The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Roberts

‘All the street boys have tested him. Nothin’. He doesn’t buy drugs, doesn’t drink, not even beer. No girls.’
    ‘We’ll work it out, Scorp. Don’t worry.’
    ‘It’s weird,’ Scorpio frowned. ‘I’m really going outta my mind, y’know?’
    I tugged a fold of hundred-rupee notes from my pocket, and gave it to him. Scorpio took it in a faltering hand, but then slipped it into a pocket concealed inside his shirt.
    ‘Thanks, Lin,’ he said, looking up quickly to meet my eyes. ‘I was waiting here to ask you to help me, because I haven’t been on the street. The watchman told me you were still out. But then I saw you were with Lisa, and I couldn’t let her see me. I didn’t want to ask for money in front of her. She has a high opinion of me.’
    ‘We all need money sometimes. And Lisa always has a high opinion of you, whether you need money or not.’
    He had tears in his eyes. I didn’t want to see them.
    ‘Listen, you and Gemini,’ I said, leading him across the street again, ‘you guys lay up some supplies, buy some shit, and take a room at the Frantic. Stay there for a couple of days. We’ll find out who this guy is, and we’ll deal with it, okay?’
    ‘Okay,’ he said, shaking my hand with the tremble in his. ‘You think the Frantic’s pretty safe, yeah?’
    ‘The Frantic hotel is the only one that’ll take you and your lifestyle, Scorp.’
    ‘Oh . . . yeah . . . ’
    ‘This mystery man won’t get past the desk there. Not in a suit. Keep your heads down, and you’ll be safe at the Frantic until we figure this out.’
    ‘Okay. Okay.’
    He walked away, stooping his tall frame beneath the loose fronds of the hedge. I watched him do the street guy’s night walk: slowly, nonchalantly in the pools of street light – Honest Joe, nothing to hide  – then scurrying faster in the shadowed sections of the street.
    I slipped a twenty-rupee note to the watchman, standing beside me, and climbed the marble stairs to the apartment. Lisa stood in the bathroom doorway while I showered, and I told her about Scorpio George’s white-haired stalker.
    ‘But who is this guy?’ she asked as I stepped out of the shower. ‘What does he want with the Zodiacs?’
    ‘I dunno. Naveen Adair, the guy I told you about before? He smells lawyer. He might be right. He’s a smart kid. One way or another, we’ll find out who this guy is.’
    Dried off again, I flopped down on the bed beside Lisa, my head resting on the satin breeze of her breast. From that position I looked down along the length of her naked body to her feet.
    ‘Rosanna likes you,’ she said, shifting the direction of the conversation with an elegant gesture to the left with both feet.
    ‘I doubt it.’
    ‘Why? What happened with her?’
    ‘Nothing . . . happened .’
    ‘ Something happened when you were talking to her outside. What did you say?’
    ‘We just . . . talked about Goa.’
    ‘Oh, no,’ she sighed. ‘She’s nuts about Goa.’
    ‘So I discovered.’
    ‘But she does like you. No matter what you said about Goa.’
    ‘I . . . don’t think so.’
    ‘Oh, yeah. She certainly dislikes you, too, at the same time. But she definitely likes you.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘She was angry enough to hit you, when I came out.’
    ‘She was? I thought we reached a good place.’
    ‘She was ready to hit you, so she likes you a lot.’
    ‘Ah . . . how does that work?’
    ‘She was angry enough to hit you, and she doesn’t even know you, see?’
    I didn’t, but that wasn’t unusual: Lisa had her own way of incommunicating.
    ‘It’s all so clear now.’
    ‘Was she doing her body language thing,’ she asked, ‘when she was talking to you?’
    ‘What body language thing?’
    ‘She fakes a sore back, and starts rolling her hips in a circle. Did she do that?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘That’s good.’
    ‘It is?’
    ‘Yeah, because it’s pretty sexy, and she did it for me, and not for you.’
    ‘There’s a