Mastan. I remember.
That is honor for me. That such a big big seth should recall. What a memory, sir. Your own son could not recall, a much younger man.
You met one of my sons.
Sir, in Mumbai, sir. Goes now by name Apu. Which is to say, went by said name. Apologies for my clumsy English. Condolences on your loss.
How did you get this number.
Sir, I was police officer, subsequently private security. These things are possible.
Pause.
What do you want.
Only to talk, sir. I have no authority, no power, I am retired, this is USA, no jurisdiction, nothing, cold case, and you are a so so powerful man and I, nobody. Only to clarify certain things. To satisfy myself before reaching my end. For my own satisfaction only.
And I should see you, why.
In case you want to know identity of persons who killed your son. I am supposing only that this is of interest.
Long pause.
Tomorrow morning. Nine A.M.
Sharp, sahib. On the dot. Thanking you in advance.
Still later, Riya is asleep, and is woken by her cellphone. To her very great surprise, the caller is Nero Golden.
Can you come?
Now? It’s the middle of the night.
I need to talk, and now I have the words, and maybe tomorrow I won’t have them.
Give me a moment.
Daughter, I need you now.
He was about to be eighty years old and had started forgetting very recent events but the past glowed more and more brightly in his memory like gold at the bottom of the Rhine. The river of his thought was no longer clear, its water an opaque and muddied flow, and within it his consciousness was slowly losing its grip on chronology, on what was then, what now, what was waking truth and what had been born in the fairyland of dreams. The library of time was disordered, its categories jumbled, its indexes scrambled or destroyed. There were good days and bad days but with every passing day it was his faraway yesterdays that shone more clearly than last week. Then the past called him on the phone in the dark of night and all he had buried rose from its grave all at once and swarmed around him and he made a phone call of his own. In what followed I hear an echo of another Hitchcock movie. We were no longer in Rear Window. We were entering the world of I Confess.
(You remember I Confess? A murderer confesses his crime to a Catholic priest who is bound by the rules of the confessional to keep the killer’s secret. Hitchcock hated Montgomery Clift’s Method-acting techniques, and some people hated the film’s total humorlessness, but éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol praised the film for its “majesty” in Cahiers du Cinéma, pointing out that as the priest is silenced, the film is dependent on the actor’s expressions. “Only these looks give us access to the mysteries of his thought. They are the most worthy and faithful messengers of the soul.” Riya Zachariassen, hurrying across Manhattan at dead of night, was no priestess, but she was about to receive a confession. Would she keep the secret? If so, how would her looks and glances communicate what she knew? And: would possession of the secret endanger her life?)
The past, his abandoned past on the storied hill. The hill had always been a magical place ever since Ram’s brother Lakshman shot an arrow into the earth and brought the faraway Ganges here to quench their thirst. An underground spring burst through the ground and they drank. There was still fresh water in the Banganga Tank. Baan, an arrow in Sanskrit, and Ganga of course the mother river. They lived among the living stories of the gods.
And after the gods, the British, and in particular the Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone, governor of the city between 1819 and 1827, who built the first bungalow on the hill and all the city’s grandees followed his example. Nero remembered the hill of his childhood, a place of many trees and some low elegant mansions with their red tiled roofs visible among the foliage. He walked in memory through the Hanging Gardens and watched his sons play in the Old Woman’s Shoe in Kamala Nehru Park. The first tower block was built on the hill in the 1950s and people laughed at it. Matchbox House they called it because it looked like a giant matchbox standing on its end. Who would want to live there, people jeered, look, how ugly. But the machis buildings went up and the bungalows came down. That was progress. But this was not the story he wanted to tell. He wanted to finish the story he began to tell me that day in the Russian Tea Room.
(He let Riya in himself. They went to his darkened study and sat in darkness. She said nothing, or almost nothing. He had a long story to tell.)
He first met the man he started calling Don Corleone around the same time as the theatrical release of The Godfather, back when he was getting his feet wet for the first time in the world of film production. At that time everyone else called the don Sultan Ameer. His crime family was S-Company, “S for Sultan, Super and Style,” as the don liked to boast. He was a big-time criminal, master smuggler, but people loved him because he allowed nobody to be killed and he was a sort of social worker at heart. Helped the poor in the slums and the petty shopkeepers also. Prostitution he did, it’s true; brothels in Kamathipura, yes, he ran them. Bank robberies, also. Nobody’s perfect. So, yes, on the whole, give or take, a Robin Hood type, you could say. Not true, not really, operating on that mega scale is not to be compared to a bunch of small-operator bow-and-arrow bandits in Sherwood Forest, UK, but people thought him a good guy, more good than rotten. He was the first celebrity gangster. Knew everybody, was seen everywhere. Police, judges, politicians, all in his pocket. Walked the city freely, without fear. And without gangsters like him half the movies people loved would not have been made. Major investors, the mafia dons. You could ask any big filmmaker. Sooner or later the mafia came to call, with bags of money in its hands.
He trained the next generation, all local boys nurtured by him. What did Zamzama Alankar know about smuggling that Sultan Ameer didn’t teach him? He trained Zamzama (a.k.a. KG, for “Kim’s Gun,” or just the Cannon), he trained Little Feet, he trained Short Fingers, he trained Big Head, all the top guys. They, all five of them, loved movies, and Sultan Ameer had a film-star lover—this was the girl called Goldie, he poured money into dud movies trying to make her an icon—so naturally they went into the motion picture business. Nobody called it Bollywood then, that was a much later invention. Bombay film industry. Bombay talkies. It was just called that.