The Mountain Shadow

‘That lawyer has joined the long line of his fellows in hell,’ Abdullah said, his golden eyes gleaming. ‘And there will be no appeal of his sentence. But let us not disturb our peace with talk of dishonour. Let us enjoy the ride, and be grateful that, today, Allah has spared us the necessity to kill the killers we paid to kill for us. It is a great and wonderful thing to be alive, Alhamdulillah.’ By the grace of God.

But as Fardeen, Hussein and I fell in behind Abdullah for the ride back to the Sanjay Council meeting, it wasn’t God’s grace that I was thinking about. Other mafia Companies hired the Cycle Killers, from time to time. Even the cops put them on clean-up duty now and then. But Khaderbhai, who’d founded the mafia group, had always refused.

Anywhere humans gather, from boardrooms to bordellos, they seek and agree upon a moral standard for themselves. And one standard, upheld by Khaderbhai, was that if a man had to be killed, he was given the chance to look into the eyes of the men who claimed that right. Hiring assassins, rather than being assassins, was a change too far for some, I was sure. It was a change too far for me.

Order and chaos were dancing on a slender blade, held by the outstretched arm of conscience. Subcontracting the Cycle Killers tilted the blade. At least half the men in the Company were more loyal to the code than to Sanjay, the leader who was changing it.

The first glimpse of the sea on Marine Drive filled my heart, if not my head. I turned away from the red shadow. I stopped thinking of that pyramid of killers, and Sanjay’s improvidence. I stopped thinking about my own part in the madness. And I rode, with my friends, into the end of everything.

Chapter Seven

If Abdullah hadn’t been with us, Fardeen, Hussein and I would’ve raced one another to the Council meeting, cutting between the cars and overtaking all the way to the Nabila mosque. But Abdullah never raced, or cut between the cars. He expected the cars to make way for him, and for the most part, they did. He rode slowly, his back straight, head held high, his long, black hair fluttering at his wide shoulders.

We reached the mansion in some twenty minutes, and parked our bikes in places reserved for us, outside a perfume shop.

The entrance to the mansion was usually open to the street and unguarded. Khaderbhai believed that if an enemy had a death wish strong enough to make him attack the mansion, he would prefer to drink tea with him, before killing him.

But as we approached, we found the high, heavy street door of the mansion closed, and four armed men on duty. I knew one of them, Farukh, who operated a Company gambling outpost in the distant town of Aurangabad. The others were Afghan strangers.

We pushed open the door and found two more men inside, carrying assault rifles.

‘Afghans?’ I said, when we’d passed them.

‘So many things have happened, Lin Brother, since you have been in Goa,’ Abdullah replied as we entered the open courtyard at the centre of the mansion complex.

‘No kidding.’

I hadn’t visited the mansion in months, and I saw with regret how neglected the paved courtyard had become. In Khaderbhai’s time there was a constant fountain drenching the huge boulder in the pond at the courtyard’s centre. Lush potted palms and flower boxes had once provided splashes of colour in the white and sky-blue space. They’d long since died, and the dry earth that remained was covered with a sprinkling of cigarette butts.

At the door of the Council meeting room there were two more Afghans armed with assault rifles. One of them tapped at the closed door, and then opened it slowly.

Abdullah, Hussein and I entered, while Fardeen waited outside with the guards. When the door closed, there were thirteen of us in the long room.

The meeting room had changed. The floor was still tiled in cream pentagonal tiles, and the walls and vaulted ceiling still bore the mosaic pattern of a blue-white clouded sky. But the low inlaid table and plump brocade floor cushions were gone.

A dark boardroom table ran almost the length of the room, swarmed by fourteen high-backed leather executive chairs. At the far end of the table was a more ornate chairman’s seat. The man sitting in that chair, Sanjay Kumar, looked up with a smile as we entered. It wasn’t for me.

‘Abdullah! Hussein!’ he called out. ‘We’ve gone through all the small stuff already. Now you’re here, we can finally deal with some real trouble.’

I assumed that Sanjay would want me to wait outside until the meeting was over, and tried to excuse myself.

‘Sanjaybhai,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait in the courtyard, until you need me.’

‘No, Lin,’ he said, waving his hand vaguely. ‘Go sit down with Tariq. Come on, the rest of you, let’s get started.’

Tariq, Khaderbhai’s fourteen-year-old nephew and only male relative, sat in his uncle’s emperor chair at the end of the room.