by Lodge, David
“… I’m OK physically, I’m being well looked after, but these guys are serious and they’re losing patience. I explained to them that we’re not married any more and as a special concession they’ve agreed to halve the ransom money to a quarter of a million dollars. Now, I know that’s a lot of money, DÉSIRÉE, and God knows you don’t owe me anything, but you’re the only person I know who can lay hands on that kind of dough. It says in Newsweek that you’ve made two grand from Difficult Days—these guys clipped it. Get me out of this and I’ll pay the quarter of a million back to you, if it takes me the rest of my life. At least I’ll have a life.
“What you’ve got to do is this. If you agree to pay the ransom, put a small ad in the next issue of the Paris Herald-Tribune—you can phone it in, pay by credit card—saying ‘The lady accepts,’ right? Got it? ‘The lady accepts.’ Then arrange to draw from the bank a quarter of a million dollars in used, unmarked bills, and await instructions about handing them over. Needless to say, you mustn’t bring the police into this. Any police involvement and the deal is off and my life will be in peril.”
While Morris has been speaking, the telephone exchange has traced the call, and police cars are tearing through the streets of Nice, their sirens braying, to surround a call-box in the old town, in which they find the receiver off the hook and propped up in front of a cheap Japanese cassette recorder, from which the voice of Morris Zapp can still be heard plaintively pleading.
The next day, DÉSIRÉE places a small ad in the Paris Herald-Tribune: “The lady offers ten thousand dollars.”
“I think you’re being very generous,” says Alice Kauffman, on the line from Manhattan to Nice, her voice gluey with the surreptitious mastication of cherry-liqueur chocolates.
“So do I,” says DÉSIRÉE, “but I figured ten grand is a sum Morris might just seriously attempt to pay back. And it might look bad if something happened to him without my lifting a finger.”
“You’re right, honey, you’re so right,” says Alice Kauffman, little kissing noises punctuating her words as she licks the tips of her fingers. “People are apt to get emotional about a situation like this, even women who are theoretically liberated. It might have an adverse effect on your sales if he died on you. Perhaps you should offer twenty grand.”
“Would it be tax-deductible?” DÉSIRÉE asks.
…
“What kind of woman is this?” Carlo demands of Morris. “Who ever heard of anybody bargaining with kidnappers?”
“I warned you,” says Morris Zapp.
“And ten thousand dollars she offers! It’s an insult.”
“You feel insulted! How do you think I feel?”
“You will have to record another message.”
“It’s no use, unless you’re prepared to lower your price. Suppose you come down to one hundred thousand?”
Blindfolded Morris hears a hiss of sharply intaken breath.
“I’ll talk to the others about it,” Carlo says. Ten minutes later he comes back with the tape recorder. “One hundred thousand dollars is our final offer,” he says. “Tell her, and tell her good. Make sure she understands.”
“It’s not so simple,” says Morris. “Every decoding is another encoding.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Give me the tape recorder.”
…
“Look at it this way, DÉSIRÉE.” Morris’s voice crackles in the telephone while outside, beneath the balcony of her room overlooking the sea, police cars go hee-hawing along the Promenade des Anglais in search of the call-box it is coming from. “One hundred thousand dollars is less than one-twentieth of your royalties from Difficult Days, which incidentally I thought was an absolutely wonderful book, a knockout, truly—less than four per cent. Now, although I take absolutely no credit for that achievement, I mean it was entirely your own creative genius, it is nevertheless true, in a sense, that if I hadn’t been such a lousy husband to you all those years you wouldn’t have been able to write the book. I mean you wouldn’t have had the pain to express. You could say I made you a feminist. I opened your eyes to the oppressed state of modern American women. Don’t you think that, viewed in that light, I’m entitled to some consideration in the present circumstances? I mean, you pay your agent ten per cent for doing less.”
“The nerve,” says Alice Kauffman, when DÉSIRÉE recounts this new development on the transatlantic telephone. “I’d be inclined to let him rot. What are you going to do?”
“I’m offering twenty-five grand,” says DÉSIRÉE. “It’s getting kind of interesting, like a Dutch auction. I wonder what the reserve is on Morris.”
…
Persse sits on the narrow, crowded strip of beach in front of the Waikiki Sheraton, and tots up the sums on the pale blue American Express counterfoils that have accumulated in his wallet. He calculates that he has just about enough money in his bank account in Limerick to cover the total, but he will have to go into debt to get home. If he hadn’t been lucky enough to get a free ride from Los Angeles to Honolulu on a plane chartered by a TV film crew, his finances would be in an even worse state.
It is hot, very hot, on the beach, in spite of the trade winds in which the palm trees sway and rustle overhead, and Persse feels unrefreshed by the swim he has just taken in an ocean that was like warm milk to the touch and almost as cloudy to the eye. The distant surf had tempted him, but he didn’t like to leave his belongings unattended on the beach. He feels a distinct pang of nostalgia for the bracing, crystal-clear waters of Connemara, and its rock-strewn tidal beaches of firm-packed sand, where seabirds were often his only company earlier this summer. Here the sand is yielding and coarse-grained, and along the scarcely changing margin of the lukewarm sea plods an endless procession of humanity, in bikinis, trunks, Bermuda shorts and tank tops, the young and beautiful, the old and unlovely, the slim and the thin and the obese, the tanned and the freckled and the burned. Most of these people carry some form of food or drink in their hands—hamburgers, hot-dogs, ice-creams, soft drinks, even cocktails. The island is full of noises: twanging Hawaiian muzak from the hotel loudspeakers, rock music from toted transistor radios, the hum of air-conditioners and the thud of piledrivers laying the foundations for new hotels. Every two or three minutes, a jumbo jet rises into the air from the airport some miles to Persse’s right and hangs, apparently almost motionless, above the bay, above the skyscraper hotels, the shimmying palms, the hired surfboards and outrigged canoes, the shopping centres and the parking lots, before turning east or west; and from its windows those who are departing look down, with varying degrees of envy or relief, upon those who have just arrived.
When Persse himself arrived the previous evening, he took a taxi immediately to the University, but all the administrative buildings were closed, and he wandered round the campus, which resembled a large botanical garden with sculpture exhibits, asking people at random for the Genre Conference without success, until a security guard advised him to go home before he got mugged. He returned early next morning, after spending the night in a cheap lodging-house, only to be informed that the conference had ended the day before, and that all the participants had dispersed, including the organizers who might conceivably have known where Angelica had gone. All the University Information Office could offer him was a copy of the conference programme, which included a tantalizing reference to a paper on “Comic Epic Romance from Ariosto to Byron—Literature’s Utopian Dream of Itself” which Angelica had apparently delivered, and to which an Italian Professor called Ernesto Morgana and a Japanese called Motokazu Umeda had responded. How he would have loved to hear that!
Clutching this useless souvenir of Angelica’s passage, Persse took the bus down to Waikiki and, glimpsing a strip of blue sea between two huge hotels, made for the beach to relieve his frustration with some exercise, and to contemplate his next move. There doesn’t seem to be any sensible alternative to returning home. Persse sighs and buttons his wallet back into the breast pocket of his shirt.
>
Then his attention is caught by a strikingly incongruous figure among the sun-oiled, half-naked vacationers paddling along at the edge of the water. It is an elderly lady wearing a sprigged blue muslin dress, the full skirt of which has been elegantly gathered up and dovetailed to expose a modest extent of bare white leg. She is carrying a matching parasol to shade her face. Persse leaps to his feet and runs forward to greet her.
“Miss Maiden! Fancy seeing you here!”
“Hallo, young man! The surprise is mutual, but a pleasant one I’m sure. Are you staying at the Sheraton?”
“Good heavens, no, but there seems to be no way of getting to the beach in this place without walking through some hotel lobby.”
“I am staying at the Royal Hawaiian, which I am told is very exclusive, though what counts as vulgar in Honolulu I cannot imagine,” says Miss Maiden. “Are you sitting somewhere? I feel the need of a rest and perhaps a drink. They have something called slush here which in spite of its name is rather refreshing.”
“Are you here for the Genre Conference?” is Persse’s first question, when they have seated themselves at the counter of the Sheraton’s outdoor soda-fountain, with two gigantic paper cups full of raspberry-flavoured crushed ice before them.
“No, this is simply a holiday, pure indulgence without any self-improvement. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit. ‘Hawaii Five-O’ is one of my favourite TV programmes. I’m afraid the reality is a little disappointing. It generally is, I find, since the invention of colour television. Are you on holiday here yourself, young man?”
“Not exactly. I’m looking for a girl.”
“A natural ambition, but haven’t you come rather a long way for that purpose?”
“It’s a particular girl that I’m looking for—Angelica Pabst—perhaps you remember her at the Rummidge conference.”
“But how very extraordinary! I met her just a few days ago.”
“You met Angelica?”
“On this very beach. I recognized her, though I couldn’t remember her name. I’m afraid I’m losing my memory for names as I get older. Your own, for instance, just this moment escapes me, Mr. er—”
“McGarrigle. Persse McGarrigle.”
“Ah yes, she mentioned you.”
“She did? Angelica? How?”
“Oh, fondly, fondly.”
“What did she say?”
“I can’t remember, exactly, I’m afraid.”
“Please try,” Persse begs her. “It’s very important to me.”
Miss Maiden frowns with concentration, sucking vigorously on her straw and making a gurgling sound in her paper cup. “It was something about names. When she reminded me that she was called Angelica Pabst, I ventured to say that she deserved a more euphonious second name, and she laughed and asked me if I thought ‘McGarrigle’ would sound any better.”
“She did?” Persse is ecstatic. “Then she loves me!”
“Were you in any doubt about it?”
“Well, she’s been running away from me ever since I first met her.”
“Ah, a young woman likes to be wooed before she is won.”
“But I can never get near enough to her to start wooing,” says Persse.
“She’s putting you to the test.”
“She certainly is. I was on the point of giving up and going back to Connemara.”
“No, you mustn’t do that. Never give up.”
“Like the Grail knights?”
“Oh, but they were such boobies,” says Miss Maiden. “All they had to do was to ask a question at the right moment, and they generally muffed it.”
“Did Angelica happen to tell you where she was going next? Back to Los Angeles?”
“I think it was Tokyo.”
“Tokyo?” Persse wails. “Oh, Jaysus!”
“Or was it Hong Kong? One of those Far Eastern places, anyway. She was going to some conference or other.”
“That goes without saying,” sighs Persse. “The question is, which conference?”
“If I were you, I should go to Tokyo and look for her.”
“There are a lot of people in Tokyo, Miss Maiden.”
“But they are very little people, are they not? Miss Pabst would stand out in the crowd, head and shoulders above everybody else. What a magnificent figure of a gal!”
“Indeed she is,” Persse agreed ardently.
“I’m afraid she must have thought me very rude—I just couldn’t keep my eyes off her as she was towelling herself. She had been swimming, you see—I met her wading out of the sea, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, her hair wet and her limbs gleaming.”
“Like Venus,” Persse breathes, closing his eyes to picture the scene more vividly.
“Quite so, the analogy struck me also. She has the most beautiful tan, which is very becoming with dark hair and eyes I always think. I observe that you have the same fair skin as myself, which burns and peels at the slightest exposure—your nose, if you will excuse my mentioning it, is already looking rather red; I would advise you to get yourself a hat—but Miss Pabst has skin like brown silk, a flawless, even tan. Except for a birthmark rather high up on the left thigh—have you noticed that? Shaped rather like an inverted comma.”
“I have not had,” says Persse, blushing, “the privilege of seeing Angelica in a bathing costume. I’m not sure I could bear it. I should be tempted to fight every man on the beach who looked at her.”
“Well, you would certainly have had your work cut out that day. She was being ogled from all sides.”
“Don’t tell me,” Persse begs. “There was a time when I thought she was a striptease dancer—it nearly broke my heart.”
“That charming young woman a striptease dancer? How could that be?”
“It was a case of mistaken identity. It turned out to be her sister.”
“Oh? Has she a sister?”
“Her twin sister, Lily, it was.” How long ago it seems that he pursued Angelica’s shadow through the stews of London and Amsterdam. The memory of Girls Unlimited makes him think of Bernadette and reminds him that he is still carrying around, undelivered, the document signed by Maxwell. In all the excitement of getting back onto Angelica’s trail, he has forgotten all about Bernadette. How was that? He traces it back to the encounter with Cheryl Summerbee at Heathrow—Cheryl, whom he last saw inexplicably weeping over her timetable of flights to Geneva. What strange, unpredictable creatures women are!
And now, here is Miss Maiden surprising him with an unwonted sign of feminine fragility. She looks pale and sways on her stool as if about to faint. “Are you all right, Miss Maiden?” he asks anxiously, steadying her with his hand on her arm.
“The heat,” she murmurs. “I’m afraid it is too much for me in the middle of the day. If you would give me your arm, I think I will go back to my hotel and lie down.”
…
By chance, Fulvia and Ernesto Morgana fly into Milan airport at about the same time, she from Geneva, he from Honolulu. They meet in the baggage hall and embrace with style, kissing on both cheeks.
“Oh!” exclaims Fulvia. “You are very bristly, carissimo!”
“Scusi, my dearest, but it was a long flight and you know I don’t like to shave on aeroplanes, in case of sudden turbulence.”
“Of course, my love,” Fulvia assures him. Ernesto uses an old-fashioned cut-throat razor. “Did you have a good conference?” she asks.
“Very enjoyable, thank you. Honolulu is extraordinary. The post-industrial society at play. You must go some time. And you?”
“The Narrative Conference was boring but Vienna was charming. At Lausanne it was the other way round. Oh, there are my bags coming—quick!”
Fulvia has left her bronze Maserati in the airport carpark, and drives them both home in it. “Did you meet anyone interesting?” she asks, pulling into the fast lane and flashing her headlights at a laggard Fiat.
“Well, the Signorina Pabst, to whose paper I was responding, turned out to be amazingl
y young and amazingly beautiful, as well as a most acute critic of Ariosto.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Unfortunately her interest in me was purely professional. Was Professor Zapp at Vienna?”
“He was expected, but did not arrive, for some reason. I met a friend of his called Sy Gootblatt.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
Fulvia smiles. “If you did not sleep with Miss Pabst, I did not sleep with Mr. Gootblatt.”
“But I really didn’t sleep with her!” Ernesto protests. “She’s not that kind of girl.”
“Are there still girls who are not that kind of girl? All right, I believe you. So who did you sleep with?”
Ernesto shrugs. “Just a couple of whores.”
“How banal, Ernesto.”
“Two at the same time,” he says defensively. “So how was Mr. Gootblatt?”
“Mr. Gootblatt looked promising, but proved to lack both imagination and stamina. Unfortunately it turned out that we were both going on from Vienna to Lausanne, so we had to keep up pretences for another week. I did not invite him to visit us.”
Ernesto nods as if this is all he wanted to know.
When they are indoors, and have showered and changed their clothes, they exchange gifts. Ernesto has bought Fulvia earrings and a brooch decorated with uncultured pearls, and Fulvia has bought Ernesto a silver-mounted riding crop. He mixes a dry martini for both of them, and they sit facing each other in the off-white drawing-room, Ernesto sorting through the mail which has accumulated in their absence, and Fulvia with a stack of neatly folded newspapers and magazines at her side. “It is a relief to ignore the news while one is away,” she observes, “but there is such a lot of catching up to do when one returns home.” She peels the top paper from the pile and scans the headlines. Her mouth falls open and her eyes stare. “Ernesto,” she says in a quiet but steely tone.
“Yes, my love,” he replies absently, ripping open envelopes with a paper knife.
“Did you by any chance tell any of our political friends about Morris Zapp? I mean about his being married to DÉSIRÉE Byrd, the novelist?”