The Clarity of Cold Steel

AASHIRYA’S BY MY SIDE all booted up in spiked heels and liquid satin as we saunter into Chirag’s office. Never hurts to offer some eye candy for the bait and switch. Chirag’s busy scribbling something, head buried in a ledger before he adjusts his glasses and looks up, notices Aashirya, takes her in, and ain’t she the sight? He adjusts his tie. “Mister and Missus Argawal, ahem, I do believe I can save…” He stops dead when his eyes finally manage to slide over to me, recognition blossoming like a mushroom cloud, his eyes widening just so.

“Been a while,” I say, cause it has. Half a year, at least.

Chirag purses his lips in distaste as he sniffs haughtily and reaches forth, immediately mashing the button on his desk, the button that releases the hounds, the Kalighat hounds with the bundi daggers, the shotguns, the poor dental hygiene.

I smile, let him mash.

The quivering line of Chirag’s frown creaks up slowly into a smirk as he sits back and waits triumphant for muscle to come pouring through the door behind him. It doesn’t take long as the door behind him opens.

“I thought you dead, Mister Shakteel, though, seeing as you’re not, you still owe me,” he glances at a ledger on his desk, flips back a few pages, snaps his fingers, “six-month’s rent.” That shit-eating grin’s plastered across his face as the muscle enters the stage, looming behind him like twin tombstones. They’re both armed. Copiously.

I ain’t. Couldn’t get through the gate of Chirag’s castle without a once over. Hell, a thrice over. Won’t need a colonic for the next month.

“I’m pleased to see my product is still intact.” Chirag licks his pallid lips, his ravenous gaze drifting from my right flank back to Aashirya.

“It ain’t.” I pat my side, sit back, grin. Tit for tat. “The one you leased me got a few holes in it way back when. Procured a new one.” I continue the forced grin despite the road-rash of memories of how I procured it for the low-low price of my sorry soul and the life of a fifteen-year-old kid. He’s still locked in that vat up there. Spinning. Floating. Disappearing. I set a purse of steel coin on his desk. “This should cover any outstanding debts, though.”

“Hmmm, yes, I had heard.” He nods, rejects my offer with a flick of his wrist.

“From who?”

“Does it matter?” Chirag shakes his head slowly, his eyes only for Aashirya now. “Really, though, you must be aware that this whole venture was considered a long shot? Penny stocks and junk bonds.” He sets a pill bottle on the table next to my steel, pushes it my way. “I had heard you’d gone over to that scoundrel, Johnny Shakespeare.”

“What are they?” I glance down at the bottle.

“Analgesics.”

“But I feel right as rain.”

“It’s a courtesy, Mister Shakteel, nothing more. I can cut on you without them if that is your desire?” He holds a hand out to Aashirya. “Madam, I implore you, advise him to take them.”

“He so rarely listens,” she deadpans.

“And, I don’t owe you.” I reach forth, grab the coin purse and re-toss it clinking right in front of him. “There. Paid in full. Take it.” I wipe my hands. “Voilà. Have a nice day.”

“No, Mister Shakteel.” He sits back in his chair, finger to his chin, shaking his head slowly back and forth. “That liver in your side’s what’ll set us square.” He takes the coin purse between thumb and forefinger, flicks it back towards me like it’s a dead rat. “That,” his gaze rolls back to my wife, “and your whore.”

“Manners, you rat bastard,” I rise from my chair, make a sad show of rolling up my sleeves, “she ain’t as forgiving as me.”

Aashirya, for her part, merely sits there and waits, hands on her lap, prim and proper and oh-so-tantalizing.

“Heroics?” Chirag guffaws. “I do believe you’ve taken leave of your senses. One last chance. Take the pills.” He flicks at them with a finger. “Yes, go on. Take them and I won’t force her to watch me husk you clean of anything of worth.”

“Getting ahead of yourself, ain’t you?” I ask.

“I don’t think so, Mister Shakteel. Though, I am mildly curious as to why you had the stupidity to return.”

“Never been accused of having much more.”

“You should have stayed dead.”

“Didn’t take a shine to it.”

“This time, we’ll see if we can make it stick.”

“You never cared about getting Gortham back, did you?” I slam a fist on his desk. “No, wait.” I hold up a finger aimed at his eye. “You did. Not as the concerned uncle, but as the shit-heel looking to turn a profit on a thing, on a product. A rare product. The rarest of the rare.”

“Mister Shakteel, I am not fond of theater.”

“Tell me and I’ll take your pills. Make it easy on everyone.”

“Very well,” Chirag’s eyes narrow to suspicious squints, “but you take them now.”

“How many?” I reach for the bottle, unscrew it.

“One if you wish merely to dull the pain. Two if you wish blissful euphoria. Any more would be overkill, but consider them gratis if that is your desire.”

“Always been a fan of overkill.” I shake three pills out of the bottle, pop them into my mouth and chew, grimace, swallow. Aashirya clenches my knee as I sit back down. Her hand’s trembling. “Delicious.”

“No chicanery now.” Chirag leans forward, staring with eyebrow raised, at my mouth. “Open.”

“I’m fresh out of chicanery.” I open my mouth and move my tongue to offer a view. The pills leave a chalky-tingle, not entirely unpleasant.

“You surprise me, Mister Shakteel, folding so easily.” Chirag’s grin could light up a morgue at midnight. “But then, you did say you were a broken dog, did you not? I can see that now. And a deal is a deal. I knew what Gortham was from the moment his profile came across my desk.” He puffs up like an overblown rooster. “Of course, I was chief grafter for the Naydari BioTech Corporation for ten years. It was mere serendipity that Gortham was my nephew, which gave me a foot in the door, so to speak. The one-time sale of each item would have been quite substantial.”

“Your own blood…”

“All you had to do was nothing.” He sits back, crosses his legs. “And you couldn’t even accomplish that. You had to keep on digging. Even when it was patently obvious there was nothing to be found.”

“Gortham’s still alive.”

“No profit to be had, then, let us say.”

“I’ll let you say it.”

“At any rate,” he waves a hand as he explains, “in the event you were caught, I was certain you’d have little compunction against rolling on me with the authorities, so of course I took efforts to cut ties with you. Purely a business decision.”

“Fair enough.” He’s right; I don’t do compunction.

“I’m pleased I didn’t misread you.” Chirag rises, buttons his coat, and smooths back his hair, his eyes all for Aashirya now. “Now, is that all?”

“That bonfire business at Brumson’s and in the Boneyard and,” I swallow, “at my place. That was you, too?”

“Loose ends, Mister Shakteel. I don’t wish to spend the remainder of my life behind bars or dangling from a rope.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I say.

“Now,” he ignores me, moving on, “any-thing more?”

“No, that should do it.”

“Very good. Gentlemen,” Chirag turns to his men, “do not kill … him.” He stops dead in his tracks. And why’s he stop dead? Cause the muscle at his six ain’t his muscle. They’re armed, sure. And they’re scary as shit for certain. But they’re ain’t Kalighat creeps and they ain’t his. They’re mine.

Nikunj stands there with a look devoid of human emotion, and the Chieftain of the Zulu Breakers is at his side, minding the door, tall and slender and grim as death incarnate. Brooklyn stands back in the shadows, still gimped on a crutch.

“They dead?” I ask, meaning Chirag’s Kalighat toughs.

“At least.” Nikunj nods down toward Chirag. “And this one?”

I stand up, snatch my coin purse back, push the pill bottle back towards him. “Hungry?”

Chirag rises, digs a hand into his coat, “Wait—”

Nikunj pounces and Chirag’s arm is chicken-winged behind him instantaneously. Bone snaps. Chirag squeals. A second later a Derringer clatters to the floor.

“I’m done with him,” I deadpan as I stroll toward the door, tripping over my numb feet and nearly falling on my face, but Aashirya has me, wraps my arm over her shoulder, practically carries me. “Beauty and the beast,” I gawk in wonder.

“Shut it,” she warns.

“Mister Shakteel, please!” Chirag begs.

“Take the pills,” I say over my shoulder. “Take them all. Gratis.”

But the Chieftain’s already got the pills in hand and I’m betting he won’t be doling them out wholesale.

“Surely there’s some deal that can be struck?” A tremulous pitch to Chirag’s voice, the sound of terror, of anguish, of misery. “I have money! Wares. I—”

“This is purely a business decision.”

“I didn’t—”

“You killed my sons.” I nod to the Chieftain. “You killed his family. Our friends. And, by Brahma, your own gods-damned family. And you set me like a hound on the trail of your own blood so you could cut on him and cut on him and cut on him until there was nothing left but coin cascading through your greedy fingers. That kid had nothing in this world and you tried to steal that from him, too.” I swallow, tremble, can barely stand physically, or my own hypocrisy. “And you made me an accomplice.”

Chirag whines and falls to his knees as the Chieftain draws his stabbing spear.

Borne half by my wife, I lurch out the door, numbness settling like a lead shroud over my limbs. But it keeps to the surface. It doesn’t burrow deep. It doesn’t even tarnish the betrayal gnawing at my guts. At my heart. At my soul. There’s no amount of pills that can dull it. No amount of booze. No amount of anything.

But that’s just how it is sometimes.

Hero or villain or something in between, I’ve come intellectually to accept Gortham’s plight and my own complicity in the nightmare of it all, the second guessing, the sleepless nights, the crushing burden of communal guilt. As though my accepting it somehow matters.

But maybe, just maybe, there’s still some good I can do to atone for the horrors I’ve committed. Something. Somehow. Somewhere. I’m fair certain there’s not, but I’ve been wrong before.