‘They’re upstairs,’ said Vasco with a shrug. ‘You should be pleased I had them pinched. What a hit-fortune for them! You should go down on your knees and thank me. If not for my gang of professionals, they would be burnt toasts.’
‘I demand to see them at once,’ I said firmly. ‘And after that, perhaps Salvador Medina can do me a service. Perhaps we could send your housekeeper, Renegada, to call him, or even use the phone.’
‘By all means let us go upstairs and take a peek,’ said Vasco, looking unconcerned. ‘Do me the courtesy, however, of walking slowly, for I am fat. As to the rest, I am sure you really have no desire to go gilloping-galloping to the law. In your circs, which is better: incognito or outcognito? In-, I am sure. Besides, my beloved Renegada will never betray me. And – didn’t anybody tell you? – the telephone line has been cut off for years.’
‘ “My beloved Renegada”, did you say?’
‘And my beloved Felicitas, too. They would not hurt me for the world.’
‘Then these half-sisters have played a cruel game with me.’
‘They are not half-sisters, poor Moor. They are lovers.’
‘Each other’s lovers?’
‘For fifteen years. And, for fourteen, mine. How many years I had to hear you people spouting-shouting rubbish about unity in diversity and I don’t know what rot. But now I, Vasco, with my girls, have created that new society.’
‘I don’t care about your bedtime business. Let them bounce on you like a squashy mattress! What is it to me? It is your trickery that makes me mad.’
‘But we had to wait for the paintings, isn’t it? That was no trick. And then we had to get you in here without anybody knowing.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘Why, what do you suppose? To get rid of all the Zogoibys I can lay my hands on, four pictures and one person – the last of the whole accursed line, as it happens – with a boom-boom-badoom; or, to put it another way, five in a bite.’
‘A gun? Vasco, are you serious? A gun you’re pointing at me?’
‘Just a small fellow. But it is in my hand. Which is my great hit-fortune; and your mis-.’
I had been warned. Vasco Miranda is an evil spirit, and these are his familiars. I have seen them metamorphose into bats.
But I had been caught in his web from the start. How much of the village was in league with him, I wondered. Not Salvador Medina, that seemed clear. Gottfried Helsing? Right about the telephones, but otherwise obfuscatory. And the rest? Had they all conspired against me in this pantomime, doing Vasco’s imperious bidding? How much money changed hands? Were they all members of some occult, Masonic society – Opus Dei or the like? –And how far back did the conspiracy stretch? – To the taxi-driver Vivar, to the immigration officer, to the strange cabin-crew on the flight from Bombay? – Five in a bite, Vasco said. He said that. So did the tentacles of this event really reach as far back as a bombed villa in Bandra, and was this the victims’ revenge? I felt my reason slipping its moorings, and restrained my speculations, baseless and valueless as they were. The world was a mystery, unknowable. The present was a riddle to be solved.
‘So, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are in a dead-end valley encircled by hostile Indians,’ said Vasco Miranda, puffing his way up the stairs behind me. ‘And the Lone Ranger says, “It’s no use, Tonto. We’re surrounded.” And Tonto answers, “What do you mean we, white man?” ’
High above us was the source of the screeching feedback-music I’d been hearing. It was an unearthly, tortured – or rather torturing – noise, sadistic, dispassionate, aloof. I had complained about it at the beginning of our climb and Vasco had brushed my objections aside. ‘In some parts of the Far East,’ he informed me, ‘such music is considered highly erotic.’ As we climbed, Vasco had to speak louder to make himself heard. My head was beginning to throb.
‘So, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are making camp for the night,’ he shouted. ‘ “Make the fire, Tonto,” says the Lone Ranger. “Yes, kemo sabay.” “Fetch water from the stream, Tonto.” “Yes, kemo sabay.” “Make the coffee, Tonto.” So on so forth. But suddenly Tonto exclaims in disgust. The Lone Ranger asks, “What’s the matter?” “Yecch,” answers Tonto, looking at the soles of his moccasins. “I think I just stepped in a big pile of kemo sabay.” ’
I half-remembered the taxi-driver Vivar, the Western-movie buff who bore the name of a mediaeval, armour-plated cowboy, Spain’s second-greatest knight-errant – El Cid, I mean, Rodrigo de Vivar, not Don Quixote – warning me about Benengeli in a drawl that was half John Wayne in anything, half Eli Wallach in The Magnificent Seven. ‘Go careful, pardner – up there ees Indian contry.’
But had he really said that? Was it a false memory, or a half-forgotten dream? I was no longer sure of anything. Except, perhaps, that this was indeed Indian country, I was surrounded, and the kemo sabay was getting pretty deep.
In a way I had been in Indian country all my life, learning to read its signs, to follow its trails, rejoicing in its immensity, in its inexhaustible beauty, struggling for territory, sending up smoke-signals, beating its drums, pushing out its frontiers, making my way through its dangers, hoping to find friends, fearing its cruelty, longing for its love. Not even an Indian was safe in Indian country; not if he was the wrong sort of Indian, anyway – wearing the wrong sort of head-dress, speaking the wrong language, dancing the wrong dances, worshipping the wrong gods, travelling in the wrong company. I wondered how considerate those warriors encircling the masked man with the silver bullets would have been towards his feather-headed pal. In Indian country, there was no room for a man who didn’t want to belong to a tribe, who dreamed of moving beyond; of peeling off his skin and revealing his secret identity – the secret, that is, of the identity of all men – of standing before the war-painted braves to unveil the flayed and naked unity of the flesh.
Renegada had not accompanied us into the tower. The little traitress had probably scampered back to the arms of her mole-faced lover to gloat over my entrapment. A ghostly light filtered into the spiral stairwell through narrow, slit-like windows. The walls were at least a metre thick, ensuring that the temperature in the tower was cool, even chilly. Perspiration was drying on my spine and I gave a little shiver. Vasco floated up behind me, puffing and blowing, a bulbous spectre with a gun. Here in Castle Miranda these two displaced spirits, the last of the Zogoibys and his maddened foe, would enact the final steps of their ghost-dance. Everyone was dead, everything was lost, and in the twilight there was time for no more than this last phantom tale. Were there silver bullets in Vasco Miranda’s gun? They say that silver bullets are what you need to kill a supernatural being. So if I, too, had become spectral, then they would do for me.
We passed what must have been Vasco’s studio, and I caught a glimpse of an unfinished work: a crucified man had been taken down from the cross and was lying across a weeping woman’s lap, with pieces of silver – no doubt there were thirty of them – spilling from his stigmatised hands. This anti-pietà must be one of the ‘Judas Christ’ pictures I’d been told about. I had had only the briefest of looks, but the lurid, imitation-El-Greco feeling of the painting inspired queasiness, and made me hope that Vasco’s abandonment of the project was final.
On the next floor he motioned me into a room in which I saw, with a leap of the heart, an unfinished picture of quite a different calibre: Aurora Zogoiby’s last piece, her anguished declaration of a mother-love that could transcend and forgive the supposed crimes of her beloved child, The Moor’s Last Sigh. Also in the room was a large piece of what I understood to be X-ray equipment; and, clipped to a great bank of light-boxes on one wall, a number of X-ray photographs. Apparently Vasco was examining the stolen picture segment by segment, as if by looking beneath its surface he might belatedly discover, and steal for himself, the secret of Aurora’s genius. As if he were looking for a magic lamp.
Vasco shut the door, and I could no longer hear the ear-splitting music. Plainly, the room had been expensiv
ely soundproofed. However, the light in that chamber – the slit-windows had been covered over with black cloth, so that there was only the blinding white blare of light emanating from the wall of boxes – was almost as oppressive as the music had been. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked Vasco, deliberately sounding as impolite as I could. ‘Learning to paint?’
‘I see you have developed the sharp tongue of the Zogoibys,’ he answered. ‘But it is careless to mock a man with a loaded gun; a man, what’s more, who has done you the service of solving the puzzle of your mother’s death.’
‘I know the answer to that riddle,’ I said. ‘And this painting has nothing to do with it.’
‘You are an arrogant bunch, you Zogoibys,’ Vasco Miranda went on, ignoring my remarks. ‘No matter how badly you treat a man, you are sure he will go on caring for you. Your mother thought that about me. She wrote to me, you know? Not long before she died. After fourteen years of silence, a cry for help.’
‘You’re lying,’ I told him. ‘You could never have helped her with anything.’
‘She was scared,’ he said, ignoring me again. ‘Someone was trying to kill her, she said. Someone was angry, and jealous, and ruthless enough to have her assassinated. She was expecting to be murdered at any time.’
I was trying to keep up a façade of contempt, but how could I fail to be moved by the image of my mother in a state of such terror – and such isolation – that she had turned to this played-out figure, this long-alienated madman for assistance? How could I not see her face before my mind’s eye, contorted by fear? She was pacing up and down her studio, wringing her hands, and every noise startled her, as if it were a harbinger of doom.
‘I know what happened to my mother,’ I said quietly. Vasco exploded.
‘Zogoibys always say they know everything! But you know nothing! Nothing at all! It is I – I, Vasco – Vasco whom you all derided, that airport-artist who was not fit to kiss the hem of your great mother’s garment, Vasco the potboiler painter, Vasco the bleddy joke – this time it is I who know.’
He stood silhouetted before the bank of light-boxes, X-ray images to his right and left. ‘If she was killed, she said, she wanted the murderer brought to book. So she had concealed his portrait under her work in progress. Get the picture X-rayed, she said to me, and you will see my killer’s face.’ He was holding the letter in his hand. So here, at last, in this time of mirages, this place of sleights, was a simple fact. I took the letter and my mother spoke to me from beyond the grave.
‘Take a look.’ Vasco waved the pistol at the X-ray images. Silenced, abashed, I did as I was told. There was no doubt that the canvas was a palimpsest; a full-length portrait could be made out in negative-image segments beneath the surface work. But Raman Fielding had been a figure of Vasco-like corpulence, and the man in the ghost-image was slender, and tall.
‘That’s not Mainduck,’ I said, the words emerging of their own volition.
‘Correct! Absolute hit-take,’ said Vasco. ‘A frog is a harmless fellow. But this guy? Don’t you know him? Follow your instincts and outstincts! Here he may be undercover but you have seen him overcover! Look, look – the boss baddie himself. Blofeld, Mogambo, Don Vito Corleone: don’t you recognise the gent?’
‘It’s my father,’ I said, and it was. I sat down heavily on the cold stone floor.
In cold blood: the phrase never fitted anyone so well as Abraham Zogoiby. – From humble beginnings (persuading a reluctant sea-captain to set sail) he rose to Edenic heights; from which, like an icy deity, he wrought havoc upon the mere mortals below; but also, and in this he differed from most deities, among his own kith and kin. – Disjointed observations were presenting themselves to me for approval; or perusal; or what you will. – Like Superman, I had been given the gift of X-ray vision; unlike Superman, it had shown me that my father was the most evil man that ever lived. – By the way, if Renegada and Felicitas were not half-sisters, what were their last names? Lorenço, del Toboso, de Malindrania, Carculiambro? – But my father, I was speaking of my father Abraham, who had been the one to start the investigation into the mystery of Aurora’s death; who could not leave her be, and saw her ghost walking in his garden in the sky – and was that his guilt at work, or a part of his grand, cold-blooded design? Abraham, who told me that Sammy Hazaré had sworn a deposition to Dom Minto, said deposition never in fact materialising, but on the evidence of which I went forth to bludgeon a man to death. – And Gottfried Helsing? Could it be that he did not know the truth about the self-styled ‘Larios sisters’ – or was his indifference so great that he felt no need to volunteer information to me; had the sense of human community so decayed among the Parasites of Benengeli that a man no longer felt a scrap of responsibility for his fellows’ fate? – Yes, bludgeon, I say, bludgeon. Pounding his face until there was no face there. And Chhaggan, too, was found in a gutter; Sammy Hazaré was suspected of the crime, but maybe there had been an unseen hand at work. – Now, what the devil were the names of the actors who played the masked man and the Indian? A-B-C-D-E-F-Jay, that’s it, Jay, and not Silverbullets but Silverheels. Chief Jay Silverheels and Clayton Moore. – O Abraham! How readily you sacrificed your son on the altar of your wrath! Whom did you hire to blow the poisoned dart? Was there such a dart, or were slipperier means employed – a little patch of Vaseline would have turned your murderous trick, just a drop in the right place, so easily spilled, so easily removed; why should I believe a word of that Minto story, after all? O, I was lost in fictions, and murder was all around. – My world was mad, and I was mad in it; how to accuse Vasco when Zogoibys perpetrated such lunacy upon one another, and upon their wretched times? – And Mynah, my sister Mynah, killed in an earlier blast; Mynah, who sent a crooked politico to jail and obliged her father to incur some considerable expense! Could the daughter, too, have died by the father’s hand – might that have been our Daddyji’s rehearsal for the subsequent termination of his wife? – And Aurora: was she innocent or guilty? She believed me guilty, and I was not; should I not avoid the selfsame trap? Did she, having been unfaithful, truly give Abraham cause for jealous rage – so that, after a lifetime of standing in her shadow, deferring to her whim (while in the rest of his life he grew monstrous, omnipotent, diabolical), he slew her, and then used her death’s mystery to twist my mind, so that I’d slay his enemy, too? – Or was she chaste, was she pure and whole as Indian mothers should be, and did he, mistaking virtue for vice, play the unreasoning jealous loon? – How, when the past is gone, when all’s exploded and in rags, may one apportion blame? How to find meanings in the ruins of a life? – One thing was certain; I was fortune’s, and my parents’, fool. – This floor’s a cold floor. I should get up off this floor. There’s still a fat fellow over there, and he’s pointing a pistol at my heart.
20
I HAVE LOST COUNT of the days that have passed since I began my prison sentence in the topmost tower-room of Vasco Miranda’s mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli, but now that it is over I must record my memories of that awful incarceration, if only to honour the heroic rôle played by my fellow-captive, without whose courage, inventiveness and serenity I am sure I would not have lived to tell my tale. For, as I discovered on that day when I discovered so many things, I was not the only victim of Vasco Miranda’s deranged obsession with my late mother. There was a second hostage.
Still shaken to the foundations of my being by the revelations in the X-ray chamber, I was ordered by Vasco to resume my climb. Thus I came to the circular cell in which I would be left to rot for so long, deafened by the vile noises emanating from high wall-mounted speakers, certain of my own death’s imminence, and consoled only by that amazing woman who glowed through my time of darkness like a beacon. I clung to her, and therefore did not sink.
There was a painting on an easel in the centre of this room, too: Vasco’s own Boabdil, the weepy horseman, had galloped tearfully to Spain as well, leaving its purchaser C. P. Bhabha’s home and returnin
g to its maker. What had been made in Elephanta was coming to roost in Benengeli – murder, vengefulness, and art. Vasco’s first work on canvas and Aurora’s last, his new beginning and her sad conclusion: two stolen paintings, both treatments of the same theme, and each with one of my parents hidden underneath. (I never saw the other stolen ‘Moors’. Vasco claimed to have chopped them up and burned them along with their crates: he had only had them stolen, he said, to disguise the fact that The Moor’s Last Sigh was the one he’d wanted.)
X-rays accused Abraham Zogoiby in a lower circle of this ascending hell, but for concealed Aurora photographs were not enough. Vasco’s Moor was being destroyed, was being picked away flake by flake; the image of my mother when young, that bare-breasted Madonna-without-child which had so incensed Abraham once-upon-a-time, was emerging from her long imprisonment. But her freedom was being gained at her liberator’s expense. It did not take me long to notice that the woman who stood at the easel, picking paint-flecks off the canvas and placing them on a dish, was chained – by the ankle! – to the red stone wall.
She was of Japanese origin, but had spent much of her professional life working as a restorer of paintings in the great museums of Europe. Then she married a Spanish diplomat, a certain Benet, and moved with him around the world until the marriage failed. Out of the blue, Vasco Miranda had called her at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona – saying only that she ‘came highly recommended’ – and invited her to visit him in Benengeli to examine, and advise on, certain palimpsest-paintings he had recently acquired. Although she was not an admirer of his work, she had found it impossible to refuse without insulting him; and was curious, too, to peep behind the high walls of his legendary folly, and perhaps to discover what lay beneath the mask of the notorious recluse. When she arrived at the Little Alhambra, bringing with her the tools of her trade, as he had expressly requested she should, he showed her his own Moor and the X-rays of the portrait below; and asked her if it would be possible to exhume the buried painting by removing the top layer.