The Mule

by David Quantick

  ‘It sounds like it was really important to you,’ I said.

  ‘It was the best thing I ever did,’ Frant replied. ‘It was marvellous. Nothing I ever write will come close to it. Even Anna, with all her books and her success, has never done anything as good. She herself would admit that.’

  ‘Were you and she …’ I found it hard to say the words. ‘Were you and she an item?’

  ‘An item?’ said Frant angrily. ‘You mean were we dating? Were we romantically involved? Of course we were. You don’t spend ten years of your life on something like that and not become involved. Consider, man. When we began, we were two students working on, essentially, an academic prank. We did it because we loved language and we loved ideas and Anna had the idea of rendering Alice into a language that had never existed. We printed up two copies for our own entertainment. They looked astonishing, like messages from another, stranger place. Then we thought, what might that other place be like? What would its encyclopedia be? Its gazetteer? And from that small idea came the Von Fremdenplatz.’

  ‘Like Borges,’ I said, remembering the article I’d read.

  ‘Borges!’ shouted Frant. ‘Borges was a librarian! He never did anything. Bash down a thousand words and look at me, I’ve written a masterpiece. Borges wrote a little story about an encyclopedia from a different world. We made it.’

  ‘But the Von Fremdenplatz documents look amazing,’ I said. ‘They’re very professional. You must have spent a fortune.’

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ said Frant. ‘We spent our youth making them. When other people were out buying houses and cars and holidays, we were making friends with printers and bookbinders, we were getting the copyrights to images and buying expensive cameras to take decent pictures with. You haven’t seen the first Von Fremdenplatz document. It was meant to be a fakery of a travel document, typed on a real 1950s typewriter using a sheet of unwatermarked foolscap paper. We spent three weeks sourcing the paper, an afternoon making sure the typewriter ribbon was accurately faded, and then we had to find a printer who could scan it correctly. And that was for two pages.’

  ‘A real labour of love,’ I said, almost impressed. ‘I must admit, I find it hard to picture you and Madame Ferber sitting there at home, working on your great forgery together on a Sunday evening.’

  ‘You’re mocking me,’ said Frant. ‘But then, you’ve done nothing in your life. I’ve invented a world.’

  ‘With Madame Ferber,’ I said. ‘That was more the part I find hard to believe.’

  Frant shrugged and I almost expected him to say that they had been young and they had been in love. But he said, ‘She was a different person then. Not the grande dame of letters she is now. I sometimes wonder which is the greatest of Anna Ferber’s creations, the Von Fremdenplatz or Anna herself.’

  ‘So what happened?’ I said. ‘Ten years working cheek by jowl with your girlfriend took its toll?’

  ‘That,’ said Frant, ‘and a divergence of ambitions. She had always wanted to be a novelist. No, more important than that. She wanted to be a great writer. An absurd dream, of course, but by then Anna was quite an accomplished forger. She had spent a decade helping me to create an entire universe. It was no great leap, then, to write a mere novel.’

  I could smell the sour grapes coming off him. I almost didn’t blame him. He reminded me of one of those stand-up comics who’d been half of a double act – the half that never made it while the other guy became a big star. I didn’t know if Madame Ferber was a fraud or not, but she’d put the hours in, written the big heavy books and now she was reaping the reward. Meanwhile Frant, or Stevens, was selling his unwanted books on the internet. It would be a bitter enough pill at the best of times but it was worse for Frant because he had one great achievement under his belt – the Von Fremdenplatz – and nobody knew about it.

  On the other hand, he was a crook, a thief and a liar. He could have written all the big heavy books, but he had been too busy sitting at home and – well, I didn’t know what Frant had been doing all this time. Plotting the theft of the documents, probably. I didn’t know and I didn’t really care. For me, the upshot of all this – the Von Fremdenplatz, the trip to Paris, the flight from the law, the meeting with Madame Ferber – was a simple one. I was off the hook. This was nothing to do with me any more. I could just wave goodbye to Frant, turn myself in and get down to a lot of explaining. It would be painful and dull, but once I told the police what had been going on, eventually they’d see sense and concentrate on Frant, the real villain of the piece.

  There was just one thing niggling at me, though. Frant and Ferber weren’t the only people involved in this. The girl must have had something to do with it. She had found, or been given, the copy of the Alice, and I had seen her just today, in Paris. I couldn’t believe any longer that these two things were coincidence and I said as much to Frant. He just shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘You must know,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe that she just accidentally picked up a copy of your book. You said there were only a couple of copies printed.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ said Frant. ‘We had one Alice made, but then we decided to see what would happen if we printed a second and just floated it into the university library system. It was like a test run for the Von Fremdenplatz. We wanted to know if we could seed our plans subtly. Let the book go and see if it hooked in any suckers. It didn’t. It just vanished.’

  ‘So years later it turns up again and this girl finds it while working at the CCLF?’

  ‘I suppose so. It did reappear in the library’s office, after all.’

  ‘But what about the photographs?’

  ‘What photographs?’

  ‘The images of the murdered girl.’

  Frant gave me a look that managed to be both curious and bored at the same time. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Of course. I remembered then I had deliberately not mentioned the photographs. ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I believe you. One more thing, though. I saw her here, in Paris. You saw her.’

  ‘I saw a girl,’ said Frant. ‘A girl staring at us. I didn’t know it was the girl you knew until you said so.’

  I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.

  ‘What’s this about photographs, anyway?’ Frant said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I guess she must have put them there herself.’

  ‘This is wasting time,’ Frant said. He looked at his watch. ‘Anna must have reached whatever her destination is by now.’

  He sat down at the desk and reached for an old Rolodex. From it he took a single card.

  ‘Nobody really changes,’ he said, and picked up Madame Ferber’s telephone. Looking down at the card, he dialled a short number.

  ‘Madame Ferber please,’ said Frant. ‘You know who is calling.’

  There was some noise at the other end.

  ‘Well, get her then,’ said Frant.

  I had nothing to do while Frant waited. I could go to the police any time, I supposed. I took off my coat. As I did so, I felt the small bump of the girl’s notebook in my pocket. I went into the kitchen and removed the notebook from my pocket. I flicked through the pages once more. There were the reviews, and the interviews, and the press advert with the Murdered Girl photograph. After that there was nothing else. I knew so little about this girl, I realised, and I had clung onto this notebook in the hope that it would tell me something – anything – about her. Instead, I’d found nothing but a guide to her musical interests. I didn’t even know if Carrie and the Legions were her band or just some pop group that she had liked when she was a teenager. In the end, the notebook had been no use to me whatsoever.

  I was angry, I admit, and I took my anger out on the notebook. I slammed it on the counter, I shook it like a dog, perhaps hoping that some tiny piece of evidence would come fluttering out and all would be made clear. Nothing. I felt defeated. I would take one more look and, if nothing
new appeared, I promised myself I would toss it into a bin. I opened the notebook. This time, to my surprise, it was blank. For a moment I panicked, then realised I was simply holding it the wrong way round, which was why the writings at the front had disappeared and all the pages were white and empty. All except one page, I suddenly noticed. Written in faint pencil on the penultimate page of the notebook was what looked to be a short message, like a reminder.

  ‘CALL HENRY J,’ it said. ‘SAY NO. GET OUT OF THIS. NOW.’

  Henry J. The mysterious producer who had first helped and then hindered the career of Carrie and the Legions. It was, I thought, an odd name. I knew very little about popular music, as I may have said, but I did know that it was a culture obsessed with cool and trendiness and so rock stars and rappers and, I supposed, producers all went under names that were themselves cool and trendy. Unless I was very much mistaken, no music business entrepreneur worth his salt would go under the name of ‘Henry’. It was an old-fashioned, dated name, better suited to some fusty pedant.

  And then it came to me. The scales fell from my eyes. I saw it all, for the first time. The meaning of the notebook. I had broken, almost literally, the code. Nothing contradicted my theory. Every line could be interpreted as a comment on the girl’s life, every action could be tied in to her involvement in recent events. I had once heard my ex-girlfriend and her circle talk in awed terms about a strange musical discovery that a friend of a friend of a friend had made, that if you showed one particular 1930s movie musical with the mute button on, and played over it one of their favourite 1970s ‘stoner’ albums, the sound of the record and the plot of the movie tied up almost exactly. I had never understood this, as the movie was surely about an hour longer than the record, and I doubted that anybody would spend months in the studio making a soundtrack to a forty-year-old film and not tell anybody, but now I could understand the thrill that my ex and her pals must have felt. When you took the events of the last few days or weeks and laid them next to the episodes in the notebook, you had an almost exact chronology.

  First of all there was the ‘review’ of Carrie and the Legions’ first single. It was a total rave. The writer (whose identity I now had a fairly good idea about) approvingly quoted a lyric about the future and then expressed the sentiment that things would be great for Carrie. Surely this could only refer to Carrie’s determination to launch herself upon the world in some unspecified way? Clearly she was a fantasist, as there was, to my certain belief, no band or musical career, but as a coded diary, this struck me as an excellent way to convey one’s hopes and dreams without attracting, for example, the mockery of work colleagues.

  I had myself had some experience of this a few years back when, as a teenager, I had kept a diary. It had, perhaps coincidentally, been around the time that my father had left my mother and myself, and this had almost certainly imbued the diary with a more emotional content than usual. I’m sure everyone is the same: as children, we keep diaries that endlessly repeat variations on ‘Got up. Had breakfast. Went to school.’ But when we are older, we find an inner life, we find new feelings, particularly for other people, and if we are lucky, we lead interesting lives. I never understood why the diaries of famous politicians are always so dull; here they are, these national leaders and moulders of destiny, and all they write about is how what’s-his-name disagreed with thingummyjig over some small point in a ministerial meeting. Now, thinking about it, I suspect that politicians, more than people in other walks of life, have cause to be more discreet than the rest of us. They have state secrets, they have personal secrets, and they cannot own up to having fun or experiencing any emotions other than the most conventional. If, for example, a minister fell in love with a rabbit, they would never be able to mention it in the pages of their diary.

  In retrospect, I wish I had shown more discretion in the pages of my diary. Not that I fell in love with a rabbit, or indeed anyone at that point in my life. It was just that I was so full of teenage feeling and confusion about my father’s departure that I poured it all out over my journal. I can only remember one or two lines from the diary, probably because I heard them shouted over the noise of a school dinner time by an older boy, who had removed the diary from my bag. As I jumped up, trying to get it from him, his friends restrained me, and the older boy shouted lines from the diary. ‘I wonder if I drove my father away!’ he bellowed. ‘I think my mother loved him more than me!’ I finally got the diary back, but it was torn and dirty. For the rest of the term, a few boys would stop me and casually ask if my mother loved my father more than me, but I left school at the end of that year to go to college, where I took the precaution of not keeping a diary.

  All of which goes some way to explaining how I was so sure that ‘Carrie’ had used the language and form of rock reviews to disguise her own feelings, and protect herself from scrutiny. It was even more obvious in the second piece, which was written as an unfavourable review of Carrie and the Legions’ first album. Suddenly – and rather abruptly – all the promise of the future as mentioned in the first review has disappeared, and optimism and hope are replaced by disappointment and confusion. The lyric quoted is particularly distressing with lines like ‘But still the dark is growing’ and ‘I’m scared of where I’m going.’ Worst of all is the sign-off, where the reviewer (i.e. Carrie, i.e. the girl in the bar) concludes, ‘It’s almost like she knew what was coming.’

  The review also seems to blame all this darkness and chaos on the mysterious ‘Henry J’, as does the interview with Carrie, in which she damns Mr J with faint praise. She also refers to him as a ‘perfectionist’, a term with which Euros Frant would be pedantically delighted. It all seemed clear to me: Carrie, or whatever the girl’s name was, was feeling optimistic about a new project. She was working in the office of Frant’s absurd inter-collegiate administration project (hence the notebook) and there she had met Frant aka Henry J, who had lured her into his plan, with promises of what I don’t know. And the plan? That was obvious, too. To lure me, a qualified translator with a normal human heart, into Frant’s web. Using the Alice as a hook, with the bait being the girl, I would be tricked into accompanying Frant to Paris on his apparently absurd quest. The Von Fremdenplatz wasn’t exactly a red herring, as Frant wanted it badly, but it was merely a stepping stone on the route to Frant’s ultimate goal.

  I had been a fool. I had consistently undervalued the one thing I had that nobody else could deliver. Arguably, my isolation from the wider world caused this but it also meant that I was able to become close to what Frant desired most. Which was access to Madame Ferber. I had, to some extent, befriended a recluse. Even her publisher wasn’t as trusted as I was by Madame Ferber, who had only recently consented to sign up for a second time because, it appeared, of some fondness for me. And Frant, who had been a Walker-Hebborn author, however briefly, had known this. He used the girl, he used the Alice, he used me, all for one purpose: so that I, the only person who could do so, would lead him to the Paris apartment of Anna Ferber, a woman who clearly had spent the last few years avoiding him as strenuously as possible.

  I didn’t know which I felt worse about: my involvement as a patsy in this whole scheme, or the distress I had caused Madame Ferber. Then there was the girl; obviously she had used me as she had been used herself. I had wasted my time tracking down a chimera, and what is more, a chimera who had no interest in me at all. I had been a fool, and I had been used. I could turn myself in, I was in fact longing to, but the more I examined the facts of the case, the less I imagined any policeman would understand what I was talking about, let alone sympathise with me.

  I could hear Frant talking. He sounded frustrated. I marched into the next room where he was apparently arguing with someone on the other end of the phone line. I took the telephone receiver from him and set it down on the desk.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he all but hissed.

  I looked at him. ‘You’re fond of your pseudonyms, aren’t you?’ I said.

  Frant reac
hed for the telephone. I picked it up.

  ‘You’re not just Euros Frant,’ I said. ‘You’re not just Jeremy Andrews.’

  ‘Give me the telephone,’ said Frant. ‘This is the most important call of my life.’

  I put the receiver back in the cradle.

  ‘You’re Henry J,’ I said.

  Frant looked, I have to admit, taken aback. He was wearing the expression of a wrongly accused man with a decent overlay of confusion.

  ‘I’m Henry James?’ he said.

  ‘Henry J,’ I said. ‘Although that’s how I worked it out.’

  ‘Worked what out?’ Frant said. ‘Please give me the telephone.’

  ‘How you got the name. You don’t know anything about record producers or rappers, so naturally you came up with a name that didn’t even sound right to me, and I don’t know anything about popular music.’

  Frant was looking admirably distressed now. His eyes darted to the phone and I wondered if he was thinking of wresting it from me. I gripped it more tightly.

  ‘So when you had to think of a name for your character, when you had to invent another pseudonym to trick the girl, you took your inspiration from somewhere you knew a little about. Literature.’

  ‘I know a lot about literature, you blithering idiot,’ said Frant. ‘But I have no idea what you are talking about. No idea.’

  I ignored him. ‘Henry J. The name confused me for a while, because as I say it was so peculiar. And then when I heard you talking about Madame Ferber, you said his name. You mentioned Henry James. Because you are him. You named yourself Henry J after Henry James, the author. It’s so obvious to me now.’