End of reverie. The past isn’t what you came for.
Dimitri told you his money stinks. So now it does. Does that make him a liar?
All right, slipping half a million bucks to a washed-up language tutor may not be normal business practice to some anally oriented apparatchik from head office. But it could be all part of the day’s work for a fellow who buys and sells ships out of his back pocket.
Assuming Herr Brandt is a senior executive from head office, of course. That quick confiding eye and overready smile of his could come out of quite a different stable. There was more than one occasion during our uncomfortable pas de deux when I wondered whether I might be back in the Presence.
For twenty minutes or more Mundy lets his thoughts drift free-range through his head. Many surprise him, but they often do. For instance, that he is mysteriously underimpressed by his newfound affluence. If he could transfer himself by magic wand to anywhere in the world just now, he’d either be in bed with Zara in the flat, or closeted in the woodshed with Mustafa, helping him finish off a chaotic model of the Dome of the Rock in time for his mother’s birthday.
Mundy jumps to his feet and swings round. A thunderous banging has broken out behind his right ear.
Recovering his composure he is delighted to find himself staring at the gnomic features of old Stefan, his former gardener and boilermaster, floating six inches away from him on the other side of the glass. It is a sash window. In a trice, Mundy has prised open the central lock, stooped, grabbed the brass handles and with a great unfolding of his body sent the lower half of the window rattling up its ropes. He stretches out his hand, old Stefan seizes it and, with the agility of a gnome half his age, vaults into the room.
A tumult of breathless small talk follows. Yes, yes, Stefan is fine, his wife Elli is fine, the Söhnchen—he means his hulk of a fifty-year-old son—is excellent—but where has Herr Ted been, how is Jake, is he still studying in Bristol? And why has it taken Herr Ted so long when we all miss him, nobody in Heidelberg bears him a grudge, for God’s sake, the little matter of Herr Egon is long forgotten! . . .
And it’s while all this is being thoroughly gone over that Mundy realizes that old Stefan was not hanging around the garden by chance.
“We have been expecting you, Herr Ted. We knew two weeks ago that you would soon be here.”
“Nonsense, Stefan. First I heard of it myself was ten days ago.”
But old Stefan is tapping the side of his nose with his crooked finger to show what a shrewd old gnome he is. “Two weeks ago. Two weeks! I told Elli. ‘Elli,’ I said. ‘Herr Ted is coming home to Heidelberg. He will pay his debts like he always said he would, and he’ll take back the villa and start the school again. And I’ll work for him. It’s all agreed.’”
Mundy keeps his tone light. “So who slipped you the news, Stefan?”
“Your surveyors, naturally.”
“Which surveyors are they? I’ve got so many.”
Old Stefan is shaking his head and squeezing up his twinkly eyes while he tut-tuts in disbelief.
“From your mortgage company, Herr Ted. The people who are giving you your loan, of course. Today, nobody can keep anything secret, it’s well known.”
“And they’ve been here already?” Mundy says, managing to sound as if he was expecting them, and is perhaps a little irritated to have missed them.
“To look round, naturally! I was passing, I saw some figures in the window, a little light moving about, and I thought, Ahah! Herr Ted’s back. Or maybe he’s not back and we’ve got some burglars. I am too old to die, so I banged on the door. A nice young fellow, a good smile, overalls. A flashlight in his hand. And in the background some other fellows I didn’t see, maybe a woman. Women these days are everywhere. ‘We are surveyors,’ he tells me. ‘Don’t worry. We are nice people.’ ‘For Herr Ted?’ I say. ‘You are surveying for Herr Ted?’ ‘No, no. For the mortgage company. If the company lends him money, your Herr Ted will come back.’”
“What time of day was this?” Mundy asks, but the person he is really listening to is Kate, the day she came home early from school and saw shadows in the window at Estelle Road: Light on their feet . . . moving back and forth across the doorway.
“Morning. Eight o’clock. It was raining. I was on my way to Frau Liebknecht’s garden on my bicycle. In the afternoon, on my way back, five o’clock like now, they were still here. I’m so nosy it’s ridiculous. Ask Elli. I’m incorrigible. ‘What takes you so long?’ I ask them. ‘It’s a big house,’ they said. ‘It will cost a lot of money. A lot of money takes a lot of time.’”
He has done walks like this in Edinburgh. They went this way:
All right, Ted, in a minute you’re going to step out of the front door of this house and you’re going to the main railway station. You can use any public transport you like barring taxis, because we never take taxis, do we?—not the first one that comes along, not the second nor the third nor the thirteenth. Not when we’ve got our ears up. And by the time we reach the railway station, I’ll want to know whether we’re being followed and who by, and I don’t want to know they know you know. Are we clear on that? And I want you at the station within half an hour because we’ve got a train to catch. So don’t start giving me the scenic route by way of Edinburgh Zoo.
He walks and lets Heidelberg take him into its protection. Back into the lane, and a careless look at the surrounding cars and windows: Oh how I love this little square with its leafy villas and secret gardens! Across the main road, down to the river’s edge, and are those the same lovers who were canoodling on that bench when I came up here? Then over the Old Bridge, which was blown to smithereens in 1945 in a vain effort to halt the advancing American army, but everyone’s forgotten that, and a lot don’t even know it, least of all the schoolkids and tour groups that walk up and down it, admiring the barges and the statues, much as Mundy does as he leans over the parapet waiting to see who stops behind him to light a cigarette, study a guidebook or take a photograph. The day is hot, the Hauptstrasse, which is a pedestrian precinct, is as usual jammed with slowly moving crowds, so Mundy improves his speed as if he has a train to catch, which indeed he has, but not quite yet, and keeps an eye on shopwindows for anyone who might recall a forgotten engagement and similarly accelerate. He keeps going fast, cycles overtake him, and perhaps his followers called for them because following a six-footer going at full throttle when you are a few sizes shorter and also a pedestrian is a mug’s game. He leaves the old town and enters the flat industrial ghetto of gray-block houses and logo cafés. But by the time he reaches the station, all he can tell his absent Edinburgh instructors is that, if he is being followed, he’s being given the VIP coverage, which comprises everything from road sweepers to satellites, and the squirt of all-day hair spray on your shoulder that in the words of one eloquent instructor makes you glow like a fucking firefly on their grubby little television screens.
In the station concourse he goes to a public phone and with his head stuffed inside an enlarged helmet calls home. Zara has left for work. She will be at her café in an hour. He gets Mustafa, who howls. What - about - Dome - of - Rock - Ted? You - very - bad!
“We’ll give it a double dose tomorrow night.” He does the banter. Yes, yes, I’m tucked up with my girlfriend.
Zara’s cousin Dina comes to the phone. Dina, I’ve got to spend the night in Heidelberg, there’s another meeting with the bank tomorrow. Can you explain to Zara, please? Can you try and get Mustafa into bed before midnight, please? Don’t let him use the Dome as an excuse. Dina, you’re a brick.
He calls the Linderhof, gets the machine, pinches his nose and leaves a message saying he won’t be in tomorrow: flu.
The train to Munich leaves in forty minutes. He buys a newspaper, sits on a bench and watches the world go by while he wonders whether the world is watching him.
What were they doing in the schoolhouse all day? Measuring it for deep-pile carpets?
Nice. Young. Good smile. Ov
eralls. Flashlight in his hand. No, we are only surveyors.
It’s a local train and takes forever. It reminds him of the local from Prague the time he sat with Sasha in the guard’s van with their bicycles. At a tiny station in a flat field he alights and moves back two carriages. A couple of stations later he moves further back. By the time he reaches Munich there are six people left on the train, and Mundy is the last by fifty yards to leave it.
The parking garage has an elevator but he prefers the stairs, although they stink of piss. Men in leather haunt the half-landings. A black prostitute says twenty euros. He remembers Zara joining him for breakfast at the outdoor café on the day his life began again. Please, sir, would you like to go to bed with me for money?
His Volkswagen Beetle is on the fourth floor, in the corner bay where he left it this morning. He walks once round it, checking the doors for smear marks; and for clean patches where smear marks have been wiped off; and for new scratch lines on the fascias of the locks. Good lad, Ted. We always said you were a natural and you are.
Affecting to look for oil leaks, he crouches front and back, gropes for clever boxes, homers, and whatever else he can think of that was in fashion thirteen years ago. Always try to focus your fear, Ted. If you don’t know what you’re scared of, you’ll be scared of everything.
Fine, I’ll focus it. I’m afraid of bankers who aren’t bankers, money launderers, crooked billionaire philanthropists who send me half a million dollars I don’t trust, wealthy Arabs who pay for the spread of the English language, fake surveyors and my own shadow. I’m afraid for Zara, Mustafa and Mo the dog. And for my ever-tenuous hold on human love.
He unlocks the car and when it doesn’t explode he makes a long arm into the back and unearths a gangrenous khaki vest with kapok padding and poacher’s pockets. Hauling off his suit jacket, he slips on the vest and changes over the contents of his pockets. The car starts first time.
To descend to earth he must enter a hellish iron car-lift that reminds him of the Steel Coffin. For half the official parking price in cash, an old attendant unlocks the doors for him with a prison-sized key and consigns him to the nether world. Emerging in free air, Mundy takes a right and another right to avoid passing Zara’s café, because he knows that if he caught sight of her, he would scoop her up and drive her home and cause a lot of unnecessary confusion in everybody’s minds including his own.
He reaches a roundabout and heads south. He is watching his mirrors but sees nothing to focus his fear on—but then if they’re any good, I wouldn’t, would I? It’s midnight. A pink moon is shining, the road in front of him is as empty as the road behind him and there’s a brave showing of stars. Tomorrow we shall draw new lines between the stars. Dimitri may have pillaged the globe in order to save it, but along the way he found time to take a course in kitsch.
He is heading south down the road he drives every day and in forty minutes he will reach the first of the two intersections and filter left. He does. No blue Audi with Sasha crouched apelike at the wheel shepherds him, but he doesn’t need one. In defiance of the lousy sense of direction that he shares with Trotsky, he knows the way. On the drive back with Sasha he made a mental record of the lefts and rights, and now he’s following them in reverse order.
He passes the lay-by where he left his car in order to follow Sasha up the spiral staircase and keeps driving until he reaches the skimpy path that ran along the foot of the mountains. His fuel tank is a quarter full, but it won’t stop him getting there. Soon he’s driving through forest, down the same pitted alley, though the pits are deeper because the moon is brighter. He enters the forest clearing that was like the clearing outside Prague, but instead of crossing it he scans the trees for another opening, spots one below him and, switching off his headlights then his engine, coasts quietly towards it, cursing the twigs for snapping under his tires and the birds for screaming murder.
He rolls the car under the fir trees until he feels the weight of foliage on the roof, parks and picks his way between the boulders towards the concrete ramp.
Distances are real now. He’s entering Badland and the rat is gnawing at his stomach. The barn looms ahead of him. Without the Audi’s headlights shining on it, it’s bigger than he remembers: two zeppelins’ worth at least. Its doors are shut and padlocked. He edges along one side. Unlike the all-day surveyors in Heidelberg, he has no flashlight and no assistants.
He is handing himself along the barn’s wooden wall, using its stone footings as a walkway, waiting for a window or a gap in the timber. There isn’t one. He finds a loose plank and eases it. He needs his tool bag. Mustafa’s got it. He needs Des. We’re divorced.
The plank is warped. He warps it a little more. It writhes, bends back on itself and comes free. He peers through the gap. Shafts of moonlight show him what he needs to know. No shiny Jeep, no rows of quality cars for sale. In their place, three businesslike tractors, a wood saw and a pyramid of baled hay.
Have I come to the wrong address? No, I haven’t, but the tenants have changed.
He walks back to the front of the barn and sets off along the track towards the wall of death. The Jeep’s ascent by his reckoning took ten to twelve minutes. The walk will take him an hour. Soon he wishes it could be longer. He wishes it could take all his life, with Zara and Mustafa, and Jake if he’s not too busy, because in Mundy’s book there’s nothing in the world to beat plodding through pine forest by the light of the moon with mist in the valley and the first pale flush of dawn coming up ahead of you, and the clatter of spring streams half deafening you, and the scent of resin bringing tears to your eyes, and the deer playing hide-and-seek as you trot along.
It’s not the same farmhouse.
The house I came to was enormous and hospitable, with merry lights in the windows and geraniums in the window boxes and Hansel and Gretel smoke coming out of the chimney.
But this farmhouse is low, gray, shuttered and sullen. It is surrounded by a previously unobserved high-wire perimeter fence and backed against a blue rock face, and everything about it—but particularly the painted signs—says private, dangerous dogs, forbidden, one step further and you’ll be prosecuted so fuck off. And if anyone is asleep in the rooms upstairs, they’re sleeping with their windows bolted and their curtains open and they’ve padlocked themselves in from outside.
The fence is neither electrified nor new, which at first makes him feel a fool. But then he tells himself that not even the smartest Edinburgh graduate can be expected to notice everything on a first flying visit. And certainly not when he’s being driven at breakneck speed at dead of night by a pigskin-gloved Amazon with Sasha in the back breathing down his neck.
There is razor wire at the top of the fence and conventional barbed wire below. There is a locked iron gate, but inside the perimeter there are also two roe deer that want badly to get out.
So somehow they got in. Maybe they jumped. No, they didn’t, it’s too high, even for them.
What they did—Mundy discovers, as he follows the fence round and searches the barns and outbuildings for signs of life and sees none—is cross a flattened stretch five feet wide where a tractor or other farm vehicle has ignored the warning signs and smashed its way in or out, and now the deer can’t find it again.
But Mundy can find it and, better than that, he has discovered in his state of febrile agility an easy passage up a low-pitched slate roof to a window on the upper floor. And he has the wit, before he attempts the climb, to equip himself with a bit of rock. It’s solid slate, weighs a ton, but for smashing open windows can’t be bettered.
What have I come here for?
To make sure they’re all as beautiful in the morning as they were at night.
To take a second look at the hidden signal in Dimitri’s baby-blue eyes, the one that said, You asked for this.
To inquire, in the most casual way, what they think they’re doing, at this extremely delicate point in all our histories, fooling around with funny money out of Riyadh.
/> And what caused them to conduct a day-long survey of my insolvent schoolhouse two weeks ahead of asking me how much space it has.
Assuming it was a survey, which we don’t.
In short, we are here to shed a little healthy light on an increasingly perplexing experience, my dear Watson.
Only to discover that he has arrived on the scene too late. The troupe has packed up its props and costumes and moved on.
Next gig Vienna. Or Riyadh.
It is a well-worn dictum, and not only of the spy business, that you can tell who people are by what they throw away.
In a long moonlit bedroom, six bunk beds, slept in and abandoned. No pillows, sheets or blankets. Bring your sleeping bag.
Spread round the beds, the sort of waste the rich leave for the maid—to use, dear, or to give to somebody you like.
A can of fashionable men’s deodorant, half full. One of the Mormons? An anorak? A suit? A blazer?
Unisex hair spray. Richard?
A pair of Italian court shoes that weren’t comfortable after all. Tights, lightly snagged. A high-necked silk blouse left hanging in a wardrobe. The aseptic blonde? Her chastity kit?
Three-quarters of a liter of good Scotch. For Dimitri, to mix with his soy milk?
A six-pack of Beck’s beer, two left. A part-used carton of Marlboro Lights. An ashtray full of stubs. Angelo? Sven? Richard? You’d think all three had sworn on their mothers’ knees never to touch nicotine or liquor.
Or is Ted Mundy, supersleuth, chasing his usual wild goose? Has a new crowd moved in here since the old one left, and I’m reading the wrong entrails?
Mundy gropes his way along a corridor, descends a couple of steps and makes a soft landing in carpet. There are no windows. He pats the walls around him and discovers a light switch. Billionaire philanthropists don’t bother to switch off the power when they leave. He is standing opposite the door to Richard’s office. He steps inside, half expecting to see Richard with his new haircut sitting at his brand-new desk, dressed in his brand-new blazer and airline steward’s tie, but the desk is all that remains of him.
Absolute Friends Page 31