by A. X. Ahmad
“Wow, look at these prices. This is a pretty fancy part of town,” Leela says in a soft voice.
He is relieved to hear her speak; all the way here she averted her face and stared into space. She wears a white T-shirt and jeans, her hair is covered with a clean white bandanna, and her eyes are hidden behind her plastic sunglasses; she is completely unrecognizable as Lenore, the club hostess.
“Ranjit, what will we do if Ruksana has a doorman? We can’t just walk in.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“That’s really your mantra, isn’t it?” She smiles and slips her hand into his, her previous anger at him seemingly evaporated.
They stop outside Ruksana’s apartment building, a fancy-looking brick edifice with Art Deco striations, and Ranjit’s heart sinks: just the kind of place that will have a front desk and a doorman. But peering into the lobby, they see just a low-ceilinged room with a wall of mailboxes, and no one in sight.
Shabana’s key turns easily in the front door, and they take the elevator up to the second floor. The original building must have been chopped up into smaller apartments, because the doors here are very close together.
Ranjit’s guess proves correct. Unlocking the door to 2R, they walk into a minuscule, dark living room the size of a ship’s cabin, its one window facing a blank brick wall.
Flicking on a light, he sees mango-yellow walls and a blue foldout futon couch with two pillows and a neatly folded cotton blanket. Off to one side is a galley kitchen, the face of the small refrigerator covered with neat rows of takeout menus. There are no photographs, no decorations, and everything is very neat; unlike her sister, Ruksana lives like a monk.
Ranjit finds the room sterile, but Leela seems entranced.
“Wow. It’s so simple and clean. I’ve always wanted to live alone in an apartment like this.” She points to a red enamel-and-chrome machine that sits on the kitchen counter. “She even has an Italian single-serve coffee machine. Those are expensive. And look, cacti.” On the windowsill is a row of tiny potted cacti, all growing crooked toward the light.
Ranjit wonders why Ruksana sleeps in her living room. He heads down a short corridor, smelling something sharp in the air, and enters a much larger, sunny room that should be the bedroom. It has no furniture, the floor is covered with a paint-spattered tarp, and in the center sits an empty wooden easel. Along the walls are stacked more painted canvases, three and four deep.
Walking closer, he kneels and examines the paintings. They seem abstract, in luminescent whites and deep reds, interspersed with faint outlines in pencil.
“It’s them.” Leela stands in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest.
“What do you mean?” Puzzled, he steps back, and then he sees it.
Out of the fields of color two figures emerge, a red and a white one. He makes out oval faces, long necks, and long sweeps of hair.
“I see it now.” He points to a painting where the two figures are clearer. “All the paintings are of the two sisters. Ruksana’s been painting the same thing over and over, it’s obsessive.”
“There’s a closet here.”
Leela walks past him, moves a stack of canvases, and pulls open the accordion door. Inside are cans full of paintbrushes, neatly stacked palettes, and tubes of oil paint. Finding a shoebox in the corner, she squats and rifles through it.
“Hey, look at this.” She waves a photograph at him. It is old and faded, the same photograph he’d seen in Shabana’s bedroom, then at the club: she is a teenager, standing against a brick wall, but this time she wears a red salwar kameez, not a white one.
“That’s the same picture Shabana had at the club.” He gestures around the studio. “Search this room, see if you can find anything, okay? I’ll take the other rooms.”
He heads back, and starts with the kitchen. The cabinets are mostly empty, and unlined, so there is no place to hide anything. The fridge is empty except for a carton of soy milk—sour now—and a plastic carton of seaweed salad from a Korean deli, now rotten and brown. Her freezer has only ice cubes. The inside of her oven is pristine.
The living room is bare except for the futon, which he pulls off the wooden frame, then replaces. There is nothing hidden in these monastic, cell-like rooms.
He is about to go back to Leela when his phone rings. It is Kikiben, no doubt excited about Ranjit’s date with her niece, and he lets it go to voice mail, but it immediately rings again. Damn it, she’s so persistent. Standing by the living room window, he answers.
“Ranjit? Ranjit, listen.” All the excitement has gone from Kikiben’s voice. “I’m sorry, so sorry.”
Ranjit stares out of the window at the blank brick wall outside. “Sorry about what?”
“Lateef. He must have been looking through the security tapes, he saw that you had come here to visit me. He started shouting at me, asking me why you had come here, how often we were in contact. I got frightened, I told him that you had just called, you wanted to know Ruksana’s address. Baba re, he started abusing me, calling me an old cow—”
“Is Lateef still there?”
“No, no, he left quickly, he shouted at his men, they jumped into a car and … I think they’re going to Ruksana’s apartment. Ranjit? You’re not there, are you?”
“No, no, of course not. Thank you, Kikiben.”
Rushing into the back room, he finds Leela is still crouched over the shoebox of photographs.
“Talking to your girlfriend again? Meanwhile, look at what I found—”
She waves a photograph at him, but he brushes it aside, and yanks her to her feet.
“We have to leave, now, Lateef’s men are coming here—”
“What? How did they find out?”
“Never mind. Let’s go.”
The two of them run out of the apartment, pulling the door shut, and Leela heads toward the elevator, but he pulls her in the other direction.
“There must be another way out. Always two exits, it’s the fire code.”
Running down the corridor, they pass endless apartment doors, till they finally reach a metal fire door. Ignoring the EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY sign, Ranjit pushes it open and they stumble down a short set of metal stairs to an asphalt parking lot below, crowded with cars parked nose to tail.
Emerging out on Lexington Avenue, they find themselves a hundred feet south of the building entry.
“There’s no one here.” Leela struggles to keep up with him, taking two strides to his one. “You freaked me out. What the hell happened?”
“Lateef was at Nataraj Imports, he found out that Kiki had been talking to me, and she told him that I’d been asking about Ruksana’s address. I couldn’t take a chance.”
They have gone two blocks down the avenue when a black Lincoln goes past in the other direction. Inside are the two men in dark jackets, bored expressions on their faces. The driver is chewing bubble gum, and a large pink bubble blossoms from his mouth. When he sees them, the car swerves, and the bubble bursts.
Ranjit looks frantically down the street. Only tiny businesses and boutiques, no big department stores to duck into.
Tires squeal behind them as the Lincoln pulls a U-turn.
Leela points down the avenue. “There’s a subway entrance at Sixty-eighth Street…”
Grabbing her hand, he begins to run. “Come on. Come on.”
He sprints, she stumbles alongside him, and they make it another block, but the Lincoln is right behind them, drawing nearer. They reach Sixty-eighth Street, and Leela turns to the subway entrance on the corner, but Ranjit keeps moving.
“No. The trains are slow at this time. If the men catch us on the platform we’ll be trapped.”
“Are you sure—” Leela is so winded that she can barely speak.
He doesn’t bother to answer, grasps her hand tighter, and pulls her out into moving traffic. Brakes screech, a car slams to a halt, and a man shouts, Are you fucking crazy? They are across one lane of traffic, then cut in front of a moving bus to
reach the other side of Lexington Avenue.
Behind them, the Lincoln follows, changing lanes and positioning itself for a left-hand turn.
Ranjit and Leela run down Sixty-eighth Street, and tires squeal behind them as the Lincoln makes the left turn.
There is a sudden woop-woop-woop and, out of nowhere, a police cruiser appears, its red and white lights flashing. It is right behind the Lincoln, which surges forward, showing no signs of slowing down. The cruiser’s siren becomes a loud wail, and an amplified voice screams, Pull over! Right now!
Right behind them, the Lincoln slows to a stop, the irate police cruiser behind it, bristling with lights.
“Slow down. Walk. Don’t look back.” Ranjit lets go of Leela’s moist hand.
“How … how did you know … there was a cop at the corner? I didn’t see anyone.…” Sweat runs down her face, and her words come out in a gasp.
He is equally winded, but tries not to show it. “There’s a ‘No left turn’ sign at that crossing. Everyone ignores it. The cops sit in an alley back there and bust people who make that turn. I got two tickets right there.”
When they reach another subway entrance, they glance back: the Lincoln is still stopped, and the cruiser sits motionless behind it, the policeman inside typing slowly on his laptop.
“The cop is pissed off, he’ll take his time now. Come on, we’ll take the train.”
Grabbing onto Leela’s hand again, Ranjit descends into the dim, piss-smelling gloom, just in time to make the downtown local.
It is packed, and as they push their way into the center of the car, Leela leans into him, mouthing something. He can’t hear her above the roar and rattle, and just then his phone begins to ring. He grabs onto an overhead pole, gestures to her to wait, and presses the phone to his ear.
Ali’s gruff voice is unmistakable. “Ranjit? We found the maderchod.”
“Found who?” He strains to hear.
“That guy, yaar. Kishen, Mohan’s cousin.”
“You found him! Good.”
“Good? After all this effort, you bahinchud, you say good? I’ve been busting my balls trying to track down this guy for you, and—”
“I’ll name my second-born child after you, okay? Where is he?”
“Much better. Your friend, Kishen, he’s working for a high-end garage in Chelsea. Tenth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, it’s called Five Star Auto. One of our guys spotted him. Where are you? You need a ride?”
“No, I’m fine. Look, I’m on the subway, I can hardly hear you—” His phone goes dead, and he jams it into his pocket. Leela is staring at him, her face tense, something held in her hand.
“Don’t worry, we’re safe. That was Ali, they found Mohan’s cousin.”
“Ranjit, listen to me. This was in the shoebox in Ruksana’s apartment.”
She thrusts a photograph at him. It is an old Kodak print, faded over the years, and he recognizes the brick wall that forms its background, and the muddy lane. He stares at the two slim teenage girls standing against the wall, slightly apart. The straight-backed one in the red salwar kameez is looking off to the side, her face in profile. The one in white is lost in her own thoughts, leaning her slim shoulders against the wall. The girls are identical.
“I don’t understand.” He peers at the photograph. “How is Shabana in the picture twice? Is this a trick photograph?”
Leela leans in and points. “The one in white is Shabana. The one in red, she’s hiding one side of her face, that must be Ruksana.”
He stares at the photograph. “But they’re…”
“… twins.” Leela smiles triumphantly. “They are twins. Identical twins.”
Ranjit stands in the rocking train, holding the photograph closer. He’d seen both photographs—the girl in white in Shabana’s apartment, and the girl in red in Ruksana’s apartment—and assumed they were both pictures of Shabana, in different clothes.
Now, examining the photograph closely, he sees that Shabana, in white, has thinner hair, and that Ruksana, in red, has turned away to hide her damaged cheek. But despite the differences, they are almost identical: slim and waiflike, their slender necks almost too fragile for their long, black waterfalls of hair.
Leela reaches forward and takes the photograph. “That’s why Ruksana was hidden away all those years. You can’t have two versions of a movie star.”
Ranjit is wordless. This changes everything.
Two identical women: Ruksana in her dark, sad, tiny apartment, and Shabana across the park in her light-filled place at the Dakota. One a famous movie star, the other clearly obsessed with her sister, painting the two of them, over and over. It was almost as though Ruksana wanted to be Shabana, to inhabit her sister’s life.
Now Ruksana has disappeared, and Mohan as well.
Ranjit can’t ignore the most logical explanation any longer. Yes, Mohan was having an affair with Shabana, but clearly the relationship was an unequal one. Maybe Mohan tired of her and became involved with Ruksana; after all, Ruksana was just as beautiful as Shabana, but worse off, and Mohan was always a sucker for a woman in distress.
Maybe that night in the Dakota Mohan was with Ruksana when Shabana returned unexpectedly. The two sisters fought, there was some sort of struggle, and Shabana died. Why else would both Mohan and Ruksana go missing?
So Mohan is a murderer. Ranjit swallows hard when he thinks of what his old friend has done. Why is he always so shocked when people change? After all, Mohan always needed a woman, and Ruksana—beautiful, but damaged and deeply resentful of her famous sister—could have easily manipulated a man like him.
As the train rattles on, Ranjit stares at the dark window, seeing his own haggard reflection. Leela’s head barely comes up to his shoulder, her white bandanna now darkened with sweat. She probably won’t agree with his theory: she has seen Shabana humiliated at Club Ghungroo and has suffered the same fate at Lateef’s hands. She desperately wants Patel and Lateef to be guilty, and he better keep his insights to himself for now.
And now Kishen, Mohan’s cousin, has been found. Chelsea is close by, and with a change of trains, it will take twenty minutes to get there. If Kishen knows where Mohan is, chances are that Ruksana is with him. Ranjit can call the cops then, and maybe this whole thing will come to an end.
Ranjit sees a white-haired man reading The New York Times, and scans the headlines. Shabana’s murder has long since disappeared from the front page, replaced by the garbage strike. There is concern that the piles of festering garbage and the attendant rats will spread medieval diseases throughout the city: the bubonic plague is mentioned.
The train begins to slow, and there is a rustle as people prepare to disembark. Ranjit squares his shoulders, looks at Leela, and nods at the door.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Five Star Auto is a small garage on the far west side of Chelsea, its business spilling out onto the street. Sleek Teslas, Porsches, and Alfa Romeos are parked on the oil-stained sidewalk, and a few harried-looking mechanics are hooking up the cars to mobile diagnostic terminals. There are other repair shops on this street, their façades covered in looping graffiti, and farther down, in what used to be garages, is the latest incarnation of New York’s art scene: spartan, white-washed galleries that earn more selling one or two pieces than the garages make in a year. Like the rest of Manhattan, Chelsea has been gentrified, and the last remnants of its industrial past are being wiped out.
The mechanics at Five Star Auto work frantically, shouting to each other, oblivious of their impending obsolescence.
“Hey.” Ranjit walks up and taps a black mechanic on the shoulder. “We’re looking for Kishen. He works here, right?”
“We’re busy. Get lost.”
“Hey, look—”
“You heard me. Get out of here.”
Ranjit advances on the man, but Leela pulls him back.
“Let me do it. I know Kishen.” She smooths down her white bandanna, licks her lips, and walks into the garage.
Crossing to the other side of the narrow street, he watches her. The mechanics don’t stop her as she walks toward a bald man sitting at a desk at the back. Ranjit can’t hear what she is saying, but the man looks up, pushes his glasses onto his head, and smiles at her.
Leela disappears deeper into the garage, and emerges a few minutes later. The man with her—laughing, his hands thrust deeply into the pockets of his stained overalls—looks nothing like his cousin. Whereas Mohan is long-legged and elegant, Kishen is squat, with close-cropped hair and a square jaw. He seems very comfortable with Leela, chuckling as they cross the street and walk up to Ranjit.
“Oh, this is my friend, Captain Ranjit Singh. He’s an old army buddy of Mohan’s,” Leela says, and Kishen sticks out his hand, then glances down and retracts it.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’m covered in grease. Captain Singh, yeah, Mohan used to talk about you. He said you were the only guy who was nice to him at the Academy. You taught him how to box, and he won some big fight because of you. But with Mohan, it’s hard to tell what’s the truth, and what’s bullshit. Well, Captain, what can I do for you?”
Ranjit takes an immediate liking to this blunt man. “I’ll make a long story short. You and I know that Mohan’s in bad trouble. He’s an old friend of mine, I want to help him get out of the city. Any idea where he is?”
“This whole thing is crazy.” Kishen’s broad face darkens. “Mohan didn’t kill anyone, he’s incapable of murder, he’s a wimp. Besides, he was crazy about that chick, and she was crazy about him. All the papers say she’s a movie star, he’s a doorman, but so what? She was just a woman, for God’s sake, not a goddess.” Kishen points a blunt finger toward the shop. “See that bald Russian guy at the desk? He has a Ph.D. in physics from Moscow University. A fucking Ph.D. Same thing with Shabana. Back in India, she was a superstar, a goddess, but here? She’s just another frantic, middle-aged woman with no husband.”
