Mr Frankenstein

by Richard Freeborn

  If it were true what his mother had said, then he had an inkling of the latent, ensnaring guilt that had kept his parents together because it would have been too shameful ever to admit it. Increasingly, though, the guilt of incest had become real. They had been visited by an absurd atavism that laid waste their marriage and deeply inhibited their honesty towards Joe himself. So it meant for Joe what the house itself meant: something artificial, not a family home, something put together, assembled, like parts of cadavers monstrously reformed and given shameful life by the Frankenstein of his own past.

  He ran back down the stairs and as he did so the smartphone in his pocket rang. Its tone broke into the silence of the hallway like a parade-ground command. He saw the source was Jenny. That fact alone had an unexpected assurance about it. He couldn’t help responding with a smile as he acknowledged her querying, rather anxious voice.

  ‘Joe, if you’re still at your home, what time will you be back here?’

  Staring at umbrellas and walking sticks in a hallstand, he answered with apologies and love and explanations, ending with a promise to be at Inchbald Terrace as soon as he’d seen an estate agent. Except that he saw from his watch it would be too late to do that. Darkness was already beginning to fill the house with shadows. Meanwhile, his eye was caught by the elegantly shaped ivory handle of his mother’s old parasol, of Parisian manufacture, that had belonged to an elderly family friend from her girlhood. She herself had used it very rarely. ‘There’s never enough sun here in England,’ she used to say.

  When Jenny spoke, her voice was very serious. It was tired, of course, and a little irritable. Work, she said, had been difficult that afternoon.

  ‘But, Joe, I’ve got to say this. There’s been a message and it concerns you. I can’t say anything much now. Except I think you’ll have to buff up your wizard’s wand. You know: Be a Frankenstein! Yes, be a Frankenstein! Oh, just come back here and have a drink before supper, Joe, please!’

  ‘Right,’ he said. He snapped the voice off and shoved the smartphone back in his pocket. The silence of the house descended on him liked a form of burial. He stared at the old grandfather clock in the hall. It had stopped.

  ‘Right,’ he shouted, ‘you know what I’ve got to do, don’t you? I’ve got to pretend!’

  He could detect a very faint echo.

  ‘I’ve got to pretend I’m a real Frankenstein! Do you hear what I’m saying? Frankenstein! Frankenstein! I’ve got to be a real Frankenstein!’

  He felt his shouts were echoed back to him and he burst out laughing. I bet the house hasn’t heard laughter like that, he thought, oh, for years and years!

  He closed the front door behind him. Lights had begun to pop up in the rectangles of windows among houses opposite. Luckily a taxi was passing and he took it down the hill to Wimbledon station. He knew the only serious commitment would be to Jenny, but the very thought of Frankenstein re-opened the original commitment to Ben. It was hurtful, too, in re-awakening, however unintentionally, his own sense of guilt for Ben’s death. He had wanted to escape problems and threats. Now they were accumulating round him again. Jenny, though, gave him the message when he reached Inchbald Terrace.

  ‘Oh, it’s all too absurd!’ he said when she told him. ‘I am thought to have the power to revitalize, when I know I wouldn’t have the power to revitalize a dead fly even if I wanted to. It’s absurd. The trouble is the absurdity has become my responsibility and I don’t know how the hell to get out of it!’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ Jenny said, as they walked along the street to a local restaurant, ‘I know exactly how you can get out of it!’

  ******

  The Byzantium that he had never felt happy about shone like a giant glass conservatory on the first stop out of Waterloo. He alighted from the train. Jenny said he would need to have his identity checked, etc., etc., a security pass issued, etc., etc. So he went out of Vauxhall Station, crossed traffic, entered the sanctum in the foreknowledge of such close personal scrutiny and shortly afterwards found himself riding a silent lift to a nameless, numberless floor. The girl accompanying him wore an ordinary flower-patterned dress and spoke and looked so coolly up-market he knew she was essentially groomed to deliver a karate chop the instant he smiled. She had particularly long fingernails that she raised at the approach to each closed door as if she were making up her mind which one to choose. Meanwhile, she evidently received guidance from an earpiece to which she responded by talking very softly to a tube mike near her mouth. Her duties culminated in leading him down a corridor, choosing a door with confidence and pressing out a code number.

  At first glance the room he entered had a characterless functional look. A large desk flourished itself at him with chrome legs and a metal top. Three chairs facing it had shiny metal frames topped with blue upholstery on the seat and arms. It was reasonably spacious as an office, but what caught Joe’s eye initially was a large black and white, unframed picture filling the space of one wall that depicted vague human shapes emerging from a misty background. He was so distracted by it that he failed to notice a smallish middle-aged woman seated at the desk. Light flooding in from the window behind her so emphasised the rectangular shape of her high-backed, black leather armchair that it almost obliterated her from view. Only a hand wave from her towards one of the shiny metal chairs served to indicate her presence and act as a greeting.

  He seated himself and waited. For as long as half a minute nothing was said. A small folder lay on the desk top in front of the woman. She flicked over the pages. He settled himself into contemplating her black suiting and the high black collar of her jacket which matched neatly cut dark hair. With her head lowered to read, the hair tended to hide what he quickly realized was an attractively small, intelligent face that gave him a series of jerky glances, revealing shapely almond eyes and a wide mouth enhanced by unusually bright red lipstick each time she looked up.

  ‘You may call me Violet,’ she declared eventually with what struck him as a rather theatrical Irish accent. ‘And you are Mr Joseph Richter? I have notes here concerning you. Thank you for coming.’

  ‘My, er, girlfriend, Miss Malden, said I should.’

  ‘Should?’

  ‘She had a message. I should come here for a sort of debriefing.’

  ‘Debriefing! It sounds so military, does it not? No, it’s not military at all. It’s just a word in your ear. Tell me, how well do you know a gentleman called Goncharov, Oleg Goncharov, who owns a London night club? Do you know him well?’

  ‘I have met him once. He likes to be called Ollie.’ Joe described briefly what happened on the car journey up Park Lane and into Notting Hill. ‘He wanted to see what I had on my laptop. I was told I was bourgeois filth. I’m already branded as a cheat.’

  ‘And what you had on your laptop was a copy of a letter apparently written by Vladimir Ilych Lenin, yes? In code, listing the names of various contacts, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  How this little gnome of a woman called Violet knew that much surprised Joe, but he felt unable to do more than agree in face of her quick Irish delivery.

  ‘And you had received this letter from a source you suspected, but were not sure of, yes? A former colleague of yours at RGD, yes? His name would be Krestovsky, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he was shot dead in your presence while living in a rented house in Los Angeles, yes? That would be, what, three, four weeks ago, yes?’

  ‘I suppose, yes.’ He licked his lips. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I’m the one who asks the questions, Mr Richter. From the evidence of this folder and the reports we have received, I am in a position to say I know quite a lot about you. So bear with me, please. I am asking about this Mr Goncharov. He has a controlling interest in a large electronics firm that was owned by your grandfather. Is that correct?’

  ‘That’s what my mother told me.’

  ‘But your grandfather was an inventor, yes? He created a large domain, an estate
called San Jorge, situated in the Los Angeles megalopolis, where he is alleged to have built a most elaborate subterranean refuge – can I call it that? – for a living being claimed to be the son of V.I. Lenin. Am I correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you have been responsible, it is said, for helping to revitalize this being, yes?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘Your grandfather’s widow, a Mrs Martha Richter, has made this claim. Is it true?’

  ‘Well, I went there. I met her and did what she wanted. But I had this locket. That’s perhaps what did it.’

  ‘Locket?’

  He described how he had received it from a courier at Heathrow and had pressed it against the glass. ‘It saved my life,’ he explained, mentioning the ricochet.

  ‘You think that’s what did it, yes? The thing you call a locket?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it’s been destroyed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you can’t revitalize without it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Richter. I respect your honesty. Now, by all accounts, your granddaddy, if I may call him that, was a brilliant man. You don’t become as rich as he was unless you’re very exceptional. But he was not Jesus Christ. He never recreated, revitalized, revived anything. I think he was at best a Wizard of Oz who used his expertise in electronics to make it look as if had become a new Frankenstein. And people believed. And what’s most important to us, to you and me, right now, is that Mr Goncharov believes. And he believes that he may now be in possession of a highly valuable political tool, a political tool that may give him political power in Russia. Provided he can demonstrate his power to those who believe, the Old Believers, as they’re called, or all disaffected fellow Russians and that means many millions. Which is where you come in, Mr Richter. Because I suspect he will not be able to demonstrate anything without your help.’

  What the hell was this mad woman talking about? Joe stared back at the extremely bright eyes and noticed that they shone with a smile matched in a rather triumphant widening of the broad red lips.

  ‘You say you met the lady called Martha, yes?’ Violet’s broad red lips widened further. ‘Well, she has insisted that you are the only person in the world who can do it. She was never an easy lady to impress, especially if it came to anything connected with her late husband’s reputation, but you apparently impressed her by what you did.’

  ‘As I told you,’ Joe said, ‘it was only because I had that locket.’

  ‘Oh, sure, sure, and now it’s been destroyed!’ The smile vanished. ‘Sorry, that was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have seemed to mock. Your friend was killed. You did your own little Frankenstein bit by creating Ben Leyton, didn’t you? I should’ve remembered that and been more sympathetic. I’m sorry.’ She shook her head several times and began speaking quite slowly. ‘But let me just tell you what we suspect. We suspect that your friend died on the orders of Mr Goncharov. I think you may have received an intimation of this.’

  She was obviously referring to the incident at Zuma Beach. ‘Yes, I got a message. But maybe it was all my fault.’

  Her stern look was interrupted by the beginnings of an ironic smile. ‘That is a real possibility, yes. Apart, though, from blaming yourself, does it make you angry?’

  ‘It did at first.’

  ‘But now?’

  ‘Now – oh, now, I’m feeling much colder about it.’

  ‘If you take revenge, yes, it’s always best taken coldly.’

  He pressed his lips together. ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘So, Mr Richter, the time has come for me to explain something. You see I’m not in any official sense part of this excellent organisation.’ She raised both hands in an expansively priestly gesture that embraced the entire glass structure surrounding her. ‘Except by invitation and in liaison with it. My home is in Washington. I work for the CIA, though I don’t let my accent speak for me in that respect. Nor do I want to be thought of as speaking so much blarney. No, I simply have the task of asking you to do something for us. The colder you are in doing it, the greater, I suspect, will be your revenge. It will demand courage, I can’t deny that, but it will very likely have the effect of putting an end to Mr Goncharov’s political ambitions. Do you want to know what it is?’

  The response expected of him was so obvious he couldn’t help himself from smirking. But before he could speak she had raised a phone to her ear and was already issuing an order. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she was saying. ‘At once, please.’ She ended by pressing something under the rim of her desk.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘So?’

  He had remained open-mouthed. When he spoke, he knew the question sounded limp. ‘What is it you want me to do?’

  ‘We want you to use your power, that’s what we want. However much you may think it’s pretence, you must make it seem genuine, otherwise the whole thing will be a mess and you yourself may be in danger. I can’t stress that side of it too much. But if you pretend to do what is expected of you, you will damage Mr Goncharov’s reputation. That’s what we want you to do: Damage it! Kill it off! That’ll be the best revenge of all!… Ah! Here they are!’

  A moment later the door to the office opened and there stood Gloria Billington and Dolly holding her well-brought-up, rather bedraggled teddy with his usual bow tie.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Billington and, er…’ Violet consulted the open file in front of her ‘Oh, yes, Dolly. Thank you so much for coming. Mr Richter, Mrs Billington can now tell you. She knows more about what to do than I do.’

  But the knowledge came in a different form. Gloria Billington, dressed in smart fawn linen suiting, the jacket having a yellow collar, stepped at once towards Joe. He rose awkwardly out of politeness, almost tipping his chair sideways in climbing to his feet, and found himself being kissed lightly on one cheek to the accompaniment of the familiar aroma of her expensive perfume.

  ‘Joseph, here, look!’ she exclaimed. She indicated what she meant by pressing something into his hand which he instantly realized was a locket very like the one he had taken to San Jorge. ‘The last time I held something like this, oh, we did have such a row, Julie and I did! She wanted to have it, you see. She was nasty to me the whole day, can you imagine! I mean, I’d trusted her so much and then she started talking about money! Oh, it was wicked – I mean really wicked! So I’ve got to start with an apology for not saying goodbye properly when you flew out to California. This,’ she pressed the locket more firmly into the palm of his hand, ‘Daddy used. It was the last one he made, because, you know, he made each one himself. He wouldn’t let anyone else touch them. Now you must have it. The only difference is there won’t be any picture of Dolly this time.’

  The solid round object had the feel of a gift, though the look he gave her must have expressed doubt as well as gratitude at receiving it. She smiled at his uncertainty.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m sure you’ll know what to do,’ she added, clearly hinting there were other, perhaps more serious, matters to be attended to. ‘Yes, well…’

  ‘Andy told me,’ Dolly announced.

  Joe knew this would be about Ben. ‘Very sensible of him,’ he said.

  ‘But you didn’t bring him back, did you?’

  ‘Please, Dolly dear, not now,’ Gloria said.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Joe said

  ‘He was badly hurt, was he?’

  ‘No, I don’t think he was. It all happened very quickly.’

  ‘There,’ Dolly said, looking the bear straight in the face.

  ‘Dolly dear, not now, please,’ Gloria insisted.

  ‘Andy wants to know,’ Dolly explained.

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  Joe felt an intense cold suddenly engulf him. It paralysed him, as if he had been plunged into icy water. He raised his eyes from Dolly’s utterly innocent, sparkly gaze to the look on Gloria Billington’s face that was much less easy to read, but it was Dolly who spoke next.

  ‘What are they?
’ She pointed at the unframed picture. ‘Are they people?’

  ‘I’ve wondered about that, too,’ Violet remarked from the depths of her black chair. ‘This is not my office at all, you know. But you’re right to ask. I think they’re the unknown folk we’re all having to deal with. So let’s deal with some people some of us do know. Please sit down everyone. There, that’s right. And you, too, Dolly dear.’

  22

  The enlarged, Metro-style foyer of Scythian Gold was crowded with people being inspected and frisked before they were ushered towards lifts and stairs. Not an evening for the restaurant. Not an evening for waiting around. Roars of bawdy laughter filled the foyer area as the crowd pressed forward. It took a while for Joe to realize that several uniformed guards were trying to restrain a couple of evidently drunk and overenthusiastic admirers from smashing their way into the glassed-in tableau of a naked boy kissing a naked girl. Their marble figures, bathed as they were in discreet overhead lighting, seemed so natural and uninhibited that it tended to enhance their sexual allure, even though they were partly screened by artificial shrubbery. The effect was enhanced by a reflective background that suggestively repeated their nudity into distant depths.

  The drunks, waving bottles and shouting amid more gusts of laughter, were trying to protest not only at being held back from the tableau but also at the way it was slowly disappearing from view as metal shutters were in process of closing it off. To cries of approval and a scattering of applause, the men were quickly overpowered and frogmarched away. The crowded foyer then sank back into a talkative, restless, shoving melee of new arrivals.