I came to the United States for three reasons, he said. In the first place, to visit my sister in Philadelphia. Her husband is successful in the recycling of plastic bottles. This is how one makes one’s fortune in America. Get one good idea and stick to it. Professor Einstein used to say he only had one good idea. But in his case it was the nature of the universe.
Nero was at his goofiest, unfocused, his eyes wandering, humming a little private tune.
The second reason was to visit the grave of P. G. Wodehouse, he said. (That got my attention. Wodehouse, so beloved of my parents and myself. Wodehouse, who had also come to mind when Kinski sat in that chair.) Mr. Wodehouse is very popular back home, Mastan said. His tombstone is a marble book engraved with the names of his characters. My favorite is not there however. Miss Madeline Bassett who thought the stars were God’s daisy chain. But she is a minor character. I, also, myself. The same. Mine has always been a strictly supporting role.
My husband is not well, Vasilisa stiffly said. If there is a point to this visit, please arrive at it promptly.
Oh, the point, madam, yes. Bear with me. There is the point ostensible and the point actual. The point ostensible is what I have said to him telephonically. A word of warning. But the gentleman has been a worldly man. Perhaps it is not necessary to warn him of what he already knows. The community of our people in America has grown, madam, it boasts now recyclers of plastic bottles, madam, also new technology geniuses, garlanded actors, campaigning attorneys, politicians across the spectrum, fashion designers, and also, madam, criminal gangs. I’m sorry to say. In America the word mafia has specific Italian connotations so it is better to avoid it and call our people’s gangs by other names. Let us concede that they are still small, there are only the beginnings of what the Italians call families and what our people call gharaney, households, or, nowadays, companies, a term presently popular in the mother country. However there is much enthusiasm among these American companies, these new households, much potential for rapid growth. There is also a degree of outreach to the mother country, an interest in globalization, in shared activities. Our people in the USA are willing to help the people in the mother country, to facilitate actions here, in return for parallel facilitations back home. Things change, madam. Time passes. Things formerly impossible become possible. I wished to discuss these matters with the gentleman but now that I am face to face with him I find it redundant to do so. He may be aware, he may not. It may be a concern to him, or not. His intelligence may retain the capacity for analysis of threat and risk, or it may have lost that capacity. It is not my business. I see this now.
So we come to the point actual, madam, thanking you for your patience. The point actual was to take a look at the gentleman and to see what taking such a look inspired in myself. It is a man who has escaped judgment for many wrongs. For his part in desperate deeds, madam. It is a man who has expertly covered his tracks, who has used tradecraft and money to erase all links between himself and many things that are beyond words. I promised to tell him the names of his son’s murderers but of course he knows them already, he dealt with them for years on cordial terms, until they turned against him. It is possible the security forces of this great country would have been interested in these matters and perhaps I could have interested them, but I fear that without evidence I would look to them like a fond and foolish man even though I was once their colleague in a distant land. It is possible that having taken a look at this man I would have wished to take matters into my own hands although we are both old men. It is possible I would have wished to hit this man in the face, absurd as a fistfight between two old duffers would be. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that I would have wished to shoot him dead. I am still a crack shot, madam, and a weapon in America is easily acquired. But now that I look upon this man, a man whom I have hated for the larger part of my life, this man who was a strong man, I see that I have found him in his time of weakness, and he is not worthy of my bullet. Let him face his God. Let him receive judgment when he is standing before the judgment seat. Let hell receive him and let him burn in hellfire for all eternity. Thus my point is made and I will take my leave.
Riya’s hand was on Vasilisa’s shoulder, warning her, leave your pistol where it is.
Mr. Mastan rose and bowed his head. Then as he turned for the door Nero hauled himself up from the depths of the sofa where he sat and shockingly, awfully, shouted at the very top of his voice.
You come into my house and speak like this to me in front of my wife?
The retired policeman stopped in his tracks, his back to Nero, his hat still in his hand.
Bastard! Nero screamed. Run! It is you who are a dead man now.
When the detective arrives on the scene, the movie audience instinctively relaxes, expecting crime to be followed by justice, for right to triumph. But it is not inevitable that the just will gain the victory over the unjust. In another Hitchcock movie, Psycho, the horror arises from the fact that the wrong people die. Janet Leigh is the biggest star in the movie but, not even halfway through the running time, aah!, she’s dead in the shower. Then the detective, Martin Balsam, arrives, nice, comfortable, safe Martin Balsam, so professional, so reassuring, and our tension eases. Things will be all right now. And then, aah! He’s dead too. Note to self: it’s extra scary when the wrong people die.
The retired detective, Inspector Mastan formerly of the Bombay CID. Must we expect something terrible to happen to him?
One last thing about Mr. Hitchcock. Yes, he liked to make cameo appearances in his films, he said it made people watch the movies more closely to see when and how it would happen, but also, very often, he got the cameo out of the way early so that the search for it didn’t become a distraction. I say this because I now have to record, as the auteur of the present work in progress (to put it much too grandly, considering that this is very much a rookie project), that as I watched—participated wordlessly in—the scene I have just described, something uncontrollable welled up inside me. In that time of spilling secrets, I let my own secret spill.
Yes: characteristically, I hide my feelings. I lock them away or I sublimate them into movie references. Even at this crucial moment in my narrative, when I step out of the shadows into the center-stage spotlight, I’m trying (and failing) to resist talking about Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece Ran, in which, so to speak, King Lear was married to Lady Macbeth. The thought was triggered by something Inspector Mastan said. He called himself fond and foolish and whether he knew it or not was almost quoting Shakespeare’s broken king. Pray, do not mock me, Lear pleads. I am a very foolish fond old man….And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. There he sat upon his sofa, his last throne, screaming senile hatred. The Ancient of Days, who had disrupted the lives of his three sons and was destroyed not as Lear was, by their hostility, but by their destruction. And here before him, as monstrous in my eyes as the Lady Kaede in Ran, Kurosawa’s Lady Macbeth, stood Vasilisa Golden, mother of his fourth and only surviving—and only supposed—child, with a pistol in her pocketbook and fire blazing from her eyes. And I, the fool, beginning my soliloquy which would reveal the truth. As if I didn’t understand that mine was a supporting role. As if, like Inspector Mastan, I could be, at least for this one scene, the star.