The Sultan of Byzantium (10 page)

The worn-out taxi driver was from Bangladesh. I startled him with my ‘Selamün aleyküm’ and gave him the Morton Street address. In August the New York streets appear to be lying pleasantly fallow. When you go south the town looks like a chameleon that gets cuter as it gets smaller. Randolph IV’s penthouse had a plain appearance in harmony with the bohemian atmosphere of the street below. The newest book in his library could have been an Ernest Hemingway novel. I thought the ungraceful reproductions on the walls and the geometrically patterned prayer rugs on the floor might have a secret wish to exchange places.

Randolph IV had white hair, rosy cheeks, and a good deal of surplus weight. He seemed to be challenging the world with a perpetual smile on his face. I managed not to laugh when he asked me to call him Randy. He whistled as he opened one of the Margaux and put a new-age CD on the stereo. We sat next to each other on the sofa while he squeezed his biography into one paragraph for me.

I was first comforted and then worried by his not mentioning how I so resembled my father. His family was old Chicago. His grandfather had lost everything in the 1929 crash. His father was an out-of-work cellist who drowned in Lake Michigan when Randy was four. The next year his mother married a Puerto Rican dentist and moved to San Juan. Randy was brought up in Richmond by his grandmother. He diverted his gaze to the floor and told me that he and my father had shared a flat for three years at the university. He stayed married to a woman of Armenian extraction until he learned how to cook – five months. Randy appeared to be happy with a life shaped by literature and yoga.

When my turn came, I planned to earn his confidence by frankly summarizing my own life, except for the Nomo detail. I was in the US for a business meeting, I said, and wanted to learn what I could about my father and try to meet any relatives who were still around.

I was rising to my finale when the call to dinner came and my appetite fled. But the menu of arugula salad with walnuts, cold tomato soup with basil, risotto with saffron, and profiterole with ice cream was nearly faultless. As Randy encouraged me to talk and repeatedly refilled my wineglass, I realized that he was preparing to deliver a confidential monologue. When he brought in my after-dinner green tea, his face was noncommittal.

‘I was never able to learn where your father came from,’ was seductive enough as an opening sentence. ‘But when your grandfather, First Sergeant Patrick, came home from the Korean War and retired on disability pay, the family moved to Santa Teresa in California. Your grandmother – I’ve forgotten her name – was an immigrant housewife. Paul’s sister Emma was six years younger and wanted to be either a nurse or a nun. I once spent Thanksgiving holiday with the Hacketts. To me it was like the house was wrapped in an atmosphere of eternal mourning; the grandfather seemed to be making the rest of the family pay for an injustice done to him.

‘Paul Hackett always played it close to the vest – I don’t know any other way to describe him. He had the attitude of someone who’d been forced to grow up suddenly without living the joys of childhood and youth, and probably that’s why his classmates treated him as if he were older than them. He was intelligent and reticent. I was sure that his goal was to seize the past as he was seizing the day. Although he had a special talent for science, he chose to study history. When he wasn’t working mathematical puzzles he was breaking the codes of equations, and he never took his nose out of the historical atlases he found in the library. He compared the maps of Greece and Italy to abstract sculptures and that of Turkey to a mass of clouds about to rise. We never had a conflict but we never became soul-mates either. He would disappear sometimes for a day or two without telling anybody where he was going. He tutored foreign students and flirted with Asian girls. I wasn’t surprised to hear that he’d married a Turk. The year we graduated I learned by chance that he’d received a grant to continue studying at a governmental institution.

‘The most media-prone intelligence agency – and also a government scapegoat – is the CIA. Years later I heard also about the DIA, INR, NIO, NRO and other exotic small agencies. The elite agents in those places probably do nothing but read and write reports. Your father could not reveal which of these he belonged to. After graduation he worked for five years out of an office connected to the State Department. Then, at least ostensibly, he retired and became the division’s Istanbul representative. In reality he was probably being sent to the front lines after completing his education at the base. In any case he was happy because he was going to live in the ancient center of Byzantium and would get to travel in the Middle East. After that our correspondence was reduced to Christmas cards.

‘Two summers later we met in New York. He was quite changed. His anxiety was less pronounced, and he had self-confidence. He looked tired but happy. My curiosity was piqued by his expensive clothes and gold watch. I imagined that he wanted to create an image like, ‘I might get a cable at any minute summoning me to an important meeting in Washington.’ When we parted, although I was prepared for something weighty like, ‘Life is more complicated than it looked from the university campus,’ he didn’t go beyond expressing regret that he couldn’t invite me to Istanbul, even for a few days.

‘We never saw each other again, but we wrote once or twice. Not to go into detail, it was obvious from his announcement of it that his marriage wouldn’t last long. In his last postcard he reported the happy news of your birth and added that your mother had given you a Turkish name, but that he would call you Adrian. His favorite personality was always the Roman Emperor Hadrian.

‘I never heard from Paul Hackett again. I wasn’t surprised, actually, by the break in our relations. Seven years went by. I was in Charlottesville for a class reunion on the fifteenth anniversary of our graduation. A South Korean classmate of ours named Yun swore that he’d run across Paul in Toronto two months earlier. He had a beard, said Yun, and he was in the middle of the street shouting at the young and beautiful woman with him. These circumstances made him hesitant to walk up and greet Paul. Yun could be considered one of his closest friends, and was not likely to be wrong.

‘Seven more years went by. This time I read in the alumni magazine that Paul had died in a traffic accident. A very brief bio said that on leaving the media sector he’d taken a PhD in Middle Eastern history from McGill and was teaching at a university out on the Canadian steppe. In the ‘survived by’ part there was only the name of an Anglo-American woman.

‘As I read the news it occurred to me that he’d lived his forty-four years as fully as possible, in his own way. Your father was a man worth tracking down. I believe you should fly to Santa Teresa the first chance you get. Your aunt would be fifty-eight by now if she’s still living. Even if she’s moved away it shouldn’t be hard to find out where she went – when I was there it was just a quiet town of 40,000. Emma and Paul were quite attached to each other …’

I decided not to show Randy the two photocopies I’d brought along when I heard about the ‘secret agencies’ in my father’s past. Maybe I could ask my Aunt (?) Emma about the cryptic handwriting. We said good-bye and I told him I would go to Santa Teresa the next day. I added that I’d be happy to host him if he ever came to Istanbul – but felt a pang of regret as soon as I said it.

My mood improved as I walked toward Seventh Avenue. As I passed a lonely Greek restaurant I called Askaris in Istanbul on my cell phone. He was relieved to hear that I would be back in a week at the latest. I made him write down in detail the features of the two South American girls I wanted him to send to my hotel in an hour and a half.

*

I didn’t like Los Angeles, either, when I first saw it. It looked like the city planners forgot to put in a center, nor do I think a first-class poet ever came out of L.A. To avoid shallow tourists and pretentious urbanites, I rarely left the Four Seasons at Beverly Hills. Ensconced in the lobby, I observed the flow of rich patrons, then parked myself at the bar and refused to budge until I’d read John Ashbery’s last book,
A Worldly Country
, from cover to cover. The waitress who brought a dry martini to me four times told me she was studying literature at the local community college in the evenings. She confided that this was the first time she’d ever seen a book by this master of American poetry in a customer’s hands. I was touched. When I finished the slim volume I slipped a hundred-dollar bill into it and left it for her as a tip to my cup-bearer.

Next morning at Union Station I asked for a first-class train ticket to Santa Teresa. A
zaftig
woman was handing out tickets like wages to slave laborers. She was appalled. Not only did she question me about why I wanted a first-class ticket for a two-hour train trip, but she fixed her baleful bug-eyed glare on me until she received an answer.

‘Did your boss order you especially to ask this question?’ I said. She burst into laughter, her giant breasts lifting and lowering like a barbell.

There were four of us in the carriage. The mother who kept telling her small son to stop picking his nose took me back to my childhood. According to my grandmother, whenever I was caught in the act I would say, ‘I’m not picking my nose, I’m taking out mucus.’

The Pacific Ocean was on our left and the Sierra Madre mountains on our right. Yet after a while the trip grew dull. We stopped at stations with beautiful names like Olvidado and Perdido and I thought about my excommunicated middle name, which I’d learned only two days ago, along with my difficult-to-pronounce five-letter name, and smiled. But what made me laugh out loud was the honorific bestowed on me by the least-known agency on earth. My grandmother used to take my strange sense of humor to heart, saying, ‘When he grows up this boy will be a clown, but he won’t get that right either.’

The Santa Teresa train station looked like a relic from the town’s pioneer days. The train passengers, perhaps out of respect for the ancient building, exited without haste. Juanito, the elderly driver of my taxi, seized the first opportunity to mention that he was seventy-two years of age. It would clearly have broken his heart not to be told, ‘You don’t look your age.’ When I said my destination was the Edgewater Hotel he replied, ‘You got two and a half hours before check-in. Want to take an orientation tour?’ I’m sure he made the same proposition to every customer who arrived on the 11:33 train and probably never received ‘No’ for an answer.

We began our tour at Ludlow Beach. The street names of this town of 85,000 were distributed equally to the Spanish and English languages. I was familiar with the old Spanish architecture of the public buildings from cowboy movies. Rich retirees lived in Victorian English villas. Palm trees and masses of bougainvillea gave the place a canvas-like charm. Nobody was in a hurry; they seemed to belong to a more lenient time zone than L.A. Maybe because of a wish not to miss the concert offered by the ocean’s assortment of tones and colorful waves, an ad-libbed silence ruled in Santa Teresa. By and by I began to feel alienated from the shopping mall that looked like an air-raid shelter and the empty streets piercing Cabana Boulevard, which ran along the coast, like arrows. This deserted town was a postcard beauty that could easily serve as a mock-up stage set. In those squat finance centers and desolate villas quite a few crime-novel plots could be hatched, whose anti-characters could water the thirsty soil of the dead city in a short chapter.

Edgewater was more like a feudal castle than a two-hundred-room luxury hotel. As well as giant palm trees in the garden there were short ones in the restaurant. The patrons lurking in the commodious lobby seemed to conspire against the pianist by talking all at the same time. I took my key and went up to my second-floor room with ocean view. I opened the window and waited. Despite a polite wind escorting the playful sound of waves, there was something missing in the mise-en-scene. For a good while I enjoyed sensing but not knowing what it was.

According to the telephone directory and the Internet there were seven Hackett domiciles. I would have been quite surprised if among them had been the names of my father or grandfather. Moreover, the possibility of our kinship with these Hacketts was remote since, according to Randy, my grandfather did not come from Santa Teresa. On top of everything else, it would hardly be wise to carry out a thorough survey of the town if there was a Nomo agent at my back. No alternatives came to mind other than gazing at the ocean out of the open window. I called room service for a vegetarian sandwich and a glass of grapefruit juice. I think, after going through the minibar and drinking up the little bottles of cognac and vodka in a sip or two, that I went to sleep expecting a prophetic dream. At 3:22 I woke up without a plan. I went down to the lobby, taking with me the latest book –
Averno
– by poet Louise Glück. It was quieter now, with a more pretentious musician at the piano. He was in his mid-sixties and had the look of an alcoholic, moving his hands in circles, hitting the keys slowly and singing songs of sorrow.

The obese uniformed man behind the desk attracted my attention. He was enthusiastically assisting the picky patrons, using body language like an energetic policeman giving directions, making marks on their tourist maps and writing addresses on little slips of paper. As soon as he got rid of the last old couple I popped up at his desk. The name tag on his jacket pocket said ‘Jesus’; I tried not to smile. Before the saintly man could say ‘How can I help you?’ I laid a crisp new twenty-dollar bill in front of him. He abstained from seeing it.

‘In your opinion, Jesus, what would be the best way to track down a relative of mine who lived here thirty years ago?’ I took care to pronounce the first letter of his name like an ‘H’.

Jesus continued not noticing the twenty-dollar bill as his left hand moved toward the phone. He spoke to someone in a scolding tone of voice and then handed me a name and phone number on a slip of paper.

‘Kinsey Milhone is our pianist Daniel Wade’s ex-wife. Once upon a time she was said to be the best-known private eye in Santa Teresa. Nowadays she works as a security consultant for the finance companies. If she can’t help you, she’ll point you to someone who can.’