The Silver Swan (29 page)

 

"I want that photo," she said.

 

"Mmm?"

 

"I'm going to tear it up. I'm going to burn it."

 

"He'll have copies. He'll have a negative."

 

"You could get them from him. Will you do that, for me? Get them and burn them, burn them all?"

 

"Mmm."

 

 

HE THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY THAT KREUTZ WOULD DARE TO TRY TO blackmail him—why else had he sent the nudie photo of D.?—and would have dismissed the whole thing if D. had not kept on at him so. In the end, to shut her up, he had said that he would go round in the morning and call on Kreutz and give him a talking to. He had not expected to keep his promise, yet early the next day—it was early for him, anyway—he found himself bowling up Adelaide Road in the Riley. The storm of the night before had blown itself out, and the sun was shining, and the smell of rain drying on the pavements and the
look of the rinsed trees all in full leaf cheered him up. He had stopped at a postbox on Fitzwilliam Square and dropped in the re-sealed envelope with a forwarding address on it, and a girl in a white blouse going past had given him a hot look. He drove on, whistling through his teeth and smiling to himself, with the wind ruffling his long hair.

 

At Kreutz's place he parked at the curb and went through the iron gate and hammered on the door and waited. When paying a call such as this one was likely to be, a fist on the wood and plenty of noise, he considered, was a better way of announcing his arrival than merely pressing the bell; it put the wind up those indoors and at the same time got his own adrenaline going. He thumped on the panels again, but still no one came. He retraced his steps to the gate and glanced up and down the street—it was empty, at this hour in the middle of a sunny summer morning—then went back to the door and took from a zipped pocket of his wallet a gadget made of toughened, tensile wire, intricately bent. It looked as harmless as a hairpin. He inserted the business end of it into the keyhole and turned it delicately this way and that, thinking with idle satisfaction how wise he had been to bone up on so many useful skills when he was young, and presently he felt, with almost a sensual satisfaction, the oiled yet resistant shift and slide of the engaged tumblers as they gave way and turned. He pushed the door open hardly more than a hand's width and stepped sideways smartly into the hall and stood listening, holding his breath. He liked breaking and entering; it gave him a real thrill. Then his heart did a bounce and he almost shouted out in fright. Kreutz was standing motionless in the shadows at the end of the hall, looking at him.

 

He had never really understood Kreutz. Not that he expected to—wogs were different, in all sorts of ways—or cared to, for that matter. There was something in the way the fellow had of moving, though, or of not moving, more like, that he found uncanny. And quiet, too, he was always very quiet. It was not just that he said little and moved lithely; no, his kind of quiet was more a way of not being there—of being there, that is, and, at the same time, not. Inscrutable, that was
it—or was that Japs? Anyway, Kreutz was a man it was hard to scrute, if there was such a word. He was barefoot today, and wore a collarless tunic of dark-red silk buttoned to the neck and some sort of baggy Ali Baba trousers or pajama bottoms that seemed to be made of silk too. To cover his initial shock Leslie laughed and said: "Jesus, Doc, the way you're standing there I thought someone'd had you done in and stuffed. And why didn't you answer my knock?"

 

Kreutz seemed to ponder the question seriously, then asked: "What do you want?"

 

Leslie sighed, shaking his head in a show of regretful sorrow. "I ask you, Doc, is that any way to greet an old pal? Where's your warmth? Where's your hospitality? Why don't you invite me in to share a pot of your special tea? Why don't you do that, eh?"

 

The Doctor seemed to be pondering again. Leslie wondered if he was thinking of putting up a fight. That would be a laugh, if he tried it. But he would not, of course, being a Buddhist or whatever he was. Leslie was aware of a faint regret. He had that tickle in the palms of his hands that he knew of old, the tickle of wanting to hit something or someone, provided the someone or something, a woman, preferably, could be counted on not to hit back, or not seriously, anyway. And Kreutz was as good as a woman, in that regard. Without a word now he turned on his bare, horny-rimmed heel and walked into the living room. Leslie followed, and stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb in a negligent pose with his hands in his pockets and his ankles crossed. He looked down at his shoes, admiring them absently: brown loafers with tassels, old but good. Kate always made fun of the way he dressed, saying he looked like a successful spiv. "Instead of," he would say, with one of his laughs, "an unsuccessful one, which is what you think I really am." And then the fight would start. She was a good fighter, was Kate. In the early days their rows had always ended in bed; not anymore. He waggled the toes of his right foot inside the shoe. Good old Kate.

 

"What do you want?" Kreutz asked again, bringing him out of his reverie.

 

"I told you—nice cup of tea." The room was brightly, almost garishly, lit by a great panel of sunlight slanting down through the window from above the roof of the hospital opposite. Leslie could see how worried Kreutz was by the way he was standing, his arms rigid at his sides and his fingers jiggling and the whites of his eyes flashing. Well, good; he should be worried. "Go and put the kettle on," Leslie said. "There's a good lad."

 

Kreutz did not stir, just stood there beside the low table with his arms held in that stiff way, like, Leslie thought, a squaddie standing to attention; he would be saluting in a minute. Not that Leslie knew much about army life, having been clever enough to avoid the war and, afterwards, National Service, too. Kreutz took a deep breath, almost a gulp, and said: "I expected you would come."

 

"Oh? Why was that?"

 

Kreutz blinked a number of times rapidly. "I sent you something."

 

Leslie put on an act of remembering, smacking a palm softly to his forehead. "Why, so you did," he said. "How could I have forgotten?"

 

"I make the tea," Kreutz said shortly, and turned and loped off to the kitchen on his skinny stork's legs. Even on level ground, Leslie thought, Kreutz always looked as if he was scaling an awkward incline. There were kettle noises and tap noises, clatter of tea caddy and spoon and crockery—the Doc was nervous, all right. Leslie went and stood in the kitchen doorway, again with his hands in the pockets of his slacks and one ankle crossed on the other. Kreutz was spooning dried leaves of something or other into a pot that had a long, curved spout.

 

"Yes, that photo," Leslie said. "Very nice. You made old Deirdre look as pretty as a picture. You have a flair. I said it to Deirdre, I said to her, 'The Doc has a real flair for taking snaps.' " He brought out cigarettes and a lighter. "I posted it on, by the way," he said, blowing smoke upwards.

 

A sort of ripple passed over the Doctor's smooth brown polished face; it took Leslie a second to recognize it as a frown.

 

"What?" he asked.

 

"The photo. I sent it on. Forwarded it. It'll probably come back to you—I put your name on it, and the address here. Thought we might get a round-robin kind of thing going. You to me, me to someone else, someone else to you. You know."

 

Kreutz did not look at him. "Who did you send it to—why?"

 

"That's no matter." He picked a fragment of tobacco from his lower lip. "Tell me why you sent it to me in the first place. Did you think I'd be worried because you had a snap of Deirdre with her twat on show, like the ones you took of all those tarts you pretend to treat?" He chuckled. "Thought I'd be concerned for my girl's honor, did you?"

 

Kreutz did not look at him. "I can't pay you anymore," he said sulkily. "It's too much for me; I cannot support that place you and she are running. When will it start making money? You are supposed to repay me what I have already given you."

 

The kettle boiled and set up a whistle through its spout, first quavering and then increasingly strong and shrill. "Here, let me," Leslie said, and stepped forward and turned off the gas flame. He lifted the kettle and pulled the whistle thing gingerly off the wide neck of the spout. Then, so fast that it was done before he knew he was going to do it, he seized Kreutz by his left wrist high up and jerked him to the sink and poured a gout of the boiling water straight onto the back of his hand. Kreutz hardly had time to realize what was happening before the water was rolling and seething over his skin. He gave a peculiar, stifled shriek and leapt back, brandishing his scalded hand aloft and waggling it, like a voodoo dancer, or some sort of dervish, Leslie thought. He dropped the kettle into the sink. Some of the water had splashed on his own hand, and he turned on the tap and held it under the cold stream. "Now look what you've done," he said crossly. "You've gone and made me scald myself."

 

Kreutz came crowding forward and tried to thrust his hand above Leslie's under the gushing water, making a high-pitched, nasal, whining noise.

 

"Oh, stop the racket, will you?" Leslie snapped. "You'll have the
rozzers in on us. Aren't you supposed to be some sort of Buddhist who can put up with pain?"

 

"You have destroyed my hand!" the Doctor cried. "My hands are my living!"

 

"Serves you right—teach you to keep them to yourself." Leslie was examining his own hand; it was mottled with angry red patches but not blistering. By now he really was very cross indeed. He grabbed Kreutz by the shoulder and spun him around to face him and got him by the throat with his good hand and pressed him backwards until his back was arched against the draining board. He was all skin and bone, like a long, brown bird. "Listen, you nigger or kraut or whatever it is you're supposed to be—did you think you could blackmail me? Did you?"

 

Kreutz, in his pain and fright, was making gargling sounds, his eyeballs popping whitely in a swollen face growing ever darker with congested blood. Leslie released him and stepped back, wiping the palm of his hand on the side of his jacket and grimacing in disgust.

 

"I want the negative of that picture," he said, "and any prints you've made. If I see it anywhere, in anybody's hands but mine, I'll come back here and break your fucking neck for you, you black bastard. Understand?" The Doctor had his hand under the tap again. Leslie moved forward quickly and stamped hard with the heel of one of his tasseled shoes on the instep of the fellow's bare left foot. "
Do you understand?
" Kreutz did his stifled scream again, and despite his annoyance Leslie had to laugh, so comical did the old boy look, hopping on one leg and flapping his blistered hand in the air, more than ever like a stringy old bird with a damaged wing.

 

"Come on," Leslie said, "get those pictures."

 

 

THERE WERE HALF A DOZEN PRINTS, AND THE NEGATIVE. HE HANDED the lot to Deirdre when she came to Percy Place that evening, and she burned them in the mean little fireplace, filling the room with a scorched, chemical stink. He did not tell her what he had done with
the first print, the one Kreutz had sent him, or that he had kept another one for himself,
for old times' sake
, he thought, and then caught himself up, startled—old times? But when he considered the matter he realized it was true: their time together was up, his and Deirdre's. It had been fun, and she was a good girl in many ways, but it was over. He lolled on the bed with a cigarette and contemplated her where she squatted in front of the grate, poking with the blade of a table knife at the still smoldering remains of the photographs. He admired absently the taut, full curve of her behind, the pert, freckled nose, the plump bosom. She was saying something to him but he was not hearing her; it was as if she was too far away, as if she was out of earshot. Suddenly he hardly knew her—she might have been a stranger, a servant tending the room, or a waif who had wandered in from the street; she might have been anyone. Strange, the way things had of resolving themselves while a body was blissfully unaware of what was going on. He had used her up without knowing it, and now it was done. There would be the usual fuss, tears and pleas, screams, recriminations, but all that would not last long. He was an old hand at ending things.

8

 

 

MAISIE HADDON TELEPHONED QUIRKE AND SAID SHE WANTED TO SEE him. She suggested they go to the Gresham Hotel, for a change. He tried to get her to say what it was she had to tell him but she would not. "Just meet me there," she said, in her truculent way. "In the bar." It was midafternoon when he got to the hotel and when he came in out of the sunlight he was half blinded at first, but there was no missing Maisie Haddon. Today she wore a white suit with padded shoulders and broad lapels, large white high-heeled shoes, a crimson blouse, and a scarf of gauzy, lime-green silk. She had a hat, too, a boat-shaped concoction of green felt sailing at a jaunty angle above the waves of her bright-yellow perm. She was sitting on a stool at the bar with her legs crossed. Today, in deference to the venue, she was drinking a brandy and port. "For the innards," she said. "They're very delicate, the innards." He complimented her on her hat and she gave an angry laugh. "It should be nice," she said. "It cost a bloody fortune. How she gets away with it, that old hake Cuffe-Wilkes, as she calls herself, I don't know. Maison des Chapeaux, how are you. Maison de Clappo, more like." Despite the accustomed raucous tone she seemed subdued; Quirke suspected she was intimidated by the hotel's grand appurtenances, the chandeliers and high, gleaming mirrors,
the polished marble floors, the soft-footed waiters in morning coats and the waitresses in white bibs and black stockings and little silk mobcaps.

 

"Mickey Rooney stayed here, you know," Maisie said, looking about herself appraisingly. "And Grace Kelly."

 

Quirke lifted an eyebrow. "Together?"

 

She gave him a shove with her elbow.