It was an hour later, after I had wedged cardboard against the two broken panes to the French windows and cleared the bottles and butts out of my bedroom, that I realized my guitars were gone. My Martin was painful, but mine to lose. But Estelle! The custom guitar, property of the dormant folk/blues legend. Two nights and gone, about average for one of my girlfriends. Shit, this was serious. I shouldn’t have taken it. What was the upside? Well, I got to play Estelle. With new strings she was an exceptional guitar: the notes jumped out with such clarity. So powerfully that there were songs that just didn’t work on her.
I guess I was still young enough to be more proud of Natalie for some serious partying than shocked and disgusted by this bacchanalia, not that I wasn’t seriously annoyed by the condition of my flat.
This was my last Saturday before I flew back home for Christmas. Sure I’d show up at that Immigration booth and present my knife-wounded passport as if it was the most natural thing in the world. In my world maybe it was.
CHAPTER 16
On the Monday after the party, two white van blokes hired by Matthew Steyning removed the myriad bottles, cans, cigarette butts, food wrappers, dropped or discarded food items, empty wine bottles (all Italian vintages, so presumably Wormsleigh’s) and other debris from 4B and 5B. They also took away the trashed espresso machine, the wine rack that had been pulled out of its slot in the cabinetry and accordioned to a flat jumble. Then they went over both flats with an industrial vacuum cleaner. By this time the glazier had arrived to replace four broken windows. The more fundamental repairs, filling in two holes in the wall, replacing interior doors, working on cigarette burns and in the case of 4B replacing the entire living room carpet, would wait until January.
I found a cleaning agency that sent over two Polish girls to give the bathroom and kitchen the rubber glove treatment. They were too polite to ask about the blood on the bathroom walls; or else it was beyond their rudimentary English. The party had churned up and beached various deep sea exotica. The taller Slavic girl, Marina, who spoke some English, kept coming up to me and asking, “Where this go?” A book of ribald limericks found the cutlery drawer; a walking stick wedged into the handle of a kitchen cabinet; a digital recorder—the kind you talk into—in the bathroom somewhere.
Marina was happy to talk, standing with her arm snaked around the cracked balcony door so her cigarette was outside. She was from Szczecin, a Polish port next to Germany; she was modest about her German. I phoned up the Hamburg number that was on Kirk’s call list. “It says is no working this number.”
By Tuesday afternoon, 5B was fairly presentable. The kitchen had an empty slot where the wine rack had been, like a gapped-tooth smile.
MI6 Grandee Retires
Mr. Charles Hardcastle, a legend in MI6, retired this week after a forty-one year career in intelligence and diplomacy. Described as both quiet and flamboyant, Hardcastle came into his own as Deputy Station Chief in Moscow during the height of the Cold War (1965-1973), following a distinguished start in the Foreign Office and, before that, a double first from Trinity College, Cambridge. There were persistent rumors at the time that Hardcastle was a double agent. He spent the remainder of his career living that down. Many speculate this is why Hardcastle never received the customary honors for his service. (Others maintain that he didn’t want such formal recognition.)
“It always was ridiculous,” said MI6 historian and former intelligence analyst Sir Bruce Grenville. “Charles was on friendly terms with the upper echelons of the Soviet Communist Party. He was invited to dinners at the dachas of the powerful. Certainly that caused intense jealousy within the service. He used those connections tirelessly to further the interests of the empire. But double agent? There is not one crumb of evidence to support such allegations.”
Hardcastle made a name for himself with several famous defections, including KGB Colonel Vasilly Vologordsky. Yet he was a fearless champion of Soviet culture, music and most especially poetry. He was famous for delivering an apposite Soviet verse on any occasion. “He could out-culture the Soviet’s own leadership and they responded to that,” Grenville said.
Hardcastle spent two months as an intermediary between the Soviets and the Chinese at a particularly inflammatory time on their shared border. That affair is shrouded in mystery. All one can say in the end is that the crisis cooled down, and Hardcastle returned to Moscow. There were rumors of a nervous breakdown.
Hardcastle came back to London in 1973, then spent the rest of his career in the upper echelons of MI6, always focused on the Eastern Bloc.
Mr. Charles Hardcastle retires today (September 2, 1995) at the age of sixty-five.
I found the above article in an obscure magazine called The AngloRussia Journal at the British Library, an easy stop between Central London and my flat. Otherwise these last two days had brought on a curious lethargy. Maybe it was all these Christmas decorations; the major shopping thoroughfares were festooned with bright fake flakes, garlands of glittery tinsel, the strings of lights, harking back to the excitement of presents and the purely commercial impulse behind that excitement. Even my tired, shoddy High Street was decked out in an understated, budget-constrained way. It worked; I wanted to buy. I wanted to join the milling hordes on Oxford Street, toting bags, trailing scarves, cheeks red from the cold. I had no one in this town to buy a present for.
In two days I’d be on a plane back to San Francisco, and had one more item on my to-do list; the meeting with Iken Press that Natalie had set up. After that I was a free agent. Why did Kirk come to London? Why did Kirk want to meet Hardcastle? How much did he know about him pre-London? What about that damned book of my father’s poems? Kirk slipped between all these cracks until he disappeared like water into sand. It was as though Kirk was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Then there was Claudia. For some reason I suspected a link between Claudia and Kirk. He dies. In a week she disappears. The two are connected via Jack Ross, who had tried to put them in touch. I kept telling myself that Kirk was dead and I was leaving. That should be the end of it. But I was too curious now to let go.
Iken Publishing was on the second floor of Orwell House, a thoughtlessly drab six-story box grown like a weed out of a bomb crater just north of St Paul’s Cathedral. The Luftwaffe never succeeded in taking out St. Paul’s, but man were their misses accurate.
Assuming a meaningful connection between Claudia and Kirk, it must have been more than a casual chat in the foyer at Onslow Mansions before or after she showed him my flat. How did Claudia engage with him? If you believe Natalie, Claudia had acquired our album as part of a campaign to know Kirk. She meets him to show 5B, establishes a way to contact him, investigates his background, his music, calls him about something. Hardcastle? Maybe Claudia has something else he’s interested in? She’s a book publisher, no doubt connected to a range of interesting or helpful people. So two lines of inquiry at Iken: anything personal relating to Claudia, and a blind search for some connection to my bandmate.
Moira, Personal Assistant to Claudia Steyning, was a plain-looking girl with an elongated face, dull eyes, and thick, vegetative brown hair. She did have a nice mouth, generous, heart-shaped. She played up her plainness: no makeup, hair falling where it would, eyes aggressively inward.
But those clothes! More clown than couture. Today a purple sweater like a scratchy hair-shirt, orange/rust skirt, red tights, and boots more combat than civilian.
“How’s Natalie? We don’t talk much anymore.”
I came up with a blandly positive report, then asked a few questions. Moira told me that Claudia handled all her own private engagements. She harmonized them with Moira, who like many at Iken had access to Claudia’s schedule via Iken’s server. Claudia would block out time and call it “personal,” rarely going into details. Occasional lunches, but mostly late afternoons, probably to do with her daughter. Evenings were assumed to be personal unless she listed a business meeting or event.
/> Moira also confirmed that Claudia’s schedule for the week following her disappearance was a normal one, starting with the usual managers’ meeting at 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning, continuing on from there with a standard fare of literary agents, meetings, lunches with author/clients, internal meetings on any number of subjects, and an important meeting on Thursday with an assistant buyer from one of the large book store chains.
Moira was cooperative in a wary, touchy way. Reluctantly she agreed to join me at Iken’s local pub after work. She had to be holding out. Before that, she introduced me to Trevor Caspian, the acting Managing Director. He was a small man with bleached hair in a crew cut, red-framed glasses and a lop-sided smile. He was one of those weight-of-the-world guys; he made no secret that the company was struggling without their captain at the helm. He’d had greatness thrust upon him. All he wanted to do was thrust it back.
Our interview was inconclusive. Either some connection arced and sparked or it didn’t. Once the latter was established, it became an awkward fishing expedition, me throwing out free association words, phrases and names, one of which was Hardcastle. He didn’t know the name. If Hardcastle had been an author, Caspian would know about him. Maybe, Caspian speculated, Hardcastle was mentioned in one of Iken’s non-fiction books. I was welcome to trawl through their indexes—a possible project for later. Finally, there might be something in a “note for file” about a work in progress. He was sorry, but he couldn’t let me see any files, something to do with data protection.
Caspian was too indirect to come out and ask me why I was asking so many questions, so I told him myself. I explained about Hardcastle and his mysterious connection to Kirk. About how Kirk’s death was only one week before Claudia disappeared. The subtext: I was grasping at straws.
“Claudia’s life was always so…controlled. What I mean is, she was a passionate woman, but she kept that side away from work. She was a true professional. Those weeks before she disappeared she was…muted?” Caspian was a man who chose his words carefully. “Claudia could be sharply critical of you, but her eyes were nevertheless on your side. Those last weeks those sympathetic eyes were gone. Something was getting to her. As I told the police, I can’t imagine what.”
***
The Shepherd was a tired pub around the corner from Iken. The dim light only partially obscured the glaring call of Moira’s purple and orange hair-shirt ensemble. I itched just looking at her.
I happened to see her as she came through the door. The confused look around, hoping not to find me, then catching my eye, slumping into a slow approach. I abandoned any conversational preliminaries, cut to the chase. I told her about Kirk, and that I wondered whether Claudia’s disappearance was in some way connected with his death, happening as they did at the same time. I told her I was at a complete loss, struggling to make sense of any part of Claudia’s disappearance. In need of help, see? Women usually went for this stuff, a vague pull at maternal heartstrings. Not our Moira.
“What would you like to drink?”
“You choose.” She was looking at the tabletop.
I asked the guy behind the bar for the most popular woman’s drink. He was Australian, so assumed I meant most popular with men seeking a horizontal outcome. I figured that out later.
Moira sat there, inert, uncommenting. I watched her sip her rum and Coke, then she took a more generous sample, a drink more about fortitude than enjoyment.
“Look,” I said, a wave of frustration rising in me. “I can see this looks like I’m poking my nose where it doesn’t belong. You’ve got to understand it from my side, though. My best friend, murdered! Imagine how you would feel if your best friend’s life was taken like that! Gone. Forever.” If she had a best friend, I thought.
“Murder,” she intoned. Well, at least she could still talk. I had blurted this out as a way of getting to her, shake her up a bit; I could live with it. She stopped, took another sip, braced herself. Her face looked flushed, blotchy, as if she’d skipped tears and went straight for the aftermath. She closed her eyes for a long, meditative moment.
She came out of it calmer. We were quiet in counterpoint to the pub noise. After some time I sent out a few conversational feelers. Eventually, we hit on plays. They were part of my evening ritual. A well-reviewed play, a drink at the bar at intermission, that shared buzz of filing out into the cold afterwards, being a part of that crowd but alone, too. A drink at a nearby pub, overloud, throbbing with conversation, soaking it up. The Tube ride back to Kentish Town Station, writing impressions in my notebook. Fellow travelers also back from entertainment, holding programs or beer cans.
Moira liked theatre, but was evasive about any details. Fed up, I cut to the chase. “Let me ask you, have you ever heard of Mr. Charles Hardcastle?”
A contorted grimace worked its way over her face. She shook her head. It could mean no, or it could mean she was warding something off.
My pint of London Pride was finished. Moira’s drink was just about low enough to warrant another. I went off to the bar to allow her time to mull things over. My Australian gave me an eye nudge, a positive commentary on my progress so far.
When I got back, her first drink was finished. She gave me a lop-sided, guarded, yet less defensive smile. I think she was deciding whether she could trust me, or the rum was doing that for her.
I kept quiet for a time. Moira was examining the tabletop. Her right hand was balled up in a fist. She hit the table absently once or twice, sat there for a time, then that fist slowly eased. I looked at the nail marks indented in her palm; I saw a piece of paper. She looked at it for a long moment, as if it contained her life story. Her hand opened more; we waited. Finally I reached over, and took the paper. Her hand fell fully open.
We exchanged a quick glance. Hers said: “You’ve taken it, so it’s all down to you.”
The paper, the ink runny with sweat, said “Francine McLain” with a cell phone number. “She’s a client, of Claudia’s.”
Our finger food arrived—my effort to prolong the rum effect; greasy chips with a green tinge to them. Dark brown, over-nuked, chicken wings.
“Do you think Francine would see me tomorrow?” My last day before flying back home. Damn, I had a lot to do still.
“She’s not the easiest person to get on the phone. You can try.” She didn’t sound hopeful. “I’ll let her know you’re looking for her, okay?” She picked up her new drink, looked at it, set it down unsipped. “Francine doesn’t take my calls anymore.”
Moira reached over and picked up what the British call a chip; a thick, fat French fry with lukewarm mush in the middle. She turned it this way then that, as if trying to find out where her fortune was printed. “I should be going,” she said, standing up.
I watched her leave. She had the vague directional sense of a somnambulist. I wondered what her life was like. Why the gaudy hair shirt clothes? A certain belligerence to her plainness. She was hiding, I decided, behind a veil of unattractiveness. Hiding from what, was the question.
CHAPTER 17
“Rhythm of the Dice” from Back to Blank (Fifth Album) 4:10
In those black weeks after Molly was gone, I scrabbled frantically for any substantial flotsam I could crawl up on and keep from drowning. We had cancelled the end of our tour, but a large part of me wanted the release of bellowing out songs. It had always been a way of channeling my anger. My mother needed me. She was alone now, except for the erratic and inconstant orbit of her son. We spent weeks as if trapped in a dentist’s waiting room, or some circle or other of Dante’s.
In our early days, Kirk and I had joked about the Immortal Soul. Kirk had that analytical detachment where ideas never connected to feelings and consequences. They burned in their own vacuum like filaments in light bulbs. He was dismissive of the concept of an Immortal Soul.
“Let’s say your soul is the twenty-one grams that flies from you at death,” he said with that deadpan look. “Let’s say that from, well, 1650
to now, the world’s population has increased by, what, six billion? My question is this: where does this vast weight come from?” He muttered quick sums: six billion at twenty grams is 120 billion grams, therefore 120 million kilograms, divide by 2,000 gives you…now he straightened up. “Sixty thousand metric tons of soul, man! Logically there should be a law of conservation applied here. Somewhere else, or some portfolio of places, would have to lose six billion souls. Their loss; our gain. Cruel God for them this time.”
Of course our conversation back then was light-hearted: the idea of a measure called a soul-ton we both found endlessly hilarious, mere youth throwing eggs at a passing car driven by an off-duty grim reaper, scythe sticking out the back window.
Eventually I settled on a variation of one of Kirk’s other theories. In it, God is the opposite of a creator; a destroyer, killing off near infinite versions of a common world until there is only one—ours. Any Grand God can create everything, an infinity of infinite mandalas; only a magnificent God can destroy all but the one story and in that process balance a coherent world among billions of beings. Imagine that complexity, like navigating a boat through myriad micro and macro organisms ensuring that at each moment they are in the exact right configuration, while still heading exactly south-southwest.
To choose from among the infinite and keep such choice in balance, second by second, so that the entire universe moves seamlessly, must be a gargantuan task. The mother desperately praying for her child to live is asking God to reconfigure the universe, reconcile to a new storyline an entire unwinding of events out to infinity. Can death be that shortcut? A simplifying maneuver so that this overtaxed deity does not have to reconcile all lives out to infinity then back again?
Rhythm of the dice implies randomness, and randomness subverts Belief. The thought of that overworked god, Little God, helped. In taking Molly’s death out of the shaking hands of an alcoholic and putting it in those of a barely coping god, I lost some of the anger at that idiot drunk. In ascribing a purpose to Molly’s leaving, helping Little God manage the story of the world, I gained enough solid ground to work my way toward the edge of the swamp.
Little God Blues Page 7