The Fall of Saints (4 page)

This attractive side did not square with his treatment of Melinda. I didn’t understand the causes of their constant friction, but when she came to our place distraught one day, she and I had a heart-to-heart. Though Zack was home, she and I managed some private time.

“Jealousy,” she said, responding to my concern. “He dislikes my singing in nightclubs. He wants me to quit Shamrock and stick to the church choir. He says he has enough money to maintain me the way Zack keeps you. But I don’t want to be a kept woman,” she said, holding back tears. “He says I am bad and wants to straighten me out with love. Am I really that bad, Mugure?”

“Of course not. He is a male chauvinist and wants to suppress your talent.” I said, not too pleased that he saw me as the ideal of a kept woman.

I offered her a room to rest. When Mark’s car pulled up the driveway a couple of hours later, I went out to confront him. “Mark! Beating your wife senseless seems to be your special skill, eh?” I said to him as he got out of the car.

“Good morning to you, too,” he said, ignoring my confrontation.

“One of these days you are going to kill her.”

“Don’t get dramatic now. No one is going to die,” he said.

“You should just leave her if you can’t deal with the attention she gets.”

“I see she has gotten to you, too,” he said as he walked up to the house with casual indifference. “You know her voice but not the person behind the voice. I do. And do you know what? I love her. That’s my only problem.”

An hour later, Melinda and Mark came downstairs hand in hand. “She just exhibited battered woman’s syndrome,” I told Zack after they were gone. “Melinda is an adult and should be left alone to make her choices and decisions,” was all he said.

One day she called me from the Holiday Inn in SoHo with the good news that she had finally left Mark. I drove there and accompanied her to the law offices of Jameson Batts, two blocks away. She could have engaged Edward and Palmer, she told me, but Zack and Mark’s male bonding might create a conflict of interests. Mark was not pleased with my role in the divorce. A day later, he stopped at my place, wagged a finger at me, and hissed, “You will pay for this,” then left.

Months later, in Kenya, I would recall his words and ask myself why on earth I did not take them seriously. If only I had . . . But hindsight is twenty-twenty. At the moment of their utterance, I took them to mean no more than the frustration of thwarted love, and I soon forgot about the warning. I did not even bother to tell Zack or Melinda about it. That weekend Zack and I went to hear her at Shamrock, and she had everybody on their feet as she sang:
I am a free woman
 . . .

With Mark out of the way, my friendship with Melinda flourished. She traveled abroad as Black Madonna, performing in major cities. At home, she juggled her time among nightclubs, churches, and financial houses. Her work schedule was flexible, and she often changed it to spend time with me. I came to rely on her.

Today Melinda and I had planned a get-together at our favorite place, Classic Café, on West Fourth Street, near Washington Square Park. I don’t know why I bothered to bring a car into Manhattan. It was always so crowded, and the honking from the yellow cabs could easily give one an attack of road rage. I had more time than regular workingmen and -women, so my struggle with the traffic was another way of whiling away the day.

I left my car at the valet parking lot on Broadway. Waverly Place bustled with students from Zack’s alma mater, New York University. Washington Square Park had its usual carnival air. A man sat on a bench, pigeons on his arms, shoulder, and head. Another man in a dark blue suit was muttering, “I will be back, I will be back,” furious with himself for having lost a chess game to a homeless man. A white man in dreadlocks started walking alongside me, offering me a joint, telling me he was an artist specializing in pictures of Bob Marley. At the marble arch, he stopped and accosted another passerby. In a few hundred feet, I was at the Classic Café.

“Hey, girl, I see you are still wearing your graduate suit,” I said to Melinda, who was dressed, as always, in a skirt suit. I preferred her in maxidresses, but she wore them for performances only.

She made as if to punch me and laughed out loud at the same time. The happy carefree woman had taken over from the battered woman. But today I had not come for social chitchat only. I dug in my bag. She picked up the piece of paper and read it out loud: “Alaska Enterprises.” She stopped, gave me a puzzled look, and then was thoughtful for a while.

“I found it in my husband’s car,” I hastened to say.

“But do you know this company?” she asked.

“I don’t,” I answered. “Why?”

Again she looked thoughtful, as if weighing the words she would use. “Has Mark spoken to you, or Zack? Made proposals, that kind of thing?”

“Why?” I asked, feeling under interrogation.

“All the years I was with Mark,” she continued, “I was never able to understand how he became a millionaire from landscaping only. Most of his employees are illegal immigrants. I have always wondered if he was involved in smuggling illegals across the Mexican border.”

“Really?” I asked, with my eyes wide open.

“I am not quite sure, but trust me. I would be careful. One day Mark’s business empire will collapse, the chips will fall, and not where you would want them to fall.”

She was so serious, and yet her answer felt vague. I came clean about the recent history, starting with the paper on which Kobi’s name was written, hoping to draw out more from her.

“What does Kobi have to do with Alaska?” she asked me. “Are you sure it’s not a just a mix-up, that Zack just happened to write the name right next to the company’s name?”

Her questions mirrored my earlier reasoning. And by the time she said Zack should keep away from Mark—in matters of business, at least—I had arrived at the same thought. Not that we had established the company existed, but her insistence that I keep Zack away from Mark was the ammunition I needed to confront Zack.

Zack had just arrived when I got home, and I did not wait for him to sit down.“What is this Alaska business?” I asked.

Zack was startled by my abrupt question and for a moment looked confused.“What are you talking about?” he asked.

It was my turn to be confused. I did not want to tell him about the pieces of paper; then I would have to tell him how I came by them. “Alaska cropped up in my conversation with Melinda today.”

“Wait a minute, Mugure. What does your conversation with Melinda about Alaska have to do with me?” he asked, shrugging.

“Well, just in case you are working with Mark, Melinda said that Alaska might be Mark’s company. Please take this as cautionary. She must know some stuff about Mark that we don’t.”

“Melinda is still bitter about Mark,” Zack said, ignoring my suggestion. “He is many things, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say he is a criminal. He may employ illegal immigrants at miserly wages, but many employers do that. Cheap labor. Why not? America was built on the cheapest of labor: free labor,” he concluded matter-of-factly, not implying moral censure. “Civilizations are!”

Might Mark have gotten us mixed up in his enterprises without Zack realizing? He was probably protecting Mark, I thought, recalling Melinda’s talk of male bonding, but I didn’t see why I should have to be part of it. Mark was no longer Melinda’s husband: I owed him nothing. Melinda’s insinuations and Zack’s vagueness generated more questions in my mind. I didn’t want any chips of his collapsing business empire to fall anywhere near my family. Besides, I now recalled him wagging his fingers at me. I had to do something about it.

I had never really looked at the adoption papers after signing them. Now I decided to review them. I left Zack at the kitchen table bending over a law journal and went to get Kobi’s file from our common office, where I had put it about three years ago. The file was not in its usual place. I asked Zack if he knew where it was.

“Why do you need it?” he asked, barely looking up.

“Oh, the school wants his immunization history,” I lied.

We searched for the papers all over the house, Zack in his office, while I did the basement.

“Nothing in the office,” Zack said as he joined me upstairs. “Are you sure you didn’t remove the file, honey?”

“I can’t recall doing it,” I said.

“Who at the school called for it?”

“The school nurse,” I lied again.

“I can check the information tomorrow. Get copies, I hope.”

I felt awful, making Zack run around looking for something that the school didn’t really need.

Zack called me from work the next day to tell me that he’d faxed me the details and done the same for the school, attention of the nurse, thus saving me a trip there. “Damn!” I said after hanging up. I couldn’t very well tell the school that the information had been sent by mistake. So when the phone rang later and the caller identified herself as the school nurse, I started by apologizing for the mix-up. All the same, she asked to see me.

I was at her office early the next day. She told me she had noted some discrepancies between the information we had provided the school a few years ago and what was faxed yesterday. Curious, I pulled my chair close to the nurse’s and peered at the papers spread over the table.

The original papers indicated that Kobi had been immunized at a Mombasa hospital in January; the other said Malindi, in October. The dates of birth also conflicted, the recent fax indicating that he was a year younger. I was puzzled but assumed the confusion originated with the adoption agency.

“One last thing,” the nurse said. “I am not sure if this is important, but I thought I should mention it anyway. Here it says his mother’s name is Abla, father unknown. In the other, it says parents unknown. It’s as if this information is for a completely different child.”

I asked the nurse to make me a copy of the information. I could hardly wait for Zack to come home. Before he could set his briefcase down, I was on his case. “Zack, do you realize the information you faxed to the school does not match the papers we originally gave them?”

He stopped in his tracks. He stalled for a minute and then turned to look at me.“Let me see the papers,” he said, putting his briefcase down.

I pointed out the discrepancy.

“Oh my, Mugure, what do you think this means?” he asked, looking up at me, equally shocked.

“You should know. Where did you get that information?”

“From the adoption agency, of course. There has to be an explanation.”

“I will go there,” I told him. “Where’s their exact location, anyway?”

“It’s close to my office. I will go there first thing in the morning, so please don’t worry.”

“Could this affect Kobi?” I asked.

Zack rubbed his temples, like he did when he was frustrated. “We did everything by the book, so I don’t think we have anything to worry about. It’s probably a bureaucratic error,” he said at last.

•  •  •

The following afternoon Zack called from his office and astonished me with the news that the agency had closed down.

“What?” I screamed in disbelief.

“No one was picking up the phone, so I drove there. Locked up. No forwarding address. This is crazy.”

“But they faxed you the information just the other day?” I said.

“It may mean they have just closed down,” said Zack, sounding flustered.

“There has to be a way. We have to find them. We have to get the information,” I insisted.

“Mugure, calm down. I am a lawyer, remember—I’ll see what I can do.”

“See? See what you can do? Just do it. It’s Kobi’s life,” I yelled, surprising myself. I had never raised my voice to him before. The tone did not escape him. He tried to soothe me.

“There’s nothing to worry about. We are under no obligation to give any background information as a condition of Kobi’s place in the school. We need not concern ourselves with his past. Only with the future.”

He was right. The school had not asked for the information. And unknowingly, he’d hit me at a different level. He had echoed my attitude about the past, or rather, my philosophy. I had never concerned myself with my past; I had decided not to let the past hold me back. If I ignored it long enough, it would leave me alone to pursue my future. I suppose that’s why I’d never pressed my mother to tell me more about my father or probed into the real what, when, why, and how of my past. Why hadn’t he bothered to visit me when I was born, at least? How was it that he hadn’t been curious enough to find out about his own kid?

“I need the exact address of Kasla,” I demanded in a softer voice.

Zack must have sensed something in my silence, hesitancy, and a change of mood. He dictated it over the phone and then added, “Please don’t do anything foolish. I will get to the bottom of this. And please keep this within the family,” he emphasized as he hung up the phone.

No, no, honey, I said to myself. A flag has been raised. Something is not adding up. Almost as a defiant reaction to Zack’s admonition, I called Melinda and told her everything. She was concerned. Always ready for adventure, she suggested we drive down to Manhattan to visit the adoption agency’s old address and confirm the closure for ourselves. We agreed on the next day.

I picked up Melinda at the corner of Park Avenue and Fortieth Street. She was dressed in a blue suit and high heels; she had just concluded a meeting with a client. She hopped in, flung her briefcase in the back of the car, fastened her seat belt, and waved her fist in the air. “I am ready for war,” she announced.

“Oh, please,” I said, smiling. “The agency was your recommendation, remember?”

“Mark’s,” she said. “I was merely the conduit of good hope.”

Yellow was the dominant color in the ever busy Manhattan traffic, thanks to the ubiquitous cabs whose drivers kept giving me the middle finger, a few even lowering their windows to shout something unflattering about female drivers. In her warrior mood, Melinda would shout back or show them the same finger. I didn’t enter the war but continued weaving in and out of the lanes, down Broadway to Chinatown. After circling the block, I got a parking space half a block away from our destination.