‘I’m still … I don’t know. I’m just … Jesus! But I’m happy to like you. I like you a lot. I’ll be head over heels in like with you, Lin, if that’s enough.’
Her eyes were honest, and yet I knew there was a lot she wasn’t telling me. Her eyes were brave, and yet she was afraid. When I relented, and smiled at her, she laughed. I laughed, too.
‘Is it enough for now?’
‘Sure,’ I lied. ‘Sure.’
But already, like the people in the ghetto, hundreds of feet below, I was picking through the smashed houses in my heart, and rebuilding on the ruin.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DESPITE THE FACT that only a handful of people could claim to have seen Madame Zhou with their own eyes, she was the main attraction, Karla assured me, for many of those who visited the Palace. Her clients were rich men: executive-level businessmen, politicians, and gangsters. The Palace offered them foreign girls—exclusively, for no Indian girls ever worked there—and elaborate facilities for the realisation of their wildest sexual fantasies. The strangest of those illicit pleasures, devised by Madame Zhou personally, were the subject of shocked, breathless whispers throughout the city, but influential contacts and substantial bribes meant that the Palace was immune from raids or even close scrutiny. And although there were other places in Bombay that provided equal indulgence and security, none of them were as popular as Madame Zhou’s because none had the Madame herself. In the end, what kept men coming to the Palace wasn’t the skill and loveliness of the women they could have there; it was the mystery of the woman they couldn’t have—the invisible beauty of Madame Zhou.
People said she was Russian, but that detail, like all the others concerning her private life, seemed to be unverifiable. It was accepted, Karla said, simply because it was the most persistent rumour. One clear fact was that she’d arrived in New Delhi during the 1960s, a decade as wild for that city as it was for most western capitals. The new part of the city was celebrating its thirtieth year, then, and Old Delhi its three hundredth. Madame Zhou, most sources agreed, was twenty-nine. Legend had it that she’d been the mistress of a KGB officer who’d employed her unique beauty to suborn prominent Congress Party officials. The Congress Party governed India through those years with what seemed to be an unassailable lead in every national poll. Many of the party faithful—and even their enemies—believed that the Congress Party would continue to rule the Indian motherland for a hundred years. Power over Congress men, therefore, was power over the nation.
The gossip about her years in Delhi prowled from scandals and suicides to political murder. Karla said that she’d heard so many different versions of the stories, from such a wide variety of people, she began to think that the truth, whatever it might’ve been, wasn’t really important to them. Madame Zhou had become a kind of portmanteau figure: people packed the details of their own obsessions into her life. One said she possessed a fortune in precious gems that she kept in a hessian sack, another talked with authority about her addiction to various drugs, and a third whispered of satanic rites and cannibalism.
‘People say a lot of really weird stuff about her, and I think some of it’s just crap, but the bottom line is, she’s dangerous,’ Karla said. ‘Devious, and dangerous.’
‘U-huh.’
‘I’m not kidding. Don’t underestimate her. When she moved from Delhi to Bombay, six years ago, there was a murder trial, and she was at the centre of it. Two very important guys ended up dead in her Delhi Palace, both of them with their throats cut. One of them happened to be a police inspector. The trial fell apart when one witness against her disappeared, and another was found hanging from the doorway of his house. She left Delhi to set up shop in Bombay, and within the first six months there was another murder, only a block away from the Palace, and a lot of people connected her with it. But she’s got so much stuff on so many people—stuff that goes all the way to the top. They can’t touch her. She can do pretty much what she likes, because she knows she’ll get away with it. If you want to get out of this, now’s your chance.’
We were in a Bumblebee, one of the ubiquitous black-and-yellow Fiat taxis, travelling south through the Steel Bazaar. Traffic was heavy. Hundreds of wooden handcarts, longer and taller and wider than a car when fully laden, trundled along between buses and trucks, pushed by barefoot porters, six men to each cart. The main streets of the Steel Bazaar were crammed with small and medium shops. They sold every kind of metal house-ware, from kerosene stoves to stainless steel sinks, and most of the cast-iron and sheet-metal products required by builders, shop-fitters, and decorators. The shops themselves were adorned with gleaming metal wares, strung in such brilliantly polished plenty and such artful array that they often attracted the camera lenses of tourists. Behind the glossy, commercial ramble of the streets, however, were the hidden lanes, where men who were paid in cents, rather than dollars, worked at black and gritty furnaces to produce those shining lures.
The windows of the cab were open, but no breeze stirred through them. It was hot and still in the sluggish churn of traffic. We’d stopped at Karla’s apartment on the way, where I’d swapped my T-shirt, jeans, and boots for a pair of dress shoes, conservatively cut black trousers, a starched white shirt, and a tie.
‘The only thing I’d like to get out of, at the moment, are these clothes,’ I grumbled.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ she asked, a mischievous gleam in her eye.
‘They’re itchy and horrible.’
‘They’ll be fine.’
‘I hope we don’t have an accident—I’d really hate to get killed in these clothes.’
‘Actually, they look pretty good on you.’
‘Oh, shit, make my day.’
‘Hey come on!’ she chided, curling her lip in an affable smirk. Her accent, the accent I’d come to love and consider the most interesting in the world, gave every word a rounded resonance that thrilled me. The music of that accent was Italian, its shape was German, its humour and its attitude were American, and its colour was Indian. ‘Being so fussy about dressing down, the way you do, is a kind of vanity, you know. It’s fairly conceited, too.’
‘I don’t dress down. I just hate clothes.’
‘No you don’t, you love clothes.’
‘What is this? I’ve got one pair of boots, one pair of jeans, one shirt, two T-shirts, and a couple of lungis. That’s it—my whole wardrobe. If I’m not wearing it, it’s hanging on a nail in my hut.’
‘That’s my point. You love clothes so much that you can’t bear to wear anything but the few things that feel just right.’
I fidgeted with the prickly collar of the shirt.
‘Well, Karla, these clothes are a long way from just right. How come you’ve got so many men’s clothes at your place, anyway? You’ve got more men’s clothes than I have.’
‘The last two guys who lived with me left in kind of a hurry.’
‘So much of a hurry that they left their clothes behind?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘One of them … got very busy’ she said quietly.
‘Busy doing what?’
‘He was breaking a mess of laws, so he probably wouldn’t want me to talk about it.’
‘Did you kick him out?’
‘No.’
She said it flatly, but with such a clear sense of regret that I let it go.
‘And … the other guy?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
I did want to know, but she turned her face away to stare out the window, and there was a finality in the gesture that warned and prohibited. I’d heard that Karla had once lived with someone named Ahmed, an Afghan. People didn’t talk about it much, and I’d assumed that they’d broken up years before. In the year that I knew her, she’d lived alone in the apartment, and I hadn’t realised until that moment how deeply that image of her had insinuated itself into my sense of who she was and how she lived. Despite her protest that she didn’t like to be alon
e, I’d thought of her as one of those people who never lived with others: someone who let people visit or even stay overnight, but never more than that.
I looked at the back of her head, at the small part of her profile, at the barely perceptible bump of her breasts beneath the green shawl, and the long, thin fingers making prayer in her lap, and I couldn’t imagine her living with someone. Breakfast and bare backs, bathroom noises and bad moods, domestic and demi-married: it was impossible to see her in that. Perversely, I found it easier to imagine Ahmed, the Afghan roommate I’d never met, than it was to imagine her as anything but alone and … complete.
We sat in silence for five minutes, a silence calibrated by the slow metronome of the taxi’s meter. An orange banner hanging from the dashboard of the car proclaimed that the driver, like many others in Bombay, was from Uttar Pradesh, a large and populous state in India’s north-east. Our slow progress through the traffic jam gave him many chances to study us in the rear-vision mirror. He was intrigued. Karla had spoken to him in fluent Hindi, giving him precise, street-by-street directions to the Palace. We were foreigners who behaved like locals. He decided to test us.
‘Sister-fucking traffic!’ he muttered in street Hindi, as if to himself, but his eyes never left the mirror. ‘The whole fucking city is constipated today.’
‘A twenty-rupee tip might make a good laxative,’ Karla fired back, in Hindi. ‘What are you doing, renting this taxi by the hour? Get a move on, brother!’
‘Yes, miss!’ the driver replied in English, through delighted laughter. He applied himself with more energy to bullying his way through the traffic.
‘So what did happen to him?’ I asked her.
‘To who?’
‘To the other guy you lived with—the one who didn’t break a mess of laws.’
‘He died, if you must know,’ she said, her teeth clenched.
‘So … how did he die?’
‘They say he poisoned himself.’
‘They say?’
‘Yeah,’ she sighed, looking away to let her eyes drift in the shuffle of people on the street.
We drove in silence for a few moments, and then I had to speak.
‘Which … which one of them owned this outfit I’m wearing? The law-breaking one, or the dead one?’
‘The dead one.’
‘O … kay’
‘I bought it for him to get buried in.’
‘Shit!’
‘Shit … what?’ she demanded, turning to face me again, and frowning hard.
‘Shit … nothing … but remind me to get the name of your dry cleaner.’
‘We didn’t need it. They buried him in … in a different outfit of clothes. I bought the suit, but in the end we didn’t use it.’
‘I see …’
‘I told you that you didn’t want to know.’
‘No, no, it’s okay,’ I mumbled, and in fact I felt a cruel, secret relief that the former lover was dead, gone, no competition to me. I was too young, then, to know that dead lovers are the toughest rivals. ‘Still, Karla, I don’t mean to be picky, but you’ve got to admit it’s just a tad creepy—we’re off on a dangerous mission, and I’m sitting here in a dead guy’s burial suit.’
‘You’re just being superstitious.’
‘No I’m not.’
‘Yes you are.’
‘I’m not superstitious.’
‘Yes you are.’
‘No I’m not.’
‘Of course you are!’ she said, giving me her first real smile since we’d started in the taxi. ‘Everyone in the whole world is superstitious.’
‘I don’t want to fight about it. It might be bad luck.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she laughed. ‘We’ll be okay. Look, here are your business cards. Madame Zhou likes to collect them. She’ll ask you for one. And she’ll keep it, in case she needs a favour from you. But if it ever comes to that, she’ll find that you’re long gone from the embassy.’
The cards were made of pearl-white, textured, linen paper, and the words were embossed in liquid black italic. They declared that Gilbert Parker was a consular under-secretary at the embassy of the United States of America.
‘Gilbert?’ I grunted.
‘So what?’
‘So, this taxi crashes, and they gouge my body out of the wreckage, wearing these clothes, and they identify me as Gilbert. I’m not feeling any better about this, Karla, I have to say.’
‘Well, you’ll have to settle for Gilbert at the moment. There really is a Gilbert Parker at the embassy. His tour of duty in Bombay finishes today. That’s why we picked him—he goes back to the States tonight. So everything will check out okay. I don’t think she’ll be checking up on you too much, anyway. Maybe a phone call, but she might not even do that. If she wants to get in touch with you, she’ll do it through me. She had some trouble with the British embassy last year. It cost her plenty. And a German diplomat got into a real mess at the Palace a few months ago. She had to call in a lot of dues to cover that up. The embassies are the only people who can really hurt her, so she won’t be pushing it. Just be polite and firm when you speak to her. And speak some Hindi. She’ll expect it. And it’ll smooth over any trouble with your accent. That’s one of the reasons why I asked you to help me with this, you know? You’ve picked up a lot of Hindi, for someone who’s only been here a year.’
‘Fourteen months,’ I corrected her, feeling slighted by her shorter estimate. ‘Two months when I first got to Bombay, six months in Prabaker’s village, and now nearly six months in the slum. Fourteen months.’
‘Yes … okay … fourteen months.’
‘I thought no-one got to meet this Madame Zhou,’ I said, hoping to shift the puzzled, uncomfortable frown from her features. ‘You said she kept herself hidden away, and never talked to anyone.’
‘That’s true, but it’s a little more complicated than that,’ Karla replied, softly. A meditation of memories clouded her eyes for a moment, but then she concentrated again with obvious effort. ‘She lives on the top floor, and has everything she needs up there. She never goes out. She has two servants who bring food and clothes and stuff up to her. She can move around the building without being seen because there’s a lot of hidden passageways and staircases. She can look in on most of the rooms through two-way mirrors or metal air vents. She likes to watch. Sometimes she talks to people through a screen. You can’t see her, but she can see you.’
‘So how does anyone know what she looks like?’
‘Her photographer.’
‘Her what?’
‘She has photographs taken of herself. A new one, every month or so. She gives them out to favoured clients.’
‘It’s pretty weird,’ I muttered, not really interested in Madame Zhou, but wanting Karla to go on talking. I watched her red-pink lips form each word—lips I’d kissed only days before—and her speaking mouth was a sublime performance of perfect flesh. She could’ve been reading from a month-old newspaper, and I would’ve been just as delighted to watch her face, her eyes, and her lips as she talked. ‘Why does she do it?’
‘Do what?’ she asked, her eyes narrowing with the question.
‘Why does she hide herself away like that?’
‘I don’t think anyone knows.’ She took out two beedies, lit them, and gave me one. Her hands appeared to be trembling. ‘It’s like I was saying before—there’s so much crazy talk about her. I’ve heard people say she was horribly disfigured in an accident, and she hides her face because of it. They say the photos are retouched to cover up the scars. I’ve heard people say she has leprosy or some other disease. One friend of mine says she doesn’t exist at all. He says it’s just a lie, a kind of conspiracy, to hide who really runs the place and what goes on there.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I … I’ve spoken to her, through the screen. I think she’s so incredibly, psychopathically vain that she, she sort of hates herself for getting older. I think she can’t bear to be less than
perfect. A lot of people say she was beautiful. Really, you’d be surprised. A lot of people say that. In her photos she hasn’t aged past twenty-seven or thirty. There aren’t any lines or wrinkles. There’s no shadows under the eyes. Every black hair is in its place. I think she’s so in love with her own beauty, she’ll never let anyone see her as she really is. I think she’s … it’s like she’s mad with love for herself. I think that even if she lives to be ninety, those monthly photos will still show that same thirty-year-old blank.’
‘How do you know so much about her?’ I asked. ‘How did you meet her?’
‘I’m a facilitator. It was part of my job.’
‘That doesn’t tell me a lot.’
‘How much do you need to know?’
It was a simple question, and there was a simple answer—I love you, and I want to know everything—but there was a hard edge to her voice and a cold light in her eyes, and I faltered.
‘I’m not trying to pry, Karla. I didn’t know it was such a touchy area. I’ve known you for more than a year and, okay, I haven’t seen you every day, or even every month, but I’ve never asked you what you do, or how you make your living. I don’t think that qualifies me as the nosey type.’
‘I put people together,’ she said, relaxing a little, ‘and I make sure they’re having the right amount of fun to seal a deal. I get paid to keep people in the deal-making mood, and give them what they want. Some of them—quite a few of them, as it happens—want to spend time at Madame Zhou’s Palace. The real question is why people are so crazy about her. She’s dangerous. I think she’s completely insane. But people would do almost anything to meet her.’
‘What do you think?’
She sighed, exasperated.
‘I can’t tell you. It’s not just the sex thing. Sure, the prettiest foreign girls in Bombay work for her, and she trains them in some very weird specialties, but people would still come to her even if there weren’t any gorgeous girls there. I don’t get it. I’ve done what people want, and I’ve taken them to the Palace. A few of them even got to meet her in person, like I did, through the screen, but I’ve never been able to figure it out. They come out of the Palace like they’ve had an audience with Joan of Arc. They’re high on it. But not me. She gives me the creeps, and she always has.’