Brond (10 page)

‘Slainte!’ he said, grinning as if at a private joke.

The whisky plucked at my temples.

‘So what’s inside?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ve been carrying it around, quite reluctant to be parted from it and yet you weren’t curious?’

‘I didn’t say I wasn’t curious.’

‘To take a peep inside must have been a temptation.’ He turned the box and I saw the dent from its fall when Margaret pushed it away in the library. ‘Was that how this
happened?’

‘The wrapper’s still across it. There’s no way of telling what’s inside.’

He picked at the tape. It held firm and he eased place after place till it curled free. Once started it lifted off in one piece bringing with it a skin of brown paper. Unhurriedly, he picked at
the tape until he had cleared the top. Gently then he started to tease out the knots on the string. I must have let out a breath for he smiled at me.

‘Like sharpening pencils,’ he said, ‘one of the not quite mechanical tasks that soothes.’

‘Wouldn’t scissors be faster?’

Just then, though, another knot parted and he folded back the wrapping paper. I could have cursed to see the box inside was also taped.

‘No need to be consistent,’ Brond said and he pushed his fingers in under the edge and ripped off the lid. It tore and shredded against the tape and he brushed the wreckage aside
until the opening was cleared.

I craned forward so that our heads almost touched. Brond sat back.

‘Satisfy your curiosity.’

There was a towel folded round something. The cloth was stained, dull patches like fruit stains.

‘Someone’s been hurt,’ Brond said. He lifted the bundle out and laid it beside the box. All down each side of the cloth was marked. ‘Someone’s been hurt
badly.’

Using the tips of his fingers, he flipped the bundle open.

‘Recognise that?’

‘I’ve never seen it before,’ I said.

‘You know what it is though?’

‘I’m not blind. It’s a gun.’

His smile seemed genuinely amused.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you would have to drop this little box into the Brazilian jungle before there would be a chance of a finder who wouldn’t recognise that
much.’

‘Has it been fired?’ I looked uneasily at the stains on the cloth.

‘More than once. Someone has been angry or frightened. I wonder which.’

The towelling would soak liquid up and there was so much staining. I was afraid. I had done nothing but, as I had learned the shapes of guns without handling them, heard them fired in films,
seen newsreel deaths, so I had learned being innocent was no excuse.

‘I’ve never seen that thing before. It was a parcel I was trying to get rid of.’

Brond gathered the cloth round the grip and lifting the gun pointed it towards me.

I knew the function of a gun; its operations as a mechanism and their consequences. I understood what Brond was doing when he put his finger into a fold of the cloth and laid it on the trigger.
I expected to die. I watched the slow pressure of his finger as he squeezed.

‘You were telling the truth,’ Brond said. ‘You don’t know anything about hand guns.’

‘You must be bloody mad. I might have died of fright.’

‘Young healthy man. You’re not fragile.’ He laid the gun down. ‘Czechoslovakian. A favourite weapon of terrorists.’

He put more whisky into a glass and laid it beside the one I had only sipped.

‘Neat this time, eh?’

I drank it off, choking a little, but the warmth ran down the centre of my body. I put my hand to my face and the index finger of my left hand touched my lips. They trembled and I willed them to
be firm. Then as my upper lip pressed against my finger I felt the strong beating of my heart. I was alive.

‘A gun, a cloth that tells its own story – though pages are missing. If it tells of an end, we should be even more anxious to hear the middle and the beginning.’ He tipped up
the box, stirred the wrappings with his hand. ‘No letter, no cryptic message. Only yourself and the question what is to be made of you.’

‘All this is nothing to do with me. I was asked to keep it—’

‘For a friend.’

‘No, for you.’

‘I had asked you to keep this for me?’

‘The girl who was with me in the restaurant. She brought it to my digs. She said she’d got it from Peter Kilpatrick.’ I waited but he gave no sign of recognising the name.
‘She told me Kilpatrick was going away and I was to keep the parcel. She told me you would collect it.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know why. Jackie wouldn’t keep it for me and I wanted her to but she wouldn’t. And I—’

‘You got suspicious.’

He sipped whisky and I looked down to avoid his eyes. He was a good listener; at least he hadn’t interrupted me to ask who Jackie was. It was possible, of course, that he didn’t need
to ask. The shoe on his right foot had a raised platform sole. With a shoe like that, you would limp; the upper body dipping at each step. When I looked up, his eyes were on my face. It felt as if
he was reading my thoughts.

‘The girl interests me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about her.’

‘Her name’s Briody. Margaret Briody. She’s a student – in her first year. I think – yes, it must be her first year, she’s in two of my Ordinary classes. You
know her. She was at the Professor’s party.’

It tumbled out, whatever I knew; if I had known more, I would have told him. I had not thought of myself as being like that, but at the time I had no shame.

‘ “I want to be shot of it.” You said that a moment ago.’ Brond looked at me thoughtfully. ‘It’s an idiom, but an odd one. Yet you had no idea what was in the
package?’

He picked up the gun again. My stomach clenched, but this time he pointed the muzzle at his own head.

‘The package you want to be
shot
of.’

In the silence, I could hear the parts slide across each other as he squeezed the trigger for a second time.

‘Russian roulette,’ he said, ‘devised in an obscenity of boredom. Your turn.’

‘For God’s sake!’

He put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger, then pointed it at my stomach. I had had enough. I clutched my stick and headed for the door. Brond made no attempt to stop me. I tore it
open.

Primo was sitting astride a chair facing me. Without getting up, he shook his head in warning. His hands rested on the chair back. The flesh across his fingers was pulpy and liver-coloured. It
looked bad, as if one or more fingers might be broken.

I closed the door on him.

‘You still have some of your drink left,’ Brond said.

Slowly I went back and sat down. Since there was nothing better to do, I drank the whisky. It was a taste in my mouth, nothing more.

Brond brought the bottle and put it between us. We had a still life – the whisky, a muddle of wrapping paper, a length of marked towel, a gun.

‘I don’t want any more to drink.’

‘Nonsense.’ He poured into both glasses. ‘You’re what – six feet? With a sound pair of kidneys, excited as you are, you could finish the bottle and keep your
wits.’

It was easier to drink than to argue.

‘We’ll have a longer chat another time. You’re an interesting young man. When I’m less pressed for time, you’ll tell me all about yourself.’

The absurd idea came into my head it was like a job interview; only instead of a knife to see if you balanced peas on it as a test there was malt whisky and a Czech gun.

‘I’m a student,’ I said. ‘I was given a parcel to keep. I wish I’d never seen it.’

Into the silence a clock behind me spaced sweet chimes.

‘What an uncomplicated young man you make yourself sound.’

He stood up and I followed him to the far door. With Brond leading the way, we passed through another room, a passage, another room. They were places we crossed – Brond in front, Primo
behind me. No one knew I was here. Perhaps Margaret . . . No. She only knew I had gone away in a car.

We came into a small entrance hall. It looked very much like the one I had come in by, but smaller. When he opened the door, I saw across the landing the other door with its raw gouged
panels.

I stepped over the threshold on to the dirty grey stone landing like a prisoner released.

‘Wait!’ Brond said. ‘This won’t do!’

Stopping me then was like a cruel joke. He touched my shoulder.

‘Your stick,’ he said. ‘You’ve left it behind. It must be by the chair in the study.’

Primo turned back into the flat. I concentrated on keeping upright; I wanted my face to be without expression. Don’t whine, had been Primo’s advice; don’t whine. On the door
there was a piece of cardboard with a name printed on it: Anders.

‘Not an alias,’ Brond said following my glance. ‘A simple forename. Anders Brond.’

‘Anders,’ I said. The name Anderson and its history came to my mind. ‘That’s a Swedish name.’

‘Or you’ll find it in Finland. The Swedes are the aristocrats of Finland.’

A door closed inside and Primo appeared again. I took the stick from him and felt the difference at once.

‘It’s not mine,’ I said, and cursed my stupidity. Yes, it’s mine. Let me take it and go. Any stick does to lean upon. To walk away.

‘Never mind,’ Brond said. ‘I’ll make you a present of it.’

For some reason, perhaps because I was exhausted, perhaps because I had been sitting for so long, walking was harder than it had been since my accident. I needed the stick. All my weight fell on
it. With great labour, I crossed to the stairs.

‘Wait!’ Brond said for the second time.

I stopped. It seemed as if the cruel play was to be ended. As I waited, I saw a body, as if it had never been mine, lying by the side of a road with rain falling on it.

Brond came close.

‘It’s only fair to the Finns to add,’ he said, ‘that a time came when those proud Swedes lost their university posts and their comfortable places in the civil
service.’

At what he had chosen to say or at the look on my face, he burst into laughter and tapped me on the chest. Even when the door closed behind him, the laughter hung with the echo of what he said
last, ‘Things change.’ I was alone on the landing of an old tenement that smelled of a hundred and fifty years of betrayal.

As I stood, a child whimpered. The sound shocked out of the darkness below me. The bulb above my head lit the two doors and the boarded window at the turn of the stair. From somewhere beyond
that, a child whimpered out of the dark.

At the second flight I stumbled, afraid of a fall. There was a rustling whisper in the dark. I slid one foot until I found a step then gripped the bannister edging my way down. In a field last
summer a pheasant had sprung up from under my feet. It was like that: an uprising turbulence and I could see nothing and threw out my hands. There was a cry of pain and a child’s voice,
‘I’m sorry.’

Under my hand a thin shoulder. Without letting it go, I passed my other hand up to her face.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

I whispered the questions as if it were a trap. The child’s voice wheedled at me out of the darkness.

‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said.

‘What do you want?’

‘I live here.’

‘For Christ’s sake then, knock and go in.’

‘My daddy put me out.’

Why did I have to meet her?

‘I’ll knock,’ I said. ‘You can’t sit here alone in the dark.’

I had dropped my stick and now, holding her, I felt around my feet for it. I wanted it in my right hand when a father like hers opened the door to my knocking. The wood brushed my hand and I
pulled it to me.

‘What are you doing?’ the child whispered.

‘My stick. I wanted my stick.’

She moaned and took my hand from her shoulder and carried it in both of hers down between her legs. I felt the bone under the heel of my hand, and my fingers curled into her.

‘Don’t hit me,’ she said.

And I pushed her away. I heard the thud of her hitting the wall but she made no sound. Flailing, crippled, stumbling in the dark, I fell from flight to flight until I reached the outer
world.

I left that street and the next before I stopped. It was moonlight and I put a hand across my eyes and was weeping.

EIGHT

T
he last time I had been in a taxi had been at my Aunt Netta’s funeral. Don’t upset your Aunt, they’d told me when I was little,
she won’t have a breath to draw. I sat watching the dark streets go past, on my way to the Kennedys’ house where I lived, remembering my Aunt’s fat white arms and the noises that
knocked in her chest when she got excited.

I had taken a taxi because one came past empty when I was tired. I began to look through my pockets for money. I reached into my breast pocket with two fingers and felt a fold of paper which I
drew out between them. It seemed to be a note of some kind and I remembered Brond touching me there. At first I could not read it but when I angled it at the window, brief light caught Margaret
Briody’s name. Under it an address had been pencilled.

There was a sliding glass between the driver and passengers. I tapped on it and he pulled it back. I leaned forward until I was almost through it.

‘Do you know this address?’

‘What?’

‘On this paper. If you know it.’

He reached with one hand and like me held it slanted to the street to catch the light.

‘So?’

‘Would you take me there?’

‘You mean after or instead of?’

‘I want to go there now.’

‘You’re paying.’

I wanted to know where Kilpatrick had gone, and why she had given me the parcel, and if she had known what it was. I wanted someone to talk to me. I wanted to see Margaret.

You’re paying, he’d said. A gun had been pointed at me that night, the trigger pulled, and now I was sweating because I might not have the money to pay for a taxi ride. Very
cautiously, I started to feel again through each pocket. It was hard to count. I got different totals and then I dropped a coin on the floor and it rolled and got lost though I scrabbled after
it.

When I sat up, the driver was watching me in the mirror.

‘What’s up?’

I leaned forward again into the opening.