The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  But this! This—sickening chivalry, this—titillating repression, this—archaic, otherworldly restraint! Oh, honey we shouldn’t! Darling, we mustn’t! Please, I can’t stand it, stop! The whole montage would have to be reshot in soft-focus. Unconsummated yearning elevated Barrington’s courtship of Nicola Tremaine from daytime TV to Edith Wharton: a wrenching tale of thwarted passion, wasteful self-denial, and cruel social convention. While we sordid mortals were porking each other blind, the lofty Mr. Saddler and his winsome lass were exchanging fiery glances across a tea tray and doubtless packing more of a sexual wallop into an inadvertent grazing of fingers than Edgar experienced with coke on his cock.

  But does the same gambit work for drones? Edgar hadn’t jumped Nicola’s bones. Edgar hadn’t disrespected her marriage. Edgar walked around with a hard-on for the woman all day, but does Edgar get credit for being “fiendishly clever”? No, look at her: spread over the ottoman, drowsily relaxed, legs extended, ankles crossed but knees canted to expose a trustingly undefended shadow beneath her miniskirt. She wasn’t averting her eyes, lest Edgar glimpse the desire with which they smoldered. She wasn’t self-consciously tugging her lacy blouse to cover the swells at her collar, or begging to use the phone and assure Henry that she was fine, she’d be right home, no need to worry. Who was worried? However forewarned, Edgar had been beaten out of the role of leading man before he stepped off the plane in Lisbon. Left only bit parts, he’d joined the nameless supporting cast: Friend of the Fucking Family.

  So Edgar was hard pressed to keep his lip buttoned as well as his fly. The thing was, Nicola thought he was a nice guy. She thought he was an ingenuous journalist who wrote his earnest copy about those dreadful terrorists and turned it in on time. He wrote sturdy topic sentences; he spell-checked. He wasn’t, presumably, an “operator,” and she didn’t toss nights anguishing over whether that shifty, mercurial Edgar Kellogg was really a terrorist Godfather. No, white-bread Ed didn’t engage her imagination one little bit. Unlike the ever-elusive, potentially nefarious, disturbingly cynical Barrington Saddler, with his bits on the side and fingers in pies. Well, big surprise, Nicky Tremaine, meet Son of Saddler. If you figure Barrington was a shady wheeler-dealer while I’m drowning in my own sincerity, that just means that of the two I’m the better actor. Nick, you’ll think I’m pulling your leg, but . . .

  Edgar chewed on his cheek. Barrington, no doubt, loitered in the wings—or wingchair, whose cushion was depressed. Were Edgar ever to spill the beans about the SOB, he wouldn’t do so under the disapproving eye of its mastermind. So there was no alternative to remaining a what-you-see-is-what-you-get drudge in Nicola’s view for the time being.

  “The key!” Edgar grasped at one last straw, determined that Nicola confess to the groping, unseemly snuffling of earthly relations. “The night I arrived in Cinziero. You gave me the key to this joint. You’re not the next-door neighbor. Only lovers have keys.”

  “Commonly, Sherlock, you’re right. But Barrington only gave me that key the day he disappeared.”

  “What for?”

  “I wasn’t too clear, at the time. But later I concluded—he left it for you.”

  Edgar did a double take. “I don’t get it.”

  “Perhaps not you personally. But he clearly intended his successor to assume this villa. I imagine he hoped to make the transition graceful, and that you’d make yourself at home.”

  What Saddler planned was for some loser with time on his hands to decipher those floppies. “Why were you so secretive, then? About having the key?”

  “Obviously, since Barrington made preparations for his departure, it’s unlikely he was cold-cocked in the dark of night. But if Henry assumed that Barrington was, well—dead—my life would be easier. Selfish on my part. And fruitless—because for some reason, I don’t know why, Henry has never once supposed that Barrington was assassinated or felled by a lethal misadventure. At least that key kept me sane, even if it was only when the postcard arrived that I could be sure my assumptions were sound. For that first arid month or so, when Henry wasn’t home, I’d clutch the key in my fist until the brass grew warm. Feeling it was real, so that Barrington must have been safe, because he’d given me a signal, if no substitute for a proper good-bye. Relinquishing it to you was a sacrifice. I was tempted to deny having it. But that would have put you to such inconvenience for my silly keepsake that I couldn’t play dumb.”

  Sometimes the plain physical world provides a welcome reprieve from the tortuous mental mangle people make of it. “I’m starved,” Edgar announced vigorously, as if calling a time-out. “It’s time I fixed some grub.”

  “Can I—?”

  “You stay here. In fact, you could do me a favor. I need to know how this ruckus in Novo Marrakech is being spun on CNN.” Edgar switched on the TV, and left to hunt down Barrington’s last jar of beluga.

  Returning with an open bottle of wine and some messy appetizers, he checked his watch. “Shit. To get anything in the Record about that riot, I’ve gotta file in less than an hour.” Typically, publishing in a national newspaper had slipped from privilege to pain in the butt. “Do you mind hanging around while I bang something out? After dragging you to that free-for-all, I at least owe you dinner.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Edgar. I should leave you to your work. Though you might keep your word count down. If the report I just watched is anything to go by, a garden-variety riot is bound to be sidelined by Madrid.”

  Edgar’s eyes narrowed jealously. “What about Madrid?”

  “A big car bomb just went off, near the Prado. It killed one MP, for whom they think the device was intended, and four bystanders. The schoolteacher was eight months pregnant.” Nicola added deadpan, “Beat that.”

  “No claim?” Meaning, did duty call? Must he finally face down his superstitious scruples about not claiming fatalities? Did the jar in the study have enough change?

  “Yes, for once. ETA. Barba doesn’t have a monopoly on hideousness, even in Iberia. Your SOB friends have competition.”

  “There might be a way,” Edgar muttered, stroking his chin, “of pulling the rug out from under those Basque bastards.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s exactly what I was talking about,” said Nicola, helping herself to a cracker.

  “Come again?”

  “Just that sort of opaque, throwaway remark. Barrington dropped them all the time. They’re most annoying.”

  So distracted that he only implored her to stay a time or two, Edgar fetched her coat.

  Chapter 28

  Barrington Has Feelings

  EDGAR E-MAILED THE Record a hastily written story on which a few months ago he himself would have promptly turned the page. An article about some trifling riot by a bunch of foreign nobodies over deportations from one slag-heap to another would have belonged in the who-cares pile along with reports from Bosnia-Herzegovina and any other country he couldn’t spell. He might have felt sheepish, grinding out text he wouldn’t want to read himself, except that, eclipsed by Madrid, this copy would never see daylight.

  Once Edgar tripped back downstairs, the caviar crackers had been dispatched (barring the crumbs all over the carpet), and the wine bottle was empty.

  “Saddler!” Edgar shouted. “Get in here! If you’re not too ashamed to show your face, you fucking fraud!”

  The figure seemed to fold out of the pale green drapes, wearing the officer’s uniform from the bedroom closet, with the scarlet Nehru collar and cuffs. While the khaki was starched and cornered, he wore the jacket unbuttoned, his shirt collar open—combining the residual discipline and off-duty languor of the soldier on R&R. Leaning against the wall at a jaunty tilt, Saddler appeared at once dashing top brass and costume ball jape. In short, he looked every bit the part of SOB Chief of Staff.

  “Fraud,” Barrington repeated critically, straightening the medals he hadn’t earned on his breast pocket. “I get impatient with that accusation, in case
you think it’s fresh. I don’t, surprisingly, pretend to much. Other people are perpetually making claims on my behalf. When I fail this contrived reputation, I’m a poser.”

  “Don’t act all offended.” Edgar sucked the last few drips from the wine bottle. “I couldn’t hurt your feelings with a pile driver.”

  “A prevailing theory runs that I have none,” Barrington volunteered brightly.

  “What you don’t have is an honest bone in your body.” Edgar thumped the bottle on the seaman’s chest with force. “You never told me that you and Nick just held hands.”

  “I don’t recall your asking.”

  “But you were glad for me to make assumptions.”

  “Eddie, lad, what I have and haven’t done preoccupies so many people so much of the time that I could spend all day doing nothing but rectify their misconceptions.”

  “What’s with the iron will? You could have slipped Nick the snake if you’d made an effort.”

  “A vulgar sensibility blinds you to life’s more refined pleasures.” At the bar, Barrington trembled four delicate drops of bitters into two fingers of gin. “You regard Henry Durham, for example, as an impediment to your happiness. To the contrary, he fertilizes the garden of earthly delights. No Henry, and you meet the single most ravishing woman in Cinziero on your first night. You ask her to dinner, have your way with her, and part company. You’re still stuck in Cinziero, the only enticement in town exhausted, and before you know it you’ve stooped to Trudy Sisson.”

  “But I heard that you—”

  “Don’t make the same mistake.” Saddler turned heel, and Edgar trooped behind him to the atrium like a dutiful private. “After that one rash evening, I was obliged to keep the answerphone on for a month.”

  “Diversions like Trudy must have got back to Nick. In this town, you could as well have put Saddler just fucked Trudy Sisson in skywriting.”

  “She was hurt. But how could Nicola object, shacked up with another fellow herself? I’d endured so much jealous hair-tear over the years. Imagine my relief when the tenant of my affections was obliged to keep a lid on it.”

  Saddler settled onto his favorite pillows by the pool and lit up a cigarillo—a detail Edgar disliked having got wrong as much as having been left in the dark about Moscow.

  “Consider the advantages of the triangle.” Saddler stabbed his Café Crème, which smelled like one of Edgar’s scurfy running shoes set on fire. “The lady is married, still likes her chap; she has qualms. In fact, qualms provide a constant conversational fallback. Likewise the do-you-think-Henry-suspects-anything palaver, or the wistful spinning of mutual futures whose realization, relaxingly, never threatens. Eddie, our three-way suppers were fabulous! The nuances, the double entendres, the eyes, the hands on thighs under a serviette! And the gobsmacking, jaw-dropping innocence of Henry Durham was enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. Furthermore, inhibition can be far more delicious than your standard thrust-and-parry. Public school memories tend to be erotically charged because you didn’t get shagged.”

  “Go ahead and call me vulgar, then, since coming up on forty I find abstinence a pretty second-rate thrill.” Sullenly, Edgar refused to collapse into his usual nest by the fountain, but scuffled restlessly over the marble parquet. “I don’t notice Nick breaking out in a dizzy sweat because I haven’t tackled her to the sack. It seems I’m insufficiently fascinating. This notion you might be a real live terrorist has got her all hot to trot. Your basic foreign correspondent doing his dumpy bit at the keyboard doesn’t make her moist.”

  “Please don’t tell me,” said Barrington, pained, “that you’ve only been visiting my Terra do Cão phone box to impress the girl.”

  “I’ve kept my yap shut, thank you. Most guys would’ve already been dining out on your microfloppy for months.”

  “Our little secret is burning a hole in your pocket like an unspent fiver.” Barrington had removed his shoes and socks, and was diddling his toes in the pool. “But were Nicola to twig that you moonlight as paramilitary prankster, would that matter a jot?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’d still seem exciting-evil, and I’d just seem ignoble-evil,” Edgar despaired. “The trouble is I can’t compete with you, Saddler.”

  “Then stop trying,” he advised kindly.

  “You said the way was paved! That you’d done all the hard work, that she was ready to drop like a ripe peach! Or whatever.” Edgar deepened his voice, which had grown whiny. “Something corny.”

  “I’ve done what I can,” said Barrington sympathetically. “When Nicola arrived, her fortress of a marriage was unassailable. I bridged the moat. But I did not, it’s true, shove my battering ram through her gates. I’m sorry if that means in your terms that, like Operation Desert Storm stopping shy of Baghdad, I didn’t finish the job.”

  “It might help if you sent her a funeral notice or something. Shit, that fucking blank postcard will keep her panting by the mailbox for the next ten years. How can I ever get anywhere with that woman if she’s still hung up on you?” Edgar added malignantly, “I sometimes think you want to keep her on a short leash, too.”

  Instead of protesting, Barrington padded to the glass door, leaving wet footprints on the marble, and gazed out at the dark patio. With the man’s back turned Edgar couldn’t tell if the vento was shrieking through the cracks or if Saddler was whistling lightly through his teeth. “I do miss her, funnily enough. The woman always says what she’s feeling. You wouldn’t think that rare, but it is. I do enjoy it when she stops by.”

  “Good God. Feelings.”

  “Charming, wasn’t it, the way she worried about Moroccan casualties this afternoon? And she was trying to act sophisticated for your sake, but she was clearly quite distressed by that business in Madrid.”

  “She’s sentimental.”

  “She has sentiments. People like us don’t know the difference. By the way, did I detect that you’re contemplating some atrocity-poaching?”

  “It’s an option,” Edgar allowed guardedly. Even warmed by the uncommon compliment of “people like us,” he felt protective of his autonomy. Barrington had delegated, and claims were Edgar’s end of the operation now.

  “Dicey,” Barrington cautioned, tapping the glass. “If you don’t succeed in winning credit over ETA, our Soldados Ousados look greedy. And ETA’s got the edge on you. Madrid’s their patch.”

  “I might risk it,” Edgar determined, hands in pockets, businesslike. “Timing’s good. We’re perceived as strong, escalating, on a roll. Could prove an interesting test of SOB power and credibility. There’s a solid political logic to Sobs hitting Madrid. Lisbon has an investment in keeping on good terms with Spain, since their historical relations are so fractious. And it’s not a bad idea to expand our theater of operations to include Europe again. I was getting Yankee-centric for a while. Better to keep our options open. Something juicy comes along on the Continent, gift horse—don’t want to have to look it in the mouth.”

  “What about your weak stomach?”

  “Sick fucks who blew up a pregnant woman deserve to have their wretched bomb hijacked. Your reasoning, right? And,” Edgar appended reluctantly, “if we don’t claim fatalities pretty soon, nobody’s gonna take us seriously anymore.”

  “True,” Saddler granted. “But if you start filching meticulously planned, expensive festivities from established organizations who want their names in lights, they’ll get pissy.”

  “That crossed my mind. But I’m already in up to my eyeballs, and if even the FBI can’t trace the claims to me, ETA sure can’t.”

  “You’ve watched too much Efrem Zimbalist Jr. Don’t overrate the feds.”

  “After this gig, I don’t rate terrorists. So between the two of us, we’re not afraid of anybody.” A stretch. Now routinely collecting abominations as philatelists did First Day Covers, and as habitually discoursing with a Mary Shelley monster of stitched-together gossip, Edgar was increasingly afraid of himself.

  “To return to tha
t problem in your trousers.” Barrington stopped drawing pictures in condensation and turned around. “I wouldn’t dismiss a move on Nicola as futile.” Saddler’s encouragement rang with the believe-in-yourself condescension of a high school guidance counselor urging Edgar to apply to a better grade of college than he’d a snowball’s chance of getting into. “She feels so guilty already that she might find it a relief to have something of substance to feel ashamed of. And the marriage is moribund. A coup de grace would be merciful.”

  “Save the big brother advice,” said Edgar. “If you can find keeping your fly zipped so electrifying, I can at least live with it.”

  Even fucking, if Barrington didn’t do it, seemed uncool.

  Chapter 29

  Stealing Shit from Shitheads

  “KELLOGG?” WALLASEK’S VOICE was grainy; Portugal’s lousy overseas phone connections were a crucial assist to this enterprise.

  Calling his own editor was pushing his luck, but what else was luck for? Edgar poured on the accent more thickly. “I am zhe Cinziero Brigade Commander of Os Soldados Ousados de Barba.”

  “This some kind of crank—?”

  Edgar was accustomed to Doubting Thomases when he broke in a new contact, and proceeded unperturbed. “Ve veesh you to know zhat vile ve much support our fellow freedom fighters een España—”

  “Christ, you really from the SOB? Hold your horses, man, let me get a pencil!”

  “Zhe car bomba een Madreed,” Edgar barreled on, “eesh not zhe brave work of our comrades een ETA. Eesh SOB bomba. Zhees attacks veel continue unteel Barba veen her freedom, and Norte Africanos filhos da putas invading our homeland go beck vere zhey belong.”

  “Please slow down, sir!” Wallasek cried. “That’s files de putsies—?”

  “Inglês?” Edgar furnished, pleased to have at last insinuated his schoolboy Portuguese into one of these calls, “Sans of hoors. Zhat you may know zhees eesh legítimo SOB, I geev you code phraze, sim?” Lowering his voice into the conspiratorial stage whisper his editor was bound to expect—it paid to stick to cliché—Edgar delivered the magic words.