The Mountain Shadow

When I thought it was safe, I risked a look and caught a glimpse of Lightning Dilip. He was staring at the three men huddled in the corner. He was breathing hard. His face was all the wrong happiness.

I got it. I was the warm-up act. The guys in the corner were the main event.

The guys in the corner got it too, and started to beg. I had time to breathe and move and check to see the damage.

I was lucky. No bones broken, nothing ruptured, arms and legs still working. It could’ve been worse, and had been before.

When Lightning Dilip went to work on the chained men, two cops uncuffed me from the gate, and took me back to the duty sergeant’s office, to decide how much of my money to keep. They took it all, of course: it cost me all I had to buy back my clothes, personal effects and knives. They threw my stuff into the road, and threw me after it, dressed in my shorts.

I stood in the deserted, late-night street beside a traffic island, picking up my clothes, one by one, until I was dressed. For a while I stayed there, staring at the police station, as you do, sometimes, out of that stubbornness born of injustice.

I was bleeding, beat up, in the middle of the fluorescent street. I could hear the screams of Lightning Dilip’s new victims. The flashing light on the corner bathed me in red with a slow heartbeat. I stared at the place where the screaming came from.

A black Ambassador car pulled to a stop beside me. The windows were down. I saw Farid in the front seat, beside a Company driver, named Shah. Faisal, Amir and Andrew DaSilva were in the back seat.

DaSilva had his elbow on the window. He reached under the dashboard of the car, and I instinctively pulled one of the knives. The gangsters laughed.

‘Here’s your money,’ DaSilva said, passing a package through the window. ‘Thirty grand. Severance pay, for the Sri Lanka run.’

I reached out to take the package, but he wouldn’t release it.

‘Two weeks, you’ve got, of Sanjay’s protection,’ he said, grinning into my eyes. ‘After that, why don’t you try to kill me, huh? And we’ll see what happens.’

‘I don’t want to kill you, Andy,’ I said, grabbing the package from his hand. ‘I have too much fun making you look bad, in front of your friends.’

‘Good one!’ Amir laughed. ‘I’m going to miss you, Lin. Challo! Let’s go!’

The black Ambassador drove away, leaving blue smoke swirling in the fluorescent haze. I put the money inside my shirt, and heard the screaming, beginning again.

A headache said hello behind my right eye. There were bruises making themselves acquainted all along my back and shoulders.

I walked back under the wide arch at the entrance, climbed the steps to the long porch and stepped into Lightning Dilip’s office.

‘Call him,’ I said to the sleepy constable watching the desk.

‘Fuck you, Shantaram,’ he said, lounging in his chair. ‘You better not let him see you in here.’

I reached inside my shirt, pulled out a few hundred-dollar bills, and threw them on the desk.

‘Call him.’

The constable snatched the notes off the desk, and ran out of the office.

Lightning Dilip was back in seconds. He didn’t know whether I wanted to make trouble, or make up with a bribe, and he didn’t know which one he wanted more. He was oily with sadism, his bulging shirt stained with sweat.

‘This must be my lucky day,’ he said, the riding crop in his hand twirling.

‘I want to bail out three prisoners.’

‘What?’

‘I want to bail out three prisoners, with cash money.’

‘Which three?’ Lightning asked, suspicion pinching his face.

‘The three you’re kicking the shit out of.’

He laughed. Why do people laugh, when you’re not trying to be funny? Oh, yeah: when you’re the joke.

‘I’m happy to do it,’ he grinned. ‘For the right price. But will it make a difference to you, to know that one of those men has raped several little girls, and I don’t know which one of them it is yet, until I get a confession? Of course, the choice is yours.’

You try to do something right. My ears were ringing, and pain was waking my face. It was the kind of angry-pain that shivers in you, and won’t stop shivering until something very good or very bad happens. The bells wouldn’t stop ringing. A child molester? Fate is Solomon, forever.

‘I’d like,’ I croaked, and then cleared my throat. ‘I’d like to pay you to stop beating the three prisoners. Have we got a deal?’

‘We would have a deal for five hundred American,’ he said, ‘whenever you find it.’

He knew he’d cleaned me out. And the constable had wisely kept the hundred-dollar notes I’d given him to himself. Dilip gasped when I pulled the notes from my shirt and threw them on the table.

‘I have eighty more prisoners upstairs,’ he said. ‘Would you like to pay me not to beat them?’

At that moment, beat up and crazy, thinking that Lisa’s body had been at that police station, and that every cop in the place had seen her dead, and knowing that Lightning Dilip had beaten Karla, probably on the same gate he chained me to, I didn’t care. I just wanted the screaming to stop for a while.

I threw some more money on the desk.