‘I am A.J.L. Ferber,’ she said, in a voice familiar to me from many telephone calls. In person, her accent was a little less clipped, but I still found myself wondering if she was Swiss, Austrian or German. I decided that now wasn’t the time to ask her, though. She didn’t look at all pleased to see me.
‘What is the meaning of this intrusion?’ she said, not sternly but not kindly either. ‘Is this some pre-emptive strike by Mr Walker-Hebborn? I have already indicated that I will, under duress, visit him next week.’
‘It’s nothing to do with him,’ I said. ‘This is entirely my fault.’
‘I see,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Well, I presume that you have not come for my autograph. And you could hardly be here to steal the draft of my latest oeuvre because you have already translated that for me. Is this a social call?’
‘Maybe you could let the young man tell you himself?’ said Camilla, and a smile passed between Madame Ferber and her. I was impressed; in person, the most demanding author on Walker-Hebborn’s roster was proving to be far less terrifying than I had imagined. But then Madame Ferber turned back to me.
‘Camilla is right, and I do not take kindly to unannounced visitors. Why are you here?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I said.
‘I rather feared it might be,’ said Madame Ferber, which was rich coming from someone who didn’t get out of bed for less than a million words. ‘Perhaps you should sit down and tell me it properly.’
Camilla opened the door to a large sitting room and Madame Ferber and I entered.
‘Tea, please,’ said Madame Ferber to Camilla and we sat down.
‘What about your friend?’ said Camilla, looking at me, and Madame Ferber frowned.
‘You’re not on your own?’ she said. ‘That would explain the blustering earlier.’
‘He’s fine where he is,’ I said. ‘You might get him a glass of water.’ I could bring Frant into the conversation when I’d explained everything else. And there was plenty of explaining to be getting on with. Camilla left the room.
Madame Ferber lit what I could only assume was a small cheroot and blew smoke into the chair. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.
And once again I unfolded the whole saga, from bar to Alice, from police to escape and, because there was something about Madame Ferber that discouraged both omission and dishonesty, from Frant’s assault on Monsieur Derringer to our current flight to her apartment.
Throughout the story, Madame Ferber sat in silence, her expression unchanging. When I had finished, she didn’t speak, but continued to sit in even more silence. I hoped she was thinking. I hoped she wasn’t considering whether or not to call the police. And I couldn’t help wondering, in a weird and pointless way, if my revelations would affect her relationship with Walker-Hebborn Publishing. It certainly wasn’t the best way for a translator to introduce himself to one of his authors.
Finally she spoke. ‘You seem to have been, as my mother would have said, in the wars. I have no doubt that you are the source of some of your own difficulties but things would appear to have got out of hand in a manner not of your choosing.’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Right now, I would be happy to turn myself in to the police and get all this over with.’
‘I do hope that isn’t the confessional urge of the fugitive speaking,’ said Madame Ferber.
‘I just can’t think of any other way out of this,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I came to you but there seemed nowhere else to go.’
‘Never mind,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Possibly you have done the right thing. After all, you are not the idiot who assaulted that man, and most of your reactions have been those of a misguided and panicky innocent.’
I said nothing. I wanted to believe that she was right.
‘I should imagine,’ said Madame Ferber, ‘that with a few tiresome calls to the right people, I can alleviate some of the difficulties you speak of. But that doesn’t concern me right now.’
‘What does concern you?’ I said.
‘Your companion,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘The curiously silent Mr Frant. He was, according to you, furiously keen to seek asylum in my apartment, yet now he is here, he seems equally keen to keep out of my way.’
‘He just doesn’t want to impose,’ I said, but even as I said it, it sounded ridiculous. If there was one man on earth who generally did want to impose, it would be Euros Frant.
‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘But then so much of your story is … well, that is what it is like. A story.’
‘It’s all true, I assure you,’ I said.
‘Please. I did not mean to offend. But consider. You are a man who does not live a life of high drama. Excitement for you is confined perhaps to the pages of other people’s novels.’
‘That, and the pleasure of making them comprehensible to the general public,’ I said. I was surprised at myself. I had just talked back to Madame Ferber. Walker-Hebborn, had he been able to see us, would have been chewing his own knuckles in horror and disbelief.
‘I see you have learned to stand up for yourself,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘An excellent trait in a translator. Unlike some, I have always thought of translators as to a small degree collaborators in an author’s work, rather than a linguistic bureau de change, converting one tongue to another.’
Now I was surprised and pleased. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It makes a change from Mr Frant’s attitude to my job.’
‘Yes,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Mr Frant again. Have you ever been to Frant? I have. Pretty place.’
She tailed off, and appeared to go into some kind of reverie. I wondered if she was about to fall asleep, when suddenly she rang a bell. She had to ring it again, and finally Camilla came back into the room.
‘Mr Frant wanted a croissant with his glass of water,’ she explained.
‘I am sure he did,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Camilla, Jacky will be staying with us for a while.’
Camilla looked startled, and so, I imagine, did I. I hadn’t heard my own name for days, which says a lot about the fractured nature of my recent existence.
‘What about Mr Frant?’ said Camilla.
Madame Ferber gave her what my mother used to call an old-fashioned look. ‘This young man is my translator. He is familiar to me and, whatever his apparent crimes, I feel I should give him a chance and, as the Americans say, “some space” to extricate himself from the situation in which he finds himself. I am under no such obligation to Mr Frant.’
‘I don’t like him much myself,’ I said. ‘But he’s all mixed up in this too and I feel obliged to him—’
‘I fail to see why,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Nothing he has done or said suggests a shred of obligation on your part. Also there is just something about him I don’t like. Did you notice, Camilla,’ she said, turning to her companion, ‘he has the same last initial as I do?’
‘Yes,’ said Camilla. ‘We wondered if that would be the case.’
I looked at them, baffled. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Anyway, that is my offer. One hates to be dramatic, but your future rather depends on your answer.’
I wasn’t happy. It was an impossible situation. On the one hand, I was trying to help a man for whom gratitude and thanks were alien ideas. If I did help him, it would almost certainly harm my relationship with my employer’s most important client. I realise it sounds absurd worrying about career details at a time like this but the mind, as they say, is a monkey, and a pedantic, nervous monkey at that. Yet I couldn’t just abandon Frant to the authorities. Knowing him, he would assault several policemen during the course of his eventual arrest and be so unpleasant to everyone involved in his case that he would end up on the guillotine. I didn’t know if they still used the guillotine in France, but even if they didn’t, I suspected they would make an exception for Frant.
There was another reason, too. The girl. Despite Madame Ferber’s kindness and the fact that she was a
s it were the only port in the storm, she wasn’t the one who could help me find the girl. The person who could do that, regrettably, was Frant. In every aspect of the situation, from the Alice to the place where she had acquired the notebook, Frant had been peripheral to her actions. I had no idea what connection the girl had to the world that Frant moved in, but it was his world and, unpleasant though it was, he was my only link to her.
I said as much to Madame Ferber, and she looked weary.
‘Then I am afraid I have no choice,’ she said. ‘It is a terrible pity, because I find that I like you, dogged young man. Camilla, please show him out.’
I was surprised at Madame Ferber’s abruptness, but realised at once that she had acted correctly according to her lights. She had offered me a way out and I had, effectively, refused it. I stood up.
‘Thank you, Madame Ferber,’ I said.
‘Camilla will show you to the door,’ said Madame Ferber.
But Camilla was absent.
‘Camilla?’ Madame Ferber said, a note of uncertainty in her voice.
There was a thump, and a scream and Camilla staggered into the room, propelled by an unseen force. The door burst open and Frant stood there, covered in croissant crumbs. Ridiculously, he was holding a gun.
‘Where did you get that?’ I said. It wasn’t the most relevant question, but it was the first one that came to mind.
‘Shut up,’ said Frant, his usual charm to the fore. He waved the gun around, vaguely but dangerously. ‘Everyone sit down,’ he said.
‘Frant, for God’s sake! Stop acting like a gangster!’ I shouted. ‘There’s really is no need for this.’
Madame Ferber had been silent so far. Now she looked at him. ‘Get out of my apartment,’ she said. ‘Put that gun down and get out of my apartment.’
Frant ignored her. He was too busy peering at his gun and I realised he was looking for the safety catch. He obviously had little or no experience with weapons and I couldn’t work out if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I was just deciding on ‘bad thing’ when Camilla lunged at him and, with a forearm like iron, jabbed Frant in the throat so hard that he fell back against the wall. I could only stand in confusion as she grabbed Madame Ferber’s hand and pulled her towards the door.
Madame Ferber hesitated.
Camilla saw her look at me. ‘Why did you have to bring him here?’ she said, giving me a look of hate. ‘You’re as bad as he is.’
Madame Ferber shook her hand off. ‘I can’t help you now,’ she said to me.
Camilla was looking for something on the wall. She found it, a small red dot under a light switch, and pushed it.
‘Panic button,’ she said. ‘The police will be here in three minutes.’ And she pulled Madame Ferber out of the room.
Madame Ferber cast me one backward glance. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and was gone.
Silence fell in the apartment, broken only by a faint gurgle from Frant as he tried to stand up while holding his crushed throat. Eventually he got to his feet.
‘Quickly,’ he croaked horribly. ‘We haven’t got much time.’
*
When I was a child, I had what my mother used to call unsuitable friends. Even at the time, I thought this was unfair because I never thought of them as my friends. They were all different – some were bigger boys, some were runts, one was a girl – but they all had one thing in common: they were all fairly unpleasant. One was a small boy called Hendrick. His parents were perhaps the only Dutch people in the world who didn’t speak English fluently and this may have been the root of Hendrick’s oddness. More likely I think he was just naturally horrible. I was always being left with Hendrick because my mother felt sorry for his parents and used to visit them and talk to them in loud English. Hendrick and I would go to his room, ostensibly to look at his collection of weird Dutch soldiers, and as soon as the door closed he would jump on my back and thump me repeatedly in the kidneys until I began to cry silently. I had to cry silently because if I made any noise, Hendrick would bite me on the stomach. I said nothing of this to my mother because I reckoned that if she felt sorry for Hendrick’s parents, she would by extension be sympathetic to Hendrick and his horribleness.
Then there was Job-Job. I think his real name was Jonathan but he was Job-Job to everyone but his mother. Job-Job was a few months younger than me and we met in a play park one summer holiday. After that, Job-Job followed me wherever I went for about three years. He would follow me home where my mother, assuming we were friends, would invite him in for milk. He followed me when I went for walks, or to Cub Scout meetings. And once he followed me to school – Job-Job attended a different local school because he was a Catholic – which caused chaos because he managed to attend four or five classes before lunchtime when his imposture was finally rumbled. I got the blame for this but it led to the end of Job-Job’s lamb-like devotion when his furious parents blamed me for everything and sent Job-Job to a far-off boarding school where he could follow other boys to his heart’s content and nobody would ever notice.
Louise was perhaps the saddest. A tomboy, she was, like Hendrick, prone to sudden bouts of astonishing violence, but with her it was always much more random. In the middle of a conversation, she would suddenly come at me like a dervish, fists flailing, until I was bruised and stunned. I remember once we were catching butterflies and one escaped her net. I said something reassuring to her, like, ‘There’s another one over there,’ and she jumped me and kicked me in the ribs. I never said anything to my mother about these incidents, blaming them on imaginary bullies, partly because I was scared of Louise and partly because I felt sorry for her. When she wasn’t attacking me, she would tell me about her family in long, confused stories that were clearly complete fantasy.
Her father, she claimed, was a test pilot. His absence from her life was explained by the fact that he was such a good test pilot he had been asked to go to America for a year and teach other test pilots to be as good as him. Her mother was a secret agent, and that was how she had met her father, delivering some confidential (Louise said ‘compidential’ but I was good at words and knew what she meant) papers concerning a new aeroplane. They had fallen in love and when her father’s contract expired, her mother would leave the secret service and they would move away and live in a big house together. I would nod wisely, or wince if she was hurting me at the time, but I knew these stories were nonsense. I’d seen Louise’s house and it was a rundown place with rubbish on the lawn and a broken window. But Louise was waiting for the day when her father would return home on a motorbike with a flight jacket and a suntan, and I wasn’t going to disillusion her.
After a while, my mother began to notice that whenever I came home from play, I would be injured in some way. At first she blamed herself but as time went on – this would be shortly after my father went away – she decided that there was a degree of what lawyers call ‘contributory negligence’. I was deliberately hanging around with bad children, getting into fights and ripping my clothes for fun. The fact was, though, that I had never asked to be friends with these children. I was, looking back on it, someone that bullies and oddballs gravitated towards. I was, essentially, born to be their punchbag.
As the years went by, and I gained a degree of self-awareness and confidence, I learned to recognise these people. At school and at college, there were young men and women looking for someone to have a hold over, but I always managed to avoid them. I became expert, in fact, at dodging these unsuitable friendships, to the extent that if somebody showed signs of becoming a rod for my back in later acquaintance, I would almost immediately give them a wide berth. Sometimes I might look back and think, Maybe they would have turned out to be nice people after all, but nine times out of ten I would see them with their new friends, the people who had fallen victim to them, and consider myself better off.
Now I stood in the hallway of an opulent apartment in Paris, through whose doorway one of my employer’s most valuable clients had just fled, thanks to m
y incompetence, and I looked down at the expensive carpet, where Euros Frant was massaging the muscles in his throat back into place, and I realised that, once again, I had managed to fall into the hands of yet another, in my mother’s phrase, unsuitable friend. Not that Frant was my friend, you understand, as even at their worst the likes of Hendrick and Louise had afforded me the odd companionable moment, but he was the only person I had spent any considerable amount of time with for several months and we were, in a way, bound together by the coinciding of our different missions. I had even, it now occurred to me, confided in him. He was in every surface appearance a friend. I had no doubt that, in the language of the press, he was certainly an accomplice and a fellow suspect.
Camilla’s final angry words came back to me. I was as bad as he was. Frant and I were, in short, bound together, and I didn’t even like him. It was arguably at this point, then, that I should have just said to hell with it and run away. But it was also at this point that I found myself unable to. I looked at the figure on the floor, trying to get to his feet with his throat in one hand and a gun in the other, and I said, ‘Let me help you up.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Frant in the voice of a cartoon duck. He pocketed the gun – I saw he had failed to release the safety catch – and got to his feet.
‘Where the hell did you get that gun?’ I said.
‘I found it in a drawer by the front door,’ said Frant. It sounded stupid enough to be true.
‘I really think we should get out of here,’ I said. ‘The police are on their way.’
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the police have a strange habit of always being on their way and never actually arriving,’ said Frant. He went over to the panic button that Camilla had pressed and prised it from its housing with a letter opener. The two wires protruding from the back of the button were not connected to anything. ‘Quite literally a false alarm,’ said Frant, and coughed horribly. Then he crossed the room. I followed him in as he pulled out drawers and threw cushions onto the floor.
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