There was a time when Napier Road was the acknowledged red-light district of the city, its boundaries clearly defined. But the distinction between decency and indecency had blurred in recent times. The brothels had moved to the upmarket locales of Defence and Clifton, where the “respectable” citizens of the city resided. After all, as in any other economic activity, the girls needed to be close to their client base. And the prostitution rackets had slowly been taken over by senior police officers like Maqsood Mahr, who themselves had links to organized crime. Nonetheless, most of the girls continued to live in this area, and the road remained the kingdom of the naika. All those who were under her protection were inviolable.
He drove up to the entrance of the naika’s kotha. This time, he didn’t bother stopping at the front desk downstairs. This drew no protest because, after all, it was peak business hours and the management was hardly going to start turning customers away, but the presence of Mary and the girls drew some questioning stares. At the top of the stairs they could hear the sound of musical instruments and a woman’s singing, muffled by closed doors.
“Constantine, what do you think you’re doing? Where in Christ’s name have you brought us?”
He didn’t bother to respond, and kept pushing everyone else out of their way like a man possessed. He entered the naika’s audience chamber to find a line of petitioners sitting at her feet. They all grew silent at the sight of the girls.
“Salma Begum, I must speak with you privately.”
Her gray-green eyes filled with panic, and then with concern. In all her fantasies, this was a scenario she would never have imagined. It took her a moment to regain her composure, but she got up from her chair and motioned them towards her private suite.
Constantine realized the need to calm the tension that was growing in his family. He set Choti, whom he had been carrying in his arms, on to the ground, and pointed to one of the naika’s serving women.
“That lady over there will get you something to eat. I bet the two of you are hungry, aren’t you, Choti? Do you remember the lovely smell of the kebabs on the street? Go with the lady and she will get you some.”
Having dispatched his daughters, he finally turned to Mary once they were inside the naika’s suite.
“Uh, Mary, Salma Begum is, uh, an old business acquaintance of mine.” He hesitated. “Actually, she is more than that. At this point, she is the only person I can trust completely. Salma Begum, when I last came to you some years ago to ask you for a favor, you asked me to tell my daughters to think of you as an old aunt. Today I come to ask another favor from you. Men usually bring their wives and daughters to your doorstep asking for a good price for them. I come to you today to beg for their lives. I must go back and do certain things, but I need you to protect them. I do not have anywhere else to go in this city where I know they will be safe.”
Both women stared at him, surprised by the emotion in his voice. Both knew that Constantine D’Souza had never been a demonstrative man, and neither woman had expected this.
“Consendine, what is wrong? What has happened?”
“Please, Naika. I beg of you. Protect them while I am gone.” His voice quivered as he spoke.
Salma Begum stared at him, the glint of a teardrop collecting in her eye. And then, as if having remembered her position, she turned to a dumbstruck Mary and hugged her.
“Come, sister. You have nothing to fear. You will be safe with me. Do not worry, Consendine, I give you my word. As long as I am alive, no one will touch a hair on their heads.”
He nodded slowly, with the overwhelming relief of a man who had managed to secure the safety of his family. He took out a brown paper bag from his trousers. It was filled with a thick bundle of notes, his weekly take from the prison, and handed it over to Mary.
“You might be here for a couple of days, so you will need this. Tell your parents that you and the girls are safe, but don’t tell them where you are. As soon as my work is over, I will come back for you.”
He thought of saying something else. He could see the questions in her eyes, about where they were, and about where he was going and why. But this was hardly the time to try and explain Salma to her. At a moment like this, anything he said would sound banal and bizarrely out of place. So he just nodded to her and walked towards the stairs.
“Consendine . . .” Salma Begum had followed him to the edge of the stairs, out of earshot of everyone. “What is it?”
“Salma Begum, Mary, she’s . . . she’s a good woman, but not wise in the ways of the world. If anything happens to me, she’ll need help with the little things. Getting my pension out, getting permission to stay in my quarters for a while, things like that. Please help her out if you can.”
The teardrop that had been perched precariously on the edge of her eyelid gushed down like a fast-flowing river. “Consendine, why are you talking like this? Nothing will happen to you. I know it in my heart.”
She reached round her neck and took off an amulet that had been tied to a black piece of string. She held his arm and tied the string on to it. “This is an imam zamin. It will protect you from those who wish to harm you. And do not worry about your family. They are my responsibility now.”
Constantine walked back to his car and drove off. He turned off Napier Road and onto the old Bunder Road. The big cinema houses were letting out the audience of the last shows. It was a chilly night, and the figures walking on the footpaths were wrapped in shawls or blankets as they tiptoed over the bodies of homeless beggars and heroin junkies shaking from the cold and their withdrawal symptoms. He drove past the sprawling mausoleum of the founder of the nation, the Quaide-Azam. The marble of the tomb glowed ethereally in the reflection of the moonlight. He crossed the jail, which looked like some ancient fortress in the darkness, and entered Gulshan Iqbal, a middle-class residential area dominated by apartment complexes and shopping plazas. It was this middle class, which felt disenfranchised by the other political parties, that had given the United Front its core support in its formative years. As Constantine drove through the streets of Gulshan, he could still see the manifestations of that support. The graffiti on the walls sang praises of the party. Slogans dedicated to flattering the Don were interspersed with drawings of airplanes, since the airplane was the election symbol of the party. There had also been some rudimentary attempts at English, with phrases such as “Don lifes” and the unfortunately worded “We want to make love to Don,” which was a literal translation of an Urdu slogan (Hum Don se pyaar karna chahte hain) and which portrayed a very different sentiment.
Constantine drove very carefully, scanning the roads for any sign of the unusual, and keeping an eye on the rearview mirror to ensure that his guards were following him at a safe distance. He entered a street that had slightly larger houses than the rest of the neighborhood. The street was darkened, with just a solitary light shining at the far corner. From the police sentries posted at the gate of the house at the end of the street, Constantine guessed that that one was Pakora’s.
Then, out of the shadows, four armed men emerged and hailed his car down with a flashlight. They were wearing bandanas with the red and black party colors of the UF. The local ward had set up an informal checkpoint near the minister’s house. Of course, it occurred to Constantine that this would also be an excellent alibi for an ambush. Fully alert now, adrenaline pumping through his veins, he realized that he had a second to decide whether to slow down or push the accelerator. If he ran, he wouldn’t be able to put enough distance between them and himself before they riddled his car with bullet holes from their Kalashnikov rifles. He could see the minister’s sentries warming themselves in front of a brazier. For a moment, he felt safe. Tension wouldn’t have him murdered in front of the police sentries, would he? Then again, if the UF boys did open fire, it was not like the policemen would rush to his rescue. Those sentries probably knew about these men but were under orders not to interfere with the ward’s activities. These cops had learned a long time ag
o to look the other way when it came to things like this. The thought was not particularly comforting for Constantine. He reached for the gun on the passenger seat and cocked it even as he took his foot off the accelerator. It would be stupid to get killed in a case of mistaken identity if the men in front of him were indeed just part of a normal UF checkpoint. He would have to gamble on his motorcycle escort to save him if anything happened.
The man with the flashlight tapped the car window. Constantine gripped his pistol tightly as he rolled down his window. “Superintendent Constantine D’Souza, going to see the Home Minister.”
The man looked at him suspiciously and flashed the light inside the car. “ID card.”
Constantine let go of his gun and fished for his ID card inside his shirt pocket. It infuriated him to think of the fact that these street hoodlums had the gall to ask him, a senior police officer, for identification, when it should have been the other way around. But years of UF government had made these bastards brazen, and there was little Constantine could do about it in his present predicament.
The man peered at the ID card and then, apparently convinced, waved the car through. Constantine pointed to his gunmen on the motorcycle, who had stopped a few feet away. “They’re with me. They’re police officers too.”
The man grunted, and Constantine drove on, his heart still in his throat. He pulled up at the end of the street in front of an ordinary-looking house. In contrast to the vigilance of the armed UF men, the police sentries at the house were quite laidback. They barely gave him a second look. Constantine gave his name to one of them and, soon, a servant emerged from inside the house and led him into a drawing room. The room reeked of nouveau-riche taste. Gaudy, overstuffed sofas had been placed in all four corners of the room. A fake gold chandelier hung from the ceiling, and plastic floral arrangements abounded everywhere. Like the minister’s office, this room was also filled with plaques and mementos that Pakora had received over his political career.
Before entering politics, Pakora had been a poet. The walls were adorned with framed and calligraphed copies of his poems. Constantine had heard that Pakora’s involvement with the party was fairly recent. It was rumored that when the Don first began his self-imposed exile in New York, he was a depressed man, stuck in a cold, alien land, so far away from the seat of his power. Pakora was a struggling poet who was just trying to get his works published at the time. He wrote several odes to the Don, and the Don, never wanting to be seen as an uncultured fellow and always partial to flattery, had revelled in Pakora’s verses, especially as they only sang his praises. As a reward, the Don had elevated Pakora to the party’s central committee. There was no looking back after that. Pakora had soon shed the garb of a struggling poet, and very quickly exchanged it for that of an ambitious politician. And his ministerial career didn’t do much harm to his poetic aspirations either. For starters, it was no longer a problem for him to get published, especially when some party toughs personally called upon a few publishers and persuaded them to do a print run of a few thousand copies. Free of charge, of course. It was regarded as a privilege for the publishers to do such work. Besides, the publishers wanted to continue to be able to live and work in the city. Not only did his work get published, but soon it also became a bestseller as it became forced reading for party workers. And, of course, when Pakora took charge of the Home Ministry, it also became obligatory to stock his collected works in all of Karachi’s police stations, right up with the police rules and the penal code. The Don would agree to all of Pakora’s proposals, no matter how ludicrous they sounded, because whenever he got angry, Pakora would enchant him with a verse or two. And so the one-time poet and romantic, who had known little about politics and even less about the police, had come to be his party’s preeminent and most powerful minister.
There was a massive poster-sized picture on the wall, depicting Pakora demurely sitting at the feet of the Don and receiving his blessings. It symbolized the relationship between the Don and all members of his party. The Don granted his blessings and favors like a medieval potentate, in return for absolute and unquestioning loyalty. Every command of his was obeyed, on pain of death. Subsequently, there were seldom any dissentions or defections from the party.
The servant returned and served Constantine a glass of flat Coke. Then another side door opened, and Pakora entered the room, looking flamboyant in a red silk dressing gown. Behind him Constantine could see a young lady in a state of undress, straightening herself up in a bedroom. Evidently, Maqsood Mahr’s investigation in-charge had come through.
Pakora had a glass of whisky in his hands and was in a good mood, in contrast to his demeanor in the morning. “Ah, good you’re here, D’Souza. Sit, sit. Do you want something else to drink?” He waved his glass in the air. “You people drink, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I mean no, sir . . . I mean of course we Christians drink sir, but I don’t. I mean I do, but I’m fine right now, sir.”
“Relax, D’Souza, relax. I know you must be nervous because of this morning. Don’t worry about it. That was a little drama that I had to put on. I wanted to have a serious talk with you, that’s why I invited you here. Away from prying eyes and ears.” He took a sip from his glass. “I have heard good things about you. General Ibadat strongly recommended you. He said you were a trustworthy fellow.”
“Yes, sir. General sahib is too kind.”
“The problem is that I don’t know who to trust, D’Souza. The party has attached that idiot Ateeq Tension around my neck as my ‘personal secretary.’ The man is of no use to me and is only there to monitor me. I have to give him a share of every deal I do. I know you have a history with him. You arrested him. Good for you. He’s an absolute scoundrel. You should have just killed him.”
Constantine was completely bewildered. He had never expected such a response from the UF’s almighty Home Minister. He began to think that this was another trap being set for him.
Pakora smiled at the expression on his face. “I know that what I’m saying is confusing you. But there are some of us who do not approve of the atrocities people commit in the name of the party.” He looked at the Don’s picture reflexively, as if worried that the demagogue would overhear his comments. “But we cannot say anything openly. Otherwise we would be next on the hit list. So we must tolerate men like Tension. But people like him do not understand the complexity of situations. Especially this situation. I have to maintain a constant effort to ensure that the Don doesn’t listen to these fools. There is enormous pressure on all of us. I have sat in on the meetings. The Americans will have our heads if that journalist dies! Do you know that the president has to give the US ambassador a progress report twice a day? Arre, they are even questioning the Don! They are asking him how such a thing could happen, if he claims that nothing can move without his knowledge in this city!”
“Sir?”
Pakora lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “They have told us that they will hold the Don personally responsible if anything happens to the journalist. They told us this to my face. There is a good chance that they will throw him out of New York. No one in the police or the Agencies knows of this. Only a handful of us in the party know. It’s a huge worry for us. He can’t come back here, and he has nowhere else to go.”
He allowed this last sentence to sink in with Constantine. For the Don to be thrown out of America would be huge. His mystique would be shattered.
“So you see my problem, D’Souza. I cannot reveal any of this to the rest of the party. Morale would collapse. But at the same time, I have these hardliner dogs like Tension who are just out for revenge and don’t want the Don to cooperate or compromise with anyone. And the Don has been gone for so long that he doesn’t understand the ground realities anymore. He listens to any rubbish that any idiot spews out. That’s why I needed you to take such elaborate measures to come here. If it leaks out in the party that I was discussing these things, I would be dead before the American!” He laughed at
the thought, and then sighed. “You know, sometimes I think I should have remained a poet!”
Constantine finally understood what the secrecy was all about. He also realized that he was now privy to the biggest secret in Karachi, with the exception, of course, of the location of Jon Friedland.
Pakora went on. “Colonel Tarkeen has been updating me on the progress he has made with Akbar. Apparently they have traced some six numbers from the phone he told them to trace. Colonel Tarkeen feels they are closing in on the kidnappers. But they need Akbar’s continued assistance to recover the American. And Akbar naturally wants something in return. Presumably his freedom, a return of his status and position. I personally don’t have a problem with him. I realize that he was doing his job. And between you and me, some of the ward bosses he killed deserved it. They were criminals. But you know that Akbar is number one on the party’s hit list. The hardliners will not allow me to release him from prison.”
“Then this scheme cannot work, sir. He won’t cooperate unless he gets something in return. He made that very clear when Major Rommel first went to see him.”
The Prisoner Page 20