In the preceding months, Max had made a point of mentioning the Ferrari often and emphatically, watching Lockwood salivate each time it came up. He’d even gone so far as to doctor pictures of the car in U.S. Weekly and print up a fake edition of the magazine complete with an article on the painful divorce of Robert Cheskin, no actual pictures, of course, but plenty of interior and exterior shots of the Monaghan place (not really). That took brass. So, Lockwood, without ever setting foot there, felt he knew the place inside and out … its “owner,” too. Nothing could possibly make him doubt his friend’s sincerity. The whole thing, their “friendship” included, was an elaborate fiction from the get-go, and now the intimacy of that private relationship was about to get propelled into the public sphere. This was the keystone of the con man’s art.
So Step Two could be checked off, and now all Max had to do was let out some line so the fish believed it was free, and it wasn’t too late to change his mind if Lockwood wanted. He could call a halt and back up all the way if he so wished. Actually, no, it was too late for that. This was an offer he couldn’t refuse. Blinded by the Ferrari that would soon be his for a pittance, he personally walked Jiri Schiller’s mortgage application through the system, after Max brought him to Lockwood’s office. He even offered the services of his own notary, an important client of Chase Manhattan. Max, of course, graciously accepted. This Lockwood was an open book: he was going to hand-deliver his chance multimillionaire acquaintance to the bank and pile up some more brownie points for the future. Max could tell that Lockwood knew he was making out like a bandit on this one. Certain that he was, in fact, the real con man, Lockwood would obligingly jump like a fish straight into the frying pan.
The last step, the actual “frying,” was the transaction itself, and it took place early one morning in the Park Avenue office of Notary Warren, who had Schiller fill out all the necessary documents — after duly verifying all the fake property titles Max had manufactured — and handed a cheque to the “Vendor” for the amount of the mortgage obtained from the banker the day before (minus fees, of course). Lockwood’s $50,000 for the Ferrari would be directly payable to Max at noon tomorrow, when Lockwood would take possession in a shopping-centre parking lot not far from Monaghan’s house.
Max then deposited the cheque in an account he’d opened a few months prior at a branch on Third Avenue. Half of it he promptly transferred to an account he held under yet another name in Geneva, the other half going to Jiri Schiller in Frankfurt. What did he spend it on? Well, the first $11.95 went on a miniature Ferrari he saw in the window at F.A.O. Schwartz. He’d have it sent specially wrapped to the Mortgage Department at Chase Manhattan, care of Bill Lockwood.
As the saleslady was copying the address, Max suddenly felt a wave of fatigue creep over him, as though the weight of six months of lies suddenly fell on his shoulders right there at the counter. He was completely indifferent to the fate of Bill Lockwood. He was just a pigeon, a tool to get a few million out of Chase Manhattan. A drop in the bucket of their affairs. If, once in a while, Max felt himself about to go soft on anyone, he thought about what had happened to his father. There weren’t enough Bill Lockwoods in the entire world to make up for what had been done to him, his life ruined and plunged into deepest despair.
Max hailed a taxi and headed for Brooklyn Heights, his real home from the start of this affair. His bags were already packed, so all he had to do was grab them and head for the airport.
Hawaii, Jamaica, the Azores … the choice was his.
2
Juliette awoke with a start. The room was completely dark, and David was absent. She leaned toward the alarm clock: it read 11:30 p.m. The emergency meeting had gone on forever, as always. She had no trouble picturing them all around the oval table in the conference room on Shantipath, listening to High Commissioner Raymond Bernatchez unloading on the people in Ottawa once again.
“They don’t grasp the first thing about the situation here in India!” As if to say, he, Bernatchez, the former pro football player, knew anything more than the newspaper clippings provided by the Press Service — this according to David. The first secretary, William Sandmill, was probably chewing his nails without letup and casting a look of dread at Bernatchez, obviously terrified to say anything lest he rile him further. The young Indian employee, Vandana Dasgoswami, was sparing no effort to calm everyone down so they could “get some perspective.” Claude Langevin from public relations had arrived late, as usual, despite the fact he and his small family lived right there in the compound. Sunil Mukherjee, Bernatchez’s personal secretary, ever the “liberated” Brahmin, as he called himself, was the one to whom the high commissioner turned whenever he wanted a reading on this particularly bewildering country. It was Henry Caldwell, commercial affairs adviser, who would normally be running this meeting if the presence of Bernatchez were not called for. Two years away from his retirement, “Old Caldwell” was disappointed to be finishing his career so far from the family farm his brother had just willed him, and he dreamed of returning to his native Saskatchewan. He spent his lunch hour immersed in the Massey-Ferguson catalogue or else the seed book a colleague at Agriculture Canada sent him every month.
That afternoon, thirty-five Hindus had been massacred by Islamic extremists near Jammu, the winter capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, a reprisal for the murder of a thousand Muslims in Gujarat last March. In turn, fifty-nine Hindus had been burned alive in a railway car in the northern state. Such was the analysis of experts.
“You know what the worst part is?” David exclaimed when he told Juliette about it over the phone earlier that evening, “Just comfortably watching this storm and doing nothing.”
“But what else can you do? Remember what Vandana said: ‘We are nothing in the great horror of life’?”
“Yeah, well, she’s wrong.”
The hecatomb, or rather this series of them, only worsened an already-tense situation between Hindus and Muslims. It was one that had turned poisonous in December 2001. A suicide squad had attacked Lok Sabha, the Indian Parliament, in the heart of New Delhi, not far from Maharani Bagh, where David and Juliette lived. Responsibility for the assault had been claimed by Lashkar-e-Taiba, an extremist Islamic group, possibly the most deadly, based in Pakistan and fighting for either the independence of Indian Kashmir or its annexation to “the land of the pure.” Their specialty was terror strikes like this: a fire fight that had killed a dozen, including the commandos themselves.
Since then, and despite the shockwave and the breaking of diplomatic ties between India and Pakistan — whom New Delhi accused of supporting the jihadists — it was business as usual. “The illusion of normality,” David said. Now the Jammu massacre had undone all that, just as Canadian investors had recommenced their involvement in India, or so said High Commissioner Bernatchez. How to convince Canadian businessmen that things were now normal and would stay that way, despite the occasional “isolated incident” that shouldn’t affect long-term relations between the two countries? Now, repeat after me, nervous investors: one billion inhabitants …
The Montreal conference next month was aimed at calming everyone down, and now it might be postponed yet again, hence the emergency meeting of the relevant High Commission employees.
“You think this will take all night?” Juliette had asked, already knowing the answer.
“There’s nothing I can do.” As usual, she thought. Emergency or not, ever since the conference had loomed on the horizon, her husband had been keeping insane hours. He’d come in late when she was already in bed, ignore the cold plate Daya, the cook, had left in the fridge, and get right back to work early in the morning. Juliette suspected that Sandmill and Mukherjee, who were supposed to help, had left him to do it all alone. Okay, fine, so Bernatchez had unshakeable confidence in his young diplomat, but that wasn’t a good enough reason for David to risk burning himself out. However important Indo-Canadian trade relations were, they did not merit ruining his life.
He was taking on too much, as