The Moors Last Sigh

way: goblin-sagas of the present day, tales of the utterly abnormal recounted in a matter-of-fact, banal, duty manager’s normalising tones. (So this was what my feral father meant by burying himself in his work to help him bear his loss! This was what he did to assuage his pain!) … Armaments featured strongly, though the publicly listed activities of his great corporation included no such trade. A famous Nordic armaments house was negotiating to supply India with a range of essentially decent, elegantly designed and naturally lethal products. The sums of money involved were too large to have meaning, and as is the way with such Karakorams of capital, certain peripheral boulders of money came loose from the main bulk and began to roll down the mountain. What was needed was a discreet means of tidying away these tumbling boulders in a manner properly beneficial to those involved in the negotiations. The participants in the negotiations were of a great refinement, possessed of a delicacy that would have made it quite impossible for them to tidy away this rubble of lucre, even into their own bank accounts. Not a whisper of impropriety could ever attach itself to their high names! ‘So,’ said Abraham with a happy shrug, ‘we do the dirty work, and plenty of pebbles end up in our pockets, too.’
    It turned out that Abraham’s ‘Siodicorp’ – as it was now universally known – was a major player in the Khazana Bank International, which by the end of the 1980s had become the first financial institution from the Third World to rival the great Western banks in terms of assets and transactions. The more or less moribund banking operation he had taken over from the Cashondeliveri brothers had been brilliantly refurbished, and its links with the KBI enterprise had made it the wonder of the city. ‘The old days of setting up a dollar-bypass system for basket-case economies are gone,’ declaimed my father. ‘No more of that namby-pamby South-South co-operation bakvaas. Bring on the big boys! Dollar, DM, Swiss franc, yen – let them come! Now we will beat them at their own game.’ In spite of his new frankness with me, however, it was several years before Abraham Zogoiby admitted that beneath this glittering monetarist vision there lurked a hidden layer of activity: the inevitable secret world that has existed, awaiting revelation, beneath everything I have ever known. – And if the reality of our being is that so many covert truths exist behind Maya-veils of unknowing and illusion, then why not Heaven and Hell, too? Why not God and the Devil and the whole blest-damned thing? If so much revelation, why not Revelation? – Please . This is no time to discuss theology. The subject on the table is terrorism, and a secret nuclear device.
    Among KBI’s largest clients were a number of gentlemen and organisations whose names featured on the most-wanted and most-dangerous lists of every country in the free world – but who, mysteriously, themselves seemed free to come and go, to board commercial airplanes and visit bank branches and receive medical treatment in the countries of their choice, without fear of arrest or harassment. These shadow-accounts were maintained in special files, shielded by an impressive battery of passwords, software ‘bombs’ and other defence mechanisms, and in theory at least could not be accessed through the main computer. But these precautions were as nothing, and this unsavoury clientèle looked positively angelic, when set beside the precautions taken to protect, and the personnel involved in, KBI’s greatest enterprise: namely, the financing and secret manufacture ‘for certain oil-rich countries and their ideological allies’ of large-scale nuclear weaponry. Abraham’s arm had grown long indeed. If there was a stockpile of suitably enriched uranium or plutonium to be had, the Khazana Bank would have a finger in that hot pie; if by some chance a long-range delivery system unexpectedly came on to the market in the fringe states of the recently collapsed Soviet Union, KBI money would move sinuously, invisibly, beneath carpets, through walls, towards that vendor’s stall. So at last Abraham’s invisible city, built by invisible people to do invisible deeds, was nearing its apotheosis. It was building an invisible bomb.
    In May 1991 an all-too-visible explosion in Tamil Nadu added Mr Rajiv Gandhi to the list of his family’s murdered dead, and Abraham Zogoiby – whose decisions