The Mountain Shadow

She cut herself off, laughed again, and gave me about eight unhappy queens.

‘Jesus!’ she said. ‘Am I . . . actually . . . trying to talk you . . . into coming with me?’

‘Well, I –’

‘Fuck you,’ she said.

‘Fuck . . . me?’

She stood quickly, and hailed a taxi.

‘Wait a minute, Karla.’

She got in the cab, and drove away.

I sprinted to the bike, and rode too fast and too loose until I found her cab. I followed her all the way back to the Taj hotel, riding around her cab and trying to catch her eye. She never turned to look.

I parked the bike, and watched her climb the wide steps and walk into the hotel. I went to the reservations desk, and left a note for her.

I rode away from the proud galleon of the Taj hotel through rivers of traffic, and questioned every man or woman I could still trust about Concannon. I checked gambling dens, opium parlours, country liquor bars, hash hangouts and numbers-racket corners. I didn’t learn much, but street voices confirmed that Concannon was running a heroin franchise for the Scorpion Company.

Everyone called them the Scorpion Company, rather than the Scorpion Gang: everyone recognised their status as a full mafia Company.

I had to report to Sanjay. I had a standing appointment for two in the afternoon on the day after my return from Sri Lanka, whatever the date.

No doubt, Sanjay had expected me to report sooner. He wouldn’t be in a good mood. But that was okay. Since the death of his friend Salman, Sanjay didn’t have a good mood.

I parked the bike in a row of motorcycles outside KC College. I gave the parking attendant a hundred-rupee note, and asked him to keep his eyes open for dangerous types.

‘They’re college kids,’ he said in Hindi. ‘They’re all dangerous. Who knows what they’ll do next?’

‘More dangerous than the kids are.’

‘Oh, okay. You got it,’ he winked.

I walked the half-block to Sanjay’s mansion, and rang the bell. An armed Afghan guard opened the door, recognised me and ushered me inside.

I found Sanjay in the breakfast room, at the end of the house. A row of windows looked out on a distressed garden, bound by high walls. Sanjay was in his pyjamas and a dark blue dressing-gown with a monogrammed pocket.

A breakfast big enough for three big henchmen covered the table, but Sanjay was drinking tea, and smoking a cigarette.

There was only one chair in the room, and Sanjay didn’t rise from it.

‘Good work,’ he said, looking me up and down. ‘But then, you always did good work, didn’t you? Your money, for this job, will be delivered to you. All your things from the passport factory have been removed. They’re in that red case, near the front door. That leaves only goodbye. So, goodbye.’

‘How was the mission compromised? Why did I come home early?’

He stubbed out the cigarette, took a sip of tea, placed the cup very delicately on the saucer and leaned back in the chair.

‘You know why I’m glad to see you go, Lin?’ he asked.

‘Because you think I’m made for better things?’

He laughed. I’d known him for years, but I’d never heard that laugh before. It must’ve been one he saved for the right goodbye. Then he stopped laughing.

‘Because, you’re not a team player,’ he said grimly, ‘and you never will be. You’re a black sheep. Look around you. Everyone belongs to something or someone. You’re the odd man out. You don’t belong anywhere. You don’t belong to anyone. And now, you don’t belong here.’

‘Was it because Lisa died? Is that why you had a man at the airport?’

‘Like I said, you’re not a team player. There was no way to know how you’d react. You were in Madras, when it happened.’

‘When did you know?’

‘Five minutes after the cops, of course. But you had already started, and the job was too important to stop.’

‘Five minutes?’

‘You never use the phone, so I knew there was a good chance you wouldn’t come to know about it. It was my decision to keep it quiet until the job was complete, and it was my decision to have contacts for you, every step of the way.’

‘Your decision.’

‘Yes. If you don’t like it, well, you know, there’s always the fuck-you option.’

‘You didn’t tell me that my girlfriend died.’

‘You’re the one who wanted to keep her out of the family. It was your choice that we never met her, when we know the Mothers, sisters and wives of every brother in the Company.’

I looked at him, angry enough to fight him. My heart was thumping tribal music. I wondered how many times leaders lived through murderous seconds like those, without ever knowing that Death, Himself, had been lured into the room on a false alarm.

‘You still have a faint shadow of my protection,’ Sanjay said. ‘It covers you, because it would not look well for me, if a former employee was killed in the first two weeks that he left my service. But the clock is ticking. Don’t make me brush that shadow from your back sooner. Now, get the fuck out of here, and let me finish my breakfast in peace.’

I opened the door and was about to leave, but he spoke again. They always speak again: they always want the last word, even when they already had it.