The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  A trick of the light after all. Shoulders slumping, I come to a halt. Around me, fragments of conversations flurry, memories jousting with each other in loud, unhearing voices. Down the stairs men continue to come, surveying the scene with identical expressions of childlike avarice; the nymphs thread through them, bearing order pads and trays of drinks, pushed-up breasts and intoxicating smiles. A dark-haired dancer has come onstage, the girl who looks like Ariadne; I pause to watch her grind her crotch against the pole, a mechanical Siren delivering her one-note song.

  It was a mistake to come here; the night has nothing more to offer. I decide to cut my losses, make my way to the exit.

  And then I see someone indisputably real. So: at least one mystery has been solved tonight. I follow at a distance, watching the figure weave through the crowd, then come to rest in a niche close by the warren of private booths, where thinking herself unobserved she sighs, arches her back and rolls her head. Marching briskly up to her, I tap her on the shoulder. ‘No volleyball tonight?’

  She spins around – and I recoil. An enormous contusion, a swollen rainbow of purples and greens, adorns one side of her face. ‘Vot are you doing here?’ The words come in a gasp. ‘Is he here too?’ She casts desperately about the room, her hands frenetically hopping up and down over her bare flesh, as if they could cover it up one piece at a time.

  ‘It’s just me,’ I assure her. ‘I’m here with my work colleagues.’

  Her breathing eases; her eyes lift to scan mine. ‘So you do not go to festival,’ she says.

  ‘Festival?’

  Clizia waits, puffed eye louring at me, then lightens sardonically as she sees the realization hit me. Of course: tonight is the first night of the Black & White Festival. William O’Hara is interviewing Bimal Banerjee as we speak, and Robert Dodson is waiting in the wings to discuss Paul’s book proposal …

  ‘Oh,’ I say. Trying to gauge from her expression what he told her, what I need to say here. ‘Yes, ah, I was going to go with him, but there has been a crisis at work…’

  She flaps a hand at me dismissively. ‘Don’t bother, Frenchman.’

  ‘He could have gone by himself,’ I point out. ‘I’ve been too busy at work to get in touch with him. He told you he was going? To meet Dodson?’

  ‘Oh, he tells me lots of things. Wonderful things. This very morning, he says that tonight he does something big. A new plan that will change everything.’

  ‘Well then! That must be what he meant!’ I tell her I have not seen him for a little while, but that I know he’s been working hard on the proposal, and it must be nearly finished –

  ‘It will never be finished, Frenchman,’ she says, cutting me off. ‘There will never be a book. I have fooled myself with this hope a hundred times.’ She looks at me dully. ‘All this week he does not even look at his desk. Does not lift up a pen. Just drinks with that idiot Igor.’

  ‘But then why would he tell you … why…’

  ‘Because he’s a liar.’ The bitter smile drops, and it seems that her whole face is suffused with the shadow of the wounded eye. ‘That is what he does, Frenchman. He lies. If he wrote his lies down, he would have enough for fifty books. But he is too afraid to lift the pen.’ Her face becomes stone. ‘All of this time, I have been the fool who believes him. No more.’

  Her tone is bleak, final; I cast about desperately for some means of defending him. ‘What about you?’ I say. ‘When is the last time you told him the truth?’

  Clizia shrugs her beautiful shoulders. She has stopped looking at me, instead scans the crowd for customers, as the crowd, simultaneously, slows to appraise her. Most men recoil when they catch sight of her black eye – but not all of them do.

  ‘Where have you told him you are tonight?’

  She doesn’t reply, directs a salacious smile at a corporate type who has paused at the edge of our conversation; he gulps, takes out his wallet, fingers through it, moves on. Her smile inverts, her brow becoming thunderous. She insinuates herself into the throng, with me bumbling after. ‘How long have you been working here?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Who did that to your face?’

  ‘It’s not important.’

  ‘Was it…?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘But he’s seen it? Doesn’t he know? Hasn’t he guessed?’

  ‘I believe his lies, so he believes mine.’ She turns and looks at me straight on. ‘That’s how it goes at the end of love.’

  She walks away. I grab her elbow. Instantly a bouncer bristles mastiff-like from the shadows. At some imperceptible signal from Clizia, he withdraws again.

  ‘You are costing me money,’ she says coldly.

  ‘Alors, how much?’ I reach into my pockets. ‘How much does it cost to be alone with you?’

  ‘Private dance fifty euro.’

  I hand her a note; she takes it without comment. Jocelyn Lockhart and Gary McCrum spot me from the bar and cheer. My cheeks burn; I do my best not to look at her as she leads me back to the booths.

  The room is small and cramped. A red light comes on as she closes the door. She backs me into an uncomfortable chair, stands over me like a robot Amazon. ‘Five minutes. Vot do you want me to do for you?’

  ‘Tell me the truth.’

  ‘Vot for?’

  ‘I want to help you.’

  ‘I don’t need your help.’

  ‘It looks like you do.’

  ‘This is just temporary.’

  ‘Who did that to you?’

  ‘Club boss.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I borrow money, then I don’t come to work.’

  ‘When Paul was writing his book proposal?’

  ‘You are wasting your fifty euro, Frenchman. The truth is the least interesting thing about me.’

  ‘Why did you come back to the club?’

  ‘You have seen how we live.’

  ‘You had a job.’

  ‘I lost it.’

  ‘But this – dancing – you hate it. He told me.’

  ‘Is commercial transaction. Very soon I have enough to leave.’

  ‘Leave the club?’

  She smiles; she knows I know that is not what she means. My heart plunges in a spiral. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘With Remington?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I prop my elbows on my knees, scrub my head with my hands. ‘I wish you’d told me about this before. I can help you. I have money. It’s the one thing I do have.’

  ‘Oh, Claude…’ She stops short, brings her slender fingers to her heart. ‘Would you really do that for me? You are special man, very special man.’ She draws closer, till her breasts are hovering inches from my nose. ‘Maybe I can think of special way to repay you,’ she whispers. ‘A secret, just between us two?’

  ‘Stop,’ I mutter.

  She reels away, with a leer of barren triumph. ‘The hero with his shining wallet,’ she says. ‘This club is full of men who want to help me, Frenchman.’

  Exasperated, I rise from the chair; she flinches back theatrically, as if I had moved against her. I sit back again, say carefully, ‘I know you have made many sacrifices. And I know your husband has failed you many times. But I am asking you to give him just one more chance. I’m sure that this time, with a little help, he can finish this book –’

  ‘The book!’ She throws her hands in the air. ‘You are the same as him! I don’t care about the book! I don’t care if he writes another fucking word! I just want him to be here in the world with me! Be here with his son! Instead of walking around like the dead man!’

  ‘He loves you.’

  She flicks her hand as at some insignificant noise.

  ‘He does!’ I insist. ‘He told me!’

  ‘He loves me, and he drinks our money!’ she exclaims. ‘He loves me, and eviction notice comes! He loves me, and I listen to my little boy’s tummy rumble all the night long!’ She draws back;
the bruised flesh around her eye pulsates with loathing. ‘What do you know about it anyway? Little lonely Frenchman, with your sad dreams of true love, what do you know about love or truth? You sit in your palace of death buying and selling human souls, you don’t even look out window to see the world you make us live in.’

  ‘You are wrong. I do look out. I see what you have, and I envy it. The cliché is true, there are some things money can’t buy.’

  ‘Money can buy anything real,’ Clizia says.

  ‘You have not always believed that.’

  She pulls up, looks at me aslant with an ironical smile. Even in silence the force of her rage hits me like a gale. ‘It is true. Perhaps in each of us there is a little Frenchman who sighs and knots his fingers and gaze at sunset. When I was young I have lots of dreams. I dream of escaping my shithole town. I dream of marrying an artist and never think about money. I follow my dreams and I end up on a stage showing my pussy to drunks.’ She pulls indifferently at a banknote that still protrudes from her G-string, looks up at me with false merriment. ‘That is how it goes, Frenchman. We dream our dreams, and we take our pay, and the world turns to shit.’

  There is a click, and the lights come on. ‘Time’s up,’ she says.

  I gawp at her, floundering, then fumble out my wallet. I have no cash left. She looks at me coolly, as she might at any other of her clients, priapic, in love with her, desperate to prolong the fraudulent moment. ‘Please,’ I entreat her, ‘you must promise me that before you do anything, you will let me talk to him.’

  ‘I have to go,’ Clizia says.

  ‘You can’t give up yet! Just wait a little bit longer!’

  Standing in the doorway, shot through by shafts of light from the dance floor, she appears fissiparous, disintegrating. ‘Go home, Frenchman,’ she says. ‘This is not your story.’

  She turns away and is swallowed instantly by the nebular darkness. I hurry out after her, but at the door I’m seized by Gary and Jocelyn and Dave Davison. ‘Have you heard, Claude?’

  ‘There’s a rescue package!’

  ‘We’re still alive!’

  Their faces swing about me like carnival masks, repeating the same words – ‘government’, ‘last minute’, ‘Royal’. But I’m too addled to make sense of them. All I can think is that I must find Paul at once. To the sound of champagne corks popping, I climb the stairs and out onto the street.

  Just as I flag down a cab, though, I remember that I gave the last of the cash in my wallet to Clizia. I search about my pockets frantically and at last dig something out – and freeze there on the side of the road.

  ‘Are you getting in or not?’ the driver wants to know.

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ I wave numbly; he swears and pulls away again. I remain at the kerb, staring at the paper in my hand – not a banknote, but the fax from earlier today. It nests in my palm, a sheet of perfect black; and Clizia’s words resound in my ears. This very morning he tells me that tonight he does something big. A new plan that will change everything.

  A terrible thought springs out of the darkness. What if this time he was telling the truth?

  The road and footpath have almost disappeared, reduced by the downpour to islets of grit in a black lagoon of water. The rain is coming down heavier than ever – in its frenzy and force hardly like rain at all anymore, but rather the bodying forth of something awful, until now hiding out in the abstract, gathering strength there, awaiting its moment to hurl itself into the actual. A sense of impending doom is unavoidable; I break into a run, splashing past nightclubs and pizza restaurants, then leaving the waterlogged street for the shadows of the square, where I instantly spot –

  Nothing. In the decorous Georgian enclave, all is calm. The cherry trees cast their blossoms softly against the night; silence turns about the solemn axis of the oak tree like the moon through the houses of some rarefied, red-brick zodiac. My dash slows to a jog, then a plod; my heartbeat does likewise, and I see my fears for what they are: absurd, too absurd for words. Clearly the events of the day have taken their toll on me. Not even Paul would attempt a plan so outlandish – except for the plot of one of his unwritten books, maybe! I laugh out loud, there on the leaf-strewn street, am answered with a murmur of reproof from a covey of pigeons lodged in a dripping magnolia … and then the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.

  Dread thuds back into my ears; at the same moment the grey boulders of the clouds roll away from the moon, and in the interval of light I see, amid the Benzes and Jaguars parked around the square, a large and anomalous white van. KGB EXTERMINATIONS, runs the legend on its side, with a picture of a terrorized mouse fleeing a man in a trench coat. I start to run again.

  William O’Hara’s house is almost entirely dark, save for a dim glow from deep within. The garden is deserted, the front door undisturbed. It’s still possible I’ve got it wrong – but then a gate leading to a side passage opens, and a masked figure appears.

  ‘What the –?’ he says. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I return, with a sense of déjà vu.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Mon dieu – what is he doing here?’

  ‘Look, Claude, I don’t mean to be rude, but we’re sort of in the middle of something here –’

  ‘What is about, this racket-making out here?’ A third figure comes shambling out of the shadows – dressed, like Paul, in black, with a stocking over his head. ‘What is this fucking Frenchman doing here?’ he demands when he sees me. ‘It is not enough you bring your son? Who else is coming? Your wife? Your mother-in-law?’

  ‘I didn’t bring him,’ Paul hisses back. ‘I don’t know why he’s here! What the hell are you doing with that window? You could hear it a mile away!’

  ‘How I can concentrate with you people jabbering like babushkas out here?’

  ‘You said you knew what you were doing!’ Paul jabs his finger at his accomplice.

  ‘That was before I found out that as well as art heist I must be babysitting!’ Igor shouts. I grab Paul’s arm and point: a light has gone on in an upper floor of the house next door. Reluctantly, he stifles his retort; Igor, with an air of vindication, turns on his heel and disappears back into the black shadow of the house, from which a moment later further shattering noises ensue.

  ‘Oh, that’s great, Igor. Why don’t we send up a few flares while we’re at it? Or put it on Facebook? Current status: breaking into William O’Hara’s house.’

  ‘Dad?’ The boy pulls at his hand until Paul hunkers down.

  ‘Again?’ he says incredulously. ‘Didn’t you use the toilet in Igor’s?’

  ‘Igor’s toilet is scary,’ Remington says sorrowfully.

  ‘Well, you’ll just have to hold it in until – aha, here we go!’ Above us the front door swings open, a panel of deeper black in the tenebrous façade of the house, as if the night were a series of nesting darknesses into which we were tunnelling. Paul’s son has already scampered up the steps, and his father after him.

  ‘Wait!’ I hiss after them. ‘Are you crazy?’ They are already out of sight. For a moment, I remain hovering in the garden, then with a curse hurry inside.

  The house, so convivial and warm before, is as cold as a tomb. I pursue Paul’s dim ghost down the hall as he shepherds Remington, who is clutching his bottom with both hands, into the bathroom. Depositing the boy on the toilet seat, he turns to me sternly. ‘What are you doing here? Why do you have to keep sticking your nose into my business?’

  ‘Because you are about to make a terrible mistake! If you steal that painting, you will never again have peace in your life.’

  ‘Oh, you mean like the fantastically wonderful peace I’m enjoying now? Getting into my own home by the fire escape to avoid the bailiffs? Is that the kind of thing you mean?’

  ‘I know you have problems,’ I say, as he wipes the boy’s bottom. ‘But this isn’t the way to solve them!’

  ‘Fuck you, pal. If you were so concerned about my problems, wh
y didn’t you help me with the website?’ His eyes bore into me. ‘You promised you’d pitch it to your clients. Did you tell anyone? Did you tell a single person?’

  I gape back at him dumbly.

  ‘See? With friends like you, no wonder this is what I’m reduced to.’

  ‘It’s been busy … and my investors – it’s not as simple as just calling them up…’

  He grunts disgustedly, refastening Remington’s trousers and scooping him into his arms.

  ‘But what about your proposal?’ I say. ‘Ulysses II?’

  He grimaces. ‘Let’s just say I came to my senses.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, if I’m going to prostitute myself with some idiotic idea, I at least want to make some money from it.’

  ‘But there would be money,’ I call after him. ‘Dodson would pay! Look at this place! Doesn’t it prove a writer can still have a good life –?’

  He rounds on me so sharply I almost crash into him. ‘What are you, a child?’ His eyes flash at me through the darkness. ‘You think O’Hara paid for all this with his crappy books? Don’t you know who Crispin is?’

  I have no option but to gape again.

  ‘He’s one of you! He’s on the board of the bank that gave me my loan! Every time I open one of their eviction notices there’s his name in the small print on the bottom of the page!’ He turns away again. ‘So you’ll forgive me if I don’t shed any tears.’

  ‘What about Clizia? You think she wants a thief for a husband?’

  ‘I’m hardly going to tell her, am I?’

  ‘So what will you tell her? That you’re still working on your book? You’re going to lie to her for the rest of your life?’

  He spins around again. ‘Jesus, will you get off my case? You’re not going to make me feel guilty about this. If I was some big bank going bust I’d have governments around the world throwing money at me. Instead, because I’m just some ordinary defenceless Joe Schmoe, I’m left to rot. Society has given me no choice but to steal this painting. So will you please get out of my way.’