"That... callous... bitch! She left him there, tied up in that room. She brought you trouble, and me trouble and... Maurizio ... But when she told us about Modena, I just put my arm around her, and took her to the shower, and looked after her like she'd just told me she hadn't fed her pet goldfish. I should've slapped her or socked her one on the jaw or kicked her ass or something.
Now she's gone, and I'm still freaking out about Modena."
"Some people do that," I said, smiling at the anger in her because I felt it myself. "Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid and angry we feel about it after. They're the canaries, kind of, in the coalmines of our hearts. If we stop feeling sorry for them, when they let us down, we're in deep trouble. And anyway, I didn't get involved to help her. I did it to help you."
"Oh, I know, I know," she sighed. "It's not Ulla's fault. Not really. The Palace messed her up. It messed with her head completely. Everyone who worked for Madame Zhou got messed up in some way. You should've seen Ulla, back then, when she started work there. She was gorgeous, I gotta tell ya. And kind of... innocent... in a way that the rest of us weren't, if you know what I mean. I went there already crazy when I first started work there. But it fucked me up, too. We all... we had to... we did some weird shit there..."
"You told me about it," I said gently.
"I told you?" "Yeah."
"I told you what?"
"You told me... a lot of it. The night I came around to get my clothes from Karla's. I went there with the kid, Tariq. You were very drunk, and very stoned."
"And I told you about that?"
"Yeah."
"Jesus! I don't remember that. I was starting to turkey. That was the first night, when I tried to get off the stuff-when I did get off the stuff. I remember the kid, though... and I remember you didn't want to have sex with me."
"Oh, I wanted it, alright."
She turned her head quickly and met my eye. Her expression smiled at the lips, but a tiny frown creased her forehead. She was wearing a red salwar kameez. The long, loose silk shirt clung to her breasts and the outline of her figure in the strong sea breeze. Her blue eyes glittered with courage and other mysteries.
She was brave and fragile and tough in the same instant. She'd dragged herself from the life that was drowning her at Madame Zhou's Palace, and she'd beaten heroin. In defence of her friend's life, and her own, she'd helped to kill a man. She'd lost her lover, Abdullah, my friend, his body torn and mutilated by bullets. And it was all there, in her eyes and her thin face, thinner than it should've been. It was all there, if you knew what to look for, and if you knew where to look.
"So, how did you end up at the Palace?" I asked, and she flinched a little as I changed the subject.
"I don't know," she sighed. "I ran away from home when I was a kid. I couldn't stand it at home. I got outta there as soon as I could. In a couple years I was a teenage junkie, working the beat in L.A. and getting beat up by that month's pimp. Then a guy came along, a nice, quiet, lonely, gentle guy, named Matt. I fell for him, hard. He was my first real love. He was a musician, and he'd been to India a couple times. He was sure we could make enough money for a new start, if we smuggled some shit from Bombay back home. He said that he'd pay for the tickets, if I agreed to carry the stuff. When we got here, he just took off with everything- all our money, and my passport, and everything. I don't know what happened. I don't know if he got cold feet or found someone else to do the job or just decided to do it himself. I don't know. The end of it was... that I got stuck in Bombay with a big, raging heroin habit, and no money, and no passport. I started working from a hotel room, turning tricks to keep going. After a couple months of that, a cop came into my room one day and told me I was busted. I was going to an Indian jail-unless I agreed to work for this friend of his."
"Madame Zhou."
"Yeah."
"Tell me, did you ever see her? Did you ever talk to her in person?"
"Nah. Almost no-one ever talks to her or sees her, except for Rajan and his brother. Karla met her in person. Karla hates her.
Karla hates her more than... I've never seen anything like it in my life. Karla hates her so much that she's a bit crazy with it, if you know what I mean. She thinks about Madame Zhou almost all the time, and she'll get her, sooner or later."
"The thing with her friend Ahmed, and Christine," I murmured.
"She thinks Madame Zhou had them killed, and she blames herself for it. She can't let it go."
"That's right!" she answered wonderingly, her face frowning and smiling in puzzlement. "Did she tell you about that?"
"Yeah."
