Melissa, he tries out the name, why not?
He goes to the bathroom, and when he starts to get undressed the phone rings again. Melissa looks at the display and says as if asking permission:
It isn’t Tony. It’s a private client of mine. A pervert who comes over the phone, but he pays good money.
You’re a free agent, he says. Do what you like.
But my time is yours, she says carefully, trying to establish the nature of their agreement and the relations between them: You hired me for a week?.……
I didn’t hire you, he says. I rented a room, not the landlady. If that’s okay with you.
It’s fine with me, she says, still having difficulty understanding him.
She picks up the phone and listens. Every now and then she says ‘Yes’. She covers the mouthpiece with her hand and turns once more to the nameless man whom she understands less and less:
Are you sure you don’t mind me being on the phone while you’re in the bath?
If anything bothers me, he says, I’ll tell you.
He takes a glass, pours himself a double shot from the bottle of Jameson standing on the unpolished oak of the work counter in the kitchen, and goes into the bathroom.
Are you naked? she asks in a nasal simper over the phone. Today I want you to take everything off and give me all your magnificent body. My pussy’s so wet, I want you in the raw.
He strips off his clothes and gets thoughtfully into the bath. She opens a book lying on the little table next to the telephone, puts on a pair of reading glasses with narrow cats-eye frames, and as he sinks into the warm caressing foam he sees her through the open door, sitting opposite the galaxy of Manhattan shining in the window and whispering into the receiver, in a husky voice full of phony lust, a passage of hard-core porn which she reads from the book in her hand. He listens to the banal text professionally performed by this half-woman half-child, and he doesn’t feel a thing.
Suddenly it seems to him that he’s playing a part in some scene from a script written by somebody else. Maybe that kid in the pub, Tyrell from the undercover unit. The director yells ‘action’, and he sees the assistant director signaling him to take a sip of the sweetish Irish whiskey and not to look at the camera. He reaches for the glass standing on the black marble slab at the side of the bathtub, which is apparently intended for uses such as this, raises it to his lips, and sips. He rolls the whiskey round in his mouth and now it is clear to him that he is indeed acting in a movie.
This is a true story, he hears the voice in the trailer say, the story of the secret life of the undercover agent H.R., otherwise known as Billy the Bard, or Shakespeare for short. A story of desperate manhunts, daring assassinations, friendship between men, love sanctified in blood that won’t let our hearts forget. In his ears he hears the words of the song that for some reason, when sung by twenty-year-old girls in khaki uniforms, still thrills him to this day.
No, none of this is real, he says to himself, this isn’t happening to you, you’re not in New York, this girl isn’t a whore, her name isn’t Melissa or Victoria, just as your name isn’t Bill or Shakespeare. All this is happening in some crazy Hollywood studio, but what can he do when the loathsome voice of that son of Satan goes on echoing in his head, and he feels his fingers moving of their own accord at the ends of his arms dangling over the sides of the tub, scenting action, itching to grip the handle of a pistol or a dagger and do what they do best.
And when he raises the whiskey glass to his mouth again, he is suddenly sure that the mind making up the script has already set a date for the unavoidable meeting between him and Tony—whether the guy is really Tino Rossi or not, he knows that the meeting will take place. If he knows anything it’s that the scene of this meeting, from which only one of them will come out alive, is already written and only waiting to be executed. It hasn’t yet been decided where it will take place, on the deck of a yacht in the middle of the sea, or in the desert, or in a cellar, or in an abandoned loft piled with junk, but he is already being led to this fateful meeting like a blind man, and he hears Shakespeare’s familiar voice speaking to him in the second person: You’ll pretend to be blind. You’ll wear a faded, shabby khaki-beige raincoat, stained with oil and wine and mud, you’ll cover your eyes with dark glasses and your head with a bald latex wig, topped with an old hat, not a fedora, a bowler hat!
Yes, that’s clear, an ancient bowler hat from a hundred year ago. You’ll appear to him like a nightmare, like a character in an old Irish play, groping your way with a white blind man’s cane … and you’ll have a dog too, of course! A seeing-eye dog. The dog will go in first. And before the maniac understands what’s happening, you’ll follow on the heels of the dog, who got away from you—that will be the excuse, that will set his mind at rest, explain what you’re doing there, but no, he’s already seen you as a blind man, you can’t use the same trick twice. Lure him to the desert. Yes. It began in the desert, and it has to end in the desert. If he really is our man—
Is that what you call a smoking break? A powerful voice interrupts him.
Hanina turns round and sees the bronzed face and the cropped platinum hair gleaming like frost on Mona’s skull. He examines her clean cut jaws and chin. The cleavage between the firm pomegranates of her breasts under the tight red sweater descending to the walnut colored leather pants hugging her sturdy thighs and muscular calves—
Hey! Hello! Nino! Are you with us? demands Mona. Hanina nods, and she continues with her rebuke: We’ve been sitting and waiting for you for half an hour.
Half an hour? Hanina mumbles absent-mindedly, the words meaning nothing to him.
Aren’t you feeling well? Mona comes up to him and lays her soft palm on his forehead.
I’m all right, Mother.
Mother? repeats the astonished Mona incredulously: Did you call me Mother?
What?! Hanina stares at the powerful woman who manipulates sail ropes in the wind as if they were strands of wool. He looks through her and for a moment he sees the wild laughing girl with the almond eyes, who would challenge him to swim out to sea in the middle of the night.
The met at sea, they fell in love at sea, and now the sea divides them, he hears the voice of the scriptwriter Turel Shlush, making up a story about him and Mona in the third person plural.
We didn’t meet at sea, he corrects him, we met in the unit. Mona was an intelligence officer—
I’m trying to make your story a little more romantic, insists Tyrell. The formal meeting took place in the unit, but the intimate meeting was in the sea, when you swam naked in the moonlight.
When did we swim naked in the moonlight? He interrogates the scriptwriter.
You’ve forgotten, Tyrell rebukes him, you’ve forgotten a lot of things.
More and more Shlush’s voice surprises him as he writes scenes from his secret life. He sees him sitting opposite the computer screen, speaking the shooting instructions and typing. Conducting a dialogue in the name of the characters involved in the scene and typing the lines. And sometimes he addresses him directly in the second person, as he writes:
What do you know, man? What can you do? What can you expect?
He has no doubts as to the origins of Tyrell the scriptwriter. He’s a branch of his own tree, cut off years ago, when he decided to become a man of action, but lately he has begun to show signs of life, to exercise his voice in speaking in the second person to the man called ‘Hanina’, or in talking about him in the third person. He hears this undercover scriptwriter saying ‘I think’, ‘I want’, ‘I feel’,
while wondering to himself if this is really what he thinks, wants and feels. To himself Tyrell never says ‘I’, only ‘you’ and ‘he’.
Strange, why don’t you ever say ‘I’ to yourself? Think about it, he instructs Tyrell, try to think about it once.
Okay, promises Tyrell. The man will think about it.
What’s happening to you? he asks the nameless computer man sitting deep inside him, beyond Hanina and Shakespeare and Tyrell. Are you going crazy? And he hears the voice mimicking his own voice addressing Mona and speaking to her in his name:
Carry on with the meeting. I’ll be down in a minute.
Nino, she says to him, we have to make a decision. We won’t go on without you.
I’m coming, the voice says to her, and at the same time whispers to Hanina: ‘You’re not going back there. Even if you go back there, you won’t be there. So why don’t you tell her?’
Are you holding talks from here? she says suspiciously as she turns to the door of the elevator and prepares to return to the conference room.
Who can I hold talks with from here?
With God, she retorts with her dry humor and points to the sky.
Ah, says the nameless man, thanks a lot!
What for? she wonders.
For giving him a name.
Who? She knits her brow in perplexity.
God.
Ah, she says, and sniffs.
I just need a bit of air, he hears Tyrell speaking in his name from his throat, and he’s glad that for a moment, by chance, a name has been found for the anonymous narrator talking to him and about him in the third person, and
sometimes also speaking in his name in the first person, and releasing him from the onerous duty of talking to others.
Thanks a lot, God, he says to him, and God answers politely:
You’re welcome.
We’re waiting for you, she addresses him again from inside the elevator, a second before the stainless steel jaws, shining in the light of the full moon, close on her, and she is swallowed up in the belly of the monster and disappears from view.
The cell phone vibrates in his trouser pocket. A text message. He looks at the display.
‘Where are you, you shit? You’re a miserable coward like all the rest of your rotten race. Big mouth and small balls. You’re even afraid to tell me your name.’
Hanina keys in his reply:
‘We’ll meet’. And he signs: ‘Shylock.’
Why did you give him your cell number? asks Melissa.
To get to know him, he explains.
I can tell you everything you want to know about him, she says.
Not everything, he corrects her. You never saw him naked. Anyway, you know Winnie’s Tony, but you don’t know anything about Shylock’s Tony.
Can you explain yourself? she asks.
A person is matter that can take on any attribute. Every new meeting creates a new person, who didn’t exist until that moment. I hope that, from the minute you met me, a woman that Winnie didn’t know existed before is being revealed to you.
That’s definitely true, she says.
Do you know her name yet? he asks.
The minute I saw you I thought her name was Melissa, she says, but now I’m beginning to know her a bit better, it seems to me that she’s called Timberlake, or Timber for short.
And are Timber’s mother and father also Melissa or Winnie’s parents?
No, Timberlake states firmly, Winnie and Melissa aren’t Timberlake’s sisters. They aren’t related at all. Winnie’s mother was an alcoholic, and her father was a good man, but weak.
And Timberlake’s father? he asks.
Timberlake’s father was a hangman, she says with absolute certainty.
A hangman, he reflects aloud, that’s interesting. I’d like to have met him.
Let’s talk about you, she changes the subject. I hope you too are no longer the same person who met Melissa.
No, he admits, I’m somebody else.
And what’s the name of the different person talking to Timberlake now? she inquires.
The name of the different person talking to Timber now is Samael, he says.
Samael, she repeats the name to herself, Samael … a magic name.
What else can you tell me about Tony? he asks.
You were interested in his stomach, she recalls.
Right, he tenses.
I know it’s his vulnerable area.
What? he says in excitement. What do you mean by ‘vulnerable area’?
Everybody has a sensitive area in his body, where illness attacks when he’s under stress, and with him it’s his stomach.
How did you come to that conclusion?
His left hand is always massaging his stomach in the area of the diaphragm and the liver, like you massage a painful or wounded place. And he suffers from chronic flatulence and heartburn too, and I have the impression the upper sphincter of his stomach doesn’t really work, it may be completely ruined.
Where do you get that from?
Sometimes the smell of a corpse comes out of his mouth, she says.
This immediately puts him in mind of Marcus, who they called ‘Stinker’ in the unit—who divided the human race into two: the sissy majority, who were prepared to compromise on any old whiskey, but couldn’t come near a bottle of Laphroaig, and the tough, uncompromising minority, who were crazy about this whiskey, so redolent of iodine, seaweed and carbolic acid, that in the time of prohibition in America the bootleggers were able to trick the authorities and sell it officially as a medicine. And when the news that Adonis had been killed in a ‘hunting accident’ in Lebanon arrived, Marcus assembled all the members of the unit, and in honor of the occasion opened a bottle of Laphroaig 57.3 percent, the original strength reached in the barrel after distillation, and compelled all the fighters to drink a toast in pure, undiluted whiskey—and afterwards invited them all to a second round, in which he added two parts of water to the whiskey—to enable them all to enjoy the aroma of the peat, smoke and sea, as well as the bitter sweetness released in the mouths of those brave enough to overcome the initial fierceness and roughness of the drink. But as they were celebrating with the taste and aroma, or as some would say the reek of this whiskey, which seared itself into the memory like the murder of a prince or a president, a correction of the original report arrived: Tino the Syrian
had not been liquidated. The Belorussian bastard, who had German and English blood flowing in his veins, had only been mortally wounded by shrapnel from the boar-hunting bullet, and although they said there was a chance he would not survive the wound, later on it transpired that he had not only recovered, but been transformed by the failed attempt on his life into a wounded animal on the rampage, until they succeeded in locating him again, and the second assassination attempt ended in the death of Jonas and the terrible pursuit in the desert, where he succeeded in giving them the slip at the last minute and vanishing into the darkness, in spite of the intelligence version, which relied on the report of the Belgian pathologist, who was an undercover agent, according to which their man had given up the ghost in the desert, after he had become dehydrated and his liver stopped functioning, but there was no knowing if this was the truth, or only a rumor he himself had spread in order to get them off his back for good—