The Mountain Shadow

Karla dismantled the Bedouin tent over the next few days, and we painted her rooms red, with black trim on the doors and doorways. Jaswant couldn’t complain, because he’d sold us the paint.

She cut pictures from science magazines, and had them mounted in Bollywood-gold frames. She framed a feather, and a leaf, and a page from a book of poems that she found floating in the breeze in a quiet street:

The Begging Rain

Afterwards

when I am not with you

and you are alone enough

to count the nails in your heart,

studded like a treasure house door,

when you arrange your silence

in the vase of an hour,

memories of our hands,

and a spike of laughter

colouring of my eyes,

when you sit within the swell

of heartbeat,

the purple tide of daydream

lapping at the shores of love,

and your skin sings, perfume-pierced,

surrender to this thought of me:

as mimosas long for monsoon,

I long for you,

as crimson cactus flowers long for Moon

I long for you,

and in my afterwards,

when I am not with you,

my head turns to the window of life

and begs for rain.

She put up large pictures of Petra Kelly and Ida Lupino, two of her heroes, in black baroque frames. She took her balcony plants inside, and filled every corner with them, leaving a few outside to rotate in sunlight.

I think she tried to recreate the mountain forest in a hotel suite, and she did a good job. No matter where you sat in the main room you were looking at plants, or touched by them.

And she installed a long, thin, stylised sculpture of a Trojan soldier, sculpted by Taj. I tried to put a plant in front of it, but she wouldn’t let me.

‘Really? It’s because of this guy that you left the gallery.’

‘He’s a good sculptor,’ Karla said, arranging the doomed soldier, ‘even if he’s not a terrific guy.’

I used it as a hat stand. I had to buy a hat, but it was worth it. And little by little, things settled down to the semblance of peace that’s good enough, when you know enough about bad enough.

Oleg’s green rooms, as my rooms became to match the couch, were popular. Karla and I went to a few of his parties, and had a good time. We laughed our way through several more parties, listening to the crazy conversations being shouted next door, transmitted through our wall in high infidelity.

The young Russian had given up on Irina, the girl he called his Karlesha, and as the pictures he’d given to the waiters at Leopold’s faded and wrinkled, he stopped asking them if they’d seen her.

‘Why do you call Irina Karlesha,’ I asked him once.

‘I was in love with another girl named Irina,’ he replied, his perpetual smile fading in the half-light of reflection. ‘She was my first love. It was the first time I ever really fell down, inside, with love for a girl. We were both sixteen, and it was over within a year, but I still felt unfaithful to her, the first Irina, by using the name. Karlesha was a pet name that my father used for his sister, my aunt, and I always liked it.’

‘So . . . you didn’t feel unfaithful to Elena by going with Irina, but you felt unfaithful to your childhood sweetheart, by using the same name?’

‘You can only be unfaithful to someone you love,’ he said, frowning at my ignorance. ‘And I was never in love with Elena. I was in love with Irina, and I’m in love with Karlesha.’

‘And the girls who come and go in your green room?’

‘I’ve given up hope that I will see Karlesha again,’ he replied, looking away. ‘Didier’s T-shirt strategy didn’t work. Maybe it’s just not meant to be.’

‘Do you think love might spark with one of these girls?’

‘No,’ he answered quickly, brightening again. ‘I’m Russian. We R-people love very hard and very deeply. It’s why our writing and our music is so mad with passion.’

He worked madly and passionately with Naveen, and they became an intuitive team. Didier worked with them on a case that drew publicity, when they reunited lost lovers and uncovered a slavery ring at the same time, leading to arrests and the break-up of the gang.

The dangerous, debonair Frenchman devoted more time and seriousness to the Lost Love Bureau after that, and when he wasn’t holding court at Leopold’s, he was always with the young detectives, working on a shockingly urgent case.