Dead Money

by Srinath Adiga

  “You’re going to be a hero.” Ali’s parting words. A general sending a soldier off to his death. “Everyone will sing your praises. Your act will inspire more people to commit martyrdom.”

  Hero. The word attached itself to Sanjit’s ears as he stepped out of the car. When he was little, he’d never dreamt of being a hero like Amitabh Bachchan or Steven Seagal. And yet there he was, about to perform the ultimate macho act—ironically, when his body was failing, one muscle at a time. Who would’ve thought?

  He was strutting proudly now, as if he was Amitabh Bachchan, walking Mumbai’s congested streets for the last time, ignoring everything in his path: the stench of sweat and garbage, the beseeching sales pitches from stalls choking the pavement, the city’s inexhaustible supply of humanity running into him.

  A missile heading toward its target.

  The target appeared. He stopped at the entrance and scoured the premises, pretending he was searching for someone. The room resembled the photos: high ceiling, red-checked tablecloths, cane chairs, bar counter running the length of the wall, candy-colored jukebox spitting out rock music. In the cashier booth beside him, a man smoothed his bald head and nattered away on the phone attached to his ear.

  Sanjit had been there many times before. Not physically, but in his mind. He’d stood in the middle of the room under the slow, churning fan, and he’d pressed that switch dangling on his chest.

  Now, he had to do it again. For real.

  He took a deep breath. His mind shrank the room. Now it was just a floor, lighting his path. Voices in foreign tongues, rising over the music, washing his back and sides and falling off as he moved slowly, head lowered, no panic. Just like Ali had said.

  Only a few more steps.

  Suddenly, he felt a body bump into him. A jerk, a tremor, as if someone had violently shaken him out of his sleep.

  “Sorry, didn’t see you there.” A foreigner. Tall, curly brown hair, face toasted pink by the heat. And the eyes … Do NOT make eye contact! Ali’s voice screamed in his ear. But Sanjit couldn’t help it. There was something about those green discs that demanded his attention. They were bright, twinkling with laughter and kindness.

  “You okay there, buddy?” The man placed a hand on his shoulder.

  The physical contact sent a jolt through Sanjit’s body.

  “Fine, fine. It’s very hot,” he mumbled. He could only imagine how mortified he must look.

  The man’s mouth opened with a toothy smile. “Go on, get yourself a beer.” He winked.

  For a few moments, Sanjit stood in a complete daze. He looked at the faces around him, laughing, drinking, having a good time. His lips curled as he silently chanted the mantra: Why me? Why not them?

  But it wasn’t working. He was surrounded by real people, not abstractions in a visualization exercise. Real flesh. Real blood. Real hearts. Fifty of them beating in unison, creating a deafening orchestra of drums. He turned around and walked briskly toward the exit.

  On the pavement, he ran through a thicket of bodies, not knowing where he was headed. He just wanted to get away from the blasted noise in his ears. A hand grasped his arm and dragged him to a waiting car.

  “Go,” Ali ordered. He was in the backseat beside Sanjit, and Farid was at the wheel.

  “I couldn’t do it, just couldn’t,” a trembling Sanjit said, as the car jerked forward.

  A rocklike fist landed on his face. Pain splintered through his jaw and rattled his teeth.

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t do it? You think this is a fucking joke?” Ali hissed.

  “Told you this is a mistake!” Farid cried from the driver’s seat. “Told you he wouldn’t be up to it.”

  The second punch arrived while the first one was still ringing in Sanjit’s ears. It blew open his lip and filled his mouth with the taste of blood.

  “A deal’s a deal, motherfucker. You take my money, you finish the job.” Ali foamed.

  Sanjit calmly wiped the blood from his lips. Then the hand dropped to his chest, cradling the detonation switch under his shirt.

  “Hit me once more and we all die.”

  Ali jerked back.

  “Hey, take it easy.” He raised his palms, smiling nervously. “No need to do anything silly.”

  Sanjit looked at him, and then at Farid’s fluttering eyes in the rearview mirror. He burst out laughing. “Look at you two. Shitting yourselves. You have no qualms asking me to die. Yet you don’t have the guts to face your own death.”

  A bead of sweat dribbled from Ali’s temple. “Come on … we had a deal. You can’t take my money and do this now,” he pleaded.

  “I want more,” Sanjit said. This wasn’t what he’d planned when he ran away from the bar. But the bomb strapped to his chest had put him in a strong position to renegotiate.

  “I gave you three hundred grand,” Ali cried.

  “Killing innocent people isn’t going to look good on my karmic charge sheet. I’ll need the best lawyer there is.”

  Ali sighed. “How much?”

  “Two million.”

  Ali gaped.

  “Tell him to go to hell!” Farid shouted from the front seat.

  “Shut up, you moron,” Ali shot back.

  “Come on. Let’s be reasonable,” he begged Sanjit. “I’m not authorized to give you that kind of money.”

  “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. If you don’t give it to me, you’re both dead.” Sanjit smiled coldly. This was fun.

  “Meet me halfway. One million.”

  “What do you think this is, a fucking flea market?” Sanjit said, incensed. “This is my life we’re talking about. Two million or we’re all dead.” His hand reached for the button again.

  “No!” Ali screamed in panic. For a few seconds, his fist hung in the air, clenched with impotent rage. He punched the headrest of the front seat.

  “Take us to the goddamn bank,” he said to Farid.

  THE SUN SANK behind the crouched buildings. Sanjit smiled at the bright yellow blaze that filled the sky. The streets of heaven paved with gold. For him.

  A hand tapped his shoulder: Ali, gesturing him to move on. Sanjit extinguished the smile and wore his business face. He was supposed to have walked this pavement for the last time a couple of hours earlier. This was going to be the last time.

  They stopped in front of the bar’s arched entrance. Ali squeezed his arm. Somewhere under the beard, Sanjit saw glimpses of an old friend. A friendship that had started many years earlier in a school playground: two awkward seven-year-olds brought together by the fact that they were the last to get picked for football teams. But it was foolish to reflect on something that ended many years ago. It was foolish to reflect on anything other than the task at hand.

  Ali melted away in the evening crowd. Sanjit entered the bar. This time, there was no looking around, no pretending he was there to meet someone. He was going straight for it. I’m a missile, he reminded himself. Missiles don’t waver. They don’t hesitate. They get the job done. That’s what he was there to do. Get the job done. Two million Afterlife Dollars.

  The middle of the room. Point of maximum damage. He stood under a fan and lowered his hand toward the switch.

  Your heart will stop before your brain can feel the pain. He regurgitated Ali’s words to himself. Then he took a deep breath. As he moved to press the switch, a burst of laughter made him straighten.

  Don’t look. Press the goddamn switch.

  But his neck turned against his will. That man again. The foreigner with curly hair and green eyes. He was leaning halfway across the table, listening intently to his friend. Next moment, he threw his head back, laughing as if he’d heard the funniest joke in the world.

  Once again, Sanjit was inexplicably captivated by the man. Those kind green eyes were draining his resolve. His business face was falling off, strength waning from that hand on the switch.

  Two million. Come on, you’re so close. Press the goddamn switch. Come on, do it.r />
  The hand fell away limply.

  I’m not a killer.

  Suddenly, he became aware of himself: a failed missile, standing awkwardly in the middle of a busy bar. He had no idea how long he’d been there, but any moment now, someone was bound to notice. Suddenly, a voice called out his name.

  Sanjit turned, startled. It was Raunak, his former boss, standing at a table a couple of feet away.

  “Raunak. What are you doing here?” Sanjit gulped.

  “Having a drink with some friends,” Raunak replied, scratching his balls. “How about you?”

  “Same. Although I was just about to leave.”

  “Good. Very good. I’m glad to see you’re enjoying life. Remember what I told you last time we met? When you begged for your job?”

  Sanjit remembered all right. He remembered not getting the job. He also remembered being saddled with the bill.

  “Did I tell you about my friend’s mother with motor neurone disease?” Raunak continued. “I went to see her the other day. She’s a total invalid now. Can’t even talk.” He lolled his head and stuck his tongue out to demonstrate.

  Something stirred inside Sanjit as he watched the dickhead mock a woman stricken by the same disease as him. A feeling that he’d been trying to conjure up so unsuccessfully was now entering his body. And this feeling grew as Sanjit remembered everything that had happened in the two years he’d worked for Raunak:

  Denied a promotion, even though he was the top-performing salesman in the office.

  Belittled in front of a client for a small mistake in the proposal.

  Cheated of his commission because he quit before the end of the financial year. Nearly a million rupees denied because he had a terminal disease. You robbed me. You treated me like dirt. Now, you’re going to pay. Because I’ve got two million Afterlife Dollars. You’ve got jack shit.

  The hand that was limp a few moments before was now full of steel. It moved back toward the switch. Meanwhile, Raunak’s hand moved, too. Back to the groin.

  Sanjit saw this and burst out laughing.

  Raunak blinked. “What’s so funny?”

  “You’ll be scratching your balls in hell, motherfucker,” Sanjit said, and pressed the switch.

  BOOK 3 : THEO

  Amsterdam, June 2011

  1.

  CREMATORIUMS. YOU’D SEEN ONE, YOU’D SEEN them all: shrines of commoditized grieving with wide doors, tall ceilings and surprising amounts of light.

  In his thirty-one years on the planet, Theo had seen more than his fair share of them. If crematoriums had loyalty cards like coffee shops, he might even be entitled to a free funeral. Not that he’d ever want one, much as he loved his freebies. In fact, after his father’s service two years earlier, he’d resolved not to return in a hurry. Yet there he was: front row of another goddamn crematorium, gaunt frame clad in a grey suit and tan brogues, legs splayed hip width apart, palms resting flat on the lap—exactly how his father used to sit. There was a time when Theo had tried really hard not to be like the man. But now any connection was to be treasured, because every time he looked in the mirror, he saw less of his father. The hair, which had started out blond, had settled at dark brown. His eyes were deep amber, skin olive with a tinge of mahogany. Proper Italian, just like his mother.

  Unfortunately, she was dead, too. Passed away when he was nine, an age when he couldn’t spell aneurysm, let alone understand it. One moment, she was cooking his favorite sea chicken. Next moment, she collapsed on the floor. According to his father, she was the lucky one. Twenty years later, after witnessing the old man’s grueling battle with cancer, Theo had to agree.

  The thing about death was, while the end result was the cessation of life, the number of ways to arrive at that point was simply mind-boggling. You could die when blood vessels burst in your brain or rogue cells multiplied without restraint. You could overdose on narcotics, get bitten by a scorpion. You could be mowed down by lightning, choke on vomit. You could even, as the expression went, die laughing, which made you wonder: just like Santa’s elves, did the Grim Reaper have a team of helpers whose sole job it was to conjure up ways to die—an R&D department, if you will? If that were the case, you’d have to say they were doing a pretty good job.

  Yet for all his knowledge of death’s ingenuity, Theo was caught flat-footed when it came for Hans the previous week. The news had arrived when he was in his fourteenth-floor office in the World Trade Center Amsterdam, the market in the midst of a flash crash.

  After staring into space for several minutes, he’d pulled himself together and returned to work. But as he attended research meetings and counseled nervous clients, the shock of Hans’s death involuntarily manifested itself in a series of puns: “The stock’s a ticking bomb,” “The returns are mind-blowing,” “There’s blood on the exchange floor,” “Let’s pick up the pieces.”

  That shock felt as raw now as it did a week before. And as he recalled the incident, his body stiffened with a new worry: what if a tasteless double entendre had snuck into his speech, as well? The worry escalated to a mini-panic in seconds. But before he had a chance to do anything about it, the celebrant called his name.

  It was a short walk to the podium. He stood at the lectern and glanced over his shoulder. A slab of daylight shone on an oak coffin with ornate trimmings, perhaps too ornate for someone who mostly wore charity-shop clothes when he was alive. But funerals were never about the dead, were they? That coffin was the choice of guilt-ridden parents, indulging a son they’d ignored when he was alive.

  They hunched in the front row, holding hands: pale stick figures broken by grief, trying to make sense of something that defied it. He recognized the brand of pain glistening in their eyes because he felt it, too, a pain that rested in a heart choked with regret and unsaid words.

  He removed the speech from his jacket pocket, flattening the creases in the paper with his palm. The microphone picked up every sound and broadcast it to a room filled with washes of black and grey.

  It took a few seconds to bring the words into focus.

  “We’re here today because we’ve been robbed of a good man,” he said, reading the speech. The voice coming from his throat sounded strange, as if it belonged to someone else. “A kind, gentle human being. Many words have been used to describe what happened in that cafe in Mumbai. Heinous. Dastardly. Senseless.”

  He stopped abruptly and looked around the room. Rows and rows of blank faces. The striations of colored light from the narrow stained glass windows. The coffin behind him.

  Is this happening? Is Hans really dead?

  He winced and resumed his speech.

  “I’m not going to make it worse with more empty words. As I stand before you to remember a dear friend, I’ve got only one thing to say. Dear Hans, thank you.”

  He turned to the photograph tacked to the easel beside the coffin. The face, frozen in a moment in time, brimmed with life: cheeks flushed from red wine, eyes bright and bottle green, carefree bronze curls, and that awkward grin he wore when facing the camera.

  “Thank you for making me feel welcome on the first day at school. For changing your game of three musketeers to four, to accommodate me.

  “Thank you for helping me with my homework. Thank you for bringing around peanut-butter-and-hagelslag sandwiches because you thought there was no one to make me lunch after my mum’s funeral.”

  Someone sniffled in the front row. Theo blinked back a tear himself.

  “Thank you for making me laugh with your mimicry of our high-school teachers. And of course, who can forget your impersonation of the Hakken techno dance moves?

  “Thank you for the long summer days when we solved the world’s problems over a beer. Thank you for all your advice, the wisdom of which took me years to appreciate.

  “Thank you for being my helpline, even if the call came at three a.m. and I made no sense. Just as important, thank you for the kicks up the backside.

  “Thank you for putting up with me wh
en I was a complete pain. I tested our friendship on many occasions, but you accepted my stupidity with a knowing smile. Your loyalty was exemplary, not only to friends, but to that squeaking contraption of rusted metal you called a bike. When we bought you a new one for your birthday, you sold it on eBay and donated the money to charity. You were such a nice guy, it used to annoy the hell out of me, but that was only because girls fancied you instead of me.”

  He paused as strands of muted laughter bubbled in the room.

  “This may seem odd coming from a banker, but thank you for teaching me that money doesn’t matter and that happiness is a state of mind, not a swipe of a credit card.

  “And last but not least …” He drew a breath. “Thank you for jumping in the river after me when I was too drunk to swim.”

  Memories from that LSD (Last School Day) party rose to the surface as he read the sentence. The brown bar with wood-paneled walls, loud rave music, a frenzied downpour of beer followed by shots of Jägermeister. Then that stupid bet.

  He didn’t need to refer to the speech for the next line. He knew it well, because it had been wedged in his throat for nearly twenty years. With supreme effort, he pushed it out.

  “And thank you for the kiss of life …”

  He grimaced when he remembered his behavior in the aftermath of the incident, going out of his way to avoid Hans, the flashes of embarrassment and obscure anger. Once time had passed and he grew out of this puerile homophobia, he never felt the need to mention it, confident that one day he’d get a chance to acknowledge the debt; it’d happen spontaneously when they were both drunk and maudlin.

  Now Hans was dead. Not even a body to thank, but a jigsaw of charred flesh, scraped from the floor.

  Theo clenched his jaw as a face appeared in his vision. One that had been in the news all week: dark, curly black hair, sharp nose. And those eyes, bloodshot and empty, windows to a nonexistent soul. Mum’s aneurysm, Dad’s cancer, devastating as they may’ve been, were acts of biological cruelty. But this? This was perpetrated by a man, which made it a hundred times more difficult to fathom.