Harlequin

by Morris West

  ‘By fragments only… Let me explain. We met him at the airport, as friends, and brought him here to await this meeting. He accepted that. He was drugged at the dinner table. When he woke, he was suspended in mid-air in a cellar, bound and with a black hood over his head. There was no sound, no change of temperature. Whenever he moved, he gyrated in emptiness. Result, swift disorientation. He was sedated again and drip-fed. When he woke, he was again suspended in darkness, but this time subjected to cacophonous sounds and high-frequency notes, interspersed with vocables in pattern. Result, deep hallucination. This morning, he woke in his own bedroom, attended by a pretty nurse, who explained that he had been stricken with a virulent local fever. So far, he believes that he has been in delirium, but that, with the aid of stimulants he is fit to meet his clients… That, in brief, though not in depth, is the modem refinement of torture. One can be trained to resist it for a very limited period. Tony Tesoriero has never had such training. We believe he is sufficiently prepared for this meeting. If he is not, then I may have to resort to other measures. If you feel squeamish, remember how he earns his living – a very good living as you will learn. Wait here, please, gentlemen!’

  He was gone perhaps ten minutes. George Harlequin sat, placid and blank-faced, staring at the heaped logs in the fireplace. I walked across to the door and stood looking out across the fall of the green land to the farther rim of the basin, dark against the pallid noon-day sky.

  Behind me, Harlequin said, ‘There’s no need for you to stay, Paul. I have no feeling about this at all.’

  I had feelings; but I was coward enough to keep them to myself. I had started him on this walk into hell; the least I could do was bear him company and try to walk him out again, still human. That was the real terror of the moment: we were, by mutual consent, after intelligent deliberation, bent upon the fracture and fragmentation of another human being. No matter how debased he was, nor how brutish, he was still a man, born of woman, suckled at the breast, held up one day to the tribe for a promise of its continuity.

  When Tony Tesoriero came in, leaning on the arm of his nurse, with Aaron Bogdanovich, his host and patron, he did not look brutish at all. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, slim and small-boned, with the kind of dark aquiline comeliness one sees often among the Albanesi of Puglia and Sicily. His eyes were dull and puffy; he moved sluggishly and his voice was blurred, as if his tongue were too large for his mouth. His accent was Brooklyn and Little Italy. He sat down heavily. The nurse stationed herself behind him. Aaron Bogdanovich stood leaning on the stone ledge above the fireplace, toying with a Toltec figurine in the shape of a jaguar. He might have been the chairman of a charity, discussing arrangements for a Sunday fair:

  ‘…Tony, these are the gentlemen who want to hire you. Gentlemen, this is Tony Tesoriero. He’s been sick the last few days – tick-bites. We found punctures on his arms that showed he had been bitten. However, in two or three days, he will be completely recovered. Now to begin, Tony, the money’s here…’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Show him, please.’

  Harlequin opened the canvas sack and spilt bundles of notes on the tiled floor. He said, ‘Now, Mr Tesoriero, some questions.’

  ‘Call me Tony. Everyone else does. What questions?’

  ‘I want a man killed in New York. Can you do it?’

  Tony made a sluggish mime of tolerance and amusement. ‘You pay. I hit. That’s the contract.’

  ‘Do you guarantee results?’

  ‘It’s my job. So far, I done twenty-three hits – all clean.’

  ‘What’s the price?’

  ‘It starts at twenty grand and goes up to fifty – plus expenses. Also you pay insurance.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I get pulled in, you pay the attorneys, and three hundred a week to my girl, while I’m inside – if I stay there.’

  ‘How do I know you won’t talk?’

  ‘I talk; you get me killed; so, I don’t talk. You got to know that or you don’t ask me down here, right?’ He faltered over the last words and a puzzled look came into his dull eyes. ‘That’s it… That’s what I want to know. Who put you on to me?’

  Aaron Bogdanovich smiled patiently. ‘I told you, Tony… The Hallstrom job. The woman in New York.’

  ‘Oh, yeah… yeah. Blonde broad. She was set up from Mexico City… What was the guy’s name?’

  ‘Basil Yanko.’

  ‘No… No! Something else… Mexican… Say, how come you know him and you don’t know his name?’

  ‘We do know, Tony.’ Bogdanovich was gentleness itself. ‘We just told you. We’re trying to find out if you’re as bright as you say.’

  Tony looked puzzled and hostile, like a punchdrunk fighter. ‘What do you mean, bright? I took the contract. I got thirty grand. I made the hit. Does that make me dumb or something?’

  ‘You’ve just proved it, Tony. The price on that contract was fifty. I know because Basil Yanko told me. It seems to me you were robbed of twenty… Yanko won’t be happy about that, either.’

  ‘Porca madonna! All these years and Tony Tesoriero gets conned! I Okay, soon as I get out of here, I got a private settlement to make.’

  ‘Not if you want this job, Tony.’ Bogdanovich was like a schoolmaster with an over-eager pupil. ‘My friends need a clean hit, no risks and you get sixty grand.’

  ‘But to be conned out of twenty! It just ain’t right.’

  ‘That’s why we’re asking where it went wrong, Tony.’ Aaron Bogdanovich explained it patiently. ‘Fifty grand came down from New York to a guy in Mexico City. We know him. He’s a straight dealer. Now, maybe, he passed the contract through someone else and that someone else skimmed it… That’s what we’re trying to establish.’

  It was painful to watch him trying to pick through the memories and impressions scrambled inside his skull-case. He began to reason, slowly, ticking off the points on his fingers. ‘Okay, let’s start again. A guy in Miami tells me he’s got a friend in Mexico City who wants to talk contract – just like you. I come. I meet him. I take the job. I get paid, I don’t meet two guys – I meet one. He’s old. He looks like a Don, with white hair and a green pinky ring and – oh, yeah! I remember – an emerald stick-pin as big as a nut. Now that guy’s name was Pedro Galvez, same name as I got in Miami. Is that the one you’re talking about?’

  ‘The same one.’ There was no hint of emotion in Harlequin’s tone. ‘Pedro Galvez.’

  ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

  ‘Not any more, Tony…’

  ‘So, how do I get my money back?’

  ‘Take my contract,’ said George Harlequin. ‘And I’ll get it back for you.’

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘Of course. Sixty thousand and expenses and insurance. We’ll talk details tomorrow when you’re brighter and fresher. Here’s the money.’ He bent and counted out wads of notes and pushed them across the tile floor with his foot. ‘When I come back tomorrow, I’ll have your twenty; but I need a note from you to collect it.’

  ‘What sort of note?’

  ‘Oh, something very simple… “To Pedro Galvez. Basil Yanko gave you fifty thousand dollars to pay me for the contract on Valerie Hallstrom. You still owe me twenty. Give it to the man who brings this note. If not, I’ll collect it myself…” Then, you sign it. How does that sound?’

  ‘Great – just great.’

  Aaron Bogdanovich helped him out of his chair, led him to the writing desk and stood over him while he copied the message in the slow, laborious hand of a child.

  Then Bogdanovich sealed it in an envelope and handed it to George Harlequin. He asked, ‘Are you satisfied with Tony?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Nothing else you want to know?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Tony, you should get some rest now. This is a big job and you need to be fresh for tomorrow. Besides, it’s time for your next shot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Holy cow! I’m like a pincush
ion already.’

  ‘This will be the last one, Tony,’ said the nurse cheerfully.

  ‘Okay! See you tomorrow then.’

  He bent and gathered up the wads of notes and stuffed them into the front of his shirt, making crude jokes about how they would improve his figure. Then, chuckling and mumbling, he shuffled out on the arm of the nurse.

  Harlequin turned to Aaron Bogdanovich and asked, ‘What happens to him now?’

  ‘Just what you heard, my friend. He gets his last injection: a bubble of air in a vein. When it reaches his heart, he will die.’

  I could not restrain an exclamation of horror.

  Bogdanovich swung round to challenge me. ‘You’re shocked, Mr Desmond? You heard him say he had killed twenty-three people. Do you think you could convict him simply on what you have heard in this room? Never!… Besides, there is something you don’t know. Valerie Hallstrom was my agent. I trained her. I planted her. Tony Tesoriero killed her. A life for a life. That’s the rule. You knew it when you started.’ He turned to George Harlequin.’ This Pedro Galvez, what is he?’

  ‘A friend. One of my shareholders.’

  ‘How much does he know about your business?’

  ‘Too much. I told him about Alex Duggan.’

  ‘Ach! That’s bad news.’

  ‘My wife is also his victim.’

  ‘We can eliminate him, but we lose a link in our chain of evidence. Let me think about this.’

  ‘I’d like to send him a gift.’

  ‘What sort of gift, Mr Harlequin?’

  ‘Tony Tesoriero’s body. Do you think you could arrange it?’

  ‘I could, but I won’t.’ Bogdanovich was emphatic. ‘Tell me more about Pedro Galvez…’

  ‘Old family, rich from mining, arrogant with power…’

  ‘But not mad or stupid?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why does he make contracts with hit-men – and not for himself, but for Basil Yanko?’

  ‘He needs millions of new development funds: risk money and long-term money – both hard to come by and, at today’s rates, expensive. I would guess that Yanko promised him oil-funds once our business was disposed of…’

  ‘Which still does not explain, Mr Harlequin, why an old aristocrat like Pedro Galvez would sit in the same room with Tony Tesoriero.’

  ‘Oh, that’s very easy.’ Harlequin’s face puckered into a grimace of self-mockery. ‘It would appeal to him, as it did to me. There’s something exotic about owning a private executioner… It’s a kingly privilege.’ He stirred the pile of banknotes with the toe of his shoe. ‘A pile of paper buys the death of a man.’

  ‘What it can’t buy you,’ said Aaron Bogdanovich, ‘is the deferment of your own.’

  George Harlequin digested the thought slowly. There was no sign to tell whether he found it bitter or sweet. He asked:

  ‘If it was Galvez, why would he give his real name?’

  Bogdanovich smiled faintly. ‘You forget, Mr Harlequin, this is a professional relationship. It involves insurance. You have to know whether there’s money to pay on the policy.’

  ‘Is there a telephone in the house?’ asked George Harlequin. ‘I’d like to call the hospital.’

  ‘Over in the comer. It’s a poor line. You may need some patience.’

  While he was telephoning, Bogdanovich and I went outside and began pacing the patio together.

  Bogdanovich said: ‘Galvez is a bad surprise. He is also a threat to Alex Duggan, who now becomes very important. We have to decide what to do about him.’

  ‘I don’t think Harlequin’s in a fit state to decide anything.’

  ‘I disagree, Mr Desmond. If we’re talking about morals, of course he’s working in a completely new system of values. If we’re talking about his capacity to plan and execute a strategy, I believe that is considerably greater, because it is now not limited by moral considerations. Naturally, that troubles you. Your problem, Mr Desmond, is that you’re a confused man, a muddled man, half-believing, half-denying – the eternal compromiser. Your friend, Harlequin, is not like that at all. He grasps life – or death – with both hands. But I understand your doubts. I accept to be damned to futility. Harlequin will damn himself to a purpose. When the purpose is accomplished and he sees the futility… what then? That’s your question, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  ‘I have no answer, Mr Desmond. Nor am I required to have one. Like Tony, I accept the contract, execute it and prepare for the next assignment… Ah, Mr Harlequin? Did you get through?’

  George Harlequin was standing in the doorway, his face bloodless, his eyes blank. ‘Yes, I got through. Julie died fifteen minutes ago. They said it was a coronary embolism.’

  Aaron Bogdanovich clamped an iron fist on my arm and muttered, ‘Get him back to town. I’ll call you. I can’t handle a mourning husband!’

  I will tell you now that I was the one who mourned. At the bedside I wept without shame. I bent and kissed her cold lips and told her goodbye and murmured a requiescat. Harlequin stood, rigid, aloof and tearless, waiting until I was ready to be gone. What passed between them afterwards, whether he raved or wept, I do not know – and for a while I could not care. It was very strange. Hers was the great death. I felt the small death of parting, the pathos of the never-again, the never-enjoyed, the hope forever unfulfilled. And yet – the dead are happy that they never know it! – I felt relief, too. She could not suffer any more. I was released from a bondage that I had borne too long, a temptation that had pricked more sharply with every passing year. I was free at last – albeit in a cold and barren desert, I was free.

  While we waited for Harlequin, Suzy and I sat together, making the empty, reminiscent talk that follows every death. Her tears were long spent and like all women, at every obsequies, she had to think of the housekeeping afterwards.

  ‘…I hope he’ll bury her here. Otherwise it will drag on so long. We’ll need an undertaker, Paul. Will you see to that? I’ve asked the doctor for sedatives. George will need them tonight. You’ll stay in his suite, won’t you, Paul? I would, willingly; but it wouldn’t be proper… Perhaps, he’ll be prepared to end it now: finish the whole sordid business and go home. It’ll be summer soon. You could take him away on your boat… I must pack her clothes, too. It would be terrible for him to do it… Oh, Paul, I feel so sad for him…’

  I could not feel sad for him. I hated him. I was tempted to tell him that now he had another body to dump on Galvez’s doorstep. And why not? One death was very like another. Flowers would grow as well from the mouth of Tony Tesoriero as from the dead womb of Juliette Gerard. All the time I was hating myself, because I was the brave warrior with the brazen trumpet who summoned the heroes out to fight, and then blew taps over the body of the defeated, frightening the vultures away from his bones.

  Suzanne took my right hand and held it between her own. ‘Paul… please! Don’t blame yourself. Don’t blame George, either. We can only walk the path we see at our own feet. Please, chéri…!’

  A long time later, George Harlequin came to join us. He was tranquil now, flat and empty as a lake under the moon. He thanked us both – for himself and for Juliette. He had made the first, necessary decisions. ‘We will bury her here. Paul, will you please make the best arrangements possible. She should have a religious service. We should inform the Swiss Ambassador, and José Luis, and Pedro Galvez and his family, and the employees of the bank. Suzy, please cable all our offices that they will close for one day, and ask the local managers to insert an obituary notice in the press. I have already called her parents. Afterwards…’

  ‘Let’s leave that, George.’

  ‘Just as you say, Paul.’

  ‘I’ll call a taxi,’ said Suzanne.

  ‘I’ll walk back.’

  ‘We’ll walk with you.’

  ‘No, thank you, Paul. I’d prefer to be alone.’

  ‘George, do you really want Galvez at the funeral?’

  ‘
Oh, yes! He’s a friend. He had the Cardinal say Masses for Julie’s recovery.’

  If you have the choice – and the choice gets more restricted in the year of the assassins – do not, I beg you, die violently in a Latin city. The documents required to consign you out of existence are horrendous; and you will wait in limbo until every last one of them is filled. I was forced to abdicate the task of arranging Julie’s obit and leave it to José Luis Miramón de Velasco, who accepted it as a sacred duty, and the smallest amends he could make for his delinquencies. The only thing he would need would be Harlequin’s signatures. For the rest, he would ensure for Madame a dignified ceremony and a quiet resting place, near to that of his own family…

  Then the world invaded us once more. There was a stack of cables and a list of telephone calls a yard long. Our local managers were in panic. The market was in shock. The Press wanted comment and clarification. Every one wanted to know whether George Harlequin was a financial genius or whether he was stark, motherless mad. While Suzanne dealt with the cables, I battled with operators and dial codes and time differentials to answer the most important telephone calls. In New York it was late afternoon. In London it was dinner-time. In Europe it was coffee and cognac and the news of the day on colour television, while the cost of living went up and the chances of decent survival went down and down. I had just slammed down the receiver for the tenth time when Suzanne came in with a cable: ‘I think you need me… Milo Frohm.’ I called Aaron Bogdanovich and read it to him. His comment was dry as dead leaves:

  ‘If you need him, you call him. Question is how much you tell him.’

  ‘No other comment?’

  ‘I leave for New York tomorrow.’

  ‘There’s business here, unfinished.’

  ‘It will be finished in New York. Call me when you get there.’ Which still left Milo Frohm a very open question. My first thought was to defer it until Harlequin was prepared to answer it for himself. My second was to make a call to Washington and see what ground rules Milo Frohm was prepared to play. If they were flexible, we might well co-operate. If he wanted to be the friendly neighbourhood policeman, there was no way at all. I had no quarrel with policemen, especially friendly ones; the only problem was that they had to settle for too little: law and order and a quiet sleep at night – which left too many causes in dispute and a whole cesspool of injustice stinking under the sun.