by Joseph Hone
But then, forty pages in, I came to a passage which reminded me of something I couldn’t at once place.
‘Africa,’ she said, ‘is not all fat-lipped. The man we spoke to last night at the Perroquet had very thin lips.’
‘He was not Bantu. These people are Semitic. Africa south of here is fat-lipped. The people here regard all other Africans as slaves. This is an old Kingdom cut off from the world on top of a mountain where everyone is thin and proud.’
‘They have almond eyes in faces from a Byzantine fresco,’ she said. ‘I should like to look like them.’ She stirred the tall glass of white rum with a cherry stick.
‘It is a fairy story here,’ he said, ‘that is ending. The old men with sticks and lanterns against the night are dying. The frescoes are fading.’
And then I knew what it was: these descriptions of Ethiopians in their isolated Christian kingdom almost exactly paralleled the physical characteristics of the Princess. I saw her face quite clearly with these identical attributes: the almond eyes, huge pools in the thin face from some Coptic Church painting.
And then it struck me who ever had written these precise physical descriptions must have actually been to, or lived in Ethiopia. The novel was far too detailed to have been worked up by Ole Timbutu from the hearsay of some Nairobi journalist. And who the hell was Ole Timbutu? He was beginning to seem less and less real a figure – his authorship a pure fiction. So who had written the novel?
The woman with almond eyes, I thought, and a face from a Byzantine fresco. The woman who had studied in Paris, who had an air at once intensely civilised and savage. Margaret Takazze had most of the necessary attributes for authorship of this tale, just as her sex would have made her the least suspicious of shadows. She could have very well met and talked with the two protagonists of the story, without their being the least suspicious of her.
Was it possible? If it was, there was an uncomfortable corollary to her story: she had been pursuing someone called George Graham; she must have known his name. And I was George Graham. But we were two different people as she must so readily have confirmed at the reception when we had met a week before. She had asked me just that, to be sure – ‘Are you George Graham, the one that made the film?’ and yes, I’d said, I was. I was.
And then I began to think that there was just too much convenient and inconvenient fate in the whole business – yes, I thought just that, so that it wasn’t long before I discounted the idea of her authorship, or her involvement with these two figures lost in time, which she had resurrected and which I was trying to. It was too long a shot by far.
But I was wrong.
*
I called her at the UN guides centre but she was out with a group. So, taking White Savages with me, I went downstairs to the Conference building to see if I could find her. It didn’t take long. She was at the top of the escalator on the 4th floor standing beside a model of the UN building, explaining the various departments and their functions to twenty or so speechless, middle-aged visitors. I joined them casually, watching her, dressed now in something native to her kingdom, sari-like, in green silk, sparkling in stripes and patterns of gold. She recognised me at once with a brief smile, as though I was expected, just a taste of conspiracy in her expression, I thought.
‘Hello?’ A question as well as a greeting.
‘I like the book, what I’ve read of it. Are you free at all later? Could we talk?’
‘Yes,’ she said without any surprise. ‘This is my last tour. Meet me in the coffee shop on the ground floor in the UN Plaza apartments at five o’clock. Go out the visitors’ entrance here, up First Avenue, right on 48th, and you can’t miss the block on your left. A great big phallus. Coffee’s at the bottom.’ She was precise as she was outspoken in her arrangements.
‘Fine. I’ll bring the book,’ I said brightly. Then I added: ‘I’d like you to autograph it for me.’ But she didn’t reply, her head half turned away towards her flock. Just her eyes came back to me, swinging round, fixing me with their dark beams, briefly pondering.
*
Guy Jackson was back in his office when I called to thank him for his weekend invitation. He was in a cooler, less obsessive mood.
‘Fine then. Meet me here at three o’clock next Friday and we may avoid the rush hour out of town. We don’t want to be late. It’s the twins’ birthday. Helen’s organised a tea-party for them with their grandfather.’ It was as if we had never spoken of his jealousy, of his wife’s infidelity – or at least as if these were not his problems, but simply part of an interesting movie we had both recently seen and discussed. But I had to draw him back to the plot.
‘I’m sorry to drag it up again – but what sort of detective agency did you use in Nairobi six years ago. Who was it – who did the actual following?’
Jackson sighed. ‘I don’t know who it was. It was part of a security company out there, supplying guards for banks and so on. The man I dealt with was a Rhodesian. He gave me the reports. That’s all I ever saw.’
‘You never heard of an African involved in it all – a man or a woman?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I was just thinking. Curious. I couldn’t imagine there being any private detective agencies in a place like Nairobi. I thought gossip would do all that kind of work for you out there. Did you keep the reports – were they very complete?’
‘No, I burnt them. And yes, they were fairly complete. And there was no gossip. The two of them were extremely discreet. She went round the place with him as his secretary-assistant on the COI programme he was filming and researching.’
‘Didn’t you find it surprising that someone could follow the pair of them so closely, across the breadth of Africa in all those open spaces, without being noticed?’
‘Yes, I did. But that was what I was paying for. That was their job.’
‘They did it well.’
‘Yes,’ he said, the sadder and wiser man, ‘they did. It’s a long, dull story. Forget about it.’
‘I will – but I’m a little uneasy about the weekend. That’s really why I brought it up. I want to know as much as possible. You see my position, don’t you? It’s rather an awkward threesome, isn’t it? She knows, you know and I know. But we don’t all three know the same things together. With her I’m Mr X, impersonating her lover, about whom you know nothing. But in fact you do know about him – you know everything. I’m in the middle and I know very little.’ Jackson nodded his agreement.
‘Of course, she’s been asking you where he is?’ he asked.
‘To say the least.’
‘It was her suggestion – that you came up for the weekend.’
‘I’ve told her nothing.’
‘Of course.’
‘Except asking her to say nothing about it all, my impersonating Graham – to you or anyone – until I finish my work here. But how long can this go on for – this charade?’
‘I should tell her I’ve had her followed you mean, that I know all about George Graham?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look, it’s simply a personal business, all this with Graham. We’ve agreed on that. There’s no political connection. So why upset our present situation?’
‘She wanted a divorce.’
‘Yes, I knew that. She can have it now.’
‘Now that he’s gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now that you won’t be bruised – by knowing and thinking of the man she’s leaving you for? Now that there’s no one for her?’
‘Yes. Is that unreasonable?’
‘Fairly.’
‘Then I’m unreasonable. Where does that leave you for your weekend? You can get out of it easily enough.’
But why in the circumstances, I thought, had Jackson not got me out of the invitation before? I was a potential risk to him – both professionally and personally – in any association I might have with his wife. I might give any number of games away. Yet it seemed he wanted me to see as much as possib
le of her (as he had encouraged me to go flat-hunting with her in the first place) in circumstances which he could control and oversee. He would lose his private eyes and replace them with mine. I would spy on his wife for him and make my reports – perhaps that was what he hoped. Sensing my interest in her he had the opportunity now of hearing of her flaws and infidelities direct from a surrogate lover – or perhaps as her real lover, for such seemed the role he was tacitly encouraging me in. Realising the wild obsession that lay at the heart of his relationship with her, this was one explanation at least. At the same time, though I was not interested in satisfying his voyeurism, I was interested in his wife. I felt sure that somewhere in her past with Graham lay the key to my own immediate future. There was something I didn’t know, which she would never tell me – something which had happened between them, a plan, a future arrangement, which could only now have an outcome in me. I needed to know about her now for reasons quite beyond affection or sex.
So I said: ‘No, I’d like to come up for the weekend. It sounds a marvellous place. Wheel was telling me about it.’
‘Yes, he knows it. Good then, just a family weekend. And the rest – let it drop. I’ve had them call the man off. We’ll forget that.’
‘The man? But there were two men. I told you. There was a second man, with sandwiches and a homburg, deep-set eyes and white hair round his ears.’
‘Must just have been a bystander. I checked – the agency had only one man on the job: Moloney – the man you impersonated.’
‘There were two of them, I know. The other fellow tried to go on following me afterwards, when I’d slipped back into the restaurant.’
‘Not from the agency there wasn’t. There was someone else following you – if you’re sure. That’s all.’
‘That’s all? Well who? If there wasn’t anyone sent after me from London.’
‘Your KGB contact perhaps. The “stayer”. That was the plan, wasn’t it? He was going to check you out, make sure you were really George Graham, before passing on the information about KGB unreliables over here. No doubt he’ll be in touch with you now, give you those names – and we can wrap all this up and send you home.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said, while doubting just as much Jackson’s glib idea of ‘home’. Where was that? A small flat I’d had in Doughty Street near the office in Holborn, before the years in Durham jail. And I doubted Jackson himself now as well. Or rather Wheel and Jackson together, for hadn’t he just said that Wheel knew the house upstate in the Catskills? Yet Wheel at lunchtime had said equally clearly that he didn’t know it. That he had never been there. Someone else was following me. And someone was lying.
As I left Guy’s office I bumped into Wheel just about to enter it, carrying a sheaf of papers.
‘Hi!’ he said, flourishing that badge of permanent good humour which was his face. But I wasn’t entirely convinced by it now. The two of them didn’t just meet in the Delegates’ Lounge for two religious martinis before lunch. They shared some business together as well. Wheels within wheels …
*
‘Yes,’ she said in the Coffee Shoppe where everything had an ‘e’ at the end of it, the décor and furniture all folksy and ye olde from an England that never was, panelled in synthetic fumed oak with black plastic beams overhead. ‘Yes,’ she said, sitting on a milkmaid’s stool, dressed now in a rust-coloured Pringle sweater, the same shade in slightly flared corduroys and a leather belt, ‘I wrote the book. How did you guess?’
I just said I’d guessed and she licked her lips gently.
‘How did you come to be playing the detective?’ I went on.
‘I wasn’t. We were all there together, staying at the same hotel in Addis. George Graham was a friend, my English professor at Makerere University in the early sixties.’
What was she saying? Already I was on the defensive.
‘Is that what you do to old friends? Write novels about their private lives, their mistresses?’
‘What do you do with my old friends, Mr Graham? Kill them? Your story is surely better than mine. Though I don’t suppose you’ll ever publish it. I used a pseudonym. You’ve stolen his real name, his body, his life.’ She played with a sachet of sugar, tore it open, dipped a finger in and then sucked it.
‘How did you manage to follow them round East Africa without being noticed?’
‘How do you mean? That was part of the job.’ She was properly surprised. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you when you took him over? We were filming together, a documentary about an African girl visiting other African countries: I was the girl. Didn’t you see the film?’
‘No. One of his I didn’t see. There wasn’t a lot of time before – before I came over here.’
‘I used to think that George was involved in something more than just public relations for the British government.’
‘Think? You surely must have actually known – from what you’ve written in your book.’
‘No, I didn’t know exactly. That was an invention of mine in the novel. Now I see that I was right. You’ve taken his place. And I shouldn’t know about it,’ she went on. ‘Should I? Such bad luck – our running into each other the other night. Your “cover” is broken. Isn’t that the word?’ Now she laughed outright. ‘Just like the spy novels. I have you in my grasp, at my mercy – Grrrrr!’ She leant across the table towards me over the sour coffee, mimicking a tiger. I drew back involuntarily, alarmed. ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to tell anyone.’ She rested her hand on my arm for an instant. ‘I’ve nothing to do with that world, I promise,’ she said, the animal tamed in her now, meek and mild, still lightly amused. ‘This is my world. New York this month. This here, this now. My apartment upstairs. That book was a long time ago. Written and finished with. I’m not going to use it against you.’
She started one of her long smiles, a rising beam of fun coming over her face, like sunlight emerging, drifting slowly into a blaze from behind a dark cloud. She was one of those women who, in an instant, can fill themselves with happiness – as if she had a tap in her soul, a confident fountain of truth and trust which bubbled immediately for everyone at her request.
‘I’d like to hear more about it. The novel …’
‘Why don’t you tell me first?’ she leant back, withdrawing her favours for a moment, bargaining gently. ‘You’re going to have to trust me, aren’t you? I know too much already. Or are you thinking of knocking me off? That’s how it works, isn’t it, in the stories. Hitchcock and James Bond. I have to be “liquidated”.’
More laughter, more happiness. It was as though I were the feed in a comic act she had hired me for. ‘Anyway, why the novel, why the past? Why not things now? About you. About me. Isn’t there always time later for the past?’
She seemed to be propositioning me.
‘I’m fascinated,’ she said, suddenly, sharply, apropos of nothing, like one of her characters in White Savages.
‘About?’
‘Having coffee with a spy.’ She said in a deep, funny voice, ‘Do you carry a revolver?’
‘No, as a matter of fact. No guns, no golden Dunhills, no dark glasses.’
‘No vodka martinis either – very dry, stirred and not shaken. Or is it the other way round?’
I felt the skin on my face move awkwardly, creases rising inexplicably over my cheeks. Then I realised I was smiling.
‘Yes, I drink. Sometimes. Bottles of light ale, though. I’m a spy from one of those seedier thrillers, I’m afraid.’
‘Let’s have a drink then.’
‘Here?’
‘God no. Upstairs.’
I looked at her blankly.
‘Women are out too, are they? Not even “sometimes”? What a very dull book you are.’
‘I disappoint you.’
‘Not yet.’
She stood up and tightened her belt a notch. She was already pretty thin.
*
Her apartment was on the 10th floor, with almost the same view of the East Rive
r as my office had, except that we were further upstream now, and closer to the ground: she saw less of the huge northern horizon than I did but she was closer to the boats. A big silver motor cruiser, rigged out for deep-sea fishing, moved down the current in the last of the sunlight, a burly figure with a beard and a baseball cap at the helm.
It was one of those very modern, expensively decorated New York Design Centre apartments made for money to live in, not people.
She fiddled with a bottle of Fleischmann’s gin, vermouth, lemon and a bowl of ice which she’d brought in from the kitchen, handling the component parts smartly, like a nurse with a hypodermic tray in her long, clever fingers.
‘Well, what about the book then. What do you want to know?’
‘I was interested in the woman he was with.’
‘Miss Jackson?’
‘Mrs.’
She came over with the drink and sat down on the floor opposite me. But this wasn’t comfortable, so she sat bolt upright instead, like an idol, cross-legged, her narrow back arched forwards, as thin as the stem of the martini glass.
‘Yes, she wasn’t just his secretary. I knew that. Well, what about her – you’ve finished the book?’
‘No. What happens?’
She leant towards me, arching her back between her legs as though starting something in yoga, putting her glass on the floor between us.
‘Why you? Who are you?’
I had postponed the decision. But now I made it willingly: I would tell her the truth, or some of it anyway. I felt perfectly confident of her discretion; talking with her I had sensed almost immediately a quality that I had missed with everyone else since I’d left prison – with the Jacksons, with Wheel and all the men in London: the sense of rational life in a real world. With this woman there were no flaws – no lost affairs, no unsatisfied obsessions, no old wounds, no guilt that would warp the future. I could see now how, by comparison with those others, she was quite free of that air of impending calamity which marked them and which I had not recognised before.