The Mountain Shadow

by Gregory David Roberts

  ‘One thing is certain, Mr Bradley,’ Wilson continued. ‘You cannot stay in this hotel. Not when such a significant change in your financial circumstances has shifted you into a, shall we say, more significant income bracket?’

  ‘He means a more vulnerable income bracket,’ Scorpio mumbled. ‘He’s already talking kidnapping, Gemini. D’you hear that?’

  ‘Calm down, Scorpio,’ I said.

  ‘He’s right, actually,’ Divya chipped in.

  ‘You see?’ Scorpio hissed.

  ‘My dad, he’s an expert in kidnapping security,’ Divya said. ‘I’ve been trained in it since I was five years old. All rich people are. Now that you’re rich, you’ll have to learn counter-kidnapping techniques, and have all your friends carefully vetted by the police. You’ll need to stay in a safe place, too, and have an armoured limousine. No doubt about it. Bodyguards and money go together like handbags and shoes.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Scorpio moaned.

  ‘And you’re right about the fingers and ears,’ Divya added. ‘But kidnappers use couriers, not the post.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘One case I know, they cut all the fingers but one, before the family paid the ransom.’

  ‘Oh . . . ’

  ‘Divya, please,’ Naveen sighed.

  ‘In another case, they cut off both ears. Tragic. Had to give away his collection of designer sunglasses.’

  ‘Oh . . . ’

  ‘Divya.’

  ‘And hats never looked quite the same,’ Divya mused, ‘but at least they got him back. And he’s still rich.’

  ‘Divya, you’re not helping!’ Naveen snapped.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she retorted. ‘Far as I can see, there are only two millionaires involved in this conversation, Mr Bradley and Miss Me. Hello? So, I’m the only one qualified to talk about rich kidnapping victims, na?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Scorpio moaned.

  ‘Where’s the party?’ Gemini laughed, still dancing.

  ‘I have taken the liberty of reserving suites at the Mahesh hotel, on my floor,’ Wilson announced. ‘I was hoping that sooner or later I would be successful in locating you, and that I would be able to extend a measure of hospitality. My firm has also arranged for a line of credit to be opened for you immediately, Mr Bradley, for you to use until the legal matters are all resolved and you can receive your full inheritance.’

  ‘That’s . . . that’s amazing,’ Scorpio stammered uncertainly. ‘A line of credit?’

  ‘How much credit?’ Gemini asked.

  ‘I lodged a hundred thousand dollars in your discretionary account. You have immediate access to it.’

  ‘I like this guy,’ Gemini said softly. ‘Give him another million dollars, Scorpio.’

  ‘We are hoping that you will retain our services, Mr Bradley,’ Wilson said. ‘Just as your departed great-uncle Josiah Bradley did for so many years. We’re fully prepared to offer you the best possible professional advice, on the management of your legacy. We are at your complete service.’

  ‘What are we waitin’ for?’ Gemini George cried. ‘Let’s go!’

  ‘What about our stuff?’ Scorpio George asked, glancing back at the Frantic hotel.

  ‘Trust me,’ Divya said, taking Scorpio’s arm, and leading him toward the waiting taxis. ‘You’ll send a servant to do that. From now on, your servants will do everything that isn’t fun.’

  ‘Whiskey!’ Gemini said, falling into step behind them, and leaning over Divya’s shoulder.

  ‘And a long shower,’ Divya said.

  ‘And champagne!’

  ‘And a second shower.’

  ‘And cocaine! Hey, I know! Let’s mix the cocaine in the champagne!’

  ‘I’m beginning to like you,’ Divya said.

  ‘And I already like you,’ Gemini said. ‘Let’s get that party started!’

  ‘You’ll join us, of course, Mr Wilson?’ Divya asked, taking his arm as well.

  ‘If you’ll pardon the indiscretion, Miss . . .?’

  ‘Devnani. Divya Devnani. Call me Diva. Everyone does.’

  ‘If you’ll pardon the indiscretion, Miss Devnani,’ Wilson said, smiling and making no move to disengage his arm from hers, ‘didn’t you advise your friends, not half an hour ago, to kick the shit out of me?’

  ‘Silly boy,’ she chided. ‘That was before I knew you were administering thirty-five million dollar estates. And it’s Diva, remember?’

  ‘Very well, Miss Diva. I’d be delighted to share a glass in celebration.’

  After the short ride back to the Mahesh hotel, Wilson collected the room keys and arranged to have the desk manager visit Scorpio George’s suite in an hour, to sign in the new guests.

  As he was about to leave the reception area, I put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Are you planning to make a complaint?’ I asked him quietly.

  ‘A complaint?’

  ‘About Manav.’

  ‘Manav?’

  ‘Your security guard.’

  ‘Oh, him,’ he smiled. ‘He was rather derelict in his duty. But . . . I think that was because he knew I was in safe hands, with you and young Mr Naveen, even if he did expose me to the risk of Miss Diva.’

  ‘Is that a no?’

  ‘It is indeed a no, sir. I will not make a complaint against him.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, shaking hands with him.

  I liked Evan Wilson. He was calm, discreet and resolute. He’d shown courage when we’d confronted him. He had a sense of humour, was professional but pragmatic, and seemed to be a good judge of flawed characters, in life’s tight corners.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘Shall we join the others?’

  ‘No, I’ve got somewhere I already had to be,’ I replied, looking at the laughing group, Naveen, Divya, and the Zodiac Georges, waiting by the doors to the elevators.

  I looked back to the silver-haired Canadian lawyer.

  ‘Good luck, Mr Wilson.’

  I watched him walk away, and then made my way back to the ground-floor restaurant. Ranjit’s table was empty, and had been cleared and prepared for a new setting.

  I signalled the manager.

  ‘When did they leave?’

  ‘Some time ago, Mr Lin. Miss Lisa left a note for you.’

  He fished the note from his vest pocket and handed it to me. It was written in the red ink she preferred.

  Gone to a party with Ranjit, the note said. Don’t wait up.

  I gave the manager a tip, and took a few steps, before a thought made me turn and call back.

  ‘Did they have dessert?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah . . . no, sir. No. They left immediately after the first course.’

  I pushed through the main doors of the hotel. Outside in the warm night air I saw Manav, the hotel bodyguard, standing on duty with another security officer. He noticed me, and searched my eyes expectantly.

  He was a good kid, with a nice combination: big, strong and kind. He was worried that Mr Wilson would make a complaint for abandoning a guest of the hotel. It would cost him his job, and end any hope of a better career in the hospitality industry. I signalled him to come over.

  ‘Kya hal hain, Manav?’ I asked, shaking hands. How are you doing?

  There was a tip rolled into the palm of my hand, but he closed his huge hands over mine and resisted the offer of money.

  ‘No, no, Linbaba,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t . . . I can’t take anything.’

  ‘Sure you can,’ I smiled, forcing him to clutch at the money or let it fall to the ground.

  ‘That’s just what Mr Wilson would’ve given you, if you’d finished your shift with him tonight.’

  ‘M-Mr Wilson . . . ’

  ‘It’s okay. I just spoke to him.’

  ‘Yes, Linbaba. I saw you coming
inside, before. I was waiting here, but I didn’t have the guts to talk to him.’

  ‘He won’t make a complaint.’

  ‘It’s sure, Linbaba? Really?’

  ‘It’s sure. He told me. It’s okay.’

  The gleam in Manav’s black-brown eyes followed me as I collected my bike and rode along Marine Drive to the peak of Malabar Hill.

  I stopped at a vantage point looking down on the windowed jewels of light lining the bay-wide smile of Marine Drive. I rolled myself a hash joint and began to smoke it.

  A beggar, who made the long, winding climb to the summit every night for a safe place to sleep, came to sit nearby. I handed him the joint. He grinned and puffed at it happily, using his hand as a chillum to draw the smoke without touching it to his lips.

  ‘Mast mal!’ he muttered, smoke streaming out through his nostrils. Great stuff!

  Nodding sagely, he puffed again, and passed the joint back to me.

  I took the piece of hash I’d used to make the joint, and gave it to him. The man became suddenly serious, looking from the large piece of hashish in his palm to my eyes, and back again.

  ‘Go home,’ he said at last in Hindi. ‘Go home.’

  I rode back through storming rain, parked my bike in the shelter beneath my building, slipped a damp twenty-rupee note into the shirt pocket of the sleeping watchman, and entered my apartment.

  Lisa wasn’t there. I stripped off the wet clothes and boots, showered, ate some bread and fruit, drank a mug of coffee, and lay back on the bed.

  The electric fan turned overhead just fast enough to send a cooling flourish into the humid air. A new downpour drummed against the metal gable over the bedroom window, sending rivulets as silver as mercury streaming past the half-open window.

  I smoked a joint in the dark, and waited. It was after three when Lisa returned, her footsteps tapping the dissonant dance of the drunk on the marble floor tiles of the entry hall.

  She tumbled into the room, throwing her handbag against a chair. It missed, and rolled off onto the floor. She kicked one loose, untied sandal off, and hop-stumbled out of the other.

  Turning in struggling little circles, she wriggled out of her dress and panties, trailing them from one ankle as she thumped onto the bed.

  I couldn’t see her pupils, in the darkened room. One look at them would’ve told me what she’d taken: all drugs live and die in the eyes. I reached out to switch on the bedside lamp, but she stopped me.

  ‘Leave it off! I want to be Cleopatra.’

  When she was deep in sleep I took a wet towel and cooled her down. I dried her off, and she rolled onto her side of the bed, and settled into blameless sleep.

  I lay back in the darkness, beside her. Bats chittered past the open window, seeking shelter from the dawn. The watchman, who’d woken from his nap to do rounds of the building, tapped his bamboo stick against the ground to warn away foraging rats. The sound faded, and the room was still and quiet. Her breathing was waves on a gentle shore.

  I was happy for the Zodiac Georges, sudden millionaires, and happy to see that Naveen and Divya were still together, no matter how much they fought. And I was glad that Lisa was home and safe.

  But I was sick inside. I didn’t know what Lisa wanted, but I was sure it wasn’t me. There were times, I think, when I wanted her to want me, and love me, and let me love her in return. There were times when I hoped that it would happen. But wanting more was a sign of how little we had. We were friends who didn’t try hard enough to make it more.

  My eyes began to close. In a half-dream I saw Ranjit, his face contorted, a fiend, a malignant thing. I started awake, and listened for a while to the soft echo of the sea, Lisa’s breath, until my eyes closed again.

  And we slept, together and alone, as rains washed the city cleaner than the kneeling stone in a prison confessional.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The filthy Georges, as many had called them, were filthy rich. The whole of South Bombay babbled, marvelling at the fate that allowed the meekest of the city’s meek foreigners to become inheritors of the earth. The once-shunned beggars were suddenly shunted into social acceptability. How the fallen are mighty, Didier laughed happily.

  For three weeks the door of the Zodiac Georges’ suite opened, day and night, to admit a promissory of experts, devoting their talents to squeezing the square-peg street dwellers into the round holes of sudden wealth: tailors, barbers, podiatrists, jewellers, numerologists, watchmakers, yoga instructors, manicurists, stylists, meditation masters, astrologers, accountants, legal representatives, personal servants, and a frenzy of stress counsellors.

  Securing the essential services of those professionals, and driving their fees to vulture leavings, was a task that Divya Devnani applied herself to with considerable energy, and no little flair. She took a suite at the hotel for those weeks, and was almost constantly in the company of the fledgling millionaires. Reinventing Scorpio and Gemini was a duty, she told me.

  ‘I was right there when the Georges came into their money,’ she said. ‘Me, who just happens to be the richest girl in Bombay, and a girl of supernaturally good taste. This is karma. This is kismet. Who am I to snub my nose? It’s my duty to help them rise from the ashes.’

  The Zodiac Georges, for all their loving friendship, had completely different strategies for coping with the move from ashes to A-listers.

  Gemini George suggested that they should give most of the money away. The Georges never lied, never cheated their customers, and never raised a hand to anyone. Life in the slums and back alleys of Bombay had given them a long list of friends and deserving recipients: people who’d helped them, managers of cheap restaurants and little shops who’d extended them life-saving lines of credit, a shuffle of beggars and street touts whose kindness had kept them afloat, and even a few cops, who’d always looked the other way.

  With what remained of the money, Gemini enthused, they could have a long, unforgettable season of parties, and then put a modest amount into an interest-bearing account, paid monthly, and go back to living happily, and more comfortably, on the street.

  Scorpio wasn’t tempted. Although he was horrified by the responsibilities and moral burdens of his sudden wealth, and he talked about it to everyone not skilled in the art of escaping pessimists, he couldn’t bring himself to part with it.

  The first weeks of his prosperity were a nightmare, he said. Money is another word for misery, he said. Money is the ruin of peace, he said. But he wouldn’t embrace Gemini’s plan, and give the burden away.

  He fretted, paced, moaned and mumbled. Shaved and trimmed, exfoliated and massaged, manicured and moisturised, the tall Canadian wandered back and forth in the luxurious suite, prosperously uneasy.

  ‘It will end badly, Lin,’ he said to me, when I dropped in to visit.

  ‘Everything ends badly, for everyone. That’s why we have art.’

  ‘I guess,’ he agreed vaguely, not consoled. ‘Did you see Gemini, when you came in? Is he still playing cards?’

  ‘I didn’t see him. A Sikh guy let me in. He called himself your major-domo.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. That’s Singh. He kinda runs the place. Him and Diva together. He’s got a schnozz on him, that guy. If your main job is looking down your nose at people, it helps to have a long one, I guess.’

  ‘He also has a short list, to go with that long nose.’

  ‘That’s . . . that’s because we had to put a limit on who gets in here, Lin. You wouldn’t believe how it’s been, since people started hearing about how I’ve got all this money.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘They’re hittin’ on us, day and night. The hotel had to double its security staff on this floor to cope. And people still managed to get up here. One of them was banging on the door, asking for money, while I was taking a dump.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I haven’
t been on the street for three days. People were crawlin’ outta the shadows, man, all of them with their hands out for money.’

  I recalled that the Zodiac Georges had themselves emerged from a shoal of shadows over the years, and always brandishing the shell of an upturned palm.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘But don’t worry, Lin,’ Scorpio added hastily. ‘You’ll always be on the short list.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘No, I mean it, man. You always did right by us. And I’ll never forget it. Hey! Speaking of which, do you . . . do you need any –’

  ‘No, I’m good,’ I smiled. ‘Thanks anyway.’

  ‘Okay. Okay. Let’s go find Gemini. I want to tell him about the new security arrangements.’

  We found the Londoner in an annex to the suite, designed for use as a guest’s temporary business office. Gemini George had covered the large desk with a tablecloth, and had converted the office into a gambling den.

  He was playing poker with a selection of off-duty service personnel from the hotel. The litter of several meals, drinks and snacks indicated that the game had been running for a while.

  ‘Hey, Scorp! Hey, Lin!’ Gemini smiled happily, as we entered. ‘Pull up a chair. The game’s just hotting up.’

  ‘Too hot for me, Gemini.’

  Gemini George was a skilful cheat, but he never took large sums of money off people, and he sometimes deliberately lost hands that he could’ve won. For him, the thrill was in not being detected, no matter how he played the hand.

  ‘Come on, Lin, push your luck.’

  ‘I prefer my luck to do the pushing. I’ll watch a couple of hands.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, winking at me and throwing a chip on the table to raise a bet. ‘Scorpio, did you get our guest a drink?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lin.’

  He whirled on the hotel staff, playing cards.

  ‘C’mon, you guys! You’re supposed to be working in this hotel. Fetch our guest a drink. Get him a . . . what, Lin?’

  ‘I’m good, Scorpio.’

  ‘No, please, have something.’