Читаем Shantaram полностью

She smiled. Under the circumstances, it was a very good smile. If we hadn’t been standing next to a dead man with a knife in his heart, I’d have found it irresistible.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t want her to get hurt, that’s all,’ she replied evenly. The smile closed up in the thin, grim line of her pursed lips.

‘Neither do I. What happened?’

‘He busted in, slashed her up. He was crazy, out of his mind. I think he was on something. He was screaming at her, and she couldn’t answer him. She was even crazier than he was. I spent an hour with her before he crashed in here. She told me about Modena. I’m not surprised she was crazy. It’s… fuck, Lin, it’s a bad story. She was out of her mind because of it. Anyway, he crashed through the door like a gorilla, and he slashed her. He was covered in blood-Modena’s, I think. It was pretty fuckin’ scary. I tried to jump him with the knife from the kitchen. He socked me pretty good in the eye and knocked me on my ass. I fell on the couch. He got on top of me, and he was just about to start on me with that switchblade of his when Ulla gave it to him in the back. He was dead in a second. I swear. A second. One second. Just like that. He was looking at me, then he was dead. She saved my life, Lin.’

‘I think it’s more likely that you saved hers, Lisa. If you weren’t here, it would be her hugging the couch with a knife in her back.’

She began to tremble and shiver. I took her in my arms and held her for a while, supporting her weight. When she was calm again, I brought her a kitchen chair and she sat down shakily. I phoned around, and found Abdullah. Explaining what had happened in as few words as possible, I told him to contact Hassaan Obikwa in the African ghetto and bring him to the apartment with a car.

Little by little, as we waited for Abdullah and Hassaan, the story emerged. Ulla was suddenly tired, but I couldn’t let her sleep. Not yet. After a while she began to speak, adding a detail here and there to Lisa’s account, and then gradually telling the whole story herself.

Maurizio Belcane met Sebastian Modena in Bombay, where both of them made money from the work they arranged for foreign prostitutes. Maurizio was the only son of rich Florentine parents who’d died in a plane crash when he was a child. By his own account, repeated to Ulla whenever he was drunk, he was raised with indifferent duteousness by distant relatives who’d tolerated him reluctantly in the loveless shelter of their home. At eighteen he seized the first tranche of his inheritance and fled to Cairo. By the age of twenty-five he’d squandered the fortune left to him by his parents. The remnants of his family cast him out, no less for his penury than for the many scandals that had pursued his profligate progress through the Middle East and Asia. At twenty-seven he found himself in Bombay, brokering sex for European prostitutes.

The point man for Maurizio’s operation in Bombay was the diffident, dour Spaniard, Sebastian Modena. The thirty-year-old sought out and approached wealthy Arab and Indian customers. His short, slight frame and timid manner worked to his advantage, putting the customers at ease by allaying their fears and suspicions. He took one-fifth of the cut that Maurizio claimed from the foreign girls. Ulla believed that Modena was happy enough in the unequal relationship, where he did most of the dirty work and Maurizio took most of the dirty money, because he saw himself as a pilot fish and the tall, handsome Italian as a shark.

His background was very different to Maurizio’s. One of thirteen children in an Andalusian Gypsy family, Modena had grown up with a notion of himself as the runt of the litter. Schooled more in crime than in scholarship, and barely literate, he’d worked his way from swindle to grift to petty larceny across Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India. He preyed on tourists, never taking too much and never remaining too long in any one place. Then he met Maurizio, and for two years he’d pandered for the pimp, procuring clients and putting them together with the girls in Maurizio’s stable.

They might’ve gone on in that way for much longer, but one day Maurizio walked into Leopold’s with Ulla. From the first moment that their eyes met, Ulla told us, she knew that Modena was hopelessly in love with her. She encouraged him because his devotion to her was useful. She’d been purchased from Madame Zhou’s Palace, and Maurizio was determined to recover his investment costs as quickly as possible. He’d instructed the smitten Modena to find work for her twice a day, every day, until the debt was repaid. Tortured by what he saw as betrayals of his own love, Modena pressed his partner to release Ulla from the obligation. Maurizio refused, ridiculing the Spaniard’s affection for a working girl, and insisting that he put her to work day and night.