‘The publisher’s friend told someone who told me. Robert Blumenthal’s friend.’
He saw a man with hair like a dark, curly frame around his face, bright brown eyes. The look of an intellectual lumberjack. He remembered a voice, low, husky, quick speech.
That was all he remembered.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anselm. ‘I had an accident in 1993 and my memory’s bad. I can’t recall the piece. Not at all.’
She was silent. She doesn’t believe me, he thought. Well, a person who seeks out rentboys who say they were fucked by a British Cabinet Minister, she’d probably be of a sceptical bent.
‘Mr Anselm, it’s terribly important,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t being melodramatic when I said to your brother it was a life and death matter.’
He didn’t say anything.
She made a small sound. Not a cough, a sound of embarrassment. ‘I’d really like to say more,’ she said, ‘but I’m…I’m not comfortable speaking on the phone. You’ll understand, I think.’
Anselm thought he heard something in her voice. Truth, you sometimes knew it when you heard it. Truth and fear and lies, they had their pitches and cadences and hesitancies.
‘It’s a long shot,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit desperate. Very. I’ve probably bothered you for nothing. Wasted your time.’
Anselm looked at his drink. Bob Blumenthal? How did he know him, know his face so well? What short film was that? Did he like or hate the Bob Blumenthal whose face he could see.
‘I’ll call you again,’ he said. ‘Give me some time.’
‘Tonight?’
‘I don’t know. Possibly.’
‘Please. I’d be…it’s…well, it’s not a story I’m chasing, it’s something more. Anyway, I’ve said that. So…’ ‘Yes. Goodbye.’
Anselm sat for a while, smoked a cigarette. The room had warmed. He sipped the whisky, finished it, went to the kitchen and poured another one. People interested in his past, things he knew. Alex, this woman. Sniffing around him. He was a source. A repository of something. They thought he had something they could use.
But why did that make him uneasy? He knew about cultivating people, getting people to trust him, to tell him things.
Forget Caroline Wishart. She wanted something and there was no knowing what it was. It was unlikely to be what she said it was.
The life of question and answer. How had he fallen into it?
No.
He remembered something else. Her telling him, in this house, that she was leaving his father. He was seventeen. On the terrace of this house, sitting in the wicker chairs, losing their paint even then and never painted again.
The chairs were still on the terrace, the exposed surfaces bare of paint. His father had remembered them from before the war, before he was sent to America.
The last Anselm to sit in the chairs, look at the garden, at the canal. He would be that one.
The day she told him, it was autumn. He remembered the big drifts of leaves lying in the garden, in hollows, at trees. Leaves liked to cluster.
He had trouble recalling his mother’s face. In Beirut, in the coffin for two, her smell had come to him in dreams, lingered in his nostrils when he woke as if it were actually in the air. Not a perfume exactly, cologne and something else, a talcum powder perhaps. The smell had filled him with a sadness and a longing so unbearable that he would gladly have died to extinguish it.
That day on the terrace, she said, she had a matter-of-fact way, she said:
She joined Medecins Sans Frontieres. He went to college and she died in the Congo. His father said on the telephone that it was quick and painless, a fever, she lost consciousness. Some exotic viral infection, he couldn’t remember what it was called.
What did people mean when they said
Anselm rubbed his eyes, finished the whisky. He went to the big stone-flagged room off the laundry, the boxroom, floor-to-ceiling shelves. In the corner, stairs went down to the cellar. Frau Einspenner had taken him down those steep stairs, a little of the exquisite apprehension came back to him.
The cartons from San Francisco stood on the floor, only one opened.
His life before Beirut lay in the boxes. He felt no attachment to that life, no curiosity about the missing pieces of it. He should leave the material remains alone.
He began with the open carton.
50
…LONDON…
‘His name is Constantine Niemand. South African, an ex-soldier, a mercenary, worked as a security guard in Johannesburg. Two days before he arrived here, he was on the scene of an affair in Johannesburg, a burglary gone wrong, five people killed, three blacks, one a security guard, the other two…’ ‘Losin me, boy.’
‘A white couple were killed. Brett and Elizabeth Shawn, British passports.’
‘Your Krauts running that name?’
‘Yes.’
‘The woman, what’d you do there?’
‘There’s a watch on the place. She hasn’t shown.’
‘And the old address?’
‘The old address?’
‘Your reliable pricks heard the phone ring. Then he wasn’t there. Who the living fuck do you think called him? And how the fuck did she know to call him? Hasn’t crossed your brain has it? And don’t say
‘With respect, Mr Price, I’m not prepared…’ ‘Sonny, deal with me or deal with the devil. There’s much worse coming up behind me. I’m the good cop. You want to walk from this fucken Waco you created, get the fuck out. And wherever you go, get on your knees every morning noon and fucken night and pray the Lord to take away the mark on your fucken forehead.’
‘We’ll cover this stuff, Charlie.’
‘I truly hope so, Martie. I truly do. Or we’re talking missing in action.’
51
…HAMBURG…
It was in the second carton. In the top box.
A flimsy magazine with a sombre cover of light grey type on a black background.
February 1993.
Four articles were promoted on the cover. The top one was: ‘And Unquiet Lie the Civil Dead’.
