Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

face, the look of a dead man, of someone who knows he is going to die and knows he is dead. There were three or four or five times when his heart could have burst. 'Reresby is probably going to kill him now,' I thought without believing it, 'he's still got his sword with him. Or perhaps he's merely going to check that De la Garza has obeyed his orders. Or perhaps he wants to show his work to Manoia, to give Manoia or himself that satisfaction. Or maybe it is Manoia who has demanded to see the results of his labours and to give or withhold his approval, a 'Basta cos?' or a 'Non mi basta'. Or, more likely, this Sicilian, Neapolitan or Calabrian isn't going there to check anything, but is going to finish him off in person.' They did not take long, they were in and out in a trice, and when they rejoined us, our coats, Mrs Manoia's and mine, were still lying across the cloakroom counter. The fourth or the third possibilities were the most likely, either a case of accounts rendered or of pure vanity; I doubted it was the second possibility, Tupra knew as well as I did that De la Garza would not have moved an inch from his place on the floor. In that idiotic place, no one seemed to pay for anything, at least I didn't and I saw no one else pay either. Reresby must have an account there or else everything was always on the house or perhaps he was a member with a share. in the profits. Or, who knows, perhaps De la Garza had paid already behind our backs, before his last, interrupted dance, in order to seduce Flavia by that generous gesture. But that would have been most unlike him, nor would that dickhead have thought she was worth such a gesture.

The four of us got into the Aston Martin used on nights when the aim was to make a good impression or to toady up to someone, that night it had been the former; it was quite a tight fit, but we couldn't send the couple off in a taxi, we were the hosts, and, besides, it was only a short ride. We took them to their hotel, the opulent Ritz no less, near Hatchard's bookshop in Piccadilly, which I had visited so often following in the footsteps of past notables, Byron and Wellington, Wilde and Thackeray, Shaw and Chesterton; and not far from Heywood Hill, which I frequented more when I lived in Oxford, and not far either from the shops of Davidoff and Fox in St James's Street where Tupra probably bought his Rameses II and where I obtained my rather less magnificent Karelias cigarettes, from the Peloponnese.

When I said goodbye to Flavia, I had a presentiment – or was it prescience – that if she were still disappointed or disconcerted by the incident and the removal of the young man, after a while, in the darkness, when she and her husband were lying silently in their respective beds or together in their double bed, what she would remember most were the compliments paid to her during the evening and she would fall asleep feeling calmer and more contented than when she had woken up that morning; and this meant that she could still wake up the next day thinking: 'Last night, I was fine, but will I be all right today?' So at least, in that one respect, I had done my job and had, indirectly and extravagantly – the best way – given her a further extension. (How she would love to have known that she had been the cause of violence.) One more extension before the day on which her first thought would be: 'Last night, I wasn't fine, so what will happen today?' She kissed both Tupra and myself and went inside, not noticing the commissionaire who held the door open for her and not waiting for her husband to finish saying his goodbyes. He wouldn't tell her off for that, and she must have been eager to study her sfregio in a magnifying mirror and in a better light, and to start summoning up the more pleasant moments of that long night, when she had still been in such excellent spirits that she could urge me in mock-reproachful tones: 'Su, va, signer Deza, non sia cost antipatico. Mi dica qualcosa di carino, qualcosa di tenero. Una parolina e sara contenta… Anzi, me fara felice.’

As for Manoia, he shook Reresby's hand in what passed for effusiveness in such a mild, anodyne, Vaticanish man – the mildness, of course, was phoney – and I assumed that they had, in the end, reached some mutually convenient agreement, or had got from each other what each of them had asked for or proposed or had imposed by dint of some unspoken threat.

'It has been a great great great pleasure, Mr Reresby,' he said in his heavy Italian accent: he probably didn't know how else to translate 'grandissimo'. 'An evening full of incident but no less of a pleasure for that. Be so kind as to keep me informed.' In contrast, he was extremely cold with me, indeed, he left the hand I held out to him hanging in mid-air and merely inclined his head slightly, like an old-fashioned diplomat (and 'inclined' is something of an exaggeration). He did not even look at me, or, rather, I could not see his dull, zigzagging eyes behind his large, reflecting glasses. He pushed his glasses up on his nose with his thumb one last time, although they had not in fact slipped down, and said: 'Buona notte.’

Then he scuttled off after his wife, he probably found separation from her painful. He looked then more like a diligent civil servant than a rapist, not so much Mafia or Camorra or 'ndrangheta as Opus Dei or Christ's Legionnaires, or perhaps Sismi, whatever that was. But Flavia was nowhere to be seen in the lobby, not at least from the street. She must be in the lift, on her way up to their room, where she would lock herself in the bathroom for a while alone and thus postpone her husband's private reproaches. She would have warned him not to speak to her through the bathroom door, and in such matters he would doubtless have obeyed her.

He had not even added: 'Egrazie.' Nor was there any reason why he should, he was unaware of my growing anger or my unease. He may even have believed that I had been responsible for handing out the beating whose result must have pleased him when he visited the toilet to check. He may have taken me for a mere henchman, an underling, a flunkey, a thug. And the truth is that, at that moment, I did feel like a henchman and an underling, and even like a flunkey too: I had placed Tupra's victim precisely where he had wanted him to be. But not a heavy or a hitman or a goon, not a thug, because I hadn't laid a finger on anyone and had no intention of doing so. Just as I hoped no one would lay a finger on me, with or without the benefit of a sword, even with or without a comb.

25

Anything I sensed or knew about him and anything he knew or sensed about me – since you cannot, at will or with impunity, crouched or invisible like someone watching from a house or like a ghost, decipher another person who is, in turn, studying and deciphering you – came from observing someone who was also continually observing me, someone equipped with identical faculties and with the same or similar or possibly superior weapons; or perhaps all that can emerge from such a situation is a kind of sterile, reciprocal neutralisation, an impenetrability, a blockade, a cancelling out and a blindness – a sort of Cold War peace and detente – the mutual defusing of curses or gifts, paralysed and rendered useless when confronted by another mind that also suffers or enjoys them, if he and Wheeler were right and were not lying and I really did live up to their predictions. I was still so unconvinced of this that I did not quite believe it, despite Wheeler having persuaded me -invoking the authority of Rylands which there was now no way of refuting – that I did possess such a gift, and despite having grown bolder with each day spent on our one-eyed task in the building with no name, goaded by the faith of the others or by their demands: 'Tell me what else, don't stop, what else do you see, just say whatever comes into your head, don't delay or linger, the next to last thing we want is for you to keep quiet, to hesitate, to watch your back, we don't pay for your prudence, that isn't why we employ you, and the very last thing we want is for you to know nothing and to say nothing. Everything has its time to be believed, remember, so never keep silent, not even to save yourself, there's no room for that here and there's no cat either to get anyone's tongue, any of our five tongues, and you can't swallow it, not even if you wanted to choke yourself…' Or else: 'Why, you haven't even started yet. Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking. The really interesting and difficult thing is to continue: to continue thinking and to continue looking when you have the feeling that there is no more to think and no more to see, that to continue would be a waste of time. In that wasted time lies the truly important, at the point where you might say to yourself there can't be anything else. So tell me, what else, what else occurs to you, what else can you offer, what else have you got? Go on thinking, quickly now, don't stop, go on.' That was what my father used to say to us during any discussion, even from when we were very young.

And that possible situation of stalemate or of a draw and of resignation, of an absence of any duel, of holding back among one's peers, could happen not only with Tupra and, of course, with Wheeler, but with the other three, with young Perez Nuix and Mulryan and Rendel, and who knows, even with Branshaw and Jane Treves, if it came to that. And possibly with Mrs Berry too.

When Manoia had disappeared (at a trot), Tupra looked at me very seriously, almost ominously, outside on the pavement by the lights of the Ritz Hotel, Ritz Restaurant, Ritz Club. Then he smiled broadly and said: 'Shall I give