My first knife fight wasn't my last, and as I stood over Maurizio Belcane's dead body I felt the cold, sharp memory of my own experiences of stabbing and being stabbed. He was face down in a kneeling posture, with his upper body on a corner of the couch and his legs on the floor. Beside his slackly folded right hand there was a razor-sharp stiletto resting on the carpet. A black handled carving knife was buried to the crank in his back, a little to the left of his spine and just below the shoulder blade. It was a long, wide, sharp knife. I'd seen that knife before, in Lisa's hand, the last time Maurizio had made the mistake of coming to the apartment uninvited. That was one lesson he should've learned the first time. We don't, of course. It's okay, Karla once said, because if we all learned what we should learn, the first time round, we wouldn't need love at all. Well, Maurizio had learned that lesson in the end, the hard way-face down in his own blood. He was what Didier called a fully mature man. When I'd chided Didier once for being immature, he'd told me that he was proud and delighted to be immature. The fully mature man or woman, he said, has about two seconds left to live.
Those thoughts rolled over one another in my mind like the steel balls in Captain Queeg's hand. It was the knife that did it, of course: the memory of stabbing and being stabbed. I remembered the vivid seconds every time I'd been stabbed. I remembered the knives cutting me, entering my body. I could still feel the steel blades inside me. It was like burning. It was like hate. It was like the most evil thought in the world. I shook my head and breathed in deeply, and looked at him again.
The knife might've ruptured a lung and penetrated to the heart.
Whatever it had done, it had finished him fast. His body had fallen onto the couch and, once there, he'd hardly moved at all.
I took a handful of his thick, black hair and lifted his head.
His dead eyes were half open, and his lips were pulled back slightly from his teeth in a rictal smile. There was remarkably little blood. The couch had absorbed the big spill. We've gotta get rid of the couch, I heard myself thinking. The carpet had suffered no great damage, and could be cleaned. The room was also little disturbed by the violence. A leg was broken on the coffee table, and the locks on the front door hung askew. I turned my attention to the women.
Ulla bore a cut on her face from the cheekbone almost to the chin. I cleaned the wound and pressed it together with tape all along the length of it. The cut wasn't deep, and I expected it to heal quickly, but I was sure it would leave a scar. By chance, the blade had followed the natural curve of her cheek and jaw, adding a flash of emphasis to the shape of her face. Her beauty was injured by the wound but not ravaged by it. Her eyes, however, were abnormally wide and pierced with a terror that refused to fade. There was a lungi on the arm of the couch beside her. I put it around her shoulders, and Lisa gave her a cup of hot, sweet chai. When I covered Maurizio's body with a blanket she shuddered. Her face crumpled into puckers of pain, and she cried for the first time.
Lisa was calm. She was dressed in a pullover and jeans, an outfit that only a Bombay native could wear on such a humid, still, and hot night. There was the mark of a blow around her eye and on her cheek. When Ulla was quiet again we crossed the room to stand near the door, out of her hearing. Lisa took a cigarette, bent her head to light it from my match, and then exhaled, looking directly into my face for the first time since I'd entered the apartment.
"I'm glad you came. I'm glad you're here. I couldn't help it. I had to do it, he-"
"Stop it, Lisa!" I interrupted her. The tone was harsh, but my voice was quiet and warm. "You didn't stab him. She did. I can see it in her eyes. I know the look. She's still stabbing him now, still going over it in her mind. She'll have that look for a while. You're trying to protect her, but you won't help her by lying to me."
She smiled. Under the circumstances, it was a very good smile. If we hadn't been standing next to a dead man with a knife in his heart, I'd have found it irresistible.
"What happened?"
"I don't want her to get hurt, that's all," she replied evenly.
The smile closed up in the thin, grim line of her pursed lips.
"Neither do I. What happened?"
