Absolute Friends (36 page)

Grappling with Dimitri's iron grasp, Mundy again fancies he is reading a hidden signal in the moist, unblinking gaze. _You came here, you wanted it and now you've got it,__ it seems to be saying. _You have nobody to blame but yourself.__ A side door opens, Dimitri is gone. Mundy hears no departing footstep, no thunderous applause as the final curtain falls. One of the blazers is standing at Mundy's elbow, waiting to give him back his toys.

The blond woman in the business suit once more leads the way. The same anoraks watch from the shadows. Richard upstairs is sitting at his desk as before. Is he made of wax? No, he smiles. Has he been waiting up here all evening in his nice new blazer and tie, hands prespread either side of the leather folder that opens from the center like a double window?

The blond woman departs. They are alone again, two fellows across a desk. Secrets may be traded, except that Mundy is keeping his secrets to himself: I believe none of it, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

I am in a madhouse, but half the world is run by madmen and nobody complains.

If mad kings, mad presidents and mad prime ministers can wear the mask of sanity and still function, why not a mad billionaire?

In the battle between hope and skepticism that is being fought inside me, it is increasingly clear I stand to gain everything and lose nothing.

If the Counter-University turns out to be somebody's sick dream, I remain what I was before I walked through the door: poor but happy.

If against all odds the dream comes true, I'll be able to look my creditors in the eye, reopen the school, move us all up to Heidelberg, put Zara through nursing college and Mustafa into a good school and sing _The Mikado__ every morning in my bath.

So how often does _that__ little possibility present itself? we ask ourselves. Did it ever? No. Will it ever again? No.

And if I need another reason for saying yes, which I don't, there's Sasha, my one-man chaos theory.

Why I should feel responsible for him is a question to be answered in another life. But I do. A happy Sasha is a joy to me, and a wretched Sasha is a rock on my conscience.

The contract is six pages long and by the time Mundy reaches the end of it he has forgotten the beginning. However, a few stray points have lodged in his head, and in case they haven't, Richard is sitting across the desk to count them off on his athletic fingers: "The house will be legally yours, Ted, unencumbered from the day you complete your first full year of tuition. Your basic outgoings, Ted, that's heat, light, local taxes, house maintenance, will be carried by one of Mr. Dimitri's many foundations. For this purpose we will create a cash float, payable in advance, accounted for retrospectively every quarter. Here are your bank details as we presently have them. Kindly check and confirm they are correct. Vacations we leave to your discretion, but Mr. Dimitri is adamant that all of his employees enjoy their full allocation of leisure. Do you have further questions? Now's your chance, Ted. Any later is too late."

Mundy signs. The pen is the same model as Sven's. He initials each page bottom right. Richard folds the signed contract and feeds it into the pocket where he kept the thousand dollars cash. Mundy stands. Richard stands. They do some more handshaking.

"Allow five working days for the money to come through, Ted," Richard advises, just like the advertisements.

"The whole sum?" Mundy asks.

"Why not, Ted?" says Richard with a smile of spiritual mystification. "It's only money. What's money beside a great ideal?"

12

NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME in his life by any means, Ted Mundy has lost touch with who he is. A credulous fool, caught yet again in Sasha's slipstream? Or the luckiest man on earth?

Making breakfast, making love, taking Mustafa to school and himself to the Linderhof, playing the loyal servant of the late King Ludwig, hurrying home again for Zara's night off, adoring her, protecting her in her enormous and intelligent vulnerability, bringing her library books on nursing and enjoying a kick-about with Mustafa and the gang, he relives without pause his night visit to the mountaintop, says nothing to anybody, and waits.

If now and then he tries to persuade himself that the entire adventure is the wish-child of his hyperactive imagination, then how does he explain, please, the one thousand dollars he secreted under the driver's floor mat of his Beetle for the return journey to Munich, and which he next day transferred to the safety of the plant room, where it now keeps company, appropriately, with Sasha's letters?

The long night's unreality began with Sasha's ghostly reappearance, and ended with his departure. After a further promenade with Sven, Angelo and Richard through the technicalities of his resurrection, Mundy is returned to Sasha, who greets him with such effusive joy as puts to shame whatever reservations he may be harboring. The news of Mundy's recruitment to the cause has reached him in advance. Seeing Mundy enter, Sasha seizes his hand in both his own and, to Mundy's confusion, presses it to his damp forehead in a gesture of Oriental obeisance. In awed silence they board the Jeep and, with the same scraggy woman at the wheel, make an unexpectedly stately descent of the forest track.

Reaching the barn, she parks and waits while they transfer themselves to the Audi, where Sasha once more takes the wheel. But they have not driven two hundred yards before the Audi skids to a halt and Sasha staggers onto the grass verge, hands pressed to his temples. Mundy waits, then goes after him. Sasha is retching his heart out in rhythmic heaves. Mundy touches his shoulder but he shakes his head. The retching subsides. They return to the car.

"Want me to drive?" Mundy asks.

They change seats.

"Are you all right?"

"Of course. A matter of digestion."

"What's your next move?"

"I am required immediately in Paris."

"What for?"

"Did Dimitri not tell you I am personally charged with the composition of our college libraries?" He has put on his Party voice. "In Paris, a committee of illustrious French and German academics under my supervision will compose a list of works that will be common to all libraries of the project. Once the core volumes are in place, each library will be invited to augment its collection. Librarians will of course be guided by the popular will."

"Is Dimitri on this illustrious committee?"

"He has expressed certain wishes, and these have been placed before us for our consideration. He asks no preferential treatment."

"Who picks the academics?"

"Dimitri made certain recommendations. I was graciously invited to add my own."

"Are they all liberals?"

"They belong to no category. The Counter-University will be celebrated for its pragmatism. I am told that in American neoconservative circles, the beautiful word _liberal__ is already a term of abuse."

But when they reach the lay-by where Mundy's Beetle is parked, the Party voice gives way to another outburst of emotion. In the predawn light, Sasha's eager face is glistening with sweat.

"Teddy. My friend. We are partners in a historic enterprise. We shall do nothing to harm, nothing to destroy. Everything we dreamed of in Berlin has been delivered to us by providence. We shall stem the advance of ignorance and perform a service of enlightenment for all humanity. On the balcony, after you had signified your acceptance, Dimitri invited me to name the stars in the firmament. 'That is the Big Dipper,' I said. 'And over there you can just make out the Milky Way. And here is Orion.' Dimitri laughed. 'Tonight, Sasha, you are right. But tomorrow we shall draw new lines between the stars.'"

Mundy climbs into his ancient car, Sasha moves to the driver's seat of the Audi. For a while they maintain a companionable distance on the empty road, but as Sasha begins to outstrip him, Mundy has the momentary sensation that the car ahead of him is empty. But Sasha always comes back.

Thrown once more upon the banalities of his daily life, Mundy struggles to put himself in the position of the owner of a lottery ticket that may or may not have won the jackpot. If it happens, it will be true. If it doesn't happen, nobody but myself needs to be disappointed. At the same time, the events of the long night circulate in his memory like a movie he can't switch off, whether he's pointing out the glories of the Italian waterfall descending the slopes of the Hennenkopf, or explaining to Mustafa, in the great tradition of Dr. Mandelbaum, that to possess another language is to possess another soul.

That woman in the headscarf who drove the Jeep, now--he asks himself. She drove like Jehu when I didn't know where we were going, and like an undertaker when I did. Why?

Or take gloves--he asks himself. The woman in the Sherpa coat who was standing on the spiral staircase fumbling in her handbag for the door key: she wore gloves. Strong, new, yellowy, spotty, tight-fitting pigskin jobs with heavy stitching. Mrs. McKechnie had a pair, and I hated them.

But the woman who drove the Jeep was also wearing a new pair of Mrs. McKechnie's gloves. And she had exactly the same resistance to eye contact as the woman on the spiral staircase. The woman on the spiral staircase kept her head down while she was fumbling. The woman in the Jeep wore a headscarf because when you drive you can't keep your head down.

The same woman, then? The same head, with or without the scarf? Or only the same gloves?

Or take Richard's carpet--he thinks. Everything in Richard's upstairs lair was new, including Richard: new haircut, new blue blazer, new airline steward's tie. But the newest thing of all was that deep-pile carpet. It was so new that when I stood up to shake Richard's hand and looked down, I saw bubbles of fluff where our feet had been. And everybody knows that you can't vacuum a new carpet, you can only brush it.

So was the carpet purchased in Dimitri's honor? Or ours? And how about the blazer?

That carpet altogether--now that Mundy thinks about it--is a puzzle in its own right, whether it's new or old. Or it's a puzzle to Ted Mundy, the do-it-yourself homebuilder. Deep-pile wall-to-wall in an old chalet with lovely wooden floors? It's daylight vandalism, ask Des.

All right, it's a matter of taste. But that doesn't take care of the feeling that everything in the room, including Richard, has come out of the showroom on the same day.

Or put another way: the feeling that this was a first night; and that as usual the props and costumes had only just made it through the lines.

And if these quibbles seem trivial beside the splendor of Dimitri's Grand Vision, perhaps that's because I'm trying to bring it down to scale. If I don't believe in the carpet, in other words, why should I believe in Dimitri?

But I _do__ believe in Dimitri! When Mad King Dimitri builds his castle in the air, I believe every golden word. Becoming his loyal servant and getting my debts paid looks like a contract made in heaven. It's only when Dimitri stops talking that the doubts come creeping to the surface.

Back and forth, night and day, while Ted Mundy waits to hear whether he's won the jackpot.

And while he waits, he watches.

Ever since his undignified retreat from Heidelberg, he has put every possible inconvenience in the way of his mail. When an address has proved abusive he has changed it. The Munich apartment remains firmly on the secret list. At the Linderhof he is more vulnerable, but he has taken precautions. The staff pigeonholes are situated in the administrative offices. The letter M, being halfway down, is below the eye level of the casual passerby. It is perfectly reasonable that a diligent tour guide, hastening past the window on his way to quell a restless group of English Spokens, should neglect to check his mail. A whole week can go by easily--longer--before the equally diligent Frau Klamt pops out of her box and presses an ominous-looking envelope into his hand.

Overnight, all that has changed. From defense, Mundy has moved to attack.

Until now, he has observed the passage of mail vans in and out of the Linderhof much as he might log the maneuvers of enemy vehicles. No longer. A mail van is hardly out of the castle gates before Mundy is poking his head round Frau Klamt's door, asking her whether there's anything for him.

Which is how it comes about that, eight days after his descent from the mountaintop, in the ten minutes' grace allowed to him between his third and fourth tours of the day, a breathless Ted Mundy learns that he is _invited__ to call his bank manager in Heidelberg _at his convenience__ to arrange a meeting at which will be discussed the disposal of credit payments received by wire transfer and amounting between them to 500,000 U.S. dollars.

The bank has fielded no fewer than three executives, which strikes Mundy as pretty rich, considering how many times he has had to listen to the incredibly boring Herr Frinck on the subject of paying people to sit around and watch other people work.

Herr Frinck himself sits at the center, Brandt and Eisner roost either side of him. Herr Doktor Eisner is from our insolvency department. Herr Brandt, a mere commoner, is a senior manager from our head office. Sometimes, head office likes to slum it, says Frinck--or, as he prefers to put it, _participate proactively at client level__. Has Mundy any objection to his presence? Mundy couldn't be happier with Herr Brandt's presence. He feels like the boy in the painting, waiting to be asked when he last saw his father. He has put on his suit for the occasion. It's too heavy and he is puzzled to find that it has shrunk: the sleeves keep riding up to his elbows. Inside it, he feels stupid, sticky and nervous, which is how he always feels when money is the only subject on the agenda. Herr Frinck inquires after the health of--he offers a broad-minded smile--_Frau Mundy.__ In accordance with bank protocol, the lingua franca today is English. When three German bankers face one penurious English client, it is self-evident that their English will be superior to his German.

"She couldn't be better, thank you," Mundy replies heartily to Frinck's question. "Well, at _her__ age, what else would you expect?"--bark.

The reminder that the bank's client is supporting a young and doubtless extravagant common-law wife brings no joy to the faces of Herr Frinck or Herr Doktor Eisner. Herr Brandt from head office, on the other hand, seems to think it rather sporting of him. Herr Frinck laments the war. Deeply disturbing, he says, prodding the bridge of his spectacles with his fat forefinger. The consequences totally unforeseeable, puff, puff. It was all fine and well for Berlin to take the high moral ground, but America has made it clear there would be a price to pay, and now we are waiting for the bill. Mundy says, however much it is it will be a price worth paying. He practically offers to pay it himself. His generous instincts are grimly noted.