Saboteur: A Novel (6 page)

Chapter 10

“I’m sorry for what I said about sleeping together, ok,”
Samara said. “I sounded arrogant and foolish. It was obnoxious and I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” he said.

“I can’t believe I kissed you
though,” she laughed. The drinks were starting to loosen her tongue a bit. “It
was a dare I made to myself a long time ago. You were my first crush. It’s
bittersweet to think back on those days. My dad was always happiest when you
were around, most himself. You know my mother hated you a little bit? You made
her jealous with the relationship you two had. But of course she loved you
too.” She paused and her eyes suddenly went glazed with a faraway look. “I need
to talk to you about my dad. You knew him better than anyone, I think. I
imagine talking about him frankly and honestly might be a very hard thing for
you to do with me. You know I’ve been in Italy for the past three years. I came
home a month ago and was going through some of his things and I found something.
I wanted to ask you about it. Did my dad have any close friends you know of, or
you know, were there any other women who might have been close to him?”

“Charlie?” he asked shaking his
head in disbelief. “No, I mean if you mean in any way romantically--” he said
lowering his voice. “No, Samara, I never knew your dad to pursue anyone but
your m--”

“He cheated once for sure, but that
time I know about.” She interrupted. “He and my mother had that one out right
in front of me, when I was a kid.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Of course not, it was before; it
was a long time ago.” She reached into the purse slung over the arm of her
chair.

“I found this,” she said presenting
a piece of folded paper.

“This is dad’s handwriting:”

Sweets,

I love you
more than I have words to express. Don’t be afraid. We will see each other
again soon. Right now I am trapped in an impossible situation, but soon I will
be able to come to you. I love you always…

“What’s really strange is that before I left for Italy this
note was definitely not where I found it when I came back. I had already opened
the box I found it in
before
I left
looking for a picture of him to take with me. Somebody must have put it there
after. I’m absolutely sure of it.”

“Ok,” he said, “but this is not
necessarily a note to another--”

“I agree,” she said, “in fact as
far as I know I am the only person he ever called sweets. Then again, maybe I
don’t know everything I thought I did.”

“Could your mom have accidentally
put it there?”

“No. I asked her repeatedly and she
knew nothing about those boxes. She has been staying with her sister for the
last few years; she’s barely been home since he passed. Tell me, what
impossible situation was my dad ever involved in?”

“Couldn’t it just be an old note?”
he said turning it over.

“Don’t you think it’s strange that
it’s not signed? My dad always signed his name in letters. I have tons of
others he has written and he signed his name in every single one of them. I
can’t help think there is a purposeful vagueness going on, to hide something.”

He scratched at his temple.

“There’s something else,” Samara
said lowering her gaze. “Last year I went to Egypt. I felt horrible for not
being at the funeral and wanted to see Nazim. He was the last person to see dad
alive and I thought it would help me get, I don’t know, closer to what
happened. When I arrived they said Nazim was away, but then the strangest thing
happened: they all acted like they didn’t know who I was. It was as if they had
never met me. My Arabic isn’t perfect, but they acted as if my dad was
completely unknown to them, like they had erased all memory of us. It was
spooky. It frightened me. I spent a lot of time at their house as a teenager,
you know? There was even a painting I did of a street in Sakkara that they kept
on their wall. It had been taken down or thrown away. Nazim swore to me when I
was a girl he would treasure it always. You know how sincere a man he is? I
can’t believe he would take it down. Maybe what happened with dad was too much
for him, I guess. But why would his family ignore me like that? They couldn’t
tell me when Nazim would return either. Something very strange was going on in
that house. They weren’t cruel to me, just completely distant, like absolute
strangers.”

“That is very odd.”

“I left two weeks later without any
answers. I tried to see them again before I left, but they seemed reluctant to
let me back in the house. They kept apologizing and said to wait until Nazim
came back and he could speak with me, clear things up; but they were completely
vacant. I left sobbing like a fool. I’ve never felt so alone. The whole city
seemed hostile and dangerous to me after that. I started feeling like I was
being watched.”

“I can only imagine.”

“Noah, have you talked to Nazim since
the funeral?”

“Yeah, a couple of years ago. He
still maintains our boat and as far as I know the payment still goes through
each month. I always expected to return someday. Is it possible they simply
didn’t recognize you?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see how. I
have changed of course, but not
that
much.”

“I can’t imagine what’s going on
with them,” he said earnestly.

“Look, I have been through a lot
these past few years. More than I have time to tell you. I met someone and fell
in love. It could have been perfect, but I sent him away, worse than that
actually, I stood him up. We were supposed to get married, but I couldn’t get
my head straight. I had no idea why at the time, and now he hates me of course.
I started drinking too much, to forget. Finally, because mother demanded it, I
sat down to talk to someone about dad. One of mom’s colleagues actually--a
shrink. She said what you’d expect. I’m having post-paternal longings that can
only be expressed through rage and that I am transferring this distrust to all
the men in my life. It’s all to deal with my feelings of abandonment, that dad
left without saying goodbye.”

Downy thought of the picture of
Freud on the back wall, and looked up to the booth.

“If my dad wrote that note, who put
it there?” she asked snapping his attention back to her.

“If that letter was written to
me--” She looked at him intently. “Do you think it’s possible it
was
my dad?”

“I’m sure there is a logical
explanation Samara,” he said putting his hand to hers. His hand looked worn and
beaten next to her smooth, brown skin.

“That’s why I need you,” she said.
Her eyes were watering at the corners. “There may come a time when I need you
to tell me that my shrink was right about me. I will listen to you because I
trust you. But I can’t believe these things are just coincidences. That note
was planted there. Maybe someone wanted me to see it to make a point or
something. But why did my dad write it and when? Did he think my mom was a bad
situation? He never acted like that.”

“No, that doesn’t seem right to me
either,” he said flatly.

“Can you think of a reason my dad
might want to disa--”

“Don’t Samara, don’t put yourself
through that thought. Let me call Nazim and speak to him. I’m sure there is an
explanation. I promise you, we will get to the bottom of this, ok?” He squeezed
her hand.

“Thank you,” she said. “I knew I
could count on you.”

Chapter 11

Downy peered in through the glass at the rows of assembled
students. There were undoubtedly crashers, since the room was overly full; some
students sat awkwardly and uncomfortably in the aisles and some were even
standing against the back wall. You could tell which of the ones standing were
actually enrolled by the scowls on their faces. Oh well, he had warned them to
be early if they wanted a seat. The crashers smiled pleasantly, trying to blend
in in their chairs. Downy’s lecture on the Life of Julius Caesar was the most
downloaded video of its kind on YouTube. Naomi liked to joke with him that he
was almost as popular as porn. He would have been more nervous if there were
only twenty people in the room, but a group this large was faceless. Except for
one of course. He scanned the room for her. She’d been bounced to the third row
today, but there she sat looking expectant, maybe even a bit nervous. It calmed
him. He took a deep breath before he walked in. As he strode to the podium the
lights flickered dramatically, suddenly causing the room to yah in unison. In
the darkness you could feel the tension building. Then Mozart’s symphony
blasted through the left speaker, then the right and finally in full stereo.
The screen lit up dramatically, followed by a blitz of techno-laced heavy
metal. Then came the shot of the bust of Caesar, probably the only one actually
made during his lifetime, which morphed into the face of a real man, blood
followed by skin and tissue filling in over the marble, the dark, intelligent
eyes settling into their sockets. Technology could literally bring history to
life. Finally, what everyone was waiting for, the full montage of blood, sex,
and death from the mini-series. Many cheered. It had become an unexpected hit,
especially with the college crowd, based much on it’s very frank and accurate
portrayal of the Roman sexual ethic, and of course the body count at the end of
each episode. The shows real success though had come from Downy’s unique
ability to connect with Caesar. Even the crankiest of history buffs were
impressed by his ability to capture the essence of the man many considered the
most important person in the history of the world. The floodlights at the
bottom of the stage went up suddenly illuminating Downy in dramatic silhouette.

“How’s that for a title? Most
important man in the history of the world,” he asked his students, testing his
microphone as the music slowly faded out and the lights returned to normal. He
paused. “Watch your back, Jay Z. Watch your back.” It was just the kind of dry
humor that had made him a teacher everyone wanted to take. You never quite knew
when he might say something completely off the wall in the midst of trying to
make a serious point. He had once claimed that Mark Antony had bedded many
famous mistresses in his life and was briefly engaged to both Lady Amanda Bynes
and Lady Ga Ga.

 
In a crowd of seventy-five students only
one or two hands had even gone up. Apathy. Oh well, that certainly wasn’t the
problem today. Downy waited for the chatter to ease. “I will keep the lights
dimmed if that’s ok, I’m eighty percent more handsome in low light.” It was
always a great start. He whispered again into his mic: “The guy in the helmet
with the killer abs in the second scene, that was me.” Everyone laughed. “Why
is that funny?” he said looking around wildly, feigning confusion. “Seriously
though, we are here today to discuss the life of a man called Gaius Julius
Caesar. We know very little about Caesar’s abs or pecs sadly, but--”

The laughter continued. It was
perhaps the thing he most loved about his job. He was a hog for the spotlight
and always had been. Charlie really had pulled him from obscurity in some ways,
but Downy had hardly been your average bartender, any more than he was an
average professor. Even then, as now, he’d had a loyal following of customers.
One of his close friends had once insisted he’d make a great cult leader. He
hadn’t known quite how to take the compliment. Calming the crowd, he slipped
into his almost conversational tone, a tone which somehow made each individual
in the room feel like they were the only person he was talking to, and
continued. His students would laugh if they knew that he had really cultivated
his public speaking skills mostly in bars. It was certainly where he had first
charmed Charlie with his wit and of course his vast knowledge of history.

He looked for Samara in the low
light before he began:

“It may be observed that a man’s
upbringing stays with him throughout his life and that whatever else may happen
to him his heart always belongs to that place which he saw first, and to those
who first nurtured him. If this is true, then it may be said of Julius Caesar
that he was a man of the Roman streets and of the Roman people. His home,
humble by Roman standards was in a district called the
Subura
, famous for its prostitution and gambling. The young,
aspiring Gaius must have learned a lot about human nature living there. You’ll
remember from your reading that Caesar had what we might today call the common
touch. He was equally at home conversing with the average man, the lower
classes, as he was the aristocratic, or as the Romans called them the Optimates.
Unlike the Optimates, who ruled Rome and controlled the senate, Caesar owed
nothing to the men of wealth of the state and held strong anti-aristocratic
feelings from the start, even siding with his uncle Marius in the civil war
that nearly decimated Rome during his teens. Marius eventually lost the war.
But, the young man Gaius, as he would have been called, was so well liked and
noted for his talents by this time that many of the opposing regime’s own men
spoke out in his defense. Prophetically, Sulla, the champion of the senate and
Caesar’s bitter enemy is reported to have warned them that the young man would
one day destroy the aristocracy, even though he eventually agreed to Caesar’s
pardon.

“Housing in the Subura would have been humble. Caesar likely
grew up in fairly modest home: a simple cot for a bed and maybe a spare writing
table at best, stone floors and perhaps an animal skin rug. The room would have
been extremely modest, 6x9 maybe smaller. A bit like Taber Hall for those of
you who live there.”

 
The class laughed, but now they were
truly listening.

“His family had been wealthier in
earlier generations and according to tradition, semi-divine, being related to
the goddess Venus. It’s a pretty typical story, probably mostly made up to
support the notion that the family came from divinity and thus could hope to
see it restored. Venus was often associated with luck,

ironically, this was a quality
Caesar was fond of promoting about himself and which was considered a necessity
for becoming a great military leader. Whatever the family’s true past young
Gaius Julius Caesar had his sights set on a glorious future. Caesar faced
tragedy early though when he lost his father at the age of sixteen. Such was
the reality of life in first century Rome. It’s entirely possible his premature
death affected Caesar’s view of himself and his own mortality. A famous story
places a twenty-five-year-old Julius standing at the foot of a statue of
Alexander the Great, not in awe of the man, but shaking his head in disgust
with himself at how little he himself had achieved in comparison. It’s a
telling insight into his psyche and his sense of ambition. Some of
you
will undoubtedly start thinking
about how to take over the world when you turn twenty-five.”

He paused. You could hear a pin drop in the auditorium and
almost everyone was leaning forward in their seats. He somehow found Samara’s
face in the crowd again. He locked eyes with her this time. It was like a page,
he realized, ripped from the endless conversations he’d had with Charlie, much
of it in fact material Samara had probably heard him develop while he was still
Charlie’s protégé. In truth the word protégé was inaccurate. Charlie had always
treated him as an equal, even when they’d first met. Downy was only a
twenty-six-year-old bartender then, but he already knew more about history than
most academics. His gift for storytelling was just that--a gift. His
grandfather had shared with him the stories of the glorious ancient Romans;
he’d also steeped him in the great Greek mythologies, told to him as bedtime
stories when he was only a boy. He had absorbed every word. Somehow he always
managed to turn his own enthusiasm for a subject into a reason why everyone
should listen. And listen they did.

“Gaius made his first true stab at
fame when he staged a run for one of the state’s most coveted positions:
Pontifex Maximus. Those of you who are friends of the pope will recognize the
prefix pontiff, which we still use today for the head of the church. It was a
lifelong appointment and it did something else that Caesar wanted. It put him
at the center of Rome, both physically and spiritually and gave him a permanent
seat in the senate. It’s fair to point out that Caesar wasn’t a deeply
spiritual man, certainly not by the dogmas or standards of his age. We know of
at least one episode in his life when he felt compelled to openly taunt sages
who claimed they could read the future by looking at the livers of a sacrificed
animal. This
was not
the famous
warning to beware the ides of March, by the way, which is most likely a piece
of retroactive fiction. Probably someone claiming clairvoyance had warned
Caesar about every other day on the calendar as well. This episode came earlier
in Caesar’s life when he had first achieved great power and wider fame. When
the sacrificed animal in question was found to be without a heart, a bad omen,
Caesar claimed: ‘you can tell nothing about the future by looking at a
heartless beast’ and that the sage ‘might instead just ask whether Caesar
willed it or not.’ Caesar seems to have had a healthy contempt for the
supernatural and so was a practical man for his age. He corrected the entire
Roman calendar, which had been woefully inaccurate with regard to the seasons.
We still use his version, the Julian calendar, today. We derive the name of the
month of July from Julius. His nephew Augustus, who seized power after his
assassination, lays claim to August. In spite of his pragmatism, it cannot be
overstated how much the notion of fate or destiny still dominated the Roman
imagination. The flight of birds was monitored constantly as an omen. The
author Suetonius claims portents of Caesar’s death were so well documented one
gets the impression predicting the future was something of a cultural
obsession, like the weather.”

Downy put on his best fake newscaster voice, which landed
somewhere between Howard Kossel and Ron Burgundy: “News at eleven calling for
dangerous afternoon assassination attempts, possible daggers, more at eleven,
Bob.” He had to wait for the laughter to subside on this one. “Are we not just
as superstitious in some ways now, Sylvia Brown anyone? Nostradamus? Ok, I
forgot you guys are high-brow, horoscopes then.” He was in the groove.

     
“Caesar also had
a scary eye for talent. Only weeks before his assassination he put his young
nephew Octavian (later Augustus) as his primary in his will, giving the barely
seventeen-year old boy the keys to Rome, effectively jilting Mark Antony in one
fail swoop. No one had seen it coming; but Caesar’s genius was always in
outwitting his opponents, always being one step ahead.”

He took a quiet breath. “That’s true of every day but one,”
he said. The lights in the auditorium dimmed. “All of Caesar’s luck ran out at
once it seems. But that’s for later,” he said with a wave of his hands.

Then a voice interrupted. People
turned in their seats grumbling, as it was understood questions should be saved
for the end. It was the strange man in the hat again. He sat closer now.

“I have read your book professor,
but not everyone agrees with your sympathy for Caesar you know.”

“I’m sorry, excuse me?”

“You speak of this man as an almost
hero, not a ruthless dictator. Surely you don’t mean to elevate him to such
heights professor?”

“Well, many of his contemporaries,
the best men of Rome in fact, sided with him in the civil war, many of whom
were friends to the aristocracy. There was something about Caesar that drove
people to either love him deeply or hate him with equal passion. Even the
people of Rome expelled his assassins and rioted at the news of his murder. You
see, even after the civil war, Caesar pardoned his worst enemies and returned
their estates to them. His sense of clemency was admired by most, but it
absolutely drove his
enemies
crazy. It took away their
pretext for painting him as a ruthless tyrant. In any case, I welcome the
criticism and Caesar does not need my support; his actions speak for themselves
in most cases. You make a nice transition to my next point, actually. Your name
is?”

“I am Taro.”

“Taro, I will answer more questions
at the conclusion, if we can revisit this then?” Downy smiled warmly. The man
smiled back.

“I have rudely interrupted again it
seems, my apologies.”

“No worries, not at all, that’s
what we’re here for Mr. Taro, to challenge ourselves, to try to find the truth
in our shared history.”

He went on telling the story of
Caesar’s early life, his daring military exploits, his being captured and
ransomed by pirates, who he openly ridiculed for not liking his poems, which he
read to them incessantly while captive. His outrage that they had only offered
fifty talents for his ransom, claiming he was worth five times that. His
promise to return and capture and crucify them, which he made good on. Out of
the corner of his eye he could see Samara, who now seemed focused on the man in
the hat too. Downy turned toward back to the screen to pull up a slide of the
Campus Martius, where Roman politics had played out in the first century and then
of course the slide of the newly discovered Theater of Pompey, where Caesar had
actually been slain. It was Charlie’s discovery in fact, his last contribution
to the field he so loved. He had completely forgotten that Charlie was in the
picture pointing proudly at the very spot where Caesar had probably fallen and
of course Samara was in the audience. Downy looked up at the picture and went
silent. He put the clicker on the podium in front of him.