A Dandy in Aspic

by Derek Marlowe

“I’d rather stand,” replied Eberlin. “It would help you come to the point.”

  A faint flicker of annoyance crossed Brogue’s yellow-brown eyes and then he smiled and glanced at Miss Vogler, hovering indelicately behind Eberlin, all in beige and head down and toes turned in.

  “Wait outside, Vogler,” he told her.

  Miss Vogler turned toward the door.

  “Stay here,” Eberlin said quietly, “stay in here.” He looked casually out of the window.

  The Negro took a beat and lit a cigar slowly, taking his time, observing Eberlin intently. Someone knocked on the door, waited, then hurried away. Brogue leaned back in the chair.

  “I’m afraid what I have to say is private. I want your secretary to leave.”

  “She’s a private secretary. You have not the position to tell me anything she couldn’t hear. We stay.”

  “I see.”

  With slow deliberation, Brogue got up and walked to the other side of the room and picked up an ashtray from a corner table. He then stood there, holding the glass object, studying the other two occupants of the room, standing in profile.

  “Vogler–how long have you been working here?”

  She moved her head in his direction, wide-eyed, a pretty neck emerging from the white frill collar. A delicate nose.

  “For Mr. Eberlin?”

  “Altogether. How long?”

  “Three years.”

  “Three. Sit down.”

  She glanced at Eberlin and he nodded, and then she crossed to a straight-backed chair in the other corner and sat down, crossing her legs, adjusting her skirt. Eberlin remained standing, like a fulcrum, in the center of the room. Brogue walked quietly over the thick-pile carpet and stood behind Eberlin, the cigar in one hand, the ashtray in the other, his great hulk towering over the other man.

  “You dress well, don’t you?” His voice was curt and insinuating. “If you have called me here for the name of my tailor, he’s in the book.”

  Brogue smiled and puffed a column of smoke onto Eberlin’s shoulder, so that it hung on the weave of the jacket, then circled, dispersed and floated to the ceiling. Miss Vogler sat stiffly away from it all, her hands clasped tightly on her lap, slight sweat emerging in the center of her back and between her breasts. The Negro gave a short deep laugh, slapped Eberlin’s back hard, and returned behind the desk, standing there, a huge, self-satisfied grin on his face. He picked up a red file from the desk, marked CONFIDENTIAL EX. F3, and held it up over his head like a banner.

  “This is you in my hand, Eberlin. Ninety-six pages all dedicated to you. Catch!”

  He suddenly pretended to throw the file across the room, but held his hand. Eberlin made no attempt whatsoever to receive it, but kept his arms to his side, and then turned to Miss Vogler and said in a bored voice:

  “Let us go back.” She stood up.

  “What did you think of Nightingale?” asked Brogue casually, ignoring Miss Vogler.

  Eberlin, his hand on the door handle, paused and replied, “I never met the man.”

  “No?”

  Eberlin sighed. “Your work on the three men who were killed was excellent. You knew of course why they were sent? What they were doing?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did their deaths surprise you?”

  “My relations with them went only as far as the inside of this building. I am employed as an organizer, not a guardian angel.”

  ‘Yes. Yes, so you are. Please come back into the room. I have very little to say.”

  Brogue sat down again, throwing the file before him on the desk.

  “Cigar?”

  “No thank you.”

  Eberlin moved away from the door and walked to the corner table and poured a drink for himself. A Haig. Miss Vogler sat down again carefully because the chair creaked. The chair creaked.

  “I am, as you are well aware, in no position to inform you of anything not related directly to my department.”

  Eberlin dropped two cubes of ice into the glass and rattled them like dice.

  “But I would like to ask you two things.”

  Eberlin drank the whisky slowly, staring at the print in front of him. Brogue continued, swiveling once again in the chair.

  “I want you to attend a d.b. on Monday next at Selvers. Eleven hundred hours. Will you be there?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “From me, yes. From Frazer, not one.”

  “Then I’ll be there.”

  “Jolly good.” Brogue paused, then said, “You weren’t at Nightingale’s funeral, were you?”

  “Were you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was I there?”

  “No.”

  “Any more questions?”

  “No.”

  Eberlin put down the glass and returned to the door. Brogue stood up.

  “Thank you for coming.” He smiled at Eberlin, who looked at him deadpan and replied:

  “It was hardly worth the ceremony, was it?”

  The buzzer on the Negro’s desk sounded and Miss Vyse’s voice was heard to say, “Mr. Frazer is waiting outside, sir.” and Brogue replied, “One moment,” and flicked down the button and then picked up a silver snuffbox from the desk top.

  “Oh, Eberlin, you’re interested in this type of thing, aren’t you?

  I bought it from Carter and Beckett.”

  Eberlin looked at it from across ten yards of carpet and dismissed it.

  “I wrote to Carter and Beckett to discover the original owner. You see it has an inscription inside from George B. Apparently this chap George B. is George Brummell. The dandy.”

  “No.”

  Brogue gave a surprised laugh and added: “Oh, but yes. Beckett confirmed it.”

  “The snuffbox you have in your hand was made no earlier than 1880. It is too large, too clumsy and too vulgar to have belonged to George the Fourth, let alone George Brummell. On the other hand, it suits you admirably. Good day.”

  The Negro’s jaw dropped down slightly and he stared at the snuffbox in his hand. Then he dropped it onto the green leather blotter, turned his back on both of them and stared out of the window. Eberlin opened the door and went out as Miss Vogler crossed the office, clutching her notebook.

  “Oh by the way, Vogler,” Brogue muttered quietly, without turning around, “you may be interested to know that Emmanuel Gatiss will be here tomorrow. He’s arriving on the seven o’clock plane.”

  Eberlin heard the words and hesitated, then caught Frazer’s eye in the outer office and nodded, and walked past, walking quickly down the corridor to the lift. He heard Miss Vogler tip-tipping on the stone floor after him, hurrying to catch up, but he was in the lift and slamming the metal doors and pressing the G button and lighting a cigarette. His hand shook and he felt as if he was on the threshold of an enormous chasm.

  It had been a long, long morning and he needed air.

  3

  Gatiss

  Women, Vogler, are such extraordinary creatures.

  Their stubbornness never ceases to amaze me. Look

  at Henry the Eighth’s sixth wife. I mean the woman

  was either a supreme optimist, or she never read the

  Court circulars.

  –ALEXANDER EBERLIN

  What do I do? I collect noses from statues.

  –ALEXANDER EBERLIN

  THE passenger in the rear seat of the BEA Viscount Flight 63 sat staring intently at the back of the Queen’s Building through hornrimmed dark glasses, as the plane taxied to a halt at London Airport. He waited patiently till all the other passengers had left the aircraft, then got up and took his carryall from the ceiling rack, said “Good day” to the hostess, and walked out into the sun and down the steps and into the waiting coach. The other passengers took no notice as he sat casually, near the sliding door, arms folded, though the more perceptive might have noticed that he had taken no food nor drink throughout the flight, nor did he smoke or read, but sat still, arms constantly folded, loo
king out of the window for hours on end. He was a tall man, strongly built and sun-tanned, though it was evident from the ticket stub that he had just come from Munich, and his face was broad-jawed, high-cheek-boned, with an arrogant nose. Blond hair cut stylistically short. No rings, wrist bracelets or tie clips, though his few intimates knew him to have a Star of David hanging low on his chest on a gold chain.

  The coach reached the Arrival building, and the man left first now, walking quickly up the glass-enclosed ramp to the Customs room. At the British barrier he showed his passport and was waved on to the Customs officers, who ignored his black leather suitcase, and then the man strolled casually into the long, early-morning waiting lounge and stood before a bookstand, idly gazing at a gardening weekly. Another man, in a pale gray suit, approached him with a smile and touched his arm and said quietly, “Welcome back, Mr. Gatiss,” and shook his hand, and then added, “The car is waiting outside,” and the two men walked away through the crowd, walked away unhurriedly toward the exit.

  * * *

  Eberlin spent the following two days of the weekend in planned despair. Abandoning all self-imposed codes of etiquette, he banished the valet for three days, shaved never and drank one whole bottle of Emva Cream Sherry he found hidden among the shoe brushes. The full impact of the Friday hit him late the same evening, not that he hated the British plans less, but he loathed the Russian refusal to repatriate him more. He tried twice in blustering exposure to contact Pavel, but all contacts had been severed temporarily. He wandered wearily back to his room, pulled up a chair and sat staring at a point three feet beyond his eyes for two hours until the point disappeared because it had got dark; and he felt like a spoiled schoolboy.

  Eberlin had no friends to visit nor did he wish to have them. Partly due to his own acquired self-sufficiency and partly due to the risk of cultivating confidants, he had shunned close relationships. When he was at Oxford, surrounded by dozens of attractive girls who admired him openly (downward smile, sidelong glance, tip of tongue pressed at front of upper palate) and dozens of earnest young men who admired him from afar (repeating his aphorisms, copying his clothes), Eberlin had written in his journal: “I added up my friends the other day. It was a difficult task but finally, after much drastic deliberation, I narrowed the number down to none.”

  Nor, in the later years, had he gone out of his way to seek the company of his countrymen. Like all European cities, London had its circle of Russian emigrés, mostly of a generation older than himself, and it was not rare for him to encounter relics of Czarist Russia at a cocktail party or a club. The meetings were always brief and impassionate, but he would still feel a pang of nostalgia on hearing that unique attack on the English vowels which only Russians possess, and on seeing faces he remembered in a million towns in the days of his boyhood. Two weeks before taking his degree he had visited the theatre with a fellow undergraduate called Brawne to see the Moscow Art Company in The Cherry Orchard. It had been a brutal evening. Later, Brawne had taken him–“You might be amused, Eberlin, you might be amused”–to visit an aged Russian Baroness who claimed a friendship with Chekhov himself. The woman had lived in a large flat in the fashionable part of London, and was surrounded, like Miss Haversham, by souvenirs and memories of her past–faded photos of herself, drapeaux from the court of Nicholas the Second, an icon or two. She had reminisced to them as they sat perched politely on a chaise longue, her eyes filled with visions of her romantic youth. Unconscious of Eberlin’s knowledge of Russian, she would break off to talk to her housekeeper in her native language, and once Eberlin heard her say: “These boys are so innocent, so innocent. They think I’m mad, Tatyana, and sometimes I think perhaps I am,” and the housekeeper keeper had merely replied, “Tshay gotoff.” The three of them then had the tea and the Baroness showed a photo of herself as a pretty young woman, sitting in a droshky, wrapped in a fur coat and peering solemnly at the camera. It was a tender picture and Eberlin, for a moment, thought of his mother whom he had never known, and handed the picture back as if it were crystal.

  The Baroness talked of Chekhov himself: “A sad, sad man but so kind,” and then fell asleep in the chair before them, so that they had to sneak out of the apartment on tiptoes. Outside, Brawne, a normally garrulous man, merely said, “Proud isn’t she?”

  A month later, Eberlin read in the newspaper that the Baroness had been arrested for attempting to steal a bottle of cooking wine from a supermarket.

  And so Eberlin remained in his apartment alone, thinking sometimes about Gatiss and Brogue, but mostly thinking of nothing. Once he hailed a taxi and said to the driver, “Drive east,” and the driver said, “How far?” and he had replied, “Nowhere,” and had got out again immediately, shamefaced, and hurried away, tripping over the curb edge and leaving the taxi still standing there bewildered. Once, late on the Saturday afternoon, he had visited the V and A and was taken to see his Sèvres collection and asked to be left alone. He sat in the vault surrounded by the samples of his extroversion and his taste, piled high around him, sat like Morgan at Panama among the spoils, sat like Napoleon in the shell of Moscow, sat staring at the porcelain; and then clamored to be let out and returned home again, and phoned back to the V and A telling them to take them, take them all, take everything without money, take them all. Empty the vault.

  Once he spent one hour trying on every shirt he had until he tired and stood with the discarded shirts lying around his feet. “My failures,” he said echoing Brummell, and left the room.

  He got drunk again on Saturday evening. Alone he sat in the bedroom drinking whisky and listening to assorted music on the radio. He found he couldn’t get better through the drink nor even music-hall, but slowly divorced himself from his identity and started talking to himself. Full of utter self-pity he phoned the West London Air Terminal and asked the time of the next plane to Moscow. When asked his name, he froze in horror and dropped the phone, sweating, and hurried out of the apartment and stood on the end of South Street watching his own front door. Then he got drunk again, and at ten thirty he phoned Heather Vogler at her apartment. She answered and he asked her what she was doing alone on a Saturday night and she started to cry and then he said he was drunk. She came over and sat next to him on the bed and cried and talked about Gatiss, and then they both sat miserably staring at the wall. Finally Eberlin got up and went into the bathroom and took off his clothes and showered and walked naked back to the bedroom, having forgotten she was there, and stood, staring at her in surprise and muttering “Excuse me,” and got into bed.

  She stood up and said, “I ought to go,” and didn’t move, and Eberlin looked at her standing there, the incredibly soiled-pretty flower of a thing, standing there in a white silk shift, standing there before him, and he apologized for himself, saying: “The biological act of procreation has its flaws. I know for a start that someone is walking around with my personality. But if you consider me a gentleman, please go now because I think I ought to sleep with you.”

  She then walked out without a word and closed the door and he heard her in the street hurrying away, and he turned over and went to sleep. He was waked up in the early hours of the morning by Heather Vogler as she returned and said she needed some things and got undressed and slipped into bed next to him and leaned her body against his back, trying to peer at his face, but he was asleep again. He awoke next morning alone, to the sound of church bells, and then sat around again all day doing nothing, and forgot about the day and went to bed early and woke up to find it was Monday and the day he had to go to Selvers. The damn weekend was over. It was there.

  4

  Selvers

  Madness is constant betrayal.

  –ALEXANDER EBERLIN

  AT Charing Cross Station, he bought a single ticket to Wadhurst and was told that he would have to change at Tunbridge Wells, a situation he took with good humor. He walked across the platform to a small bar, and waited for the departure time. There were few seats in the room, so he stood clutching a
pint of warm, thin beer, looking out of the window at the bustle of the station until it was time to go to the train. Being in a particularly reflective frame of mind and naturally antisocial, he chose a small, corridorless compartment, and sat by the window. He had bought a copy of all the newspapers, plus a History Today, a recent Stern, and copies each of White’s The Making of the President 1960 and Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage; the former he always intended to read and the latter, not to reread, but to send to Vogler as promised. He placed the stack of reading matter beside him on the green seat, glanced through them all once, and then never touched them again throughout the journey. As he was slowly taken south out of London past the familiarities of the Festival Hall, and then through the southern suburbs, clean and surprisingly empty in the sunshine, Eberlin, grateful that the compartment had remained empty, found himself considering what might be in store. It seemed frighteningly probably that he would be asked to continue Nightingale’s operation, which immediately would put him in a tricky situation regarding his loyalties. His duties to Pavel were not as informer, but, in basic terms, as assassin. Some passing of information had been involved, but he knew that he had been trained to kill the secret enemies of the Soviet Union such as Esau Pretty and Sidney Nightingale, and nothing more. This he had achieved with the minimum of difficulty apart from decapitating the Mistrale on the Route Nationale. If asked then, what to do? Impossible to contact Pavel, for some damning reason, which meant that the decision was in his lap. Eberlin considered taking the train all the way to Hastings and St. Leonard’s, changing his name to Smith and abandoning the whole thing: flush it down a toilet, discard it, wash his hands of it, spit it out. But hardly a practical gesture.

  The train was stopping at Sevenoaks now, and a man and his wife and two children whom they called Michael and what sounded like Shlemiehl but couldn’t be, joined Eberlin in the compartment and ruined his concentration entirely. He took out a cigarette, requested a light from the father, who, red-faced, disturbed the order searching for a lighter, and then lit the cigarette with, “Knew I had it. Knew it was there,” and tried to further the conversation. But Eberlin turned away and stared out of the window at the monotonous but beautiful southern countryside. Trees really are greener in England. Another one of those signs in the field. Three cows under a tree. One cow in a field. One horse in a field. A wooden bridge with a hole in it. Two more cows and a horse. Two more cows and a horse and another of those signs in a field. Three oast houses. Gatiss himself would be there without doubt. A row of Victorian houses without shutters but shutter hooks and Monday washing on the line. A blue boiler suit. Poetic working-class man living on the downs? Sounds like a crossword clue. That would be the reason he had flown back from Munich. Emmanuel Gatiss. A new white seat in an empty fields miles from anywhere. And what about Frazer? He too? I suppose a man must have crossed all those acres with a can of white paint in one hand and a brush in the other just to paint the bench. Sublime effort. Another cow in a field. He had never been to Selvers before. Might be interesting. He had never been to Wadhurst before. Let’s face it, he had never been on this train before. Narrow life in the Ministry. Fourth one of those signs in a field. Consistent but a failure. Train going too fast to read the damn thing–looks like Watkinson’s something. Watkinson’s the Opticians? The Mistrale ought to be ready soon. It was entirely his fault but it ought to be ready. Where did he say I have to change? Tonbridge or Tunbridge Wells? Tunbridge Wells. Someone shouted “Tunbridge Wells” and Eberlin got out. Two more stations to go.