The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  Despite further prefatory assurances that Henry himself wasn’t being made a fool of, Edgar couldn’t help but feel as he exposed this kid’s archenemy as smoke and mirrors that he was robbing the guy—of purpose, of pathos. For no good reason, Henry had apparently wasted the prime of his thirties in a wind-battered dustbowl, while a multimillionaire might at least have been drowning his sorrows with boat drinks in St. Barts. Edgar’s glib assurances to the contrary, Barrington’s “ha-ha” left Henry not a bold aspiring journalist who’d spurned the lap of luxury to get at the truth about his family’s destruction, but a common patsy. Overnight, Henry’s precious clip file was invalidated as anything but an embarrassment, evidence that he’d been had. In the course of Edgar’s fifteen-minute monologue the slumped and scowling Henry Durham was demoted from Richard the Lionheart to Man of La Mancha.

  “I’d a gut sense Barrington was winding me up,” Henry grumbled.

  “You suspected the SOB was a leg-pull?” Edgar asked in surprise.

  “Not that,” Henry said irritably.

  Nicola cocked her head sharply. “Winding you up about what?”

  “His tearjerker story about how the Sobs were after him and that,” said Henry. “Since he’d been so bloody hard on them in the Record. He said the leadership had offered to ‘spare him for a price.’ Else they’d track him down wherever he went, and he’d always be looking over his shoulder. Bear said if he couldn’t buy the wankers off, there was no point in scarpering at all. The SOB has ears to the ground, he says, all over the planet. Might as well face the music here, he says. Might as well enjoy the time he has left, he says. Having tea with me and Nicky.”

  “Henry,” said Nicola, in the same neutral voice she’d used when Edgar broke the news that every day in Barba was April Fool’s. “How much did you give him?”

  “I figured—” Henry didn’t look her in the eye—“best a good round number. Check’s easier to write, and what do I care? We’ve got loads. We’d never miss it. Haven’t, have we?”

  “How many zeroes?” asked Nicola calmly.

  “Never counted,” Henry admitted. “However many in ten million pound.”

  “But you said,” Nicola said, a subtle over-enunciation her only sign of incredulity, “you’d a ‘gut sense’ he wasn’t telling the truth. That the story about needing to buy off the SOB’s fatwah seemed concocted.”

  “He was telling the truth that he wouldn’t leave Cinziero without the money! What did it matter to me if he was bluffing about the rest? With everything we did, Nicky, I’d hear, Why don’t we ring Barrington? or Is Barrington coming? or Let’s wait till tomorrow, so Barrington can come as well. When he was meant to call by, you’d spend all day in the kitchen, and that night you’d open a third bottle of wine and stay up till all hours . . . And if we’re on our own? Bangers and beans, cup o’ tea, bit o’ Portuguese telly and drawing pictures for Barrington’s office. Oh, and an early night! To sleep, mind you, right? I started keeping track, mate,” Henry told Edgar. “Bear calls by, every bleeding time, after he leaves? She’s all over me. No Bear? It’s too hot, she’s too knackered. Tell me that isn’t fishy!”

  “I promised you, Henry,” said Nicola, “I never—”

  “Who bloody well cares what you never did, if you wanted to?” Henry cried, loudly enough to draw glances from colleagues at the middle table. “A lousy ten million pound! I call that good value, Nicky! I’d have paid twice that! I’d have given that bloke my every last bob to clear off and leave you be!”

  It was a potentially heartwarming moment, were Edgar in the mood to be moved, which he wasn’t. All the same, the woman couldn’t have quite had a grip on herself if Nick could lean toward her husband right then and ask breathlessly, “So do you know where he is?”

  Well, there you had it. Henry’s face imploded. Nicola’s hungry inquiry about Barrington’s whereabouts was so colossally uncool that Edgar’s romantic optimism on his own account revived in a flash. So long as he left a contact address behind he had a very, very good chance of seeing Nicola, on her own, single or soon to be, and not a year or two from now, but next week.

  As if to give expression to Edgar’s epiphany, at that instant the air pressure in the bar altered. In concert, the background hubbub against which this too-public discussion had been conducted went silent. For one elongated microsecond, Edgar could see the open mouths around him, emitting no sound. Then the vista washed white. That was the point at which Edgar remembered, the way your mind will seize on incidentals of daily life in dreams, that when Bebê Serio smote them with that hideous simper and lumbered from the bar, he wasn’t carrying the bag.

  Chapter 37

  The Curse of Interesting Times

  BLINKING DUST FROM his lashes, Edgar came to on his back. He was lying on the vinyl back of a banquette, his feet tangled up on the seat cushion. Blessedly, when he commanded his legs to lift off the cushion, they obeyed. Shaking dirt, glass, and bits of white noise-proofing tile from his hair, Edgar took a primitive inventory: a gash in his right arm and a sticky lump on his skull, but so far everything worked.

  He dragged himself to a sitting position on the floor, resting his arms on his knees and blearily scanning the disheveled bar. Overhead, rough-hewn roof beams thrust jaggedly into the dusty air at the cubist angles of Picasso’s brown, murky period. The banquette had sailed a good fifteen feet, its original location marked by a dropped metal steam pipe. Blasted plaster reinforced with chicken wire formed sinister, ghostlike silhouettes, reminding Edgar teasingly of the people to whom he’d last been talking—to whom or about what he couldn’t quite recall.

  Gradually his hearing returned.

  “In what security sources deem a discouraging indicator, this morning’s SOB statement . . .” Uncannily, the television over the bar—what had been the bar—was still yammering CNN.

  “My face! Win, is it bad? Will it scar?”

  “Those motherfucking fuckers! Those sick, demented peckerheads! They blew up their own fucking bar! Stupid fucking fuckwit cunts! Since when do Sobs hit hacks?”

  “Clear the area! There’s been structural damage here, folks, it’s not safe! Let’s move on out, now! No panicking, slow and orderly, but don’t knock those beams!”

  Dizziness returned. Edgar’s face went clammy, and his peripheral vision contracted. He dropped his head to give it some blood. While his head spun, a fresh crisis seemed to ensue. A tumble of advice—Head down! A blanket!—was pierced by repeated cries for an ambulance. What about CPR? . . . Hey! ANYONE HERE KNOW CPR? Yet the uproar mysteriously dwindled as rapidly as it had arisen.

  Head still buried between his knees, as his faintness began to clear Edgar realized with surprise that he did like these people, for all their foibles. As a crude tribute to this fact, he worked his way mentally around their traditional round table to make sure that all of his colleagues were accounted for. The woman who’d gashed her face must have been Alexis; at least a fit of healthy cosmetic terror beat a frantic search through the rubble for her cellular phone. The guy incensed that the baddies had broken the rules could only have been Ordway, who just then crossed Edgar’s line of vision inexplicably cradling a pound of hamburger; it took a second to register that it wasn’t a purchase from the butcher but his right hand. Edgar spotted Trudy pulling Martha from the rubble, while certain that the practical, head-in-a-crisis voice organizing an evacuation could only have belonged to Win Pyre.

  Edgar jerked his head upright. “Nicola!” The bar’s pandemonium having grown subdued, the loud voicing of the young woman’s name had an unseemly quality. But Edgar was beyond decorum. “NICOLA!” he bellowed again, scrambling unsteadily to a stand.

  Henry slammed his chest to splay Edgar on the glass-strewn linoleum. “You stay away from Nicky!”

  “Henry, where’s Nick? Is she all right?” When Edgar began warily to climb up again, Henry kicked him brutally back to the floor. In the days when Edgar had gone looking for trouble he’d given bar brawlers as go
od as he got, but he let Henry dig a boot into his ribs without coming up swinging. The pain almost felt good.

  “She was fine before you showed up,” Henry shouted, kicking, “she was finer before Saddler showed up, so I hope you’re both happy!” In the distance, sirens wailed.

  “Henry, tell me what’s happened,” Edgar pleaded on all fours.

  “Think I didn’t notice, you taking notes, like you was on a bloody course? Well, it worked, didn’t it? You got your A-levels! Now you’re just like Saddler—you’re a menace!!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Edgar feebly, “but what—?”

  “She’s—!” Henry clutched his face.

  In a wave, Edgar’s body washed cold and damp. He could only lurch to his feet when the weakness passed. Apparently Henry couldn’t be bothered to knock him down again.

  “We should all, really, evacuate the premises,” Win continued to urge, although his voice had lowered, as if he were in church.

  The legs of the journalists’ regular round table had been blown off, and the top, swept clean of detritus, sat flat on the floor. Nicola was laid on its surface. As Edgar approached, the others parted to make way. They looked embarrassed. He thought he’d kept his feelings for Henry’s wife successfully private, but they all clearly knew the score, and no doubt carelessly assumed that Edgar and Nicola had been conducting a sordid little affair for the duration.

  Crouching, at first Edgar exhaled in relief, because her face was unmarked, though frozen into the slight censorial frown with which she had chided him two days back, Is this what I’ve heard about all my life? Boys being boys? But her black turtleneck was blacker, as if she’d spilled something on it. Her hand was limp, and so, as he felt her neck, was Edgar.

  In this small, dense instant, Edgar learned more about his ostensible expertise than he had through his whole swaggering, know-it-all Barban stint. In fact, every hack in this bar was presumably an authority on terrorism. But to understand “terrorism” you needed at least a hazy appreciation for what you were afraid of. Accordingly, you got past this idea that bombs, however unfortunate, were at least events—talking points, big blooming flashes of action. Many were the bored Barbans this evening who would be secretly contented that something in dumpy Cinziero was finally happening.

  But beyond a single loud noise that Edgar couldn’t even remember, this occasion was mostly about what wouldn’t happen. He would never unwrap another painstaking pen-and-ink drawing of his villa, or a merciful portrait of his own face that looked back at him with all the kindness of the artist herself. The afternoon would never arrive when he received his promised replica of the Barking Rat logo crocheted into his very own throw pillow. He would never again open his door to the one person whom he most wanted to see, so that greeting his every visitor forever onward his expression would imperceptibly sag. He would never be allowed the Casablancan melodrama of begging this woman to fly away with him.

  “Don’t you touch her!” cried Henry, thrusting Edgar from his wife. Kneeling, Henry scooped Nicola’s body into his arms and looked daggers at Edgar. “That was rich before, you assuring me my family’s plane crash wasn’t ‘a joke.’ You just got the woman you fancy murdered for national self-determination in Barba. Who’s the joke on, mate?”

  Though knowing better, Edgar reached a consoling hand to Henry’s shoulder.

  “Get out!!”

  The idea recommended itself. Edgar was a lawyer, and understood that grief was an entitlement, lodged in the fine print of a marriage license. The only thing that would insult Henry more than his simply walking away was for Edgar to stay.

  Backing off from his colleagues, Edgar made the grisly discovery of how brass-tacks practical the human animal could prove amid catastrophe. A discreet retreat served a double agenda. Yes, Henry deserved to escape the torment of his presence; no, he couldn’t help Nicola now; no, he hadn’t earned the right to join the procession as Nicola’s impromptu pall-bearers carried her body out the door. But it was also about time that he bore in mind precisely for whom this bomb had been intended.

  For the moment, O Creme might assume they got their man. Edgar had a tiny window of opportunity through which to squeeze his own ass, and it would close up as soon as a single Creamie caught sight of him in one piece—at which point they might well take his Batman-plotting advice and “just shoot the fucker.” There would be ample time for scathing self-recrimination later, but in order to feel really, really sick about his house-that-Jack-built responsibility for Nick’s death he would first have to stay alive himself.

  Edgar quietly picked his way out a hole blasted in the Rat’s side wall. Luckily, it was dark, and the Saab wasn’t far. Much as he might have liked to honor Nicola’s memory by fulfilling her last request of him, going to the authorities to expose the SOB as a fairy tale right after this “imaginary” organization had blown a local establishment to smithereens was bound to lowball his credibility. It was better to grab the next plane to anywhere, and plan on spilling his guts from a safe distance—like, from Micronesia. He checked the Turbo’s chassis, then plowed back toward Abrab Manor to get his passport.

  As he gunned down the main road, Edgar’s mind was a miasma of terror, fury, and self-disgust. He tried to direct his rage toward Tomás Verdade, but it kept looping back to himself, the way when you flick a lit cigarette out a four-door’s front window it will fly in the back and burn up the car. Anger at Verdade was like anger at a scorpion for being a scorpion. The guy was an opportunist, and, as Barrington had observed, opportunists need opportunities—which Edgar had obligingly provided. Indeed, as Edgar reeled through the past to locate exactly where he’d gone wrong—pleading with Whoever negotiated these things that he would right his mistake if only he were given a second chance and then Nicola would rise from that round table with one of those balmy smiles like an opened window—he found himself spooling all the way back to the cursed, miserable day he was born.

  Desperate for distraction, Edgar wondered how Barrington would handle this. Picturing Saddler as stoic, Edgar seized on this calming vision of impassivity to keep from bawling while he drove. Saddler might be philosophical, sedately reflective . . . Or terse, remote, contained . . . Grave, but he wouldn’t fall to pieces . . .

  Maybe he fucking well should fall to pieces, the cocksucker.

  And naturally a star-crossed romance with his friend’s wife, thwarted by a terrorist bomb on the very eve the illicit lovers might have fled the country in one another’s arms, would have pumped Saddler’s already bloated reputation to the size of the Hindenburg. But for once Edgar didn’t fume that this nauseous turn of events would never have the same inflationary effect on his own renown, because he didn’t want it to. Fiercely, Edgar promised himself never, ever to lounge in a gin mill on his third drink with some standoffish fox and launch in, You know, I’ve had a hard time, like, feeling anything since this thing happened, like, I’ve just been sort of numb . . . Oh, it’s a long story. Gary, another white wine for the lady! No longer nursing the slightest desire to be mythologized, he wished and deserved to be remembered forever after as nothing so dignified as a bounder or a scoundrel, but as a clown.

  In fact, if the rubble of the Rat was the sort of ugly scene that Barrington would rise above, it was here that Edgar decisively parted company with his ambient alter ego. He didn’t want to rise above. Rather, he accepted that tonight’s calamity was destined to loom over his head for the rest of his life. If that meant he didn’t have the goods to be a Great Character, maybe at heart he was too decent to be interesting.

  In other circumstances, Edgar might have spared a sigh that his beloved Abrab Manor had turned into a wind tunnel, where the adoptive objects of his recent life swirled in a continual disassociated cyclone. But mortality put the inanimate in its place, and Edgar didn’t give a damn.

  Edgar was intent on making this a sixty-second operation, so his inability to lay his hands immediately on his passport sent him into a tizzy of ripping the study apart
even more thoroughly than it had been ransacked by the Creams. In a blizzard of paper, Edgar shouted, “Moron! Asshole! Moron! Asshole!” at the top of his lungs. Only when he located the thing—sheepishly, in the “safe place” he had stored it—did Edgar admit to himself that he’d become hysterical.

  When the doorbell rang, Edgar decided that he might just keep on being hysterical, too. Peeping down from the study window, he saw a taxi in his drive—Christ, couldn’t a Creamie hit man afford his own car?

  “Mistah Kellogg!” piped a high voice from the porch, and the door rapped. “Mistah Kellogg, I have somesing faw you!”

  Yeah, I bet you do, Edgar thought. But as he eyed the porch—remembering, sickeningly, that the front door lock still wasn’t fixed, and this assassin could sashay right in—a slight figure stepped back so he could see her. A girl?

  Edgar retrieved the cut-glass candy dish from the bedroom, and crept downstairs. Crouching below one of the shattered windows, he eyed his visitor, who shone in the headlights of the cab. She was tiny, exquisite, and, of all things, Asian. For a parochial outfit like O Creme, a mind-blowingly chic contract killer.

  “Mistah Kellogg!” She rapped the door again, and stabbed the doorbell. Not exactly the form for your average assassin, but Edgar wasn’t taking any chances.

  “I’m warning you, I’ve got a gun!” he shouted.

  “Please, mistah. Don’t shoot. I have—” She raised an envelope.

  “Open it!” Edgar wasn’t falling for any letter bombs.

  The girl looked frightened, so Edgar ducked. Nothing went blooey. When he peeked up again, she was waving an oblong flap of paper that whipped in the wind. “Is for you! I have message, you come quick!”

  Warily, Edgar sidled to the front door and cracked it. “What is it?” he grunted mistrustfully.