by Lodge, David
“Is that Mrs. DÉSIRÉE Zapp?”
“Not any longer.”
“I beg your pardon ma’am?”
“I used to be Mrs. DÉSIRÉE Zapp. Now I’m Ms. DÉSIRÉE Byrd.”
“The wife of Professor Morris Zapp?”
“The ex-wife.”
“The author of Difficult Days?”
“Now you’re talking.”
“We just had a telephone call, Mrs. Zapp—”
“Ms. Byrd.”
“Sorry, Ms. Byrd. We just had an anonymous telephone call to say that your husband has been kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped?”
“That’s right ma’am. We’ve checked it out with the Italian police and it seems to be true. Professor Zapp went out jogging from a villa in Bellagio three days ago and never returned.”
“But why in God’s name would anybody want to kidnap Morris?”
“Well, the kidnappers are demanding half a million dollars in ransom.”
“What? Who do they think is going to pay that sort of money?”
“Well, you I guess, ma’am.”
“They can go fuck themselves,” says DÉSIRÉE, putting down the phone.
Soon the young man is back on the line. “But isn’t it true, Mrs. Zapp—Ms. Byrd—that you received half a million dollars for the film rights alone of Difficult Days?”
“Yeah, but I earned that money and I sure as hell didn’t earn it to buy back a husband I said good riddance to years ago.”
DÉSIRÉE bangs down the phone. Almost immediately it rings again. “I have nothing further to say,” she snaps.
There is silence for a moment, then a heavily accented voice says, “Ees dat Signora Zapp?”
…
Persse has breakfast in a pleasant room on the ground floor of the Beverly Hills called the Polo Lounge, which is full of people who look like film stars and who, it gradually dawns upon him, are film stars. The breakfast costs as much as a three-course dinner in the best restaurant in Limerick. His American Express Card will take care of the bill, but Persse is getting worried at the thought of the debits he is totting up on the Amex computer. A few days’ living in this place would see off the remainder of his bank balance, but there’s no point in checking out till noon. He goes back to his palatial suite and telephones the twenty-seven Pabsts in the directory without finding one who will admit to having a daughter called Angelica. Then, cursing himself for not having thought of the expedient earlier, he works his way through the head offices of the airlines in the Yellow Pages, asking for Mr. Pabst, until, at last, the telephonist at Transamerican says, “Just one moment, I’ll put you through to Mr. Pabst’s secretary.”
“Mr. Pabst’s office,” says a silky Californian voice.
“Oh, could I speak to Mr. Pabst?”
“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting right now. Can I take a message?”
“Well, it’s a rather personal matter. I really want to see him myself. Urgently.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible today. Mr. Pabst has meetings all the morning and he’s flying to Washington this afternoon.”
“Oh dear, this is terrible. I’ve flown all the way from Ireland to see him.”
“Did you have an appointment, Mr….”
“McGarrigle. Persse McGarrigle. No, I don’t have an appointment. But I must see him.” Then, “It’s about his daughter,” he risks.
“Which one?”
Which one! Persse clenches the fist of his free hand and punches the air in triumph. “Angelica,” he says. “But Lily, too, in a way.”
There is a thoughtful silence at the other end of the line. “Can I come back to you about this Mr. McGarrigle?”
“Yes, I’m staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” says Persse.
“The Beverly Hills, right.” The secretary sounds impressed. Ten minutes later the phone rings again. “Mr. Pabst can see you for a few minutes at the airport, just before his plane leaves for Washington,” she says. “Please be at the Red Carpet Club in the Transamerican terminal at 1:15 this afternoon.”
“I’ll be there,” says Persse.
…
Morris Zapp hears the telephone ringing in the next room. He does not know where he is because he was knocked out with some sort of injection when they kidnapped him, and when he woke up, God knew how many hours later, he was blindfolded. From the sounds of birdsong and the absence of traffic noise beyond the walls of his room he deduces that he is in the country; from the coolness of the air around his legs, still clothed in red silk running shorts, that he is in the mountains. He complained bitterly about the blindfold until his captors explained that if he happened to see any of them they would be obliged to kill him. Since then, his main fear has been that his blindfold will slip down accidentally. He has asked them to knock on the door before they come into his room so that he can warn them of such an eventuality. They come in to give him his meals, untying his hands for this purpose, or to lead him to the john. They will not allow him outdoors, so he has to exercise by walking up and down his small, narrow bedroom. Most of the time he spends lying on the bunk bed, racked by a monotonous cycle of rage, self-pity and fear. As the days have passed, his anxieties have become more basic. At first he was chiefly concerned about the arrangements for the Jerusalem conference. Later, about staying alive. Every time the telephone rings in the next room, he feels an irrational spasm of hope. It is the chief of police, the military, the U.S. Marines. “We know where you are, you are completely surrounded. Release your prisoner unharmed and come out with your hands on your heads.” He has no idea what the telephone conversations are actually about, since they are conducted in a low murmur of Italian.
One of Morris’s guards, the one they call Carlo, speaks English and from him Morris has gathered that he has been kidnapped not by the Mafia, nor by the henchmen of some rival contender for the UNESCO chair, such as von Turpitz, but by a group of left-wing extremists out to combine fund-raising with a demonstration of anti-American sentiment. The Rockefeller Villa and its affluent life-style evidently struck them as an arrogant flaunting of American cultural imperialism (even though, as Morris pointed out, it was used by scholars from all nations) and the kidnapping of a well-connected resident as an effective form of protest which would also have the advantage of subsidizing future terrorist adventure. Somehow—Morris cannot imagine how, and Carlo will not tell him—they traced the connection between the American professor who went jogging at 5:30 every afternoon along the same path through the woods near the Villa Serbelloni, and DÉSIRÉE Byrd, the rich American authoress reported in Newsweek as having earned over two million dollars in royalties and subsidiary rights from her novel Difficult Days. The only little mistake they made was to suppose that Morris and DÉSIRÉE were still married. Morris’s emphatic statement that they were divorced clearly dismayed his captors.
“But she got plenty money, yeah?” Carlo said, anxiously. “She don’ wan’ you to die, huh?”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Morris said. That was Day Two, when he was still capable of humour. Now it is Day Five and he doesn’t feel like laughing any more. It is taking them a long time to locate DÉSIRÉE, who is apparently no longer to be found in Heidelberg.
The telephone conversation in the next room comes to an end, and Morris hears footsteps approaching and a knock on his door. “Come in,” he croaks, fingering his blindfold.
“Well,” says Carlo, “we finally located your wife.”
“Ex-wife,” Morris points out.
“She sure is some tough bitch.”
“I told you,” says Morris, his heart sinking. “What happened?”
“We put our ransom demand to her…” says Carlo.
“She refused to pay?”
“She said, ‘How much do I have to pay to make you keep him?’”
Morris began to weep, quietly, making his blindfold damp. “I told you it was useless asking DÉSIRÉE to ransom me. She hates my guts.”
“We shall have
to make her pity you.”
“How are you going to do that?” says Morris anxiously.
“Perhaps if she receives some little memento of you. An ear. A finger…”
“For Christ’s sake,” Morris whimpers.
Carlo laughs. “A leetle joke. No, you must send her a message. You must appeal to her tender feelings.”
“She hasn’t got any tender feelings!”
“It will be a test of your eloquence. The supreme test.”
…
“Yeah, there were two babies on that KLM flight, twin girls,” says Hermann Pabst. “Nobody ever did discover how they were smuggled on board. All the women passengers were questioned on arrival at Amsterdam, and the stewardesses as well, of course. It was in all the papers, but you would have been too young to remember that.”
“I was a baby myself at the time.”
“Right,” says Hermann Pabst. “I have some cuttings at home, I could let you have copies.” He scribbles a note on a memo pad inside his wallet. He is a big, thickset man, with pale blond hair going white, and a face that has turned red rather than brown in the Californian sunshine. They are sitting in the bar of the Red Carpet Club, Pabst drinking Perrier water and Persse a beer. “I worked for KLM in those days, I was on duty the day the plane landed with those two little stowaways. They were parked in my office for a while, cute little things. Gertrude—my wife—and me, we had no children, not by choice, something to do with Gertrude’s tubes” (he pronounces the word in the American way as “toobs”). “Now they can do an operation, but in those days… anyhow, I called her up, I said “Gertrude, congratulations, you just had twins.” I decided to adopt those kids as soon as I set eyes on them. It seemed…” He gropes for a word.
“Providential?” Persse suggests.
“Right. Like they’d been sent from above. Which, in a way, they had. From 20,000 feet.” He takes a swig of Perrier water and glances at his watch.
“What time does your plane leave?” Persse asks him.
“When I tell it to,” says Hermann Pabst. “It’s my own private jet. But I have to watch the time. I’m attending a reception at the White House this evening.”
Persse looks suitably impressed. “It’s very good of you to give me your time, sir. I can see that you are a very busy man.”
“Yeah, I done pretty well since I came to the States. I gotta plane, a yacht, a ranch near Palm Springs. But let me tell you something, young man, ya can’t buy love. That was where I went wrong with the girls. I spoiled them, smothered them with presents—toys, clothes, horses, vacations. They both rebelled against it in different ways, soon as they became teenagers. Lily ran wild. She discovered boys in a big way, then dope. She got in with a bad crowd at high school. I guess I handled it badly. She ran away from home at sixteen. Well there’s nothing new about that, not in California. But it broke Gertrude’s heart. Didn’t do mine a lot of good either. I have high blood pressure, mustn’t smoke, scarcely any drink”—he gestured to the Perrier water. “After a coupla years we traced Lily to San Francisco. She was living in some crummy commune, shacked up with some guy, or guys, making money by, would you believe, acting in blue movies. We brought her back home, tried to make a fresh start, sent her to a girls’ college in the East with Angie, the best, but it didn’t work out. Lily went to Europe for a vacation study programme and never came back. That was six years ago.”
“And Angelica?”
“Oh, Angie,” Hermann Pabst sighs. “She rebelled in a different way, the opposite way. She became an egghead. Spent all her time reading, never dated boys. Looked down at me and her mother because we weren’t cultured—well, I admit it, I never did have much time for reading, apart from the Wall Street Journal and the aviation trade magazines. I tried to catch up with those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, but Angelica threw them in the trash can and gave me some others to read that I just couldn’t make head or tail of. She got straight ‘A’s for every course she took at Vassar, and graduated Summa Cum Laude, then she insisted on going to England to do another Bachelor’s course at Cambridge, then she told her mother and me she was going to Yale graduate school to do complete literature, or somethin’.”
“Comp. Lit.? Comparative Literature?”
“That’s it. Says she wants to be a college teacher. What a waste! I mean, there’s a girl with looks, brains, everything. She could marry anybody she liked. Someone with power, money, ambition. Angie could be a President’s wife.”
“You’re right, sir,” says Persse. He has not thought it prudent to reveal his own matrimonial ambitions with respect to Angelica. Instead, he has represented himself to Mr. Pabst as a writer researching a book on the behavioural patterns of identical twins, who happened to meet Angelica in England, and wanted to learn more of her fascinating history.
“What makes it worse, she refuses to let me pay her fees through graduate school. She insists on being independent. Earned her tuition by grading papers for her Professor at Yale—can you imagine it? When I make more money in a single week than he does in a year. There’s only one thing she’ll accept from me, and that’s a card that gives her free travel on Transamerican airlines anywhere in the world.”
“She seems to make good use of it,” says Persse. “She goes to a lot of conferences.”
“Conferences! You said it. She’s a conference freak. I told her the other day, ‘If you didn’t spend so much time going to conferences, Angie, you would have gotten your doctorate by now, and put all this nonsense behind you.’”
“The other day? You saw Angelica the other day?” says Persse as casually as he can manage. “Is she here in Los Angeles, then?”
“Well, she was. She’s in Honolulu right now.”
“Honolulu?” Persse echoes him, dismayed. “Jaysus!”
“And I’ll give you three guesses why she’s there.”
“Another conference?”
“Right. Some conference on John.”
“John? John who?”
Pabst shrugs. “Angie didn’t say. She just said she was going to a conference on John, University of Hawaii.”
“Could it have been ‘Genre’?”
“That’s it.” Pabst looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, McGarrigle, but I have to leave now. You can walk me to the plane if you have any more questions.” He picks up his sleek burgundy leather briefcase, and Persse his scuffed sports bag. They walk out of the air-conditioned building into the smog-hazed sunshine.
“Does Angelica have any contact with her sister, these days?” Persse asks.
“Yeah, that’s what she came home to tell me,” says Mr. Pabst. “She’s been studying in Europe these last two years, on a Woodrow Wilson scholarship. Living in Paris, mostly, but travelling around, and always on the lookout for her sister. Finally tracked her down to some nightclub in London. Lily is working as some kind of exotic dancer, apparently. I suppose that means she takes her clothes off, but at least it’s better than blue movies. Angie says Lily is happy. She works for some kind of international agency that sends her all over, to different jobs. Both my girls seem determined to see the world the hard way. I don’t understand them. But then, why should I? They’re not my flesh and blood, after all. I did my best for them, but somewhere along the line I blew it.”
They walk out onto a tarmac parking area for private planes of every shape and size, from tiny one-engined, propeller-driven lightweights, fragile as gnats, to executive jets big as full-size airliners. A group of young men, squatting in the shade of a petrol tanker, rise to their feet expectantly as Hermann Pabst approaches, holding up handwritten signs that say “Denver,” “Seattle,” “St. Louis,” “Tulsa.” “Sorry, boys,” says Pabst, shaking his head.
“Who are they?” Persse asks.
“Hitchhikers.”
Persse looks back wonderingly over his shoulder. “You mean they thumb rides in airplanes?”
“Yup. It’s the modern way to hitchhike: hang about the executive jet parks.”
&nb
sp; Hermann Pabst’s private plane is a Boeing 737 painted in the purple, orange and white livery of Transamerican Airlines. Its engines are already whining preparatory to departure, whheeeeeeeeeeee! They shake hands at the bottom of the mobile staircase that has been wheeled up to the side of the aircraft.
“Goodbye Mr. Pabst, you’ve been very kind.”
“Goodbye, McGarrigle. And good luck with your study. It’s a very interesting subject. People are surprisingly ignorant about twins. Why, Angelica gave me a novel to read once, that had identical twins of different sexes. I didn’t have the patience to go on with it.”
“I don’t blame you,” says Persse.
“Where shall I send those cuttings?”
“Oh—University College, Limerick.”
“Right. So long.”
Hermann Pabst strides up the steps, gives a final wave and disappears inside the aircraft. The steps are wheeled away from the plane and the door swings shut behind him. Persse puts his fingers in his ears as the engine noise rises in pitch and volume, and the plane slowly taxis towards the runway. WHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEE! It disappears out of sight behind a hangar, then, a few minutes later, rises into the air and flies out over the sea before it banks and turns back towards the east. Persse picks up his grip and walks slowly back towards the little group squatting in the shade of the petrol tanker.
“Hi,” says one of the young men.
“Hi,” says Persse squatting down beside him. He takes a piece of foolscap from his bag and writes on it, in large letters, with a felt-tip pen, the word, “HONOLULU.”
…
The telephone rings in DÉSIRÉE’s hotel room on the Promenade des Anglais. The man from Interpol sits up sharply, puts on his headphones, switches on his recording apparatus, and nods to DÉSIRÉE. She picks up the phone.
“Ees dat Signora Zapp?”
“Speaking.”
“I ’ave message for you, please.”
After a pause and a crackle, DÉSIRÉE hears Morris’s voice. “Hallo, DÉSIRÉE, this is Morris.”
“Morris,” she says, “where the hell are you? I’ve had just about…” But Morris is speaking on regardless, and it dawns on DÉSIRÉE that she is listening to a tape-recording.