On the bed there was a young man sprawled with one leg over the foot of the bed. He was naked to the waist, and his trousers were open at the front. One boot was discarded and the other was still on his left foot. He was about twenty-eight years old. He was dead.
No pulse. No heartbeat. No breathing. The overdose had thrown his body down the long black well, and his face was as blue as the sky at 5 p.m. on the darkest day of winter. I hauled his body up onto the bed, and put a roll of sheet behind his neck.
‘Bad business, Lin,’ Anand said tersely. He stood with his back to the closed door, preventing anyone from entering.
Ignoring him, I began cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on the young man. I knew the drill too well. I’d pulled junkies out of overdoses, dozens of them, when I was a junkie myself. I’d done it fifty, eighty times in my own country, pressing and breathing life into the living dead. I pressed at the young man’s heart, willing it to beat, and breathed his lungs to their capacity for him. After ten minutes of the procedure he stuttered, deep in his chest, and coughed. I rested on my knees, watching to see if he was strong enough to breathe on his own. The breathing was slow, and then slower, and then it stopped in a hollow sigh. The sound was as flat and insentient as the air escaping from a fissure in layers of geyser stone. I began the CPR again. It was exhausting work, dragging his limp body back up the whole length of the well with my arms and my lungs.
The girl went under twice while I worked on her boyfriend. Anand slapped at her, and shook her awake. Three hours after I stepped into the hotel, Anand and I left the room. We were both soaked through with sweat, our shirts as wet as if we’d been standing in the rain that drummed and rattled beyond the windows. The couple was awake and sullen and angry with us, despite the girl’s earlier plea for help, because we’d disturbed the pleasure of their stone. I closed the door on them, knowing that some time soon, someone else in that city, or some other, would close a door on them forever. Every time junkies go down the well they sink a little deeper, and it’s just that little bit harder to drag them out again.
Anand owed me one. I showered and shaved, and accepted the gift of a freshly washed and ironed shirt. We sat in the foyer then, and shared a chai. Some men like you less the more they owe you. Some men only really begin to like you when they find themselves in your debt. Anand was comfortable with his obligation, and his handshake was the kind that good friends sometimes use in place of a whole conversation.
When I stepped down to the street, a taxi pulled in to the kerb beside me. Ulla was in the back seat.
‘Lin! Please, can you get in for some time?’
Worry, and what might’ve been dread, pushed her voice almost to a whine. Her lovely, pale face was trapped in a fearful frown.
I climbed in beside her, and the taxi pulled out slowly from the kerb. The cab smelled of her perfume and the beedie cigarettes that she constantly smoked.
‘
It was my night to be the white knight. I looked into her large blue eyes, and resisted the impulse to make a joke or a flirtatious remark. She was afraid. Whatever had scared her still possessed her eyes. She was looking at me, but she was still staring at the fear.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, breaking down suddenly, and then pulling herself together just as swiftly. ‘I didn’t even say any hello to you. How are you? I haven’t seen you for a long time. Are you going good? You look very good.’
Her lilting German accent gave a fluttering music to her speech that pleased my ear. I smiled at her as the coloured lights streamed across her eyes.
‘I’m fine. What’s the problem?’
‘I need someone to go with me, to be with me, at one o’clock after midnight. At Leopold’s. I’ll be there and… and I need you to be there with me. Can you do it? Can you be there?’
‘Leopold’s is shut at midnight.’
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice breaking again on the edge of tears. ‘But I’ll be there, in a taxi, parked outside. I’m meeting someone, and I don’t want to be alone. Can you be there with me?’
‘Why me? What about Modena, or Maurizio?’
‘I trust you, Lin. It won’t take long-the meeting. And I’ll pay you. I’m not asking you to help me for nothing. I’ll pay you five hundred dollars, if you’ll just be there with me. Will you do it?’
