I nodded, listening to him, and thinking about something Abdul Ghani had said to me once: All the secret police of the world work together, Lin, and that is their biggest secret.

"So, the Pakistan ISI told the Iranian secret police about their contact on the Khader council."

"Abdul Ghani. Yes," he replied. "In Iran they were very worried.

Six good traitors gone. Nobody ever can find the bodies of those traitors. Only three were left. The three men from Iran, so then they work with Abdul Ghani. He told them how to make a trap for me. At that time, do you remember, we did not know it, that Sapna, he was working for Ghani and planning to move against us.

Khader did not know. I did not know. If I knew that, I would put the pieces of those Sapna men into Hassaan Obikwa's hole in the ground myself. But I did not know. When I came into the trap, near to Crawford Market, the men from Iran fire the first time from a place near me. The police, they think that I am firing my gun. They fire at me. I am dying, I know, so I take my guns and I shoot at the police. The rest, you know."

"Not all of it," I grunted. "Not enough. I was there that night, the night you got shot. I was in the crowd at Crawford Market police station. It was wild. Everyone said you were shot so many times that your face was unrecognisable."

"There was so much blood. But Khader's men, they did know me.

They make a riot and then they fight step and step into the police station, and they take my body out of there and away to the hospital. Khader had a truck near there, and he had a doctor - you know him, Doctor Hamid, do you remember him?-and they saved me."

"Khaled was there that night. Was he the one who rescued you?"

"No. Khaled was one of the men who make the riot. It was Farid who took my body." "Farid the Fixer got you out of there?" I gasped, stunned that he'd said nothing about it in all the close months we'd worked together. "And he's known about it all this time?"

"Yes. If you have a secret, Lin, put it in the heart of Farid. He is the best of them, my brother, now that Abdel Khader is gone.

After Nazeer, Farid is the best of them. Never forget that."

"What about the three guys? The three Iranian guys? What happened to them after you got shot? Did Khader get them?"

"No. When Abdel Khader killed Sapna and his men, they ran away to Delhi."

"One of the Sapna guys got away. You know that?"

"Yes, he went to Delhi also. When I was strong again-not completely fix up yet, but strong enough to fight-just two months ago, I went to look for the four men and their friends. I found one of them. One from Iran. I finish him. Now there are only three left from that time-two spies from Iran, and one Sapna killer from Ghani."

"Do you know where they are?"

"Here. In the city."

"You're sure?"

"I am sure. That is why I have come back to Bombay. But now, Lin brother, we must return to the hotel. Salman and the others, they are waiting for us, upstairs. They want to make a party. They will be happy I can find you-they did see you leaving, hours before, with a beautiful girl, and they told me I will not find you."

"It was Lisa," I said, glancing unconsciously over my shoulder at the bedroom window on the first floor of the Taj. "Do you... want to see her?"

"No," he smiled. "I did meet someone-Farid's cousin, Ameena. She has been looking after me for more than a year. She is a good girl. We want to be married."

"Get the fuck outta here!" I spluttered, more shocked by his intention to marry than I was by his survival of the killing fusillade.

"Yes," he grinned, reaching out to give me an impulsive hug. "But come on, the others are waiting. Challo."

"You go ahead," I answered him, smiling to match his happy grin.

"I'll be with you soon."

"No, come, Lin," he urged. "Come now."

"I need a minute," I insisted. "I'll be there... in a minute."

He hesitated a moment more but then smiled, nodded his head, and walked back through the domed arch toward the Taj Hotel.

Evening dimmed the afternoon's bright halo. A haze of dusty smoke and vapour misted the horizon, sizzling soundlessly, as if the sky at the distant wall of the world was dissolving into the waters of the bay. Most of the boats and ferries were safely tied to their mooring posts at the dock beneath me. Others rose and fell and rose again, swaying on the secure tethers of their sea anchors. High tide pushed the swollen waves against the long stone wall where I stood. Here and there along the boulevard, frothy plumes, like gasps of effort, slapped up, over, and onto the white footpaths. Strollers walked around the intermittent fountains, or ran laughing through the sudden boom and spray. In the little seas of my eyes, those tiny blue-grey oceans, waves of tears pushed hard against the wall of my will.

Did you send him? I whispered to the dead Khan, my father.

Assassin grief had pushed me to that wall where the street boys sold heroin. And then, when it was almost too late, Abdullah had appeared. Did you send him to save me?

The setting sun, that funeral fire in the sky, seared my eyes, and I looked away to follow the last flares of cerise and magenta streaming out and fading in the ocean-mirrored sapphire of the evening. And staring out across the rile and ruffle of the bay, I tried to fit my feelings within a frame of thought and fact.

Strangely, weirdly, I'd re-found Abdullah and re-lost Khaderbhai on the same day, in the same hour. And the experience of it, the fact of it, the inescapably fated imperative of it, helped me to understand. The sorrowing I'd shunned had taken so long to find me because I couldn't let him go. In my heart, I still held him as tightly as I'd hugged Abdullah only minutes before. In my heart, I was still there on the mountain, kneeling in the snow and cradling the handsome head in my arms.

As the stars slowly reappeared in the silent endlessness of sky, I cut the last mooring rope of grief, and surrendered to the all sustaining tide of destiny. I let him go. I said the words, the sacred words: I forgive you...

And it was good. And it was right. I let the tears fall. I let my heart break on my father's love, like the tall waves beside me that hurled their chests against the wall, and bled onto the wide, white path.

CHAPTER FORTY

The word mafia comes from the Sicilian word for bragging. And if you ask any serious man who commits serious crimes for a living, he'll tell you it's just that-the boasting, the pride-that gets most of us in the end. But we never learn. Maybe it's not possible to break laws without boasting about it to someone.

Maybe it's not possible to be an outlaw without being proud in some way. Certainly, in those last months of the old mafia, the brotherhood that Khaderbhai had designed, steered, and ruled, there was plenty of boasting and no less pride. But it was the last time that any of us in that corner of Bombay's underworlds of crime could've said, with complete honesty, that we were proud to be gangsters.

Khader Khan had been dead for almost two years, but his precepts and principles still dominated the day-to-day operations of the mafia council he'd founded. Khader had hated heroin, and he'd refused to deal in the drug or permit anyone else but desperately addicted street junkies to trade in it within the areas he'd controlled. Prostitution had also appalled him. He'd seen it as a business that injured women, degraded men, and blighted the community where it occurred. The hemisphere of his influence had extended to all the streets, parks, and buildings across several square kilometres. Within that little kingdom, any man or woman who hadn't kept their involvement with prostitution and pornography to very low, very discreet, levels of activity had risked his condign punishment. And that situation prevailed under the new council headed by Salman Mustaan.