101 Detectives

by Ivan Vladislavic

  There was also a single book by Lilian Turner. The Girl from the Back-blocks had a Methodist Sunday School bookplate to say that it had been presented to Sylvia Shepperd, Heilbron SS, 27 Nov. 1938. Lilian Turner – the pen name of Mrs F. Lindsay Thompson – was also the author of Betty the Scribe, Peggy the Pilot and Three New Chum Girls. These words at the end of Chapter VIII had been underlined in red pen: ‘Joan Darcy, aged fourteen, of Killali Homestead, Killali, Moonagudgerry, away beyond Berribullam, had arrived at Greythorpe School, Miss Sharman’s high-class college for young ladies.’ I typed these facts into my catalogue too.

  But I still did not know what to make of them.

  In the inventory of his books, I could trace the outlines of a character, the son of a manufacturers’ representative who had become a teacher. I saw this shadowy figure, somewhere between the boy with the curls on his rocking horse and the bald man with the bitter mouth in his deckchair, and sensed his interests, one could say obsessions. He liked women in nylons with seams and little girls with Shirley Temple ringlets and flounced skirts. He was fascinated by automata: he had written several scholarly papers on the symbolism of the mechanical creature in literature. He had an interest in sudden appearances and inexplicable disappearances, in Kaspar Hauser and the Mary Celeste, paranormal powers and ghosts. If this man called Claude, a ghost himself, could be given substance, if some flesh could be put on his bones, he might carry the story that still lay in the trunks, scattered among faded photographs, mangled typescripts and postcards in French and German.

  How much could he be made to bear though? Among the books that were in a category of their own, the one that bothered me most was Juden sehen Dich an by Johann von Leers, an anti-Semitic diatribe by one of Hitler’s most poisonous propagandists. Of course, the possession of such an odious book did not necessarily mean that Claude – or Berti – had been a Nazi or an anti-Semite, but the sight of it filled me with disquiet.

  I created a folder called Dr T (still wishing to preserve a formal distance between myself and Claude, my subject, if that’s what he was) and stored my list in it. Digital records are a marvellous advance on the paper ones in this respect: they gather no dust and they occupy so little space.

  The following winter, a pipe burst in the roof of the guest suite and ruined the ceiling and walls. In order to repair and repaint the place, the trunks had to be moved. Fortunately, none of the contents had been damaged. Extracting the valuables a couple of years earlier had created space in all four trunks and this seemed like the right time to repack them more sensibly to lighten my load. I had shuffled through the papers too often still to have qualms about disturbing their arrangement. Finally relinquishing whatever correspondences the physical ordering of the papers may have revealed, I repacked everything and left one of the metal trunks empty. Rusted though it was, the painter was very pleased to have it. When the job was done, he filled it with tins and brushes and took it away on the back of his bakkie.

  Then I forgot about the trunks. Margery and I had drifted apart and I no longer expected her to call to find out if I had made up my mind about Claude and Berti. The trunks simply sat there in the guest suite; they had become part of the furniture.

  In May of 2008, a thief broke into the guest suite and made off with some linen, a two-plate stove and a handful of ornaments. He ransacked the trunks, throwing books, letters and photographs out on the floor and the bed, but found nothing. This intrusive stranger brought the trunks back into focus for me. I was glad now that I’d thought to move the valuables into the house. Worthless as many of these objects were, a frustrated housebreaker may well have walked off with them. But such a thief was always unlikely to steal papers. As far as I could see, not a single item was missing. But how on earth would I know? One thing was certain: whatever residual logic the ordering of the papers may have retained was now inalterably undone.

  I repacked the papers and had the shattered door repaired. I thought about putting in a security gate or an alarm, but the truth is there was not much left to steal out there. My house guests had stopped coming too. The friends who used to call on me felt unsafe in my neighbourhood; they knew people in the northern suburbs who offered them safer, more comfortable lodgings.

  After the burglary, I went out to the guest suite more often to check that everything was in order. A few months later, when I opened the door, I noticed a single cufflink lying on the tiles, a silver disk with an ivory cameo inset, perhaps depicting a Roman god. It must have been dropped by the thief, I thought, as he made off with the other one in the pair. But where had he found them? I’d never seen them before. I’d meant to move everything of value from the trunks, but perhaps I’d missed something, some small cache of treasures, a cough-drop tin full of coins, a cigar box holding an old timepiece or an antique razor. More importantly, why had this object, this shiny clue lying in the middle of the floor, remained invisible until now? It seemed impossible that I could have overlooked it. Who or what had carried it out into the open? I checked the windows, but there was no sign of forced entry, as the detectives say. I peered through the keyhole, as if that would tell me something.

  In that moment, I wished that the thief had carted away the trunks and left me nothing but this mismatched cufflink. At the same time, the fear of never seeing their contents again ran through me like a paperknife.

  So I arrived, by the circuitous and painful route described here, at a point of equilibrium. I had been in possession of Dr T’s trunks for more than a decade. I no longer believed I could make anything of them, nor could I imagine getting rid of them. I was simply stuck with them.

  It’s not true to say I could make nothing of them. Without even trying, I already had. From time to time, when I least expected it, some scrap of the life story of Claude and Berti would drift into my mind, almost like a distant memory of my own childhood. Berti worked as a manufacturers’ representative for textile factories in Manchester and he spent half his life travelling. He was always on a boat to Singapore, Calcutta, Yokohama, Colombo, Hong Kong. Among his papers were scores of sample catalogues and price lists, manuals for power looms, tables of weights and measures. His little notebooks were filled with the names of clients, quotations, orders. Wherever he went, he took photographs of himself with the men he met in the course of business, and sometimes with their wives and children, almost as if they were his own. He sent postcards from a hundred different cities, not a few of them now vanished from the atlases – Leopoldville, Lourenço Marques, Port Swettenham, Saigon – always missing Claude, always wishing he were there. The postcards let me imagine Claude too, running downstairs in the mornings in his pyjamas, with a legionnaire’s helmet on his head and a six-shooter strapped to his hip, hoping to see a card from Berti lying on the carpet under the slot in the front door. Claude’s mother, Berti’s wife, must be there too, but I could not picture her at all.

  In the autumn of 2011, circumstances compelled me to put my house on the market. The trunks could not be moved again: I would be going to a flat where there simply wasn’t space for such bulky things. Even if I kept the papers, as I thought I might, the trunks themselves would have to go, along with the other excess furniture. I had to tidy the place up before the show days began.

  The first step was to distribute the contents of the trunks into smaller boxes. I went down to Box It at the Darras Centre and acquired twenty C14 boxes, which the man behind the counter assured me were just right for books. He taught me a valuable lesson about assembling a cardboard box: never fold the flaps over one another (as I had always done). The strength of the box lies in the corrugations that keep them rigid and bending the flaps to interlock them weakens the whole structure. Instead, simply fold the short flaps towards one another, then do the same with the long ones, and run a length of packaging tape along the seam. It looks like a flimsy join, but it’s ten times stronger than a folded one.

  I did not have time to linger over the books and papers in the guest suite. As quickly as I could
, I would almost say frantically, I assembled boxes, filled them and sealed them. On some of them I wrote ‘Dr T’ and on others ‘Claude’. After all these years, the man was out of the coffin and multiplying.

  When I was done, there were around a dozen full boxes. Emptied of their weighty contents, the trunks seemed smaller and I had second thoughts about shedding them. All of them were in poor condition, but the metal one would be easy to fix: knock out a few dents, strip off the paint and refinish it, and you would have a perfectly good trommel. The wooden chest could be sanded down and revarnished, and furnished with new hinges and handles. The steamer chest with the hardwood slats was a different matter. Some film-properties company or design studio would love to get their hands on it. It was very Out of Africa. I could see it rented out to an advertising agency; or doing duty as a coffee table in the right sort of baronial Bryanston townhouse. You’d want to restore it first, clean it up a bit without making it look good as new, as if it had just been carried off a Union-Castle liner from Southampton.

  I did not have the time or the energy for any of this. When I called the Salvation Army to come and take away the furniture, I stacked the trunks in the middle of the floor, ready to go.

  The thought of never seeing them again made me sad. I thought of taking a picture with my cellphone. Instead, I fetched a notebook and copied out the labels on the metal trunk, faded yellow rectangles with outmoded typefaces in pale blue and red.

  The first read:

  TRANSPORTS INTERNATIONAUX

  D. FREICHE-PRIM

  PARIS

  And the second:

  SERVICE EXPRESS

  M. Thos Cook & Sons

  30 Strand Street

  Cape Town

  PWL 1729 Bertrand T—

  D. FREICHE-PRIM

  3, RUE ELISA LEMONNIER

  PARIS (XIIe)

  ---

  68, BOULEVARD DES DAMES

  MARSEILLE

  Weighed against the mass of words the trunks had contained, these few lines seemed hopelessly inadequate. What a useless historian I am! I nearly tore the page from my notebook and threw it away.

  The Salvation Army lorry looked like it came from the 1950s. It was not a truck but a lorry. The Salvation Army shield was painted on the side and there was a clattering roller door at the back, which the driver and his helper flung upwards between them to expose a gaping space that smelt of metal and sweat. The space was empty except for some brown hessian sacks and a huge spill of webbing straps like kelp washed up on a beach. The two men appeared to be in period costume to match the lorry: the young one looked like a social worker, fit and healthy, smooth-skinned and crisply dressed in blue jeans and a checked shirt. The older one looked like a survivor, someone who had come through the ranks at the Salvation Army, an old soak who had pulled himself together. He had pitted cheeks and a worn brush of dirty blond hair; the tail of a mermaid, coloured the dirty green favoured in the days before there were tattoo parlours in the malls, showed under the sleeve of his T-shirt. The two of them fell on the furniture with glee. They practically ran it out to the lorry and flung it into the back. They did not bother with the straps or the sacks, as if they had decided there was nothing here that would not withstand a bit more wear and tear. Did they want everything? I asked, suddenly ashamed of my greasy couch and scarred TV trolley. Did people even use such things any more? Yes, they wanted everything, the young man said, they would sort it out themselves. I had no wish to treat them as the garbage-removal men, they should feel free to leave what they didn’t want. No, everything, I should leave it to them. A suspicious thought crossed my mind: this stuff will never get to the Salvation Army. They’ll drive it to the nearest junk-dealer and exchange it for cash. In an hour from now, they’ll be sitting in the Booysens Hotel, drinking beer and eating T-bones. Did they want the trunks? I asked. They weren’t in great shape. They could leave them behind if they liked. No, everything, they said. They wanted absolutely everything. It was all good. Good to go.

  The trunks went last. The young man took the metal trunk, which was more difficult to handle, and the older man the wooden chest. I followed them to the street, watched as they shoved these things into the lorry, and then the three of us went back for the travelling chest. They hoisted it onto their shoulders and carried it between them out to the street, and I walked behind like the only mourner.

  It hardly needs to be said that the relief I felt when the Salvation Army retreated up Blenheim Street was misplaced. I had seen the end of the trunks – but I still had all the papers, packed into thirteen cardboard boxes marked Dr T and Claude.

  I still had Louis Fehler’s trommel too, but that is another story.

  When at last my house was sold, the future of Claude’s papers had to be decided. I called Margery, explained the situation to her and asked whether she wanted me to return what was left of Claude and Berti. It was an awkward call. I don’t think I’m going to write anything about them, I said. I’ve tried, really I have. I’ve picked through these things more often than I can tell you: I know them pretty well. And I just don’t know what to do with them. I could invent a character, perhaps. I’ve seen Claude sometimes, flitting through a corner of my mind in grey flannels and a flecked cardigan, with a book under his arm, I can’t see what it is, Handbuch der Judenfrage or The Nicest Girl in the School, I’ve seen him. But all these papers don’t help. He keeps disappearing behind them. They’re crying out for the attention of a historian.

  The following week (it was February 2012) I packed the boxes into my car and drove them to Margery’s place in Westdene. Her boy Julian was there, twice as tall and broad as I remembered, and he helped us carry the heaviest boxes into the house. Margery hefted a couple too. But I made sure I took only the smallest. I had put my back out with all the packing and shifting of boxes and it had only just begun to heal.

  Margery has always had a knack for living well, with a carefree, tumbledown grace you cannot copy from the design magazines. Her home felt open and welcoming. There was a lean-to roof between the house and the outbuildings, and a concrete slab with a table and chairs on it, perfect for eating outside. To one side stood the weightlifting bench where Julian must have done the work of broadening his shoulders. We sat around the table and drank tea. The garden was lush and green in the late summer sunlight. We might have been in the Italian countryside, although there was not a Tuscan folderol to be seen.

  A box full of Dr T’s effects stood on one of the chairs and I fancied I could smell that compound of musty paper and cigarette smoke he gave off. At home here, I thought.

  As we spoke about him, a strange thing happened. I began to see the outlines of his life more clearly than ever. I remembered the crossing to Dover, the garden in Brockley. The little girls on the omnibuses, with their straw hats and ribboned hair, and the striped bathing suits they wore on the strand at Wimereux and Rochebonne. The day on the jetty at Boulogne-sur-Mer when the wind blew Mama’s hat into the sea and Berti dived in to save it. What luck he was there to do it – he was so seldom at home. He was always sending postcards from far away, from Montevideo, Nassau, San Francisco. How excited we would get, but Mama would just turn them over with a sigh and stand them up on the mantelpiece.

  I told Margery I had binned the books at the SPCA shop in Edenvale and she was relieved. Now that all these things were under her roof again, she remembered certain details: the photographs from Japan, for instance. Was it possible that Berti had led a second life? That he had another family somewhere? We spoke about trying to track down the relatives in Nova Scotia. But they’re fish packers, Margery said. What would they do with all this old junk? What could they do that we haven’t been able to?

  Now that she mentioned them, I also remembered the photographs from Japan. I couldn’t recall seeing them on my last repacking of the boxes. Perhaps the thief who broke into the guest suite had walked off with a few things after all. I told her about the burglary and my efforts to keep the contents of the t
runks intact over the years. While I was talking, another ghost appeared in the corner of my eye. This time it was Berti, strolling in the gardens of the Nagata Shrine at Kobe with Mr Nakamura. A brusque, self-confident European, with an imperial moustache and a polka-dot bow tie, a man for whom the world was not so much a playground as a marketplace.

  It grew late and the air chilled. Julian went to work. Margery fetched a bottle of wine from the fridge and the conversation strayed to other things, the joys and sorrows of growing old, the long years of our friendship, the need to work and the wish to garden. As night fell, I noticed that Claude had left the table, although the box was still there on the chair, mute and unremembering.

  ‌Report on a Convention

  DAY 1

  17:30

  Pleasantly surprised to see ‘Mr Wu’ on the board at the airport. Accustomed (almost) to being called Mr Jing. The climate is hot, yeasty, overspiced. No doubt the place would seem filthier without the vegetation, profuse greenery everywhere, enormous leaves and vivid blooms – ‘flamboyants’ – in which the litter looks floral.

  We took the coastal road to the destination, with the sea behind the dunes most of the time, smelt rather than seen. The driver wanted to chat but I shut the partition. As you know, I like to keep my marketing eye open. Papa’s face everywhere in the terminal, as expected, on gantries and signposts, and on billboards advertising the Trade Fair along the highway. No sign of bandits.

  The Ambassador is one block back from the beachfront – fine views though – within walking distance of the Convention Centre. Or it would be if one could brave the streets, which I am advised against. Rickshaws are recommended. The taximan said I should summon him, day or night, if I want a ‘good time’. We’ll see about that. Keyed in the number of the control room just in case.