Harlequin

by Morris West

  ‘Only the police have to prove things. We don’t. How are you feeling? A little heavy? That’s normal… No, Mr Yanko! If you try to get up, I’ll shoot you and that will be very painful… So far, you’re more privileged than any of the people you killed. You’re dying; but you’re dying quietly. No pain. No confusion… You’re sweating, Mr Yanko. That means you’re fighting it. It doesn’t help. Just relax.’

  ‘What the hell do you want from me?’

  ‘Nothing. It was interesting about your wife. Bernie Koonig told us. You were in New York. He put gasoline in the bilges. When she pressed the starter – boom! We wondered why you never knocked him off like Frank Lemnitz. You were probably softer in those days – or less experienced. How do you feel? Flex your fingers! The reactions are a little slow. You’re coming along nicely…’ He pushed the paper and the pen across the table. ‘You should read that while you can still focus… Funny thing about this stuff, gentlemen. We could pump him out anytime within the next fifteen minutes and he’d be fine. If we don’t, he’s kaputt. As you see, Mr Yanko, the document is in the form of a confession. Would you like to sign it?’

  ‘I’ll see you in hell first!’

  ‘No, Mr Yanko. We’ll watch you go.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man!’ Herbert Bachmann’s voice was cracked and quavery. ‘This is torture.’

  ‘I know, sir.’ The photographer was reasonable as any man could be. ‘But Mr Yanko is impervious to suffering. Madame Harlequin died with a bullet in the belly. Her child was hung by his hands from a fifth floor window… the child you saw here tonight. Audrey Levy was probably tortured before she was killed… However, if Mr Yanko would like to end the suffering for you and for himself, he has only to sign the confession. I should leave then, and you would still have time to get him a doctor.’

  Yanko still had fight in him. His voice was faintly slurred but the mockery came through. ‘You see, I told you it was a trap I’

  ‘If you don’t sign, Mr Yanko, it’s a trap-door. You fall through it to nowhere. I don’t care either way. Your speech is thickening. Also you’re probably losing sensation in the extremities.’

  ‘Sign, man!’ said Herbert Bachmann desperately. ‘It’s your only chance.’

  ‘It’s his life,’ said Karl Kruger. ‘Let him do what he likes with it.’

  George Harlequin said, without malice, ‘Whatever I tell him, he won’t believe me.’

  There was a long silence and then we watched, fascinated, as Yanko tried to control his slackening muscles, grip the pen and write his name at the bottom of the paper.

  ‘Pass it back to me, please,’ said the photographer.

  He folded it, slowly, and put it back in his pocket. Then he said:

  ‘Mr Yanko, you will now claim that this paper was signed under duress. So it’s not enough to save your life. Around this table are four witnesses – excluding myself, because I come and go. Answer one question with one word. Did you organise the deaths of those people? Yes or no?’

  ‘But you said… you promised…’

  ‘This time, I’ll keep the promise. Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Yanko… No! Don’t move, gentlemen! He’ll be dead in about five minutes.’

  ‘But you promised…’

  I could stand it no longer. I pushed back my chair, stood up and began to move towards Yanko. I heard the click of a loading mechanism and the voice of the photographer, sharp and frigid:

  ‘Sit down, Mr Desmond.’

  The camera was aimed at my middle. I moved slowly back to the chair and sat down. Basil Yanko was lolling over the table, muttering and gurgling like a drunken man. We watched in helpless silence until he collapsed, face forward, on the table-top.

  ‘For pity’s sake!’ said Herbert Bachmann. ‘You’ve got what you want. Now, let’s get a doctor!’

  The photographer grinned and shook his head. ‘He doesn’t need a doctor. He’ll sleep it off. It’s just a modem variant of the old Mickey Finn… By the way, gentlemen, in case you’re called to testify, you’d better see this.’

  He snapped open the camera and made us pass it from hand to hand. ‘As you see, it’s a normal photographic instrument. Nothing lethal about it at all. You might like to tell Yanko when he wakes up.’

  Herbert Bachmann looked from one to the other round the table. He was shocked and angry. ‘Who arranged this… this horror?’

  ‘I did,’ said the photographer. ‘It’s not pretty to watch, is it? But it’s quite a normal, if rather crude, interrogation method. They teach it in police schools and in the armed forces. You pay for it, Mr Bachmann. You subsidise people to teach it to your allies – some of whom don’t need lessons.’ He took the paper out of his pocket and handed it to George Harlequin. ‘This should go to Milo Frohm.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll have it delivered. Tell Aaron I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Who is Aaron?’ asked Herbert Bachmann.

  ‘No one you’ve ever heard of, sir,’ said the photographer. ‘Shalom!’

  Karl Kruger picked up Basil Yanko’s limp hand, felt his pulse, then let the hand fall back with a thud on the table.

  ‘What are you going to do with him?’

  ‘My boys will take him downstairs. His chauffeur will get him home and to bed. I wish I could be there when he wakes. I’d like to talk to him.’

  Everyone else was asking questions. I felt I had the right to the last one.

  ‘You’ve got his money, George. You’ve got a confession that won’t hold up in court but will discredit him forever. What’s left to talk about?’

  ‘He died tonight,’ said George Harlequin sombrely. ‘I’ve always wondered how Lazarus felt when he walked out of the tomb.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how he felt, George. He took one look at what people were doing to each other, and begged to go back!’

  It was a cry of despair; an expression of utter desolation. Long after Herbert and Karl had left, and Yanko had been removed, the words hung in the room like the final blasphemy for which there is no forgiveness. The circle of my own damnation was complete. I had urged violence. I had co-operated in violence. I had seen life destroyed. I had ended by denying it as an obscenity.

  When I looked at my watch, I expected to find that time had stopped. I was shocked to find that it was still only seven in the evening, that Suzanne was still typing, that George Harlequin was telling fairy-tales to a wide-eyed child, that people were still homing for supper. I could not bear to wait. I walked out, past the security men, and hurried blindly across town to join the other lost souls in Gully Gordon’s bar.

  It could have been an hour later, it might have been two, because Gully was eating his dinner, the place was almost empty and I was sitting alone and morbid in a booth, when George Harlequin came in with Suzanne. They sat, one on either side of me, so that I could not escape.

  Suzanne held my slack hand in hers and said, ‘George wants to talk to you, chéri.’

  ‘What’s to say? It’s finished. Let’s forget it!

  ‘We need forgiving, too, chéri.’

  ‘We don’t deserve it, woman. We’re just as much murderers as Basil Yanko… Not you, but George and I. That’s true, isn’t it, George?’

  ‘For me, yes. Not for you, Paul. You tried to restrain me. I would not be held. At the very last moment, you were still trying.’

  ‘What are you now, George – a father confessor?’

  ‘No. I’m trying to be a penitent. It isn’t as easy as it sounds.’

  ‘Did you expect it to be easy?’

  ‘Possible, at least.’

  ‘George, I’ve run out of absolutions and indulgences. I haven’t got one for myself.’

  ‘I have,’ said Suzanne, gravely. ‘I love you both… This is the last step, Paul. Make it for me.’

  ‘How much more do you want?’

  ‘Everything, Paul. That’s what loving means.’

  ‘Oh, Christ…!’

  George Harlequi
n sat a long time staring into his glass, then, slowly, painfully, he began to piece out the confession:

  ‘I wanted him dead… I wanted to see him stripped and trembling, waiting for the execution. I talked to Aaron Bogdanovich. He offered me a dozen choices. I never knew before how many simple and ingenious ways there are of killing a man: a puff of vapour blown in his face as he walks downstairs, a prick from a poisoned pin, a bomb in his car, a letter that will explode in his hands, a sniper’s bullet, a virus culture in his drink… It gave me pleasure to study them, play out each sequence like a chess gambit… That’s the symbol, of course: the chess-game. The pieces are inanimate. They’re bits of wood or metal or ivory. They have names, but no life, no soul… You argue their fate as an intellectual exercise. The arguments make eminent sense, and Aaron Bogdanovich exhibited them all. The law cannot redress injustice: you must work outside the law. The political system is beyond reform: you must destroy it before you can make a better one. You cannot achieve the ideal: you must content yourself with the expedient. The torturer is triumphant: you must eliminate him. The robber is laughing over the spoils: you choke him with his stolen gold. Democracy is a fraud because the people are gulled for their votes and duped by policies they do not understand. All men are traitors and all women are whores, provided the price is right… There is no answer to those arguments, except an act of faith, which I could no longer make… Strange! You, Suzy, and you, Paul, made it for me. You believed I was something better than I wanted to be. You couldn’t convince me because you had been too close to me for too long. I could deceive you and deceive myself and make illusions for us all… But I couldn’t deceive Bogdanovich and he wouldn’t let me deceive myself… Came the day when a decision had to be made. I went to see him at the flower-shop. He was playing with a tiny kitten, a stray that had wandered in from the street. He asked me to state exactly what I wanted. I told him: my money back and Yanko’s life for Julie’s. He didn’t argue the decision. He simply broke the kitten’s neck and laid it on the desk in front of me. Then he said: “That’s what it means, Mr Harlequin. Can you do it?”… I knew I couldn’t. I could hardly bear to touch the body…’

  ‘But you could still watch a man go through the agonies of dying…’

  ‘Yes. That’s the shame of it. I could and I did and I believed I was seeing justice done.’

  ‘Do you still believe it?’

  ‘No. I saw terror crushed by terror… Well, that’s it! Nothing’s changed. I thought you had the right to know.’

  He tried to stand up, but was trapped in the cramped booth. I caught his arm and held him back. ‘Stay, George!… I apologise. I’m not proud of myself, either. Bogdanovich passed a verdict on me, too. He said I wanted respectability without virtue, possession without threat, pleasure without payment… John Q. Citizen conniving at every horror in the world so long as it doesn’t disturb his rest or his dinner…! We make a fine pair, don’t we?’

  ‘I have news for both of you,’ said Suzanne soberly. ‘You tried to dispense with the law, and yet you sit here humbled by the verdict of an assassin. I think you need a change of company…’

  On that sour note, we left it, because Gully Gordon was back, bowing his welcome, and begging us to name the music of our pleasure.

  The next forty-eight hours were a limbo of non-events. Suzanne was busy ordering Harlequin’s affairs before he left for Europe. I pottered about the apartment, getting under Takeshi’s feet, picking up books, dropping them after I had read a page, confusing myself with plans, projects, timetables for a future which was now as vague as last year’s weather. I read the papers and wondered why there was no news of Yanko’s arrest. I played music and heard not a bar of it. I was like the boy in the fairy-tale who lost his shadow and couldn’t live happy until he found it.

  I had lost more than a shadow. I had lost the small part of myself which was left intact after years of wandering and inconclusive battling. I had lost a friend – one of the few to whom I had ever committed myself with wholehearted trust. I had found a woman to love. I had forfeited the respect without which the love could not last a twelve-month. Now I was facing the ordeal of a dinner-party given by a man whom I would not offend for the world, to celebrate a promise that I doubted could ever be fulfilled. Three times I picked up the phone to put him off. Each time I lost courage, and another fragment of respect for myself. Suzanne was loving and solicitous; but even when I responded, I felt I was playing the false lover, empty of hand and heart, too fearful to confess.

  It was not only my private world which was out of joint. The world beyond my windowpane was a hostile place, too. I could never face it again, innocent and unarmed. Always I must wear the chain-mail of the cynic, the dagger and pistols of the wary traveller. I must bite every coin before I took it, pin every man to his contract with a threat, trust no woman and look twice in my mirror to make sure that I was still myself. In this mood of disillusion – proper to my age, but most improper to a man attending his espousal feast – I set off with Suzanne to dine with George Harlequin and Francis Xavier Mendoza.

  Our rendezvous was one of those old comers of New York still preserved from the barbarians – a basement cellar on First Avenue, lined from floor to ceiling with choice vintages, furnished with a refectory table, served by a single chef, two waiters and a wine-master, all dedicated to the proposition that eating and drinking together was a sacred rite, the first and last of our mortal pilgrimage. Harlequin was already there, making the rounds of the racks with Mendoza, reverent as any disciple with his guru.

  Mendoza welcomed us like martyrs reprieved from the lions. He kissed Suzanne on both cheeks, clasped my hands, looked me up and down, and announced:

  ‘Not bad! At least you have survived! Harlequin, here, has told me the story. I marvel that you are all in one piece. Now, let me show you what we have prepared… To begin, a canapé of Roquefort and walnuts, with that, my own Palomino, and some quiet talk. Susana querida, I know! They have talked you into the ground. Here, you and you only are the subject. Have you opened my bottle yet?’

  ‘Not yet, Francis. They’re not ready for it!’

  ‘Ay de mi! And I thought they were civilised men. No matter, you and I will tame them. George, I know Paul is a Visigoth. I expected better from you.’

  ‘I’m a fool,’ said George Harlequin. ‘It takes time to unlearn the trade.’

  ‘Time and wine – we have plenty of both. Now, for the meal, we have a mousse of salmon, and with that a Pinot, very dry, a vintage of which I am very proud… George, have you never thought that Islam is a wise faith? Its promises are those we understand – sweet waters and flowers and wine and generous women… We Christians promise harps, which no one can play and a beatific vision of which no one understands the meaning.’

  ‘But we yearn for it, Francis. The simple knowing, the simple enjoying…’

  ‘Ah! Now you have it, George! Simplicity – oneness! That’s the secret we spend a lifetime learning.’

  ‘And fail, always, to understand.’

  ‘Suzanne, why are women simpler than men?’

  ‘Are they, Francis?’

  ‘Everywhere and all the time. We men are stupid, complicated. We wake at a woman’s breast. We die, if we are lucky, in the same embrace. We walk a million miles to come back to the point of departure. Paul, what do you say?’

  ‘It’s a good Palomino, Francis.’

  ‘Good, the man says! There’s no better until you get to Jerez de la Frontera – and even there it’s hard to find… Next, my friends, we have a filet de boeuf en croute with a sauce Perigueux, and with that, my Cabernet of sixty-five… a wonderful year, no frost, the right rain, a wine-maker’s dream! We are drinking it now, eight and a half years later, a ripe time for all of us. My friends, no matter what has happened, no matter what may arrive tomorrow, we are the fortunate – fortunate to know, fortunate to enjoy, fortunate to be thankful. Will you join me in a blessing?’

  We stood, hands joined, head
s bowed, while he pronounced it: ‘We eat while others are hungry. We laugh while others are sad. For what we have, we are thankful. Grant us always to remember what others have not, and where we can, to restore it. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.’

  He waved us to our places – Suzanne on his right, Harlequin on his left, myself facing him – and said:

  ‘I never know what grace to say. I have never understood why the Almighty is so unequal in his giving.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s blind,’ I said flippantly.

  ‘Or we are,’ said Suzanne.

  ‘Or we’re using the wrong measures,’ said George Harlequin.

  ‘More likely,’ said Francis Xavier Mendoza ‘Good appetite, my friends!’

  We ate; we drank; we talked inconsequences, happy for a while in the presence of a good man, which was like the shadow of a great tree in a parched landscape. We made silly jokes. We laughed as we had forgotten how to laugh for a long time. Then, too soon for me, came the time for the toasts, which, said Francis Mendoza, must be drunk, not in the wine of a new country, but in that of the old, an Oporto, aged, soft, the colour of fine rubies.

  We were a small company, but he stood for the ceremony. For George Harlequin, the polyglot, he spoke first in Spanish, then in French for Suzanne, and for me in English:

  ‘Dear friends! This is a moment of promise – a promise between Suzanne and Paul, who have learned late to love each other, between us all who need one another so much. If I could not share this wine with you, I should be the loneliest man in the world, and the wine would die, untasted, in the bottle. If you cannot share with each other the pain you have suffered and the forgiveness we all need – ay! – you, too, will live lonely and the wine of life will be soured for you forever. I blessed you when you came. I beg that you will bless me when you go, friends together…’

  ‘So be it,’ said Suzanne.

  I had no words at all. George Harlequin sat silent for a long moment and then stood up, slowly. He, too, spoke first in Spanish and then in English:

  ‘Francis, we have been honoured at your table and blessed in your company. We thank you, all of us. I thank my friends, who stood with me in a dark time, and shared pain with me, and saw me do evil under the sun, and still managed to hold fast to me and forgive me. With your permission, I should like to give a gift to Paul and Suzanne. I offer it with the motto of my ancestor who was a buffoon: “If you laugh, I eat. If you cry, God help us all!”’