Walls of Silence

by Walls Of Silence Free(Lit)

  Jefferson Trust should be cracking open the champagne in celebration. On the one hand Ketan had said in Clause 5: We want all theclients. Then in the schedule they’d said: Oh, fuck it, you can have them all back again.

  Why?

  Take it from the top, I told myself, first principles. Ketan had the domestic Indians. Okay. Then all the big guys were handed over to Jefferson on a plate. Weird. Who did that leave? The minnows. The flotsam of no-hopers, bobbing on the massive ocean of the financial markets.

  They weren’t all minnows, though, were they? The order-routing agreement proved that. Unknowns, but with billions to spend. Offshore fat cats in shades. Ketan Securities wanted to keep control over them, not let nice respectable Jefferson Trust dirty its hands.

  I remembered a statistic in one of the newspaper articles in Terry’s India file. There were around one hundred and twenty billion dollars of assets outside India but owned by Indians. The Non-Resident Indians.

  Gold had been a sideshow. Huxtable and Ketan were playing for bigger stakes, their slice of the cake owned by patriotic Indians who might want to wash their goodies in and out of India. To do this they needed a kindly lock keeper who could crank the handles and make sure that the waters flowed in the right direction, and at the right depth.

  I had to persuade Carol to listen, to see that Ketan Securities was little more than an industrial-scale financial laundry. Jefferson Trust would own it, but have no control. The Ketans would keep that for themselves.

  I tried to track her down at Ketan Securities. Out, sir. With the Ketans, sir. A message? Certainly, sir.

  And what did Charles Mendip know about Ketan Securities? Maybe no more than what Askari told him. But there was Ernie’s signature on the Huxtable agreement. The signature of Mendip’s right-hand man. Should I confront him, point out to him that he’d told me to do my job, tell him Ihaddone my job? Ask him what the fuck was going on.

  Again, my hand neared the phone.

  It rang.

  “Sheesh, you’re a tough guy to find.”

  “I’m not hiding, Pablo,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, really sorry,” Tochera said.

  “About what?”

  An intake of breath, the prelude to bad news.

  “Have they charged me?” I asked.

  “How the fuck should I know? I haven’t spoken to Manelli for over an hour.”

  “What, then?”

  “I . . . Christ. Look, I can’t go on acting for you, Fin. I’ve told McIntyre it’s making me sick. I’ve asked him why he’s telling me to do my best for you and then . . . Jesus, I’m shooting my mouth off, here. If this continues, I’ll be lucky if they let me clean the trainees’ Allen Edmonds.”

  “Allen Edmonds?”

  “Shoes, Fin.”

  “And cutting loose from me will help, will it?” I felt a fly tickle the scab on a small shaving cut I’d given myself that morning. I swatted it. It circled once and returned to the same spot. “Jesus, Pablo. McIntyre put you on my file in the first place. Why should he think you’re partnership material if you run to him with a doctor’s note when a case gets tough?”

  “Fuck you. I’ve tried my best; I haven’t been home for a week. Julia sent me a postcard yesterday; told me the weather was good on the Upper East Side, would I like to join her. Sheesh. This isn’t what I signed up for.”

  “This is litigation, and you’re a litigator,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

  “This is a whole heap more than litigation.”

  “Elaborate. It’s the least you can do.”

  “Someone else can handle your case better than me,” Tochera said, his voice calmer now. “I fucked up, though you won’t get me to say that in company. McIntyre will assign someone who can provide the right coverage. McIntyre knows my strengths and weaknesses. He wants me to play to my strengths from here on. And I can’t do that on this case.”

  “This is totally unethical,” I protested. “I wantyou.”

  “Why? You just said I was unethical.”

  “McIntyre’s unethical.” My mouth was caked in dried saliva. “You . . . You . . . Well, I don’t want you for your ethics, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, Fin,” he whined.

  “You’ve said that already.”

  “I’ve got to go. I just wanted to tell you face-to-face. Well, you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t know what he meant at all. But the smell of his fear filled my horrid little room.

  “When will I know who’s acting for me?” It was either that or trying to get hold of someone like Jack Kempinski, a one-room, one-photocopier attorney, and instruct him over the phone from Bombay, explain my situation and give him a swift résumé of the assets with which I could remunerate him. A very swift résumé.

  “McIntyre will call, I’m sure.” Tochera didn’t sound sure at all.

  “Could you put me through to him?”

  Tochera hesitated. “I’ll try.”

  Music.The Marriage of Figaro.Schuster Mannheim was preparing for the wedding with Clay & Westminster.

  The music stopped mid-bar. “He’s away from his desk right now. I’ve left a message for him to call you.”

  “How can you do this, Pablo?” I had no pride; he couldn’t help but hear the desperation in my voice.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just not possible to explain. Good-bye.”

  I tried to get through to Charles Mendip. He was away from his desk too.

  It looked like I was on my own.

  As promised, Raj showed up later that afternoon.

  “Successful day?” He asked lightly.

  I didn’t reply as I slid my pen into my pocket and stood up.

  Raj frowned. “You need cheering up, my friend. I will take you to some jolly places.” He picked up my briefcase. “I will carry your bag to the car and you will go back to the Taj and change into your chinkos first.”

  “Chinos, Raj.”

  He giggled. “My heavens, yes.” I caught a goodish breeze of beer.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Ifelt like a bag of cement. Christ only knew how many beers and buckets of curry were thickening into an impregnable dyke between my small intestine and all normal exit routes.

  “I will ask for some Paan,” Raj said, empathizing with my bloated condition.

  He carried on talking and drinking and mopping his plate with chapati. Since Raj had collected me from the hotel at seven, he had talked all evening. Above the racket of a restaurant filled to capacity, he had yelled his life story, elaborating on the loss of parents, his love of cricket, the luck of his sister, the generosity of Askari, and how he, Raj Shethia, last of the male line, was going to break out of the grim squalor of his chawl and find a nice apartment. And maybe, just maybe, go to America.

  And find a wife. Oh yes, sir, a fine woman to bear me children. She will come to America with me and we will have American children. So that the Shethia name can expand into an American future under American citizenship. He was certain, as certain that the Paan would ease my distended stomach.

  The Paan arrived. A chrome lazy Susan—a “Paan daan,” Raj called it—sectioned into bowls of betel nut, cumin, coconut, caraway, aniseed, and stuff I didn’t recognize. He smeared honey across an olive-green leaf—banana? I wasn’t sure—and carefully applied a strip of pure gold foil over the honey before tipping a teaspoon of each item from the lazy Susan onto the leaf. Then he rolled it up into a tight package, a green owl pellet.

  I sniffed at the package.

  “All at once, Fin,” Raj said. “Crunch, crunch.”

  I popped it into my mouth and bit hard. It was like chewing a forest floor.

  But then an almost narcotic wave swept over me: pine, eucalyptus, Listerine, and cognac all at once.

  And my stomach eased.

  Raj was laughing. “Good, ya?”

  “Good,” I managed.

  I began to relax again, more confident now that I wouldn’t explode. I even asked for another beer, conscio
us that I was about six behind Raj, who had somehow stayed fresh and dapper in his well-worn Pierre Cardin suit and fake Gucci loafers.

  “So where precisely does your sister live?” I asked. Raj had made vague reference to New York.

  “I do not know exactly. Her school moves her from place to place, to ensure a broad education.”

  “So how do you write or call, if you don’t know where she is?”

  “She has a PO box, so I can write, and she telephones me every few months. She tells me how happy she is, how one day she will be a model and I will see her on the cover ofVoguemagazine.”

  “She must be very beautiful.”

  Raj smiled and nodded. Then he tapped his head like he’d just remembered something important. This time he got his wallet out and flipped it open.

  “It is an old photo. Taken before she left Bombay.”

  A girl, fourteen, maybe fifteen, in a school uniform—lilac, a crest on the jacket, a small elephant deity with four arms—with wild eyes and wild hair that the photographer had tried to tame without success.

  The kind of wild thing that was all legs, and fast; fast enough to run from a bedroom to a bathroom in a split second, fast enough to betray only a flash of face, but one that would stick in my mind for a lifetime.

  The face of my father’s wood nymph.

  My stomach tightened, the effect of the Paan evaporated. And suddenly I felt drunk too. The photo swam in front of my eyes. The elephant on the crest seemed to leer at me.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” Raj stroked the picture and slipped the wallet back into his pocket.

  “Did she ever go to England?” I heard myself ask.

  Raj pursed his lips and tugged at his curried mustache. “No. Why do you ask?”

  Because my father was a colonial villain who had pleasured himself with her at a Victorian house in Hampton Court, then tossed her in the garbage.

  “What is the elephant crest on her jacket?” I asked.

  “Ganesh,” Raj said. “A very important god. We have big festivals here in his honor. He is the god of good luck. It is good to pray to him.”

  “What’s he like at getting insurance companies off your back?”

  Raj seemed to take my question seriously. “He is also the god of removing obstacles.”

  Then his lips curved into a sly smile. “I shall take you to the bazaar now.”

  Shit. Haggling over souvenirs larger than my suitcase was the last thing I needed.

  Raj must have sensed my reluctance. “Not the usual kind of bazaar, Fin. This is more interesting, I promise.”

  Hell’s teeth, not the red-light district, please. I’d visited more rancid, overpriced bars in the world’s capitals than I cared to remember; evenings of moronic antics with hostesses who hated you and had to submit to indignities like drunken tongues licking lime juice out of their cleavages or sitting on the laps of businessmen whose wives didn’t understand them. Then the instant replay in the taxi back to the hotel, the mutual tales of what we could have done, if only we dared. The next morning’s hangover and the crumpled VISA slip for a thousand bucks.

  “I’m sorry Raj, I don’t really think . . .”

  He looked crestfallen. “Very good place. High-class. Tip-top.”

  He stood up and swayed, I could see he was very drunk. The silly dolt didn’t know what he was doing.

  “Okay,” I said, sighing.

  I stood up and then realized how drunkIwas.

  At the door Raj dipped his hand into a wooden bowl and scooped up a handful of Khyber matchboxes.

  “Here. Take these,” he said.

  “I don’t smoke, Raj.”

  “Take. Take. A souvenir.”

  I stuffed them into my pocket.

  In the cab, Raj snored while I watched the street distractedly, feeling the nausea of a stomach overladen with curry and beer. Or maybe it was guilty anticipation of where we were going.

  He jerked awake and looked about him. “Thieves’ market.” A clotted vein of a street, furtively crawling with people picking their way through the vehicle parts and other untraceable proceeds of crime.

  Then it went dark, as the shanties closed in on us. The houses melted like dark glaciers into the potholes and garbage. The bulbs were no longer white.

  The car stopped.

  “Stay close to me,” Raj said.

  Sound advice, I thought, stepping into a bog of rotting vegetables and watching shifty groups of men staring at the barred windows of garishly painted slums; the dull light hinting of shadows of women inside; women caged and for hire.

  “Here?” I asked.

  Raj crooked his arm in mine. “Goodness, no. These are the whores for layabouts and millworkers.” He spat.

  I looked up at the upper floors, many with white billboards, like bar signs protruding from them, proclaiming that help was at hand: Dr. This and Dr. That, specialist in VD, in skin diseases, in HIV.

  “Where are we?”

  “Falkland Road, Kamatipura,” Raj said, virtually dragging me along the street, pushing aside those who got in the way.

  Reeperbahn, Wanchai, Pat Pong, Rappongi. As an observer rather than participant, I’d witnessed the various red-light galleries. But this was something else. There was a purity of purpose in this place. Sex unadorned, the release of semen as a need, not a pleasure. No neon, no enticement, no packaging. The uncut heroin of sex.

  “You see,” explained Raj, “the ratio of men to women in Bombay makes such places necessary. And for most, these men cannot afford to marry or they are on the move all the time, truckers. So”—he waved his free hand at the barred windows—“this is the only alternative.”

  I felt an icy thrill, horror cut with the mentality of the Peeping Tom. “I shouldn’t be seen around here.”

  Raj laughed and squeezed my arm. “Chilly out, Fin. It is completely legal, well, nearly. And if someone sees you, then you should be asking what they are doing here. Their gun is your gun too.”

  And the experience wasn’t sobering me up either. My legs were sandbags, my arms as pendulous as two snakey coils, my vision the texture and angle of a sixties movie.

  Suddenly, Raj pulled me into an alley, pitch-black, only the sound of scurrying rats signifying a way ahead. We turned a hairpin, Raj seeming to know when it was coming. There was light at the end of this stretch of tunnel.

  We emerged into a small courtyard, surrounded on three sides by squat ramshackle tenements, the fourth occupied by a detached house, a crazy distorted timber structure, painted electric blue.

  Raj whispered into the ear of one of the two mammoth bouncers standing side-by-side at the foot of a flight of steps leading up to the entrance. They didn’t move and ignored Raj.

  “We can go in,” Raj told me, patting the folded arms of a bouncer and receiving a death threat stare in return. He ran up the stairs, with me close behind, expecting the bouncers to reanimate and lock me in a vice as I squeezed between them.

  Inside the house, the light was leaden blue and red, muting edges, obscuring reality, while thick incense clogged the nose and brain. Females aged fifteen to fifty sat on couches or beanbag chairs, readingfilm magazines, filing nails, or just staring ahead of them. A few men wandered among them, gripping tumblers of booze incongruously swaddled in delicate paper lace doilies. The walls depicted scenes from the Kama Sutra, and torn chiffon hung from the ceiling, some weird take on the seven veils.

  I could see Raj sweat and fidget as he spoke to an elderly twig of a woman, guarding another flight of stairs ascending lopsidedly into the building’s upper reaches.

  Raj beckoned me. I followed him upstairs, feeling more nauseous with every step as the soles of my shoes stuck to the threadbare carpet.

  We turned left at the top of the stairs into a thin hallway. I looked to my right. There was just a large door, sealed with a huge rusty padlock.

  Raj giggled nervously. “Behind that door isn’t for us, my friend.”

  Not one splinter of this plac
e was for me, I told myself piously.

  The hallway suddenly got busy and we wove among men and women who had finished their few moments of bliss, and were now vacating the cubicle for the next shift, like train cars emptying at a station.

  Some doors stayed shut, and from behind them I could hear unambiguous thrashing and groaning.

  I was glad to reach the end of the hallway.

  We found ourselves in a brightly lit room, like a library, floor-to-ceiling shelving on two sides, the timber slats sagging dangerously under a mass of books. And ahead of me, a curtain of glass beads, leading perhaps to a balcony. The slight tinkle of glass on glass betrayed a gentle breeze.

  An enormous woman sat slumped in an armchair. A ring-encrusted hand dangled lazily over the arm of the chair and foraged in a copper tray of pistachio nuts perched on a wooden stand. Henna tattoos snaked around her fingers and over her knuckles before making their way up her arms and under the sleeves of a gold sari, where they were swallowed by the deep folds of her whalelike interior.

  With long red fingernails, she raked a brittle mane of golden hair while her sandals scrunched in the gravel of pistachio shells.

  She eyed us haughtily.

  “Good evening,” she said at last.

  Raj shuffled like a child in front of a headmistress. “Baba Mama, this is a visitor from America. He is English.”

  No names. People didn’t have names in this house.

  Baba Mama smiled. Midas teeth—a row of gold, preened by a gold toothpick that chiseled away at shards of nut, which, when dislodged, she spat from the side of her mouth, obligingly, away from us.

  “And the weather?” she said. “Is it cold in New York?” She mimed a shiver and drew a tartan rug up to her neck as if I had brought an icy blast with me.

  She’d guessed I was based in New York. Was it merely a guess?

  “It’s summer. It’s hot, though not as hot as here.”

  She nodded slowly and then shifted her hair almost an inch. She seemed unconcerned that we should know it was a wig.

  “And are you ready to enjoy our services?”