by Peter Temple
‘This meeting tomorrow,’ said O’Malley. ‘Can that be covered?’
‘Outdoors, it’s a put-and-pluck on Serrano,’ Anselm said. ‘With possibilities of disaster. Want to wear that?’
‘I’ll have to.’ O’Malley ran a hand over his tightly curled greying black hair, touched the collar of his lightweight tweed suit, the knot of the red silk tie. ‘The world used to be a much simpler place, didn’t it? There were things you could do, things you couldn’t. Now you can do anything if you can pay for it.’
‘Nostalgia,’ Anselm said. ‘I was thinking the other night. I’ve never asked. What happened to Angelica?’
‘She doesn’t work anymore. She paints. She married an Englishman and now there’s an American.’
‘People you know?’
‘The Pom, yes. I liked him. Eton and kicked out of the Guards. Rooting the CO’s batman probably, much worse than rooting the CO’s wife, he doesn’t fuck his wife. The American’s rich, inherited. I had dinner with them in Paris, in their apartment, the Marais can you believe? They have a cook, a chef. But there’s hope, she’s really distant with the hubby. Not surprising, he’s an Egyptologist, the place’s like a tomb and he could bore Mormons stiff.’
O’Malley drank the last of his wine. ‘Still interested?’
‘Just curious.’
‘I could bring you together. Accidental meeting.’
‘We only actually kissed once. While very drunk.’
‘I remember. The Angel didn’t kiss casually, though. Not a serial kisser.’
‘I may be too late for accidental meetings. I may have had my ration of accidental meetings.’
‘No, there’s always one left.’
A youth in white had appeared to take away the plates. Close behind him came another young man, dark, Italianate, long-fingered. He fawned over O’Malley, suggesting the dessert trolley or something from the kitchen, anything, any whim. O’Malley ordered cognacs. He had the accent identified with Cologne, somehow frivolous in the intonation. North Germans found it annoying.
The waiter gone, O’Malley sighed. ‘Well, a business lunch. What’s a put-and-pluck cost?’
‘As an estimate, plenty.’
O’Malley was looking away, watching three sailors on a Japanese container ship taking photographs of the shore. He said nothing for a while, drank some riesling, nodded in answer to some inner question. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I thought it would be in that vicinity.’
They sat in silence until the cognacs came, more fawning. O’Malley rotated his fat-bellied glass and sniffed the small collar. ‘If angels peed,’ he said, and sipped.
Anselm felt the unease returning, wanted to be out of the place, away from people. He saw O’Malley’s mouth rolling the liquid, his upward gaze, the calibrating.
‘Nice lunch,’ said Anselm. ‘Thank you.’
O’Malley landed his glass on the heavy white linen. ‘My pleasure. You eat quickly, not so much a diner as an eater.’
‘I usually eat in the street,’ Anselm said. ‘Vendor food. You get into habits like that.’ The unease was growing. He steadied himself. ‘I have to go.’
On their way out, O’Malley stopped and bent over a handsome woman in dark business clothes, alone. ‘Are you stalking me, Lucy?’ he said. ‘How did you know I’d be here?’
Anselm kept going, he wanted to be outside. A flunky was waiting to open the door. He went out onto the pavement, closed his eyes, breathed deeply, said his mantra.
In the taxi, O’Malley said, ‘That woman, she’s English, a very smart maritime lawyer based here. Froze a Polish ship for us in Rotterdam. I hope she’s going to do the trick again.’
‘I’m sure the courts look kindly upon her.’
‘She’s persuasive. They say she blew a judge when she was starting out in England. That’s the gossip. Judgment overturned on appeal.
Black mark for a judge.’
‘At least he’s got his memories,’ Anselm said. ‘Keep her wig on?’
O’Malley shook his head. ‘How can you be so ignorant of legal decorum?’
13
…LONDON…
Halligan, the deputy editor, presided over the news conference. Caroline Wishart was nine minutes late, just behind skeletal Alan Sindall, the chief crime reporter.
‘Welcome,’ said Halligan. ‘I’m thinking of making this meeting’s time more flexible. We’ll just run the fucking thing from 2 p.m. to whenever, open-ended, pop in whenever it suits you.’
‘Sorry,’ said Sindall, eyes down.
Caroline said nothing, eyes on the styrofoam cup of coffee she was carrying.
‘Came together did you!’ shrieked Benton, the small, fat deputy news editor, clapping his hands in front of his glasses. ‘Came together!’
‘Shut up, Benton,’ Halligan said, ‘we don’t have to be like our readers. We purvey smut. That does not require that we ourselves be amused by childish double entendres.’
‘Just a joke, Geoff,’ said Benton, eyes down.
‘Pathetic. Since by the grace of something or other the chief criminal reporter and the stand-in to the power of three for the editor of Frisson or Pissoir or whatever it’s called are now here, let’s hear it. About Brechan, Marcia?’
‘Where’s Colley?’ said Marcia Connors, the news editor, a sharp-faced woman in her late thirties. ‘Does he still work here? Does anyone know?’
Colley ran the paper’s Probe team.
‘He’s accounted for his absence,’ said Halligan. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Nothing,’ said Simon Knight, the chief political correspondent, slumped, looking over his glasses, chins rolling into a loosened collar already dirty. ‘Brechan apparently doesn’t have a care in the world.’
‘The question was addressed to me,’ said Marcia.
‘Oh,’ said Knight. ‘Well, go for it, old dear.’
Marcia eyed him briefly, touched a canine with a short-nailed fingertip. ‘Brechan gave us the slip last night.’
‘And the catamite?’ Halligan was looking at her hopefully.
She shook her head.
‘Can’t find him?’
‘No.’
‘Marcia, someone is going to find out about this and find the prick. We heard it first. You’re saying it’s not going to be us?’
‘We can’t find him.’ She ran a hand over her hacked-short hair. ‘Simple as that. If someone else can, good fucking luck to them. Gary vanished on Tuesday, thereabouts. His ex-boyfriend, this little poof is more vegetable than animal, into very serious substance abuse, he thinks Gary rang at some time around Tuesday to say he was going into a private clinic somewhere. He thinks. And he’s never heard of Brechan.’
‘Somewhere?’ said Halligan.
‘Somewhere. We’ve tried, believe me, we’ve tried. Could be in fucking Montevideo.’
‘Have you tried Montevideo?’ said Simon Knight.
Marcia didn’t look at him. ‘Oh fuck off, you fat ponce,’ she said.
Halligan waved his hands placatingly, swivelled his chair to face the window. ‘How did we come to stuff this thing up so comprehensively? Handed to us on a plate.’
‘Don’t know about handed anything,’ said Marcia. ‘It was only a tip-off.’
‘Perhaps it is a pack of lies,’ Simon Knight said. ‘The man’s got more enemies than Thatcher at her peak. And he’s only the Defence Minister in waiting.’
Halligan came back to face the room, deep lines across his forehead. ‘Bugger it,’ he said. ‘I told the boss we’d get the story. He was beside himself with joy. His favourite position.’ He shook his head. ‘Well, what is there for the front then?’
‘Public schoolboys selling drugs,’ said Marcia.
‘That’s news?’ said Merton, the industrial affairs editor. ‘What about pubs selling beer?’
‘And fuck you too,’ said Marcia.
Caroline put up a hand.
‘Yes?’ said Halligan.
‘I’ve got pictures,’ she sai
d.
Silence in the room.
‘What?’ said Marcia.
‘What?’ said Halligan.
‘Pictures.’
Marcia showed teeth, both top and bottom. ‘I think it’s too early in the day for you, darling. Up all night with the braying coke snorters. Tell us about your shitty little shots when we get to the rubbish end of the paper.’
‘I’ve got pictures of Brechan and Gary,’ Caroline said to Halligan.
A silence lay on the room, a religious silence. Halligan clicked his nails on the table. Nails too long for a man, Caroline thought. Her father would have thought so, anyway.
‘Brechan and Gary?’
‘Yes. And Gary’s story.’
Marcia leant towards her. ‘What kind of pictures? Doing what exactly?’
Caroline looked pointedly at the woman’s bleached moustache, savoured the moment. She’d heard that Marcia had once had an affair with Halligan. ‘I’m talking to Geoff,’ she said. ‘When I want to talk to you, I’ll give you a sign. I’ll indicate.’
‘Doing what?’ said Halligan.
Caroline took the lid off her coffee cup, had a tentative sip. ‘Christ, the coffee’s terrible around here,’ she said. She wanted to make them wait. Since her first day on a free suburban rag in sodden Birmingham, all her life really, she had wanted a moment like this.
‘Well?’ said Halligan. His mouth was open and, with his pendulous jowls, he looked like a dog about to drool. ‘Well? Doing what?’
Caroline had another sip of coffee. ‘We should probably talk in private,’ she said. ‘Meeting adjourned for ten minutes,’ Halligan said. ‘Don’t stray too far.’
Everyone got up and filed out except Marcia, who was lighting a cigarette.
Caroline waited until the door closed behind the last person before she looked at Marcia. ‘You too,’ she said. ‘Out.’
Marcia was about to draw on the cigarette. She took her hand away, her mouth frozen and fish-like. ‘Who the fuck do you…’ Halligan raised both hands to her, palms outward. ‘This won’t take a moment, dear…’ ‘Don’t you fucking call me dear you spineless shit.’ She got up. At the door, she said, ‘This is going to be a defining moment in both your lives. I’ll make fucking sure of that.’
She slammed the door.
Halligan pulled at his nose with thumb and forefinger. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘The pictures.’
‘Gary and Brechan fucking.’
‘Fucking,’ he said. ‘Each other? Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Taken by?’
‘I don’t know. It could be a remote thing.’
‘You’ve got the pictures in your hands?’
‘Yes. And Gary’s story on tape. The full story. I’ve promised him thirty thousand pounds.’
Halligan looked at the table, tapped his pink forehead with his knuckles. ‘Chickenfeed,’ he said. Wait till the boss hears. Unbelievable. This is terrific. Terrific. You are terrific.’
Caroline took the folded sheet of paper out of her inside pocket, gave it to him.
He read it, looked up at her. ‘Yes, you can leave the Frisson section immediately. Yes, you can be off-diary. Yes, you can have an office. But as for the rest of this, Caroline, it’s ridiculous…’ She stood up and started for the door. ‘Read the story in The Sun.’
‘Caroline my dear, sit down, let’s talk,’ he said.
14
…HAMBURG…
Light draining from the world, the coming winter on his skin, knee joints pleading, Anselm ran home, not stopping till he stood at his gate in the silent street, slumped in the shoulders, seeing his ragged breath in the air.
He was in the kitchen, about to drink bottled water, weak, unshowered, when the knocks sounded on the huge front door. He froze. There was a bell, it worked, someone chose to knock. Pause-again the hollow knocking.
He spoke to himself, calmed himself, and went down the cavernous passage into the hall, switched on the outside light. A shadow lay on the front door’s stained-glass window.
‘Who is it?’ he said
‘Alex Koenig.’
Anselm opened the door. She was formally dressed, a pinstriped suit, dark, a white shirt with a high collar, dark stockings. She looked severe and striking.
‘I came to apologise,’ she said. ‘I was wrong to come here uninvited and what I said was unforgivable.’
Anselm shook his head. ‘You don’t have to apologise. No one who deals with me ever has to apologise.’
‘You will accept my apology?’
‘Of course, but…’ ‘I won’t bother you again.’
She turned and went quickly down the path. He wanted to call after her, ask her to come back, come inside, show her that he was not the savage and unpleasant person he had presented to her.
But he did not. He was scared of her. Of what she knew about him.
Alex Koenig didn’t look back, the gate clicked behind her. A wait, then a car drove away, its sound lost in the murmuring city.
Anselm went back to the kitchen, down the flagstone passage so wide he could not touch the walls with outstretched arms. He put the bottle of water away, opened a beer and downed it in two long-throated drinks, the clean tawny smell filling his nasal cavities. He poured a glass of white wine, sat at the pine table. Just to sit there comforted him. The great, worn table in the kitchen always comforted him.
In Beirut, fighting against claustrophobia and pain and panic, his memories of the house on the canal, of the kitchen and the garden saved him. He had forced himself to think about the house and his childhood, his family: being woken by his brother in the middle of the night and seeing adults in the garden throwing snowballs; walking by the canal with his grandfather, autumn leaves underfoot; in the kitchen helping Fraulein Einspenner to shell peas, peel potatoes, knead dough. The kneading he had remembered most clearly: the feel of the dough, the life in it, the resistance building beneath his hands, the sensual, silky, breast-like resilience.
And he remembered the roses one summer-the ones the colour of burnt cream in the big pots on the terrace, the three or four shades of pink around the front gate, the dark satiny reds that smothered the boundary wall.
Later, after he had been beaten, after the panic when he began to discover the holes in his mind, the blank spaces, the lacunae, it began to gnaw at him that he didn’t know the names of so many things. For a long time, he could not distinguish between what he had never known and what he had forgotten. And when he thought he could, he was filled with an aching despair that he would die without knowing the names. In that hopeless space, always dark, the world was gone, the whole world of sky and earth and trees moving in a cold wind. Gone.
And with it the names.
Now, sitting at the table in the flagstoned room, he remembered clearly the ache to know the names, to be able to say them to himself.
The need to know names.
The names of so many things.
‘Do you know the names of any roses,’ he had asked.
‘What?’ Riccardi, a whisper.
‘Roses.’
‘Roses?’
‘Yes. Roses. Their names.’
And so it began. In that foetid hole, black, a shallow grave, two men lying so close together they could not be sure whose breath they smelled, whose body sounds they heard, whose heartbeat they felt- they began to name things. In three languages. Roses. Trees. Give me ten trees. Dogs, name twelve dogs. Fifteen saints. Twenty mountains. Flowers, stars, saints, rivers, seas, singers, capitals, wars, battles, writers, songs, generals, paintings, poets, poems, actors, kinds of pasta, ocean currents, deserts, books, trees, flowers, desserts, architectural periods, cars, American Presidents, parts of speech, characters in books, prime ministers, volcanoes, hurricanes, bands, waterfalls, sculptors, American states, meat dishes, actors, breads, wines, winds, women’s names from A to Z, men’s, towns, villages, statues, operas, kings, queens, the seven dwarves, engine parts, films, directors, diseases, bibl
ical figures, boxers, names for the penis, for breasts, the vagina, for eating and shitting and pissing and kissing and fucking and pregnancy and telling lies.
But not words for dying.
No, not words for dying. They didn’t need words for dying. They were going to die.
The tape recorder was on the table. He went to the study and fetched the box of tapes. He went back and forth on the one with 2 written on it, circled.
You were talking about Kate yesterday.
Oh. Yes. Kate was a Jew.
Who’s Kate?
Our cousin’s wife. I’ll show you her photograph. Beautiful girl, lovely. A Jew.Nominally. Her family. Not in a religious sense. I don’t think they had any religion to speak of. We, of course, we thought of ourselves as Christians. But all we did was observe the traditions. We only went to church on Christmas day, to the Landeskirche, just a family tradition. And of course we had the most wonderful Christmas Eves, the Feuerzangbohle, the presents, my dear, the wonderful presents.
What about Kate?
Moritz was abominable. Isn’t that a lovely word? Abominable. English is a lovely language. Stuart used to call all kinds of things abominable. Do you know about the creature of the snows? In the Himalayas? Where do you place the stress in that? I’ve never been comfortable with the word.
About Kate? Moritz?
Moritz said we should put the Sturmer sign on the entrances to the family businesses. Such a stupid and dreadful thing to say… What sign?
Oh, you know, Juden sind hier nicht erwunscht. He was talking about how Germany needed to be cleansed of Jews, it was a matter of hygiene, nonsense like that, he had obviously been drinking.
Kate heard that?
Your great-grandfather didn’t like that kind of talk. We dealt with many Jews.He was an old-fashioned person. Well, he was old. Not that old, I suppose…as old as I am now, I suppose. Good heavens. I would need to work that out. How old he was. One forgets.
This was just before the war?
You looked like Moritz when you were a boy, do you know that? A little bigger, he was thin. But your eyes and the hair and the chin.
No. Did many people you knew feel the way Moritz did?