Absolute Friends (3 page)

It is in his quest for solid verification therefore that Mundy now casually changes his vantage point, first by flinging out a rhetorical arm, then by spinning round on his box to point out to his audience the view, the splendid, the magnificent view, afforded from the royal bedstead--just follow my arm, ladies and gents--of the Italian waterfall descending the northern slopes of the Hennenkopf.

"Imagine you're lying there!" he urges his audience with a rush of exuberance to match the spectacular torrent. "With somebody who loves you! Well, probably _not__ in Ludwig's case"--gusts of hysterical laughter from the Russians--"but lying there anyway, surrounded by all that royal Bavarian gold and blue! And you wake up one sunny morning, and you open your eyes, and you look out of the window at--_bang.__"

And on the word _bang__ nails him: _Sasha--good God, man, where the hell have you been?__ Except that Mundy says none of this, neither does he indicate it by so much as a slip of the eye, because Sasha in the Wagnerian spirit of the place is wearing his invisibility hat, his _Tarnkappe__ as they used to call it, the black Basque beret worn severely across the brow that warns against the slightest indiscretion, particularly in time of war.

In addition to which--lest Mundy has by any chance forgotten his clandestine manners--Sasha has placed a curled and pensive forefinger to his lips, not in warning but rather in the dreamy pose of a man relishing the vicarious experience of waking up one sunny morning and looking out of the window at the waterfall coming down the Hennenkopf. The gesture is superfluous. Not the keenest watcher, not the smartest surveillance camera in the world would have caught a hint of their reunion.

But Sasha all the same: Sasha the midget-sentry, vital even when he is motionless, poised that little bit apart from the person nearest him in order to escape the comparison of height, elbows lifted from his sides as if he's about to take off, his fiery brown eyes aimed just above your eyeline--never mind that, like Mundy, you're taller than he is by a head and a half--bonding, accusing, searching, challenging, eyes to inflame you, question and unsettle you. Sasha, as I live and breathe.

The tour is ending. House rules forbid guides to solicit but allow them to hover at the doorway, nodding their departing audience into the sunlight and wishing them a safe and simply _marvellous__ holiday. The take has always varied, but war has reduced it to a trickle. Sometimes Mundy stands empty-handed till the end, his bowler roosting on a convenient bust lest it be mistaken for anything as vulgar as a begging bowl. Sometimes a devoted middle-aged couple or a schoolteacher with unruly charges will dart shyly forward and press a banknote on him, then dart back into the throng. This evening it's a genial building contractor from Melbourne and his wife Darlene who need to explain to Mundy that their daughter Tracey did this _very same tour__ way back in the winter, with the _self-same travel company,__ would you believe it? And had just _loved__ every minute of it--maybe Mundy remembered her, because she sure as hell remembered the big tall Pom in the Bowler Hat! Blond girl, freckles and a ponytail, boyfriend a medical student from Perth, plays rugby for his university? And it is while Mundy is putting on a show of hunting for Tracey in his memory--the boyfriend's name was Keith, the building contractor confides, in case it's any help--that he feels a hard small hand encircle his wrist, turn it palm upward, insert a folded note and close his fingers over it. In the same moment, out of the corner of his eye, he glimpses Sasha's beret disappearing into the crowd.

"Next time you're in Melbourne, right?" the Australian building contractor yells, tucking a card into the pocket behind Mundy's Union Jack.

"It's a date!" Mundy agrees with a cheery laugh, and deftly palms the note into a side pocket of his jacket.

_It is wise to sit down before you start a journey, preferably on your luggage.__ The superstition is Russian but the axiom originates with Nick Amory, who is Mundy's longtime advisor in matters of self-preservation: If something big is in the air, Edward, and you're part of it, then for pity's sake curb your natural impetuosity and give yourself a break before you jump.

The Linderhof's day is over, staff and tourists are hurrying towards the parking lot. Like a benign host, Mundy hovers on the steps bestowing multilingual benedictions on his departing colleagues. _Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Meierhof! Still haven't found them then!__ He is referring to Iraq's elusive weapons of mass destruction. _Fritz, tschüss! Love to your dear lady! marvellous speech she made the other night at the Poltergeist!__--our local culture and debating club where Mundy occasionally goes to let off political steam. And to his French and Spanish colleagues, a married male couple--_Pablo, Marcel, we'll commiserate together next week. Buenas noches, bonsoir, the both of you!__ The last stragglers disappear into the twilight as he withdraws into the shadows of the western prospect of the palace, immersing himself in the blackness of a stairwell.

He stumbled on the place by luck soon after he took up the job.

Exploring the castle's precincts one evening--a moonlight concert is to be held in the grounds and, Mustafa allowing, he has a mind to stick around and hear it--he discovers a humble basement staircase that leads nowhere. Descending it, he meets a rusted iron door, and in the door a key. He knocks and, hearing nothing, turns the key and steps inside. To anyone but Mundy, the space he enters is no more than a grubby plant room, a dumping ground for watering cans, old hoses and ailing plants. No window, just a grille high in the stone wall. Air heavy with the stink of putrid hyacinth and the rumblings of a boiler next door. But to Mundy it is everything Mad Ludwig was looking for when he built the Linderhof in the first place: a sanctuary, a place of escape from his other places of escape. He steps back outside, relocks the door, puts the key in his pocket and for seven working days bides his time while he mounts a systematic reconnaissance of his target. By 10 a.m., when the castle gates open, all healthy plants in the public rooms have been watered and unhealthy plants removed. The plant contractor's van, a flower-painted minibus, leaves the grounds at 10:30 a.m. latest, by which time ailing plants have been consigned to the plant room, or to the van for hospitalization. The disappearance of the key has raised no eyebrows. The lock has not been changed. It follows that from eleven every morning the plant room is his private property.

It is his tonight.

Standing his full height beneath the frugal ceiling lamp, Mundy extracts a penlight from his pocket, unfolds the note until it becomes a rectangle of plain white paper, and sees what he expects to see: Sasha's handwriting, as it always was and ever shall be: the same spiky Germanic _e__'s and _r__'s, the same adamant downstrokes that declare the man. The expression on Mundy's face as he reads its message is hard to parse. Resignation, anxiety and pleasure all play a part. A rueful excitement dominates. Thirty-four bloody years, he thinks. We're men of three decades. We meet, we fight a war, we separate for a decade. We meet again, and for a decade we're indispensable to each other while we fight another. We part forever, and a decade later you come back.

Fishing in his jacket pockets he takes out a scuffed book of matches from Zara's kebab café. He plucks a match, strikes it and holds the note in the flame by one corner then another until it's a twisted flake of ash. He lets it fall to the flagstones and grinds it to black dust with his heel, a necessary observance. He looks at his watch and does the arithmetic. One hour and twenty minutes to kill. No point to ringing her yet. She'll just have started work. Her boss goes crazy when the staff take personal calls in peak hours. Mustafa will be at Dina's house with Kamal. Mustafa and Kamal are bosom pals, leading lights of the Westend's all-Turkish national cricket league, president, Mr. Edward Mundy. Dina is Zara's cousin and good friend. Scrolling through a mildewed cellphone, he locates her number and dials it.

"Dina. Greetings. The bloody management have called a meeting of tour guides for tonight. I totally forgot. Can Mustafa sleep over at your place in case I'm late?"

"Ted?" Mustafa's croaking voice.

"_Good evening to you, Mustafa! How are you doing?__" Mundy asks, slowly and emphatically. They are speaking the English that Mundy is teaching him.

"I - am - doing - _very - very - well,__ Ted!"

"Who is Don Bradman?"

"Don - Bradman - is - greatest - batsman - ever - the - world - was - seen, Ted!"

"Tonight you stay at Dina's house. Yes?"

"Ted?"

"Did you understand me? I have a meeting tonight. I will be late."

"And - I - sleep - at - Dina."

"Correct. Well done. You sleep at Dina's house."

"Ted?"

"What?"

Mustafa is laughing so much he can hardly speak. "You - very - bad - bad - man, Ted!"

"Why am I a bad man?"

"You - love - other - woman! I - tell - Zara!"

"How did you guess my dark secret?" He has to repeat this.

"I - know - this! I - have - big - big - eyes!"

"Would you like a description of the other woman I love? To tell to Zara?"

"Please?"

"This other woman I've got. Shall I tell you what she looks like?"

"Yes, yes! You -tell - me! You - bad - man!" More hoots of laughter.

"She's got very beautiful legs--"

"Yes, yes!"

"She's got _four__ beautiful legs, actually--very _furry__ legs--and a long golden tail--and her name is--?"

"Mo! You love Mo! I tell Zara you love Mo more!"

Mo the stray Labrador, thus named by Mustafa in honor of himself. She took up residence with them at Christmas, to the initial horror of Zara, who has been brought up to believe that touching a dog makes her too dirty to pray. But under the concerted pressure of her two men, Zara's heart melted, and now Mo can do no wrong.

He rings the apartment and hears his own voice on the answering machine. Zara loves Mundy's voice. Sometimes, when she's missing him in the daytime, she says, she plays the tape for company. I may be late, darling, he warns her in their common German over the machine. There's a meeting of staff tonight and I forgot all about it. Lies like this, told protectively and from the heart, have their own integrity, he tells himself, wondering whether the enlightened young imam would agree. And I love you quite as much as I loved you this morning, he adds severely: so don't go thinking otherwise.

He glances at his watch--one hour and ten minutes to go. He advances on a worm-eaten gilded chair and puts it in front of a dilapidated Biedermeier wardrobe. Balancing on the chair, he gropes behind the wardrobe's pediment and extracts an ancient khaki knapsack thick with dust. He pats the dust off, sits down on the chair, sets the knapsack on his lap, yanks the webbing straps free of their tarnished buckles, lifts the flap and peers dubiously inside as if uncertain what to expect.

Gingerly he unpacks the contents onto a bamboo table: one ancient group photograph of an Anglo-Indian family with its many native servants posed on the steps of a grand colonial house; one buff folder marked FILE in aggressive hand-inked capitals; one bundle of ill-written letters of a similar period; one twist of woman's hair, dark brown, bound round a sprig of dried heather.

But these objects attract only a curt acknowledgment from him. What he is looking for, and has perhaps deliberately left till last, is a plastic folder in which float as many as twenty unopened letters addressed to Mr. Teddy Mundy care of his bank in Heidelberg in the same black ink and spiky hand as the note he has this minute burned. No sender's name is supplied, but none is needed.

Floppy blue air-letters.

Coarse-grained Third World envelopes reinforced with sticky tape and blazoned with stamps as radiant as tropical birds from places as far apart as Damascus, Jakarta and Havana.

First he sorts them into chronological order according to their postmarks. Then he slits them open, one by one, with an old tin penknife, also from the knapsack. He starts reading. For what? _When you are reading something, Mr. Mundy, first ask yourself why you are reading it.__ He is hearing the accented voice of his old German teacher, Dr. Mandelbaum, forty years ago. _Are you reading something for information? That is one reason. Or are you reading it for knowledge? Information is only the path, Mr. Mundy. The goal is knowledge.__

I'll settle for knowledge, he's thinking. And I promise I won't fall for dangerous ideology, he adds, with a mental doff of the cap to the imam. I'll settle for knowing what I didn't want to know, and I'm still not sure I want to. How did you find me, Sasha? Why must I not recognize you? Who are you avoiding this time, and why?

Folded among the letters are press clippings torn impatiently from newspapers and bearing Sasha's byline. The salient passages are highlighted, or indicated by exclamation marks.

He reads for an hour, returns the letters and press clippings to the knapsack and the knapsack to its hiding place. The mixture as expected, he silently tells himself. No quarter given. One man's war continues as planned. Age is not an excuse. It never was and never will be.

He puts the gilded chair where he found it, sits down again and remembers he's wearing his bowler hat. He takes it off, turns it upside down and peers into it, a thing he does in pensive moments. The maker Steinmatzky's first name is Joseph. He owns to sons, no daughters. His firm's address in Vienna is _No .19 Dürerstrasse above the Baker's.__ Or it was, because old man Joseph Steinmatzky liked to date his handiwork and this example boasts a vintage year: 1938.

Staring into the hat, he watches the scene unfold. The cobbled alley, the little shop above the baker's. The smashed glass, the blood between the cobblestones as Joseph Steinmatzky, his wife and many sons are dragged away to the vociferous approval of Vienna's proverbially innocent bystanders.

He rises, squares his shoulders, lowers them and wriggles his hands around to loosen himself up. He steps into the stairwell, relocks the door, mounts the stone steps. Strips of dew hover over the palace lawns. The fresh air smells of mown grass and damp cricket field. Sasha, you mad bastard, what do you want now?