Walls of Silence

by Walls Of Silence Free(Lit)

  “Sure.”

  I waited.

  “Well, what is it, Pablo? The new name.”

  “Yeah, right. The new name. Cacacoo.”

  “What?”I was beginning to appreciate what Paula was up against.

  “There’s not a lot left that isn’t taken, you know.” He sounded professorial, like he was lecturing a newcomer to the game. “Cacais ‘shit’ in Spanish, you know.”

  “I know. And ‘coo.’ What’s that?

  Pablo hesitated. “Well, coo is, well. Just coo. It isn’t anything, I guess. Sounds nice, though: cacacoo, cacacoo. It has a rhythm.”

  “Like Salsa.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, whatever,” I said, “listen to me. If you don’t get a call from me by seven tonight, then I want you to arrange for an e-mail to be sent to every employee in Clay & Westminster and Schuster Mannheim, or whatever the name of the merged firms might be by then.”

  “It will take weeks to send them to every employee.” Pablo’s voice was starting to rise.

  “There will be a global distribution icon,” I explained. “It’ll take no longer than if you’d sent it to one person. Paula will show you how.”

  “And what’s in this e-mail?”

  “The two Website addresses: Kipgem and”—I could hardly bring myself to say it—“Cacacoo. Along with an instruction to open the sites. Then you outline an offer to the first five employees who manage to decipher the code. They get two hundred thousand dollars each. Say that the competition is in honor of the merger. Say that it’s the personal offer of Jim McIntyre. Out of his own pocket.”

  “I can’t do that, Fin.” I’d pitched him an unethical ball.

  “I hope it won’t be necessary,” I said. “But if it is, then remember this. I’ll most likely be dead and it will have been McIntyre or someone connected to him that did it.”

  “That’s a little extreme, Fin.”

  “They tried to kill me in Bombay. . . . Shit, Pablo, we’ve been through all of this.”

  “Perhaps Paula can press the button,” he said. “I can show her how.”

  Pablo was a resourceful lawyer. If it worked for him, then it worked for me.

  “Seven o’clock, Pablo. Not a second after.”

  “I think you’re about to do something dumb. It’s not too late to change your mind and deal with the matter through more conventional channels.”

  “I don’t know what conventional means anymore.” I hung up.

  Nearby were two cops, standing next to a nest of newspaper racks. They seemed edgy, expectant—of me perhaps. I sidled toward the revolving doors and dissolved into the lobby.

  Inside this cathedral to capital, solemn murals sought to persuade that man could vie with the gods: Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson. As I trotted down the North Corridor, the murals got bolder, seeming to suggest that man had conquered the entire cosmos. Then it suddenly struck me that the money used to erect this place was from the same source that had built the Cloisters. Old man Rockefeller was obviously a shrewd hedger of bets.

  I’d reached the fifth elevator bank and found a badge saying “Jesse” level with my eyes, Jesus, how tall was this man in his crisp blue uniform, curly wire running from behind his ear down the back of his shirt, a bald head that shone like polished mahogany?

  “You have a pass for me,” I said.

  “Name, sir.” Jesse smiled.

  For a moment, I forgot the name I’d given myself. Codes, false names, false hair, wacky spectacles. This was getting crazy. I took a deep breath.

  “Brown,” I said. “Colin Brown.” Like it was Bond, James Bond. Shit, I needed a dose of reality before I became eternally locked in this twilight world.

  Jesse led me to an elevator and jabbed the call button.

  The elevator arrived almost immediately and, as he held the door open for me, Jesse turned a key sticking out of a discreet hole near the floor. He then pressed the button. “Sixtieth-floor express. No stops.” His smiling face disappeared behind the closing doors.

  The doors opened onto a hallway paneled in some grotesquely expensive wood veneer. A smiling woman stood in front of me. Schuster Mannheim plainly didn’t like people to suffer withdrawal symptoms from lack of smiles. The hallway could have been a catwalk; that’s where the woman looked like she belonged.

  McIntyre’s secretary. She was the image of Paula, fewer worry lines, but they could have been sisters. She didn’t look like she’d been invited yet to the house on the hill.

  “Hi.” That one syllable could sound so good. “Mr. McIntyre is going to be held up a while,” she said with a small pout of disappointment. “He said you were sure to understand, and told you not to worry.” Her face wrinkled in bewilderment. “He said you weren’t toread anything into it. Whatever that means.” She laughed. “I think this merger has made us all a little screwy.”

  I nodded. She was right, and then some. “Not to worry,” I said.

  She started walking down the hall. It was empty, like they had cleared the way in honor of my arrival. They didn’t want me frightening the horses.

  “We’ve got a great room for you, with a great view. Coffee? Tea?” She gave me a mischievous version of her smile. “Some cookies, maybe?”

  It was hard to believe that I was talking about cookies when so much was at stake. I was being offered refreshments before I became the main course in the lion’s den.

  “Cookies would be nice,” I said. “And some aspirin, something strong if you have it.”

  She frowned. “Ibuprofen or acetaminophen or what? We have to be careful. You may have a reaction to some formulations.” Again the laugh. It trilled more than Paula’s and would have bugged me after a while. “Heck, we’re a firm of attorneys,” she prattled. “We have to think about that kind of thing.”

  “Ibuprofin will be fine.” I smiled weakly. “I’ll sign a disclaimer.”

  She opened a door onto an empty meeting room.

  “You make yourself cozy and I’ll bring your order. Then I’ll call when Mr. McIntyre’s ready for you.”

  It was hard to make myself cozy in the wood-paneled anteroom of the gods, with its view over the Promenade leading to Fifth Avenue: Saks dead ahead and St. Patrick’s Cathedral a block to the left. More gods . . .

  Turning away, I looked at my watch. It seemed that the merger could wait too. It was already past four and I didn’t anticipate finishing with McIntyre—or he with me—in less than an hour. Still, it was his firm, his timetable. I had my own and it said seven o’clock on it, in big letters.

  Sitting down at a table as long as a runway, I pulled out Ernie’s letter and a photocopy of the “Gemini” story that I’d had Pablo make—I wasn’t going to carry Mr. Muckerjee’s original around with me.

  So, Ernie knew the code. He wasn’t a founding member of the Gemini Club, but he had clearly been near the center. And what of my father? Had he paid his subscription and been handed the Club manual?

  I shook the thought from my head and focused on the paperwork.

  Time for another run at Ernie’s letter. Now I had rules, signposts, now the handwriting didn’t seem so intimidating, less angry, more that of someone in a desperate hurry to do something right before he died.

  After finding the relevant paragraphs and carefully numbering the words in blocks of fifty, I expected meaning to emerge.

  But it didn’t. Gibberish. What the hell was Ernie playing at?

  I took a sample section from the middle of the piece. Garble.

  I was missing something.

  Ernie had already helped me find the key to the other e-mails, but the cloak over his own had a double lining.

  There was a knock on the door. A maid came in with a tray stacked more densely than the Rockefeller development around me.

  Sandwiches, cake, cookies. Shrimps, bigger and pinker than thumbs. Little puff-pastry canapés with poppy seeds on top. Strips of cold teriyaki beef, for Christ’s sake. Bud, Coke, Pellegrino water. Tea,
coffee. And ibuprofen.

  I stared at the crisp white napkin sitting on the fine bone china plate.

  At one corner there was a large blue logo, picked out in intricate cotton. Two hands, locked in a handshake. I wanted to vomit. On one, a floridS. On the other, aW. Over the top of the fingers, an ampersand. I could figure out this code. Schuster & Westminster. So, this was what the PR suits had come up with for their six-figure fee.

  I turned to the food. A trick? Poison the upstart Border. Or maybe get him to stuff himself to death.

  I tipped the napkin off the plate. There was the logo again, a neat monogram on the china. They were determined for this merger to go ahead, and believed it would. They’d already paid for the wedding gifts. I picked up the knife and fork. Again, perfect little handshakes.

  The food was a diversion, a distraction.

  Put distance between yourself and a problem. Step back and see it for what it is. Dad used to say that.

  Ernie too.

  No. Not quite.

  Ernie said that the original thinker was the one who stepped sideways. Take two steps to one side, he’d said. Then you’ll see the thing from an angle that everyone else has missed.

  Two steps sideways.

  To the left or right? Backward or forward?

  Intuition told me forward.

  For the counterintuitive Ernie that meant backward.

  Two steps sideways—to the left. Backward.

  I started counting words in the Gemini text and then applying them to the numbers in Ernie’s letter. But instead of taking the first letter of the relevant word, I took the penultimate letter of the preceding word.

  Fragile shoots of meaning began to materialize from the dead paper.

  “August is the cruellest month.”

  A misquote from T. S. Eliot. An echo of Ernie. A section fromThe Waste Land.He recited it often. In the original poem it was April, wasn’t it? How April bred lilacs out of the dead land, something like that.

  And August was the month—this month—when Ernie had checked into the Plaza and had been strangled on one of their faucets.

  And the quote came from the first section ofThe Waste Land.The section headed:The burial of the dead.

  This was Ernie’s epitaph. He’d always want the last word.

  There was no time to reflect, only to translate.

  He was guilty of much, he said.But the darkest crime still lies in my head, my heart, as yet uncommitted.The body would hold out no longer, though. He couldn’t control it; the demons held sway. He had to stop the demons before he was damned by his body.

  Carlstein wants me to commit the crime. More than anything he wants to put me beyond redemption.

  Ernie spoke of a journey. Or rather two journeys. One his, the other . . . He wasn’t clear. The code failed at certain points. Maybe Ernie had been in no fit state to write fluent code.

  My journey lies beyond the bolted door where stirs hope born ofmutilation.The bolted door—up the stairs at Baba Mama’s, turn left for her sanctum and, to the right, the bolted door, the one Raj had giggled at, the one he said was not for us. Ernie must have known that I would take that journey.

  The hope is real and so is the pain. The pain is perhaps too high a price to pay. Pain is the ransom. Hope is released upon payment. The hope is the promise of a state of grace. As a Hijra.

  Hijra?

  Theotherjourney was across an ocean, a one-way ocean, he said.

  And who were these one-way sailors? PI, something, IES. An Ernie word, maybe, something typically Ernie.

  Pixies.He liked that word. He used it to refer to people he considered pretty, rascals perhaps, but vulnerable with it. Little people that needed protection.

  So, the Pixies went across the ocean and couldn’t come back. The next few words meant nothing. Then he spoke of a ship’s masts waving in the wind and a stoney Vig Dolorosg—no, Via Dolorosa. Of course. The route of Jesus to the crucifixion. Who had used that term to describe my wanderings in Bombay? Along my father’s Via Dolorosa. Mendip. It had been Mendip.

  The imagery shifted. It said Ellis Island, I was sure. I checked again. I was right. He was talking about the staging post for immigrants into the USA, the forbidding blob to the right of the Statue of Liberty.

  I am the landlord of the halfway house to hell, the receiving station at the other side of the Styx. I am the stevedore unloading the cargo of the damned.

  He wasn’t the only landlord, he said. A collective held the deeds to the estates. There was a black synod, of which he was only a minor cleric.

  And the bishops, who were they? A grim quartet of Askari, McIntyre, Mendip, and Carlstein.

  But not my father.

  Then more garble.

  I glanced at the time. Five-thirty. What the fuck was McIntyre doing?

  What the hell.

  The next word I could read wasProtector.Of the pixiesfollowed easily enough.

  He had failed, Ernie said, to protect them. He had wanted to. But he loved them too much. He wanted to dance with them. A dance with purity, a defiling dance.

  The tusks of Ganesh are blunted, his four arms folded. Lazy God? Leaving the fate of the Pixies to me. Without the hope that lies in mutilation, the Pixies will feel the ugliness of my skin. With the hope, I am the smiling eunuch, their smiling Hijra protector.

  Ernie was never to the point. His journey to a message was always via a roundabout route.

  There was a quiet tap on the door and McIntyre’s secretary poked her head around.

  “Mr. McIntyre will see you now,” she said. She looked at the tray of food and frowned. “Not hungry?”

  No thanks. I wondered if I’d ever be hungry again. Ernie’s letter spelled death to hunger.

  McIntyre sat in an armchair. He looked relaxed, hands folded on his lap, the dead lights of his eyes guttering but ready to flare. A gentle smile rippled through his dark, close-cropped mustache and beard.

  Mendip stood near the window. Fidgeting. I could hear his breath wheeze from where I stood, a hand flicking over his five o’clock shadow compulsively, his gaze alternating between me and the endless view outside.

  McIntrye motioned me to sit at a large round drum table, two hundred years old or more, exquisitely inlaid. A hundred thousand, on a bad day at auction.

  The place was full of antiques. I scanned the huge room.

  Then I saw him. The snail in the corner. Askari, merged with the dimpled brown leather of his armchair, set near a large bookcase. Camouflaged.

  McIntyre cast a swift glance at Mendip and Askari. Then me. “There have been enough misunderstandings, I think.” The snap in the voice had gone; it was all massage oil.

  “If you call killing my father and mother and a few others misunderstandings, then I entirely agree.”

  “We didn’t kill your father, Fin.” Mendip could hardly speak; he fought for oxygen like he was under water.

  “Okay,” I said. “It was Damindra Ketan. It comes to the same thing. You were the puppet masters.”

  Mendip didn’t react.

  “It isn’t the same thing,” McIntyre said. He leaned forward and lifted a small teapot that stood on a delicate stem table. He slowly poured himself a cup of tea, indicating with one hand that I was free to do the same with the china on my drum table.

  “Your father cut himself adrift,” McIntyre continued. “He put himself beyond our help. Sunil tried to bring him back.” Askari nodded solemnly, his sour-milk eyes brimming. “But he was out of his depth. He simply didn’t understand what he was dealing with, and when we tried to throw him a lifeline, he swam out farther. I have no idea if Damindra administered a coup de grace, perhaps he did. In any event, he would only be killing a man who was already dead.”

  The bastard was trying to tell me it was a mercy killing. It was breathtaking.

  But it wasn’t merely the fact of my father’s death that required explanation; there was the “where” too.

  “Why the Towers of Silence, then? Why there?
” I kept my voice even. Maybe I was expected to shout, lose it. But I didn’t shout.

  Askari stirred like a waking ox. “Who knows? It was a place of your father’s choosing. Perhaps he wanted to upset my best clients. Perhaps he became lost. It is without meaning, without consequence.”

  Without consequence.Everything in India had consequence.

  “What about Raj, was that a mercy killing too?” It had taken less than a minute to break my own rule on shouting.

  Askari lumbered over to me and peered into my face. He then spat at me. Thick, hot spittle snaked across my cheek and stained one lens of my ridiculous spectacles. I met his stare and didn’t even raise a hand to wipe away the spittle.

  “All I know,”—Askari’s voice was curare-soaked velvet—“is that because of you, a business started by my grandfather and one whichhas become, under my stewardship, one of India’s treasures, has been turned to ashes. This is all I know. Do you think I am concerned one iota that a clerk was turned to ashes in the process? My only regret is that you did not burn with the building.”

  “Time-out. Take a seat, Sunil,” McIntyre said, smiling like an understanding uncle. “Don’t let this kid wind you up. We can do business and then he’s out of here.”

  I turned to Mendip. “Why, Charles? What are you doing with these people? My father worshiped you; fifteen hundred people worship you. What brought you to this? You didn’t want me to go to Bombay, did you? You had half a conscience, what happened to the other half?”

  He just stared at me.

  “You see, Fin,” McIntyre said, “when you spend time together, cooped up, if you like, you either get to hate each other, or you come to tolerate different points of view. We”—he spread his arms to include Mendip and Askari—“learned to tolerate each other. We’re different, of course, but we complement each other, and we have similar worldviews.”

  “I’m surprised you’ve managed to restrain yourselves from going out together and invading Poland.”

  McIntyre’s face momentarily tensed. Then he forced himself to relax. “So, Fin. In your short but busy visit to Bombay, what did your researches uncover? Enlighten us.”