Mr Frankenstein

by Richard Freeborn

  The first thing he saw were lemons, some green, some yellow, hanging directly outside. To his amazement a hummingbird hovered by one of them as apparently still as if it were a glistening Christmas ornament shedding momentary sparks of light from the beating of its wings. The sound of the wing beats was lost in the distant hammer strokes, so the bird seemed to hang there right by the window. Then the sight of the handkerchief and renewal of the hammer strokes must have frightened it. The bird vanished. It left Joe gazing down the length of the backyard. He saw what looked like green eggs on a shady patch of wiry grass. They were lying under a large tree. The sight puzzled him. Then he heard Ben mention the word ‘Avocado’.

  ‘An avocado tree?’

  Ben affirmed as much. ‘They call it attractive nuisance. Climbing is forbidden.’

  This piece of information seemed utterly gratuitous. Joe was about to query it when he saw a man standing in the shade of the tree looking directly at the house. He had just risen from a stooping position, it seemed, because he held one of the avocados in his hand. Ben saw him drop it. Maybe at that instant he saw Joe in the window, because Joe found himself exclaiming:

  ‘Oh, you’ve got a gardener!’

  Ben was at his side the next moment, peering out. He was rather unsteady on his feet. ‘No,’ he muttered, ‘no gardener.’

  The noise from the construction site suddenly stopped. There was perfect silence. So engulfing was the silence it was possible to think that the whole megalopolis of the Los Angeles basin had fallen quiet.

  Ben was standing next him peering at the backyard. Joe did not have time to blink. Then the flashes came from the shade of the avocado tree.

  The next thing he knew was an explosion of pain across his chest. He was forced back into the room. It floored him. A shower of hot red drops swept across his face and blinded him. Ben gave a groan. Joe heard through the noise of Ben’s groan the practically instantaneous, slightly dull sound of gunshots buried within the renewed noise of the pile driving. He forced open his eyes. Ben was beside him, blood coming in gouts from a head wound. It streamed down the side of his face and spread over the floor. Barely able to draw breath as he lay next to it, Joe pushed his feet against the nearest chair legs. He was able to get away from the spreading pool of dark-red blood. At the same time he drew his hand across his mouth and tasted what must have been Ben’s blood. It made him shake violently. He was gasping. He was scarcely able to breathe. He could not make himself speak. Then down the passageway he heard the front door open and a child’s voice started shouting:

  ‘Uncle Ben, Uncle Ben, we’re back!’

  20

  He knew he had to keep quiet, but he also knew there had to be some stop to the shouting. It came up through the slit of light from down below in the hall because his bedroom door had been left slightly open. All the sounds from the hall and the stairs in the Wimbledon house came upwards through light filtering into the room from the landing; and as long as the light came, the sounds came; then one voice raised, then another, the pitch of the voice sharp like his mother’s, the lower register of his father’s distant but fiercely resonant in its tipsy defiance; then often the banging of a door below and one or another distinctly shouting ‘No, I won’t! You can if you like, but I won’t!’ and then footsteps on the stairs. Usually they would be his mother’s footsteps first. They would come up to the landing, pause just outside his bedroom door as if listening, then go firmly along the passage. After a while, if he were still awake, his father could be heard stumbling up from below, cursing softly as a foot slipped on a stair tread or his grasp of a banister rail was not firm enough, and after reaching the landing he would plunge the house into darkness by switching off the light from below in the hall and start feeling his way across the darkened landing towards his own bedroom.

  It was what Joe kept on remembering. Voices and footsteps more real than the screams of the children and Lorella’s cries and the smell of blood. He must have had moments of consciousness. Certainly he had forced himself away from the blood. He knew he was feeling nauseous and the conscious world of people talking and the neon strip lighting above him in the ambulance and the siren and the oxygen mask stuck over his nose and mouth. But still he could not be sure. It was his mother’s voice, quite plainly his mother’s voice saying something distinct. He felt certain about that. ‘No, I won’t!’ she was saying. ‘No way!’

  He knew he was hurt. The constriction of his chest, the shallow breathing and, more certain still, the awareness of nakedness, of having been stripped of his clothes. The facts did not fit. There was no sequence to them. If he were alive and awake, what the hell was he doing staring at the elaborate Regency stripes of the drapes moving slowly from side to side and the pelmet frill doing a little ripple and hearing as if through thick cloth the voices muttering things that distantly concerned him but were not distinct enough to be understood? Or was he not hearing, not staring? He felt he was going round in circles faster and faster, dizzyingly on some whizzing carousel, and would spin off any moment. The faster he went, the greater the difficulty in breathing, the difficulty in holding on, the difficulty of keeping from dropping off into some abyss.

  Only for it all to stop quite suddenly. Smash!

  He was utterly dead. Life had been stepped on. Life was finished.

  At this point the guilt began. The sense that he must have been responsible drained so much out of him he thought of himself as a husk. Why hadn’t he thought of his very presence on the sidewalk as virtually raising a banner? Look at me, I’m on my way to see Ben! Anyone could have guessed. They would have guessed. He would have been covertly observed, covertly followed. And then the guilt came, the guilt itself breaking upon his consciousness like a rogue comet suddenly emerging through the surrounding atmosphere and bursting upon his life with its fiery tail of sheer fright. The guilt brought fright. He was frightened by the nearness of death. But to be frightened, he knew, was shameful. He had to be ashamed of being frightened.

  ‘Mr Joseph Ambrose Percival Richter?’ a man’s voice asked.

  ‘I said No!’ his mother’s voice was saying. ‘No way! Please. My son needs rest. He needs to be cared for. You can see, can’t you?’

  ‘Are you Mr Joseph Ambrose Percival Richter?’ the male voice persisted. ‘It is imperative you speak to us if you are able.’

  Was he able? He felt he had not opened his mouth to speak in years.

  ‘Please, detective, can’t it wait? Tomorrow would be so much better.’

  ‘No, ma’am, I am under orders. I have to question your son as the principal witness. Mr Richter, can you hear me?’

  He opened his eyes for the first time in years. It was the bedroom he had always stayed in at the Zuma Beach house – a window beside his bed, drapes with vertical red stripes, a gold-framed oil painting of palm trees against an ultramarine sea, white wardrobe, a circular lampshade and all the usual smart, anonymous accessories of the room, to which were now added a dark-haired man, smooth, lightly tanned complexion, eyes dark blue, in a brown linen jacket, white shirt and tie. He was seated in an upright chair with an older, bespectacled LAPD uniformed officer behind him, a peaked hat under one arm. At the end of his bed was his mother. She displayed her usual casual sense of style by matching her elegant features with her favourite Egyptian silver broach pinned to a red silk scarf round her shoulders over a short-sleeved blouse. She held her lips tight together, evidently annoyed.

  Once he had absorbed the scene, Joe was startled by the appearance of a nurse. She stepped briskly forward and began adjusting the pillows at the back of his head. He had not realized until that moment how he was propped up, surrounded, it struck him, by wires and monitors. Being moved, however slightly, at once revived the sense of being constrained and the pain of it. He was back again in the Courtier Street de luxe flat, being pinned down and interrogated.

  ‘Mr Richter, please give me an account of what happened. You were with a Mr Boris Krestovsky in a back room at…’ A
street number in thousands was mentioned, at which Joe closed his eyes… ‘in Andover Avenue, West LA. Can you hear me, Mr Richter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you received a ricochet from shots fired in the vicinity of the backyard of the property, one of those shots killing Mr Krestovsky outright, am I right?’

  Joe kept his eyes closed. ‘You are right.’

  ‘The deceased, Mr Richter, was apparently not known as Mr Krestovsky, a Russian national. He used the name Leyton.’ The name was spelled out. ‘Is that correct?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Why? Why did he use that name?’

  ‘I made him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, you said…’

  ‘I made him.’

  ‘You are saying you forced him?’

  ‘No, I made him into Ben Leyton.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir, you are expecting me to believe you created a personage with that name?’

  ‘I made him, yes. He wanted to disappear.’

  ‘Why did he want to disappear?’

  ‘He wanted to disappear into England.’

  ‘He wanted to disappear into England. Right.’ There was some loud throat-clearing. ‘I am bound to ask you again – why?’

  ‘Because he was frightened.’

  ‘Frightened of what?’

  ‘People called Old Believers.’

  ‘And who are they?’

  ‘They believe in the old Soviet ideology.’

  ‘So this is Russian politics, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That’s what we believed. So you were helping him, were you?’

  ‘I was only helping him in the sense of making him English.’

  ‘Right. So he could disappear, so you say, into England? Am I getting a clear picture?’

  ‘Clear enough.’

  ‘So you made Mr Krestovsky into Mr Leyton?’

  ‘Yes, I helped to make him into Ben Leyton.’

  ‘He was issued a visa in the name of Krestovsky. That’s the name on his passport.’

  ‘He wanted to be known as Ben Leyton.’

  ‘Yeah, because you made him! What would you like to make me into, Mr Richter?’

  ‘Please,’ his mother implored.

  ‘Okay, okay, ma’am. I don’t mind what your son makes me, so long as he doesn’t make a fool of me! I think that’s maybe all I need right now.’ The detective’s head was shaking slowly from side to side. He coughed and slid a note pad into his jacket pocket. ‘Perhaps it would be better if…’

  ‘Leave it until tomorrow,’ Joe’s mother said. ‘He’ll be better tomorrow.’

  ‘Very well, ma’am.’ There was exasperation in his tone. ‘But make sure he’s available for me to see him ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Oh, I will. He will be here at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’

  The compliance soothed things. It also quite inconspicuously proved what Joe always knew about his mother. She had a soothing, refrained way of speaking that could be mistaken for courtesy but had a subtle underlay of rebuke. The police detective frowned, rose, nodded at Joe, beckoned to his assistant and withdrew as if glad to be out of range of further rubbish. The nurse, by contrast, was more hustled out of the bedroom by a glance than a word or gesture from his mother. She then drew a vacant chair forward and seated herself at Joe’s bedside.

  He was not accustomed to having her close. Whenever she drew as close as this, he submitted to the intimacy with an anxious wariness that made him tauten his back and become very still. This time, because the pain in his bandaged chest returned quite sharply and forced him to take a few shallow breaths, he had to test his own reactions to the point of being unsure whether he had the strength to listen, let alone respond to what she was apparently determined to tell him. He drew back a little, the movement seeming to lessen the pain, and closed his eyes. She began whispering.

  ‘Joe dear, I want you to know this. You had morphine and were sedated. They took you downtown at first – that was the day before yesterday, or no, the day before that, I’m getting muddled with dates – and I was told they did an ultra-sound scan, an x-ray, other things, I don’t remember what exactly, I hate hospitals, you know, and they wanted to keep you there because of the damage to your breastbone and the extent of the bruising, but I said No, you should come back here.’ She went on to explain that they, the LAPD, had wanted to question him about the victim, Mr Boris Krestovsky, but she had tried to postpone the questioning, only for the detective to insist.

  ‘Tell me the truth, Joe dear. You’re not guilty, are you?’

  He opened his eyes. His mother’s face, less than an arm’s length from him, wore the same look of disappointment and reproach he had often seen on it as a boy. It could be read as annoyance at his stupidity or some misdemeanour, but was just as likely to be annoyance at the whole world of men and male foolishness personified, of course, by his father.

  It was again, of course, her insistence on ‘the truth’ that mattered. The fiery tail of fright at his own guilt came back with such force he could barely make himself breathe. He could feel once more how ridiculous it was that his mother should have such power over him, though he knew he could resist it. The shield of adulthood was one protection; another was anger at her own neediness. He did not need to concede to her dutiful self-regard for the truth at all costs.

  ‘Yes, I’m guilty.’

  ‘Joe dear, you mean…’

  ‘I am, yes, guilty.’ He almost spat out the admission in defiance of her increasing anxiety. ‘Stupidly. I stupidly did not think.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About being watched, being followed.’

  ‘I see. But tomorrow, when the detective comes again, you won’t say you’re guilty, will you?’

  ‘I did not kill my friend, no.’

  Whether or not this satisfied her he could not tell because she gave no sign. He waited for her to speak but the only sounds in the room were the faint, almost inaudible, hum of the monitor, the louder purring of an electric fan, occasionally the rustle of the drapes in the light breeze and, indistinctly but continuous, the noise of traffic on the coastal highway. She suddenly blew her nose.

  ‘Who was he, your friend?’ she asked.

  ‘Leo told you about the letter, didn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, that!’

  A lot seemed to be summed up in that one exclamation. It left Joe bewildered. How much could she possibly know about Ben? He had been a source, unspoken about, wilfully reclusive, a traitor to most, a friend to very few.

  ‘We met through RGD,’ he muttered. ‘He wanted to disappear, not only in England but here as well. Silly, you may think. But he had found something in the Moscow archives and he was frightened.’

  ‘So what had he found?’

  ‘That Lenin possibly had a son.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Why do you say Ah?’

  ‘Joe dear, please.’

  She had moved back, away from him, as she spoke and appeared so distraught he couldn’t be sure whether it was his query or some instant pain, perhaps a headache, that made her clutch her forehead and turn away.

  ‘Mother, what’ve I said?’

  ‘Nothing, dear.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She had a paper tissue in her hand and blew her nose again. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m being rather silly, that’s all. Oh, yes, I remember now. I wanted to show you this.’

  Prompted by the recollection, she rose, searched among what he recognised as his clothes wrapped in transparent plastic and another plastic bag beneath it, extracted a round object that looked familiar but was obviously bent out of shape and carried it back to where she had been sitting.

  ‘This thing. What is it?

  It was the locket he had used at San Jorge and had shown to Ben. She handed it to him. Now crushed and split though it was, it had assumed the shape of a smashed identity disc or even a very personal piece of badly damaged jewel
lery. He knew then it had saved his life, but simultaneously damaged and bruised him. The irony of that fact was inescapable. He inhaled a long, slow, shallow breath.

  ‘They said you were wearing it.’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘It’s why I was at San Jorge.’

  A lock of hair fell across her face as she lowered her head, nodded, swept the lock back and then looked up at the ceiling. ‘Silly, silly me! Of course! Leo took you.’

  He fingered the broken locket. ‘I used it to – oh, hell! – I used it to revitalize, that’s what it was called.’

  ‘Oh, Joey, Joey, Joey, I should’ve told you!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We both should’ve, your father and I, both of us!’

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘We were both in the wrong.’

  What on earth was his mother talking about! Both in the wrong? The quite unexpected change of tone and the distraught way she fluttered the tissue as she spoke flagged up such doubt he automatically grew taut again. She cleared her throat, but instead of speaking she stared at him with a steady, fixed look of her light-blue eyes. He blinked in attempting to withstand it, knowing that such a look was more a test of her willpower than a delving into his. Throughout his more recent visits to her here at Zuma Beach, he had seen that look and persuaded himself into the belief that it was her own way of defying death, as if she were deliberately plucking up the courage to speak her ‘truth’ about her condition. He had always deferred to that belief and yet, somehow or other, that particular ‘truth’ had been evaded. A little joke, a laugh, or, more often, a kind of religious silence would slowly distance the need to confront it. It would be passed over. Both of them would be secretly glad. Or so he had thought.