by Philip Kerr
‘What’s this? A joke? You know I couldn’t stand that woman.’
‘Oh, I think you’ll like this book, John. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s the most absorbing biography you’ll read all year. Especially chapters ten to thirty.’
‘Ah.’ He flicked open the book and tugged out one new 500-euro bill. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. God bless Mrs T. Thanks, Don. Without a credit card I’ve been paying for nearly everything with Bitcoin until now.’
‘Where do you get a hundred thousand euros in new bills anyway?’
‘You remember that trip I made to the Lahore Literary Festival? The French DGSE got me to do a job for them while I was there.’ He shrugged. ‘Can’t say any more than that.’ John grinned. His grin got even wider when he unscrewed the pen and emptied the five stones onto the marble worktop. ‘Thanks again, old sport.’
‘And the diamonds?’
‘I bought them in Amsterdam. I was going to have them set in a necklace for someone.’
‘For Orla?’
‘No,’ he said, quietly.
‘So,’ I said. ‘What happened to her? And don’t tell me you were cleaning the gun and it went off. Cleaning the kitchen I might believe, but not a 22 automatic. According to the cops she got it right between the eyes and probably while she was asleep. I’ve seen the pictures.’
‘Look, I’ll tell you the truth. About everything, Don, I promise. And then I’m going to ask you another big favour. But why don’t I show you around first? Take you to your room and let you unpack. You can see some of Bob Mechanic’s art collection. Then we’ll order in some sushi from Uchitomi. It’s Geneva’s number one Japanese takeout. And the best part is, it’s on Bob’s account. Now that you’re here at last I’m starting to feel hungry again.’
‘All right.’
I shrugged. I’ve never cared very much for modern art, by which I mean the sort of crap that wins the Turner Prize. The last twentieth-century artist I had any time for was David Hockney.
John walked me through some other rooms with modern art installations and pictures until we came into an otherwise empty conservatory that was dominated by a female version of Michelangelo’s greatest sculpture, David.
‘Who’s this? Davina, I suppose.’
‘This is another Perucchetti,’ explained John. ‘It’s half size and made of the same Carrera marble as the original.’
‘I always wondered who buys this kind of shit,’ I said. ‘I guess now I know.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘On the whole I prefer something with a little less novelty and a bit more original thought. You know – stuff that doesn’t need a whole catalogue and Waldemar Januszczak to explain it.’
‘Hmm. You could be right.’
The drawing room was dominated by a huge blue chandelier that looked like a sort of amoebic creature from a Men in Black movie. I had to admit that this was impressive, but couldn’t help but add that I wouldn’t care to try and dust it.
‘You know, I’d forgotten what a fucking philistine you are, old sport,’ said John.
‘That’s what I am, I guess. But then again, isn’t that why you used to pay me to write your books?’
‘Oh, I see.’ John grinned, patiently. ‘Now that I’m a wanted man you figure you can insult me with impunity, is that it?’
‘You’ve been doing it to me for years. And you’re going to have to get used to me telling you what a cunt you are, John. At the very least you’ll have to put up with it until you’ve explained what the fuck happened in Monaco. So why don’t you skip the Jay Jopling, White Cube tour of this absurdly impressive house and try to take this situation a bit more seriously? Out of respect for the person who just brought thirty grand’s worth of diamonds through customs for you. I’ve been very patient, John. But as you yourself pointed out on Skype I’m running quite a risk in helping you here. And I certainly didn’t come all this way to Geneva just to see Michelangelo’s David missing a dick and wearing a nice pair of tits. So let’s hear it: the undisputed truth or I swear I am leaving on a jetplane.’
‘You’re right, Don, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I just don’t know how to behave in this situation. I suppose I was trying to put on a brave face; to play the good host and make you feel welcome after coming all this way. Especially after the way things ended between us. Really, I’m so grateful you came. But I don’t know how to be myself. I’ve got quite a lot on my mind, old sport. It’s not easy to talk about any of this. Not easy at all. You hear me chattering away about fucking art but inside I’m mute with horror at what’s happened.’ He tapped his diaphragm and swallowed uncomfortably. ‘I have this persistent feeling of indigestion. Look, sit down. I’ll fetch another bottle and we’ll talk. I’ll talk. The fact is I haven’t talked to anyone since it happened. Since I arrived here in Geneva.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve just sat around in silence and stared at the walls, wondering what the fuck to do. I’m like a monk in this place.’
I sat down on a large cream sofa and raised my glass. ‘At least it’s a nice monastery.’
John went away to fetch a second bottle and I stood up and walked around the room. Photographs of Bob Mechanic and his family were arranged along the broad white piste that was the mantelpiece; in pride of place was what looked like a Grayson Perry vase featuring a series of obscene cuddly toys that resembled the children in the photographs. Grey-coloured faux fur throws were arranged neatly on a crescent of cream sofas, only they weren’t faux, they were real; the silver foxes who had worked closely with the interior decorator were doubtless glad to have given their lives to keep such a nice family warm on colder Geneva nights. In the centre of the crescent was a coffee table on which you could have dried a year’s entire crop of arabica beans.
How the other half live or, to be more accurate, the other 0.001 per cent. Were the rest of the Mechanic family crossing the Antarctic continent, too? If so it probably made a stimulating change from a summer in the Hamptons. It certainly made a change from Switzerland. Outside the window a lawn as big as a polo field led down to the lakeside and a stone quay. An American flag hung limply on a tall pole and a couple of swans were dozing in the sun. There wasn’t much happening on the shores of Lake Geneva, either. Then again that was why you lived on the shores of Lake Geneva. That was probably why they had built le jet d’eau; so something harmless could happen in Geneva, even if it was just a few people enduring the momentary discomfort of getting hit with the spray.
John came back in the room bearing another bottle of liquid gold.
‘“Things fall apart,”’ I said. ‘“The centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”’ I smiled and came back to the coffee table. ‘Although not in Switzerland.’
‘What’s that?’
‘With apologies to William Butler Yeats.’
‘I think I’d forgotten what a fucking lefty you are. Cheers.’
‘I’m only a lefty by your rough, bestial standards, John.’
He arranged fresh glasses on the table and poured the wine.
‘Old sport, I have the strangest feeling that any minute now, you’re going to give me a lecture about brotherly love and the cuckoo clock. Are you?’
‘I’m not the one the police are looking for, Mr Lime. Cheers.’
‘Is that really how you see me?’
‘Why not? You’ve always reminded me a little of Orson Welles.’
‘Don’t be so melodramatic. We’re friends, you and I. We’ve always done everything together. And when all this is over, when I’ve cleared my name, it will be just like it was before. Maybe not exactly like it was before. Orla won’t be there of course, and that’s a tragedy. She had her whole life before her, poor girl. Oh, I know you and she didn’t get on and I always regretted that. But she was a great woman and a wonderful wife and I really di
d love her, Don. In my own way. You mentioned Yeats and I suppose you could say she was my Maud Gonne. It’s true, I have a bad conscience about some things that happened between us – times when I didn’t behave as I ought to have done, that’s the real pain; then again, my conscience is not so bad, in the great scheme of things. I remember the first time I saw her. She was the centrefold in a magazine. I can’t remember the one but it might have been Playboy. As soon as I saw her picture I promised myself that I was going to marry her and I did.’
He paused for a moment as something welled up from deep inside him and then two tears that were full of white wine and self-pity trickled down the sides of his broad nose, and his big shoulders started to shake as if there was something almost seismic about what was happening to him; it was nothing less than a tsunami of grief.
For a moment he wept without a sound, his face a grey, Guernican rictus of agony and bereavement which reminded me of Michael Corleone’s silent scream of agony at the end of Godfather 3 when he has seen his beloved daughter Mary murdered on the steps of the Palermo Opera House. It was painful to watch, much more painful than I might have expected.
There’s something about another man’s tears that’s more awful than a woman’s. In Northern Ireland there had been several occasions when I’d seen the boys from my platoon crying – I wept myself after the Warrenpoint ambush. Nothing wrong with that. No one is unmanned by tears. Mostly you just sat it out in the Bulldog, waited for them to finish – if there was time – and then never mentioned it again. Not ever. That was it, done, and it was all right. This was all right, too – it was all right because as I watched John weep his heart out in front of me I knew he couldn’t have murdered his wife. Not him. Not in a thousand years.
JOHN HOUSTON’S STORY
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
After publishing more than one hundred books you might be forgiven for thinking I’d know how to begin a story, but with this one I’m not at all sure how or where. I’ve always believed that a bad beginning makes a bad ending. You know me, Don: I like to start with a title and a great first line – something that really arrests you. I think my favourite first line in all literature must be ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ Christ, I wish I could write something as simple but as good as that.
I suppose I could start from the moment you and I last saw each other, old sport, in the Aston on the French autoroute, when I told you that I was shutting down the atelier; but I could as easily start a few weeks after that, from the moment when I arrived in Geneva for the first time, to begin writing The Geneva Convention – which was before Orla’s murder – because it seems to me now that a number of strange things happened to me here in Switzerland that could be easily connected with her death. Then again if this was film noir I’d probably begin the story in medias res, as Horace has it – with the night of her death. You know? The poor husband comes back home in the wee small hours to find his wife dead. Now that’s what I call a cold opening. Except that I didn’t find her dead when I came home. Not exactly. When I came home I thought Orla was asleep. She was in bed and it was dark after all; and I had good reason not to want to wake her. The plain fact of the matter is that when I got back into bed beside her she was more than likely already shot. And if I hardly thought it unusual she didn’t stir when I climbed into bed beside her that’s because she never did, on account of the fact that she took sleeping pills: Halcion. When Orla took Halcion there was very little that could wake her for several hours. Only who would believe that? Certainly not the police. That’s what happened, however, and frankly if I’d been going to kill my wife I’d hardly have done it in a way that left me looking as guilty as Crippen – I’d have pushed her out of a high window, or something; I mean, I’m a thriller writer so it’s second nature to me to analyse the circumstances of the crime and offer a critique of her homicide, right? But you can’t tell the cops that. Suggesting an alternative and better way of killing your own wife – moreover one you stood a better chance of getting away with – doesn’t exactly encourage them to think you’re innocent. Cops are the purest form of the bourgeoisie, for whom fiction is the frivolous privilege of aristocracy, or people who play at being aristocrats, like writers. In their eyes an allegiance to hard facts is what distinguishes honest, ordinary folk.
I don’t know what the Monty cops have told you about what happened in the hours leading up to Orla’s murder. On a Friday night we often went to Joël Robuchon at the Hôtel Métropole on Avenue de la Madone. I don’t know why we went there so often. Robuchon is ridiculously expensive but the reason I hated going there with Orla was not because of the food – which is excellent – but because there is something slightly corrupt about the atmosphere. It always made me feel like one of the old roués who go there with their very much younger mistresses and rentals like characters from the pages of Nana; I felt like some old fool in love – Comte Muffat or La Faloise. Also, they give you a delicious lemon cake when you leave, which Orla always insisted on taking although it was never her who ate it, but me, who could least afford to consume the extra calories. But Orla truly loved the place. She enjoyed dressing up and people-watching, which is a serious sport at Joël Robuchon. And since she seldom drank anything it was also an excuse for Orla to get behind the wheel of her Ferrari. Frankly we could have walked there in about the same time it took to drive there. People watch the Monaco Grand Prix and imagine the place is some kind of motoring Valhalla; but driving in Monaco is a bit like shifting your car around one enormous parking lot.
On the telly I saw that Orla’s local fans have been leaving flowers and photographs to her memory in front of the entrance to the Odéon Tower, Diana-style. I don’t know why I’m surprised about that. Orla was one of the few people I ever met who actually liked living in Monaco. After we moved there she developed a thing for Grace Kelly. Orla always believed she bore a strong resemblance to her. She was just as bad a driver. And of course she was in that disastrous remake of Rear Window, which only contributed to her stupid little conceit. There were certainly other people in Monaco who commented on the resemblance and perhaps that’s why she took the place to heart. On the walls of her dressing-room at the Tour Odéon she had hung some framed movie posters of Grace Kelly in High Society and To Catch a Thief, although, in retrospect, Dial M for Murder might have been more appropriate. And I suppose that in the eyes of the public I’m just as much of a cad now as Ray Milland was in that movie. More so, if the truth was known.
Anyway, she really didn’t like the idea of us moving back to London – not one bit – and when we were in the restaurant we argued about it. Orla was dead against the idea. As you know she had no great love for the English and was even less enthusiastic about the weather, not to mention the tax situation. People seem to have forgotten that Orla was quite a wealthy woman in her own right. She made a ton of money from that stage musical about WikiLeaks that she invested in: WikiBeats.
Anyway, the argument became quite loud and at one point I grabbed her by the ear and twisted it, which she didn’t take kindly to and kicked me hard on the shin. I let out quite a yelp because Orla could always give as good as anything she got. She called me an arrogant cunt and I called her a fucking cow and then the maître d’ came and asked us to keep our voices down. No doubt the cops have already told you about that. There’s nothing like a lover’s tiff in public to provide a convenient background for a murder. It’s pure Agatha Christie. You have an argument, perhaps a face is slapped, some harsh things get said, very probably you meant some of them and therefore you must have killed her. The way the cops are you’d think a bit of a barney between husband and wife was one of Aristotle’s four fucking causes.
Actually, it was a fairly wide-ranging sort of argument, and not just about the move back to Blighty. I’d found out that Orla was giving money to all sorts of people and institutions I didn’t much care for. UNESCO was something we were both passionate about and we were actively in
volved in events like World Book Day and International Literacy Day. But I’m rather less keen on the RSPCA, the Labour Party, Julian Assange and Sinn Féin. Probably it was just her way of making me pay more attention to her, which I admit sometimes I didn’t do enough of; quite the opposite. But I’m not telling you this to excuse what I’m going to tell you, old sport, merely to illustrate that my relationship with Orla was occasionally tempestuous. I was capable of driving her mad; she was capable of irritating the hell out of me, but not enough to kill her. Jesus, no. As George Clooney says in From Dusk to Dawn, ‘I may be a bastard but I’m not a fucking bastard.’
As we were leaving the restaurant I made some tasteless remark about Irish republicans which she greeted with silence. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but Orla can make a silence as cold and loud as a blast of air conditioning. Then, outside the hotel entrance, as we were waiting for the valet to bring us the car, Orla hit me with the Robuchon carrier bag containing the lemon cake. Hard enough to knock me off balance. I expect the doorman saw this and then me trying to laugh it off. Now a Ferrari is not a good car to drive when you’re angry – especially when it’s almost new – so I thought it best to apologize and, to my surprise, she started to cry, accepted my apology, told me she was sorry for hitting me with the cake, and then handed me the car keys. I don’t expect anyone saw us make up in the car.
When we were back home I apologized again, for good measure, and I really thought everything between us was all right and that everything had blown over. We even had a good laugh about the incident and reflected it was fortunate that the Daily Mail weren’t there to see what happened. I made a joke about it being lucky it was a Robuchon lemon cake and not one cooked by her mother – who’s the world’s worst baker – which Orla thought was very funny. Then we kissed and made up again – I swear that’s exactly what happened, although in view of what now took place you could be forgiven for thinking our making up was hardly sincere on my part.