The Mule

by David Quantick

  ‘Please stop doing that,’ I said.

  ‘Oh!’ shouted Frant. ‘Excuse me! Have I crossed a line? Apparently it’s all right to rob people and attack them and pull guns on them but throwing some cushions around! Beyond the pale!’

  I didn’t bother pointing out that he was the one robbing and attacking people and even if he wasn’t, it still didn’t make it all right. I was very tired. I put one of the cushions back on the sofa and sat on it. Frant had now moved on to shoving pictures to one side on the wall, like a burglar looking for a wall safe, I thought, until I realised that he actually was a burglar looking for a wall safe, and I was just sitting there watching him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘This is Madame Ferber’s apartment. You should stop, now.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Frant said. ‘Do you think I give a fig for Madame Ferber? She always was a third-rate authoress, anyway. These drapes and furnishings were not the fruits of talent, I can assure you.’

  A thin chill went down my spine. ‘You told me you’d never heard of her,’ I said. ‘You denied knowledge of her books entirely.’

  ‘Of course I did,’ said Frant. ‘I was playing my cards close to my chest. Do you think that if I had expressed my true knowledge of Madame Ferber’s rotten books, you would have been so eager to take me to her apartment?’

  ‘I wasn’t in the least eager,’ I said.

  ‘You were so keen to show off your threadbare acquaintance with the famous writer that you all but carried me here,’ said Frant, tapping at a dado rail. ‘Look at me, the great translator, best of friends with the legendary A.J.L. Ferber. Oh, she’s such a recluse, you know, but I’m sure she’ll have time to see me.’

  I didn’t argue with him. There was no point. He had a gun and he was an idiot. Instead, I got up, closed some drawers and straightened some paintings. Now Frant was peeling up the corners of the carpet.

  ‘Have you actually read any of her books?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I have,’ I said, ‘I’m her translator. It’s one of the essential requirements of the job.’

  ‘I don’t mean follow them line by line like a child working out a code in a puzzle book,’ said Frant. ‘I mean actually read them. Comprehend their meaning beyond the odd sentence. Garner a sense of the message and philosophy behind each novel.’

  I said nothing. Of course, as a translator you don’t really have to indulge in the luxury of enjoying the book that you’re working on. I had always said to myself that one day I would sit down and really have a go at one of Madame Ferber’s novels, but what with one thing and another I’d never actually got around to doing so.

  I must have said as much to Frant because he paused in the act of prising up a loose floorboard and said, ‘There’s really no need. She combines the most turgid moments of Henry James’s later prose with the least interesting insights of Ayn Rand. All mixed in with a mysticism that would make Kahlil Gibran feel queasy.’

  There was something tugging at the back of my mind about Frant’s rather too pat summary. I wondered if I’d read it somewhere else. It wouldn’t surprise me, as Frant had never struck me as particularly inventive, even for someone who did write books in imaginary languages.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve never read any of those authors,’ I said. ‘And surely all great writers are influenced by other people? You yourself owe a huge debt to Tolkien and Umberto Eco.’

  That struck home. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Frant, and stood up. Whatever he was looking for was continuing to elude him.

  ‘Can we go now?’ I said. ‘I have no idea what we’re doing here.’

  ‘We can go when I’ve found it,’ said Frant, and to my alarm he picked up a poker from the fireside.

  ‘Found what?’ I said.

  ‘What I came here to get,’ Frant said, hefting the poker in his soft writer’s grip.

  ‘We came here because it was my idea,’ I said. ‘We came here to find a safe haven, as I remember it. You didn’t know we were coming here—’

  ‘Just like I didn’t know who Madame Ferber was,’ said Frant. He got down on his knees by the fireplace and started jabbing the poker up the chimney.

  I realised that I was completely out of my depth. I was beginning to suspect that somehow I was being led along. I felt depressed and used. Finally, I felt that I couldn’t go any further. I got to my feet and wondered if I should just leave without saying goodbye to Frant. It would be easy. I could simply sidle over to the door and walk out. Then again, he had a gun.

  ‘Ah,’ said Frant. The jabbing had dislodged something. He prodded the chimney some more and great lumps of soot fell into the fireplace. Frant shoved again, harder, and this time something quite large dropped into the grate.

  ‘Get me a newspaper,’ said Frant.

  ‘I want nothing more to do with this,’ I said. ‘I’m going to the police, right now. I’m sorry, Frant, it’s over.’

  ‘All right,’ said Frant. ‘Just pass me some newspaper and you can go.’

  I paused. ‘Damn you,’ I said. Then I added, ‘Why have I got to get the newspaper?’

  ‘Because we’re in this together,’ said Frant. ‘Because this concerns you as well. And because I’ve got soot on my hands.’

  I passed Frant a copy of the Herald Tribune and he wrapped it around the large item. He wiped it down and I could see it was a black metal box. He picked it up.

  ‘It’s locked,’ he said. ‘Look in the bureau drawer.’

  I went over to the desk, opened it and inside the first drawer was a small bunch of keys. I gave them to Frant and he selected the smallest. It fitted the lock. Frant opened the

  box.

  ‘Your hands are clean,’ he said. ‘Yours is the honour of removing the package.’

  Inside the box was something small wrapped in clean white tissue paper. I lifted it out carefully and set it on the bureau. Frant wiped his hands on the curtain and came over.

  ‘Unwrap it,’ he said.

  I removed the thin layers of paper. Inside was a book, bound in red cloth with gold lettering. I picked it up. The lettering read Il Abentres D’Alissa Paro Illo Specolo. Even I could translate that. Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass.

  ‘I’ve seen this book before,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve seen a copy of it,’ Frant said. ‘A copy lost or misfiled in a London student library office. This is the original. This,’ he said, taking the translated Alice from me, ‘is what we came to Paris for.’

  I stared at him. ‘We came to Paris for the Von Fremdenplatz documents,’ I said. ‘You remember. You hit a man over the head with a bust and ran away with three of the bound volumes.’

  ‘I have to get them all back,’ said Frant.

  ‘All the Alices?’ I said. ‘How many are there?’

  ‘All the books. Open this.’

  I realised he meant the book. I opened it to the title page. It was all gibberish to me. Familiar gibberish, but gibberish nevertheless.

  ‘Read it,’ said Frant, his eyebrows all but crawling across his forehead in agitation.

  ‘Il Abentres D’Alissa Paro Illo Specolo Y Quasta El’ Trovada,’ I said, wondering absurdly if I was getting the accent right. This was a language that nobody had ever spoken, and for good reason. ‘Paria Lewis Carroll. Nove Translati Paria Jeremy Andrews Y Anna Ferber …’

  I looked at Frant. His eyebrows were virtually tangoing.

  ‘Madame Ferber?’ I said. ‘I’m guessing, but this blurb means that Madame Ferber was one of the translators of the Alice?’

  Frant nodded. ‘Along with Jeremy Andrews,’ he said.

  ‘But if she translated the Alice—’

  ‘With Jeremy Andrews—’

  ‘Then why didn’t she mention it when I was telling her about the girl and everything?’

  ‘Interesting question,’ said Frant, taking the Alice back. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I am completely and utterly confused. I tho
ught she was – well, I thought she might be my friend.’

  ‘She is nobody’s friend but her own,’ said Frant. ‘She is Ferber, the betrayer of men. But now we have her. The web is closing in.’

  I didn’t understand what he meant about Madame Ferber but he was right about the other thing. I had no idea if a web could close in or not, but I supposed that if it could, one was closing in on us all right.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I said. ‘I still think we should take this to the police.’

  ‘No,’ said Frant. ‘Not when we are so close. Besides, you want to see the girl again, don’t you?’

  For a moment I actually had to think about it. Tiredness does that to you. You’re focused on something for the longest time until in a way you take your focus, your obsession if you like, for granted, and you put it into a little room at the back of your mind, as if for safe-keeping. And you lock it up there and you get on with things and one day, when you’re finally getting close to your goal, you realise you’ve almost forgotten what you signed on for. That’s how I felt, anyway. I didn’t even know if I was any nearer to finding the girl, and when I thought about it, I grasped how absurd my quest might seem to her. After all, as I said, a long time ago it feels like, we didn’t exactly part on the best of terms and what to me seems perfectly natural might be totally weird to her.

  But then we had seen her in the street. That was the bit that really seemed like a dream. I have never hallucinated in my life. I’ve only been drunk a couple of times and I didn’t have visions or see things then, I just fell asleep. I had no idea why she was in Paris. Maybe it was simply a good place to hide.

  ‘I need a moment to think,’ I said. Frant was about to say something, then thought better of it.

  I sat down on the settee. ‘I came here to find the girl,’ I said. ‘I don’t, with all due respect, care about the Von Fremdenplatz documents or the Alice or any of this. I care about finding the girl. I don’t know how Madame Ferber is involved with this, if she is, or if she can help me find the girl. I guess if she could help me, or she wanted to, she would have said something, instead of keeping quiet all the while when I was telling her everything.’

  ‘She is not your friend,’ said Frant.

  ‘Please be quiet,’ I said. ‘Because there’s you, as well, isn’t there? You bring me here to look at the documents, you say, but when we get here, you batter a man unconscious, steal a book and then … Oh my God. You made me come here, didn’t you?’

  Frant said nothing.

  ‘You knew Madame Ferber was here all the time,’ I said. ‘You knew I would lead you to her.’

  ‘How could I?’ said Frant. ‘I didn’t know that you knew her.’

  ‘No, but you could easily work it out. You just have to look inside one of her books to see my name where it says “Translated by”. Or maybe when you came to Walker-Hebborn with your manuscript, you realised she was one of his writers and you worked it all out from there.’

  ‘I don’t see why I would need you to lead me to her,’ said Frant.

  ‘Because she’s Madame Ferber, the famous recluse,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t see anyone, let alone people who’ve got a grudge against her. She wouldn’t have seen me unless it was an emergency.’

  ‘It was an emergency,’ said Frant. ‘We were – we are – on the run from the authorities. Unless you’re saying that I staged that too. And that for good measure I also arranged for you to be framed for murder.’

  I thought about that. Frant had a point. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I do know that our coming here is not a coincidence.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what it is,’ said Frant. ‘Anna Ferber is an evil woman. That’s all you need to know.’

  I think that’s what did it for me. If all your life you’ve been told by people not to ask questions and don’t worry about it, it can get wearing. When you ask questions like, ‘When is my father coming home?’ or ‘Are you seeing someone else?’ and you never get real answers, just a pat on the head and a kind word as if you’re the kind of person who’s unable to understand important things, like you’re not all there or something. I was tired of being the child left outside the door while an argument was going on in the other room. I was sick of being the man everyone talked about behind his back because his girlfriend wasn’t really his girlfriend. I hated being the person in the office who got looks even though he was the only one the famous weird author would talk to.

  ‘I don’t think she is evil,’ I said. ‘She may not have been entirely straight with me, but neither have you been. And she hasn’t attacked anyone or pulled a gun on them. So if you don’t mind I’ll make my own choices about who’s evil and who’s not. And you can help me, Frant.’

  Frant looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘You can tell me what exactly is going on,’ I said. ‘No more lies. I want to know how you know Madame Ferber. I want to know how she wrote a book in the same language as the Von Fremdenplatz documents. I want to know how the girl comes into it. And,’ I said, almost as an afterthought, ‘I want to know why we saw the girl from the bar in a street in Paris.’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Frant.

  ‘Stop lying!’ I shouted. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I had startled myself. ‘And now please, if you don’t mind, I’m very tired and I’m extremely confused and I would just like you to tell me what the hell is happening.’

  ‘I will tell you one thing and one thing only,’ said Frant.

  ‘Like fun you will,’ I said.

  ‘This is the only thing you need to know,’ Frant said. ‘I assure you, everything else will fall into place afterwards.’

  ‘It better,’ I said. I sat back, waiting for Frant to speak.

  ‘I draw your attention to the title page of the Alice,’ he said.

  ‘Oh great,’ I said. ‘That again.’

  ‘As you correctly surmised, under the title it reads “New translation by Jeremy Andrews and Anna Ferber”.’

  ‘I got that,’ I said. ‘No offence, but so what?’

  Frant put the book down. ‘I,’ he said, ‘am Jeremy Andrews.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  I looked at him. ‘Pardon?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I am Jeremy Andrews,’ said Frant. ‘I’m Jeremy Andrews. I really can’t put it more simply than that. Yo soy Jeremy Andrews. Je m’appelle Jeremy Andrews. Ich heiße—’

  ‘Yes, all right, I get it,’ I said. ‘But you’re not Jeremy Andrews. You’re Euros Frant.’

  ‘I write as Euros Frant,’ said Frant, or Andrews. ‘Do you suppose my readers, steeped as they are in fantasy and myth, would accept a book from the hand of a mere Jeremy Andrews? No, I am Euros Frant to them, a name that combines both the Celtic twilight and a good honest English

  village.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘So now I know that you and Madame Ferber translated the Alice into your made-up language. That doesn’t help me at all.’

  ‘Really?’ said Frant. ‘Think about it.’

  Another expression I really dislike. Like there’s something really obvious that everyone else has realised straight away without even having to work it out, but stupid here has got to think about it. That’s me all over, I guess. The Mule, as they say. Nevertheless, I thought about it.

  ‘You and Madame Ferber worked up this Alice yourselves,’ I said slowly. ‘So you made up this whole language. Which is the same language as the—’

  I stared at Frant.

  ‘Now you’re getting it,’ said Frant.

  ‘Which means you two wrote the Von Fremdenplatz documents,’ I said.

  ‘Strictly speaking, I did most of the actual writing,’ said Frant. ‘Anna was involved in … other ways. Editing, researching and perhaps to some extent the actual initial conceptualisation.’

  ‘You mean it was her idea and she did all the work?’ I said.

  ‘That is how she might put it,’ Frant said. ‘But without me it woul
d just be a catalogue, a random collection of images.’

  ‘Whereas with your input it’s a random collection of images in a made-up language,’ I said, but I knew I was

  wrong.

  Frant could see it too, because he nodded and said, ‘The Von Fremdenplatz wouldn’t have worked if I … if we hadn’t rendered it into its own language. Where’s the mystery in a document written in English, or German? Where’s the enigma? It’s the fact that nobody knows what the Von Fremdenplatz is, or what it was for, that makes it interesting. And valuable.’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You knew all along what language the documents were written in because you invented it. You and Madame Ferber.’

  ‘She really just did the grammar,’ said Frant, ‘which, being based on Nordic and Romance influences, wasn’t particularly hard. The vocabulary, on the other hand—’

  ‘Is mostly a mishmash of several well-known languages with a few weird words thrown in to make it a bit harder,’ I said. ‘Given a bit more time and a lot less running around, I could probably have translated the Von Fremdenplatz myself. But I didn’t get to see it until ten seconds before you clouted a guy with a bust.’

  ‘Such vanity,’ said Frant. ‘The Von Fremdenplatz documents are one of the great achievements of the modern age, and I won’t have them dismissed so easily.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘You didn’t mind lying through your teeth about them to get here. They’re just a bargaining tool to you.’

  ‘A bargaining tool I spent ten years of my life creating,’ said Frant. ‘When I say achievement, I mean achievement. The planning, the sourcing, the writing … the sheer expense of the project. While others of our generation were going out into the world and making their noisy mark, Anna and I worked ceaselessly and in secret on our project.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why do all this work and not tell anyone? Leave all these books in different places and just watch when some rich guy buys them and locks them away in a museum?’

  ‘We had a plan,’ said Frant. ‘Anna’s idea, really. She wanted to create something that existed purely for itself. It would have no roots in anything modern or contemporary and it wouldn’t be part of any movement or trend or fashion.’ He almost spat the words. ‘It wasn’t there ironically or as a reference to someone else’s work or a tribute. It didn’t exist for profit or fame, or to further anybody’s career. And it was mysterious because that would make it more beautiful, and because then nobody could file it or label it.’ He looked almost dreamy.