The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  As I neared my door, I saw Captain Chaddock standing by his men's white Toyota. He crossed the road and met me near the door of the apartments, where he saluted and said to me, That woman. With the eyes. Waiting in the lobby for you. Curfew's two hours off.

  The old woman? I asked.

  Young one, he insisted. With the eyes. And he joined his hands, fingers splayed across his forehead and nose to indicate something more striking than Mrs. Carter. He must mean Louise James. The eyes.

  Not my business, said Chaddock. Maybe she needn't leave at curfew.

  I stared at him. He seemed embarrassed, and cast his eyes about. Been a hard time for you, Mr. Sheriff.

  Yes. Particularly with you fellows all over the street.

  He grinned and wagged his head about, to show he could take a joke.

  She's from America, I said.

  She's been checked out. Relatives here. He shrugged. None of my business, but . . .

  The lady will be gone before curfew, I told him.

  Your choice.

  Yet again, was it possible to believe that in the right circumstances he would put a bullet in a head while a family watched, howling? Or was he used only to softer jobs? Was I a soft job? I said good night and went in the door.

  Louise James was sitting on the old settee at the bottom of the steps. I hadn't seen anyone sitting there in my entire residency. She stood up, the dim lobby light on her. Yes, the eyes, as Chaddock had remarked. Interestingly, I found I was pleased for her company.

  Good evening, Alan, she said. Pardon the intrusion. But I'm flying home—I mean, back—tomorrow.

  I said that I hoped the journey was a happy one.

  I made a bit of a fool of myself, didn't I, the other day? I'd say it was the sip or two of brandy that did it.

  I raised my hands to appease and reassure her.

  But I meant it. Let me be your wife and look after you.

  I smiled. I'd been humanized a little by finishing my task. I asked gently, In Texas?

  Or here, she said. I don't care.

  No, I'm sorry, I told her. This gets more and more ridiculous.

  No, it's less and less so.

  I pleaded, There are other matters . . .

  She sat on the settee again.

  For God's sake, I told her, Come upstairs and have a drink.

  I wondered if anyone saw us rising up the stairs, and reached the same facile conclusions as Captain Chaddock. With the furtiveness of a student, I let her into the flat. I took her light jacket, went to fold it on a lounge chair, then took it to the bedroom where lay the spectral residue of both the Sarahs, the living and dead. I did not put her jacket on the bed. I hung it on a hook behind the door.

  Outside again, I offered Louise James a drink, but she said she would just like tea. It was a long flight back to the United States, she explained, virtually twenty hours, since she had to change planes in Paris.

  This university post for you, she said. It's got nothing to do with my other . . . my other proposal. Do you want me to initiate it?

  Thank you, I said with my newfound manners. But no.

  I could not really imagine any future at all. Perhaps Great Uncle would imagine one for me, by being discontented with my prose. Perhaps he would send Sonny to chastise me.

  Then I will have to come back here, she said. I'm sorry to be importunate. But I see it as a matter of destiny, my coming back.

  How would you make a living here?

  Well, I'll make a living being a stringer to, say, the Washington Post or the Atlanta Constitution.

  That's a perfectly good way of getting into prison, I told her.

  I could also be the servant of your international voice. She said this without irony, with her huge dark eyes upon me.

  I laughed. That should take at least two hours every week, I said. I have no international voice. I intend to be a film subtitler, if anything.

  She leaned forward and touched my wrist. Her hands were not thin—they were more sumptuous, a substance to them. My observation in this matter had more to do with comparative anatomy rather than any rediscovery of desire.

  Why don't I make us both tea? asked Louise James.

  No, I said, in a sudden panic. I was suddenly willing to block her access to the kitchen by force.

  She stood. Come on, she said, I know poor Sarah died making tea. But that doesn't put the kitchen out of bounds forever, does it?

  The question, asked at any other time of the lunatic that I'd become, might have caused fury and blows. Asked tonight, it had a curious effect. The skin on my arms felt astringent—a particular kind of grief was exiting by my pores. It was like the casting out of a spirit of sorrow. My neck crept, and I was taken from below by the idea that it was all right to have tea made in the kitchen by someone other than myself, McBrien, and Sarah. More than that, I half liked the idea of a woman making tea for me.

  All right then, I told her. You'll find the tea on the shelf beside the refrigerator.

  I'll attend to it, she said.

  Yes, I told her. You can go to make tea. But I still don't intend to marry you.

  I sat drowsing, and after about five minutes was awoken by the caterwaul of the kettle. She emerged with the teapot on a tray, and two cups and saucers. I had got out of the way of trays and saucers, and found them strangely touching, the way a child might who has returned to a normal living room after time in an orphanage. She set the tray down and stood pouring. Like an anxious mother waiting for a son to approve a recipe, her vast eyes lay on me. Delightful, I said, after mixing in sugar and taking the first scalding mouthful.

  Very well, she said, smiling broadly. That much is established! I can make tea!

  We drank our tea in silence.

  I made some banal remark when I finished—very refreshing.

  She stood up. Stand up, Alan! she told me.

  No, I said. I was actually amused.

  Stand up! she said. It was as if she were proposing a parlor game. Naturally I asked her why. Sometimes, she told me, it's best for big boys not to ask questions.

  That's silly talk, I said. But I stood up.

  She grasped me—it was like a wrestling hold. Her eyes glittered powerfully and seemed to take up most of my vision. She was not as surpassingly beautiful as Sarah, but she had a handsomeness and a lot of physical strength. Her breath felt hot yet fragrant. Now, she said like a girl, I've got you wrapped up. You see? It's not so hard to be held by a woman, is it?

  Against my will it is, I told her. Where in God's name did you learn to behave like this?

  Ah, she said, winking. You think it must be the hedonist influence of America, don't you? Because everyone agrees America's hopelessly decadent, don't they? Not our society though. Not Sonny and his cohorts.

  Her voice took on a hoarseness, exciting and, as I told myself, foreign. Foreign to me, that is. I had forgotten that it was one of the gifts of women. Stimulating in particular to the oaf in me, and not offensive to the sage either.

  You see? she said. You see? And, by the way, the United States, along with places like Canada and Australia, has passed the Benthamite test of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number.

  And bad luck for those who miss out, I argued, feeling I and my argument would be choked.

  Don't be such a spoilsport, she advised me.

  To be held so fiercely had its attractions. Perhaps disgracefully, absorbing and consenting, I began to hold her. I can't blame it on my lower impulses. It was the total I who kissed the side of her neck, in sudden hunger for companionable flesh. It was I who held her with a kind of need, which I did not see as erotic at all but as an even profounder appetite, very simple, nearly infantile. I could discern in the reactions of her body a marvelous willingness to satisfy me.

  She said the one word, Quick! Thus, it was apparent that she did not wish to satisfy the prurient Overguard by overstaying the curfew. Or else, of course, she had other urgencies.

  There is no need to
go into the disrobings, the clothing one loosened oneself or had loosened by the lover. Louise James had a succulent, broad, muscular, full-breasted body. In fact, as I remembered later, she represented very accurately the national ideal of womanhood, the ample seductress and the mother of the tribe. She lay back on the floor, smiling and happily dazed, ready to accept me. There were no complaints about the discomfort of this. It was too serious a battle of the senses for that sort of thing. Ever a lusty child, I drew on the imagined milk of her wide breasts. Maybe, I thought in my heat, maybe she will become my wife, and I can be here, in the shelter of her broad shoulders, for a lifetime of nights. But first, this evening's discourse of flesh! After I had explored her with more patience than I felt, the antique manuals of love at work even in my haste, I felt that supreme homecoming of berthing my penis in her. I was sure I wanted to stay in this mode of freshness and discovery eternally, but the pressure of the blood, so ordinary and so laughable in retrospect, was driving me. In my certainty of my own power, the only question for the moment was how long I could withhold.

  I had read in the past that impotence can strike at the height of passion, though I had never believed it. Erection is not always the fundamental problem. That pressure and frenzy to pour all your substance in the one direction itself requires that all one's life be encapsulated in a second of giving. All ghosts are summoned up in that second. All lost battles. Forgotten doubt can rise and powerfully mist the veins.

  Predictably, I saw again Sarah's transformed face, the leather of it, the filaments, its sunken and vacated features, and across the brow and temples and cheeks, veins once submerged by her beauty now demarcated by the evil, clogging ink which her blood had become. Desire for Louise James was closed off as suddenly as a door shut by a gale. What I was engaged at seemed what it was. Child's play.

  I rolled away from Louise James, I was on my back beside her, and there were tears on my face. She put her arm around me, but it felt different, less essential than it had been.

  Is there something I can do? she asked.

  No. I'm impotent.

  I knew that specter would always be waiting for me, just below the summit of desire. I knew it.

  It doesn't matter, she told me. You've had a cruel time. I understand. It's not important to me.

  I said nothing to her. She got up and on her wide, spatulate feet with painted toenails, she went and got a towel from the bathroom, and began cleaning up my tear-besmirched face. Hush, she said. I'm not as shallow a woman as that.

  I told her she was far too good a woman for me, and I could see that though she felt flattered at that, there was sorrow in her eyes. I admired the way she had descended from her desire to turn so quickly into a nurse.

  She smiled. I shall keep contact. I have not necessarily finished with you yet. But I won't push as much now.

  She spread her arms, bare-chested, kneeling beside me. You know where rescue lies.

  We put on our clothes like two members of a beaten football team, although I the one who had very little faith in our future competition chances, and she retaining too much. It was a little before nine o'clock. There was plenty of time to escort her home or call her a cab before curfew. We walked down the stairs together. She retained a certain smile as we descended in the dim light—it was the sort of smile an aunt would have for an eccentric nephew. I could see Captain Chaddock's dark staff car and white Toyota. I knew him nearly so well, I felt now, that I could ask him to give Louise a lift home. But I decided that might seem strange, and an uncomfortable experience to subject my friend Louise James to. The street was empty of cabs, and so I began walking with her along the boulevard.

  From the corner nearest to our door emerged a bustling Mrs. Carter. I stopped in my tracks, but Louise James had gone a step or two ahead before she realized I had halted.

  Mrs. Carter was wearing a shawl against the night chill. It was tied under her chin. She said, So, Alan! Do you think you can walk this street and pluck whatever beauty you want? In my boy's place?

  I shook my head.

  She said, You won't have beauty after beauty.

  She produced a long knife that looked almost surgical in its contours. She drove it upwards into Louise James's sternum.

  I heard Louise utter a fearful cough. She stepped back and leaned against me. Blood ran between her lips; she turned her enormous eyes upwards to me. Within seconds, however, the leaning became a collapse. I sank down with her.

  Captain Chaddock and his men were all round us.

  Mrs. Carter, said Chaddock. What have you done now?

  He won't possess beauty, she said, as if that were an argument that would hold up in a murder court.

  I was kneeling by Louise James, whose eyes, lit by the torches of the Overguard, retained only the briefest pleading and disbelief. An Overguard removed Mrs. Carter's exorbitantly long knife from her hand. Chaddock was calling instructions into the radio by his chin. So were various of his officers. It all looked so practiced, as if they were used to murders of this kind committed by the bereaved mothers of soldiers. Chaddock went down on one knee and faced me over Louise James's body, which had now begun to shudder furiously. I had in part lifted her and held her tightly by the shoulders, a man promising to hold her together. She urinated on the pavement, the first indignity of her death.

  Chaddock said, Don't get too messy, Alan. We've just had a call for you.

  A call for me? I asked, unbelieving.

  Yes, you know, a call. And he pointed his index finger towards heaven. I'm sure it's good news. But you can't linger.

  He yelled to his subordinates. Where are those fucking lazy Overalls?

  He meant the Metropolitan Police in their blue overalls, who would eventually come to take Mrs. Carter away. Crimes of such passion as Mrs. Carter had just committed were not within the purview of the Overguard. Their tasks were both subtler at one extreme, and more Gothic at the other.

  Chaddock returned his gaze to Louise. We both saw her eyes roll up in a strange way. An ambulance wailed into the curb, and Overguards lifted me away so that the ambulance men could deal, kneeling, with the victim. It seemed that within seconds a creaky old Fiat of the Metropolitan Police rolled up too, and a man in a suit and three Overalls got out.

  One of the ambulance men tried to pump Louise James's heart, but deep veinous blood emerged instead of breath. The ambulance man looked up to the plainclothed Overall and Captain Chaddock. No, he said. Sorry, he told me, as if I were James's husband.

  Chaddock said to me, Sorry Alan, but you've been called away.

  Not now, I told him.

  He pulled my elbow.

  Not now, I yelled.

  Calm yourself, Alan.

  Curse you, Mrs. Carter, I yelled stupidly as Overalls pushed her into the Fiat. She looked at me with purest hatred. Now two Overguards took me, for the first time in our association, firmly and fiercely by the arms, and dragged me off.

  You see! yelled Mrs. Carter through her window. Perhaps in her mind, the Overguard were taking me to be punished for long-established lies. I was thrown, rather than aided, into the back of the car. Someone opened a flask and brandy went willy-nilly down my throat. By the time I had stopped choking on it, and its artificial comfort entered my veins, the car was rolling, leaving behind the Overalls and the ambulance men and ranting Mrs. Carter, and the limbs of Louise James.

  As the limo rolled, the blindfold was applied again, and in the darkness I began the futile yet disabling business of absorbing all that had happened to me and to others. I mentioned to the darkness of the limo that I had blood on my shirt—I could feel it.

  Don't worry, Chaddock told me. Palace will look after you. Long as Boss isn't kept up after midnight.

  This time the journey seemed shorter than the first one made by McBrien and myself. Soon, all were whispering at whatever palace gate it happened to be, and the Overguard men slipped my blindfold off while we were still in progress within the walls. I was surprised to see, well
dug in, amongst the splendid gardens, a battery of antiaircraft rockets. Who were these rockets intended for? The Americans? Or the internal dissenters, some of them in the army and air force? The colonnade at the end of the driveway was a different one from that of the palace in which I'd first met Great Uncle. I presumed that this was Highgate Palace, the one nearest Martyrs Avenue.

  They opened the door of the car and helped me out, and I went up the stairs in my bloodied shirt and pants with Chaddock. A palace Overguard officer, member of the Praesidia and a far more scholarly-looking man than Chaddock, met us inside the door and saluted to Chaddock as he handed me over. But the procedure as I progressed along the corridors was similar now. I surrendered my clothing.

  Do I get my passport back now? I asked.

  In a while, said the officer. Not tonight.

  No distaste showed on the faces of the men who handled my clothes soaked with poor Louise James's blood. But I felt that the astonishment and horror I had brought with me would swamp my coming conversation with Great Uncle, and I confess I was pleased to see them clear out with the mess. I showered, gave a urine sample, had an anal examination, and dressed in the same sort of sterile costume I had been put in last time, and dipped my hands in permanganate. This time, however, there was no stop in any anteroom. Stumbling, accompanied by two Praesidian guards, I was taken at a good clip along corridors, and unlike last time there was now no dim office or bureaucratic corridor, but a hallway which seemed to be all gold cloth, and in its midst double doors, molded with tigers and dauntless fifteenth-century hunters. If Great Uncle had greeted me like a soldier in a bunker last time, this time—so the molded and sculpted doors indicated—he would greet me as a prince.