‘Saala Rashique maader-chod had to go to the bathroom at that very moment. What is done is done… We will get him another day. I called to tell you that it is not very safe for you there. And get that Juliet bitch away too.’
‘She’s safe where she is.’
‘No, you idiot, she is not. You think Bhai does not know about her nursing classes? Even we know about that, chutiye.’
Jai kept mum. Things were definitely going into the ground, faster and faster.
‘Listen, saale,’ Salim bellowed on the phone, ‘you get to her as soon as you can and ask her to get out of Byculla now. And you get your ass to me. I will put you somewhere safe.’
Those words rang through Jai. He had heard that assurance before; in fact yesterday, in his ‘dream’. The dream that had not gone all that well in the end.
‘Shit!’ escaped Jai’s mouth.
‘Yes! You are right. Shit is the word. Get to Capital Godown in Wadala. You will meet my men there. They will take care of you.’
‘Yes, Salim Bhai,’ mumbled Jai.
Wadala was the last place he wanted to be. He had a funny sensation in his fingers that had been chopped yesterday in his dream. And the pain in his chest returned, somewhere near the place where the knife had been thrust into him yesterday in his dream after he had been captured from Salim Bhai’s Capital Godown in Wadala.
He immediately ran down his contact list and called Juliet. Her phone was switched off.
That probably meant more bad news.
Chapter 4
Death on the Sognefjord
Sogn og Fjordane
Fjord Territory, Northern Norway
8 May, 2012
The winds were bone chilling. The temperature was around four degrees Centigrade but the icy winds drove up the chill factor making it feel almost sub-zero. Steep walls of white-streaked rock rose from the banks. Tiny rivulets and waterfalls gushed into the anonymity of the icy-cold fjord. A single twin-sail boat rocked in these icy waters and a man in an ‘Under Armour’ Cold Gear zip-top, and a flimsy, flashy boxer, held the rudder of the sail.
Ludvig Hansen was no ordinary man.
Mere mortals would not be where he was then.
His company, Hantel, had just announced the largest single financial year profits, and it had beaten the next business house by a neat 1.1 billion kroner. There was to be a celebration sometime next week.
And Ludvig felt terribly bored. He needed some time to himself and that was why he was on the Sogn.
He had taken a helicopter ride to Eivindvik, at the mouth of the Sognefjorden and had got himself a thirty-foot sailboat and seven days of solitude. His company issue Hantel X-99, the most advanced mobile phone in the world would be switched off for most of the next seven days.
It was just him and the icy, ravenous beauty of the Sogn for the week-long cruise. He soon left the tourists and the villagers behind and was headed for the solitude of a frozen communion with unforgiving nature. Sognefjorden was the longest and the deepest of the fjords in the icy north of Norway. The fjords were a natural formation of deep recesses and ravines that cut deep into the land from the Arctic Ocean. These ravines had dug themselves to levels below the sea level and flowed inland from the Arctic. Steep icy walls rising hundreds of metres on both sides of the ravines surrounded these fjords.
Dry, icy breezes pounded Ludvig’s seventy-year-old body and sapped the warmth out of it. People half his age would not dare be on the adventure that he had taken on.
Sheer madness!
But Ludvig was different.
He did not know the fear of death. And a man who hasn’t that has no other.
It hadn’t always been this way, though. But the last thirty years had been different. And the company in those thirty years had risen from the verge of bankruptcy to being the number one company in all of Europe and Russia, and a close second in the rest of the world. The company had survived its death knell and had staved off no less than five takeover attempts.
The odds that Ludvig had managed to steer his company through were, simply put, humanly insurmountable. But maybe that’s what made Ludvig different, more different than anyone else.
He was looking forward to his seven days in the wild. He did this almost every year. He took on a challenge that was so difficult that no one was insane enough to dare do it, and he completed it to prove another point to himself. There was hardly any publicity for these events. Only close subordinates and some from his immediate family ever came to know of these private exploits; many after these deeds were done.
The wind was blowing across the fjord, sweeping down into the valley from the heights, travelling across the fjord and then battering against its walls. The turbulence created thus, flapped the sails wildly and made it difficult for Ludvig to control his boat.. He pulled in both his sails to the centreline and that brought a little more stability to the boat.
He settled down for a quick bite from the rations that he carried and which were only going to last him for another day. Come tomorrow, he would have to fend for himself from the Sogn, and the wilds flanking it. He would also have to circle round two waterfalls that created deadly vortices where they landed in the Sogn.
‘Could I survive a straight descent down the falls?’ He chuckled to himself as he thought about those waterfalls, and then shook his head.
‘Maybe some other time.’
He had a quiet meal and then looked up at the sky. Light was fading fast and he decided to pull up to the shore where he would set up camp for the night.
***
The week of boating on the Sogn was drawing to a close. It had been a dreadful week. Nevertheless, he had not died.
Not even once.
He had come close a couple of times but had barely managed to survive. He had decided to go for a little hiking trip inland from Storestienneset to the Viagrafossen or the Viagra falls, so named because the waters here were supposed to confer potency and fertility to men. People tended to take the more conventional route from Sogndal, but this was a rawer trail, winding treacherously over snow-capped mountains. While on this trip, he had to tackle a bull reindeer that he had wounded with his shotgun. It had had a fair bit of fight left in it and Ludvig had been surprised. He had ducked in time to miss the charge of its antlers and had avoided certain death that time. Another had been a nasty fall from a slippery boulder that had landed him inches from the sharp edge of an ice-pick, which had slipped out of his gear moments earlier. Narrow escapes, both.
The rest of the trip had been exhilarating. He felt rejuvenated and felt recharged enough to drudge through another year of corporate skulduggery. It was the final day of his sojourn and after the excitement of the last few days, he now steered his boat through the calmer waters of the fjord. It was late afternoon when he could at last see the end of his journey on the bank on Fjaerland. There was a huge rope-net tied across the river to guide his boat to the bank. He sighed when he made out a small gathering of people on the bank of the river. The boat slowly made its way to the bank where he aligned it with a temporary jetty that had been erected for him.
There was going to be a small reception for him. A few trusted aides and his son, Cristoffer, were there to greet him.
To be joining him later for dinner was Dagny, last year’s national beauty pageant winner and a budding actor with a promising career in films. She had recently been hired by Hantel as a brand ambassador at a price exceeding a million kroner per year. She had been bought at twice her market price but then Ludvig was hoping to take that price on to a more intimate level.
Cristoffer was the first to greet his father as he climbed the stairs after anchoring his sailboat.
‘Welcome back, Dad! I don’t know what to say. It’s a relief to see you again.’ There were tears in his eyes. And it was strange to see a thirty-seven-year-old corporate heir with tears in his eyes. But he adored his father and had genuine concern for him in his heart. Ludvig worried about Cristoffer too and often wondere
d if he would be strong enough to guide the company after him. He was man enough, but when it came to business, Ludvig was not so sure. He dilly-dallied with his decision-making and was unsure of his decisions most of the time.
But making decisions was not easy for Cristoffer. He had tried his best, having trained in the best business schools money could buy. However, despite his efforts, when it came to the real deal, he always found himself a step behind his father. His decisions had been overturned on numerous occasions by Ludvig and generally these seemingly rash and erratic decisions by Ludvig had proven to be a veritable goldmine for the company. This filled Cristoffer with dread and self-doubt, and was slowly killing the entrepreneur in him. He would have felt differently about it, perhaps felt cheated, if he had known Ludvig’s secret but that was not something anyone was privy to, and it left Cristoffer a lot less sure about himself and his business skills. Cristoffer was currently the CEO of the European Hantel operations, the Russian operations being handled by the younger Sonya, Ludvig’s daughter by another marriage, and someone Ludvig thought very highly of. He had always felt that Sonya had inherited the right genes from him and had oftentimes considered making her in charge of the entire affairs of Hantel once he was gone. But that would necessitate some political and familial tight-rope walking and it was a challenge for another day.
Sonya and Cristoffer got along well enough for step-siblings. Sonya liked Cristoffer for being a nice and honest man and she often reassured Cristoffer about their dad’s misadventures.
‘This is what excites him. He could have been an adrenaline junkie, a spy, or a really calculative serial killer. But he became a corporate honcho and we should be thankful for that. The stability of his empire doesn’t excite him enough… anymore. So you should stop worrying and let him be. Just let him be.’
Cristoffer did not understood much of what Sonya wanted to say but still it reassured him to know that someone understood his dad’s ways even if he could not.
The medical team waiting on the banks did not find anything major amiss with Ludvig and gave him a clean chit, advising rest, vitamins and plenty of fluids over the next few days.
An entire alpine hotel had been hired for the welcome-back dinner. Dinner was bountiful although Ludvig’s appetite would take some time to recover after his days on the Sogn surviving only on fish and the half-cooked remains of the reindeer that had nearly killed him with its antlers on the third day of his expedition.
The party lasted late into the night and the festivities were joined in by the folk-dancers from Sogn and the surrounding villages on the coast of the Sogne. Dagny had joined the festivities in the middle after having flown directly from Milan where she had been busy shooting for a Woody Allen movie which was being almost entirely funded by Ludvig.
Ludvig endured the pleasantries of the gathering and then made a small speech
‘Blah blah blah blah…,’ he started, twirling a glass of akvavit in his left hand and with a Gurkha Black Dragon cigar in his right.
‘Thanks for coming along. It is nice to see some familiar faces after a week of wilderness. Hope all of you suckers enjoy the free meal and the finest free booze…’ There was laughter all around at Ludvig’s nonchalance.
He continued, ‘And now my tired old bones need to rest. So that’s it; cheers and good-night.’
He got down from the podium to generous applause.
He bade them all goodbye and retired to rest his ‘tired bones’.
A master suite had been decked out for Ludvig’s resting there for the night. He hurried to the rest room to piss deep brown urine, the mark of his exhausting sojourn across the Sogn, the pigment of his tired, broken-down muscles being excreted in the urine. He was not too alarmed by that as he knew from experience that it would subside in a couple of days. After an alternating cold, warm, and cold splash to his face, he put a dab of cologne on himself.
He entered his room and was pleased with what he saw. Dagny lay on the bed, resplendent in two-piece lace lingerie, reading a book on the mysteries of Egyptian Art. She put the book down as soon as he came into the room and flew into his arms. He enjoyed the warm embrace, enjoying the vigour and sensuousness of her young and beautiful body on his ageing and wrinkled skin. He scooped her light body off the ground and hoisted her on to the edge of the bed, dipping his head in her voluptuousness. She let out a sigh and curled up her toes, enjoying and relishing the touch of a master d’amour. She never appreciated the pungency of aged wine but knew the bit about ‘older being better’ to be true of a handful of her old lovers. She turned around, pushed him down on to the bed and hurriedly disrobed him of his party attire. He sensed the blood rush up his body as Dagny went inching kisses down his chest and on to his belly. He felt the rush of pleasure surging within his brain and spreading across like a raging wildfire within him. His pulse raced ahead and he felt his heart pounding against his chest. She reached further down and the warm feeling in him gave way to a hot throb emanating from his heart, a sensation that rapidly morphed into one of constriction and a distinct unease.
His eyes opened. His vision was blurred and his breathing came in gasps. There was a distinct and growing ache within his chest that worsened in seconds. He started to sweat profusely and his breaths turned to loud guttural whoops. Gusts of air were sucked into his laboured chest but he did not feel it invigorating his drowning body. Rather, it felt like a waste of breath as if the air went into his lungs but his body refused to draw from it. He choked and gasped more furiously, but with the same result. By now, he was panicking and Dagny looked up and screamed. Ludvig shot bolt upright on the bed, throwing Dagny to the ground. There was froth at his mouth.
Dagny recovered from the shock of being thrown from the bed, ran across the room, and opened the doors, screaming for help in the corridor.
Ludvig knew it was too late for anyone to do anything. He gave a last sigh.
‘Shit!’
His last word.
His dead body rolled off the bed and he slumped on to the floor of the room, dead from an acute massive myocardial infarction.
Chapter 5
Two is Company
Domus-Nova
Mouse-tail Galaxy
Domus-Nova Year 2548, Earth Year 7859 AD
Ludvig woke up in the white room.
He let out a sigh. A sigh was the most he could do here anyway.
He was trapped in here and hated being imprisoned in what he referred to as his ‘white interruptions’. The only thing he could do, strapped to a white cot in an impossibly white room, with his limbs totally paralysed, was to stare at the ceiling of the room, and all around there was only the white nothingness of the room. Sometimes he would have a little more control of his body and then all he would be able to do was to inch his neck around and fat lot of good it did him! It was just the same white all around.
The walls were not concrete. They were either metal or a kind of glazed fibreglass, reminding him almost of an exquisite brand of bone china.
Today was one of those occasions when he was a little more in command of his faculties and could turn his head by a bare fraction.
His eyes roamed around the room and this time the wall to his right was different.
He was surprised to see an open door in the wall, a neat rectangle cut into it. He was sure that he had never, in so many ‘interludes’ before, ever seen any opening in the room.
The rectangle in the wall led to an adjacent white room with a cot in it. And there was someone strapped on to the cot in the other room, just like he was in his own cot. He could not make out much of the person, but judging from the profile, he seemed to be a young lad in his twenties with a thin but well-built frame. What struck him as odd, however, was the face of his companion. It was tanned, incredibly so, almost bronzed a rusty golden brown. It could not just be the tan.
Much too tanned for Norway anyway. The same white colour continued on to the walls of the adjacent room also. The person on the cot was still and p
robably as paralysed as he was. How many more were there like him? Was it an assembly line of dead bodies in a purgatory, which he visited every time he died and somehow failed to make it to the next level? Why was he sent back to his life on Earth each time? Was this the house of God or did God have nothing to do with life and death anymore? Every time he returned, he felt a pang of disappointment. A part of him wanted to cross over and see what was on the other side. It was as frustrating as not being able to access the next, more difficult, level of a game. However, in this game of hyper-reality, there was nothing that his paralysed self could do to change the outcome. He died, woke up in this white room, spent varying amounts of time paralysed on this cot and then went back to his self on Earth, to the last time he woke up from sleep.
The hows and whys of it eluded him. He had asked these questions before and had had no answers. At least now he knew that he was not alone. There might be others who could not die, like him. Maybe he could have his answers if he tried. Before he could analyse the scene any further, a door in the rectangular opening slid down from the top, closing his view into his neighbour’s room. He let out a frustrated sigh and struggled hard against his bonds but could not muster even a flicker of a movement in his body, save his head threshing on the pillow.
As Ludvig was struggling against his restraints, yet another door slid up at the foot end of his bed and a man in a strange, white, bulky Hazmat-type suit walked into his room. He was holding a ten by ten inch rectangular frame in his hand and he steadily walked up to his bed. He reached over his torso and Ludvig cringed in terror. A haggard, old face looked back at him through the visor of the Hazmat suit. He had big eyes and an impossibly large head, hidden under the helmet. But there was no threat, just the look of compassion on his face.
Maybe even guilt.
But then maybe Ludvig was reading too much into a Hazmatted face.
The man lifted the rectangle and held up the frame to Ludvig’s face.
Immortals Page 4