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.
"Seedha jao!" she told the driver. _Go straight ahead! "I have a problem, Lin. I need some help."
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?"
I heard a warning, deep within-we usually do, when something worse than we can imagine is stalking us, and set to pounce.
Fate's way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed. Of course I would help her. Ulla was Karla's friend, and I was in love with Karla. I would help her, for Karla's sake, even if I didn't like her. And I did like Ulla: she was beautiful, and she was just naive enough, just sanguine enough to stop sympathy slipping into pity. I smiled again, and asked the driver to stop.
"Sure. Don't worry. I'll be there."
She leaned across and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I got out of the cab. She put her hands on the window's edge, and leaned out.
Misty rain settled on her long eyelashes, forcing her to blink.
"You'll be there? Promise?"
"One a.m.," I said firmly. "Leopold's. I'll be there."
"You promise?"
"Yeah," I laughed. "I promise."
The taxi pulled away, and she called out with a plaintive urgency that seemed harsh and almost hysterical in the stillness of the night.
"Don't let me down, Lin!"
I walked back toward the tourist beat, aimlessly, thinking about Ulla and the business, whatever it was, that her boyfriend, Modena, was involved in with Maurizio. Didier had told me they were successful, they were making money, but Ulla seemed afraid and unhappy. And there was something else that Didier had said- something about danger. I tried to remember the words he'd used.
What were they? Terrible risk... great violence...
My mind was still shuffling through those thoughts when I realised that I was in Karla's street. I passed her ground-floor apartment. The wide French doors, leading directly from the street, were open. A desultory breeze riffled the gauze curtains, and I saw a soft yellow light, a candle, glowing within.
The rain grew heavier, but a restlessness I couldn't fight or understand kept me walking. Vinod's love song, the song that rang bells in the dome of the Gateway Monument, was running on a loop in my mind. My thoughts floated back to the boat sailing on the surreal lake that the monsoon had made of the street. The look in Karla's eyes-commanding, demanding-drove the restlessness to a kind of fury in my heart. I had to stop, sometimes, in the rain, to draw deep breaths. I was choking with love and desire. There was anger in me, and pain. My fists were clenched. The muscles of my arms and chest and back were tight and taut. I thought of the Italian couple, the junkies in Anand's hotel, and I thought of death and dying. The black and brooding sky finally ruptured and cracked.
Lightning ripped into the Arabian Sea, and thunder followed with deafening applause.
I began to run. The trees were dark, their leaves wet through.
They looked like small black clouds themselves, those trees, each one shedding its shower of rain. The streets were empty. I ran through puddles of fast-flowing water, reflecting the lightning fractured sky. All the loneliness and all the love I knew collected and combined in me, until my heart was as swollen with love for her as the clouds above were swollen with their mass of rain. And I ran. I ran. And, somehow, I was back in that street, back at the doorway to her house. And then I stood there, clawed by lightning, my chest heaving with a passion that was still running in me while my body stood still.
