Jacob Homel

The past is like a gun in the hands of our enemies. What we’ve said, what we’ve done, whether deliberate or not, the mistakes we’ve made when we were kids — sooner or later someone will find out about them and point them at your head.  I made a promise to myself I’d never write again; I’ve paid too high a price already. And if I find myself wandering through this story now, my own story, it’s to establish the truth and hope that with it, I might regain those I loved and lost — through my own fault.   On that morning in October 1995, I woke at dawn, still on edge from the previous night’s meeting. A grey light filtered through the window. It was still too early to take in the hills on the other side of the canyon, along with their great white lettering, still hidden by the thick smog that rose from the city. The sight of that sign was the consecration of my success, a feeling of revenge experienced every time I contemplated the sight from my office window, in my house all the way up Appian Way.  In the car on the way home, I had unleashed my anger on Ann, who’d been troubled by the intensity of my words. I saw the way she stiffened in her seat, and I regretted it instantly, “If that’s success, I want no part of it! What are they trying to do? Silence us? Take away our freedom to write? It’s the money, goddamn it, the money that’s making us cowards!”  She touched my arm, and with that soft but unyielding voice she used in such moments, when she wished to calm me down, said, “It’s okay, Romain, forget what just happened. It won’t happen again, you’ll see.” And I thought, How can you be so sure?  It was Chastity’s abortions that had provoked the most violent responses. Letters, calls, sometimes threats, not to mention the small groups of demonstrators that had begun parading silently in front of the La Brea studio we called The Bunker, their anger a burning ember, the colour of painted blood splashed on their signs. Gloomy looking pro-life demonstrators would arrive early in the morning, icebox and folding chair under their arms, as if they were going to a baseball game, and leave late in the evening with, or so I imagined, the feeling of having accomplished something. They ignored us, and we ignored them. We did our job, they did theirs. Each of us defending our own understanding of freedom of speech in this country, though always keeping a distance from the other, in a show of feigned but civilized respect. To me it wasn’t a problem; to me that’s what America was all about.  Chastity was a character in my television series In Gad We Trust. I had finally succeeded in selling my first script after years of disillusionment and struggle, at a point when I’d pretty much stopped believing it would ever happen. “When perseverance pays,” the newspapers had said. Success at the ripe age of fifty, which wasn’t a common story in Los Angeles, made me into a sort of celebrity that was apparently mocked, or at least that was what some large, drunken fellow from ABC had told me at a party, his warm hand on my shoulder, a dumb smile on his lips, “Have you heard what they’re saying about you? That they ended up saying yes to you for humanitarian reasons.” I had no qualms about it. I’d even learned to laugh at my own expense, speaking with derision of a miracle worked by Gad himself, adding sometimes, “Like a pregnant woman who thought she was sterile her whole life.”  Don’t get me wrong though — the story I’m telling you here isn’t a comedy. This scriptwriter hasn’t laughed in a long time.  It was a stimulating and exciting time, despite the whining from various quarters. Complaints told us we were on the right track: boldness doesn’t always please. At least that’s what we told ourselves, until the attacks became more personal and the head office of our network, It’s All Comedy!, became preoccupied with remarks made by an influential columnist with the Los Angeles Daily News. We were in the middle of filming the second season, surfing on the instant success of the first, which had put wind in our sails and given us enough arrogance to ignore the negative comments. But this, this was different. The criticism had turned into a vicious mess.  “These Hollywood types never go after Jews. But Christians — why not?... Would these eager defenders of freedom of expression have been so eager to defend Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic pamphlets in Nazi Germany? Of course not.”  And of course, within “of course not” sits the malicious intent of the author. So much so that after the text was published, the author was interviewed on a popular talk-radio show, and the putrid wind — Jews, money, Hollywood — blew once again through the town’s populist media. And Josh Ovitz, president of It’s All Comedy!, felt himself the target of these cruel attacks.  I told Josh, “Don’t let it distract us. We know what it’s all about, this disgusting propaganda. Another reason not to give a single inch.”  The whole affair had shaken the crew and provided the impetus for a series of long discussions among the staff, How far is too far? It’s around that time that a certain scene, which hadn’t been thought of as problematic after a first read, had suddenly become so. And Josh had asked all of us over for a meeting. On a Sunday afternoon.  In production meetings, I had the reputation of being pugnacious when defending my ideas. We’d wanted dark comedy, we had dark comedy. A handful of complaints from saggy sanctimonious nothings in Orange County wouldn’t paralyze us.  “Okay, Roman …” Dick, a producer friend, was speaking. “But the stuff on God.…”  Flabbergasted, I stared at Dick. I suddenly wondered if the complaints, which until that point we’d treated with either indifference or amusement (hadn’t we popped a bottle of champagne in honour of the first one?) — and now these fallacious newspaper articles — would complicate our task. Censor myself? No way! Sure, what we had undertaken was edgy, but it wasn’t revolutionary in any sense — the American public was ready for it. The Simpsons on Fox had opened the way. Now, new cable outfits had taken the baton and run with it, taking greater and greater risks. To me there was something a hundred times worse than sedition: vulgarity.  And here was Josh Ovitz, an intelligent young man, a bit over thirty and intrepid, a pure product of East Coast education, out of arguments. Without much resistance, he was signing on with Dick and all the others around the table, including Matt, a man whose work I admired, and Ann, who’d participated in the writing of the series. Ann? You agree with them? Before my astonished air, she lowered her eyes, while Josh’s assistant distributed photocopies of the scene in question, which I was asked to read out loud. I staggered through it without the enthusiasm with which I’d written the thing: 
Season 2 / In Gad We Trust / episode 4 / scene 14: interior, Paradise Church, day  (After a particularly lucrative religious service — the faithful had once again been generous — Gad Paradise and his son are chatting in the room behind the altar. Gad takes off his preacher’s garb.) GAD PARADISE  You know, God, he’s like a Mafia Don. God-Bonanno. God-Al Capone. God-Lansky. God-Father. D’ya get it? God-Father! If you go behind his back, God can have you dead any time, any place. Divine prerogative, right? You following me? (Gad picks up the collection bags filled to the brim, and begins opening them) But if you work hard for him, well, well (he snaps his fingers), he’ll be generous right back! (Gad empties the bags on the ground.) Everything that falls to the ground is ours. If God wanted any of it, he should have reached out from Heaven and held out his hand!  God, what a schmuck! 
Around the table, total silence. Dick shook his head. “You can’t call God a schmuck, Roman. You know me, I generally don’t give a shit. But that, even I can’t abide.”  “We’re not the ones saying it, a character is.”  “It won’t fly. No one is okay with it. It’s just … anti-American.”  “Anti-American! Having a laugh at God is anti-American?” No one reacted. I was stupefied. Matt, a tall man with a deep voice, added, “It’s a small phrase. It doesn’t have an impact on the story.” Everyone nodded and Dick added, “Right, a small, blaspheming phrase.”  I went on, indignant, “You, Dick? Nagging me about blasphemy? You can’t say two words without cussing!”  Dick pressed his lips together, no doubt keeping some choice words to himself at that very moment. Ann was facing me, her back straight, looking at me as if to say, They’re right. The series is explosive enough. They’ll never be able to accuse us of deference. Just let it go.…  “Blasphemy hasn’t been a crime in this country since 1971! We’ve got the Constitution on our side, for crying out loud!”  Josh grabbed a pen and drew a line over the phrase in his copy. He stood up, avoided my eyes, and spoke to the room as if I’d already left, “Good, we’re all agreed, then. We’re filming the scene tomorrow without the phrase, okay?”  All agreed. “Wait!” I protested. Josh looked sorry now, sincerely sorry. Who was behind this censorial operation? The board? The shareholders? And no one to inform me about it before now? Finally, I found my words, rage filling me, “Today, it’s just one phrase. And tomorrow, what will it be? What are we going to be shooting for our fifth season? The Waltons?”  Josh rubbed his hand in his hair. “We’re wasting our time, Roman. How many of us around the table? Eight? So it’s seven against one.”  “I’m the writer!”  I glanced over at Ann, and she put on a brave smile. My heart tightened. Josh continued, “Please, Roman, in the future, let’s try to avoid easy formulas and simple phrasing, okay? I’m sure you can find something better to write. In fact, I can’t see how it affects the scene. Really.”  Avoid easy formulas?  If I was being honest, I’d have admitted that Josh was right on this one. The phrase certainly wasn’t the best one I’d written in my career. But considering the circumstances ... not saying anything? Because that was the whole point of this improvised — though not so much when I came to think about it — intervention: to shut me up. Ann watched me, imploring me with her eyes to not say anything. She knew how angry I could be, knew that the simple idea of being muzzled sent me back to my childhood, which I didn’t like to talk about and which she didn’t entirely understand. A childhood made of bitter and unpleasant memories, like a dish you hated as a kid and promised yourself never to eat again when you grew up. I’d spent my entire life fighting for a way to express myself, total freedom, without concessions or constraints, and I wouldn’t, at my age, fifty years old for crying out loud, let myself be told, you can’t say that! Especially just because a gang of fanatics might feel offended.  “Shit!”

Max O’Brien had headed straight to the Intercontinental Hotel to drop his bags off after coming in from New York City. An hour later he was off to wander through — and lose himself in — the streets of the Lipscani District, a maze of lanes filled with Bucharest’s citizens out for a bit of Christmas shopping. At some point he burst out of the maze of small commercial streets and onto Unirii Boulevard in front of the Palace of the Parliament. The sheer monstrosity of the monument startled him. Like a wedding cake with its top layer missing, crushing the capital around it, it was one of the largest buildings in the world. The dream of a megalomaniac tyrant, Nicolae Ceausescu. The People’s House — though the people themselves had renamed it the People’s Madhouse. Around it, the Civic Centre, built over the ruins of a nineteenth-century neighbourhood. Twelve churches, two synagogues, and three monasteries, not to mention hundred of homes and shops, had been razed to build it. The destruction of a district twice as large as Le Marais in Paris. The Civic Centre was a city within the city, the place the dictator had ruled from to the end of his life. After the revolution in 1989, Romanians took over construction of the palace, which now housed the Parliament and various ministries. And yet it felt unfinished, as if it couldn’t ever be completed.
Max kept on walking.
He had a meeting on the other side of the fountain, near the pond that ran along the boulevard.
The past forty-eight hours had been dizzying. Max had learned from a newspaper in New York that the Romanian police were looking for his friend Kevin Dandurand in relation to the murder of twenty-three Roma. Max had tried in vain to get in touch with Kevin’s wife, Caroline, in Montreal. So he’d called Gabrielle, their daughter, who’d been living with her father since the couple had split. Kevin taught physical education at Collège Notre-Dame du Sacré-Coeur, but, according to the teenager, who’d been shocked by the news, Kevin had been on sabbatical since September. He’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail by himself. The trail ran from Maine to Georgia, the hike of a lifetime for an experienced outdoorsman. He could only be reached through email. And what about Caroline, what was happening with her? Gabrielle had explained that she’d locked herself in her house, refusing to answer the phone after being hounded by journalists following the accusations levied by the Romanian police.
Max had written a long email to Kevin, demanding an explanation, and left his cellphone number. Gabrielle had done the same thing — several times — earlier that very same day. As one might expect, Kevin hadn’t answered a single one of her messages. Gabrielle told Max that Josée, Kevin’s half-sister who worked as a lawyer in Paris, was already packing her bags for Bucharest. She was off to sort out the whole mess. She’d be there the next day.
In other words, total chaos. Kevin a killer? A murderer of twenty-three innocent Roma? Surely it had to be an error. Max would clear things up and get his friend out of whatever mess he was in.
On his way to Kennedy Airport, Max had left a message with Josée at her office on avenue des Champs-Élysées, setting up a meeting with her at the Intercontinental in Bucharest. He then reached out to one of his contacts in Prague, who put him in touch with a fixer. Max needed a guide and an interpreter. Someone for whom Romania and the internal dynamics of its judicial system held no secrets. Someone who might guide Max through the maze of Romanian society.
Toma Boerescu.
And so Max, feet frozen in his boots, now waited next to the fountain for the man. What about Romanian punctuality? Clearly, the fall of the Ceausescu regime had wreaked havoc on good manners!
A crowd milled around Max: German tourists, their cameras strapped over their shoulders; older women negotiating with their tiny dogs at the end of taut leashes; teenagers on their skateboards, sporting esoteric tattoos, pants low on the hips, and enormous, untied running shoes. Those pimply teenagers were all amnesiacs, likely enough, completely unaware that the construction of the road they were risking their necks screwing around on had required the displacement of seventy thousand people.
Max circled the Christmas tree proudly displayed at the intersection. A gigantic tree that brought back memories of Kevin. Over the past two days, as he’d prepared for his trip to Bucharest, Max had relived the painful stages of their long friendship, all overshadowed by a horrible tragedy: the death of Kevin’s father, Raymond, and of his infant son, Sacha. Max could remember every fresco painted on the walls of Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Bon- Secours in Montreal, a few days after Easter. Raymond’s family, his friends, and employees of Nordopak, the company Kevin’s father had founded in the 1960s. It had been an emotional ceremony punctuated by sobbing from Kevin, Caroline, Gabrielle, and Josée, each more bereft than the last. Caroline was in a complete state of shock, blaming herself for having left her child with her father-in-law that day. How could she have known that he would stop on his way to have a drink with his friends? The autopsy had confirmed it: traces of alcohol in Raymond’s blood. The businessman had been in no state to drive his Pathfinder.
Standing behind the crowd, Max had chosen to remain discreet. He’d surveyed the neighbourhood before coming, inspected the area surrounding the small church. Once inside, he’d quickly made mental note of lateral exits and his most likely escape route, if need be. Max had come to Montreal under a cloud: he knew the Quebec provincial police, the Sûreté du Québec, was after him, and had been for years. His crime? Fraud. His victims? Hustlers, the nouveau riche, takers who exploited those without the means to defend themselves. Max was constantly changing his identity, and his appearance, too. A perpetual lie that was becoming progressively harder to bear.
That day he’d run a risk by being there. But he couldn’t have stayed away; he just had to be present for his friend, to support him in this tragedy. In a way, Kevin and Max were responsible for these two deaths, the result of their mistakes.
After the funeral, once the rubberneckers had dispersed, Max made his way to Kevin’s place, finding Gabrielle in a state of shock. Caroline was exhausted, having cried every tear in her body. Sacha had been the blood in her veins. Sacha-the-Red, Raymond had called him, because of the large birthmark on the back of his neck. Caroline felt as if she had killed her son with her own hands. She was entirely blameless, of course, but how could you convince a grieving mother that she was an innocent bystander? Josée, meanwhile, seemed incapable of getting hold of herself. She had cried throughout the ceremony, and she was still crying, huddled in a corner. She’d adored her father. She’d moved to Paris recently, and they’d spoken several times a week, Josée telling her father about her heartaches and her challenges and her joys.

PART ONE: The Kandoya Method
Chapter 1

On the small-screen television jammed beneath the instrument panel between a toolbox and a bottle of whisky, Barack Obama’s visit to Tanzania was being celebrated with the racket of marching bands and the usual overblown speeches. The flickering, ghosted, washed-out images spoke of a major historical event according to Rashid, the boat’s captain, who was manoeuvring his craft with one eye on TVZ and the other on the exit of the Malindi harbour in Zanzibar. It was early April 2009, and the new American president was coming in from Ghana, stopping over in Dar es Salaam, and then touching ground a few days later in Kenya, his father’s country. “Obama is Africa in the White House,” Rashid had declared as he’d greeted Max O’Brien on the dock a few minutes earlier, encouraging his passenger to participate in the celebrations.

But Max had other things on his mind. He hated improvisation but had to depend on Jayesh Srinivasan’s decisions. Jayesh had told Max more than once over the phone, “Rashid has received and understood my instructions and will obey you blindly.”

However, Jayesh hadn’t informed Max that this former fisherman who’d become a boat captain was a political junkie, and he had woven a web of talk around Max ever since the two met the evening before. In the smoky little café in Stone Town where they finalized the operation, Rashid prattled on and on about international politics and their consequences — dire, it went without saying — for the African continent.

Once they moved out of the harbour, Rashid pointed out a scruffy-looking dhow at anchor in the middle of the bay where more than a hundred refugees in rags were huddled. A makeshift tarp offered poor shelter from the sun and oppressive heat. Children crying. Babies bawling. Worse, the empty eyes of emaciated people, starving, fresh in from the belly of human misery.

“They escaped from Burgavo,” Rashid explained above the rattling of the engine.

Burgavo, in Somalia, near the border with Kenya.

They must have tried to land in Mombasa, farther south, but the authorities would have kept them out of the port, the result, most likely, of the tensions between Kenya and Somalia. They kept on going and entered Tanzanian waters, coming to a halt outside the port, praying for pity.

“They picked the wrong day,” Rashid remarked. “The Zanzibar port authority is closed on Saturdays. Sundays, too.”

The unfortunate travellers wouldn’t see the immigration agents until the offices opened on Monday. More than thirty-six hours of being baked alive in the port with no food and limited water. It was forty degrees Celsius, and the humidity stuck to the skin like a coating of filth.

A hundred metres from the dhow, a glittering floating monster, all whiteness on blue water: Jonathan Harris’s yacht, freshly minted at the German shipyards of Blohm &Voss. Heading for the Mediterranean where its home port was — Nice, to be exact — the Sunflower was coming from Cape Town and was expecting to stop at Mombasa and Suez after sailing past Djibouti. The Gulf of Aden was infested with pirates. Harris’s advisers had tried to dissuade the billionaire from attempting the passage, and even the captain, normally so obsequious, had added his voice to the chorus, but Harris wasn’t the type to be frightened off by “primitives with machetes,” as he called them. Having done good business in South Africa, he decided to purchase the services of a private militia armed to the teeth that would travel with the crew and passengers. The shock troops would board in Mombasa and remain on duty until Suez.

And with all the security, Harris still had no idea that the Mr. Robert Flanagan who’d offered him his expertise and would be joining him on the yacht today was actually Max O’Brien, a notorious con artist who had Interpol at his heels.

Usually, Max chose his victims carefully; he studied, scrutinized, and plotted. Each scam was carried out according to a modus operandi that was more or less identical. After a long period of observation, after setting out appetizing bait, his accomplices having warmed up the future victim, Max stepped in. The work sometimes took only a few days, or stretched out over several months. Each victim was unique, and adjustments were always necessary. Most of all, total control from beginning to end of the operation was essential.

But when it came to Harris, Max had to trust someone else’s plans and preparations, something he despised. Even if the other was Jayesh Srinivasan, his friend he’d worked with in India.

The great age of fraud was over for Max, and he’d sworn those days were past. When he returned from Europe after the business with the Roma, he slowly abandoned his activities and settled in the village of Shela, just outside Lamu, in northern Kenya.

Two weeks ago, Jayesh called Max from Mumbai. Pure gold, according to him. An easy mark, and he’d prepared the perfect trap for the billionaire Jonathan Harris. All Jayesh needed was the master con artist who would put the finishing touches on the operation. Jayesh had thought of Max, since he lived in the region now.

“I’m out of the game, Jayesh. I’m through. I’m not leaving paradise.”

Jayesh had insisted, saying he’d give Max a bigger cut — half the take — but Max didn’t bite. He wouldn’t sacrifice his retirement for all the gold the world had to offer.

Not long after Jayesh’s call, Sophie Stroner, Valéria Michieka’s daughter, announced she was coming to visit. The news had been a bit of a surprise, though a happy one, indeed. He hadn’t heard from Valéria in such a long time, but Max couldn’t blame her. Things had ended badly between them. It had taken him months to purge himself of the shape of her next to him, and all that time he could only dream of her calling him out of the blue, or sending him a simple email. Max was a proud man; he wanted her to take the first step toward reconciliation. Perhaps Sophie’s visit was a sign.

Max had rented a villa from an Italian industrialist, a dazzling white building looking out over the Indian Ocean. He spent his days strolling along the beach, heading south, into isolation, or north, until he reached Lamu with its handful of hotels, three or four decent restaurants, and the busy life of a small Swahili town with its port and mule trains carrying spices and other goods.

That was where Max went to meet Sophie. Her plane was coming from Bukoba in Tanzania, via Nairobi, and had landed an hour earlier on the other side of the strait where the tiny Lamu airport lay. He spotted her among the tourists, standing in the shuttle, working to keep her balance as the captain brought the boat to a stop at the pier. She was twenty-five and girlish and would probably always look that way, like her mother.

He offered her his hand, and she stepped onto dry land. Slung over her shoulder, her small travel bag showed that she wasn’t staying long. To reach Shela, they could go on foot along the beach, the way Max usually did, or they could take a dhow that would drop them off in front of the Peponi Hotel. Sophie was tired, she had set out early from Nairobi, and she was thirsty. Max took her to the bar in the little hotel facing the port, one of the few authorized to sell alcohol, since Lamu was in Muslim territory.

“Happy to see you again,” Sophie said, once they were sitting in the dim room.

Max suspected her visit wasn’t a simple social call. “You came back to Africa,” she continued.

Max smiled. After his breakup with Valéria, he’d lost his attachment to the continent, yet decided to stay on temporarily. He liked Lamu. It felt as if it belonged to another world, with its sandy streets and sticky humidity.

“How’s your mother?”

“Fine. Very good, actually.”

A number of years earlier, when she graduated from Makerere University, law degree in hand, Valéria had opened a practice in Bukoba in northwest Tanzania, near the Ugandan border, right on the shores of Lake Victoria. In the Kagera region, to be exact. A place cut off from the rest of Tanzania, closer to Kampala or Nairobi than to Dar es Salaam, the former capital and the country’s biggest city. The area inhabited by the Haya people had once been a prosperous kingdom, highly developed economically, but all that had disappeared when the Germans, then the British, colonized the country at the beginning of the twentieth century. Things went slowly downward from then on. The region developed at a painfully slow pace. Today, as far as roads went, there was only one paved section south of Bukoba, the administrative centre, and the rest of the network was made up of rough dirt tracks, or barely passable trails used by farmers and fishermen from the surrounding villages.

The area around Lake Victoria had witnessed the bloodiest conflicts of recent years, the legacy of the colonization that bled the region dry, thanks to the work of Western predators. Refugees from Rwanda and Burundi to the west found relatively safe haven in Kagera during the 1994 genocide. Two decades earlier, people escaping Idi Amin Dada’s regime to the north crossed the Ugandan border in search of something close to peace. Not to mention AIDS, which devoured the survivors and decimated families and whole villages. In the Kagera region at one point, according to Valéria, nearly a quarter of the population was infected, the highest rate in East Africa.

In other words, Bukoba and the surrounding area summed up what was most beautiful and most terrifying about Africa. In that part of Tanzania, history seemed to have revisited the tragedies and cataclysms of past centuries and given them an exotic colouring. Evil, surely, but in a luxuriant environment. Living hell in a magnificent setting designed by a vengeful, cruel, ironic god.

That was where Valéria offered her legal services to a population that couldn’t pay for them. In Dar es Salaam, things would have been easier. But she chose Bukoba for one particular reason: the terrible hunting down of albinos, a wound in the social fabric that decimated families and spread destruction.

For genetic reasons, Tanzania counted more albinos — a total of two hundred thousand according to some estimates — than any other African country. And Africa’s albino population was already that much higher than in Europe or in the Americas.

Since the beginning of time, people have attributed magical powers to these “white Africans.” This superstition pushed gangs of criminals in search of profit to scour the countryside for albinos of any age, kidnapping, killing, and cutting them up, then selling pieces of their bodies to medicine men and healers who flogged them to their customers. An albino would disappear, never to be seen again, the only trace of his or her existence now contained in some trinket or lucky charm.