David Lodge - Small World (39 page)

Morris began to weep, quietly, making his blindfold damp. “I told you it was useless asking Desiree to ransom me. She hates my guts.”

“We shall have to make her pity you.”

“How are you going to do that?” says Morris anxiously. “Perhaps if she receives some little memento of you. An ear. A finger…”

“For Christ’s sake,” Morris whimpers.

Carlo laughs. “A leetle joke. No, you must send her a message. You must appeal to her tender feelings.”

“She hasn’t got any tender feelings!”

“It will be a test of your eloquence. The supreme test.”

“Yeah, there were two babies on that KLM flight, twin girls,” says Hermann Pabst. “Nobody ever did discover how they were smuggled on board. All the women passengers were questioned on arrival at Amsterdam, and the stewardesses as well, of course. It was in all the papers, but you would have been too young to remember that.”

“I was a baby myself at the time.”

“Right,” says Hermann Pabst. “I have some cuttings at home, I could let you have copies.” He scribbles a note on a memo pad inside his wallet. He is a big, thickset man, with pale blond hair going white, and a face that has turned red rather than brown in the Californian sunshine. They are sitting in the bar of the Red Carpet Club, Pabst drinking Perrier water and Persse a beer. “I worked for KLM in those days, I was on duty the day the plane landed with those two little stowaways. They were parked in my office for a while, cute little things. Gertrude—my wife—and me, we had no children, not by choice, something to do with Gertrude’s tubes” (he pronounces the word in the American way as “toobs”). “Now they can do an operation, but in those days… anyhow, I called her up, I said ‘Gertrude, congratulations, you just had twins.’ I decided to adopt those kids as soon as I set eyes on them. It seemed…” He gropes for a word.

“Providential?” Persse suggests.

“Right. Like they’d been sent from above. Which, in a way, they had. From 20,000 feet.” He takes a swig of Perrier water and glances at his watch.

“What time does your plane leave?” Persse asks him.

“When I tell it to,” says Hermann Pabst. “It’s my own private jet. But I have to watch the time. I’m attending a reception at the White House this evening.”

Persse looks suitably impressed. “It’s very good of you to give me your time, sir. I can see that you are a very busy man.”

“Yeah, I done pretty well since I came to the States. I gotta plane, a yacht, a ranch near Palm Springs. But let me tell you something, young man, ya can’t buy love. That was where I went wrong with the girls. I spoiled them, smothered them with presents—toys, clothes, horses, vacations. They both rebelled against it in different ways, soon as they became teenagers. Lily ran wild. She discovered boys in a big way, then dope. She got in with a bad crowd at high school. I guess I handled it badly. She ran away from home at sixteen. Well there’s nothing new about that, not in California. But it broke Gertrude’s heart. Didn’t do mine a lot of good either. I have high blood pressure, mustn’t smoke, scarcely any drink”—he gestured to the Perrier water. “After a coupla years we traced Lily to San Francisco. She was living in some crummy commune, shacked up with some guy, or guys, making money by, would you believe, acting in blue movies. We brought her back home, tried to make a fresh start, sent her to a girls’ college in the East with Angie, the best, but it didn’t work out. Lily went to Europe for a vacation study programme and never came back. That was six years ago.”

“And Angelica?”

“Oh, Angie,” Hermann Pabst sighs. “She rebelled in a different way, the opposite way. She became an egghead. Spent all her time reading, never dated boys. Looked down at me and her mother because we weren’t cultured—well, I admit it, I never did have much time for reading, apart from the
Wall Street Journal
and the aviation trade magazines. I tried to catch up with those
Reader’s Digest
Condensed Books, but Angelica threw them in the trash can and gave me some others to read that I just couldn’t make head or tail of. She got straight ‘A’s for every course she took at Vassar, and graduated Summa Cum Laude, then she insisted on going to England to do another Bachelor’s course at Cambridge, then she told her mother and me she was going to Yale graduate school to do complete literature, or somethin’.”

“Comp. Lit.? Comparative Literature?”

“That’s it. Says she wants to be a college teacher. What a waste! I mean, there’s a girl with looks, brains, everything. She could marry anybody she liked. Someone with power, money, ambition. Angie could be a President’s wife.”

“You’re right, sir,” says Persse. He has not thought it prudent to reveal his own matrimonial ambitions with respect to Angelica. Instead, he has represented himself to Mr Pabst as a writer researching a book on the behavioural patterns of identical twins, who happened to meet Angelica in England, and wanted to learn more of her fascinating history.

“What makes it worse, she refuses to let me pay her fees through graduate school. She insists on being independent. Earned her tuition by grading papers for her Professor at Yale—can you imagine it? When I make more money in a single week than he does in a year. There’s only one thing she’ll accept from me, and that’s a card that gives her free travel on Transamerican airlines anywhere in the world.”

“She seems to make good use of it,” says Persse. “She goes to a lot of conferences.”

“Conferences! You said it. She’s a conference freak. I told her the other day, ‘If you didn’t spend so much time going to conferences, Angie, you would have gotten your doctorate by now, and put all this nonsense behind you.’ “

“The other day? You saw Angelica the other day?” says Persse as casually as he can manage. “Is she here in Los Angeles, then?”

“Well, she was. She’s in Honolulu right now.”

“Honolulu?” Persse echoes him, dismayed. “Jaysus!”

“And give you three guesses why she’s there.”

“Another conference?”

“Right. Some conference on John.”

“John? John who?”

Pabst shrugs. “Angie didn’t say. She just said she was going to a conference on John, University of Hawaii.”

“Could it have been ‘Genre’?”

“That’s it.” Pabst looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, McGarrigle, but I have to leave now. You can walk me to the plane if you have any more questions.” He picks up his sleek burgundy leather briefcase, and Persse his scuffed sports bag. They walk out of the air-conditioned building into the smog-hazed sunshine.

“Does Angelica have any contact with her sister, these days?” Persse asks.

“Yeah, that’s what she came home to tell me,” says Mr Pabst. “She’s been studying in Europe these last two years, on a Woodrow Wilson scholarship. Living in Paris, mostly, but travelling around, and always on the lookout for her sister. Finally tracked her down to some nightclub in London. Lily is working as some kind of exotic dancer, apparently. I suppose that means she takes her clothes off, but at least it’s better than blue movies. Angie says Lily is happy. She works for some kind of international agency that sends her all over, to different jobs. Both my girls seem determined to see the world the hard way. I don’t understand them. But then, why should I? They’re not my flesh and blood, after all. I did my best for them, but somewhere along the line I blew it.”

They walk out onto a tarmac parking area for private planes of every shape and size, from tiny one-engined, propeller-driven lightweights, fragile as gnats, to executive jets big as full-size airliners. A group of young men, squatting in the shade of a petrol tanker, rise to their feet expectantly as Hermann Pabst approaches, holding up handwritten signs that say “Denver”, “Seattle”, “St Louis”, “Tulsa”. “Sorry, boys,” says Pabst, shaking his head.

“Who are they?” Persse asks.

“Hitchhikers.”

Persse looks back wonderingly over his shoulder. “You mean they thumb rides in airplanes?”

“Yup. It’s the modern way to hitchhike: hang about the executive jet parks.”

Hermann Pabst’s private plane is a Boeing 737 painted in the purple, orange and white livery of Transamerican Airlines. Its engines are already whining preparatory to departure, whheeeeeeeeeeee! They shake hands at the bottom of the mobile staircase that has been wheeled up to the side of the aircraft.

“Goodbye Mr Pabst, you’ve been very kind.”

“Goodbye, McGarrigle. And good luck with your study. It’s a very interesting subject. People are surprisingly ignorant about twins. Why, Angelica gave me a novel to read once, that had identical twins of different sexes. I didn’t have the patience to go on with it.”

“I don’t blame you,” says Persse.

“Where shall I send those cuttings?”

“Oh—University College, Limerick.”

“Right. So long.”

Hermann Pabst strides up the steps, gives a final wave and disappears inside the aircraft. The steps are wheeled away from the plane and the door swings shut behind him. Persse puts his fingers in his ears as the engine noise rises in pitch and volume, and the plane slowly taxis towards the runway. WHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEE! It disappears out of sight behind a hangar, then, a few minutes later, rises into the air and flies out over the sea before it banks and turns back towards the east. Persse picks up his grip and walks slowly back towards the little group squatting in the shade of the petrol tanker.

“Hi,” says one of the young men.

“Hi,” says Persse squatting down beside him. He takes a piece of foolscap from his bag and writes on it, in large letters, with a felt-tip pen, the word, “HONOLULU.”

The telephone rings in Desiree’s hotel room on the Promenade des Anglais. The man from Interpol sits up sharply, puts on his headphones, switches on his recording apparatus, and nods to Desiree. She picks up the phone.

“Ees dat Signora Zapp?”

“Speaking.”

“I ‘ave message for you, please.”

After a pause and a crackle, Desiree hears Morris’s voice. “Hallo, Desiree, this is Morris.”

“Morris,” she says, “where the hell are you? I’ve had just about…” But Morris is speaking on regardless, and it dawns on Desiree that she is listening to a tape-recording.

“… 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 anymore 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, Desiree, 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 Day
—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, Desiree 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 Desiree, “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?” Desiree 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, Desiree.” 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.”