Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (57 page)

The first thing I did when I walked through the front door of the apartment, which, for a while, came to be my home, ingenuously furnished by an Englishwoman I never met, was to dial Tupra's home number. It was the weekend and no one would be at the building with no name, at least in theory, for I knew I wasn't the only one who went there out of office hours, to finish off some task or report or to rummage around or investigate. As had happened when I phoned him from Madrid, a woman's voice answered. I uttered the name I found repellent to use, Bertie, in order to show my familiarity with him—not that I needed to; my knowing his home number was indication enough.

'He's out of London at the moment,' the voice said. 'May I ask who's calling?' I didn't have his cell phone number, which Tupra guarded jealously, and, besides, he was of the opinion that everything could wait 'as used to happen in the old days.'

'Jack Deza,' I said, and I unintentionally pronounced the 'z' as a Spaniard would, having got used to doing so again while in Spain, it would have sounded like 'Daetha' or 'Deatha' to an English ear. 'I work with him, and it's very important. Would you mind giving me his cell phone number? I've just got back from Madrid and I have something urgent and of great interest to tell him.'

'No, I'm sorry, I don't think I can. He's the only one who can do that,' replied the woman. And she added slightly impertinently, which made me suspect that she was Beryl, although I hadn't spoken to her for long enough at Wheeler's supper to be able to recognize her voice, which wasn't particularly young, although not old either: 'If you don't have it, it must be because he didn't consider it necessary.'

'Are you Beryl?' I asked, at the risk of causing my boss some domestic or conjugal upset if she wasn't. Not that I cared any more; he would soon cease to be my boss—I had made my decision. Or almost, nothing is sure until it's over and done with.

'Why do you ask?' was her reply. And in a tone of voice that seemed half-stern and half-mocking, she said: 'You don't need to know who I am.'

'Perhaps Tupra has forbidden Beryl, if she is Beryl and she must be,' I thought, 'from telling anyone that they're an item again, still less that they're living together, or perhaps they prefer to think of themselves like that, rather than as married, enjoying the clandestine nature of their situation.' I remembered her long legs and her unusual smell, pleasant and very sexual, which were perhaps the things that drew Tupra back to her again and again; sometimes our weaknesses are for the simplest of things, the things we cannot give up. I was about to say: 'If you are Beryl, we've met before. I'm a friend of Sir Peter Wheeler's. We were introduced at his house some time ago now' I resisted, however, thinking that if I said any more, it would only make matters worse.

'I apologize, I didn't mean to be impertinent,' I said. 'Could you perhaps tell me when Bertie will be back?'

'I don't know exactly, but I imagine that if you work with him, you'll see him in the office on Monday. I assume he'll be there.'

This was a way of telling me not to phone him again at home on a weekend. I thanked her and hung up; I would have to wait. I opened the window to air the apartment after so many days away, quickly unpacked my bag, did a little dusting, examined the accumulated mail, and then, when evening was coming on and I didn't really know what else to do—when you've just arrived home, life lacks its normal rhythm—I went over to the window and saw my neighbor opposite dancing, beyond the trees whose tops filled the center of that square: nothing had changed—why should it, time deceives us when we go off traveling, it always seems longer than it was. His usual two women friends were with him, the white woman and the black or mulatto woman, a well-matched trio, the women must be each other's
ġe-bryd-guma,
with him as their link, another similarity with Custardoy, who enjoyed taking two women to bed with him at the same time, although not, I think, with Luisa—where would Custardoy have gone with his shattered hand, where would he really have gone, it was no affair of mine and I didn't care, just as long as he met my conditions and kept away from her and, most important of all, never told her of my intervention. The three dancers were performing some very fast steps, a kind of flamenco-style stamping or perhaps it was tap—I couldn't guess what loud music he would be playing in his living room on a Saturday—because they each had their right arm raised to hold something in place on their respective shoulders, some small and apparently living moving object, and this time I couldn't resist picking up my binoculars and when I managed to focus, I saw to my amazement that each of them did, in fact, have a very tiny dog draped around their shoulders, now I don't know anything about the different brands or, rather, breeds of dog, but the man's dog was snub-nosed and hairy, and the women's were more like rats, with pointed snouts, one of those scrawny dogs with a crest or bun or fringe or toupee on their heads, disgusting creatures whatever they were. The dogs certainly didn't look as if they belonged to them and I wondered where they would have got them from, perhaps they'd hired them especially in order to perform their eccentric dance, but whatever the truth of the matter, the poor creatures must have been feeling horribly dizzy, or indeed positively upset and desperate; the dancers' tapping would feel to them like a permanent earthquake or something similar. It was to be hoped that no member of an animal protection society, which are so fierce and so active in England, spotted what my neighbors were up to, because they'd doubtless be reported for the torture, harassment and bewilderment of small defenseless beasts. 'They must be mad,' I thought, 'they must think there's some special merit in being able to dance and, at the same time, balance a living being on their shoulders; one false move, and a dog could go flying off, hurled against a wall or a window.' I stood watching them for a few minutes until they all stopped abruptly amid urgent gestures of displeasure and alarm: the white woman's little dog had peed on her, spraying her face and hair, and because this had happened in the middle of some particularly frenetic stamping, it had sprayed the other two as well. Finding itself the object of such frenzied movements, the poor dog had doubtless judged that incontinence was its last line of defense. They released all three mutts—who tottered off—and began quickly and disgustedly taking off their soiled clothes, and just as the man was about to remove his elegant polo shirt, he looked straight across at my window and saw me. I immediately hid my binoculars and took two steps back, ashamed to be caught spying. However, they didn't seem angry at all, even though the two women had by then stripped down to their bras, a situation made worse—or better—by the fact that the mulatta wasn't wearing one. As on the previous occasion when they had spotted me, they waved cheerfully, beckoning me to come over. I had felt ashamed on that occasion too, but had managed to see an advantage in that reciprocal visual contact and thought that if one particular night or day proved truly desolate: I at least had the possibility of going in search of company and dancing on the other side of the square, in that happy carefree household whose occupant resisted all my deductions and conjectures, and inhibited or eluded my interpretative faculties, something that happened so infrequently that it bestowed on him a slight air of mystery. And the prospect of that hypothetical visit, that possible future contact, had made me feel lighter and less vulnerable, as if it provided a kind of safety net. That day could not have been more desolate, a whole empty Sunday stretched ahead of me until I could speak to Tupra, one of those desolate Sundays 'exiled from the infinite' or
'banni de l'infini,'
as I believe Baudelaire once wrote and as English Sundays tend to be; I knew them well from many years before, from the first time I had lived there, in Oxford, and I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know. So perhaps the moment had arrived to take advantage of the safety net offered by that jovial trio; what's more, the women had no compunction about showing themselves to me, especially the one I had always preferred and who had the most to show. I hesitated for a moment about whether to go downstairs, across the square and up to that other apartment, but instantly dismissed the idea. 'No, now it makes even less sense than ever,' I thought, 'in a few weeks or a month, at most two, I probably won't be living here or looking out on this square any more, and they will become merely a pleasant memory that will gradually fade. And now, alas, I can't help but interpret my dancer, because I can't help associating him with Custardoy and seeing an affinity between the two.' And so, smiling, I went back over to the window and wagged my forefinger at them to tell them 'No.' Then I opened my hand and raised it slightly in a friendly gesture, my way of saying 'Thank you' and perhaps also 'Goodbye.'

I shut the window and came back into the room. I decided to go out to a nearby grocery store and buy a few basic things to fill up the nearly empty fridge; the store also sold magazines and newspapers, but I no longer wanted to buy a copy of
The Sun
or any other paper of that ilk; and when I returned, I chose not to turn on the TV, sure that some program, if not most, would be discussing the horrible crime of Dr. Dearlove, former odontologist, now transformed into the new Hyde who could never go back to being plain Dr. Jekyll: he would be a lascivious murderer from now until the Final Judgment, at which, in other times—the times of steadfast faith—people would have expected a Bulgarian or Russian boy called Danev or Deyanov, Dimitrov or Dondukov to confront him and accuse him with the bitter words of someone who died too young. Or perhaps he would address Tupra or even me. I preferred not to know too much, about him or about Dearlove, mainly because I didn't need to and because it would only increase my sense of sadness. I already knew enough, and the press would be full of ghoulish, misleading speculations. What no one would know was that there was someone behind it all, an expert on narrative disgust or horror and on the Kennedy-Mansfield complex and its all too effective curse, and that the murder had nothing to do with chance or a bad night or a moment of mental derangement. Danev or Dondukov could no longer tell who had hired him or how, nor what he had been hired to do, and I was in no position to prove anything. Nor, indeed, was I even considering the possibility.

I phoned young Pérez Nuix, who was at home, told her I had just got back and asked if we could meet that evening or the following day ('It's urgent, important; but it'll only take a moment,' I said, as she had once said to me, and on that occasion, 'it' had lasted until morning; an experience that had not been repeated). She said that would be fine, made no attempt to find out in advance what it was about and was happy to come over to my part of town ('It'll do me good to get a bit of fresh air, I've hardly been out all day, and besides I need to walk the dog'), we shared a kind of unconfessed loyalty. We arranged to meet in the bar of the luxury hotel I could see from my window ('Give me an hour and a half, no more, long enough for me to take the dog out and then come over'), and when she was installed there, with a drink before her, I told her about Dick Dearlove and the interpretations Tupra had elicited from me after the celebrity supper in London and, later, in Edinburgh. I laid out to her my arrogant reports, my hypotheses, my theories, my mise-en-scenes, and my predictions. As things had turned out, they appeared to indicate a high degree of prescience on my part.

'It's too much of a coincidence, don't you think?' I added, and I did not for a moment imagine she would contradict me.

I noticed that she seemed slightly uncomfortable, as if for some reason she felt impatient with or displeased by my anxieties, and she took a slow sip of her drink as you do when you need to think a little longer about what you're going to say. Finally, she said:

'Coincidences do happen, Jaime, as you well know. In fact, I think they're part of normal life. But not, I guess, where Bertie is concerned. Where Tupra is concerned,' she corrected herself, 'you're right, it's unlikely. With him almost nothing is coincidental.' She fell silent for a few seconds, giving me, I thought, almost a commiserative look, then she went on: 'But what is it that you find so troubling? Giving him the idea to lay a trap that you don't like? That someone else was harmed, rather than the person who should have been hurt by that trap? That someone, an instrumental victim, died? Yes, of course, what else do you want me to say, of course I understand your unease. But we've talked about this before,' she reminded me. And seeing my bewildered expression, she added: 'Yes, I told you that what Tupra did or decided was not our responsibility. Everyone, regardless of who they work for, occasionally provides their boss with the occasional idea, and if he thinks it's any good, that boss then takes up the idea and, a mere two minutes after hearing it, believes he was the one who thought of it in the first place. Sure it's irritating, they don't even give you a pat on the back, but it also means that we're absolved of all responsibility. At the time, I said that worrying about what happened with our reports was like a novelist worrying about what potential buyers and readers of his book would understand and take away from it.'

I remembered that, and I also remembered saying that I didn't think the comparison worked. She had made further comparisons, none of which had convinced me. Again, she seemed to me more experienced and, in a way, older than me. She was looking at me as if she were idly witnessing the end of time, something that she had already experienced and left behind. Perhaps that was the origin of her impatience, displeasure or discomfort: it's disheartening having to explain to someone else what it took blood, sweat and tears to learn and with no help from anyone. Or perhaps she had been able to count on Tupra's help, who was no mean arguer.

'I didn't think the comparison worked,' I said. 'Besides, a novelist
should
take care what he puts in his book, don't you think?'