Khaderbhai put the last bullets into their heads himself. But one of those Sapna guys wasn't in the car park, and he got away. We never tracked him down. He went back to Delhi, and he disappeared from there. We haven't heard anything since."

"I liked that Ahmed Zadeh," Sanjay said quietly, dispensing what was, for him, extravagantly high praise with a little sigh of sorrowing recollection.

"Yeah," I agreed, remembering the man who'd always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd; the man who'd died with his hand clenched in mine. "He was a good guy."

Nazeer spoke again, grunting the words at us in his wrathful style as if they were threats.

"When the Pakistani cops were tipped off about Khaderbhai,"

Sanjay translated, "it was obvious that it had to be Abdul Ghani behind it."

I nodded my agreement. It was obvious. Abdul Ghani was from Pakistan. His connections there went deep, and high. He'd told me about it more than once when I'd worked for him. I wondered why I hadn't seen it at the time, when the cops raided our hotel in Pakistan. My first thought was that I'd simply liked him too much to suspect him, and that was true. More to the point, perhaps, was how flattered I'd been by his attention: Ghani had been my patron on the council, after Khader himself, and he'd invested time, energy, and affection in our friendship. And there was something else that might have distracted me in Karachi: my mind had been filled with shame and revenge-I remembered that much from the visit to the mosque when I'd sat beside Khaderbhai and Khaled to hear the Blind Singers. I remembered reading Didier's letter and deciding, in that shifting, yellow lamplight, that I would kill Madame Zhou. I remembered thinking that and then turning my head to see the love in Khader's golden eyes. Could that love and that anger have smothered something so important, something so obvious, as Ghani's treachery? And if I'd missed that, what else had I missed? "Khader wasn't supposed to make it out of Pakistan," Salman added. "Khaderbhai, Nazeer, Khaled-even you. Abdul Ghani thought it was his chance to take out the whole council in one shot-all the guys on the council who weren't with him. But Khaderbhai had his own friends in Pakistan, and they warned him, and you made it out of the trap. I think Abdul must've known he was finished from that day on. But he held his peace, and he didn't make any moves here. He was hoping, I guess, that Khader, and the whole lot of you, might be killed in the war-"

Nazeer interrupted him, impatient with the English that he despised. I thought I understood what he'd said, and I translated his words, looking to Sanjay for confirmation that my guess was correct.

"Khader told Nazeer to keep the truth about Abdul Ghani a secret.

He said that if anything happened to him in the war, Nazeer was to return to Bombay and avenge him. Was that it?"

"Yeah," Sanjay wagged his head. "You got it. And after we did that, we had to fix the rest of the guys who were on Ghani's side. There's none of them left now. They're all dead, or they got the fuck out of Bombay."

"Which brings us to the point," Salman smiled. It was a rare smile, but a good one: a tired man's smile; an unhappy man's smile; a tough man's smile. His long face was a little lopsided with one eye lower than the other by the thickness of a finger, a break in his nose that had settled crookedly, and a mouth that hitched in one corner where a fist had split the lip and a suture had pulled the skin too tightly. His short hair formed a perfectly round hairline on his brow like a dark halo that pressed down hard on his slightly jugged ears. "We want you to run the passports for a while. Krishna and Villu are very insistent. They're a little..."

"They're freaked out of their fuckin' brains," Sanjay cut in.

"They're scared stupid because guys were getting chopped all over Bombay-starting with Ghani while they were right there in the fuckin' cellar. Now the war's over, and we won, but they're still scared. We can't afford to lose them, Lin. We want you to work with them, and settle them down, like. They're asking about you all the time, and they want you to work with them. They like you, man."

I looked at each of them in turn, and settled my eyes on Nazeer.

If my understanding was correct, it was a tempting offer. The victorious Khader faction had reformed the local mafia council under old Sobhan Mahmoud. Nazeer had become a full member of the council, as had Mahmoud Melbaaf. The others included Sanjay and Salman, Farid, and three other Bombay-born dons. All of the last six spoke Marathi every bit as well as they spoke Hindi or English. That gave me a unique and very significant point of contact with them because I was the only gora any of them knew who could speak Marathi. I was the only gora any of them knew who'd been leg ironed at Arthur Road Prison. And I was one of the very few men, brown or white, who'd survived Khader's war. They liked me. They trusted me. They saw me as a valuable asset. The gangster war was over. In the new Pax Mafia that ruled their part of the city, fortunes could be made. And I needed the money. I'd been living on my savings, and I was almost broke.

"What exactly did you have in mind?" I asked Nazeer, knowing that Sanjay would reply.

"You run the books, the stamps, all the passport stuff, and the licences, permits, and credit cards," he answered quickly. "You get complete control. Just the way it was with Ghani. No fuckin' problem. Whatever you need, you get it. You take a piece of that action-I'm thinkin' about 5 per cent, but we can talk about that if you don't think it's enough, yaar."

"And you can visit the council whenever you want," Salman added.

"Sort of an observer status, if you get my meaning. What do you say?"

"You'd have to move the operation from Ghani's basement," I said quietly. "I'd never feel happy about working there, and I'm not surprised the place has got Villu and Krishna spooked."

"No problem," Sanjay laughed, slapping the table. "We're going to sell the place anyway. You know, Lin-brother, that fat fuck Ghani put the two big houses-his own one and the place next door-in his brother-in-law's name. Nothin' wrong with that-fuck, man, we all do that. But they're worth fuckin' crores, Lin. They're fuckin' mansions, baba. And then, after we sliced and diced the fat fuck, his brother-in-law decides he doesn't want to sign the places over to us. Then he gets tough, and starts talking lawyers and police. So we had to tie him up over a big dubba of acid, yaar. Then he's not tough any more. Then he can't wait to sign the places over to us. We sent Farid to do the job. He took care of it. But he got so fucked up, yaar, with the disrespect Ghani's brother-in-law showed us, and he was real angry with the madachudh for making him set up the acid barrel and all. He likes to keep things simple, our brother Farid. The whole hanging-the cunt-up-over-the-acid thing, it was all a bit-what did you call it, Salman? What was the word?"

"Tawdry," Salman suggested.

"Yeah. Taw-fuckin-dry, the whole thing. Farid, he likes to get respect, or cut to the chase and gun the motherfucker down, like.

So, angry as he is, he takes the brother-in-law's own house as well-makes him sign over his own house, just for being such a big madachudh about Ghani's houses. So now he's got nothing, that guy, and we got three houses on the market instead of one."

"It's a vicious and bloodthirsty racket, that property business,"

Salman concluded with a wry smile. "I'm moving us into it as soon as I can. We're taking over one of the big agencies. I've got Farid working on it. Okay, Lin, if you don't want to work at Ghani's place, where would you like us to set it up for you?"

"I like Tardeo," I suggested. "Somewhere near Haji Ali."

"Why Tardeo?" Sanjay asked.