Whipping Boy

by Allen Kurzweil

  A few days later, I broadened the search by adding Aiglon to my list of key words. All that did was grow the grim inventory of alumni tragedy started by Mrs. Senn. The web alerted me to a Belvedere boy who had drowned in a yachting accident off the Florida coast and the avalanche death of the son of the ski instructor who had taught me how to wedel.

  Some nonfatal updates proved equally disturbing. A sexual predator sneaked into the school, anesthetized three girls, and raped them; a chemistry teacher was relieved of his duties after posting a series of homoerotic fantasies online; an Aiglon headmaster spent two years in a Swiss prison cell after his wife accused him—wrongfully, it later emerged—of abusing the younger of their two sons.

  Much to my regret, Cesar Augustus steered clear of such tawdry misfortune. As far as the Internet was concerned, he didn’t even exist. While that frustrated me, it also offered some comfort. It suggested that Cesar Augustus Viana was venturing through life without distinction.

  THE MANILA FOLDER

  Although the web failed to locate Cesar, it did provide an update on the beauty school where Cesar had previously received his mail. According to a site devoted to Filipino jurisprudence, the Realistic Institute was entangled in a protracted civil lawsuit stemming from a tragic accident. Records revealed that on October 24, 1955—in other words, a few years before Cesar was born—a fire had broken out in a downtown Manila warehouse near the beauty school where my future roommate would later receive his mail. Panicked by the ensuing smoke and flames, some 180 cosmetologists-in-training charged toward the institute’s only exit. That stampede resulted in four deaths.

  Relatives of one of the four victims sued the institute’s owner, a woman named Mercedes Teague. The case dragged on until 1973, when the Supreme Court of the Philippines ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Try as I might, I was unable to establish an explicit connection between Mercedes Teague and Cesar Augustus Viana (beyond the mailing address).

  The case popped up while I was investigating Cesar’s family background and, more specifically, his father’s rumored ties to Ferdinand Marcos, the longtime president of the Philippines. The unverified connection made sense to me now, in a way that it hadn’t as a child. The temperament of the Filipino strongman meshed nicely with Cesar’s martial sensibilities. Still, I wanted proof.

  When the web failed to corroborate the hearsay, I contacted an Australian friend who worked for the United Nations. The same day I sent him a note, he emailed an American colleague based in Manila.

  “I have a cryptic request for you,” he told his associate:

  A very old friend of mine periodically sends me very odd emails asking for obscure information. His latest request sets a new standard, and I am going to pass it on to you for a quick bit of local research. In a nutshell, Allen needs to confirm whether the father of some kid who beat him up in a Swiss boarding school (1971–72) was (or was not) head of security under Marcos?! (I have learnt not to ask too many questions BTW). I will let Allen give you more information on surnames etc. . . . and am copying him on this email.

  Matt Sherwin, the young foreign service intern on the receiving end of the email, also responded promptly: “Ha, yes that is a pretty cryptic request, but I’m glad to help. Allen—do you have a name that I could try to track down?”

  {United States Navy}

  Another dead end: Fabian Ver was not Cesar’s father.

  I sent the information he requested and, for good measure, attached a PDF of Teague v. Fernandez, et al. Matt promptly contacted various Filipino politicians, historians, and journalists. He also checked half a dozen Southeast Asian databases. Cesar’s surname didn’t come up.

  “A number of people have asked if I meant Virata, who was Finance Minister under Marcos and PM from ’81–’86,” Matt wrote back.

  No, I assured him. It’s not Virata.

  “What about Gen. Fabian C. Ver, who was in charge of security of Marcos (Presidential Security Command)?”

  No, it wasn’t Ver, either.

  “I think this confirms that the Marcos claims were fictitious,” I informed Matt in an email thanking him for his help, adding in a postscript: “If business ever takes you near the building where the four girls perished, I’d love to get a JPEG, but don’t put yourself out.”

  As I hoped, Matt ignored my feigned discouragement. A few days later, he sent me thirteen JPEGs and the following reconnaissance report:

  Allen, I couldn’t find a Barbosa Street in Quiapo. The court opinion mentions the corner of Quezon Blvd. and Soler St. as the location of the Realistic Institute. Quezon Blvd. is a main thoroughfare, Soler St. a side street that runs perpendicular to Quezon, but, at least as of today, does not intersect with it. Soler intersects Evangelista (parallel to Quezon) about 70 meters short of Quezon, where it turns into Florante. Florante is a tight alley of crammed living spaces on one side and an abandoned building on the other. It does not intersect with Quezon; the alley ends with more of these “homes,” on the other side of which is Quezon.

  It pleased me to learn I wasn’t the only one who took research way too seriously. Surveying the photographs Matt attached to his email, I was struck by the squalor. It was hard to connect Cesar to the seedy locale. Geographically and economically, Quiapo was a world away from Aiglon. No hay fields, no milk cows, no aristocrats. And it wasn’t the Alps that loomed in the background. It was the faded facade of the Philippine College of Criminology.

  {© Matt Sherwin}

  The location, in Manila, of the defunct Realistic Institute.

  WHITE OWL CIGAR BOX

  A few months after the search hit an impasse for the umpteenth time, it was revived by Max while we were visiting my mother at her summerhouse on Cape Cod. He approached me as I wrestling with a rope of bittersweet, an invasive vine that has killed off much of the Cape’s native flora.

  “Hey, Dad, check this out!”

  I took a look. He was holding a battered White Owl cigar box he’d discovered in the bottom of a trunk. I put down my loppers and pulled off my gloves. As soon as I opened the lid, I was transported back in time.

  The cigar box was full of Swiss memorabilia: ski patches and postage stamps, a wooden match safe encased in a tiny ski boot, a dried-up sea horse. (How that found its way into the box, I can’t say.) A small pink object the size of a Scrabble tile caught Max’s attention. “What is that?”

  “A Sugus. Your grandfather introduced me to them. They’re like Starburst, only better.”

  “No way!”

  “Yes way.”*

  Max held up a small Swiss coin. “How much is this worth?”

  “Ten centimes? It would have paid for a game of foosball.”

  “What’s this?” Max produced a rusty red disk of metal.

  “My rank badge.”

  I was holding the patch I had torn from my Aiglon blazer on July 4, 1972, running my fingers over the motto (“God Is My Strength”), when Max produced the tape cassette.

  The Swiss time capsule Max found in the bottom of a trunk.

  “Jesus Christ!” I blurted out. I couldn’t have cursed more relevantly if I’d chosen my words with care. What the hell was that doing in the box?

  “Uh, Dad?”

  Did I swipe it to stop the performances?

  “Dad?”

  Was it given to me as a sadistic going-away present?

  “Yoo-hoo. Earth to Dad.”

  Did I buy it, like a brainwashed hostage who forms a pathological attachment to his abductors?

  “Dad? You okay? You look funny.”

  Max was around twelve—old enough to receive an unedited account of my alpine terrors.

  As usual, he was full of questions. “Did Cesar really whip you, or was it just pretend?”

  “A bit of both.”

  “What kind of belt did he use?”

  “A normal belt.”

  “Did you tell?”

  “Kids didn’t tell back then. Not at that school.”

  “That sucks.”<
br />
  “Not as much as when he and another kid swiped my dad’s—your grandfather’s—watch.”

  “What a douche!”

  A few days later, I decided to play the ancient tape. In the graveyard of electronics that clutters our attic, I found a cassette player minus its power cord. After a futile attempt to match some dozen adaptors to the obsolete device, I pried open the battery compartment, removed the leaky C-cells, cleaned the heads, popped in three new batteries, reinserted the audiotape, and pressed PLAY.

  I barely made it through the overture before I was overcome by nausea and hit STOP. I tried more than once that day to listen to “The Thirty-Nine Lashes.” I couldn’t. I tried a week later and failed that time, too.

  Despite my persistence certain stuff remained off-limits. Why was that? What caused me to swing between compulsion and revulsion? It was hard enough to ask questions like that. Finding answers was all but impossible.

  PART III

  “A LIE, A CONTRIVANCE, A FICTION”

  I like treachery, but I cannot say anything good of traitors.

  Caesar Augustus, in Plutarch’s Life of Romulus

  If you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

  Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test

  “THRONE FOR A LOOP”

  Until Max found the cigar box, evidence relating to my search fit comfortably in the slim journal bearing Cesar’s name and a couple of manila folders. (Given the subject’s birthplace, manila folders seemed an appropriate storage solution.) The new cache of materials demanded a bigger container, so I consolidated the materials and placed them in a document box, which I labeled the Cesareum.

  The title was wishful. Although I had surveyed an impressive pantheon of imperial impostors, my ex-roommate—the real Cesar—remained at large, his whereabouts and personal history a complete and total mystery.

  Once more I was standing at a crossroads: abandon the inquiry or pull out all the stops. The choice was obvious.

  My revived efforts began in 2005 at a major research institution that subscribed to a broad range of licensed news sources. When I explained at the reference desk what I was after, a sympathetic librarian overlooked the institution’s user restrictions and slipped me a password that allowed access to dozens of proprietary databases. When I thanked him, he said, “No problem. I had a Cesar when I was growing up.”

  Most of the digital records proved useless. They either duplicated material I had already obtained or supplemented information about irrelevant Cesars. Only one fresh lead emerged, but boy, was it a doozy! A passing reference to a new Cesar appeared in a 2001 New York Post article bearing the headline: ‘KNIGHT FALLS’ AS FEDS BUST UP A ROYAL RIPOFF. Here’s how the story began:

  A trio of American fraudsters posing as fake European royalty were busted on charges they swindled more than $1 million out of unsuspecting investors, authorities said yesterday.

  The three allegedly posed as a British knight, a Serbian prince and a German prince to pitch bogus “medium-term notes” to investors in a scheme dating back to 1997.

  The article went on to allege that the three con men duped dozens of sophisticated investors into entering loan agreements with the Badische Trust Consortium, a sham investment house claiming to manage some $60 billion. According to the Post, the fake financiers rented suites in Switzerland, traveled on diplomatic passports issued by the Knights of Malta, and adhered to a fourteen-point dress code that required the use of walking sticks, homburg hats, and Montblanc fountain pens.

  The names of the crooks were equally preposterous. The chairman of the bank was identified as Prince Robert von Badische (rhymes with baddish), his chief lieutenant called himself the Baron Moncrieffe, and their youthful “administrator” was known as Colonel Sherry. And how did the man whose name matched my roommate’s figure into the cockamamie con? “Cesar A. Viana” was one of two so-called independent project consultants who, according to a federal prosecutor, “lured [the victims] in with false promises of big money.”

  It’s my guy! I told myself. It’s got to be!

  The Badische fraud, with its reliance on theatricality, manipulation, and misdirection, was a perfect sequel to the juvenile spectacles Cesar staged in the tower. In fact, it was the apotheosis of all things Cesarean, even going so far as to exploit my nemesis’s preferred brand of fountain pen. Never in my wildest dreams had I expected to unearth such exquisite corroboration of childhood villainy. Max had been right all along. Once a bully, always a bully.

  For the next five hours, I sat glued in front of the library computer, greedily downloading every reference to the crime I could find. The pinch-me feeling only grew when I learned that all the defendants (except for Prince Robert, who only eluded prosecution by skipping town) were tried, convicted, and sent to federal prison.

  Given the outlandish nature of the fraud, it was puzzling that the news coverage hadn’t spread much beyond New York. (The AP, for example, limited its reporting to a brief arrest bulletin.) Still, the local tabloids had a field day with the headlines. The Daily News was partial to forced rhyme (41 MOS. IN SLAMMER FOR PRINCELY SCAMMER and PRISON FOR SCAMMIN’ BARON), whereas the Post had a weakness for puns: THRONE FOR A LOOP and ROYAL FLUSHED.

  The reporting itself was pretty perfunctory. I did, however, pull up one lengthy piece about the crime, but it was written in Dutch. I forwarded the story to a translator I’d met years before at a literary festival, along with this melodramatic note:

  Nadine, I’m contacting you with a sense of dire (but thrilling) urgency. I believe I’ve located a despicable boy who tormented me during a miserable year (1971) at an English boarding school in Switzerland. . . . Details of his postgraduate crime spree are (in part) chronicled in an article I cannot read. Do you think you could supply a translation? (See attachment.)

  I was on a high, confident that the Dutch article would amplify the perfunctory local coverage. But that Gotcha! feeling vaporized when I came across a photograph of the criminals in a New York Post article headlined CON JOB “KINGDOM”—EX-GI ON TRIAL IN $50B FANTASY-NATION SCAM.

  None of the men in the group portrait resembled my former roommate, which raised doubts I was trying to ignore: How could I be sure the convicted shill was my childhood bully? Maybe I had stumbled upon another false positive.

  Only two concrete biographical details about Cesar the shill emerged from the news reports: (1) he resided in San Francisco, and (2) he was forty-four years old at the time of trial, in 2002.

  The first fact was of little significance. Although a quick search confirmed that nearly one in five residents of San Francisco claim Filipino ancestry, that hardly explained how a Manila-born kid educated in Switzerland had relocated to the Bay Area.

  The second fact was more encouraging. The ages of the two Cesars matched. The forty-four-year-old criminal would have been twelve when I was ten.

  So where did that leave things? Was I confident my Cesar was the San Francisco con man? Yes. Was I certain? No.

  FEAR

  I told Max about the scam.

  “Cesar’s a crook? Cool!”

  “He might be a crook. I’m not a hundred percent sure.”

  “Same first and last name? Same age? What are the chances?”

  I pulled out the Belvedere house photo. “Compare this kid”—I tapped the face of a frowning schoolboy—“to the guys in the newspaper photo. None of the con men have the kid’s eyes or nose. And the smile is completely different.”

  “Where is he now?” Max asked.

  “In prison.”

  “Forever?”

  “No, not forever, kiddo. He got thirty-seven months.”

  “That’s all? W
hen will he be out?”

  “I’m guessing in about a year.”

  “What happens then? What if he tracks us down? What if he steals all our money like he did those other people’s?” Max was no longer young enough to believe that his father was invincible. The prospect of facing a real criminal who had stolen real money from real people made my son anxious. Hell, it made me anxious. All the more so when I realized Max was the age I had been when the Cesar saga began.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “It’s probably not the same guy. And even if it is, the guy knows nothing about us, and there’s no reason he ever will.”

  “So you won’t try beating him up?”

  {© New York Post}

  The photo in the New York Post identified only Colonel Sherry (seen standing on the left) by name. Was the fellow on the far right my former roommate?

  “I have no interest in beating him up,” I assured my son. But Max’s question raised a deeper issue. What would I do if I ever crossed paths with Cesar? I had invested so much energy looking for him, and yet neglected to consider the consequences of actually finding him. In fact, I had actively avoided confronting the consequences of confronting Cesar. Doing otherwise would have forced me to face feelings of vengeance and anguish roiling just below the surface of the search.

  Max’s concerns were echoed by Françoise. “What do we know about him?” she said. “Maybe he is violent.”

  I tell her what I told Max. “It’s probably not even the same person.”

  “Whether he is or isn’t, promise me you won’t make contact.”

  I felt torn. Françoise was right to worry. Still, I wasn’t willing to abandon the search. Not now. Not before confirming that I’d found my fugitive. “You’re the one who first pushed me to look for Cesar, remember?”