Borderless Deceit (30 page)

Maybe the foundation is a complex form of atonement for him. But for what? What does he think he's done wrong?

I wanted to talk practically because it's true, the right kind of foundation could change the fate of thousands. So I made suggestions for linking it to the broader international development effort. The whole time he was looking at me
with a mixture of hope and innocence. When I finished he didn't speak for about half a minute. I thought he was thinking about his foundation some more. But no, because finally he said: Rachel, do you have children?

In that setting that was a strange question. I wanted to ask, Do you? but Nikko began talking about his. Charming stories. He's got quite a brood. Like you
.

Well, an eccentric lunch. The elegant setting, the talk of putting up a fortune for a humanitarian idea done so casually you'd think they do it every day, the banker being practical and down to earth, the merchant acting like a mystic, and me, gadfly, enthusiastic about everything. If Morsi is a businessman, he's unlike any I've met. Evlyn, the farm manager, mentioned there were parties attended by classy English women. I imagine they go wild over him – handsome, fabulously rich, terribly vulnerable. It's charming. But does it add up? I don't think so. But then, who am I to talk about things not adding up?

Anne-Marie, dearest, are you thinking this whole trip doesn't add up? That it was unwise of me to travel with a married man who should be spending his free time with his wife and children? Not only the lunch was eccentric. The whole experience was. Beautiful but eccentric. But none of it was planned. It just developed. And it may go on for a while. What else can I do except rationalise it by insisting I'm not out to displace anyone's family? On the plane back to Geneva I told Nikko that
.

When they depart Ruai, Mount Kenya has shaken its cloudy burden. The take-off is towards the mountain and when the jet does a graceful, lazy bank towards the north, Rachel's view, as Evlyn predicted, is exquisite: a jagged half-molar rising from a colossal mound, soaring above the equatorial snow line. The land below slowly changes into near desert with tantalising combinations of whites, yellows and reddish-browns, sometimes in stripes, sometimes in blotches. Rachel's attention is fixed on the textures and the colours (the other times she flew over Africa were at night), while Nikko hauls out a briefcase and
disappears into his work. As before, he goes through a metamorphosis, the conviviality sent packing, the documents attacked with savage energy. What is it about running a bank? Rachel muses. The business makes him more cruel and unforgiving than the land below.

It's still day outside when Nikko, snapping the briefcase shut, comes back. “What's been happening outside?” he asks pleasantly, as if he never ceased being his companionable self.

“We've been following the Nile, I believe. It flows through some amazing landscapes.”

The Nile, Egypt, the Egyptian, the progression to Morsi is natural and she asks about him. “He tickled your curiosity,” Nikko observes as Rachel's questions keep coming.

She admits he did. “I can't imagine him running a fleet of rustedout container ships. Such complicated feelings towards the world. Why doesn't he just recognise he's a hermit and be done with doing business? It wouldn't surprise me if he wrote poetry on the side.”

Nikko shrugs. “I think he delegates a lot. Probably has great managers.” He reaches over and puts his hand on Rachel's, stroking it with a thumb. “Thanks for coming. So much happened. It seems it's a month since we left. Every minute was perfect. Visit me in Berlin.”

Rachel takes a moment. “I'd be free for it,” she says, “if you are.”

“I'm often free.”

“Should we agree on a few things?”

Nikko spreads his hands as with a business deal, as an indication that he's willing to examine the conditions. “We could.”

“One, if I can't come when you're free, don't ask why.”

“That's fair.”

“Two, talk to me about your wife and kids as if I was your friend.”

“No problem with that.” He waits, taking in Rachel's stare. “Is that it? That's the contract?”

“Some fine print.”

“Naturally.”

“No presents. No mementoes. No flowers for St. Valentine's. None of that kind of thing.”

The banker thinks. “That restricts the things that give pleasure.”

“To the essentials.”

“To the essentials. Yes. Well, let's shake on it then.”

“I refuse to believe it, Jaime. You don't know Rachel Dunn. Rachel is smart. She's got stature. Getting messed up with Carson…it would be beneath her.”

“Irv, you didn't listen. I didn't say they mess around. Only that there's stuff on her in Carson's files.”

The Czar of Service Operations, huddled with Jaime in the dim light of her lab, had his back to the line of computers. The screens were doing their dancing, colours exploding and imploding, and were rendering him in silhouette. But before him Jaime's animated face reflected all the changing hues. She could have been on stage, irrepressible, unbound, a diva caressed by the spotlights.

“Rachel's got judgement,” Heywood's dark visage continued its dour protest. “Excellent judgement. You may not know, but she's our best high flyer. Compared to her, Carson's a smear, a film of slime, and that's pushing his charm quotient to the limit. She'd stay well clear of him.”

So defensive, Jaime thought. Okay, so he hates Carson and admires that woman. But can't he rise above it? Why blind yourself to facts?

“I don't know who's got charm and who doesn't,” she countered. “It doesn't come through in the files. Speaking of slime though, my feeling is Carson's seen it all. He's got tabs on more scumbags than you'd want to know about. And he's cleaned up most of them. How
that dude copes with all he's wise to is beyond me.” She waved a stack of print-outs at the Czar's silhouetted hulk. “And Irv – like it or not – in his work this Rachel Dunn lady figures. Maybe you're right. Maybe she doesn't belong in that crowd. But yes or no I'll find out. There's a banker and some other fat cat who sails a yacht up and down the Mediterranean. Did you call her a high flyer? What's a high flyer anyway? Someone who smokes better stuff than the rest of us?”

Heywood sighed. “Jaime, really. You don't know what a high flyer is?” He threw a distrusting look back over his shoulder at the screens and their colourful frolicking, then shifted his great weight forward. A conspiratorial pose. The Czar loved these moments of sharing secrets. “High flyers, Jaime,” he whispered, “absorb divine elixirs when they're young – from the air they breathe and the water they drink. It gives them instant access to truths which the rest of humanity gets at only through hard work. And they possess unlearned knowledge. Their miraculous brains gush it out, instantly, constantly, copiously. Not only that, when high flyers get older like me, they're infallible at spotting talent. That's part of it, grooming our successors to run the world.” The proud Czar nodded. After a moment of reflection, broken with a snort, he added: “I've smoothed a few paths upwards in my day, Jaime, but of all my protégées, Rachel is unique. She always reminded me of me when I was her age. So I made sure she'd be our youngest ambassador ever.” Heywood swivelled on the chair whereby the faint light falling upon his front revealed that a naive and saintly happiness had settled on his fleshy face.

“If you say so,” an irritated Jaime replied. “All I can add to that lady's high-altitude existence is that she's mobile in other ways too. Someone paved her way to the boudoir of that Egyptian king's concubine and she rolled right in.”

“I thought you said that palace hideaway is a hotel now.”

“Sure, but do overnight prices ever change?”

“Jaime! I won't have this innuendo. It's that scorpion Carson we can't trust, him giving us that bum steer on the plague. Do you really believe he would hesitate before pinning responsibility for the whole disaster on someone innocent like Rachel? That piece of schmaltzy prose you found, you know, the boat on the horizon thing, I believe it's all made up.”

“Irv, you're such a geezer. Your brain's a cart stuck in the mud. Catch a listen. I told you, Carson tried to hide the plague's origin
to prevent
this Miss Dunn from being implicated. The plague got started in Romania, okay? She's your ambassador there, remember? It happened on her watch, right? Carson wanted to delink her from the plague. Totally. He turned somersaults to recreate history. Why a cover up? There's something between them. I feel it.”

“My child,” Heywood sighed. “Yes, you're a high flyer too. You also have miraculous access to truths. You're blessed with marvellous insight…in your field. But in my field we know how to read the deeper motivations of the hell-hounds of the world. What I'm saying is that Carson deflected attention from our embassy in Bucharest to Radu Corioanu with that silly fake death certificate because he knew someone would find out he'd done that. He knew that would force the question being asked – why the deceit, why would he go to such lengths to hide the real culprit? That's your question and it's predictable. Mainstream reaction to news that the plague's originator lived in Romania will also be predictable. Naturally there will be a suspicion that the embassy was somehow implicated, that the ambassador was asleep on the job. But my conclusion is subtler. I believe he was creating a ruse. He's manipulating us. He wants us to do what you're doing. He wants mainstream to suspect that my finest young ambassador is incautious, even involved perhaps in odd dalliances. Why? Because he wants to destroy her. And the reason he wants to destroy her, I suspect, is that he knows it would destroy part of me. The file you found about Rachel staying in what used to be the boudoir of that king's mistress – I'm certain it's fabricated because it hardens suspicions so naturally. Therefore I'm not buying it.”

Jaime shook her head. She'd be no more incredulous if the Czar, muttering
abracadabra
, had started dispensing occult vapours from his fingertips. “You're off your rocket, Irv. Carson didn't hide his stuff thinking it would be found. He hid his stuff convinced it wouldn't be. I sweated days and nights untangling what he hid in the world's great books. All the spooks in the universe tasked to figure that out would have tripped over each other for years. So stop cooking up paranoid suspicions and give me some credit. Don't you see where you're at?
This pseudo-intellectual trotting around – all it does is spice up your own ego.”

The Czar lifted a hand off the steering wheel and wiped a tear away. The garage door of the Service complex was rumbling up and the guard outside caught the movement. He bent forward and motioned for the car window to be lowered. An embarrassed Heywood thought:
May the ergonomic chair I bought you last month for your pampered posterior disintegrate this night into a bed of spikes
.

“Going home early, Mr. Heywood?” the guard asked. “Everything all right?”

“Fine,” the Czar grumbled. “Celebration in the family tonight. Looking forward to it.”

“Thought so. I get that way. Sentimental as hell every time there's something with the kids.”

Heywood headed for the Minto Bridges, onto and off Green Island, then Maple Island, and rumbled over the metal grating under the fresh-white, geometric spans. How he loved the daily ceremony of crossing the river on these pretty bridges. A sudden inflow of Gulf air from the south had layered the river banks – it seemed overnight – with a deep vernal succulence, and farther along, the tidy front gardens of New Edinburgh were suddenly awash with sheets of tulips in yellow, red and orange. Actually, the whole city had been invaded by tulips, untold thousands, maybe millions of tulips, all proudly in bloom, each flower wishing ecstatic beholders a well-deserved and happy spring.
So much beauty
, Heywood thought.
Enough to mellow a grown man. But can I ever truly be content again? Spice up my ego? I have one, sure. It's always been robust. That's healthy. But it's widely known I'm never happier than when I'm playing second-fiddle. Can't Jaime recognise that what I want most is what the people I care for want?

From the bridges his route was along Union Street to the end with a right turn into Mackay. Heywood liked driving down Mackay at this time of year – like being in a garden – and he took his time. The overhanging branches formed a solid cover which calmed. Maybe, he speculated, that's why people like to walk in parks, to feel the trees'
canopy as a ceiling, to experience spiritual protection, to enjoy a respite from the cruelties that abound. Maybe, he suddenly realised, that was the reason Hannah spent so much time under the boughs of the towering maple rooted in the backyard of their neighbours. Rita and Gerry loved their great tree and so did Hannah, the way it spilled over the fence, providing umbrage. She was probably there right now, this balmy afternoon, regaining her strength. She had beaten the cancer, the doctor had said. Soon she'd be her bubbly self again. Irving couldn't wait. Hannah when she bubbled was his sustaining artesian well.

Driving down Mackay, with every tree bud and spring bulb radiating optimism, he, Irving Heywood, success story in life, went limp with gratitude over the great regenerating forces of nature.

Except for the tussle with Jaime. The poisonous things children say to their elders. Why the need to show that their teeth are viperous? He'd instantly forgiven her for the outburst, naturally. Still, why hadn't she been more restrained? Didn't she understand he only wished her well?

My child, don't misunderstand. Your decryption was brilliant. You're pure genius, you really are. I'm merely putting up straw men, you understand. I attack theories to ensure only the sound ones survive. That's my job. That's what I'm paid for
.