Hala and I step back behind a stall selling kulfi ice cream, keeping out of Hassan’s eyeline. Behind us, a group of men play cards for thin stacks of rupee notes. Meanwhile, our mark pockets his sunglasses and lights up a cigarette, leaning against the wall to enjoy his smoke.
“Where are we going to talk to him?” Hala asks.
“Right there. He won’t want a drama in front of his kid. Anyway, what else are we going to do? Ask him to dinner?”
“What if he runs?” she asks.
“Two of us, one of him,” I reply.
“Weapon?” she asks.
“Not seeing anything on him, are you?”
She peers at Hassan one more time and agrees.
“I’ll go talk to him, you run backup,” I tell her.
Hala stays where she is while I start walking toward Hassan. He has a strong face, all jawbone and angles, with a broad forehead that juts out like a cliff face, leaving his eyes in shadow.
“Hassan Shah?” I say.
He throws down his cigarette and a tendril of acrid smoke curls up from where it lies, still burning, on the ground. I raise the heel of my boot and grind down the butt with my foot.
“I need to talk to you about the school attack that happened this morning.”
“What attack?” he says, his eyes holding mine, aggressive. Well, either I just found the only man in Mumbai who hasn’t heard about the bombing, or he’s already lying.
“Your photo ID is on record, visiting the school. If you don’t want to end up taking the blame for this, we need to talk.”
He hesitates, probably trying to figure out who on earth I am.
“Who are you? British police? What are you doing here?”
His upper lip starts to sweat. He glances back into the garage, at his son’s legs, sticking out from under the car.
“Your son doesn’t need to know.”
He nods, his breathing shallow.
“Just relax. Why don’t we step around the back and talk . . . ?”
He nods again. And then he takes off. He just runs, propelling himself across the road, between idling traffic and into a tiny side street. He moves faster than I would have imagined. Pounding after him, I calculate that he has a hundred feet on me already. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Hala running like mad, coming up on my right side.
“I told you he’d run,” she complains.
I pick up speed, intent on catching him quickly, but Hassan turns fast and is smart enough to go straight for the heart of a looming slum area ahead. It looks like a warren of tiny lanes and ramshackle tin houses. He probably knows it inside out too, making it the worst possible place for us to keep track of him.
I glance at Hala. She gestures upward, and as we veer to the right to follow Hassan’s trail, she clambers up a single-story home and gets onto the roof. From there, she stays high, running across the roofs of dwellings that are built tightly together, bounding across gaps like a mountain goat, following him from above. But I’ve lost Hassan completely.
“Turn left,” Hala directs me in my ear, from her bird’s-eye view. “Then first right.”
Following her directions, I slide into another tiny street, my feet skidding into something wet that I think it’s better I ignore—and now I glimpse his banana-print shirt up ahead. He hurtles along, veering left suddenly. I follow him directly into someone’s house—he’s upturned a cooking pot, people are gasping, and then yelling at us. Up ahead of me, my target runs out of the back door, ripping his way through a bright blue sari that’s hanging out to dry. The soft, winding cloth billows up, settling gently right in my path, entangling me for a moment.
“Where are you?” Hala pants in my ear. “Turn left, he’s in the tunnel.”
Pushing aside the sari, I sprint to try to make up time, and find myself hurtling into a dark concrete tunnel that runs under a bridge. Pounding through, I can see the dark silhouette of the guy as he exits the other side of it.
“Can’t you jump him?” I ask Hala.
As I run, the walls echo my pounding steps off all sides, drowning Hala’s reply. I emerge back into the beating sunshine and turn right, tearing after a glimpse of Hassan’s shirt and into a road that stretches around between tightly packed street vendors. Chaos descends on me like fog. There are so many people, suddenly, jostling between stalls that sprawl out all over the narrow lanes. I keep running with smells, sounds, images blurring around me. Pots and pans hanging off hooks clatter as I pass, long ropes of chilies dry in the sun, some kind of street food sizzles in hot oil, hawkers shout, piles of vegetables loom up before me, a cart pulled by a cow crosses my path. Surprised shouts from people in the street follow me as they watch me barrel through. Up ahead, a painfully thin dog is snapping at the heels of someone who’s just disappeared. I follow, avoiding the dog, who is standing still now, barking like mad, but I can’t see Hassan. This side street is quieter and it winds uphill, long and thin; there’s no way he could have gotten to the end of it already.
“Where is he?” I pant to Hala.
A noise of frustration in my earpiece tells me that she has no idea either. Glancing up, I see Hala appear on a roof opposite, still moving, still scanning around for any sight of him. Then I see it, crumpled in the gutter ahead of me. The banana-print shirt.
“He’s taken off his shirt,” I tell her. Smart move, considering how conspicuous it is.
Looking for a bare chest helps her. “Got him!” she mutters.
She leaps across to another roof, then bounces like a strip of lightning along a thin wall, a hundred feet ahead of me. In a busy jumble of people up ahead, I catch sight of our shirtless man moving quickly, but now he’s trying not to run and draw attention to himself. I scramble to follow. He slides into a tiny street barbershop and plucks something from the counter, then whips back out and runs left. Hala is far ahead of him, so I veer left to try to head him off. My feet pound through a narrow lane where a naked toddler chases a chicken. A mechanical sound and a waft of oily fumes drift over to me, but I hardly notice as I hurdle over the flapping bird and the kid and keep going, skittering out of the alleyway in the hope that our target will run right into me.
But that sound and those fumes belong to a train. Thick iron tracks rear up right before me, right next to the densely packed buildings we’ve been running through. A freight train has just rumbled through. Car after car of containers move inexorably, slowly, up a route that winds off into the distance, where the sun is just beginning to lower into the late-afternoon sky. And our shirtless target is far ahead of me, running alongside the final car. With a magnificent leap, he grabs hold of the metal railing on the end of it and hauls himself up. He’s too distant for me to catch now; I can see him panting as he turns and gives me a long look. From back here I can’t really tell if he’s smiling, but it feels like he might be.
8
I WATCH HASSAN AS HE moves away from me, clinging to the side of the train—but now it’s my turn to smile. Because I can see something that he can’t. Hala is on the roof of that train, walking toward the very carriage that he’s hanging off. Her gait is careful but relaxed. Now that I’ve caught my breath, I start running again. I can’t catch up, but I can keep the train and our target, not to mention Hala, within range.