The Mountain Shadow

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Naveen replied. ‘So, of course, I agree with everything.’

‘It’s just,’ Didier sniffed, looking at the letters, ‘I rather thought he might have put up some little fight, perhaps, to keep my love letters. Some . . . some show of lingering affection.’

I recalled the look of simian hatred on the face of Gustavo, Didier’s ex-lover, as he screamed curses on Didier’s genitals, and hurled the little bundle of letters into a rubbish pit below the back window of his bungalow.

I had to pierce his ear with my thumbnail to make him climb into the pit, retrieve the letters, wipe them clean and hand them to me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Affection has moved on.’

‘Well, thank you, Lin,’ Didier sighed, putting the letters in his lap as the beers arrived. ‘I would have gone down there myself to get the letters, but for that little matter of the outstanding arrest warrant in my name, in Goa.’

‘You’ve gotta keep track of these warrants, Didier,’ I said. ‘I can’t keep up. You could paper a room with my fake yellow slips. It’s wearing me out, clearing you of all charges.’

‘But there are only four outstanding arrest warrants in all of India, Lin.’

‘Only four?’

‘At one time, it was nine. I think it must be that I am becoming . . . reformed,’ Didier puffed, curling his lips at the distasteful word.

‘A slander,’ Naveen observed.

‘Why, thank you. You . . . are a very agreeable young man. Do you like guns?’

‘I’m not good with relationships,’ Naveen answered, finishing his beer and standing. ‘I can only bond with the gun in my hand.’

‘I can help you with that,’ Didier laughed.

‘I’ll bet you can,’ Naveen laughed back. ‘Lin, that guy in the suit, the one following the Zodiac Georges, I’ll look into it, and get back to you here.’

‘Be careful. We don’t know what this is, yet.’

‘It’s cool,’ he smiled, all fearless, immortal youth. ‘I’ll take my leave. Didier, it has been a pleasure and an honour. Goodbye.’

We watched him out into the early evening haze. Didier’s brows edged together.

‘What?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing!’ he protested.

‘What, Didier?’

‘I said nothing!’

‘I know, but I also know that look.’

‘What look?’ he demanded, as if I’d accused him of stealing my drink.

Didier Levy was in his mid-forties. The first powder snow of winter wove spirals through his dark, curly hair. Soft, brilliantly blue irises hovered in the anemone patchwork of red veins filling the whites of his eyes, making him seem young and dissolute in the same smile: the mischievous boy still hiding inside the ruining man.

He drank any kind of alcohol, at any time of the day or night, dressed like a dandy, long after other dandies melted in the heat, smoked tailor-made joints from a bespoke cigarette case, was a professional at most crimes, the master of a few, and was openly gay, in a city where that was still an oxymoron.

I’d known him for five years, through struggles against enemies, within and without. He was brave: the kind of man who’ll face a gun with you and never run, no matter what the fall.

He was authentic. He expressed the uniqueness when what we are, is what we’re free to become. I’d known him through lost loves, alarming lust, and kneeling epiphanies, his and mine. And I’d spent enough of those long, lonely wolf nights with him to love him.

‘That look,’ I repeated. ‘The look that says you know something that everybody else should know. The look that says I told you so, before you tell me anything at all. So tell me, before you told me so.’

Didier’s outraged expression crumbled in smiles, and fell into a laugh.

‘It is more of a told me so,’ he said. ‘I like that boy very much. More than I expected to. And more than I should, because this Naveen Adair, he has a reputation.’

‘If reputations were votes, we’d be presidents of somewhere.’

‘True,’ he replied. ‘But this boy’s reputation carries a warning. A word to the wise, isn’t that the expression?’

‘It is, but I’ve always wondered why the wise need a word.’

‘It is said that he is very, very good with his fists. He was a boxing champion at his university. He could have been the champion of India. His fists are deadly weapons. And as I have heard, he is very quick, too quick perhaps, to provoke into using them.’

‘You’re no slouch in the provoking department, Didier. And it doesn’t take a stick through the bars to get me going.’

‘Many men have already fallen to their knees before that young life. It is not a good thing, in a man so young, to see so much submission. There is a lot of blood behind that charming young smile.’

‘There’s a lot of blood behind your charming smile, my friend.’

‘Thank you,’ he nodded, accepting the compliment with a little toss of the greying curls. ‘I’m simply saying that from what I have heard, I would very much prefer to shoot that handsome young fellow than to fight him.’

‘Then it’s a lucky thing you carry a gun.’

‘I’m . . . if you’ll excuse the lapse . . . being serious, Lin, and you know how much contempt I have for serious things.’