"Relax, man," Amir put in.

"What relax? Fuck Khader, and fuck his gora, too!"

"You should watch your mouth," I muttered through clenched teeth.

"I should?" he asked, thrusting his face forward pugnaciously.

"Well, fuck your sister! How's my mouth now? You like that?"

"I don't have a sister," I said evenly in Hindi. A few men laughed.

"Well, maybe I'll go fuck your mother," he snarled, "and make you a new sister!"

"That's good enough," I growled, shaping up to fight him. "Get 'em up! Get your fuckin' hands up! Let's go!"

It would've been messy. I wasn't a good fighter, but I knew the moves. I could hit hard. And if I got into real trouble in those years, I wasn't afraid to put the wet end of a knife into another man's body. Andrew was capa- ble. With a gun in his hand, he was deadly. As Amir moved around to support him, directly behind his right shoulder, Abdullah took up a similar position beside me. A fight would become a brawl. We all knew it. But the young Goan didn't raise his hands, and as one second became five, and ten, and fifteen, it seemed that he wasn't as willing with his fists as he was with his mouth.

Nazeer broke the stand-off. Pushing between us, he seized Andrew by the wrist and a scruff of shirtsleeve. I knew that grip well.

I knew that Andrew had to kill the burly Afghan if he wanted to break it. Nazeer paused only long enough to give me a bewilderingly cryptic look, part censure and part pride, part anger and part red-eyed affection, before he shoved the young Goan backwards through the circle of men. At the car, he pushed Andrew into the driver's seat and then climbed into the back with Tariq. Andrew started the car and sped away, spitting gravel and dust as he wheeled around and headed back toward Marine Drive. As the car swept past me I saw Tariq's face at the window. It was pale, with only the eyes, like wild paw prints in snow, betraying any hint of the mind or the mood within.

"_Mai _jata _hu," I repeated when the car had passed. I'm going.

Everyone laughed. I wasn't sure if it was at the vehemence of my tone or the blunt simplicity of the Hindi phrase.

"I think we got that, Lin," Salman said. "I think that's very clear, na? Okay, I'll put you with Abdullah, out the back.

There's a lane behind Chuha's house-Abdullah, you know it. It has two feeds from other lanes, one into the main street, and one around the corner to other houses in the block. At the back of Chuha's house there's a yard. I've seen it. There are two windows, both with heavy bars, and only one door to the house.

It's down two steps. You two hold that place. Nobody goes in when we start. If we do right, some of them will try to make a run for it out there. Don't let them get past you. Stop them right there, in the yard. The rest of us will go in through the front. What about the guns, Faisal?"

"Seven," he answered. "Two short shotgun, two automatic, three revolver."

"Give me one of the automatics," Salman ordered. "Abdullah, you take the other one. You'll have to share it, Lin. The shotguns are no good inside-it's gonna get very close in there, and we want to be real sure what we're shooting at. I want them on the street outside, for maximum coverage if we need it. Faisal, you take the shotguns, and give one to Hussein. When we're finished, we'll go out the back way, past Abdullah and Lin. We won't go out the front, so put holes in anything that tries to go in or out once we're in there. The three other guns are for Farid, Amir, and Mahmoud. Raj, you'll have to share with us. Okay?"

The men nodded, and wagged their heads in agreement.

"Listen, if we wait, we can get thirty more men and thirty guns to go in with us. You know that. But we might miss them. As it is, we've already talked for ten minutes too long. If we hit them now, quick and hard, before they know it, we can take them out, and none of them will get away. I want to finish them, and finish this business, right now, tonight. But I want to leave it up to you. I don't want to make you go in if you don't feel ready. Do you want to wait for more men, or go now?"

One by one the men spoke, quickly, most of them using the one word, Abi, meaning now. Salman nodded, then closed his eyes and muttered a prayer in Arabic. When he looked up again, he was committed, fully committed for the first time. His eyes were blazing with hatred and the fearsome killing rage he'd kept at bay.

"_Saatch... _aur _himmat," he said, looking each man in the eye.

_Truth... _and _courage.

"Saatch aur himmat," they replied.

Without another word, the men claimed their guns, climbed into the two cars, and drove the few short minutes to Chuha's home on fashionable Sardar Patel Road. Before I could order my thoughts and even consider, clearly, what I was doing, I found myself creeping along a narrow lane with Abdullah in a darkness deep enough for me to feel the widening of my straining eyes. Then we climbed over a sheer wooden fence and dropped down into the backyard of the enemy's house.

We stood together in the dark for a few moments, checking the luminous dials on our watches, and listening hard as we let our eyes adjust. Abdullah whispered beside me, and I almost jumped at the sound.

"Nothing," he breathed, his voice like the rustle of a woollen blanket. "There's no-one here, no-one near."

"Looks okay," I answered, aware that my whispering voice was raspy with hard-breathing fear. There were no lights at the windows or behind the blue door at the rear of the house.

"Well, I kept my promise," Abdullah whispered mysteriously. "What?"

"You made me promise to take you with me, when I kill Chuha.

Remember?"

"Yeah," I answered, my heart beating faster than a healthy heart should. "You gotta be careful, I guess."

"I will be careful, Lin brother."

"No-I mean, you gotta be careful what you wish for in life, na?"

"I will try to open that door," Abdullah breathed, close to my ear. "If it will open, I will go inside."

"What?"

"You wait here, and stay near the door."

"What?"

"You wait here, and-"

"We're both supposed to stay here!" I hissed.

"I know," he replied, creeping with leopard stealth toward the door.

In my clumsier way, looking more like a cat waking stiffly from a long sleep, I crept after him. As I reached the two wide steps leading down to the blue door, I saw him open it and slip inside the house like a shadow thrown by a swooping bird. He pushed the door shut soundlessly behind him.

Alone, in the dark, I took my knife from the sheath in the small of my back, and enclosed the hilt in my right fist, dagger-point down. Staring out into the darkness, I put all of my focus on the beating of my heart, trying by force of will to slow its too rapid pace. It worked, after a time. I felt the count reducing, calming me further in turn as the meditative loop closed around a single, still thought. That thought was of Khaderbhai, and the formula he'd made me repeat so often: The wrong thing, for the right reasons. And I knew, as I repeated the words in the fearing dark, that the fight with Chuha, the war, the struggle for power, was always the same, everywhere, and it was always wrong.

Salman and the others, no less than Chuha and the Sapna killers and all the rest of them, were pretending that their little kingdoms made them kings; that their power struggles made them powerful. And they didn't. They couldn't. I saw that then so clearly that it was like understanding a mathematical theorem for the first time. The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world. And only men like Qasim Ali Hussein and Johnny Cigar were such kings and had such power.

Unnerved and afraid, I pressed my ear to the door and strained to hear anything of Abdullah or the others within. The fear that twisted in me wasn't the fear of death. I wasn't afraid to die. I was afraid of being so injured or wounded that I couldn't walk, or couldn't see or, for some other reason, couldn't run from capture. Above all things I was afraid of that-of being captured and caged again. As I pressed my ear to the door, I prayed that no wound would weaken me. Let it happen here, I prayed. Let me get through this, or let me die here...