"The police were here," he said, suddenly lucid. His pale blue eyes looked into mine as if he was looking for something at the bottom of a pond. "They were boasting about it to Mehmet, one of the owners.
You know Mehmet. He's also Iranian, like Abdullah. Some of the police from the Colaba station, across the road, were in the ambush. They said that he was surrounded in a little street near Crawford Market. They called on him to surrender himself to them.
They said he stood perfectly still. They said his long hair was streaming behind him in the wind, and his black clothes. They talked about that for quite some time. It is strange, don't you think, Lin, that they were talking about his clothes... and his hair? What does it mean? Then they... they said he took two guns from his jacket, and began to shoot at them. They all returned the fire at once. He was shot so many times that his body was mutilated, they said. It was torn apart by the fusillade."
Lisa began to cry. She sat down next to Didier, and he wrapped an arm around her in the automatism of grief and shock. He didn't look at her or acknowledge her. He patted at her shoulder and rocked from side to side, but his sorrow-struck expression would've been the same if he were alone and wrapping his arms about himself.
"There was a big crowd," he continued. "They were very upset. The police were nervous. They wanted to take his body to the hospital in one of their vans, but the people in the crowd attacked the van, and forced it off the road. The police took the body to the Crawford Market police station. The crowd followed them there, shouting and screaming abuse. They are still there, I think."
Crawford Market police station. I had to go there. I had to see the body. I had to see him. Maybe he was alive...
"Wait here," I told Lisa. "Wait with Didier, or get a cab home.
I'll be back."
A spear rammed into my side, up beside my heart, and out through the top of my chest. The spear of Abdullah's death, the spear of thinking about his dead, dead body. I rode to Crawford Market, and every breath pushed the rough spear up against my heart.
Near the market police station I was forced to abandon the bike because a milling crowd mobbed the road. Striking out on foot, I soon found myself in a wild, aimlessly rambling frenzy of people.
Most of them were Muslims. What I could make out from the many chants and shouted slogans indicated that they weren't simply mourners. Abdullah's death had touched off a prairie fire of discontent and long-nursed grievances in the neglected acres of the poor around the market area. Men were shouting a confusing collection of complaints, and clamouring for their own causes. I could hear prayers ringing out from several places.
Inside the legions of screaming men it was chaos, and every step toward the police station was won with a wrestling, shoving effort of force and will. Men came in waves that swept me sideways and then forward and then back. They pushed and punched and kicked out with their legs. More than once I almost went under those trampling feet, reaching out at the last moment to save myself by grappling my fingers into a shirt or a beard or a shawl. I finally caught sight of the police station and the police. Wearing helmets and carrying shields, they were three or four deep across the whole width of the building.
A man beside me in the crowd seized my shirt and began to punch me about the head and face. I had no idea why he'd attacked me- maybe he didn't understand it himself-but it didn't matter. The blows were struck, and I was in it. I covered myself with my hands and tried to wrench myself free. His hand was locked onto the shirt, and I couldn't shake him off. I stepped in closer, jabbed my fingers into his eyes, and crashed my fist into his head just ahead of the ear. His hand released me and he fell back, but others began to punch at me. The crowd opened out around me and I shaped up, punching out at random and hitting anything within range.
It was a bad situation. I knew that sooner or later I would lose the energy and the surprise that kept the posse of men at bay.
Men rushed at me, but only one at a time and with no technique.
They took solid hits and drew back. I danced around, hammering anyone who came near me, but I was surrounded and I couldn't win.
It was only the crowd's fascination with the fighting that kept them from surging forward in a strangling crush of bodies.
