“For he might have been a Roosian, A French, or Turk, or Proosian, Or perhaps Italian!
But in spite of all temptations, To belong to other nations, He remains an Englishman!”
Some of Gilbert’s phrases were too cryptic for Max. As the only Englishman with whom Max was regularly in contact, I was expected to decipher all the “Britishisms” and explain such Gilbertian inexplicables as “A Sewell & Cross young man, A Howell & James young man”. Poor Max, I never did find out for him.
And yet there was nothing so inexplicable as Max himself He was his own worst enemy, if my father was to be believed, but my father detested Max. In fact he detested “Lange” Koby and all of what he called “the American freebooters” in Berlin. That’s why my father stayed clear of them.
“Are you listening, Bernard?” I was jolted from my memories by Cindy.
“Yes, Cindy, of course I am.” I suppose I hadn’t nodded and smiled frequently enough while listening to her small-talk. “I’m going to Strasbourg,” she said suddenly, and she had all my attention. With the cigarette still in her hand, she made a movement that left a thin trail of smoke. Then she touched her hair; it was shiny and curly and looked as if she’d been to the hairdresser. Her hair always looked like that. “On holiday?”
“God-a-mercy! Don’t be stupid, Bernard. Who would go to Strasbourg on holiday?” She waved the cigarette in the air, and a long section of ash fell on the bedcover.
“A job?”
“Don’t be so dense, Bernie. The bloody European Parliament is there, isn’t it?” As if angry about the marked bedcover, she stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray, pushing it down in a punitive action that deformed its shape and left it bent and broken.
“And that’s who you’ll be working for?” I wondered why the hell she hadn’t mentioned it earlier, when we’d been talking about the weather and how difficult it was to get seats for the Royal Opera House unless you knew someone. But then I realized that she didn’t want to tell me until I’d had a drink.
“The pay is terrific and I’ll have no trouble selling my place in London. The estate agent is putting an ad in next Sunday’s papers. He says I’ll have hordes of people after it. He said that if I spent a bit of money on the kitchen and bathroom he could get another fifteen grand but I just don’t have the time.” see.
“You’re not interested, I suppose?”
“Interested in what?”
“What’s wrong with you tonight, Bernie? Are you interested in buying my house? I’d sooner it went to a friend.” “I’ve just moved,” I said. “I couldn’t go through packing and unpacking again.”
“Yes. I forgot. You’re in the sticks. I couldn’t live in the suburbs again. It’s a slow death.”
“Yes, well, I’m not in a hurry,” I said. I felt as if I’d just been given a swift kick in the guts. I’d come here believing that Cindy was even more determined than I was to get to the bottom of the mystery, and now I found she wasn’t interested in anything but selling her bloody house. Tentatively, and keeping Dodo out of it, I said, “I think I might have had a breakthrough on the matter of the German bank account.” She had started rummaging through the expensive crocodile handbag that never left her side. “Good,’ she said looking down into the handbag and showing little or no interest in anything I might have discovered.
I persisted. “I hear it’s a bank called Schneider, von Schild and Weber. I found it in the Berlin phone book. We’ll need more details.”
“I’ll be in Strasbourg as from the end of next week.” From the handbag she brought her pack of cigarettes and a gold lighter. “That’s damned sudden.”
Without hurrying she lit her cigarette, blew a lot of smoke high into the air and said, “Sir Giles put my name in.” “Creepy-Pox strikes again.”
She gave a fixed smile to show that she didn’t think it was amusing but wasn’t going to make an issue of it. “It’s a plum job. The vacancy came up out of the blue. That’s why I got it. The fellow there now has AIDS. Two others shortlisted for the job are both family men with children at school. They wouldn’t move at such short notice. No, I have to be there next week.”
I swallowed the angry words that first came to mind and said, “But the last time we talked, you said that no one was going to shut you up. You said you weren’t going to let it go.” “I’ve got my fife to lead, Bernard.”
“So now you want me to forget it?”
“Don’t shout, Bernie. I thought you’d be pleased and wish me good luck. I’m not telling you what to do, Bernie. If you want to continue and solve your whodunnit I’m not going to stop you.”
Patiently and quietly I said, “Cindy, this isn’t a whodunnit. If it’s what I think it is - what we both think it is - it’s the biggest KGB penetration of our department ever.”
“Is it?” She didn’t give a damn. It was as if I was talking to a stranger. This wasn’t the woman who’d vowed to uncover the truth about the murder of her ex-husband.
“Even if I’m wrong,” I said, “we’re still talking about embezzlement on a mammoth scale: millions!” “I thought the same at first,” she said very calmly and very condescendingly. “But when you consider it more carefully, it’s difficult to sustain the notion that there’s some gigantic financial swindle, and that the D-G is in on it.” She smiled one of her saccharine smiles to emphasize the absurdity of that suggestion.
“The D-G has virtually disappeared.” I was exaggerating only slightly; he was very seldom in the office these days. “Is the disappearance of the D-G all part of this plot?” she said with that same stupid smile on her face.
“I’m not joking, Cindy,” I said. Only with considerable difficulty did I resist telling the stupid bitch that she was the one who’d started all this. And she was the one who set up, this discreet meeting and used a pay phone to do so.
“I’m not joking either, Bernie. So just answer my question: are you saying there is a conspiracy in which Bret Rensselaer, Frank Harrington, the Deputy and maybe Dicky Cruyer are all implicated?”
It was such an absurd misrepresentation of anything I’d ever thought that I didn’t know where to start refuting it. I said, “Let us suppose that just one really irreproachable individual . .
“The D-G,” she said, like a particularly haughty member of the audience choosing a card for an amateur conjuror. “Okay. For the sake of argument, let’s say the D-G is a party to some big swindle. Surely you see that the structure of the Department is such that no one would believe it. Frank, Dicky, Bret and all the others would simply stand firm and say everything’s fine.”
“And you’re the little boy telling the Emperor he has no clothes?”
“Just because everyone says there is nothing wrong, we shouldn’t refuse to examine it more closely. Strange things happen in the place where I go to work. I’m not talking about the Ministry of Education or the Department of Health and Social Services, Cindy. I’m talking about the place the rough stuff is arranged.”
“If you want my advice . She slid off the bed and stood up. Having eased her shoes half off her feet she squeezed back into them, putting all her weight on first one foot then the other. “You should stop beating your head against a brick wall.” “You make it sound like I enjoy beating my head against a brick wall.”
She smoothed her lapels and reached for her coat. “I think you want to destroy yourself. It’s something to do with Fiona leaving you. Perhaps you feel guilty in some way. But all those theories you dream up ... I mean, they never come to anything do they? Don’t you see that inside you there is some kind of worm that is eating you up? I suppose you desperately want to believe that all the world is wrong, and only Bernard Samson is right.” She snapped her handbag lock closed. “Forget all this crap, Bernard. Life is too short to rectify all the world’s wrongs. It took me a long time to see that, but from now on I live my life.
I’m not going to change the world.”
“There’s one small thing you could do before you go to Strasbourg.”
“Not before I go, and not after I get there either. I don’t want to know, Bernie. Do I have to draw a diagram for you?”
I looked at her and she stared back. She was not in any way hostile, not even tough. She was just a woman who’d made up her mind. There was no way to change it. “Okay, Cindy. Have a good time in Strasbourg.”
She smiled, visibly relieved by my friendly tone of voice. “God willing, I’ll find some nice young sexy Frenchman and get married.” She drew the window curtain aside to see if it was raining. It was. She buttoned up her coat. “Do you want to buy the Mercedes, Bernard? Dark green 380 SE. It’s only two years old; it does twenty-five to a gallon.”
“I can’t afford it, Cindy.”
“That’s on the motorway, of course. In town, more like twenty.” When she got to the doorway she stopped. just for a moment I thought she was going to say she’d help after all but she said, “The steering is on the wrong side for the Continent, and I can buy a tax-free car when I’m there, so I’ll have to sell it.”
We walked down the stairs in silence. When we got to the brightly lit foyer she stopped and delved into her handbag until she found a white plastic rain hat. There was no one there, even the reception desk was unmanned. Cindy walked over to look in the mirror and be sure her hair was tucked away. “Everything else I’m taking with me,’ she said while looking at herself in the mirror. “Furniture and TV and video and hi-fi. That sort of thing is very expensive in France.”
“Your TV won’t work in France,” I said. “They have a different system.”
She didn’t look at me. She turned and pushed the main door open and went out into the night without saying goodbye. The heavy doors slammed behind her with a soft thud. She thought I was trying to annoy her.
It was a long walk to where I’d left the car. The street was noisy and crowded with people and cruising traffic of all kinds. Young couples, skinheads, punks, freaks, whores of all sexes, cops and robbers too. Painted faces whitened under the bright neon. I found my car still in one piece. No sooner had I pulled away from the kerb than another car was taking my place in the narrow parking slot.
The rain got heavier. My old Volvo stuttered and choked in the heavy downpour. Maybe they didn’t have rain in Sweden.
So I thought about Cindy’s Mercedes all the way home: British racing green; paintwork waxed so that even Mr. Gaskell approved, and a Vee-eight engine. I wondered what she was asking for it.
When I got to Balaklava Road the downstairs lights were out. The children were in bed and nanny was watching a TV play in her room. Gloria wasn’t there. I’d forgotten that she’d changed the night for visiting her parents to Friday. She probably never had the slightest intention of joining me and Cindy for our little drink and discussion in town. Gloria knew she could depend upon me to forget which evenings she went out. I opened a tin of sardines and a bottle of white burgundy. I put a tape of Citizen Kane in the video and ate my supper from a tray on my knees. But I spent all the time thinking about Bret Rensselaer’s anger, Jim Prettyman’s murder, Dodo’s diatribe and Cindy Matthews” sudden change of mind. By the time Gloria got home I was in bed. I wasn’t surprised that she was late. I guessed that it was something to do with this “crisis” that her mother said threatened their marriage. Whatever domestic crisis she’d attended, Gloria didn’t arrive back low-spirited. In fact she was bubbling with excitement. I knew what she’d be like even before she came into the house. Her old yellow Mini could only just be fitted into the space between the kitchen and the fence to which our neighbour’s cosseted wistaria clung. Even then it meant squeezing out on the passenger side. This tricky feat was not something that Gloria always felt willing to attempt, but on this night I heard her bump over the kerb and, with no slackening of speed, on to the garden path and stop with a squeal of brakes. She gave the accelerator a little jab of satisfaction before switching off the ignition. I could visualize the smile on her face. “Hello, darling,” she said as she tiptoed into the bedroom still carrying the plastic bag that I knew contained one of her mother’s Hungarian walnut cakes and a tub of home-made liptoi cheese, pickles and all sorts of other things that her family felt she needed regular supplies of when not living at home. “How was Mrs. Prettyman?”
“Suddenly silent.”
Gloria looked at me, trying to read the expression on my face.
“Has someone put a gun at her head?”
I laughed. “Right,” I said. “A golden gun. Suddenly she’s been offered a plum job with the Strasbourg bureaucrats, lots of money, little or no tax. God knows what else.” “You don’t think .
“I don’t know.”
“I wouldn’t like to be trying to bribe her,” said Gloria.
“Because she’d ask for more than you had to offer?” “No, I don’t mean that. I just think she’d be touchy. I’d worry that she might write it all down and take it to the newspapers.”
“It’s just a soft job in Strasbourg,” I said. “Not even the reporters from the tabloids could make that into a bribe, unless Cindy declared herself so incompetent that the offer was ridiculously inappropriate.”
“I suppose so.” She put the bag of Hungarian delicacies on the dressing table and began to undress.
“what is it?” I asked, for she had the sort of self-satisfied grin on her face that usually meant I’d done something careless, like locking the cat in the broom closet or absent-mindedly picking up the milkman’s money and putting it in my pocket.
“Nothing,” she said, though I could tell by the wanton abandon with which she disrobed and threw aside her clothes that there was some kind of joke to share. But I thought it would be something about her parents or the latest about the egregious Dodo, who’d now been given temporary rent-free use of a comfortable little house near Kingston on Thames. “That bank,” she said as she got between the sheets and huddled against me. “Guess who owns that bank?” “Bank? Schneider, von Schild . . .”