‘What the fuck ever happened to good, old, meaningless sex, without any strings attached?’ she rasped, her lips drawn tightly over her teeth.

It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway.

‘I’m not ruling that out-as a fall-back position, so to speak.’

‘Look, I don’t want to be in love,’ she stated, in a softer tone. She raised her eyes to stare into mine. ‘I don’t want anyone to be in love with me. It hasn’t been good to me, the romance thing.’

‘I don’t think it’s kind to anyone, Karla.’

‘My point, exactly.’

‘But when it happens, you haven’t got a choice. I don’t think it’s something any of us do by choice. And… I don’t want to put any pressure on you. I’m just in love with you, that’s all. I’ve been in love with you for a while, and I finally had to say it. It doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it-or me either, for that matter.’

‘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.’