Abdullah finished his man quickly. I heard a frightened shriek, choked off, as Abdullah snapped a hard, straight, right hand to the man's throat. From the corner of my eye, I was aware that the solid man fell back, grasping and clutching at his throat. The man on the bed jumped to his feet and kicked outward, trying to use the advantage of high ground. Abdullah and Vikram tipped the bed up, sending the man sprawling behind it. They leapt over the upturned bed and fell on him, stomping and kicking him until he stopped moving.
I held the strap of the big man's singlet with my left hand, and pounded at him with my right. Ignoring the blows to his head, he managed to get his hands around my neck, and started to squeeze.
My throat locked tight. I knew that the breath I held in me was the last until I finished him. I reached out for his face, desperately, with my right hand. My thumb found his eye. I wanted to push it into his brain, but he moved his head, and the thumb slipped between the eye and the hard ridge of bone at his temple.
I drove the thumb in harder and deeper until I gouged his eye from the socket, and it hung there from bloody strands. I tried to reach it, to rip it away or to dig my thumb into the empty socket, but he pulled back to the limit of his reach. The eye hung out on his cheek, and I swung my fist at his head, trying to crush it.
He was a hard man. He didn't give up. His hands squeezed tighter.
My neck was strong and the muscles were well developed, but I knew he had the strength to kill me. My hand reached, groping for the pistol in my pocket. I had to shoot him. I had to kill him. That was all right. I didn't care. The air in my lungs was spent, and my brain was exploding in Mandelbrot whirls of colored light, and I was dying, and I wanted to kill him.
Vikram crashed a heavy wooden stool into the back of the big man's bald head. It's not as easy to knock a man out as it seems in the movies. It's true that a lucky hit can do it in one shot, but I've been hit with iron bars, lumps of wood, boots, and many hard fists, and I've only ever been knocked out once in my life.
Vikram slammed the heavy stool into the back of the man's head five times, with all of his strength, before the big man buckled and fell. He was defeated, and groggy. The back of his head was pulpy. I knew that his skull was fractured in several places.
Somehow, he was still conscious.
We worked on them for half an hour, overcoming their initial reluctance to talk. Raheem joined us, speaking in English and their Nigerian dialect. Their passports told us who they were- Nigerian citizens, on tourist visas. Other information in their wallets and luggage told us where they'd stayed in Lagos before they came to Bombay. Little by little, the story emerged. They were muscle: hit men, sent by a gangster in Lagos to punish me for a major heroin and Mandrax tablet deal that had gone wrong.
The deal involved some sixty thousand dollars-money that their boss in Lagos had lost in a hustle in Bombay. The hustler, whoever he was, had nominated me as the mastermind of the plan; the man responsible for ripping off the money.
The hired thugs surrendered that much information, but then they balked. They didn't want to give me the man's name. They didn't want to tell me who'd set me up. They didn't want to betray him without the express permission of their Nigerian boss. We insisted, and they were persuaded. The man's name was Maurizio Belcane.
I put the big man's eye back into its socket, but it stared out at a strange angle. From the way that he turned his head to look at me, I guessed that he couldn't see out of it, yet, and I suspected that it would never sit correctly again. We closed the eye with tape, bandaged his head, and tidied the other men up.
Then I spoke to them.
"These men will take you to the airport. You're gonna wait in the car park. There's a plane to Lagos tomorrow morning. You're gonna be on it. We're gonna buy the tickets with your money. And get this straight-I had nothing to do with this. That's not your fault- it's Maurizio's-but that doesn't make me any happier about it.
I'm gonna fix Maurizio, for lying about me. That's my business, now. You can go back to your boss, and tell him that Maurizio will get what's coming to him. But if you ever come back here, we'll kill you. Understand? You come back to Bombay, you die."
"Yeah, you fuckin' understand?" Vikram shouted at them, lashing out with a kick. "You come here and fuck with Indians, you fuckin' fuck-heads! India is finished for you! You come back here and I will personally cut off your fuckin' balls! Do you see my hat? You see the mark on my fuckin' hat, you fuckin' bahinchhud?
You put a mark on my fuckin' hat! You don't fuck with an Indian guy's hat! You don't fuck with Indian guys for any reason, hat or no hat! Not ever! And especially not, if they do wear a hat!"
