Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

believe in that Judgment at the hour of their departing, certainly almost all murderers and instigators of murder throughout history. However, I wasn't concerned so much with heaping more blame on him as with holding myself together, which I was managing only with difficulty, how I would love to have appeared completely indifferent. And so I asked him a genuine question, that is, one I would have wanted to ask him anyway, when I was more myself.

'If he assumes you have something on him and you've got something like that, how come you were pussyfooting around him all evening? It looked like you were trying to placate him, not making any demands. According to what you've just told me, these videos are used above all to make it easier to wheedle concessions out of people, to blackmail them, but my impression was that you were having a hard time persuading him to do whatever it was you were trying to persuade him to do, or getting out of him what you wanted.'

Tupra looked at me in a slightly amused, slightly irritated way. I had still not moved from the ottoman, and so he was looking down on me.

'How do you know he doesn't have some footage of us? We could lose our advantage or it could be cancelled out.' He said 'of us,' not 'of me,' I thought that it could be footage of Rendel or Mulryan, although the latter seemed a very cautious type, and I couldn't imagine Perez Nuix behaving like Manoia in that cowshed. Or it could be Tupra, of course, or someone above him or, rather, above us, for I, too, was 'us.' Or a compromising video of another sort, not equivalent, not comparable, not as vile, or so at least I hoped. What I had seen in that film from Sicily was utterly repellent, as were the scenes shot in Ciudad Juarez and other places, I would never be able to forget them or, better still, erase them: as if they had never existed or trod the earth or strode the world, or passed before my eyes.

'That was in Sicily, wasn't it?' I asked then, adopting a technical tone of voice, which is the most helpful when one is on the verge of collapse.

'Very good, Jack, you get better and better,' he replied and made as if to applaud me, although he couldn't do so while holding the disk in one hand and his cigarette in the other. 'How did you glean that, from the song, the language or both things?'

'Three things-there was the guy with the lupara as well. It wasn't that hard.' I assumed he would know that word, even if he didn't know Italian. I was wrong, and this surprised me.

'The what?'

'The lupara! And I spelled it out for him. 'That's what they call that kind of double- barreled shotgun in Sicily'

'Well, you do know a lot.' Perhaps he was bothered because I was managing to put on a semblance of composure; after spending so much time covering my eyes, he must have felt sure that I would completely fall apart when I saw the man with whom I had shared both supper and drinks, whose hand I had shaken, with whose wife I had danced, gouging out a person's eyes. And of course I had fallen apart, I was trembling inside and I wanted to get out of that room as quickly as possible, but I wasn't going to let Tupra see that, he had tormented me quite enough for one night and I wasn't prepared to give him still more pleasure. Flavia would have no inkling of her husband's sadistic side, it's astonishing how little we know the faces of those we love, today or yesterday, let alone tomorrow.

'What I'd like to know is how come there was a camera in what I assume to be a remote cowshed somewhere in the back of beyond? Isn't that rather strange?' I tried to maintain that technical tone of voice, and I was doing quite well with my efforts to pull myself together.

Tupra again looked down at me from above, more amused now than irritated.

'Yes, it would have been very strange, Jack, if the fellow with the lupara, you see what a quick learner I am'-he pronounced the word as if it were English, 'looparrah,' he didn't have a very good ear-'hadn't hidden it there beforehand. If they'd discovered it, he might have ended up just like the man in the chair.'

I didn't really want an answer to my next question, but I asked it purely in order to shore myself up, until the moment when I could leave, and I asked it in that same technical tone:

'You're not telling me that guy's English, are you, looking like that? You're not telling me he's our agent?' I almost said 'your,' but I corrected myself or changed my mind in time, possibly ironically, possibly because in some way it suited me.

The answer was obvious, 'What else do you think we spend our money on?' or 'Why else do we have contacts?' or 'Why else do we resort to blackmail?' but Tupra, at that late hour, wanted to draw the attention back to himself. The fact is he had been doing this intermittently all night.

'That's a big question, Jack.' He moved away from me, went to the desk from which he had taken the disk, carefully put the disk back inside, and locked the drawer with the key, the key to his treasures. Then he turned to ask me the question again, from the other side of the desk, in the near-darkness. He said it with his large mouth- with his overly soft and fleshy mouth, as lacking in consistency as it was over-endowed in breadth-at the same time blowing out smoke: 'You've had plenty of time to think about it, so answer the question I asked you in the car. Now that you've seen things you'd never seen before and, I hope, never will again. Tell me now, why, according to you, one can't go around beating people up and killing them? You've seen how much of it goes on, everywhere, and sometimes with an utter lack of concern. So explain to me why one can't.'

None of the classic responses would work with him, I had known that from the start. I hadn't expected Reresby to come back to it, although I don't know why, given that like me and like Wheeler, he never lost the thread or forgot any unresolved matter or let go of his prey if he didn't want to. I looked stupidly around me, as if I might find an answer on the walls; the room lay in semi-darkness, the lights down low. For a moment, my eyes rested on the one image, perhaps as a respite from all the others, from those I had seen on that wretched television screen and from Tupra's living image: the portrait of a British officer wearing a tie and curled mustache and a Military Cross, his hair grown into a widow's peak, his eyebrows thick and an elegiac look no doubt like mine in his eyes, and in that mournful look I saw a reflection of my own exhaustion, a look that might give me away to Tupra, despite my artificial tone of voice. I could just make out the signature on the drawing, 'E. Kennington. 17,'

a name I had heard in Wheeler's mouth when he spoke to me about the Careless Talk Campaign of 1917, during World War One, the war that both he and my father had experienced as children, it seemed incredible that the two of them had still not been erased from the world, that they were not safe more or less in one-eyed, uncertain oblivion as the officer in the portrait would certainly be, unless Tupra knew his identity, the killing in that conflict had been worse than in any other, I mean people were killed in the very worst of ways, with new techniques but also in hand-to-hand combat and with bayonets, and those who had fallen at the front were uncountable, or no one had dared to count them. I tried a slight diversionary tactic, playing for time:

'Who's that military gendeman?' And I pointed to the drawing. Reresby's answer was contradictory, as if he simply wanted to get rid of the question:

'I don't know. My grandfather. I like his face.' Then he immediately returned to the matter at hand. 'Tell me why one can't.'

I didn't know what to reply, I was still very shaken, still dismayed and upset. I nevertheless said something, almost without intending to and certainly without thinking, purely in order not to remain silent:

'Because then it would be impossible for anyone to live.' I couldn't judge the effect of these words or indeed if they had one, I never found out if he would have laughed or not, if he would have mocked them, if he would have refuted them or scornfully allowed them to fall without even bothering to pick them up, because just then, the moment after I had spoken them, I heard a woman's voice behind me:

'Who are you with, Bertie, and what are you doing? You're keeping me awake, do you know what time it is, aren't you coming to bed?'

This was said in a domestic tone of voice. I turned round. The woman had switched on the light in the corridor and her shadowy figure on the threshold was silhouetted against the brightness, she had opened the door but her face was invisible. She was wearing a transparent, ankle-length dressing gown, made of gauze or something similar, tied with a belt or else in another way caught in around the waist and the rest was loose and flimsy, at least that was my impression, her apparently naked figure could be clearly seen through the gauze, although it was unlikely she would be naked, if she had heard my voice, or our voices; she had on slippers with high slender heels, as if she were an old-fashioned model of lingerie or negligees or nightdresses, a pin-up girl from the 1950s or the early '60s, a woman from my childhood. She looked like a calendar girl. She smelled good too, a sexual smell that