"Fuckin' gandu," Sanjay growled, using the slang word for arsehole. "I never met one of these psycho types who wasn't a fuckin' squealer, yaar."
"Lucky for us, there were mostly foreigners in the place that night, so they didn't know what he was talking about. One of our guys was there, in the bar, and he told Jeetu to shut the fuck up. Jeetudada said he wasn't afraid of Abdel Khader Khan because he had plans for Khader, as well. He said Khader was going to end up in pieces, just like Madjid. Then he starts waving a gun around. Our guy called Khader right away. And the Khan, he went and did that one himself. He went with Nazeer and Khaled, and Farid, and Ahmed Zadeh, and young Andrew Ferreira, and some others."
"I missed that one, fuck it!" Sanjay cursed. "I wanted to fix that maakachudh from the first day, and especially after Madjid.
But I was on a job, in Goa. Anyway, Khader fixed them up."
"They found them near the car park of the President Hotel.
Jeetudada and his guys put up a fight. There was a big shoot-out.
Two of our guys got hit. One of them was Hussein-you know, he runs the numbers in Ballard Pier now. That's how he lost his arm-he took a shotgun blast, both barrels of a crowd-pleaser, a sawn-off, and it tore his arm right off his body. If Ahmed Zadeh hadn't wrapped him up and dragged him out of there, and off to hospital, he would've bled to death, right there in the car park. All four of them who were there-Jeetudada and his three guys-got wasted.
Khaderbhai put the last bullets into their heads himself. But one of those Sapna guys wasn't in the car park, and he got away. We never tracked him down. He went back to Delhi, and he disappeared from there. We haven't heard anything since."
"I liked that Ahmed Zadeh," Sanjay said quietly, dispensing what was, for him, extravagantly high praise with a little sigh of sorrowing recollection.
"Yeah," I agreed, remembering the man who'd always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd; the man who'd died with his hand clenched in mine. "He was a good guy."
Nazeer spoke again, grunting the words at us in his wrathful style as if they were threats.
"When the Pakistani cops were tipped off about Khaderbhai,"
Sanjay translated, "it was obvious that it had to be Abdul Ghani behind it."
I nodded my agreement. It was obvious. Abdul Ghani was from Pakistan. His connections there went deep, and high. He'd told me about it more than once when I'd worked for him. I wondered why I hadn't seen it at the time, when the cops raided our hotel in Pakistan. My first thought was that I'd simply liked him too much to suspect him, and that was true. More to the point, perhaps, was how flattered I'd been by his attention: Ghani had been my patron on the council, after Khader himself, and he'd invested time, energy, and affection in our friendship. And there was something else that might have distracted me in Karachi: my mind had been filled with shame and revenge-I remembered that much from the visit to the mosque when I'd sat beside Khaderbhai and Khaled to hear the Blind Singers. I remembered reading Didier's letter and deciding, in that shifting, yellow lamplight, that I would kill Madame Zhou. I remembered thinking that and then turning my head to see the love in Khader's golden eyes. Could that love and that anger have smothered something so important, something so obvious, as Ghani's treachery? And if I'd missed that, what else had I missed? "Khader wasn't supposed to make it out of Pakistan," Salman added. "Khaderbhai, Nazeer, Khaled-even you. Abdul Ghani thought it was his chance to take out the whole council in one shot-all the guys on the council who weren't with him. But Khaderbhai had his own friends in Pakistan, and they warned him, and you made it out of the trap. I think Abdul must've known he was finished from that day on. But he held his peace, and he didn't make any moves here. He was hoping, I guess, that Khader, and the whole lot of you, might be killed in the war-"
Nazeer interrupted him, impatient with the English that he despised. I thought I understood what he'd said, and I translated his words, looking to Sanjay for confirmation that my guess was correct.
"Khader told Nazeer to keep the truth about Abdul Ghani a secret.
He said that if anything happened to him in the war, Nazeer was to return to Bombay and avenge him. Was that it?"
"Yeah," Sanjay wagged his head. "You got it. And after we did that, we had to fix the rest of the guys who were on Ghani's side. There's none of them left now. They're all dead, or they got the fuck out of Bombay."
