In the end it was Hassaan Obikwa, another Nigerian, who gave us the decisive clue. The men were tourists, completely new to the city, and unknown to Obikwa. He had no precise idea of their motive-it was something to do with a drug deal-but his network of contacts had confirmed that they were determined to do me harm.

Hassaan's driver, Raheem, almost fully recovered from the injuries he'd suffered in prison, discovered that they were in one of the Fort area hotels. He offered to _resolve the matter.

He was conscious of the debt he owed me for buying him out of Arthur Road Prison. With an earnest, almost shy expression, he offered to have the men killed, slowly and painfully, as a personal favor to me. He seemed to think that it was the least he could do, under the circumstances. I refused. I had to know what it was all about, and I had to put a stop to it. Clearly disappointed, Raheem accepted the decision, and then led us to the small hotel in the Fort. He waited outside with our two cars while we went inside. Salman and Sanjay remained with him, watching the street. Their brief was to stop the cops, if they arrived, or slow them up long enough for us to leave the hotel.

One of Abdullah's contacts smuggled us, whispering, into a room adjoining that taken by the three Africans. We pressed our ears to the connecting wall, and could hear their voices clearly. They were joking, and talking about trivial, unrelated things.

Finally, one of them made a remark that tightened the skin on my skull and face with dread.

"He got that medal," one of them said. "Around his neck. That medal is gold. I want that gold medal."

"I like them shoes, them boots he got," another voice said. "I want them shoes."

They went on to talk about their plan. They argued a little. One of the men was more forceful. The others agreed, at last, with his idea to follow me from Leopold's all the way to the quiet car park beneath my apartment building and then beat me until I was dead, and strip my body.

It was bizarre, standing in the dark and listening to the details of my own murder. My stomach dropped and tightened on a curdling mix of nausea and rage. I hoped to hear some clue, some reference to a motive, but they never mentioned one. Abdullah was listening with his left ear against the thin partition, and I was listening with my right. Our eyes were only a hand's width apart. The signal to move, when I nodded my head, was a gesture so faint and subtle that it was as if our minds had spoken the message.

Vikram, Abdullah, and I stood outside the door to their room, with a passkey poised over the lock. We counted down _three...

_two... _one... then I turned the key and tried the door. It wasn't locked from the inside. I stood back, and kicked it open.

There was a second, three seconds, of utter stillness, as the surprised and frightened men stared at us, their jaws gaping and their eyes bulging. Nearest to us was a tall, very solid man with a bald head, and deep scars cut into his cheeks in a regular pattern. He wore a singlet and boxer shorts. Standing behind him was a slightly shorter man, who was dressed only in jockey shorts. He was bending over a waist-high dressing table, poised in the act of snorting a line of heroin. The third man was shorter still, but very thick in the chest and arms. He lay on one of the three beds, at the furthest corner of the room, holding a Playboy magazine in his hands. There was a strong smell in the room. It was the smell of sweat and fear. Some of it was mine.

Abdullah closed the door of the room behind him, very slowly and gently, and locked it. He was wearing black: he almost always wore a black shirt and pants. Vikram was dressed in his black cowboy rig. By some chance, I too wore a black T-shirt and black trousers. We must've looked like the members of some club, or gang, to the goggle-eyed men in the room.

"What the fuck-" the big man bellowed.

I ran at him and rammed a fist into his mouth, but he had time to raise his hands. We grabbed at each other, fists flying, and locked in a hard grapple.

Vikram sprang for the man on the bed. Abdullah closed on the man at the dresser. It was a short fight, and a dirty one. There were six of us-six big men in a small room. There was nowhere to go but into each other.

Abdullah finished his man quickly. I heard a frightened shriek, choked off, as Abdullah snapped a hard, straight, right hand to the man's throat. From the corner of my eye, I was aware that the solid man fell back, grasping and clutching at his throat. The man on the bed jumped to his feet and kicked outward, trying to use the advantage of high ground. Abdullah and Vikram tipped the bed up, sending the man sprawling behind it. They leapt over the upturned bed and fell on him, stomping and kicking him until he stopped moving.

I held the strap of the big man's singlet with my left hand, and pounded at him with my right. Ignoring the blows to his head, he managed to get his hands around my neck, and started to squeeze.

My throat locked tight. I knew that the breath I held in me was the last until I finished him. I reached out for his face, desperately, with my right hand. My thumb found his eye. I wanted to push it into his brain, but he moved his head, and the thumb slipped between the eye and the hard ridge of bone at his temple.

I drove the thumb in harder and deeper until I gouged his eye from the socket, and it hung there from bloody strands. I tried to reach it, to rip it away or to dig my thumb into the empty socket, but he pulled back to the limit of his reach. The eye hung out on his cheek, and I swung my fist at his head, trying to crush it.

He was a hard man. He didn't give up. His hands squeezed tighter.

My neck was strong and the muscles were well developed, but I knew he had the strength to kill me. My hand reached, groping for the pistol in my pocket. I had to shoot him. I had to kill him. That was all right. I didn't care. The air in my lungs was spent, and my brain was exploding in Mandelbrot whirls of colored light, and I was dying, and I wanted to kill him.

Vikram crashed a heavy wooden stool into the back of the big man's bald head. It's not as easy to knock a man out as it seems in the movies. It's true that a lucky hit can do it in one shot, but I've been hit with iron bars, lumps of wood, boots, and many hard fists, and I've only ever been knocked out once in my life.

Vikram slammed the heavy stool into the back of the man's head five times, with all of his strength, before the big man buckled and fell. He was defeated, and groggy. The back of his head was pulpy. I knew that his skull was fractured in several places.

Somehow, he was still conscious.

We worked on them for half an hour, overcoming their initial reluctance to talk. Raheem joined us, speaking in English and their Nigerian dialect. Their passports told us who they were- Nigerian citizens, on tourist visas. Other information in their wallets and luggage told us where they'd stayed in Lagos before they came to Bombay. Little by little, the story emerged. They were muscle: hit men, sent by a gangster in Lagos to punish me for a major heroin and Mandrax tablet deal that had gone wrong.

The deal involved some sixty thousand dollars-money that their boss in Lagos had lost in a hustle in Bombay. The hustler, whoever he was, had nominated me as the mastermind of the plan; the man responsible for ripping off the money.

The hired thugs surrendered that much information, but then they balked. They didn't want to give me the man's name. They didn't want to tell me who'd set me up. They didn't want to betray him without the express permission of their Nigerian boss. We insisted, and they were persuaded. The man's name was Maurizio Belcane.

I put the big man's eye back into its socket, but it stared out at a strange angle. From the way that he turned his head to look at me, I guessed that he couldn't see out of it, yet, and I suspected that it would never sit correctly again. We closed the eye with tape, bandaged his head, and tidied the other men up.