St. John was startled for a moment and looked around as though he didn’t know where he was. They were on the terrace near where he had been sleeping. The sound of the sea and the gulls, and the sight of his own house, the curtains billowing in the soft breeze, reassured him. He closed his eyes.
He heard Marlies rub oil into her hands, a voluptuous slurping noise. Then he smelled vanilla as Marlies began working on his chest. She pressed deeply with the heels of her hands and moved out toward his arms as though she were separating his muscles into discrete bundles to be worked on later.
He opened his eyes. She stood above him, her face directly over his as she worked. She held the tip of her tongue pressed between her lips in concentration. There were little beads of sweat on her forearms and wrists, and she breathed strongly from the exertion. Her pulse flickered at her throat. She noticed St. John looking.
“How is that?” she said.
St. John smiled.
“Good,” she said.
She slid her arms under his shoulders and used his weight to work the shoulders. She took his left upper arm in her strong hands and squeezed and released and squeezed and released it. St. John watched as her body bobbed above him in time with the work her hands were doing. She wore a loose white T-shirt. He could plainly see the contour of her body beneath it. She saw him looking and smiled. St. John smiled back. St. John liked for a massage to merge into sex. And Marlies was generally willing to comply. He closed his eyes.
The music she had brought was a seductive melding of orchestra and female voices, with the voices sometimes taking instrumental parts and the instruments, including cellos and accordions, singing as human voices might. The song was a long one in a major key with a rising, uplifting melody. It alluded to folk songs, and then suddenly to Mozart or Bach; St. John didn’t know enough about Bach or Mozart to know which one it might be. Still, he found himself listening with more interest than music normally elicited, trying to discern why it seemed familiar—he felt sure he had never heard it before.
St. John looked straight up, past Marlies, into the cloudless sky. Here in the Caribbean the water often reflected the sky, echoing its violet or turquoise tones. But on rare occasions it was as though the water emanated its own particular colors, and the sky then reflected the water, picking up its blue first of all, but then its liquid shimmering green layers and its blue-black depths. It made St. John dizzy since he was looking up but had the sense that he was looking down into the ocean.
Although these layers of color were not clouds—there were no clouds—the layers he saw took on the quality of clouds, faintly at first, then becoming increasingly opaque and yet vague at the same time, drifting past and across and over one another in different directions, massing and dispersing in unexpected ways. There were so many layers that there was no way to see past them all, and yet suddenly they configured themselves in such a way, one above the other, that there was a clear aperture through them to clarity, a hole that was, as St. John experienced it, nothing less than a hole through time, which afforded him, without his having sought or desired it, an unmitigated, unrefracted view of his own distant past.
Through the hole in the sky or ocean or whatever it was, St. John saw himself in front of the small house where he had grown up on Kenawa Street on the far outskirts of Milwaukee between the Little Menomonee River and the Spooner Farm. He stood beside the redbud tree he and his father had dug up in the woods and planted in the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street.
He was eight. His sister stood beside him, and they peered intently into their hands, which were cupped and joined, examining something. St. John was intensely aware that this moment was leaving as quickly as it had arrived; he rushed to gather up as much as he could of the riches he somehow was certain it held.
He was a boy again. Not as we all become our younger selves from time to time, finding a forgotten moment presenting itself vividly in our present. No, he was a boy as if for the first time—purely, entirely, and with only the dimmest, most vague sense that that boy had a future he had already lived through. He felt the absence of a future that a child feels, the sense that the moment is everything and that what comes after is unimportant. He stood there without memory or a sense of his own experience and peered into his and his sister’s hands. He could not see what they held, did not know what they were examining, but knew at the same time that it was everything, it was the universe.
If there had been a magnifying glass between their gaze and its object, the object and their hands would have burst into flame, so intense and complete was their scrutiny. St. John felt things, long-forgotten things, sensations and feelings that he had known intensely as a boy, but that had disappeared slowly and imperceptibly on the long meandering journey to adulthood and now middle age. Along the way these things had been sloughed off because they had no value. Until they were gone. Then, once they had disappeared, it was as if they had never been there, had never been the most important part of who he was or how he felt.
At twelve St. John had felt safe, for instance, safe meaning unassailable, invulnerable, and immortal, because he knew with absolute certainty—he could not imagine that it was or would ever be otherwise—that his father and mother were watching over him as God was watching over his creation. Their love was presumed, taken for granted as were all the laws of nature. All St. John had to do was run up the stairs and into the house calling “Mom!” and his mother would rush to see what was the matter.
“Are you all right, Sinjy? What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
His father worked long hours at a tiresome job so that St. John could have a better life than he had had. The twelve-year-old was not aware of any of this. He knew only the moment in which he found himself. And though he had a slowly awakening sense of time, it was of an endless continuum of minutes that could last an eternity. Latin class was fifty-five minutes long, but it might as well have been a year. He could look at the clock and then look again an hour later, and the clock would not have advanced a single minute. When the school year ended, the summer stretched before him like endless territory, golden and immense, its proportions so great that its sides and end and eventually even its beginning lay far beneath the most distant horizon.
The hole closed; the layers slid past and closed over one another; the sky became the sky again. St. John came back to himself with a rush. He felt a great loss, the death of everyone and everything, including himself. They all now lay behind interminable doors. Doors after doors upon doors. If he could somehow open one, if that impossible power to move back through time, as he just had, could magically be granted again, there would be another door, and behind that another, and another, and another. The past was gone, done and sealed forever. None of it belonged to him. His mother and father were dead and had been for a long time. He had avoided them during their last years, and they had been relieved that he had. He never saw his sisters or even spoke to them.
He should have realized it before, but he hadn’t: His past was by now the far greater part of his life. His future was a small, insufficient slice of the pie. Even if St. John lived out the remainder of a natural life expectancy and died in relative old age, what remained to be lived was a short time, shorter than a single Latin class, certainly shorter than a twelve-year-old’s summer. St. John felt his eyes fill with tears. It was not self-pity; it was genuine loss.
“Are you all right, honey?” said Marlies.
St. John sent her away.
LI
ZAHARIA HAD MONITORED ST. JOHN’S bank accounts on a daily basis for weeks now, and so was the first to notice that something big was amiss. A flood of money was leaving the accounts. In a matter of days, the various accounts together now contained not hundreds of millions of dollars but a few thousand.
“A grand total of fourteen thousand six hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Fourteen thousand…?” Louis was astounded.
“And six hundred and fifty.”
“Whe
re did it all go?” Louis had been working on a new painting. A Louis Morgon, and he was having trouble getting the other painters—Picasso, Derain, Cézanne—off his palette and out of his hand.
“I don’t know,” said Zaharia. “All the transaction and routing information has been scrubbed clean. All the history. And no Charter Island accounts, including the bank’s own reserves, seem to have grown by any amount that would account for the missing money.”
“So he’s taken it out of the bank.”
“I guess he has.” Zaharia was crestfallen. “He or someone else. But where should I look for it?”
“I don’t know. Wouldn’t a transfer that big show up?”
“It might if the money stayed together and I knew where to look. But if he divided it up into odd, smaller amounts and wired it in all different directions … I’m sorry, Louis.”
“No, I’m sorry, Zaharia. I shouldn’t have mixed you up in this whole affair in the first place.”
The Russian, Dimitri Adropov, and his banker had an analogous conversation in a small office in midtown Manhattan. “Hundreds of millions cannot just disappear.” Dimitri pulled back his coat so his man could see the gun. “You moved money and now you not tell me.”
“I swear,” said the man. He was sweating. “I swear I didn’t. Where could I move it?”
Against his better judgment, Dimitri believed him.
At about the same time, Richard Smythe stared at the bank of computers on his desk. He looked from one screen to the next. He could not believe his eyes. Not only had St. John emptied his accounts, but he had done it while the accounts were flush with assets from proprietary Charter Island accounts, assets Richard had been stuffing into St. John’s accounts to make up for the money he—Richard—had been stealing. Not only had St. John withdrawn his millions, he had also—unwittingly this time—made off with a lot of Richard’s money.
Richard looked at the routing information—information Zaharia had not yet found—and groaned. St. John had used the money to buy industrial and government bonds and various countries’ treasury bills. Some of the money had gone into Swiss and other offshore accounts. Richard picked up the phone and called St. John.
“Did you get the paintings, my friend?” Richard heard the cry of gulls in the background.
“Hey, Richard, how are you?”
“Excellent, excellent, Sinj.”
“Still in Bali?”
“No, I’m home,” said Richard. “Things to attend to. Always upgrading our security. You know.” He laughed.
“Did you sell the yacht?” said St. John.
“You know, I was going to. But then I’ve just spent the loveliest four weeks on it, so I’m going to hang on to it for now. And you? What about those Picassos you were going to buy?”
“No, that didn’t work out. They were of lesser quality than the photos showed. Picasso did some real crap, you know? Most people don’t know that. They would have diminished the collection. Let someone else have them.”
“I see you moved your money.”
“I did. It was a bit sudden, I know.”
“How, without…?”
“Impulsive, I know. I used drafts and checks and wire transfers. What with the paintings falling through and … It seemed prudent to divide it up, have it more places. A lot of people are looking for it, you know.”
“Yes. One can’t be too careful; no argument from me there. No dissatisfaction with our service, then? I know Citi, Bank of America, some of the big guys are offering the same services, but—”
“No, no, no, Richard. Don’t even think it. No dissatisfaction whatsoever. I owe you big time.”
“You know, you can always move it back, Sinj. The way you moved it out; move it back in pieces. If you decide you prefer a banker who … someone on your wavelength after all. We could revisit our arrangement if that would help. But hiding money, avoiding scrutiny—it’s what Charter Island does. Better than anyone. We’re structured with that in mind. Bonds don’t hide anything. And they’re negotiable, St. John; remember that. They’re pretty much like cash. If anyone gets hold of them, they’re gone. I’m sure you know the Swiss banks are under pressure from the Americans to reveal their account holders, and I expect they’ll cave. Think about it, St. John. I say it as your oldest friend. For your own sake. I’m always ready to help, Sinj. You know that.”
“I know, Richard. I know.”
Peter Sanchez was certain that he knew what had happened as soon as he heard from the forensic banking guy that the Larrimer money was gone. He didn’t know how he had done it, but Peter was certain Louis had it.
LII
SINCE HIS DISCHARGE FROM THE HOSPITAL, Mohan ate breakfast with his son every morning on the broad veranda. Charanjeet waited at the table laid with a gay tablecloth and bouquets of flowers and bowls of fresh fruit. He watched anxiously as Abinaash walked Mohan to his chair. Mohan would have preferred to remain in his pajamas, but Abinaash insisted that he dress. “You must greet the day as everyone else does,” she said, “ready for your work.”
“I have no work,” said Mohan mournfully.
“Your work is to get well,” said Abinaash. “It is a very important job.”
Mohan seemed unsteady on his feet. “We could use the wheelchair,” he said hopefully.
“Dr. Burgati says you must walk and not ride,” said Abinaash.
Once Mohan was seated at the table, Charanjeet rose and went over and kissed him. They ate porridge with fresh mango, banana, and berries. There were some sweet buns and tea.
“I would like eggs and bacon,” said Mohan, but Abinaash had already gone inside, so there was no one to contradict him. He sighed. “She would not allow it anyway.”
“I do not like the way she talks to you,” said Charanjeet.
“She talks to me the way she is supposed to,” said Mohan. “It is why we hired her.”
“She does not know her place.”
“You surprise me, Charanjeet. She knows her place very well: It is to take care of me. In fact, she does her work far better than I could have imagined.”
“Well, I do not like her ways.”
Mohan studied his son. “Are you jealous. Charanjeet?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Daddy. I am just looking out for your welfare. And why does she dress that way, like an American teenager? And wearing that ridiculous scarf.”
“Don’t you find her the least bit fetching?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Daddy. What are you thinking?” Mohan smiled, which caused Charanjeet to say again, “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re being completely ridiculous.”
Of course Charanjeet found her fetching. He just could not admit it, to his father or to himself. Although, even in his confused state of mind, he had to admit, albeit reluctantly, that she was a very effective caregiver for his father. In the few weeks she had been attending to Mohan, she had not only gotten him out of bed and on his feet, but had also gotten him taking daily walks. They were not yet long walks, only to the park and back. But they were walks he would never have taken otherwise, and at her urging, they were getting longer all the time. Mohan still leaned on her arm, even though, Charanjeet suspected, he no longer needed her support. And on the walks he pretended to tire so that they could sit together on a bench in the shade.
Abinaash had also forced Mohan to modify what he ate in strict accordance with Dr. Burgati’s recommendations, which was something of a miracle. Golapi and even the cook had been persuaded to change their habits too. Sometimes, to everyone’s shock and chagrin, Mohan invited Abinaash to sit with him for a meal. She of course declined because it was a scandalous suggestion, but that did not stop Mohan from asking.
Charanjeet tried his best to avoid Abinaash. Seeing her confused him. He must not find her attractive, and yet he did. Her smooth, dark skin, flashing eyes, and white teeth made her arresting to look at. The way she moved because of her injured leg accentuated her lithe and curvaceous body, the sight of which caused Charanjee
t unease and pleasure at the same time. Pleasure because she was beautiful to see and unease because this pleasure was one he did not dare allow himself. He was the son of wealthy and cultured Brahmins; she was a lower-caste peasant girl. She had no education, no sophistication, and no claim on happiness.
Charanjeet had never been in love before. He had only had sex a few times, and that had been with prostitutes in London and New York. The experience had been mostly furtive and perfunctory. But he now found himself having the most arousing amorous fantasies. My mind is infected, he thought. He attributed this “infection” to his time living in the west, away from the norms and strictures of his own society. Women were loose in the West, and castes did not exist. Despite the egalitarian principles of Islam, castes still had a strong foothold in Pakistani society.
Charanjeet had expected that his parents would select a suitable wife from among the children of their friends, but they had made no move in that direction. In fact quite the opposite: They seemed to have decided that he should be at liberty to do as he pleased. “You have come home to a different Pakistan,” said Mohan, and he did not seem unhappy at the change. Charanjeet looked to his mother to contradict his father, but she only smiled at him and nodded.
The more Charanjeet rejected any thought of loving Abinaash, the more he found himself drawn to her. And because he tried to avoid her when he was at home, he encountered her at every turn. He would round a corner in the garden, and she would be coming toward him with an armload of laundry. He would stop in to see his father, and she would be taking his blood pressure. This happened more than once in fact. It seemed to Charanjeet as if Mohan was always having his blood pressure taken.
“Roll up your sleeve, Charanjeet,” said Mohan one morning. “Abinaash will take your blood pressure.”
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