Sunny begins to squirm and cry out.
“Then you will deliver the story of your life.”
Sunny fights against his ropes, strains every muscle to find one bit of freedom.
Tries to stand with the chair attached to him, tries to bring it down again to break its legs.
Something.
Anything.
But he’s in agony and weak and nothing works.
“Your life is also pain. The pain that is native to our land.”
Rastogi crouches so close and searches Sunny’s eyes.
“And then? I asked him. Do I kill him then? Oh no, he replied. You let him live. And I asked him, Why?”
Rastogi reaches out and cups Sunny’s cheek in his palm.
All Sunny hears is the hammering of his heart.
Not the sound of the motorbike in the distance.
“Do you hear?” Rastogi says, suddenly standing up. “Yes. Manoj is here.”
He steps back from Sunny toward the door.
Backing away.
Backing away.
The sound becomes solid, a bike racing at speed.
Rastogi presses his back flat against the wall beside the door. “As Himmatgiri lifted me to my feet and held me in his arms I asked him that question. Why? Why all this to let him live?”
The bike is almost on them.
Sunny can see the jagged sweep of the headlight under the door.
“Do you know what he said, Sunny Wadia?”
The bike’s engine cuts off.
The sound of feet across the dusty ground. “Sunil bhaiya, Sunil bhaiya!” Manoj rushes in full of joy, cradling a duffel bag in his arms, bursting past the concealed Rastogi. “Sunil bhaiya, I have it!”
He skids to a halt, sees Sunny bound and screaming with the rag in his mouth.
Before Manoj can think, Rastogi steps forward and grabs him by the hair, yanks his head back, and gouges the flesh of his throat. Digs deep and vicious until the opened artery sprays.
Manoj drops the bag, raises his hands to his neck, tries to say something, but he’s drowning in himself.
Rastogi holds his head back, pulls Manoj’s arms away.
Sunny watches the life vanish from Manoj, his eyes wide in sorrow.
His legs buckling.
He’s gurgling.
Trying in vain to reach the gun in his waistband.
But he’s already leaving this world.
Rastogi eases him to the floor.
He lets the limp Manoj go, takes the gun, picks up the duffel bag of cash, walks to the door. Turns one last time.
“?‘Because the face you will see,’ Himmatgiri said to me, ‘is the face of my son.’?”
FIVE
NEW DELHI, JANUARY 2008
THE KING WAS EXTREMELY ALTERED
MORNING
1.
Sunny wakes naked beside the girls from last night. Maria and ? He doesn’t even remember the other’s name. He plied them with so much vodka and LSD even they hadn’t remembered by the messy end. He’d coaxed them into fucking each other while he watched, made them do it like that scene from Requiem for a Dream. It got him going, knowing they’d have to face each other in the morning.
* * *
—
He’s a dog digging a phantom hole. A needle gouging the skin to find a vein.
* * *
—
Now the light hurts, the day hurts, everything fucking hurts. He strains up from the bed, stumbles across the marble floor to the bathroom that’s bigger than Maria’s apartment in South Ex. He climbs inside one of the floor-to-ceiling shower cubicles designed to look like teleporting pods, but which today resemble the psychic cages in which Bacon condemned his Popes. He pisses long and hard, a malevolent stream of raw malice, pushing each palm to the glass, head raised in a silent scream, watching his life go down the drain.
* * *
—
He climbs out and wraps himself in one of the Langham bathrobes hanging from a portable rack in the middle of the floor.
When he reenters the bedroom, the girls don’t stir. He looks at Maria, facedown. Feels nothing. Bored even of his own emptiness, he pops out three two-milligram bars of Xanax from the stash in his bedside table, swallows them with the dregs of a beer, picks up a pack of Dunhills, pads through the bedroom door, a nine-foot high, silent, swinging beast, out into the cool corridors of his mansion wing, a maze that resembles a museum, little sealed glass boxes containing artworks: gruesome figurines in the Mojave desert, a piece of the Berlin Wall, a female mannequin in a silk kimono and fencing mask, suspended in the air by kinbaku ropes in the style of Araki.
* * *
—
He opens a door into a vast and gaudy ballroom, fifty meters long, the ceiling adorned by small lamps mapping the constellations of the night sky. An archipelago of velvet sofas, big as beds, dot the room below, with sleeping bodies strewn like the victims of a poisoning cult. Chill-out music plays low from the stereo system installed in the walls, the bass vibrates from the panels beneath the floor. He picks his way through the mess, runs his hand along the sweeping curve of the bar, the Platonic form of all the nightclubs he has known. Rounding the business end, there’s Fabian, the wealth manager from Paris, the one Ashwin brought. He’s slumped against the wall with a thousand-yard stare, a loaded crossbow in his arms. Sunny steps over him, plucks a bottle of tequila from the shelf.
* * *
—
He approaches one of the giant bay windows that look out over the mansion grounds. Like an imprisoned Emperor he surveys the manicured lawns, the amphitheater beyond, the sanctuary of woodland on the horizon, the hundreds of workers in the crisp sunlight of the February morning pegging tents, setting tables, constructing the stage upon which the artists will perform, building and stocking the bars, assembling the mini Ferris wheel, the fairground attractions: the hall of mirrors, the ghost train, the shooting range.
He unscrews the bottle and pours tequila down his throat. Takes a breath.
“Fuck.”
He pours again, first down his throat, then over his head, drenching his hair, streaming tequila into his eyes, into his beard, inside his robe. He drops the bottle to the floor, then fishes the pack of Dunhills from his pocket, inserts a cigarette in his mouth, considers the consequence of tequila and fire . . .
Thwack!
A crossbow bolt embeds itself in the ceiling.
He lights the cigarette anyway.
Today is Sunny’s wedding day.
* * *
—
In the prison cell Ajay looks down on the brand-new safari suit laid upon his mattress. The skin of another life. He is told to dress in it. An escort will be here in half an hour. They will drive him to the Wadia mansion, then bring him back to jail before the night is out.
A compassionate day release.
He has no say in the matter.
His presence has been requested.
He does not know why.
What he’ll do when he’s there, he doesn’t know either.
Will he be made to serve drinks?
Stand by Sunny’s side?
Or just linger in the back, head down, out of sight?
The absurd reward for four silent loyal years as an undertrial.
“Have fun!” Sikandar roars.