The Mountain Shadow

‘You can’t come back. The cops will be here in minutes, for sure, and I don’t want them asking questions you can’t answer. Stay away, and stay quiet for a couple of days for fuck’s sake, you motherfuckers. Tell me the truth, were any civilians shot?’

Abdullah bristled at the phrase Tell me the truth. Gritting his teeth in disgust, he handed me the phone.

‘No civilians, Sanjaybhai,’ I replied.

The term civilians referred to anyone who wasn’t involved in the criminal underworld: anyone other than judges, lawyers, gangsters, prison guards and the police.

‘Two Scorpions took it in the leg, and a freelancer named Concannon. He got it twice, in the same leg, but I wouldn’t count him out. There were a lot of witnesses. Most of them were street guys, or waiters at Leo’s.’

‘You made this fucking mess, Lin, and you’re telling me how to clean it up? Fuck you, motherfucker.’

‘If memory serves me right,’ I said calmly, ‘you shot someone outside Leo’s, once.’

Abdullah held up two fingers, waggling them at me.

‘Twice, in fact,’ I said. ‘And I didn’t start this mess, Sanjaybhai. The Scorpions started it, and that was a while ago. They’ve hit us nine times in the last month. They hit Leo’s, because it’s a place we all love, and it’s in the heart of Company land. The foreigner, Concannon, just wants Sanjay Company and the Scorpions to kill each other, because he’s starting his own gang. That’s as much as I know. I can’t tell you what to do, and I wouldn’t try. I can only tell you what I know. That’s for you, not against you.’

‘Madachudh! Bahinchudh!’ Sanjay shouted, and then calmed himself again. ‘This will cost a fortune to cover up. Who do you think set it up with the Colaba cops?’

‘Lightning Dilip was on duty. But I think this is too ambitious for him. He likes his enemies alive, and tied up.’

‘There’s a sub-inspector, Matre by name, who’s been on my back for a while,’ Sanjay mused. ‘Motherfucker! This has got his sweat all over it. Thik. I’ll handle everything at this end. You two stay out of sight for a couple of days. Check in with me again tomorrow. Put Abdullah back on the phone.’

I handed the phone back to Abdullah. He glared at me for a moment. I shrugged my shoulders. He listened.

‘Yes,’ he said twice, and hung up.

‘What’s the deal?’

‘Did he ask you if you were injured?’ Abdullah asked me.

‘He’s not the affectionate kind. He’s the disaffectionate kind.’

‘He did not ask,’ Abdullah snarled, frowning hard.

There was a small, brooding silence, and then he came back to the moment.

‘Your face. You are bleeding. We should see one of our doctors.’

‘I checked it in the mirror. It’s not that bad.’

I tied a handkerchief across the places on my forehead and eye socket where Concannon’s sap had drawn blood.

‘Right now,’ I said, ‘our problem is that Sanjay’s not going to war for us, and we’re on our own.’

‘I could force him to war.’

‘No, Abdullah. Sanjay let me dangle in the wind, and now he’s letting you swing with me. He’ll never go to war, until the war’s over.’

‘I repeat, I can make him go to war.’

‘Why is war even an option, Abdullah? I’m not complaining that Sanjay won’t go to war. I’m glad he won’t go to war. I’m glad that nobody else will get involved in this. We can handle payback on our own.’

‘And we will, Inshallah.’

‘But since we are alone, as we seem to be, we gotta work out a strategy, and the tactics to achieve it, because you just shot three people. One of them twice. What do you want to do?’

He looked away from me, checking the surrounding junction of major arterial avenues, cars streaming gleaming metal from one current or the other.

He looked at me again and half-opened his mouth, but there were no words for the experience: he was alone, and his comrades weren’t riding to his rescue. He was a soldier behind enemy lines, told that the escape route had just closed.

‘I think we should put as much distance as we can between us and them, for a while,’ I said, filling the dissonant gap. ‘Maybe Goa. We can ride there overnight. But don’t tell anyone. Every time I tell someone I’m going to Goa, they ask me to collect their dirty laundry.’

I’d tried to raise a smile, in the sierra of his doubt. It didn’t work.

Abdullah glanced back in the direction of South Bombay. He was wrestling with the desire to return, and kill every Scorpion that ever crawled out from under a rock. I waited for a few moments.

‘So, what’s the deal?’

He wrenched himself into the minute, and let out two long breaths, charging his will.

‘I came to Leopold’s to invite you to come with me to a special place. It is a lucky thing, perhaps, that I came when I did, but let us wait, until we see what the consequences of this day are, for each of us.’

‘What special place?’

He looked again to the horizon.

‘I was not expecting that we would be going there with such a dark shadow following us to the mountain, but, will you come with me, now?’

‘And, again, where might that be?’