I understand.
I am an honest businessman, as my father was. My father cared for Parizad until the day he died. We are loyal. Until I am able to liquidate my companies, I need a partner who will—for lack of a better term—front me some cash. And for his risk, I’ll pay back at a more-than-fair rate.
Gotcha, Bo said. And where do you plan to put the cash?
I’d like to make an investment in the West Texas fields, of course, Shahin said. I would never make a recommendation I’m not willing to take myself.
And what’s my rate of return?
For this particular line of credit?
For this particular line of credit, yes.
Five percent and a percentage of the sale price of the shipping companies.
Gotcha, Bo said. He could get eight percent and a toaster at the Harlem Savings Bank. This was all expected. He’d walked into the room assuming the conversation was a front. The sale of the shipping companies—which would never happen—the absurdly low interest rate, all of it was stagecraft, polite misdirection. But because he’s on his knees, he’s going to make me come out and ask for it, Bo thought.
What more can I offer you? Shahin said. More than five percent?
Five isn’t much.
Even in this market, Shahin said, the companies are worth thirty million. The assets alone would bring in fifteen. What do you want? Ten percent of the sale price?
What a performance, Bo thought. What about the Saudi? he said.
Sorry? Shahin said.
Good god, Bo thought. Can we stop fingering it and get to the good part?
What about your Saudi friend? He doesn’t want to help you out with a little loan?
Oh no, not his line at all. He’s a construction and oil man.
Got it, Bo said. What about I help you, you help me?
I see, Shahin said. With the Saudi.
And you can keep it at five percent on the loan, Bo said.
That’s very generous, Shahin said. I believe I can arrange a very favorable introduction. Shahin paused, as if he were thinking about it, then added, I can guarantee a favorable introduction, in fact.
Bo knew better than to trust anyone who guaranteed anything, but he’d been on board since the moment Shahin had mentioned the Saudi. The shipping companies were a lost cause, who cared? The loan was nothing more than polite cover for what Shahin was actually offering: his services as a fixer.
And Bo was more than happy to pay twenty-five million dollars for a real and meaningful connection to Salem bin Laden. It wasn’t that the guy was hard to get to. Holding his attention was another matter entirely.
7.
Despite Bo’s prodigious dialing the night of the party, he never intended to call my mother and father. Neither did Jane. She had no desire to invite my father to a party intended to be enjoyable for the rest of her guests. Until my headfirst landing, the evening had passed normally in our apartment. We’d eaten, my father had disappeared into his study to work, my mother staked out the bright corner of the sofa with the quartered crossword page and her glasses perched on her nose. I had wandered around the apartment, looking out the windows at the snow, before finally setting up shop in the foyer. After a while, my father had come shambling in.
He was not an imposing man. His hair was weedy and he was a little chewed up around the earlobes, soft at the jowls and neck, suggestive of an English grandmother who put on pearls to walk to the end of the drive for the mail. A crosshatched, mottled span of flesh. Age had collected on him like a fine dust, yet his nose sprung as gracefully from his narrow face as a cliff diver launching into the air. The tangle of eyebrows overhanging his blue eyes was a promising start to old-man wilderness. The pot protruding from his midsection so contrasted with his otherwise skinny body that in profile he resembled a python digesting an antelope, and wasn’t helped much by his usual mode of dress, unremarkable as it was, an adaptation of professorial comfort wear, corduroy and wool anchored by a pale blue oxford button-down shirt, that most rigid of styles which is defined by the care lavished on maintaining shabbiness and a sense of musty, subterranean lethargy. Physically, it was hard to say what distinguished him from thousands of other fifty-five-year-old Caucasian male New Yorkers; he was a caricaturist’s final exam, a blank slate.
This will matter later: My father’s memory was fine. He remembered what he was supposed to. His problem was that he had extra memories. He remembered things that hadn’t happened, and he needed to repeat those things to other people. It wasn’t an uncommon problem, and most people with extra memories are marginally productive members of society. Some go into sales, some into politics. Some become con artists. The rest become writers, which is what had happened to my father.
He worked in what had formerly been the pantry, bellied up to the elbow of two desks he’d wedged into an L against the back wall. He’d left up the shelves, rust-ringed from a century’s worth of canned goods, now sagging a little under reference books and piles of old manuscripts. It was a closet, really, a space for a man who didn’t like surprises. Between bouts of writing he haunted the apartment, floating from room to room silently, a man in a fog, acting like a fog.
In the foyer, heat whistled up through the floor grate. The parquet creaked when he crossed the threshold, but I didn’t open
