Yousseff introduced himself as “Joseph,” which was the Anglicized version of his name. He said he was general counsel for the Hanaman family. Then he went straight to the point. No pleasantries. No talk about the weather.
“So, tell me, sir,” Yousseff said to the oily little man sitting across the desk from him. They were the only two in the office. Omar had headed back up the Indus, and Kumar was in school. “Tell me… exactly how much money do you want?”
Mr. Just-call-me-Sahota looked at Yousseff in astonishment. He found himself completely at a loss. No one started a negotiation like that. Not in Karachi. Not in Afghanistan. Not even in America, where it was common knowledge that no one had manners, and where it would appear that this man had been spending much of his time. Sahota thought that this Joseph must be some sort of barbarian, completely devoid of manners and culture.
“What do you take me for, sir?” Sahota asked in shock. “I have integrity! I have ethics! I have morals! I am an honest man, and I am just doing my job. Are you saying that you think you can bribe me?” With each question, Sahota worked himself further into a self-righteous rage.
“Yes, of course, Mr. Sahota,” Yousseff responded calmly. “That is exactly what I am doing. I know what your salary is. I know how much your house costs you. I even know how much you pay for your whores on Old English Street. Of course I am bribing you. Was I being too subtle? Are you not understanding some part of this?”
In all his life, which had been full of cagey little deals, backroom payments, and money for greasing the wheels, Sahota had never encountered a conversation quite this basic. He started to protest again, but Yousseff quickly interrupted him.
“Mr. Sahota, what part of ’how much’ are you not understanding?”
Sahota started to protest again, but broke off, and sat silent and staring. Yousseff just stared back, unblinking. A full minute went by in silence. Yousseff knew about this part of making a deal — the first one to break the silence loses. Yousseff had learned well the art of knowing when to talk and when to stay silent.
“Fine,” Sahota broke under the pressure. “I want $1,000 American a month. And it must be cash,” he said quickly.
Yousseff couldn’t believe his ears. The “and it must be cash” almost made him blink. Obviously this dolt did not know that he had suitcases full, safe houses full, and barns full of cash. Nor did he know that Yousseff’s greatest intellectual exercises consisted of finding ways to make the cash morph into other things, such as land, houses, ships, and loyalty. Of course he did not know these things — how could he? And yet it caught Yousseff by surprise to be so misjudged.
He paused for a moment and then decided to go double or nothing. “I will make it double. I will pay you $2,000 American a month, in cash, if you keep the union away from my client, and if you make the life of the KSEW Board of Directors a living hell. And I will do this for as long as you honor your part of the deal. If that’s for 50 years, it’s payment for 50 years.”
Now it was Sahota who could not believe his ears. He was 37 years old. The average wage in Karachi was a tenth of what he was being offered. The circus had come to town. Bring out the dancing girls and the beer, he thought. Good beer, in fact. The German stuff.
They rose to shake hands on the deal. Before the handshake, Yousseff hesitated and looked Sahota directly in the eye again. “If you forget this contract, Mr. Sahota, you will die. You will die slowly and painfully, as will your children, your wife, and your mistresses.” At this point, Yousseff named Sahota’s four children, from oldest to youngest, his wife, and three of his mistresses. He did this in a slow and deliberate matter, staring directly at Sahota. Mr. Just-call-me-Sahota was chilled to the bone. He found himself shaking terribly. Had he just leapt into bed with a dozen cobras?
“Do you understand me, Mr. Sahota?” asked Yousseff.
“Yes, Mr. Joseph. Yes sir, I do. I am your loyal and obedient servant always. Yes, yes.” Why worry? he thought. Why mess this up? This circus could be in town to stay, as long as he kept his part of the deal.
Yousseff, for his part, had no intention of wiping out the entire Sahota clan, including mistresses. He felt no need to tell Sahota that, however. The threat was all that was necessary.
From that point on, the fortune of Karachi Drydock and Engineering seemed only to increase. There were more sales, more jobs, more employees, and more of everything else. KSEW, on the other hand, became more and more mired in union strife, and had particular problems with the PASWEU.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” an angered Nooshkatoor cried during one dinner with Sahota. “What on earth are we paying you for? One thousand dollars a month, and it has to be American dollars, and cash to boot! That is an enormous sum of money. And still you can’t control your damned members. What the hell kind of business agent are you anyway?”
To this Sahota could only wring his hands and say what a difficult outfit the PASWEU had become. A few small labor relations victories would ensue, only to be met by yet another round of wildcat walkouts and ridiculous demands.
Yousseff only smiled when he heard the news. Nooshkatoor now ran the company with an iron fist, just managing to keep the huge corporation solvent. But try as he might, he could not find a way to snuff out KDEC, and that miserable little bastard child, Kumar Hanaman.
While Yousseff’s deal with Sahota kept Nooshkatoor from making trouble and provided for some entertaining moments, his arrangement with Kumar was paying rich dividends. Karachi Drydock and Engineering had strengthened his empire profoundly. A thousand tricks had been created by Yousseff, Omar, and Kumar to ease the transportation of product from dock to boat, boat to boat, and boat to dock. Ingenious devices were employed to create false hulls; many of Yousseff’s craft measured 30 feet in length from the outside, but only 28 feet from the inside. Kumar delighted in the construction of these invisible storage areas, and before long, they were being used not only in Yousseff’s ships but in his automobiles and airplanes as well. Yousseff and Kumar, working together, standardized the size of a pallet of heroin and designed all the transportation machinery to be the same size, so that transfers from craft to craft could be accomplished with even greater speed and efficiency.
Kumar obtained his engineering degree in a record three years and returned to KDEC as its full-time president when he was only 18 years old. He built his first submersible before he was 21.
In the case of PASWEU, the day inevitably came when Sahota approached Kumar and told him he needed more money. It would have to be $3,000 per month, or the agreement would be brought to the attention of Nooshkatoor, and perhaps even the police.
Kumar nodded slowly and said, “Yes, I see your point. Give me a day.”
Kumar called Yousseff. Yousseff called Marak. Just-call-me-Sahota disappeared. His body was found washed up on a nearby beach a few weeks later. His hands and feet had been cut off by some sharp instrument, while he was still alive. An autopsy determined that he had been shot once in the head with what might have been a Glock 9 mm. Ballistics analysis was inconclusive.
27
Yousseff was 24 when he went to work as a deck hand on the Arabian Queen II, the tramp freighter owned and operated by Bartholomew. It was the same old ship that the smuggler had acquired more than a decade earlier; it had already been ancient when Yousseff first started bringing him heroin, and hadn’t been kept up. The only improvement, thought Yousseff, was that a few hundred coats of paint had been applied since then. The last few coats had been with the compliments of KDEC. The crew joked that the paint was the only thing holding the ship together.