“He’s away from his desk,” I said. I looked at my watch. TwoA.M.
“You need to head to the airport in two or three hours,” I said. Carol’s face started to collapse. “That is, if you’re going to obey orders. Are you?”
The tears started. “I have no choice.”
I dabbed her face with my robe and nodded.
She was shaking. “What will my parents think? Christ, they’re going to wake up and read a paper that makes me out as . . .” She couldn’t find the words and sobbed instead.
I drew her to me again. “They sound like okay people. You can explain.”
“Why did I ever look at that man? It could have been you and me all along. Why are you Brits so fucking inhibited? Why didn’t you say something, make a pass? You don’t know how easy it would have been.”
“If only,” I whispered. If only.
“JJ was energy, you see,” Carol said. “Brain energy, body energy. Heglowed. He seemed to understand how to harness it. I know it sounds crazy, I know what he did on the FDR, but he was gentle with it, kind. He was able to control the power, wield it where he thought it might do some good; the schools, hospitals, that kind of thing.”
I couldn’t stop myself from asking: “Why did you leave him?”
“Like I told you, he started to scare me. I began to see that he was having trouble controlling the energy, like it wasn’t really his, you know, like he was a nuclear reactor but the fuel rods weren’t his. He was scared of himself. The first time we split up, it was his doing. It hurt, but he told me that I should get out, he wasn’t safe to handle, volatile material. But then he came to me after a while.” Carol caught her breath, seemed to choke a little. “He needed me, he said. I was the only thing that was real in his life. Nobody had ever said that to me before. I believe he meant it too.”
“So what went wrong?”
“The drugs. The moods. And you know what was weird: He could buy a forest in Chile, but couldn’t afford to get me a soda. Hetalked about the kids a lot, Miranda as well. He was worried they would be taken from him. Shit, it was him fooling around, but it was more than a divorce that scared him. There was something, someone else: His brother, the one at the funeral; he would brood about him, watched for him. He seemed to think that whatever it was, whoever it was, would take me too, but that’s another story. JJ said he wouldn’t be real without me. He would cease to exist. I didn’t like that, Fin, being someone’s life support in that way. It wasn’t healthy. I wanted to make him happy, me too. But I wanted to love and be loved without all that other stuff getting in the way. His kind of love was making me ill.”
She got up and poured herself another glass of water, draining it in one draft. She came back to the bed.
“Of course we know now that in many ways he wasn’t real,” she said. “No Harvard MBA.” She tossed her head back and shook her hair. “But MBAs don’t make people real. Or unreal. Do they?”
“He wasn’t really an employee of Jefferson Trust either.”
Carol touched my lips. “So you found that out, huh? I remember the bitching we had over his business card. I fought with him over that one.”
“It may affect Jefferson Trust’s liability,” I said.
“Fuck Jefferson Trust’s liability,” she said, then kissed me hard. Her tongue probed my mouth.
Mine probed right back.
She pulled away for a moment. “You know, I was thinking of you all day. Even before theAmerica Dailything, I’d planned we would be doing this.” She let us both fall back on the bed, lying on our sides, facing each other, locked hard. “And this.” She ground her hips into me. I pushed myself hard against her. “And this.” She unthreaded the cord on my robe and ran her hands down my back, over my buttocks, and then moved one hand to my front. “I want you so badly. I want you the way it was . . .”
I started to ease down her shorts, caressing her soft skin, exploring her wetness, my hand acting on its own, without orders. It was the great escape, a world beyond remorse and recrimination, beyond grim memory.
But it was delusion. The world of a few hours earlier wouldn’t go away that easily; the voices, smells, and images of a whorehouse weren’t going to be banished like an unwelcome Jehovah’s Witness. The voices were armed with a warrant. They spoke of physical and moral corruption, a baton of depravity handed to me and which I’d held on to, for whatever reason. They said I shouldn’t have gone to Baba Mama’s. Period. It wasn’t Raj’s fault. I could have said no and stood by my refusal. But there had been a part of me that had thrilled at the prospect, in spite of my self-righteous distaste.
Carol studied my face closely, a shadow of confusion darkening her own. “What’s the matter?” Her eyes were trying to glean something, a clue to the conflict between my mind and the rest of me. But, as the battle raged in me, I wasn’t giving anything away about its origins.
I pushed Carol gently away. “I can’t. I . . .”
She stared at me. Her face was receding, plunging into a depth of sadness never before explored, where the pressure seemed likely to crush her.
I tried to pull her back to me, but she recoiled.
Without another word, she ran from the room.
“Carol,” I shouted, but stayed on the bed. Frozen.
I picked up the pillow and hurled it against the wall. I picked up Carol’s empty glass and hurled that too. It shattered against the bathroom door.
I stared at the phone. Hurl it or dial it?
I stabbed at the keys. Voicemail. I just screamed her name down the phone and waited.
“For God’s sake, pick up. Please.” I was desperate. I hung up and called again. Same voicemail, same scream, same plea. Same silence.
I retrieved my robe cord and ran out of my room and down to the floor below. I hammered on her door. Then listened.
I could hear her weeping.
Again, I rapped on the door, shouted. She never came. Down the hallway, a man’s head appeared inquisitively from a doorway.
Back upstairs, I lay on my bed, one hand stretched across the phone in case it rang. I tried not to think, reflect, or analyze. With myeyes shut I could see my father, with them open, the painful white of my remaining pillow. Open, shut, open, shut. Breathe. Ragged. Breathe again, asthma. Where’s my inhaler? Shit, shit.
You don’t have asthma. Charles Mendip has asthma. Breathe again. Smoother this time. Open and shut eyes. No, keep them closed. Just breathe. Don’t sleep. Keep away from the Dakhmas. Don’t let the mooching vultures in.
But I did sleep and the vultures were there, padding lazily on the raked floor of a Dakhma, looking for meaty chunks.
Sometime later, I found myself sitting upright in the bed, nursing a glass, swirling water around the inside of my mouth, slaking the nightmare.
After a while I looked at my watch.
I called Carol’s number again. Voicemail.
I called reception.
“She’s just checked out,” a distant voice told me.
THIRTY-FOUR
Icalled reception again some time later, and asked ifAmerica Dailyhad showed up yet. No newspapers until seven.
I scalded away the grime of Baba Mama’s under the shower and then asked room service for a pot of coffee.
The phone rang.
Please, not the press.
“Alone, are we?” It was Mendip. “Not brought back some dark fluff from the brothel to keep you company?”
How did he know?
“I . . .”
“Save it. No one can hear you in the wilderness, and that’s where you’ve put yourself, my lad.”
“Then why did you call?” I felt like hanging up. But he was right about the wilderness.
Mendip grunted. “You were supposed to keep your head down, Fin. Do the deal and come home. But instead you chose to insult somevery respectable and powerful people and then go philandering in a Bombay sewer. Retracing your father’s Via Dolorosa?”
“They’re not respectable people.”
“More respectable than you, though that wouldn’t be difficult.” He was growling now. “Is that the best you can do? I wouldn’t reach for the Schuster defamation lawyer; you’ve no reputation to protect.”
I wasn’t going to be deflected; not this time. “And I suppose it’s not a disgrace that Askari had been acting for the Ketans until very recently.”
“Good God. So what? I cleared it myself, it’s not a problem.”
“And the price for Ketan Securities. It’s a blatant undervalue.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mendip retorted. “Since when was fifty million dollars a trifling sum? In any event, you have no basis on which to appreciate the valuation issue. There are all kinds of factors at work here.”
“Like an order-routing agreement with a scumbag Antilles company for which Ernie was the signatory? You cleared that too, did you?”
“I’m not going to debate the matter with you. I haven’t got time. I have a merger to save. How do you think Jim McIntyre is feeling right now? Did you think of that?”
McIntyre was probably playing with himself in anticipation of sharing an office with Paula. Either that or he was busy instructing the coffee machine to be my next Schuster attorney.
“Ketan Securities is a can of worms,” I said. “And Jefferson Trust shouldn’t be buying it.”
“They know exactly what they’re buying. Keep your nose out of it.”
“Carol Amen didn’t know.”
Mendip paused. “Miss Amen is history.”
I remembered Carol’s sweat-stained back as she’d fled my room.
I should have followed her, stopped her.
“So am I, it seems,” I said. “Pablo Tochera has been called off my case and nobody’s prepared to say who is minding my interests,” I said. “What the fuck’s going on?”
Mendip’s breathing was ragged. I heard a rustle followed by the whisper of his inhaler.
The breathing cleared. “I warned you, Fin.” Another jab at the inhaler. “You’re to go back to London.”
“I thought you said I was in the wilderness.”
I imagined myself in England, sitting across a Cotswold kitchen table from my mother, the old Roberts radio leaking Mozart, our hands wrapped around mugs of cocoa. The two of us numb after another losing bout with Bombay.
“And what if I don’t want to come back?” I asked.
“Of course you want to come back,” Mendip snapped. “I’m in New York for a few more days to finalize the merger and then I’ll be in London. Stay in a hotel, stay with your mother, I don’t care. But just get the hell out of Bombay and be in England when I get back. I’m trying to help you, for God’s sake.”
He hung up.
It wasn’t until nine thatAmerica Dailyarrived.
The photo of Carol was terrible. Maybe she should have been grateful; nobody would stop her on the street. The words painted an equally cruel portrait; unrecognizable, a wide-screen, surround-sound Jezebel.
And then me. No photo, but an artillery bombardment of narrative. A high flyer in New York, owner of an F1, a Svengali who had as good as cast the cokehead JJ into the flowing torrent of the FDR. And lover of JJ’s lover, the despicable Carol Amen.
Then the quotes: unguarded statements made by people woken by the rottweiler Brad Emerson, their defenses down. A senior guy at Jefferson Trust, a “no comment” merchant. Tight-lipped, lawyerly evasion from Mendip and McIntyre. And Miranda. Nothing sleepy about her response. It was lucid and venomous.
I tossed the paper into the wastebasket.
I went to the room safe. The order-routing agreement was still there, scrolled untidily among my tickets, money, and passport. Even if I did manage to return it, someone was bound to notice that it had seen some action outside the data room.
I took out my airline ticket, passport, and money and stuffed themin my jacket pocket. I would be needing them if I was going to follow Mendip’s instructions to insert my tail between my legs and return home.
But I had formed a mental agenda. First Paula and then those nasty little swastikas.
I called Paula at her home number. The line was busy. So I went down to reception. As usual it was busy, and it took a few minutes to get their attention. “Where are the good bookshops in Bombay?” I finally got to ask a desk clerk.
“We have a most excellent one in the hotel, sir. The Nalanda.”
They wouldn’t have what I was after. I didn’t want an overpriced paperback novel or a photographic guide to the temples of India.
“Any others?”
The clerk took out a map and turned it the right way up for me on the counter. He then took a pen and marked twoXs on it.
“Here is the Strand in Pherozshah Street. Very good. Or what about Bookpoint in the Ballard Estate?”
“That it?”
“You could try Dr. Dadabhoi.”
“Who’s Dr. Dadabhoi?” I asked. It sounded more like somewhere I could pick up the hippy’s handbook and a few back copies ofRolling Stone.
The clerk laughed. “Dr. Dadabhoi is a road, not a gentleman. There are many bookstalls there.”
“Mark it on the map, would you?”
The clerk carefully outlined a length of street with his pen before folding up the map and handing it over. “Happy hunting, sir.”
There would be nothing happy about this hunting trip. “Thanks,” I said, and turned to find myself staring into the petrified face of Raj.
If a mustache could speak for its owner, then Raj’s was fluent in a hundred languages. The clump of coarse hair was sad, matted and deranged. The rest of him was a sodden accompaniment. It must have been raining hard outside and he wasn’t carrying an umbrella.
“We need to talk, sir.” He looked around nervously. “But not here.”
He walked swiftly toward the main entrance. His once pristinePierre Cardin was baggy and soaked, leaving a slick of water in its wake.
I followed him.
He made his way out of the hotel and over the road to the piazza surrounding the Gateway of India.
I stopped under the canopy over the hotel entrance. Rain was hammering on it and, beyond, the world was awash.
Scanning the forecourt, I saw an umbrella rack nearby and grabbed at one of the handles.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” I said to an enormous white-turbaned Sikh at the door who seemed ready to floor me.
Racing across the road, I caught up with Raj.
We went around to the seaward side of the Gateway, where there was less chance of being spotted, but every chance of being snatched by one of the waves crashing against the pier and swirling around our feet.
I opened the umbrella, a bright yellow monstrosity advertising an electronics company. The wind immediately plucked it from my hand and swept it out to sea.
“You are in the newspapers,” Raj shouted.
“I know.”
Raj clutched my arm. “Mr. Askari is very cross. He says you are the devil.”
“I had a feeling he didn’t like me,” I said.
“He is very cross with me as well.” Through the waterfall pouring down Raj’s face, I could see his eyes widen.
“Why you? You’ve done nothing.” Except take me to a brothel and maybe let me poison my bloodstream. That and talk to me about my father.
“He is saying that he will throw me back on the streets. He says he will bring my sister Preeti back from America and throw her on the streets with me. He says I am ungrateful.”
“Why the hell should he say that?”
“I allowed a document to be taken from the data room.”
I pretended I couldn’t hear.
Raj grabbed me by the arm and pulled me around to the side ofthe Gateway, the leeward side, a haven from the wind. I would have to hear what Raj said now.
“A document has gone, Fin. And he is blaming me. He thinks you took it but that I must not ask you. You are the devil and I must stay away from you.”
“Why does he think that a document
has gone; why should he think I took it?”
Raj shuddered. “Askari knows everything.”
Askari knows a document is missing, Mendip cornered me with my visit to Baba Mama’s. Baba Mama knew I was from New York. All of them drinking at a river of information. Where was its source?
“What kind of document was taken?” I asked.
“A material contract, a share dealing agreement. Not important, Askari says, but he is angry at the impertinence.” Raj looked like a bedraggled floor mop that had come to the end of its useful life. “Did you take it, Fin?” I couldn’t lie to him.
“If it was so unimportant, why is Askari rattled?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it because it might contain something that, if you knew where to look, might not be so good?”
“I don’t know,” Raj pleaded. “I’m only a clerk. You must ask Askari.”
“And why is Ketan Securities so cheap? Any thoughts?”
Raj looked astonished. “Fifty million dollars, Fin? It is a wondrous sum of money.” I conceded that this point was unlikely to go far with someone whose annual income was less than most people’s monthly mortgage payment.
“Here’s a question youcananswer. When did Askari & Co. stop acting for Ketan Securities, stop being their attorney of choice? Five minutes ago, Raj? Ten minutes? When?”
Raj blocked his ears like a child. “Oh God, you must stop asking these questions.”
I wrenched his hands off his ears. “If you want the document back, just answer the questions. Askari will never know what you said and you can tell him you’ve found the document in the data room, or maybe in the box of beer bottles. You’ll think of something. Just answer my questions.”
A look of hope came over Raj’s face. “You have the document?”
I nodded. “You can have it right now, if you want.”
He hesitated. “There is bad stuff in it, but I don’t know what. Non-Resident Indians, perhaps, moving their property, here and there, in ways they shouldn’t. There are men who rule Askari, people who frighten him. Maybe one man more than others, a shadow, Fin. I do not know who he is. Askari will not breathe his name.” His mouth snapped shut.
Walls of Silence Page 24