‘I wasn’t negotiating,’ I said. ‘I was giving in. I was agreeing. This has gone far enough, Frant. Let’s go and see Madame Ferber and let’s get the girl.’
‘You sound like a silent movie hero,’ said Frant.
‘And you sound like a silent movie villain,’ I said. ‘I keep expecting you to twirl your eyebrows and sneer.’
Frant wasn’t listening. He was trying to flag down a taxi.
* * *
‘What I don’t understand,’ I said as we hurtled around several corners, ‘and please believe me, I know that what I don’t understand is merely the tip of the iceberg, what I don’t understand is how you could have underestimated Madame Ferber so badly.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Frant. ‘I’ve always known she was a dangerous maniac. I just didn’t feel it was something you needed to know.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. Instead I asked, ‘Where exactly are we going?’
‘Gare du Nord,’ said Frant. ‘Which is good news for me. I should be just in time for the next train home.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘I thought we were meeting Madame
Ferber.’
‘We are,’ said Frant. ‘I suspect, however, that she has travel plans of her own. Doubtless the police will want to know why she called them and then vanished into thin air.’
I took Frant’s point. It was time for all of us to get away, although I couldn’t see how we would manage this.
‘You can’t just get on the Eurostar,’ I said. ‘Your passport will give you away at once.’
‘Which one?’ said Frant.
‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got two passports.’
‘The one in my real name is authentic and blameless,’ said Frant. ‘I only ever use it for social occasions. The one in the name of Euros Frant is not perhaps entirely legal, but suffices for the more cursory kind of check. Railway stations mostly. Of course, now I shall have to retire both it and the name of Frant. Which is a shame. I’ve never liked my real name.’
‘What am I going to do?’ I said. ‘I don’t have a false name or a fake passport. And I’m wanted–’
‘By the police of two continents, yes, you never get tired of reminding me,’ said Frant. ‘Equally, you never weary of insisting on your innocence. I should imagine that a few hours in custody with a half-decent lawyer should be enough for you to demonstrate your much-vaunted lack of guilt to any number of law enforcement officers, no matter how many continents they have come from.’
I took the grenade from my pocket and forced him to swallow it. I would have too, if I’d had a grenade. Instead I looked out of the window of the taxi. It was raining now, turning into streaks of silver on the roads. The driver slowed down with the traffic. I recognised some bars and restaurants.
‘I think we’re nearly there,’ I said.
Frant began to fuss with his coat like an old woman looking for pennies to give to a beggar. For a moment I thought he was searching for his wallet so he could pay the cab driver, but he was only checking that he had all the Von Fremdenplatz volumes with him. The evidence that would make him, in his mind at least, a respected and wealthy figure on the world stage, which was also the reason Madame Ferber was apparently prepared to kill the girl.
I found this hard to believe, although the evidence of the gunshot was compelling enough. While Anna Ferber’s books often featured extreme statements and actions, at no point did any of her characters kidnap anyone and hold them to ransom at gunpoint. Purely from a reader’s perspective, this was a shame; a thousand pages into one of her convoluted narratives and you really did long for a lone assassin to come in and blast away at her pompous philosophising
mouthpieces.
I did once find in her file at Walker-Hebborn a long academic piece entitled The Psychosis of Art: A.J.L. Ferber and the Killer Inside by some professor or other, which attempted to argue, not without some force, that Madame Ferber’s books were not closely argued attempts to put over a cogent worldview, but rather the grand fantasies of a megalomaniac. One paragraph stuck in my mind: ‘Ferber’s outlook despises the ordinary man and woman just for their ordinariness. Not for her the terraced house in a grubby street; in Ferber’s world, the boulevards are wide and the buildings grand. Her mind is as if designed by Albert Speer.’ As soon as I remembered those words, I thought of the clean world of the Von Fremdenplatz documents and for the first time I could picture the division of labour between the two of them, Ferber and Frant, the one designing those wide boulevards lined with plane trees and abstract sculptures, the other inventing an imperious and wordy language to express perfectly the grand design of this new, hollow world. The Von Fremdenplatz documents might be a masterpiece of detail and a hymn to human effort at its most obsessive, but they were also a tribute to emptiness on an epic scale. They had removed humanity and replaced it with nothing. That said, I still wasn’t sure if Madame Ferber was nuts enough to shoot someone. Making up books is one kind of craziness, killing people is another.
The taxi came to a halt. Frant did up his coat as if to further emphasise that his purse was going nowhere. I paid and got out onto the pavement, uncertain as to what to do next. Frant seemed to feel the same way, as his eyebrows darted this way and that, never quite resting. Or maybe he was just wondering where to check in for the Eurostar.
‘Are you coming with me, then?’ I said. ‘Or are you just going to run? Because I really don’t care. Just give me the Alice and the Von Fremdenplatz and I’ll hand them over to Madame Ferber and we can stop all this foolishness.’
‘Oh no you won’t,’ said Frant, finally confirming my belief that one day a career in pantomime awaited him. ‘The only person who can stop all this foolishness, as for once you correctly put it, is me. I intend to persuade Anna to see reason and accept the truth, for I am the only voice of reason in this monstrous regiment of women’s brouhaha.’
‘Yeah, say that,’ I said. ‘That should win her over.’
Frant’s phone buzzed. On the screen was a tiny photograph. A table in a bar, and underneath it an address.
‘Not far now,’ said Frant. I followed him as he set off down the street and around the corner.
* * *
The bar was a sliver among other buildings, a narrow entrance with barely enough room above the door for the name. The barman looked up as we walked in and tilted his chin towards a thin staircase at the back. We clattered up the carpetless stairs to a small landing and Frant pushed open a door.
‘Hello,’ said Madame Ferber. She sat at the only table in the room. Against the wall were two other people. One was Camilla and the other was the girl, who looked at me imploringly. She was still beautiful, and on a different day I would have knocked anybody and everybody down to be with her, but not now. Camilla didn’t look at me at all. She just took Frant’s pistol from his pocket with a deft gesture and sat down to reload it.
‘Sit down,’ said Madame Ferber.
Frant sat opposite Madame Ferber at the small table. I was clearly not one of the great powers at this gathering. Unwilling to stand with Camilla and the girl as if we were Ferber and Frant’s seconds, I took up a position by the door.
‘Very well,’ said Frant. ‘We are here. I have what you want and you have nothing I want.’
Madame Ferber was about to speak when I found myself interrupting. ‘I thought you shot her,’ I said to Camilla. ‘I heard a gunshot.’
Camilla shrugged.
‘A moment of artifice and melodrama,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Camilla fired into the skirting board. Nobody has been harmed as yet.’ She turned to Frant, as if tired by her explanation. ‘We’ve spent too much time on this,’ she said. ‘Please return to me what is mine and we can all return to our lives.’
‘Yours?’ said Frant. ‘What’s yours is mine. Your work is my work. I’m not referring, of course, to your otiose works of fiction.’
‘My little successes?’ said Ferber, a small smile at the corners of her mouth
. ‘I find it entertaining that you claim to want no part of my triumphs, but instead are desperate to garland yourself with obscurities from our youth.’
‘It’s because of you that this great work is obscure,’ said Frant. ‘We created an extraordinary project! We made a universe! And you would keep it under tarpaulin in a garage like an old automobile.’
‘The past is the past,’ said Ferber. ‘It would do neither of us any good to have our student pranks revealed to the world. We have positions now, and reputations. At least, I have.’
Frant was silent and I almost felt sorry for him. Madame Ferber had success and fame. She lived in a grand apartment and won prizes for her work. Frant, on the other hand, lived in a tiny flat and people thought he was a fool. And yet they had begun in the same place, on a project that anyone could see was a remarkable achievement. I couldn’t stand the man but even I understood why he felt he was entitled to get something out of the Von Fremdenplatz.
Madame Ferber clearly disagreed. She obviously believed that letting the world know that she was partly responsible for one of the great literary pranks of the last fifty years would do serious harm to her standing as an important literary figure. Me, if I’d thought of something so crazy and impressive, I’d be trumpeting it from every tall building, but I wasn’t Anna Ferber. And I wasn’t sitting at a small table in a Parisian bar holding a beautiful girl hostage.
‘Aren’t you even going to look at her?’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’
Frant reluctantly twisted his head round to look at the girl. He seemed peculiarly sullen. I wasn’t sure that sulking was an apt response to his situation, but then with Frant nothing negative was a surprise.
‘Hello,’ he said to the girl, absurdly.
The girl returned his sulky stare. ‘Hello, Dad,’ she said.
CHAPTER TEN
Frant started. So did I.
‘I’m not—’ he began. ‘Did she tell you that I was? You can’t believe what she tells you.’
‘She didn’t have to,’ said the girl. ‘I did the research. I went online, ordered up the birth certificate. You’re my father. I wish you weren’t.’
‘She’s your daughter,’ said Madame Ferber, looking more amused than I felt was right. ‘Just think, and you don’t even know her name.’
‘She’s called Carrie,’ I said without thinking. ‘She’s called Carrie and she’s the only decent person here.’
The girl looked at me in surprise. ‘The notebook,’ she said. ‘You found it.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I fished it out of my pocket and stepped towards her. Camilla lifted her gun.
‘It’s a notebook,’ I said, ‘it’s not loaded.’
The girl took the notebook. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s the only thing I have of me.’
It was a strange thing to say but I didn’t exactly have time to analyse it. Right now my brain was filled with chaos and static.
‘Carrie,’ said Frant. ‘What an awful name. I would never have chosen it.’
‘I chose it,’ said Carrie. ‘She called me Isolde. Like she wanted me to get beaten up every day at school.’
I looked at Madame Ferber. ‘Why would you choose her—’ I stopped. ‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Yes, oh,’ said Madame Ferber. She looked hard at me, as if I were a puppy in a shop window. ‘You really are no detective, are you? You’re a plodder. I suppose that’s why I liked you. Nobody else stood up to me about my prose, but you just plodded in and asked questions. And you were right.’
‘Is that why I’m here?’ I said. ‘Because I stood up to you?’
‘Goodness, no,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘You’re here because he needed you. Surely you’ve worked that out?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was the only person Frant could get to who knew where you lived. I wouldn’t have brought him here just for a social call, so he had to find a lure.’
‘Allure,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘I like to imagine that word being made of two other words. Allure. A lure.’
‘The notebook was the clue,’ I said. ‘Once I realised that Carrie’s entries weren’t reviews and interviews but a sort of coded diary, it all became clear. She had met a man called Henry J who had offered her a way to change her life. All she had to do was find this patsy in a bar, some clown who could be reeled in using an intriguing book. And sex.’
The girl said nothing.
Frant said, ‘I told you, I’m not Henry—’ but a wave of Camilla’s pistol silenced him.
‘The girl – Carrie – vanished, making sure I’d seen enough of the book,’ I continued. ‘And someone reported her missing, making sure I was implicated, which put the pressure on. I had to find her and the only clue were the pages from the translated Alice. And who was the only person I knew who could tell me what those pages were? Frant. The rest was simple. We go to Paris, Frant hits a man, we’re on the run and the only place we can hide is the apartment of the one person in Paris I happen to know slightly. As Frant well knew from his time with Walker-Hebborn.’
I leaned against the wall.
‘All this so Frant could track down Madame Ferber and make her admit in public that she helped him make the Von Fremdenplatz documents.’
The room seemed very small. I could almost hear everyone in it, thinking, processing what I’d just said. It was, I knew, a lot to absorb. The girl Carrie, taken in by her own father. Madame Ferber, holed up in Paris and unaware that the one man who could unravel her reputation was hotfoot on her trail. And Frant himself, the spider at the centre of the web, plotting it all.
‘Just one small thing,’ said Frant. ‘I do apologise for repeating myself, but I cannot emphasise this enough. I am not Henry J.’
I gave him one of my mother’s old-fashioned looks. I was tired of all the lies and deceit but most of all I was tired of Frant’s dogged insistence on this small thing. I must have said so because Carrie suddenly looked pained and said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, he’s telling the truth.’
‘Be quiet,’ said Madame Ferber.
‘Why, what are you going to do, shoot me?’ said Carrie, and once again Camilla’s finger twitched. ‘I mean, that’s how much you care about me. Get me involved in all this, send me off to meet a complete stranger. All this and for what? She’s Henry J,’ she added casually.
‘I said it wasn’t me,’ said Frant, smugly.
‘How can she be Henry J?’ I said.
Carrie didn’t answer. Instead she was looking at her mother.
‘It was the photos that did it,’ said Carrie. ‘One day I went into the CCLF and I opened the Alice and there were these pictures of me, dead. I just freaked. I was probably still freaking when I met you in the bar. I still don’t know what they are or where they came from.’
‘That was the easiest part,’ said Madame Ferber.
‘It was you?’ said Carrie. ‘You did that to me?’
‘You did it to yourself,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Believe me, I wasn’t the one passed out on drink and dope every night. I had Camilla take them when you were, as usual, comatose in your room on one of your visits to Paris to borrow money from me. I was reserving them to use as a warning next time you overdosed on my premises. After she’d developed them, Camilla pointed out, with her usual acumen, how much you appeared to be a corpse in them. All it would take was a little graphic manipulation.’
‘I despise you,’ said Carrie. ‘I despise you both.’ Her voice was tremulous.
‘Excellent, we all despise each other,’ said Frant. ‘Now can we get on with what we came here for?’
‘Certainly,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Just give me the books and you won’t get shot.’
‘You wouldn’t shoot me,’ said Frant.
‘Camilla would,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘You’ve already assaulted her, and she has a history of violence as it is.’
Camilla clicked the safety off on her gun. ‘Finally,’ she said.
‘You can’t shoot him,’ said Carrie. ‘He’
s the father of your child.’
‘And I couldn’t think of a better reason to shoot him than that,’ said Madame Ferber.
Carrie looked sullen, as if she had heard this before, often.
‘All the years I had to waste rearing you,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘All the expense and the time and the effort, when I should have been writing, and thinking. The perambulator in the hall is nothing. I have suffered the vodka bottle in the cistern, the bandages in the hospital, the police in the sitting room. I do not know what sentiment failed me when I allowed you to be born, I really don’t.’
Carrie began to cry.
‘Oh, tears,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Please. Enough is enough.’ She held her hands out to Frant. ‘Return to me what is mine.’
‘I won’t,’ said Frant.
‘Then Camilla will shoot you,’ said Madame Ferber.
‘You can’t kill him,’ said Carrie.
‘Then Camilla will shoot you. I really don’t care. Shoot him or shoot her, or both of them. I don’t care. I just want to go home now and draw a line under this.’ She looked at me, as if for understanding. ‘I have work to do,’ she said.
I looked back at her. Her eyes were the deepest brown I had ever seen. They were also as empty of compassion and love as they were full of distant intelligence. I looked at Frant, who was nervously studying his fingernails as if waiting for the results of an exam. Carrie was sitting now, still crying silently.
‘You are the worst people I have ever met,’ I said. ‘You’re so obsessed with books and literature and fame and esteem that you don’t care about anything else.’
‘Perhaps that’s true,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘But I don’t see how it’s any of your business.’
‘It isn’t,’ I said. ‘You’re right. On the other hand, I do have a man-bag.’ I held up Frant’s bag.
Frant started. ‘Give me back my bag,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said as Madame Ferber stared at me blankly.
‘The one with the books you wanted in it,’ I told her. ‘Let me and the girl walk away now and then you can have it.’
The Mule Page 23