The Devil I Know (7 page)

‘Mr St Lawrence, what precisely is the nature of your relationship with the financier Mr Deauville?'

Ha! What a question!

‘Just answer it, please, Mr St Lawrence.'

I'm not sure I can, Fergus. To try to do so, I'll have to go back to the beginning. I'll tell you everything I know about M. Deauville, which isn't all that much for a variety of reasons, one being that the gentleman in question is an extremely private individual, and another that our relationship was focused from the outset exclusively on me and my sobriety, seeing as I was in dire need of saving when he found me. I did all the talking and he did all the listening – pretty much the same set-up as here, I've just noticed. What does that say about me? Nothing positive.

I need hardly point out that M. Deauville would be most displeased at finding himself under such scrutiny, the chief witness being a former . . . how shall I describe myself? A former protégé. I am not of his church now. Our relationship had not always been a business one, you will have gathered. It ran far closer to the bone than that. M. Deauville was my sponsor. Everyone in the fellowship has a sponsor, someone you can talk to in your hour of need.

I joined Alcoholics Anonymous – or first attended it, rather, since it is not a movement you can really join as such, just as it is not a movement you can really leave as such – in May 2005, three or four days after missing a flight home to attend to my mother who had been hospitalised. Nobody told me she was dying. I missed the flight because I was too drunk to board the plane. M. Deauville was the man who saved me. From what? Lord, do you really need to ask? From myself.

The morning after I missed the flight, I did not wake up. The cleaning staff admitted themselves to my room when I failed to check out on time. I was in a Brussels airport hotel, though to put it bluntly I did not know where I was. Did not know who I was either. I had methodically popped a full month's supply of sleeping tablets out of their blister packs and knocked them back with the contents of the minibar.

The cleaners found me comatose and called 999, but the phone must have been upside down and 666 dialled in the panic because it was Hell that I was despatched to, and not hospital, make no mistake. Sheer hell. I had hit what is known in the trade as rock bottom.

They loaded me into the back of an ambulance, it was explained to me later by the registrar manning the ward when I came around and demanded to know where the hell I was and how the hell I'd gotten there and who the hell had stolen my clothes. Hell, hell, hell. I couldn't stop saying that word. Still can't. The registrar informed me that my heart had stopped beating. The cardiac team had worked to get it going for a full half hour. Time of death was called by the duty surgeon at one minute past midnight. My body was growing cold in the harsh glare of the emergency room when the monitor detected a pulse. The instruments transmitted news of this development to the nurses' station and the team was recalled. They had never seen anything like it before, the registrar said. Uncanny. That was the word he used.

I checked my chart when he left the room.
Temps de mort: 00.01h
.

I am somewhat hazy on the passage of time following my emergency admission. It lasted for eternity, as is the way with Hell. Days bled into nights, faces morphed into other faces and then back to the original face, monitors beat time. My back ached from the burden of lying on it, my stomach was a knot of acid. That period felt like a thousand-hour flight. The electronic atmosphere, the toxic static, the unremitting cramp. Around and around the globe we orbited, conflating time zones, cruising airspace, never touching down to get out and stretch for there is no rest for the wicked. I had woken in a foreign country with a tube in my arm, confused and gasping for a drink. I wanted my mother. She was my first thought. I needed her to comfort me. And then I remembered that she was in hospital too and needed me to comfort her. My body clenched with shame. ‘Nurse,' I cried, ‘
Infirmière! Verpleegster!​
'

I attended my first meeting in the hospital itself. A porter propped me into a wheelchair and transferred me to a room upstairs in which sat a group of people who were blatantly not part of the medical corps. ‘What the fuck is this?' I wanted to know, because I used to curse a lot back then. I used to do a great many bad things back then. I am paying for it now. The nurses had kitted me out in a pair of geriatric pyjamas and a maroon dressing gown since my luggage hadn't accompanied me to the hospital. I wouldn't accompany me either, given the option. The porter rolled my wheelchair into the circle and made a song and dance of applying the brake, letting me know in no uncertain terms that I was parked.

The group turned to me and smiled the meek, apologetic smile. I scowled, wondering what their game was. They would have registered that I was a hard case. You soon learn to recognise the signs. I wasn't there of my own volition and they knew it. All I knew was that I could murder a pint.

The meeting was conducted in French.
Salut
,
je m'appelle
Marcel
.
Je suis un alcoolique
.
Salut Marcel
, let's hear it for Marcel,
a big hand for Marcel. I stared at him with open hostility. What had he ever done that was so great? Then Marcel started speaking. The meek smiling stopped and the earnest listening began.

The woman beside me leaned in and took to translating Marcel's story into English, making a fair fist of it too. Marcel knew it was time to knock his drinking on the head when he woke up in the North Sea one freezing November dawn clinging to a rock. He rolled up his sleeves to show us the scars of the wounds he had sustained, and the stump where his ring finger used to be, at which sight I looked away and stared at my feet. They were clad in another man's slippers, old brown things that smelled a little ripe. Then one of them slid off and landed with a slap on the linoleum floor. Marcel broke off his narration to glare at the slipper as if I'd laid a turd. No one stooped to pick it up and replace it on my bare foot. And me in a wheelchair. Marcel re-embarked on his story. When he was finished, he wiped away a tear and everyone clapped except me. Then they chanted some class of prayer.

The meeting ended, but there was no sign of the porter coming to rescue me. The lot of them tramped out, leaving me alone in an empty circle of seats with my back to the door. There is nothing so atmospheric as a recently vacated room. I extended my foot to the floor and hooked the slipper with my big toe, flipped it back onto my foot. Why the staff had installed me in a wheelchair, I could not say. I still had the use of my legs. Fuck this, I thought, and got up and headed out for a smoke.

That was my first meeting. It was a beginning.

They discharged me a few days later, and I was standing on the hospital steps looking up and down the street in search of the nearest bar when my mobile phone rang. I took it out and frowned. Last I'd looked, the battery had been dead.
Unknown
, read the screen.

‘Hello, Tristram.' The voice was a cultured one, grave and authoritative. ‘My name is Monsieur Deauville,' the caller continued. ‘I realise that you are dying for a drink, and I am ringing to inform you that if you pursue this course of action, you most certainly
will
die for it.'

For a lurid moment, I saw my death certificate.
Temps de mort, 00.01h
. I reached for the handrail to steady myself, blinking to drive out the sight of those words, but the pulsing letters had seared my retina and were superimposed on the street, and the hospital and the sky, and anywhere else that I cared to look.

‘Do you wish to die?' M. Deauville asked.

I was having trouble breathing. A man came up offering assistance but I waved him away because what help could he possibly have given me? My heart had stopped and I had been pronounced dead, during which time a signal had been triggered and my death certificate retrieved from whatever vault it had been stored in. It had been loaded onto a trolley just as my body had been loaded onto a trolley, and wheeled to some senior functionary's desk, where it was stacked with the certificates of the other souls awaiting the authorisation to be dispatched. I was dying for a drink.

When I did not answer, M. Deauville repeated his question. ‘Do you wish to die?'

‘No,' I wheezed down the line. ‘No, I don't wish to die.'

Tocka tocka
in the background – what was that strange noise? ‘Good. Go back to your hotel room,' he instructed me. ‘I have called you a car. You will find it waiting by the hospital entrance.'

I wheeled around. A man in a suit was standing by a black Mercedes, holding a sign which bore my name.

‘I will call back when you have checked in.'

‘Wait.' I didn't have M. Deauville's number, but he had already hung up.

I have been here before. That was my first thought when I entered the hotel room. I took off my jacket and shoes and lay on my back on the bed. Was this the room? I couldn't tell if it was the same room in which I had almost killed myself because they are all the same room. They are all hell. You cannot imagine the depth of the hole into which I had dug myself. At least, I hope you can't. I leapt up and sprang across the room and wrenched open the minibar. It was empty. Everything was empty. I looked at the ceiling and moaned. And then M. Deauville called.

We were like lovers. We were holed up in that one room together for days on end like lovers, talking the long hours away. We shut the rest of the world out since the equilibrium we had chanced upon was so very fragile. At least, it was so very fragile to me. I was terrified of upsetting the balance, having spent my life upsetting the balance. But M. Deauville assured me that there was no such thing as a pattern that could not be broken.

I had my meals sent up and I deposited the emptied trays out in the corridor. Housekeeping exchanged old towels for new at the door and replenished my stock of sparkling water. I did crunches and press-ups in front of the window and kept to my fourteen-by-twelve cell. For the first time since hitting his teens, Tristram St Lawrence was sober. I had broken my mother's heart. With a racing pulse I picked up the phone. ‘Tristram,' she gasped, ‘the Guards told me you were dead!' I had not heard her voice in years. Too ashamed to call or show my face. ‘It's okay, Mummy, I'm still alive!' I was crying. So was she. I promised to come home but the connection went dead and my pledges vanished into the ether. I later discovered that she passed away the following day. It was probably for the best that I did not know this at the time. The news would have finished me.

Did I go to her? Why ask me that question, Fergus? Here, in front of all of these people? You were at my mother's funeral and you know well that I wasn't.

M. Deauville rang at the moments when I felt weak, and there were no moments when I felt strong. He had to check in with me day and night. I could not be left to my own devices for long. When I felt I couldn't cope a second longer and had reached for the hotel phone to dial room service to order up a drink, on cue, my mobile would ring. It was as if he could read my mind. It takes one to know one, I suppose. I'd put down one phone to answer the other, overcome with gratitude tinged with resentment and the inevitable and apparently endless flood of shame.

Once I started talking to M. Deauville, I found I couldn't stop. It all came pouring out. I bared my soul to the man, revealed its shrivelled dimensions, allowed him to gauge its clotted heft, or what was left of it. He appeared genuinely concerned for its fate, wretch slab of offal that it was, as pitted and honeycombed as a consumptive lung. He accepted the sorry state of it and did not condemn me, but instead listened patiently as I droned on. I owed him my life. It was as simple as that. I cannot overstate the degree of my indebtedness. Without M. Deauville, I would be long in my grave. Of that there is no doubt.

‘You're a saint,' I told him after one particularly gruelling session which had racked my body with tears, wrung it out like an old rag. I nodded vigorously to persuade him of my sincerity, as if he were there in the room. I felt him there. I felt him with me. ‘A saint,' I averred, ‘a walking saint!'

It was the only time I ever heard M. Deauville laugh.

No, I'm afraid I cannot disclose M. Deauville's full name to the Commission, primarily because I don't know it. He never mentioned a Christian name. Alcoholics
Anonymous
it is called. That first phone call on the hospital steps was the only time he had occasion to use his name, which led to the confusion that later ensued. We'll come to that.

Naturally, I waited for him to invite me to use his forename –
please, just call me X –
particularly since he never addressed me as Mr St Lawrence. Or Lord Howth, if you wish to get pedantic. Always it was Tristram, but this familiarity did not extend both ways.

His nationality? Again, this is something of a grey area. There are no white areas in my tale. His English was elegant although I doubt it was his mother tongue. His use of it was too formal, too academic. I was unable to pinpoint his first language, such was his mastery of them all. When a minion entered his office seeking authorisation on some matter, he would answer in German or French or Russian or on one occasion in what I think was Mandarin, switching from one language to another as if changing stations on a radio. His calls originated from every corner of the globe since he moved about constantly to service his many international business interests. If I apologised for taking up his time at an ungodly hour, he would murmur to think nothing of it, that all hours were ungodly and that it was the working day in his part of the world. Sometimes airport announcements were audible in the background.
The flight for Dubai is now boarding. Please have your passport and boarding card ready for inspection
. And then you'd hear nothing for a few hours, his phone set to flight mode.

Over the years of our association, I came to think of M. Deauville as another Lawrence, pronounced with a Gallic inflection: Laurent. He was my own personal Saint Lawrence, my Higher Power. It is true that M. Deauville did not put his signature to a single document pertaining to Castle Holdings, despite his being the architect of the enterprise. I trawled through every last communication in my possession before submitting the file in its entirety to you. Unfortunately, it is my family name that is scrawled all over the operation, mine and Desmond Hickey's. Therefore, I cannot confirm the spelling. Perhaps I misheard him on the hospital steps. Perhaps he was not Laurent Deauville but Laurent de Ville, Lawrence of the City, the ultimate urbanite, the bottom line in sophistication. Yes, it is fair to say I was in awe of him. He was a man from an old era, you see, from an old family, older than mine. All families are old, it goes without saying, but some – well, they have moulded history. They have exerted a force through time. I would not have been in the least bit surprised had M. Deauville revealed to me that he could trace a direct line to the Medici princes, or to Alexander the Great, or Ivan the Terrible. But he did not reveal any such thing to me. He revealed nothing at all. Monsieur du Veil, he should have called himself, because he always wore one. You will never catch him. There is not a chance of that. There is not a chance in hell.