Back Up

by Paul Colize

  Stern wanted to know more. The guy directed him to another bartender, a fat guy with a bad-tempered look. The man listened for a moment, frowning in annoyance, then cut him short and asked why he was there. Stern had to shout to make himself heard. He explained he was a journalist, and outlined the main stages of his investigation.

  The man seemed uninterested. He wiped glasses while he listened to Stern, interrupting him frequently to serve other customers.

  When Stern had finished, the man said he couldn’t see how he or Jacques Berger could possibly be mixed up in this business. He told Stern that Berger had got himself a drumming gig with a band that had left for a tour in some far-flung place on the other side of the world. He didn’t know the group’s name.

  Stern knew the man was covering his friend’s tracks. He would get nothing further here. He left his card all the same and asked the barman to tell Berger to get in touch if ever he heard from him.

  Outside the club, he quickly scribbled the words ‘Mary’ and ‘Frames’ in his notebook.

  63: MY LAST IMAGE OF HER

  I returned to London on Wednesday night. Mary wasn’t at the flat. I hadn’t slept for three nights. We were playing at Ronnie Scott’s that very night and I needed to rest, if only for an hour or two. I was counting on my small stash of Pervitin pills to see me through.

  I thought Mary would come home, wake me up, and that we would go to the gig together. But Mary didn’t come back.

  I woke up the next day, around noon. I was confused. I had slept for over twelve hours. The light hurt my eyes. I felt I was returning from a long journey to a distant land, and rediscovering the real world.

  Mary was still not back, and I was overcome with anxiety. Suddenly, I realised the implications of what I had done. I had left without warning, I had taken our money and given her no choice in the matter. I had jeopardised the group. They must have scrambled to find a back-up drummer and keep our bookings.

  I called Bob, one of the guitarists. He cut me off angrily and hung up before I had spoken barely a couple of words.

  I should have gone to look for Mary straightaway. Things would have turned out differently. I sensed my absence had brought its share of consequences, but I refused to face reality. Naïvely, I thought things would become clear in time, that tensions would subside and the problems would be resolved in a matter of hours.

  I went to the record shop, and was greeted with a furious tirade. The manager gave me a warning, and a direct threat: next time I went AWOL I’d be fired immediately. I said I was sorry, and got to work. Sonny was there. He gave me a reassuring wink.

  The news from the War was discouraging, to say the least. The Egyptians had attacked an unarmed American ship and it was feared the US would join the fighting, on the Israeli side.

  While World War Three brewed, an endless stream of carefree London youth filed through the shop. One after another they came in and left with a copy of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, a syrupy single by a band called Procul Harum.

  At closing time, I put ‘A Day in the Life’ on one of the turntables. I listened right through to the end, as instructed by Gunther.

  When the reverberations of that final chord subsided, a twenty-second silence was interrupted by a kind of squeaking noise, followed by crackling, and the chatter of sing-song voices on a loop. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. It made me think of a stuck record, with the needle going round and round in the same groove. The sequence ended with something like forced laughter.

  I listened to it a few times, trying to decipher what was being said.

  I called Sonny and the other assistants over. One of the storeroom guys had sat in on the recording sessions and knew what it was all about. We clustered round, and for the first time, I heard about backmasking.

  The process involved inserting recorded sounds or words backwards. According to our colleague, John Lennon had discovered the technique by accident when manipulating tapes while he was high on dope.

  The Beatles had used it several times after that, adding phrases or noises, even running a guitar solo backwards on one song. It was just playing around, a favourite trick of their producer, George Martin.

  The technique used on ‘A Day in the Life’ was more complicated. The symphonic part was played by forty musicians from the Royal Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras. McCartney had asked them to play the lowest possible note on their instruments, and then to get to the highest note possible, in loosely defined stages over twenty-four bars.

  He said the mysterious final groove contained a hidden message, consisting partly of a reversed tape and partly of a whistle that was inaudible to humans but which could be picked up by dogs, to make them bark.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have found the conversation amusing, and intriguing. But now, the theory opened up disturbing possibilities.

  Was it possible to insert messages or sounds, inaudible to the human ear, which could be decoded by the human brain? Could the messages bypass the conscious mind, to reach our subconscious, and affect our behaviour?

  I returned to the apartment, my head full of puzzles and contradictory facts. A quick glance around told me that Mary had not been there all day.

  I panicked. I swallowed a couple of Pervitin and hurried over to Soho, to Ronnie Scott’s Club. The manager told me that last night’s concert had been cancelled due to my absence. The guys hadn’t found a replacement drummer, and Mary had disappeared.

  I made the rounds of our usual haunts, pushed doors, spoke to people who knew us. I must have looked half-crazed – I could read the fear and discomfort in the eyes of the people I questioned.

  Gradually, I learned that she had been seen with Gab, a Jamaican we hung out with from time to time. He had tried to sell us heroin on several occasions, and I had always refused.

  I knew where to find him. I went to his place. He lived in Brixton. A street drunk pointed out his pad, in a small, two-storey building on Angell Road.

  My nerves were raw. The door to the building yielded to a shove from my shoulder, and I raced upstairs. I knew he had a gun, like most dealers, and didn’t want to give him too much warning. I hammered on his door.

  He came to open it. He was bare-chested, and had hastily pulled on some jeans. His skin glistened with sweat. He had the distant gaze of a person sky-high on heroin. The gun was in his hand.

  He asked me what I wanted. I wanted to know where Mary was. I read the answer in his eyes. He sensed danger and tried to close the door, but I pushed on it with my full weight. It flew open and I hurried to the bedroom with Gab at my heels. He was hollering, thumping me from behind, threatening to shoot.

  Mary lay on a mattress at the back of the room. A threadbare cover did nothing to hide her nakedness. She seemed to be sleeping, but her eyes were open and she stared at me, without seeing me.

  The image of Floriane, in Paris, burst into my consciousness.

  I spun around to face Gab.

  He was pointing the gun at me.

  He fired. I felt the bullet enter my shoulder. I kept walking towards him. He had no time for a second shot. I tore the gun from his grasp, grabbed a fistful of his hair and slammed his face into the table. I saw red. I pulled him back to his feet. Still gripping him by the hair, I smashed his face against a wall, once, and then a second time. I heard his skull splinter, I saw his flesh torn open. My hands were red with his blood.

  When I had finished pummelling him, he was an inert mass, limp in my hands. I couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead. My shoulder didn’t hurt. It was pouring blood and my shirt was soaked.

  Mary was on her feet and watching the scene.

  She moved forward, naked, into the middle of the room. She walked like an automaton, her expression absent. She stared at me, then looked down at Gab, lying at my feet. She had reached the end of the road, the frontier of madness.

  Suddenly, she realised what had happened. He
eyes widened, she raised her hands to her mouth.

  My last image of her.

  64: MY DIGNITY

  The gunshot had alerted the neighbours. The wail of the sirens was intensifying. Brixton was a notorious area, and the police were never far away.

  I cursed Mary. I cursed her for betraying me. I cursed her for causing me to commit an irreparable act. I cursed her and I cursed me, too. It never occurred to me that the meth coursing in my veins was in large part responsible for my uncontrollable access of rage.

  Despite my feelings, I should have wrapped her in a blanket and carried her off on my shoulder, far, far from there. I should have spared her the suffering and harassment, the grief.

  My rage and fear got the better of me. I panicked and took to my heels.

  I wandered the streets until dawn. I hugged the façades of buildings and lurked in their shadow. I was disorientated. I was crying. I was drunk with rage. The pain had awoken and I suffered agonies in my shoulder. The Pervitin was still at work. I was supercharged, brimming with hatred. I wanted to attack the drunks I came across. I had to keep control, forced myself not to grab them by the neck and pummel them senseless, as I had done with Gab.

  Sunrise came early. It was almost the summer solstice. I made my way to Brian’s. I knew he kept a complete first-aid kit to hand. I rang the bell. He came to the door but wouldn’t let me in. I forced my way in, grabbed him by the neck of his dressing gown and forced him down to the cellar.

  He was squealing like a rat, begging me for mercy. I demanded he open the safe hidden at the back of the bar, behind the mirror. I took all the money. Brian was crying like a baby, shaking and drooling. He’d even pissed himself. I took a bottle and broke it over his head. He collapsed like a dead weight.

  I went back upstairs. I dressed my shoulder one-handed, as best I could. The entry wound was level with the top of my arm, but the bullet was lodged inside, against the bone. I emptied a box of antiseptic powder into the wound and applied a bandage. Each movement provoked a groan of pain.

  Next, I began looking for clean clothes, and dope.

  I swallowed dozens of pills and packed a few things I found lying in an unoccupied bedroom. Before leaving, I went down to the cellar. Brian was still lying unconscious, but his heart was beating and he was breathing. His eyes were rolled back and there was blood on his face.

  I felt a fresh surge of rage. I kicked and elbowed and knee’d the guitars, the drum kit and the amps. With my good hand, I took each of the bottles lined up on the shelves and hurled them across the room, breaking everything I could.

  When I climbed the stairs once more, a handful of guys were standing at the top, their faces tired and sleepy, but wide-eyed in terror. They said nothing, and made no attempt to go down to the cellar.

  Mid-morning, I burst into the restaurant on the Clerkenwell Road. It had just opened. I didn’t order the dish of the day. I gave the password to the server who came to greet me, and told him it was an emergency.

  He took me into the back room, where three men were seated at a table, reading the newspaper. I laid my identity papers and a wad of notes on the table. I told them I would need new papers by nightfall. I laid a second wad of notes beside the first and asked them to find me a doctor to extract the bullet lodged in my shoulder.

  They saw I meant business and didn’t try to negotiate. One of the men got to his feet, pocketed the money and told me to come back around midnight.

  I left the restaurant and visited several different pharmacies, to stock up on antiseptics, painkillers and bandages. I took refuge in the Underground for the rest of the day. I emerged from time to time, to go to a bar and change my bandages in the toilets.

  Little by little, the bleeding stopped, but the pain was still keen and I was worried the wound would become infected.

  In the early evening, I called Sonny. The police had come to the record shop and questioned everybody. The cops knew my identity – the one on my false ID. Sonny didn’t know what had happened, and hadn’t heard anything from Mary.

  I thanked him and hung up.

  I got my new papers that evening. From now on I was René Schnegg, a French citizen, born in the Alsatian city of Colmar, on July the thirty-first, 1945. They had found someone to treat my wound, too: a vet aged about sixty whose red-veined nose announced the extent of his alcohol dependency. He slipped on a pair of glasses, and a headlamp, administered a local anaesthetic and began digging about in my shoulder. The three Italians looked on, visibly wincing.

  He extracted the bullet and stitched the wound. It had damaged my shoulder, and he was doubtful whether a full recovery could be achieved without effective physiotherapy. I was likely to find certain movements difficult, he said.

  I was very far from imagining he would be proved right, and that I would never play the drums again.

  The Italians must have been satisfied with the money I had handed over: they let me use a room above the restaurant.

  I turned back and forth on the squeaky bed, incapable of sleep.

  Next day, I took the first train to Glasgow. Heathrow airport would be under surveillance and I would be stopped the instant I set foot in the place.

  I planned to fly to San Francisco, with a few stopovers to cover my tracks. My new ID reduced my risk of arrest, but for all I knew, I might be wanted for murder now, and would have to exercise the utmost caution.

  In Glasgow, I took a taxi to Prestwick airport and bought a ticket for Geneva. The flight left late in the afternoon. I curled up in a corner of the terminal and tried in vain to sleep.

  I was shaking with fever. An acute, throbbing pain pierced my shoulder.

  On arrival in Geneva I headed for the Pan Am desk to buy a ticket to New York. A poster caught my eye. It showed a close-up image of a saxophonist. A jazz festival was opening the following week, in Montreux.

  I changed my plans and took a train to Montreux. Two hours later, I reached my destination. I stepped down from the train.

  I was alone on the platform.

  And then the realisation struck. I had lost everything in the space of just a few hours: the woman I loved, my best friend, my identity, my dignity.

  65: THE MAN CLOSED HIS EYES

  It took Dominique almost a month to decipher the riddle X Midi had posed.

  CEM XL

  Without a singular stroke of luck, he might never have succeeded.

  Initially, he had focussed on the three first letters, thinking they might be an abbreviation. He had searched dozens of directories, hoping to find something that might correspond.

  CEM was listed, amongst other things (in French), as cours élémentaire moyen (a primary school grade), chef d’état-major, a business specialising in applied microwave technology, or an automatic classification algorithm.

  As for XL, Dominique was convinced the letters indicated ‘extra-large’.

  It was during a treatment session with another patient that it occurred to him the last two letters might mean something else.

  He had been asking the woman about her age, her career and where she came from. She replied that she came from Ixelles, and had spent most of her life there.

  At first, Dominique paid no attention, and made no connection with the coded letters. The possibility only struck him at the end of the session; he asked the woman to repeat the name of her home town.

  She did so, further noting that Ixelles is one of the nineteen municipalities of Greater Brussels and that it was often written simply as XL, even in certain official documents.

  In a flash, Dominique thought he saw the solution. X Midi wanted him to consult the carte d’état-major or land registry for the commune of Ixelles. A20P7 – the letters and numbers inscribed on his hand – were very likely references allowing him to locate a particular square on the map.

  He began hunting, but quickly gave up. Not only could he not find a carte d’état major, or a topographical map of Ixelles, but A20P7 corresponded to no map or GPS reference he could id
entify.

  De Rouck, the indispensable Brussels street map carried in every Bruxellois’ glove compartment before GPS came along, was of no help either.

  The second flash of inspiration was equally unexpected, following a death at the clinic.

  Dominique was in the clinic’s main office when staff from a local funeral parlour came to collect the body. Along with the documents for the transfer of the patient’s body, and the certificate from the commune where the burial would take place, was a paper indicating the grave plot:

  Cimetière de Verrewinkel

  125 avenue de la Chênaie, 1180 Brussels

  Allée 9, Pelouse 16, Emplacement 53.

  With the cipher A20P7 fixed firmly in his mind, Dominique had taken to poring over every combination of letters and numbers that came his way.

  He started visibly at the sight of the paper.

  X Midi had given the reference to a grave.

  The A and P corresponded to the cemetery’s pathways and greens. The theory fitted for CEM too. The man spoke English. Given his confused state and his evident difficulty manipulating the alphabet, he must have confused cimetière in French with the English cemetery. Which would also explain why he hadn’t attempted to complete the word.

  At the end of his shift, Dominique called the cemetery in Ixelles. The clerk confirmed that there was, not an Allée, but an Avenue 20 and a pelouse (or ‘green’) No.7. It lay on the east side of the cemetery, not far from the railway line, and contained a hundred tombs.

  Next day, Dominique entered X Midi’s room with none of the usual preliminaries.

  He sat on the bed without saying a word, and waited for the man to catch his eye.

  ‘Good morning, my friend.’

  The man stared at him in curiosity.

  ‘Would you like me to pay a visit to your green, No.7? On Avenue 20, in Ixelles cemetery?’

  The man’s eyes conveyed the same distressed appeal as when he had first given Dominique the message.