one another apart, he seemed to belong to some race that had learned, finally,
to reconcile the
brain and the heart, keenness and kindness. He wasn’t just a numbers whiz—he
understood people, cared for people. I believe the same sixth sense that allowed
him to see which way the currency markets would go—to anticipate the tides of
human greed—is also what allowed him to see precisely what sort of social
interventions would truly matter on this planet. But if you ask why he threw
himself at these problems everyone else regarded as hopeless, you have to put
reason to one side. Great minds are rare—great hearts rarer still. And this was
ultimately a matter of the heart. Philanthropy in its root sense: a kind of
love.” Now Fielding blew his nose quietly and blinked hard, determined to keep
his emotions at bay.
“I owed him everything,” Janson said, remembering the dust of Baaqlina.
“As does the world,” Fielding said. “That’s why I said it cannot be. For my
reference was not to fact but to consequence. He must not die. Too much depends
upon him. Too many delicate efforts toward peace and stability, all sponsored by
him, guided by him, inspired by him. If he perishes, many will perish with him,
victims of senseless suffering and slaughter—Kurds, Hutus, Romani, the despised
of the world. Christians in Sudan, Muslims in the Philippines, Amerindians in
Honduras. Cas-amance separatists in Senegal … But why even begin a list of the
damnes de la terre? Bad things will happen. Many, many bad things. They will
have won.”
Fielding looked smaller now, not merely older. The vital energy had drained from
him.
“Perhaps the game can be played to a draw,” Janson said quietly.
A despairing look came over the scholar. “You’ll try to tell me that America, in
its bumbling way, can pick up the slack. You may even think it is incumbent upon
your country to do so. But then the one thing that you Americans have never
quite grasped is how very deep anti-Americanism goes. In this post-Cold War era,
many people around the world feel that they live under the American economic
occupation. You speak of ‘globalization’ and they hear ‘Americanization.’ You
Americans see televised images of anti-American demonstrations in Malaysia or
Indonesia, about protesters in Melbourne or Seattle, hear about a handful of
McDonald’s being rubbished in France—and you think these are aberrant events. On
the contrary. They are harbingers of a storm, the first few spittlelike drops
you feel before a cloudburst.”
Janson nodded. These were sentiments he had heard before, and recently. “Someone
told me that these days, the hostility isn’t really about what America does, but
about what America is.”
“And that is precisely why Peter Novak’s role was invaluable, and
irreplaceable.” Heat entered the don’s voice. “He wasn’t American, or perceived
to be a handmaiden of American interests. Everyone knew that he’d spurned
America’s advances, that he’d angered its foreign-affairs establishment by
steering his own course. His only polestar was his own conscience. He was the
man who could stand up and say that we had lost our bearings. He could say that
markets without morality could not sustain themselves—he could say these things
and be heard. The magic of the marketplace wasn’t enough, he was saying: We need
a moral sense of where we want to go, and the commitment to get there.”
Fielding’s voice started to crack and he swallowed hard. “That is what I meant
when I said that this man must not perish.”
“Yet he has perished,” Janson said.
Fielding rocked back and forth gently, as if he were at sea. For a while he said
nothing at all. And then he opened his light blue eyes wide. “What’s so very odd
is that none of this has been reported anywhere—neither his abduction nor his
murder. So very odd. You have told me the facts, but not the explanation.”
Fielding’s gaze drifted toward the overcast skies that hovered over the
courtyard’s ageless splendor. The fen’s low-hanging clouds over the rough-hewn
Portland stone of the courtyard: a vista unchanged in centuries.
“I guess I was hoping you’d be able to help me there,” Janson said. “The
question is, who would want Peter Novak dead?”
The don slowly shook his head. “The question is, alas, who wouldn’t?” Janson
could tell his mental gears were meshing; his fish-pale eyes grew intent, his
face taut. “I exaggerate, of course. Few mortals have so earned the love and
gratitude of their fellows. And yet. And yet. La grande be-nevolenza attira la
grande malevolenza, as Boccaccio has it: outsized benevolence always attracts
outsized malevolence.”
“Walk me through this, OK? Just now you spoke of ‘they’—you said ‘they’ will
have won. What did you mean?”
“Do you know much about Novak’s origins?”
“Very little. A child of war-torn Hungary.”
“His origins were at once extremely privileged and extremely not. He was one of
the few survivors of a village that was liquidated in a battle between Hitler’s
soldiers and Stalin’s. Novak’s father was a fairly obscure Magyar nobleman who
served in Miklos Kallay’s government in the forties
before he defected, and it’s said that he feared, obsessively, for the safety of
his only child. He had made enemies who, he was convinced, would try to avenge
themselves against his scion. The old nobleman may have been paranoid, but as
the old saw has it, even paranoids have enemies.”
“That’s more than half a century ago. Who could possibly care, all these decades
later, what his dad was up to in the forties?”
Fielding gave him a stern, college-master look. “You obviously haven’t spent
much time in Hungary,” he said. “It’s in Hungary, still, that you’ll find his
greatest admirers, and his most impassioned foes. Then, of course, there are the
millions elsewhere who feel victimized by Peter Novak’s successes as a
financier. Many ordinary people in Southeast Asia blame him for triggering a run
against their currency, their rage fomented by demagogues.”
“But groundless, do you think?”
“Novak may be the greatest currency speculator in history, but no one has more
eloquently denounced the practice. He’s pushed for the very policies of currency
unification that would make that sort of speculation impossible—you can’t say
he’s been an advocate of his own interests. Quite the opposite. Of course, some
would say that merry old England bore the brunt of his speculative savvy, at
least at first. You remember what happened back in the eighties. There was that
great currency crisis, with everyone wondering which European governments were
going to lower their rates. Novak leveraged billions of his own money on his
hunch that Britain was going to let sterling plunge. It did, and Novak’s Electra
Fund nearly tripled. An incredible coup! Our then prime minister pushed MI6 to
poke around. In the end, the head of the investigation told the Daily Telegraph
that, and I quote, ‘the only law this fellow has broken is the law of averages.’
Of course, when the Malaysian ringgit plunged and Novak landed himself another
windfall, the politicians over there didn’t take it very well. Lots of
demagoguery there about the manipulations of the mysterious dark foreigner. So
you ask who would like to see him dead, and I must tell you it’s a long list of
malefactors. There’s China: the old men of that gerontocracy fear, above all
else, the ‘directed democracy’ that Novak’s organization has been dedicated to.
They know he considers China the next frontier of democratization, and they are
powerful enemies. In Eastern Europe, there’s a whole cabal of moguls—former
Communist officials who seized the plunder of ‘privatized’ industries. The
anti-corruption campaigns spearheaded by the Liberty Foundation in their own
backyards are their most direct threat, and they’ve sworn to take action.
As I say, one cannot perform good deeds without a few people feeling threatened
by them—especially the ones who prosper from entrenched enmity and systematic
corruption. You asked what I meant by ‘they,’ and that’s as good a specification
as any.”
Janson could see Fielding struggle to sit up straighter, to rally, to keep a
stiff upper lip. “You were part of his brain trust,” said the operative. “How
did that work?”
Fielding shrugged. “He’d solicit my opinions from time to time. Perhaps once a
month, we’d talk on the phone. Perhaps once a year, we’d meet face-to-face. In
truth, he could have taught me far more than I him. But he was a remarkable
listener. There was never a shred of pretense, except, perhaps, the pretense of
knowing less than he did. He was always concerned about unintended consequences
of humanitarian intervention. He wanted to be sure that a humanitarian gift
didn’t ultimately lead to more suffering—that, say, helping refugees didn’t prop
up the regime that had produced those refugees. You can’t always call it right,
he knew. In fact, he always insisted that everything you know might be wrong.
His one article of faith. Everything you know must be critically assessed at all