The Paperchase (13 page)

THERE WAS WORSE NEWS
to come. The burglary had delayed any possibility of my leaving by at least two weeks.

A cursory inspection of the house in the morning showed no obvious evidence of theft or damage, apart from the broken door. But after a frantic hunt for money to pay the locksmith, it became apparent to me that the burglar had made off with the black leather pouch that contained virtually all my cash, my credit cards and chequebook, both my passports, and my plane ticket back to London.

The locksmith was sympathetic; I was mortified. We had to drive in convoy to Westwich where I borrowed the money to pay him from Mr Diaz.

The previous day’s rain seemed to have purged the air of humidity. It was bright and dry, and the sea sparkled lazily all
the way out to the horizon. It was a beautiful place, no doubt about that. The horn blast of the outgoing ferry split the air with an enormous
moo.
At the beginning of the summer I had welcomed the idea of spending months on Ionia. Now, two obligatory weeks there felt like a prison sentence.

‘What else did you lose?’ said Mr Diaz, when the locksmith had been paid off. His assistant brought us crullers and strong filter coffee. The office was furnished with a chunky
reproduction
Victorian desk and armchairs upholstered in generic law-office leather.

I told him I had no idea. ‘Nothing is obviously
not
there. I mean, nothing that was there is obviously missing. But you’ve been to the house – the difficulty is knowing where everything is … was. I could really use the inventory you mentioned.’

‘I am
so
sorry.’ Mr Diaz slapped his hand theatrically on his forehead. ‘I promised to get one to you and it completely slipped my mind. Let me get one copied for you now.’

Mr Diaz joked with his secretary for my benefit as he passed on his instructions to her over the intercom. ‘First we lock him out of his house, then we forget to send him his inventory. He must be wondering how I stay in business.’

The burglary involved me in several days of boring hassle with insurers, passport offices and the airline which had only two high points. One was using Mr Diaz’s office as a base for making phone calls and receiving faxes. I found myself
enjoying
being in an office again and flirted with a pretty paralegal called Stephanie, who unfortunately turned out to have a
serious
boyfriend. The other was my first-ever identity parade.

Officers Topper and Santorelli waited with me behind the one-way mirror while the suspects were marched in.

My guy – Bill Kelly – could hardly have been more
conspicuous
if he’d had three arms. He was the only one in the line-up who looked like he had spent the night in a bush. He had an uneven skull like a bumpy old potato – I heard later it was caused by an industrial accident – and I recognised the slack, unshaven face that I’d seen poking out of the bin-bag.

Leaving the police station, I was hopeful that I might find out what Kelly had done with my plane ticket and passports at least, but he remained adamant that he was not responsible for the break-in. He claimed he had been sleeping on the beach when he had been woken up by the rain. He wasn’t sure where he got the trash-bag sou’wester he had been wearing when I saw him, but eventually ‘remembered’ seeing a
new-model
Japanese four-by-four parked in my driveway.

‘Right,’ I said to Officer Santorelli. ‘In other words, the car that belonged to the real burglar.’

‘He says he took nothing from the house.’

‘But you don’t think he’s telling the truth?’

‘I’m not paid to have opinions, I’m paid to catch bad guys,’ said the policeman. I was beginning to miss Officer Topper and his signet ring. Officer Santorelli was a pencil-thin Italian American whose meagre physique somehow suited his
officious
, cheese-paring manner. He went on: ‘There have been cases – I’m not saying this is one of them – where collectibles are stolen to order. This kind of crime on the island has just exploded in the last couple of years. I guess the only way of knowing for sure is to go through the inventory and check it’s all there.’

I was so furious I could barely bring myself to speak to the trauma counsellor who came round to visit me – and turned out to be Officer Topper. ‘We’re a small force,’ he admitted. ‘We need to multitask.’

‘I’m very keen to get my property back,’ I said. ‘I would be inclined not to press charges against Mr Kelly if he just told me where I could find my passports and plane ticket. This whole … debacle’ – if in doubt with an authority figure it’s always good to slip in some ten-dollar words – ‘comes at a very unpropitious time for me.’

Officer Topper nodded sadly and told me that the first stage in overcoming any form of loss is learning to accept it.

After half an hour of this nonsense, he tried to engage me in another genealogical discussion but I couldn’t bring myself
to humour him. People trace their genealogy to find out who they are, but as you climb up a family tree, the branches
multiply
exponentially. You don’t arrive anywhere, you dissolve into atoms, into primordial soup. Ten generations back, we all have one thousand direct ancestors and that number continues to double as you go further and further into the past. Who knew how many generations there were between Officer Topper and the Siege of Acre? He might have had a million ancestors alive at that time. There was a chance he was related to My Lord de Pearse, but there was an equal chance that he was related to some poxy old falafel seller in the Saracen army, or a one-eyed washerwoman who gave hand jobs to the Norman cavalry. We’ve all got kings, peasants, blackguards, bishops and salt-of-the-earth village blacksmiths in our
ancestry
.

But fixating on some probably spurious ancestors was no more ridiculous than what Patrick had done. Out of all the objects in the world, Patrick had chosen a handful with some arbitrary association to himself and designated them to be his legacy. Keeping it all together was so important that he’d made arrangements for its survival beyond his own life into the Patrick-less world that came after him.

I began to wish that Bill Kelly had just taken the whole lot and saved me from my role in perpetuating a dead man’s
foolishness
.

IF THE POLICE BELIEVED
that the likeliest villains were a gang of well-organised crooks who wanted to get their hands on my uncle’s cup-plate collection, it wasn’t my business to contradict them. In fact, it seemed more sensible to go along with their theory and inflate my insurance claim accordingly. I wasn’t hopeful that I would see much of the money myself, but I
figured
I might get some, and besides, the idea of selling or hiding some of Patrick’s beloved possessions satisfied an
irrational
desire for revenge on the house and its contents. At the back of my mind, I think I knew that I was behaving like someone who kicks a table leg after he’s barked his shin on it. All the same, I was determined to find some things in the house worth stealing.

Patrick had word-processed the inventory on his computer,
a machine so obsolete it used floppy disks that looked as if they belonged in the jukebox. The printer was no less antique. It typed the text through a ribbon in a feeble, crabbed font that I remembered from letters he’d sent me at school. The
document
itself was two hundred and fifty pages long. I imagined Patrick revising it lovingly over long winter months, adding to it, elaborating his descriptions of the objects. Its tony prose read like the brochure of the auction house where I’d worked during my summer holidays: ‘twin-handled chamber pot in Sèvres porcelain, hand-painted with rosettes of acanthus leaves’; ‘four blown-glass decanters mounted in buffalo-hide tantalus, monogrammed in gold lettering,
TWO
’.

More than half of the pages dealt with his book and record collections, but I decided that in the interest of realism, I’d set these sections aside at first. The thief I had in mind was an opportunist with no special knowledge of the house. It would strain credibility for him to be sifting through the filing cabinets of 45s in the hope of unearthing a rare piece of vinyl. Similarly, I knew various books were definitely missing from the library – having seen Edgar Huvas making off with them at the Greyhound station in Providence – but a
bibliophile
burglar was an unlikely apparition. My thief – and I was beginning to feel as if I knew him quite well – was more of a magpie. He would have sneaked in, grabbed the shiniest, most valuable-looking things he could find and made off with them.

The difficulty was that even the most optimistic or
desperate
burglar would have looked around Patrick’s kitchen with a sinking heart. I imagined the beam of his flashlight flickering over the penny-banks. He might have rummaged through the drawers over the sink looking for some cash. All he would have found were ‘five lace-trimmed tea towels in Derbyshire needlepoint’. Maybe he’d snatched the painting from above the kitchen table – ‘contemporary landscape in Primitive style by Martha Calhoun of Dennis, Mass. Painted in 1983 and signed by the artist’ – only to realise it was a
picture
of the house he was burgling. The burglar who tried to fence that might as well include an arrow showing where he’d got in.

I opened the inventory at random and stabbed at the page: ‘Alpine wineskin with hand-carved wooden stopper’ – hopeless.

Another stab: ‘authentic Gurkha kukri with notched blade. Cased in original leather scabbard.’ I remembered the knife – it looked like something for peeling potatoes. Then: ‘
hand-painted
satirical Russian matryoshka dolls’. I turned over half a dozen pages impatiently. This was more like it: ‘pair of early nineteenth-century English duelling pistols with chased silver handles’. Without thinking what I was doing, I put a tick by it on the list.

Was that smart? I reversed the pencil and rubbed out the mark. I started to feel slightly guilty about the whole exercise.

A bang on my door made me jump. I looked up to see Nathan Fernshaw shading his eyes and peering through the kitchen window.

‘What’s up, Nathan?’ I said, overcompensating for my
nervousness
by being overfriendly.

‘My mom said you might need a hand.’

‘That was thoughtful,’ I said. I was trying to remember how I’d last behaved when I’d had nothing to hide. ‘You know what, it would be a big help if you could cut the grass – I’ll pay you.’

I took him down to the shed and showed him how to drive the mower. ‘Take your time,’ I said. ‘If anything gets caught in the blades, do
not
try to free it, come and get me. I don’t want you jeopardising your future as a concert pianist.’

He was excited by the chance to drive the mower by
himself
. I told him to go slowly: I would pay him by the hour. This small act of patronage made me feel better about my criminal activities. I also thought he might alert me if Officers Topper and Santorelli turned up unexpectedly.

For the next two days Nathan mowed and I went through the inventory, ticking off the items that would have appealed
to a sharp-eyed thief. As the fictional burglar enriched his swag bag hourly and I, his accomplice, rummaged around the house aiding and abetting him, it became clearer that Bill Kelly had taken almost nothing apart from my money and travel
documents
. All the most precious objects remained untouched. Nothing had gone from the cabinets in the library or the
packing
cases in the cellar. I worked slowly, accumulating a stash of items which I hid in a sea chest in the attic. I erred on the side of caution, but still ended up with a fairly valuable-looking haul, including some nice silver pieces and jewellery. The
pistols
were less glamorous than the description in the inventory would have led you to believe. They were stubbier, less ornate, rusty and a little greasy. I cocked one and aimed at the wall. The hammer tripped with a satisfying click. The other was faulty and wouldn’t work at all.

I found myself often distracted by the things that I unearthed: photos of Patrick, a dozen different kinds of Chinese cricket cages, a Victorian toy theatre with a painted proscenium. Meanwhile, the lawnmower buzzed just out of conscious awareness.

On the second day, I heard the mower stop. It was around eleven-thirty in the morning. I was in the library, sorting through a drawer of cuff-links – the light was better in there.

Peering out of the window, I saw Nathan, still sitting on the mower, talking to a blonde woman in a frock and pointing towards the house.

I put the drawer back upstairs in Patrick’s bedroom and came back down when I heard knocking. I could see the woman’s shadow outlined on the mesh of the screen door. She was shading her eyes with her hand and trying to peer in.

The lawnmower started up again as I stepped out on to the porch. My first look at the woman was enough to disabuse me of the idea that she was a police officer. She was wearing too much make-up, and was too expensively and impractically dressed in a frock and a pair of heels. She had big sunglasses on, and crazy hair in blond corkscrews which were loosely tied
back. She was nervous, I thought, but greeted me with an enthusiasm that bordered on the ferocious. ‘Well, hi! You must be Damien.’

I was taken aback. Something in her manner made me think of a little girl, but she was certainly over fifty.

‘Miranda Delamitri,’ she said, giving me her hand. ‘I was a friend of Patrick’s.’ She lifted her sunglasses with her free hand, exposing plenty of blue eye-shadow, and smiled at me. She had great teeth and the time-defying youthfulness of a well-loved vintage car.

‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ she said. She didn’t let go of my hand.

‘You’re a friend of Patrick’s?’ I said, feeling a little
uncomfortable
.

‘Uh-huh.’ She was looking me up and down. ‘You know, you remind me of him so much.’

‘It’s probably the clothes,’ I said. ‘They’re his.’

She gave a little yelp of pleasure. ‘Oh! That shirt was a gift from me! I’m so glad you’re wearing it.’

I’d found it in Patrick’s closet. Its quality had set it apart from all of the others. By now, Mrs Delamitri had stepped over the threshold into the kitchen. ‘Oh my,’ she said
plaintively
. ‘And everything’s just the same.’ She seemed overcome for a moment. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been a while since I was here. This is rather painful.’

I offered to get her some Kleenex but she pulled out an expensive handkerchief of her own and dabbed at the corner of her eye mournfully.

‘Would you like to be alone?’ I said.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just give me a minute.’ She took a couple of deep breaths. ‘They say you should just let it out, don’t they?’

‘Let what out?’

‘The grief. The pain.’ She blew her nose silently. ‘How are you coping, Damien?’

‘I’m coping,’ I said, with a stab of guilt as I thought of the
sea chest full of valuables in the attic. ‘One day at a time, you know. Remembering the good things.’

‘And there are so many good things,’ she said with passion. ‘That’s right. What are the good things that you remember?’

A voice in my head said:
pair of early nineteenth-century English duelling pistols with chased silver handles.

‘His humour. His kindness. What about you?’

Mrs Delamitri took another deep breath. There was a slight catch in her voice as she said: ‘His mind.’

Through the window behind Mrs Delamitri’s head, I could see Nathan raking apples from under the apple tree as I’d asked. If they were left where they lay, they could clog up the blades of the mower.

Mrs Delamitri wandered into the dining room. ‘I’ve always loved this one,’ she said, gazing at a framed Mughal fan painted with a semi-erotic scene of a woman entertaining her moustachioed lover in a garden.

‘You’re welcome to take it,’ I said. As odd as she was, Mrs Delamitri’s grief about Patrick’s death exceeded anything that had been expressed by his own family.

She looked at me with amazement. ‘I could never do that. He wanted it all to stay together.’ She seemed overcome again. ‘I – oh my. Do you mind if I sit down?’

I got her a glass of water from the kitchen. Since she seemed disinclined to take off her sunglasses, I switched on the light.

‘Patrick and I were close,’ she said. ‘I just wasn’t able to come to the funeral. I hoped he’d understand.’ She dabbed her eyes again. ‘You’re probably wondering what on earth this crazy woman is doing in your house.’

‘Just slightly,’ I said as a joke, but she looked puzzled, so I put my arm on her shoulder to reassure her.

Her sob turned into a chuckle. ‘So like Patrick,’ she said wistfully, holding on to my sleeve as if it were a holy relic, and gazing at me through the big moons of her glasses.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come. Please excuse the air of chaos. I got burgled earlier this week.’

‘How awful,’ she said.

‘It’s more of an inconvenience. The police picked up the guy who did it, but he’s insisted he didn’t take anything. It’s all a big pain in the arse.’

We sat and talked in the library for about half an hour. In spite of her oddness, I couldn’t help liking her. She had met Patrick at a writing class he had taught during the summers in Westwich, she said. He’d had a reputation as a gifted teacher. All of this was news to me. She said he’d also commuted to the mainland to teach at a prison outside Boston, where he was popular with the inmates. Although she didn’t say so, I had the impression that Mrs Delamitri’s relationship with my uncle had eventually transcended literature, but I was trying not to think about the two of them in bed together.

‘What was he up to?’ I asked her.

‘I think he was doing a little painting, more writing.’

‘Any idea what? Not the dreaded dictionary?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t talk about it.’

The screen door creaked open and then slapped shut. Nathan Fernshaw called out from the kitchen, ‘I’m going home for lunch.’ His head poked round the door of the library ‘I’ll finish the lawn when I get back. Hello, Mrs Delamitri.’

‘Hi, Nathan. How’s your sister?’

‘She’s good.’

‘You two know each other?’ I said.

‘Oh, sure,’ said Mrs Delamitri. ‘We’re old friends, aren’t we, Nathan?’

Nathan’s bicycle was parked beside the front porch, so I unlocked the front door to let him out. Mrs Delamitri was looking more composed when I got back. She’d tethered up her crispy blond hair and applied a lick of lipstick.

‘One of the reasons I came, Damien, is that I have some things of yours. Patrick left them with me, but I’m sure he wanted you to have them.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. This seemed very odd to me, it wasn’t like Patrick to let anything out of his sight.

We went out to her sporty, powder-blue convertible and she opened the trunk. In it were eight green box files of the kind that had disappeared from Patrick’s study.

‘Any idea what’s in them?’ I asked, trying to sound breezy, though I felt puzzled and suddenly suspicious.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Letters, I think.’

Carrying the boxes back to the house, I was dry-mouthed with anticipation. I wanted to open them, but not in front of this nutty woman. I was torn between my eagerness to see what was in them and a fear that the contents would
disappoint
me. I was sure they were the files that had disappeared from Patrick’s desk.

We stacked them in the library.

‘Well, thank you very much, Mrs Delamitri.’ This definitely seemed like the right place to end her visit. ‘I hope this didn’t take you too much out of your way.’

‘Oh no, I’m staying with one of my girlfriends up at War Bonnet.’ She took a long, valedictory look over the
bookshelves
. ‘I’ve just had a crazy idea,’ she said suddenly. ‘Why don’t you let me buy you lunch?’

I hesitated. I was trying to cook up an excuse to stay behind and look at the files in privacy, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse.

‘Please. It would mean a lot to me.’

‘That would be nice,’ I said, half hoping I sounded
lukewarm
enough to make her rescind the invitation. I didn’t.

We drove to a fancy upscale place on the other side of the island. It was in a beautiful position, set back from a cliff top. The maître d’ treated Mrs Delamitri with an un-American
deference
. This, and the fact that she seemed to have booked a table, made me think there was something more calculated about our excursion than she let on. But since she was buying me lunch, it seemed a bit rude to accuse her of boosting my uncle’s papers.