‘When Maurizio stopped with the knife … the cutting … and left the room, I waited for a long time,’ Ulla said, staring at the carpet and shivering beneath the blanket. Lisa was sitting on the floor at her feet. She gently prised the glass from Ulla’s fingers, and gave her a cigarette. Ulla accepted it, but she didn’t smoke. She looked into Lisa’s eyes, and craned her neck around to look into Abdullah’s face and then mine.
‘I was so afraid,’ she pleaded. ‘I was too much afraid. After a time I went into the room, and I saw him. He was lying on the bed. There was the rag tied on his mouth. He was tied up to the bed, and he could move only his head. He was cut up all over. On his face. On his body. Everywhere. There was so much blood. So much blood. He kept looking at me, with his black eyes staring, and staring. I left him there … and I … I ran away.’
‘You just left him there?’ Lisa gasped.
She nodded.
‘You didn’t even untie him?’
She nodded again.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Lisa spat out bitterly. She looked up, moving her anguished eyes from Abdullah’s face to mine and back again. ‘She didn’t tell me that part of it.’
‘Ulla, listen to me. Do you think he might still be there?’ I asked.
She nodded a third time. I looked at Abdullah.
‘I have a good friend in Dadar,’ he said. ‘Where is the hotel? What is the name?’
‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s next to a market. At the back, where they throw the rubbish away. The smell is very bad. No wait, I remember, I said the name in the taxi—it is called Kabir’s. That’s it. That’s the name. Oh, God! When I left him, I just thought … I was sure they would find him … and … and make him free. Do you think he might be on that bed until now7 Do you think?’
Abdullah phoned his friend, and arranged to have someone check the hotel.
‘Where’s the money?’ I demanded.
She hesitated.
‘The money, Ulla. Give it to me.’
She stood up shakily, supported by Lisa, and walked into the bedroom she’d used. Moments later she returned with a travel flight bag. She handed it to me, her expression strangely contradictory—coquette and adversary in equal parts. I opened the bag and took out several bundles of American hundred-dollar bills. I counted out twenty thousand dollars, and pushed the rest back into the bag. I returned the bag to her.
‘Ten thousand is for Hassaan,’ I declared. ‘Five thousand is to get you a new passport and a ticket to Germany. Five thousand is to clean up here, and set Lisa up in a new apartment on the other side of town. The rest is yours. And Modena’s, if he makes it.’
She wanted to reply, but a soft tap at the door announced Hassaan’s arrival. The stocky, thickly muscled Nigerian entered, and greeted Abdullah and me warmly. Like the rest of us, he was acclimatised to Bombay’s heat, and he wore a heavy serge jacket and bottle-green jeans with no trace of discomfort. He pulled the blanket from Maurizio’s body and pinched the skin, flexed a dead arm, and sniffed at the corpse.
‘I got a good plastic,’ he said, dumping a heavy plastic drop-sheet onto the floor and unfolding it. ‘We got to take off all them clothes. And any of his rings and chains. Just the man, that’s all we want. We’ll pull the teeth later.’
He paused, when I didn’t reply or react, and looked up to see me staring at the two women. Their faces were stiff with dread.
‘How about … you get Ulla in the shower,’ I said to Lisa with a grim little smile. ‘Have one yourself. I reckon we’ll be finished here in a little while.’
Lisa led Ulla into the bathroom, and ran a shower for her. We dumped Maurizio’s body onto the plastic sheet and stripped it of its clothes. His skin was pallid, matt, and in some places marbled-grey. In life Maurizio was a tall, well-built man. Dead and naked he looked thinner, feebler somehow. I should’ve pitied him. Even if we never pity them at any other time, and in any other way, we should pity the dead when we look at them, and touch them. Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. And dead men demand prayers. The silent heart, the tumbled nave of the chest unbreathing, and the guttered candles of the eyes—they summon our prayers. Each dead man is a temple in ruins, and when our eyes walk there we should pity, we should pray.
But I didn’t pity him. You got what you deserve, I thought, as we rolled his body in the plastic sheet. I felt despicable and mean-souled for thinking it, but the words wormed their way through my brain like a murderous whisper working its way through an angry mob. You got what you deserve.
Hassaan had brought a laundry-style trolley basket with him. We wheeled it into the room from the corridor. Maurizio’s body was beginning to stiffen up, and we were forced to crunch the legs to fit it into the basket. We wheeled and carried it down two flights of stairs unobserved, and out into the quiet street, where Hassaan’s delivery van was parked. His men used the van every day to deliver fish, bread, fruit, vegetables, and kerosene to his shops in the African ghetto. We lifted the wheeled basket into the back of the van, and covered the plastic-wrapped body with loaves of bread, baskets of vegetables, and trays of fish.
‘Thanks, Hassaan,’ I said, shaking his hand and passing him the ten thousand dollars. He stuffed the money into the front of his jacket.
‘No,’ he rumbled in the basso voice that commanded unquestioning respect in his ghetto. ‘I am very happy to do this work. Now, Lin, we are even. All even.’
He nodded to Abdullah and left us, walking half a block to his parked car. Raheem leaned out of the van to flash a wide smile at me before turning over the engine with a flick of his wrist. He drove away without looking back. Hassaan’s car followed it a few hundred metres behind. We never heard so much as a murmur about Maurizio again. It was rumoured that Hassaan Obikwa kept a pit in the centre of his slum. Some said the pit was full of rats. Some claimed that it was filled with scuttling crabs. Others swore that he kept huge pigs in the pit. Whatever the hungry creatures were, all the whisperers agreed that they were fed from time to time with a dead man, one piece of the corpse at a time.
‘Money you did spend well,’ Abdullah muttered, with a blank expression, as we watched the van drive away.
We returned to the apartment, and repaired the door locks so the door could be sealed shut when we all left. Abdullah phoned another contact and arranged for two reliable men to visit the apartment on the following day. Their instructions were to bring a saw, cut the couch into pieces, and remove it in rubbish sacks. They were to clean the carpet and leave the apartment in an orderly state, removing every trace of its recent occupants.
He put the phone down, and it rang at once. His contact in Dadar had news. Modena had been discovered by staff in the hotel room, and rushed to hospital. The contact had visited the hospital, and learned that the weak and wounded man had checked himself out of the ward. He was last seen speeding away in a taxi. The doctor who’d attended him doubted that he would survive the night.
‘It’s weird,’ I said when Abdullah had related the news. ‘I knew Modena, you know … I sort of knew him well. I saw him at Leopold’s … I don’t know … a hundred times. But I can’t remember his voice. I can’t remember what he sounded like. I can’t hear his voice in my head, if you know what I mean.’
‘I liked him,’ Abdullah said.
‘I’m surprised to hear you say that.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I replied. ‘He was so … so meek.’
‘He would have made a good soldier.’
I raised my eyebrows in greater surprise. Modena wasn’t just meek, it seemed to me then, he was a weak man. I couldn’t imagine what Abdullah meant. I didn’t know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.
And when all the loose ends were cut or tied, when Ulla left the city for Germany, and Lisa moved to a new apartment, and the last questions about Modena and Maurizio and Ulla faltere
d, faded, and ceased, it was the mysteriously vanished Spaniard who claimed my thoughts most often. I made two double-shuffle flights to Delhi and back in the next two weeks. I followed that by flying a seventy-two hour turnaround to Kinshasa with ten new passports for Abdul Ghani’s network. I tried to keep busy, tried to focus on the work, but the screen in my mind was filled too often with an image of him, Modena, tied to the bed and staring at Ulla, watching her leave him there, watching her walk away with the money. And gagged. No way to scream. And what he must’ve thought when she entered the room … I’m saved … And what he must’ve thought when he saw the terror in her face. And was there something else in her eyes: was it revulsion, or was it more terrible than that? Did she look relieved, perhaps? Did she seem glad to be rid of him? And what did he feel when she turned and walked away and left him there, and closed the door behind her?
When I was in prison I fell in love with a woman who was an actress in a popular television program. She came into the prison to teach classes in acting and theatre for our prison drama group. We clicked, as they say. She was a brilliant actress. I was a writer. She was the physical voice and gesture. I saw my words breathe and move in her. We communicated in the shorthand shared by artists everywhere in the world: rhythm, and elation. After a time, she told me that she was in love with me. I believed her, and I still believe that it was true. For months we fed the affair with morsels of time stolen from the acting classes, and long letters that I smuggled to her through the illegal jail mail system known as the stiffletter run.
Then trouble found me and I was thrown, literally, into the punishment unit. I don’t know how the screws found out about our romance, but soon after I arrived in the punishment block they began to interrogate me about it. They were furious. They saw her affair with a prisoner, carried on for months under their noses, as a humiliating affront to their authority and, perhaps, to their manhood. They beat me with boots, fists, and batons, trying to force me to admit that she and I had been lovers. They wanted to use my confession as the basis for laying a charge against her. During one beating they held up a photograph of her. It was a smiling publicity still that they’d found in the prison drama group. They told me that all I had to do to stop the beatings was nod my head at it. Just nod your head, they said, holding the picture before my bloody face. Just nod your head, that’s all you have to do, and it’ll all be over.
I never admitted anything. I held her love in the vault of my heart while they tried to reach it through my skin and my bones. Then one day, as I sat in my cell after a beating, trying to stop the blood flowing into my mouth from a chipped bone in my cheek and my broken nose, the trapdoor opened in the door of my cell. A letter fluttered in and landed on the floor. The trapdoor shut. I crawled over to the letter, and crawled back to the bed to read it. The letter was from her. It was a Dear John letter. She’d met a man, she said. He was a musician. Her friends had all urged her to break up with me because I was serving a twenty-year sentence in prison, and there was no future in it for either of us. She loved the new man, and she planned to marry him when his concert tour with the symphony orchestra was complete. She hoped I understood. She was sorry, but the letter was goodbye, goodbye forever, and she would never see me again.
Blood dripped onto the page from my broken face. The screws had read the letter, of course, before giving it to me. They laughed outside my door. They laughed. I listened to them as they tried to make a victory of that laughter, and I wondered if her new man, her musician, would stand up under torture for her. Maybe he would. You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.
And somehow, in the weeks after Maurizio’s death, Modena’s face, or my mind’s picture of his gagged and bloody and staring face, became confused with my own memories of that love I’d lost in prison. I wasn’t sure why: there didn’t seem to be any special reason why Modena’s fate would twist itself into the strands of my own. But it did, and I felt a darkness growing within me that was too numb for sorrow and too cold for rage.
I tried to fight it. I kept myself as busy as I could. I worked in two more Bollywood films, taking small parts—as an extra at a party and in a street scene. I met with Kavita, urging her once again to visit Anand in prison. Most afternoons, I trained at weights and boxing and karate with Abdullah. I put in a day here and there at the slum clinic. I helped Prabaker and Johnny to prepare for their weddings. I listened to Khaderbhai’s lectures, and immersed myself in the books, manuscripts, parchments, and ancient faience carvings in Abdul Ghani’s extensive private collection. But no work or weariness could drive the darkness from me. Little by little, the tortured Spaniard’s face and silent, screaming eyes became my own remembered moment: blood falling on the page, and no sound escaping my howling mouth. They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us unscreamed. That’s where loves, like elephants, drag themselves to die. It’s the place where pride allows itself to cry. And in those sleep-lonely nights and think-rambled days, Modena’s face was always there, staring at the door.
And while I worked and worried, Leopold’s changed forever. The crowd that had coalesced there dispersed and disappeared. Karla was gone. Ulla was gone. Modena was gone, and probably dead. Maurizio was dead. Once, when I was too busy to stop for a drink, I passed the wide entrance arches and I saw no face that I knew. Yet Didier persisted at his favourite table each evening, conducting his business and accepting drinks from old friends. Gradually a new crowd collected around him with a new and different style. Lisa Carter brought Kalpana Iyer with her for drinks one night, and the young assistant producer became a Leopold’s regular. Vikram and Lettie were in the last stages of preparation for their wedding, and they stopped for coffee, a snack, or a beer almost every day. Anwar and Dilip, two young journalists who worked with Kavita Singh, accepted her invitation to drop in and look the place over. On their first visit they found Lisa Carter, Kalpana, Kavita, and Lettie, with three German girls who’d worked for Lisa as extras on a film —seven beautiful, intelligent, vivacious young women. Anwar and Dilip were healthy, happy, unattached young men. They came to Leopold’s every day and night after that.
The ambience created by the new group was different to that which had flowered around Karla Saaranen. The indelible cleverness and piercing wit that were Karla’s gifts had inspired her own group of friends to a more profound discourse and a higher, thinner laughter. The new group took its more erratic tone from Didier, who combined the expressive mordancy of his sarcasm with a proclivity for the vulgar, the obscene, and the scatological. The laughter was louder, and probably more frequent, but there were no phrases that remained with me from the jokes or the jokers.
Then one night, a day after Vikram married Lettie, and a few weeks after Maurizio went into Hassaan Obikwa’s pit, as I sat amongst the new group while the cawing, shrieking gulls of good humour settled on them, sending up squawks of laughter and fluttering hands, I saw Prabaker through the open arch. He waved to me, and I left the table to join him in his cab parked nearby.
‘Hey, Prabu, what’s up? We’re celebrating Vikram’s wedding! He and Lettie got married yesterday.’
‘Yes, Linbaba. Sorry for disturbing the newly-marriages.’
‘It’s okay. They’re not here. They’ve gone to London, to meet her parents. But what’s up?’
‘Up, Linbaba?’
‘Yeah, I mean what are you doing here? Tomorrow’s your big day. I thought you’d be drinking it up with Johnny and the other guys at the zhopadpatti.’
‘After this talk only. Then I will go,’ he replied, fidgeting nervously with the steering wheel. Both front doors of the car were open for the breeze. It was a hot night. The streets were crowded with couples, families, and single young men trying to find a cool wind or a curiosity somewhere to distract them from the heat. The crowd who streamed along the road beside the parked cars began to eddy around Prabaker’s open door, and he pulled it shut hard.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Oh, yes, Lin, I am very, very fine,’ he said. Then he looked at me. ‘No. Not really, baba. In fact of speaking, I am very, very bad.’
‘What is it?’
“Well, how to tell you this thing. Linbaba, you know I am getting a marriage to Parvati tomorrow. Do you know, baba, the first time I ever saw her my Parvati, was before six years, when she was sixteen years old only. That first time, when she first came to the zhopadpatti, before her daddy Kumar had his chai shop, she was living in a little hut with her mummy and daddy and sister, the Sita who is a marriage for Johnny Cigar. And that first day, she carried a matka of water back from the company well. She carried it on her head.’
He paused, watching the aquarium of the swirling street through the windscreen of the cab. His fingernail picked at the rubber leopard’s skin cover he’d laced onto his steering wheel. I gave him time.
‘Anyway’ he continued, ‘I was watching her, and she was trying to carry that heavy matka, and walk on the rough track. And that matka, it must have been a very old one, and the clay was weak, because suddenly it just broke up in pieces, and all the water spilled down on her. She cried and cried so much. I looked at her and I felt …’
He paused, looking up at the strolling street once more.