Free Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra Page A

seen with film stars.’
    â€˜Gaitonde…’
    â€˜But you know, I’ve had all that. And I’ll beat you. Even in this last game I’ll beat you.’
    â€˜How? You have some of your boys in there with you?’
    â€˜No. Not one. I told you, I’m alone.’
    â€˜A tunnel? A helicopter hidden inside?’
    Gaitonde chuckled. ‘No, no.’
    â€˜What then? You have a battery of Bofors guns?’
    â€˜No. But I’ll beat you.’
    The bulldozer was shimmering on the black road, flanked by grim-eyed policemen. Their choices were narrowing rapidly, leading them inevitably to this metal door, and they were determined, and helpless, and afraid.
    â€˜Gaitonde,’ Sartaj said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Last chance. Come on, yaar. This is stupid.’
    â€˜I can’t do it. Sorry.’
    â€˜All right. Just stay back from the door when we come in. And have your hands up.’
    â€˜Don’t worry,’ Gaitonde said. ‘I’m no danger.’
    Sartaj stood up straight, his back to the door, and checked his revolver. He rotated the cylinder, and the yellow bullets sat fat and round in the metal. The heat came through the soles of his shoes, into his feet.
    Suddenly the speaker came to life again against his shoulder blade. ‘Sartaj, you called me yaar. So I’ll tell you something. Build it big or small, there is no house that is safe. To win is to lose everything, and the game always wins.’
    Sartaj could feel the tinny trembling in his chest from the speaker. The machine in front of him produced a blare that pressed him back against the door, and it was enough. He palmed the cylinder back into the revolver, and stepped off the porch. ‘All right,’ he shouted. ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ He waved towards the door with the weapon. The speaker was buzzing again, but Sartaj wasn’t listening. As he walked away, he thought that under the engine’s roar he heard a last fragment, a question: ‘Sartaj Singh, do you believe in God?’
    Sartaj called, ‘Come on, Bashir Ali, move.’ Bashir Ali raised a hand, and Sartaj pointed a rigid finger at him. ‘Get that thing moving.’
    Bashir Ali crouched in his high seat, and the behemoth lurched forward, past Sartaj, and smashed against the building with a dull crunch, raising a soaring cloud of plaster. But after a moment, when the bulldozer pulled back, the building still stood complete and sacrosanct, the doornot even dented. Only the video camera had been injured: it lay next to the door, flattened neatly half-way along its length. A long jeer rose from the crowd down the street. It grew louder when Bashir Ali switched off his engine.
    â€˜What was that?’ Sartaj said when Bashir Ali stepped down into the bulldozer’s shadow.
    â€˜What do you expect when you won’t let me do it the way it should be done?’
    They were both wiping plaster from their noses. On the sunlit side of the bulldozer the crowd was chanting, ‘Jai Gaitonde.’
    â€˜Do you know the way to do it?’
    Bashir Ali shrugged. ‘I have an idea.’
    â€˜All right,’ Sartaj said. ‘Fine. Do it how you want.’
    â€˜Get out of my way then. And get your men back from the building.’
    As Bashir Ali spun his steed on the gravel, Sartaj saw that he was an artist. He operated with flicks and thumps of his hands on the driving sticks, leaning into the direction of his turns, in sympathy with the groaning gears underneath. He raised and then lowered his blade, positioning it precisely, with its lower extended edge level with the door. He reversed ten feet, twenty, thirty, his arm jauntily on the back of his seat. He came at the building at a diagonal, and as he went past Sartaj he gleamed a white grin. This time there was a scream of metal, and when the violent juddering of the bulldozer had ceased, Sartaj saw that the door had been