Famous Last Words (53 page)

The realization I was alone with this horror drew me to my feet. It dawned on me what Reinhardt had in mind. This murder I had asked him for was to be mine completely, and when the authorities came it would be mine to pay for.

And so—of course—I ran.

In the dark of July the 7th, 1943 in Berlin at the Hotel Eden, the Piano Tuner returned to finish what he had begun.

von Ribbentrop said; “it’s too late, now. They’re already on their way. Everything’s been set in motion.”

But Schellenberg said; “you’re wrong, I’m afraid. I’ve called the whole thing off.”

“Called it off? How?”

“Your submarine. It will not surface.”

“But…”

“It will not surface, Excellency, and therefore it will not pick up your cargo.”

von Ribbentrop slumped forward in his chair. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You must let it happen.”

“No,” said Schellenberg. “We have other plans, now.”

von Ribbentrop stared at him.

“We?” he said.

“Yes. We.” Schellenberg smiled—and sat down. “Us.”

After a moment, von Ribbentrop was able to speak again

and said; “you are not one of us.”

“I am, now.”

“You don’t understand what you’re tampering with. You

can’t—or you wouldn’t be doing this.”

“Listen,” said Schellenberg, “you should be grateful. The war is changing everything. The face of everything is changed.

Your friends, the Windsors—they would really do more

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harm than good. And the good they can do is best kept up our sleeve for now.”

“But you don’t understand…”

“You don’t understand. Excellency. I am saying you have lost control of this.”

von Ribbentrop could feel his innards giving way.

“As I say, you should be grateful. You’ve carried it alone so long. And now you have help. That’s all.”

“There are others,” said von Ribbentrop. “You don’t understand what you’re tampering with.”

“What others. Paisley? Ciano? You will come to understand.

The order of your priorities has been changed, Excellency.

Please: believe me. You will come to understand.”

von Ribbentrop stood up. He was afraid his bowels would give away completely. Standing was the only way he could gain control of them.

“And me?” he said. “What happens to me?”

Schellenberg shrugged very pleasantly and smiled in an

altogether friendly way and said; “We’re not in any hurry to decide that.”

We? von Ribbentrop looked at his feet. So Schellenberg

had found the upper echelon, von Ribbentrop’s feet appeared to be dangling in space, they were so very far away.

“Besides,” said Schellenberg, “we don’t know the final

outcome of all this yet. I think we should wait to hear what happens and, in the meantime…”

von Ribbentrop looked up. But there weren’t any meathooks there. There wasn’t any wire, just yet.

Schellenberg sat back.

“We rest.”

“Rest?”

“For now. Yes.” Schellenberg’s eyes lowered. “Sit down, Excellency.”

von Ribbentrop began to fade away in the dark. But he

thought; death is not death until they put you in the ground.

Everything above ground is life. I still have some chances.

So long as I can see the ground…

His lips moved. But he was silent.

And he thought; when you die like that: when they cut

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off your head—does your head go on living? Is it capable of thought? Even for a moment? And—what if there was

something left to say? What if there was something to be told: some warning to be given? And no voice. No voice.

He moved his hand along his thigh towards his knee. He

was aware of every finger. Aware of the cloth. The skin beneath the cloth. The sinew. Tissue. Tendons. Muscles.

Bones.

The marrow.

Everything still there.

Knee.

Shin.

Ankle.

Foot.

Sock.

Shoe.

Floor.

In the dark—in the storm—they were cast adrift. A motor launch had been with them—but all at once there had been a violent wave—and when the wave had passed, the motor

launch was gone. Gone on purpose, of course. The painter had been cut. The last thing Wallis had seen had been a man leaning down to wield the knife.

And the yacht never came. And, of course, the submarine had probably been a myth to begin with.

Only a myth. Or a dream.

Dear God.

They were sitting in the rowboat with their luggage piled around them, when the sun came up.

The Duchess of Windsor was sitting aft—with her arms

spread wide to steady her, the Duke more or less in front of her—turned away.

The storm had departed in the dark and now the sea was

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calm, though the groundswell was terrific and with every rise the Island slithered into view and slid away with every fall.

They were drifting. Waiting. Listening. Six little dogs were lying at their feet. Wallis shaded her eyes and scanned the whole horizon. Nothing—but the Island.

Wallis sighed.

It was over. She looked at the Duke and her mouth twisted down. Whatever they were—here and now—the two of them—

was exactly what they would be forever. She looked away towards one side and then the other, counting her pieces of luggage. Twenty-six.

The back of her neck was rigid. She was perched very still on the edge of the seat. Her hair, pushed back and up, was severe yet elegant. It was covered with a pale blue veil and the veil came down to her chin. Her mouth was very red; her eyes, though blue, had darkened against the intrusion of so much light. Her whole face had frozen and now must carry, even through the veil, through the rest of time.

If only David would speak. But his mind was in the water, trying to wash the past away—and the future, too, she supposed—if he could get his way.

He was holding onto the gunwales—desperately—just as

if the boat were the only reality left.

“David?” she said.

He closed his eyes.

“David,” she said. “Let go.” And she reached across her knees and his and began to release his fingers from their hold. “Let go,” she said. “Let go.”

There. He relaxed. He even looked up at Wallis.

It’s Thursday, she was thinking.

Cards.

The Island held them two more years. And every evening

the Duke went walking with Wallis and the six small dogs.

The perimeters of their empire—newly defined—were the

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mans—trying not to look like soldiers, trying not to be an army (armies were being slaughtered)—caught in the middle, turning circles on their backs like flies about to die. And the Russians moving in from the east.

Thank God for Switzerland, from which direction only

spies could come, singly and in pairs, perhaps, but not in armies. Never an army of spies.

Mauberley could hardly see. His eyes were weighted down with plaster dust and lack of sleep. And his fingers, drained of their blood since he had to hold his hand above his head to write, could barely any longer hold the pencil. Sometimes he held it like a knife and carved the letters into the wall.

Other times he had to use both hands to hold it up, while yet again he simply had to stop and, while his mind rushed on across the words, he tried to hold them back until his hands could master them.

By now he was reaching the end.

Had all the truths been told? Had everything been said?

He gazed around the walls. Not bad. Four rooms completed.

Isabella’s rooms, at that. And even though his words

weren’t eagles, her eagles were there. He had put them there so long ago, it seemed. All her life Isabella had believed above all other things in the value of the human mind. And she had placed her faith in the currency of the human mind, the written word. Her husband had died for the written

word, and her children because of it. Nothing he knew of Isabella Loverso was more profoundly moving than that.

And yet, in spite of those deaths of family and friends, and in spite of her terrible fear, she had remained determined to salvage what she could of words and hold them up against the sword.

Mauberley got down off his chair. Now would be a good

time for music, moving him through to the end. Schubert’s “last words” would do very nicely. This, after all, was Schubert’s country—not only the place, but the ending of things.

Mauberley shuffled through the rooms with his candelabra in hand, until he came to the salon. All along the ledges of the windows, even in spite of the shutters, there was snow.

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He placed the opening disc of the sonata on the Victrola, turned the crank and lowered the heavy arm with its precious needle—the last—into place. He lit another KavaJier

cigarette and washed away its cardboard taste with a great long swig of brandy. Looking across the room, he read: Wallis is sitting in my mind as I saw her first in the lobby of the old Imperial Hotel in Shanghai…

He raised the bottle.

“Prosit.”

Done. He could see himself in the mirror. Not a happy

sight. Ah, well. He straightened the line of his pinned-up coat and even went so far as to match the ends of his scarf and push them neatly back inside against his chest. Using his knuckles, since his fingerends were in pain, almost raw, from holding the silver pencil in the cold, he whisked away the plaster dust and the cigarette ash and the little bits of glass—his rhinestones from all the broken windows he had failed to mend.

And all this while the perfect music, played by the perfect fingers of Alfred Cortot, made its perfect rhythms and made its perfect impact—Schubert’s last words—endings.

Summations. Yes. There was one last thing for Mauberley to say.

Think of the sea, he began to write and went on writing until the music ended.

Damn.

Mauberley got down off the chair and, still with the pencil in his hand, he made his way to the Victrola, lifted the arm and turned the record over.

Last movement: Allegro ma non troppo.

He cranked the machine accordingly: sprightly, but not

too quickly. And smiled. It was excellent advice, with the end in sight and a good night’s rest and…

Who was that?

He moved towards the door.

“Hugo?”

No answer.

Mauberley looked back into the room. The candelabra’s

candles were guttering. He put it back in its place and before

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he blew them out, he took up another candle and drew a

light for it from the others. Then, closing the door behind him—always his safety precaution—he moved off down the hall towards his own room.

“Hugo?”

Still no answer. It must only have been the chandeliers he had heard, going through one of their midnight dances in the wind.

He was tired. He would sleep.

“Hugo?”

Nothing. So when he reached his door, he turned and

looked back down the corridor and saw that Garbo’s door and Isabella’s door and all the other doors were closed and all his lights extinguished.

“Goodnight,” he said out loud.

And the chandeliers jangled. Draughts from somewhere.

Never mind. Bed.

In the morning, Hugo would come with an egg, perhaps.

And perhaps the wind would die away and the sun would

shine. You never know. A person never knows.

It would be such a pleasure, he thought, to sit in the sun and to eat an egg. Just to sit there. Just to be there.

Mauberley turned the corner into his room.

“Hugo?”

There was someone.

“Kachelmayer? Is it you…?”

No.

It was Harry Reinhardt.

As, of course, it had to be.

Mauberlev’s struggle was mostly a struggle not to be slaughtered.

The death itself was welcome. But he wanted not to

be slaughtered. Please. He put out his hands. He even offered the silver pencil. Anything, not to die like this. If one could only pay the executioner, the way that kings had done; be quick. Be quick. —

But it was not to be.

And worst of all, in the final moments of his struggle, with

his arms both broken and his fingers locked at the ends of his hands, he was turned by Harry, long enough to see the figure of Hugo, die iveisse Ratte, standing apparently passive; watching.

Just as the ice pick entered the eye, Mauberley’s very last thought was: the brain itself can feel no pain.

And cannot bleed. It can only die. And death is rest.

Reinhardt’s final act was to get the boy to help him burn the notebooks. All of Mauberley’s journals and papers and letters, poured into the bathtub and covered with kerosene and

set ablaze. It was marvellous to Harry’s eyes. The complete destruction of the man he had been sent, by Schellenberg, to kill—and of all his words.

The boy, when the fire was over, put out his hand for

payment.

“Once we’re downstairs,” said Harry.

“But you promised,” said Hugo.

“Yes. And I keep my promises,” said Harry.

And they went out into the corridor.

Hugo started down the stairs. He was debating whether

or not he should tell this man about the writing on the walls.

In fact, as they got to the landing, he turned to say so.

“There’s…” he said.

But that was all.

His body was found where Harry Reinhardt felled him.

The others also. The ratty father; the terrified mother; the running, squealing children.

It was over.

Out beyond the shutters the wind was bringing down the

last great blizzard of the winter from the mountain. All the shutters banged and the snow crept through into the rooms and all the candles guttered and went out and drifted over the bodies in the courtyard and the silent gramophone wound down.

All the light there was, was grey. And the air was filled

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with crystal noise and a blowing avalanche into which Harry Reinhardt disappeared.

*

Quinn finished reading at dawn.

Crossing to the windows, he opened them and pushed the