Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  Chuck stirred. “God, I nearly forgot: the snakes. This forest is the domain of the mapepire snakes—pit vipers. There are two kinds, the z’ananna and the balsain. There is an antidote for balsain venom, but the z’ananna, the bushmaster, fifteen feet long with diamond markings on its back—boy, if one of them bites you, it’s certain death. They’re night animals, but it’s easy to disturb them. So while I was terrified about the men running after me—who I couldn’t hear, by the way, I just sensed them—I was also terrified about snakes. My God, when I think back…” Again, Chuck shook his head. “I remember the sound of the stream getting louder. I come down to a dry ravine, a gully. I jump across the ravine and climb up the bank, holding on to roots to pull myself up. Now I’m heading down again, straight for the stream. It’s a clear stream, very rocky. I don’t have to worry about snakes anymore. I don’t hesitate: I go downstream. I have no choice—upstream are these huge rocks, and straight ahead is a sheer escarpment, then more snakes. But the terrible thing was, I couldn’t see where I was going. Fronds, thick heliconia fronds, hung over the stream, and I had to fight through them. I had a horrible feeling those men knew of some shortcut—you know, I’d push aside the fronds and they’d be waiting for me. Anyway, I just kept going down the streambed, walking through these cataracts, trying not to slip on rocks. Then—and here’s where it really gets like a movie—the stream dropped twenty feet into a pool. I tried to edge down the side of the waterfall, but it was no good. No way down. Then I heard voices, not far away, not far away at all. ‘Dread! Dread! He down there!’”

  Chuck paused. “Let me ask you this: have you ever run for your life? I don’t mean what happened at that cricket match, although that was pretty dangerous. I mean, a real do-or-die situation?”

  I didn’t humor him with an answer. But we didn’t have too many do-or-die situations in The Hague.

  In a wondering voice, he said, “What I think about now, when I look back, Hans, is how, when you’re running for your life, you have this strong sense of luck. You don’t feel lucky, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, you feel luck, good and bad, everywhere. The air is luck. Do you understand what I’m saying? I tell you, it’s a horrible feeling.”

  He paused, frowning. “Anyhow, I decided to jump. We’re talking twenty feet, into water that may or may not be deep. It was a real situation, because I couldn’t swim—I still can’t. And let me tell you, I can barely walk up a staircase without getting vertigo. But somehow, I forced myself to jump. Lord, the fear I felt as I dropped…” Chuck shivered heavily. “I was lucky. The pool was deep enough to break my fall, but shallow enough for me to splash out. I banged my knee, but I could walk. I struggled onto the rocks and kept going. I was exhausted, finished. But I pushed myself on, trying to breathe, trying to forget about the pain in my knee. What I can’t understand, now,” Chuck said, “is my pursuers. I was running for my life—but these men? So much determination, just to catch a boy? Why, Hans? I wasn’t any threat to them. I was just this small kid with a semp…All I can think is, it has something to do with hunting. The hunt triggers some deep instinct within us. These men were hunters, for sure.

  “So on I went,” Chuck continued. “Walking and stumbling. About twenty minutes later, I started to see cocoa trees. I thought about leaving the stream, but my fear of snakes returned, because a cocoa plantation is a favorite habitat of the bushmaster. I ran along the edge of the water, sometimes in the water, sometimes on land. Then I came to a place where huge tree trunks had fallen across the stream. I climbed over one and finally sat down to catch my breath. I was broken, I tell you. There was no sign of the men. But I couldn’t be sure they were gone, because the fronds blocked the view. Then, I’ll never forget this, a blue morpho, a blue emperor butterfly, came flying through the sunlight.” He turned to face me. “Are you—what’s the word—a lepidopterist?”

  I almost smiled.

  “I love that word. Lepidopterist. Well, anyhow, I head off again. I come to this faded old trail. Did the men know about this trail? Were they ahead of me, waiting? It didn’t matter anymore. I was too tired to care. I followed the trail up this steep embankment, steep like this”—he made an angle with his forearm—“and found myself in an abandoned tonka-bean estate. You know tonka-beans? The seed was used for perfume, snuff. Nowadays, they’ve got synthetic products, so the old plantations are returning to forest. Same thing with cocoa. That business stopped because of the snakes. People were no longer prepared to gamble with death. Anyhow, I come to the top of the tonka-bean hill. Down below are the houses of Naranjos, this mountain village. The people there are farmers and planters, a mixture of black and Spanish, almost red-skinned. Some have deeds going back to the Spanish time. They have Spanish names—Fernandez, Acevedo. And the village itself, Naranjos, is named after the orange trees they planted between the cocoa trees. I’m calling this place a village, but we’re really talking about farmland with a house here and there, you follow me?” Chuck drew breath. “It was still a full hour’s walk to the actual center of the village. So I limp along for an hour, and at last, at long last, I come to a rum shop. I tell you, I’ve never been so happy to see a rum shop in all my life. I stay right there, next to a bunch of guys shit-talking and drinking puncheon. Guys that make you feel safe. You know what,” Chuck said, leaning forward and slapping the dashboard, “I still remember what they were talking about. Let me see, they were talking about a man who rode on his bike from Sangre Grande to San Juan with a pet snake wrapped around his neck—a boa constrictor. Dumb idea. The snake started to choke him, and he fell off his bike, totally blue. Lucky for him somebody came by and pulled the snake off.” Chuck gave a soft, merry gasp. “Then I rode down to the shore in the back of a pickup truck carrying a load of coffee. And that was it. End of story.” He laughed. “Or beginning of story.”

  The car advanced us ever closer to New York.

  Chuck said pleasantly, “I’ve never spoken to anyone about that before.”

  It wasn’t my sense that he was misleading me. “Why not?” I said.

  He rubbed his jaw. “Who knows,” Chuck said, suddenly looking tired.

  Very little was said during the rest of that journey to New York City. Chuck never apologized or explained. It’s probable that he felt his presence in the car amounted to an apology and his story to an explanation—or, at the very least, that he’d privileged me with an opportunity to reflect on the stuff of his soul. I didn’t take him up on this. I wasn’t interested in drawing a line from his childhood to the sense of authorization that permitted him, as an American, to do what I had seen him do. He was expecting me to make the moral adjustment—and here was an adjustment I really couldn’t make. I dropped him off at a subway stop in Manhattan. We had no further contact until the day I rang him and told him that I was leaving. It was only to make life easy for myself that I agreed to meet him on Thanksgiving.

  “I find it incredible,” Rachel comments, “he traveled all that way to see you.”

  “That was just like him,” I say.

  “He must have valued you,” she says.

  Between us we have drunk a bottle of claret, and what Rachel has just said makes me happy. Until she adds, “I mean you were valuable to him. He wasn’t interested in you.” She says, “Not really. Not in you.”

  By way of reply I stand up and clear the table. I am too tired to explain that I don’t agree—to say that, however much of a disappointment Chuck may have been at the end, there were many earlier moments when this was not the case and that I see no good reason why his best self-manifestations should not be the basis of one’s final judgment. We all disappoint, eventually.

  In the following days and weeks I phone Detective Marinello repeatedly because I have, so I think, relevant information about Chuck Ramkissoon. Unbelievably, it takes him a whole month to get back to me. Marinello takes down my personal details—address, phone numbers, employment. At last, infuriatingly, he asks, “So, you have some information pertaining to Mr.
Ramkissoon?”

  He leads me through my statement. I tell him everything I know, even facts that are potentially troublesome for me, and over the course of an hour Marinello carefully records every word I say. This makes it all the more surprising that he immediately signs off, with no follow-up questioning, “Thank you, sir, that’s great.”

  “That’s it?”

  Marinello sighs. Then, maybe because I’m in England and beyond the jurisdiction, or because he’s made me wait a month, or because cops do this from time to time to make life easier for the good guys, he tells me something “off the record”: they know who did this. “We just don’t got the courtroom evidence,” Marinello says.

  “Evidence?” I say blankly.

  “Witnesses,” Marinello says. “We got no witnesses.”

  For the second time I say, “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Marinello says. He sounds satisfied. He feels he has taught somebody a lesson in realities.

  Whether or not this is true, I feel I must persist. At the weekend, I ring Anne Ramkissoon again: this is when I find out the Ramkissoon home number is no longer operative. I dig out an old diary and with it Eliza’s home number. A man with a Hispanic accent answers her phone. Eliza is out, he tells me. “This is her husband. Can I help?”

  So that he doesn’t get any wrong ideas, I tell the guy exactly who I am. Either he’s wary or not especially interested, because he barely reacts. “I’ll call another time,” I tell him.

  I don’t, however. I leave it there. Sure, I have my theories—Abelsky is an unlikely killer of Chuck, I tentatively conclude—but Marinello’s indifference to me suggests that I have no personal connection at all to the relevant facts. Chuck Ramkissoon was involved in things categorically beyond my knowledge of him.

  A month passes, and then another. Then, in July, there is an unforeseen development. I read somewhere that Faruk Patel, the millionaire guru whom Chuck claimed as a backer, is in town on a speaking tour. I decide to call Faruk’s publicist and ask for a meeting. “Tell him it’s about Chuck Ramkissoon,” I tell the publicist.

  Within an hour—this takes me aback—she calls with an appointment.

  Faruk is quartered in a suite at the Ritz. An assistant escorts me into his presence. He is wearing, as the Faruk brand requires, a white tracksuit, white T-shirt, and white sneakers. He democratically joins me on a large white sofa and tells me that I’m lucky to catch him since he comes to London infrequently and is very busy when he does.

  “Tell me,” he continues, leaning back and waggling a foot, “what exactly was your relationship to Ramkissoon?”

  “He was a personal friend,” I say. I sketch my role as assistant groundsman. “I had nothing to do with his business.”

  Faruk seems amused. “He told me you were a director of his company. Then he told me you were a nonexecutive director. Then he told me you were involved, but only informally, and that you would show yourself once we got permission to build.”

  I laugh. “Well, it’s possible I might have,” I said. “Who knows?”

  Faruk also laughs. “He was an intriguing chap. That’s why I became involved in the first place. My advisers told me not to touch it. But I wanted to know what this funny fellow would do next. One never knew. I captained my university team, you know,” he suddenly boasts. “Sometimes I think I should have been a professional cricketer.”

  Somebody pours us tea. I say, “Do you think it would have worked?”

  “The New York Cricket Club,” Faruk says, raising his eyebrows, “was a splendid idea—a gymkhana in New York. We had a chance there. But would the big project have worked? No. There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket.”

  When, out of loyalty to Chuck, I say nothing, Faruk says emphatically, “Look, he wanted to take the game to the Americans. He wanted to expand the operation, get them watching it, playing it. Start a whole cricketing revolution.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Faruk says, “My idea was different. My idea was, you don’t need America. Why would you? You have the TV, Internet markets in India, in England. These days that’s plenty. America? Not relevant. You put the stadium there and you’re done. Finito la musica.” He drinks up his tea.

  We rise to our feet. “It’s a tragedy,” Faruk Patel solemnly says, putting his hand on my shoulder: we are brothers in sorrow. “Ramkissoon was a rare bird.”

  That night, I cannot fall asleep. I get out of bed, go down to the kitchen, help myself to a glass of mineral water. The family laptop is on the kitchen table. I switch it on.

  I go to Google Maps. It is preset to a satellite image of Europe. I rocket westward, over the dark blue ocean, to America. There is Long Island. In plummeting I overshoot and for the first time in years find myself in Manhattan. It is, necessarily, a bright, clear day. The trees are in leaf. There are cars immobilized all over the streets. Nothing seems to be going on.

  I veer away into Brooklyn, over houses, parks, graveyards, and halt at olive-green coastal water. I track the shore. Gravesend and Gerritsen slide by, and there is Floyd Bennett Field’s geometric sprawl of runways. I fall again, as low as I can. There’s Chuck’s field. It is brown—the grass has burned—but it is still there. There’s no trace of a batting square. The equipment shed is gone. I’m just seeing a field. I stare at it for a while. I am contending with a variety of reactions, and consequently with a single brush on the touch pad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrinkles and all—have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere. From up here, though, a human’s movement is a barely intelligible thing. Where would he move to, and for what? There is no sign of nations, no sense of the work of man. The USA as such is nowhere to be seen.

  I shut down the computer. I drink a second glass of water and begin to study a sheaf of work papers. I’m wide awake.

  While Cardozo rushes by Underground to Sloane Square and his fiancée-to-be, I stroll across Waterloo Bridge with my jacket suspended from a hooked finger. I am happy to be walking. Although it’s early evening, it’s still very warm: this is, after all, the summer of the great heat wave. The English summer is actually a Russian doll of summers, the largest of which is the summer of unambiguous disaster in Iraq, which immediately contains the summer of the destruction of Lebanon, which itself holds a series of ever-smaller summers that lead to the summer of Monty Panesar and, smallest of all perhaps, the summer of Wayne Rooney’s foot. But on this evening at the end of July, it feels like summer simpliciter, and it’s with no real thought of anything that I detach myself from the mass whose fate is Waterloo Station and go down the steps to the riverbank. It’s a scene of good cheer on the esplanade, where the wanderers are in receipt of that peculiar happiness a summer river bestows, a donation of space, of light, and, somehow, of time: there is something regretful in Big Ben’s seven gongs. I go under Hungerford Bridge and its sunny new walkways and am overwhelmingly confronted by the London Eye, in profile. Here, by the tattered lawn of Jubilee Gardens, is where I’ve arranged to meet wife and son. Rather than crane up at the Eye, I pass ten minutes watching the waters of the Thames. It’s hard to believe this was exactly the stretch where, in January, with television helicopters floating overhead and millions following its every sinking and surfacing, a whale swam. Chuck, the birder, taught me the term for such a creature: a vagrant, to be distinguished from a migrant.

  My son’s voice calls out. Daddy! Turning, I see my family and its superlong shadows. We are all beaming. Reunions in unfamiliar places have this effect, and maybe the great wheel itself is infectious: the stupendous circle, freighted with circumferential eggs, is a glorious spray of radiuses. In due course a security guard waves his wand over our possessions; an egg hatches Germans; and a gang of us boards. According to officialdom, we are flying counterclockwise at less than two miles per hour. Jake, berserk with excitement, quickly befriends a six-year-old boy who speaks not a word of English. As we rise over the
river and are gradually presented with the eastern vista, the adults also become known to one another: we meet a couple from Leeds; a family from Vilnius (Jake’s pal is one of these); and three young Italian women, one of whom has dizziness and must stay seated.

  As a Londoner, I find myself consulted about what we’re all seeing. At first, this is easy—there’s the NatWest Tower, which now has a different name; there’s Tower Bridge. But the higher we go, the less recognizable the city becomes. Trafalgar Square is not where you expect it to be. Charing Cross, right under our noses, must be carefully detected. I find myself turning to a guidebook for help. The difficulty arises from the mishmashing of spatial dimensions, yes, but also from a quantitative attack: the English capital is huge, huge; in every direction, to distant hills—Primrose and Denmark and Lavender, our map tells us—constructions are heaped without respite. Riverbank traffic aside, there is little sign of life. Districts are compacted, in south London especially: where on earth are Brixton and Kennington and Peckham? You wonder how anyone is able to navigate this labyrinth, which is what this crushed, squashed, everywhere-spreading city appears to be. “Buckingham Palace?” one of the Lithuanian ladies asks me, and I cannot say. I notice, meanwhile, that Jake has started to race around and needs to be brought to order, and that Rachel is standing alone in a corner. I merely join my wife. I join her just as we reach the very top of our celestial circuit and for this reason I have no need to do anything more than put an arm around her shoulder. A self-evident and prefabricated symbolism attaches itself to this slow climb to the zenith, and we are not so foolishly ironic, or confident, as to miss the opportunity to glimpse significantly into the eyes of the other and share the thought that occurs to all at this summit, which is, of course, that they have made it thus far, to a point where they can see horizons previously unseen, and the old earth reveals itself newly. Everything is further heightened, as we must obscurely have planned, by signs of sundown: in the few clouds above Ealing, Phoebus is up to his oldest and best tricks. Rachel, a practical expression all of a sudden crossing her face, begins to say something, but I shush her. I know my wife: she feels an urge to go down now, into the streets and into the facts. But I leave her with no choice, as willy-nilly we are lowered westward, but to accept her place above it all. There is to be no drifting out of the moment.