Mr Frankenstein

by Richard Freeborn

  ‘Yes, but, Mr Kamen…’

  ‘No buts, my dear. There are not buts in this matter.’ He replaced his dark glasses. ‘No buts at all. There are things that must not be told, Miss Schiff. Hell can freeze over, so far as I’m concerned, but I’m not saying. The fact is he wanted certain, er, elements. Money alone wouldn’t buy them. You get my meaning?’ He looked to Joe as if for corroboration but did no more than purse his lips. ‘No, by hook or by crook, as they say, along with some heart-ache, eh? A very Russian matter, I think.’

  The inscrutability was becoming tedious. Joe reacted by clearing his throat. ‘Leo,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. But let me tell you –something’s happened.’

  ‘So what’s happened? Tell me.’ The tone changed to businesslike. ‘I’m on your side, you’re on my side. There are arrangements, obligations, contractual responsibilities. We agreed, remember?’

  ‘I agreed to pay your money back…’

  ‘That’s right, that’s right.’

  ‘Well, I think I must.’

  ‘Hey, not so fast!’

  ‘It’s burnt! Everything’s burnt!’ Julie Schiff blurted out in a petulant, resentful way.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘It’s all ashes!’ she cried.

  ‘What’s this about?’ Leo lifted his chin in a show of concern.

  Joe knew it was essential to keep control of the situation. He was growing increasingly aware that if there was any way of buying him off or off-loading him, he would be bought off or off-loaded at the first opportunity.

  ‘The letters or whatever the material was – it’s all been burnt. I saw it all burnt.’

  ‘You saw it all burnt.’ Leo appeared to be talking to himself. Leaning his elbows on the table, he brought his hands together in a light clasp that arched above the glass of iced water. ‘So.’ His two dark lenses contemplated the middle distance of swimming pool and jacarandas for a few seconds until the slow movement of the tip of his tongue round his lips seemed to indicate a readiness to believe. A slow nodding accompanied the next words: ‘So all the original material is ashes, is what you’re saying?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘So it hardly matters any more, does it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was a fear of blackmail. If what you say is true, there’ll be one very happy lady waiting for us. It’s great news. It’s my job to take you to see her, so you’ll be able to tell her.’

  The modest chiaroscuro of light and dark from the sun’s rays through the palm fronds and jacarandas suddenly erupted into dazzling morning sunshine. It was both blinding and hot. Shade still covered his face, so that for a moment the whiteness of his suiting emitted such brilliant light it looked as if he had been beheaded. Then slowly he rose from his seat and the line of shadow extended to the lower edge of his jacket. He glanced at a gold rectangular wristwatch and gave the impression of being about to leave.

  ‘What about me?’ came Julie’s irritably sharp inquiry. ‘What about me, Mr Kamen? Don’t I rate? I’m owed, aren’t I? It smells of money, you know it does!’

  ‘Ah, Miss Schiff…’ No doubt he was prepared to say she did not rate at all. Instead, he was professionally reassuring. ‘Sure you rate. I am very grateful to you. As my late grandfather always used to say when in the presence of a beautiful lady, Je vous remercie pour le plaisir de faire la connaissance d’une femme si belle et si charmante. My sincere thanks to you for your cooperation. There is money, sure. But it’s not for you, Miss Schiff.’

  ‘Not for me? Why not?’

  Julie was caught off guard. She looked up at Leo in startled disgust. Then she jumped up, her eyes flashing. She was one fine Joan of Arc of the pantiles.

  ‘This stinks, you know it does!’ She snapped her fingers.

  Leo Kamen shook his head. ‘No.’ He was adamant. ‘No money.’

  ‘I work for the firm, remember!’ she cried.

  ‘Why, so you do!’

  The whiff of sarcasm was suddenly too much for her. She stalked off towards her room without looking round. Joe was about to go after her, but Leo restrained him.

  ‘We mustn’t delay. We are expected.’

  Again the wristwatch was flourished. He went on to explain that Martha had sent a car and there was no time for politesse.

  ‘Please,’ was all he said.

  Joe was appalled and startled by the abruptness of Julie’s dismissal, but there seemed no point in disagreeing. Leo Kamen was the contact. The future was governed by him. They went over to the elevator and descended three levels in silence. A large stretch limousine stood in the walled-in entrance. They were shown into passenger seats at the rear by a dark-suited man who then slipped briskly into the driver’s seat. Within seconds they were out on San Vicente going eastwards.

  ‘Miss Schiff and yourself…’ Leo was leaning back in the ultra-soft upholstery, practically everything about his face expressionless due to the masking effect of the dark lenses ‘…are, er, good friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’

  The car’s interior was a lot cooler than the smouldering annoyance discernible beneath Leo Kamen’s impeccable exterior. Cooler by far than the waves of hot, panicky apprehension passing successively up Joe’s spine, not to mention the moisture gathering in the palms of his hands. For the first time he had a clearer idea of Leo’s purpose. Impelled by such awareness, he said very calmly, looking straight ahead of him, aware that his companion was probably as wired as the car’s interior:

  ‘There’s nothing in it for you now, is there?’

  Leo grunted. ‘You say you saw it all being burnt. I have been wondering where?’

  ‘At the start of all this, you said we shouldn’t mention our contacts.’

  ‘True. Of course I knew about your friend Krestovsky.’

  ‘But not about where I visited him.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know where you visited him.’

  So that made one thing clear: Leo did not know about Gloria Billington. No doubt, if he had actually been working for Martha all along, he probably wouldn’t. No doubt, equally, he had known about Boris Krestovsky. But he did not know about what was hanging round Joe’s neck.

  ‘No, for sure I didn’t know,’ Leo admitted. ‘Nor do I know why I’m taking you on this visit. I’m just acting on instructions. Right now I’m not sure I’ll get much out of it, as you’ve pointed out.’

  ‘Let’s say,’ Joe said, ‘I pose you a hypothetical question.’

  ‘Sure. Let’s hear it.’

  ‘Do you see any connection between being branded a cheat and the name Hazell?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I’m posing you a hypothetical question. Because it’s all I’m getting out of it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the mark on my wrist.’

  Leo glanced round, saw what he was being shown and turned his head away. ‘Sure, you showed me.’

  ‘A brand, Leo. That’s what I’ve got. A brand burnt into my skin to signify I’m a cheat.’

  ‘Yeah? You mean…’

  ‘I mean I don’t know who the hell I’m meant to be or why I’m here. That’s what I mean.’

  ‘Patience, Joe. You will.’

  They joined Wilshire Boulevard and then went northwards into Beverly Hills, across Sunset and out towards Mulholland. Here were opulent homes set amid emerald lawns secluded beyond locked gates with distant vistas of driveway and greenery, as if they were places sacred to deities whose names could only be uttered in a soft, reverential voice. Beyond Mulholland Drive they cruised through acres of tree-lined roads, neat front gardens, ornamental shrubbery, parked cars, until, down an avenue of jacarandas, they approached huge wrought-iron gates that opened to them with sesame-like readiness and closed behind them in a smooth, mysterious act of imprisonment. A tunnel of deep shade formed by trailing vines greeted them, the roadway itself trailing downwards in sharp turns and curve
s, giving occasional glimpses of far sunlit stretches of Los Angeles suburb or, at another turn, a vision of semi-arid hillside.

  A final turn in the roadway caused a sharp crunching of tyres on fine gravel. The limousine swept gently, ship-like, across a smooth wide forecourt towards a small-scale palace façade that might have been transplanted from Disney World. In the centre of the forecourt the tall single jet of a fountain splashed down upon an ensemble of naked marble maidens riding marble dolphins. The limousine then came to a gentle halt in front of a columned porch. At that moment the Southern Californian reality intruded with the appearance of a bulky security guard in a khaki uniform, almost black sunshades under a peaked cap, with a gun holster strapped to his waist. He stepped forward and opened the rear car door.

  Another man in the interior gloom of a doorway requested their names and directed them to step through a security arch. They were each frisked and their details entered on a keyboard. If there were cameras or banks of monitors, they were not evident in the spacious entrance. It resembled the entrance to a museum rather than a hallway, the walls encumbered with deadpan portraits and large framed canvasses of classical scenes carefully shaded from the down-falling atrium light. Statuary was stationed at occasional intervals, naked ladies conveniently draped, naked men less so, all somewhat diminished, it seemed, by the high ceilings, Doric columns supporting gilded entablature and the echoing effect of their footfalls as they crossed the wide stone floor.

  Leo evidently knew his way. The man leading them deferentially slowed his pace to match the straight-backed, doll-like progress Leo adopted as, like the showman he was, a red silk handkerchief dangling from his cuff, he elegantly pointed out first one piece of statuary, then a glass-fronted display cabinet, then a painting, naming each item in demonstration of his expertise. The performance was not prolonged, because they were soon entering a small drawing room. Here Joe recognised at once where Leo might have acquired his fondness for ormolu and Venetian glass. There was a manifest abundance of ormolu gilding on furniture and mirror-frames and, in one corner, an elaborate miniature replica of the façade of the house in glass, with a glass version of the naked maidens riding dolphins splashed and made to glitter by a pencil of water. It was a pretty, utterly tasteless, ornate conceit.

  ‘Martha may keep us waiting.’

  Saying this in a hushed voice, Leo languidly seated himself and allowed his right hand to loll with Recamier negligence over the chair-arm, the red silk handkerchief hanging from it. His large dark lenses made him as inscrutable as ever,

  Joe caught sight of himself in a mirror. The smooth blond hair, broad face and broken nose looked more than normally vulnerable. His features appeared tensioned and youthfully drawn from fatigue. In this grotesquely opulent setting he felt edgy, despite the image of blond heroic Englishman in white open-necked shirt and Marks and Spencer trousers that the long mirrors repeated back to him as he walked up and down impatiently. He was also annoyed by the way Leo seemed to absent himself from the occasion by poring over a magazine. He tried to elicit from him exactly who Martha was, but Leo would not be drawn and for the best part of half an hour they kept themselves to themselves.

  Eventually footsteps resounded on the stone floor outside and the man who had accompanied them reappeared. He signalled to Joe to follow him. Joe stopped in front of Leo and offered his hand.

  ‘Leo, I’d like to thank you.’

  The other raised the mask-like glasses, held them up for a moment or so to allow brief eye contact, then replaced them and nodded twice. Without rising, he shook the hand offered him with his own dry hand.

  ‘Don’t thank me. Remember I got you into this. Your mother’ll be wanting to see you. Now go see Martha. I’ll be waiting for you.’

  Joe followed the man out of the room. They were soon walking down a long carpeted corridor with tall windows overlooking what looked like a courtyard, the centre of which was occupied by another fountain, this time with several jets, all caught like so much flickering mercury in what, at second glance, was obviously a stage set. At the end of the corridor there were double doors opening into a very large room decked out in Hollywood style to resemble a throne room, with two-thirds of the floor area covered in deep-red carpet and gilded chairs placed against the walls. At the far end stood a large table and several upright chairs and, incongruously, a consol or keyboard similar to something he had glimpsed in the large Tudor room of Gloria Billington’s house.

  After being led down the centre of the room, across the expanses of red carpet, he was asked to wait by the table. In a very short while two sections of panelling in the wall drew apart to reveal the interior of an elevator. Joe thought he was being invited to step inside, but it was then he saw emerging from one corner of the interior a silver electric wheelchair with a small woman seated in it. She propelled herself out onto the carpet and towards him, accompanied by a faint humming from the electric motor.

  His first reaction was to think of her as a woman of forty. Her hair was auburn, artfully coiled and styled to conceal its sparseness, and probably also tinted. The eyes were also auburn, remarkably wide-open and brilliant, like a girl’s eyes. It was only when the tinted blue lids flickered over them that an illusion of old age seemed to intervene. The face was small, the chin sharp and clean-cut, though the skin of the neck had developed gatherings that tended to suggest a faintly reptilian likeness. The mouth was a thin crimson slit and its lack of movement made the reptilian resemblance even more oddly conspicuous. By its very colour it drew attention to the paleness of the surrounding complexion and the fact, clear from closer scrutiny, that the whole skin of the face was a teeming mass of wrinkles concealed only in certain lights by careful make-up. She was dressed very formally in a dress with a high ruff, of dark burgundy material. Slowly, as though purring, she came across the carpet towards the table.

  ‘You are the young man who has something for me?’

  Her voice quavered. He thought it sounded much older even than her elderly appearance. It was high-pitched, perhaps querulous at that moment, but its chief characteristic was its moneyed authority.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘From England?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Please sit down and be good enough to tell me. Make it short. I want it short.’

  He had been prepared for this woman called Martha to be formidable. He had not been prepared to find in her something else, not instantly definable but evident after the lengthy scrutiny to which she subjected him. She was unreasonable to the point of paranoia; not maliciously, not insanely in any diagnosable sense, but to the point of extreme self-delusion. That much could be discerned, he felt, from her round auburn eyes. Exactly how crazily self-deluded he couldn’t be sure. It was the covert message transmitted by her eyes, as obvious to him as if she had announced it out loud and all the more frightening for being so cleverly concealed. He found his mouth was very dry when he tried to speak.

  ‘I can only guess, you see, what it is.’

  The room deadened his voice. Or perhaps the room’s excessive silence exaggerated the effort required for speech. Sitting stiffly upright in one of the upright chairs, he felt a chill sweat break out on the crown of his head. He repeated idiotically:

  ‘I can only guess.’

  ‘What is that? What can you only guess, young man?’

  The twanging voice seemed to jerk the word from the crimson slit while the luminous eyes held him in their glassy, lens-like stare. With a little purr the wheelchair spurted forwards and halted about a metre from him. He pressed himself back in his chair a moment, anticipating some violent reaction from her.

  ‘What is it?’

  He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. He would have been glad of a drink as he met the challenge of her look:

  ‘I guess your late husband was the grandson of someone who called himself Jacob Richter.’

  Martha studied him. ‘Go on.’

  He licked his lips again. ‘H
e was born in this country, in the United States, the son of an Englishwoman, a recent immigrant. Her name, I think, was Hazell. She had fallen in love with a Dr Hazell in England. He emigrated to California and she followed him. They married shortly after arriving here.’

  Martha listened carefully. She held her head with one ear towards him, nodding slowly, if not in agreement then in careful attention to his words, even though she blinked her eyes with a slowness that left the impression she was about to fall asleep. The only other movement she made was to dry-wash her hands, again slowly, so that a number of bangles on her thin wrists clicked faintly together. He saw that she intended to remain listening, although aware she could cut him short any moment.

  ‘I think she was a remarkable woman. I can only tell her character from the letters that I have had the privilege to translate. Although they were originally written in English, I believe that through my translation I have discovered more meaning in them, more insights into her character, than I would have done if I had simply read them in the original. She was a passionate, honest, loving, generous woman. Her character united extreme candour and unusual directness. This is partly explained, I believe, through the example of her own mother, who had left her a legacy, though she herself had lived very frugally and devoted much of her life to charity and helping the poor. When she passed on, the legacy had not gone immediately to her daughter as she had wished.’

  He waited for Martha to stop him, but the bangles clicked in unison as she waved for him to continue.

  ‘She went with an aunt on holiday to a small seaside town in Brittany to rest and recuperate after her mother’s death and perhaps also after an engagement had been broken off. While there she met a foreign gentleman called Jacob Richter. I suspect their relationship grew close. When she returned to London the connection was renewed. She offered to give him English lessons. Her father, though, was suspicious. Perhaps he suspected the relationship was not as innocent as it seemed. Mainly, I think, he suspected that Mr Richter wanted his daughter’s money for his own purposes. So he may have threatened litigation. But Jacob Richter was frightened of this. He asked her what her true feelings were. According to her letters, they did not involve him, they involved a young doctor, Dr Hazell, her father’s partner in the medical practice. He was the one who…’