The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “Nick, this is no time to discuss the ‘Observer Paradox.’ I’ve got a job to do.” Edgar trod carefully, skirting wide of risking his life for journalism like her posturing husband.

  “Nothing good can come of this. These people, they used to be so kind, so decent and warm! God, something terrible is happening to this country. If anything awful goes down here, Edgar, it’s going to be partly your fault.”

  Edgar started. In point of fact, he had been feeling hauntingly culpable. No anonymous phone calls from Terra do Cão, no renewed SOB campaign. No renewed SOB campaign, no need to appease O Creme de Barbear. No appeasement, no BEIP. No BEIP, no sweeps of Novo Marrakech for illegals. No Beep sweeps, no riot. Edgar told himself that this chain of cause-and-effect was overextended—like the tenuously linked sequences through which kingdoms fell for want of a nail, or weather patterns in North America traced to butterflies over Tokyo. But he also told himself that telling yourself anything instead of plain old thinking it is the red flag of self-deception.

  Unsettled, Edgar begged Nicola’s indulgence, and dodged into the adjoining entryway, where he canvassed the group huddled there with, “English? English?” One mustachioed hothead stuttered in a mix of English and Portuguese that over a hundred illegal immigrants had been rounded up for deportation that afternoon. His friend asserted the numbers were much higher—two hundred, three! A third claimed that five Morrocans had been killed, while his companion said more like twelve; the number of officers in the Brigada Encarnada slain in retaliation numbered either zero, three, or twenty-seven. Great. More “eyewitnesses.”

  Just then, two patrols of Beeps entered the square from opposite roads, each corralling handcuffed captives. The crowd howled in outrage. Meanwhile, one Moroccan contingent had stockpiled crates of oozy missiles to rain on the police, positioning themselves cannily upwind so that the glutinous blobs carried a distance and landed with force. The pera peluda season was nearly at an end; the hairy pears left on the market were formless and corrupt, good only for beer or fertilizer. A cloying stench rose in the square.

  Recruited from Lisbon and O Porto, Beeps were unfamiliar with the hairy pear. When handfuls of reeking purplish slop plopped on their helmets and stained their riot shields, the officers gagged and clawed goo from extruding hair. The BEIP had kept its cool admirably through cannoned lemons and eggplants, stoically submitting to fusillades of dried fava beans, but this new assault of noxious local napalm was apparently the limit. Revulsion rapidly transformed to rage.

  At once, Beeps unholstered pistols and advanced on the crowd, firing in the air. Women ululated from overhead windows. Moroccans crumpled to their knees, arms raised against baton blows. Another car burst into flames. The sedan’s gas tank finally exploded. As echoes of shattering plate glass radiated off the plaza, Portuguese and Arabic merged into an Esperanto roar. At last the pitched battle takes were spliced one to another, the silence fed, the nagging narrative need for climax met. If it had been difficult to know what was happening before, it was impossible now, and sticking around to reconcile conflicting versions was out of the question. Having promised warm tarts and mandolins, Edgar had a responsibility to more than his apathetic readership. He had to get Nicola out of here.

  Chapter 27

  Friend of the Fucking Family

  “OBRIGADO . . . SIM. You’re sure? Definido, categórico? Sem mortes? Fantastic. Muito, muito obrigado. Adeus.” Edgar hung up, patting his moist forehead with the tail of Barrington’s flowing rayon shirt. His hands were unsteady, and he had to sit down.

  “The Chicken Littles in the next doorway were full of shit.” Edgar collapsed on the ottoman. “The hospital confirms Lieutenant Carvalho’s version. Nobody killed. A few injuries. Bones’ll mend.”

  Nicola stooped and touched his cheek. “Your face is clammy! You’re relieved. Really relieved.”

  “Those immigrants aren’t my pen pals, but I’ve no reason to wish them tough luck,” said Edgar brusquely. “Why shouldn’t I be relieved?” The fact was, he felt a bit sick.

  Nicola cocked her head. “I’ve never seen a journalist who’s entirely pleased when no one gets killed. No deaths, and your story slips below the fold.”

  “No byline’s worth somebody’s life,” Edgar said airily.

  He sat up and took a deep breath. Light-headedness subsiding, Edgar detected impending high spirits. The riot in Novo Marrakech had resulted in no fatalities about which to feel nauseously culpable; he’d persuaded Nicola to accompany him back to Rua da Evaporação instead of groveling home to her snit-prone husband; and after eating nothing today but one date-nut square, Edgar could contemplate a substantial dinner with the fearless righteousness of the underfed.

  “The injuries,” Nicola asked, “are there many, are they serious?”

  The adrenal buzz of making those phone calls had left Edgar jittery. Rubbing his thighs, he jumped up again. “How should I know?”

  “You’re a journalist, and you just rang the hospital.”

  “Fifty, sixty, something like that,” he said impatiently. “But no blindings that they mentioned, nothing permanent, all right?”

  “Why so prickly, so—?”

  Edgar blurted, “Barba suffered from plenty of racial and religious tension before the SOB!”

  “I’ve gathered—” Nicola licked her lips, tolerating his non sequitur—“that the rise of the SOB has made friction between Catholics and Muslims much, much worse.”

  Edgar assured her briskly, “The Sobs just tapped poisonous groundwater.”

  “Why absolve the SOB of responsibility for what happened this afternoon?” Nicola puzzled. “A brutal round-up of law-abiding immigrants, some here for twenty years, paying taxes? I can’t see why that would be happening, if the Portuguese government weren’t trying to golden-handshake your little terrorist friends into early retirement.”

  For an apolitical naïf, she fingered the salient dynamic pretty quick. “Immigration would still be an issue,” Edgar dug in, “Sobs or no Sobs.”

  “You wrote yourself how the bloodlines of Moors and Barbans are intermingled!”

  “But don’t forget the religious divide.” Edgar settled on the ottoman at a professorial slant. “And you can understand Barban territorial paranoia just a little, can’t you? With all that jihad jingoism coming out of hard-line Islam—”

  “Most North Africans are progressive Muslims, and Edgar, I don’t understand you! When you arrived here, you’d no time for those SOB scoundrels, and had contempt for their intolerance. Now you seem to be coming round to their way—”

  “Nick, don’t put words in my mouth. I don’t approve of blowing up airplanes. I’m just saying that you can’t blame the SOB for everything that’s wrong with Barba.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice softened. “I shouldn’t, if you will, read you the Riot Act. At least you seem to care.” Nicola perched next to him and placed a hand shyly on Edgar’s knee, which occasioned another amphetamine rush. “Your colleagues can be so callous that to see you anguished about total strangers . . . Ringing the police, you were shaking! You’re sure to turn into another jaded crocodile like Win Pyre, but while it lasts, your compassion—well, it’s lovely.”

  Edgar wished she wouldn’t go on like that. Yes, he was relieved, but only because headline fatalities could have been all his fault.

  “I don’t suppose you got Barrington,” Edgar milked it a bit, “bawling his eyes out over the vicissitudes of the world’s sad sacks.”

  “No.” Nicola straightened and collected her hands in her lap.

  Idiot! He actually had her talking about Edgar and what he was like, never mind that he wasn’t really like that, and then he had to go and ruin it by mentioning Saddler.

  “You’ve still not found anything peculiar here, have you?” she asked forlornly.

  “Very weird shampoos, why?”

  She rose and paced a few steps, fiddling with the strings of her lacy black blouse like a rosary. “This may sound far-fetc
hed, but I’ve sometimes wondered if Barrington was—if he might have been involved.”

  “In what?”

  “In this—in the SOB somehow. That sounds unlike him in a way. He was a cynic. Still, if you don’t believe in anything, then I expect you can play at believing whatever you like. It seems improbable that he’d put himself on the line for any cause. But it seems positively preposterous that Barrington of all people would share a town with a notorious terrorist outfit and have nothing to do with it.”

  “So if Saddler covered the Russian mafia, he must have been a made guy?”

  “Funny you should mention that, because he was up to his neck in Moscow. He ran a smuggling ring. These silk pillows, this villa—you can’t imagine that he afforded all this on a correspondent’s salary. Barrington was an operator. For every finger, a pie.”

  It bugged Edgar that he hadn’t clued up to the Slavic swindle, as if being the repository for Saddler’s final secret he was the rightful vessel for them all. Besides, he’d had enough of being told what Barrington was like, and his lover’s blithe presumption of greater intimacy rankled. Edgar didn’t have to take it up the ass from the guy to know a thing or two about Saddler.

  “What made you suspicious that he was in cahoots with the SOB?” Edgar taunted, if only to remind himself who had the inside track here.

  “Enigmatic asides, and the fact that he found Barban politics altogether too enthralling. I don’t mean prissily that death oughtn’t to be entertainment. Only that I think the issue of immigration bored him senseless. Or should have. And he’d an air. How do I explain it? Of keeping something in. Of being about to burst.”

  She didn’t have to explain it. An air of combustible smugness. An air of rattling a skeleton in your closet with the door ajar and wheedling, Guess what I’ve got! An air of aching to whisper sweet-somethings to Nicola Tremaine in particular, to enfold her sharp shoulders into the damp, dark embrace of your confidence. An air of hearing your own voice begin, Nick, you’ll think I’m pulling your leg, but . . . , or, Nick, I think I may have done something incredibly stupid and I’ve no one else to turn to . . . , until your head is so cluttered with elliptic ice-breakers that you trip over them like pick handles in a tool shed. Except Barrington wouldn’t have felt watched by Barrington himself, who disdained a weak-willed stoolie unable to keep his trap shut.

  “Did you suspect he was involved before he disappeared?” Edgar asked neutrally.

  “For a while, yes.” Absently, she sank into the emerald velveteen wingchair.

  “And that bothered you? You didn’t like the idea?”

  “Of course I didn’t like the idea,” she snapped. “But I still liked Barrington.” Glancing down, she seemed suddenly to realize where she was, and sprang up again, as if she’d sat in someone’s lap.

  “He could be a murderer and you’d still—like him.”

  “More than like him,” she admitted.

  “And if he were actively involved in the SOB, that could implicate him in the massacre of Henry’s whole family.”

  She nodded, eyes downcast.

  “So this suspicion of yours, it makes you feel like a jerk.”

  Nicola’s eyes rolled, like, Duh.

  Edgar took pity on her. “Saddler was no terrorist,” he said carefully, “strictly speaking.”

  “Oh, how do you know?” she snapped. “But whether Barrington was a terrorist is academic. He’s not here. The point is, I’d not have gone off him if he were!”

  “Does Henry know that?”

  “I hope not. And I wish I didn’t know that about myself, either. But self-knowledge is like any knowledge: you can’t take it back.” Nicola perched on the trunk, as if she didn’t deserve a real chair. “I’m a fine one to be high and mighty with you, Edgar. You’ve never done anything dodgy, while I, I’ll fall for a murderer, I’ll sell my own husband downriver, for, for—”

  “For what?”

  She threw a hand at the empty wingchair. “For nothing, apparently!”

  “So,” Edgar pried quietly, “do you wish you’d never met him?”

  “You must know the answer to that question.” She dropped to the ottoman, limp.

  Edgar gazed into her attractively harrowed face, drawn and wan like that of a nineteenth-century heroine perishing from consumption. He couldn’t remember when he’d ever felt this jealous. “You think about him all the time, don’t you?” he said blackly. “Saddler’s having vanished, it’s tearing you up. Not a day goes by—”

  “Not a day. Not an hour. Which, without his being told, Henry knows very well. And every time I brood about Barrington, I betray my husband.”

  “Thought-crime?”

  “There is such a thing. Cheating in your head may be more treacherous than cheating in bed. It’s cowardly, and cheap; you can almost always get away with it. Lately I feel duplicitous even with strangers. When you introduce someone as your ‘husband,’ you’re not meant to be saying, ‘Hello, I’d like you to meet the second-most important man in my life.’ ”

  “You said once that people chased after something Saddler had—a facility, a façade—and not who he was. What about you? Did you go for the decoy, or the real McCoy?”

  “Oh, I’ve wondered. Whenever I try to get my hands on the distinction, Barrington goes to gossamer. Maybe you can’t separate the ‘real’ person from the illusion they create—from the way they turn a phrase, light their cigarillo.”

  “I thought Saddler smoked Cubans.”

  “Heavens no, he smoked those foul-smelling Café Crèmes that come in tins.”

  “But to you,” Edgar filled in dryly, “they smelled like lilies-of-the-valley.”

  Nicola half-smiled. “Not quite.”

  “Sorry, I interrupted. You were about to explain how only you understood the real Barrington. How you alone recognized that in his heart he was a wounded little boy—”

  “Edgar! If you’re going to be unkind to me, I wish you’d have the decency to sneer at me behind my back, the way you’re unkind to everyone else.”

  Chastened, Edgar apologized, and begged her to go on.

  “It’s true,” she resumed warily, “that Barrington had a B-side—not flashy and booming, but torn, reflective. For a time that did seem like the Queen’s shilling. But I came to doubt if quiet-confiding-Barrington was any more authentic than big-booming-Barrington. I wondered if this introspective variation might be another illusion he was terribly good at. Oh, maybe I had started to fancy that only I knew the real Barrington. But this conviction that only you knew the real Barrington, you’re right, Edgar, it was the form. I can’t tell you how many of his acquaintances told me, ‘What most people misunderstand about Bear . . .’ It was like continually running into claimants waving competing deeds for the same property. Because this sensation of ownership, of special insight—I’m convinced that Barrington deliberately induced it. For him, intimacy was one more deception. Did I love Barrington for who he was? I told you when we met, Edgar: I’m an aesthete. I’m superficial. I’m sure I loved what Barrington appeared to be, like everyone else.”

  “I never heard you say that before,” Edgar grunted. “That you loved him.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “Embarrass me! Hell, Nick.” Edgar covered his own stupidly hurt feelings by tossing off, “All of Cinziero and half of New York knows about your affair.”

  Nicola bristled. “I never said we had an affair.”

  “Not in so many words, but we’re adults here—”

  “Even adults spend evenings playing Parcheesi.”

  “Right, Nick, and pigs fly.” As her expression remained constipated, Edgar raised his hands. “But hey—I’m the one who advised: take a line and stick to your story.”

  “It’s not a story.”

  “What, are you trying to tell me that you two never—?”

  “We never.”

  “Are you shitting me?!” Like Barrington who-me?-ing that he’d never blown a
nyone up, Nicola met his gaze with serenity. “Man, I don’t believe this!”

  “Neither does Henry. Interestingly, it’s been every bit as destructive for me to tell the truth and be disbelieved as had I lied. The emotional algebra is so neat that Barrington must have worked it out in advance. Besides which, my faithfulness to Henry was a technicality. I should have liked to sleep with Barrington, all things being equal. That I didn’t constituted a by-the-book loyalty that hasn’t, in retrospect, made much difference. It did, however, make our threesome possible. I expect Barrington worked that out as well.”

  “You make him out as so conniving. But didn’t you yank his chain yourself? A womanizer like that, who can help himself to any broad he wants? Saddler rose to a challenge. You were shrewd, with his type, to hold out.”

  “I didn’t ‘hold out,’ ” said Nicola with distaste. “Barrington held out on me.”

  “Jesus,” Edgar mumbled. “Maybe Saddler was a fudge-packer.”

  “I think not,” Nicola submitted. “But he was fiendishly clever.”

  Edgar rose to run his fingers through his remaining hair, a stagy gesture that he might as well make the most of before he went bald. Somehow Saddler’s implausibly chaste relations with Nicola were infuriating. Maybe the ultimate possession of any woman was to turn her down. Besides, an age of easy sexual access had devalued physical conquest, lowered the tone. Now commonplace, doing the extramarital nasty merely dragged every romancer down to the same coarse literalism, making sex, as much as death, the great leveler. Edgar’s prurient mental flashes of Barrington and Nicola thrashing on the canopied four-poster upstairs had always evinced a pleasantly incongruous aspect. As Alexis had observed, Barrington’s “soul was clad,” and Barrington in the buff couldn’t gift-wrap his round pink-gin tummy with a cummerbund. Consequently, these fleshy notional centerfolds were prone to stimulate less Edgar’s jealousy than his sense of humor. Besides, Edgar had done that, Edgar knew all about that. Since there are limited variations on what-sticks-where, Edgar felt relative confidence that, whatever those two got up to, he’d got the T-shirt.