Imaginary Crimes

Toby Green

Description

4 CITIES, 4 LIVES, 1 CRIME� In Madrid, an Argentinian bookseller gets caught up in the scheme of an American professor to prevent an appalling crime. Her sidekicks soon include a Gambian migrant in Paris and a Spanish waitress in London. Seeking some sort of companionship in their exiles, the four characters join forces in a quest that becomes a dangerous obsession. All four lives seem to be fatefully connected. But how to get people to take the crime seriously if it does not yet exist? In Buenos Aires, the criminals are remorselessly pursued. They cross paths with a Nigerian judge, the wife of one of General Franco�s thugs, a caretaker to the wealthy, and Peter Halbtsen, an expert in Chinese culture. It is early March 2004. Halbtsen has spent years deciphering a book which may hold the key to the mystery. But where is the crime? Who is the criminal? And can anything be done to prevent humanity from reaping the whirlwind?

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers
• Date de parution: 16 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789870827115
• Langue: English

Extrait

Imaginary Crimes a novel
Imaginary Crimes a novel
Toby Green
PUBLISHED BY
Mkuki na Nyota Publishers Ltd
P. O. Box 4246
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
www.mkukinanyota.com
Toby Green 2013
Cover Illustration: Emily Fowke
Design Layout: www.spearheadbranding.com
ISBN 978-9987-082-39-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Mkuki na Nyota Publishers Ltd.
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Distributed worldwide outside Africa by African Books Collective. www.africanbookscollective.com
contents
Madrid 2004
Paris 2004
London 2004
Buenos Aires 2004
In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word? I thought for a moment and replied, The word chess.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
This novel is dedicated to the memory of Adri n Gim nez Hutton, who took me to Tigre
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, to Walter Bgoya and Mary Jay, for believing in this book enough to take the significant risk of publishing it; to Dave Kerr, without whose incomparable creative energy, and his championing of this book, it would never have found the right publisher; to Ian Rakoff, who read through many drafts of the book with me, and helped me to find the book s voice; and to Maggie Pearlstine for never losing faith in it, and for helping me to make it readable in the first place.
Since I started writing this book in December 2003, so many friends have helped me along the way, and without them this wouldn t have been possible. For our discussions about books, and for giving me little clues as to how to finish this off, my thanks to Shola Adenekan, Catherine Boyle, Stewart Brown, Jamie Crawford, Tim Dowling, Richard Drayton, Paulo Farias, Bob Fowke, Emily Fowke, Conrad James, Juliana Mafwil, Tom McCaskie, Jos Lingna Nafaf , Insa Nolte, and Keith Shear.
Madrid 2004
I
What would it be like to steal a soul? Had there ever been such a thing except in that blinding flash of fire that heralded this universe of ours and all its joy and suffering?
These were questions I asked myself more and more as I worked in the bookstore. I d been prompted to do the modern equivalent, to get hold of someone s papers. Few people thought that souls existed any more, it was assumed that they d been disposed of by the three high priests of the Anglo-Saxon canon, Darwin, Dawkins and Dennett. But I d read my Gogol and still had a romantic nature. I could still dream that such a horrible theft could be possible, that somehow paper souls could be transubstantiated into that mythical and otherworldly essence which used to provide all of us with meaning.
It was a thoughtless idea, I knew that, and dangerous. Gogol went mad in the end and I didn t want to follow him. So if stealing a soul was even remotely possible I certainly wasn t going to accept all the responsibility. I had read so much since arriving in Europe that I felt imprisoned in the fantasy that people longed for crimes like this, thefts that fed the soul its stolen milk. I wondered if secretly they didn t want what was even more forbidden, a sacrifice in a world where sacrifices were taboo, a crime so atrocious that it might forestall all others and yet stand for them as a totem. Perhaps it s irresponsible to cast all the blame on others and yet without their imaginations, piling up daily in towers of bones in the news, I never would have had the courage to act.
I mulled the idea over for a few days as I worked in the store. Very quickly it became obvious what a brainless daydream it was. For days I tried to spot one from the bookstore where I worked on the Puerta del Sol. There passed the people heavy in the city s lustful heat. Ah, so much potential there was, for just one soul, but there was a constant tugging at the groin, sleepily, just like they were all sucking at one another in the dark whilst only half awake. With their half-formed desires the souls were always just escaping me. There weren t any souls left in the Spanish-speaking capital. There weren t any souls anywhere. The bottom had fallen out of their market and there wasn t even any room for them in hell any more so they had fallen out of there.
I would just have to settle for procuring the papers instead. It would be illegal but that did not matter. Wasn t the law developed by those who wanted to legalise their own crimes? What really bothered me was the moral question of whether I could prevent a crime by committing one. I tried to convince myself that I could, and should. The crime we all imagined had to be possible exactly because we loved what might be stolen or destroyed.
I had plenty of time to think about souls just then. I felt as if this was my job, since customers came to the bookstore hoping for some recommendation which might set them onto a better and more humane path. I wasn t much occupied by the rest of my work. Of course I pretended to carry on doing what my employers thought of as my job, stacking the books on the display tables by the window. I did this work, easy as it was, and I was paid for it. It was all so boring. The only spark of interest was with the manager, who really irritated me. I think he sensed the strength of my emotion but mistook it for something else, which is easy to do in this city where the sun is always jumping you with more energy. He would come close by just to criticise me. But all I had to do was smile, say I d try harder. You won t last long, Elena , he d respond.
Perhaps I didn t keep my eyes peeled as well as I might have done. I was distracted by the manager and by the activity of the Puerta del Sol where the bleached tourists from the North slobbered over their ice creams and ran their hands over their stomachs like an imperial army coming to terms with its newly expanded territory. I knew I needed to try some place else. One day I demanded permission to leave early. The manager did not refuse me. I picked up a couple of volumes as I left and walked up the hill towards Gran V a past some of the rival bookstores. Most of the people heading this way barely glanced at the shop windows. They seemed more interested in the trinkets which the African hawkers set out on fraying black sacks curled up at the edges of the pedestrianised precinct. I sensed that it might be just here that I would discover something, in a space which no one else seemed to care about.
I d been eyeing up the Africans for some time. Finally I d realised that my best chance of getting hold of some papers was among them and the cheap goods which they sold in the middle ground between indifference and pointless possessions. These were the most vulnerable people in the city. They didn t have the money to leave. Perhaps even sharks worry about the bluntness of their teeth sometimes, since not even credit card companies would take a chance with them so that they could raise 500 Euros and flee back home. Instead the cops used to taunt them by strolling along the road so that they had to wrap up their goods in their sacks and stand back against the shop fronts, innocent and law-abiding citizens. Everyone knew that the cops came down here off duty to see how the land lay, to calculate how best they could humiliate these wretches.
Luckily, the day I found my mark there were no cops about. Soon after leaving work I was sizing up the Africans. I went up and down several times. Perhaps I was taunting them although I didn t mean to. I felt as if souls were rising, as if they d found their way to the surface and recovered their will to breathe again. Here in Madrid one could spend days, weeks, knowing without thinking that one s soul was slowly rotting like an unpicked fruit on a tree. It was a constant struggle to hold on to the soul, something that required the sort of thought which no one bothered much with any more. It was a battle I d often felt as if I was losing, so that when I looked in the mirror I would see someone I wouldn t like to meet, someone I couldn t think well of.
Eventually I settled on one. I watched him from a distance for twenty minutes. There was a touch of softness and compassion about him even though he was selling even less than the others. Here was someone whose character might be one that I could touch. Weren t we both immigrants from the same kind of boat, washed up by unhappy circumstance in this city which neither of us cared for and yet which somehow we both helped to subsist? He was unusually tall, thin like they all were, with those ritual scars below each eye which told their own story of a different world and of its losses. He had a gold bracelet on his right arm, though at the time I couldn t understand why he hadn t sold it and tried to better his lot. None of the others spoke to him. He seemed so solitary, and I felt a mixture of sadness and desire when I saw him. Surely, he would want to offer me something. What did he care about his papers? What did any of us care? I hoped he might sell them for very little, next to nothing, provided I approached him in the right way.
What are you selling? I asked, and he gestured without words at what was on the floor before him. I m interested in something larger than that, I replied. I had decided to create a false sense of mystery, to lure him in as if he were a reader. It was what the professor had done with me. I d use a trick which would make me and my plan seem much more imp