“Juan-Bautista
wore a hat and carried a walking stick, and he ambled at a pace so slow that it
would likely have been illegal for him to cross at an intersection in New York.
When we were seated and he had ordered on our behalf, he said, “I have been
observing you, and I think it is no exaggeration to say, young man, that you
seem upset. May I ask you a rather personal question?” “Certainly,” I said.
“Does it trouble you,” he inquired, “to make your living by disrupting the
lives of others?” “We just value,” I replied. “We do not decide whether to buy
or to sell, or indeed what happens to a company after we have valued it.” He
nodded; he lit a cigarette and took a sip from his glass of wine. Then he
asked, “Have you heard of the janissaries?” “No,” I said. “They were Christian
boys,” he explained, “captured by the Ottomans and trained to be soldiers in a
Muslim army, at that time the greatest army in the world. They were ferocious
and utterly loyal: they had fought to erase their own civilizations, so they
had nothing else to turn to.”
He tipped the ash
of his cigarette onto a plate. “How old were you when you went to America?” he
asked. “I went for college,” I said. “I was eighteen.” “Ah, much older,” he
said. “The janissaries were always taken in childhood. It would have been far
more difficult to devote themselves to their adopted empire, you see, if they
had memories they could not forget.”
**
“Juan-Bautista’s
words plunged me into a deep bout of introspection. I spent that night
considering what I had become. There really could be no doubt: I was a
modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was
invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to
ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. Of course I was struggling!
Of course I felt torn! I had thrown in my lot with the men of Underwood Samson,
with the officers of the empire, when all along I was predisposed to feel
compassion for those, like Juan-Bautista, whose lives the empire thought
nothing of overturning for its own gain.”
