Hanif Kureishi - A Theft - My Con Man

It occurred to me to call Jeff. He answered his phone and, as always, he was available and chatty. It was a relief that he hadn’t disappeared and was willing to offer an explanation. That evening he came over to my local cafe and told me he’d got into difficulty with the investments. He didn’t like the word ‘steal’, he said, as he’d never intended to keep the money for himself. He had ‘moved’ people’s money about, as financial gaps began to appear around him. He had borrowed money from some clients to pay off others. As he explained this, he also spoke to other clients on his phone; on another phone he was on the internet, on eBay, where he was trying to sell his sofa, some artwork, other household items and, hardest of all, his James Bond toys. His hands were shaking, his voice was weak, he could barely speak.

In Gabriel García Márquez’s great story ‘There Are No Thieves in This Town’ a feckless thief steals the billiard balls from the bar’s only billiard table, which is, more or less, the only entertainment in the little flyblown town. As the tale unwraps, we see that this theft causes chaos; there is a tsunami of unintended and unpredictable consequences, of guilt, revenge and violence. By the end the thief is attempting to make reparation, but that also goes wrong. At one point he considers fleeing, as if attempting to get away from himself, so noxious has he become, but where could he go?

It was getting hot for Jeff, recriminations were piling up, and a few days later he fled. He went to Spain, either to hide out from the anger directed his way, or to try to retrieve some of the money which had been stolen from a joint bank account by a lawyer who turned out to be ‘a scammer’, despite the fact Jeff had had him checked out. It looked as though Jeff had believed he could make some money, but had fallen into a brood of vipers, a nest of crooks. Not that I should worry about anything, he said during one of his daily phone calls from Spain. One of his more trusting investors had given him some money to live on while he recovered the stolen stuff. He was, he told me, right now standing outside the house of the scammer who had stolen our money. He could see the bastard through the window. Jeff had followed and confronted the man when he went to his office. Now the man closed his curtains and didn’t go out. Chandler was ‘shutting him down’. Jeff had also, undercover, sent hard men to threaten various parties. Not that this Spanish investment was the only one he had going. There was another, in Switzerland, which would come through later. There was no doubt, he said, that the money would turn up. It was only a question of when. What was wrong with a little patience?

He began to call me regularly from Spain, sometimes twice a day. When I told him what anguish and shock this theft, this violation and stupidity, had visited upon me and my family, and when I wondered what the point of his promises was, he’d apologise for what he’d done, saying his only chance was to pay everyone back. There was no point in any of us contacting the police, he said; the money would never be returned if he was in prison. I had to give him one more chance; he knew how to sort it out. Crime hadn’t been his career choice, otherwise he’d have disappeared to Albania, where his fiancée’s family lived, and where he could, at least, have worked as an accountant. No; he’d made the wrong move because the scheme had looked good to him, and he’d invested for us. And for himself, of course. Still, all would be fine; my money would be returned ‘by Thursday’. It became a family joke. He was the ‘Thursday man’. Many Thursdays came and went, yet his little squeaky voice was always optimistic. The money would ‘definitely’ turn up. ‘They have no choice,’ he’d say. ‘It’s our money.’ It was yes, yes, yes, with him. And so in this way days, weeks, months passed.

Not speaking to the police was the only leverage I had over him. But then he exhorted me to pity him. He had placed himself, I could see, at the centre of a large network of people who were dependent on him. Having obtained money from twenty of his friends, as well as members of his own family, all these distressed people were now calling him; they all required information, and he connected us all, sitting in the centre of the shattered mirror of his life, like a broken, helpless king muttering meaningless phrases.

There was another thing. One morning, just before he left for Spain, Jeff had rung to say he hadn’t been in contact because his mother’s sister had died and he’d been at another funeral. Soon he informed me that two of his investors and three members of his family had recently died. His fiancée’s mother was on the verge of death. They were dropping like flies; he seemed to be aware that he was killing everyone around him. We had entered a wild disorder — the realm of death, if not murder — in his mind. But not only had he stolen from me, and, in total, about four million pounds from others, he wanted consolation and support. He had it, too; I threw myself into an orgy of encouragement. What an unlucky fellow he was with everyone dying around him, and what a bad year he was having in this cemetery of ghosts. Was there anything I could do? If he ever needed to talk, I was there. When it occurred to me to go to his house and stand outside, watching his movements and seeing how he lived, I visualised relays of semi-concealed desperate voyeurs observing one another while attempting to remain unnoticed.

Once, later, when I couldn’t find him, when his phone was cut off in Spain because he couldn’t pay the bill, I fell into a sort of raging madness, and didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked, I punched things and shouted obscenities; at one point, I was phoning him every fifteen minutes. I just had to know where he was. But perhaps he was busy soothing the many others he had reduced to the same condition?

There was nothing sensuous or erotic in all this fury and despair. In fact, it could lead you to believe that life is hopeless, and nothing but a trap. Yet however ridiculous, shaming and humiliating it was, the game could not end. That was the one thing which could not happen. Jeff was the lover I always wanted to hear from and was even keener to see. I would beg him for a ‘new lie’, and he would give me one, and they were some of the best lies I’d ever heard. He was never haughty, cruel or taunting, but always straightforward, as if he understood that deception was a medicine I required urgently. Forever waiting for my man, I was reminded of a coke dealer I had in the nineties, a sweaty, paranoid madman whose eventual arrival in a knackered Rolls-Royce, with a pit bull — a snuffling violent ball of threat which he would release in my flat — was greeted by me as a great event, as the highlight of the day. I’d given Jeff my savings, why not give him my time and health and life too? Usually, when one believes one is most safe, one is in most danger. But I knew how easy it is to become addicted to catastrophes, and how difficult it is to let go of violent pleasures. What was happening to me?

There’s a passage in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science which states, ‘What if a demon crept after you one day and said to you, “This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust.”’ And in Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche writes, ‘Time is a circle. Do you desire this innumerable times more?’

I began to wonder if I was being thrust back into something I recognised. I come from a South London suburb, and though Jeff was in his early forties and I’m fifteen years older than him, growing up in 1960s South London I knew plenty of post-war spivs and wide boys like him. The area was full of smart and nasty thieving crooks and off-the-back-of-a-lorry merchants. The other significant interest of the suburban young was music. A lot of bands made the relatively short journey to the suburbs, and many kids were starting to form groups. The music and the drug dealing and thieving had one thing in common, which was a kind of defiance of dead authority and the manufacture of excitement through transgression. But the music we heard and made, and the clothes and creativity which came out of it, was alive, and represented a future, while the thievery was a futility. But I couldn’t, then, always tell them apart, and the mad thing was, I still hadn’t learned.