Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“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?”