Mr Frankenstein

by Richard Freeborn

  My darling,

  These letters and other writings belonged to my grandmother. She taught English to someone called Jacob Richter when he was in London in 1902. The evidence for that fact is to be found among my papers at San Jorge. Please destroy all the material. It was what she wanted. I was never strong enough to do it in my lifetime.

  Your very loving, very fond father.’

  Also in her hand was a small leather-bound volume tied with a ribbon. She sat down, holding it on her lap. ‘Can you guess now?’

  He nodded as she untied the ribbon to show him that the volume, although labelled with the word ‘Diary’, was in fact so worn it had become merely a folder containing so many loose pages. ‘It was Ben who recognised what it was. That letter, the first thing you translated – Ben had found it in the archives and brought a copy with him from Moscow. Apparently the codes in it mentioned Daddy’s grandmother and Dr Hazell as people who could be trusted. Ben proved it all to me with the names of different birds and so on, but I can’t remember exactly what they were. And when he saw some of the things in here, in the letters, he nearly went crazy. I’d never, never, never seen anything like it!’

  She laughed, shook her head and stretched back so spontaneously at the recollection that she almost tipped everything in her lap onto the floor. He leaned across and held the loose pages in place. The closer he was to her physically, the less he felt the pain of his sore ribs and stiff jaw, as if her spontaneous laughter stimulated him to laugh and smile with her.

  ‘Oh, he couldn’t keep still! He marched about this room clutching his head, shouting things in Russian and then roaring with laughter! You know, I really thought he’d gone mad! There was all the proof he needed here, he said. And it was after that he grew frightened. “What if they find me now?” he’d ask. “What if they find me holding these pages?” He was a frightened little boy. It was then I converted that old golf house into a home for him. It could hardly be seen and it was made very secure. He was sure he could disappear into it. So that’s what he did. But I had another problem. I heard from Martha that the attorneys over there in California wanted access to everything, including what’s in here,’ she tapped the loose sheets in her lap, ‘because they’d been through the papers at San Jorge and found references to the stuff here.’

  ‘Martha?’

  She pressed her lips together in a sour grin at the question. Then with a sigh and a slight heave of the shoulders she explained.

  ‘She calls herself my stepmother. It’s how she is, always wanting to be in charge. She’s Daddy’s widow.’

  Just her father’s widow! She spoke of her literally as if she were just that and no more, a stranger to her, it seemed, but one who had played a continuous and often quite obtrusive role in her life. On the single occasion that Gloria had been taken out to California to see her father’s domain at San Jorge, Martha had been outraged that her husband should have dared to bring his love child into her home. Being a woman of domineering personality and strong will, though childless herself, she had insisted on exercising certain rights, parental as well as financial, over Gloria as if she were really her daughter. The business interests were of course already secured long before her husband’s death and she had no role other than beneficiary in that regard. On the other hand, as bereaved wife and loyal widow she took steps to ensure that Gloria’s assets were safeguarded by being thoroughly ring-fenced. Everything relating to inheritance came under close scrutiny from California, especially access to what promised to be very considerable wealth. But there was something else.

  ‘I don’t think Martha’s grasping.’ Gloria Billington spoke defiantly in apparent readiness to be contradicted. ‘I just think she’s hard. And I know why she’s hard. It’s not just infidelity. She knew about Daddy’s affairs. You know what I mean? She knew about all that, I’m sure she did. No, she’s hard because…’ at this point her voice was lowered almost to a whisper ‘… it’s silly, I know, but she’s sort of under orders. She’s been under the orders of the CIA, you know, the Intelligence Agency. That’s partly why she’s hard. They’ve ordered her not to reveal things. But now things have got more complex, what with the projected sale of San Jorge. Which is why, I think, the attorneys want the material. And it makes me feel the best thing now would be to burn all this…’ she again tapped the worn cover in her lap ‘…as Daddy wanted.’

  ‘May I see it?’

  She handed him the ribbon-tied bundle almost too eagerly as if glad to be rid of it. He laid it on a side table beneath one of the lamps, untied the ribbon and opened it. At that moment a clock somewhere in the darkened area of the room chimed eleven. He was reminded that he had lost his watch. Quite unexpectedly he yawned from tiredness.

  Staring up at him was a strong, upright handwritten text. The ink was brown, no doubt discoloured a little from its original black, but there was no problem over legibility. The lines had been ruled by hand because they were at slightly irregular intervals on loose pages perforated at the edges where they had been torn from the binding.

  It was all there: the letters, the day by day domestic details, page after page of such entries and, of course, as proof, the relationship with H (not G as in the Russian) under the heading ‘Evinell Road. Thursday’ replete with the London place names and the account of the visit to the seaside. All in English, obviously written by someone literate and intelligent, so why the hell had it all been translated into Russian, only for him to translate it all back again?

  ‘I think I know now why all this was in Russian,’ he murmured under his breath.

  ‘Why? I don’t know why. I don’t know anything about it. More whisky? Oh, I see Julie must have brought in sandwiches while we weren’t looking.’ She had jumped up and was on her way to the drinks cabinet. He thanked her and added:

  ‘In that thermos. The one you gave me in the Sainsbury’s bag…’

  ‘Oh, that!’ She tipped ice cubes into her glass followed by whisky from a decanter. ‘Ben wanted you to have it.’

  ‘You didn’t know what was in it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t know it was all Russian stuff?’

  ‘No.’ She was finding the questions tiresome. ‘I’d just put some hot coffee in it. I don’t know anything about Russian stuff.’

  He took in a deep breath. ‘So it was Ben!’

  ‘He went to London twice to find you, you know. The first time you’d changed flats, the second time you weren’t at your girlfriend’s.’ She placed a plate of sandwiches on the table, stirred the fire again and remained standing, one arm resting on the mantelshelf, looking down at him. ‘So he asked me to find you. I said I’d take Dolly, but of course he insisted it had to be done without you knowing. I think he wanted to test how trustworthy you were.’

  She smiled, made a rather roguish face and took a sip of her whisky. The ice cubes sounded so loud in her glass that they seemed to renew the strength of his own assumptions. He sipped his own renewed whisky.

  First: Ben had brought it all from Russia, either on disc or memory stick or somehow.

  Second: He had discovered the English original, but couldn’t use it. He had to have proof that the Russian text was a translation.

  Third: It was probably in Russian because the addressee – or Jacob Richter, as he was known – feared the letter-writer’s ‘escapade’ could lead to litigation or blackmail and therefore all chance of funding for his cause might be lost.

  Fourth: What if this Jacob Richter had actually fathered a child? If so, would the lady want to admit she was pregnant by him? Knowing her father, probably not. Meanwhile, she had fallen in love with H.

  ‘So you didn’t know anything about these diary extracts being translated?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you knew nothing about the DNA?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The DNA belonging to J. Richter.’

  She was open-mouthed, either with amazement or disbelief, he couldn’t be sure which. �
��What did you just say?’

  ‘DNA, the phial of DNA. I’ll show it you.’ He fought back the pain, pulled off his woollen sweater, reached up his shirt sleeve to what was in his left armpit and at once pulled loose the handkerchief. ‘J. Richter’s. That’s what it says on the phial.’ He held it up, smiling a little uncertainly.

  She said nothing. Instead she pursed her lips as if debating something, looked down and took in a deep breath. He pulled his sweater back on. The action renewed the hurt in his ribs and he was too distracted by the pain to hear exactly what she was saying. She seemed to be talking to herself about Ben.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ben did what?’

  ‘He had tests done. I remember him talking about the two DNA samples he had. He got them tested.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He took the test results with him to LA. At least I think that’s what he did.’

  ‘Well I assume,’ Joe said, ‘this is mine. But why tests? Why should my DNA need testing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered flatly. ‘He didn’t say. He must have put it in with the thermos for some reason.’

  ‘Okay, so he put it there! I’m getting more and more puzzled.’ His tone showed his irritability and tiredness.

  ‘Ben said it was proof. It was what they were really after.’ She shook her head. ‘But that’s not all.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘All right, Ben trusted you,’ she conceded. ‘But that’s not what really matters.’

  ‘What really matters?’

  She was looking at him quite fiercely, he realized, her mouth open and her eyes wide in utter certainty. ‘It means something much more important!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It means you are really Mr Frankenstein!’

  ‘What the hell…’

  ‘You are, you know! That’s what it means!’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You are Mr Frankenstein!’ she shouted.

  She stood quite still, her head tilted slightly at hearing something, and – sure enough – a man appeared in the doorway beside the fireplace. When she saw him, she smiled.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, Peter, it’s okay. I spoke a bit loudly. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’

  He nodded and withdrew.

  ‘He’s one of the staff. You may not think it but I have quite a large staff here. They’re on duty day and night. Can I have it, the envelope, the DNA? Thank you.’ She stooped down, took it from Joe’s outstretched hand and placed in on the mantelshelf. He relinquished it gladly, for it dawned on him what it might mean and she immediately reassured him. ‘If there’s a match, Martha’ll be forced to agree, won’t she?’

  He did not answer. The question was obviously rhetorical. She stared into the fire, still leaning where she was, and looked steadily at him for a long silent moment, a decision clearly beginning to form behind the fierce brightness of her stare.

  ‘I think it’s all best burnt. I don’t want to live with knowing it’s here. So long as people know it’s here, there’ll be someone after it. And what Martha fears is blackmail if someone gets hold of it. I do, too. Even though this place is a sort of fortress, because that’s the way Daddy wanted it, and I still have my protectors, but to go on and on protecting these papers that should have been destroyed years ago makes no sense at all. So I think they’re best burnt.’

  It was quite decisive. She seized the folder from the table, took a page from it and threw it on the fire. For a moment he felt like retrieving it. He watched the upright handwriting lie there intact among the red embers, the whiteness of the paper momentarily untouched. It looked up at him like a face. The words seemed about to speak. Then the edges browned, brown holes appeared in the writing like eyes bursting through and finally and swiftly came the flames eating away the paper and crisping it. Other pages were thrown. In no time at all they turned it into flimsy black webs that she dispersed by stirring them with a long poker. He remained paralysed at the sight, sensing vaguely that he had witnessed an act of great courage and perhaps foolishness, the contradictory components of which were soon consumed by the outbreak of fresh flames.

  15

  ‘You’ll have to stay the night.’

  Her words were a command as much as an invitation. In addition they were full of common sense. The moment he stood up he felt the pain. After the long rest in the armchair he was reminded so sharply of the bruising to his ribs that he was almost as buckled as if he had been hit again by the same blows. He clutched his ribcage.

  ‘Peter!’

  She gave orders and he was led away quickly through the door beside the fireplace. Peter was dressed in blue jeans and blue jersey with a head of slicked down black hair. Joe followed him down a corridor. They hardly spoke apart from the admission that the room to which he was guided had earlier been ‘the Russian gentleman’s’. Ben’s, Joe assumed. Before, that is, he had moved to his present Surbiton.

  In any case, anonymity reigned in the room’s chill airlessness when the lights were switched on. Large and smart though it was, it seemed like a hotel room kept in readiness for immediate occupancy. The thermostat was engaged. Shortly the temperature rose and he found the water run hot in the en suite. He stripped. His naked reflection glowed at him palely in the full-length steamy mirror set along one wall as he stepped carefully over the bath rim before lowering himself stage by stage into the hot water. The initial sharp pain of the bruising began to lessen as he leaned back and let the heat have its slow recuperative effect. For some time he lay there with his eyes closed.

  She had said something, he remembered. Gloria Billington had been talking once the fire revived after the burning of the papers. ‘Do something for me, will you,’ she had said. ‘Do it for my sake and Ben’s sake and especially for Daddy’s. Go tell Martha. Go show her who you really are. Julie can go with you.’

  ‘Who?’

  Julie, she explained, was Julie Schiff, the girl who had taken his raincoat and brought a towel. She was a Californian girl whom Gloria Billington liked to regard as her confidante and had surreptitiously provided the sandwiches. Formerly a young PA to her late father, she had stayed on after his death because she had been helping to sort out his affairs. Moreover, she knew the set-up out in LA and was trusted. This detail of trust mattered a great deal. What also mattered a great deal was a further detail divulged only in a whisper and with the requisite amount of shock and awe. It placed Julie Schiff in a special category of importance: she belonged to the firm. At first he naively assumed this meant the late father’s business. Gloria Billington quickly went on to admit in confidence, leaning towards him in the dying firelight and whispering quite softly, that the firm was not any old firm, it was the Intelligence Agency – ‘You know what I mean, the Central one, the CIA’ – and, what is more, Julie Schiff was a trusted employee. ‘But I’m telling you this now in secret. You mustn’t tell anyone else. Promise.’

  He promised. Of course he promised. By this time, having talked past midnight, he had lost count of the number of sandwiches and whiskies she had consumed and even the number he had been persuaded to have to keep her company and therefore he believed her implicitly and was ready to promise whatever she wanted.

  Nothing definite had been said about the reasons. For his part he was glad to have a sanctuary. So long as he was a zhulik, a cheat, a counterfeit, he would need to hide. The brand on the inside of his wrist told him that. The longer he had stayed in Jenny’s apartment, the more accessible and vulnerable he would have been and the greater would have been the need to escape. His presence there would have tarnished her world, especially if the police had come, for instance, to ask him what had happened to Ronald Salisbury. How much would he have had to divulge about Ben? He would not have been able to hide the translation. Maybe he would have been forced to talk about Scythian Gold and the Old Believers and so on, even to mention Leo Kamen and Ollie Goncharov, though what precise connection there was between him and the translated material, let a
lone the DNA, made no sense at all. It seemed threatening for that reason.

  Gloria Billington’s hospitality, then, was welcome. He was glad not to have to drive back to London. As for whatever she meant about California, the woman called Martha and Julie Schiff, he let it recede from his mind just as the pain of his ribcage slowly receded. The only reason for believing what he had heard from the evening’s talk was the certainty that Gloria Billington had fallen in love with Ben. So he, Joe Richter, the Mr Frankenstein who had created him, would do whatever she wanted to ensure his monster’s happiness. Consoled by the thought, he dried himself, pulled on a bathrobe in the absence of any pyjamas, trod back into the bedroom, lay down and slept.

  He awoke to thoughts about his mother. He had dreamt of seeing her. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she had said quite distinctly at the end of a long dream. He was so amazed by the distinctness of her words he could hardly believe he was hearing them. Yet the words had been spoken. He was quite certain. Then he heard a childish voice saying something on the other side of the room. He leaned up on one elbow. Sunlight flowed in through long drapes just beside his bed and showed him a small girl dressed rather formally and neatly in school clothes. She had her back to him and was speaking towards an armchair.

  ‘I told you to sit still, Andy. He’ll probably come back. When he sees you, he’ll know.’

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  The girl jumped round, revealing as she did so that she had been addressing a bedraggled looking bear with a bow tie seated in the armchair. It was Dolly. ‘Oh, I didn’t know! This room was Uncle’s… Oh, it’s you!’ She saw clothes lying on a stool.

  ‘Me,’ he agreed.

  ‘I didn’t know someone was in here.’

  ‘You’re telling your bear to sit still.’