Читаем Shantaram полностью

‘It’s Modena!’ I shouted, running after the limping Spaniard. I didn’t look back at Vikram, Abdullah, and the Zodiacs. I didn’t answer Vikram’s call. I didn’t think about what I was doing or why I was pursuing him. My mind was only one thought, one image, and one word. Modena…

He was fast, and he knew the streets well. It occurred to me, as he ducked into hidden doorways and all but invisible gaps between buildings, that I was probably the only foreigner in the city who knew those streets as well as he did. For that matter, there were few Indians-only touts and thieves and junkies-who could’ve kept up with him. He scrambled into a hole that someone had knocked through a high stone wall to create an access hatch from one street to another. He stepped around a partition that seemed as solid as brick, but was made from stretched and painted canvas. He took short cuts through improvised shops in sheltering archways, and weaved his way along the labyrinth lines of washed, brightly coloured saris hung out to dry.

And then he made a mistake. He ran into a narrow lane that had been commandeered by homeless pavement dwellers and extended families that were crowded out of local apartments. I knew it well. About a hundred men, women, and children were living in the converted lane. They slept in shifts, in a loft space they’d built above the cobbled lane and between the walls of adjacent buildings. They did everything else in the long, dark, narrow room that the lane had become. Modena dodged between the seated and standing groups; between cooking stoves and bathing stalls and a blanket of card players. Then, at the end of the lane-room, he turned left instead of right. It was a cul-de-sac surrounded by high sheer walls. It was completely dark, and it ended in a little dogleg where the space curved around the blind corner of another building. We’d used it, sometimes, to make buys with drug dealers we didn’t completely trust, because there was only one way in or out. I rounded the corner, only a few steps behind him, and stood there, panting and straining my eyes to pierce the darkness. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he had to be in there.

‘Modena,’ I said softly into the black echoes. ‘It’s Lin. I just want to talk to you. I’m not trying to… I know you’re in here. I’ll just put my bag down, and light us up a beedie, okay? One for you. One for me.’

I put the bag down slowly, expecting him to make a rush past me. I took a bundle of beedies from my shirt pocket, and extracted two from the pack. Holding them between my third and fourth fingers, thick ends inwards, as every poor man in the city did, I worked open a box of matches and struck one. With the flame playing over the ends of the cigarettes, I allowed myself a glimpse upward and I saw him, cringing away from the little arc of light thrown by the match. Just as the match died, I extended my arm to offer him one of the glowing beedie cigarettes. In the new dark, after the match failed, I waited for a second, two seconds, three seconds, and then I felt his fingers, softer and more delicate in their grasp than I would’ve believed, close around my own and accept the cigarette.

When he puffed at the beedie I saw his face clearly for the first time. It was grotesque. Maurizio had sliced and slashed so much suffering into the soft skin that it was almost frightening simply to look at it. In the faint orange light, I saw the sneering smile that gleamed in Modena’s eyes as he recognised the horror in my own. How many times, I wondered, had he seen that horror in the eyes of others-that wide, white dread as they imagined his scars on their own faces and his torment in their souls? How many times had he seen others flinch, as I’d flinched, and shrink away from his wounds as if from the open sores of a disease? How many times had he seen men ask themselves: What did he do? What did he do to deserve this?

Maurizio’s knife had opened both cheeks beneath the dark brown eyes. The cuts had healed into long Y-shaped scars that dragged down the lower lids of his eyes and ran like the trails of hideous, mocking tears. The lower lids, permanently red and raw, gaped open in little trenches of agony that revealed the whole globe of each eye. The wings and septum of his nose had been cut through to the bone. The skin, when it closed together, had fused in jagged whorls at the sides but not at all in the centre, where the laceration was too deep. The wide hole where his nostrils had been resembled the snout of a pig, and flared with every inward breath. There were many more cuts beside the eyes, around the jaw, and along the full width of his brow below the hairline.