Goodbye Again (11 page)

How could someone like this be involved in Nazi art looting? My mother, the worn, tired face, but always happy in the kitchen making apfelstrudel or Wiener schnitzel. What possible clue was there, in either of their lives, which might have led one to suspect this sort of evil past in them? I couldn’t deal with these thoughts about my parents anymore. I had to switch to something else, to a much happier time: going to America when I was eighteen and staying near Charlottesville, Virginia, with wealthy German friends of my father’s, the Kochs. They had a stud farm out in fields
with white fences, big chestnut hunters, some arabs, palominos, a long row of stables.

They hunted in the Fall with the Albermarle County pack. I spent a whole year there and loved it. Riding out into wild country, up into the Blue Ridge Mountains, forested, with tumbling streams, old ruined homesteads and apple orchards from early settlers in the mountains, with deer and wild turkeys jumping up in front of you and having to stay clear of the bear tracks.

I could keep my mind on this for a bit, until I realized now that Mr Koch might well have been a war criminal. Since he was an old friend of my father’s – they had been in the army together – he and his stud farm could well have been financed by the looted art. The Blue Ridge memories were at risk of being tainted as well.

I’d liked the Kochs and they helped me get into the University at Charlottesville, where I studied languages, French and German. I knew German anyway and had good matriculation French. I didn’t have any problems until I met Curtis, one of the English professors, at a frat party in Rugby Road. He was young and brilliant, vividly engaging, from an old Southern tobacco family. A gentleman. He’d just had a novel published, which had apparently been well reviewed. He’d described it to me as a ‘literary’ novel that first evening. I didn’t know then that there was any other kind.

Indeed there was, he said, and he talked to me about all the other sorts of novels in the following months. Except the sort of novels he also wrote, which I didn’t find out about until after we were married a year later and were living outside town in an old clapboard house off the Military Road.

He wrote hardcore pornography, under another name, for a publisher in Paris. I found out by chance when I discovered some of the books. They’d been posted over from France, the parcel had partly broken open, and Curtis was away. One fell out. I glanced through it. Brutal sexual athletics, where the woman, who was
clearly me, was doing things we’d never done. I saw how he’d lied and used me as a sort of sexual guinea pig in reality and then in his fiction, as the manipulated, degraded ‘heroine’ in the novel.

I hadn’t slept with anyone before Curtis, but when I found out about his other literary efforts and how I figured in them, I exploded. I’d been used as his muse, but a soiled muse. I gave men up and decided never to be used again. That’s when I met Martha. Martha seized my real heart.

I’d been down in New Orleans researching an article on French-Cajun cooking. There’d been a hurricane raging round the Gulf and no flights out of New Orleans that day, so I’d taken the train back, the Amtrak Crescent to New York, as she had too. She’d been giving a lecture at the Maritime Law School at Tulane.

We met in the dining car, first night out, both of us alone, so the steward put us at the same table for two. She had a delicate, rather plain face, with two swathes of straight hair either side of a central parting. Narrow-shouldered, unfashionable, in a beige wool skirt, a dun-coloured silk blouse, a cameo brooch. Though in her mid thirties she had an air of immaturity and innocence, a fragile,
otherworldly
appearance. I didn’t know then what drew me to Martha, but I knew what this was several months later, after we’d met again in New York and she’d moved into my West Side apartment.

It was her adolescent restlessness, that first night on the train in the storm. The way she fidgeted with her cutlery, her napkin, looking out the window aghast, like Dorothy in
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
as if the hurricane was going to hurl itself upon us at any moment and overturn the huge train, and we’d all be sucked up into the raging skies. She was so earnest, naïve and frightened. And I thought I knew, five years later, how it was just these qualities, which at first had attracted me, that took her away from me. Her appealing fidgets, her seriousness, that quizzical gleam in the eye – these were the seemingly innocent seeds which were to grow
into exotic hothouse blooms, an overweening ambition to take a leaf out of my creative writing books and write a virgin-
attorney-working
-death-row-in-Miami novel.

I asked her later what had attracted her to me. ‘Almost the first words you said in the dining car, looking at the menu – “I’m going to have the New York Strip Steak.” The daring way you said it. It was somehow sexy.’ It must have been. We shared my small sleeping compartment that first night out in the train from New Orleans.

That meeting with Martha was more than a dozen years later, though. After I left Curtis I went back to Dublin and moped a while with my parents in Killiney. Then I went back to New York. I did a cookery course, at the Cercle de Cuisine, near the Lincoln Center. Then I worked as a guide on the Circle Line Manhattan boats, and then the same in the UN. I did other odd jobs, in restaurants mostly, waitressing at first, then the cooking, which I suppose was what I’d really wanted all along.

I was lucky. I was waitressing in a small West Side restaurant, the Brittany du Soir. Red check tablecloths, bistro style, damn good. Seafood a speciality. The chef burnt his arm badly early one Saturday evening, and the place was booked out, with only the French patron there. He knew I could cook a little, we’d talked about food. And of course I spoke French. ‘
Vas-y, Elsa
!’ he said. ‘Get in there and help me out. The scallops are one of the specials tonight – see what you can do.’ Coquilles St Jacques. I did them okay, and Lobster Mornay, and oysters quick-fried in batter with a dash of white wine and parsley, a Brittany dish. I did the cooking for several weeks. The chef never came back, and I got his job.

I loved the work and the place and the people. Happy days. Then the restaurant and my cooking were reviewed in
The New York Times
, so that soon there were smart-ass types over from the East Side, showing off or making ignorant complaints, and I
didn’t find it so congenial. I wanted out. The patron didn’t find it so congenial either, but he was coining money. So he said one day, ‘Why don’t we write a Brittany du Soir cookbook?’

We did. It was a success. I became a cookbook writer. Three other books followed, where I travelled in Europe, India, China, Russia. Part diary, part travel book, but the underpinning was always accounts and recipes of simple or unusual food and traditional cooking methods. Talking to the locals in remote places. Venison and sun-dried fig kebabs, and sweet champagne, high in the Georgian mountains. Honey and breadcrumbed Porca
Alente-jano
and very fresh vinho verde in a riverside café I found halfway up the Tagus. And French-Cajun cooking in New Orleans, which is how I met Martha.

Martha. My mind stopped flashing about. I tried to think of something else quite unsullied. The time in Lisbon, the vast, fabulous seafood platter in what had looked like a McDonalds, right next to the hotel. It was after I’d finished my Portuguese article, the first evening of a holiday with Martha, when she’d flown over and we had a few days together doing nothing but walk the mosaic sidewalks, letting the wind swirl round our ankles, that ever-sweet wind off the Tagus. But the only world then had been us. I’d said to Martha on the plane back, looking at her, ‘If I never wrote another cookbook again, I wouldn’t mind.’ Shaking my head, looking at her, in wonder.

Next morning I woke early, just after dawn, and went up on deck. The sky was pearl-grey, but brightening, the sun about to rise over the hulks of the great barges. There was no sign of Ben. A sudden panic. Then I saw him. He was behind the wheelhouse, sitting right on the stern with a fishing rod, gazing intently out on the grey water. I moved round the wheelhouse. He was looking at a float, motionless in the water.

‘Ben?’

‘Shh …’ He turned, eyes alight, and spoke softly. ‘Perch, roach, who knows what? I’m trying anchovy as bait. So I might even tempt a great pike. They like smelly bait and murky backwaters like this. I’d like to get a big pike. You know how to cook them?’

‘Bake them slowly for hours in tinfoil, stuffed with as much herbs and white wine as you can get into them, and even then they’re filthy, oily and full of bones. I didn’t know you fished.’

‘Oh, yes. On lakes up in the north of Ireland. Big pike there, monsters. I used to go with my father. He loved it. Early morning, or twilight.’

‘Okay, but it hardly seems the moment.’

‘It’s the ideal moment – told you, dawn.’

‘No, fathead! I meant generally. We’re on the run, Goddamnit! Supposed to be trying to get out of here, not taking a fishing holiday.’

‘Get out of here later. Maybe you could make some coffee?’

‘Okay.’ I turned back. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s something I didn’t tell you last night. On the
Sorrento
, when that guy went through your bag looking for your father’s art inventory – well, he thought he’d found it, but it turned out to be some sort of scrapbook or journal. He threw it on the floor. I rescued it. Thought it might be important for you. I have it in my bag.’

He was gazing intently at the float, and then he spoke, still with his back to me. ‘Oh, yes, that journal’s important all right. Katie left it behind in her bag, in my barn, that afternoon before she set off to kill herself. I drove after her to give it back, but I was too late.’

‘I see.’ I wondered if he was going to tell me now how I looked just like her.

He didn’t. He continued quickly: ‘I’ve only read bits of it. So I don’t know what she’s really said there. A diary, yes, partly about us. Which is why I didn’t go on with it.’

I wanted him to tell me the truth, about how I looked just like Katie – but just then the float dipped violently in the water and the reel spun out viciously with a great whine. He had some big fish hooked.

‘God! This could be it.’ He stood up, playing the fish back and forth back for the next five minutes, the rod bent – reeling the line in to breaking point, it seemed – before he released some mechanism and the line spun away. Then reeled it in slowly again. To and fro, arms braced, muscles bulging. A great battle. ‘Christ!’ He was shouting now. ‘It must be a big one!’ He was beside himself. ‘That net behind me,’ he shouted. ‘Get the net, be ready with it, over the stern here. I need both hands.’

It took another five minutes. Then we saw the fish, the shadow of it first, then the mottled green and yellow skin, twisting viciously about just beneath the water, when it ran deep again, and was pulled back. Finally he had it, bringing it towards the net, which I held over the stern, as he pulled the fish over the wire lip.

It was a pike. It must have been nearly three feet long, its great flat head and wide gaping jaws staring up malevolently at me, chomping at the wire lead, with a disgusting, sagging white belly. It was nasty, ferocious, its huge mouth snapping. I could see its sharp run of teeth – as if famished, biting on nothing except your fingers. I was thankful when Ben took the net from me and lifted it up onto the stern boards, where it flashed and flew about, struggling in the net, its body arched in a semi-circle.

‘God, it must be nearly twenty pounds. Just look at the brute!’

He hit it on the back of the neck with an iron mooring stake. ‘Hook’s too deep to get it out, swallowed it right down. I’ll have to kill it.’ It lay inert, just the odd twitch now.

‘It’s far too big to cook with what there is in the galley,’ I said.

‘Fillet it. Or cut it into steaks.’

Then something distracted him. He looked up. I turned round.
The sun was rising, and there, illuminated on the high deck of the derelict barge to our left, were two men, in caps and uniforms.

‘If only you hadn’t gone bloody fishing and shouting!’ I said, shouting myself, ‘we could have been out of here long ago!’

‘Yes, but we wouldn’t have had the fish – and what a fish!’ We ran to the wheelhouse.

NINE

They were only private security guards. Alerted by our ridiculous shouting and splashing they’d come running from somewhere behind the old warehouses. They shouted at us in French, from the prow of the big barge above us. ‘Can’t you read? “Private Property – Keep Out – No Mooring”.’

Ben placated them, and we headed upriver. ‘Trouble is,’ he said, as we chugged east into the morning sun, ‘they may remember us if they get to hear the police are looking for a man and a woman out on the river. They’ll know the direction we’re taking as well.’

‘What direction are we taking?’ We were in the wheelhouse drinking coffee. A vast commercial barge, the deck loaded with cars, was bearing down on us, producing a great wave to either side of its prow. I was worried. We seemed to be headed straight for it.’ ‘What side of the road do we drive on here?’

‘The right, and every big commercial barge has the right of way.’ He slewed the wheel round and we made for the shoreline, just in time, I thought. The great barge hooted at us. ‘That’s only to thank
us,’ he said. ‘The “
camaraderie des chaloniers”,
comradeship of the bargees.’

‘Thanks. I do speak French. And it’s “mariners”. You can’t turn the barge, “la chalande”, into the “bargees”.’

‘Yes. Well, where are we?’ He got the map and showed me. ‘We turn off the Seine about four kilometres ahead, left onto the Marne. Then along for about fifteen kilometres to Vitry-le-François, where we turn left again onto the Canaux de la Marne au Rhin, and that leads us to Bar-le-Duc, about another forty kilometres. Okay?’

‘What’s that? About a day’s run?’

‘We’re not driving a car, you know. We’re on the water. Four miles an hour, and there are locks, about fifteen or so of them.
Bar-le
-Duc? Three or four days.’

‘Wait a moment! We’re supposed to be on the run, not swanning along at four miles an hour on a holiday. We should get off this boat as soon as possible. Dump it and make for one of the channel ports, like you said.’

‘You
wait a moment – swanning along slowly is the best game we can play. Let the trail go cold, before we make for one of the channel ports. And furthermore, I’m not going to dump Geoff’s boat, his livelihood, until we get to Bar-le-Duc, where we said we’d leave it. And I’m captain of this boat – so there!’ Taking his hands off the wheel, he started to roll a cigarette. Another great barge was bearing down on us.

‘For God’s sake … watch out!’ I shouted.

‘Calm down.’

‘Look, you can have yourself run over, but not me!’

‘Christ, I wouldn’t like to drive a car with you in it.’

‘You won’t ever have to, I can assure you. Just let me out!’

‘Let you out? We’re not in a car you know – I keep telling you. That’s water out there. You’d drown.’

‘I can swim.’

‘Wouldn’t if I were you. That big barge, or the next would certainly get you then. First it’d suck you under, then you’d be mincemeat when you got to the propeller.’ I could hear the throb of big engines now. Ben finally turned out of its way.

I was panting with annoyance. ‘You’re playing your bloody games again. First in Paris with Geoff, then with that damn great fish, getting us into trouble, now dicing with death with these huge barges. What is it with you? You really think this is the way to go on? Risking our lives with every damn great barge that comes along. You got a death wish or something?’

‘No.’ He turned. ‘Just the opposite, and it’s always been my reading of things to do what the crooks and the cops won’t expect. And they won’t be expecting us to swan along at four miles an hour in this barge enjoying ourselves.’

‘Okay, well I’m not enjoying myself, so you can let me off at the next stop and I’ll make my own way home.’

‘Right.’ He didn’t look at me. ‘Let you off at Vitry-le-François. Should get there this afternoon. You can get a train there back to Paris in half an hour, then fly straight out, back to New York. You could be eating that damn cheesecake in your local deli this time tomorrow.’ He turned and looked at me, downcast, so that for several seconds I was tempted to stay on board with him. But no, that’d be crazy. He was crazy.

‘Okay, let me off at Vitry-le-François.’

‘Right, another four or five hours. Maybe you could cut a few steaks off that pike and cook it for lunch?’

‘That fish has caused us trouble enough.’

‘Well, you could cut it up for the cats.’

‘Cats?’

‘Yes, there are two cats that Geoff forgot to tell us about, in his cabin. I heard them this morning, mewing, went in and gave them some anchovies. They didn’t like them.’

‘Cats – well that’s just great.’

‘We’ll need to get cat food at Vitry.’

‘You didn’t find anything else in there – a couple of mad dogs?’

‘Yes, almost. Cabin’s stuffed full of bits and pieces, like an antiques shop, props for his theatricals, I suppose. All sorts of strange things.’

‘I knew that guy was nuts.’

‘So why don’t you give the cats some of the pike? They’re starving – and take a look at the things in there.’

‘Okay, I’ll feed the cats, but I’m getting off at Vitry.’

I left the wheelhouse, cut some flesh off the disgusting pike, diced it up on a plate, went below, opened the cabin door and saw the two tabbies, mewing, tails in air now. They started to eat hungrily. I looked round the cabin. It was extraordinary, packed out with things on shelves and on the floor. An old horn
gramophone
, a Red Indian headdress and a tomahawk, other things I couldn’t identify. Over his bunk a full frontal photograph of a naked African girl. Another lecher.

Then I saw it and sprang back: hanging by a cord at the end of a shelf was a pitch-black, shrunken human head, bulbous nose with a ring in it, elongated lobes with strings of beads hanging down, long shanks of matted dark hair trailing round the back, the eyelids and lips roughly sewn together. A nightmare. My God, I wanted off this boat.

I told Ben about the shrunken head when I got up to the wheelhouse again.

‘Yes, I saw it.’

‘He’s really nuts. That’s a human head.’

‘Sure it’s a human head. It probably comes from some South American Indian tribe. Spoils of victory over another tribe.’

‘Maybe, but it was a real person.’

‘What did you think it was, something from EuroDisney?’

‘How would you like your head smoked and shrunk and hung from a shelf?’

‘I wouldn’t know much about it, would I, but I do see their point: it’s a way of keeping power over your enemies, and much less harm than cruise missiles or cyanide showers.’

I got off near Vitry-le-François. We’d moored half a mile out of town, to avoid anyone on the lookout for us at the quay in the town. It was nearly three in the afternoon, and very hot.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Don’t think badly of me.’

‘No, I don’t think badly of you. That’s your privilege, running away from things. I’m just sorry I didn’t get to paint you.’

‘Maybe some other time. I’ll come back to Dublin, or your place in England. Paint me when all this has blown over.’

‘Yes, but the trouble is we’re involved in something that can’t ever really blow over.’

‘We’re not involved in all this looting. They were – if they were, which I very much doubt.’

I left him.

I walked along the riverbank into the town. The main square was surrounded by heavily ornate, turn-of-the-century buildings: the town hall, library, a museum; a sign pointing to the Gare SNCF. I was near the station. The light was blinding. I badly needed a pair of sunglasses. I’d lost mine sometime yesterday. There was a touristy shop next to the museum entrance and a circular rack of sunglasses outside. There was a selection of mirrored sunglasses and in the mirror of one of these I saw a man and a woman crossing the square behind me, coming towards me. The woman with a headscarf, dark glasses, rather dowdy, in a flower-print dress. The older man,
overweight
in a linen suit and a Panama hat. An owlish face. Just a couple.

But somehow I was on alert. They were such an incongruous pair. I had no reason to think they were interested in me but I felt there was something wrong about them and I wasn’t taking any chances.

Without turning around I walked up the steps into the museum, paid three francs, and was pointed to another flight of wide stairs up to the first floor. The high-ceilinged rooms were cool and quite full of visitors: exhausted tourists sitting on benches, a few old men escaping the hot weather, a group of noisy schoolchildren with a teacher. An interesting provincial museum full of Celtic, Roman and Frankish things and display cases, filled with old coins,
porcelain,
silver goblets, swords and gilded daggers. Portraits of
grandees
in suits of medieval armour.

I moved round, keeping an eye on the door I’d come in by. The couple I’d seen were almost certainly nothing. Just nerves. Nobody could know we’d be stopping in Vitry-le-François, or that I’d be leaving the boat alone. The couple didn’t appear at the doorway, but I’d give them time, just in case. I wandered round.

There was a marble bust of François Premier, the founder of the town, with a garland of laurel on a plinth, looking very military and proud and satisfied. Just behind him was a doorway. ‘
Dames.’
I wanted a pee. The place was clean and modern and no old woman waiting to take pennies off me inside. It was empty.

When I came out of my cubicle the woman in the headscarf and dark glasses was staring straight at me, a gun in her hand. She must have been in her forties, a thin, rather raddled face. I finally said, ‘What do you want?’ I was shaking.

‘Out of here,’ she said in English in a coarse, north-country accent. ‘And when we’re out of here, and you meet my friend, you will walk between us, carefully, and tell us where you and your friend have put the stuff you were supposed to deliver to us in Paris. Which we paid for, half the agreed price. And if you shout or do any other stupid business when we get out of here I’ll shoot. The gun is silenced.’

She gestured with the gun, then covered it with another silk scarf she had in her hand. We moved out into the museum. The
middle-aged man in the Panama hat met us. His face was round, the skin very white and smooth and frozen, like marble. Only the eyes moved, but he was affable. He raised his hat a fraction to me. ‘How good to meet you.’ A real gent. He gestured towards the doorway. ‘Let us go and have coffee, shall we?’ His English was perfect, but the very slight accent was German, I thought.

We moved down the first of the two flights of the wide marble staircase. I saw the big mahogany door on the half-landing marked ‘
Privé
’. It was ajar.

I was on the inside by the wall as we went down. We were alone on the staircase. As we passed the door I threw myself at it. It flew open, and I ran. It was dark inside after the glare. A storeroom, a big room full of broken statuary, pillars, bits of old masonry on the floor, suits of armour, swords and halberds.

I turned and ducked left into one of the dark corners. Then right, behind a group of statues. I could hear footsteps and peered out. It was the woman in the headscarf. I’d no idea what to do. I’d assumed there’d be someone, one of the museum staff, in the room, which was why the door was ajar, but there wasn’t.

Then, in the gloom beside me, I saw the exhibit. It was a mock-up of a room in a Roman villa, wooden-framed, with figures: a
tableau vivant.
Figures in togas, men, women, children, in lifelike poses: two women going about various domestic tasks, one combing her hair, a second baking bread, two children beside her; two men in togas in the darkened background, conversing, with wine goblets in hand; a third man, behind them, sharpening a short sword on a grindstone, and sheets littered about.

I stepped into the
tableau vivant,
picked up a sheet and draped it around me, and went back to the shadows, beside the guy
sharpening
his sword. To hide my face I bent down by his shoulder, as if I was helping him, and stood stock-still.

I heard nothing for a minute. Then I saw the woman, gun in
hand. She came towards the exhibit, stopped, looked at it, seemed to stare straight at me for a moment, then moved on. I thought I had escaped, but she reappeared, and now she stopped for longer, looking at the motionless figures. Then she stepped into the room. But no, she hadn’t seen me. She stopped at the woman baking bread, gazed at the one combing her hair. Then she came towards the two frozen men holding their wine goblets. She looked at them carefully, and then turned past them, towards me.

I knew if she came close, she’d know I was real. I gripped the wooden broad sword. I saw her out of the corner of my eye coming up to the grindstone, behind the stooped soldier. She stopped, looking at him, then up at me. And in the second she saw I was real I let her have it with the sword, catching her on the cheek, then again on the shoulder, and again somewhere else as she fell. I felt like decapitating her, but there wasn’t time.