"Ulla, listen to me. Do you think he might still be there?" I asked.
She nodded a third time. I looked at Abdullah.
"I have a good friend in Dadar," he said. "Where is the hotel?
What is the name?"
"I don't know," she mumbled. "It's next to a market. At the back, where they throw the rubbish away. The smell is very bad. No wait, I remember, I said the name in the taxi-it is called Kabir's. That's it. That's the name. Oh, God! When I left him, I just thought... I was sure they would find him... and... and make him free. Do you think he might be on that bed until now? Do you think?" Abdullah phoned his friend, and arranged to have someone check the hotel.
"Where's the money?" I demanded.
She hesitated.
"The money, Ulla. Give it to me."
She stood up shakily, supported by Lisa, and walked into the bedroom she'd used. Moments later she returned with a travel flight bag. She handed it to me, her expression strangely contradictory-coquette and adversary in equal parts. I opened the bag and took out several bundles of American hundred-dollar bills. I counted out twenty thousand dollars, and pushed the rest back into the bag. I returned the bag to her.
"Ten thousand is for Hassaan," I declared. "Five thousand is to get you a new passport and a ticket to Germany. Five thousand is to clean up here, and set Lisa up in a new apartment on the other side of town. The rest is yours. And Modena's, if he makes it."
She wanted to reply, but a soft tap at the door announced Hassaan's arrival. The stocky, thickly muscled Nigerian entered, and greeted Abdullah and me warmly. Like the rest of us, he was acclimatised to Bombay's heat, and he wore a heavy serge jacket and bottle-green jeans with no trace of discomfort. He pulled the blanket from Maurizio's body and pinched the skin, flexed a dead arm, and sniffed at the corpse.
"I got a good plastic," he said, dumping a heavy plastic drop sheet onto the floor and unfolding it. "We got to take off all them clothes. And any of his rings and chains. Just the man, that's all we want. We'll pull the teeth later."
He paused, when I didn't reply or react, and looked up to see me staring at the two women. Their faces were stiff with dread.
"How about... you get Ulla in the shower," I said to Lisa with a grim little smile. "Have one yourself. I reckon we'll be finished here in a little while."
Lisa led Ulla into the bathroom, and ran a shower for her. We dumped Maurizio's body onto the plastic sheet and stripped it of its clothes. His skin was pallid, matt, and in some places marbled-grey. In life Maurizio was a tall, well-built man. Dead and naked he looked thinner, feebler somehow. I should've pitied him. Even if we never pity them at any other time, and in any other way, we should pity the dead when we look at them, and touch them. Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. And dead men demand prayers. The silent heart, the tumbled nave of the chest unbreathing, and the guttered candles of the eyes-they summon our prayers. Each dead man is a temple in ruins, and when our eyes walk there we should pity, we should pray.
But I didn't pity him. You got what you deserve, I thought, as we rolled his body in the plastic sheet. I felt despicable and mean souled for thinking it, but the words wormed their way through my brain like a murderous whisper working its way through an angry mob. You got what you deserve.
Hassaan had brought a laundry-style trolley basket with him. We wheeled it into the room from the corridor. Maurizio's body was beginning to stiffen up, and we were forced to crunch the legs to fit it into the basket. We wheeled and carried it down two flights of stairs unobserved, and out into the quiet street, where Hassaan's delivery van was parked. His men used the van every day to deliver fish, bread, fruit, vegetables, and kerosene to his shops in the African ghetto. We lifted the wheeled basket into the back of the van, and covered the plastic-wrapped body with loaves of bread, baskets of vegetables, and trays of fish.
"Thanks, Hassaan," I said, shaking his hand and passing him the ten thousand dollars. He stuffed the money into the front of his jacket.
"No," he rumbled in the basso voice that commanded unquestioning respect in his ghetto. "I am very happy to do this work. Now, Lin, we are even. All even."
