The guide saw him and shouted: ‘Hey!’
The tourists saw him and gasped: ‘Whoah!’
Gino saw him and yelled: ‘Aha!’
Ajatashatru had been right. Regardless of all the witnesses, the gypsy pulled the flick knife from his pocket and held it in front of him, ready to deliver the final thrust. Only a wire basket now separated the Indian from the blade’s sharp point. Utterly exhausted, Ajatashatru closed his eyes and bent down, his hands on his knees as he attempted to catch his breath. This is where my journey ends, he thought. The last thing he saw was the painting on the wall of his hotel room. All his dreams now were of peace and tranquillity. To his surprise, he found himself wishing that he could be reincarnated as a hay bale in a quiet field.
WHEN AJATASHATRU OPENED his eyes, he became aware that he was still alive and that he had not been transformed into a hay bale. His eyelids had shut just as the man had hurled his knife, blade first, at his stomach. But, instinctively, the Hindu had thrown himself backwards, tripping over an obstacle in the process and falling horizontally onto the cold floor of the basket.
He remained in this position for a few seconds, finding it considerably more comfortable than standing face to face with a murderer ready to do him in for €100 and perhaps nick a briefcase from him containing €100,000. This was the second time in two days that he had used the ‘playing dead’ technique. It was starting to become habit, a genuine combat strategy.
After a few minutes passed without the gypsy, the guide or any of the tourists climbing into the basket, Ajatashatru sat up and looked around him, speechless. He realised that the thing he had tripped over was in fact a large ice cooler and that there were other objects on the floor, including a handle that opened a trapdoor and yellow carboys that undoubtedly contained reserves of gas.
The Indian climbed carefully to his knees and took a look through the holes in the wire basket. The hit man had vanished, along with the guide and all the tourists. Everything had vanished: the trees surrounding the clearing in the gardens, the gardens themselves, the houses, the hotel, Rome, the Earth . . . everything. Around the basket, as far as the eye could see, there was only powder-blue wallpaper decorated with little white marks. The sky.
The hot-air balloon had liberated itself from its shackles and, free for the first time in its long career in tourism, had risen into the air, leaving terra firma forever.
The writer leaned over the side a little bit. Below him hung the rope that, a few minutes earlier, had held the machine fast to the ground, and that someone had cut through with a knife. He was not dead, but was that a good thing, now that he found himself abandoned in the infinity of the firmament and at the mercy of a diabolical contraption that he had no idea how to work? Wasn’t this only a temporary reprieve before a death that was just as inevitable and far crueller than being repeatedly stabbed with a knife on solid ground?
The Parisian taxi driver was not humane enough to wish his enemy a speedy death. He had probably ordered the hired killer to provide the Indian with a slow and painful end. And, spotting the balloon, the hit man had seen his chance to inflict the most vicious torture imaginable.
Ajatashatru did not suffer from airsickness or vertigo, thankfully, but seeing the houses as small as those plastic ones in Monopoly and the tourists as tiny as ants in sandals was enough to throw even the most Zen of Buddhists into a panic.
Had there been no wind, the balloon would simply have hovered over the clearing in the Villa Borghese gardens. Instead, it drifted slowly but surely towards an unknown destination, carried away by Aeolus’s breath. It was now at an altitude of five hundred feet, and from there our hero could see the city limits, the fields surrounding Rome and some silvery reflections in the distance. It was towards those pearly flashes that the balloon was flying, at about ten miles per hour. Soon, Rome would be nothing but a memory, a tiny dot on the horizon. Yet another city that I won’t get to explore, thought Ajatashatru.
Above the Indian, the canvas globe gaped open like the mouth of a yawning octopus. In Five Weeks in a Balloon, he had seen that a wheel had to be manipulated occasionally in order to send flames or gas up inside the balloon. This worked on the principle of hot air rising above cold air, carrying the balloon with it. So he looked for the wheel, found it and turned it. Like an angry dragon, the fuel reserves breathed gigantic flames, which disappeared inside the darkness of the deep throat.
A hot-air balloon cannot be steered any more now than it could two centuries earlier. It drifts wherever the wind takes it. Its pilot knows where he is taking off from, but not where he will land. That is the whole appeal of ballooning.
Although the average length of a balloon flight is around sixty minutes, one can, depending on the amount of gas available, remain airborne for as long as two or three hours, sometimes even longer. A balloon generally travels between six and twelve miles in an hour, so it did not take more than three hours for Ajatashatru to reach the Mediterranean – which was, of course, the very moment chosen by the gas reserves to run out and for the contraption to begin its inevitable descent towards the deep waters of the sea.
The ex-fakir could do nothing to ward off fate. All he could do was watch helplessly as the balloon fell towards the threatening surface of the water. This was it, then: he was going to die. Drowned, because he had never learned to swim. Then again, what good would it have done him even if he could swim? The coast moved ever farther from view with each passing second. He would try a few clumsy breaststrokes, and then he would sink inexorably, like a stone, to the bottom of the sea.
So his journey ended here. All that, just for this.
The pretty blue surface was his finishing line. But the pretty blue would soon change to puma red, and then to blood red. So, there was something worse than the syndrome of the truck that slowed down and stopped: the syndrome of the balloon that slowed down and fell into the sea.
Pulling himself together, he looked around for a life jacket but could not find one, because of course the balloon was not intended to do anything other than rise and fall in the same fixed place above Rome. Inside the ice cooler that he had tripped over, he found some cans of soda, useless in these particular circumstances. He tried opening the trapdoor, then almost fainted when he looked down into the void. He immediately closed it again and waited, resigned to his fate.
He waited until the basket landed on the water and began to sink. Around him, the vast sea stretched out in all directions. In a few minutes, he would be trapped underwater inside a wire cage. In a few minutes, he would be dead. Ajatashatru Oghash Rathod would vanish from the surface of the Earth. His final disappearing act.
He looked out at the vast blueness. How many lives had been lost here? Fishermen, lone sailors, pilots who had run out of fuel, illegal aliens freezing on stowaway ships, all those hundreds of African illegals that Assefa had told him about who disappeared each year between Libya and the Italian coast without ever having reached the promised land, their only mistake to have been born on the wrong side of the Mediterranean. So, there you go, he would die like them, dragged under by the cold water. One more body for the insatiable killer.
And then he realised that, if he died now, the world would remember him only as a con man, a thief, an egotist, someone who devoted his life to taking from others without ever giving anything in return. Was he ready to face the final judgement with this weighing on his conscience? Your CV is not exactly great, Buddha would say, playing with his long earlobes.
No, he could not die. Not yet.
Not before he’d been able to help someone. Not before he had shown – to others, and to himself – that he had changed.
And then, there was Marie. He could not die before he had ever known love. That would be ridiculous.
In the space of a few seconds, his entire conversation with the Frenchwoman flooded back into his memory like a film played on fast-forward, and then he saw his cousin and his adoptive mother, all the happy moments he had experienced in the
ir company, and then he remembered the less happy moments: the hunger, the violence, those men leaning over him and drooling, those clammy hands gripping him, those snakes biting him. His whole life passed before his eyes. A short life, so eventful but so vain. No, there was no way he could meet Buddha like this. He would undoubtedly be reincarnated as a cherry tomato on a skewer, a fate very different from the tranquillity of being a hay bale in a quiet field.
But what could he do in order to avoid death? The situation did not seem very promising. He was a prisoner in a trap that was closing around him a little more with each passing second. Ajatashatru knelt down in the basket, which was already leaking water, and held the briefcase tight to his chest. The briefcase which was stuffed with money that would now be of no use to him whatsoever. As if to prove, for once, the truth of the saying ‘Money can’t buy happiness’.
Captain Aden Fik had never seen a buoy as big and blue and as far from the coast as the one he was seeing now from his pilot house. So, being an enlightened and pragmatic man, he came to the conclusion that it was not a buoy.
But what was it, then?
A weather balloon that had fallen from the sky? The mushroom from Tintin’s fantastic island? A hot-air balloon whose basket contained an Indian and a briefcase stuffed with €100,000 in cash?
Whatever it was, it was something strange and unusual, and that did not bode well. It could easily be a trap laid by pirates. He turned up the engine, propelling his freight ship forward more quickly.
Aden picked up his binoculars and examined the UFO (unidentified floating object). Straight away, he realised it was a hot-air balloon. But where the basket should have been, there was only the opaque surface of the sea. It looked as if the basket had been completely submerged, along with its occupants.
Dismissing the possibility that this was a trap laid by pirates, the captain called one of his officers and ordered him to put a lifeboat out to sea with two men, so they could take a closer look at it. He had to act fast. Aden would much rather pick up the living than the dead. You could always get something from a living person. The dead were worthless.
Twenty minutes later, the men came back in the lifeboat, accompanied by a tall Indian, thin and gnarled like a tree – a wet tree, in this case – and wearing a white turban. With one hand, he held onto the aluminium survival blanket that had been draped over his shoulders; with the other, he gripped tightly to a black briefcase that he seemed reluctant to let go.
‘I am the captain of this vessel,’ Aden Fik announced proudly in English, relieved to have found a living person from whom he might be able to squeeze something. ‘It was lucky for you we were passing at the right time. What happened to you?’
Ajatashatru introduced himself and explained that he had been taking part in a hot-air balloon race near Rome when an unfavourable wind had made him deviate dangerously from his course towards the sea. When his gas reserves ran out, his only solution had been to land on the water. He would have drowned if the captain’s men had not appeared.
‘In that case, welcome to the Malevil. I imagine your most pressing desire is to return to Rome and get back to your normal life,’ added the captain, ogling the survivor’s mysterious little black briefcase. ‘However, due to a tight schedule, it is impossible for me to go back to the Italian coast. You are therefore obliged to swim there, which might prove rather difficult with a briefcase in your hand, or to stay with us until we reach our final destination, Mr I-shat-a-satchel. But in that case, you must pay. As I’m sure you’re aware, life has a price. Unlike death . . .’
These words made Aja shiver. Yet again, it seemed he had flown from a frying pan into the fire. Perhaps he should have drowned when he had the chance?
‘And where are we heading to?’ he asked, forcing himself not to show the fear he felt.
But his hand was shaking so violently against his briefcase now that it was audible. He sounded like a Brazilian percussionist during carnival season in Rio.
The captain pointed to the red, black and green insignia sewn onto his shirt. ‘To Libya, of course! Now, tell me what you have in that expensive-looking briefcase . . .’
Libya
WHEN THE MALEVIL dropped anchor in the port of Tripoli the next day at 2 p.m., Ajatashatru walked down the pontoon that led him to solid ground, €15,000 lighter than he had been before, but relieved.
The forced crossing had proved expensive. It could have been much worse, however. On the ship, he had been at the mercy of the Libyans’ moods. After all, the captain could have taken all his money and thrown him overboard, without anyone knowing. Yes, he had definitely got off lightly.
Libya was going through a period of unprecedented unrest and everyone wanted money, even captains of freight ships. Particularly captains of freight ships, in fact. To make ends meet, they sometimes transported illegal aliens, from Africa or elsewhere, towards Italy. On occasion, when an Italian patrol was drawing close, the traffickers would throw the illegals in the water, whether they knew how to swim or not. That way, the Italians were forced to rescue them and to take them to the coast, while the criminals could sail back to Libya, unpunished and undisturbed, to plan the next crossing.
Nine months after Colonel Gaddafi was overthrown by NATO forces, the country was still the victim of terrible violence, rape and unending human rights violations. So you have to feel some compassion for those poor people. When they were given the opportunity to save an Indian and his briefcase containing €100,000 from the middle of the sea, they weren’t going to let him go scot-free. Obviously he was going to have to make a contribution towards the welfare of Libyan citizens who were living through one of the darkest periods in their history.
But in that case, you might ask, how did our Indian manage to save himself for a mere €15,000 when he was carrying a briefcase that contained €100,000?
Well . . . when you know how to transform water into wine using dye capsules skilfully hidden in the palm of your hand, when you know how to twist ‘thermomolten’ metal forks simply by looking at them and stroking them, when you know how to stab a skewer in a false tongue that you are holding between your teeth, you are in a good position to escape – with a little intelligence – from any sticky situation or excrement-filled creek in which you might find yourself.
So when the captain, holding a pistol, had politely asked Ajatashatru to open his briefcase, the shipwrecked Indian could find nothing to reproach in the request and accordingly did as he was told.
A purple haze – the colour of the €500 notes – lit up the Libyan’s face, like the face of a pirate who has discovered treasure.
‘I rather doubt you fell into the sea during an innocent hot-air balloon race, Mr I-ingest-ash-atchoo! In fact, I suspect you were trying to escape from someone. The police, perhaps. Did you rob a bank?’
‘Don’t get too excited. These are counterfeit notes,’ Ajatashatru told him persuasively. He had stopped trembling and now seemed to have the situation in hand, because he had thought of an idea.
‘They look pretty genuine for counterfeit notes!’ said the captain, who was not going to be outfoxed by someone who was even more of a crook than he was.
‘That’s because they’re well done. All of this is equipment for a magic show. It’s worthless, I swear on my integrity as a fakir!’
With these words, Ajatashatru took a half-dollar coin from his pocket and tossed it in the air.
‘Heads,’ he bet.
And the coin did indeed fall into the palm of his hand, face side up.
‘All right, heads again,’ said the Indian, tossing the coin in the air for a second time.
Once again, he won his bet.
‘I know this trick,’ said the sailor confidently. ‘It all depends how you toss the coin.’
‘Close,’ said Ajatashatru, showing him the half-dollar’s two identical sides. ‘But no cigar! People often think magicians have great talents for manipulation when the whole secret lies in their equipment . . . Another d
emonstration?’
The Indian did not wait for the captain to reply. He dug into his trouser pocket again and pulled out his green €100 note. He turned it over several times in his hand, showing the front and the back.
‘So?’ said the Libyan, bored with this little magic show.
‘So what do you see?’
‘A one-hundred-euro note.’
‘Well observed. And does it seem normal to you?’
‘Yes, completely normal. Well, as far as I can tell, anyway. You keep turning it over like an omelette.’
‘Wrong again,’ Ajatashatru told him, opening wide his Coca-Cola eyes.
The captain looked startled.
‘Contrary to what I told you a minute ago, rigged equipment is not always enough, in itself, to create an illusion. So, the magician has to use all his talents as a conjuror.’
And, with these words, he slowly turned over the note to reveal the blank underside.
‘That note is only printed on one side! But I . . . that’s impossible!’ stuttered the captain, unable to believe his eyes.
‘Just a question of training,’ said the fakir/writer, turning the note over with a click of his fingers and this time revealing that the side which had been blank was now printed.
‘Incredible . . . How do you do that?’
The magician went on without listening: ‘As for this briefcase, it’s rigged. It looks like it is full of notes – real ones – but that, I’m afraid, with all the respect due to a man who is pointing a pistol at me, is purely in your head.’
Ajatashatru took a purple note from one of the wads in the briefcase, held it out in front of him, his fingertips touching the upper corners, as if he wished to admire the watermark, and began to methodically fold it in two, then in four, then in eight, and so on, until the piece of paper was no bigger than a fingernail. He blew on his two hands and the note disappeared. Then he took another note from the wad and did the same thing, three times running.
The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir who got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe Page 13