Kraven Images (11 page)

She worshipped him. After twenty years of marriage he loved her deeply, warmly, but no longer passionately. His
passion
he reserved for a series of mistresses. But he chose discreetly and well, for he would not have hurt Lotti for the world. Infidelity is too harsh, too narrow a word to describe Koko’s … what? peccadillos? adventures? amours? He and Lotti enjoyed a marriage of mutual contentedness and kindliness, in the middle years an idyllic state.

Then came the German bomb, assembled in a cursed hour and blasting to smithereens the shelter at 15 Beauchamp Close. Koko endured the death of his beloved Lotti by the simple expedient of refusing to acknowledge it. She was away on holiday, it would do her a world of good. He would join her as soon as he could get away.

Probably no one will ever possess all the facts having to do with Koko’s violent death. Precisely what followed his ill-timed arrival on the platform of the Tottenham Court Road station and preceded his ill-fated interference with the smooth-running of the Northern Line will almost certainly always remain shrouded in mystery. The official facts, however, are these: (1) ‘On or about eleven o’clock on the night of 12 September 1946,’ Oskar Kraven, widower, womanizer and poker player, had purchased a ninepenny ticket at Tottenham Court Road underground station; (2) at eleven twenty-three he had been overtaken in the tunnel, within eight hundred feet of Goodge Street, by a train already slowing down for the station approach; (3) according to the Medical Examiner’s report, ‘deceased was discovered to possess in his bloodstream a level of alcohol far in excess of what might be expected from convivial drinking.’ Deceased, in short, as the Medical Examiner had added when pressed by the Coroner for clarification, had been ‘blind reeling drunk’.

This last ‘fact’ Onkel Ferri, the Compleat Mourner, had dismissed as a caddish insinuation, a vile affront to the memory of his fallen brother. In Ferri’s reconstruction of the melancholy events, Koko had probably peered over the edge
of
the platform in a vain search for some sign of his train. He had been struck from behind ‘by a person or by persons unknown’, – the Kraven demon(s)! – who had seized this opportunity of catching a Kraven in so defenceless a position. His assailant(s) had immediately fled into the night.

The anti-Kraven forces, as the Compleat Mourner saw it in that far-off time, were still legion in the world. Flushed with their successes of 1941, the malevolent demons had struck again. The recent defeat of Nazi Germany had not diminished their fervour or ingenuity. Pity the poor Kraven who let down his guard!

Koko had perhaps lain on the tracks for a short while, momentarily stunned. But then he had pulled himself to his feet, dusted himself off as best he could, and with typical Koko-esque insouciance had decided to return home on foot. He had set off into the tunnel’s black mouth, no doubt swinging his cane.

* * *

KRAVEN’S TRAIN SCREECHED INTO BLEECKER STREET. Once more he had overshot his station. This must stop, and now. He was becoming a Pynchonian yoyo. The human brain, he had read somewhere, began daily at age thirty to shed particles in shocking quantities, a kind of galloping intelligential dandruff, the seborrhea of the mind. He ploughed today through drifts of such stuff as once his dreams were made on.

Kraven got off the train right there, at Bleecker Street. The pattern must be broken before it gelled, before it became a way of life. How many of the ancient derelicts he had seen over the years and at all hours, male and female, sitting sometimes in their own urine on platform benches, pawing through refuse bins, shunned like lepers of an earlier time, left alone to their haunted dreams, their fitful catnaps,
how
many of them, he wondered, had been caught long ago as he had almost been caught today in a Moëbian nightmare, a goetistic spell, the lifetime shuttle? Fanciful, no doubt. But he left the platform for all that.

Climbing to street level, he found himself in a neighbourhood of factories and gas stations, an area of converging dirty streets, a place of giant trucks and honking automobiles. The streets hummed with noise and activity. Large, heavily muscled men in T-shirts and Levis, stomachs bulging with beer, shouted at one another, kidded, cursed. Kraven walked quickly towards Houston, hailed a cab, and got in.

‘Where to, Mac?’

‘Home, please.’

‘You kiddin me? Where’s home, mistuh?’

‘Oh, sorry.’ Kraven told him.

The driver soon found the heaviest traffic and contrived to stay with it. He aimed his cab unerringly at the larger potholes, even when to do so threatened bloody collision. A neatly printed sign on the rear of the driver’s seat advised passengers to ‘Sit Back And Relax.’ Kraven watched the meter tick away.

About an hour later the taxi drew up just short of Kraven’s building. The fare was witheringly high. Kraven stepped, right foot first, out of the cab. As the foot took his weight, he felt the ground beneath it momentarily subside and then hold slippery-firm. He had never developed the specialized antennae of the native New Yorker. ‘Oh, shit!’ he said, with perfect accuracy.

RING-RING
! KRAVEN’S TELEPHONE
, sounding its shrill summons, reminded him abruptly and cruelly of unfinished business. Almost certainly it was Stella. The events of yesterday morning flooded back to torment him. Into what snares and befuddlements had Stella carelessly led him?
Ring-ring
! He could not cope with her now. She must allow him time to think, a minimal courtesy to the victim.

He walked through to the living-room windows and shifted the blinds slightly. A huddle of loutish youths across the Drive were staring up at him. Was that Princip, the SDS champion of his Shakespeare class, among them? The costume and the scoliotic posture were all too familiar. They seemed to be arguing among themselves, gesticulating. One of them pointed at his window. Instinctively Kraven pulled back. What were they up to? Princip gave a clenched-fist salute. Immediately below, the doorman from the next building was in neighbourly conversation with his own doorman, Clarence. We are not safe, Clarence; we are not safe. The phone meanwhile had ceased its importunings. Kraven turned from the window. Princip and his fellows, whatever their fancied intentions, were the least of his concerns.

The apartment comprised, essentially, four large rooms. The dining room, across the gallery from the living room, he had transformed into a study: book-lined walls, reading
lamps
, easy chairs, the sanctuary of the scholar. The living room could easily accommodate the dining table and chairs; in any case, he took most of his meals in the kitchen, a large and forbidding area of exposed pipes and gauges, a turn-of-the-century Engine Room of a transatlantic steamer. In view of their size, living room and bedroom might seem to the casual eye sparsely furnished. Kraven’s purchases had been a couch, two easy chairs, a coffee table, and some rugs, Persian in type if not in provenance. All the other furniture, large items and small, had come from the house in Hampstead. Here were the pieces that just before his planned departure for New York Marko had claimed as belonging to his own branch of the family in Vienna. As it turned out, Marko’s destination had been not the New but the Other World. When that unhappy fact became known, the furniture itself had already been long upon the high seas, obedient to the established westward yearning of Kraven destiny. It was Nicholas not Marcus Kraven who had reclaimed it from dockside storage.

For the last twenty years of his life Onkel Ferri had served in the dual capacity of Compleat Mourner and Keeper of the Record. As Keeper of the Record Ferri had had in his possession a century’s collection of Kraven documents, letters, photographs, knick-knacks of all kinds. After Opa’s death the collection had become swollen with the old man’s vast hoard of Sarah Bernhardt memorabilia. Our Kraven had become the Keeper in his turn. It was an obligation that he took very seriously. The walls in his living room, bedroom, gallery and entrance hall were covered with photographs of the Divine Sarah, the earliest dating from 1869 (
Le Passant
) and the latest from 1920 (
Daniel
). There were also numerous framed prints, among them a rarity from her first American tour, Sarah Bernhardt, unimpressed, standing upon the back of a whale in Boston harbour. There were, besides, four original Mucha prints in mint condition,
Lorenzacchio, La
Samaritaine
, Gismonda
, and
Tragique Histoire d’Hamlet
. It was a cheap modem reproduction of this last that decorated Kraven’s Mosholu office.

Mixed in at discreet intervals among these relics of the incomparable
tragédienne
were photographs from the general Kraven collection. All the Kravens he had heard of or knew were represented at least once, some many times, especially Opa, who had loved to be photographed. His mother, however, appeared only twice on the walls: in one (
circa
1922), in her late teens and ravishingly beautiful, Mummy was dressed in the costume of a Spanish dancer. She was striking an attitude, inspired no doubt by a moving picture of her idol, Rudolph Valentino, and biting on a rose. In the second photograph, taken after the last wave of Kraven immigration from Vienna, his mother was alone in the midst of the entire Kraven clan. The picture had been taken in the Hampstead drawing room. The focus of attention, naturally, was Opa. The rest of the family had disposed itself around him. All the grown-ups looked grim – unsurprising, in view of what they had recently fled from. Only Tillie was smiling. Marko and Nicko sat on the floor at Opa’s feet, Marko biting his nails and Nicko rubbing his eyes. Felix was not in the picture, from which fact Kraven deduced that his father had been the photographer.

This curious blanketing of the walls might well strike the unprepared visitor as weird. In Stella’s view, it was ‘creepy’; the apartment, she said, looked like ‘a mausoleum’. On those Thursday nights spent in his apartment, she preferred the illumination of candles. Candlelight softened the mood, she maintained. It was ‘sexier’; more important, it caused the offending photographs to disappear into a devouring gloom.

Over in a corner, stuck in the earth of a glazed clay pot, was Opa’s magic stick. The stick had been his first purchase in England. He was never without it. It was a long shaft of
ebony
with a sharp metal point at one end and a double handgrip at the other. ‘It’s a magic stick,’ said Opa. ‘It’s a shooting stick,’ said Nicko’s mother flatly, ‘that’s all it is, Nicko.’ But that was silly, thought Nicko. It couldn’t shoot anything, not possibly. Where was the hole for the bullets? ‘I wouldn’t be so vexed if he just used it outside, but he uses it indoors. Look at my floors, look at the holes and scratches! Take a good look, for heaven’s sake, at the carpets!’ ‘He’s an old man,’ said Felix, ‘he needs a stick.’ ‘But must it be
that
one? My father also needs a stick, but his has a sensible rubber tip.’ ‘He likes that one, that’s reason enough. Not another word, Victoria. Remember whom you’re talking about.’

Meanwhile, in the Hampstead garden, Opa demonstrated to Nicko some of the extraordinary stick’s properties. ‘Look at its point: hoopla, it’s a sword!’ He assumed a fencer’s stance and made a few passes in the air. True, he staggered a little and held his free hand to the small of his back. But in Nicko’s eyes this was a creditable performance. ‘Look at it now!’ Opa stuck the point into the earth. ‘Hipsy-pipsy, it’s a chair!’ And he opened the handle and sat down. Oh, it was magic, all right.

The phone was ringing again. Kraven went to his window and peeped out. Princip and company had gone. He must remember to get in touch with Nimuë. The phone stopped ringing. Kraven returned to the couch.

He sorted the morning’s mail on his coffee table, bills, advertisements, and – what was this? – a letter from England, from Aunt Cicely, no less. What could have prompted her to break silence? He felt a vague, inexplicable disquiet. It seemed an ill-omened thing. His hunger returned with increased force. He would have something to eat, and then, thus strengthened, he would see what the old girl wanted. It was lack of food, surely, that caused the hand carrying the letter into the kitchen to tremble.

Aunt Cicely was his mother’s younger sister. Dry and cold, there was no juice in her. As a young woman she had not wanted for beaux, but she had never much wanted them either. They came and went, evanescent. She had never married.

Still, she had nursed her mother, her sister, and her father through their last illnesses with commendable skill. She was good at plumping pillows and changing bedpans, at administering pills and charting temperatures. In the sickroom she displayed a brisk and bracing manner, a cheerful no-nonsense determination. She thrived on the ill-health of others.

Cicely lived frugally, rattling around in the damp house in Hendon, once her father’s, now hers. In winter she confined herself to the kitchen, where she set up a bunk bed, considerably reducing thereby her fuel bill. She made all her own clothes and ate, in her own phrase, ‘not enough to keep a squirrel alive’. Certainly she had the hoarding instincts of a squirrel, for Aunt Cicely was undeniably rich. Not only had she her own fat savings and shrewd investments over many years but also Grandfather Blum’s, the fruit of a long lifetime of parsimony and thrift. There was even Kraven’s old house in Hampstead, which he had sold her for a piddling sum before leaving England, eager to be rid of it and, a Kraven to the end, unwilling to haggle over price. She must by now be receiving a handsome rent on that.

He had no expectation of inheriting her wealth. Aunt Cicely would know that a Kraven could be relied on only to fritter away the money.

She was his only living relative. They had never cared much for one another. Infrequently, very infrequently, they exchanged cards. But now this letter. Kraven had finished his sandwich, had drunk down the last drop of his coffee. Gingerly he picked up the envelope, slit it open, and took out the letter.

Dear Nicholas,