Tornado Pratt (31 page)

In Rome, it wasn’t a martial but a spiritual tremor. The crowd gave a start, as if the frames had jerked in the projector, and the next moment I was carried by a tide of people down a narrow side street towards the boulevard while a rising murmur of awe engulfed me. Across the boulevard I saw a woman drop to her knees, crossing herself and sobbing. She was quite young and smart and the thing that particularly registered was that her tight grey skirt was forced half way up her thighs so that she looked obscene and reverent at the same time. A moment later three black cars sighed past and I just caught a glimpse of the Holy Father’s plump unsmiling face and a finger raised in benediction.

That night, in the café, I asked some people how the crowd had sensed the Pope was about to drive past and a sneering Englishman maintained that Vatican runners always tipped off selected
individuals
so that there’d be a “spontaneous” demonstration. I don’t know if that’s true but the thing made a very unfavourable
impression
on me. I couldn’t see how Christ’s Vicar could drive about in big black limousines. That night I tore up my religious pamphlets and booked a flight back to New York.

But when I reached the airport the next morning I felt an even bigger distaste for New York. What was waiting for me? I couldn’t think of a single person I really wanted to see. A sadness coursed through me. Harvey had been mangled by a truck. Wheatear had disappeared long ago. Jack Borowski was in Japan. My ma and pa were still alive and I had a yen to visit them. But then I thought:
what’s happened to all the women? I must have had affairs with hundreds of women. Where have they all got to? And that made me think of Alex. I knew she was travelling for a syndicate of papers. So I phoned the New York office and discovered she was in Cairo. Later in the day, I took a plane to Cairo, my heart lifting at the thought of again seeing Alexandra Wilks. I decided I’d
propose
to her.

In Cairo, I found that Alex had gone up to the Sudan to
interview
a tribal leader. She was expected back in a week. But towards the end of that week, her office informed me that she’d been
rerouted
to Alexandria. So I took a bus to Alexandria. But I had a hangover and got on the wrong goddamm bus and found myself in a crumbling desert village. There wasn’t a bus back to Cairo for a week but in the bazaar I found a camel caravan setting out for Alexandria. So I bought a camel and teamed up with them. But on the way the chief’s wife died and the caravan just stopped dead for ten days of mourning. So I cut loose on my camel but, with just a pocket compass amongst all those dunes, I contrived to miss Alexandria. I phoned Alex and learned she was now in Sicily interviewing an American gangster. You won’t believe this, Horace, but the next unbelievable calamity was: the fishing boat taking me to Crete sank in a goddamm squall and we had to row in a small boat back to Libya. After that it was more camels and then a truck to Tripoli and finally a flight to Sicily in a two-seater. You guessed it. By that time, Alex had moved on to Paris. It wasn’t until I was finally established in a hotel room in Paris, swigging whisky and cleaning myself up, that the absurdity of my pursuit began to hit me. My black mood became pierced with memories of ludicrous incidents—like once when my camel wanted to go south instead of north and I had to practically drag it after me—which made me grin and then laugh aloud until finally I was staggering about the room, doubled up with laughter. Then finally New York phoned and gave me the name of Alex’s hotel. So I got a cab, stopped to buy an armful of flowers, and went fizzing along to the opulent palace they’d named. I had the room number and so, intending to surprise her, I went up in the elevator, padded along the deep carpet and knocked discreetly on the door, like a servant might have done. I was hissing with escaping glee and when Alex opened the door, I dropped the flowers, grabbed her up in my arms and just charged with her into the room and straight towards the bed, shouting: “Baby, wait till I tell you—”

But I didn’t get much further. I realized Alex was not responding
with delight. Instead she was bawling me out and pounding on my arms. Then I saw the bed was behaving strangely. I’d noticed it was unmade and assumed Alex had been having a nap, although she was fully dressed. But the bed began to squirm and out of it popped a disagreeable head. It was something like a monkey’s head—kind of brown and wizened—and my first thought was that Alex must have got herself a pet monkey. It even flashed through my mind that she must have a lot of pull these days because most hotels would be very uptight about guests harbouring monkeys in their rooms. But then I realized that the creature, although simian in appearance, had certain features, like hairlessness, which
compelled
one to classify it as human. And that realization was like a body blow, Horace, because if it was human it was definitely male and when a naked man is found in a woman’s bed, why—

I swear, Horace, it took me about ten seconds of concentrated speculation to reach this position and then I gave a low growl. This stimulated Alex to even more vigorous efforts to dislodge me while the monkey-man, with a startled grunt, hopped naked out of bed—revealing a figure like a dumpling with twigs stuck in it for arms and legs—and rummaged through a suitcase for something. I
released
Alex to be ready and was not surprised when the thing came up with a pistol. I plucked it out of his hand, took him under my arm and flipped him out into the passage. Then I shut and locked the door after him and turned to Alex with, I guess, an expression of pained inquiry. There was a muted frenzy of hissing and
scuffling
from the other side of the door and Alex screamed:

“He’s naked! You can’t leave him there!”

So I took a suitcase that contained male clothes, opened the door, tossed the suitcase out and shut the door again. Then I turned back to Alex. She was in the biggest rage I’d ever seen her. She stamped and her raven hair fell across her face. She yelled:

“Will you—give me that gun!”

I started to comply and then I felt a slight pang of fear lest Alex might be so het up she’d use it on me. So I opened the bottom drawer of a cabinet and dumped the Browning in it. Alex stormed to the door and seized the handle. But, before opening it, she turned to me again.

“When I open this door, Tornado, I want you to go out and Andreas to come in. And if you make one more hostile gesture towards him I will never speak to you again. Is that understood?”

I nodded.

She opened the door and called:

“Andreas! Andreas!”

She peered up and down the broad corridor but the missing link had vanished. I offered:

“Must have gone to the john to get dressed.”

Alex closed the door wearily, murmuring:

“Oh God.”

I burst out.

“But who the hell is he, Alex? I mean—hell—if you wanted a man you could have found something a little more elegant than that—in Paris!”

All the fight had gone out of her. She glanced at me absently and then went to the dresser and straightened her hair. She said:

“We’re going to be married.”

I thought: that’s ridiculous. I thought: that’s typical of Alex—she confers the tremendous honour of her body on a little freak for some kindly reason and then, when I kid her, she claims she’s going to marry it.

I asked:

“Where did you find him?”

She spun towards me then with a slight revival of her anger.

“I’ve told you about him. He’s my second cousin—from Salonika.”

But what began to seep numbly into my bones, Horace, was a realization that Alex meant it. That—curiosity—which was
doubtless
scampering through the hotel at that moment scaring dogs, was really her fiancé. A big knot of resentment began to tie itself in my throat, Horace. I suddenly perceived that the farcical trip I’d just completed had really been a noble pilgrimage, a sanctified quest for the mistress of my heart. And when the knight finally rides battle-stained back through his castle gates he finds his lady getting screwed by a monkey.

Then I began to get faint chimes from the name. Andreas? Yeah, Alex had talked about some Andreas. She’d said things like: the only really fine man I’ve ever known. Sure, whenever Alex had sought an example of nobility or an antidote to baseness, Andreas had been trotted out. I’d never invited her to enlarge upon this paragon because, I guess, I’d been jealous of the affection in her voice. Even when she’d shown me—Christ!
That’s
why I’d had trouble relating the monkey to the name! I’d seen his picture or at least a picture. But the image on the black and white positive had been of a sturdy, good-looking Greek with an
imposing
moustache. I’d only been jealous because he was so fine-looking.
If what had been on that picture had been monkey-Andreas I’d just have felt very sympathetic about the unfortunate—guy.

“How’d he get so shrivelled up?” I asked her a couple of days later.

There were just the two of us on a terrasse on the Champs Elysées. It had needed two days of abject telephone apologizing to get her to agree to meet me. But half an hour after we met we were back on the old easy footing.

“The Germans tortured him. He was a resistance fighter.”

“Alex—why does he have a gun?”

She shook her head with a little frown.

“I didn’t know he had until—”

It was about that moment I perceived that Alex wasn’t in love with Andreas. And that made it easy for me to be cordial to him. On our first civil meeting, that night at dinner in a restaurant, after profuse apologies, I delivered a rip-roaring account of my hunt round the Levant. I made it funny, particularly about my
stiff-necked
camel. Alex laughed a lot and Andreas grinned and nodded. Okay, I thought, you have no reason to like me. I’ll give it time. But no amount of time endowed Andreas with a sense of humour and his response to jokes—with Alex and me choking—was a nervous smile. The more I tried to see in him the ruined lineaments of a hero the more he blossomed as a creep. And, without it bothering me much, I felt that Alex thought so too. The Andreas she was really marrying was just a reminiscence—a profound young idealist who’d taken her sailing in gales and ignored the weather to discourse on Heraclitus. She was continually using this memory to screen off the reality of the physical and mental cripple she was engaged to.

I suggested this one time when we were alone but she flared up and quoted a Greek poem at me which I couldn’t understand even when she translated it. After about a week I headed back to New York.

About a month later, Alex turned up at my apartment and
confessed
that I’d been right. Andreas had changed and she’d decided not to marry him. I asked how he’d changed and she said he’d become reactionary.

“He’s some kind of agent for the Americans. That’s why he has the gun.”

“Well—”

“Don’t pretend you liked him.”

“No—I—straight on the line—thought he was a creep.”

A faint, rueful snort.

“When he was young, he wasn’t a creep.”

We went out for a meal and drank a bucket of wine by
candle-light
. After we’d talked about life and loneliness and somehow reached an expectant pause, she asked irritably:

“So—do
you
want to marry me?”

But before I could voice the inevitable reply which all our time had ineluctably generated, she quickly forestalled me.

“No, of course, you don’t. It’s not for us, is it? The funny thing is: I don’t believe in marriage. And I certainly have no conscious desire to be married. But—I suppose it’s the way women have always been trained—I keep remembering the word.”

And that, Horace, was positively the last time anything like romance interfered with the love between Alexandra Wilks and me, a love which lasted ten more years, as her lungs rotted away, until the moment when she tried to rise and greet me—her nurse pushing her back—and then issued a hoarse scream and died before my eyes. But my love for her didn’t end then, Horace. That’s the thing about love. It continues after the death of the person you love. In fact, it even gets a boost because all the niggling details of the living person are stripped away by death and just the warm central core remains.

About that time I received a letter from my bank manager
lamenting
the fact that my current account was moribund. This distressed, but did not surprise, me because I knew I’d been munching steadily at a puny bale of hay. I went to my share-dealer to unload a block of stock and found that, for some curious and crummy reason, most of my shares had collapsed. At current market prices, I wasn’t worth much more than about two thousand bucks.

I felt a great revulsion from making money. All kinds of slickers had been pestering me to wheel and deal with them. But none of the big boys. I just wasn’t respectable. Sure, I was part of the
financial
history of the twentieth century but they had me down as the last of the cowboys, brilliant but unstable, and so none of the solid corporations would even let me piss in their john, while fixers and operators besieged my door. But I had to do something, so I finally settled for a bean-pole with a shock of white hair who had a scheme for ripping off the Incas. We hustled down to Peru and set up a trading corporation. It worked fine. Two years of toil shovelled a million greenbacks into my account. But then a vile
incident with an Indian kid, who was a cripple and—something’s wrong. That wasn’t after the war. Shit, those Perkins swine—yeah, it was definitely before the war I ran into Sam Perkins in Chicago and—yeah, that’s got to be right because we could never have mounted the operation, with the new controls, in the sixties. So—where did I get?—hell, it’s a funny thing but I could swear I remember discussing the moon-shot with Ulysses Perkins and the moon-shot wasn’t until—the fifties, was it? Sixties? Long after the thirties. Comes to me a possible explanation could be that I wasn’t discussing the moon-shot but the
possibility
of a moon-shot with the Perkins hood. That could figure because I remember reading in Peru some book by Verne or Wells or someone about a primitive moon-shot and I remember Ulysses, the philistine,
booming
: who cares, Tornado?—moon, shmoon, are there any suckers there? Another possibility is that I was discussing the moon-shot in the sixties with someone whom I’m now confusing with Ulysses Rat Perkins. But then what the hell
did
I do when the bucks dried up in the sixties?