We got up to pay the bill and leave. Didier stopped me when the others walked to the cashier's desk. He pulled me down into a chair beside him. Sliding a napkin from the table, he fumbled under the table's edge for a moment and then slid a bundle across to me. It was a pistol, wrapped in the napkin. No-one knew that Didier carried a gun. I was sure that I was the first to see and handle the weapon. Grasping it tightly in the napkin wrapping, I stood and joined the others as they left the restaurant. I looked back over my shoulder to see him nodding gravely, the curly black hair trembling about his face.
We found them, but it took us all the day and most of the night.
In the end it was Hassaan Obikwa, another Nigerian, who gave us the decisive clue. The men were tourists, completely new to the city, and unknown to Obikwa. He had no precise idea of their motive-it was something to do with a drug deal-but his network of contacts had confirmed that they were determined to do me harm.
Hassaan's driver, Raheem, almost fully recovered from the injuries he'd suffered in prison, discovered that they were in one of the Fort area hotels. He offered to _resolve the matter.
He was conscious of the debt he owed me for buying him out of Arthur Road Prison. With an earnest, almost shy expression, he offered to have the men killed, slowly and painfully, as a personal favor to me. He seemed to think that it was the least he could do, under the circumstances. I refused. I had to know what it was all about, and I had to put a stop to it. Clearly disappointed, Raheem accepted the decision, and then led us to the small hotel in the Fort. He waited outside with our two cars while we went inside. Salman and Sanjay remained with him, watching the street. Their brief was to stop the cops, if they arrived, or slow them up long enough for us to leave the hotel.
One of Abdullah's contacts smuggled us, whispering, into a room adjoining that taken by the three Africans. We pressed our ears to the connecting wall, and could hear their voices clearly. They were joking, and talking about trivial, unrelated things.
Finally, one of them made a remark that tightened the skin on my skull and face with dread.
"He got that medal," one of them said. "Around his neck. That medal is gold. I want that gold medal."
"I like them shoes, them boots he got," another voice said. "I want them shoes."
They went on to talk about their plan. They argued a little. One of the men was more forceful. The others agreed, at last, with his idea to follow me from Leopold's all the way to the quiet car park beneath my apartment building and then beat me until I was dead, and strip my body.
It was bizarre, standing in the dark and listening to the details of my own murder. My stomach dropped and tightened on a curdling mix of nausea and rage. I hoped to hear some clue, some reference to a motive, but they never mentioned one. Abdullah was listening with his left ear against the thin partition, and I was listening with my right. Our eyes were only a hand's width apart. The signal to move, when I nodded my head, was a gesture so faint and subtle that it was as if our minds had spoken the message.
Vikram, Abdullah, and I stood outside the door to their room, with a passkey poised over the lock. We counted down _three...
_two... _one... then I turned the key and tried the door. It wasn't locked from the inside. I stood back, and kicked it open.
There was a second, three seconds, of utter stillness, as the surprised and frightened men stared at us, their jaws gaping and their eyes bulging. Nearest to us was a tall, very solid man with a bald head, and deep scars cut into his cheeks in a regular pattern. He wore a singlet and boxer shorts. Standing behind him was a slightly shorter man, who was dressed only in jockey shorts. He was bending over a waist-high dressing table, poised in the act of snorting a line of heroin. The third man was shorter still, but very thick in the chest and arms. He lay on one of the three beds, at the furthest corner of the room, holding a Playboy magazine in his hands. There was a strong smell in the room. It was the smell of sweat and fear. Some of it was mine.
Abdullah closed the door of the room behind him, very slowly and gently, and locked it. He was wearing black: he almost always wore a black shirt and pants. Vikram was dressed in his black cowboy rig. By some chance, I too wore a black T-shirt and black trousers. We must've looked like the members of some club, or gang, to the goggle-eyed men in the room.
"What the fuck-" the big man bellowed.
I ran at him and rammed a fist into his mouth, but he had time to raise his hands. We grabbed at each other, fists flying, and locked in a hard grapple.
Vikram sprang for the man on the bed. Abdullah closed on the man at the dresser. It was a short fight, and a dirty one. There were six of us-six big men in a small room. There was nowhere to go but into each other.
