The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “What?” Disconcerted, Edgar ventured in.

  The pantry door slammed. Edgar’s ears popped. Outside, the deep whoo of wind flutes glissandoed to a shrill upper octave. At once from along the whole westward wall of the manor came an end-of-the-world crash, as if twenty loaded china cabinets had simultaneously pitched forward.

  Frozen, Edgar waited in the dark as the crash subsided to tinkles. A nippy breeze began whipping under the pantry door.

  “Thanks, Saddler,” said Edgar soberly. The cherry-kirsch goo wasn’t settling well in his stomach. Woozy, he cracked the pantry door open, and crept out.

  Having written about the devices daily, Edgar assumed it was a bomb. Smashed kitchen windows seemed to confirm as much. He padded nervously to the atrium, where the glass double doors were completely blown in. The pool glinted with glass. Dagger-length splinters pinioned the pillows on which he’d just been slumping. Yet he was unable to locate an epicenter, a black mangle where a bomb had been planted.

  In the living room, all the windows along the western wall were also shattered inward. The vento had lunged inside, and eddies of pillow stuffing fluffed in cyclones about the furniture. Newspapers flapped against the ceiling like spastic seagulls. Squinting into a gust as his eyes teared, Edgar examined a window frame. Chisel marks.

  Chapter 36

  Barringtonizing the Barking Rat

  WHETHER HAM-HANDED MURDER attempt or deft threat, loosening windowpanes prior to a Barban Wind Watch went well beyond practical joke. Standing amid the shambles of his living room—the floor crumbly with loosened caulking, wind currents coursing from the shattered windows like water penetrating a flow-thru teabag—Edgar was seized with that quintessential American experience of wishing he had a gun. For a lethal projectile, he was forced to settle instead for the heavy cut-crystal candy dish, which he hoisted in assault position until his arm ached. Upstairs, he clutched its cold stem wide-eyed in bed. Edgar would have vacated the premises immediately, were it not for the Winnebago-flipping whimsies of the great outdoors.

  By daybreak, the vento had subsided to its old steady pummel. Decidedly incurious about what other misadventures Verdade had planned, Edgar darted out to the Saab, and this time his chassis scan was as thorough as a woman’s survey for spots when she’s already had skin cancer. It was too early to bother Nick and his office was no safer than Abrab, so Edgar drove blindly away from town. At last sure that he hadn’t been followed and surrounded by the vast desolation in which the peninsula specialized, he pulled to the side of the road and caught some narcotic shut-eye. By the time he called from a bar phone in a village on the northern coast, Nick was out.

  Punctuating the aimless journey with more fruitless pay-phone calls to Nick and Henry’s machine, Edgar drove around the monochrome Barban countryside all day, thus verifying the madness of anyone who’d kill to gain full possession of a dismal, scrubby outback that you couldn’t give away. Edgar supposed that if the Creams were really trying to whack him he should hightail it to Lisbon; better yet, to Seville or Madrid. But the notion of a real off-screen hit man was so foreign to a former corporate lawyer that Edgar couldn’t quite take his own plight seriously. However imprudent the return, all afternoon he knew for certain that eventually he was headed back to Cinziero. He had to get the hell out of Barba, but not without saying good-bye to Nick. Or maybe, he thought rashly, asking her to come with. Shit. Come with where?

  So, against his better judgment, Edgar cruised back down the coast. Cinziero on the horizon at sunset achieved that same roseate glow of his West Eighty-Ninth Street apartment and his two-timing girlfriend once he’d decided to leave them behind. In this terminal light, even the hunky souvenir factory looked grand, the gaudy hotels glamorous. Similarly, the unsettlingly extant SOB, the backbiting Barban hack pack, and his own double life as mild-mannered reporter by day, soldado ousado by night were already acquiring a nostalgic halo in his head.

  The screwiest sentimentality Edgar indulged was over Abrab Manor. Sure, he’d miss the satin sheets, the fragrant cedar furnishings, the nut-house padding of polychromatic pillows, but it was the impending loss of a less tangible luxury that grieved him more: the merely residual yet still intoxicating presence of Barrington Saddler.

  With still no answer at Nick and Henry’s, they were surely at the Rat, and a public venue might be safer than a private home at that. He disliked the predictability of his showing up at the bar, but the whole reason a man had an orbit was that it encompassed all of the places he had reason to go.

  In spite of himself, Edgar smiled at the logo of the Barking Rat on his way in. Ever since he’d resolved to cut and run, Barba had seemed funkier, kookier, kinkier. Too bad he hadn’t noticed what a kick he got out of Cinziero before he had to leave town. This time, no Bebê Serio at the door: bad sign. Every time Serio didn’t show lately, something nasty went down.

  All day, Edgar’s senses had been jacked up. The vento’s rush widened to the obliterating whah of Niagara Falls; grains of sand pelted his cheeks like chickpeas; rotting roadside peras peludas exuded the ammoniacal shock of smelling salts, and sweat drizzling from his upper lip stung his tongue with such distilled acridity that he might have been licking a urinal. In kind, Edgar’s advance on the journos’ regular round table went slo-mo. So sharply was each consecutive instant exposed on his retinas that Edgar would later be able to reference the images like cinematic stills.

  Trudy Sisson noticed him first. When her eyes lit on Edgar, a smorgasbord of a smile spread across the girl’s face, like a table of appetizers to which he might help himself. He had sensed for a while now that she’d come across if he crooked a finger. But that would have been accepting the kewpie doll when he’d failed to win the stuffed bear, and love was one contest in which second prize could be worse than losing. Cute, yeah, but Trudy had never passed the Breakfast Test—a crude cost-benefit analysis that assessed whether X (getting his rocks off) equaled or exceeded Y: enduring the awkwardness of a mealtime whose underlying presumption ran that sex had made them intimate, when in truth they’d have got to know each other just as well had Edgar stuck his finger in her ear.

  While Trudy’s face brightened, Martha’s sank. Since in Hulbert’s life agony and love were interchangeable, Martha’s dread was more touching than Trudy’s come-and-get-it. Martha had a crush on him. Conveniently, no one else in the press corps had suspected that, because it’s expedient to assume that the undesirable themselves lack desire, as if they should know better. More conveniently still, Martha would never declare herself. But she wouldn’t have the discipline to avoid him instead, because women like Martha could no more resist tormenting themselves in romance than Angela had ever been able to refrain from squeezing messily at ingrown leg hairs.

  When Alexis Collier spied her colleague from the Record, tiny vertical striations scored her upper lip—pleats that by her fifties would gather into a permanently disapproving pucker. She still had a bug up her ass about that Sob interview. But then, Alexis had only two categories, the folks to whom she condescended and the folks whom she resented, so Edgar had risen as high in her estimation as it was possible to ascend.

  Win Pyre wrenched around to greet Edgar with uncomplicated masculine welcome, and worked his chair aside to make room. At last, said his improved posture, a decent conversation. By contrast, Roland Ordway’s rolled eyes left Edgar with the satisfying confidence that his arrival had ruined Ordway’s evening.

  The penultimate visage in this circle should have been the most gratifying. Not so long ago, Henry Durham would meet Edgar’s arrival with a casual Hi, mate, casting the American reporter into that undifferentiated sea of humanity that Henry, out of laziness more than naiveté, broadly construed as benign. Edgar had been a cooperative audience at which Henry could pitch his various despairs, like pennies against a curb: his embarrassing twinning of too much money and too little talent, his pernicious affection for his own romantic rival, his bleak discovery that tragedy didn’t always produce pr
ofundity, and his train wreck of a marriage, in which mutual mawkishness over their own lost innocence was the main thing that still bound them together.

  But the wariness now clouding Henry’s pupils signaled that at last Edgar had been differentiated all right, and as a threat. Instinctively, Durham huddled closer to his wife. From a schnook as carelessly affable as Henry Durham, the leeriness was an achievement.

  Oh, Edgar didn’t kid himself that this life-of-the-party sensation was anything more than a momentary confluence of transitory influences, an alignment of planets. Trudy wasn’t in love; she was horny. Martha was smitten precisely because Edgar would never return the compliment; Hulbert had a nose for men who could make her miserable, and sought out misery for the same reason that Edgar courted boredom: it was comfortable. Alexis would compete with a corpse if it got its name in the paper. Stuck between two broads, Win was hungry for guy-talk and had a weakness for cronies; Edgar had won his favor merely by becoming familiar. Roland detested Edgar with such flattering virulence because, in their mutual desperation to be streetwise, they were too much alike. And no amount of jealousy on Henry’s part could make up for the fact that there was far too little between Edgar and his wife to be jealous of.

  Even so, however fleeting, the look who’s here! was a bona fide glimpse of the Saddleresque. Edgar had turned heads, electrified a roundtable. For just a few seconds, Edgar had Barringtonized this little gathering. And he didn’t care.

  He didn’t care if they liked him anymore, if his arrival caused a stir. Indeed, the very fact that for the moment he didn’t give a rat’s ass what they thought may have generated his magnetic field—a revelation that, since he didn’t care if they liked him anymore, was of no use. Maybe having someone trying to kill you was clarifying.

  Whatever they felt for him, across the board what Edgar felt for them was mild. He had nothing against Trudy; she wasn’t as stupid as she first appeared, but that was the end of it. He felt sorry for Martha Hulbert, and he’d turned a blind eye to her growing partiality because it was a burden. Maybe he disliked Alexis Collier, but the dislike was as scrawny and meatless as Alesbo herself. His liking for Win was equally vegetarian. He couldn’t return Roland Ordway’s loathing in kind, one reason Edgar drove the guy nuts; Roland was simply immaterial. The only reason he had any feelings at all about Henry Durham was that Edgar was in love with his wife. And what Edgar felt was all that mattered. Received emotion was as worthless as a fistful of escudos in New York; you couldn’t spend it without first converting it into the currency of your own heart.

  Only when Nicola’s face lifted last of all did Edgar meet the flash of heat that he always imagined would singe his eyebrows on lighting up a bar. A simple black turtleneck set off the tendrils of her tumbling pre-Raphaelite hair. Her eyes, though troubled, were undefended. She was glad to see him, and he was glad to see her—dollar for dollar.

  As Edgar threaded toward Nicola, for once he was thankful that she’d never seen him as larger-than-life. Magnification was still distortion of a kind, and as Toby Falconer had claimed so long ago, there was no such thing as larger-than-life; there was only life-size and “other people’s bullshit.” Formerly, Nick’s frank appraisal of Edgar as a normally proportioned character had seemed insulting. But now he got it: a man built plainly on the scale of Nicola herself had surely a far greater chance at her abiding affections than the mythically immense. Lingering by the phone, Nick had been awaiting a call not from a lover but from a legend. Just now, Edgar had never been happier to be an unimposing five-foot-eight, no unflappable paragon but a ragbag tatter of mortal terrors in need of common comforting.

  “Listen,” said Edgar, kneeling by her chair. “Can we find a corner and talk?”

  Nicola shot an inclusive glance at her husband. “Henry, do you want to—?”

  Edgar sighed, rose, and slapped his thighs. “Never mind.”

  “No, we should talk,” Nicola pleaded. “All three of us.”

  Great. Hey, Henry. Be a sport. I’m going back to New York. No, I’m okay for cash. But lend me your wife for a while, will ya? Like, for about fifty years.

  Pointlessly, in Edgar’s view, the trio relocated to a side booth. This triangular farewell was not what Edgar had planned. Maliciously, he talked about the weather. “Some wind last night, huh?”

  Henry wasn’t having any of it. “I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Too much in one department,” said Edgar obliquely, “not enough in another.”

  Nicola leaned forward. “Any secret kept from your partner is a worm in the garden. It doesn’t have to be an affair. It can be what you did last Thursday—that you went to the shops instead of the park. I’ve had enough of that life, Edgar. I can’t keep anything from Henry. I haven’t told him. But I want you to. Please. For me.”

  Edgar sat back, annoyed. “You realize I could be arrested?”

  She traced the graffiti gouged into the table, VIVE OS SOB! “Yes.”

  “And you still want to spread this all over town. Just so you and Henry can read each other’s e-mail with impunity.”

  “I’ve thought about this, Edgar,” said Nicola. “Those scares, the bullring. It’s going to get worse. You’ve got to spanner it. You’ll have to tell the truth anyway, to discredit . . .”

  “I could get at least five years.” Edgar kept his voice low. “Ruin my career. For this shit hole? I’m not that ‘lovely’ a man, Nick.”

  “Blame it on Barrington!” she urged in a whisper.

  “Sounds like a sitcom.” Edgar grinned. “Like Leave It to Beaver.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Henry intruded petulantly.

  “It may have been Saddler’s idea,” Edgar carried on speaking to Nicola, “but I ran with the ball, Nick. My hands are dirty.”

  “Say that even after he disappeared,” Nicola proposed, “he was the one who called—from wherever. Say that you just now found out, and immediately rushed to report . . . Look, Edgar, I know I promised not to tell, but all this coded hugger-mugger isn’t fair to Henry! You owe him an explanation.”

  “Oh, I do not. I have nothing to feel guilty about with you, Nick. Wish I did.” Skirting the truth was risky, but it felt good.

  Nicola blushed. Henry glared. And it was all Edgar could do to stop himself from leaning over the table and kissing her then and there.

  “Is he gonna blab?” asked Edgar.

  “Listen, mate,” said Henry. “I got plenty experience keeping a secret.”

  Henry’s assertion had an edge that was unlike him, and Edgar looked twice. At which point he also noticed Bebê Serio shamble past with a bulging plastic carrier bag and thump into the booth behind Henry’s head. Funny, Serio didn’t seem the type to pick up milk and pork chops for the little woman on the way home. Still, the goon’s presence was an opportunity of sorts. They were in public, Edgar was probably safe for the time being, and he was sick of being pushed around.

  “I could start the story at the end,” said Edgar, full-voice. “Tomás Verdade is trying to have me whacked. Assassinar-me, sim? Too bad for Tommy that his minions are too GORDO and ESTÚPIDO to pull it off.”

  “Are you having us on?” asked Nicola in alarm.

  “No fooling,” said Edgar. “First this elefante tries to run me off the road in a pera peluda truck. But our idiota can’t even do a proper job of driving like shit. Next, during the Wind Watch last night? Turns out the Creams have installed free air-conditioning. Bracing, but not fatally, right? I figure these lard-heads have seen too many Batman reruns. That always bugged me as a kid, the too-clever-by-a-yard. The villains always had to dangle Adam West over boiling oil, wire him to a ticking A-bomb. Why not just shoot the fucker?”

  Having followed Edgar’s line of sight to the back of Serio’s head, Nicola advised, “I wouldn’t give them any ideas.”

  “A Cream wouldn’t know an idea if it sucked his weenie.”

  Bebê Serio pulled himself up again, and hulking past their booth
he paused. It was awful: the massive moon-pie face turned to Edgar and smiled. The upturned lips in the expanse of his vacant features described the perfect fleshly equivalent of the “smiley face” blighting so many T-shirts in the 1970s—which, in its lobotomized cheer, had always looked to Edgar faintly evil.

  As Serio ambled from the Rat, Edgar remembered who his real enemies were, and was no longer inclined to torment Henry with his silly secret. Edgar was leaving, and from the looks of this couple—which they still determinedly were—he was leaving without the girl. It was all Barrington’s fault. Saddler may have loosened the bolts in that marriage. But however a machine screw wobbled in its grooves, total detachment was dependent on that one last turn, and Nick felt too guilty to do the honors. That was the one aspect of Saddler’s legacy that Edgar couldn’t combat. At best, Edgar represented a salvation that Nicola the flagellant might deny herself. At worst, he’d presented her a glorious opportunity to relive the errant past and right her sins. Edgar hadn’t only walked into the friend-of-the-family trap; he’d been doubly hoodwinked by Nick’s twangy country-western This-Time-I’ll-Be-True. Maybe if Edgar were to hover in the wings another year or two . . . But life was short. Very short, if Edgar dallied much longer.

  “Guys, I’m going to have to quit Cinziero,” said Edgar.

  “Oh, no!” said Nicola.

  “The Creams are gunning for me for real,” said Edgar, thinking, Sure you’re crestfallen, Nick. Gonna have to find some other sap to be a saint with. “They didn’t used to be dangerous, but they’ve taken a correspondence course.”

  “What’s this?” Henry asked skeptically, though he didn’t look too upset that Edgar was leaving town. “You dared to slag off the Creams in print, and now they want your head? I’ve heard this waffle once before, and it sounded dodgy the first time.”

  The din in the bar covered him, and Edgar proceeded in a steady murmur. “Try not to take this personally, Durham. What happened to your family sucks, and nothing could make BA-321 into a joke. Still, whoever killed your parents, your sister, and your brother-in-law? They were sons of bitches alright. But they weren’t in any, quote-unquote, ‘SOB.’ ”