Mr Frankenstein

by Richard Freeborn

  Ben, doubtless, had been in that ambience as well – briefly no doubt, presumably on arrival from the UK in the company of Ollie Goncharov – but that could hardly be the reason why he had hidden himself away in this part of West Los Angeles. Aircraft overhead, a car lot, more streamers, pick-up trucks unloading stores at some sort of drive-in, it was all a blend, Joe thought, of urban activity with the apparent stillness of the houses nursing their privacy beyond areas of manicured lawn and shrubbery. Puzzled, he walked for ten minutes, then fifteen, meeting very few people out like him on the sidewalk. Those he did meet hardly shared a glance. It was not so much that he was among strangers as the hostility of so many signs on houses or front lawns proclaiming that trespass of any kind would be met by appropriate force. Not frightened, but wary, the inhabitants of this neighbourhood liked to ensure their own homeland security. It was their right and to be respected. Joe mused on the common sense of this. A vehicle swooped by – he did not catch sight of the markings – and suddenly emitted a wailing siren sound. As if it had deliberately awoken him to his purpose, he found he was at an intersection and there, to his satisfaction, was what he had been looking for: Andover Avenue.

  He turned into it. The sidewalk narrowed. Jacarandas planted at intervals rustled away busily and shed puddles of shadow beneath them. To his left after some two hundred metres on the other side of the avenue he came across a large construction site, with scaffolding, cranes and noise, while the mostly single-storey homes to his right remained aligned in curtained primness one beside the other in neat plots as if imperturbably oblivious to what was happening opposite. Among them, beside a mailbox, he was confronted by a notice for Unforgettable Rentals and there, as he might have expected, was a small yellow logo of an elephant in silhouette.

  Set back a little from the sidewalk behind some waist-high shrubbery, the single-storey house looked unpretentious. A paved pathway led to a porch and front door that were darkened by overhanging eaves from a low roof. Geraniums bloomed red and pink like weeds among greenery round the brick foundations. There was no outward sign of recent occupancy, although a small mislaid tricycle and a ball suggested that children might be around. The windows to the front all had blinds drawn. Though this could simply be protection against the sun, it reinforced the impression of neglect or untidiness. The presence of a car parked in a short driveway to one side of the house was of course as essential to its existence as the house itself. Yet even that did not entirely dispel any doubts, so Joe approached the front door more in hope than certainty, pressed the bell and waited.

  He knew he could be observed. The spy-hole at eye level facing him was one sign. Noise from the construction work opposite made it hard to hear any response. After an interval of waiting he pressed the bell again. Finally something happened.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The voice was a woman’s. It came sharply from inside. Joe gave his name.

  ‘Who you want?’

  ‘Ben, Mr Leyton.’

  At this the door was opened slightly. A black woman’s face peered out at him.

  ‘You wantin’ Mr Leyton, yes?’

  ‘I’m wanting to see Mr Leyton.’

  ‘An’ who might you be?’

  Joe repeated his name. ‘I’m a friend.’

  ‘You a friend. Right.’

  At least the name Leyton had been recognised even though the door was promptly closed. Joe waited. Some kind of pile driver was at work on the site opposite and each time what sounded like a hammer blow struck it was impossible to hear noises in the avenue, let alone from inside the house, so it came as a mild shock to find the door had been opened during one of the louder strokes and he faced the black woman in a smart pink dress fronted by a frilly white apron. She gave him a faint smile of welcome from shapely broad lips.

  ‘These old Spanish-style homes, they got real thick walls.’

  He supposed this was an explanation for the delay. It was dark in the hallway, as it seemed to be dark throughout the house, and he took a moment or so to get used to it after the sunlit outdoors.

  ‘How’d you know Mr Leyton was here?’ the woman asked.

  ‘I got his message.’

  ‘He don’t see no one since bein’ here. You’s the first. So you just follow me. I must be goin’ to fetch my kids from playschool shortly.’

  He followed her along a straight passageway after passing through the hall. It pointed directly through into a reasonably well-lit kitchen and the accompanying smells of cooking, but that was not their destination. Their destination was a door to the right that opened into a large sitting room. It was as dark as the passageway and seemed filled at first glance with furniture, including a very large sofa extending round one corner, with the only source of light coming from a rectangular window at the far end that was partly open but covered with fine-mesh metal mosquito netting. Close by it Joe caught sight of a seated figure. He recognised it as Ben more from the straightness of his shoulders and the bulk of his torso under a loose-fitting checked shirt than from his features which were dominated by large dark shades and several days’ growth of black stubble. Strangely there was no instant recognition from him. He raised a hand in what Joe assumed was a welcome, but he did not rise. There were no hugs of greeting. Instead a chair was indicated and Joe slowly sank into it. The woman immediately turned her back and left the room, closing the door firmly behind her.

  ‘How you know I am here?’

  Spoken very softly, the question sounded feeble, but Joe guessed Ben wasn’t ill. He was a recluse, behaving like a recluse, as he had expected and the professor had mentioned. It seemed out of character, though the question’s present tense was typical.

  ‘Your message.’

  ‘That man, professor, he shows you?’

  ‘He did. I used our code.’

  There was a nod of the head. ‘Good. And no one follows?’

  ‘No one,’ Joe asserted a little too glibly. It had never occurred to him that he might be followed. He had been so preoccupied with finding the avenue named in the initial letters of Ben’s message and worrying whether the simple code made any sense, not to mention the reason for it all, that he had not worried about the likelihood of being trailed. Obviously he was in the wrong for being so careless, but Ben seemed not to notice any more.

  ‘I am happy, Joseph, my friend, very happy to see you!’

  With that the mood of suspiciousness or sheer caution seemed to recede. Sitting as he was almost opposite Ben, Joe felt his knee being patted. It was the sign of friendship that he had hoped for. However strange the circumstances of the meeting and Ben’s initial lack of welcome, he appeared glad now. But his attempt to disguise himself, the darkened room, the bolt-hole of a house, Bob Reid-Sladek’s quite deliberate unwillingness to accompany Joe or offer more than cursory help in finding Ben left a great many questions unanswered. It left Joe himself bewildered.

  ‘You’re here because?’

  The query stayed there like that, ghostly in the half-light, merely causing a shifting of Ben’s body that was his way of showing silent embarrassment and disapproval. It was answered by a rather defiant: ‘U menia pivo, Amerikanskoe, khoroshee.’

  Ben opened a small ice box next to his chair and held out a bottle. Joe knew he had been drinking. A couple of empties lay at his feet. He took the bottle, readily accepting he was being fobbed off, let the ice-cold glass surface rest in his hand before unscrewing it and then took a mouthful. The beer fizzed refreshingly down his throat.

  ‘You’re not answering my question. You’re here because?’

  ‘Let me…’ Ben broke into Russian, but he spoke quietly and quickly. ‘I wanted to know what Oleg Fiodorovich was up to. He offered me the chance to come here.’

  ‘You mean Ollie Goncharov.’

  ‘Yes, the rich Mr Goncharov. Gloria knew he was on the point of gaining control. But I began to suspect he was not, you know, trustworthy. And I had to see the professor. The idea was that my work in the Mosco
w archives and what I’d found – the letters and the domestic stuff – would guarantee that I was well qualified to authenticate the being, the person, whoever it was. But nothing, nothing! The widow woman had befriended that manservant, the one Oleg Fiodorovich hired.’

  ‘He’s called Harlow,’ Joe said.

  ‘He came with us on the flight here. But he knows nothing. So it was a great disappointment.’ Ben made a gesture of dismissal accompanied by several shakes of the head. ‘I had thought, you know, now I would find out. Can you imagine, to have come this far, and then nothing! So that was it. And then I knew Oleg Fiodorovich suspected me of something – I don’t know what exactly. And I knew the Old Believers would be watching. So I had to disappear and I have disappeared here now for, oh, four, five days. No one comes and I am very glad. You are the first. Tomorrow I think I will be flying back to England, to my Sur-bit-on. So that is my story. Now you tell me yours. We speak English.’

  ‘I have been there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘San Jorge. I was there yesterday.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I saw him.’

  It was like a small but quite real explosion. No other revelation, it seemed to Joe, could have had the same effect, even though at that instant and almost simultaneously his words were greeted by a renewal of the hammer blow sound from across the avenue. The sound was muffled in this rear room of the house, though the air between them seemed instantly taut with expectation.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I had to revitalize.’ Joe took out his locket from beneath his shirt and showed it.

  ‘So it is you!’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘So it works!’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it did. Ben, I wanted to say…’

  ‘So you see what?’

  ‘I did the translations.’

  ‘O, good, but what is it?’

  ‘Gloria burnt them, the originals.’

  ‘She burns them! Well okay. It is her right. But what is it?

  ‘Then there was that Miss Schiff. Did you know the CIA was involved?

  ‘CIA? Oh, yes! But tell me, what do you see?’

  ‘She was not allowed to take me to San Jorge.’

  ‘Joseph, what is it?’

  ‘I had this round my neck and I pressed it against the glass.’

  ‘You press it… Oh, they are very precious! They are very special designs.’

  ‘It took at least a whole day to make, I think, probably longer. I can’t remember. I didn’t see Gloria again.’

  ‘So you press it against glass. So what is it?’

  ‘Dolly wants you back, you know. I was told to bring you back.’

  A smile of great warmth suddenly drew Ben’s lips apart. ‘Ah, little Dolly! So she wants me back.’ He leaned earnestly forward. ‘Do you know something? Gloria likes me to pretend to be Dolly’s father, but of course I’m not. But I will be, I will be!’

  Joe smiled and nodded.

  ‘Now,’ Ben said, his expression once again serious and intent, ‘now Joe, my friend, tell me! What is it?’

  The dark shades and the growth of stubble shone with such determination that the sharply spoken question had a lightning flash quality in the semi-darkness. Joe reeled from it and knew he could not avoid answering. He stuffed the locket back behind his shirt. Ben meanwhile took a long swig from his bottle of beer.

  ‘A man.’

  ‘And he is alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He moves?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He speaks?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘I didn’t hear him speak.’

  ‘So you do what?’

  The lenses darkening Ben’s eyes caught a fragment of the meshed sunlight from the window. For an instant they seemed covered in bright white dots. Joe saw them as marks of his friend’s frustration. He knew he was being evasive.

  ‘I ran.’

  ‘Ran?’

  ‘Ran back up the long mineshaft. Ran away.’

  ‘You ran away!’

  ‘Of course I ran away!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it was absurd. He could not be alive. How could I believe he was alive? I couldn’t! But what if I did?’

  ‘So?’

  Joe felt a chill run up his spine. He drank some more of the beer. ‘The trouble is I don’t want to know. I’m a cheat, remember?’

  Ben was nodding. ‘So cheats believe what?’

  ‘A cheat believes whatever he likes.’

  ‘No,’ Ben said solemnly, ‘cheats believe in nothing. And you are not cheat. You believe.’

  The statement was so plainly honest in its sincere assertion of Ben’s trustfulness that Joe could not dismiss it out of hand. He had to acknowledge that a truth had been spoken.

  ‘So I believe what?’

  ‘You believe if it is alive, it can also die.’

  This quietly delivered pronouncement, more obviously satisfying to Ben than to Joe, received a kind of headline meaning by the door suddenly opening and the black woman looking in to announce she was off to get her children from playschool.

  ‘I’ll be gone just fifteen minutes. Maybe not so long. They may’ve been let out early.’

  She left the door ajar behind her, saying, ‘See you, Mr Leyton.’ Her voice and then her rapidly retreating footsteps down the passageway had the backing sound of some large vehicle passing along the avenue out front, which itself died away into a modest interval of quiet. A short while later a car’s engine broke into a purr and quickly retreated out of earshot.

  ‘Lorella, it’s her name, looks after me,’ Ben said. ‘Her kids, they play out in backyard. I am Uncle Ben. Like rice. They come and see me. We talk.’ It seemed utterly plausible and natural. He seemed contented by what he said as it if were no more than an aside. ‘Go on, tell me – I am right or wrong? You believe he lives, yes?’

  Joe pursed his lips. ‘What if I can raise the dead?’ A note of truculent aggressiveness entered his voice. ‘Have you ever thought what that could mean?’

  ‘God’s power.’ Ben slowly placed his beer bottle on the flat top of the ice box. He had spoken with the sort of deliberate carefulness of someone who knew he might be nearly drunk. Then he solemnly crossed himself and leant forward, his hands pressed together in an act of prayer. ‘Me, Joe,’ he stressed, ‘you make me, remember?’

  ‘No, Ben, I just assembled you. It’s not the power of God. How can I believe I have anything like such power? But why would I be gifted like that? If I really am a kind of Frankenstein, a modern Prometheus, then “Frightful must it be…” Just let me try to remember. “…for supremely frightful…” That’s right. Yes. “…for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” Mary Shelley wrote that. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Mary Shelley.’ Ben started laughing. ‘Mary Shelley, I read it, her novel. And do you know what I find?’ The laughter continued a little drunkenly, Ben’s chest shaking, his shoulders quivering. ‘Monster of Frankenstein, he does not die! No, he is alive when novel ends!’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I mean nearest land is Russia! He jumps from ship and is in Russia!’

  ‘So he became Russian?’

  ‘Oh, yes, he is Russian! No, it is my joke. But you create me, Joseph, my friend. I am Ben Leyton, you create me. You must believe it. You create me!’

  ‘Oh, Ben, for heaven’s sake, you wanted to disappear into England, that’s what you said! It was my joke, if you like, to make you into Ben Leyton. And you did disappear, didn’t you?’

  Ben smiled rather reluctantly at this. ‘I disappear, yes.’

  Joe refrained from pointing out the obvious. Here was his friend doing the same thing in this rented house in West Los Angeles, but reclusively drinking himself silly in the process. For a ridiculously possessive reason this annoyed him. He got halfway out of his chair abruptly as if preparing to remon
strate, when he glimpsed a book of Lermontov’s poems also lying on the top of the ice box next to Ben’s bottle.

  ‘So Ben Leyton, the monster I created, is still reading Russian poetry, is he?’ He could not conceal the irony in the question. ‘Why Lermontov?’

  The answer came in a solemn Russian whisper. ‘Exile.’ Ben used the Russian term for exile from homeland rather than its penal meaning. ‘I sit here by the window and sometimes I see clouds. Mostly sunshine, but clouds come sometimes and I remember Lermontov’s poem: “Heavenly clouds eternally wandering…” Remember? “Eternally cold, eternally free, Thou hast no country, no exile for thee.” The words remind me of what I am here. I am an exile from friends, from those I love. You know what I mean, Joseph, my friend?’

  The question came with an unmistakably pleading look that made Joe shiver. He fiddled with his beer bottle in a strange unwillingness to accept Ben’s candour as more honest than self-pitying, only for Ben to add in a slightly louder voice:

  ‘So I am glad you have come. You can understand, I think.’

  ‘Of course I understand. Do you not go out at all?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Lorella takes me to Santa Monica. She parks her car. I walk about among people. I watch the Pacific ocean. But it’s not what I want. I want to be home. I am waiting to disappear into England, into my own place. I am waiting to hear the sea, the wind, to be in my little Sur-bit-on, to see Gloria, to have Dolly visit after school.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’ Joe felt hot. He put down his bottle.

  ‘I do not know. Tomorrow perhaps.’ Ben had reverted to English. ‘See, I pack. My things ready.’

  Joe now saw, his eyes having grown accustomed to all the shady shapes in the room, what looked like two suitcases near the door. ‘They will fetch you, you mean?’

  ‘No.’ Ben seemed to take offence at the suggestion. ‘No, I do not tell anyone I am here. Only you know I am here.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I have my ticket, my passport. So I go to airport.’

  ‘So tomorrow you’ll be going?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The news was comforting. It contradicted all Joe’s latent fears that Ben might be being manipulated by powers way beyond his control. Simultaneously came a resumption of the muffled hammer-blows from the building site. Joe sprang up from his chair to take a look through the fine-mesh netting over the window at the backyard. It was warm in the room and he felt the need for fresh air. His armpits were damp with sweat. As he stood gazing out at the bright vista of small backyard he wiped his face with a handkerchief.