Once crime starts to pay, you soon learn that the key to survival isn’t making money, it’s keeping it. Every black rupee you make has a hundred hands reaching out to take it away. And you can’t call the cops, because the cops are often the ones taking it away.
And when the cash you make comes in bundles, and you don’t have any burning desire to spend it, because you’re a rainy day kind of a guy, few decisions are more important than where you decide to keep it.
The first rule is not to put it all in one place. If things get bad, and you’ve gotta give something up, a plump reserve is a good idea. I kept some at home as escape money. I left some with Tito, Didier’s man. He gave me friend rates of two per cent. He still called it ten per cent, but only charged me two.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, when he muttered ten per cent again, out of habit. ‘My mind is angry with me.’
‘Listen, Tito, if someone comes calling, telling you that I’m tied up in a cellar somewhere, and being tortured, and uses the code 300 Spartans, just give him the money, okay?’
‘Done,’ he said. ‘For ten per cent.’
Chapter Fifty-Two
Every woman of a certain age is automatically an auntie, in India. Half-Moon Auntie, who ran a black bank in the fish market, was maybe fifty years old, and so voluptuous in her seductive powers that no man could stay more than ten minutes in her company, it was said, without proposing to her. And Half-Moon Auntie, a widow not in mourning, did everything in her considerable range of talents to make the minutes of any transaction roll into double digits.
So far, I’d always been a nine-minute guy with Half-Moon Auntie: deal done, and outta there.
‘Hi, Half-Moon Auntie,’ I said, handing a paper-wrapped bundle of rupees to her assistant clerk, sitting behind a fish counter. ‘How are you?’
She kicked a plastic chair at me. It slid to a stop at my feet. She’d done it before. She did it every time, in fact.
Decades of fish oil, soaked into the concrete, made the surface almost frictionless. It was hard to walk around. It was hard to keep standing up, in fact. It was as if the dead fish, soaked into the stone around Half-Moon Auntie’s rope bed, wanted to make us fall down. And people did, every day.
I took the chair, knowing that there was no such thing as a fast getaway from Half-Moon Auntie’s black bank.
I was sitting at the end of a very long stainless steel cutting table. It was one of several in the fish market, an area the size of a football field under waves of slanted tin and clotted skylight crests.
Work had stopped for the day, and the shouting had shrunk into a silence that was, perhaps, like the gasps of fish, drowning in our air, just as we drown in theirs.
I could hear Half-Moon Auntie swallowing. I could hear the clock on the wall ticking. I could hear Auntie’s assistant, counting the money slowly, carefully.
It was dark, but the shade was hotter than the sunny street outside. The smell had been strong enough to close my mouth, at first, but it began to settle into a low hum of fish not in the sea.
Someone started to run a hose at the far end of the market. Blood and pieces of dead things floated past in a gutter chiselled into the concrete floor.
Beside the gutter was Half-Moon Auntie, standing in her slippers, her rope bed covered by a hand-sewn quilt as silver as the fins of a mirror fish.
‘So, Shantaram,’ she said. ‘They say that a woman has your heart.’
‘That’s true, Half-Moon Auntie,’ I replied. ‘How are you doing?’
She put her arms out to her sides. Very, very slowly she lowered herself onto the rope bed, her arms extended at her sides. Then she dripped her feet out of the slippers, and her legs went into action.
I didn’t know if it was yoga or contortionism, but Half-Moon Auntie’s legs were pythons, searching for something to constrict. They moved left and right, north and south, twirling above her head and extending wide enough to ford a stream, before settling underneath her on the silver quilt, the prehensile feet tucked up against Olympian thighs.
It took about thirty seconds. If it had been a show, I would’ve applauded. But it wasn’t a show, and I wasn’t a customer.
She began to roll her shoulders.
‘So, how’s business, Half-Moon Auntie?’ I tried.
Too late. She leaned toward me slowly, arching her back to feline fluidity. Her breasts fell into view, half a moon tattooed on each globe, and she didn’t stop until the moon was full.
Her exceptionally long hair fell to the bed around her folded knees, closing a curtain on the moon, and spilling almost to the blood-stained floor.
She raised her eyes, threatening me with mysteries and things we shouldn’t know, then curled her arms backwards around her until her hands clasped her own neck, the fingers wriggling like anemones, spawning in the light of that inverted moon.
No-one can say she didn’t have her charm. But I liked her, more than I liked her famous routine.
Half-Moon Auntie was always armed, which is invariably interesting, no matter which way you look at it. She had a small automatic pistol, presented to her by the Chief Commissioner. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know the story. I knew that she’d fired it twice, both times to save someone being bullied by thugs from other areas of the city.
She read fortunes in people’s hands, and made more money as a sorceress than she did as a fisherwoman and black banker combined.
And she won the girls’ wrestling championship in the fishermen’s slum, three years in a row. It was a girls-only event, strictly cordoned off by faces of husbands and brothers and fathers, their backs to the girls who wrestled alone. No-one ever got to see it but the girls who fought until they found a champion.
I wanted to know about the event. I wanted to know the story of how the Commissioner gave her the gun. What I didn’t want was a game, with a ten-minute deadline.
‘A woman always finds a way,’ she said, straightening up, and glancing at the clock. ‘At least once, when you are with this woman who has taken your heart, you will be thinking of me, while you make love to her.’
‘See, Half-Moon Auntie, you’re wrong. That’s not gonna happen.’
‘Are you so sure?’ she asked, holding my stare.
‘Completely. With all due respect, Half-Moon Auntie, my girlfriend kicks your ass. You’re a lovely woman, and all that, but my girlfriend is a goddess. And if it comes to an actual fight, she’d kick your ass there, too. She’d beat both of us together, with change, and have us thanking her for it, after she did it. I’m crazy about her, Auntie.’
She held my stare for a couple of seconds, testing me, maybe, then slapped her thighs and laughed. I liked it so much that I laughed with her.
‘All correct,’ her assistant called out, putting my bundle of rupees in a metal bin, locking it, and logging the amount in his ledger.
‘You’re not the first to say such words,’ Half-Moon Auntie said. ‘But not many do. A few. Most of them beg for their free show, and create lies, as reasons to consult with me.’
‘To be fair to them, you put on a great show, Auntie.’
She laughed.
‘Thank you, Shantaram. That’s how the legend of my palm-reading skills began. An adulterous husband invented it, so that he could hold my hand, and watch the phases of the moon. Some of them sweat with how much they need it. Even people you know. Your friend Didier sits with me every week.’
‘I’ll bet he does,’ I laughed. ‘Why do you do it, Half-Moon Auntie?’
I suddenly realised that the question might hurt her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘It was a writer’s question, so, you know, probably unforgivably rude.’
She laughed again.
‘Shantaram, you can only ask that question, when you have the power to do it. So, when you have the power to do it, ask yourself.’
‘My girlfriend is gonna love that line.’
‘Bring her with you, next time,’ she threatened.
‘What if she crosses ten minutes, and proposes to you?’
‘Of course she will propose to me, and so will you, one day.’
‘I thought we covered that,’ I frowned, not understanding.
‘You write stories, Shantaram,’ she smiled. ‘One day you will write about me, and that will be a declaration of love. And this woman who has your heart will propose to me, out of happy love, nothing more.’
‘Isn’t every love happy love?’
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘There is your kind of love. You, and the few like you, who have become my dearest friends.’
‘I don’t want unhappiness in love,’ I said, frowning. ‘I don’t want unhappiness at all.’
‘I’m talking about the real thing,’ she replied. ‘The real thing is always more painful and more rewarding than anything less.’
‘That’s . . . very confusing,’ I said. ‘But I’m so glad we had this talk, Half-Moon Auntie. If I’ve been unwittingly rude, and you’re not gonna shoot me, please give me about two minutes’ head start. It’ll take me that long to get to the door, on this surface.’
‘Go, now, Shantaram,’ she laughed. ‘You are a VIP customer, from this day. May the Goddess keep your weapons sharp, and your enemies afraid.’
I slowly skated away from her, sliding and slipping my way across slaughter’s floor until I reached the golden arch of sunlight leading to the open market beyond.
While I scraped my boots dry, I looked back at her, doing yoga exercises on the bed.
One foot was raised high and enclosed in her palm, like a flame resting in the space above her head. Half-Moon Auntie: businesswoman, gangster and Mistress of Minutes. She was right, I thought. Karla probably would propose to her.
My third bank, my Didier reserve, was the floating poker game that Gemini George ran from their penthouse apartment.
Games that turn over a lot of money need a bank to fund the house. The house takes a percentage of the game, win or lose, but the house also plays, because the margin you win, if you play well, is always bigger than the vig paid for running the game.
The best way to keep a house bankable is to have a good dealer who knows when to fold, and another player in the game, who appears independent but is actually giving his winnings to the house.
Even with improved odds like that, it’s always possible for some golden child to walk in and break the bank. It happens. Sometimes, it happens three nights in a row.
But a golden child event is rare enough to make a well-run game pay off, five nights from seven, and Gemini George knew how to run a game.
I put money into the bank, with Didier and Gemini, and the three of us primed the pump for the poker games. My winnings, on a weekly basis, were about equal to the interest I would’ve earned on my money in a well-run fund.
Gemini had given up cheating. It was a mandatory requirement, mandated by Didier and me. We had to run a straight game, or there was no point.
And Gemini did it. He played every game for the house as straight as the bridge between fear and anger. His honesty and skill won him a lot of new friends, and won a lot of money for us.
Gemini needed the game, because his millionaire friend, as it turned out, was stingy with a dollar. Scorpio paid all the bills for the penthouse floor at the Mahesh, because it was the only place in Bombay that he felt safe, and he didn’t feel safe enough to leave the city and go somewhere else, where millionaires live in safety.
But he scanned every receipt and invoice for minute economies, and frequently found them, scraping pennies from accounts measured in thousands.
He refused to fund Gemini’s parties. Gemini told everyone to bring their own stimulants, and the parties rolled on. They were cheaper, and gaudier, and much more popular. The hotel became a place where famous people met infamous people, and every bar and restaurant was crowded.
Scorpio restricted Gemini to a limited expense account at the hotel, for food, drink, and services. He also gave him two hundred dollars in cash every week.
Gemini made two hundred dollars in cash every hour with us, in the game, and played in a trance of elegant dexterity. He was confident. He lost with a joke or a line from a song, and won without pride.
‘I thought of settin’ up a support group, a sort of AA, for people like me, who can’t stop cheatin’, Card Cheats Anonymous, you know, but the trouble is, you wouldn’t be able to trust no-one. Not when it actually came down to cards. Know what I mean?’
‘Come on, Gemini. A cynic is someone angry at his own soul, and you’re no cynic.’
He squinted on the thought.
‘I love you, mate,’ he said, smiling to himself.
‘Love you too, brother. And anyway, you did it, man. You cold-turkeyed cheating at cards, and you’re playing straight, and better than ever.’
‘Took some doin’, I tell ya,’ he shuddered. ‘I turned to books, at first. I hit Keats pretty hard and got very sad-trippy, then I got totally Kerouaced, as out of it as a drunken chimp and sayin’ the first thing that came into me addled mind. I stumbled into Fitzgerald, staggered out of Hemingway, got totally Deronda with George Eliot, stoned with Virginia Woolf, batty with Djuna Barnes and deranged with Durrell, but then I switched back to movies, and three days of Humphrey Bogart had me right as rain.’
‘Quite a support group, Gemini.’
‘Yeah. Nothin’ like writers and actors for company, is there, when you’re at the end of your rope.’
‘You got that right. I’m glad it worked out for you.’
He looked at me, lifting aside a curtain of reticence.
‘It’s a nice view, from the other side of the line, Lin. I never thought I’d say this, but it almost feels good not to cheat.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
‘You think so? It feels dodgy, sometimes, being straight. Know what I mean?’
‘Sure,’ I laughed. ‘Keep it up. You look great. An abundance of chance and a scarcity of sunlight wear very well on you, card champion. How’s it going, with Scorpio?’
‘I . . . ’
‘That bad, huh?’
‘He keeps to himself way too much, Lin. He’s all alone in the presidential suite, most of the time. I’m not allowed in.’
‘Not allowed in?’
‘Nobody is, except the staff. He eats most of his meals in there. I mean, if he had some lovely piece of womanhood in there with him, I’d be guardin’ the door. But he doesn’t, mate, and the two of us, Scorpio and me, we were never alone.’
‘Maybe, he just needs a time-out.’
‘We split everything, shared every mouthful of food, down to countin’ out the peanuts in a packet and sharin’ every one of ’em, even and fair. We argued about everything, all the time, but we never ate a thing without the other one there. We haven’t broke bread, so to speak, for three days. I’m worried about him, Lin.’
‘Gemini, has he thought about leaving Bombay?’
‘If he has, he doesn’t talk to me about it. Why?’
‘He’s nervous, being rich. He needs to move on, and he probably won’t move on, unless you move him on.’
‘Move him where?’
‘Anywhere that millionaires live. They tend to stick together, and they know how to look after themselves. He’ll be safe there, and you’ll get some peace of mind.’
‘I’m having enough trouble living with one millionaire. I couldn’t handle a whole suburb of them.’
‘Then take him to New Zealand. Buy a farm, near a forest.’
‘New Zealand?’
‘Beautiful country, beautiful people. Great place to vanish in.’
‘I’m so worried, Lin. You know, I actually lost a game that I should’ve won, yesterday.’
/> ‘You played about three hundred games, yesterday.’
‘Yeah, but I’m afraid of losin’ my grip, you know? I feel so helpless to help him, and I love him, mate.’
I should’ve shut up. I couldn’t know what my suggestion would bring to the Zodiac Georges. If I had three wishes, one of them would be to know when to shut up.
‘Maybe, I don’t know, you should just get him outside. Take him for a walk around the hotel. It’d be just like old times, except with bodyguards. It might shake him awake.’
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ Gemini said thoughtfully. ‘I could trick him into it.’
‘Or invite him into it.’
‘No, I’ll have to trick him into it,’ he said. ‘I’d have to trick him into drinking water in the desert, because he’d think the CIA put it there. But I’ve got a plan.’
‘Please don’t tell me,’ I said, leaving my bundle of cash for the poker game bank, and heading for the door. ‘I’m allergic to plans.’
I should’ve worried, for my friends. I know that now. Like so many people in the city, I thought that Scorpio’s money solved all their problems. I was wrong. The money was a menace, as it often is, that threatened their friendship, and their lives.
Chapter Fifty-Three
I left the hotel and rode to the Starlight Restaurant, on Chowpatty Beach. The restaurant was an illegal pop-up on a small, appropriated stretch of beach near the beginning of the sea wall.
It had been running for three months. A movie star and a local entrepreneur had the idea to create a restaurant, as a gift to the city, on a derelict section of public beach, so they created a Goan fragment, complete with palm trees, thatched table umbrellas and sand for open toes.
The food was excellent, and the service was efficient and friendly. But the fact that it was completely illegal, and likely to close any time, added a zest so special to the flavour that the city officials charged with closing down the illegal structure waited days, for a table.
The local entrepreneur, whose eccentric, ephemeral gift to the city cost him a lot of money that he knew he’d never recover, was a friend of mine. Karla was waiting at a table he’d reserved for me.