CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

One hour after I'd left Abdul Ghani's mansion to confront Madame Zhou, Nazeer and three of his most trusted men forced the door of the house next to Ghani's and made their way through the long basement workshop that connected the two houses. At about the time that I picked my way through the rubble of Madame Zhou's ruined Palace, Nazeer and his men, wearing black knitted masks, pushed up the trapdoor in Ghani's kitchen and entered the house.

They seized the cook, the yardman, Abdul's two servants, and the Sri Lankan counterfeiters, Villu and Krishna, and locked them in a small room in the basement. As I climbed the blackened stairs of the Palace to the attic and found Madame Zhou, Nazeer crept upstairs to Abdul's grand study and found him sitting in the wing chair, weeping and still. Then, at about the time that I uncurled the knotted fist of my revenge to pity my broken enemy, the drooling Madame, Nazeer avenged himself and Khader Khan by killing the traitor who'd betrayed us all in Pakistan.

Two men held Abdul's arms against the chair. A third man forced his head back and his eyes open. Nazeer removed his mask. Staring into Abdul's eyes, Nazeer stabbed him in the heart. Abdul must've known he had to die. He was sitting there, alone, waiting for his killers. But his scream, they say, came all the way from hell to claim him.

They rolled his body off the chair and onto the polished floor.

Then, as I struggled with Rajan and his twin in the attic across the city, Nazeer and his men used heavy cleavers to hack off Abdul's hands, his feet, and his head. They scattered the pieces of his corpse around the great house, just as Abdul Ghani had ordered the Sapna killers to do with the butchered pieces of loyal old Madjid's body. And as I left the ruined Palace, my heart free and almost at peace for the first time in too many vengeful months, Nazeer and his men released Krishna, Villu, and the servants-all deemed to have had no part in Ghani's treachery-and then left the mansion to hunt down the members of Ghani's faction, and kill them all.

"Ghani was freakin' out for a long time, yaar." Sanjay Kumar said, translating freely from Nazeer's Urdu into English. "He thought Khader had gone crazy. He thought he was, like, obsessed, you know? He got the idea that Khader was going to lose all the business and the money and the power of the council. He thought Khader was spending too much time on Afghanistan, the war, and all that. And he knew Khader had all these other missions planned - stuff in Sri Lanka and Nigeria and such like. So when he couldn't talk Khader out of it, and he couldn't get him to change, he decided to use all this Sapna business. The Sapna thing was Ghani's operation, right from the start."

"All of it?" I asked.

"Sure," Sanjay answered. "Khader and Ghani, both. But Ghani was in charge. They were using the Sapna thing, you know, to get what they wanted from the cops and the government."

"How?"

"Ghani's idea was to freak everybody out-the cops and the politicians and the other councils-with a common enemy. That was Sapna. When the Sapna guys started chopping people up all over the place, and talking about a revolution, and Sapna being the king of thieves and all that, everybody got worried. Nobody knew who was behind it. That got them to work with us, to catch the fucker, in exchange for our help. But Ghani, he was hoping to get a shot at Khader himself."

"I'm not sure he wanted that from the start," Salman Mustaan interrupted, shaking his head at his close friend to emphasise his point. "I think he started out just like always, backing Khader all the way. But that Sapna thing-that was some weird shit, man, and I think, you know, it bent his mind."

"Whatever," Sanjay continued, shrugging off the fine point. "The result's the same. Ghani has this gang-the Sapna guys-his own gang, that only answer to him. And he's killing fuckers all over the place. Most of them were people he wanted to get rid of anyway, for business reasons, which I got no problem with. So everything's going fine, yaar. The whole fuckin' city is going crazy looking for this Sapna fucker, and all Khader's traditional enemies, they're falling all over themselves to help him smuggle guns and explosives and other heavy shit through Bombay because they want him to help them find out who this Sapna is, and take him out. It's a fuckin' crazy plan, but it's working, yaar. Then, one day, a cop comes to see him. It was that Patil- you know the guy, Lin-that sub-inspector Suresh Patil. He used to work out of Colaba. And he's such a cunt, yaar."

"But a smart one," Salman muttered respectfully.

"Oh, yeah, he's smart. He's a very smart cunt. And he tells Ghani that the Sapna killers have left a clue at the scene of their latest murder, and it leads back to the Khader Khan council.

Ghani freaks out. He can see all that shit he's been doing coming right home to his doorstep. So he decides that he's got to have a sacrifice. Someone from the Khader Khan council itself, you know, right in the fuckin' heart of it all, that the Sapna guys can chop up to throw the cops off. They figured, if the cops saw one of our own guys get all chopped up, they'd have to think that Sapna was our enemy."

"And he picked Madjid," Salman concluded for him. "And it worked.

Patil was the cop in charge of the case, and he was there when they were putting the pieces of Madjid's body into carry bags. He knew how close Madjid was to Khaderbhai. Patil's dad-now there's a tough cop, yaar-had some history with Khaderbhai. He put him in jail once."

"Khaderbhai did time?" I asked, disappointed that I'd never asked the Khan myself: we'd talked about prison often enough.

"Sure," Salman laughed. "He even escaped, you know, from Arthur Road."

"You're fuckin' kidding!"

"You didn't know that, Lin?"

"No."

"It's a damn fine story, yaar," Salman stated, wagging his head enthusiastically. "You should get Nazeer to tell it some time. He was the outside man for Khader Khan during the escape. They were fuckin' wild guys, Nazeer and Khaderbhai, in those days, yaar."

Sanjay, in agreement, clapped Nazeer on the back with a hard, good-natured slap. It was almost exactly the place where Nazeer had been wounded, and I knew the slap must've hurt, but he showed no sign of pain. Instead, he studied my face. It was my first formal debriefing after Abdul Ghani's death and the end of the two-week gangster war that had cost six lives and put the power of the mafia council back in the hands of Nazeer and the Khader faction. I met his gaze, and nodded slowly.

His stern, unsmiling face softened for an instant and then quickly set in its customary severity.

"Poor old Madjid," Sanjay said, sighing heavily. "He was just a- what the fuck do you call those red things? Those fish?"

"A red herring," I said.

"Yeah, one of those herring fuckers. The cops-that Patil cunt and his guys-they decided that there wasn't any connection between Sapna and Khader's council. They knew how much Khader loved Madjid, and they started looking in other places. Ghani was off the hook, and after a while his guys started chopping fuckers up again. Business as usual."

"How did Khader feel about it?"

"About what?" Sanjay asked.

"He means about Madjid being killed," Salman cut in. "Don't you, Lin?"

"Yeah."

There was a small hesitation as all three men looked at me. Their features were set in grim and almost resentful stillness, as if I'd asked them an impolite or embarrassing question. But their eyes, lit with secrets and lies, seemed regretful and saddened.

"Khader was cool with it," Salman answered. I felt my heart stutter, murmuring its pain.

We were in the Mocambo, a restaurant and coffee bar in the Fort Area. It was clean, well serviced, and fashionably bohemian. Rich businessmen from the Fort mixed with gangsters, lawyers, and celebrities from the movies and the rapidly developing television industries. I liked the place, and I'd been glad that Sanjay had chosen it for our meeting. We'd worked our way through a big but healthy lunch and kulfi dessert, and had moved on to our second coffee. Nazeer sat at my left, with his back in a corner space, and facing the main street door. Next to him was Sanjay Kumar, the tough, young Hindu gangster from the suburb of Bandra who'd once been my training partner. He'd worked his way into a permanent position on what remained of Khader's mafia council. He was thirty years old, fit and heavy-set, with thick, dark-brown hair that he blow-dried to match the bouffant of the movie heroes. His face was handsome. Wide-apart brown eyes, set deep into the shelter of a high brow, looked out with humour and confidence over a wide nose, a smiler's mouth, and a softly rounded chin. He laughed easily, and it was always a good, warm laugh, no matter how often he provoked himself to it.