The Mountain Shadow (126 page)

‘We can’t leave him here for the cops to find,’ I said.

‘You’re right,’ she replied. ‘This is the kind of scandal that kills cleverness.’

‘Not gonna be easy. That’s a steep climb, with a dead body.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, looking around, her hands on her hips.

We wrapped him in a student’s sari, and tied him securely. We fastened ropes for us to hold, at both ends.

We were just finished, when Silvano and Vijay arrived. Vijay’s eyes were oysters of dread.

‘A ghost?’

He was trembling, pointing at DaSilva’s wrapped body.

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘We’re taking him down to the house. There’s no need for the cops to know he was up here.’

‘Thank you,’ Silvano said quickly. ‘Let us help you.’

‘We got this,’ Karla said. ‘They’re our friends down there. They know us, but they don’t know you, and they might start shooting if they see you. It’ll be safer if we do this without you. Stay here and guard those books.’

‘Okay,’ Silvano smiled, doubtfully. ‘Okay. If you insist.’

‘
Presto
,’ Karla said, tugging on the dead man’s rope. ‘This ghost has a way to go yet.’

Chapter Eighty-Four

W
E DRAGGED
D
A
S
ILVA’S BODY TO THE RIDGE,
and started down the path. I went first, taking most of the weight, while Karla held on as best she could from above.

I felt ashamed that I hadn’t protected her from that sad and criminal thing we had to do: more ashamed, in fact, than I was of doing the sad and criminal thing. I thought of Karla’s hands, and the rough rope shredding her skin, and scratches and grazes wounding her feet with every second step.

‘Stop!’ she said when we were just past halfway.

‘What is it?’

She took a few deep breaths, and shook the tension from her arms and shoulders.

‘Okay, this,’ she puffed, one hand wiping hair from her forehead, the other holding a dead man, ‘is officially the best date ever. Now, let’s get this corpse down this fucking hill.’

At the base of the mountain, I carried DaSilva’s body on my back along the path to Khaled’s mansion. The path was still lit, and the door of the mansion was open. It seemed deserted.

We climbed the stairs together, and walked into the vestibule. I slipped DaSilva’s body to the floor, and we began to untie him.

‘What are you doing?’ Khaled asked, from behind me.

I spun round to face him. He had a gun in his hand.

‘
Salaam aleikum
, Khaled,’ Karla said, and she had a gun in her hand.

‘
Wa aleikum salaam
,’ he responded. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Where’s Abdullah?’ I asked.

‘He’s dead.’

‘Ah, no, no,’ I said. ‘Please, no.’

‘May Allah take his soul,’ Karla said.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ I asked, choking the words. ‘Where is he?’

‘There were four other dead men on top of him, when I found him. One of them was Vishnu. I knew that arrogant thug would come here in person, to gloat. Now he’s dead, and my Company will take everything he had.’

‘Where’s Abdullah’s body?’

‘With the bodies of my dead men,’ Khaled said. ‘In the dining room. And I ask you, for the last time, what are you doing here?’

‘This miscreant wandered too far,’ I said, pulling the cover back to reveal DaSilva’s face. ‘We’re wandering him back. Is he one of yours, or theirs?’

‘He’s the man we used to set up the trap,’ Khaled said. ‘I shot him myself, after he served his purpose, but he got away.’

‘He got back,’ Karla said. ‘Can we leave him here, Khaled? We want to keep Idriss out of this.’

‘Leave him. My men will be back, soon, with the trucks. I’ll put this one with the bodies we’re throwing into the sewer tomorrow.’

‘I don’t want to see Abdullah’s body, Khaled,’ I said. ‘Do you swear to me that he’s dead?’

‘
Wallah!
’ he replied.

‘
I
want to see him,’ Karla said to me. ‘But you don’t have to come.’

Everywhere together, never apart: but sometimes the two of you is something that only one of you must do.

‘I’ll come,’ I said, feeling sick already. ‘I’ll come.’

Khaled led us through a drawing room to the main dining room. Four bodies were lying on the table neatly, like pavement dwellers sleeping together on the street.

I saw Abdullah at once, his long black hair trailing over the edge of the table. I wanted to turn away. I wanted to run. That beautiful face, that lion heart, that fire in the sky: I couldn’t bear to see it emptied, and cold.

But Karla went to him, put her head on his chest, and wept. I had to move. I drifted along the table, dead men’s heads a breeze against my fingers, and took Abdullah’s hand.

The face was stern, and I was comforted to see it. He was wearing white, and it showed blood everywhere. A clear line crossed his brow, where his white cap had been, but his proud face, all eyebrows, nose and beard like a king of Sumer, was speckled and blotched everywhere else.

He’d been shot, and stabbed, but his reddened face was unmarked.

It hurt inside like a cramp to see his time stopped. My own threads of time vibrated within me, one strand of the harmony silenced.

It hurt to see no breath, no life, no love. It was hard to stare at a man still there, and already suffered for, and already missing.

She was right, to make us cry.
If you don’t say goodbye
, an Irish poet once said to me,
you never say goodbye
. And it took a long time to cry goodbye.

Finally I let the dead hand fall, and let the myth of the man fall with it. Each one that leaves us, leaves an unfillable space. She came back with me to the veranda in control again, but grieving, and knowing that there was an empty cave inside both of us: a cave that would draw us again and again to sorrow, and remember.

Khaled was waiting for us.

‘You should hurry,’ he said. ‘My Company is very jumpy tonight.’

‘Your Company?’

‘The Khaled Company, Lin,’ Khaled replied, frowning. ‘This night, we took Vishnu’s life, and now we take everything that Vishnu had. This night, the Khaled Company is born. That was the plan. Abdullah’s plan, in fact, to use himself as the bait.’

‘You know what, Khaled –’ I started to end it with him, but I stopped, because just then a man stepped out of a shadow.

‘
Salaam aleikum
, Shantaram,’ the Tuareg said.

‘
Wa aleikum salaam
, Tuareg,’ I said, standing closer to Karla.

‘The Tuareg has been freelancing for me,’ Khaled said. ‘He set all of this up. And now he’s back home, in the Khaled Company.’

‘You set this up, Tuareg?’

‘I did. And I kept you out of it, by sending you after the Irishman,’ the Tuareg said. ‘Because you shook my hand.’

‘Goodbye, Khaled,’ I said.

‘
Allah hafiz
,’ Karla said, taking my arm on the steps, because we were both unsteady on our feet.

‘
Khuda hafiz
,’ Khaled replied. ‘Until we meet again.’

When we reached the base of the mountain, Karla stopped me.

‘Do you have the keys to
State of Grace
?’

‘I always have the keys to my bike,’ I said. ‘You wanna ride?’

‘Oh, yeah, let’s ride,’ she said. ‘I’m so messed up that only freedom can save me.’

We rode to the temple, where Idriss and the students were sheltering for the night, and told them that the danger was over. Idriss sent a fit, young student to tell Silvano the news. We took a blessing from the sage, and left.

We rode the last hours before dawn, going nowhere the long way, the bike chattering machine talk on empty boulevards, with signals on both sides flashing green, because nobody in Bombay stopped, at that hour, for red.

We parked the bike at the entrance to the slower, softer path to the mountain. I chained the bike to a young tree, so she wouldn’t be afraid, and we walked the long, gentle, winding path to the mesa.

Karla clung to me. I put an arm around her waist, supporting her, and making her steps a little lighter.

‘Abdullah,’ she said softly, a few times.

Abdullah
.

I remembered when she said it to make us laugh, on the steep climb. I remembered when Abdullah was a friend I could laugh with, and tease. We cried together as we walked.

We reached the camp, and found students there, already bringing things back to function and faith.

‘Okay, this is too busy,’ Karla said, leaning against my shoulder. ‘Let’s hit the grassy knoll.’

We headed for our makeshift tent on the knoll. I set her down there, unresisting, falling back onto a cushion as if into a dream, and within a minute she was asleep.

We had a large water bottle in our kit of supplies. I soaked a towel, and cleaned the cuts and grazes that I’d already imagined, and then found, on her hands and feet.

She moaned, from time to time, when cloth and water sent streaks into her sleeping mind, but didn’t wake.

When the wounds on her hands and feet were clean, I rubbed them with turmeric oil. It was the medicine that everyone on the mountain used for cuts and scratches.

When I finished massaging oil into her scraped and cut feet, she curled onto her side, and went deeper into that annihilating sleep.

Abdullah. Abdullah
.

I took water into the forest, emptied myself, cleaned myself, scrubbed myself, and returned to find her sitting up, staring at our patch of sky.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘Where were you?’

‘Cleaning up.’

‘After you cleaned the cuts on my hands and feet.’

‘I’m a sanitary guy.’

I settled in beside her, and she settled in beside me.

‘He’s gone,’ she said, her face against my chest.

‘He’s gone,’ I echoed.

Day raised the blue banner, and sounds of life shuddered from sleep: a shout, a laugh, bird cry brazen in the light, and doves trembling stories of love.

She slept again, and I was calm with her, in the peace that only sleeping love creates, while thoughts of Abdullah, bullet wounds in the mind, kept bleeding.

He was self-discipline, he was kindness unto blood for a friend, and he was ruthless enough to shame his own honour, which I was, too, in my own way.

I slept, at last, riding a wave of consolation in words, words Idriss spoke, running through my mind again and again, sheep counting sheep.

The mystery of love is what we will become
, the phrase repeated.
The mystery of love is what we will become
. And the susurrus of syllables became the first gentle rain of the new monsoon, as we woke the next morning.

Still wounded by the night we returned to the camp as heavy rain filled the sky with seas, purified in ascension and pouring from tree-shoulders, shaken in the wind.

Rivulets played, making their own way through prior plans, and birds huddled on branches, not risking freedom’s flight. Plants that had been thin apostrophes became paragraphs, and vines that had slumbered like snakes in winter writhed insolent in vivid new green. Baptised by the sky, the world was born again, and hope washed a year’s dust and blood from the mountain.

Part Fifteen

Chapter Eighty-Five

A
T THE END OF THAT FIRST WEEK OF RAIN,
after watching Silvano
dance with students in a rare, sunny shower, and even Idriss shake a step or two, leaning on his long staff, Karla and I made our way down the mountain for the last time.