Shantaram (78 page)

She began to tremble and shiver. I took her in my arms and held her for a while, supporting her weight. When she was calm again, I brought her a kitchen chair and she sat down shakily. I phoned around, and found Abdullah. Explaining what had happened in as few words as possible, I told him to contact Hassaan Obikwa in the African ghetto and bring him to the apartment with a car.

Little by little, as we waited for Abdullah and Hassaan, the story emerged. Ulla was suddenly tired, but I couldn't let her sleep. Not yet. After a while she began to speak, adding a detail here and there to Lisa's account, and then gradually telling the whole story herself.

Maurizio Belcane met Sebastian Modena in Bombay, where both of them made money from the work they arranged for foreign prostitutes. Maurizio was the only son of rich Florentine parents who'd died in a plane crash when he was a child. By his own account, repeated to Ulla whenever he was drunk, he was raised with indifferent duteousness by distant relatives who'd tolerated him reluctantly in the loveless shelter of their home. At eighteen he seized the first tranche of his inheritance and fled to Cairo. By the age of twenty-five he'd squandered the fortune left to him by his parents. The remnants of his family cast him out, no less for his penury than for the many scandals that had pursued his profligate progress through the Middle East and Asia.

At twenty-seven he found himself in Bombay, brokering sex for European prostitutes.

The point man for Maurizio's operation in Bombay was the diffident, dour Spaniard, Sebastian Modena. The thirty-year-old sought out and approached wealthy Arab and Indian customers. His short, slight frame and timid manner worked to his advantage, putting the customers at ease by allaying their fears and suspicions. He took one-fifth of the cut that Maurizio claimed from the foreign girls. Ulla believed that Modena was happy enough in the unequal relationship, where he did most of the dirty work and Maurizio took most of the dirty money, because he saw himself as a pilot fish and the tall, handsome Italian as a shark.

His background was very different to Maurizio's. One of thirteen children in an Andalusian Gypsy family, Modena had grown up with a notion of himself as the runt of the litter. Schooled more in crime than in scholarship, and barely literate, he'd worked his way from swindle to grift to petty larceny across Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India. He preyed on tourists, never taking too much and never remaining too long in any one place. Then he met Maurizio, and for two years he'd pandered for the pimp, procuring clients and putting them together with the girls in Maurizio's stable.

They might've gone on in that way for much longer, but one day Maurizio walked into Leopold's with Ulla. From the first moment that their eyes met, Ulla told us, she knew that Modena was hopelessly in love with her. She encouraged him because his devotion to her was useful. She'd been purchased from Madame Zhou's Palace, and Maurizio was determined to recover his investment costs as quickly as possible. He'd instructed the smitten Modena to find work for her twice a day, every day, until the debt was repaid. Tortured by what he saw as betrayals of his own love, Modena pressed his partner to release Ulla from the obligation. Maurizio refused, ridiculing the Spaniard's affection for a working girl, and insisting that he put her to work day and night.

Ulla paused in her story when a tap at the door announced Abdullah's arrival. The tall Iranian entered silently, dressed in black like a thing made from the night itself. He greeted me with a hug and nodded gently to Lisa. She came forward and kissed him on the cheek. He lifted the blanket to look at Maurizio's body.

Nodding and turning down the corners of his mouth in professional approval of the single killing thrust, he let the blanket fall, and muttered a prayer.

"Hassaan is busy. He will be here after about one hour," he said.

"Did you tell him what I want him to do?"

"He knows," he replied, raising one eyebrow in a tight smile.

"Is it still quiet outside?"

"I checked, before I came inside. The building is quiet, and the street all around."

"There's been no reaction from the neighbours, so far. He took the door out with one kick, Lisa says, and there wasn't all that much shouting and screaming. There was loud music playing next door when I got here. It was a party or something. I don't think anyone knows about this."

"We... we have to _call someone!" Ulla shouted suddenly, standing and letting the lungi fall from her shoulders. "We should... call a doctor... call the police..."

Abdullah sprinted to her, and wrapped her in his arms with surprisingly tender compassion. He sat her down again and rocked her, murmuring reassuringly. I watched them with a little pinch of shame because I knew that I should've comforted her myself, long before that, and in just the same gentle way. But the fact was that Maurizio's death had compromised me, and I was afraid. I'd had reason enough to want him dead, and I'd beaten him with my fists for it. That was, in other words, a motive for murder.

People knew that. I was there in the room with Lisa and Ulla, and it seemed that I was helping them, responding to their call for help, but that wasn't all of it. I was also there to help myself.

I was there to make sure that no part of the sticky web of his death clung to me. And that's why there was nothing gentle in me, and all the tenderness came from an Iranian killer named Abdullah Taheri.

Ulla began to speak again. Lisa poured her a drink of vodka and lime juice. She gulped at it, and went on with her story. It took quite a while because she was nervous and afraid. She skipped important details from time to time, and she was loose with her chronology, ordering the facts as they occurred to her in the telling rather than as they'd happened. We had to ask questions and prompt her into a more sequential account, but little by little we got it all.

Modena had been the first to meet the Nigerian-the businessman who'd wanted to spend sixty thousand dollars on heroin. He introduced him to Maurizio, and too quickly, too easily, the African had parted with his money. Maurizio stole the money and planned to move on, but Modena had other ideas. He seized his chance to free Ulla and rid himself of Maurizio, the man he resented for enslaving her. He snatched the money from him, and went into hiding, prompting the Nigerian to send his hit-squad to Bombay. To distract the understandably bloodthirsty Africans while he searched for Modena, Maurizio had given them my name and told them I'd stolen their money. Abdullah and I knew the next part of that story well enough.

For all his cringing cowardice with me, and his dread that the Nigerians might return to hunt him down, Maurizio Belcane couldn't cut his losses and leave the city. He couldn't rid his heart of the killing rage he felt for Modena and the righteous lust he felt for the money they'd stolen together. For weeks he watched Ulla and followed her everywhere. He knew that, sooner or later, Modena would contact her. When the Spaniard did make that contact, Ulla went to him. Without realising it, she also led the crazed Italian to the cheap Dadar hotel where his former partner was hiding. Maurizio burst into the room, but he found Modena alone. Ulla was gone. The money was gone. Modena was ill.

Some sickness had ruined him. Ulla thought it might've been malaria. Maurizio gagged him, tied him to the sickbed, and went to work on him with the stiletto. Modena, tougher than anyone knew and taciturn to the end, refused to tell him that Ulla was hiding in an adjoining room, only footsteps away, with all the money.

"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 now? 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.