Chapter Sixteen
I swung the bike away from Farzad’s house and into the wide, divided boulevard that followed the Island City coast north. Densely packed, sodden rainclouds closed in overhead, darkening the street.
I began to pass a wide, sheltered inlet, and slowed down.
Long wooden fishing boats painted vivid blue, red and green had been dragged onto the shore for maintenance work. The fishermen’s simple huts leaned into one another, their plastic sheet coverings secured to the corrugated roofs against storm winds by bricks and pieces of broken concrete.
Nets were strung between wooden poles. Men worked on them, threading spools of nylon through holes and woven loops. Children played on the sand, defying the gathering rainstorm, and chased one another between the boats and webs of netting.
From dawn, the little bay was a small but important part of the local fishing community. After midnight it was a small but important part of the local smuggling community, who used fast boats to bring in cigarettes, whiskey, currencies and drugs.
Every time I passed the sandy beach I scanned it, looking for faces I knew, and signs of illicit trade. I had no personal interest: Farid the Fixer administered the bay, and the profits and opportunities were his. It was professional curiosity that drew my eye.
All of us in the black market knew every place in South Bombay where crime flourished, and all of us sent a discreet, searching eye into them, every time we passed. We began in caves and dark places, Didier once said, and we criminals still miss them terribly.
I let my eyes glance back to the wide divided road, and saw three motorcycles pass me on the other side. They were Scorpions. The man riding in the centre was Danda. I recognised one other as Hanuman, the big man who’d given me a professional beating in the warehouse.
I stopped my bike, shifted into neutral gear, and adjusted the rear-view mirror until I could see them. They’d stopped at a traffic signal, some way in the distance behind me. As I watched in the mirror, they talked, argued, but then swung their bikes around and came after me. I sighed, and hung my head for a moment.
I didn’t want to fight them, but I was in my own area, and I didn’t want to lead them into any of the Company operations. And too proud to run, I didn’t want to let them chase me into the arms of my Company friends, only a few streets away.
Kicking the bike into gear, I let out the clutch, rapped the throttle, and spun the bike around in a tight circle. Gunning the engine, I accelerated toward the oncoming Scorpions, on the wrong side of the divided road.
I had nothing to lose. There were three of them, and if the charge didn’t go well for me, I was in trouble anyway. I’d come off motorcycles before, and preferred to take my chances with an accident than a massacre. And my bike was in everything with me, all the way, as I was with her.
They must’ve had something to lose, or less loyal motorcycles: at the last moment they turned their bikes aside.
Two of them rattled away into spiralling arcs, as they tried to keep their bikes under control. The third bike spun out, crashing into a slide against a wall at the side of the road.
I braked hard, whirling through a half-turn, one boot sliding on the wet road, and threw my bike onto the side-stand, cutting the engine with the kill-switch.
The fallen rider struggled to his feet. It was Danda, and me with no aftershave. I met him with left and right punches that threw him backwards onto the ground.
The other Scorpions let their bikes fall, and ran at me. I felt bad for their bikes.
Ducking, weaving and throwing punches where I could, I battled the two Scorpions on the side of the road, beside the tumbled scatter of their motorcycles. Cars slowed on the road as they passed, but none stopped.
Recovering from the blows, Danda ran at us. He stumbled past his friends and into me, grasping at my vest to steady himself.
I lost my footing on the wet road and fell backwards. Danda landed on top of me, growling like an animal.
He was burrowing his head in next to mine, trying to bite me. I felt his mouth against my neck, the wetness of his tongue, and the blunt nub of his head, as he strained to get close enough to put his teeth on my throat.
His fingers were locked in a clutch of my vest. I couldn’t throw him off. The other two Scorpions kicked at me, trying to land blows in the gaps between Danda’s body and mine. They missed, and kicked Danda a couple of times. He didn’t seem to notice.
I hadn’t been hurt, or even properly hit by anyone. I could feel my two knives pressing against my back on the ground. I had a policy. I never drew the knives unless the other man was armed, or if it became a question of life or death.
I managed to roll over, wrestled away Danda’s grip on my vest, and stood up quickly. I should’ve stayed down. Hanuman was behind me. He wrapped an arm around my throat from behind. His powerful arm began to choke off my air.
Danda rushed at me again, trying to burrow his head in close. He was a biter. I knew one in prison: a man whose anger suddenly became biting, until pieces were missing from anyone he attacked. A victim knocked his teeth out, leaving the rest of us in peace, and I was thinking of doing the same to Danda.
He was pressed up close against me, his head tucked in under Hanuman’s arm, his teeth against my arm. I couldn’t hit him in any place that might make him let go.
I reached up, closed my fingers around Danda’s ear, and ripped at it hard. I felt the whole flap of his ear give way, tearing itself from the side of his head. When he stopped biting, I stopped ripping.
He screamed, hurling himself backwards, clutching at the bloody wound.
Shifting my hand around, I tried to shove it between Hanuman’s body and mine. I wanted to reach one of my knives, or one of his balls; either one would do.
The third man rushed at me. In his fury, he began to slap at my head, standing too close. I kicked him in the balls. He fell as if he’d been shot.
I closed my hand around the hilt of my knife, as darkness closed a hand around my throat. The knife was free. I tried to stab the big man in the leg. I missed. The knife slid away to the side.
I tried again. I missed. Then the blade found flesh, a small cut on the outer edge of Hanuman’s thigh. He flinched.
It was enough to get a bearing. I struck again and rammed the blade into the meat of his thigh. The big man lurched suddenly, and I lost my grip on the knife.
The arm didn’t weaken. I’d followed my training, turning my chin into the crook of his elbow to lessen the choking effect. It was no use. I was going under.
A voice, blurred and rumbling, seemed to be calling my name. I twisted my head against the locked muscle and bone of Hanuman’s arm. I heard a voice.
‘Look away, now, boyo,’ it said.
I saw something, a fist, coming at me from the sky. It was huge, that fist, as big as the world. But just when it should’ve smashed into my face it struck somewhere else, somewhere so close that I felt the shudder of it. And again it struck, and again.
And the arm around my neck released its grip, as Hanuman fell to his knees and flopped forward, his head made of lead.
I rolled and stood, shaping up, my fists close to my face, coughing and breathing hard. I turned to look around me. Concannon was standing near the fallen Hanuman, his arms folded.
He smiled at me, and then nodded his head in a little warning.
I turned quickly. It was Danda, all blood-streaked teeth, blood-streaked eyes, and blood-streaked ear. And me with no aftershave.
He swung a wild punch trying to knock me out. He missed. I snapped a fist at the gash where the ragged flap of his ear was hanging by a tongue-tip of skin. He screamed, and it rained. Sudden rain spilled and splashed on us.
Danda ran, clutching at the side of his head, rain running red into his shirt. I turned to see Concannon swinging a kick at the other departing Scorpion. The man yelped, and joined Danda, stumbling toward a stand of taxis.
Hanuman groaned, wakened by the rain. He crawled to his knees, stood unsteadily, and realised that he was alone. He hesitated for a moment.
I turned to look at Concannon quickly. The Irishman was grinning widely, all clenched teeth.
‘Oh, Lord,’ he said softly. ‘Please make this man too stupid to run away.’
Hanuman lurched away, limping after his friends.
My knife was lying in the rain, still bleeding into the bitumen. Some way down the wide road, the Scorpions tumbled into a taxi as it sped away from the rank. I picked up the knife, cleaned it, closed it and slid it into the scabbard.
‘Fuckin’ grand fight!’ Concannon said, slapping me on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get stoned.’
I didn’t want to, but I owed him that, and more.
‘Okay.’
There was a chai shop beneath a very large tree, close to where we stood. I pushed my bike under the shelter of the tree. Accepting a rag from the chai stall owner, I dried the bike off. When the job was done, I began to walk back to the road.
‘Where the fuck are you goin’?’
‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘We’re havin’ a civilised cup of fuckin’ tea here, you Australian barbarian.’
‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
The abandoned Scorpion motorcycles were still lying in the rain by the side of the road, leaking petrol and oil. I picked them up, stood them on their stands in the cover of the stone wall, and returned to Concannon as the tea arrived.
‘Lucky for you I came along,’ he said, sipping at a glass of chai.
‘I was doin’ okay.’
‘The fuck you were,’ he laughed.
I looked at him. When a man’s right, he’s right.
‘The fuck I was,’ I laughed. ‘You really are one mad Irish motherfucker. What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘My favourite hash shop used to be near here,’ he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Cuffe Parade. ‘But somebody threw a fella off a building next door, and he landed right on top of the shop. And on top of Shining Patel, the owner.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘The upside is that a notorious singer was also hit, which saved me quite a bit. I used to pay him, regularly. It was the only way I could get him to stop singin’. Where was I?’
‘You were telling me what you’re doing here.’
‘Oh, so ya think I was followin’ ya? Is that it?’ Concannon asked. ‘You must have a mighty high opinion of yourself, boyo. I’m just here buyin’ hash.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Some time passed. It was a strangely brooding silence between men, brooding in strangely different directions.
‘Why did you help me?’
He looked at me with an expression that seemed genuinely hurt.
‘And why the fuck would one white man not help another white man, in a fuckin’ heathen place like this?’
‘There you go again.’
‘Alright, alright,’ he said quickly, putting a hand on my knee to calm me down. ‘I know you’ve got a soft heart. I know you’re a compassionate sort. That’s the beauty of ya, and there it is. You’ve even got compassion for motorcycles, may God have pity on you. But you don’t like my plain talk. You don’t like it when a man calls a spade a heathen, or a faggot a mincer.’
‘I think we’re done here, Concannon.’
‘Hear me out, man. I know it offends your sensibilities. I understand that. I truly do. I don’t like that about you, and I don’t respect it. I’ll be straight up about that. You can’t respect kindness. Not really. You know what I’m talkin’ about. You’ve done time behind the wall, on the other side of things, as I have. But you’re a compassionate man, even though you’re more like me than you think.’
‘Concannon –’
‘Wait. I’m not finished. Compassion’s a very strange thing. It comes from deep inside. People know it when they see it, because you can’t fake it. I know. I’ve tried. I was terrible at it. I got sick, when I tried. I had to go back to being a genuine, uncaring cunt, just to get well again. It’s genuine, see, even being an uncaring cunt, and I’m drawn to genuine things, even if I don’t like them. Do you see what I mean?’
‘You don’t know me at all,’ I said, meeting his eye.
‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve been in Bombay for a while, you know. A few days after I got here, I heard your name in a conversation of unsavoury types at an opium den. Then I heard it again, twice in quick succession. At first, I thought it was two foreign fellas they were talkin’ about, until I figured out that Lin and Shantaram were one and the same bad-mannered miscreant. You.’
‘So you were following me.’
‘I didn’t say that. What I said was that I got intrigued. I started asking about you. I made it my business to get to know people you know, and people you do business with. I even know your girlfriend.’
‘What?’
‘She didn’t tell ya that she met me?’
He grinned. I was beginning not to like that grin.
‘I wonder why she didn’t tell you? Maybe she likes me.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘It’s no big deal,’ he said. ‘I met her at an art exhibition.’
My raised eyebrow provoked him.
‘Oh, what? Because I’m a big lump of a Northern Irish potato-muncher, I can’t be interested in art? Is that it?’
‘Get to the point.’
‘There is no point, boyo. I met Lisa – that’s her name, right? – at an exhibition. We talked, that’s all.’
‘Why?’
‘Look, I didn’t even know she was your girlfriend, until one of her friends mentioned your name, then I put two-and-you together, so to speak. I swear.’
‘Keep away from her, Concannon.’
‘Why? She seemed to like me. I think we hit it off, a little bit. I certainly liked her. You’ll have to let her go, one of these days, but I’m sure you already know that, don’t you?’
‘That’s it,’ I said, standing.
‘Wait a minute!’ he implored, standing with me and putting a hand gently on my arm. ‘Please. I don’t want to fight you, man. I didn’t . . . I mean . . . I’m not tryin’ to upset you. It’s just my way. I know it’s fucked up. I really do. But I don’t know any other way to be. It’s like I said before, about you. Even if you don’t like it, you have to see that it’s genuine. This is what me being genuine looks like. I truly don’t mean to hurt your feelings. And I truly would like to talk.’
I resisted, staring back at him and trying to read his eyes. The pupils were tiny: pinpoints vanishing in an ice-blue tide. I looked away.
On the road nearby, a traffic warden’s truck pulled up beside the Scorpion gang motorcycles. Leaping from the back, the team of lifters dragged the motorcycles to the side of the truck, then hoisted them onto the back, cramming them up against others that had been seized for parking illegally.
Concannon followed my gaze as I watched the operation.
‘If I hadn’t come along when I did,’ he said softly, ‘it might’ve been your dead body bein’ thrown onto the back of a truck.’
He was right. I didn’t like him, and I was pretty sure that he was crazy. But he’d stepped in at exactly the right time, and he’d saved me.
I sat down again. Concannon called for two more glasses of chai. Working quickly, his thick fingers made a small joint.
‘Will you smoke with me?’
I took it and puffed it alight as he held the match in the lantern of his cupped hands. After a time, I passed the joint back to him.
‘Seein’ as how you’re always gettin’ so offended, and jumpin’ up, and wantin’ to fight with me or run off somewhere, I’ll come straight to the point,’ he said, exhaling a stream of grey-blue smoke.
‘The point of what?’
‘I’m startin’ a new gang, and I want you to join me.’
It was my turn to laugh.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘How about . . . why?’
‘Why a gang?’ he asked, passing back the joint. ‘The usual. So we can buy guns, do a little menace and mayhem, scare people into giving us truckloads of money, spend the truckloads of money, and die in the effort.’
‘Dying in the effort? That’s your sales pitch?’
Just then a man named Jibril, a horse-breeder from the stables in the nearby slum, approached me. I stood to greet him.
He was a gentle man, shy and a little uncomfortable speaking with human beings, but talkative and loving when dealing with his horses.
His eldest daughter had developed a fever a few weeks before that day, and had become desperately ill. Jibril called me, and agreed to have the girl screened via wide-spectrum viral toxicity.
I’d paid for the testing at a private clinic, and the tests had revealed that the girl was suffering from leptospirosis, a sometimes fatal disease carried in the urine of rats. Because it had been detected early, the girl was responding well to treatment.
Holding my hand between his, Jibril assured me that his daughter was feeling much better, and invited me to take tea with him and his family in their home.
I thanked him in return, and invited him to join us for a glass of chai. He declined, apologising for the refusal, and hurried off to an appointment with a grain merchant who supplied feed for his horses.
‘You see what I mean?’ Concannon said, when I sat down again. ‘These people like you. They don’t like me. And I don’t want them to. I don’t want to eat their food. I hate their bloody food. I don’t want to watch their movies. I don’t want to speak their fuckin’ language. But you do. You understand them. You communicate with them, and they respect you for it. Think about it. We’ll be unbeatable. We could take over this part of the city, you and me.’
‘Why would we want to do that?’ I laughed.
‘Because we can,’ he said, leaning in close to me.
Because We Can: the motto of power, since the idea of power over others was born in our kind.
‘That’s not a reason, that’s an excuse.’
‘Look around you! Ninety-nine per cent of people are just doin’ what they’re told. But you and me, we’re in the one per cent. We take what we want, while the rest of them, they take what they’re given.’
‘People rise up.’
‘Aye, they do,’ he agreed, his pale blue eyes gleaming. ‘From time to time. And then the one per cent take all their privilege back from them, and usually their pride and dignity for good measure, and they go back to being the slaves they’re born to be.’
‘You know,’ I sighed, returning his stare. ‘It’s not just that I disagree with what you’re saying, it’s that I actually despise it.’
‘That’s the beauty of it!’ he cried, slapping his thighs with both palms.
He read my mystified frown for a moment, and then continued in a softer tone.
‘Look . . . me Ma, she died when I was just a baby. Dad tried his best, but he couldn’t manage. There was five of us kids, all under ten years old, and he was a sick man. He sent us to these orphanages. We were Protestants. The girls went to Protestant places, but me little brother and me, there was no place for us, and we ended up with the Catholics.’
He paused for a while, allowing his gaze to fall to his feet. The rain squalled again, striking the plastic awning of the chai shop with the sound of drummers at a wedding.
His foot began to scrape away at the earth slowly, his running shoe leaving a pattern of scrolls and whorls in the muddy ground.
‘There was this priest, you see.’
He looked up. Fractal patterns in the irises of his ice-blue eyes glittered around the pinpoint pupils. The whites of his eyes were suddenly red, as if burned by the sea.
‘I don’t talk about this,’ he said, lapsing into a leaden silence again.
His eyes filled with tears. He clenched his jaw, swallowing hard, and willing the tears away. But they fell, and he turned his head.
‘You’re a fuckin’ cunt, you are!’ Concannon snapped, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, fuckin’ you! This is what all your nice reasonableness does to people. You turn ’em into weak cunts. That’s the first time I’ve let a tear fall in many a long year, and it’s the first time I’ve talked about that fuckin’ priest in longer still. And that’s . . . that’s why we’d be so good together, don’t you see?’
‘Not . . . really.’
‘I got out of that orphanage when I was sixteen. By my eighteenth birthday I’d killed six men. One of them was that fuckin’ priest. Shoulda seen how he begged for his life, the miserable sick thing.’
He paused again, his mouth pressed into a bitter wrinkle. I was hoping that he’d stop talking. He didn’t.
‘I forgave him, you know, before I killed him.’
‘Concannon, I –’
‘Will you not hear me out, man?’
He seemed desperate.
‘Alright.’
‘I never forgave anyone, after that,’ he began, brightening with violent recollection. ‘I was a full ranked volunteer with the UVF. And I went on breakin’ heads, shootin’ Catholics in the knees, sendin’ pieces of the IRA cunts we captured to their widows, and a lot more. We worked together with the cops and the army. Unofficial like, of course, but we had a fuckin’ green light. Hit squads, killin’ and maimin’ on demand, no questions asked.’
‘Concannon –’
‘Then it all fell apart. It got too hot. I got too hot. Too violent, they said. It was a fuckin’ war. How can you be too violent for a war? But they sent me out. Scotland first, then London. I fuckin’ hated the place. Then I went on the road, and ended up here.’
‘Look, Concannon –’
‘I know,’ he said quickly. ‘I know what you’re thinkin’ and I know what you’re gonna say. And it’s true. I can’t deny it. I like hurtin’ people who deserve it. I’m a twisted cunt. Lucky for me, there’s a lot of twisted girls out there, so I’m happy bein’ twisted. But you’re not like that. You have your principles. Don’t you get it? You’re the talk softly, and I’m the big stick. You look ’em in the eyes, do business with ’em, and shake their hands. I chop their hands off, if they disobey.’
‘Chopping people’s hands off. There’s a leap forward.’
‘I’ve given it a lotta thought,’ he said alarmingly. ‘That’s why I’ve been tryin’ to pull you away from that French mincer.’
‘You just don’t know when to quit, do you?’
‘No, wait, hear me out. It’s . . . it’s like . . . if you strip a religion down to its most basic parts, the parts that make it work so well and last for hundreds and hundreds of years, it boils down to this – nice words and the fear of horrible punishments that never end. You and me. You can’t beat a combination like that. Popes and heathen mullahs have got fat on it for centuries.’
I let out a long sigh, and put my palms on my knees, preparing to stand. He reached out to put a hand on my wrist. The grip of his hard fingers was fierce, and there was enormous strength in it.
‘That’s not advised,’ I said.
He released his grip on my arm.
‘Sorry, I . . . just . . . think about it,’ he said, the grin leaning in through the doorway of his eyes again. ‘I’ll talk to you in a few days. We won’t be alone in this, if you throw in with me. I’m already talkin’ with others, and there’s plenty of them that’s interested, make no mistake. Think about it. That’s not too much to ask for savin’ your talk softly arse today, is it? I’d like to have you in this with me. I’ll need someone to talk to. Someone I trust. Just think about it, that’s all I ask.’
I rode away, leaving him standing there under the blue plastic awning. I didn’t think about his offer, but I did think about him, that afternoon, as I made the rounds of cafés and bars we used as passport drops.
I talked with my contacts. I listened to gangster street music: gossip, slander, lies and denunciation. Always funny. But in every idle moment my thoughts returned to Concannon, and to those tears he resented so bitterly, but failed to stop.
What dream, what hope, what despair drives us to the things we do, just to desert us when the deed is done? What hollow things are they, motive and reason, born at night to fade so quickly in the sunlight of consequence? What we do in life lives on inside us, long after ambition and fear lie frosted and opaqued on forgotten shores. What we do in life, more than what we think or say, is what we are.
Concannon was running into crime, and I was already running away from it. For too long I’d done things because the fear of capture became a mirror, a face in the water, not really me, and I absolved myself of my own sins. But the waters were stirred, and the face I’d always put on the things that I did was blurred, and vanishing.