Larry Schwartz had been born in Boston and had worked the northern Immigration beats before winning an assignment to Florida, and he was so grateful for the hot weather and so fed up with the cold that he customarily wore a lightweight seersucker jacket, white shirt and no tie. This made him conspicuous in the Florida summer, but he was not comfortable without the coat, so when he had eaten at the Burger King three or four times, he failed to notice that while he was shadowing Molly, someone off to the side was shadowing him. It was Gunter Hudak, who had been alerted by his sister, who was far more clever than the men around her assumed. ‘Gunt, there’s this guy in a seersucker jacket keeps coming in at night.’
‘Lots of people come in at night.’
‘But he’s different.’
However, when Gunter studied the stranger he concluded that he was just another customer who had no wife and frequented the Burger King because the salad bar was copious and inexpensive, and he convinced his sister to stop worrying about him.
Then, one evening when Schwartz and Gunter happened to be in the restaurant at the same time, a tall, good-looking Hispanic came in, ordered a hamburger, kept his eye on Molly, and waited till her stint ended. Then, as she came out in street clothes, he moved close, took her arm, and encouraged her to snuggle up, betraying in a dozen different gestures that they were lovers. Her brother had become alarmed the minute he saw José Lopez, the Nicaraguan to whom his sister was legally married, and immediately notified his gang, who had given Lopez strict orders, and a few dollars, to stay away from his wife until she received her divorce from the Hindu, and this bold intrusion imperiled their plans. But what had worried Hudak even more was what he saw happening inside the restaurant: the man in the seersucker suit was carefully watching the lovers and making notes. And as Schwartz left the Burger King, he was grabbed by two members of the Hudak gang, who punched him about the head, and one of the men snarled: ‘Now who in hell are you, mister?’
When he blurted out the answer he always gave: ‘Insurance adjuster,’ one of the thugs rifled his pockets while the other man held him. There was not a single card indicating that Larry was with Immigration, but there were two forms proving he was in insurance, so after giving him several more sound thumps they let him go. That night the same thugs waited till Molly reached home, intercepted her, took her for a drive in their car, and cursed her for having been seen with her husband. ‘The goddamned Indian’s divorce papers ain’t final yet.’
She promised never to take such a chance again until the Immigration paperwork was completed, but two days later Mr. and Mrs. Ranjit Banarjee received a registered letter requiring them to report to the office of Investigator Larry Schwartz at Immigration headquarters, and that night Gunter Hudak began his intensive coaching.
‘This is deadly serious,’ he said to the divorcing couple, and with the assistance of a member of his gang who had handled such situations in the past, he laid out his instructions: ‘You have filed for divorce, and that’s what alerted the Feds. Our job is to prove that even though you’re splitting now, you did enter into a legal marriage last year.’ His accomplice, an evil-looking man from the Gainesville area who had supervised numerous fake marriages for alien students at the University of Florida, warned: ‘You’ve got to make it sound real, and we’re here to teach you how. Molly’s been through this before, but you’—and he stared contemptuously at Ranjit—‘can screw it up if you don’t learn your lines.’ And from a grease-stained portfolio he produced a well-thumbed xerox of Title 8 of the Federal Criminal Code, Section 1325 (b), brutal in its clarity and threat:
Marriage Fraud: Any individual who knowingly enters into a marriage for the purpose of evading any provision of the Immigration laws shall be imprisoned for not more than 5 years or fined not more than $250,000 or both.
When Ranjit realized he might be subject to a quarter-of-a-million-dollar fine, he cried pathetically: ‘Why did I ever get mixed up …?’ but he was not allowed to finish, for Gunter struck him across the lips and growled: ‘Shut up, you damned fool. You asked to do this. You paid me money to arrange it.’
When Ranjit tried to claim ignorance of the law, Gunter hit him again and said: ‘You have to protect yourself, but you also have to protect your wife. Even more, you have to protect me. And if you make one mistake, you filthy Hindu, you are dead, because my neck is on the line.’
Satisfied that Ranjit was properly impressed by the gravity of the situation, he became conciliatory: ‘We’re going to be all right. We’ve been through this before and we know all the cons to beat the rap.’ He told them that Schwartz, whoever he was and ‘ten to one he’s the guy in the seersucker,’ would interrogate them separately, Molly in one room, Ranjit in the other, ‘and we’ve learned just about what questions he’ll ask to trap you. So memorize these answers.’ And from a paper his gang had used when preparing for past interrogations, he hammered into their heads the answers they must both give when describing their happy marriage.
‘Did you sleep in the same bed?… Yes.’
‘Who slept on the right-hand side, looking down from the headboard?… You,’ and he indicated Ranjit.
‘Who went to bed first?’ Again Ranjit.
‘Did you use the same bathroom?… Yes. And I want Ranjit’s toothbrush and shaving things in there tonight.’
‘How many people had dinner at the table, most nights? Five. Because he probably knows I live here.’
‘How many went to church on Sunday? Where?’
He drilled them on about sixty questions with which interrogators tried to trick couples they suspected of fraud, and when he felt that his sister and her Indian had their answers pat, he turned to the matter of the money.
‘Did you give her any money?’ he roared at Ranjit, who fumbled. ‘Listen, damn you! This Schwartz could be very rough. He’s got a million tricks. Now, did you give her any money? The answer is No! No! No!’
‘Did you give her a wedding ring? Yes! Yes! Yes! Where is it now? And you both say that she hocked it when we needed money for a suit for you—you damned dumb Indian.’ And he gave his sister a pawnbroker’s receipt with an appropriate date. ‘It’s effective if you cry when you say it, Molly, and you must look very ashamed, Hindu.’
When he felt they could defend themselves he allowed them to go into Miami to face their ordeal with this Schwartz, whoever he was, and as soon as Molly entered his office she noticed the seersucker coat hanging on a rack, and Schwartz noticed that she noticed, so they started even, but not quite, because he did not separate them for the traditional private grilling her brother had anticipated. Instead, he sat them in comfortable chairs, then called out for Joe Anderson to come in.
‘This is my man Joe. Now, Joe, I want you to tell these good people what you did this morning the minute you were sure that these two and her brother Gunter had left the house at 2119 San Diego in Coral Gables, not far from the university.’
Joe, a hefty fellow who looked capable of defending himself if he stumbled into trouble, said: ‘I went to the front door, knocked, and showed the woman who answered the door this court order.’ He showed them the document, a search-and-seize order covering the premises at 2119 San Diego.
‘And then what?’ Schwartz asked, and Joe said: ‘I searched the place, as you directed.’
‘You mean the whole house?’ and Joe said: ‘No, just the cellar, like you said.’
The Banarjees gasped, Ranjit more than Molly, for when Schwartz said: ‘Tell them what you found, Joe,’ the latter went into another room and returned with the entire bed on which Ranjit had been sleeping since his marriage.
Then, with remorseless probing, Schwartz hammered at the now-confused couple and all of Gunter’s careful coaching flew out the window, for Schwartz did not ask one of the anticipated questions. When he had them hopelessly bewildered and practically admitting that their marriage had been a fraud, he signaled Joe, who now brought in brother Gunter and one of the men who had participated in the assault on him, and
from an entirely different set of papers he read the results of a longtime investigation of the racket that the Hudak family had been running.
Icily he ticked off details of the three earlier marriages Molly had contracted, the amounts of money exchanged and the disposition of the cases against the unfortunate aliens who had been involved. When the irrefutable facts were laid out, he told Gunter and his thug: ‘Don’t ever slug a special agent in the mouth. There are harsh laws against that. It cost me three hundred and twenty dollars to get my teeth fixed. It’s going to cost you and your buddy about fifteen years,’ and Gunter was led away by two policemen.
But even when Schwartz was satisfied that his case against the Hudaks was so tight that they would surely go to jail in a later trial, he wasn’t so sure about Molly. ‘Look,’ he told his team, ‘since we deported her three illegal husbands, the only one we have to testify against her is her husband, who we know won’t say a word.’
‘We have the Hindu,’ Joe said, but Schwartz cautioned: ‘That little fellow is starry-eyed. He still loves her … would never say a word against her.’
Joe protested: ‘Boss, consider what she did to him. Never allowed him to kiss her. Made him sleep in the cellar. Had her brother beat him up at least twice. Mark my words, Banarjee will make her burn.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Schwartz said, for his stomach was sending messages, and when Ranjit was summoned to a hearing two weeks later, he refused to testify against the woman he had considered his real wife.
‘Dr. Banarjee,’ the Federal District judge said, ‘I want you to stand over here so we can talk, man to man.’ Ranjit stood before the bench, a frail Hindu in a J C Penney suit that didn’t quite fit, and awaited the questions.
‘Do you still claim that yours was a marriage for love, not money?’
‘I do.’
‘And do you still love your wife?’
‘I do.’
‘And if I order you to be deported, do you wish to be returned to Trinidad?’
‘I do.’
‘You will be removed this day to the waiting area at the Krome Avenue Detention Center, from which, two days hence, you will be flown to the airport at Port of Spain, Trinidad. You may approach the bench.’ When Ranjit stood before him, he said so that others could not hear: ‘You seem a decent sort. I’m sorry you’ve treated the United States poorly and vice versa.’
In October 1986 a disconsolate Ranjit Banarjee, his marriage having been annulled because of fraud, flew out of the United States in a dull, aching trance. As he took his seat in the British West Indies plane to Trinidad, the stewardess handed him a Miami newspaper with the screaming headline JEALOUS NICARAGUAN LOVER MURDERS BEAUTIFUL WAITRESS. There were the photographs, some grisly with blood, some taken years ago when Molly graduated from high school and was quite lovely. On the inside pages were two photographs of her husband but none of Gunter Hudak, the cause of the tragedy.
Fifteen, twenty times during the flight Ranjit reopened the paper to study the front page and pursue the story on the inside, and as the plane approached Port of Spain he asked the stewardess if he could please have the papers that the other passengers were leaving on their seats, and she helped him collect some. He folded them reverently, for they contained the only photographs he would ever have of a woman whom he had, in his hesitant way, loved.
In Trinidad his friends, knowing of his arrest but not of Molly’s murder, received him with tears of gratitude over his having escaped a prison sentence in America. He had a full-fledged doctorate in philosophy from the University of Miami, but there were no openings at the main campus of the University of the West Indies, nor in its Trinidad branch, and his deportation from the States prevented him from ever returning there for a job. The local colleges, high schools really, judged him to be overqualified for their needs, so after sitting around in idleness for some months unable to find work of any kind, he flew back to Jamaica, asked that his credentials for graduate courses in history be transferred to the registrar at U.W.I., where he enrolled to take a second doctorate, this time in history, and although he seemed ill at ease when the course work started, for he was much older than the other students, he soon found his place and liked it.
He was referred to as Dr. Banarjee, and younger students who hoped to become scholars themselves deferred to him, but those in business or the sciences smiled at his overly courteous manner, his diffident way of avoiding direct confrontations, and his aroma, one might almost say, of bookishness.
Some students in the humanities who rather liked him were perplexed one day when, before the start of a class, he was handed a letter bearing quite a few stamps and readdressing labels. Ranjit took it, studied the writing on the front, and said clearly: ‘Well, well.’ But his hands trembled as he opened it, and when he finished reading, he remained erect in the sunlight, but all the bones seemed to melt within his body, and finally he accepted help from a younger student, who led him to a bench. There he sat, a tidy little fellow, determined not to weep despite the tears welling from his eyes.
The letter was from Norma Wellington, who informed him that she had recently married the head of surgery at her hospital in Chicago and was happily engaged in caring for his two children by a former wife, who had died of cancer. The letter rambled a bit, then got to the point: ‘Ranjit, I’ve heard of the disaster in Miami. Remember that those of us who knew you best love you for the trim little gentleman you are, and that I love you with particular warmth. Keep studying, and someday you’ll share your great understanding with the world. Norma.’ There was a postscript: ‘Mehmed Muhammad is the sensation of our hospital and the entire staff is helping him get his citizenship.’
When he returned to Trinidad with his second Ph.D. he frequented libraries, poked about old records of shipping firms that had imported slaves, and created a bit of stir when it became known that several different universities in Great Britain had inquired about hiring him as professor. He was interested, certainly, and three times he went through the hideous British ritual called ‘the short leet’ in which the university announced the three or four finalists who were being considered for an appointment. Photographs of the scholars appeared in the newspapers of the university city, of course, and were mailed off to the hometowns of the competitors, so that Trinidad papers could announce proudly: RANJIT BANARJEE ON THE SHORT LEET AT SALISBURY.
Sadly, he never won an appointment, but despite his repeated failures, his Indian friends in Port of Spain greeted him with extra deference: ‘You must be proud, Ranjit. Salisbury, no less,’ and he would reply jokingly: ‘I’m beginning to feel like those Indian scholars in Bombay and Calcutta who write passionate letters to the editor and sign them: “Ranjit Banarjee, M.A. Oxon (Failed)” They had been enrolled at Oxford, had tried and had gained prestige even in failure.’ Ranjit’s ability to mask his disappointments in jokes at his own expense imbedded him more securely in Trinidad as ‘our scholar.’
The one man who was not fooled by Ranjit’s apparent indifference was his old master Michael Carmody, who came to him after each announcement that the appointment had gone to someone else: ‘It must be galling to go through that experience, but take heart. I read the other day that the world has more than a thousand good universities. One of them will want a real scholar like you,’ but Ranjit replied: ‘Most of them are in the United States, and even if they did want me, I wouldn’t be allowed to go there.’
It was Carmody who secretly went from one wealthy Indian trader to the next, saying: ‘It’s shameful the way Trinidad treats this splendid man. His cousin gives him a niggardly allowance even though the Portugee Shop should be his, and the poor fellow can hardly afford a new suit. I want you to arrange with your friends for him to have a decent sum each month. And I will launch the fund with this two hundred pounds. In years to come, you’ll be proud of this man, a great intellect.’
He also talked them into gathering a fund which enabled the U.W.I. to publish in respectable format a collection of Ranji
t’s academic essays, including his long poem on Alexander Hamilton and the hurricane and his seminal essay ‘Indians in Trinidad.’
It was the circulation of these works which encouraged Yale University to invite him to publish through its prestigious Press his important full-length study Prospect for the Caribbean. Of course, the book earned no money, so Ranjit continued to live off the largesse of his family plus such funds as Carmody could quietly provide. And occasionally some older American couple would debark from a cruise ship for a one-day visit to Trinidad and inquire in the Portugee Shop: ‘Would it be possible, do you think, for us to meet your distinguished scholar Dr. Banarjee?’ When the clerk said: ‘He lives quite close, I’ll just ring him up,’ Ranjit would hurry down, greet the professor from Harvard or Indiana or San Diego, and lead the pair to the old Banarjee house built by his ancestors. There he would serve limeades and pistachio nuts and hold discourse with his fellow scholars.
PEOPLE WHO SAW HIM approach gasped, and one woman stood stock-still and cried aloud: ‘Oh my God!’ All moved aside to give him free passage, and well they might, for none had ever seen anything like him on All Saints Island.
He was about twenty-five years old, six feet two inches tall and thin as the legs of a stork. His clothes were sensational: on his head a floppy gold and green tam, on his feet big leather flats, like those of a Roman centurion, with thongs winding up his pant legs, which were a hideous purple, all emphasized by a very loose T-shirt bearing a likeness of Haile Selassie and, in bold, well-printed letters, three phrases: I-MAN RASTA, DEATH TO POPE and HELL DESTRUCTION AMERICA.
But what made him look really wild and fierce was his hair, for it had been neither cut nor combed during the past five or six years. Natural tangling, assisted by plasterings of mud, oil and chemicals, had caused it to fall in long matted strands, which had been separated and plaited into two- and three-foot lengths that fell almost to his waist like writhing vipers. By this device he had converted himself into a male Medusa, whose frightening appearance was magnified by a heavy, untrimmed beard, equally matted. In addition to all this, he had a fierce, penetrating gaze and very white, big teeth that gleamed through his half-open mouth. He looked terrifying.