Chapter Six
Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.
Nietzsche
I had a killer to track and a mystery to solve. I prefer to work alone. It’s less messy. Cass’s discovery of Rook Investigations and her insistence on being involved was a problem, but I tried to keep her at a distance from any real danger. I convinced myself that the work I asked her to do was mostly investigative and staring at a screen so, arguably, I was helping her to hone her research skills. It’s not a convincing argument but never underestimate the power of self-delusion.
Despite my predilection for aloneness, sometimes it is useful to have friends in low places. My work had brought all kinds of strange people into my sphere. One was Sam Spot, so called because whenever I asked him to do something he held out his palm and said “Hit the spot.” Everything he did was tangential – he walked crabwise, spoke only from the corner of his mouth, never looked me in the eye, and always came to the point indirectly. His head moved constantly as if he suffered from cranial tarantism or feared attacks from everywhere except in front. I met him at his favourite haunt – Alfonso’s cafe near Hammersmith Bridge. He sat in a corner looking out at a flurry of pigeons squabbling over an abandoned McDonald’s. It was a fierce battle, a bustle of feathers and wing beating. I wondered if birds had become addicted to fast food too. Sam continued to look as I sat opposite.
“Hi Sam.”
“Lost a fortune at the dogs.”
“I’m sorry. I need to find someone.”
“I’d be better off with nags. You can study form with nags. Dogs – much harder.”
“His name’s Marty Hebden. Last seen three days ago in Birmingham. I’ve written the details for you.”
“Hit the spot,” he said, showing me an open palm, still looking at the pigeons.
I put an envelope in his hand. He pocketed it without looking.
“Dogs is a harder game. And you can’t take the turf into account. Most of ‘em run on sand and clay, some of the dodgier ones on bloody tarmac. Criminal. It’s less monitored too. Horses – that’s the way forward.”
“This is urgent, Sam. I’ll be seeing you.”
I left and turned at the door to see if he’d sneak a look at me. He didn’t. I wondered if he even knew what I looked like. He had a good nose for sniffing things out, though, because he was so unstriking. As if living sideways gave him an edge and people talked to him because he gave the impression of not listening and that made them feel safe. I liked Sam. He was admirably indifferent to the opinions of others.
*
At the university Alfred and the hamster were having a standoff, Alfred testing the bars of the cage with his powerful beak and the hamster sitting in his wheel staring at him. The little creature was smart. He understood that he was currently safe, and that’s all any of us can hope for. I told Alfred the hamster was here to stay but he didn’t believe me. I searched online again for something on Brissot, but without luck. I had been warned off, but I suspected nothing would happen until I made another move. As yet, I had no idea what that would be. I looked at the names of Andy’s drivers – N. Hale, A. Ames, J. Andre, R. Sorge. I tried all four mobile numbers but they were dead. Something here was very wrong. Cass came in and looked at me the way Lizzie used to – as if wondering how the hell she’d ended up with me.
“Dad. It’s six thirty. You’re meeting Mum at seven. You haven’t shaved, you’re wearing the same shirt as yesterday and your hair looks like a bird’s nest.”
“But it’s this unkempt bohemianism that made her fall in love with me.”
“It’s also what made her leave you.”
“Fair point.”
“Dad – Alfred is staring at a hamster.”
“Yes, he’s joining us.”
“What’s his name?”
“Good question. You name him.”
“Kierkegaard.”
“You think he’s an existentialist?”
“Yes. You can see it in his eyes.”
“Kierkegaard it is then.”
Our little band was growing.
*
I just had time to go home and change my shirt before meeting Liz at what was our favourite Greek restaurant in Muswell Hill. Dimitrios the owner greeted us warmly, his big hairy arms squeezing us both.
“Mister Paul and Mrs. Lizzie. My favourite dee-generates. Lovers who never grow up. I like this. You must excuse. Tonight we also have Greek wedding between my cousin Benjamin and some English girl like a flower – Rose by any other name. Benjamin it mean ‘son of the right hand’. He one of the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel. All names have meanings, no?”
“Yes,” I said, something nagging at my mind. Neither Lizzie nor I thought it worth telling him we were separated. Greek patriarchs take a dim view of divorce. We sat with our retsina and roasted garlic tzatziki with halloumi cheese fingers. I decided to take the bull by the horns.
“Lizzie, David is a shallow piece of effluence, a spumescent grimalkin, a toadying cockalorum, a worthless spit of vomit, an achromic blatherskite. He has small legs and large ears. He has less personality than egg white. Leave him to his moral obliquity and run away with me to an enchanted castle where I’ll feed you olives and rose petals and adorn you with silks and feathers from exotic birds and we’ll love forever like a whiff of heaven.”
“You don’t believe in heaven.”
“In Whitby then.”
“Paul. Once upon a time I found you funny and sexy.”
“And now?”
“Annoying.”
“That’s good. We have something in common. I find myself incredibly annoying.”
By now the wedding party had arrived, many already drunk. Loud toasts in Greek, slapping of thighs, colourful costumes, whistling, elderly people in black like wizened crows sitting and nodding their heads, and a few people already dancing on the tables. I ordered a bottle of ouzo and poured two large ones.
Lizzie sipped and stared into her drink. The smell of ouzo makes me think of sunshine, gods, ocean and sweet sex. I loved this woman as much as ever and perhaps always would. Love makes us crazy. Anyone who doesn’t know that has never been truly in love, never been crucifyingly, wantonly, bedazzled and unhinged by it. Shakespeare knew: This is the very ecstasy of love,/ Whose violent property fordoes itself/ And leads the will to desperate undertakings. As ever, he gets it in a nutshell. Ecstasy. Desperation. Longing. Destruction. Violence. I realised Liz was talking.
“There was always something unresolved. As if you had a secret you didn’t trust to share. Was there?” She looked at me properly for the first time that evening. A defining moment. I could tell her about Rook Investigations. Perhaps then we might open a door to each other. She looked at me expectantly. Here was a way back. A chance to start again. How could I do it? Even if I was more open it would be a mistake. She would look back on our history and see it as a sham. It could also put her in potential danger, which was now my constant concern with Cass. Rook Investigations is not a family business but a personal obsession. My secrecy ensured her safety, for what she didn’t know she couldn’t tell. I took a large slug of ouzo, then poured another. I smiled at her. The moment hovered, flickered, passed. A shade of disappointment darkened her eye, then died. Around us bedlam was igniting. Metaxa four star brandies were being sucked down like lemonade, glasses gleefully smashed against the walls. Someone was playing a balalaika frenetically, the sweat pouring down his cheeks, and the bride lifted her skirts and twirled, princess for a day.
“Liz, it’s always been you,” I said pathetically, and she looked at me quizzically. She hadn’t heard. Our own marriage was in ashes while another was being stoked by brandy and desire. Lizzie and I were blue touch paper to each other, and we couldn’t resist the scratch and flare of the match. She took an envelope from her pocket and passed it to me.
“In any case, I got you here under false pretences. A new set of divorce papers. Please, sign them, Paul. For
me.”
Some Cupids kill with arrows, some with traps. The ouzo had settled in nicely and the room was abandoned to noise and colour. The snag in my mind tore a tiny hole and I thought of what Dimitrios had said. “All names have meanings.” God, how could I have been so stupid? I suddenly realised. And Hebden. His drivers’ names were fake. I stood.
“Time to go,” I said.
We got outside. A van was parked and the driver got out and greeted Lizzie. She looked at me, then at the driver.
“It’s his stuff,” she said, and walked away.
“Where d’you want it then, mate?” he said.
I opened the back of the van. Everything I owned from the marital home: clothes, furniture, Aubrey Beardsley prints, electrical equipment, CDs, lamps, books. I looked through the books, took my etymological dictionary, a book of Leonardo’s drawings and good editions of Nietzsche’s Anticristo and The Birth of Tragedy. There was so much left. A lifetime of stuff. How do we manage to accumulate such junk in our lives?
“How much do you think it’s all worth?” I asked.
The driver ran a large hand over his stubbled head.
“Some nice bits. Them lamps is class. Nice rolltop. Solid electricals. Pictures I dunno. Books can’t give away these days. I’d say if you was lucky two and a half grand.”
“The prints are worth that on their own.”
“Yeah? Say four grand then. Tops.”
“OK. Give me two hundred quid and the lot’s yours.”
His mouth opened. His natural instinct to bargain was thwarted by a sense that I might be joking.
“Cash?” he said.
I gave him the divorce papers.
“And these are free,” I said.
Five minutes later I drove home two hundred pounds richer and a lifetime lighter. I should throw things away more often. I smiled grimly at myself in the driver’s mirror, saw the desolation in my eyes and some time during the night I would awaken with thunderbolts of loneliness, regret and self-recrimination choking my dreams. In one evening I’d lost my wife and my possessions, but I’d had a breakthrough, I consoled myself. The names of the drivers for Andy Hebden’s firm, N. Hale, A. Ames, J. Andre, R. Sorge. How could I be so stupid? They were the names of high profile spies. Nathan Hale was the first American spy and John Andre was a British officer hanged as a spy during the American Revolutionary War; Richard Sorge was a Soviet spy in Japan; Al, or Aldrich, Ames was a CIA Counter-Intelligence Officer who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union in 1994. This could mean that the company had no drivers and had no fleet of lorries – it was all a subterfuge for their main activity, but that was unusual because criminals in Andy’s class always had a legitimate business front. More likely the real drivers remained anonymous to protect them and the business. I felt strongly that discovering what his real business was would take me closer to finding the missing Marty, and knowing why Andy was killed. Using spy names was perhaps an ironic joke, given that the original Jacques Brissot was accused of being a spy. I felt even more strongly that the answers lay with the elusive contemporary Jacques Brissot. How to get to him was proving difficult. How could I know that assistance would come to me so strangely, so perversely and dangerously?
Chapter Seven
A prophet is not without honour except in his hometown and in his own household.
The New Testament
Morning came like a butcher’s knife on my hangover. I had downed a fair few whiskies after the debacle with Lizzie. Cass was sleeping peacefully on the couch, sucking her left thumb, legs curled under her. She had Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil open, held by one trailing hand on the floor. How could such a beautiful head be grappling with the nature of evil? But then I saw she had underlined maxim 153: That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. She already understood that he wasn’t interested in moral categorising, but whatever strange possibilities lay beyond morality. Not good and evil, but what was over the frontier. How odd that my own daughter was becoming a soul mate at the very time she should be rejecting me. I didn’t deserve such luck. I keep suggesting I empty my tiny study so she can use it until she finds somewhere better, or throwing out the junk in the little spare room, but she likes the sense of camping out. Uncomfortable but bohemian. I dreaded telling her how disastrously the evening with Lizzie had been, but she had probably already guessed. I love her beyond everything I am.
It was 5 a.m. I needed to clear my head. I made a flask of coffee, packed some shortbread biscuits in a plastic bag and drove to London, stopped at Queen’s Park and took the Bakerloo line to Embankment. I walked along smelling the damp vapours of an early morning Thames. A solitary heron stood one legged in the mud scanning for fish, its black gold-rimmed eye like a laser, rapier beak sharp for a kill. A cormorant stood balletically, wings outstretched, head pointing straight up, like some feathered medieval runic elder divining the heavens. I thought of Andy Hebden’s body in its mutilated wing span of death. I sat on a metal bench close to the river and then closed my eyes. It was cold, but my head felt as if it might eventually return to its usual chaotic state.
Unbidden, in my mind’s eye I saw, in black and white, a man in a big fedora hat rowing a boat towards me. Then a wave crashing violently over someone’s head. I suddenly realised it was my head and I was gasping for breath, the saltwater filling my lungs. Then piercing sunlight through trees and the unsettling shriek of a bird. A man’s voice startled my eyes open.
“Trouble in the brain-pan, pilgrim? The stench of mortality in your nostrils?”
I turned. Sitting at the other end of the bench was a battered looking man in tattered clothes, the rags of an urban desolate, torn short raincoat, wearing odd shoes – one a tasselled golfing shoe and the other a battered suede boot. He was smiling like a ragamuffin jester, showing a tombstone gallery of bad teeth, a few missing. Salt and pepper matted hair. He obviously hadn’t washed in a while. His eyes glittered with a scathing intelligence.
“Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly for I speak not loud or long.”
He was quoting T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I finished the lines.
“But at my back I hear the rattle of bones,
and chuckle spread from ear to ear.”
His grin cracked wider.
“Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning…” he said.
“Stevie Smith,” I said.
“Fine writer. Schizophrenic. Manic depressive. You too are troubled, or, to use the correct clinical term, well and truly fucked. You sleep badly, drink, separated despite the ring. Problem with authority. Childhood still rears up and assaults you on a daily basis. Too bloody clever by half, as the ruby-lipped tart said to Einstein.”
This was an alarming mind in a battered frame.
“You’re Septimus King,” I said.
His face contorted and he stamped his feet alternately. I thought he might hit me. He shook his head violently.
“Wrong wrong wrong! The king is dead. Long live Freud. Call me an incarnation of the great Sig. Call me a hobbledehoy. Call me Mister Bojangles, but finally, call me Freud.”
“Freud it is.”
He relaxed and the Halloween pumpkin smile returned.
“I think you saw death a moment ago. When you closed your eyes.”
This man was uncanny. Disgusting but intelligent.
“I think I did.”
“Fear not, pilgrim. It may be metaphorical. And be comforted. There is one glorious certainty. We all die. Every last rotting zombie.”
He took two empty coke bottles from his old raincoat and held them as if they were pistols and pretended to shoot me. Then he held them up as binoculars and looked at my bag.
“Any nourishment in the bag? Nice piece of cheese perchance. Somerset brie or stinking bishop? Mascarpone?”
I offered him the biscuits. Disappointed, he took one and crushed it in his hand and let the crumbs drop to the pavement. An early pigeon with a striking white crown strutted nervously towards the crumbs. Freud took a small ball of something from his pocket, perhaps it had once been cheese, and threw it towards the pigeon, who trapped it neatly with one claw and swallowed it.
“I’m a cheese man. Choice between a heavy breasted loose woman and a nice piece of Epoisses de Bourgogne and I’d take the cheese every time. I’m that sort of soul. Enough frippery. To business. Jacques Brissot. You’re going about it all wrong.”
I didn’t show my surprise. If he knew how to find me he could also know what I wanted.
“He’s hard to find,” I said.
“Think Mohamet and the mountain.”
“If I can’t go to him…”
“Precisely. He to you. The key to unlocking the man is his vanity.”
He sucked his teeth for a minute, looked up at a grey cloud-tendrilled sky and sighed. There was no point in pushing. This man went at his own pace.
“Do you believe in evil?” he asked.
“No.”
“Excellent. Just good intentions gone bad. Idealism becomes its own worst enemy. The French Revolution begins with passionate young idealism, equality, liberty, fraternity… and ends in the Terror. Suspicion, envy, spite, torture, murder. They’re all of the same coinage.”
“Jacques Brissot was an idealist. He wanted a united assembly of all European intellectuals. He was active in promoting the abolition of slavery. I’m guessing the same spirit of the revolution isn’t true of his current namesake,” I said.
“I told you – it’s the same coinage. Idealism and corruption are bedfellows. Both promoted by different sorts of egotism. Our Jacques says he is a direct descendant of the old revolutionary and enormously proud of it. That’s the key to finding him. His inordinate vanity. It’s like a bloody balloon inside him, waiting to swell, and when it does, you might just pop him. Or he you.”
He leaned in close to me. His breath was from beyond the grave.
“Create an event,” he said.
Beyond Good and Evil Page 3