Jigsaw (5 page)

Tobias Barron said only that he was glad to be back. He wore a black cashmere coat over his white suit, and a black silk scarf knotted at his neck. Gulls, disturbed by the engine of the launch, flew out of the
vaporetto
stations and winged toward the moon like large moths mesmerized by light. Barron gazed at the lit structures that leaned against the water, admiring as he always did the sheer persistence of beauty, the way grandeur prevailed against floods of pollution.

The imagination of men, he thought. It encompassed creation and destruction; he found no paradox in this. The same inscrutable organ that could build was also able to destroy with equal facility. The human heart was a chamber in which dark and light might coexist.

He drew his scarf a little tighter at his neck. Venice was icy, cold to its soul. The
Desdemona
left the Grand Canal, steering into quieter waters, passing under low bridges. There were lights from cafés and trattorias. Lovers stood on a bridge and watched the launch pass under them. Laundry flapped against the sides of crumbling houses. Discarded plastic bottles that had once contained
acqua minerale
were agitated in the quiet wake of the boat and shuddered in pale white eddies. The smell here was stronger than it had been on the Grand Canal, danker, greener, as if just beneath the water fish were mysteriously decomposing.

‘We have arrived,' Alberto said. He moored the launch and made sure in his fussy fashion that Signor Barron disembarked without hindrance. Then he gathered together Barron's suitcases and stacked them on the dock where another man waited, Schialli, a taciturn fellow who had been Barron's servant for years. Schialli, like Alberto, was armed; both men carried automatic pistols. It was a sorry fact, Barron thought, that he had made a number of enemies, that his rivals were ambitiously bloodthirsty.

Schialli and Alberto gathered the luggage and walked alongside Barron down a narrow thoroughfare called Calle dei Avocati, where at number 3720 Barron owned a house. He used only the upper two floors, converted into a large apartment; the rest of the place, although sumptuously decorated, was usually unoccupied.

Schialli, who always made a great business of the heavy keys, rattling them with a show of importance, unlocked the big door, which was sixteenth century and adorned by the carved heads of angry lions. The three men entered a flagstoned foyer, then stepped into an elevator. Schialli pressed a button, and the lift rose with a quiet cranking sound.

‘Is the woman here?' Barron asked when the elevator stopped.

‘She is,' said Schialli, with a slight inclination of his head.

Barron got out of the elevator, followed by the two men hauling his bags. The upper two floors of the house were joined by a spiral staircase; Barron's bedroom was directly above the drawing-room. He directed the suitcases to be unpacked as soon as he entered the drawing-room. The central-heating system was blowing forced air throughout the apartment. He removed his coat and scarf, and walked to the unlit marble fireplace and stood with his back to the hearth, as if this was the source of heat. Alberto had silently withdrawn, and Schialli, having unpacked the luggage in the bedroom and hung the clothing away, brought Barron a negroni and soda.

‘Wait fifteen minutes, then send the woman to me,' Barron said.

‘Of course.' Schialli went out.

Barron sipped the drink and moved around the room, which was furnished in an eclectic way with pieces purchased here in Venice. There might have been an uneasy juxtaposition of periods in the eye of an antique dealer, but Barron bought whatever appealed to him. A room was your own because you made it so. It was the same with the world, he thought. It was whatever you wanted it to be – if you had the power and the urge to shape it.

He wandered for a time, rippling the keys of a seventeenth-century spinet that occupied the window space where amber and claret brocade curtains hung. Possessions and belongings: one might enjoy them, but never to the point where they owned you. Everything was dispensable in the end. Everything could be returned to the auction room. He went back to the fireplace, the mantelpiece of which was littered with framed photographs.

There was a picture of Barron arm-wrestling with the late Ferdinand Marcos in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. In the shot Marcos is smiling, but behind the smile is the stress of a man whose
machismo
is on trial. There was another of him dancing with Imelda at her private disco in the Malacanang Palace during the dizzily surreal days of her reign when, taking time out from grandiose schemes of building monuments to herself, all she did was dance and sing ‘The Impossible Dream'. He still sent her Christmas cards, hand-printed for him by a small company in Macon, Georgia. A third photograph was of Barron with Fidel Castro in the courtyard of a whitewashed house in the Granma Province of Cuba. Fidel, unsmiling, has one hand laid on Barron's arm in a gesture that appears to suggest restraint. The last picture was of Barron in the company of William J. Caan, the United States Ambassador to Britain. Good old Bill has his arm linked with Barron's in the shot, the big breezy ambassadorial smile in place.

Somebody had once half-jestingly said of Barron that he knew everybody in the world. He was on first-name terms with a variety of pols and show-business sorts. He'd known Visconti and Truffaut. He'd spent time in the company of Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Jerry Brown. Barron seemed to exist in that shadowland of fame where politics and show business become one and the same, that place of dreams and power. He'd fallen under the spell of this hinterland; its landscape enchanted him. Men of power had about them a special presence. They moved through the world with a disregard for the banal demands of life. They rose above the commonplace; they ascended into their own heavens.

Barron saw his reflection in a mirror over the mantelpiece. No matter the season, he always had a suntan. He habitually wore white or beige suits to underline his bronzed features. He seemed never to age. Rumours of surgical adjustment were always smilingly denied. Despite his public image, he remained a private man. He was congenial, wealthy, handsome, he had a marvellously photogenic face – but what did anybody really know about him? Where did his bucks come from? How did he get to be such a high-roller?

On the dinner circuit that rolled from Gstaad to Aspen and then to Monte Carlo, there were those who said he'd inherited wealth, while others spoke of a portfolio – suspect, nefarious – put together over a period of twenty years; there was also a wildly implausible story in which he'd gained access to Marcos's legendary cache of Japanese gold. None of these rumours had any basis in truth.

As for his origins, he always said he came from the obscure Californian town of San Luis Obispo, but he'd never been near the place, never seen pictures of it. In the end he was a mystery.

And that was precisely the way he wanted it.

He turned away from the photographs and unlocked the door of a small antechamber, a chilly space. An electronic world map, surrounded by a dozen clocks showing the time in different parts of the planet, was located on one wall. Here and there red, yellow and green cursors blinked. These indicated the status of any project at a given time; red was the colour for a dubious area, green represented a situation already in hand, yellow stood for those places where negotiations were under way. On the surfaces of the oceans white cursors tracked the movement of ships; presently one was located off the coast of Madagascar, another in the Caribbean a hundred miles from Cuba, still another in the Baltic, about seventy miles from Tallinn. A fourth was cruising the Adriatic. The direction of land traffic – trains, trucks – was indicated by orange cursors, which flickered in such places as South Africa, Guatemala, Angola and Afghanistan.

Shelves were lined with computer equipment, video consoles, a couple of laser printers, three fax machines. He had rooms similar to this in all his other properties; machines interfaced with other machines, as if in some form of electronic polygamy. Barron's world was wired, and the wires carried all manner of information. He looked at the messages that had come in over the faxes.

These fell into four broad categories. Some were detailed accounts of incidents in various parts of the world – a mass grave of women and children freshly dug up in Bosnia, the resurgence of the Communist party in various parts of what had once been the Soviet Union, a bloody uprising of the People's Army in the southern Philippines, the deaths of seventeen blacks at the hands of right-wing extremists in Durban, two hundred dead during ethnic violence in eastern Zaire: these reports might have come from an exceptionally well-informed wire service, except that the correspondents were not employed by Reuters or Associated Press. They were not from journalists accredited in any sense of the word.

The second category consisted of analyses created by experts paid by Barron; computer-generated predictions concerning the possible outcomes of crises in places like Georgia, Nigeria, the Lebanon, Bosnia, Somalia, Northern Ireland. Key figures involved in these disputes – politicians, dictators, potentates, warlords, gangsters and miscellaneous scum – were meticulously profiled. Barron always read these reports carefully.

The third category of message were requests for assistance, sometimes in the form of money. The final classification, no less important than the others, concerned logistics, the movement of trains and trucks and ships, timetables.

Barron regarded all these messages for a while. As he did so, he was struck by the range of human dreams and aspirations. He considered his own role a moment. He was the man who provided the fuel for dreams. What did the nature of the dreams themselves matter? He saw himself sometimes as an illusionist, a magician whose art lay in imbuing dreams with substance, a shaper of other people's worlds. It was as if he were at the centre of some enormous board-game whose rules he had devised himself. He brooded over this board, shifted this or that piece, studied the consequences of each move; unlike other games, there were no black or white pieces, no forces set in opposition to each other, no sides he favoured.

He turned off the light, locked the antechamber. Inside the drawing-room the woman was waiting for him. He went toward her, took her hand and kissed it.

‘You're cold,' he said.

The woman smiled a little forlornly. He drew her toward a sofa in front of the fireplace. The material of her blouse was icy to his touch. He observed her beautiful face which, already lightly touched by the process of aging, had begun to show small lines – but these contrived to add a dimension to her loveliness. Some women were destined to spectacular maturity.

‘Drink?' he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I think not. I'm not in the mood.'

He finished his negroni. ‘What mood are you in?'

She shrugged. ‘Hard to say.'

‘Ambivalent.'

‘Call it that.'

‘You should never be ambivalent in Venice,' he remarked. He observed her briefly. What this room needed was genuine firelight, flames that would enhance the woman's features. There was some danger in her expression, a cutting brittle quality. He knew she was in a state of some withdrawal. She had these times in which she abandoned any known reality and retreated to a place of her own making. He could never quite follow her down these mazy trails. He could never altogether imagine the inside of her head. She was beyond classification, a caller from another planet.

He mixed himself a second negroni – campari, a splash of vermouth, a generous quantity of gin. The woman watched him and thought: How typical of Barron to come out with a remark like that.
You should never be ambivalent in Venice
. It had a quiet certitude to it. It was the way he said so many things. He was so sure of himself. Cocksure. She stood up, pressed the palms of her hands against her thighs, felt the lambswool of her navy-blue skirt create a friction against her legs. She approached him, laid her face against his shoulder. The bronze of his skin seemed to emit a form of energy.

He put his hand against the side of her face. She always sent little depth-charges through him. He wondered about the bizarre nature of chemistry, of human attraction, desire. He wondered about love, if it were merely a matter of musks that stimulated certain areas of the brain. Did he love this woman? The question was unanswerable. All he could ever safely admit was that she held a deep fascination for him, that when it came to her he'd developed an uncharacteristic blind spot, that he experienced unexpected urges to protect her, both from the world and from herself.

‘I'm not sure I'm enjoying your mood,' he said. ‘You're too introspective. Too languid. If that's the word.'

She wandered away from him, studied the pictures on the mantelpiece. ‘Why do you need these things?' she asked.

‘My public persona needs them.'

‘And is there really such a difference between the public Barron and the private one?'

He stirred his drink. ‘You know that by this time.'

‘I'm not sure I really know anything.'

He said nothing. She'd never asked about his life, his past, his origins. It was as if she wanted him to have no beginnings.

‘I always think these photographs suggest a weakness,' she said.

‘Are you going to tell me something obvious about my base need for recognition? If you are, skip it. I know what the pictures mean. There's no mystery about it. I have an ego, which likes being stroked.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘You have an ego.'

He caught her hand and held it against his chest. He was muscled, angular.

‘As big as your own,' he said.

‘Maybe so.'

‘Except you're wayward. More theatrical.'

‘And you're not? What would you call these?' And she gestured toward the photographs. ‘You're a collector of famous people. What could be more theatrical?'

‘My public image is useful to me,' he said. He gestured in a vague way.