People said she was Russian, but that detail, like all the others concerning her private life, seemed to be unverifiable. It was accepted, Karla said, simply because it was the most persistent rumour. One clear fact was that she'd arrived in New Delhi during the 1960s, a decade as wild for that city as it was for most western capitals. The new part of the city was celebrating its thirtieth year, then, and Old Delhi its three hundredth. Madame Zhou, most sources agreed, was twenty-nine. Legend had it that she'd been the mistress of a KGB officer who'd employed her unique beauty to suborn prominent Congress Party officials. The Congress Party governed India through those years with what seemed to be an unassailable lead in every national poll. Many of the party faithful-and even their enemies-believed that the Congress Party would continue to rule the Indian mother- land for a hundred years. Power over Congress men, therefore, was power over the nation.
The gossip about her years in Delhi prowled from scandals and suicides to political murder. Karla said that she'd heard so many different versions of the stories, from such a wide variety of people, she began to think that the truth, whatever it might've been, wasn't really important to them. Madame Zhou had become a kind of portmanteau figure: people packed the details of their own obsessions into her life. One said she possessed a fortune in precious gems that she kept in a hessian sack, another talked with authority about her addiction to various drugs, and a third whispered of satanic rites and cannibalism.
"People say a lot of really weird stuff about her, and I think some of it's just crap, but the bottom line is, she's dangerous,"
Karla said. "Devious, and dangerous."
"U-huh."
"I'm not kidding. Don't underestimate her. When she moved from Delhi to Bombay, six years ago, there was a murder trial, and she was at the centre of it. Two very important guys ended up dead in her Delhi Palace, both of them with their throats cut. One of them happened to be a police inspector. The trial fell apart when one witness against her disappeared, and another was found hanging from the doorway of his house. She left Delhi to set up shop in Bombay, and within the first six months there was another murder, only a block away from the Palace, and a lot of people connected her with it. But she's got so much stuff on so many people-stuff that goes all the way to the top. They can't touch her. She can do pretty much what she likes, because she knows she'll get away with it. If you want to get out of this, now's your chance."
We were in a Bumblebee, one of the ubiquitous black-and-yellow Fiat taxis, travelling south through the Steel Bazaar. Traffic was heavy. Hundreds of wooden handcarts, longer and taller and wider than a car when fully laden, trundled along between buses and trucks, pushed by barefoot porters, six men to each cart. The main streets of the Steel Bazaar were crammed with small and medium shops. They sold every kind of metal house-ware, from kerosene stoves to stainless steel sinks, and most of the cast iron and sheet-metal products required by builders, shop-fitters, and decorators. The shops themselves were adorned with gleaming metal wares, strung in such brilliantly polished plenty and such artful array that they often attracted the camera lenses of tourists. Behind the glossy, commercial ramble of the streets, however, were the hidden lanes, where men who were paid in cents, rather than dollars, worked at black and gritty furnaces to produce those shining lures.
The windows of the cab were open, but no breeze stirred through them. It was hot and still in the sluggish churn of traffic. We'd stopped at Karla's apartment on the way, where I'd swapped my T-shirt, jeans, and boots for a pair of dress shoes, conservatively cut black trousers, a starched white shirt, and a tie.
"The only thing I'd like to get out of, at the moment, are these clothes," I grumbled.
"What's wrong with them?" she asked, a mischievous gleam in her eye.
"They're itchy and horrible."
"They'll be fine."
"I hope we don't have an accident-I'd really hate to get killed in these clothes."
"Actually, they look pretty good on you."
"Oh, shit, make my day."
"Hey, come on!" she chided, curling her lip in an affable smirk.
Her accent, the accent I'd come to love and consider the most interesting in the world, gave every word a rounded resonance that thrilled me. The music of that accent was Italian, its shape was German, its humour and its attitude were American, and its colour was Indian. "Being so fussy about dressing down, the way you do, is a kind of vanity, you know. It's fairly conceited, too."
"I don't dress down. I just hate clothes."
"No you don't, you love clothes."
"What is this? I've got one pair of boots, one pair of jeans, one shirt, two T-shirts, and a couple of lungis. That's it-my whole wardrobe. If I'm not wearing it, it's hanging on a nail in my hut."
