The Moor's Last Sigh (35 page)

go well with me. Yet I could not refuse Abraham, my newly reacquired father. Nervously, however, I did at last bring myself to ask indelicate questions: why would Mainduck--what motive, what provocation did he have...? 'Boy wants to know why I suspect that froggy bastard,' Abraham Zogoiby yelled between terrifying cackles, and ruined old Minto likewise slapped a mirthful thigh. 'Maybe he thinks his Mummy was a saint, and only his bad Daddy strayed from the fold. But she tried out most things in trousers, isn't it? Short attention span, only. Hell hath no fury like a froggy spumed. QE bleddy D.' Two macabrely laughing old men, accusations of marital infidelities and murder, a walking ghost, and me. I was out of my depth. But there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There was only what had to be done. 'Big Daddy, worry not,' whispered Minto, peering through blue glass, as softly spoken as Abraham had been stentorian. 'This Fielding, consider him quartered, drawn and hung.' Children make fictions of their fathers, re-inventing them according to their childish needs. The reality of a father is a weight few sons can bear. It was the conventional wisdom of the period that the (mainly Muslim) gangs controlling the city's organised crime, each with their ruling boss or dada, had been weakened by their traditional difficulties in forming any kind of lasting syndicate or united front. My own experience with the MA, working in the poorest quarters of the city to win friends and build support, suggested something different. I had begun to see hints and glimpses of something shadowy, so frightening that nobody would talk about it--some hidden layer under the surface of what-seemed-to-be. I had suggested to Mainduck that the gangs might have finally achieved unity, that there might even be a single Mafia-style capo di tutti capi in place, running all the rackets in town, but he laughed me to scorn. 'Stick to punching heads, Hammer,' he sneered. 'Leave the deep stuff to deeper minds. Unity takes discipline, and we have the monopoly of that commodity. Those sister-fuckers will be squabbling until the heavens fall.' But now, with my own ears, I had heard Dom Minto name my father as the biggest dada of them all. Mogambo! The moment I heard it, I knew it was true. Abraham was a natural commander, a born negotiator, the deal-maker of deal-makers. He gambled for the highest stakes; had even been willing, as a young man, to wager his unborn son. Yes, the High Command did exist, and the Muslim gangs had been united by a Cochin Jew. The truth is almost always exceptional, freakish, improbable, and almost never normative, almost never what cold calculations would suggest. In 33i the end, people make the alliances they need. They follow the men who can lead them in the directions they prefer. It occurred to me that my father's pre-eminence over Scar and his colleagues was a dark, ironic victory for India's deep-rooted secularism. The very nature of this inter-community league of cynical self-interest gave the lie to Mainduck's vision of a theocracy in which one particular variant of Hinduism would rule, while all India's other peoples bowed their beaten heads. Vasco had said it years ago: corruption was the only force we had that could defeat fanaticism. What had been, on his lips, no more than a drunkard's gibe, had been turned by Abraham Zogoiby into living reality, into a union of hovel and high-rise, a godless crooked army that could take on and vanquish anything that the god-squad sent its way. Maybe. Raman Fielding had already made the grave error of underestimating his opponent. Would Abraham Zogoiby be any wiser? Early indications were not good. 'A bug,' he'd called Mainduck. 'A stupid collared dog.' And if both sides went to war because they believed the enemy was easy to vanquish? And if both sides were wrong? What then? Armageddon? In the matter of the Baby Softo narcotics scandal, Abraham Zogoiby--as he confirmed during our 'briefing sessions', with a wide, shameless grin--had received a complete exoneration by the investigating authorities. 'Clean bill of health,' he crowed. 'Pair of hands, likewise clean. Enemies may try to drag me down, but they must try harder than that.' There was no question that the Softo company's talcum powder exports had been used as cover for the dispatch overseas of rather more lucrative white powders, but in spite of herculean efforts by narcotics squad officers it had been impossible to prove that Abraham had been aware of any illegal activity. Certain minor functionaries of the company--in the canning and dispatch departments--had indeed been shown to be in the pay of a drugs syndicate, but thereafter all investigations simply hit a wall. Abraham was generous in caring for the families of the jailed men--'Why should women-children suffer for activities of fathers?' he liked to say--and in the end the case was closed without any of the charges against high personages that had originally been trumpeted, not least by Raman Fielding's MA-controlled city corporation. It remained a matter of embarrassment that the drug overlord known as 'Scar' remained at liberty. The supposition was that he had taken refuge somewhere in the Persian Gulf. But Abraham Zogoiby had different news for me. 'How foolish we would be if immigration-emigration matters were not also capable of being arranged,' he cried. 'Of course our people can slip out and in whenever they may so choose. And drugs squad officers also are only human. On their low pay it is hard to make ends meet. What to tell you? It is the duty of the well-off to be generous. Philanthropy is our necessary role. Noblesse oblige.' Abraham's victory in the Baby Softo affair had been a blow for Fielding, who urged me constantly to pump my father for information about drug-related activities. But I did not need to pump. Abraham was intent on opening his heart to me, and told me plainly that the Softo win had not been without long-term costs. With the talcum powder route closed, a more perilous operation had had to be constructed at some speed and in the teeth of the intensive police investigation. 'Start-up costs were ridiculous,' he confided. 'But what to do? In business a man's word is his bond, and there were contracts to fulfil.' Scar and his men had been working full-time to set up the new route, which culminated in the dusty wastes of the Rann of Kutch (thus necessitating the bribery of officials in Gujarat as well as Maharashtra). Small boats would ferry the 'talcum' out to waiting cargo ships. The new route was slower, riskier. 'Only a stop-gap,' said Abraham. 'In time we will find new friends at the air cargo terminal.' I would go to his high-rise glass Eden at night and he would tell me his serpentine tales. And they were like fairy tales, in a way: goblin-sagas of the present day, tales of the utterly abnormal recounted in a matter-of-fact, banal, duty manager's normalising tones. (So this was what my feral father meant by burying himself in his work to help him bear his loss! This was what he did to assuage his pain!)... Armaments featured strongly, though the publicly listed activities of his great corporation included no such trade. A famous Nordic armaments house was negotiating to supply India with a range of essentially decent, elegandy designed and naturally lethal products. The sums of money involved were too large to have meaning, and as is the way with such Karakorams of capital, certain peripheral boulders of money came loose from the main bulk and began to roll down the mountain. What was needed was a discreet means of tidying away these tumbling boulders in a manner properly beneficial to those involved in the negotiations. The participants in the negotiations were of a great refinement, possessed of a delicacy that would have made it quite impossible for them to tidy away this rubble of lucre, even into their own bank accounts. Not a whisper of impropriety could ever attach itself to their high names! 'So,' said Abraham with a happy shrug, 'we do the dirty work, and plenty of pebbles end up in our pockets, too.' It turned out that Abraham's 'Siodicorp'--as it was now universally known--was a major player in the Khazana Bank International, which by the end of the 19805 had become the first financial institution from the Third World to rival the great Western banks in terms of assets and transactions. The more or less moribund banking operation he had taken over from the Cashondeliveri brothers had been brilliandy refurbished, and its links with the KBI enterprise had made it the wonder of the city. 'The old days of setting up a dollar-bypass system for basket-case economies are gone,' declaimed my father. 'No more of that namby-pamby South-South co-operation bakvaas. Bring on the big boys! Dollar, DM, Swiss franc, yen--let them come! Now we will beat them at their own game.' In spite of his new frankness with me, however, it was several years before Abraham Zogoiby admitted that beneath this glittering monetarist vision there lurked a hidden layer of activity: the inevitable secret world that has existed, awaiting revelation, beneath everything I have ever known.--And if the reality of our being is that so many covert truths exist behind Maya-veils of unknowing and illusion, then why not Heaven and Hell, too? Why not God and the Devil and the whole blest-damned thing? If so much revelation, why not Revelation?--Please. This is no time to discuss theology. The subject on the table is terrorism, and a secret nuclear device. Among KBI's largest clients were a number of gentlemen and organisations whose names featured on the most-wanted and most-dangerous lists of every country in the free world--but who, mysteriously, themselves seemed free to come and go, to board commercial aeroplanes and visit bank branches and receive medical treatment in the countries of their choice, without fear of arrest or harassment. These shadow-accounts were maintained in special files, shielded by an impressive battery of passwords, software 'bombs' and other defence mechanisms, and in theory at least could not be accessed through the main computer. But these precautions were as nothing, and this unsavoury clientele looked positively angelic, when set beside the precautions taken to protect, and the personnel involved in, KBI's greatest enterprise: namely, the financing and secret manufacture 'for certain oil-rich countries and their ideological allies' of large-scale nuclear weaponry. Abraham's arm had grown long indeed. If there was a stockpile of suitably enriched uranium or plutonium to be had, the Khazana Bank would have a finger in that hot pie; if by some chance a long-range delivery system unexpectedly came on to the market in the fringe states of the recently collapsed Soviet Union, KBI money would move sinuously, invisibly, beneath carpets, through walls, towards that vendor's stall. So at last Abraham's invisible city, built by invisible people to do invisible deeds, was nearing its apotheosis. It was building an invisible bomb. In May 1991 an all-too-visible explosion in Tamil Nadu added Mr Rajiv Gandhi to the list of his family's murdered dead, and Abraham Zogoiby--- whose decisions could at times be so incomprehensibly dark as to suggest that he actually believed he was being funny--chose that awful day to 'brief me on the existence of the secret H-bomb project. At that moment something changed within me. It was an involuntary alteration, born >t of will or choice but of some deeper, unconscious function of ^y self. I listened carefully as he went into the specifics (the overarching problem the project faced at present, he noted, was the need for an ultra-fast supercomputer capable of running the complex weapons delivery programmes without which the missiles would never hit anything they were supposed to; in the whole world there existed less than two dozen such FPS or 'Floating Point System' computers with VAX accessing equipment that enabled them to make around seventy-six million calculations per second, and twenty of these were in the United States, which meant one of the remaining three or four--and such a machine had been located in Japan--must either be acquired by a front organisation so impenetrable as to deceive the enormously sophisticated security systems surrounding such a sale, or else it would have to be stolen, and then made invisible, smuggled to the end-user by means of an improbably complex chain of corrupt excise officials, falsified bills of lading and duped inspectorates) but, as I listened, I heard a voice within me making an absolute, non-negotiable refusal. Just as I had refused the death which Uma Sarasvati had planned for me, so I now believed I had passed the bounds of what was required of me by family loyalty. To my surprise, another loyalty had taken precedence. Surprise, because after all I had been raised in Elephanta, where all communal ties had been deliberately disrupted; in a country where all citizens owe an instinctive dual allegiance to a place and a faith, I had been made into a nowhere-and-no-community man--and proud of it, may I say. So it was with a keen sense of the unexpected that I found myself standing up to my formidable, deadly father. '... And if we are found to be smuggling it,' he was saying, 'all aid agreements, favoured-nation privileges and other government-to-government economic protocols would be terminated on the spot.' I took a breath, and plunged: 'I guess you must know who-all this bomb is meant to blow into more bits than poor Rajiv, and where?' Abraham became stone. He was ice, and flame. He was God in Paradise and I, his greatest creation, had just put on the forbidden fig-leaf of shame. 'I am a business person,' he said. 'What there is to do, I do.' YHWH. lam that I am. 'To my astonishment,' I told this shadow-Jehovah, this anti- Almighty, this black hole in the sky, my Daddyji, 'excuse me, but I find that I'm a Jew.' By this time I was no longer working for Mainduck; so Chhaggan had been right, I suppose--the blood in my veins had proved thicker than the blood we had spilled together. It was not I, but Fielding who had suggested, not without a modicum of grace, that we had reached the parting of the ways. He probably knew that I was not prepared to spy on my father for him, and he may very well have intuited that information about his activities might be flowing in the opposite direction. It must be added that my appetite for office work was not great; for while my youthful habit of neatness, my urge-to-unexceptionality was well suited to the humble, mechanical tasks I was given to perform, my 'secret identity'--that is, my true, untamed, amoral self--rebelled violently against the tedium of the days. Nothing to be done with an old hoodlum, a superannuated goonda, except retire him. 'Go and rest,' Fielding told me, putting his hand on my head. 'You have earned it.' I wondered if I