Читать книгу The New Republic - Lionel Shriver - Страница 15

At a pat on his shoulder, Edgar jolted upright. Nicola laughed. “You look like a vento head!” she teased. “Can I drive you home?”

Unchivalrously, he accepted the lift. After Nicola went up to fetch her car keys, she met Edgar in the foyer with a significant glance. “Before I forget.” From the folds of her cloak, she withdrew an oversize brass skeleton key, its head cast with runes, as if it might open a chest of gold doubloons or a secret medieval torture chamber. The key was heavy, with a smaller, modern key attached, and so made quite a clatter when she dropped it on the flagstones. As she dived to scoop it up, Henry was walking up the stairs.

“No, let me,” said Edgar, lunging for the set. “My keys,” he said to Henry, “from the Record. Dropped them. Clumsy of me. Must be tired.”

Henry blinked. The key was distinctive. Something didn’t quite compute. Still Nicola looked, though whiter by a shade, relieved.

“That was quick thinking, in the foyer,” said Nicola, as they pulled off in her Land Rover. “Thanks.”

“You may be a dandy rug weaver,” said Edgar. “But when it comes to the art of deception, you suck.”

She smiled, tightly. “I’m not sure if I should be offended by that, or not.”

Edgar delivered a few slash-slash assessments of her other guests, but Nicola didn’t pick up, and Edgar feared that he’d just queered the goodwill of one of those if-you-can’t-say-anything-nice types.

“I’m sorry that your new home won’t have been tidied,” she said. “It was left more or less au naturel. Not that Barrington was a slob—I mean, he was, but after these big, impromptu dos of his a few guests were always eager to stay and clear up. Some nights—mornings, rather—they actually fought over the Hoover. I dare say there were certain young ladies who’d have scoured his toilet bowl with their own toothbrushes.”

“No, the real test,” Edgar mumbled, “is whether they’d use them after.”

“Funny, some people go missing for weeks, and no one notices until a frightful smell starts leaking from their flats. But the alarm went out about Barrington in a matter of hours. He was meant to dine at Trudy’s that night. She’d made beef Wellington, of all things, an all-day-in-the-kitchen affair that Barrington had once mentioned in passing that he fancied. Foie gras, wild mushrooms, goodness knows what else. She insisted on making the puff pastry from scratch; the leaves came out a bit thick. Me, I find it’s often the simplest … Oh, never mind.

“He was always late, of course, but he’d usually make an appearance. I’m afraid that Trudy’s having gone to so much bother would count for all too little, but there’s not that much to do here, and the rest of us were all at Trudy’s.”

“More to the point, you were at Trudy’s.”

Nicola ignored the insinuation. “By two a.m. she was hysterical. We all thought she was overreacting, upset about having made rather a hash of the beef (not to be unkind, but it came out a tad well-done, and there was no disguising that cutting the crust was hard work). We thought she was hurt that after all her talking up the dish he’d made other plans. The dear girl has made great capital since from her intuition that something ghastly was wrong. How she felt ‘a wash of cold air’ and ‘suddenly Cinzeiro felt empty.’ She claims she’ll never again eat beef Wellington—which she insists on calling ‘beef Barrington’ in tribute. Well. Not much danger, in Barba.

“I’ve only been back to Barrington’s once,” she continued. “And please don’t mention it to Henry. But I simply couldn’t bear the idea of the police smashing that lovely cedar door with a battering ram. So when Barrington became an official missing person, I rang the chief inspector and arranged to let him in.

“The detectives went through everything,” she explained. “All they found was some gibberish on Barrington’s computer disks. Nonsense, according to Lieutenant de Carvalho. There was only one part of the house I steered the police away from. A small tower; they never noticed the door. You’ve the key to its padlock. But Barrington told me not to go up there. So I haven’t.”

“Even Bluebeard’s wives didn’t play along with that shit,” Edgar slurred. “You always so obedient?”

“When I make a promise.”

Including to your husband? “What do you think’s up there, then? Bodies?”

“Maybe one. That’s the only place we haven’t checked for Barrington. But on the off chance … I guess I didn’t want to know.”

She pulled up to a long dark hulk and sat, with the Land Rover idling, hands in her lap. Though the villa was virtually invisible, she closed her eyes, as if for good measure. “It does light up,” she said dismally, all but spelling out: Though only when a certain someone was inside.

Edgar fumbled his good-byes and trundled with his bags to the dim front porch. The lock responded gladly to his skeleton key. Pushed by the Barban gale, the thick cedar door opened by itself, as if Edgar were expected.

After groping for a light switch, he had a vague, cockeyed impression of having infiltrated a deserted sheikdom. He bumbled upstairs to a king-size four-poster. An ironing board would have sufficed. Having dragged off his clothes, he plunged into a small death.

Edgar woke between royal blue satin sheets, under billows of goose-down duvets. Pillows buttressed his every side, as if he were packed for overseas shipping. Opposite, lemony late-day sunlight filtered between shifting drapes of crimson velvet, and upper panes of leaded stained glass dolloped red and green lollipops onto the bed. A sole reminder of where he was, a high hissing whistle sang through the window cracks. Panes rattled as if o vento insano were rapping to get in, and a faint, low-pitched moan groaned outside.

According to his diving watch—in his freelance poverty so discordantly showy, yet in the context of his immediate surroundings a dime-store trinket—he’d slept fifteen hours.

Edgar propped on the springy pillows, which puffed cool air onto his cheek at every readjustment. This was indeed a master bedroom. Laid with overlapping Oriental carpets, the floor was elevated a step under the bed. Raising the four-poster into a throne of repose, the dais made fifteen hours’ sleep seem his due. Edgar could easily see settling here for days at a time amid splayed half-read books, occasionally granting an audience or tinkling a clear brass bell for breakfast service. The image of broad trays (carved camphor wood, Edgar decided, with ivory handles) hovered over both tall side tables. Spread with embroidered cloths, they’d be littered with goblets of guava juice, crumbs of honeyed pastries, ornate cups of thick, sweet coffee, and filigreed silver spoons.

Disquieted, Edgar disentangled himself. He disapproved of sloth, and had a positive horror of honeyed pastries. The bedding was contaminated with another man’s fantasy life.

Edgar padded gingerly around the room, as if afraid to wake someone up—like himself. More crimson velvet canopied the bed, and velvet drapes hung on rings from the frame’s upper rail. The curtains could be pulled all the way around the mattress to make a private tent. The fragrant dark cherries and rosewoods of the massive furniture were carved into busty prows of women or tumbles of ripe fruit; the bureau shimmered with mother-of-pearl inlays. A mosaic of colored glass beads framing the mirror threw highlights on Edgar’s naked figure, making his chest look more finely muscled than it was and his complexion lustier than he felt. The reflection likewise elongated his frame to tower beside the bedpost, and Edgar was only five-foot-eight. It was a mirror made for self-deceit. What it must have done for Saddler, a much larger man by all accounts, well—he must have looked leviathan.

Penetrating scents of cedar, sandalwood, and the residual haunt of a woman’s perfume intoxicated Edgar with the giddy notion of going back to bed. Rubbing his eyes, he ambled to the cavernous en suite bath to splash his face in the black alabaster sink. Drying, he plunged into a white towel plush as rabbit’s fur; the nap buried his fingers to the first knuckle. Scoping out the sunken tub—round, black marble, and wide enough for laps—he drew himself a bath.

Edgar treated himself to warm-up hot-water blasts and picked through an array of toiletries—saffron conditioner, mandarin-and-cloudberry shampoo, almond oil, truffle-and-musk mud-mask: effeminate frippery. Edgar inclined toward plain Ivory and timeless Head & Shoulders: man-stuff. Still. He tried the cloudberry shampoo.

The clothing he’d packed was clearly too summery, so Edgar was able to rationalize picking through rack upon rack of preposterous regalia in the walk-in closet: old-fashioned tails and cutaways, with magenta cummerbunds; kimonos whose dragons licked up the facing; quilted smoking jackets; flowing rayon shirts wide as kites, writhing with van Gogh sunflowers or flaming with foot-wide poinsettias; a charcoal woolen cape, lined with cream silk, fit for Bela Lugosi; some biblically voluminous caftans and togas; and a number of officers’ uniforms from foreign military outfits, whose appearance of authenticity was all the more reason not to prance around in them. None of the outlandish glad rags suited a man for writing, only for being written about. Although a smattering of standard Anglo fare—Burberrys, camelhairs, and tweeds from the finest London tailors—bespoke a journalist who occasionally did his job, the suspenders (braces, a voice whispered) marched with toy soldiers, and there wasn’t a tie to be found, just two dozen ascots.

Impetuously, Edgar slipped a dressing gown off its wooden hanger. The radiant golden robe faced with plum brocade might have costumed Apollo Creed.

Camp, sure. But somehow in their vastness all these garments stopped shy of kitsch. The lines of the finery were so drastic, their patterns so fantastic, their pretensions drafted on such a scale that they were rescued from ridiculousness by sheer audacity.

Except on Edgar. A foot too long, the nacreous dressing gown dragged like a wedding train. The shoulder pads drooped to his elbows, and the sleeves dangled inches beyond his fingertips. Even in the magic mirror, he looked like a Norman Rockwell: Junior Wears Father’s Bathrobe.

Fuck it. Edgar gathered the train and swirled out of the bedroom with a little transvestite flounce, assured that you could get away with anything so long as you did it with conviction.

Nicola was right: the house was enormous. Edgar’s disgust that the National Record would coddle any correspondent with such palatial accommodations failed to undermine exultation at his own good fortune. Aside from the one tiny round tower, the villa rose only two stories high, but spread across what must have amounted to half a New York City block. Its Moorish architecture expressed the clean, wide lines of Frank Lloyd Wright fare, without the iciness of modernity. Hanging tapestries and Oriental carpet softened the perpendiculars of mosaic tile and marble parquet. Downstairs was constructed on a variety of levels, the floors landscaped into benches cushioned with rotund pillows. The dining area’s table, like the bath, was sunken.

Though the western windows looked frosted, their panes were pitted irregularly: dulled by gale-borne sand. When the wind would poom a door against its frame, like a body slammed from the patio, it took practice not to jump.

Edgar’s favorite room at ground level was the atrium: open and Romanesque, lit by skylights slit around the ceiling, and organized around a rectangular pool whose fountain still plashed in Saddler’s absence. The atrium called out for scantily clad slave girls offering fleshy grapes, palm-leaf fans, and a flow of red wine as ceaseless as the fountain. While Edgar formed an instantaneous affection for the hall, it also made him nervous. Lassitude! Indiscipline! Sloth!

In fact, the entire villa was imbued with an indulgent sensibility to which Edgar was constitutionally hostile. The drinks cabinet clinked with a bonanza of top-shelf booze. Beckoning pillows plumping every room made Edgar’s head list and his eyelids heavy. Numerous guest bedrooms invited all-night social excess. The pantry, chock-full of absurd gift tins and jars—hazelnuts in Cointreau, glacé cherries, pickled quail eggs, smoked baby oysters—enticed three a.m. binges when no one was watching. Though the airy kitchen was fitted with every convenience, Edgar couldn’t picture Saddler chopping onions, and sure enough there was a Post-it note gummed to the Silver Palate Cookbook: “B, Could I leave this here for next time? See page 46—yum! —E.”

Since Edgar could no more envision Saddler plowing through The Peloponnesian Wars in original Greek than slicing zucchini, the upstairs study’s glassed-in leather-bound library—rows of erudite European histories and biographies in multiple languages from Flemish to Hungarian—was expensive paneling.

It was the study that showcased the got-the-T-shirt trinkets of a foreign correspondent, keepsakes that recalled the We Were There series that Edgar had devoured as a kid. In We Were There at Pearl Harbor … at Appomattox … at the Boston Tea Party, a pack of lucky brats always popped up at the right time and place. He should have told Wallasek that he quit being an attorney in order to jump between the covers of We Were There before it was too late, since no one was about to write a book about kids who serendipitously visit a corporate law firm in a season of hostile takeovers.

At any rate, Barrington Was There. The room overflowed with souvenir booty: a rifle slug, a rubber bullet, a melted metal bicycle pump, a human skull with a patch of scalp sun-dried to the bone. A U.S. Army C-ration kit gritty in the crevices may have commemorated the Gulf War or the invasion of Panama; a tin ladle cleverly fashioned from a can of potted beef, marked “Gift of Finland,” must have been saved in fond remembrance of a famine.

On the wide, curly maple desk sat a clear, catering-size mayonnaise jar, the sort coveted in primary school for terrariums. It brimmed with coins, from rands to bahts, including currencies, like the Zaire, that had become so devalued that its silver was no longer minted. Next to this cosmopolitan piggybank lay an unopened letter from Amnesty International addressed to Mohamed Siad Barre, a Spider-Man comic book in Russian, and a sheet of ghoulish “AIDS Has No Cure” postage stamps from Kenya. The left-hand desk drawer was brimming with electoral buttons: Vote for Marcos, Mengistu, Mobutu, Duvalier, Rabin … Mostly demagogues, plus Rabin had been assassinated: quite a cynical tribute to democracy. One file opened on the desk appeared to include every SOB atrocity claim and policy statement ever issued; another drawer rattled with microfloppies alluringly labeled SOB STORIES. The floppies could save Edgar some work.

A set of three-ringed notebooks lined one bookshelf, and Edgar pulled the first volume: Saddler’s clip files. Edgar scanned the initial feature, an impassioned exposé about Thai prostitution—the slave wages, diseases, indentured servitude. Touching, if overwritten. But reading is the ultimate submission. Edgar shoved the notebook back. Turning gruffly from his predecessor’s accomplishments, Edgar started as a pair of eyes met his own.

Well, well. The big, big, big man in the foreground of that black-and-white enlargement had to be none other than Himself. Saddler was seated on the downstairs ottoman, bulwarked by pillows. His barrel-chest burst with such self-satisfaction that it strained the rhinestone buttons of the tuxedo shirt. His eyes sparked with the sinister twinkle of Santa Claus paging kiddy porn. And his right arm was hooked in a virtual headlock around Nicola.

Edgar was consternated. Sure, he’d caught the wink-and-nod in Wallasek’s office, but that was before he’d met her and before he knew she was married. Edgar was mystified why such an elegant and estimable woman would muck in with a scumbag like Saddler.

Yet a second revelation rankled more considerably.

Edgar had verified in childhood what the New Testament only hints at. Yes, mobs will reprieve murderous hooligans before they acquit a babbling messianic head case; Barabbas was merely wicked, and Jesus was actually irritating. What the Bible failed to illustrate was Edgar’s personal Apocrypha: that people will exonerate sadists, braggarts, liars, and even slack-jawed morons before they’ll pardon eyesores. If you’re attractive, people need a reason to dislike you; if you’re ugly, people need a reason to like you. They don’t usually find one. In his tubby school days, Edgar had learned the hard way that every vulgar slob on the block was an aesthete.

Now along comes this absentee paragon, about whom no one from New York to Cinzeiro can stop talking for more than ten minutes even using a stopwatch, and guess what? Barrington Saddler wasn’t even handsome.

Saddler was built like a grain silo. Drawn practically into his lap, Nicola looked like a stick puppet in comparison. His eyelids were swollen, his cheeks loose; he had an infant double chin. Some great frames afforded no end of abuse, but in a few years’ time the likes of that full back-up case of Beefeaters in the pantry would begin to show. His lips had a faintly feminine fullness, and his neck was thick. His features were pinched, gathered too closely into the middle of his face, as if someone had laced a drawstring around its perimeter and pulled. Though shaggy around the ears, in front his hair was thin. This was no Romeo, but a sybaritic lout well on his way to a stout and gouty middle age. How did he do it?

Defiantly, Edgar tossed the golden robe onto an overstuffed leather armchair. He began his daily one hundred push-ups, keeping his back perfectly straight, lowering his nose fully to the floor. From overhead, Saddler seemed to find the hale-and-hearty exhibition bemusing. For no reason that Edgar could fathom, he stopped at ninety-nine.