Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “Well fuck you,” it said in the accents of pure Brooklyn, and flounced away.

  Thad carefully stepped over rolling champagne bottles and advanced a little way into the hall. By the entrance to the crowded drawing room, Fabian greeted him.

  “Thad—you’re late. Lewis just called from the airport…” Fabian rummaged in his pockets, swaying a little on his feet, and finally drew out a piece of paper on which an address was scrawled. “He and Helen have split. They’re going to London. He said to give you this. He’ll call you tomorrow…”

  “Oh, fine…” Thad nodded absentmindedly, and Fabian weaved away. Thad put the piece of paper into his pocket. He looked around him and sighed. If this was an orgy, it was boring. He had just decided to make himself some tea in the kitchen, and then go to bed, when, looking across the huge space of the hall, and past the throng of people, he saw someone he recognized. He paused, and then, shouldering his cases, trotted across the space dividing them.

  The man was standing in the doorway of Prince Raphael’s library. He was wearing a black three-piece suit of funereal elegance, just as he had been on the two previous occasions when Thad had glimpsed him. His face, as he looked out across the hall, was filled with a cold distaste. The library behind him was empty—a state of affairs that Thad, looking at him appreciatively, could guess was no accident.

  Thad puffed to a halt in front of him, and the man, who was very tall, looked down on Thad, who was five feet two, as an eagle might look down at a slug. Thad waited patiently. Gradually, as he had expected, he saw recognition dawn way back in the dark blue eyes. The man had never seen Thad before, of course, but Thad felt reasonably certain that, if he had gotten this far, the man would have been furnished with a description that was all too recognizable.

  The man stepped back into the library without a word. Thad silently followed him, shut the door, and—on consideration—locked it.

  The library had ceiling frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli, and, at intervals between the bookcases, a series of bronzes by Benvenuto Cellini which had been in Prince Raphael’s family for sixteen generations. The beautiful books, many of them of great antiquity, bound in calf, and tooled with the family arms in gold, were, in the main, of pornography, of which—like his father and grandfather before him—Prince Raphael was an internationally celebrated collector. Thad’s eyes flicked up to the frescoes, passed along the Cellini bronzes, along the serried ranks of books, and came to rest on the man who stood now before the carved marble mantelpiece. Thad did not know his name.

  Next to him, on the floor, Thad observed something the man had apparently brought with him: a large Gladstone bag, fashioned from maroon crocodile skin. Thad looked from the bag to the man, then back again, slightly puzzled. The one so austere, the other so flamboyant; he would not have expected this man to carry this bag.

  Thad, whose smell for power was acute, watched the man, and waited. Since he could tell the man was expecting him to speak, he said nothing. He had a fairly good idea of why the man was here, and he felt a quiet interest in how he would conduct himself. He wouldn’t shout, or bluster, or make a scene—Thad was sure of that, and he was right. After waiting a few moments, with no sign of discomposure, the man spoke in a clear even voice, in English, with only the very slightest trace of a French accent.

  “Where is she?”

  Thad put down his cases.

  “Helen Craig?” His voice squeaked a little, as it often did when he was excited. He had wondered if the man knew her by that name, and whether Helen had told him the same lies she had told Thad, or different ones. But he had no way of telling from the man’s reaction; not a muscle moved in his face. Thad, who had observed this man twice before—without ever mentioning that fact to Lewis or Helen—examined his face with interest. He had not looked so expressionless those times. Now the man nodded, quickly, curtly.

  “She just left,” Thad said with a little giggle. He waited a beat to prolong the suspense. “With Lewis.”

  The man gave him a long cold look. Thad was impressed. Under the force of that stare, lesser men than he would have shriveled. Certainly started talking. Thad did no such thing. He waited, and after a moment, the man turned, with a quick dismissive gesture, and walked toward the door. Thad moved across the room, and sat down, settling his weight on the silk moiré cushions of an elaborately carved gilt couch. He waited until the man had reached the door, and then he said, “I can tell you where they’ve gone.”

  He didn’t look around, but he knew the man was hesitating, that he wanted to walk out and shut the door on Thad forever. Thad waited philosophically: if he walked out, he walked out. He looked the kind who would, and besides, if he’d traced her this far, he’d probably have no trouble tracing her farther. Lewis was a fool, Thad thought, picking his nose reflectively. After that Englishman had turned up at the Café Strasbourg asking questions, Lewis had been nervous. But sooner or later Lewis would get tired of being careful. So, the guy could leave, no sweat—it was just that Thad hoped he wouldn’t. He surreptitiously transferred the substance he had removed from his nose to the underside of the silk cushion. The man turned around, and walked back to him. They looked at each other once more, and this time, Thad thought, the man got his measure more accurately.

  Thad smiled. “You’re not her father, right? That guy at the Strasbourg, he wasn’t her brother?”

  “No.”

  Thad shrugged. “Oh, well. She told me some story, you know, and it seemed to fit. But I didn’t really believe it. It was—well—crappy.” He paused. “You want to tell me all about it?”

  “I don’t think I want, or need, to tell you anything at all.”

  “That’s okay.” Thad smiled again benignly. “I don’t care. I’ll tell you where they’ve gone anyway. But first—let me tell you about the movie. About Helen and the movie.”

  The man stood very still, and Thad, leaning back on the cushions, began to talk. He talked rapidly for some five minutes, during which the man never interrupted him once. What he had to say seemed simple, for the plot of Night Game was simple: two men, one woman, the eternal triangle. The men began as friends and ended as rivals. The woman survived; the two men were less fortunate—one ended up dead, killed by the other. At the beginning of the film, the woman seemed the quarry, the men the hunters. By its end, possibly, these roles were reversed. “It’s a comedy,” Thad finished helpfully.

  “It sounds most amusing.”

  “It’s called Night Game. Every scene takes place in daylight—it’s the people who are in the dark.” Thad paused. “Well, most people are, don’t you think? I find that funny.”

  He had caught the man’s attention now. He was looking at Thad thoughtfully.

  “Not tragic?”

  Thad grinned. “Oh, sure. Tragic and funny. Both at the same time. Like life.”

  The man’s mouth tightened. “You’re wasting my time…” He started to turn away.

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” Thad’s voice was humble. “You see, I got the idea for the movie after I saw you.”

  The man stopped then, as Thad had known he would, and turned slowly back. He looked at Thad with contempt.

  “We’ve never met, until now.”

  “Oh, not met, no. But I’ve seen you twice—it was just that you didn’t see me.” Thad giggled. “I saw you with Helen in Paris. You took her back to the Café Strasbourg one time, and you picked her up there the next evening. She said nothing about it the first time, so I knew it was important. Helen never talks about the things that matter to her—not to me and Lewis anyway. I like that. Her being secretive. It’s good. Lewis doesn’t understand it, of course. Isn’t even aware of it. But then, Lewis is naive, you know. Gab gab gab. Lewis gives it all away…”

  “Come to the point.”

  “All right. The point is, when Helen took off for those weeks, I guessed she’d be with you. She was, wasn’t she? And that was funny—because Lewis was really broken up, really worried. He thought she wo
uldn’t come back, you see. I didn’t say anything. But then I knew she would. So I just, you know, waited.” Thad paused. “I never mind waiting. It’s a gift I have, being patient.”

  “My own patience is less extensive. It’s beginning to run out. Come to the point.”

  “The point is…” Thad smiled imperturbably. “You’ve been looking for Helen—I’m right, aren’t I? Now you think you’ve found her. Well, you haven’t. I have. Because I understand her. I know her.” He looked up, modestly. “If you still want to locate her, I can give you an address in London, and you can go there. But it won’t do any good. If you really want to find her—you’ll find her in this movie. This one, and the other ones she’s going to make. With me.”

  There was a long silence. Thad, who thrived on tension, eyed Edouard with respect; it was nice to play games with another master. He wondered if the man would make the mistake—the easy mistake—of being dismissive.

  Edouard, looking at the fat and slightly ridiculous figure of Thad, was tempted—not to lose his temper, he was not that foolish—but to reject him and what he said, yes, he was tempted by that. A small fat ugly and conceited man; a poseur; a fool. He was tempted to think that, and to say it. But he could feel the force of Thad’s will, and that force he never underestimated. He looked at Thad quietly, giving himself time to think ahead as he would in a chess game, looking for his opponent’s weakness. The conceit, he thought finally. The fat man had been unable to resist the temptation of making a strong dramatic move, an aggressive move, a bishop moving in a deep diagonal across the board, or the queen, perhaps, brought early into play. Edouard decided on a classic defensive response: the small, apparently irrelevant moving of a pawn. One square.

  “I don’t understand.” He allowed emotion to come into his voice. “It’s not possible. I thought I knew her.”

  “Well, you would, I guess. You think you love her, right?” the fat man sounded both pitying and complacent.

  Good, thought Edouard. He loathed to do it, but he nodded.

  The fat man seemed pleased. He stood up and shifted about from foot to foot. “You see, you did know her in a way. A bit of her…” He jiggled the change in his pockets, then, as he grew more excited, and his voice rose, he took his hands out and waved them, two pudgy pink paws, in the air. “She does that, I’ve watched her. She gives pieces of herself to people. She doesn’t know who she is yet, and she’s frightened, so she gives just a bit here, a bit there, testing, you know, waiting for the reaction, and then, when she thinks she’s given away too much, she gets afraid. Then she tells a lie. It’s all self-protection. She’s getting good at it, and she knows it. She told me some really big lies. She told other ones to Lewis. I expect she lied to you. You shouldn’t mind. It doesn’t matter. She only does it out of fear. Like, she can see she has this incredible effect on people, especially men, and she doesn’t understand it. She thinks if they knew her, really knew her, the girl behind the face, they might not want her. They might reject her. She’s really insecure, you know? Something happened, I guess, in her childhood…”

  Edouard listened to this outburst attentively. Beneath the banality of the speech, he sensed intuition, and sensed it to be sharp. Another little move, he thought. The fat man would now need little prompting. Edouard merely sighed and bent his head; it was enough.

  “I’ve met women like her before…” Thad waved his hands. “Not as beautiful, maybe, but it’s the same syndrome. That’s why I knew she was right, the moment I saw her. I knew she’d come across on film. It’s in the eyes, maybe—like, she hardly moves, and the eyes talk to the camera. My camera. Because I know where to look for it, how to bring it out. She tells my camera the truth. Everything. No lies. She stops being afraid, and she gives herself to it—really. Like sex. I mean it. She’d be good in anybody’s movies, but my movies will make her a star. More than a star. A legend.”

  Edouard looked up. Thad’s hands were clasped together, his plump face looked triumphant. Edouard, loathing him at that moment, thought him unbalanced, a little mad, but nonetheless frightening. Then he feared for Hélène.

  “You think that’s what she wants?”

  He put the question coldly, but Thaddeus Angelini was by then beyond caution.

  “She doesn’t know what she wants, not yet. She’ll know when she sees this movie. Or maybe the next one. She’ll realize that that’s where she is—on celluloid.” Thad paused, looked back at Edouard pityingly. “You shouldn’t mind that she left, you know. I expect it was real for her, in a way. It was just bad timing. She always wanted to act, right back from the time she was a little kid. She told me that, and I believed her. It’s just something she knows she’s got to do. It’s a really heavy thing for her—like, you know, her destiny. If you’d met her later, it might have been different.”

  “Why?”

  Thad looked impatient. “Well, she’s a woman. Sooner or later, she’ll start thinking about love, and marriage, and having babies. She’ll have her career by then, she’ll be a star, and then she’ll decide she isn’t truly fulfilled, you know? That she needs something more. It’s all bullshit, of course. But women are like that—she’ll convince herself, she’ll believe it. If you came along then, who knows? You might get lucky.” He shrugged. “You’d still get hurt in the end though. She doesn’t really need any of that stuff, you see, and eventually she’ll realize it. What Helen needs, really needs, only I can give her…”

  “And what’s that?”

  Thad giggled. “Immortality.”

  Checkmate, Edouard thought—he thinks it’s checkmate. He looked at Thad, at the small eyes glinting behind the shaded glasses. He smiled.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said firmly.

  Thad looked a little taken aback by the simplicity of the statement, but he rallied quickly.

  “You think I’m wrong about the timing?”

  “I think you may be right about the timing. I think you’re wrong about the result. I think you underestimate women. I think you underestimate Hélène.” Edouard paused. “People, too, perhaps. The things you dismiss so easily—love, fulfillment, marriage, children—don’t most people, men and women, need them?”

  Thad hesitated. He put his hands back into his pockets and jiggled his keys. He looked down at his feet, then up again at Edouard, craftily.

  “I don’t need them.”

  “You’re saying you’re less than human.”

  “Or more than human.” Thad smiled.

  Edouard looked at him coolly; he was thinking that the fat man probably meant what he said, and that if he did, the deficiency would show up in his films, eventually. He turned away to the door, and Thad, after a moment’s pause, hastened after him.

  “You want this address or not?” He brandished the slip of paper. Edouard glanced down at it, then away.

  “Thank you. I don’t need it.”

  He had reached the door, which he unlocked. Thad put the piece of paper back into his pocket.

  “Let me guess—you’re going to London, right?”

  Edouard turned, and saw that the fat man was still smiling amiably.

  “London? After all you’ve told me? All you’ve explained? No. I shall return to Paris.”

  Thad looked at Edouard suspiciously. “You mean you’re not going to contact Helen at all?”

  “I am not going to contact her, no.”

  “You want me to give her a message or anything?”

  “Hélène and I do not need messengers.”

  This was said with calculated hauteur, and the fat man frowned.

  “Why d’you keep calling her Hélène?”

  “Because it’s her true name,” Edouard said. Then he walked out, and closed the door quietly behind him.

  Thad stared at the door irritably. He disliked others to have the exit line. He savored the prospect of going after the man, achieving the final word, and then rejected the idea. He prowled back into the room and saw that the maroon crocodile bag bore the initi
als H.C. He gave it a savage kick. After a while, he sat down on the couch again.

  The man was probably bluffing, he thought, consoling himself. He was quite a good actor, had a lot of self-control, that was all. And that suit helped: Thad had observed the suit with interest. He himself could learn from that suit, he decided. Not from the man, because he was wrong, misguided, in the dark—as most men were where women were concerned.

  He took off his spectacles, panted on them, and polished them on his sleeve. Without his glasses, Thad was acutely myopic: the huge room, the frescoes, the books, the bronzes, instantly blurred.

  He leaned back on the cushions, aware that he was a little edgy, a little disconcerted, something he rarely felt. And for the second time that day too. First because of Helen; now because of this man. He allowed himself, briefly, to think of the scene that had taken place at the house in Trastevere: the memory filled him with a hot, angry mortification. It had not gone as he intended; the interview with the man had not gone entirely as he intended, either. Both the man and Helen had, in some way, eluded him: he had felt the lasso of his will start to tighten around them, and then—then they had managed to slip free. It was as if they knew something, understood something that Thad himself did not know or understand, and that knowledge gave them a quiet combative power that had thwarted him. It would not always be so, Thad decided.

  His gaze flicked up at the volumes of elegantly bound pornography, which he had investigated, in a desultory fashion, some weeks before. Pornography bored him. Its increasingly obscene devices seemed to Thad desperate, pathetic, and always destined to fail. Metaphors for possession, that was all. His face took on a sneering expression. Sexual possession seemed to Thad innately trivial: it was not the possession of which he dreamed; its posturings did not make his pulse beat faster.

  Art, now. Art was different. Art was the ultimate possession. He turned his mind back, with pleasure, to the film he had just made. He let it loop through his mind, sequence by sequence, frame by frame: exact, beautiful, potentially perfect; his movie, his creation, his immortal child. He felt immediately calmed, as he always did at such moments; it was an Olympian calm, the calm of potency and absolute control. It made his body stir, and harden.