Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Getting into clubs like Vito’s was a breeze if you had Ham. Hanging with him meant your life was in the commuter lane, no waiting, no hang-ups, zipping right along while taxpayers sat fuming. Clubs were free; movies were seen months before release; musicians worked his name into songs. Everybody owed him. He needed to be owed. He was lonely. The loneliest is the person with the largest entourage.

  I joined the debtors. That’s as far as I could go in the commitment business.

  “I’m not saying you aren’t special, Devi,” Linda, my psychic neighbor, warned. “But so’s everyone. Take anyone in our building, take anyone in the universe. You think that poor schmuck from that Van-whatever place isn’t special when there’s a bounty on his head? And how about the little girls who traipse up our stairs to get their cunts sewn by the resident charlatan? Let me tell you about a client I’m counseling.”

  We were sharing oven space. I was heating up the last slice of a soy-cheese, artichoke and clam pizza, and Linda was roasting herbs guaranteed to lower blood pressure. Loco Larry was in our upstairs kitchen too, defrosting the fridge with a mallet and a spatula, but he had on his Walkman. Like the blonde with the DEVI vanities at the state line, Larry knew to make himself the center of the world that mattered.

  “Just a normal kid,” Linda went on. “Pacific Heights. Nice parents, nice siblings, decent grades. But in his previous life he was an Indian from India. The kid threw bombs, shot up cops, gave the British Raj a tough time. Such a hard time that the British shipped him off to a convict island and hanged him. Last winter the family finally took a trip to this island. The Andamans? Heard of it? It’s a tourist trap now. Lots of fat Germans with fancy cameras checking out the empty prisons. But here’s the thing. This kid from Pacific Heights found the spot on the wall of his old jail cell where he’d scratched his name with his fingernails. The kid leads his folks straight to the wall and reads off his name as though Indian’s his mother tongue!”

  I accepted Linda’s chastisement. Every life is special. Some wondrous events transpire without making tabloid headlines. Linda was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany, spoke her first word (cuidado!) in Argentina, married a Japanese doctor in Brazil and divorced him in Chile, then found fulfillment as a psychic in the Haight.

  So here’s my not-so-special history as Fred Pointer told me in installments during early-morning runs at the Golden Gate Park.

  In a small-town courthouse in Rajasthan, India, Mr. Raj, the Bombay associate of Vulture, located files of cases going back further than fifty years. The files were bundled into bedsheets and cloth squares by year and month by court clerks and stacked on tops of cabinets by sweepers. Mr. Raj has also heard Hari, the oldest resident of Devigaon, a village now in danger of being swallowed by the town with the courthouse, tell lurid tales of a sahib and his memsahibs who smoked hemp, danced naked and made human sacrifice.

  Hari, half blind and long retired as watchman of the courthouse, won’t give up his broken stool to younger gatekeepers who can read and write but who can’t remember as far back as Hari can.

  Here’s a transcript of one of three conversations Mr. Raj had with Hari, though something may have been lost or doctored in Mr. Raj’s translation.

  This happened some time ago, I was working as chief chowkidar in tourist bungalow where rich ladies from foreign came for spotting birds in every bush, shrub and tree.

  How many years ago, Hari? Ten years, twenty years?

  I answer your question with my own question. I ask you, sir, I ask you who wear expensive watch bought in foreign, what is time when our universes rise many times and fall many more times within one eye-wink of God Brahma? When this event came to pass, I was a fit fellow, I was carrying three-four suitcases on my head and running from the train station to the tourist guest house with no stop, no drop, no cough. No arthritis in neck nor knees, and my teeth … my teeth were so strong I used to chew sugarcane stalks …

  So what was the crime you witnessed, Hari? What did the foreigners do?

  The sahib and memsahibs? The ones who danced naked before they sacrificed one mem and one baby?

  Here Mr. Raj resorts to summary. It was a cold night, because Hari was wearing a wool vest, a scarf and what the PI identifies as a “monkey cap” with slits for eyes and lips. Hari and three cronies were drinking country liquor in a dead rajah’s palace ruins when the sahib drove into view in a huge, fancy automobile. The sahib looked like a Bombay film “hero,” only more handsome. Hari described him as wearing blue jeans like Bombay film stars, and moving the way a cheetah springs for the kill.

  Then it’s back to transcript format.

  Hari, did you witness the killings?

  I am saying a killer’s hands began a job. Whether the hands were guided by the killer’s head or by the killer’s fate, who can say?

  But you admit that you were present at the scene. Is that correct, Hari?

  I was present and also not-present. How can we attain Nirvana if we say this is this and only this and that other is that other and only that other when this is a guise of that and when these are those and these-those are one single undifferentiated thing? I will say this much, sir, I was smoking bidi with my friends and we were drinking home-brewed toddy in palace ruins and the sahib and his two memsahib were visible smoking hemp and drinking bottled whiskey.

  So what was the MO? Hari, how did the sahib do his killing?

  First everybody was living. One, two, three and the baby, so altogether four dancing and singing. Then two became corpses and two kept dancing.

  Then you reported the incident to the police.

  You think I’m a fool, sir? You think police wouldn’t lock me up as low-caste chowkidar with toddy on his breath and accuse me of the killing and stealing?

  Did you not report the murders?

  I ran fast-fast to sore grease women. Sore grease are old women from foreign but they have been in Devigaon so long they no longer act like memsahib. I told the sore grease women about the dead baby and the dead memsahib.

  [N. B. “Sore grease” caused me some extra time, for which I shall not bill your client. I consider it personal research. The phrase means “Gray Sisters,” but in French, bounced back to local English. “Sore grease” ’s original spelling may be “Soeurs Grises.”]

  Life bytes. I didn’t try to get them to make sense.

  After a run one morning Fred and I were standing side by side, looking down on the scummy water pooled in the ruined Sutro Baths, when Fred sprung Hari’s story about the ghost on me. Fred led into the ghost stuff by reading out a paragraph from a report faxed in the night before by Mr. Raj.

  “ ‘ESP is not considered at all extraordinary in villages like Devigaon where villagers routinely encounter ghosts, gods, demons and headless monsters.’ ”

  “Okay, so he’s not charging for the French lesson,” I interrupted, “but now he wants money to hire a psychic and an exorciser?”

  “Okay.” Fred shrugged. “I’ll put it in words you can understand. Your father is one of the most notorious serial murderers in modern history. He’s rotting in an Indian jail even as we speak. One of his early victims, in fact, was his baby daughter. In other words, you. Hari saw you die. You died, Devi, and you turned into a ghost. You’re still haunting poor old Hari’s village. Satisfied?”

  “I’m dead?”

  “Killed when you were a baby.” Fred picked up a small rock, weighed it in his palm, then lobbed it at the ruins. “You turned into a ghost hours after you were killed.”

  Hari’d witnessed the murders of two firangi the night he’d been drinking with his buddies in the dead rajah’s broken palace. Overnight, one of the corpses had changed itself into a ghost. The morning after, four boys on their way to the Late Maharaja Mohan Primary School stumbled upon only one female firangi body. They’d found the corpse lying facedown across a path that had connected, once upon a time, Maharaja Mohan’s palace with the school he’d built. Her neck had been snapped back and broken. Vult
ures had torn into the corpse. Field rats had feasted on soft tissue.

  Soft tissue, I thought. What a concept.

  Bio-Daddy of the killer hands had wanted the body found. Admire my art, envy my strength. He’d seen himself as a proud artist. I could learn a lesson or two from Bio-Daddy.

  “My man Rajeev lucked out,” Fred said. “Turns out that one of the four schoolboys who discovered the body is chief constable in a neighboring district.” Then he did a Peter-Sellers-doing-Indian-English number. “What murder? No murder was committed by no person. It was an open and shut case of self-indulgence, you see. Hippie people are having only sex and drugs on their brain, no? A decision was made at highest levels to keep such nonsensical business out of press et cetera. Why harm India’s fledgling tourist industry?”

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  “If you can’t handle it, maybe you should quit.”

  “Soft tissue,” I said out loud.

  Mr. Raj stayed on the footloose strangler’s trail. The strangler killed again, in another village not far from Hari’s. Bodies were discovered again, this time in a clearing not far from a dried-out well. And again, again, on fogbound plateaus and silvered beaches. The victims were always young backpackers. Bio-Dad killed at first to be admired, then kept killing to be noticed. I was back in Frankie Fong’s Asia: hot, smoky, full of liars and cheats. In Bio-Dad’s overcrowded Asia, how does even an ambitious killer get himself noticed? No media coverage, no computerized Victim-Net, no milk cartons, no xeroxed flyers.

  In Bangkok the lovers quarreled. They made up in Bali, to break up again in Surabaja. In Katmandu he added a Romanian to his harem. In Colombo, a Swiss. In Kabul he spent a day in jail for cursing a policeman. In all these cities, and in Chiang Mai, Srinagar and Taipei, he strangled, he conned, he made love to women he liked and to women he scorned and, who knows, maybe left my half siblings behind. In Singapore the lovers quarreled one final time. The woman went to the Singapore police and ratted on the man. She accused him of having strangled give or take seventeen men and women. The cops locked her up on drug-peddling charges, and passed her stories on to Interpol. Two Interpol agents interviewed her, and one of them believed her. She repeated her story about the seventeen murders, and went into detail about the when, where and how they’d been committed. She said nothing about the two killings in Devigaon, she said nothing about me at all. Interpol tracked her lover through Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, to a hill station in India. The name the lover gave the Indian police when they booked him was Romeo Hawk. The suspect confessed to killing five, but was convicted of killing nine and sentenced to nine consecutive life sentences. He let Mr. Raj visit him in jail on condition that Mr. Raj brought him the latest Tom Clancy and a carton of cigarettes.

  “Rajeev says the guy’s a nutrition purist and a work-outaholic. The cigarettes were for bribing guards,” Fred explained.

  Rajeev Raj has met Bio-Dad; I envy him that. I don’t have any idea what he looks like and what he sounds like. Smooth as butter, I’ll bet. I got my good looks from him, and my fantastic good luck. So I chant Frankie’s Asia mantra. Hot, smoky, full of liars and cheats and murderers. But all I can picture is a pair of hands. The hands swat at flies, scorpions, spiders, roaches. The cell floor is thick with bug corpses.

  I didn’t have to go on those dawn walks in Land’s End with Fred. I didn’t have to authorize Mr. Raj’s trip to the shabby retreat house of Les Soeurs Grises in Mount Abu. I didn’t have to find out what act of charity Sister Madeleine Corveau, originally of Levis, Quebec, had performed in Devigaon the same night that Hari’d come running to her with his tales of human folly and wickedness.

  Sister Madeleine spoke to Mr. Raj in the Devigaon dialect. She’d lived in the village for over forty years. Mr. Raj translated and summarized what he thought important. Fred hadn’t brought the full report with him. Too bulky, he claimed. He pulled a couple of sheets out of his sweatpants and handed them over.

  “She was near death,” Mr. Raj reported Sister Madeleine’s having said.

  Minutes from death. I saw her, but not right away. It was a dark night, and I had only my torch. I’d missed her at first because she had crawled under the poor woman’s skirt, the dead woman’s, may her soul rest in peace. Only when I tried to lift the dead, the dead are so heavy, no?… it was horrible, too horrible. Fortunately we kept all kinds of anti-toxins in our little dispensary. Villagers get snakebites, liquor poisoning, rabies. They come to the Soeurs Grises. The sore grease, they call us. Some stay around and find Jesus. Not anymore, you understand. People don’t want us here anymore, the country doesn’t want foreign missionaries. Now I’m a pariah. But I don’t remember French, I can’t dream of Levis.

  I take it that you saved the child, Sister?

  Jesus did.

  Afterwards you arranged the adoption? I know your order places children in Europe, America and Canada.

  We did the only right thing under the circumstances. We took the child to her mother.

  But the mother was in jail, wasn’t she?

  Ministering to women prisoners, especially firangi [foreign, white] women prisoners, that was one of our duties. The warden told us the mother wanted cigarettes. So first time, we came with a Bible and two packs of cigarettes. Next time we came with Faustine, and more cigarettes. That was the name we gave, we named our orphans like typhoons, Adele, Bella, Catherine … she was our sixth that year, such a pretty little imp.

  The prisoner must have been overjoyed, Sister.

  The damned construe the Good Lord’s interventions as curses. The woman thanked us for the cigarettes.

  I dealt with that sucker punch by handing the sheets back to Fred. The sun floated out over the bay, like a balloon.

  “I should be heading back,” Fred said. “I do have other clients. I have a life, you know.”

  “Who’s stopping you?” I stalked off ahead of Fred. He didn’t follow.

  The trail felt steep, stark, damp. A man on a mountain bike passed me slowly. Then he wheelied around. He cut two tight loops around me. He watched me, but said nothing. He had on a camouflage jacket. He hadn’t been in any wars; he’d fried his own brains. I felt sad for Loco Larry. I felt sad for the baby girl the Gray Nuns’d brought to visit the prisoner. I felt sad for all the dumped and discarded. I heard the cypresses wail.

  As Ham scouted free parking not too far from Vito’s, I slipped in my question. “About Jess and you …”

  They’d been involved. At one time or another he’d been involved, he said, with all the women I had met, or might meet, through him. “Serially,” he added. “I’m not a lech, if that’s what worries you.”

  “That’s all you’ll say?”

  He slowed down. A man in a Lexus had either just pulled into a metered spot or was getting ready to pull out. The overhead light was still on.

  “That’s it?”

  Ham tapped the steering wheel. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  “It’s just the body count that makes me wonder,” I said.

  Lexus Man stepped out his car with a fat smile on his thin face. I thought: If I had a gun, I’d kill you. You don’t know how close you came.

  Ham moved forward, still prowling for space. “You were never there, hon. It happened once in my lifetime. It was over quickly and it never came back.” He grabbed my shoulder with his free hand.

  From the way his face looked, I thought he was going ballistic on me. But when he finally spoke, his voice was melancholic. “We’re the fucking freaks now. We’re the surviving core, that’s what you’ll be looking at tonight.” He slackened his grip, and I eased my body closer to the passenger-side door. “We created the Age, and we created the Scene. We created all of it, flower power, acid, free speech, rock, protest … Leary and Kesey and Brautigan, they got it from us.”

  I got the gist. All of them should have died thirty years before. They had friends who had, others who’d changed their lives and moved into the Establishment. Lik
e Jess, like Ham, like Fred. Even old Bio-Mommy.

  “We’re just like the Nam vets.” Ham sighed. “A lot of casualties, even more fucked-up survivors. And quite a few traitors.” He brightened. “We came closer to destroying this nation than any group at any time in history. And we end up the Rodney Dangerfield generation.”

  He pulled into a parking lot and prepaid the attendant. We walked into Vito’s in that odd, ambivalent mood.

  Inside the club the lights were kept so low that it took me a few minutes to make out faces. He slow-guided me around crowded tables. People caught his eye and shouted his name. We stopped and chatted. “Aren’t you going to introduce her, Ham?” some of them kidded. “At your own risk,” Ham kidded back. “My friend Devi.”

  Vito’s had a small dance floor packed with serious dancers, mostly Cuban. Ham was big on salsa music. My SUNY marketing degree didn’t come in handy for telling mambo from bolero from tango from samba from salsa, and doing the macarena didn’t count with Ham.

  Given my guide, everyone assumed I belonged. They also assumed I’d come to California from somewhere more fascinating. All of a sudden Brazilians led off speaking to me in Portuguese, Zydecos in Creole, Mexicans in Spanish. The whole world had gone into my making, wasn’t that Fred’s complaint? The whole world was mine to claim. I shut my eyes for a moment as I floated through the club on Ham’s arm. If I squeezed my eyelids harder, kept squeezing, I was sure I’d start speaking the language I’d shared with Sister Madeleine.

  “You okay?” Ham whispered. “We won’t stay long.”

  His lonely-man entourage swelled as we made our way to the booth that Jess DuPree was holding. She waved, all biceps, no flab. Her friends waved. Fred Pointer looked up, didn’t wave. Of course he’d know Jess; everyone was in the loop except me. Fred acted as though we were meeting for the first time, a good PI trick. The game seemed harmless, so I played along. We spilled into adjoining booths, took over and joined tables. Ham reigned, king of lounge lizards.