I know all about this Barone Biaggio, hmm, about his suite in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in Palermo—what is it? Suite 202 or 204 or maybe both?—he goes there to party and to whore, hmm?, which is fine, it is our place, we go there for the same reasons, and so, if he goes there today and stays there for the rest of his fucking life we will not kill the little fucker but if he tries to set foot outside the hotel he should remember that the corridors are crawling with our guys and the whores work for us as well and before his foot touches the ground of the square outside the building he will be dead, his bloodied head with the bullet in his forehead will hit the ground before his fucking shoe. Hmm? Hmm? Tell him that.
In the screenplays and treatments for screenplays that I carried around in my head the way Peter Kien in Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé carried whole libraries, the “baron in the suite” remained imprisoned in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes, Palermo, Sicily, until his dying day, forty-four years later, he went on partying and whoring in there, food and drink was brought to him every day from his family’s kitchen and wine cellar, his son Vito was conceived there on one of his long-suffering wife’s infrequent visits (but born where his long-suffering wife preferred, in her bedroom at Castelbiaggio), and when he died his coffin left by the front door, feet first, surrounded by an honor guard composed of most of the staff of the hotel, and several of the whores.—And Vito, disillusioned by Palermo, by the Mafia and by his father too, grew up to make his home in New York, and became determined to lead the opposite life to his father’s, utterly faithful to his wife Blanca, but refusing to spend a single evening stuck alone with her and the children at home.
I fear I may have given the reader an unnecessarily poor impression of my character. I would not wish you to think of me as an indolent fellow, a ne’er-do-well and a burden on my parents, still in need of a real job after getting on for three decades of life on earth. The truth is that, then as now, I was and am rarely out on the town at night, and I rose and rise early in the morning in spite of being a lifelong insomniac. I was also (and remain) an active member of a group of young filmmakers—we had all been to graduate school together—who, under the leadership of a dynamic young Indian-American producer-writer-director called Suchitra Roy, had already made a host of music videos, embedded internet content for Condé Nast and Wired, documentaries that appeared on PBS and HBO, and three well-regarded theatrically released, independently financed feature films (all three had been selections at Sundance and SXSW and two had won Audience Awards) in which we had persuaded A-list performers to work for scale: Jessica Chastain, Keanu Reeves, James Franco, Olivia Wilde. I offer this brief CV now so that the reader may feel in good hands, the hands of a credible and not inexperienced storyteller, as my narrative acquires what will be increasingly lurid characteristics. I also introduce my work colleagues because their running critique of this, my personal project, was and continues to be valuable to me.
All that long hot summer we would meet for lunch at our favorite Italian restaurant on Sixth Avenue just below Bleecker Street, sitting out at a sidewalk table wearing substantial sun hats and Factor 50, and I would tell Suchitra what I was doing and she would ask the tough questions. “I understand that you want your ‘Nero Golden’ to be something of a mystery man, that’s fine, I see that that’s right,” she told me. “But what is the question his character asks us, which the story must finally address?” At once I knew the answer, though I hadn’t ever quite admitted it even to myself until that moment.
“The question,” I told her, “is the question of evil.”
“In that case,” she said, “sooner or later, and the sooner the better, the mask must begin to slip.”
The Goldens were my story, and others could steal it. Muckrakers could purloin what was mine by the divine right of I-was-here-first, the squatter’s rights of this-is-my-turf. I was the one who dug in this dirt for longest, seeing myself, almost, as a latter-day A. J. Weberman—Weberman the soi-disant Village “garbologer” of the 1970s, who rooted around in Bob Dylan’s trash to discover the secret meanings of his lyrics and the details of his private life, and although I never went that far, I thought about it, I confess, I thought about attacking the Golden garbage like a cat in search of a fishbone.
These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies, until the lies reveal those truths in ways impossible to foretell. And now that so much is hidden, now that we live in surfaces, in presentations and falsifications of ourselves, the seeker after truth must pick up his shovel, break the surface and look for the blood beneath. Espionage isn’t easy, however. Once they were settled in their lavish home, the old man grew obsessed by the fear of being spied on by truth-seekers, he called in security personnel to sweep the property for listening devices, and when he discussed family matters with his sons, he did it in their “secret languages,” the tongues of the ancient world. He was sure we were all snooping into his business; and of course we were, in an innocent village-gossip way, according to the natural instincts of ordinary people by the parish pump or water cooler, trying to fit new pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of our lives. I was the most inquisitive of all of us, but with the blindness of the foolishly obsessed Nero Golden didn’t see that, thinking of me—quite inaccurately—as a no-account ne’er-do-well who had not found a way of making his fortune and could therefore be discounted, who could be erased from his field of vision and ignored; which suited my purposes excellently.
There was one possibility that I confess didn’t occur to me, or to any of us, even in our edgy, paranoid era. Because of their open and generous alcohol consumption, their comfort in the presence of unveiled women, and their evident failure to practice any of the major world religions, we never suspected that they might be…oh, my…Muslims. Or of Muslim origin, at least. It was my parents who worked that out. “In the age of information, my dear,” my mother said with justifiable pride when they had done their work at their computers, “everyone’s garbage is on display for all to see, and all you need to know is how to look.”
It may seem generationally upside down but in our house I was the internet-illiterate one while my parents were the super-techies. I stayed away from social media and bought “hard copies” of the Times and Post every morning at the corner bodega. My parents, however, lived inside their desktops, had had Second Life avatars ever since that other world went online, and could find the “proverbial eedle in the e-stack,” as my mother liked to say.
They were the ones who began to unlock the Goldens’ past for me, the Bombay tragedy that had driven them across the world. “It wasn’t so difficult,” my father explained, as if to a simpleton. “These are not low-key people. If a person iss vell known, a straightforward image search vill probably vork.”
“All we had to do,” my mother said, with a grin, “was to go right in the front door.” She handed me a folder. “Here’s the skinny, sugar,” she said, in her best hard-boiled gumshoe accent. “Heartbreaking material. Stinks worse than a plumber’s handkerchief. No wonder they wanted to leave it behind them. It’s like their world got broken like Humpty Dumpty. Couldn’t put it together again, so they took off and came here, where broken people are a dime a dozen. I get it. Sad stuff. We’ll be sending in our expense sheet for your early attention.”