Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Now all heads were nodding. “Only in 2015 did U.S. senators make this issue public. I myself launched an online campaign and within one week twelve thousand families replied. Here I must indicate a fault within ourselves, I’m sorry to say. But we must face our own community issues, isn’t it. This crisis arises, there is addiction, there is grave danger to family member or members, but we hide it. We think of it as our shame, and we conceal. Back home in India also, it is hidden. Consequently there is a serious shortage of rehabilitation facilities. The crisis gets worse. Strange but true, it is not because money is not being spent. In the U.S. in 2013, eight billion dollars spent. In 2014, ten billion. Resources are growing but the problem also is growing. Why? Here I must use a word with which all of us sadly are familiar.” A dramatic pause. “That word, honored Consul saab, honorable guests, is corruption. ” A further cause for the obligatory gasp of shock. “Powerful pharmaceutical companies and lobbyists are responsible. Also the small percentage of doctors, I estimate maybe one percent, who are corrupt. Meanwhile new and more powerful drugs arrive on the market. Here is the issue. I am trying to face it. So must we all.”

Anderson Thayer, dutifully taking notes at the back of the room alongside the reporter from Rajdhani, had taken an immediate liking to Dr. Smile because he, too, was small. Two Munchkins in Oz, he thought. We need to stick together. But the longer the doctor spoke, the more impressed Anderson became. This guy was something else. He stood up among his peers and more or less flat out told them, here’s what I’m doing, and made them believe the opposite. Everybody left the meeting thinking he was the sheriff, not the outlaw. He posed as Pat Garrett when secretly he was Billy the Kid. The guy had balls. Not for him the timid Anderson Thayer position of small-not-big. This guy gurgled up a big mucus ball of really big lies and spat it right out between shameless teeth.

Later that afternoon Anderson made the phone call from a burner phone which he would dispose of before he left town. He introduced himself, as he had said he would, as “Sam,” and at once Dr. Smile began to scold him. “Very bad practice for you to attend the conference,” he said. “Local community journalist was there. Not a good idea to allow somebody to add one and one and make two.”

“I’m sorry,” Anderson replied, taking care not to sound sorry. “I wanted to get a look at you, to know who I’m dealing with.”

“And you concluded what?” Dr. Smile’s tone was both aggrieved and a little insecure.

“That you are somebody I can do business with.”

“The first delivery will be a courtesy.” Now Dr. Smile’s voice became stony and businesslike. “There will be no charge. You will receive a small package which will also contain instructions for use, to which you must adhere closely.”

“Understood.”

“La Reina del Taco on the Buford Highway. Go to the men’s room at 10 P.M. precisely and you will find the package waiting behind the cistern.”

The taqueria at night was not a quiet place. The lighting was neon and lurid, the walls were noisy (some pink, some lime green), the ceiling was overly jazzed up by little dangling objects (throbbing red hearts, big yellow hearts, blue broken hearts), the music was very loud, and the volume on the flat-screen TV on one wall was turned up high to do battle with the music. The tables were full of students, from Emory, Morehouse, Spelman, and they generated such noise as only students en masse were capable of producing. It was an excellent choice, Anderson thought, nobody was paying attention to anything except themselves and their food. He checked out the men’s room at five minutes to ten. There was an OUT OF ORDER sign on the door. He walked away and came back five minutes later. The sign was gone, the men’s room was empty, there was a brown paper parcel waiting in the specified place. He took it and headed out to his rented Camry.

It was too late to catch a plane. He would have to spend the night at an airport hotel and fly back to New York in the morning. He hated Hartsfield-Jackson Airport for its immense size and frequent logistical problems. When he’d flown in he’d heard a fellow passenger wearing a Braves baseball cap telling what he assumed to be a local joke. “If you die and go to Hell,” the Braves fan said, “you have to change planes in Atlanta.”

This is the life I could have had, he thought. He had studied Russian at Davidson, taking one course entitled “Russia and Ukraine—War and Peace,” and another studying the use of the metaphor of the vampire in Russian culture, and in his senior year he had been approached by representatives of both American and Russian intelligence and asked if he wanted a job. He had thanked them equally graciously for their interest and declined both their invitations. The American representative had returned to tell him that if he attempted to visit Russia at any time in the future it was probable that his passport would be confiscated and other actions against him might follow. He abandoned Russian, dropped out, did not graduate, and became, instead, a humble (or maybe not-so-humble) personal assistant to the stars. But he could have been a spy if he had said yes. He could have led a secret agent’s life.

What are you talking about, he told himself. This is the life you do have. You’re living it right now.

THIS TIME THE MAN who called himself Quichotte had sent Salma a photograph of himself along with a new note. A clumsy selfie, printed out, no doubt, at some FedEx Print & Ship Center somewhere along his road, and mailed, so it seemed, in Pennsylvania. So he was close. This was a little alarming, but also, she had to admit to herself, interesting. She had not expected him to be handsome, but he was, in his crazy-old-guy way. He reminded her of the actor Frank Langella. His face was long and thin with prominent cheekbones. His white hair was short and he sported three-day-old white grizzle around his chops. He stood erect; no stooper he. He possessed an attractive formality, a nice smile, a melancholy air. As do his letters, she thought, weakening momentarily. They, too, have charm.

Then all of a sudden she began to tremble, because memory burst upon her with the force of a flood, with the terror of a haunting, and she understood that he reminded her of someone else as well as Mr. Langella, and that someone was the man about whom she never spoke, the missing piece in the explanation of her choices, and her life. Quichotte was the spitting image of her maternal grandfather, the long-ostracized and now-deceased Babajan.

“Give this to security,” she told the staffer who had brought her the envelope with the photograph in it. “If this guy ever shows up at the door, call the fucking cops.”

In the car on the way home, her chauffeur was genuinely concerned.

“If I may say so, Miss Daisy,” he said, “you look like you just saw a ghost.”

“None of that Miss Daisy crap tonight, Hoke,” she replied. “I’m not in the fucking mood.”

IT IS TIME TO shed light on Miss Salma R’s last and darkest family secret.

When Salma was twelve years old her grandfather Babajan grabbed her by the wrists and kissed her on the mouth. At the instant that it happened all she could think was that he had been aiming for her cheek and missed, but then he did it again and this time his tongue was no accident. She bent backwards away from that searching tongue and it came after her. Then she broke away and ran.

The Juhu Beach mansion was really two houses with a walled garden in between. There was a smaller, two-story house that gave onto the street, then the garden with its sunken ponds and climbing bougainvillea creeper, then the main, three-story building, looking out to sea. Both buildings were full of paintings by Husain, Raza, Gaitonde, and Khanna, and the garden boasted ancient stone sculptures of the gods Shiva and Krishna and the Buddha too. What were they doing, those great artists both ancient and modern, just hanging there on expensive walls, those deities just standing there on podiums in the sunshine and looking on? What use was genius, what was the point of godliness slash holiness, if it couldn’t protect a twelve-year-old girl in her own home? Shame on you, artists, gods! Climb down off your pedestals, unhang yourselves, and help!—Nobody helped.—The assault happened one weekend when young Salma wandered across the garden from the beach house to the street house, where the main kitchens were, in search of an afternoon snack. This was the house in which Babajan had an upstairs suite in which, for the most part, he kept his own counsel. He was seen in the gardens only at prayer times—he prayed five times a day, as truly religious people do, and also people in serious need of divine forgiveness—when he brought his little prayer mat, rolled up, to the edge of a sunken pond, unrolled it, faced toward Mecca, and got down on his knees. But as must now regretfully be revealed, he preyed almost as often as he prayed. On this weekend afternoon, as Salma headed for the refrigerator, and in a moment when no prying eyes were around, no servants, chauffeurs, or security staff, he emerged from a shadow grinning like a demon, took hold of both her wrists, pulled her toward him, and kissed her with great force, twice, the second time, as has been said, with his tongue. When she ran from him he trotted after her for a few steps, laughing his little laugh, heh-heh-heh, which she had always thought to be his sweet-old-man good-natured giggle but which she now heard as being filled with menace. Then he gave up the chase and, with a shrug and a little dismissive wave of a hand, went upstairs to his quarters.