Trio
Page 26
“The flat is in the 13th arrondissement. I saw him go in,” Kincade said. “Followed him in and of course had lost him. But I discovered there was a postbox in the lobby with the name Duhameldeb on it. Bingo.”
“His flat?”
“Or a family member’s. But I bet you good odds Anny Viklund is in it.”
“All that avoiding action is suspicious. Bit of a giveaway.”
“You catch on fast, Mr. Kydd.”
Once more Talbot was beginning to find Kincade’s relentless, sardonic persona a bit wearing.
“What do we do now?” he said, flatly, not humouring Kincade.
“Now comes the fun part. We drive over there in our special hire car and watch and wait.”
They drove south-east to the 13th arrondissement. Talbot didn’t know this area of Paris. It was like another city, like the suburbs of some provincial town with tatty, dilapidated towers of apartments, and bustling, busy streets filled with cheap shops. They passed a small market selling clothes and vegetables. The people looked poor, needy. They parked the car with a view of the entrance to the apartment block and waited. The afternoon seemed interminable. Talbot smoked three cigarettes in two hours. Kincade went to a superette and bought them fizzy drinks and fig rolls.
“I haven’t had a fig roll since I was a boy,” Talbot said.
“I think I’ve become addicted to them,” Kincade said. “This is what I do, Mr. Kydd. Sit around waiting and watching for hours and hours and hours. Don’t encourage your children to join my industry.”
“What do you think is going to happen?”
“At some stage she’s going to walk out of that front door, there. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow,” Kincade said. “Maybe the next day.”
Talbot settled down, thinking that he would give it another twenty-four hours, full stop. Then he would head back home and see if there was any way the film could be saved.
Kincade munched at a fig roll, swigged from his bottle of pop.
“How was your club, your Inferno, last night?” Talbot asked, as casually as he could manage.
“It was excellent. I had sex with a very nice guy called Jean-Louis.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Don’t you have sex, Mr. Kydd?”
“I’m not about to discuss my private life with you.”
“Your choice.”
They sat in silence for a while. Kincade ate another fig roll.
“I have been to a club, you know,” Talbot said. “In Brighton.” He instantly regretted his bravado.
“Oh, yeah? Which one?”
“It’s called the Icebox.”
“I’ve been there,” Kincade said. “Nice enough place.”
“So it seemed. I was meeting a friend. An army friend,” he added, as if that somehow brought more propriety to the confession.
“Were you in the army?”
“Yes. In the war. The Second World War, that is.”
“I’ve heard about that one.” Kincade closed his eyes for a moment. “See any action?”
“Far too much.”
“I’m going to have to adjust my dossier on you, Mr. Kydd. A soldier. The Second World War. Saw action.”
“Your dossier is your concern.”
“I assume your army friend bats for the lavender team as well.”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“Did you have sex with him?”
Talbot sighed. “You don’t always have to have sex, you know.”
“Why go to a club, then?”
“Never mind.” Talbot couldn’t believe how the conversation had become so wildly uncontrolled, veering around in ways he should never have allowed.
He was aware that Kincade was staring at him.
“Would you like to have sex with me?” Kincade said.
This was typical Kincade, Talbot recognised. Throwing a conversational grenade into the room.
“No. Certainly not. But thanks for asking.”
“It was a hypothetical question, don’t worry.” Kincade swigged from his bottle and belched quietly.
Talbot changed his mind about staying on for one more day. He felt irritated. Kincade had got to him with his brazenness, his provocations. He felt his back itching as if the discomfort was a physical correlation of his mental agitation. He wasn’t enjoying sitting in this car any more even if he understood the unique pressures of the journey that had brought him here. He would give it one more hour, then he was heading home. This was getting out of hand. Ridiculous. Why should he, of all people, be putting himself—
“Hello. Here she is,” Kincade said quietly.
Talbot looked at the entrance to the apartment block. He saw Anny emerge and walk along the pathway. She was wearing a short cream raincoat, sunglasses and one of those peaked forage caps favoured by folk singers pulled down low over her brow. No one would have recognised her, he thought.
“What do we do now?” Talbot said.
“We? You follow her. My job is over, man.”
Talbot stepped out of the car, feeling a little foolish, and set off after Anny, keeping a good distance between them. She stopped at a worn near-grassless little park where some children were playing on swings and a roundabout. There was a decorative pond full of floating rubbish. Then she moved on, turning down a street. He looked for its name—rue de la Colonie. Here there were a few shops—a butcher, a shoe shop, a superette and, on the corner, a large café with a stained chocolate-brown awning and chairs and tables set out on the pavement. Café Couderc was its name. Anny found a table outside and signalled a waiter. Talbot hovered, moving behind her so she wouldn’t spot him, his sense of foolishness returning forcefully. A foolishness that began quickly to shade into anger. He was a distinguished film producer and here was his film star hiding incognito in Paris, under contract to YSK Films, jeopardising everyone’s work and livelihood, not to mention the art they were trying to create. The film business had landed him in some ridiculous and stupid situations but this one was unmatched. It was time to sort out everything once and for all.
15
Anny looked up from her coffee as a man sat down opposite her.
“Hello, Anny,” he said, in a friendly voice.
She stared at him in what she knew was cartoon astonishment. The last person she’d ever expect to see—here, sitting in front of her—Talbot Kydd, her producer.
“Hello, Talbot.”
She saw he was wearing a dark grey suit, a pale blue shirt and a thin maroon tie with small badges on it. His white hair was swept stiffly back in two wings on either side of his shiny bald head. As usual, he was looking smart and well dressed, she thought, almost distinguished. He could have been a retired ambassador, or some high-up museum curator art-expert type, or a rich banker, or a count in a minor, sophisticated aristocracy.
“How the hell did you find me?” she said, finally. “I don’t believe it.”
“It was quite a journey,” he said in his clenched, reedy English voice, “but here I am.” He gestured at the café and the street. “In this dead-end corner of Paris. What’s going on, Anny? You should be in Brighton today, filming your secret marriage with Troy. Not here.”
She felt tears fill her eyes.
“I know,” she said softly. “I know I should. I’m so sorry this happened.”
“Look,” he said, more firmly. “We can sort everything out. We have lawyers, we have influence. You didn’t do anything seriously wrong.”
“I know,” she said, “but this isn’t about me. It’s about Cornell and what he did, what he represents. They want to drag him down and drag me down with him.” She paused. “I have to take a stand. I have to speak out against what’s happening to me, this witch-hunt.”
“No you don’t. Just do your job. The one you’re so good at.”
/> “No, Jacques is arranging everything. We’re going to have a press conference, here in Paris. He’s got all his friends in the media alerted. We’re going to expose those fuckers. Tell the world what the FBI and the American state is doing. I’m innocent. I’ve been caught up in this business through no fault of my own and they want to destroy me.” She was breathing deeply, she realised; she tried to calm herself.
She saw Talbot purse his lips as he thought.
“I don’t think a press conference is a wise idea,” he said gently. “It’s too public a confrontation. You’re inviting them to attack you.”
“They’re already here in Paris, the FBI—and the CIA for all I know. They’ve been harassing Jacques. He had to call his lawyer. They want to bring me down, Talbot. We have to fight fire with fire.”
“All right, all right, let’s talk through the options,” Talbot said.
He offered her a cigarette and she took it. He lit it for her, then lit his own.
“There’s another way of looking at this problem,” he said patiently, “and maybe you haven’t thought of it. But you signed a contract and you’ve been paid a great deal of money to appear in our film. And now you’ve run away. And the film isn’t finished.”
“It’s not my fault.”
Talbot smiled, sadly, it now seemed to her.
“If you don’t come back, Anny,” he said, “the brutal truth is that you’ll never work on a film again. You’ll be seen as too big a risk. No one will insure a film you’re in and, as you know, you can’t start a film without such insurance—a ‘bond’ as they call them. I’m sure you’ve never thought of this. So, far and away the best thing for you to do is to come back—come back with me—and we’ll sort out this problem with the FBI and your ex-husband. We can say he threatened you, threatened to kill you if you didn’t give him money. You were frightened…” He paused and took a puff on his cigarette. “But,” he went on, “if you don’t come back, it’ll be…” He paused again, thinking about what he was going to say. “It’ll be a scandal in our sorry little world. A huge scandal and no one will ever forget it. Or forget you.”
Anny felt confused. She’d never thought of this consequence and she felt alarm building in her. Where was Jacques? He said he’d be right behind her. She felt the familiar fluttering bird of panic begin to stir beneath her ribcage.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kydd—Talbot. I’m sorry for you, for the film, for Troy, but I can’t come back. I wouldn’t be safe. They’d try to send me to prison, I know. I’m only safe here, in France. They can’t get me in France.”
“It’s the wrong decision, Anny.”
“What else is new?” She laughed. “All my decisions are wrong. It’s my specialty. It’s what I do. I fuck up.”
Still chuckling to herself, somewhat shocked by the acuity of her observation, she stubbed out her cigarette.
“What’s so funny?” came a voice.
She looked up. Jacques was standing there, staring at her, angrily. Talbot looked round. He stood up. Two tall men facing off against each other.
“What are you fucking doing here?” Jacques said to him.
“I’m trying to persuade Anny to come back with me.”
“So she can go to jail in America?”
“She won’t go to jail, you idiot. We’ll sort everything out and she can finish the film she agreed to make with us.”
“This piece-of-shit film—you’d risk her life for that? You’d turn her over to the FBI for that?”
“No one’s going to risk anyone’s life, Monsieur Duhameldeb—”
Then she saw Jacques strike Talbot in the face, hard, suddenly—he knocked him down with one blow. He fell sprawling to the pavement, uttering a strangled yelp of astonishment, his hand going to his mouth. He shook his head and tried to stand up but Jacques shoved him back down.
“Putain d’Anglais,” he said, and spat on him. “You can pay for her coffee. Charge it to your shit film.”
He took Anny’s hand and led her brusquely away, striding off with her.
Anny looked back quickly. People were helping Talbot to his feet and she could see he had blood coming from his mouth. She felt shame. Why had Jacques hit him? Talbot was a nice man. He was only trying to help, in his way.
Jacques tugged at her hand and she hurried to keep up with him.
ESCAPE
1
The River Ouse wasn’t as deep as it had been on her previous visit, so it seemed to Elfrida. Then she remembered it was tidal, here by Rodmell, so the tide must be out, or going out, or had been out and was coming in, she reasoned. Still, it was deep enough for her purposes. She looked around. It would have been better if the day had been dull with perhaps some intermittent drizzle—the pathetic fallacy had always seemed to her an underrated literary tool—it would have been more appropriate to what was about to occur. But instead it was warm and breezy with large gaps of blue sky between the cloud-islands scudding eastwards. A near-perfect summer’s day.
She had bought a walking stick at an ironmonger’s, a sturdy oak one with a metal ferrule at the end that was proving very useful when it came to prising up large stones embedded in the embankment’s turf. Her fur coat smelt a bit mildewy but as it had only cost her a pound at a church jumble sale she could hardly complain. There would have been no point in buying anything more expensive. It was all about symbols: the walking stick, the fur coat, the wellington boots. All she needed now was a decent-sized stone that would fit in a pocket.
She left the river bank and advanced into the meadow, eyes on the ground searching for stones. She spotted one, about the size of a Cornish pasty, and dug it out with the aid of the iron tip of the walking stick. She brushed it clean with the palms of her hands. It weighed two or three pounds, she reckoned, and she assumed it was the same size—approximately—as the one Virginia Woolf had placed in her pocket. It had to fit in a pocket, after all. Calculating further, as she rammed it into the right-hand pocket of her fur coat, she realised that it must have been the sodden coat that would have really weighed Virginia down—not the stone—the sodden coat would have been far more effective. Funny that no one else had elaborated this theory, she thought. Try swimming in a fur coat. Even for Virginia Woolf the stone was more of a symbol, a symbol that this was her clear intent to end her life—that she was not victim of an accident, hadn’t slipped and fallen in. Because of the stone, they wouldn’t be able to rewrite the story of her life more comfortably. Poor, brave, mad woman.
With the stone now snug in its pocket, Elfrida walked, in a somewhat ungainly way, back up the embankment and stared at the river again. Should she jump in? Or should she slither down the bank on her bottom and wade in? Whatever she decided, she would deliberately leave the stick on the bank to indicate where she’d entered the water. She looked downstream to the bridge at Southease wondering vaguely where her body would end up. She didn’t care, in fact: she was at the end of her tether, she admitted to herself, the very end. Her marriage was a shameful farce; she seemed incapable of writing more than a few lines of the novel that was going to redeem her, cancel out the years of silence and revive her reputation. Add to this the fact that her arm was infested with tiny parasites feeding on her skin. It was more than one person could take. She was pleased that as a side consequence of ending her own miserable existence she’d also drown these vile microbes.
She reached into her left pocket and removed her bottle of vodka. She took too large a swig and coughed, harshly. And she was an alcoholic, let’s not forget that, she told herself. All in all, oblivion would be a blessing. Then she heard, as if in answer to her cough, a distant laugh.
She looked upriver towards Lewes and saw a small group of ramblers wandering along the Ouse’s bank on her side of the river. Fuck. Just when she was ready. She’d have to let them pass, now, and no doubt nod and smile and say, “Lovely day, isn’t it?”
She leant on her stick and stared out over the river as if in a contemplative reverie. Maybe they’d just walk on by and not disturb her trance. She’d pretend they weren’t there.
She heard their excited chatter draw nearer. She closed her eyes. Please, just keep going. Ignore me, leave me alone.
“My goodness,” she heard the man say. “What an extraordinary coincidence!”
She turned, vaguely recognising the man in shorts, then absolutely recognising him as she spotted his yellow-grey Abraham Lincoln beard. Maitland Bole, of all the people on this earth. She almost felt like crying.
Bole halted his little group and stepped towards her.
“Yes, what a coincidence,” Elfrida said as they shook hands, trying to raise a smile. “Just doing some research.”
Bole gestured at her fur coat. “Getting into the spirit, eh?”
“I mustn’t keep you.”
“We’ve walked over from Charleston,” he said. “We call it the Vanessa to Virginia walk. We’ll go up to Monk’s House via the church and that’ll be that. Time for a tankard of foaming ale in the Abergavenny—not for me, of course. You’re very welcome to join us.” He lowered his voice. “I should explain. These guided tours are another sideline. Du Côté de Chez Virginia Woolf. Increasingly popular.”
“Some other time, perhaps,” Elfrida said, faintly.
Bole swivelled round to face his group of women. They were mainly middle-aged, Elfrida saw, with stout walking shoes and anoraks. Three in bright headscarves, one in a straw hat and the fifth—the only youngster—who looked Japanese. They were all staring curiously at this fur-coated, rubber-booted woman on the banks of the Ouse in midsummer, Elfrida thought, with good reason.