Gently Continental (16 page)

They stroll further. Gently retains the flower, which now somehow symbolizes the discussion, is a badge, a warning to all comers that the lairds are at their cracks. Shelton has it in his eye. Gently ponders it, daps the air with it. There is faint scent from the broken stalk, from the button of trumpets, scent. The scent is sweetish, sharpish, autumnal, though autumn is nowhere in the sky, not in the seasound, not in the witch-oak beneath which Trudi and Stephen sprawled. Yet autumn is somewhere about that spot, to evoke so strongly in the marguerite's scent. It may be that dying Breske sent the season on before. You meant what you told them, Shelton broods, about his death being an accident? Can you, Gently replies, interpret what happened in any other light? Breske escaped from his torturer, but in escaping ran over the cliff. By chance he ran over above the pill-box. No theory of intent can explain the circumstance. Neither can it: and Shelton once more feels the bruising weight of a superior vessel. For had not he himself, though without actually achieving it, come to the brink of this conclusion? He had worked for suicide, so hard! He had argued to it and at last beyond it. Then, left with murder, he had teased and wrestled the facts to understand how murder could be. And he'd reached the brink: had found he could explain neither of these ‘theories of intent' – but left it there. Gently, at that point, had turned his back and walked on. Sad Shelton! He is not used to making these existentialist leaps, is at once alarmed, indignant, and cast down. How dare Gently proceed like this? Shelton seeks a loop-hole. It could still have been suicide! Only hitting the box need be accidental. Gently raises the flower, says, Occam's Razor, and smiles. Occam's Razor? Shelton is ignorant of this celebrated shaver, but he gathers the general tone of the smile, realizes Gently, in some way, has him.

What follows from it, Gently says, sniffing the button of the marguerite (and thus further irritating Shelton, who begins vaguely to feel the flower is his enemy), is that Breske was chased, and hence had so far not revealed his information, because if he had revealed it the torturer would have done with him and he need not have been in such a panic. We assume here that the information relates to a criminal matter, which Breske could not reveal to the police, to whom thus he would not dare complain. A criminal matter, frowns Shelton. You mean, Breske himself is a wanted Nazi? The precise category of the criminal matter we wait to hear, Gently says. It is considerable, we know this, or Breske wouldn't have skipped to England, nor would he have been pursued to such a distance, or be expecting such pursuit. The gentlemen who ate with Breske in Cassidy's Restaurant, if they appear in this affair, do not seem by themselves a force adequate to mount a transatlantic manhunt. I expect to hear of an organization. The Nazis, Shelton says, everything points to it. An organization, Gently says, with, to put it no higher, international associates. It may be political, may be criminal, not unlikely is both, but however, is large. Breske was doubtful if he could hide from it. What a hell of a position, Shelton says, my God, to know they are coming for you. Not to be able to run anywhere where they won't get you at last. Yes, Gently agrees, a hell of a position. It is living a posthumous existence. You died when the hunt was up but had no benefit of not being. I wouldn't, Shelton says, have been in his shoes for all the tea in China. Yet it is just our position, Gently says, except his was short term, ours is long. Life's Razor. Shelton stares. But damn it, he says, we can live with
that
. Perhaps he, too, could live with his, Gently says. And perhaps after all it is no evil.

Shelton is silent, thinking of Breske, the body, X, (X) Clooney, sometime Stenke, the man, once a youth, once a boy, once a child: unimaginably cradled in that unimaginable city, amorphously known to Shelton, for the most part, as a name encountered in coach-tour literature, though not that either, entirely, since buried now by fretting time. What strange and tortuous ways brought little Martin to his dark tower? How many journeys, short and long, had he taken to reach that goal? Already his small feet tapping the pavement by the bright Rosenkavalier poster were trotting, trotting through Hapsburg Wien towards the concrete nugget, then unenvisaged. And the faltering bow, slowly mastered, squeaked and droned of his coming, and ten thousand phrases lodged in his brain to marshal him the road he went: and the eager kisses of Edith Tichtel, one more being one less, and the new sorrow of wrinkled Frieda, drove him on, on, on. Wars hurried his step, shrill revolution, women, smile melting in smile, streets, houses, stairs, beds, the thickening face his brush lathered: seasons, ever less-prosperous, hopes, never hugged home, pleasures, barely mantling boredom, sorrows, each with double-sting – march, Breske, march! Change the Old World for the New! Set your back to that lump of concrete and march on: till you meet it. Because you know, Martin Breske, you must hit that bugger head-on, and not the stars staying in their courses, not prayer like thunder, can alter that. The midwife's slap sent you wauling to your brief pilgrimage, here. But why, why? Shelton asks, wide-eyed, fronting unreason with his indignation. Why not, Shelton? What's in question? Doesn't a man live till he dies?

No, I wouldn't have been him, Shelton shivers. What that poor bastard must have gone through. You should have seen his face. I'd have talked if someone worked me over like that. Perhaps he did, Gently shrugs, but that's not my reading of the matter. His torturer could not conveniently be his executioner, though probably Breske was marked for killing. Somewhere else, more anonymously, shot, perhaps, from a passing car, would have been the end of Martin Breske, if he had talked, and not died as he did. We were not to be interested, yet. Breske killing himself was unfortunate. Because he did we have stepped in prematurely to the possible prejudice of someone important. So I read it. Then you know, Shelton says, you know the identity of the torturer. Why yes, Gently says, I can hazard a guess on the strength of your interrogations today. His interrogations! Shelton is dumbfounded, would wither the marguerite with his glare. In all that sweaty, grinding routine, where did he uncover a pearl of this price? But Gently says he has, and Gently is honourable, says not what he cannot make good: will make good, sans doubt, when next the American oracle speaks. Dare Shelton guess too? He casts about wildly, but cannot make his suspicion take root. And cruel Gently only raises his flower, against the blue sea, the bluer sea-sky.

N
IGHT AGAIN
.

Shelton has gone, with his frowns and frustrations, setting inland the English grille of his English Oxford Mark 6; with him also, by his side, Walters, who knows well when to button his lip, and in the back Sally Dicks, nursing a fat folder of scribble. Gone, and silently gone: no comment passed during the journey: Shelton, Walters and Sally, dumbly proceeding in the Oxford: till twenty miles on they reach headquarters, home, the place where Shelton is Somebody, the hub of a world in his size and which, in his fashion, he knows to control. There somebody will say to him (in fact it is the duty sergeant, Godbold, who says it), What was he like, sir, the Big Fellow? Did you get on with him all right? And Shelton will thaw enough to admit, You can always talk to these big blokes, adding, You can sometimes learn a thing or two from them. It's good to work with them now and then.

Night again!

Stody too has driven away in his modest heap, and even the newshawks, dined on a statement, have drawn off all their force but two. These two, having no beds, play a wicked game of brag in the hall lounge, till midnight breaks up the school and they seek a drowse on the settles. Gently, they know, sleeps above them – and tomorrow the world shall know it too; because he, the beloved of all their tribe, has laid his head on the dead man's pillow; while (X) Clooney cools still in the mortuary, he, the Man, the avenger, warms (X) Clooney's sheets: blankets, at all events: and of such stuff are captions made. And sleep he may: for has it not, somehow (and nobody quite knows how, whether Shelton was indiscreet, or Gently himself, in talking to the reporters, could not quite conceal it), got about that one more phone call will do the Great Man's business for him, and that for this, this only he waits, before dropping his hand on the guilty shoulder? Indeed that message went into the grapevine. The strained, scared Breskes had obviously heard it. It flew round the guests, who all had it at dinner, and perhaps from them to the waiters and the kitchen quarters. The musicians knew it: they discussed it between numbers, played it as false notes in Lehar and Offenbach; Trudi knew it; Stephen Halliday knew it; it may even have reached the village via Stody and Brother Fred. So Gently may sleep, whoever else doesn't, in that gone-to-bed building by the sea, though lying in the room, on the very mattress, of him who now sleeps to wake no more. Breske's avenger, surely, is secure from Breske's ghost.

Night again . . .

Southwards the lights of the resort town wink out, gemmed lacework, visible from the cliff, the attic dormers of the hotel, winking suddenly, leaving black, though still supporting a glowing gloom, the stooping, heavy, promontorial outward swing of the coast. And a moon shows, a sickle moon, soon to charm up the herring. It stitches goldeny the scaly sea below the dewed furzes of the cliff. Where Clooney (he was Clooney then) went the hunting natterjacks run, but cannot see, as he could not, the moondull concrete under the cliff. Will his ghost walk here? Brother Fred doesn't see it, nor does skinny Sid Balls, as they run their boat down the beach. The boat goes soft and even into the wash which is little more than a lakeshore fret, rocks them aboard, is poled out, rowed away, its one lamp swaying. And Brother Fred, if he thinks of Clooney (for Brother Fred is facing shorewards as he dips, hauls, dips, hauls, his arms of oak fresh and free), does so confusedly, his only image of him being of a chill corpse, not a man; So Am Not I, tending to be the line of thought of Brother Fred. And the lamp sways paler and the oars thud lighter and the boat grows dimmer in the dark sea, and at last a faint firefly, coming and going, is all a shore watcher may see of the fishermen. Sea-silence then, which is silence enough. A lisp and babble at the world's edge. On the cliff, the lightest rustle as a natterjack darts, pounces. A manner of coolness or breathing in the air which has no direction, is not a breeze, will not stir or set murmuring the least filament of grass or ling. On such a night may not he walk, the man who here violently ended, and his squareset mouth again rupture the dim dome of heaven?

Night, the darker hours.

Overmuch sleep at the Hotel Continental. One light only, that in the hall, where the two reporters hunch on their settles. The doors are bolted, the Aquarium locked. The big stairs have never a creak in them. The shadowy landing, the long corridors, have slippered silence built in. House silence: the silence of sleepers, arrested, contained by walls, bars: silence not quite silent, yet the listener hears no sound. Is there a listener? A reporter stirs, moans discontent, blinks at his watch; moans again and burrows at the settle: only its hardness has waked him. The other reporter, also uneasy, twists his head in the search for comfort, and by doing so provokes a choking snore, which spurs him to twist his head again. Overmuch sleep! But who should be waking in this building's many mansions, in the deep shadow between sun and sun, before Brother Fred has shot his nets? Lovers have finished with their loving, talkers have had their talk out, worriers have worried themselves to slumber, there are none sick, in pain. Yet . . . overmuch sleep! Though that bell is not now ringing, though dead Breske stays dead, does not walk, and no thief stands by the window. Across at the village (and autumn is in it, as it was in the smell of the marguerite: a frost in the sound, frozen moonlight) hysterically laughs a little owl, and again, and again: the humour of some droll slaughter: and none to hear him, here or there, or cast a thought to his jolly murder. Or do the sleepers turn at the sound? In their dark oceans, does it start a dream? Is it this or some other that begins to beat and beat in their ear like muffled drum? Do they truly dream, or wake, hearing this sound far away, thumping, thumping, with behind it, more remote still, sleep-murdering . . . screams? Overmuch sleep! But sleep's away, if not the dream, suddenly exploding. Doors slam, lights flash, and the screams go on, peal by peal. Shapes, rushing down the dim corridors, shapes, pounding up the stairs, calling, shouting, shrieks of women, and the screams, and the screams. Who is it screaming? Down by the landing, where is no light except from the hall, is the shape that screams, in the fecund shadows, pale, with a glistening darkness at her bosom. And the darkness spreads as she screams and the darkness spots on the carpet and on the wall which she hugs is the darkness, dripping, rolling in fat streaks. Lights, oh lights! Here's bloody Frieda, tolling the skies with her throbbing throat, bleeding her life over her lap, sliding, gurgling down the wall. She's stabbed, stabbed, and her screams go out, she crumples, sprawls, moans, bleeds: lays her head against the wall, shuddering, groaning through her teeth. Oh lights! They find the switch. Merciful God, the blood, the blood! What will stop it? Who can staunch it? How keep that little life from flowing out?

And comes the Man.

With never a word he takes the bloody girl in his arms, strides to her room, from which blood trails, and lays her on her dishevelled bed. He rips her bloody nightdress from her and wads it in a pad for her bloody breast, then jams it into the rippling wound and bears upon it, calling for bandages. Frieda's white face turns and turns, her eyes roll. Who? he whispers. She doesn't hear him, moans, turns, gives a shivering sigh and faints away. Bandages come: he lashes the pad, the oozing pad, tight to her breast. One of you keep pressure on it, he orders, and three step forward to be that one. Chiefie, I've rung the doctor, pants a reporter, he's fetching an ambulance from town. Shall I ring your people? Yes, Gently says, tell them to get out right away. But he himself is standing still, staring about the meagre room, eyes, no longer mild, thrusting, stripping, eating up minute detail. The window is open top and bottom. He strides to it, stares out. Trudi comes flying in at that moment, falls on her knees, sobbing, at the bedside. Where is Mrs Breske, Trudi? God knows! Frieda – oh, Frieda! He is out of the room. Who has seen Mrs Breske? Nobody: nobody has seen that lady. He breaks through the crowd, begins to run, races down the long corridor, the corridor still reaching into shadow, and thunderously pounds on the Breskeian door. Mrs Breske! She must hear him! Nobody living can be so deaf! He crashes the door in – to find Mrs Breske sleeping, snoring, in a four-poster bed. Wake up, wake up, Mrs Breske! But no, she slumbers raucously on. He shakes her – still the snores come. Will anyone wake that woman again? He switches on the light. The rococo room, stuffed with treasures of old Vienna, with a certain scent of stale lavender, and a furtiveness, spreads about him. Here too the window is open. He doesn't go to this window. On the lower frame of the window he can see, quite clearly, the marks of three bloody fingers. He glances at the door, where the guests are crowding, at the bed, where snores the unconscious woman; then, moving silently, he approaches the bed, and, with a great heave, sends it rolling.