Netherland (31 page)

He leads me through my statement. I tell him everything I know, even facts that are potentially troublesome for me, and over the course of an hour Marinello carefully records every word I say. This makes it all the more surprising that he immediately signs off, with no follow-up questioning, “Thank you, sir, that’s great.”

“That’s it?”

Marinello sighs. Then, maybe because I’m in England and beyond the jurisdiction, or because he’s made me wait a month, or because cops do this from time to time to make life easier for the good guys, he tells me something “off the record”: they know who did this. “We just don’t got the courtroom evidence,” Marinello says.

“Evidence?” I say blankly.

“Witnesses,” Marinello says. “We got no witnesses.”

For the second time I say, “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Marinello says. He sounds satisfied. He feels he has taught somebody a lesson in realities.

Whether or not this is true, I feel I must persist. At the weekend, I ring Anne Ramkissoon again: this is when I find out the Ramkissoon home number is no longer operative. I dig out an old diary and with it Eliza’s home number. A man with a Hispanic accent answers her phone. Eliza is out, he tells me. “This is her husband. Can I help?”

So that he doesn’t get any wrong ideas, I tell the guy exactly who I am. Either he’s wary or not especially interested, because he barely reacts. “I’ll call another time,” I tell him.

I don’t, however. I leave it there. Sure, I have my theories—Abelsky is an unlikely killer of Chuck, I tentatively conclude—but Marinello’s indifference to me suggests that I have no personal connection at all to the relevant facts. Chuck Ramkissoon was involved in things categorically beyond my knowledge of him.

A month passes, and then another. Then, in July, there is an unforeseen development. I read somewhere that Faruk Patel, the millionaire guru whom Chuck claimed as a backer, is in town on a speaking tour. I decide to call Faruk’s publicist and ask for a meeting. “Tell him it’s about Chuck Ramkissoon,” I tell the publicist.

Within an hour—this takes me aback—she calls with an appointment.

Faruk is quartered in a suite at the Ritz. An assistant escorts me into his presence. He is wearing, as the Faruk brand requires, a white tracksuit, white T-shirt, and white sneakers. He democratically joins me on a large white sofa and tells me that I’m lucky to catch him since he comes to London infrequently and is very busy when he does.

“Tell me,” he continues, leaning back and waggling a foot, “what exactly was your relationship to Ramkissoon?”

“He was a personal friend,” I say. I sketch my role as assistant groundsman. “I had nothing to do with his business.”

Faruk seems amused. “He told me you were a director of his company. Then he told me you were a nonexecutive director. Then he told me you were involved, but only informally, and that you would show yourself once we got permission to build.”

I laugh. “Well, it’s possible I might have,” I said. “Who knows?”

Faruk also laughs. “He was an intriguing chap. That’s why I became involved in the first place. My advisers told me not to touch it. But I wanted to know what this funny fellow would do next. One never knew. I captained my university team, you know,” he suddenly boasts. “Sometimes I think I should have been a professional cricketer.”

Somebody pours us tea. I say, “Do you think it would have worked?”

“The New York Cricket Club,” Faruk says, raising his eyebrows, “was a splendid idea—a gymkhana in New York. We had a chance there. But would the big project have worked? No. There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket.”

When, out of loyalty to Chuck, I say nothing, Faruk says emphatically, “Look, he wanted to take the game to the Americans. He wanted to expand the operation, get them watching it, playing it. Start a whole cricketing revolution.”

“Yes, I know.”

Faruk says, “My idea was different. My idea was, you don’t need America. Why would you? You have the TV, Internet markets in India, in England. These days that’s plenty. America? Not relevant. You put the stadium there and you’re done.
Finito la musica.
” He drinks up his tea.

We rise to our feet. “It’s a tragedy,” Faruk Patel solemnly says, putting his hand on my shoulder: we are brothers in sorrow. “Ramkissoon was a rare bird.”

That night, I cannot fall asleep. I get out of bed, go down to the kitchen, help myself to a glass of mineral water. The family laptop is on the kitchen table. I switch it on.

I go to Google Maps. It is preset to a satellite image of Europe. I rocket westward, over the dark blue ocean, to America. There is Long Island. In plummeting I overshoot and for the first time in years find myself in Manhattan. It is, necessarily, a bright, clear day. The trees are in leaf. There are cars immobilized all over the streets. Nothing seems to be going on.

I veer away into Brooklyn, over houses, parks, graveyards, and halt at olive-green coastal water. I track the shore. Gravesend and Gerritsen slide by, and there is Floyd Bennett Field’s geometric sprawl of runways. I fall again, as low as I can. There’s Chuck’s field. It is brown—the grass has burned—but it is still there. There’s no trace of a batting square. The equipment shed is gone. I’m just seeing a field. I stare at it for a while. I am contending with a variety of reactions, and consequently with a single brush on the touch pad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrinkles and all—have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere. From up here, though, a human’s movement is a barely intelligible thing. Where would he move to, and for what? There is no sign of nations, no sense of the work of man. The USA as such is nowhere to be seen.

I shut down the computer. I drink a second glass of water and begin to study a sheaf of work papers. I’m wide awake.

W
hile Cardozo rushes by Underground to Sloane Square and his fiancée-to-be, I stroll across Waterloo Bridge with my jacket suspended from a hooked finger. I am happy to be walking. Although it’s early evening, it’s still very warm: this is, after all, the summer of the great heat wave. The English summer is actually a Russian doll of summers, the largest of which is the summer of unambiguous disaster in Iraq, which immediately contains the summer of the destruction of Lebanon, which itself holds a series of ever-smaller summers that lead to the summer of Monty Panesar and, smallest of all perhaps, the summer of Wayne Rooney’s foot. But on this evening at the end of July, it feels like summer simpliciter, and it’s with no real thought of anything that I detach myself from the mass whose fate is Waterloo Station and go down the steps to the riverbank. It’s a scene of good cheer on the esplanade, where the wanderers are in receipt of that peculiar happiness a summer river bestows, a donation of space, of light, and, somehow, of time: there is something regretful in Big Ben’s seven gongs. I go under Hungerford Bridge and its sunny new walkways and am overwhelmingly confronted by the London Eye, in profile. Here, by the tattered lawn of Jubilee Gardens, is where I’ve arranged to meet wife and son. Rather than crane up at the Eye, I pass ten minutes watching the waters of the Thames. It’s hard to believe this was exactly the stretch where, in January, with television helicopters floating overhead and millions following its every sinking and surfacing, a whale swam. Chuck, the birder, taught me the term for such a creature: a vagrant, to be distinguished from a migrant.

My son’s voice calls out. Daddy! Turning, I see my family and its superlong shadows. We are all beaming. Reunions in unfamiliar places have this effect, and maybe the great wheel itself is infectious: the stupendous circle, freighted with circumferential eggs, is a glorious spray of radiuses. In due course a security guard waves his wand over our possessions; an egg hatches Germans; and a gang of us boards. According to officialdom, we are flying counterclockwise at less than two miles per hour. Jake, berserk with excitement, quickly befriends a six-year-old boy who speaks not a word of English. As we rise over the river and are gradually presented with the eastern vista, the adults also become known to one another: we meet a couple from Leeds; a family from Vilnius (Jake’s pal is one of these); and three young Italian women, one of whom has dizziness and must stay seated.

As a Londoner, I find myself consulted about what we’re all seeing. At first, this is easy—there’s the NatWest Tower, which now has a different name; there’s Tower Bridge. But the higher we go, the less recognizable the city becomes. Trafalgar Square is not where you expect it to be. Charing Cross, right under our noses, must be carefully detected. I find myself turning to a guidebook for help. The difficulty arises from the mishmashing of spatial dimensions, yes, but also from a quantitative attack: the English capital is huge, huge; in every direction, to distant hills—Primrose and Denmark and Lavender, our map tells us—constructions are heaped without respite. Riverbank traffic aside, there is little sign of life. Districts are compacted, in south London especially: where on earth are Brixton and Kennington and Peckham? You wonder how anyone is able to navigate this labyrinth, which is what this crushed, squashed, everywhere-spreading city appears to be. “Buckingham Palace?” one of the Lithuanian ladies asks me, and I cannot say. I notice, meanwhile, that Jake has started to race around and needs to be brought to order, and that Rachel is standing alone in a corner. I merely join my wife. I join her just as we reach the very top of our celestial circuit and for this reason I have no need to do anything more than put an arm around her shoulder. A self-evident and prefabricated symbolism attaches itself to this slow climb to the zenith, and we are not so foolishly ironic, or confident, as to miss the opportunity to glimpse significantly into the eyes of the other and share the thought that occurs to all at this summit, which is, of course, that they have made it thus far, to a point where they can see horizons previously unseen, and the old earth reveals itself newly. Everything is further heightened, as we must obscurely have planned, by signs of sundown: in the few clouds above Ealing, Phoebus is up to his oldest and best tricks. Rachel, a practical expression all of a sudden crossing her face, begins to say something, but I shush her. I know my wife: she feels an urge to go down now, into the streets and into the facts. But I leave her with no choice, as willy-nilly we are lowered westward, but to accept her place above it all. There is to be no drifting out of the moment.

What happens, however, is that I’m the one who drifts—to another sundown, to New York, to my mother. We were sailing on the Staten Island Ferry on a September day’s end. The forward deck was crowded. There was much smiling, pointing, physical intertwining, kissing. Everybody looked at the Statue of Liberty and at Ellis Island and at the Brooklyn Bridge, but finally, inevitably, everybody looked to Manhattan. The structures clustered at its tip made a warm, familiar crowd, and as their surfaces brightened ever more fiercely with sunlight it was possible to imagine that vertical accumulations of humanity were gathering to greet our arrival. The day was darkening at the margins, but so what? A world was lighting up before us, its uprights putting me in mind, now that I’m adrift, of new pencils standing at attention in a Caran d’ Ache box belonging in the deep of my childhood, in particular the purplish platoon of sticks that emerged by degrees from the reds and, turning bluer and bluer and bluer, faded out; a world concentrated most glamorously of all, it goes almost without saying, in the lilac acres of two amazingly high towers going up above all others, on one of which, as the boat drew us nearer, the sun began to make a brilliant yellow mess. To speculate about the meaning of such a moment would be a stained, suspect business; but there is, I think, no need to speculate. Factual assertions can be made. I can state that I wasn’t the only person on that ferry who’d seen a pink watery sunset in his time, and I can state that I wasn’t the only one of us to make out and accept an extraordinary promise in what we saw—the tall approaching cape, a people risen in light. You only had to look at our faces.

Which makes me remember my mother. I remember how I turned and caught her—how could I have forgotten this until now?—looking not at New York but at me, and smiling.

Which is how I come to face my family with the same smile.

“Look!” Jake is saying, pointing wildly. “See, Daddy?”

I see, I tell him, looking from him to Rachel and again to him. Then I turn to look for what it is we’re supposed to be seeing.

Acknowledgments

Significant portions of this book were written at Ledig House and at Yaddo. In the matter of artistic sanctuary I am also deeply thankful to the Bard family; to John Casey; and, most deeply of all, to Bob and Nan Stewart.

A Note About the Author

Joseph O’Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in various parts of the world, most significantly Holland, where he attended British and French international schools. He received a law degree from Cambridge University and is a barrister. His previous works include the novels
This Is the Life
and
The Breezes
and the nonfiction book
Blood-Dark Track,
a family history centered on the mysterious imprisonment of both his grandfathers during World War II, which was a
New York Times
Notable Book and a book of the year for the
Economist
and the
Irish Times.
He writes regularly for the
Atlantic.
He lives in New York City.

Also by Joseph O’Neill

FICTION

This Is the Life

The Breezes

NONFICTION

Blood-Dark Track: A Family History

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Joseph O’Neill

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, London.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O’Neill, Joseph, [date]

Netherland / Joseph O’Neill

                           p. cm.

I. Title.

PR
6065.
N
435
N
48 2008

823'.914—dc22                                                                2007033711

www.pantheonbooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-37759-3

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