In the Evil Day

by Peter Temple

  ‘Zwei Biere, bitte,’ he said in an irritated tone, not a Bavarian accent.

  ‘Ist das tatsachlich moglich?’

  Anselm got up. At the door, he turned his head. The two men had no interest in him. He went outside, into a cold early winter evening perfumed with vehicle fumes and cooking smells, walked to where O’Malley stood beside an Audi.

  ‘My condoms for this tape.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said O’Malley, ‘I could use these frangers. The night is young.’

  ‘Unlike you and the condoms. Will she wear her wig? It excites me, the thought.’

  O’Malley smiled. ‘Really, John, that’s pathetic. You need more exoticism in your life. I like women in full surgical gear, green smock, rubber boots, the cap, the face mask.’

  ‘You’re sick.’

  ‘The exact point, my good man.’

  18

  …HAMBURG…

  Anselm took the car back to the office. He was looking at the logbooks when the phone rang.

  ‘We go on,’ said O’Malley.

  ‘So be it.’

  He finished his reading, signed, changed and set off for home, running in the cold dark, hearing the city humming like a single organism. There was no wind. The lake was still and the lights of the far shore all came to him in silver lines, followed him as he moved: he was the focus, the point of intersection.

  As he ran, he thought about coming back to the house that day, after Beirut. It had been spring, late evening, the house empty and shuttered, almost everyone who had lived there dead. He was mostly dead too, and he had begun to cry when he opened the gate, saw the roses in bloom. He was half drunk, and he wept, sitting on the steps, his head in his hands, tears pooling in his palms. He knew that he was home, as close to home as he would ever be.

  Inside the house, the power was off, the heating had not been on for years, the air smelled of dust and ancient lavender furniture polish and, somehow, faintly, of cigar smoke, of the Cuban cigars smoked by his grandfather-his great-grandfather, for all he knew. He had walked through the ground-floor rooms, opened the curtains, heavy as wet canvas, pulled the shrouds off the furniture.

  That day he took the whisky out of his bag, chose a glass from dozens in the pantry, rinsed it in one of the porcelain sinks in the scullery, the water running dark for a good while. He sat on a huge, deep embossed-velvet sofa looking out at the terrace, the overgrown darkening garden, took the tablets and drank himself to sleep. At some point, he drew up his legs, becoming as small as he could.

  The next day, he was woken by the pounding of the knocker on the front door. His brother, Lucas, fresh, pink-cheeked. They embraced, awkwardly, they had no easy way to touch each other, there was no fit of body, arm or hand. Anselm had felt his stubble scrape the smooth cheek of Lucas, pulled back. They drew apart.

  ‘This is stupid,’ said Lucas. ‘For God’s sake, we were worried, this is not a good idea, John, you’re coming to stay with us, you can’t stay here. Lucy’s adamant, I’m adamant, for God’s sake…’ ‘Just for a while,’ Anselm heard himself say. ‘Get myself sorted out.’

  They went inside. Anselm followed Lucas, his older brother grown small, as he walked around inspecting things. Lucas owned the house. It had been left to him.

  In the kitchen, Lucas said, ‘Are you sure? About staying here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll say it again, you’re more than welcome in London. There’s also the cottage in…’ ‘No. Thank you. Thank Lucy. I want to be here.’

  The relief in Lucas showed in his eyes, in a movement of his mouth. He took out his telephone. ‘We’ll need some German efficiency. Yes. Get things liveable here. I’ll talk to a man I have dealings with. Deutsche Bank.’

  By late afternoon, lunch had been delivered, the power was on, the phone connected, a new refrigerator was cooling in the pantry, a plumber had been, a new water-heater installed, six people had cleaned the house, cartons of food and drink delivered by a small van had been stored.

  At the gate, the taxi’s diesel engine thumping, Lucas said, ‘Listen, I’d like to stay but I’ve got to be in New York tomorrow, we’re in a shitfight with Murdoch’s people.’

  Anselm said, ‘Thanks, I appreciate…all this.’

  ‘I’ll have your stuff from San Francisco sent. It’s in storage, I did that, I thought…well, need anything, just call the number. It’s on the pad. Next to the phone? I wrote it down. They’ll get me. Any time, it doesn’t matter.’

  Anselm nodded.

  ‘The time doesn’t matter. Okay?’

  His brother put out his right hand and touched Anselm’s cheek, found himself doing it, crumpled his hand, tapped Anselm’s face with a loose fist.

  ‘You will,’ he said. ‘John, you’ll call me, won’t you?’

  Anselm said, ‘Yes. Thanks. For everything. Give my love to Lucy. And the boy.’

  He’d forgotten the boy’s name.

  ‘Hugo, it’s Hugo.’

  ‘I know that. You don’t always name things. You don’t always have to say the name.’

  He saw wariness in Lucas’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ said Lucas. ‘Of course. I know you know Hugo’s name. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise.’

  They tried to hug again, failed miserably, and Lucas was driven away, a hand at the window.

  Tonight, as he ran, Anselm remembered going inside and walking around, standing in the kitchen. He had been close to Riccardi for so long, so close. He had dreamed of being alone, of walking on an empty beach, no one near, and now he was alone and it frightened him. He had sat down at the table and rested his forehead on the lined scrubbed wood, cool, and he had begun to cry again.

  Now, in his street, almost walking, sweat cooling on him, that day seemed close. He thought that he was only marginally different now. In some ways, he was worse now.

  He went inside, showered, drank, watched television. He hoped the phone would ring. It didn’t. He went to the kitchen, sped across tape number 3, sampling, looking for a mention of Moritz, his own teenage voice strange to him. He caught the word:

  Moritz. What happened to him?

  It’s a lovely day. We could go for a walk. Are you bored here? With an old woman? Two old women.

  I’m not bored. I like being here. I want to know about the family, my dad doesn’t say much so it’s… It was the summer he was seventeen, the five weeks he had spent with his great-aunt, the two of them and Fraulein Einspenner in the huge house. Next door, a girl lived, Ulrike, a year younger. She wore a big straw hat when she was out in the long garden that ran to the canal, and she was pale in a way no American girl was pale. He lusted after her. Once, after they were introduced, they sat side by side on the terrace. She leant forward and he looked into the big, loose armhole of her summer blouse and saw that she was not wearing a bra. He saw the full hanging curve of her right breast. Even paler than her face. Pale and veined like graveyard marble. His blood changed course. He made an excuse, went upstairs to his bedroom and stood looking down at her, penis in hand.

  Einspenner has always been besotted by you. From the day you came here, a little American boy who spoke German.

  What happened to Moritz?

  He didn’t come back from the war.

  He was killed?

  Well, the war.

  A silence.

  Afterwards, we tried to forget the war, you know. It was so unfortunate. Such a mistake. Your great-grandfather went into a decline. The business was ruined. All those years, the tradition. Destroyed. Gone. Your grandfather tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. He would not accept it. For him, London was closer than Berlin or Munich, he went to England five or six times a year. He talked about going to London as we would talk about going to, going to Monckebergstrasse. He had old friends from Oxford. And the people we dealt with of course. He knew Chamberlain, do you know that?

  No.

  And there was his mistress in London.

  Chamberlain’s mistress?

 
No, your grandfather’s mistress, that drew him to London. Of course. She lived on Cheyne Walk.

  You knew about his mistress?

  It was no secret. We all knew. I met her after the war. A woman of great charm. And dignity. She was not a kept woman, she had her own money. He was a very attractive man, my brother. He hadn’t been close to your grandmother for a long time. They were friends, but they weren’t close. You know what I mean. She had her own interests.

  Didn’t the war…I mean, what did his mistress feel about Germans then?

  Silence.

  She understood that Hitler didn’t speak for all Germans. But lots of English people admired Hitler. It made your grandfather so angry. That Mitford girl who hung around Hitler. Her father was an English lord.

  About Moritz, didn’t you… What do they teach you at school? Do you read the great works?

  Well, we have to read a lot of… My father loved English poets. Milton and Wordsworth. They were his favourites. And Blake, he liked Blake. He used to read them to us. Thackeray and Dickens he liked too. And Gibbon, he used to take Gibbon on holiday to the sea.

  So was Moritz… And Shakespeare, he loved Shakespeare, the tragedies. He used to say that Shakespeare didn’t write the tragedies, a German must have written them and had his work stolen because no one except a German could be so… Sitting at the kitchen table, Anselm listened until the end of the tape, lulled by Pauline’s quiet voice talking about people whose blood ran in his veins and who were now just faces in faded photographs. He heard himself ask about Moritz again and receive no answer.

  19

  …HAMBURG…

  In the morning, Anselm spread out the family tree his great-aunt had drawn up on pieces of paper, taping pages together as the record widened and lengthened. He had found it, carefully folded, in a desk drawer in the small sitting room. Unfolded, it was half the size of a single-bed sheet.

  Pauline had traced the family back into the German primeval forest. The Hamburg branch had come to the city in 1680. From then on, she had recorded in her minute script the occupation of every member who achieved some distinction. Here a senator, here a consul, aldermen, physicians, a writer, a judge, attorneys, scholars, a composer. The rest were presumably just merchants. There was a French connection too, Anselm noticed. Pauline had written Huguenot in parentheses after the French names of people two Anselms married in the late 1600s.

  Anselm found his grandfather, Lucas, and siblings Gunther, Pauline and Moritz. The birth dates, marriages and offspring of the first three were recorded, as were Lucas’s death in 1974 and Gunther’s in 1971. For Moritz, there was only his date of birth: 1908.

  What became of Moritz, who looked like Count Haubold von Einsiedel? Did he marry? Were there children? When did he die?

  Anselm remembered his father talking about Gunther. In 1940, the three children had been sent to live with Gunther and his American wife in Baltimore and they never really went home to Hamburg. But his father had never mentioned Moritz.

  Time to go to work. Beginning to run in the morning was like starting an old machine, like pulling the cord of a lawnmower never oiled, the moving pieces reluctant, grating.

  When he was warm, moving without pain, Manila came to his mind: Angelica Muir, the side-on look of her, the small nose, her teeth, the taste of her.

  After the first lunch, he had many meals-lunches, dinners, late breakfasts, early breakfasts-with O’Malley, Angelica and Kaskis. They went to all kinds of gatherings and parties, everything seemed to turn into a party. O’Malley floated in the culture, spoke fluent Tagalog, knew everyone from millionaire Marcos cronies to penniless hardline Communists. He never stopped paying, no one else was allowed to pay. And, when things were moving at some party, he broke into song-country amp; western songs, Irish songs, operatic arias, songs from the War of Independence against the Spanish, Neil Diamond’s greatest hits, Cuban revolutionary songs.

  O’Malley had called himself a financial adviser. His firm was Matcham, Suchard, Loewe, two secretaries and an elegant crew-cut Filipino with an American accent and a wardrobe of Zegna suits.

  After he had filed his last story from the Philippines, Anselm had dinner with O’Malley and Angelica and Kaskis. She was wearing a green silk dress that touched her only on the shoulders, her nipples, her sharp hipbones. By midnight, fifteen people were in the party. At 4 a.m., they were in a garden, smoking the weed from the mountains, drinking out of the bottle, San Miguel, vodka, anything, fifty or sixty people, talking politics, breaking off to join O’Malley in songs about heartbreak, revenge, and dying for freedom. Around 5 a.m., under a tree in the heady night, he told Angelica that he was in love with her, it had come to him suddenly, no, a lie, from the moment he met her.

  In the shadows, she kissed him, his head in her hands, her tongue in his mouth, touched his teeth with her perfect teeth, moved them, a silken abrasion felt in the bones of his face. It went on for a long time.

  That kiss was in Anselm’s mind as he ran down the home stretch, a cold wind coming over the Alster, his eyes watering. He remembered the soft, damp night, the feel of the tropical tree against his back, against his spine, Angelica’s hipbones, her pubic bone on his, that he wanted to kiss her forever. If necessary, they could be fed intravenously while they kissed.

  And then, at 5.30 a.m., he had to leave, the day already opening, a sky streaked from edge to edge with pale trails as if some silent armada of jets had passed in the darkness. Angelica put her hands into the taxi, ran them over his face like a blind person, said, ‘You should have spoken.’

  She put her head in, one last kiss, their lips bruised, puffy, like boxers’ lips.

  O’Malley appeared. ‘The right thing now, boyo,’ he said. ‘Go home and tell them to pull the plug on the miserable old cunt.’

  Taking off, looking down at the hopeless tilting shanties, children, dogs, his numb fingers trying to direct the nozzle’s airstream onto his face, his eyes, it came to Anselm.

  On the first night in the Tap Room, the Rotary harlot with the hand that lay on him like a big spider, O’Malley had believed that he was CIA and he had never changed his mind.

  Years later, on that morning in Cyprus, two clean men, soaked, scrubbed, shampooed, cleaner than they would ever be again, after the doctors took off their gloves and left, Riccardi said something.

  ‘Why me?’ Riccardi said, not looking at Anselm. ‘Why am I the one they didn’t hurt?’

  A hundred metres to go to the gates, no wind left, aching.

  He couldn’t run it out, stopped, stood with his hands on his hips, feeling sick. Walked the rest of the way, trying to regain composure.

  Eyes on him. He felt them and he looked.

  Inskip was on the balcony, black T-shirt, shaking his head. He drew on a cigarette. A second, then smoke came out of him like his spirit escaping.

  20

  …LONDON…

  Security rang and she went to the bare, functional room and looked at the man downstairs. The equipment was good quality, big colour monitor, and there were two angles, full frontal, close up, and full length, left profile.

  He was tall, dark hair flat on his head, cut short. He looked French, Mediterranean, a long nose, broken, no twitches or quick eye movements, that was a good sign, coat with a leather collar.

  ‘Bag?’ said Caroline Wishart.

  ‘All okay metalwise,’ said the security man.

  ‘Send him up.’

  He was standing when she came into the interview room, nodded at her, eyes grey-green, the colour of the underside of poplar leaves, the poplars at the bottom of her grandmother’s garden.

  ‘Caroline Wishart,’ she said. ‘I’ve only got a couple of minutes.’

  He took a video cassette out of a side pocket.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said.

  She took the tape. A slip of paper was taped to the side with numbers written on it in a strong vertical hand: 1170. Slotted it into the machine, and found the remote control. She switched t
he set on, pressed the play button. Just static. She pressed again, pressed anything. Numbers appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  ‘Fuck this,’ she said. She looked at him. He was sitting with his hands on his stomach. Most men would have been twitching to intervene. Either he was different or he was even more technologically incompetent that she was.

  He said nothing. He didn’t look at her.

  ‘Can you do this?’ she said, hating to have to say it.

  He held out his hand. She gave him the remote. He switched off the set, switched on, pressed a button, pressed another.

  The film began.

  The sub-tropical plain, dark.

  When she saw the bodies, Caroline felt sweat start in her hair and she began to feel sick, a small wave of nausea, a ripple. She glanced at the man, Mackie. He had laced his fingers.

  At a certain point, Caroline closed her eyes. She turned her head slightly so that Mackie couldn’t see.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said.

  She opened her eyes and watched him retrieve the tape. He didn’t sit down again, stood looking at her. She didn’t know what you did with something like this. This wasn’t politicians fucking rent boys. That was simple, just an extension of the story that got her to London, her breakthrough story: Mayor Denies Brothel Payoff. She should get Halligan in…no, he’d simply take over, it wouldn’t be her story anymore.

  ‘They tried to kill me,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  He shrugged. ‘Sent people to my hotel.’

  ‘And?’

  Another shrug. ‘I’m here.’

  She realised. ‘You offered it to someone else?’

  ‘And now I’m offering it to you.’

  ‘Could be faked,’ she said because she couldn’t think of any other response. Distrust, suspicion-they were always sound responses in journalism. ‘I’d have to show it to other people here, they’d check it out…then we could talk about money.’