‘Ulla was one of the most popular girls Madame Zhou ever had. Then she left the Palace. Maurizio had a contact at the German Consulate. He wanted to oil the wheels on some deal that he was working on with the German, and he discovered that the German was crazy about Ulla. With some heavy persuasion from the consulate officer, and all his own savings, Maurizio managed to buy Ulla free from the Palace. Maurizio got Ulla to twist the consulate guy until he did… whatever it was Maurizio wanted him to do. Then he dumped him. The guy lost it, I heard. He put a bullet in his head. By then, Maurizio had put Ulla to work, to pay the debt she owed him.’
‘You know, I’ve been working up a healthy dislike for Maurizio.’
‘It was a shitty deal, true enough. But at least she was free from Madame Zhou and the Palace. I have to give Maurizio his due there-he proved it could be done. Before that, nobody ever got away-not without getting acid thrown in her face. When Ulla broke away from Madame Zhou, Christina wanted to break out as well. Madame Zhou was forced to let Ulla go, but she was damned if she was going to part with Christina as well. Ahmed was crazy in love with her, and he went to the Palace, late one night, to have it out with Madame Zhou. I was supposed to go with him. I did business with Madame Zhou-I brought businessmen there for my boss, and they spent a lot of money-you know that. I thought she’d listen to me. But then I got called away. I had a job… a job… it was… an important contact… I couldn’t refuse. Ahmed went to the Palace alone. They found his body, and Christina’s, the next day, in a car, a few blocks from the Palace. The cops… said that they both took poison, like Romeo and Juliet.’
‘You think she did it to them, Madame Zhou, and you blame yourself, is that it?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Is that what she was talking about, that day, through the metal grille, when we got Lisa Carter out of there? Is that why you were crying?’
‘If you must know,’ she said softly, her voice emptied of all its music and emotion, ‘she was telling me what she did to them, before she had them killed. She was telling me how she played with them, before they died.’
I clamped my jaw shut, listening to the ruffle of air breathing in and out through my nose, until our two patterns of breath matched one another in rhythmic rise and fall.
‘And what about you?’ she asked, at last, her eyes closing more slowly and opening less often. ‘We’ve got my story. When are you going to tell me your story?’
I let the raining silence close her eyes for the last time. She slept. I knew we didn’t have her story. Not the whole of it. I knew the small daubs of colour she’d excluded from her summary were at least as important as the broad strokes she’d included. The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story. But she
Somewhere out there in the night, Jeetendra wept for his wife. Prabaker mopped at Parvati’s sweating face with his red scarf. Heaped up on the blankets, our bodies bound by weariness and her deep slumber, surrounded by sickness and hope, death and defiance, I touched the soft surrendered curl of Karla’s sleeping fingers to my lips, and I pledged my heart to her forever.
WE LOST NINE PEOPLE in the cholera epidemic. Six of them were young children. Jeetendra’s only son, Satish, survived, but two of the boy’s closest friends died. Both of them had been enthusiastic students in my English class. The procession of children that ran with us behind the biers carrying those little bodies, garlanded with flowers, wailed their grief so piteously that many strangers on the busy streets paused in prayer, and felt the sudden burn and sting of tears. Parvati survived the sickness, and Prabaker nursed her for two weeks, sleeping outside her hut under a flap of plastic during the night. Sita took her sister Parvati’s place at their father’s chai shop; and, whenever Johnny Cigar entered or passed the shop, her eyes followed him as slowly and stealthily as a walking leopard’s shadow.
