Shalimar the Clown (46 page)

The city’s angels were far away, in another earthquake zone. They were Italian and had never seen the city. Along with the Virgin Mary they were painted on the altar wall of St. Francis of Assisi’s first, little church of La Porziuncola,
porciúncula
in Spanish, meaning the “very small plot of land.” On Wednesday, August 2, 1769, the Portola expedition had reached the purlieus of what was now Elysian Park and made camp on Buena Vista Hill, and Fray Juan Crespi, struck by the beauty of the valley, named the river after St. Francis’s church, whose memory he carried with him like a cross. He was forty-eight years old and already bore within himself the worm of a slowly approaching death, but whenever the worm stirred in him the image of the angels of La Porziuncola acted as an antidote, pushing away morbidity and reminding him of the joyous and everlasting life to come. He named the Los Angeles River after the angels of Assisi and their holy mistress and twelve years later, when a new settlement was established here, it took its title from the river’s full name, becoming El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Very Small Plot of Land. But the City of Angels now stood on a Very Large Plot of Land Indeed, thought India Ophuls, and those who dwelt there needed mightier protectors than they had been given, A-list, A-team angels, angels familiar with the violence and disorder of giant cities, butt-kicking Angeleno angels, not the small-time, underpowered, effeminate, hello-birds-hello-sky, love-and-peace, sissy-Assisi kind.

The murder of Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls was being mourned worldwide. The French government officially lamented the fall of one of the last surviving heroes of the Resistance, and the French press glowingly retold the story of the flight of the Bugatti Racer. India’s fragmenting, infighting leadership united to praise Max as a true friend of the country, committed to “an honorable Indo-Pak détente,” and the scandal that had ended his ambassadorship was barely mentioned. There were tributes from the White House and from the U.S. intelligence community as well. As with the invisible man in the movie, death restored Max to something like full visibility, declassifying many details of his life; the lengthy obituaries and effusive encomia revealed his long service to his country at the heart of the invisible world during his last, hidden career as a senior spook, in the Mideast, the Gulf, Central America, Africa and Afghanistan. Three years after the ignominious termination of his New Delhi posting he was deemed to have atoned for his sins, to have been cleansed by the temporary withdrawal of power, and he was offered a chance to serve in a new capacity. The post of U.S. counterterrorism chief, which Max agelessly went on to hold for longer than anyone else, under several different administrations, was of ambassadorial rank, but was never spoken of in public. The person who held the job could not be named, his movements were not mentioned in the newspapers; he slipped across the globe like a shadow, his presence detectable only by its influence on the actions of others. India Ophuls had believed herself to have grown close to her father in his last years but she learned, now, of another Max, about whom the Max she knew had never spoken, Max the occult servant of American geopolitical interest,
Your father served his country in some hot zones, he swam for America through some pretty muddy water,
Invisible Max, on whose invisible hands there might very well be, there almost certainly was, there had to be, didn’t there, a quantity of the world’s visible and invisible blood.

What then was justice? Was she, in mourning her butchered parent, crying out (she had not wept) for a guilty man? Was Shalimar the assassin in fact the hand of justice, the appointed executioner of some unseen high court, was his sword righteous, had justice been
done to Max,
had some sort of sentence been carried out in response to his unknown unlisted unseen crimes of power, because blood will have blood, an eye demands an eye, and how many eyes had her father covertly put out, by direct action or indirect, one, or a hundred, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, how many trophied corpses, like stags’ heads, adorned his secret walls?

The words
right
and
wrong
began to crumble, to lose meaning, and it was as if Max were being murdered all over again, assassinated by the voices who were praising him, as if the Max she knew were being unmade and replaced by this other Max, this stranger, this clone-Max moving through the world’s burning desert places, part arms dealer, part kingmaker, part terrorist himself, dealing in the future, which was the only currency that mattered more than the dollar. He had been a puissant speculator in that mightiest and least controllable of all currencies, had been both a manipulator and a benefactor, both a philanthropist and a dictator, both creator and destroyer, buying or stealing the future from those who no longer deserved to possess it, selling the future to those who would be most useful in it, smiling the false lethal smile of power at all the planet’s future-greedy hordes, its murderous doctors, its paranoid holy warriors, its embattled high priests, its billionaire financiers, its insane dictators, its generals, its venal politicians, its thugs. He had been a dealer in the dangerous, hallucinogenic narcotic of the future, offering it at a price to his chosen addicts, the reptilian cohorts of the future which his country had chosen for itself and for others; Max, her unknown father, the invisible robotic servant of his adopted country’s overweening amoral might.

Her telephones rang but she didn’t answer them. Her buzzer buzzed but she didn’t respond. Her friends were concerned, they left urgent expressions of concern on her voice mail, they shouted their concern from the street below her balcony,
Come on, India, let us in, you’re scaring us here,
but she kept her defenses up, her defenses being Olga Volga and the pairs of police officers guarding her floor in two-hour shifts,
No visitors,
she told them, banishing her increasingly angry friends from her presence. Her beloved friend the high-powered executive headhunter, a gesticulating Italian woman with acute foot-in-mouth disease, sent her an e-mail expressing the general exasperation,
Okay, darling, so your dad is dead, okay, it’s sad, I agree, it’s horrible, no question about it, but what, are you going to kill us all as well, we’re dying here with worry, how many deaths do you want on your conscience?
But even her closest intimates didn’t feel real to her anymore, not even her film producer friend who had only just survived a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight and who now, restored to health, had taken to recommending the quadruple-bypass operation enthusiastically to all his colleagues, not even her friend the personal trainer, presently unattached, whose eggs had made babies for four other women but who had no children of her own, not even her friend (and former lover) who managed a band whose name changed every day and who kept signing contracts with indie outfits that immediately went belly-up so that the band was getting an unfortunate reputation as a jinx, not even her friend who broke up with her husband because he got angry when she complained about his snoring, not even her friend who left his wife for a man of the same name, not even her geek friend who was losing his dot-com fortune, not even her broke friends who were always broke, not even her cameraman, her sound guy, her accountant, her lawyer, her therapist, these were stories she couldn’t relate to right now, she was the only person who felt real to herself, apart from her dead father and the assassin, they were real, and when she was in the ring with her instructor Jimmy Fish he briefly felt real as well.

Fish was a stocky middle-aged man with thick bottle-black Italian hair, heavy in the gut, his face still handsome in a flat-nosed Marciano way, and he was pulling his punches, which didn’t mean they didn’t hurt. The first time he hit her, in the stomach, avoiding her breasts, she was badly shocked and a little scared, but she stayed calm, the ice didn’t leave her veins, and moments later she connected with a pair of fast left jabs to the chin and had the satisfaction of seeing the anger flare up in his eyes, seeing him working to fight it down. He called a time-out. They were both breathing heavily. “Listen,” he said. “You’re a beautiful lady, you don’t want me to damage anything you can’t fix.” She shrugged. “Seems to me,” she said, “that you’re the one who just got himself cluster-punched in the mouth by a woman.” He shook his head mournfully, and spoke more slowly, like a parent. “You’re not paying attention,” he said. “I was a ranking light-heavy. You know this. I was
ranking.
I got in the ring with people you don’t want to even imagine getting in the ring with, not even to hold up the card saying what round. You think you can take me? Lady, I’m a professional fighter. You follow? You’re a Sunday driver. Don’t make me hit you. Let me put the pads back on my hands and you can get yourself a great workout, tone that body you got there, that’s like a national treasure. You work with what God gave you and stop dreaming. You think I’m fighting you here? Baby, you can’t fight me. You fight me, you’re dead. Pay attention now. This is serious. You’re not in the family business. You’re a civilian. You’re Kay Corleone. You can’t fight me.”

She touched gloves with him and backed off, going into her crouch, shuffling, dancing. “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” she said. “I don’t come here to talk.”

Her father’s killer was her mother’s husband. The investigation had uncovered this one immense, all-explaining, devastating thing. The crime, which had at first looked political, turned out to be a personal matter, insofar as anything was personal anymore. The assassin was a professional, but the consequences of U.S. policy choices in South Asia, and their echoes in the labyrinthine chambers of the paranoiac jihadi mind, these and other related geopolitical variables receded from the analysis, could with a high percentage of probability be eliminated from the equation. The picture had simplified, becoming a familiar image: the cuckolded and now avenged husband, the disgraced and now very nearly decapitated philanderer, locked in a final embrace. The motive, too, turned out to be conventional.
Cherchez la femme.
India had learned the murderer’s real name, which sounded more like an alias than his alias, and the reports confirmed his wife’s name as well, her mother’s name, which India knew already because she had found it in an old copy of the
Indian Express
preserved on microfiche at the British Museum’s newspaper library in Colindale. Neither India’s father nor the woman she lived with when she was a child had ever spoken that name: not once in a quarter-century. Her father had once accidentally referred to his lover by the name of her greatest role, Anarkali, and India, watching him as only children watch their parents, saw an expression cross his face that only crossed it when he thought about her mother, an expression in which his undimmed desire for the young dancing girl mingled with shame, nostalgia and something darker, a premonition of death, perhaps, an intuition of how this particular Anarkali’s story would end. As for the woman who was not her mother, the woman she had lived with when she was a child, on the rare occasions when that woman was forced by India’s questions to allude to the birth mother she used the term
paramour,
as in
your father’s paramour,
and when irked by India’s insistence she would say in a tone of finality,
We will not speak of her.
But now the wheel had turned and it was that woman’s name which was never spoken, not by India, anyhow, whereas Bhoomi a.k.a. Boonyi Kaul Noman’s name was traveling the world’s airwaves on, for example, CNN.

The élite Special Forces officers, looking a little disgusted at the case’s turn toward the ordinary, handed over responsibility for the investigation to Central Homicide, the regular, nonterrorist, crime-related-elimination guys, and two new detectives, Lieutenant Tony Geneva and Sergeant Elvis Hilliker, sad-eyed men with high mileage numbers on their clocks, came to inspect the murder scene, but they weren’t interested in briefing India on the status of the search for the man she was now trying to think of as “Noman,” maybe there was classified material which they were keeping to themselves but the only things they came out with were bland, ready-to-wear formulations like
the manhunt is intensifying, ma’am,
and snippets of useless facts,
He planned his day carefully, took a change of clothing along in the trunk, we found the soiled garments in there,
Lieutenant Geneva said, and Sergeant Hilliker added,
He abandoned the car just a few blocks east of here, on Oakwood near Crescent Heights, and if he’s on foot in this town he’s going to be hard to miss, plus if he tries to steal himself a ride we’ll have him in our sights, so we’ll get him, ma’am, don’t doubt it, this isn’t Indian country, it’s ours.

She understood their remarks to mean that they were under pressure from their senior officers and needed to sound effective. (When she innocently used the term
superiors
to describe their bosses at City Hall, they had plenty to say, they momentarily achieved something like volubility,
They’re not our superiors, ma’am, senior officers is all they are,
Lieutenant Geneva rebuked her, and Sergeant Hilliker vehemently added,
Which doesn’t make them our betters.
Everybody was sensitive nowadays. Everybody had a vocabulary to peddle. Words had become as painful as sticks and stones, or maybe skins had grown thinner. India blamed the ozone layer, apologized and changed the subject.) Max’s death was a big story, and they had more than just the commissioner on their backs, the TV audience was impatient, too, it wanted the pictures right away, a shoot-out, preferably, or a car chase with helicoptered cameras, or at the very least a good, close-up look at the captured murderer, manacled, shaggy haired, and in orange or green or blue prison fatigues, pleading to be put to death by lethal injection or cyanide gas because he didn’t deserve to live.

She had no way of knowing if an arrest was near because she wasn’t fully in the information loop. But the truth—the impossible truth, the truth that proved to her she was more than a little crazy right now, the truth she couldn’t share with anyone, and which consequently sealed her off from the people who loved her—the insane, segregating truth was that she knew things about the fugitive which the police did not, because she had begun to hear his voice inside her head. Or not exactly a voice but a disembodied nonverbal transmission, like a wild screech full of static and internal dissension, hatred and shame, repentance and threat, curses and tears; like a werewolf howling at the moon. She had not experienced anything like this before, and in spite of her occasional power of second sight she was made greatly afraid by this auditory manifestation, by her transformation into a medium for the living. She locked her apartment door and sat in darkness, doubting her own sanity, until she slowly came to terms with what was happening. The shouted, argumentative, out-of-control babble in her head was the cry of a deranged soul, a man in a state of elated horror, He might be a professional, she thought, but he’s not reacting professionally this time, something about this hit has unhinged him, this wasn’t done in cold blood. This was hot.