A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [48]
Twice, miraculously interpreting a nonsense telephone call from him as an appeal for help, I had to take away things from his flat.
The first time, one afternoon, after some inconsequential talk from him about tennis and the shoes I had asked for, I drove to his flat and blew my horn. He didn’t come down. He opened a window of his sitting room and shouted down to me in the street, “I’m sending the boy down with the tennis shoes for you. Right, Salim!” And, still standing before the window, he turned and shouted in patois to someone inside. “ ’Phonse! Aoutchikong pour Mis’ Salim!”—aoutchikong, from caoutchouc, the French word for rubber, being patois for canvas shoes. With many people looking on, the boy Ildephonse brought down something roughly wrapped in newspaper. I threw it on the back seat and drove off without hanging around. It turned out, when I examined it later, to be a bundle of foreign bank notes; and it went, as soon as it was dark, into the hole in the ground at the foot of my external staircase. To help Mahesh like this, though, was only to encourage him. The next time I had to bury some ivory. Burying ivory! What age were we living in? What did people want ivory for, apart from carving it—and not too well these days—into cigarette holders and figurines and junk like that?
Still, these deals made Mahesh money, and he acknowledged my help and put me in the way of adding to my little store of gold. He had said that there was no right. It was hard for me to adapt to that; but he managed it beautifully. He was always cool and casual, never ruffled. I had to admire him for it. Though the casualness could lead him into situations that were quite ridiculous.
He said to me one day, with the mysterious, over-innocent manner he put on when he was about to tell about some deal: “You read the foreign papers, Salim. Are you keeping an eye on the copper market? What’s it like?” Well, copper was high. We all knew that; copper was at the bottom of our little boom. He said, “It’s that war the Americans are fighting. I hear they’ve used up more copper in the last two years than the world has used in the last two centuries.” This was boom talk, salesmen’s chat from the van der Weyden. Mahesh, just across the road, picked up a fair amount of that chat; without it, he might have had less idea than he had of what was happening in the world.
From copper he turned to the other metals, and we talked for a while, quite ignorantly, about the prospects for tin and lead. Then he said, “Uranium—what about that? What are they quoting that at now?”
I said, “I don’t think they quote that.”
He gave me his innocent look. “But it must be pretty high? A chap here wants to sell a piece.”
“Do they sell uranium in pieces? What does it look like?”
“I haven’t seen it. But the chap wants to sell it for a million dollars.”
That was what we were like. One day grubbing for food, opening rusty tins, cooking on charcoal braziers and over holes in the ground; and now talking of a million dollars as though we had talked of millions all our lives.
Mahesh said, “I told the general it could be sold only to a foreign power, and he told me to go ahead. You know old Mancini. He is consul for quite a few countries here—that’s a nice line of business, I always think. I went to see him. I told him straight out, but he wasn’t interested. In fact, Mancini went crazy. He ran to the door and closed it and stood with his back against it and told me to get out. His face was red, red. Everybody’s frightened of the Big Man in the capital. What do you think I should tell the general, Salim? He’s frightened too. He told me he stole it from some top-security place. I wouldn’t like to make an enemy of the general. I wouldn’t like him to think I hadn’t tried. What do you think I should tell him? Seriously, seriously.”
“You say he’s frightened?”
“Very frightened.”
“Then tell him he’s being watched and he mustn