The Mountain Shadow

by Gregory David Roberts

  ‘I will stay and protect this place,’ Silvano said.

  ‘You must not,’ Idriss said. ‘You must come with us.’

  ‘I must disobey,’ Silvano replied.

  ‘You must come with us,’ Idriss repeated.

  ‘It’s just good sense, Silvano,’ I agreed. ‘If someone from down there tries to escape up here, and others start chasing him, nobody will be safe.’

  ‘I must stay, master-ji,’ Silvano said. ‘And you must go.’

  ‘It is possible to be too brave, Silvano,’ Idriss said. ‘Just as it is possible to be too loyal.’

  ‘All of your writings are here, master-ji,’ Silvano said. ‘More than fifty boxes of them, most of them unpacked for study. We cannot gather them together in the time we have. I will stay, and guard your work.’

  I admired his dedication, but it seemed like too big a risk, to me: too high a price for the written word. Then Karla spoke.

  ‘We’ll stay with you, Silvano,’ she said.

  ‘Karla,’ I began, but she smiled true love at me, and, well, what can you do?

  ‘Looks like you’ve got company, Silvano,’ I sighed.

  ‘It is settled, then,’ Idriss said. ‘Come with me, now, and gather the students together with their valuables, as quickly as possible. We will walk the slow path to the Kali temple, where the highway begins. Send a message to us there, when all is quiet again in our sanctuary.’

  ‘Idriss,’ I said. ‘I feel bad that this has found its way up here. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Taking responsibility for the decisions and actions of others is a sin against Karma,’ Idriss said. ‘Equal, in gravity, to avoiding responsibility for your own decisions and actions. You did not cause this. It is not your karmic burden. Be safe tonight. You are blessed, all of you.’

  He placed his hand on our heads, one by one, chanting mantras of protection.

  The students tipped their personal belongings into shawls, tied them into bundles, and assembled at the entrance to the slow path downhill, the torches and lanterns in their hands whirling like fireflies.

  Idriss joined them, turning to wave to us, and led the way, the long staff in his right hand.

  Another student, named Vijay, had decided to stay with us. He was thin, tall, and dressed in white pyjama-style cotton shirt and pants. He was barefoot, and carrying a bamboo pole that reached to his shoulder.

  His young face was expressionless, as he watched his teacher depart. He turned his fine features on me, eyes lit with India.

  ‘Are you fine?’ he asked.

  I looked at his bamboo stick, remembering the men I’d fought in the last year, from Scorpions to Concannon, and thinking that it might be a good idea to tie a knife to the end of that stick.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a spare knife, if you want to tie it to that stick.’

  He stood back, began to whirl the stick around, jumped while he whirled, and brought the stick down a toe away from my boot.

  ‘Or . . . maybe not,’ I said.

  ‘Shall we split up, and take different vantage points?’ Silvano asked.

  ‘No!’ Karla and I said, together.

  ‘Anyone who comes up here, comes onto our ground,’ I said. ‘We find a position with cover, with an escape route, where we can see the top of the climbing path. If anyone comes into the open space, we can scare them away with gunfire, and noise.’

  ‘And if it becomes a fight?’

  ‘We kill them,’ Karla said, ‘before they kill us. You’re a dead shot, Silvano, and I’m not bad. We’re okay.’

  ‘Or,’ I suggested, ‘we could escape, regroup, and wait it out. There are plenty of places to hide, and they can’t stay on this mountain forever.’

  ‘I say we fight,’ the student with the stick said.

  ‘I say we decide to run or to fight, when we have to decide,’ I said.

  ‘I agree that we should have a good place of cover,’ Silvano mused. ‘The cave nearest to the path is the best place to see them coming.’

  ‘No exit strategy,’ I said. ‘I always like a way out.’

  ‘There is a way out,’ Silvano said. ‘Let me show you.’

  There was a curtain at the far end of the cave. I’d seen it, but had always thought that it hung there to cover the bare cave wall.

  Silvano pushed it aside, and led us by torchlight along a narrow channel that had formed or been carved between the first cave and the last.

  We emerged from the passageway into Idriss’s cave, close to the ragged edge of the jungle: only a few steps from cover.

  ‘I like it,’ Karla said. ‘I’d buy it, and live here, if I could.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s get set up in the first cave. We don’t have long.’

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ Silvano said, rubbing his belly, ‘but I’m hungry.’

  We brought cold food, water, blankets and torches to the cave. I ate the plate of food Karla passed to me before I knew what it was. But when hunger was satisfied, fear started nagging.

  Karla, sitting beside me, and killers on the way: my instincts were shouting to get the hell out of hell. But she was calm, and resolute. She’d finished her food, and was cleaning her gun. She was humming. And I guess, when I look back at it, she always had enough guts for both of us.

  ‘Where are the boxes of Idriss’s writings?’ I asked, looking away to Silvano.

  ‘In the main cave,’ Silvano replied, finishing his food.

  ‘Then let’s keep any action away from there. A stray bullet could start a fire.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Vijay took Karla’s plate and stacked it with the others, outside the cave.

  ‘I know this forest,’ Silvano said, standing and stretching. ‘I will make a search of the area, with Vijay. And I need to visit the bathroom.’

  He walked out to join Vijay quickly, and they passed from sight, moving to the right. The point where the path led onto the mesa was to our left.

  So many feet had moved across the ridge that only wild grasses grew here and there. There was no moon yet, but it was a clear night, and we had a good view of the flattened space, fifty metres away.

  My heart was beating fast. I slowed it down, willing it calm, but thoughts of Karla hurt or captured pulled the heartbeat back again. She looked at me, and she knew how afraid I was for her.

  ‘Make a big noise, and run and hide?’ she said, her mouth a beautiful sneer. ‘That’s your strategy?’

  ‘Karla –’

  ‘Chee, chee! Can you keep that one to yourself at the next meeting?’

  ‘I say we fight, the guy with the bamboo stick says,’ I laughed. ‘That’s a better strategy? I just don’t think it’s worth fighting for.’

  ‘A writer who doesn’t think written wisdom is worth fighting for?’

  ‘No. I’ve escaped through windows, because the cops were chasing me, and I had to leave everything behind. It’s all gone, that work, but I’m still here, and I’m still writing. No life is worth the written word.’

  ‘How so?’

  Karla didn’t ask How so unless it was a challenge.

  ‘It’s not because the texts are sacred that life is important. It’s because life is sacred that the texts are important.’

  She grinned happy queens at me.

  ‘That’s my guy. Let’s get ready.’

  We piled boxes and sacks in the entrance to the cave, and stretched out with a view of the open ridge. She held my hand.

  ‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else on this planet, right now,’ she said.

  I couldn’t reply, because we heard the first shot.

  The further you are from a gunshot, the feebler the fear. The blast that deafens you, close to your ear, is a click of the fingers from far away. We heard the first shots, sounding like handclaps, an
d then it became volleys of applause.

  Silvano and Vijay scampered back to the cave, squatting down beside us.

  ‘There’s an army down there,’ Silvano said, listening to the spatters of gunfire.

  ‘Two armies,’ I said. ‘And let’s hope they stay there.’

  The fusillades finally subsided. There was silence, and then single shots snapped, one after another, a few steps apart. There were quite a lot of them.

  We waited in the dark, listening hard to every broken twig or shuffle of wind. Minutes passed in threatening silence, and then we heard noises, grunting and moaning, coming from the steep path.

  Silvano and Vijay were up and running before I could caution them. Karla made to leave as well, but I held her down beside me.

  A man appeared at the summit of the path, crawling on hands and knees. Silvano was a shadow, standing to his right, aiming the rifle at his head. The man staggered to his feet. He had a pistol in his hand.

  Vijay swung his stick, disarming the man, but the pistol fired, and a bullet hit the wall of the cave not far from where we hunkered down.

  ‘Good call, Shantaram,’ Karla said. ‘That bullet had my name on it, if I was standing there.’

  The man hovered on wavering legs for a second and then fell, face flat to the ground. Vijay turned him over as Karla and I arrived.

  The man was dead.

  ‘You better check there wasn’t a tail wagging on this one, Silvano,’ I said.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘His name’s DaSilva.’

  ‘Which side was he on?’

  ‘The wrong side,’ I said. ‘Right to the end.’

  Silvano and Vijay trotted away down the path to check for stragglers.

  Staring at the body, I knew that I couldn’t let it be found in the camp where Idriss taught. There was no choice. I had to move it. Karla had moved two bodies in her life: two that I knew about. I’ve moved three: one in prison, one in a friend’s house, and the dead gangster who hated me, DaSilva. He was the hardest of them for both of us.

  ‘We can’t leave him here for the cops to find,’ I said.

  ‘You’re right,’ she replied. ‘This is the kind of scandal that kills cleverness.’

  ‘Not gonna be easy. That’s a steep climb, with a dead body.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, looking around, her hands on her hips.

  We wrapped him in a student’s sari, and tied him securely. We fastened ropes for us to hold, at both ends.

  We were just finished, when Silvano and Vijay arrived. Vijay’s eyes were oysters of dread.

  ‘A ghost?’

  He was trembling, pointing at DaSilva’s wrapped body.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘We’re taking him down to the house. There’s no need for the cops to know he was up here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Silvano said quickly. ‘Let us help you.’

  ‘We got this,’ Karla said. ‘They’re our friends down there. They know us, but they don’t know you, and they might start shooting if they see you. It’ll be safer if we do this without you. Stay here and guard those books.’

  ‘Okay,’ Silvano smiled, doubtfully. ‘Okay. If you insist.’

  ‘Presto,’ Karla said, tugging on the dead man’s rope. ‘This ghost has a way to go yet.’

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  We dragged DaSilva’s body to the ridge, and started down the path. I went first, taking most of the weight, while Karla held on as best she could from above.

  I felt ashamed that I hadn’t protected her from that sad and criminal thing we had to do: more ashamed, in fact, than I was of doing the sad and criminal thing. I thought of Karla’s hands, and the rough rope shredding her skin, and scratches and grazes wounding her feet with every second step.

  ‘Stop!’ she said when we were just past halfway.

  ‘What is it?’

  She took a few deep breaths, and shook the tension from her arms and shoulders.

  ‘Okay, this,’ she puffed, one hand wiping hair from her forehead, the other holding a dead man, ‘is officially the best date ever. Now, let’s get this corpse down this fucking hill.’

  At the base of the mountain, I carried DaSilva’s body on my back along the path to Khaled’s mansion. The path was still lit, and the door of the mansion was open. It seemed deserted.

  We climbed the stairs together, and walked into the vestibule. I slipped DaSilva’s body to the floor, and we began to untie him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Khaled asked, from behind me.

  I spun round to face him. He had a gun in his hand.

  ‘Salaam aleikum, Khaled,’ Karla said, and she had a gun in her hand.

  ‘Wa aleikum salaam,’ he responded. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Where’s Abdullah?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Ah, no, no,’ I said. ‘Please, no.’

  ‘May Allah take his soul,’ Karla said.

  ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ I asked, choking the words. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘There were four other dead men on top of him, when I found him. One of them was Vishnu. I knew that arrogant thug would come here in person, to gloat. Now he’s dead, and my Company will take everything he had.’

  ‘Where’s Abdullah’s body?’

  ‘With the bodies of my dead men,’ Khaled said. ‘In the dining room. And I ask you, for the last time, what are you doing here?’

  ‘This miscreant wandered too far,’ I said, pulling the cover back to reveal DaSilva’s face. ‘We’re wandering him back. Is he one of yours, or theirs?’

  ‘He’s the man we used to set up the trap,’ Khaled said. ‘I shot him myself, after he served his purpose, but he got away.’

  ‘He got back,’ Karla said. ‘Can we leave him here, Khaled? We want to keep Idriss out of this.’

  ‘Leave him. My men will be back, soon, with the trucks. I’ll put this one with the bodies we’re throwing into the sewer tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t want to see Abdullah’s body, Khaled,’ I said. ‘Do you swear to me that he’s dead?’

  ‘Wallah!’ he replied.

  ‘I want to see him,’ Karla said to me. ‘But you don’t have to come.’

  Everywhere together, never apart: but sometimes the two of you is something that only one of you must do.

  ‘I’ll come,’ I said, feeling sick already. ‘I’ll come.’

  Khaled led us through a drawing room to the main dining room. Four bodies were lying on the table neatly, like pavement dwellers sleeping together on the street.

  I saw Abdullah at once, his long black hair trailing over the edge of the table. I wanted to turn away. I wanted to run. That beautiful face, that lion heart, that fire in the sky: I couldn’t bear to see it emptied, and cold.

  But Karla went to him, put her head on his chest, and wept. I had to move. I drifted along the table, dead men’s heads a breeze against my fingers, and took Abdullah’s hand.

  The face was stern, and I was comforted to see it. He was wearing white, and it showed blood everywhere. A clear line crossed his brow, where his white cap had been, but his proud face, all eyebrows, nose and beard like a king of Sumer, was speckled and blotched everywhere else.

  He’d been shot, and stabbed, but his reddened face was unmarked.

  It hurt inside like a cramp to see his time stopped. My own threads of time vibrated within me, one strand of the harmony silenced.

  It hurt to see no breath, no life, no love. It was hard to stare at a man still there, and already suffered for, and already missing.

  She was right, to make us cry. If you don’t say goodbye, an Irish poet once said to me, you never say goodbye. And it took a long time to cry goodbye.

  Finally I let the dead hand fall, and let the myth of the man fall with it. Each one that leaves us, l
eaves an unfillable space. She came back with me to the veranda in control again, but grieving, and knowing that there was an empty cave inside both of us: a cave that would draw us again and again to sorrow, and remember.

  Khaled was waiting for us.

  ‘You should hurry,’ he said. ‘My Company is very jumpy tonight.’

  ‘Your Company?’

  ‘The Khaled Company, Lin,’ Khaled replied, frowning. ‘This night, we took Vishnu’s life, and now we take everything that Vishnu had. This night, the Khaled Company is born. That was the plan. Abdullah’s plan, in fact, to use himself as the bait.’

  ‘You know what, Khaled –’ I started to end it with him, but I stopped, because just then a man stepped out of a shadow.

  ‘Salaam aleikum, Shantaram,’ the Tuareg said.

  ‘Wa aleikum salaam, Tuareg,’ I said, standing closer to Karla.

  ‘The Tuareg has been freelancing for me,’ Khaled said. ‘He set all of this up. And now he’s back home, in the Khaled Company.’

  ‘You set this up, Tuareg?’

  ‘I did. And I kept you out of it, by sending you after the Irishman,’ the Tuareg said. ‘Because you shook my hand.’

  ‘Goodbye, Khaled,’ I said.

  ‘Allah hafiz,’ Karla said, taking my arm on the steps, because we were both unsteady on our feet.

  ‘Khuda hafiz,’ Khaled replied. ‘Until we meet again.’

  When we reached the base of the mountain, Karla stopped me.

  ‘Do you have the keys to State of Grace?’

  ‘I always have the keys to my bike,’ I said. ‘You wanna ride?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, let’s ride,’ she said. ‘I’m so messed up that only freedom can save me.’

  We rode to the temple, where Idriss and the students were sheltering for the night, and told them that the danger was over. Idriss sent a fit, young student to tell Silvano the news. We took a blessing from the sage, and left.

  We rode the last hours before dawn, going nowhere the long way, the bike chattering machine talk on empty boulevards, with signals on both sides flashing green, because nobody in Bombay stopped, at that hour, for red.

  We parked the bike at the entrance to the slower, softer path to the mountain. I chained the bike to a young tree, so she wouldn’t be afraid, and we walked the long, gentle, winding path to the mesa.