“The indiscretion will not be held against you,” says Lieutenant Mori brightly, “because you did not know the nature of your new assignment.”
“Pardon me?”
“Digging. You are here to dig, Goto-san.” He snaps to attention and bows deeply. “Let me be the first to congratulate you. Your assignment is a very important one.”
Goto Dengo returns the bow, not sure how deep to make it. “So I’m not—” He gropes for words. In trouble? A pariah? Condemned to death? “I’m not a low person here?”
“You are a very high person here, Goto-san. Please come with me.” Lieutenant Mori gestures towards one of the tents.
As Goto Dengo walks away, he hears the young motorcycle driver mumble something.
“What did he say?” Lieutenant Mori asks.
“He said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ It’s a religious thing,” Goto Dengo explains.
CALIFORNIA
* * *
HALF OF THE people who work at SFO, San Francisco International Airport, now seem to be Filipino, which certainly helps to ease the shock of reentry. Randy gets singled out, as he always does, for a thorough luggage search by the exclusively Anglo customs officials. Men traveling by themselves with practically no luggage seem to irritate the American authorities. It’s not so much that they think you are a drug trafficker as that you fit, in the most schematic possible way, the profile of the most pathologically optimistic conceivable drug trafficker, and hence practically force them to investigate you. Irritated that you have forced their hand in this manner, they want to teach you a lesson: travel with a wife and four kids next time, or check a few giant trundling bags, or something, man! What were you thinking? Never mind that Randy is coming in from a place where DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS is posted all over the airport the way CAUTION: WET FLOOR is here.
The most Kafkaesque moment is, as always, when the customs official asks what he does for a living, and he has to devise an answer that will not sound like the frantic improvisations of a drug mule with a belly full of ominously swelling heroin-stuffed condoms. “I work for a private telecommunications provider” seems to be innocuous enough. “Oh, like a phone company?” says the customs official, as if she’s having none of it. “The phone market isn’t really that available to us,” Randy says, “so we provide other communications services. Mostly data.” “Does that involve a lot of traveling around from place to place then?” asks the customs official, paging through the luridly stamped back pages of Randy’s passport. She makes eye contact with a more senior customs official who sidles over towards them. Randy now feels himself getting nervous, exactly the way your drug mule would, and fights the impulse to scrub his damp palms against his pant legs, which would probably guarantee him a trip through the magnetic tunnel of a CAT scanner, a triple dose of mint-flavored laxative, and several hours of straining over a stainless-steel evidence bucket. “Yes, it does,” Randy says.
The senior customs official, trying to be unobtrusive and low key in a way that makes Randy stifle a sort of gasping, pained outburst of laughter, begins to flip through some appalling communications-industry magazine that Randy stuffed into his briefcase on his way out the door back in Manila. The word INTERNET appears at least five times on the front cover. Randy stares directly into the eyes of the female customs official and says, “The Internet.” Totally factitious understanding dawns on the woman’s face, and her eyes ping bosswards. The boss, still deeply absorbed in an article about the next generation of high-speed routers, shoves out his lower lip and nods, like every other nineties American male who senses that knowing this stuff is now as intrinsic to maleness as changing flat tires was to Dad. “I hear that’s really exciting now,” the woman says in a completely different tone of voice, and begins scooping Randy’s stuff together into a big pile so that he can repack it. Suddenly the spell is broken, Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured this process of being ritually goosed by the Government. He feels a strong impulse to drive straight to the nearest gun store and spend about ten thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it’s just that any kind of government authority gives him the creeps now. He’s probably been hanging out too much with the ridiculously heavily armed Tom Howard. First a hostility to rainforests, now a desire to own an automatic weapon; where is this all going?
Avi is waiting for him, a tall pale figure standing at the velvet rope surrounded by hundreds of Filipinas in a state of emotional riot, brandishing gladiola spears like medieval pikemen. Avi has his hands in the pockets of his floor-skimming coat, and keeps his head turned in Randy’s direction but is sort of concentrating on a point about halfway between them, frowning in an owlish way. This is the same frown that Randy’s grandmother used to wear when she was teasing apart a tangle of string from her junk drawer. Avi adopts it when he is doing basically the same thing to some new complex of information. He must have read Randy’s e-mail message about the gold. It occurs to Randy that he missed a great opportunity for a practical joke: he could have loaded up his bag with a couple of lead bricks and then handed it to Avi and completely blown his mind. Too late. Avi rotates around his vertical axis as Randy comes abreast of him and then breaks into a stride that matches Randy’s pace. There is some unarticulated protocol that dictates when Randy and Avi will shake hands, when they will hug, and when they will just act like they’ve only been separated for a few minutes. A recent exchange of e-mail seems to constitute a virtual reunion that obviates any hand-shaking or hugging. “You were right about the cheesy dialog,” is the first thing Avi says. “You’re spending too much time with Shaftoe, seeing things his way. This was not an attempt to send you a message, at least not in the way Shaftoe means.”
“What’s your interpretation, then?”
“How would you go about establishing a new currency?” Avi asks.
Randy frequently overhears snatches of business-related conversation from people he passes in airports, and it’s always about how did the big presentation go, or who’s on the short list to replace the departing CFO, or something. He prides himself on what he believes to be the much higher plane, or at least the much more bizarre subject matter, of his interchanges with Avi. They are walking together around the slow arc of SFO’s inner ring. A whiff of soy sauce and ginger drifts out of a restaurant and fogs Randy’s mind, making him unsure, for a moment, which hemisphere he’s in.
“Uh, it’s not something I have given much thought to,” he says. “Is that what we are about now? Are we going to establish a new currency?”
“Well obviously someone needs to establish one that doesn’t suck,” Avi says.
“Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?” Randy asks.
“Don’t you ever read the newspapers?” Avi grabs Randy by the elbow and drags him over towards a newsstand. Several papers are running front-page stories about crashing Southeast Asian currencies, but this isn’t all that new.
“I know currency fluctuations are important to Epiphyte,” Randy says. “But my god, it’s so tedious I just want to run away.”
“Well, it’s not tedious to her,” Avi says, yanking out three different newspapers that have all decided to run the same wire-service photograph: an adorable Thai moppet standing in a mile-long queue in front of a bank, holding up a single American dollar bill.
“I know it’s a big deal for some of our customers,” Randy says, “I just didn’t really think of it as a business opportunity.”
“No, think about it,” Avi says. He counts out a few dollar bills of his own to pay for the newspapers, then swerves towards an exit. They enter a tunnel that leads to a parking garage. “The sultan feels that—”
“You’ve been just sort of hanging out with the sultan?”
“Mostly with Pragasu. Will you let me finish? We decided to set up the Crypt, right?”
“Right.”
“What is the Crypt? Do you remember its original stated function?”
“Secure, anonymous, unregulated data storage. A data haven.”
“Yeah. A bit bucket. And we envisioned many applications for this.”
“Boy, did we ever,” Randy says, remembering many long nights around kitchen tables and hotel rooms, writing versions of the business plan that are now as ancient and as lost as the holographs of the Four Gospels.
“One of these was electronic banking. Heck, we even predicted it might be one of the major applications. But whenever a business plan first makes contact with the actual market—the real world—suddenly all kinds of stuff becomes clear. You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense dictates that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts.”
“And that’s what happened with the e-banking thing,” Randy says.
“Yes. During our meetings at the Sultan’s Palace,” Avi says. “Before those meetings, we envisioned—well you know what we envisioned. What actually happened was that the room was packed with these guys who were exclusively interested in the e-banking thing. That was our first clue. Then, this!” He holds up his newspapers, whacks the dollar-brandishing moppet with the back of his hand. “So, that’s the business we’re in now.”
“We are bankers,” Randy says. He will have to keep saying this to himself for a while in order to believe it, like, “We are striving with all our might to uphold the goals of the 23rd Party Congress.” We are bankers. We are bankers.
“Banks used to issue their own currencies. You can see these old banknotes in the Smithsonian. ‘First National Bank of South Bumfuck will remit ten pork bellies to the bearer,’ or whatever. That had to stop because commerce became nonlocal—you needed to be able to take your money with you when you went out West, or whatever.”
“But if we’re online, the whole world is local,” Randy says.
“Yeah. So all we need is something to back the currency. Gold would be good.”
“Gold? Are you joking? Isn’t that kind of old-fashioned?”
“It was until all of the unbacked currencies in Southeast Asia went down the toilet.”
“Avi, so far I am still kind of confused, frankly. You seem to be working your way around to telling me that my little trip to see the gold in the jungle was no coincidence. But how can we use that gold to back our currency?”
Avi shrugs as if it’s such a minor detail he hasn’t even bothered to think about it. “That’s just a deal-making issue.”
“Oh, god.”
“These people who sent you a message want to get into business with us. Your trip to see the gold was a credit check.”
They are walking through a tunnel toward the garage, stuck behind an extended clan of Southeast Asians in elaborate headdresses. Perhaps the entire remaining gene pool of some nearly extinct mountain dwelling minority group. Their belongings are in giant boxes wrapped in iridescent pink synthetic twine, balanced atop airport luggage carts.
“A credit check.” Randy always hates it when he gets so far behind Avi that all he can do is lamely repeat phrases.
“You know how, when you and Charlene bought that house, the lender had to look at it first?”
“I bought it for cash.”
“Okay, okay, but in general, before a bank will issue a mortgage on a house, they will inspect it. Not in great detail, necessarily. They’ll just have some executive of the bank drive by the property to verify that it exists and is where the documents claim it is, and so on.”
“So, that’s what my journey to the jungle was about?”
“Yeah. Some of the potential, uh, participants in the project just wanted to make it clear to us that they were, in fact, in possession of this gold.”
“I really have to wonder what ‘possession’ denotes in this case.”
“Me too,” Avi says. “I’ve been sort of puzzling over that one.” Hence, Randy thinks, the frowny look in the airport.
“I just thought they wanted to sell it,” Randy says.
“Why? Why sell it?”
“To liquidate it. So they could buy real estate. Or five thousand pairs of shoes. Or something.”
Avi scrunches his face in disappointment. “Oh, Randy, that is really unworthy, alluding to the Marcoses. The gold you saw is pocket change compared to what Ferdinand Marcos dug up. The people who set up your trip to the jungle are satellites of satellites of him.”
“Well. Consider it a cry for help,” Randy says. “Words seem to be passing back and forth between us, but I understand less and less.”
Avi opens his mouth to respond, but just then the animists trigger their car alarm. Unable to propitiate it, they form a circle around the car and grin at one another. Avi and Randy pick up their pace and get well away from it.
Avi stops and straightens, as if pulled up short. “Speaking of not understanding things,” he says, “you need to communicate with that girl. Amy Shaftoe.”
“Has she been communicating with you?”
“In the course of twenty minutes’ phone conversation, she has deeply and eternally bonded with Kia,” Avi says.
“I would believe that without hesitation.”
“It wasn’t even like they got to know each other. It was like they knew each other in a previous life and had just gotten back in touch.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Kia now feels bound by duty and honor to present a united front with America Shaftoe.”
“It all hangs together,” Randy says.
“Acting sort of like Amy’s emotional agent or lawyer, she has made it clear to me that we, Epiphyte Corporation, owe Amy our full attention and concern.”
“And what does Amy want?”
“That was my question,” Avi says, “and I was made to feel very bad for asking it. Whatever it is that we—that you—owe to Amy is something so obvious that merely manifesting a need to verbalize it is… just… really…”
“Shabby. Insensitive.”
“Coarse. Brutish.”
“A really transparent, toddler-level exercise in the cheapest kind of, of…”
“Of evasion of personal responsibility for one’s own gross misdeeds.”
“Kia was rolling her eyes, I imagine. Her lip was sort of curled.”
“She drew breath as if to give me a good piece of her mind but then thought better of it.”
“Not because you’re her boss. But because you would never understand.”
“This is just one of those evils that has to be sort of accepted and swallowed, by any mature woman who’s been around the block.”
“Who knows the harsh realities. Yeah,” Randy says.
“Yup.”
“Okay, you can tell Kia that her client’s needs and demands have been communicated to the guilty party—”
“Have they?”
“Tell her that the fact that her client has needs and demands has been heavy-handedly insinuated to me and that it is understood that the ball is in my court.”
“And we can stand down to some kind of detente while a response is prepared?”
“Certainly. Kia can return to her normal duties for the time being.”
“Thank you, Randy.”
Avi’s Range Rover is parked in the most remote part of the roof of the parking ramp, in the center of about twenty-five empty parking spaces that form a sort of security buffer zone. When they have traversed about half of the glacis, the car’s headlights flutter, and Randy hears the preparatory snap of a sound system being energized. “The Range Rover has picked us up on Doppler radar,” Avi says hastily.
The Range Rover speaketh in a fearsome Oz-like voice cranked up to burning-bush decibel levels. “You are being tracked by Cerberus! Please alter your course immediately!”
“I can’t believe you bought one of these things,” Randy says.
“You have encroached on the Cerberus defensive perimeter! Move back. Move b
ack,” says the Range Rover. “An armed response team is being placed on standby.”
“It is the only cryptographically sound car alarm system,” Avi says, as if that settles the matter. He digs out a keychain attached to a black polycarbonate fob with the same dimensions, and number of buttons, as a television remote control. He enters a long series of digits and cuts off the voice in the middle of proclaiming that Randy and Avi are being recorded on a digital video camera that is sensitive into the near-infrared range.
“Normally it doesn’t do that,” Avi says. “I had it set to its maximum alert status.”
“What’s the worst that could happen? Someone would steal your car and the insurance company would buy you a new one?”
“I couldn’t care less if it gets stolen. The worst that could happen would be a car bomb, or, not quite as bad, someone putting a bug in my car and listening to everything I say.”
Avi drives Randy over the San Andreas Fault to his place in Pacifica, which is where Randy stores his car while he’s overseas. Avi’s wife Devorah is in at the doctor’s for a routine prenatal and all the kids are either at school or being hustled around the neighborhood by their tag-team duo of tough Israeli nannies. Avi’s nannies have the souls of war-hardened Soviet paratroopers in the bodies of nubile eighteen-year-old girls. The house has been utterly abandoned to kid-raising. The formal dining room has been converted to a nanny-barracks with bunk beds hammered together from unfinished two-by-fours, the parlor filled with cribs and changing-tables, and every square centimeter of cheap shag carpet in the place has been infused with a few dozen flakes of glitter, in various festive colors, which if they even cared about getting rid of it could only be removed through direct microsurgical extraction, one flake at a time. Avi plies Randy with a sandwich of turkey bologna and ketchup on generic Wonderoid bread. It is still too early in Manila for Randy to call Amy and make amends for whatever he did wrong. Down below them, in Avi’s basement office, a fax machine shrieks and rustles like a bird in a coffee can. A laminated CIA map of Sierra Leone is spread out on the table, peeking out here and there through numerous overlying strata of dirty dishes, newspapers, coloring books, and drafts of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan. Post-it notes are stuck to the map from place to place. Written on each note, in Avi’s distinctive triple-ought Rapidograph drafting-pen hand, is a latitude and longitude with lots of significant digits, and some kind of precis of what happened there: “5 women, 2 men, 4 children, with machetes—photos:” and then serial numbers from Avi’s database.