In the months that I’d been away, Ghani had followed my suggestion to push the focus of the operation laterally into the production of permits, certificates, diplomas, licences, letters of credit, security passes, and other documents. It was a booming trade in the booming economy of Bombay, and we often worked through the dawn to satisfy the demand. And the business was generational: as licensing authorities and other bodies modified their documents in response to our forgeries, we dutifully copied and then counterfeited them again, at additional cost.
‘It’s a kind of Red Queen contest,’ I said to Salman Mustaan when the new passport factory had been running for six diligent months.
‘
‘Yeah. It’s a biology thing. It’s about hosts, like human bodies, and parasites, like viruses and such. I studied it when I was running my clinic in the zhopadpatti. The hosts-our bodies-and the viruses-any bug that makes us sick-are locked in a competition with each other. When the parasite attacks, the host develops a defence. Then the virus changes to beat that defence, so the host gets a new defence. And that keeps on going. They call it a Red Queen contest. It’s from the story, you know, Alice in Wonderland.’
‘I know it,’ Salman answered. ‘We did it at school. But I never understood it.’
‘That’s okay-nobody does. Anyway, the little girl, Alice, she meets this Red Queen, who runs incredibly fast but never seems to get anywhere. She tells Alice that, in her country, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. And that’s like us with the passport authorities, and the licensing boards, and the banks all over the world. They keep changing the passports and other documents to make it harder for us. And we keep finding new ways to fake them. And they keep changing the way they make them, and we keep finding new ways to fake them and forge them and adapt them for ourselves. It’s a Red Queen contest, and we all have to run real fast just to stand still.’
‘I think you’re doing better than standing still,’ he asserted. His tone was quiet but adamant. ‘You’ve done a damn fine job, Lin. The ID stuff is deadly-it’s a real big market. They can’t get enough. And it’s good work. So far, all our guys who’ve used your books have gone through without any problems,
I didn’t look at him. We were walking quickly, side by side, along Mahatma Gandhi Road toward the Regal Circle roundabout on a hot, cloudless afternoon. Where the footpath was clogged with shoppers halting at the tabletop street stalls, we walked on the road with a slow, unceasing stream of traffic behind and beside us. I didn’t look at Salman because I’d come to know him well enough during those six months to be sure he was embarrassed by the praise he’d felt moved to lavish on me. Salman was a natural leader but, like many men who have the gift of command and the instinct to rule, he was deeply troubled by every expression of the leadership art. He was, at heart, a humble man, and that humility made him an honourable man.
Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and mafiosi as men of honour. The confusion, I think, was hers, not mine. She’d confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way-the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason-and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.
‘You know,’ he remarked, as we moved to the wider footpath opposite the cloisters of the university buildings, ‘I’m glad it didn’t work out with your friends-the ones you wanted to help you with the passports, right at the start.’
I frowned, and remained silent, keeping pace with his rapid step. Johnny Cigar and Kishore had refused to join me in the passport factory, and it had shocked and disappointed me. I’d assumed that they would jump at the chance to make money-to make more money with me than either of them had ever dreamed of making alone. I’d never anticipated the saddened and offended expressions that closed their smiles when they understood, at last, that I was offering them nothing more than the golden opportunity to commit crimes with me. It had never occurred to me that they wouldn’t want to do it. It had never occurred to me that they would refuse to work with criminals, and for criminals.
