The Mountain Shadow

The first rule is not to put it all in one place. If things get bad, and you’ve gotta give something up, a plump reserve is a good idea. I kept some at home as escape money. I left some with Tito, Didier’s man. He gave me friend rates of two per cent. He still called it ten per cent, but only charged me two.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, when he muttered ten per cent again, out of habit. ‘My mind is angry with me.’

‘Listen, Tito, if someone comes calling, telling you that I’m tied up in a cellar somewhere, and being tortured, and uses the code 300 Spartans, just give him the money, okay?’

‘Done,’ he said. ‘For ten per cent.’

Chapter Fifty-Two

Every woman of a certain age is automatically an auntie, in India. Half-Moon Auntie, who ran a black bank in the fish market, was maybe fifty years old, and so voluptuous in her seductive powers that no man could stay more than ten minutes in her company, it was said, without proposing to her. And Half-Moon Auntie, a widow not in mourning, did everything in her considerable range of talents to make the minutes of any transaction roll into double digits.

So far, I’d always been a nine-minute guy with Half-Moon Auntie: deal done, and outta there.

‘Hi, Half-Moon Auntie,’ I said, handing a paper-wrapped bundle of rupees to her assistant clerk, sitting behind a fish counter. ‘How are you?’

She kicked a plastic chair at me. It slid to a stop at my feet. She’d done it before. She did it every time, in fact.

Decades of fish oil, soaked into the concrete, made the surface almost frictionless. It was hard to walk around. It was hard to keep standing up, in fact. It was as if the dead fish, soaked into the stone around Half-Moon Auntie’s rope bed, wanted to make us fall down. And people did, every day.

I took the chair, knowing that there was no such thing as a fast getaway from Half-Moon Auntie’s black bank.

I was sitting at the end of a very long stainless steel cutting table. It was one of several in the fish market, an area the size of a football field under waves of slanted tin and clotted skylight crests.

Work had stopped for the day, and the shouting had shrunk into a silence that was, perhaps, like the gasps of fish, drowning in our air, just as we drown in theirs.

I could hear Half-Moon Auntie swallowing. I could hear the clock on the wall ticking. I could hear Auntie’s assistant, counting the money slowly, carefully.

It was dark, but the shade was hotter than the sunny street outside. The smell had been strong enough to close my mouth, at first, but it began to settle into a low hum of fish not in the sea.

Someone started to run a hose at the far end of the market. Blood and pieces of dead things floated past in a gutter chiselled into the concrete floor.

Beside the gutter was Half-Moon Auntie, standing in her slippers, her rope bed covered by a hand-sewn quilt as silver as the fins of a mirror fish.

‘So, Shantaram,’ she said. ‘They say that a woman has your heart.’

‘That’s true, Half-Moon Auntie,’ I replied. ‘How are you doing?’

She put her arms out to her sides. Very, very slowly she lowered herself onto the rope bed, her arms extended at her sides. Then she dripped her feet out of the slippers, and her legs went into action.

I didn’t know if it was yoga or contortionism, but Half-Moon Auntie’s legs were pythons, searching for something to constrict. They moved left and right, north and south, twirling above her head and extending wide enough to ford a stream, before settling underneath her on the silver quilt, the prehensile feet tucked up against Olympian thighs.

It took about thirty seconds. If it had been a show, I would’ve applauded. But it wasn’t a show, and I wasn’t a customer.

She began to roll her shoulders.

‘So, how’s business, Half-Moon Auntie?’ I tried.

Too late. She leaned toward me slowly, arching her back to feline fluidity. Her breasts fell into view, half a moon tattooed on each globe, and she didn’t stop until the moon was full.

Her exceptionally long hair fell to the bed around her folded knees, closing a curtain on the moon, and spilling almost to the blood-stained floor.

She raised her eyes, threatening me with mysteries and things we shouldn’t know, then curled her arms backwards around her until her hands clasped her own neck, the fingers wriggling like anemones, spawning in the light of that inverted moon.

No-one can say she didn’t have her charm. But I liked her, more than I liked her famous routine.

Half-Moon Auntie was always armed, which is invariably interesting, no matter which way you look at it. She had a small automatic pistol, presented to her by the Chief Commissioner. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know the story. I knew that she’d fired it twice, both times to save someone being bullied by thugs from other areas of the city.

She read fortunes in people’s hands, and made more money as a sorceress than she did as a fisherwoman and black banker combined.