The Mule

by David Quantick

  ‘It’s not at all obvious to me,’ said Frant. ‘I didn’t call myself Henry J and I didn’t invent any pseudonym to trick some girl. I’ve never met this girl. You met the girl. You’re the only one who did. Nobody else has seen her. If it wasn’t for the newspaper article, I’d think she was a figment of your imagination. That, and you haven’t really got an

  imagination.’

  I stared at him, my mind racing pointlessly like a car spinning its wheels in mud. I was so sure he was Henry J. It all fitted. He – using the pseudonym of a famous author – had lured the girl into his plan, given her the Alice with the photos in, and arranged for her to meet me in the bar, and the rest was history. I had been used, she had been used, and surely Henry J was the man behind it all.

  ‘It’s in her notebook,’ I said.

  ‘You mean that incoherent collection of pop music reviews?’ said Frant. ‘Some rock group called Carrie and the Nations?’

  ‘Carrie and the Legions,’ I said. ‘I should have paid more attention. It’s a code.’

  ‘I think you’ve lost your mind,’ Frant said. ‘And I’ve just realised there’s probably an extension to this telephone in the bedroom.’

  He walked away from the desk. I put the other phone down and followed him.

  ‘The notebook was a way of talking about what she was doing without making it obvious. The reviews, they’re not about a band, they’re her life. The things she’s doing, where she’s going wrong, where she hopes to do well, it’s the story of you and her. When she says she’s made a good album, she means her life is on the right lines. When she says she’s lost her fans, well, that’s where she knows she’s messed up. And when she meets Henry J, who she thinks will turn her career around, that’s you. You’re Henry J. You’re the Svengali who she hoped would change her life for the better, but instead you wrecked it.’

  Frant stopped at the bedroom door. ‘I was wrong about your imagination,’ he said. ‘You’re a fruitcake.’

  ‘There’s only one thing that puzzles me,’ I said.

  ‘Only one?’ Frant said. ‘You amaze me. I would have thought you’d have this bag of nonsense tied up with a pretty pink ribbon by now.’

  ‘The photographs,’ I said. ‘The images of Carrie as a murdered girl. She seemed genuinely frightened by them. And they don’t really fit into the diary. I know she called one of her songs “The Murdered Girl”, but actually having pictures taken of her as a dead body is different.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Frant, ‘She sounds as barmy as you are.’

  I stepped in front of him. ‘You’re the key to all this. You are Henry J.’

  ‘I am not,’ said Frant. ‘And I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  He opened the bedroom door and went in. I had to admit he was good. At no point had he let his guard slip. I made to follow him into the bedroom but as I did so, I heard the click of a key. I rattled the door handle, but I was locked out. I banged on the door.

  ‘Be quiet!’ Frant shouted. ‘I’m on the phone!’

  There was no point banging any further, I realised. I would just have to wait until Frant completed his call. I sat there, trying to correlate all the information, true or false, that I had been bombarded with. I knew I was right about Frant. Nobody else would have wanted to trick me into going to Paris. Everything he had done, from revealing the Alice to me, to attacking the curator of the institute, had been designed to speed our progress to the apartment where we now found ourselves. It was an intricate plan that only someone who combined extreme pedantry with maniacal self-obsession could have thought up. There was no doubt in my mind: Frant was behind the whole thing.

  I heard shouting from the other room, and the dull clank of a phone being slammed down. Frant strode in, red-faced. Obviously his call had not gone well.

  ‘Brewing up more ridiculous conspiracies?’ he said.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘another odd thing has occurred to me.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Frant. ‘You want to know if I shot President Kennedy.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s this. Here I am, on the run from the police at home. Here you are, a man who assaulted a museum official. We are both responsible for the theft of valuable documents, and now we have entered the home of a prominent author and committed I don’t know how many crimes.’

  ‘Our offences are many,’ said Frant. ‘What is your point?’

  ‘Only this,’ I said. ‘Where are the police? We’ve been going around breaking the law for days now.’

  At that moment, a siren screamed outside, followed by another, and another.

  ‘I think that answers your question,’ said Frant, cramming the Alice in his man-bag. ‘Run,’ he added almost as an afterthought.

  * * *

  There was a slamming of car doors. There were raised voices, and voices coming from megaphones. I think I heard a helicopter. It was hard to tell what was happening but the sounds outside made everything clear. We were surrounded.

  It’s funny how the instinctive will always overrule the logical. I had spent the last couple of days going on about how I wanted to hand myself in to the police, just offload the guilt onto some station clerk and allow myself to be hauled off in irons to the cells. But now that it came to the crunch, the heart of the matter, I found myself wanting no such thing. And to be fair, I could hardly be blamed. I was in a siege. My heart was pounding. Adrenalin was in every vein in my body.

  I took Frant’s advice and ran. First of all, I ran blindly into several rooms whose windows were either sealed or tiny. Then inspiration struck and for once I ignored the voice of intuition and ran out of the apartment. Sure enough, an unlocked fire door swung back with my first shove and I ran up the stairs leading to the roof, hoping perhaps for a fire escape that somehow the police had left unguarded.

  Presumably the architect’s plan in the event of a major conflagration was to let the occupants of Madame Ferber’s building burn to death, cursing him in their fiery death agonies. I all but spun around, looking for stairs leading downwards but there was none. The roof was blank and flat, leading only to a seventy-metre drop between this building and the ones surrounding it. The only way out that I could see was to take an enormously long run up towards the drop and jump over the gap, and this was clearly impossible for someone not a trained athlete.

  I took a deep breath and began running towards the gap. They say not to look down when you’re climbing, which I know is not the same thing as when you’re jumping over a seventy-metre drop, but it’s good advice all the same. As my legs windmilled in the empty air and my arms flailed helplessly, I somehow managed to throw a glance downwards and what I saw I can’t say I enjoyed. The ground, while not being very, very far below, was certainly far enough below to kill me or at the very least smash me up like a rag doll full of blood and organs when I hit it. My plan had been reckless and deeply flawed.

  I felt an awful crunch in my hip and a battery of thumps and bruises as I rolled across the roof of the next building. My jacket was ripped and something odd had happened to my ankle. I hobbled to my feet in disbelief. Somehow I had judged the distance correctly and reached the other side alive. There was, however, no time for self-congratulation. Even now, my escape was probably being shown live on every French news channel. I had to keep moving. I stumbled across this fresh roof and was rewarded with the sight of a rickety iron fire escape. I hopped over a railing and descended as fast as I could.

  There was nobody at the bottom of the fire escape. Instead, as I walked down the road, trying to limp in a nonchalant fashion, I could see that police vehicles were still clustered around Madame Ferber’s block and everyone was concentrating their attention on the entrance, perhaps in case Frant and I were about to saunter out and be taken by surprise. A moment later it was me who was taken by surprise when one of the doors opened and a man and a woman got out. They were Quigley and Chick, the cops who had questioned me at home in what seemed like another era. I stepped into a side road
.

  A hand thudded into my chest, palm outward. ‘Stop!’ said a voice. I stopped. It was Frant.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘Obviously you were unable to find the service lift, but even so, the fact that you are here implies some hidden depths of self-sufficiency.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ I said.

  Frant ignored my rudeness. He took out a mobile phone and dialled.

  ‘We got out,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s right. I am the relentless pursuer. Now please meet with me and accede to my demands. Full rights, full apology, full monies.’

  I assumed he was talking to Madame Ferber, but from his strident tone Frant might just as easily have been bargaining with a publisher.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he said. ‘That’s got nothing to do with me. For goodness’ sake, how many people do I have to say this to? I don’t care what – no, I won’t put him on.’

  I stared at Frant. Negotiations seemed to have taken an unexpected turn, and now I was involved.

  ‘No,’ said Frant loudly. ‘No, you’re just muddying the waters.’

  There was a pause. Frant sighed deeply and passed the phone to me.

  ‘She wants to talk to you,’ he said.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  It wasn’t Madame Ferber who spoke, but her assistant, Camilla. ‘We have been trying to convey to Mr Frant that we are not interested in negotiating with him,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t see how this concerns me,’ I said. ‘I am not in the least interested in these negotiations, and I want to go home.’

  ‘We are aware of this,’ said Camilla. ‘But Mr Frant persists. Therefore we have been compelled to introduce an extra factor into the situation, one that we are sure you will agree does concern you.’

  I waited. These people were awfully fond of their pauses.

  ‘The girl is here,’ said Camilla.

  ‘What girl?’ I said, even though I knew.

  ‘The girl you met in a bar, and did not have sex with,’ said Camilla. ‘The girl you perhaps know as Carrie. She is here, albeit not willingly.’

  ‘I don’t see how that concerns me,’ I said. ‘Any concern for whoever she is has been cancelled out by the treatment I have received from her and from Mr Frant.’

  Frant rolled his eyes at this.

  ‘Mr Frant has nothing to do with it,’ said Camilla. ‘Mr Frant is a clumsy planner, incapable of seeing more than a few moves ahead. We, however, are more prescient. That is why we have the girl. We are aware that you would not wish her to come to any harm. Nevertheless, if Mr Frant does not cease his harassment of Madame Ferber, the girl will come to harm.’

  ‘I don’t really know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘I don’t wish anyone to get hurt, but this isn’t my problem. It—’

  Camilla interrupted me. ‘Last time, we merely staged her death,’ she said. ‘It was a wake-up call. On this occasion, if you fail to persuade Mr Frant to leave us alone, we will kill her.’

  The phone went dead. Frant took it from me.

  ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I really don’t know this girl.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Frant, or Alan, or whatever your name is. Henry J, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Please stop lying. Everything points to you. Who else would be obsessed enough to trick me into coming here? And who else would be weird enough to plot all this instead of, I don’t know, just paying someone to give them Madame Ferber’s address?’

  ‘I’m not weird,’ said Frant. ‘And now I think we should make good our escape.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I think we should do as they say.’

  ‘Why?’ said Frant. ‘I hold all the chips. This girl means nothing to me. And she means even less to you. Look at the way she treated you.’

  Frant’s sudden paternal concern was both absurd and irritating. It also came a bit late in the day.

  ‘How dangerous is she? Madame Ferber?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, you mean the popular author Anna Ferber?’ said Frant, with a touch of irony. ‘Why, she’s the most dangerous popular author I know. Positively vicious. She’s a writer,’ he spat. ‘She’s not a Mafia killer.’

  ‘Her secretary didn’t sound so nice,’ I pointed out. ‘She sounded capable of anything. And what did she mean when she said that last time they staged—’

  ‘Personal loyalty counts for a lot,’ Frant interrupted. ‘Not that you’d know anything about that. But I somehow doubt that looking after Madame Ferber’s correspondence and declining interviews on her behalf is the same thing as having her enemies rubbed out.’

  I had to agree with him. If there was anyone around who was capable of hurting people, all the evidence pointed to that person being Frant. Ferber and Camilla had all the talk but they were unlikely to be violent killers. Besides, the girl had betrayed me. And as a third consideration, the police would now be extending their search to the nearby streets.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  ‘This way,’ said Frant, and headed off up a slanting alleyway in the opposite direction.

  * * *

  ‘So who were you telephoning earlier?’ I said, as Frant began to slow down and walk at a less manic pace. For a fugitive, he really hadn’t thought enough about his own physical fitness. ‘Back at the apartment?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Frant, clutching his chest for what I imagined were dramatic rather than medical reasons. ‘Nobody.’

  ‘You seemed rather angry with nobody,’ I said. ‘Were you trying your mysterious friend who could get us to America? Were you attempting to get safe passage out of here?’

  ‘None of your business,’ said Frant, and leaned against a wall to catch his breath.

  I saw my moment. I leaned in and slid my hand into the pocket where I knew he kept his mobile phone. Frant made a grab for it but I slapped his hand down. I scrolled up his calls list until I found the most recent. Next to a long number was the single word AGNT.

  It took me a moment, I must say.

  ‘You called your literary agent?’ I said. ‘In the middle of all this you called your agent? I didn’t even think you had an agent. You surely don’t need one.’

  ‘We may not have kept in touch of late,’ said Frant. ‘But I thought this would be an excellent occasion to re-establish our professional relationship.’

  ‘Which occasion?’ I said. ‘The occasion when you hit a man over the head with a bust and robbed a respected French museum, or the occasion when you broke into a famous author’s apartment and threatened her at gunpoint?’

  ‘The occasion,’ said Frant, oblivious as ever to anything I said, ‘of my being able to prove my co-authorship of the Von Fremdenplatz documents. With this knowledge out in the open, I will be able to publish the documents under my own name, and their notoriety and high quality will ensure that they are worldwide bestsellers. Obviously she will receive a credit,’ he added thoughtfully.

  ‘Don’t you think you might have picked your moment better?’ I said. ‘The burning in your lungs surely suggests to you that you might have timed this badly.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Frant. ‘As I pointed out to my agent, the oaf, a week ago I was an undeservedly obscure academic with a small reputation as a writer of the fantastic. And now I am a wanted criminal, a desperado on the run. I am a romantic figure.’

  Right up there with Quasimodo, I thought. ‘And how did your agent take this news?’ I said. I couldn’t believe we were in a dark alley, in the middle of our escape from the police, talking about Frant’s agent, but we were.

  ‘She was disinclined to discuss the matter,’ Frant said. ‘Apparently the last time I called her, some ten months ago, I was quite offensive. Justifiably so, I expect.’

  ‘You don’t remember?’ I said.

  Frant didn’t reply.

  ‘Let me guess,’ I continued, ‘you don’t remember because you were drunk when you called her. You got hammered and decided to give her a piece of your mind.’

  ‘That is neither here nor there,’ Fra
nt said. ‘The fact is, my plan is an excellent one and she refused to listen to me.’

  He looked utterly downcast. Even I could see that the events of the past few hours had taken their toll. Frant slumped against the wall, drained of all energy.

  ‘If I get out of this alive,’ he said, ‘I am definitely getting a new agent.’

  At that moment, something in my hand buzzed. It was Frant’s phone. I moved to one side before Frant could snatch it from me.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ said Camilla. ‘We are addressing the monkey, not the organ-grinder.’

  I said nothing. Sticks and stones.

  ‘We presume that Mr Frant has no useful reply to our proposal concerning the girl,’ Camilla said.

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘We thought not. In that case, please can you set your mobile to speakerphone.’

  I fumbled with the keypad for a moment.

  ‘It’s on speaker,’ I said.

  ‘One moment, please,’ said Camilla’s distorted voice. There was silence.

  ‘Now what?’ said Frant, and I motioned for him to be quiet. As I did so, a sudden sharp noise came from the phone.

  ‘That was a gunshot,’ said Frant. He looked shaken for once.

  ‘What did you just do?’ I shouted.

  After a few seconds, Camilla spoke. ‘There is a girl here in some considerable pain,’ she said. ‘She would not be in that state if you had acceded to our demands. We will call again in exactly two minutes. If by then you have not acceded to our demands, we will cause the girl even more—’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. There was the hiss of static at the other end. ‘Tell me where you are.’

  Frant tried again to get the phone from me.

  ‘What about Mr Frant?’ said Camilla.

  ‘Screw Mr Frant,’ I said. ‘I’ve had enough of this. We’re coming in and we’re going to end this. Just don’t hurt the girl any more.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Camilla. She gave me an address.

  I returned Frant’s phone to him.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ he said. ‘You know you should never negotiate with kidnappers.’