Aiding and Abetting

by Muriel Spark

  Lucan, in Scotland for his latest collecting venture, received a phone call from Walker.

  “Don’t think,” said Walker, “don’t so much as let it cross your mind to fail to return to Paris. I need you here.”

  Lucan said, “I’m coming to Paris.” In fact he had nowhere else to go. He hated Walker, but there was no escape from him. And now he had begun to find out more about Walker, who knew so much, so very much, about him, if only through those books and articles that had probed every aspect of his past life.

  Walker and Lucan, Lucan and Walker, they were bound together.

  Walker, for his part, could hardly bear to look at Lucan’s melon-shaped head, exactly like his own.

  There was one enormous difference between them, however, and both knew it. Lucan was a killer and Walker was not.

  Lucky Lucan believed in destiny. By virtue of destiny he was an earl. His wife had been destined to die, according to his mad calculation. It was the madness of a gambler. During the last two months before the attempt on his wife, Lucan had behaved with comparative civility towards her; even, it was reported, with tenderness. He understood she was destined to die and did not for one moment reflect that this destiny arose merely from his own calculations and plans. His “needs” dictated fate itself. He had “needed” the money that would have derived from the sale of the house she occupied, he “needed” his wife dead, and it was destiny.

  It was also now his destiny to share his life with Walker. But an overriding “need” had arisen. Old friends were dying or dropping off. Lucan needed to rid himself of Walker, and soon; before Walker decided that Lucan must die, it was Walker’s destiny to die.

  On the plane to Paris, Lucan began to work out the mechanics of Walker’s death. Walker was a card to be played in this gambling den of life; not an ace card, merely a card. It was a situation in which Lucan felt confident, with the sort of confidence with which he had felt he could kill his wife with impunity. His feelings were those of a gambler. His confidence was a card player’s. His sense of destiny obliterated the constant, well-known fact that the gambler loses and the bookie, the croupier or whoever, always wins in the end. Walker was a card to be played, and there was no intention in Lucan’s mind to generously share his latest “collected” windfall with his lookalike. This latest bundle of luck might well be the last, these days being these days.

  Walker must go. The stewardess brought him a glass, a half bottle of flat Vichy water and a miniature Johnnie Walker which Lucan twirled in his fingers with some scorn, before opening and pouring. Presently she returned, offering him a plastic meal which he refused.

  Walker must go, die, disintegrate. By habit Lucan wore tinted glasses; they had no special lens: his contact lenses, a messy brown color, disguising his blue eyes, were made for his natural vision. He was in business class and sat in the aisle seat, which he always preferred. It gave him the feeling of a quick getaway, even on a plane. Twenty-five years had not settled his jitters. No years would do that. If he had remained at home and faced his trial and certain conviction, under the two charges against him, he would by now have been a free man for at least ten years, a fact which he appreciated but did not ponder. There had been no question of his standing trial. He was the seventh Earl of Lucan. He had never got used to, or understood, the casual treatment, often contempt, that had been slung his way in the press by his peers. Not one of the other earls, even those of his schooldays or his regimental years, had spoken up for him. Besides most of his immediate family, which was understandable, only his gambling friends and his less nobly born friends had expressed horror at his plight; they had done their best.

  By habit Lucan scrutinized, with more than usual passenger curiosity, the other travelers. Beside him was a girl with long streaky hair, reading Newsweek while picking into her tray of food. She, yes, could be a detective. Had they stopped looking for him? He could never be sure. This trip to England would have to be his last. With modern technology, collecting was becoming too dangerous and the collection itself too meager. He took out his book, a detective paperback. For twenty-five years he had been taking out paperbacks on planes and buses, remembering always to turn the pages regularly, even when his glances were elsewhere. His jitters at all times: he felt he did not deserve such a fate. He hadn’t killed his wife, after all. Only the girl with all that blood. He turned a page and sighed. His neighbor read and picked on.

  Across the aisle, on his left, were a couple of men, one older than the other. They, too, were busy with their drinks, talking together quite softly but audibly. Lucan disliked homosexuals; what he disliked most about them was what he claimed to be their sentimentality. No ruthlessness; no sense of destiny; no idea that what had to be done had to be done, like the murder. It was a blunder but it was destiny, it was the throw of the dice. The couple beside him across the aisle were a man of about fifty and one of about twenty-five. The older man had shoulder-length hair. The younger had a close-cropped head and was bedecked with worked-silver earrings. They were discussing a film. (Gone were the days when it happened to Lucan that he would overhear people at the next table, in a bus or a waiting room, discussing him.)

  “It was all too obvious,” said the older man. “All you had to do after the halfway mark, more or less, was sit through it to the end.”

  “I thought the sex scenes kind of cool,” observed the younger man.

  “Did you? I thought they looked contrived. They did it in their underpants.”

  The hostess came along with their trays and they started to eat in the silence due to the task.

  Suddenly, from the seat in front of them, the seat diagonally in front of Lucan’s to the left, came the electric word “Lucan,” quite discernible amongst the patchy fuzz of their conversation. A bald man of about sixty with a pretty fair-haired woman in her thirties. Lucan released his seatbelt; he stood up and out into the aisle to see them more clearly from the height of his 6´2´´. They had a large quantity of newspaper cuttings on the table in front of them. Yes, indeed, they were all old cuttings, some from the long past, all about him.

  LUCAN DISAPPEARS

  BODY FOUND IN U.S. MAIL SACK

  WHO KILLED SANDRA RIVETT?

  COUNTESS BLEEDING IN HOSPITAL

  LUCAN AT LARGE

  Lucan went to the lavatory, came back and settled in his seat. By this time the couple had put away their papers and were eating their meal with a good deal of appetite.

  Good God, it is Joe Murray—or is it? Yes, he would be about that age now. Clearly it was Joe, who had been at St. Columba’s monastery with his girlfriend, Maria Twickenham’s daughter, snooping into his whereabouts. It was Joe and this girl who had trailed him down from the north up to the gates of the house with that fortuitous wedding. Yes, it was them. Ambrose had said he’d given them cuttings, bloody fool. Lucan now applied himself to his book, turning pages at due intervals.

  Lucan had brought only hand luggage. As soon as the plane stopped and the passengers were allowed to shuffle out, he reached up into the baggage compartment and fetched down his bag. He hastened.

  “Funny,” said Joe to Lacey, as they followed the tall dark-spectacled fellow to the exit, “how, if you concentrate on a subject, you seem to see examples of it all over the place. I could have sworn that the man along there, three people in front, resembled Lucan. But of course . . .”

  Lacey had to tiptoe to see the indicated passenger. So many of the people now pushing up to the exit or reaching for their luggage in the upper compartments were, it seemed to her, excessively big, blocking her view of the possible Lucan. What she managed to see were hefty people, men and women. One of the men was wearing dark glasses, but as soon as he had pulled down his bag he took them off and put them in his breast pocket; hardly the gesture of a Lucan wishing to hide himself.

  Lucan was already on the Paris Center–bound bus by the time Joe and Lacey retrieved their luggage from the roundabout. It was only then that Joe, standing still, said, “Lacey, yo
u know I believe that man in the plane was Lucan. He caught my eye very rapidly, you know; I think he recognized me; and yes, I recognized him, I really did. But too late; what an old fool I am.”

  “We could have had him stopped, even arrested, right there on the plane,” said Lacey. “The captain has the power to do that.”

  “I wouldn’t really have cared to call the captain,” said Joe. “Suppose we’d been mistaken?”

  “But aren’t you sure?”

  “In fact, yes, I’m sure. It’s difficult to say what one would do.”

  “Oh, Joe,” she said, lifting her luggage and ready to move off with it, “I thought you wanted to help me.”

  “Yes, I do.” He looked round the crowded hall. “He’s gone, of course. Gone. We’ll find him in Paris, maybe, though. At least we’re almost sure he’s in Paris, now.”

  “Oh, Paris,” said Lacey. “Come on, let’s get a taxi.”

  14

  Jean-Pierre, in his ample, cluttered workshop, was restoring a gramophone of the 1920s for someone with more money than sense, when a tall black young man came to the glass door and rang. Jean-Pierre sometimes kept this door locked even when he was inside, with the shutters up; the area was a rough one.

  Jean-Pierre opened the door to this decidedly tranquil customer.

  “We’ve been on the phone,” said the man in English. “I’m Dr. Karl K. Jacobs, patient of Dr. Hildegard Wolf.”

  “Come in.”

  “You rang me up.”

  “Yes, I know. You said you were fed up with Hildegard; something like that. Have you any news of her?” Jean-Pierre moved a pile of old magazines and catalogs off a chair, and pushed it with a foot towards Dr. Jacobs. “Sit down.” He himself sat opposite on a rickety work stool.

  “I had enough,” said Jacobs. “She was always talking about herself, enquiring about the voodoo cults of the Congo, the medicine men. I had enough interrogation. The concierge at the rue du Dragon told me where your shop is.”

  “Enough, but you’ve come for more?” said Jean-Pierre.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Where she is,” said Karl Jacobs. “I was recommended to consult her but all she has done is consult me. Then—off.”

  “That’s her way.”

  “She not only consults, she insults. She wants to needle me, reminding me always of my background as she thinks it is. I come from the center of Africa but I haven’t just walked out of the jungle. What about the voodoos, the witch doctors? she wanted to know. How should I know about the medicine men, all those frauds? I am a qualified M.D.”

  “Where do you work?” said Jean-Pierre.

  “I’m at a private nursing home north of Versailles, I live near the Marais. I get in and out by autobus, sometimes I use the Metro and change. What have I got to do with jungle magic and blood rites?”

  “Blood rites?”

  “Yes, blood is important in these activities. Why does she worry me?”

  “That’s something between you and her,” said Jean-Pierre. “I can offer you a cup of instant coffee or a glass of wine.”

  “Wine.”

  “I know,” said Jean-Pierre as he poured two glasses of red wine, “that Hildegard is interested in superstitions.”

  “Yes, but why should she be interested at my expense? I paid her for those sessions. I have my own problems.”

  “Psychiatrists have their methods, you know,” said Jean-Pierre.

  “But I paid her for her advice.”

  “Women are expensive,” said Jean-Pierre. “Look—I’m trying to trace her whereabouts, I don’t deny. Do you have any clue where she might be?”

  “London.”

  “Why do you say London?”

  “It’s where I’d go if I wanted to hide.”

  “How do you know she wants to hide?”

  Karl Jacobs was neatly dressed in a dark business suit, a blue shirt with a white collar, and a gray striped tie with dark-blue dots. He sat with his long legs stretched forth. An effortlessly athletic man. Jean-Pierre repeated his question, “Why should she hide?”

  “Her interest in voodoo, in blood cults and fraudulent mystifications, was very genuine. I think it was probably personal. She could be connected with someone like that.”

  “Do you know anything, Dr. Jacobs, about these practices?”

  “Call me Karl. My name is Karl Kanzia Jacobs. My father was a judge, he’s dead. My mother is alive. She is a very important citizen of Kanzia.”

  “And Kanzia is where?”

  “It’s an independent entity of central Africa, slightly north of the Equator.”

  “But certainly they wouldn’t have any witchery and magic there, I imagine,” ventured Jean-Pierre.

  “Oh, indirectly, I know something. My grandfather Delihu is still a paramount head man. My uncle was a voodoo chap, he died. He was definitely what you would call in your terms a witch doctor. He performed great good, especially with rites and totems and herbs and of course the terror of beliefs. Beliefs are essential. I can confirm as a medical man that these witch men can cure, but there is also a lot of mumbo-jumbo, like you say. It’s a question of cutting a fine line, Jean-Pierre, and Dr. Wolf was interested in that aspect, the question of responsibility on the part of the self-styled healer. Myself, I feel it is a treachery to scientific practices to agree with her. And yet . . . She said, if a cure is effected does it matter whether or not there was an actual miracle to cause it? Why should the healer be prosecuted, or at least blamed, if in fact he heals? She put that very question to me. I told her no. I told her there should be no blame, but all this was at the expense of my pocket. I paid for those sessions.”

  “Perhaps I can reimburse you on her behalf?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “But surely,” said Jean-Pierre, “it is always worthwhile conversing with Hildegard? If it isn’t, what are you doing here?”

  “She is very fascinating,” said Karl Jacobs, gloomily.

  Jean-Pierre asked if they might keep in touch, and assured Karl that once Hildegard returned, as surely she would, he would see to it that she would give him the full sessions he was due. “If you have any other brainwaves or intuitions about where she has gone,” said Jean-Pierre, “call me at once. I intend to have her back. She’s my girlfriend and my life companion for more than five years and I can’t live without her. London might well be the place. I’ll work on that.”

  When Karl had gone, Jean-Pierre took out of his pocket a sheet of paper on which he had made notes of all the replies to his enquiries of Hildegard’s patients. He scribbled the word “promising” beside the name of Dr. Karl K. Jacobs. Then he studied the list again. Only one name, of course, was equally promising: that of Mrs. William Hane-Busby.

  Madrid—the Paradiso—He had already called there without success.

  Seelach Gasthof—There were so many guest houses which could fit that description. However, none of them had yielded Hildegard. Then London. “London is where I’d hide,” Jacobs had said with a quite definite tone. “London at Queen’s Gate . . .” Mrs. Hane-Busby had mused.

  Jean-Pierre decided to hunt up in the directories all the hotels and boarding houses at Queen’s Gate, London. It was only five-thirty in the afternoon, but he shut up shop.

  15

  Hildegard lay in her bath trying to trace back the source of a slightly disconsolate and disagreeable sensation that lingered over from the day. It was 6:30 P.M. The best feature of the hotel was its constant, really hot water; Hildegard profited by it frequently before dinner: soothing power of a hot bath. What was her feeling of uneasiness due to? She had left the hotel that morning at ten and taken a bus to Marble Arch. From there she went to several department stores in a leisurely way all along Oxford Street. Hildegard had brought few clothes with her, and now she was beginning to need a change. Gradually, that morning, she had acquired a woollen jacket, a pair of suede boots, four pairs of nylon tights, a p
air of brown jeans, a brown cotton shirt and a bottle of English toilet spray called Amours de Boudoir. It was here that Hildegard’s pondering in the bath was arrested. Walking along the ground-floor aisles of the shops that afternoon, she was reminded of her days as a student, earning a poor living from a part-time job at the handbag counter of a department store in Munich. At the cosmetic counter, Hildegard had stopped to try the toilet-water samples being offered by a young woman. It seemed to Hildegard that this woman looked away, and looked again and looked away. Hildegard was taken back to the store of her youth. It was the cosmetics girl who had unwittingly given her the idea of assuming the false stigmata. The cosmetics girl, Ursula, could make up and transform the most ordinary faces. Hildegard had been fascinated. Ursula did a romantic scar, one day, on the left cheek of a young man who happily said he was going to pose as having been involved in a duel.

  Ursula, when the time came, made a deep, false indentation in the palm of Hildegard’s hand. Hildegard, then Beate Pappenheim at the height of her success, would get Ursula to come around each month at the time of her menstruation and put the touches of reality on her “five wounds so that they could be photographed.”

  Could that young woman in the department store in Oxford Street be really Ursula? She looked so like Ursula, it was incredible, and then her furtive glances at Hildegard, her look, her look away, her look again, her look away . . . Did she recognize me? Hildegard asked herself.

  And then she realized how perfectly ridiculous her idea had been. Ursula twelve years ago must have already been over thirty. Now she would be in her mid-forties, much older than the young woman in the department store of today. Hildegard, pulling her thoughts together, apprehended how she herself must have looked strangely at the girl in order to provoke the strange looks she returned. Hildegard had allowed herself to be sprayed by the scent, had bought some and left. Amours de Boudoir—oh, well . . .