Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“Yes,” I said. “Same here.”

Though not exactly the same, I thought, stepping down from my stepladder and squinting at my handiwork. Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for third parties to whom, fortuitously, we were already married.

Jake and I spent the second day of our Indian expedition at a nature reserve. There was a boat safari on a lake, and from the boat we saw elephants and deer and wild pigs. Best of all, there were monkeys everywhere; Jake was a monkey fanatic and believed he could speak the language of monkeys. There was also the wonderful knowledge that the hills around us held tigers. The next morning we left well before sunrise. There wasn’t much going on, at this dark hour, aside from dogs skittering across the road. In the village, streetlights shone, and my son’s head on my lap was a waxing and waning moon; but presently all wayside illumination came to an end. The car and its dazzling forerunner went onward through the mountain forest. There, at the edge of the beam, I saw movement.

Men were walking by the side of the road. They were on their way to work. They walked not in groups but alone, in a broken single file. They were almost unnoticeable, and when they were noticeable, it was only for an instant. Some of these men wore a shirt; some did not. Most wore a lungi arranged like a skirt. They were small and thin and poor and dark-skinned, with thin arms and thin legs. They were men walking in the forest and the darkness.

For some reason, I keep on seeing these men. I do not think of Chuck as one of them, even though, with his very dark skin, he could have been one of them. I think of Chuck as the Chuck I saw. But whenever I see these men I always end up seeing Chuck.

Marinello is the name of the ice-cream shop, or ijssalon, in The Hague where, after a shopping eternity at the Maison de Bonneterie, my mother would sweeten me with two scoops of chocolate ice cream. Marinello is also the name of the NYPD detective who telephones me about Chuck Ramkissoon. I’ve been trying to speak to him for a month. It’s the end of April. I heard from the Times reporter in late March.

My immediate instinct, on this earlier occasion, is to fly to New York for the funeral. But the telephone directories don’t have a phone number for Anne Ramkissoon; only Abelsky is listed.

“When he disappears,” Abelsky says right off the bat, “a guy says to me, Maybe he killed himself. I said, You idiot! Chuck isn’t a suicide guy! This guy has more life inside him than ten people! Then they find him in the river with his hands tied up. I tell this schmuck, I tell him, You see? I was right.” Abelsky wheezily inhales. “They never said what he died for.”

“I’m sorry?”

“What was the reason for death?” Abelsky asks scientifically. “Drowning? Or was he killed before?”

I don’t have an answer. Abelsky continues, “When I get the news, I’m like a statue. He was a great employee. Full of ideas. Although I should have fired his ass a hundred times. I’m paying his salary and he sets up an office in the city? With no one else I would have allowed this! Nobody! Only Chuck!” Very reasonably he says, “But we adapted already. You gotta adapt, to stay in business. You gotta move with the times.”

Abelsky, who tells me he doesn’t know about the funeral, gives me Anne Ramkissoon’s phone number.

“What’s happening to her share of the business?” I ask.

There is a pause. “The lawyers are investigating all of this. She will get what she is entitled, of course.”

“Yes, she will,” I say.

“Otherwise what?” Abelsky replies immediately. “Otherwise what? What gave you the right to talk?”

I laugh at him, this shrunken businessman.

He says in a wounded voice, “You think I killed him? You think I killed Chuck? What the hell!” he shouts. “Because I’m a Russian, I kill him? Because I yell at the guy? Always we were fighting! From the beginning, when he told me how to sell kosher fish to the Jews. What a guy!” There is more coughing and wheezing. Abelsky doesn’t sound good. “Nobody knew Chuck then,” he says, all tender emotion now. “He was a nobody. A nothing. But I saw something in this guy. He was a great guy, a terrific guy. If I find out the fuck who gone and did this, I’m going to kill him with my hands. That’s a promise I make to his wife.” This calms him, apparently, because he says, “I don’t know what you know about Chuck. But if you know like I know, you wouldn’t talk to me like this. But that’s OK,” he says, releasing me from culpability. “You only know what you know.”

I know that I last saw Chuck on Thanksgiving Day, 2003. I’d rung him a few days before and told him, out of correctness more than anything else, that I was about to fly to England for good.

“Let’s get together for the holiday,” Chuck said. “We’ll mark your departure.”

It was agreed. I imagined a lunch in Flatbush, with Anne serving up the turkey and my host lecturing us on the significance of the day of national gratitude. What in fact happened was that I received a call from Eliza. She said I was to meet her and Chuck at his office on Twenty-seventh Street, whereupon we’d walk the few blocks to Herald Square and catch the tail end of the Macy’s parade. The rest of the agenda, of Chuck’s devising, remained undisclosed. When I responded to this last item with silence, Eliza said, “Yeah, me too.”

Thanksgiving Day in New York, that year, was clear and windy. I walked through Chelsea’s streets with an exodist’s attentiveness. For the last time I took in the benign monumentalism of Seventh Avenue, and for the first time I noticed a row of small golden trees at the corner of Seventh and Twenty-fifth Street.

On Fifth Avenue, Eliza was waiting for me outside the office building. “He’s saying meet him at Herald Square,” she said. “I mean, can you think of anything crazier?”

It was a good question. Herald Square — or, rather, Thirty-second Street, where barriers and squad cars blocked further progress — was a scene of near-chaos. Spectators were massed on and around the ledges and windows of the skyscrapers, and on the street a great crowd, held back by cops and barricades, pushed and strained to see what was going on in the square. In this regard, I had no problem; I had the advantage of height. The parade seemed to have come to a halt. Ronald McDonald, thirty feet long, yellow-gloved, red-shoed, red-mouthed, red-haired, hovered and hovered over Herald Square, his right arm stuck in a terrible wave. Human Ronald McDonalds teemed beneath, holding the balloon ropes and gesturing and smiling at the multitudes. Immediately behind Old McDonald, as Jake used to call him, was a pink float on which princesses frantically gesticulated at us, and farther up, on Broadway, other airborne monsters could be made out — poor Charlie Brown poised to kick a football, and Chicken Little, and a giant fetuslike character, red-skulled and forward-leaning, who meant nothing to me. From behind a building, a marching band’s trumpets and drums carried over to us in a splintered din.

“We’re never going to find him,” Eliza wailed. “Where is he?”

The parade at last lurched onward. Ronald McDonald turned around the corner and flew into the gap of Thirty-fourth Street.

I tapped Eliza’s arm. “Straight ahead,” I said.

Chuck was on the far side of Thirty-third Street, on the east side of the square, where a few members of the public had been allowed to gather. He was watching the parade. We pushed toward him. “Hey!” Eliza shouted. “We’re over here!” Chuck turned to her voice and broke into a grin. “Hey!” he shouted back faintly. “I’m coming.”