"Beautiful? I think not. Among the Africans, the men are beautiful, in my opinion, whereas the women are merely very attractive. For Europeans, the opposite is true. Karla is beautiful, and I never knew a European man who is beautiful in that way. But that is another matter. I mean only to say that they are customers of Rafiq, Nigerians, and that their business between Bombay and Lagos is one of the concessions-a spin-off is the term, I think-of this deal with the Sainiks. The Sena has a man at Bombay Customs. So much money is moving from hand to hand. Rafiq's little scheme is a tangle of countries, Afghanistan and India, Pakistan and Nigeria, and of powers-police and customs and politicians. All of it is a part of the struggle for control here in our cursed and beloved Bombay. And all of it, all this intrigue, grows from the closing down of my dear old opium dens. A tragedy."
"This Rafiq," I muttered, perhaps sounding more flippant than I'd intended, "is quite a guy."
"He is Afghan, and his country is at war, my friend. That gives him an edge, as the Americans say. And he works for the Walidlalla mafia council-one of the most powerful. His closest associate is Chuha, one of the most dangerous men in Bombay. But the real power here, in this part of the city, is the great don, lord Abdel Khader Khan. He is a poet, a philosopher, and a lord of crime. They call him Khaderbhai. Khader-_Elder-_Brother. There are others, with more money and more guns than Khaderbhai-he is a man of rigid principles, you see, and there are many lucrative things that he will not do. But those same principles give him-I am not sure how to say it in English-the immoral high ground, perhaps, and there is no-one, in this part of Bombay, who has more real power than he does. Many people believe that he is a saint, with supernatural capabilities. I know him, and I can tell you that Khaderbhai is the most fascinating man I ever met. If you will allow me the small immodesty, this makes him a truly remarkable individual, for I have met a great many interesting men in my life."
He left the words to swirl for a moment in the eye contact between us.
"Come, you are not drinking! I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. It is like putting on a condom to masturbate."
"No really," I laughed. "I, er, I'm waiting for Karla to come back. She's due any minute now."
"Ah, Karla..." He said her name with a long, purring roll. "And just what are your intentions with our inscrutable Karla?"
"Come again?"
"Perhaps it is more useful to wonder what intentions she has for _you, no?"
He poured the last of the one-litre bottle into his glass and topped it up with the last of the soda. He'd been drinking steadily for more than an hour. His eyes were as veined and bloodshot as the back of a boxer's fist, but the gaze that stared from them was unwavering, and his hands were precise in their movements.
"I saw her on the street, just hours after I landed in Bombay," I found myself saying. "There was something about her that... I think she's one of the reasons why I've stayed here this long.
Her and Prabaker. I like them-I liked them both on sight. I'm a people person, if you know what I mean. If the people in it were interesting, I'd prefer a tin shed to the Taj Mahal-not that I've seen the Taj Mahal yet."
"It leaks," Didier sniffed, dismissing the architectural wonder with two words. "But did you say interesting! Karla is interesting?"
He laughed out loud again. It was a peculiarly high-pitched laugh, harsh and almost hysterical. He slapped me hard on the back, spilling a little of his drink.
"Ha! You know, Lin, I approve of you, even if a commendation from me is a very fragile endorsement."
He drained his glass, thumped it on the table, and wiped his closely trimmed moustache with the back of his hand. When he saw my puzzled expression, he leaned close until our faces were only a few centimetres apart.
"Let me explain something to you. Look around here. How many people do you count?"
"Well, maybe, sixty, eighty."
"Eighty people. Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Americans.
Tourists from everywhere. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing.
And from Bombay-Indians and Iranians and Afghans and Arabs and Africans. But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamique for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousands of people? I will tell you-four. Four people in this room with power, and the rest are like the rest of the people everywhere: powerless, sleepers in the dream, anonyme.
When Karla comes back, there will be five people in this room with power. That is Karla, the one you call interesting. I see by your expression, my young friend, you do not understand what I am saying. Let me put it this way: Karla is reasonably good at being a friend, but she is stupendously good at being an enemy. When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy. And there is no-one in this city that makes a worse or more dangerous enemy than Karla."
He stared into my eyes, looking for something, moving from one eye to the other and back again.
"You know the kind of power I'm talking about, don't you? Real power. The power to make men shine like the stars, or crush them to dust. The power of secrets. Terrible, terrible secrets. The power to live without remorse or regret. Is there something in your life, Lin, that you regret? Is there anything you have done, that you regret it?"
"Yes, I guess I-"
"Of course you do! And so do I, regret... things I have done... and not done. But not Karla. And that is why she is like the others, the few others in this room, who have real power. She has a heart like theirs, and you and I do not. Ah, forgive me, I am almost drunk, and I see that my Italians are leaving. Ajay will not wait for much longer. I must go, now, and collect my little commission, before I can allow myself to be completely drunk."
He sat back in his chair, and then pushed himself to his feet by leaning heavily on the table with both of his soft, white hands.
Without another word or look he left, and I watched him walk toward the kitchen, threading his way through the tables with the rolling, spongy step of the practised drinker. His sports coat was creased and wrinkled at the back, where he'd been leaning against the chair, and the seat of his trousers hung in baggy folds. Before I knew him well enough, before I realised how much it meant that he'd lived by crime and passion for eight years in Bombay without making a single enemy and without borrowing a single dollar, I tended to dismiss Didier as little more than an amusing but hopeless drunkard. It was an easy mistake to make, and one that he himself encouraged.
The first rule of black business everywhere is: never let anyone know what you're thinking. Didier's corollary to the rule was: always know what the other thinks of you. The shabby clothes, the matted, curly hair, pressed flat in places where it had rested on the pillow the night before, even his fondness for alcohol, exaggerated into what seemed to be a debilitating addiction-they were all expressions of an image he cultivated, and were as carefully nuanced as a professional actor's. He made people think that he was harmless and helpless, because that was the precise opposite of the truth.
I had little time to think about Didier and the puzzling remarks he'd made, however, because Karla soon returned, and we left the restaurant almost at once. We took the long way to her small house, walking beside the sea wall that runs from the Gateway of India to the Radio Club Hotel. The long, wide street was empty.
On our right, behind a row of plane trees, were hotels and apartment buildings. A few lights, here and there, showed windowgraphs of the lives being lived in those rooms: a sculpture displayed on one wall, a shelf of books on another, a poster of some Indian deity, framed in wood, surrounded by flowers and smoky streamers of incense and, just visible in the corner of a street-level window, two slender hands pressed together in prayer.