"Not even Karla?" I smiled, savouring the last puff of the cigarette and then stubbing it out on the ground.
"Well, maybe Karla," he conceded, laughing the small, sad laugh.
"But that's Karla. I think the only guy she never fucked over was Abdullah."
"Were they together?" I asked, so surprised that I couldn't help the pinch of jealousy that pulled my brows together in a hard, little frown.
"Well, you couldn't say together," he answered evenly, staring into my eyes. "But I was, once. I used to live with her."
"You what?"
"I lived with her-for six months."
"What happened?" I asked, gritting my teeth and feeling stupid for it. I had no right to be angry or jealous. I'd never asked Karla about her lovers, and she'd never asked me about mine.
"You don't know, do you?"
"I wouldn't ask, if I knew."
"She dumped me," he said slowly, "just about the time you came along."
"Ah, fuck, man..."
"It's okay," he smiled.
We were silent for a moment, both of us reeling back through the years. I remembered Abdullah, at the sea wall near the Haji Ali Mosque, on the night that I met him with Khaderbhai. I remembered him saying that a woman had taught him the clever phrase he'd used in English. It must've been Karla. Of course it was Karla.
And I remembered the stiffness that was in Khaled's manner when I first met him, and I realised, suddenly, that he must've been hurting then, and maybe blaming me for it. I saw clearly what it must've taken for him to be as friendly and kind to me as he was at the beginning.
"You know," he added after a while, "you really got to go careful with Karla, Lin. She's... angry... you know? And she's hurt.
She's hurt bad, in all the places that count. They really fucked her up when she was a kid. She's a bit crazy. She did something, in the States, before she came to India. And that fucked her up, too."
"What did she do?"
"I don't know. Something pretty serious. She never told me what it was. We talked around it, if you get my meaning. I think Khaderbhai knew about it because, you know, he was the first one to meet her."
"No, I didn't know that," I answered him, frowning with the thought of how little I knew about the woman I'd loved for so long. "Why... why do you think she never told me about Khaderbhai? I knew her a long time-when we were both working for him-and she didn't say a word. I talked about him, but she never said a word. She didn't mention his name once."
"I think she's just loyal to him, you know? I don't think there's anything against you, Lin. She's just incredibly loyal-well, she was incredibly loyal to him. She thought of him like a father, I think. Her own father died when she was a kid. And her stepfather died when she was still pretty young. Khader came along just in time to save her, so he got to be her father."
"You said he was the first one who met her?"
"Yeah, on a plane. It's kind of a weird story, the way she told me. She didn't remember getting on the plane. She was running from something-something she did-and she was in trouble. She ended up going on a few different planes from different airports - for a few days, I think. And then she was on this plane that was going to Singapore from... I don't know... somewhere. And she must've had, like, a nervous breakdown or something, because she cracked up, and the next thing she knew, she was in this cave, in India, with Khaderbhai. And then he left her with Ahmed, who looked after her."
"She told me about him."
"Did she? She doesn't talk about it much. She liked that guy. He nursed her for near about six months until she got herself together again. He brought her back-into the light, like. They were pretty close. I think he was the closest thing to a brother she ever knew."
"Were you with her-I mean, did you know her then, when he was killed?"
"I don't know that he was killed, Lin," Khaled stated, frowning hard as the knot of recollections turned in his memory. "I know Karla believes it-that Madame Zhou killed him, and the girl..."
"Christine."
"Yeah, Christine. But I knew Ahmed pretty well. He was a very gentle guy-a very simple, soft kind of a guy. He was just the type to take poison with his girlfriend, like in a romantic movie, if he thought he couldn't ever be free with her. Khader looked into it, real close, because Ahmed was one of his guys, and he was sure Zhou had nothing to do with it. He cleared her."
"But Karla wouldn't accept it?"
"No, she didn't buy it. And coming on top of everything else, it really fucked her up. Did she ever tell you she loves you?"
I hesitated, partly from reluctance to surrender the little advantage I might've had over him if he believed that she did say it, and partly from loyalty to Karla-because it was her business, after all. In the end, I answered him: I had to know why he'd asked me the question.
"No."
"That's too bad," he said flatly. "I thought you might be the one."
"The one?"
"The one to help her-to break through, I guess. Something really bad happened to that girl. A lot of bad things happened to her.
