No Sale

by Patrick Conrad

  Exhausted, but relieved that she is still alive, Cox drops on to the bed. He clutches her pillow and falls asleep with the taste of iodine in his mouth.

  That night Cox dreams of Sylvia, the monumental woman bathing in an evening dress in the silver cascade of the Trevi Fountain in Rome while Guido Anselmi sits behind the misted-up windscreen of his car in a deafening traffic jam while La Saraghina in an extremely obscene gesture spreads her superb dark thighs and squatting among the rubble behind a bunker pisses on the ground while Encolpio fights the Minotaur in broad daylight while Toby Dammit blind drunk crashes in his blood-red Ferrari while Zampanò in the depths of despair murders the lover of his wife Gelsomina while Wanda dresses up as a slave girl out of love for the white sheikh while a gnarled Holy Father appears as a neon icon in the sky above Los Angeles while the liner Rex with its sirens bellowing looms out of the mist on its return voyage from America while Casanova sodomizes Sister Maddalena in the musty corridors of her convent while the ashes of the deceased opera diva Edmea Tetuo are scattered in the sea off the island of Erima while Ginger and Fred dance one last convulsive step while Orlando, in a lifeboat, tries to rescue a rhinoceros after the shipwreck of the Gloria Non an ocean of plastic, just like the children of the Meteor’s projectionist on the beach tonight.

  20

  Farley Granger

  When Cox wakes up the next morning with a headache, he is lying across the bed, still fully clothed. He rubs the sand out of his eyes, hauls himself up laboriously and looks around in a daze. Starr has left nothing behind, no farewell letter, no short message in lipstick on the bathroom mirror like she used to do. If the belt on the bathrobe had not been missing he might have thought that she had never set foot in this room and that everything since his fatal encounter with Debbie Marchal had been a dream. To tell the truth he hadn’t really looked. Perhaps the belt was already gone when he arrived at the hotel.

  There is no point in hanging around Koksijde any longer. He calls reception to ask for the bill and leaves a message on Starr’s mobile saying that he is not cross, that he understands, that he was worried yesterday that she had been gone for so long, that he had gone to look for her, that he was coming home and that he loved her.

  “Are you leaving us already, Professor? I hope it’s nothing to do with that awful business,” asks Monsieur François as he hands Cox his bill.

  “No. My girlfriend couldn’t stay any longer and asked me ifif I wanted to come to Antwerp to help her with an audition.”

  “Is she going to be in a film?”

  “There’s a good chance.”

  “I’m really sorry I wasn’t able to meet her.”

  “You must have seen her walk past a couple of times yesterday. A very young woman with a Louise Brooks hairstyle.”

  Cox pays with his Visa card and waves to Nick, who is rinsing glasses.

  “I’ll bring the car round,” says Cox.

  “And I’ll have your bags brought down. Don’t forget your shoes on the beach, Professor.”

  His socks have blown away but his shoes are still lying in the spot where he came across the two little boys the previous evening. The sea is out again and before he returns to the hotel he strolls across the expanse of sand to the breakers where he saw Starr walk into the water. In the distance a rusty tanker slides across the horizon.

  Five minutes later Cox is standing in the hotel car park with his shoes in his hand. Apart from a Scandiafish rental vehicle the area is empty. His car, which he parked here the previous week, has disappeared.

  “That’s never happened before,” says the concierge in dismay. “It’s as if somebody up there doesn’t like you, Professor. If I was you I would report the theft to the police right away. For the insurance. Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless your girlfriend went off with the car.”

  Why hadn’t he thought of that before? When they went out together it was usually Starr who drove; he had given her the spare key himself. But she must have been in a really bad mood to do something as mean as that. It was time to sort all these things out and make up.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with me lately,” says Cox, “but I’m beginning to forget things. I did in fact suggest that she should take the car.”

  Cox just manages to catch the crowded 11.43 train and finds a seat opposite a suntanned man aged about thirty. He is immediately struck by his old-fashioned black-and-white shoes. Buried in the Sunday Times sports pages, he doesn’t even look up when Cox jostles his feet as he sits down. As the train sets off sluggishly, Cox tries to remember where he has seen him before. Because those smooth features, that rugged chin, that straight nose, those chiselled lips and that shiny combed-back hair do seem familiar. On the seat next to him are two tennis rackets in a grey cover embroidered with the initials G.H. Cox runs through every famous tennis player in his mind but cannot think of any whose name would correspond to the initials G.H. It’s not that important, he thinks, and looks out of the window at the polders, the reclaimed land of the Low Countries, covered in mist and sliding past like a painted set. Again and again the same willows, the same brickwork farmhouses, the same ponds in the same pastures with the same dappled cows. Nothing will send you to sleep faster than the Flemish polder landscape viewed from the Ostend – Antwerp train. Just before the train reaches Jabbeke, Cox nods off.

  He has barely shut his eyes when he suddenly realizes who the man opposite him is: Guy Haines, the English tennis champion in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train whose wife Bruno Anthony offers to murder if Guy kills his father in exchange. He looks exactly like the actor Farley Granger and the initials on the cover match too. The train slows down and stops at the little station in Jabbeke. Cox pretends to be asleep and hardly dares move. Around him he can hear the bustle of travellers leaving and entering the compartment. As soon as the train sets off again he half-opens his eyes. Opposite him, where Guy Haines had been, a nun with round glasses and plump, veined cheeks is sitting, looking at him with a friendly smile.

  “Hello Mrs Kountché,” says Cox, happy to be back in the real world.

  “Hello, Mr Cox. How was it in the elephant?” asks his Nigerian neighbour.

  Cox smiles. The fantasy about living in an elephant has obviously made an impression on her.

  “I’m not coming from the elephant, Mrs Kountché. I went to the coast for a few days to do some writing.”

  “That’s what I thought. Our neighbour’s been gone a long while this time, I thought.”

  “You haven’t happened to see whether my girlfriend has brought my car back, have you?”

  Normally nothing in the neighbourhood would escape Mrs Kountché. If Starr had come by she would surely have noticed.

  “I haven’t seen anything, no. But I haven’t had much time because my family has come to visit. My sister and her husband and her six children.”

  “Well then, you’ve got your hands full! Take care,” says Cox, collecting the bills and junk mail from the overflowing letterbox.

  The house smells of old books and Cox opens the windows in his study to let in some fresh air. Then he listens to the answering machine in the hope of hearing Starr’s voice. But there is only one message. The chairman of the High Noon Film Club is asking him to get in touch about a lecture on eroticism in the works of Hitchcock.

  21

  Sandy Misotten de Landshove

  For days, for months there was no sign of life from Starr. Cox was inconsolable and virtually stopped seeing anyone. Because she did not answer the phone, he went to her door every day for the first few weeks. But it was as if the apartment was empty and the whole Mortenson family had left the country in haste. He sought out every cinema, café and restaurant where they had passed the most beautiful hours of their lives together, but to no end.

  On Thursday, 14th March 2002, precisely five months after Starr had disappeared, he received a phone call from the police station in Hoboken to enquire whether his car had be
en stolen recently. He replied that he was not sure and so he had not reported it. The inspector did not understand and asked him to explain.

  “It’s possible that my girlfriend took the car,” Cox mumbled into the phone.

  “What do you mean, don’t you know whether she did?”

  “The problem is that we have lost touch with each other.”

  “Well, the border police recovered your car in a depot. It was with dozens of other stolen cars waiting to be loaded on board. You can pick up your vehicle from today from the Antwerp police pound in Hoboken.”

  And that’s what he did. He climbed into his car and saw her, sitting radiant with happiness in her place at the wheel. It was as if he were diving down once again into the twilight of his inevitable dream. As he drove home along the quayside he thought back to that day when he stood in the Astoria Hotel car park in Koksijde and could not find his car. The day when his life had collapsed again into loathsome mediocrity.

  The lurid setting sun slanted across the filthy windscreen. Turning a corner, he thought he could decipher a message scraped in the muck on the glass just as you sometimes think you can make out a face in the clouds, white letters on a dull grey background. I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool. The words spoken by Eugene Pallette to Margery Wilson in the silent film Intolerance. The words he had wanted to whisper in the ear of Starr if she had woken up beside him on that fatal Monday morning.

  This decrepit old car, scratched and filthy, was his last absurd link with the woman who had made him forget the hell he had been through with Shelley, and also his only hope of ever seeing her again. But instead it turned out to have been no more than an ordinary theft, and as a result Starr’s disappearance suddenly seemed irrevocable. Irrevocable and incomprehensible. Nothing had suggested that their relationship would end so brutally. He found it hard to imagine that the trivial quarrel about his not picking her up at Ostend was a reason for them to part. Sometimes he wished that she was dead. Nothing was more unbearable than the feeling of betrayal, than the doubts and uncertainty with which he had been living for months.

  On the night of Thursday, 16th May 2002, after sitting up late and working hard on his lecture on eroticism in the films of Hitchcock, he was lying numbly on the sofa with a bottle of port watching William Dieterle’s Love Letters. In the middle of the scene in which Jennifer Jones murders her lover Roger Morland after discovering that he is anything but the charming man his love letters imply, there was a ring at his door. For months now he had not received any visitors and was not expecting anyone. Who else but Starr would come to visit him unannounced in the middle of the night? That’s what she used to do. At impossible times. She would creep, silent as a cat, between the sheets and he would pretend he was asleep and had not heard her slip in. Until he felt her tongue on his neck and she stroked him awake and he turned over moaning to embrace her in the darkness.

  He springs up, knocking his glass over, runs with beating heart down the hallway and opens the front door. Luyckx and Lannoy are standing there. This is it, he thinks, they’ve found her. He prepares for the worst.

  “Sorry to bother you so late, Mr Cox, but we saw the lights were on and thought…”

  “No problem, I was up working. Come in.”

  The Sponge and his partner follow him through the hall to the living room and sit down next to each other on the sofa. On the television screen Allen Quinton, the true author of the letters, is visiting Jennifer Jones in prison. Cox switches off the video player and asks if they would like a drink.

  “Just a beer.”

  “Me too,” says Lannoy, looking at the spilt glass of port.

  Cox fetches two Stellas from the fridge and starts trembling violently. They don’t dare tell me the truth, he thinks.

  “Are you alone?” he hears Luyckx ask in the living room.

  “Yes, I’m alone,” he replies, handing them the bottles. “My girlfriend and I don’t really live together. Young people nowadays are more prudish than you think.”

  But Luyckx’s question reassures Cox somewhat.

  “Did you watch the news tonight, Mr Cox?”

  “No. I was working on a lecture. On eroticism in Hitchcock. What strikes me is that he stages love scenes as murder scenes and vice versa.”

  “Interesting,” says Lannoy.

  “So you probably don’t know why we’re here?”

  “No.”

  “Does the name Sandy Misotten de Landshove mean anything to you? Baroness Sandy Misotten de Landshove, to be precise.”

  “A baroness? No. Why?”

  “Because we found your name and telephone number in her address book.”

  “It must be a mistake. I don’t mix in aristocratic circles.”

  Lannoy digs out a black leather address book and opens it at the letter C.

  “Here. Professor Cox – tel. 03 233 0976. That’s your number, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They found her body this morning in the greenhouse of her chateau.”

  “I have never heard of the baroness.”

  “Right. But of five women murdered since 1995, you knew three of them: your wife, Marion Mees, Deborah Marchal. And now Sandy Misotten.”

  Nothing had suggested that they would end up at Cox’s again that night when Luyckx and Lannoy drove through the impressive gates of the mist-wreathed estate of de Landshove at around ten o’clock on Thursday morning. Baron Frans Misotten de Landshove, the owner of the Multipress & Co. media empire, was standing on the steps of his chateau as straight as a poplar tree waiting for them. He was a tall, elegant man of about seventy, with silver-white hair and ochre-coloured hawk eyes. The sort of personality who, even as he steps out of his helicopter, seems to have been born in the wrong century. In fact he had landed in his private plane just an hour earlier on the field behind the stables after spending the past week chairing a conference in Barcelona on the regulation of Chinese paper imports. He was extremely well-bred, spoke with few words and was finding it difficult to hide his emotion, despite his self-control. He led Luyckx and Lannoy in silence over the spotless gravel paths between rows of rhododendrons to the greenhouse, where the gardener had discovered the body of his wife when he went to pick up his tools at about half past seven. In the distance, on the edge of the forest of oaks, a flock of sheep was grazing in the mist. On a lake somewhere wild duck were quacking.

  “You must excuse me, gentlemen,” he said in a weary voice, “but I would prefer to remain outside. I fear I do not have the strength to see her a second time.”

  “We understand, Baron Misotten.”

  “When you need to sign the papers you’ll find me in my cabinet of curiosities. The butler will show you the way. Our family doctor, Dr Leenaerts, who has certified the death, is waiting for you in the greenhouse. Together with Jules who found her this morning. I’ll see you later.”

  When the de Landshove family doctor, choking, draws back the sheet from the naked body, The Sponge remains lost for words. The main thing that strikes him is the age of the victim. She could not have been more than twenty-five or so. Dr Leenaerts noticed Luyckx’s confusion and said: “Sandy was Frans’s second wife. They had not even been married for one year. My God, what have we done to deserve this! The world has gone mad, Superintendent, quite mad!”

  “How old was she?”

  “Nearly twenty-six. I know the difference in age shocked some people, but you will have noticed that Baron de Landshove is a man of exceptional character. The two were really in love. He hasn’t given any sign, because the de Landshoves do not display their feelings, but I fear he will not survive this drama. There are injustices in this life that can fell even a mighty oak like Frans, believe me.”

  She was not only young, but strikingly beautiful. The type of woman you only see in glossy magazines and wonder whether they really exist. She was lying on a bed of rotting leaves, with her arms and legs spread. Her mouth, her cheeks and her forehead had been smeared with h
aphazard, brutal smudges of lipstick. The murderer had drawn two circles around her nipples with the same lipstick and on her taut belly a red arrow pointed from the navel, where a diamond sparkled, to her close-shaven pubic hair.

  “What are your initial conclusions, Doctor?”

  “I’m not a pathologist, but the blue welts on the neck suggest to me that she was strangled. Probably with the garden hose.”

  “Raped?”

  “There’s not the slightest doubt about that.”

  “Any trace of her clothes?”

  “I found madam’s clothes behind the greenhouse in the rhubarb,” said the gardener, who up until then had been standing some distance away with his hat in his hands. “I think that… it… must have happened in the kitchen garden because a whole lot of plants have been trampled there. Leeks, parsley, radishes. The kitchen garden was madam’s domain. She was busy there every day. This year she planted fennel for the first time.”

  “How long has she been dead?”

  “I’m not an expert,” replied the doctor carefully. “But I would say about six or seven hours. I saw Frans’s first wife go, Superintendent, bone cancer, she suffered terribly and was not even sixty. He was with her up to the last minute and was inconsolable when she died. Instead of shutting himself up and pining away, he threw himself into his work. Ten years later he met Sandy, and rediscovered his zest for life.”

  “I guess anyone would,” remarked Luyckx laconically.

  “It is Frans’s wish that this case should give rise to a minimum of publicity. The family cannot permit a scandal, not to speak of the need to protect the shareholders of Multipress.”