by Nick Salaman
‘But why did they want me?’ asked Marie. ‘Middleburg keeps talking about it but he doesn’t explain.’
‘You’re a PR dream. What could be less sinister than a young girl with the Messinger name reclaiming her place in the company?’
‘Do we know anything of its background? Is it hiding something?’ Marie asked Joe. ‘I know it’s a research company, and it’s in chemicals, because we had the tour. What else?’
‘I did some checking,’ Joe told her. ‘It was started after the war by the Government and CIA with, or for, a small group of naturalised Germans. It involved national security. There was talk of chemical warfare, drugs to boost or retard metabolism. It grew as the Cold War grew. Very big. But here’s a funny thing. I can’t swear to it, but it looks to me as if the group that started Messinger were the same as the people who started The Other Judas, in other words TOJI.
‘Yes,’ said Marie. ‘They were. He told us that.’
‘It’s still privately owned,’ concluded Joe. ‘It means a very few people, including you, are sitting on a hell of a lot of money.’
‘There is something about this that doesn’t add up,’ said David, trying to appear impartial. ‘Marie says Middleburg always seems to be one step ahead of her. What is his secret? Is he afraid of us?’
She had noted a tendency in David to ask questions rather than state opinions. It gave him a way out. She wondered whether she was becoming ever so slightly irritated by his assumption of proprietorial rights.
‘If they’re afraid, it makes them more dangerous,’ said Joe.
Good opinion, Joe, Marie thought. But wrong. Middleburg is not afraid.
‘So what am I going to do?’ she asked.
‘We are going to drive to the castle on the appointed day,’ said Joe.
‘I am going to get out and enter the place from the front,’ said Marie.
‘And then Joe will enter the castle from the kitchens and serve tea…’ said David.
‘Behave, David. This is serious.’
‘Kitchens are over to the left at the back,’ said Joe. ‘And then I’ll put on one of the kitchen porters’ white coats and make my way up to the great hall…’
‘While I wait outside with the car, ready for a quick getaway,’ said David. ‘But he kind of said he’ll let me in.’
Maybe he’s thinking of a quick getaway just by himself if things are getting too hot, thought Marie. The school chapel came to her mind again. Our earthly friends may fail us … Yes, she had discovered that. Funny how the old lessons kept coming back. The three of them reminded her of a group of children playing with a chemistry set, never sure which mixture would explode.
‘Well, now we have all that sorted out, have we any idea what they are going to say?’ asked Joe. ‘Just give us a rundown of what we know.’
‘I had been led by Middleburg to believe that my father was heir to a big family fortune, and was accused of terrible crimes in the fifties which echoed something that happened long ago in France to an ancestor of ours called Gilles de Rais. But, according to the papers and letters I have seen, my father was framed by people, cousins of his, who filled him with drugs and meanwhile accused him of the same kind of terrible things – linking him with the black magic and murders perpetrated by the wilder Californian communes – obscene crimes and murders, sometimes of children, like a Manson only worse. He was accused and brought to trial and imprisoned for life. There was some legal problem with the evidence, the Mexicans claimed him and kept him on death row while they sorted it out, but then it seems he died. I was brought up in the shadow of these accusations, but unaware of them, by old aunts and people who only hinted but never spoke out. And then when I reached eighteen or so, I found many of the people I trusted were in league with, or were employed by these same plotters. And now a few days ago, I discover from Middleburg that it was all baloney and that really I am the daughter of a Nazi war criminal. With some kind of perverted logic, he thought he would break me in to that idea by originally pretending I was the daughter of a multiple sex killer. Don’t ask me why; something to do with a Nazi guilt complex. On the 24th August I shall be twenty-five according to their reckoning, I think that is the important moment for them. This huge company they have built on my father’s money could perhaps, technically, be mine on that date. That is why they want me there. But there must be more to it than that. On the other hand, this could all be pantomime.’
‘There is a whiff of the CIA about all this,’ said David. ‘It could be bigger than we thought.’
They looked at each other.
‘It’s the weirdest thing I ever heard,’ said Joe, at last, ‘and, believe me, I have heard weird.’
Marie thought of something.
‘I don’t think Felipe died at all. You remember Felipe, Joe? He was taken away in an ambulance. It was a sham. It’s all down to Middleburg. He loves playing Prospero.’
‘Well,’ said David, ‘we had better plan for this party. Only a fortnight away. What do we need?’
‘Do you have a gun?’ Joe asked him.
‘Can’t say I do.’
‘I have,’ said Joe, adding, with a cowboy accent, ‘Took it off one of them cavalry boys.’
‘Really?’ asked Marie.
‘Nope. At least, not the last bit. But I have a gun.’
‘Do you think we’ll need one?’ asked David, with a hint (Marie thought) of alarm.
‘Someone fired a warning shot when we went over to look at the place a few weeks ago,’ said Joe. ‘I’ll bring it along.’
‘If anybody’s going to do any shooting, it should be me,’ Marie said. ‘It’s my quarrel, my father, my life.’
‘I have to go,’ said David. ‘Sorry. Late for a meeting.’ He made a gesture with his arms of hopeless possibility as he left the room. He wasn’t going to shoot.
Marie watched him leave. He was attractive: engaging, charming. She couldn’t help loving the boy who had lain with her under the stars – but somehow she didn’t quite trust the man. He had had the chance when they were together and he had taken the path well-frequented. Did she trust anyone? Joe drank his coffee and kept his counsel.
‘Do you think I should reply?’ she asked. ‘It says RSVP.’
‘No need,’ said Joe. ‘He knows the white squaw is coming. He hear the tom toms.’
***
Sitting together in the broad front seat of the delivery van as it chinked and rattled along, its back piled high with cases of wine, they discussed the evening ahead, how the boys could keep an eye on the proceedings without being caught, and the strange history of the castle itself. The boys were jolly. It was an adventure. She felt unprepared.
There was something constant, reassuring and helpful about Joe, but intuitive as well and full of surprises. She felt she could spend her life with someone like that, not David who she kept at arm’s length. She loved the idea of him, he attracted her, but there was a question mark over his priorities. She could tell he loved the sniff of money with which Middleburg had surrounded her. What would David do if the money wasn’t there? Would he grow cabbages with her or take to the open road?
‘You’re quiet,’ he said, breaking in on her thoughts. ‘Apprehensive?’
‘Middleburg always likes to keep you on your toes. I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what he wants. He feeds on uncertainty. That I do know.’
‘At least his wine order is predictable,’ Joe told them. ‘He likes big Burgundies – and of course Alsace.’
The late summer evening was only just beginning to show signs of that liminal moment when, it is said, the other world impinges on the human one and the day turns to dusk, but the castle was already ablaze with lights as they drove up. The whole place was floodlit and the sound of a distant band could be heard as Joe’s Chevy van settled its tyres onto the gravel. All the appearances of a party about to go into full swing were there. It lacked only one thing: people. No one else was on the steps. No other car was drawn up.
Now the moment had come she felt understandably nervous. What was she doing in this huge place called nightmare where so many horrifying things had supposedly been done so many centuries ago, and so many bones of boys and girls had supposedly been found a mere matter of a decade or so since? What did Middleburg call them? Privileged visitors. She felt like the little fly going up the spider’s staircase.
She got out of the car and the two men watched and waited while she climbed the steps to the great front door. Her bones felt sullen and heavy as she dragged them up the flight. Nothing happened as she reached the top and waited, so she pushed the door, which swung open, and disappeared from their view inside the castle perilous.
A burst of music and party noise greeted her. She found herself once more in the large baronial hall with the various small chambers and cloakrooms leading off it. There were the same oaken chairs and table, the ancestral portraits and heads of various beasts killed by the castle’s occupants, there was armour, there were swords and pikes, even one or two cannon balls. The party itself seemed to be going on beyond the two big double doors that faced her, leading to the refectory. She was glad that she had put on a pretty red dress, because she liked the dress, it went well with her bright hair, and of course she had worn it just in case the hosts really meant a party and were not just playing a trick. You could never tell with Middleburg and company. There was a notice on the door: Presentation to Miss Marie Messinger on the Occasion of her 25th Birthday.
She pushed open the door to find herself, not in a party surrounded by people and champagne, but alone on the refectory hall’s elevated stage. She had been told it had been designed to be suitable for visitor and staff entertainments, presentations and shows. As well as stage curtains, it seemed to have a thick white sound-proof partition, rather like a fire curtain, so that the stage could become a chamber for small meetings and discussions, closed off from the main body of the hall. It was dove-white, a little like an operating theatre. Any time now, she thought, nurse will come, give me an injection, fit me into a surgical straitjacket and I’ll wake up again in Beverly Hills. At that moment there was a further burst of laughter and chatter and snatches of conversation from the direction of the white fire curtain and she saw that a movie had been projected onto it from somewhere behind her.
It was showing, as she now perceived, a piece – or home movie – about an elegant party. Hollywood folk, she supposed. But as she looked, she thought she began to recognise some of the people it featured. It was like a dream. They were playing her a dream.
A chair had been considerately placed for her to sit and watch, with a table beside it on which stood a glass of champagne, but for now she remained on her feet, spellbound. It was, she felt, like the moment before dying when all your life comes back. She held on to the back of the chair, giddy.
The background music and party hubbub continued, but there were also half-heard snippets of conversation, voices she recognised. And there were, inevitably, the Holdsworths, lots of people from Merrymaids whom she knew, people from London, the squatters and, yes, even Daddy ‘Oh, man’, Mrs Izzard and Fist were there. Fist showed his fist and grinned hugely. The housekeeper and factor from Castle Fairlie were there, the well-fleshed and oily Prelati and the plump Francesca, reminding her of happiness and sorrow in Cannes, sex-mad Harvey too. Grindlay was there. David was there (why had he said nothing to her about it?) but not Joe. There was Mr Merriman, smiling the smile, a pretty girl on each arm – one of them, she saw, was Margot (who had also said nothing). There were executives. There was long-legged Tamara from TOJI’s head office. There were expensive looking women and powerful men, at least two of them ambassadors if they weren’t Hollywood bit part players, but at the head of them all were Middleburg and his faithful Ariel, Brickville, bathed in a kind of aura she had not associated with them before. They exuded power and dark magic. They seemed anointed with gold.
It was a trick, of course, a grotesque charade. At least, she thought, I might as well enjoy it. She sat down and drank from the glass, feeling a little like Alice in a strange new and not altogether appealing wonderland. She was surprised there wasn’t a label on the glass saying ‘Drink me’. Oh no, she was mistaken. There was, tucked under the flute. The champagne was excellent.
As soon as Marie sat down, everyone on screen stopped talking. And then they started clapping. Marie didn’t know what to do so she stood up and curtseyed as she had been taught at school, then she sat down again. That seemed to go down well. Middleburg and Brickville advanced to centre screen.
‘Here she is,’ said Middleburg.
‘The heiress,’ intoned Brickville, psalmically.
Everything they said seemed to draw a reaction from the crowd.
‘Stepping straight into Forbes Magazine,’ said Brickville.
‘Wow,’ went the crowd.
‘Sitting on the board,’ said Middleburg.
‘Attagirl.’
‘Shaping the destiny of this great nation,’ declaimed Brickville.
‘Rah rah rah.’
‘We are all friends here,’ declaimed Middleburg, ‘and we have drawn wide to bring some of you from your home across the pond, to our home here in the US of A…’
Cheers.
‘…Take some champagne with us, Marie, lift high the glass, and in a few minutes we will drink your health, and ours…’
More cheers.
‘But first mingle awhile, greet the long-lost faces, savour the moment, carpe the diem and be the most favoured guest of The Other Judas, Inc, Charity Extraordinary, known to the world as TOJI, the brand you feel at home with – TOJI at home, TOJI away, TOJI tomorrow, TOJI today! But … and it is a big but … we must never forget the name Messinger – the power behind the TOJI throne.’
Loudest cheers of all.
‘The brand your father built and that from now on, you will share with us as our newest and youngest vice president.’
Cheers to lift the roof.
‘You see how much they love you,’ said Middleburg, ‘but we had the party without you because you are so bad at turning up. Hold on, though, now. Stay where you are and I’ll be with you in a minute.’
All well and good, she thought, if you like Marie Celeste presentations, but she could not tell whether she was in a ceremony or a charade.
The sound went off and the screen went blank. She got up from the chair. Far away, up the staircase at the end of the hall, she could hear someone calling her name.
‘Marie … Marie…?’
She followed the voice up the flight until she came to a door that looked as if it were furnished with high-powered locks but which was, however, open. She entered the room because it seemed like an invitation but it almost immediately closed behind her. On the floor was an apparently unconscious woman in the uniform of a nurse, or medical security guard, or both. Was this for real or part of the play? She began to realise she had been asking herself this question most of her life. At this stage the play started to go wrong.
‘Ah, there you are,’ a man’s voice said, suddenly, almost in her ear; a voice she seemed to recognise. ‘She’s not dead, you know. Yet.’
It was the kind of moment when you wish you were a ventriloquist’s dummy with a head that goes round 180 degrees. She half-managed it to 90, when a blindfold was place over her eyes and she was pulled backwards onto the floor, with a pinion hold round her arms. Girls at school used to do this kind of thing to unpopular colleagues. It had happened to her.
‘You don’t know me,’ the same voice went on, ‘and I don’t know you. That is the way I like it. You chose a bad day when you came here. Because…’
It was a thin, scholarly voice with a slight German accent.
‘Because what?’ she asked, fighting down panic tinged with anger.
The man sounded so civilised. He was standing very close to her and now started very slowly moving towards her like a steam-roller, pushi
ng her backwards by the sheer force of the air between them.
She was back in the nightmare in the shed at the docks.
‘…because … I can’t remember,’ he said.
‘What are you doing here? Do you live here?’ she asked, trying to play for time
‘Of course I do, it’s all mine.’
‘What is it you want? I have been invited here.’
Would he be swayed by an appeal to his sense of hospitality? It was hard to control the tremor in her voice. The adrenalin was kicking in.
‘Invited to meet me,’ he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
‘And who … who are you?’
Her knees were shaking.
‘I am a patient. I have been patient.’
‘You are patient? You are a patient? You are not very kind to your nurse.’
She was saying whatever came into her head. It might rub him up the wrong way but she couldn’t help it.
‘Oh but I am kind. I am going to do to you what I do best.’
‘And wh … what is that?’ she stammered.
‘I’m going to measure you and then I am going to kill you. Or I might kill you first.’ Oh my God. He said it so calmly, so plausibly, she could see exactly why it might make sense for him to do it.
‘I would rather you didn’t.’
‘Of course you would. That is what they all say. Or words to that effect. But first I have to measure your sex. That is really my skill, my claim to fame as you might say.’