I wasn’t and never would be. “I think we are visiting to pay our respects, as it were.” I saw Raj wince and stare down at his fake Gucci loafers.
At that moment a servant came in wielding a steel tray with three small shot glasses filled with a clear liquid. Baba Mama took a glass and tipped the drink straight down her throat, exposing gold all the way back to her abrasive larynx. Raj took a glass and did the same.
I held the glass and hesitated.
Baba Mama stopped smiling.
“I hope you like it.” It didn’t sound as if she cared whether I liked it or not. I just had to drink it.
I did.
I remembered as a child being told never to rifle among the bottles and boxes and packets that lurked under the kitchen sink. They’d kill me if I even touched them. Someone had distilled everything under the sink into a thimbleful of concentrate and just given it to me to drink. I would have given a thousand bucks for an owl pellet of Paan to dull the taste.
But Baba Mama was smiling again. Raj was smiling too. I couldn’t. Standing up was about all I could manage.
“Where were we?” Baba Mama asked. “Ah. My girls and you; Iremember now.” She adjusted her wig. “You see, we have rules here. The rule of law, inherited from our past. Our colonial masters, the great justice of the white man. It is what separates us from our past.”
She allowed a pause for us to take in the grandeur of her historical perspective.
“And there is a particular rule,” she continued. “It provides that anyone who honors us with a visit must choose one of my lovely girls and pass time with her, behind closed doors. They need not do the business; they may converse and drink tea if they wish. But it is not for anyone to deny that they have spent time with one of my lovely girls and so feel, mistakenly, superior to other gentlemen.”
Baba Mama was becoming a blur. I leaned forward to try and reclaim a sharper vision and felt myself start to fall.
Raj steadied me. He held me for a moment and then slowly withdrew his hands to see if I could stand unaided. He watched me like a window dresser eyeing a rogue mannequin.
Baba Mama ignored my little drama. “It is a good rule, and stops gossip and the unwarranted superiority of gentlemen.” She waved her hand in a grand gesture. “It prevents”—her hand circled and circled like a plane in a holding pattern waiting to land—“what is the word?” She stared at Raj.
“Horridness?” Raj ventured.
Baba Mama scowled. “Hypocrisy.” The hand settled back into the tray of pistachio nuts.
She peered at me. “Come here.”
I was glued to the spot.
“Bah,” she said, “I will come to you.” She heaved herself out of the armchair, shifting her huge bulk with surprising grace as she scrunched over the carpet of pistachio shells.
She held my chin in her hands. I could feel the gold of her rings press into me.
She raised her head and stared at me, her piggy eyes ranging over the contours of my face. “We had a gentleman in here once who looked very much like you.” She let go of my face and returned to herchair, tucking in the tartan rug around her tightly as if the room had turned cold. “He came to a bad end, I believe.”
Suddenly I was thirsty, a desperate thirst. I asked for some water. At least I thought I did. Nobody seemed to hear me, though. So I asked again and then again. I sensed I was shouting, but they still ignored me. They were talking; I could see lips move. But hear no sound.
I had to move, prove I had a body. I lurched and felt muscles tense and then relax. I lurched some more and found myself moving at speed across the room past Baba Mama toward the glass bead curtain.
I burst through it. I wasn’t expecting a noise, but the yielding ropes of glass shrieked as if I’d destroyed an entire display of crystal in a New Year’s sale.
The balcony was occupied. Three women in cane chairs sat around a copper table loaded with tumblers of beer and packs of cigarettes. The women were weaving or sewing, I couldn’t tell exactly, I just saw hands at work and twine and thread looped around their fingers and trailing to the floor under the table, where they ended in untidy balls of fiber.
I rocked on my feet. Two of the women remained focused on their task. The third turned her head and I looked into her face.
It was the face of a man. Framed by a fringe of luxuriant black hair were the unmistakable features of an old, old man, cheeks sunken by toothlessness, eyes large, mournful and bloodshot, stubble sprouting on the chin and below the nose. Lip gloss and eye shadow merely emphasized both age and masculinity.
“Fuck,” I wanted to say and maybe did. I didn’t hear the response as massive arms circled me and I was dragged back into the presence of Baba Mama.
Whoever had pulled me off the balcony was now pinioning me against the bookshelves, my face pressed hard against the spines of the books. I could smell old paper and taste bitter dust.
Distantly, I could hear Baba Mama. “Take your friend to a room now. Let him have value for his rupees.”
No. No.
Raj was laughing. I opened my eyes onto a line of swastikas. Little Nazi dancing wheels receding to the horizon at the end of the bookshelf.
I felt myself being spun around and my arm placed over the shoulder of Raj. “It is time to leave Baba Mama alone.” He sounded jovial.
And then I heard the voice of my father whispering in my head. “Tell Raj about Preeti. Go on: Wipe the stupid smile from under that stupid mustache of his.”
When I opened my eyes again, I was staring at a forty-watt bulb dangling from a ceiling of gray-stained Styrofoam tiles.
At my side knelt a girl. She was thin, almost emaciated, eyes deep and tragic, and her skin, despite its blackness, showed the ravages of acne or something worse.
She was naked.
So was I.
I looked down the plateau of my chest and could see my penis, semierect and unsheathed.
Christ, please, no. Tell me I didn’t. Tell me that much at least. I didn’t feel like I’d felt with Carol after we’d made love, but our union hadn’t taken place in a squalid box on a filthy mattress, bathed in the light of a forty-watt bulb.
I sat up and pulled my shirt across me, trying to wipe away the sweat that drenched me. Sweat from sex? It was hot enough to make a sleeping salamander leak buckets, so maybe it didn’t signify anything. But how could I be sure?
“Did I . . . I mean we. Well, did we?”
The girl looked at me blankly and brushed her hair.
She then picked up a little notebook and wrote a number on a page with lots of numbers already on it. Five hundred, she wrote.
I owed her five hundred rupees. Eleven dollars. Jesus.
She closed the notebook. It was a school notebook. It had a crest on it. A little elephant with four arms.
The door creaked open and Raj’s grinning face appeared.
“I told you it would be interesting,” he said.
As we passed the two bouncers outside, a random thought flitted across my dizzied consciousness. The Nazis hadn’t been the first ones to fly the swastika.
THIRTY-THREE
Iwas woken by a loud hammering on the door. I looked at my watch. Middle of the night. Only two hours since I’d collapsed in my hotel room.
The knocking was insistent, frenzied.
My head nearly disintegrated as I got up and slid my robe on.
It was Carol, her face barely a shade darker than her white T-shirt.
I noticed the shadows of sweat down her back as she pushed past me and sat heavily on the bed.
She started to sob. I poured a glass of water and sat down on the bed beside her. As she sipped I stroked her hair, soft as a cat’s fur. “When you’re ready,” I said.
The choking sobs became less intense, the gaps between them increased. She raised her head and groaned.
“They know,” she said, shaking her head hard and pressing her palms under her eyes to wipe away the tears.
Know what?
>
She finished the water and clutched the empty glass. Her knuckleswhitened; she was holding the glass so hard I thought it might fracture. I gently pried it from her fingers.
Her body went limp and she curled up on the bed in a fetal position. I was prepared to be patient, but I wasn’t going to let her take a nap before she told me what was going on.
“Tell me, Carol. What’s happened?”
She uncurled and sat up against the pillows. “America Dailywill be running a story.”
A single sob gripped her and she held her breath for a moment. “About me.”
“What will it say?”
“Miranda Carlson has found out about me and JJ. I don’t know how, but she has. It will be a big story.”
Jefferson Trust’s chief banking attorney the lover of FDR smash banker. She was right; it would be big and ugly. Pictures of Miranda and the two kids. A mug shot of Carol, only the prisoner numbers missing, but the readers’ minds would supply them, sure enough.
“Who knows this is on the way?” I asked.
“Everyone.” She gave the pillow a vicious thump. “America Dailypeople have been calling around for backup and quotes. They called me; someone must’ve told them I was here. Jesus, the guy was almost bubbling with excitement, wanted all the background: where, when, how many times, did I make JJ kill all those people, did I know Miranda, the kids. It was sick.”
“What did you say?”
She chewed her lip. “I’m still an attorney. I said no comment and hung up.”
She took my hand. “They asked about you too.”
I felt my heart jolt.
“They know that the car was in your name. They kind of implied we’d run off to India together . . .” She clenched her fists, her face; a whole body clench. “Oh, Christ. I should have gone to the police and saved you and me a lot of pain.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Nothing wrong?” she hissed. “Jefferson Trust doesn’t see it that way.”
“You’ve spoken to them then?”
“The general counsel called me. He’s married, four kids. A Baptist preacher. He could hardly speak. Wants me on the next plane to New York. I tried to explain, but he didn’t want to know, said I could tell it to the chairman.”
She lifted her head. The face was raw, ravaged by desperation and despair. Strands of hair were stuck across one eye and over her cheek.
“I’m ruined,” she said.
“Shh.” I removed the hair from her face. “Take it one step at a—”
“And you. Look what I’ve done to you. Let me call the police now.”
It wouldn’t be that simple. We were Bonnie and Clyde.
She gripped my arm. “I guess you’re wondering why I’ve been kind of shitty. Well, distant anyway.”
“You fell in love with Ashish Ketan and couldn’t bear to tell me.”
In spite of everything, she laughed. “No. Though he’s kind of cute for an old guy.”
“Why then?”
The smile fled. “Chuck Krantz reckoned we were seeing each other. There was a rumor, someone in Starbucks saw us and tried to add it up and got the right answer. Anyway, Chuck called me. Told me to get on with the deal, no distractions. And if I was out of line he would tell the general counsel and allege that Clay & Westminster only got deals because I was sleeping with you.”
“And you and I know that it’s because I’m a great attorney.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Anyway, I got scared, lost track of priorities.”
We fell silent. I could hear the rain had started again, not hard yet, but it would be.
“Of course, Chuck’s threat is rather academic now,” I said.
“I guess.”
The phone rang.
“This is Brad Emerson from theAmerica Daily.”A sentence delivered at a hundred miles an hour. A journalist’s sentence. I cupped the mouthpiece.
“They just found me too,” I said.
I let my hand go, still watching Carol, who was rocking gently like she’d done in her apartment after we’d made love.
I had a problem with journalists at the best of times. “What do you want?”
“You’re a hard guy to track down. We’ve had to run a piece without your input, so I’m giving you an opportunity to tell it your way for a later edition. You know what I’m talking about; you’re not going to make me sweat it out of you, are you? That’d be a waste of our time and I know how busy you international attorneys are.”
“When will it be in the paper?”
The guy laughed. “We’re a real-time outfit now. Printing is fly-by-wire and we can update anytime on the Web. To answer your question, the Asian hard copy is out around now. It’ll be in tomorrow’s in New York. Now you can answer some of my questions.”
“Up yours,” I said and hung up.
“Was that such a good idea?” Carol asked.
“Ernie Monks always told me that hacks need oxygen to breathe, and I wasn’t about to open my valves.”
Carol looked unconvinced.
“Anyway,” I said. “There’s nothing I could say that would make it any better.”
“Hold me,” Carol said.
I held her, feeling her damp T-shirt, the sweat turned cold by the AC. I prayed she wouldn’t recognize the smell of whorehouse on me, detect the incense, the booze, the cheap scent and draw the only possible conclusion. I felt infected.
“You should get changed, you’ll get a chill,” I said.
“Sure, Mom.”
“When’s your flight?” I asked.
“Just after seven this morning. Air India to JFK.” She nuzzled into the base of my neck like a frightened pup. “You know what the general counsel said? He told me to travel coach, so that Jefferson could get a refund on the first-class ticket. I don’t think he cares about the money; he was delivering a message about where I was headed.” I couldfeelher voice, her warm breath a breeze bending my chest hair. She couldn’t help but arouse me.
“Do the Ketans know you’re leaving Bombay?” I asked.
“I didn’t say anything. I took theTribunecall at their house andreturned to the table as if nothing had happened. It was a great performance, although I don’t know why I bothered. Anyway, someone from Jefferson Trust will call them, I expect. By tomorrow I won’t be their golden girl.”
“You’re probably better off out of it.”
Carol sat up. “Why do you say that?”
“Like I’ve told you, there’s something very wrong with Ketan Securities.”
“Not the Ernie Monks and JJ thing again. It doesn’t show anything.”
So far it was just dots, no picture. But I was sure there was a picture in there somewhere. “There’s more.”
“Like what, Fin? More shadows?”
“Like the purchase price, for starters. You must see that it’s too cheap.”
Carol needed more before she’d join my three-wheeled bandwagon.
“Then there’s the fact that Askari & Co. were Ketan’s attorneys until about five minutes ago. They’re not on our side, you can be sure of that.”
“How do you know?”
“The name was whited out from the agreements.”
Carol looked more interested, but not on board yet.
“Go on.”
“The exclusivity clause keeps the toxic stuff in the hands of the Ketans and there’s a material contract that stinks. Ketan has entered an order-routing agreement with a number of people. You know, so they can get the business and maybe give a discount.”
“Fin, we handle soft dollar arrangements all the time. What of it? Sure, it might be on the edge, but it isn’t such a big deal.”
I shook my head. “I don’t much care if it is illegal. It’s the size of the thing. Massive. Disproportionate to the value ascribed to it. And the parties smell. These people are launderers. If I had a career, I’d stake it on that fact.”
I started to get off the bed and go to the room safe, but Carol grabb
ed my hand.
“I don’t want to read an order-routing agreement right now.”
I stayed put. “You remember I told you how my father got involved in something bad, something that finished him?” There was the matter of the wood nymph too, but that could wait.
“Gold and stuff. Havala, you said.”
“He was working for a client. A company called Huxtable. They’re a party to the order-routing agreement.”
Now she was interested.
“And Ernie Monks was the signatory.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Something’s rotten in the Shrine of the Ketans. My guess is that a few years ago there was a small operation to run gold and it got bigger. There’s a reservoir of money outside India held by non-residents—NRIs. And Huxtable and Ketan are their bag carriers, acting as an illegal conduit for assets in and out of India. And now that Jefferson is acquiring Ketan they get a foothold in a huge and respectable bank. Jefferson keeps the kosher activity and the Ketans pursue the illicit trade on an expanded basis.”
“But where’s the backup, the proof?”
“Not in the data room, that’s for sure. That material was put together under laboratory conditions. Maybe at Ketan Securities. Maybe Askari. Who knows? Maybe in a file somewhere at Jefferson Trust.”
Carol shook her head sadly. “I don’t think you are going to be on this case long enough to find out.”
I’d reached a point where the picture was coming into focus, and so was a promise to myself: that this was one cause I couldn’t abandon. Whatever had happened, it drove my father to his death. It was my case now. It should have been my case long ago, but the wood nymph got in the way. My father’s crime had put him beyond the pale, guaranteed that I’d hang up on his first plea for help. But now that Huxtable was a factor in my own file, I figured that my father’s could be reopened.
In India, everything was connected with everything else. The events of the last two weeks were merging with those of five years ago, even though the contact points were weak, and the weld as yet incomplete.
“What about Clay & Westminster?” Carol asked. “You going to tell Charles Mendip?”
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