The Mountain Shadow

by Gregory David Roberts

  The doors opened on a storage floor, with walls of filing cabinets and open shelves stacked with dusty folders.

  ‘Ah, the Kafka Room. Can’t wait to see the menu.’

  ‘Come on!’ Lisa said, rushing to the stairwell. ‘We have to hurry.’

  Taking the steps two at a time, she led me up the stairs. At the top she hesitated, with her hand on the emergency release bar of the closed door.

  ‘I hope he remembered to leave this door unlocked,’ she said breathlessly, and then pushed on the bar.

  We stepped through onto the roof of the building. It was a vast area, with several small metal huts on the periphery.

  A huge structure towered ten metres over us, braced by heavy steel girders. It was the illuminated logo of the Air India company: a stylised archer, with a drawn bow, circled by a great disc.

  The gigantic figure rose from a central support pylon, fixed to a rotating steel table, which was in turn supported by an array of girders and cables.

  Like every other Mumbaikar, I’d seen the huge sign rotating above the Air India building hundreds of times, but standing so close to it, so high above the rolling sea, was a different truth.

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘We made it in time,’ Lisa grinned.

  ‘There’s a bad time for this? What a view!’

  ‘Wait,’ she said, staring up at the archer. ‘Wait.’

  There was a whirring, grinding sound, as if a generator had started up nearby. The throb of an electric turbine began, building from a soft purr to a persistent whine. Then the click and stutter of a condenser, or several of them, chattered from somewhere very close, at the base of the immense sign.

  Suddenly, in one burst of flickering crimson colour, the great circular logo lit up, bathing the whole space in blood-red light. Moments later, the crimson archer began to rotate on its pylon axis.

  Lisa was dancing little excited steps, her arms wide.

  ‘Isn’t it great?’

  She was laughing happily.

  ‘It’s brilliant. I love it.’

  We watched the huge wheel of scarlet light turn for some time, and then shifted to face the open sea. The clouds had swollen together to fill the whole of heaven with black brooding. Distant lightning strikes forked through the darkness: ribs of cloud, rolling and shifting on the bed of night.

  ‘You like it?’ she asked, leaning in beside me as we watched the sky and sea.

  ‘I love it. How’d you come up with it?’

  ‘I was here a couple weeks ago with Rish, from the gallery. He was thinking about making a full-size copy of the Air India archer for a new Bombay exhibition, and he invited me to come take a look. When we got here, he changed his mind. But I liked it so much up here that I cultivated the guard, and bribed him to let us come up here, you and me.’

  ‘You cultivated the guard, huh?’

  ‘I’m a cultivated girl.’

  For a time we gazed at the rejoicing sea, far below. It was a dangerous view, irresistible, but my thoughts slithered back to that afternoon, and Concannon.

  ‘Did you meet a tall Irishman named Concannon, a while back?’

  She thought for a moment, one of my favourite frowns curling her upper lip.

  ‘Fergus? Is that his name?’

  ‘I only know him as Concannon,’ I said. ‘But you can’t miss this guy. Tall, heavyset, but athletic, kinda rangy, a boxer, with sandy hair and a hard eye. He said he met you, at an exhibition.’

  ‘Yeah, Fergus, that’s his name. I only spoke to him for a while. Why?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just wondering why he was at the exhibition. I don’t figure him for an art lover.’

  ‘We had lots of men at that show,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It was our most successful show so far. The kind of show that brings people who don’t normally go to galleries.’

  ‘What kind of a show?’

  ‘It was all about the broken lives that spin out from bad or troubled relationships between fathers and sons. It was called Sons of the Fathers. There was a big piece about it in the paper. Ranjit gave us great coverage. It pulled in a crowd. I told you all about it. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been in Goa, Lisa, and you didn’t tell me about it.’

  ‘Really? I was sure I did. Funny, huh?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Sons of the Fathers. Was it that phrase, those words, Sons, Fathers, glimpsed on a poster that had drawn Concannon to the exhibition? Or had he followed me, and then followed Lisa to the gallery, using the show as a pretext to meet her and talk to her?

  Acid memories had burned his eyes, when he spoke to me. I had memories of my own. I woke too often still chained to a wall of the past, being tortured by the ghosts of men whose faces I’d already begun to forget.

  I turned my head to look at Lisa’s gentle profile: the deep-set, hooded eyes; the fine, small nose; the sculpted flow of her long, graceful chin; the half-smile that almost always played in the stream of her lips. The wind was picking up, lifting the blonde curls of her hair into a feathered halo.

  She was wearing a loose, knee-length black dress with a high, stiff collar, but no sleeves or shoulders. She’d kicked off her sandals, and her feet were bare. The only jewellery she wore was a thin necklace of irregular turquoise beads.

  She read my face, frowning a little, as she made her way back into my mind.

  ‘Do you know what today is?’ she asked, laughing as my eyes widened with alarm. ‘It’s our anniversary.’

  ‘But, we got together in –’

  ‘I’m talking about the day I let myself love you,’ she said, her smile showing how much she was enjoying my confusion. ‘This is exactly the day, two years ago, that you stopped your bike beside me on the causeway, a week after Karla got married, when I was waiting for the rain to stop.’

  ‘I was hoping you forgot that. I was pretty high, that day.’

  ‘You were,’ she agreed, the smile filling her eyes. ‘You saw me standing with a bunch of people under the shelter of a shop. You pulled up, and asked me if I wanted a ride. But the rain was pouring down like mad –’

  ‘It was the start of a flood, a big one. I was worried that you might not make it home.’

  ‘Pouring in buckets, it was. And there’s you, sitting on your bike in the rain, soaked through to your bones, offering me, dry and comfortable, a ride home. I laughed so hard.’

  ‘Okay, okay –’

  ‘Then you got off your bike and started to dance, right there in front of the whole crowd.’

  ‘So stupid.’

  ‘Don’t say that! I loved it!’

  ‘So stupid,’ I repeated, shaking my head.

  ‘I think you should make a promise to the universe that you’ll always dance in the rain, at least once, if you’re in Bombay during monsoon.’

  ‘I don’t know about the universe, but I’ll make a pact with you. I hereby promise that I’ll always dance in the rain at least once, in every one of my monsoons.’

  The storm was coming in fast. Lightning shocked the theatre of the sea. Heartbeats later, the first thunder smashed the clouds.

  ‘That’s a big storm coming in.’

  ‘Come here,’ she said, taking my hand.

  She led me to an open space beneath the slowly turning wheel of the crimson archer. Ducking into an alcove, she fetched a basket and brought it out.

  ‘I paid the watchman to leave it up here for us,’ she explained, opening the basket to reveal a large blanket, a bottle of champagne, and a few glasses.

  She handed me the bottle.

  ‘Open us up, Lin.’

  While I peeled away the foil wrapper and twisted the wire tether, she spread out the blanket, holding it in place against the gathering wind with spare tiles she found on the roof.

  ‘
You really thought this out,’ I said, popping the cork on the champagne.

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she laughed. ‘But this is a special place. When I came up here with Rish, I took a damn good look around. This is one of the only open spaces in Bombay, maybe the only space, where nobody can see you from any window, anywhere.’

  She pulled her dress up over her head, and tossed it aside. She was naked. She picked up the glasses and held them out. I filled them. I put the bottle aside, and held my glass close to hers for a toast.

  ‘What shall we drink to?’

  ‘How ’bout getting your goddamn clothes off?’

  ‘Lisa,’ I said, as serious as the storm. ‘We’ve gotta talk.’

  ‘Yeah, we do,’ she said. ‘After we drink. I’ll make the toast.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘To fools in love.’

  ‘To fools in love.’

  She drank her glass down quickly, and then threw it over her shoulder. It shattered against a stone buttress.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ she said happily.

  ‘You know, we should talk about –’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  She unfastened my clothes and pulled them off. When we were both naked she picked up another glass and refilled it.

  ‘One more toast,’ she said, ‘then we talk.’

  ‘Okay. To the rain,’ I suggested. ‘Inside and out.’

  ‘To the rain,’ she agreed. ‘Inside and out.’

  We drank.

  ‘Lisa –’

  ‘No. One more drink.’

  ‘You said –’

  ‘The last one didn’t do it.’

  ‘Didn’t do what?’

  ‘Didn’t wake the Dutchman.’

  She filled the glasses again.

  ‘No toast this time,’ she said, drinking half her glass. ‘Bottoms up.’

  We drank. A second glass shattered in the shadows. She pushed me back onto the tethered blanket, but slipped away again, her body on the sky.

  ‘Do you mind if I dance while we talk,’ she said, beginning to sway, the wind happy in her hair.

  ‘I’ll try not to object,’ I said, lying back to watch her, my hands clasped behind my head.

  ‘This is another anniversary, of sorts,’ she said dreamily.

  ‘You know, there’s a special place in hell for people who never forget birthdays or anniversaries.’

  ‘This is one that starts tonight, two years after the other one started.’

  ‘The other one?’

  ‘Us,’ she danced, twirling in a circle, her arms woven in the wind. ‘The other us, that we used to be.’

  ‘That we used to be?’

  ‘That we used to be.’

  ‘And when did we change?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘We did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the elevator, or on the stairs?’

  She laughed and danced, her head moving to a beat only her arms and hips and legs could hear.

  ‘I’m doing a rain dance,’ she said, her hands already swimming through water. ‘It has to rain tonight.’

  I glanced up at the immense disc of the archer, rotating slowly, chained to the rock of the city with steel cables. Rain. Rain means lightning. The red archer looked like a very tempting lightning rod.

  ‘It has to rain?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said, flopping at my feet and staring at me, her body supported on one arm. ‘And it will now, soon.’

  She picked up the champagne bottle, took a mouthful and kissed me, trickling the wine into my mouth in the bruised blossom of a kiss. Our lips parted.

  ‘I want to have an open relationship,’ she said.

  ‘It can’t get much more open than this,’ I smiled.

  ‘I want to be with other people.’

  ‘Oh, that kind of open.’

  ‘I think you should be with other people, too. Not all the time, of course. Not if we stay together. I don’t think I’d like to see you in a permanent thing. But definitely sometimes. I could actually hook you up. I’ve got a friend who’s really hot for you. She’s so cute that I wouldn’t mind doing a threesome.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It would only take a word,’ she said, staring into my eyes.

  The storm was close. The wind smelled of the sea. I lifted my eyes to the sky. Pride has most of the anger, and humility most of the right. I didn’t have the right to tell her what to do, or what not to do. I didn’t even have the right to ask her. We didn’t have that kind of love.

  ‘I don’t have the right –’

  ‘I want to be with you, if you want to love me,’ she said, lying beside me, her hand on my chest. ‘But I want us to be with other people as well.’

  ‘You know, Lisa, you picked a pretty weird way to tell me this.’

  ‘Is there a way that isn’t weird?’

  ‘Still . . . ’

  ‘I didn’t know how you’d react,’ she pouted. ‘I still don’t know. I thought, if you don’t like it, this’ll be the last time we make love. And if you do like it, this’ll be the first time we make love as the new us, free to be what we want. Either way, it’s a memorable anniversary.’

  We looked at one another. Our eyes began to smile.

  ‘You knew I’d completely love this stunt, didn’t you?’

  ‘Totally.’

  ‘The whole Air India archer thing.’

  ‘Totally.’

  I leaned over her, smoothing the wind-strewn hair from her face.

  ‘You’re an amazing girl, Lisa. And I’m constantly amazed.’

  She kissed me, her fingers vines around my neck.

  ‘You know,’ she murmured, ‘I did some research.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yeah, on how often this place gets hit by lightning. Do you want to know?’

  I didn’t care. I knew what was happening to us, but I didn’t know where we were going.

  The storm was on us. The sky connected. Rain filled our mouths with silver. She pulled me onto her, into her, locked her feet in the small of my back, and held me inside, tight, loose, and tight again, daring me to follow.

  A waterfall of wind and rain drummed on my back. I put my forehead to hers, sheltering her face with mine, our eyes only lashes apart. The monsoon, flesh-warm, poured from my head and splashed up from the ground. We pressed our mouths together, breathing into one another, sharing air.

  She rolled me over onto my back, holding me inside her, flattening her long fingers across my chest, her arms stiff.

  A roar of thunder smashed new rain from sodden clouds. Water poured in rivulets from her hair and her breasts, running into my open mouth. Water began to fill the roof of the building, ebbing around us in a secret sea, high above the Island City.

  Her fingers clawed. Her back arched, cat-fierce. She slid her hands from my chest, down along my body. Sitting upright, she locked me inside, and turned her face to the sky, her arms out wide.

  A drum began to beat: a heavy footstep in a hall of memory, my heart. We were breaking apart. In that instant it was clear: what we had was all we ever were, or could be.

  Lightning painted the water around us on the roof. They turned above my head, Lisa and the storm and the wheel of Fate, and the whole world was red, blood red, even to that sea the sky, that sea the sky.

  Part Four

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ruling a criminal enterprise requires an instinct for fear, a

  flair for ruthless caprice, and a talent for herding your men into that lush minion-pasture between awe and envy. Running a criminal enterprise, on the other hand, is all hard work.

  I woke early after the night of the red archer, feeling that an arrow had passed through me leaving a red emptines
s inside. I was at my desk in the passport factory before nine.

  Three hours of detailed work with Krishna and Villu brought my counterfeit passports up to date. After a call to my contact at the Bombay Municipal Corporation, asking him to deliver copies of

  the permit documents for Farzad’s treasure-hunting family, I headed

  to the Colaba Causeway for a working lunch.

  Most of the five-, four- and three-star hotels in South Bombay were within a three-kilometre radius of the Gateway of India monument. Ninety per cent of Bombay’s tourists could be found within the same arc of the peninsula, along with ninety-five per cent of the illegal passport trade, and eighty-five per cent of the drug trafficking.

  Most businesses in the south paid protection money, called hafta, meaning a week, to the Sanjay Company. The Company exempted the owners of seven restaurants and bars in the same area. The owners of those bars allowed touts, pimps, tourist guides, pickpockets, drug dealers and black market traders connected with the Sanjay Company to use their premises as convenient drop-off points for goods, documents and information.

  My passport forgery and counterfeiting unit had to monitor those seven drop-off centres for usable documents. For the most part, that job fell to me. To keep enemies and potential rivals guessing, I changed the order of the bars and restaurants every day, rotating between them often enough to confuse any sense of routine.

  I started, on that day, at the Trafalgar Restaurant, only a good knife’s throw from Lightning Dilip’s desk in the Colaba police station. At the door of the corner-facing restaurant, below the three steep steps leading inside, I paused to shake hands with a Memory Man named Hrishikesh.

  Memory Men were a criminal sub-caste in those years: men who lacked the foolhardiness to risk prison time by actually committing crimes, but whose intelligence and prodigious memories allowed them to make a modest living, serving the fearless fools who did.

  Taking up positions in high criminal traffic areas, such as the causeway, they made it their business to know the latest figures for the day’s gold prices, the current black and white market exchange rates for six major currencies, the carat price for white diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, and half-hour fluctuations in the price of every illicit drug, from cannabis to cocaine.