The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “We’ve had visitors,” Barrington advised usefully.

  “Thanks. I’d never have noticed.” Scanning the detritus on the floor, Edgar spotted a silver cigarillo case, an ornately faceted crystal candy dish, and a solid-gold snuffbox. “This can’t be a run-of-the-mill burglary.”

  Barrington laid a finger on his chin. “I think not.”

  “Why didn’t you stop them?” Edgar cried, even as he recognized that depending on imaginary-Barrington to protect the property was like keeping a stuffed Rottweiler. “We’re overrun by barbarians, and you rescue the Beefeater and bitters!”

  “Naturally I—what’s that linguistic abortion you Americans use? Prioritized.” Barrington’s brow dimpled. “But Eddie. I’m a bit concerned about the study.”

  Edgar groaned. Before trudging upstairs, he took a slug of Barrington’s gin.

  It was the study on which the twister had planted its most passionate kiss. The jar of international coins was cracked open like a piñata, and change plinked under Edgar’s feet as he waded through ankle-deep tossed paper. Barrington’s three-ringed clip files were pulled from the shelves and splayed. Since their brain-surgeon guests apparently couldn’t work the fiddly clasps on the glassed-in bookcases, the panes were smashed and the woodwork splintered. The pitching to corners of Barrington’s melted bicycle pump, hairy skull, and rare demagogic button collection confirmed that one man’s memorabilia was another man’s junk.

  In the tumult of tossed objects, it took Edgar a few minutes to sort out what wasn’t there: his own computer. After scrounging on all fours for fifteen minutes, he resigned himself that the floppies were gone, too.

  Edgar numbly retired to the atrium to allow these absences to sink in.

  “Did you,” Barrington began with an air of diplomacy, “save your translations?”

  “What translations?” Edgar snapped.

  “Of my SOB STORIES. Did you save the decoded files to disk, or store them on your hard drive? Or might you have hit that most magical of keys, D-E-L?”

  “I saved them,” Edgar admitted glumly.

  “Ah,” said Barrington. “And you’ve been switching the code phrase every so often? It’s terribly important, like changing your underdrawers.”

  “Of course!” said Edgar impatiently.

  “But you don’t keep a record. You keep them in your head.”

  “No,” Edgar moaned. “I keep a list. At first I relied on memory, but after two or three replacements I was afraid I’d forget.”

  “A handwritten list,” Barrington proposed hopefully, “that you store on your person, perhaps?”

  “I don’t even write my grocery list by hand.”

  “So.” Barrington sighed. “This list of code phrases is on your computer?” Hangdog, Edgar nodded. “And it is up to date.” Edgar’s answers had proved so consistently unfortunate that this last query Barrington didn’t bother to phrase as a question. “Then I suggest,” he continued, “that you go ring a newspaper.”

  “I decided to quit!”

  “You’ve no choice. Unless you want our visitors to ring them for you.”

  “What good is that code phrase to anyone but me? Christ, it’s not even any good to me, really—except to carry on with a joke that’s got pretty fucking old.”

  “We’ve spent so much agreeable time together,” Barrington despaired. “Please don’t force me to conclude that you’re an idiot.”

  “But why would anyone tear this place apart? What were they looking for?”

  “Anyone,” Barrington scoffed, “was more or less looking for what they took.”

  “Nobody would search for evidence of our racket unless they’d already caught on. How could someone have found us out?”

  “Now it’s us, is it? I’ve noticed that we’re only in this together when something goes wrong. But I really can’t accept responsibility here. You called attention to yourself with that cabaret act for Jasmine Petronella. Oh, I grant you it was cute. Too cute, by half.”

  “Reckless, yeah. So? The whole world thinks Cinziero’s crawling with Sobs. My ‘interview’ fed local superstitions is all. Like sighting a leprechaun.”

  Barrington settled by the pool, dipping the belt of his smoking jacket into the water. “Never mind our humble home. You realize that Tomás Verdade has been metaphorically turning this whole town upside-down for years?”

  “Looking for what?”

  “Soldados Ousados, you halfwit!” Barrington got shirty when Edgar was slow on the uptake.

  Edgar shrugged. “Why has he bothered? The make-believe kind work swell.”

  “Think of matters from Verdade’s perspective,” Barrington chided. “He leads a movement whose paramilitary arm provides him all the power he’s got. But he’s no notion who these people are. He’s no more prescient about SOB operations than any old punter. Tomás has to stay light on his feet, and though he plays a good game and looks in control, he isn’t. You’ve talked to our friend a time or two. Think he enjoys being buffeted by the winds of fortune? You set up an interview with a leprechaun. He got word you knew a Sob, Eddie. Tomás has never located a Sob, Eddie. As of this afternoon? He’s found one.”

  Having poured himself a tall straight gin, Edgar lay flat on the marble floor. The cold stone’s evocation of a morgue slab seemed apt.

  “Will he blow the whistle on me?” Edgar mewled.

  “That’s the one fate you’re safe from. It’s less in his interests to expose the SOB than it is in yours. If the SOB’s a joke, it’s on Tomás. He’d become a laughingstock.”

  “Then maybe it doesn’t matter.” Edgar brightened. “Maybe he’ll keep playing along. Meantime, I don’t call in any more claims. The whole debacle peters out.”

  “No, Eddie,” Barrington cautioned with a rare note of seriousness. “It matters.”

  “Leave me alone!” Edgar implored. “I’m shot!”

  “If you don’t listen, you very well may be. Aside from myself, you’re the only soul in the world who’s twigged that the SOB’s closest corollaries aren’t Hamas and the Tamil Tigers, but the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. Tomás won’t want that information in anyone’s hands but his own. You’re a threat to his future presidency of an independent Barban state. Equally, to his cushy honoraria in America, his Vanity Fair profiles, and the stretch limos sent to escort him to the Lisbon parliament. Now, I doubt that Tomás has ever done anything dire, actually. But not because he’s such a good Catholic. He’s kept his goons in check because he’s afraid of the SOB. He won’t be afraid of the bugaboos from now on.”

  Edgar hoped that Barrington would stop there, but not wishing his point to be lost Saddler spelled it out forcefully: “As of tonight, your existence, Eddie—is inconvenient.”

  Chapter 33

  Little Jack Coroner Sits on a Foreigner

  BARRINGTON HAD THE gall to urge a return to Terra do Cão that very night, but Edgar refused—first by railing, then by whimpering, finally by conking out cold by the fountain. Only when Barrington roused him before first light—meaning Barrington himself arose before noon—did Edgar register how soberly his conventionally indifferent mentor apprehended the situation.

  Bumbling and bleary, Edgar plopped into the Saab’s bucket seat, failing to see the necessity for this expedition. Hadn’t he sworn off this drill, and if so why was he heading once more to that filthy phone booth?

  He opted to call his contact at the New York Times, where at midnight they’d still be putting the paper to bed. The night staff secretary on the foreign desk had grown so genial that, in more conducive circumstances, he might have asked her out.

  “Ceendy?” Edgar was so exhausted he probably sounded drunk; in fact, maybe he was still drunk. “Thees ees Os Soldados Ousados de Barba, sim? . . . No, no bomba. Just, we change zhe code phrase, sim?”

  She interjected something puzzled like, “Again?” but Edgar let it go. He wanted to get this over with and hit the sack.

  “You ready? You have pencil?
. . . That’s right, lápis! Muito bom!” (Edgar’s regular calls had inspired Cindy to take an introductory course in Portuguese at the New School.) “Last code we decide go, ‘Jack Splat was once too fat, his wife could be so mean.’ Esta bem? New code: ‘Leettle Jack Coroner sat on a foreigner, eating his words and clay.’ ” Edgar’s latest fad in code phrases was fractured nursery rhymes, and usually Cindy would repeat the couplet to confirm. Instead he heard crackling silence, so Edgar decided to make this one long and racy: “ ‘He stuck in his cock, and pulled out a sock—’ ”

  “Mister, Mister SOB man,” Cindy interrupted, as she wouldn’t usually dare. “There’s no call to use that language.”

  Impudent! “You want our new code phrase or not?”

  “Not,” she snipped.

  “Run that past me again?” Edgar forgot the accent.

  “No, I don’t want your new code phrase,” she said primly. “One of you people called this afternoon and changed the Jack Splat to something else, which has already been distributed to staff. You’re not up to date.”

  Edgar’s cheeks tingled. The last time he felt this chagrined was after a few months of “freelancing” and his platinum American Express card was declined at Tavern on the Green. “What, if I call up and claim a bomb with my Little-Jack-Coroner-sat-on-a-foreigner tag, the SOB doesn’t get credit?”

  “Your responsibility would be reviewed, yes,” she explained, as if his account were overdrawn and he’d be considered for another card after a period of probation.

  Edgar was enraged. Not only had those Creamie yahoos ransacked his house, but they’d filched his clout—the hard-earned clout of an organization whose reputation, like that of any respected family business, had taken years to build. This was a hostile takeover! At least now Edgar grasped why Barrington was so exercised about changing the code. As of last night, Edgar had been cut out of the loop. Without the current code phrase, the authority of any SOB statements he issued would be called into question.

  “There’s—there’s been a split!” he sputtered.

  “I’ll inform the editor,” Cindy said stiffly, and then softened. “And—I didn’t like the dirty stuff. But the first part—the coroner-foreigner thing—that was cute. Better than the other guy’s. His was kinda boring.”

  Edgar said defeatedly, “I can imagine.”

  Edgar did go to bed for a few feverish hours, during which he enfolded the entire SOB hoax into a dream from which he’d shortly awaken, just as the B-movie director escaped the sticky cinematic cul-de-sac with a hackneyed squiggly screen. Slitting his eyes open, he half-expected to glimpse his old blond-wooded bedstead on West Eighty-Ninth Street.

  When he confronted Barrington’s bordello-red canopy instead, the last twenty-four hours restored themselves as belligerently real. Fair enough, Edgar concluded, burrowing further in his satinate cocoon, if the Creams had taken over the SOB, he’d effectively been bought out. They were welcome to it. The burdens of management had been lifted from his achy shoulders. Like any retired CEO, he could sleep late, eat well, and spend the rest of his days fishing.

  But once fully, obnoxiously awake, Edgar glared over the duvets to accept that the SOB may have been Barrington’s ball, but he had run with it. Without being pumped up by Edgar’s faithfully frequent phone calls, that ball would have deflated into puckered historical oddity. If the Creams did anything untoward with that acronym, anything at all, it was his fault. But what could he do? There was nothing worse than feeling culpable, and powerless.

  Hungry and hungover, Edgar dragged on his jeans and drowned himself in one of Bear’s oversize military jackets, which made him look suitably absurd. He felt so bewildered that no sit-down with Saddler would do—Saddler whose enticements to don his own demigod mantle had lured him into this fiasco to start with. No, Edgar was frantic to talk to someone who was actually there.

  “Special K!” Nicola exclaimed fondly. She’d laundered the boarding school epithet into an endearment with the same thrifty ingenuity that converted her old Raleigh bicycle seat into a stool. “You look ridiculous!” she cried, taking in his get-up. “You also look dreadful. Do come in.”

  “Listen, is Henry here?”

  “No, he’s off covering the big story. I’m surprised you’re not as well.”

  Edgar didn’t ask what story. He didn’t want to know. “Gotta talk. Better it’s just us.”

  He nestled into her bunchy hand-upholstered couch, propping his head against the pillow lumpily crocheted with the Barking Rat logo, while Nicola rustled up coffee. A stained-glass mobile poppled sun blobs onto the throw rugs’ strange off-center stripes. Since it was Nicola’s “mistakes” that made her handiwork loveable, Edgar prayed that the same could be said of people.

  “I heard on the radio there was a split!” Nicola shouted from the kitchen. “In the SOB! According to one pundit, a splinter group may want to call a ceasefire!”

  “Yeah,” Edgar slurred, head back. “There’s an element in the SOB that’s had enough alright.” All the way here he’d rehearsed what he planned to say, but hadn’t come up with quite the optimal, well, transitional phrase.

  Coffee arrived. The steamed milk was sprinkled with cocoa, the mugs glazed in celadon with salamanders scampering the handles. Right now Edgar wished he could spend the rest of his life sipping this fortifying brew while Nicola Tremaine massaged his feet.

  “What was so urgent?” she asked cheerfully.

  That fantasy with the feet would only wash if Nicola were still speaking to him.

  “I, uh, owe you an apology.” Edgar rubbed his forehead and avoided Nicola’s gaze. “In a way, I’ve been lying to you. I never meant for things to get so far out of hand. But it’s too late now, and I have to get this off my chest.” He smeared his hands down his cheeks to inspect the palms as if they belonged to somebody else.

  When he glanced up, Nicola was leaning forward, considering his face intently. “It’s Barrington, isn’t it,” she intuited. “You know where he is.”

  Rattled, Edgar broke stride. “Um, no. I haven’t the faintest idea where he is, or if he’s alive or dead. If I had, I’d have said so.”

  Her eyes drilled him another long beat before Nicola sank back in her chair. “Sorry,” she said wiltedly. “Of course you would.”

  “Christ, you still jump when the phone rings, don’t you?” Edgar asked, peering at her sunken expression with incredulity. “But it’s been—”

  “I know. Gave myself away there, didn’t I?” She smiled. “And I was terribly rude. Here you came to confide in me, and I leap right into my own neurosis.”

  “I’ve got a few quirks myself.”

  “Let’s see, what else could it be?” Nicola mused. “Angela’s begged you to come back. You’re tempted, but she’s still ‘friends’ with Jamesie, and even considering it makes you feel ashamed of yourself.”

  “I’ve a whole file of old letters to Angela on my hard drive, but not one of them got sent. Or I used to have a file,” he mumbled. Shit—those letters, which had morphed into his journal . . . Verdade could now scroll through Edgar’s personal life at will. “That’s not it.”

  Nicola leaned forward again, and if Edgar didn’t know any better he’d think she was coming on to him. “You’re in the CIA?” she teased.

  As she bent so far across the tray that her hair trailed into her steamed milk, Edgar realized with horror that she knew very well he’d got over Angela ages ago; that she was expecting a declaration of love. He’d have liked nothing better than to fall on bended knee, but now was not the time. Jesus, this was embarrassing.

  “Nick, the SOB—” he began.

  At this unexpected detour to politics, Nicola drew back, wiping the milk from her split ends with hasty self-consciousness. He gave her a moment to rearrange both her hair and her expectations.

  “The SOB isn’t real,” said Edgar bluntly. “It doesn’t exist. It was just Barrington’s idea of a ha-ha.”

  Her face remained unchanged. �
��Edgar, check your calendar,” she said evenly. “It’s not April first.”

  “Heard of that American tourist trap called ‘Santa’s Workshop,’ where it’s Christmas all year long? Well, in Barba—” Edgar’s eyes met hers—“every day is April first.”

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?” Her voice was calm.

  “Well, it sounds more dastardly than it is, or was, at least at first . . .”

  “Start at the beginning,” she urged neutrally. Though her body language remained languid, inviting, her temperature was dropping. Edgar had to talk fast, before her demeanor cooled from tepid to icy.

  Edgar told her everything—or almost. About the statements, the surgical gloves, the phone booth. The accent, the atrocity poaching, even the interview with Jasmine and the Groucho glasses. He did save the Creamie break-in at Abrab Manor for later, to give her a chance to accustom herself to the core concept. And the other bit he tactfully omitted was that he’d become inseparable pals with Barrington Saddler—whom he’d never met. She only interrupted to ask simple, practical questions.

  When he finished, Edgar fell back onto the couch, weak with relief. He’d had no idea that keeping his eccentric hobby to himself had taken such a toll. He hadn’t felt so liberated since submitting his resignation at Lee & Thole.

  However, that untethered sensation on quitting the firm had proved grievously short-lived. It was the briefest of windows: when you were released from one life, but weren’t yet forced to face the life that followed. As Edgar had recognized lifting off from Kennedy, you could never perfectly leave. You were always arriving somewhere else. And Edgar arrived somewhere else the next time Nicola opened her mouth.

  “That,” she said slowly, “is the most juvenile story I have ever heard.”

  “You don’t believe me? But I—”

  “Oh, I believe you,” she cut him off briskly. “It’s the very juvenility of your story that makes it credible. Is this what I’ve heard about all my life, ‘boys being boys’? Do you really think people are toys?”

  Edgar realized that he might never have seen Nicola angry.