was determined to recover his investment costs as quickly as possible. He’d instructed the smitten Modena to find work for her twice a day, every day, until the debt was repaid. Tortured by what he saw as betrayals of his own love, Modena pressed his partner to release Ulla from the obligation. Maurizio refused, ridiculing the Spaniard’s affection for a working girl, and insisting that he put her to work day and night.
Ulla paused in her story when a tap at the door announced Abdullah’s arrival. The tall Iranian entered silently, dressed in black like a thing made from the night itself. He greeted me with a hug and nodded gently to Lisa. She came forward and kissed him on the cheek. He lifted the blanket to look at Maurizio’s body. Nodding and turning down the corners of his mouth in professional approval of the single killing thrust, he let the blanket fall, and muttered a prayer.
‘Hassaan is busy. He will be here after about one hour,’ he said.
‘Did you tell him what I want him to do?’
‘He knows,’ he replied, raising one eyebrow in a tight smile.
‘Is it still quiet outside?’
‘I checked, before I came inside. The building is quiet, and the street all around.’
‘There’s been no reaction from the neighbours, so far. He took the door out with one kick, Lisa says, and there wasn’t all that much shouting and screaming. There was loud music playing next door when I got here. It was a party or something. I don’t think anyone knows about this.’
‘We … we have to call someone!’ Ulla shouted suddenly, standing and letting the lungi fall from her shoulders. ‘We should … call a doctor … call the police …’
Abdullah sprinted to her, and wrapped her in his arms with surprisingly tender compassion. He sat her down again and rocked her, murmuring reassuringly. I watched them with a little pinch of shame because I knew that I should’ve comforted her myself, long before that, and in just the same gentle way. But the fact was that Maurizio’s death had compromised me, and I was afraid. I’d had reason enough to want him dead, and I’d beaten him with my fists for it. That was, in other words, a motive for murder. People knew that. I was there in the room with Lisa and Ulla, and it seemed that I was helping them, responding to their call for help, but that wasn’t all of it. I was also there to help myself. I was there to make sure that no part of the sticky web of his death clung to me. And that’s why there was nothing gentle in me, and all the tenderness came from an Iranian killer named Abdullah Taheri.
&n
bsp; Ulla began to speak again. Lisa poured her a drink of vodka and lime juice. She gulped at it, and went on with her story. It took quite a while because she was nervous and afraid. She skipped important details from time to time, and she was loose with her chronology, ordering the facts as they occurred to her in the telling rather than as they’d happened. We had to ask questions and prompt her into a more sequential account, but little by little we got it all.
Modena had been the first to meet the Nigerian—the businessman who’d wanted to spend sixty thousand dollars on heroin. He introduced him to Maurizio, and too quickly, too easily, the African had parted with his money. Maurizio stole the money and planned to move on, but Modena had other ideas. He seized his chance to free Ulla and rid himself of Maurizio, the man he resented for enslaving her. He snatched the money from him, and went into hiding, prompting the Nigerian to send his hit-squad to Bombay. To distract the understandably bloodthirsty Africans while he searched for Modena, Maurizio had given them my name and told them I’d stolen their money. Abdullah and I knew the next part of that story well enough.
For all his cringing cowardice with me, and his dread that the Nigerians might return to hunt him down, Maurizio Belcane couldn’t cut his losses and leave the city. He couldn’t rid his heart of the killing rage he felt for Modena and the righteous lust he felt for the money they’d stolen together. For weeks he watched Ulla and followed her everywhere. He knew that, sooner or later, Modena would contact her. When the Spaniard did make that contact, Ulla went to him. Without realising it, she also led the crazed Italian to the cheap Dadar hotel where his former partner was hiding. Maurizio burst into the room, but he found Modena alone. Ulla was gone. The money was gone. Modena was ill. Some sickness had ruined him. Ulla thought it might’ve been malaria. Maurizio gagged him, tied him to the sickbed, and went to work on him with the stiletto. Modena, tougher than anyone knew and taciturn to the end, refused to tell him that Ulla was hiding in an adjoining room, only footsteps away, with all the money.