‘Yes. It has a long tail and sharp ears, and a chain of little skulls around the neck. I make it that I am a demon, an evil spirit. And Ramesh, he makes that he is a holy sadhu, looking like a holy man, and he beats me away from the house. And I come back, and I make it that I am trying to steal the baby. And the women scream when I come near the baby. And Ramesh, he beats me away again. Again I come back, and again he beats me until, at the very last, he beats me so badly that I make like I am dying, and I run away. The people pay us good money for the show.’
‘I never heard of it before.’
‘No. It is our own idea, Ramesh and me. But after the first rich family paid us, all the others wanted to be sure to beat the evil spirit away from their new baby son. And they pay us good money, all of them. I have an apartment. I don’t own it, of course, but I have paid more than a year of rent in advance already. It is small, but it is comfortable. It will be a good place for Ulla and me to live together. You can see the waves of the sea from the main window. My Ulla, she loves the sea. She always wanted a house near to the sea…’
I stared at him, fascinated no less by the fact of his speech than its meaning. Modena had been one of the most taciturn men I’d ever known. When we’d both been regulars at Leopold’s he’d gone for weeks at a time, and sometimes as long as a month, without uttering a word in my presence. But the new Modena, the scarred survivor, was a talker. I’d been forced to run him down in a blind alley to get him to talk at all, it was true; but once he started, he became disconcertingly chatty. As I listened to him, as I reoriented myself to the disfigured, voluble version of the man, I became aware of the melodies that his Spanish accent made as it moved fluently between Hindi and English, mixing the two seamlessly, and incorporating words from each into a hybrid language that was his own. Adrift on the softness in his voice, I asked myself if that was the key to the mysterious bond that had existed between them, Ulla and Modena: if they’d talked to one another, for hours, when they were alone, and if that tender euphony, that voice music, had held them together.
And then, with a suddenness that caught me off-guard, the meeting with Modena was over. He stood to pay the bill and walked out into the lane, waiting for me just beyond the doorway.
‘I must go,’ he said, looking nervously to his left and right before raising his wounded eyes to mine. ‘Ramesh is there by now, outside the President Hotel. When she comes back, Ulla will be there, she will stay there. She loves that hotel. It is her favourite. She loves the Back Bay area. And there was a plane this morning from Germany. A Lufthansa plane. She might be there.’
‘You check… after every flight?’
‘Yes. I do not go in,’ he murmured, lifting his hand as if to touch his face, but running it through his short, greying hair instead. ‘Ramesh goes in the hotel for me. He checks her name-Ulla Volkenberg-to see if she is there. One day she will be there. She will be there.’
He began to walk away from me, but I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
‘Listen, Modena, don’t run away from me next time, okay? If you need anything, if there’s anything I can do, just ask me. Is it a deal?’
‘I will not run away again,’ he said solemnly. ‘It is just my habit to run. And it was just my habit that was running away from you. It was not me running, just my habit. I am not afraid of you. You are my friend.’
He turned to leave, but I stopped him again, drawing him closer to me so that I could whisper into his ear.
‘Modena, don’t tell anyone else that you keep so much money on you. Promise me.’
‘Nobody else knows that, Lin,’ he assured me, smiling that deep-eyed grimace at me. ‘Only you. I would not say that to anyone. Not even Ramesh knows that I have money with me. He does not know that I save my money. He does not even know about my apartment. He thinks that I spend my share of the money that we earn together on drugs. And I do not take any drugs, Lin. You know that. I never did any drugs. I just let him think that I do. But you are different, Lin. You are my friend. I can tell you the truth. I can trust you. Why should I not trust the man who killed the devil himself?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m talking about Maurizio, the enemy of my blood.’
‘I didn’t kill Maurizio,’ I said, frowning down into the red-walled caves of his eyes.
His perfect mouth widened into an accomplice’s leer. The expression dragged harder on the Y-shaped scars that once were the lower lids of his eyes. The gape of those eyes was so unnerving in the flame-lit lane that I had to steel myself not to flinch or draw back when he reached out to put his palm on my chest.
