At 7 A.M. on the morning of his wedding, one of the hottest days of the summer, with hurricane warnings on the weather reports, Nero Golden went, as usual, to play tennis at Fourth and Lafayette with three members of his close-knit group of friends-slash-business-partners-slash-clients. These mysterious men, there were five of them in all, I think, all looked alike: tough, walnut brown from prolonged exposure to expensive sunshine in expensive locations, with thinning hair worn close to the head, clean-shaven, strong-jawed, barrel-chested, hairy-legged. In their sporting whites they looked like a team of retired Marines, except that Marines could never have afforded the watches they wore; I counted two Rolexes, a Vacheron Constantin, a Piaget, an Audemars Piguet. Rich, powerful alpha males. He never introduced them to us or invited them to the Gardens to engage in social chat. They were his guys. He kept them to himself.
When I asked his sons how the old man had made his fortune I got a different answer every time. “Construction.” “Real estate.” “Safes and strongboxes.” “Online betting business.” “Yarn trading.” “Shipping.” “Venture capitalism.” “Textiles.” “Film production.” “Mind your own business.” “Steel.” After my parents the professors had identified him for me I began, to the best of my ability, quietly to investigate the truth or otherwise of these extremely various assertions. I found that the man we knew as N. J. Golden had formed habits of secrecy long before he arrived among us, and the web of false fronts, proxies and ghost corporations he had set up to protect his dealings from public scrutiny was far too complex for me—just a young man dreaming of the movies—to penetrate from a distance. He had his fingers in many pies, with a reputation as a fearsome raider. He cloaked himself in benami anonymity but when he made his move, everyone knew who the player was. He had had a nickname back in the country that could not be named. “The Cobra.” If I ever succeeded in making a movie about him, I thought, maybe that should be its title. Or maybe King Cobra. But after due consideration I set those titles aside. I already had my title.
The Golden House.
My investigations led me to the notorious 2G Spectrum scam, which had recently hit the headlines in the country that could not be named. It appeared that in that no-name country members of the no-name government had corruptly sold cellphone frequency licenses to favored corporations for startlingly low prices, and something like $26 billion had accrued in illicit profits to the companies so favored. According to Time magazine, which a few people still read in those days, it ranked second on their Top Ten Abuses of Power list, right behind the Watergate affair. I read the names and stories of the companies that had been granted the licenses and found the same kind of web favored by Nero, an intricate system of companies owned by other companies in which yet other companies bought significant shares. My best guess was that Nero was the force behind the biggest of these companies, Eagle Telecom, which had merged with a German business, Verbunden Extratech, and then sold forty-five percent of its stock to Abu Dhabi’s Murtasín, who renamed it Murtasín-EV Telecom. Legal proceedings were being initiated against many of the new license-holders in a series of special courts set up by the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI. This was my “aha” moment. I had never believed that Nero would have made such elaborate plans to leave his country for no reason—he could not have foreseen the death of his wife in the terrorist attack on the iconic old hotel—and his possible involvement in this immense scandal provided a much more convincing reason for him to make preparations in case he needed to fly the coop. Naturally I did not dare to confront him with my suspicions. But my imaginary film, or my dreamed-of series of films, was becoming much more attractive; a financial and political thriller, or a series of such thrillers, with my neighbors at the very heart of it. This was exciting.