early apprentice days, Max had extorted huge sums without any real difficulty, and now came this undertaking, which wouldn’t net him a cent, just the satisfaction of unmasking his nephew’s killers, and he still had an army of cops on his tail, with this bulldog Roberge as determined as ever.
He was finding the life of a fugitive increasingly unbearable. He thought he was free, but it was just one more mirage. His criminal “career” had bought him the freedom of running farther and farther … from himself in some ways.
“Roberge blackmailed Patterson,” came Juliette’s voice from the other side of the world. “He knows things about you.”
Forget about it? Tell her to mind her own business? Max’s hand passed over his face as if to get his thoughts organized. “Patterson was having financial problems, and I had money to launder, so he laundered it for me.”
Max could feel Juliette’s disappointment at the other end. She was expecting something a little spicier, worthier of Roberge’s delirious imagination, something to do with dark, smoky basements. Sorry, lady, economic crimes are hardly ever that sexy.
“But why?”
How could he explain? What should he tell her? Should he open up to her in a way he never had before? Okay, he’d saved Patterson, but only to keep an old promise to Philippe. If Patterson had been ruined, David would have suffered, too.
Juliette understood now why the former diplomat had been so cowed. Luc Roberge could bring him down along with Max.
Despite Max’s help, there was still the same uneasiness between the two men. Patterson continued to keep him at arm’s length from David, just as Béatrice had done. His activities were still illegal, despite the fact that Patterson had benefitted from them in his darker days. Was Patterson afraid Max would use his “slip” to blacken his reputation with David and Béatrice? Or maybe turn him in to the police, something Max would never do. Out of respect for Patterson? No, not that either. Max cared about David and didn’t want to make his world any shakier than it was. David needed someone strong in his corner, like Patterson, instead of a dishrag of a shady uncle.
“Don’t go by appearances,” he told Juliette, “I’m not doing this for you or even for David. I’m doing it for myself, that’s all, to be at peace with myself.”
She said nothing.
“I’m not an honest man, Juliette. Everything Béatrice told you about me is true.”
Juliette replied, “She says you could’ve prevented your brother’s death.”
There was moment’s silence. Juliette felt she shouldn’t have mentioned it, but she wanted to know. That was all. Béatrice hadn’t gone into detail.
“I could’ve done things differently. I could’ve got involved, but Philippe asked me not to. I shouldn’t have listened to him. One of these days, I’ll tell you the whole story.” Then he added, “There’s a plaque in San Salvador on the house that used to be the embassy.”
“Have you been there?”
“Yes. I wanted to see where it happened. I know it’s dumb, but I had to be on the spot where he was killed.”
“What did you feel?”
“Nothing. I was so sure there’d be something of him left there. Call it what you want: a flame, a spirit, a sign of some kind. I stood in the office, right where he probably fell. I didn’t experience a thing, except a great deal of pain, and it wasn’t worth crossing the Americas for that. I went to where Pascale died, too, and it was the same. I didn’t feel anything but sadness and an incredible sense of waste that just needed death to cap it off.”
There was a long silence, and Juliette realized he didn’t want to say any more.
After a while, she said, “Hindus say the universe wasn’t created out of nothing the way Christians think, but from the ruins of older universes.”
Up to this point for Max, Juliette had just been David’s widow, his nephew’s companion. Now he realized she had a life of her own, her own dreams, secrets, sadness, and beliefs. “You’re interested in Hinduism?” he asked her.
“A bit, superficially, anyway.”
“Pascale swore by Shiva, Ganesh, and all those other bozos. The apartment smelled of incense all day long, and I had the feeling we were on one long pilgrimage.”
Shiva in particular was her favourite Hindu god. One day, facing a statue of Shiva Nataraja, with its four arms, Pascale explained that the lower right hand, with the palm showing, indicated, “Fear nothing. I will protect you. Abhayamudra.” Max shrugged. He’d never dreamt he’d need the protection of a watchful eye from a benevolent foreign god. How do you pray to it? he wondered. Oh well, no matter.
“This Pascale,” said Juliette, “was she …”
“A crook like me, the best there was.”
In his most depressed moments after Pascale left, Max felt like just another pigeon on her trophy shelf. Imagining her as treacherous, faithless, and nasty like this was the only way to forget her. Yet even slandering her to himself he couldn’t get her, or the memory of her body against his own, out of his head. Eyes that never look away from one another, hers brighter than ever, that sudden glow I will never forget. Sister Irène’s call from the far corner of the globe had confirmed it for him: this was the only woman he’d ever loved or ever would.
21
Goa, 1510, and the Portuguese were on the beach, wading through the water, watched by the natives as if hypnotized. Alfonso de Albuquerque wondered: would this do as a trading outpost? Why not? It would boost Portugal’s economic power and eventually compete with the British, who would need a base to the north in Mumbai and one to the east in Kolkata, and the French, who would open another post in Pondicherry in the southeast. It was an ambition that the Portuguese would take quite seriously … more than just commerce, a colony. The French and English would just wait politely on the dock, not daring to impose themselves, not for the time being, at least. They’d trade discreetly, almost apologetically, but the Portuguese had no such scruples, and from the very beginning, their machine was running at full throttle, not hesitating before the huge task of “civilizing these barbarians” and forcing the Portuguese model on them, as they were soon to do in Africa, Brazil, and Macau. All the French and the British saw in India was a place to make tidy profits for their adventurers in commerce and finance. The Portuguese would be adding soldiers and priests to the mix. Goa was a proper colony, and when the Portuguese finally withdrew, after the Indian Army invaded in 1961, they left curiously empty shells behind on the beach, in the form of Portuguese-sounding names, European-style women’s dresses, and, inevitably, Catholicism.
This explained Max’s sense of déjà vu as he stepped into the small Roman Catholic cemetery. It was created by the Indians from the former colony who had been exiled to the capital. Its tombstones, cenotaphs, and sepulchres scattered pell-mell over the hill, it could have been a cemetery from Douro or Algarve transplanted to New Delhi.
A woman in black stood before the family crypt. She was the mother of Luiz Rodrigues, the young High Commission clerk who’d been killed along with David. Her white hair was tied back and held in place by her shawl. Her shoulders were stooped, her hands clasped against her stomach like a Madonna abandoned by her Portuguese god. She gripped her rosary with all her might, as Max had seen
