I took one of my knives out of its scabbard, and passed it to him. He opened the flick mechanism expertly, and then flipped the long, heavy, brass-handled weapon around his fingers as if it was a flower on a stem.
‘Nice knife,’ he said, closing it and handing it back to me. ‘Who made it?’
‘Vikrant, in Sassoon Dock,’ I answered, putting the knife away.
‘Ah, Vikrant. Good work. You wanna see my knife?’
‘Sure,’ I replied, reaching out to take the weapon he offered me.
My long switchblade knife was made for street fighting. The Cycle Killer’s knife was designed to leave a deep, wide hole, usually in the back. The blade tapered quickly from the wide hilt to the tip. Gouged into the blade were trenches to facilitate the flow of blood. Backward serrations entered a body on the smooth side but ripped the flesh on the outward pull, preventing the wound from spontaneously closing.
The hilt was a brass semicircle, designed to fit into a closed fist. The knife was used in a punching action, rather than a slash or jab.
‘You know,’ I said, as I handed back the weapon, ‘I hope we never, ever fight each other.’
He grinned widely, putting the knife back into its scabbard.
‘Good plan!’ he said. ‘No problem. You and me, we never fight. Okay?’
He offered me his hand. I hesitated a moment, because gangsters take stuff like that seriously, and I wasn’t sure that I could promise not to fight him, if our gangs became enemies.
‘What the hell,’ I said, slapping my palm into his, and closing my fingers in a firm handshake. ‘We never fight. No matter what.’
He grinned at me again.
‘I’m . . . ’ he began in Hindi. ‘I’m sorry about . . . about that comment before.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘Actually, I like dogs,’ he said. ‘Anyone here will tell you that. I even feed the stray dogs here.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘Ajay! Tell him how much I like dogs!’
‘Very much,’ Ajay said. ‘He loves dogs.’
‘If you don’t stop talking about dogs right now,’ Ishmeet said through the sliver of a smile, ‘I’m going to kick you in the neck.’
Ishmeet turned away from his man, displeasure a crown pressed on his forehead.
‘Abdullah,’ he said. ‘You want to talk to me, I think so?’
Abdullah was about to reply when a crew of ten workingmen entered the courtyard, pulling two long, empty handcarts.
‘Make way!’ they shouted. ‘Work is close to God! Workingmen are doing God’s work! We are here for the sacks! Old sacks going out! New sacks coming in! Make way! Work is close to God!’
With a disregard that might’ve cost other men their lives, the workers ignored the status and comfort of the murderous gang and began pulling sacks from the improvised throne. Deadly Cycle Killers tumbled and stumbled from their places on the pile.
As quickly as his dignity would allow, Ishmeet scrambled off his vantage point to stand close to Abdullah while the demolition continued. I climbed down with him to join my friends.
Fardeen, nicknamed the Politician, stood at once and offered his wooden stool to Ishmeet. The leader of the Cycle Killers accepted, sat beside Abdullah, and called importantly for hot chai.
While we waited for the tea, the workers removed the tall hill of sacks, leaving only scattered grains and straws on the bare stones of the courtyard. We sipped adrak chai, spicy ginger tea strong enough to bring tears to the eyes of someone judging judges.
The workers brought fresh sacks into the open ground. Within minutes a new mound began to appear, and men who worked for the Cycle Killers began to shape it into a series of throne-like seats once more.
Perhaps to cover the embarrassment of having his estrade so abruptly dismantled, Ishmeet turned his attention to me.
‘You . . . foreigner,’ he asked, ‘what do you think of Das Rasta?’
‘Ji,’ I said, using the respectful term equivalent to sir, ‘I was wondering how we were able to come in here without a challenge.’
‘We knew you were coming,’ Ishmeet replied smugly, ‘and we knew you were friends, and how many you were. Dilip Uncle, the old man reading the newspaper, do you remember him?’
‘Yeah. We passed right through his house.’
‘Exactly. Dilip Uncle, he has a button on the floor under his chair. The button rings a bell here in the courtyard. From the number of times he presses the button, and for how long, we can tell who is coming, friend or stranger, and how many. And there are many uncles like Dilip, who are the eyes and the ears of Das Rasta.’
‘Not bad,’ I allowed.
‘Your frown is another question, I think.’
‘I was also wondering why this is called Das Rasta, Ten Ways, when I can count only nine ways in and out.’
‘I like you, gora!’ Ishmeet said, using the word that meant white man. ‘Not many have noticed that fact. There are, in truth, ten ways into and out of this place, which is the reason for the name. But one of them is hidden, and only known to those of us who live here. The only way that you could pass through that exit is to become one of us, or be killed by us.’
Abdullah chose the moment to reveal his purpose.
‘I have your money,’ he said, leaning in toward Ishmeet’s well-oiled smile. ‘But there is a matter I must make clear, before I give it to you.’
‘What . . . matter?’
‘A witness,’ Abdullah said, speaking in a tone that was loud enough for me to hear. ‘You have a reputation for being so fast, in your work, that even the Djinn cannot see your blade strike. But in this assignment we gave to you, someone was allowed to see the deed. Someone who made a clear description of your men to the police.’
Ishmeet locked his jaw shut, glanced around quickly at his men, and then looked back at Abdullah. The smile returned slowly, but the teeth were still locked together as if they were holding a knife.
‘We will, of course, kill this witness,’ he hissed. ‘And at no extra charge.’
‘No need for that,’ Abdullah replied. ‘The sergeant who took the statement is one of ours. He thrashed the witness, and convinced him to change his story. But you understand that with a matter such as this, I must speak of it in the name of Sanjay himself. Especially since it is only the second assignment we have given to you.’
‘Jarur,’ Ishmeet hissed again. Certainly. ‘And I can assure you that you will never have to raise the question of witnesses again, for so long as we do business together.’
Ishmeet took Abdullah’s hand in his, held it for a moment, then stood, turned his back, and began to clamber to the top of his new throne of sacks. As he settled himself at the top of the pile once more, he spoke one word.
‘Pankaj!’ he said, speaking to the Cycle Killer who’d been sitting with me.
Fardeen took a package of money from his backpack. He passed it to Abdullah, who handed it on to Pankaj. As the Cycle Killer turned to climb up the pile of sacks he hesitated, and swung his gaze around to face me.
‘You and me, we never fight,’ he grinned, offering his hand once more. ‘Pukkah?’ Correct?
His wide smile and obvious, innocent pleasure in a new friendship would’ve been derided as naïve by the gangsters and outlaws I’d come to know in the Australian prison. But we were in Bombay, and Pankaj’s smile was as sincere as his willingness to fight me had been only minutes before; as sincere as mine.
Until I’d heard Ishmeet use his name, I hadn’t realised that the man I’d traded insults with was the second-in-command of the Cycle Killers, and as feared a knife-man as Ishmeet himself.
‘You and me,’ I said in Hindi, ‘we never fight. No matter what.’
His wicked grin widened, and he scampered athletically up the pile of sacks to give the package to Ishmeet. Abdullah raised his
hand to his chest in farewell.
We followed Abdullah out through the labyrinth of lanes, through the living room where Dilip Uncle still sat, reading his newspaper, his foot hovering close to the button set into the floor, and then out into the street.
As we kicked the bikes to life, Abdullah caught my eye. When I met his gaze, his face opened in a rare, wide smile of happiness and exhilaration.
‘That was close!’ he said. ‘Shukran Allah.’
‘Since when did you start subcontracting?’
‘Two weeks ago, while you were in Goa,’ he replied. ‘The lawyer we hired, who betrayed our men to the police, and told them everything he had said in private?’
I nodded, recalling the anger we’d felt at the life sentence the Company men had received, based on their own lawyer’s treacherous information. An appeal of the conviction was pending in the courts, but our men were still in prison.
‘That lawyer has joined the long line of his fellows in hell,’ Abdullah said, his golden eyes gleaming. ‘And there will be no appeal of his sentence. But let us not disturb our peace with talk of dishonour. Let us enjoy the ride, and be grateful that, today, Allah has spared us the necessity to kill the killers we paid to kill for us. It is a great and wonderful thing to be alive, Alhamdulillah.’ By the grace of God.
But as Fardeen, Hussein and I fell in behind Abdullah for the ride back to the Sanjay Council meeting, it wasn’t God’s grace that I was thinking about. Other mafia Companies hired the Cycle Killers, from time to time. Even the cops put them on clean-up duty now and then. But Khaderbhai, who’d founded the mafia group, had always refused.
Anywhere humans gather, from boardrooms to bordellos, they seek and agree upon a moral standard for themselves. And one standard, upheld by Khaderbhai, was that if a man had to be killed, he was given the chance to look into the eyes of the men who claimed that right. Hiring assassins, rather than being assassins, was a change too far for some, I was sure. It was a change too far for me.
Order and chaos were dancing on a slender blade, held by the outstretched arm of conscience. Subcontracting the Cycle Killers tilted the blade. At least half the men in the Company were more loyal to the code than to Sanjay, the leader who was changing it.
The first glimpse of the sea on Marine Drive filled my heart, if not my head. I turned away from the red shadow. I stopped thinking of that pyramid of killers, and Sanjay’s improvidence. I stopped thinking about my own part in the madness. And I rode, with my friends, into the end of everything.
Chapter Seven
If Abdullah hadn’t been with us, Fardeen, Hussein and I would’ve raced one another to the Council meeting, cutting between the cars and overtaking all the way to the Nabila mosque. But Abdullah never raced, or cut between the cars. He expected the cars to make way for him, and for the most part, they did. He rode slowly, his back straight, head held high, his long, black hair fluttering at his wide shoulders.
We reached the mansion in some twenty minutes, and parked our bikes in places reserved for us, outside a perfume shop.
The entrance to the mansion was usually open to the street and unguarded. Khaderbhai believed that if an enemy had a death wish strong enough to make him attack the mansion, he would prefer to drink tea with him, before killing him.
But as we approached, we found the high, heavy street door of the mansion closed, and four armed men on duty. I knew one of them, Farukh, who operated a Company gambling outpost in the distant town of Aurangabad. The others were Afghan strangers.
We pushed open the door and found two more men inside, carrying assault rifles.
‘Afghans?’ I said, when we’d passed them.
‘So many things have happened, Lin Brother, since you have been in Goa,’ Abdullah replied as we entered the open courtyard at the centre of the mansion complex.
‘No kidding.’
I hadn’t visited the mansion in months, and I saw with regret how neglected the paved courtyard had become. In Khaderbhai’s time there was a constant fountain drenching the huge boulder in the pond at the courtyard’s centre. Lush potted palms and flower boxes had once provided splashes of colour in the white and sky-blue space. They’d long since died, and the dry earth that remained was covered with a sprinkling of cigarette butts.
At the door of the Council meeting room there were two more Afghans armed with assault rifles. One of them tapped at the closed door, and then opened it slowly.
Abdullah, Hussein and I entered, while Fardeen waited outside with the guards. When the door closed, there were thirteen of us in the long room.
The meeting room had changed. The floor was still tiled in cream pentagonal tiles, and the walls and vaulted ceiling still bore the mosaic pattern of a blue-white clouded sky. But the low inlaid table and plump brocade floor cushions were gone.
A dark boardroom table ran almost the length of the room, swarmed by fourteen high-backed leather executive chairs. At the far end of the table was a more ornate chairman’s seat. The man sitting in that chair, Sanjay Kumar, looked up with a smile as we entered. It wasn’t for me.
‘Abdullah! Hussein!’ he called out. ‘We’ve gone through all the small stuff already. Now you’re here, we can finally deal with some real trouble.’
I assumed that Sanjay would want me to wait outside until the meeting was over, and tried to excuse myself.
‘Sanjaybhai,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait in the courtyard, until you need me.’
‘No, Lin,’ he said, waving his hand vaguely. ‘Go sit down with Tariq. Come on, the rest of you, let’s get started.’
Tariq, Khaderbhai’s fourteen-year-old nephew and only male relative, sat in his uncle’s emperor chair at the end of the room.
He was growing fast, already almost as tall as any man in the room. But still he seemed small and frail in that winged chair, once a throne for the king of South Bombay crime.
Behind Tariq was Nazeer, his hand resting on the handle of a dagger: the boy’s protector, and my close friend.
I moved past the long table to greet Tariq. The boy brightened for a moment when I shook his hand, but quickly assumed the cold impassive stare that had hardened the bronze of his eyes since the death of his uncle.
When I looked at Nazeer, the older man gave me a rare smile. It was a grimace that could tame lions, and one of the favourite smiles of my life.
I took a seat beside Tariq. Abdullah and Hussein took their places, and the meeting recommenced.
For a while, Sanjay directed the discussions through business matters: trouble with striking workers at the Ballard Pier dockside had slowed the supply of drugs into South Bombay; some fishermen at Sassoon Dock, anchorage of the biggest fishing fleet in the Island City, had formed an association and were resisting the payment of protection money; and a friendly city councillor had been caught by a police raid on one of the Company’s prostitution dens, requiring a favour from the mafia Council to hush the matter up, and save the man’s career.
The mafia Council, which had carefully set up the raid to force the city councillor deeper into its embrace, authorised the sums required to bribe the police, and determined that twice the amount should be charged to the councillor in question, for doing him the favour.
The final matter was something more complicated, and went beyond business. The Sanjay Company, and the Council that ordered its affairs, ran the whole of South Bombay, an area that stretched from Flora Fountain to the Navy Nagar near the very southern promontory of the Island City, and included everything in between, from sea to sea.
The Sanjay Company was the sole black market authority in the area, but wasn’t generally despised. In fact, a lot of people took their disputes and grievances to the Company, in those years, rather than the police. The mafia was usually quicker, often more just, and always cheaper than the cops.
When Sanjay took the leadership, he called the group a Company, joining
a gangster trend that divided the city along business lines. Khaderbhai, the dead Khan who’d founded it, was strong enough for the mafia clan to have no other name but his own. Echoes of Khaderbhai’s name gave the Sanjay Company an authority that Sanjay’s name didn’t, and still held the peace.
Occasionally, however, someone decided to take matters into his own hands. One such rogue element was an ambitious landlord in the Cuffe Parade area, where tall, expensive apartment buildings stood on land reclaimed from the sea. He’d begun hiring his own thugs. The Sanjay Company didn’t like it, because the Company had the reputation of its own thugs to consider.
The private goons had thrown a rent defaulter from the window of a second-storey apartment. The tenant survived the fall, but his body landed on a cigarette and hashish shop owned by the Company, injuring the operator, known as Shining Patel, and a popular customer who was a renowned singer of Sufi songs.
Shining Patel and his black-white-market shop was just business for the Sanjay Company. The injury to a great singer, loved by every hash smoker in the southern peninsula, made the offence personal.
‘I told you this would happen, Sanjaybhai,’ a man named Faisal said, clenching a fist on the table. ‘I’ve been warning you about this kind of thing for months.’
‘You warned me that someone would fall on Shining Patel’s shop?’ Sanjay sneered. ‘I must’ve missed that meeting.’
‘I warned you that respect was slipping,’ Faisal said, more quietly. ‘I warned you that discipline was slipping. Nobody’s afraid of us, and I don’t blame them. If we’re so scared that we put mercenaries on the door, we’re the ones to blame.’
‘He’s right,’ Little Tony added. ‘This problem with the Scorpion Company, for example. That’s what gives chutiyas like this landlord bahinchudh the idea that he can go past us, to create his own little army.’
‘It’s not a Company,’ Sanjay spat back at them. ‘Those Scorpion fucks haven’t been recognised, not by any of the other Companies in Bombay. It’s a gang. They’re just North Bombay guys, trying to squeeze into the south. Call it what it is, man, a cheap little gang.’