The Moors Last Sigh

perish by foul play require a settlement before they find repose. He seemed to be falling further and further into the traps of superstition, apparently unable to accept the fact of Aurora’s death. In ordinary circumstances this slippage into what he had always called mumbo-jumbo would have shocked me deeply; but I, too, was caught in obsession’s strengthening grip. My mother was dead and yet I needed to repair a rift. If she was dead beyond recall then there could never be a reconciliation, only this gnawing, imperative need, this wound-that-could-not-heal. So I did not contradict Abraham when he spoke of phantoms in his hanging gardens. I may even have hoped – yes! – for a sudden tinkle of jhunjhunna ankle-bracelets, a flurry of fabric behind a bush. Or, better still, for the return of the mother of my favourite times, paint-spattered, and with brushes sticking out of her high-piled, chaotic hair.
    Even when Abraham announced that he had asked Dom Minto to re-open, on a private basis, the inquiry into her fall–Minto of all people, blind, toothless, wheelchair-ridden, deaf, and kept alive, as he approached his century, by dialysis machines, regular blood transfusions, and that insatiable and undiminished inquisitiveness which had taken him to the top of his professional tree! – I made no demurral. Let the old man have what he needed to soothe his troubled spirit, I thought. Also, I must say, it was not easy to contradict Abraham Zogoiby, that ruthless skeleton. The more he took me into his confidence, opening his bank-books, his secret ledgers and his heart, the more profoundly I began to feel afraid.
    ‘Fielding, must be ,’ he shouted his suspicion at Minto in the Pei orchard. ‘As to Mody, fellow doesn’t have what it takes. Investigate Fielding. Moor here will lend any assistance you may require.’
    My fear increased. If Raman Fielding – guilty or innocent – ever suspected I was spying on him with a view to incriminating him in a putative murder, it would not go well with me. Yet I could not refuse Abraham, my newly reacquired father. Nervously, however, I did at last bring myself to ask indelicate questions: why would Mainduck – what motive, what provocation did he have …?
    ‘Boy wants to know why I suspect that froggy bastard,’ Abraham Zogoiby yelled between terrifying cackles, and ruined old Minto likewise slapped a mirthful thigh. ‘Maybe he thinks his Mummy was a saint, and only his bad Daddy strayed from the fold. But she tried out most things in trousers, isn’t it? Short attention span, only. Hell hath no fury like a froggy spurned. QE bleddy D.’
    Two macabrely laughing old men, accusations of marital infidelities and murder, a walking ghost, and me. I was out of my depth. But there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There was only what had to be done.
    ‘Big Daddy, worry not,’ whispered Minto, peering through blue glass, as softly spoken as Abraham had been stentorian. ‘This Fielding, consider him quartered, drawn and hung.’

    Children make fictions of their fathers, re-inventing them according to their childish needs. The reality of a father is a weight few sons can bear.
    It was the conventional wisdom of the period that the (mainly Muslim) gangs controlling the city’s organised crime, each with their ruling boss or dada , had been weakened by their traditional difficulties in forming any kind of lasting syndicate or united front. My own experience with the MA, working in the poorest quarters of the city to win friends and build support, suggested something different. I had begun to see hints and glimpses of something shadowy, so frightening that nobody would talk about it – some hidden layer under the surface of what-seemed-to-be. I had suggested to Mainduck that the gangs might have finally achieved unity, that there might even be a single Mafia-style capo di tutti capi in place, running all the rackets in town, but he laughed me to scorn. ‘Stick to punching heads, Hammer,’ he sneered. ‘Leave the deep stuff to deeper minds. Unity takes discipline, and we have the monopoly of that commodity. Those sister-fuckers will be squabbling until the heavens fall.’
    But now, with my own ears, I had heard Dom Minto name my father as the biggest dada of them all. Mogambo! The moment I heard it, I knew it was true. Abraham was a natural commander, a born negotiator, the deal-maker of deal-makers. He gambled for the highest stakes; had even been willing, as a