Back Up

by Paul Colize

  He paused for a moment.

  ‘If ever you do want to talk to me one day, you should know that I’m your friend. I’ll listen, I’ll answer your questions, and whatever you say will be between you and me.’

  The man stared at him with sustained concentration.

  ‘Okay? If you want to talk to me one day, if you have something to say or something you want to ask, you can count on me. I give you my word. Deal, my friend?’

  X Midi closed his eyes, kept them shut for a moment, then opened them again.

  Dominique stood up and left his field of vision.

  45: TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

  We were together from that moment on. Mary rented a small attic room in a smart townhouse in Kensington, on Argyll Road, not far from Holland Park. The owner was an old acquaintance of her mother, a long-time widow, and half deaf. She tolerated Mary’s vocal exercises, her nocturnal comings and goings, feeling her way along the hall in the small hours. But she couldn’t allow Mary to bring a man into her home. Mary went to fetch a few things, and stored them in my room: sheet music, a wash bag, clothes.

  Brian didn’t like her. The day after we met, he came to find me and said he knew her reputation, she was a whore, she’d sleep with anyone, and I should watch out. I thanked him for the warning. I would watch out. I was on my guard.

  A fortnight later, Brian erupted again. It was a Sunday morning. Sonny and I were eating breakfast in the bay window. Mary had just gone out.

  It was a beautiful winter morning. The sunshine was dazzling. Sonny and I squinted in the bright light. He sat opposite me, smiling. The coffee burned my palate. I was happy. Mary and I were in love.

  Brian came downstairs and began to holler.

  His house wasn’t a hotel, let alone a brothel, he’d had enough of hearing my whore squealing like a sow all night, and he didn’t want me to spend another day under his roof. If I wanted to waste my time with that silly bitch I would have to go fuck her somewhere else.

  I was dumbstruck, impotent, incapable of responding to his violent outburst.

  I wanted to find the right words, to defend Mary’s reputation, tell Brian he had gone too far, but I was speechless.

  Sonny could tell I was reeling from the blow. He got to his feet and came to my defence. Brian was exaggerating, he was rude and ungrateful. He was cashing in on the people we brought back every night, we’d made his cellar one of the hippest places in London, I’d played with Clapton, the least he could do was to leave me in peace and let me fuck whoever I wanted.

  Brian refused to calm down. Quite the opposite, in fact. He reeled off a paean of praise to his own altruism and generosity. He was housing ten people at his own expense and no one had offered to contribute a penny, not even the ones with paid jobs, like the two parasites we were.

  Voices were raised.

  I sat and listened, unsure what to do.

  Sonny wasn’t stopping there. They were screaming at one another now. They spoke fast, and shouted. I didn’t understand it all.

  Brian was furious. Just because Sonny’s father was screwing half the Cabinet didn’t mean he could do what the hell he liked.

  Sonny broke off in mid-sentence.

  I watched as his face turned white.

  His lips trembled.

  I stood up and walked straight over to Brian. His eyes widened.

  I threw a punch that sent him reeling to the other end of the room. He staggered backwards, clutching his nose, and crashed into the bookcase, sending books clattering down around him.

  Sonny stood frozen in the middle of the room, tears in his eyes.

  I took him by the shoulder. He was deeply hurt. I hugged him tight, cradling him like an unhappy child. I tried to comfort him as best I could. We’d go see the Easy Beats at the Upper Cut that evening. Brian was just a poor rich kid who didn’t feel comfortable in his own skin, he was talking rubbish, I hadn’t understood a word. We’d have fun, we’d get pissed and swallow tons of pills. Your harmonica will sing and we’ll play till the end of the night.

  46: AN UNLIKELY SCENARIO

  No sooner had the previously unseen connection jumped out at him than Michael Stern grabbed the telephone and dialled the number for the Yoyo bar, the club where Pearl Harbor had played from Sunday, January the second, 1966 (the start of their contract) to Monday, March the thirteenth, 1967 (the date of their final show).

  An employee answered that the boss had gone to Frankfurt for the weekend and wouldn’t be back in Berlin until the following Monday, late afternoon.

  Stern promised to call back, and continued his enquiries by contacting the shop-keeper on the ground floor of the four men’s apartment building. There was no answer; the store was clearly shut at this late hour.

  Nothing for it but to bide his time and call back on Monday afternoon.

  The boss of the Yoyo bar confirmed that the musicians had kept all their dates, every night. No one had failed to show in the final weeks, right up to the day they asked for last-minute leave and never came back.

  The grocer was more irascible. He couldn’t talk, there were people in the shop and he had no recollection of the musicians’ comings and goings in the days prior to their deaths. He repeated what he had told Stern in person, during his visit to Berlin.

  When Stern said he wanted to talk to the tenant on the sixth floor, he was told she had no telephone and rarely went out. She suffered with rheumatism and was unable to make her way down six floors without a great deal of pain.

  Stern suggested they arrange a time to call, and asked the grocer to help the woman down to the telephone on the ground floor. Sensing the other’s reluctance, he explained that he was making progress with his investigation, that this was clearly a case of multiple murder and that her testimony could be decisive.

  Later that afternoon, he telephoned at the appointed time and managed to question the lady. He muttered a few words in German and succeeded in making himself understood. She reiterated what she had told to him to his face. Shortly before the four men’s deaths, one of them had stayed in the apartment for an entire evening. She had heard him walking about. She heard his coughing fits, and the sound of him retching and throwing up.

  But she was unable to give a precise date.

  Stern tried to refresh her memory by asking questions about her own activities that day. He suggested clues. What had she eaten? Had anyone come to visit? How had she spent the evening?

  Tentatively, she remembered comparing the vomiting she could hear upstairs to a medical column she had been reading in Der Spiegel. The article reported that Germans ate too much fat at breakfast.

  The magazine was delivered on Tuesdays, she said, and she always spent the evening reading it.

  A quick call to the magazine established that the article in question appeared under the headline ‘Reiner Tisch’, that it had been written by a staff writer covering health issues and that it had appeared in the twelfth edition of that year. The news weekly had gone on sale on Monday, March the thirteenth. Subscribers would receive it the following day.

  This meant the woman had heard the noises overhead on the evening of Tuesday, March the fourteenth, 1967.

  Stern concluded that one of the four hadn’t taken part in the recording, but had stayed at home feeling ill, perhaps with a stomach complaint.

  The detail was of secondary importance, but it indicated that if the group had indeed been witness to some dark goings-on, only three of them should have been killed.

  Stern read his notes one more time and tried to identify who had been absent from the recording. He called Birgit, Jim Ruskin’s girlfriend, and asked her to help him make sense of the puzzle by reconstructing the group’s movements.

  Ruskin had spent the evening of Wednesday, the fifteenth of March at Birgit’s apartment, as he had done on Thursday the sixteenth, Friday the seventeenth, and Saturday the eighteenth, when the group had stopped working and taken their leave. Jim had stayed with her on all four nights, but she had
asked him to go home on Sunday evening, saying she was tired and would be going back to work the next morning.

  Michael Stern noted the information and made his deductions.

  The recording had taken place on Tuesday, the fourteenth of March, 1967. Only three of the four musicians had taken part. The fourth had stayed at their apartment, feeling ill. On Wednesday, the fifteenth of March, Jim had slept at Birgit’s, but the other three had slept in their own beds. The same was true of Thursday, the sixteenth.

  On Friday, the seventeenth of March, Steve Parker had taken the late morning train to Hamburg. Larry Finch and Paul McDonald had stayed in the apartment. On Saturday, the eighteenth, Larry Finch and Paul McDonald had left for Majorca and London respectively.

  That night, Saturday, the eighteenth of March, the apartment was empty. Jim Ruskin came back alone on Sunday evening. His presence was confirmed by the grocer, who had woken him up towards the end of Monday morning.

  Stern examined his notes.

  They looked like a logic problem from his early years as a student.

  He sketched a table, inserted the names of the four men across the top of the columns and assigned a date to each line, then filled in the information he had gathered, noting where each person was reported to have been.

  The document was peppered with question marks.

  Who had stayed at the apartment on the night of the recording? And why was that person dead? If he hadn’t taken part in the recording, why was he, too, in possession of a large sum of money?

  He couldn’t exclude the possibility that someone from outside the group had been in the apartment that evening. But that seemed an unlikely scenario.

  47: FIND A JOB

  Brian had suffered a broken nose. He left to get treatment. When he came back, nothing more was said. That night, Mary slept with me, we made love and she cried out even louder than usual.

  Apart from that, we spoke little. We were both naturally reserved.

  She sang to exorcise the things she didn’t say. The words of her songs expressed her distress, her anger, her dashed hopes. Her couplets railed against abandonment, violence, servility and the childhood she never had.

  I did the same on the drums, my own form of words. I thrashed with my sticks to forget the fear I felt at the madness I was being drawn into.

  We drank until we were sick. We started again next morning with a few harmless beers, and wine. Late in the evening, we drank spirits. We smoked grass and used amphetamines to keep going.

  On her return to London, Mary had taken heroin and sang its praises to me. She dreamed of taking it again, of initiating me, but we didn’t have enough money.

  I didn’t tell her that I had been putting money aside. I didn’t want anything to do with the stuff. Since Paris, I associated it with rape, misery and death.

  The image of Floriane, trapped between the two men, her arm outstretched, continued to haunt me.

  We would spend long hours stretched out beside one another on the bed, churning our thoughts without exchanging a word. We listened to one another’s breathing, or to The Stones, or the noises circulating in the house. When the silence became too heavy, we made love.

  We spent New Year’s Eve in my room. Our haven. Mary was celebrating her twentieth birthday. The house was quiet.

  In the street, people laughed and shouted and whistled. Cars drove by faster than usual. We heard the cacophony of horns, and the crackle of fireworks in the distance.

  We made love until we gasped for breath.

  In the small hours, I told her I loved her. The words sounded strange in my mouth. I heard them over and over again in songs, but I was speaking them for the first time.

  She said nothing. She took me in her arms and held me there for a long time. She seemed thoughtful.

  After a while, she drew a deep breath and told me she had been pregnant.

  A few weeks after their wedding, she and her husband had invited one of his friends over for dinner. They had eaten, laughed and drunk themselves crazy. At the end of the evening, they had all screwed. It wasn’t unpleasurable, but she thought it was a one-off, a chance occurrence. It happened again the following week, and again after that. He was insatiable. He brought other men back, people she didn’t know. Sometimes three in one evening.

  One day, she was late. Her period didn’t come. She went to see her doctor and he told her she was pregnant. She left her husband and got an abortion in London.

  No one knew about this. I was the only person she had ever dared tell.

  Her confession didn’t change my feelings, but something had broken inside her.

  A few days later she told me she was leaving for Berlin. A German night club agent had been sent to London to look for new artists.

  He had seen her singing with the Frames. The same evening, he had offered them a three-month contract with a fashionable club. The deal included food, bed and board and a salary to boot.

  They had all accepted, apart from the bass player. The German said he would find a replacement in Berlin. He took Mary to one side. So long as the singer came, everything was fine.

  I told Mary I didn’t want to be without her, and would come too.

  She flew off the handle. Three months was nothing, I wasn’t being reasonable, I had a job, I had friends, my passion, there was nothing for me in Berlin, the three months would soon go by.

  I insisted. I would find a job, even if I had to serve in a bar, clean windows, deliver newspapers or sweep the pavement. Perhaps I would find work as a drummer. So many groups played in the big cities in Germany.

  She stared at me, shrugged her right shoulder, just the one, and nodded.

  I was stubborn. I could do whatever I liked.

  I needed new papers to leave England and travel to a city like Berlin. I had enough money to buy them. I went back to the restaurant on the Clerkenwell Road, ordered the dish of the day and gave the waiter the password.

  In the back room, I put my money on the table and said I needed the papers that week.

  Three days later, they were ready. I was Jacques Berger, a Canadian citizen, single, born in Quebec on March the sixth, 1946.

  The remaining members of the Frames were not happy to have me along. I had played with them in the cellar from time to time, but they seemed unhappy to have me with them in Berlin. They also knew full well their contract depended on Mary and that without her, they would have nothing.

  We left London on January the fifteenth, 1967, destination Berlin. The other members of the band ignored me, except to say they hoped I would find a job.

  48: HE’LL ONLY TALK TO YOU

  On Monday, November the fifteenth, Dominique arrived at the clinic at around 7:00a.m.

  As usual, he walked through the lobby, called out a greeting to all present and headed for the cloakrooms, skipping a dance step or two along the way.

  One of the night nurses was sitting in the rest area, her head in her hands. She looked deeply concerned.

  ‘Michèle? How come you’re still here?’

  The nurse looked exhausted.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  Dominique laughed out loud.

  ‘Waiting for me? Must be my lucky day! Watch out, Michèle, you’re a happily married lady with two children!’

  ‘I’m not joking, Dominique. X Midi had a bad turn last night.’

  Dominique’s smile disappeared.

  ‘How bad? He’s not––’

  ‘No, his condition’s stable now.’

  ‘What happened?’

  The nurse glanced out of the window.

  There had been torrential rain all weekend. Several rivers had burst their banks. The rising water had brought serious flooding. A number of towns and villages were badly affected. Hundreds of homes had been evacuated. Fallen trees and mudslides had blocked roads and caused severe disruption to rail traffic.

  On Saturday afternoon, the country’s emergency response plan had been activated. Fire and rescue cre
ws had worked day and night. On Sunday morning, the army and Red Cross had been called out to provide support.

  She sighed.

  ‘It’s been one hell of a weekend. Apocalyptic! The Tubize Clinic was hit by lightning – the basement was flooded and their electricity cut out. The residents had to be transferred elsewhere. The patients here saw it all on TV, you can imagine the panic. They were traumatised. We were dealing with anxiety attacks one after the other. Things have calmed down now, thank goodness.’

  ‘You should have called me; I’d have come in.’

  She dismissed the suggestion with a wave of her hand.

  ‘We’ve seen worse. Let’s go out for a minute, I need a smoke. We can talk outside.’

  She pulled on her coat. Dominique put his jacket back on and followed her out into the car park.

  ‘You should stop smoking.’

  ‘So you’ve told me a thousand times.’

  ‘What happened with X Midi?’

  She dragged on her cigarette, inhaled the smoke, held it for a moment in her lungs, then breathed it out.

  ‘Last night, about 9:00p.m. The TV volume shot up in his room. I went to look. There was no one else there, but he had the remote control in his hand.’

  Dominique frowned.

  ‘He knows how to use it, but he’s only done it once.’

  ‘So I thought. He turned the sound up as far as it would go.’

  ‘Did he do it on purpose?’

  ‘I’m sure he did. He was motionless, but his hands were shaking, he was drooling, he was making rattling, groaning noises, and he stared at me very hard.’

  She lit a second cigarette from the stub of the first.

  ‘I checked his blood pressure and pulse. His heart was racing. He was sweating. I called the duty doctor. He said he was having an anxiety attack and gave him Valium.’

  ‘Did he calm down?’

  ‘No. That’s what was surprising. It didn’t seem to have any effect on him. Either he’s a force of nature, or he’s been dependent on Valium in the past. The doc waited for half an hour, but he was still agitated. He injected another dose after forty-five minutes.’