Gently Continental (18 page)

Sure, sure.

GENTLY

Was Clooney dead when you left him down there?

CARLO

Man, I just took off, I didn't inquire. He was trouble enough. Ain't that sense?

Sense enough, it would appear, since Gently asks no more questions, lets Carlo make his point, all his points, to persuade, if they will, a jury yet uncalled. And Carlo sits back, feeling maybe he's scored, maybe he's put up a good front, need sweat a little less now he's explained so well what, in the first place, was merely bad luck.

I'd best get a search-warrant, Shelton says to Gently, when the latter rises, goes towards the door. If that money is here we'll have to find it, though it means tearing the place down. Do you reckon it's still here? Gently shrugs, Why not? Gordini certainly hasn't found it, and if Frieda did, then she either left it where it was, or re-hid it, on the premises. Where would Shelton have hidden it? Shelton looks blank, says, In a cistern, chimney, that sort of place. – Where searchers, of course, would look for it, Gently says, but where, to our best knowledge, they didn't find it. Well, then, in the roof, Shelton says, under the floorboards, in books, a mattress, the top of a wardrobe; in an outhouse maybe, or in the cellar, in a flour-bin, fridge, lampshade, switchbox. Yet Gordini searched for a month, Gently says, in such places, and lately Frieda, with better knowledge. So they missed it, Shelton says, but it has to be there. Nobody thought of a new place yet. I wonder, Gently says. He goes out into the hall, where reporters swarm like September wasps, and where Trudi, last left representative of the Breskes, though tearful, maintains her ground and authority. Miss Trudi, Gently says, if you had money, notes, to hide, where a good searcher wouldn't find them, in this hotel, where would you put it? Money, Trudi says wondering, a lot of money? A fair bulk of it, Gently says. Not enough to fill that carved chest, but still plenty. Say a hatbox full. Trudi stares about the hall, not hopeful, not thinking an answer seriously intended, till, her eye reaching the alpenhorn above the Aquarium, she says, carelessly, I'd stick it in that! Have it down, Gently says to Stody, and Stody, with a chair, performs the feat: nine perilous feet of monster horn come wavering down from their high station. See what's in it! Stody pokes a moment, draws a wad of newspaper from the trumpet mouth: peers: gets the alpenhorn on his shoulder: braces himself: heaves, tilts. And there it is, and out it comes: money, money, with more money: a sliding stream of banded rolls, to scatter and heap on the hall tiles.

O man of fortune! Even this last flourish has come to hand in your triumph, picked from the air like a conjurer's silk, a wanton gesture to applause. And the reporters, adoring as they may their idol, their never-failing fountain of copy, surround him, where he stands, with staggering Stody, to burn flash-bulbs without end. Haydon, thou shouldst be living yet to masterpaint this ranging scene! See how they group to the marvellous focus of Triumph and The New Cornucopia! And above them, ascending to the landing's gloom, the admiring guests in night attires, with, aside, such studies as Shelton, the star-crossed man; Trudi, beauty in amaze; and shackled Carlo, the bloody-handed, whose eyes would unhinge all creation. More, while this holds, open flies the door, admitting the ocean-planing light of dawn, and anxiety, presented by Brother Fred, with augury, skinny Sid Balls; while the lover, Stephen, the worshipper, Sally, and caution, Walters, in their several postings, add, continue, enrich all ways the diverse and epic composition. Seize it, some Haydon of later day! It is worth another ten-year labour. The camera lies: there is no truth but as it is felt and given to feel.

A
COOL SEA
and a cool sky are the mode of Friday morning, grey above grey, both pale, and still, soft-going as a seaside may be.

What news, where all has been news? There is no Breske to preside at breakfast. Trudi is encamped at the County Hospital, will scarcely be seen again all day. Notwithstanding, the coffee comes hot and breakfast goes its common gait, for the hour has found its man: plump Rudi Dorfmann, who has the Breske touch, and joys to apply it. All is the same, though all is changed, is the note at the Hotel Continental. Nothing, under Rudi, may be expected, in the way of slack service, to hint at sensation the night before. So they must concede (heavy-eyed breakfasters) that dull routine is again in threat, and that soon, barring tennis, putting or flirting, no large excitements will remain to try. Certainly some early ones (most were late) witnessed sponging operations on the landing; indeed, the papers are lurid, with promise of more and better to come; but the thing's self, the action, is complete, may lead no further; is subject for rounding and analysis only, has stopped as short as B.C. Lost, except in its effects, which to the guests are a secondary concern: as, how Mrs Breske recovered from snoring, was quickly her mournful, querulous self; how Frieda fared, how long on blood, on saline drip: when conscious; with what indignation Gordini heard himself, after all, charged with murder. Lost, and yielding a sense of loss; in sensation's ruins the guests sit; they have been too spoiled and gorged with excitements to find a gust for the cold meats now. When Carlo went, all went that was mainspring to the action. Gently himself, without Carlo, begins sinking towards moderate humanity.

So the tide is ebbing, ebbing, ebbing, when at last the bells tolls, when Cyrus Fleischer, full of bubble, pours out his budget of information; and That Man, sensation's antonym, whose bait of questions caught these answers, is seen, for he takes the call in the Aquarium, to look almost bored as flesh is given to the bones he knew. Yes, for sure, Breske, or Stenke, has been linked to the three men, Pat, Toni and Abdul, now identified as Patrick O'Malley, Toni Guzzi and Benjamin Stephanopoulos; and sure, more sure, they are professional criminals, enjoying the protection of the local gang-boss, one Montelli, a Sicilian by birth, and connected up to his ears. And, says Fleischer, though proof is to seek, these men pulled a job on the night of 10 May, inasmuch as they curiously entered, by precise excavation, the strongroom of a bank in East 56th Street. Curiously entered, because by the ceiling, from the office of some insurance brokers above, a feat requiring very special knowledge of the exact location of the strongroom. How obtained? At first a mystery, but now becoming sharply clear. The building was a project of that same firm by whom Stenke/Breske had been employed. Stenke/Breske could have studied the plans, provided the very special knowledge; in fact, most certainly surely must have done so, and concluded his play by heisting the loot. A notable coup by an amateur! The boyo must have been quite a guy. But you didn't do that to the likes of Montelli and expect to live too long afterwards. And the amount stolen? Gently asks flatly. The amount is the same as Stody poured from the horn. All Breske bought with it was twenty-two cuts and a fast farewell, and that was interest. Then Gently exchanges information, promises other returns, hangs up; sits a while, a dead pipe drooping slack between his teeth. He has here set down the pyramid he carried, and which needs carrying by him no more: the weight's gone. What burden he leaves is such as lesser men may carry.

And the guests who watch (they are many) see some tiredness in the sitting man, as though, oh heresy! – he were just another, lacking his sleep, like themselves: no Atlas but common clay, wistful after a job done: one too heavy to rouse himself for the next task in hand. After all, have they mistaken him? Shelton, arriving then, supplies a contrast. Shelton too is tired, but not so tired as to lack his hard, policeman's edge. Shelton is never less than Shelton, though Gently may abdicate from Gently: Shelton's a power, however modest, wherever Shelton happens to be. Then is Gently, too, a kind of make-believe, an attitude bearing a label? Shrewdly selected by omniscient Whitehall to counter a wrong attitude developed here? A brilliant actor, no more, who can strut his part like an Irving, but who, in his dressing-room, the curtain fallen, becomes a dull dog, a block, a stone? Ah, but the heresy is only of a moment! See him rise, now, to greet Shelton! See the tiredness, wistfulness, fall from him, and the eyes twinkle, the mouth shape! The part's in him, not put on, he has no stage but all the world: the fault's in us if we mistake him, seeking to limit him in a mood. The wizard who came, saw and conquered is the very same who smiles at us now, and who will soon step into his bronze-and-black Sceptre and depart, undiminished, from our gaze. Shelton, we shall have always with us: Gently, once, on a herring moon. He is human, ye guests – rejoice! But he is also himself too.

And go he does, and Shelton goes, and the reporters stay only for lunch, and the guests are left with the very tail-end and tough scrag of the affair. Seeing, not clearly, into what has passed, seeing, scarcely at all, into what shall come, or where will end, if it ever ends, the strange convulsion that happened there. For this was a knot or hurricane in time, to which, from which its elements accelerated. Quickly they came, quickly they went, after slow approach, before slow dispersal. And from whence they came was no origin and whither they went is no end: only tied in this knot are they a moment in pattern. Be shapeless again, elements! See Carlo returned to starve in Sicily, nine years later, to quote a figure, which, understand, is quoting chaos; Trudi, see, she's in Canada, a widow with Stephen's one child, Stephen dying, almost casually, in a crash outside a Toronto hospital; fatter, wheezier, Edith Breske, like a grumpy Pekinese, snores now away the rich incomes of three hotels on the coast; and daughter Frieda is Breske no more, but thin, shrewish Frau Dorfmann – yet a proper mate, though thin, though shrewish, for prospering Rudi: these two childless. True or untrue? Fact or dreaming? Return to the knot or hurricane! Stay there, with the disconsolate guests, and Gently's smoothly-driven exit. Stody, who interested The Man, got promotion before Christmas, and Shelton, by a retirement, was made happy, or what passed for happy, too.

NORWICH
,
July '64–September '66