dropped from the height of a weather balloon and had just now crashed down in the middle of the campus, so that the roof was gone, the east wall was gone, the other walls were still crumbling as he watched, and a thick grey ruff of dust was rushing after the audience of
After he’d accompanied her as far as the little hospital in Pasadena, he decided to walk straight home. Stent Mutton had told him that he ought to stay on campus to answer questions for the police, but he felt sure they had no chance of finding Bailey, so a delay would hardly matter, and after all that had happened he very much needed a solipsistic whisky. When he turned off Palmetto Drive on to his own street, however, he saw that the lights in his house were on. Was even Woodkin so efficient that he could already have engaged some sort of skunk mortician?
Loeser unlocked the front door. ‘Hello?’ he said.
‘Oh, hello, Loeser,’ said Rackenham, who stood naked in the middle of the sitting room. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back until later. Isn’t it your play tonight?’
Loeser closed his eyes and told himself that it would be an overreaction to ajudge that this was the absolute worst thing to which he could possibly have come home. Lots of other things would have been worse. A ghost, for instance; or a skunk; or a giant ghost skunk; or the vengeful and newly cyclopean Professor Franklin Bailey digging his spurs into a giant ghost skunk like some grim mounted herald of the fish god Dagon; or even his ex-girlfriend Marlene.
No. There was nothing. There was not one thing worse than Rupert Rackenham standing there naked. ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house?’ said Loeser in German.
‘I can promise it will be much better for your peace of mind if I don’t tell you.’
‘Just tell me.’ He was trying not to look at Rackenham’s penis but it seemed to occupy about two thirds of his field of vision.
‘Fine, if you must know: I was with Gorge’s wife. We didn’t know what the smell was — I’d be fascinated to learn, by the way — and there wasn’t time to find anywhere else to go before her appointment with her psychiatrist, so I insisted we make the best of it. At Winchester I slept in a dormitory with eight other boys every term for five years, so this strikes me as pretty mild. But we’d only just got the motor running, so to speak, when she began to feel queasy. So she got dressed and left. I would have left too, but it occurred to me that if the stain on the air turned out to be indelible I might not have any occasion to come back here again, and I ought to find Delia Sprague’s nail scissors at last, so I stayed. They’re some sort of cherished family heirloom and she’s been pestering me for weeks. Wealthy women learn to be forgetful because they know everything can pleasurably be replaced — except that once in a while it can’t. To tell you the truth, when I looked in that box of yours, I couldn’t quite believe the quantity and variety of the rejectamenta. I’m surprised you never wondered where it was all coming from.’
‘Of course I fucking wondered! How many women have you brought here?’
‘A good deal. When you’re out. They can hardly receive me at home, can they? They’re millionaires’ wives. The servants would talk. And my house in Venice Beach is an hour’s drive away. Los Angeles is so spread out. Why do you think I was so keen for you to take this place? And so helpful about bringing you the key after I got it from Woodkin? I hope you haven’t forgotten that when I got you that first invitation to dinner at Gorge’s house, you said you’d owe me a favour.’
There were quite a lot more questions Loeser wanted to ask, but in his bewilderment he could only manage: ‘So why are you still nude?’
‘It’s a warm night for December. Now, old chap, I really must find these nail scissors — might you have any idea where they are?’
‘I can promise it will be much better for Delia Sprague’s peace of mind if I don’t tell you. Just get your clothes.’
The skunk’s colleague gathered his clothes, went into the bathroom to get dressed, and came back out. ‘You know, as it happens, I could ransack a pot of tea: I don’t suppose before I go I could just—’
‘No,’ said Loeser.
‘By the way, have you heard about Brecht?’
‘What about Brecht?’
‘He’s coming to Los Angeles. He’s in Finland now, but he’s going to apply for a visa.’
‘Please just leave my house before you tell me anything else that makes me want to walk into the Pacific.’
Since the only regular visitor to Loeser’s bungalow was the postman, the sound of Rackenham’s departing footsteps was enough to remind him that he hadn’t checked his mailbox that day. He went outside and found in it a letter with a Berlin postmark. When he looked at the address, he recognised the handwriting, and breathed out the vapours of an overwhelming relief.
Loeser had never replied to that letter about the incident on the tram that Blumstein had sent him in 1938. But his former mentor had persisted in his attempt to patch up their friendship, continuing to write every three or four weeks. Each time, Loeser got through about a paragraph, and then as soon as Blumstein made any reference to the conditions in Berlin, he would stop reading and throw the letter away. Loeser told himself that he hadn’t come to live six thousand miles from the Allien Theatre just to endure rambling appeals for sympathy from his irrelevant former mentor. He began to resent them more and more. Each ivory envelope was like a ragged little emigrant from Blumstein’s life that could not be turned back at the border because it had all the right stamps from all the right officials — like a pestering ghost condom, a dead French letter, stuck down with the warm fluid of all that Loeser had not done but probably should have — as unwelcome in his mailbox as any strange deposit from the domestic spirit in which he had once believed. And as the months went on, it became harder and harder to persuade himself that, when the sight of his own address in Blumstein’s handwriting made him feel as if he had his head caught in a bear trap, it was just some banal combination of boredom and annoyance, rather than, for instance, guilt: because to concede that he felt guilty about Blumstein’s letters, or even to concede that there was any reason whatsoever why he might expect to feel guilty, would demand an internal readjustment of a magnitude not unlike his recent experience with Adele — except without a comparable sense of liberation. And no one could make him concede any of that, so he didn’t.
Then the letters stopped.
When Blumstein was writing letters, Loeser wanted him to stop writing letters. But then when Blumstein stopped writing letters, Loeser wanted him to start writing letters again — and he wanted it ten times as much. When Blumstein was writing letters, Loeser had to force himself not to think about Blumstein. Then when Blumstein stopped writing letters, Loeser still had to force himself not to think about Blumstein — and he had to force himself ten times as hard. Quite often, he’d dreamed about getting more letters, but nothing had actually come until today.
Loeser closed the mailbox. He went back inside. He sat down and he tore open the envelope. He saw that there was nothing inside.
And for some reason the sight of the empty envelope made him think of Ziesel lying dead in that locked chamber, and he coughed twice on the skunk rot, and his eyes filled with tears, and at that moment he knew for sure that Blumstein was going to die before he ever wrote another letter.
This wasn’t logical, of course. There were all sorts of reasons why an envelope might have arrived empty. Blumstein might have made an absent-minded error; or his wife Emma might have; or it might not have been an error at all, but rather a deliberate performative metaphor for the end of any chance of reconciliation; or some postal official might have steamed open the envelope for the purposes of censorship or espionage or theft and neglected to replace the contents afterwards. All those explanations made some sense, whereas there was no causal connection at all to be drawn between an empty envelope and Blumstein’s doom.
Nonetheless, Loeser was certain. He would never see Blumstein again. Not without a phasmatometer.
The telephone rang and Loeser went to pick it up. Just like the very first time a missive from Blumstein had
