The Teleportation Accident

by Beauman, Ned

  But Scramsfield’s third and supreme consolation was Phoebe. She had sent him to Paris to be a writer. And with the Armenian in jail because of those cheques, he was free to be a writer again. No money and no distractions was better than money and distractions. His father had money and distractions. Anyone could have money and distractions. That was the important thing.

  Just after one o’clock on this clement April day, two women walked up to the door of Shakespeare and Company, stood for a minute looking at the books in the window, and then tried the door. It was locked, but they kept trying it, as if they thought it might realise its rudeness and change its mind. After wiping his front teeth with a napkin, Scramsfield got up, hurried towards the women, slowed to a saunter before he got near enough to be noticed, and then carried on past. A few steps further on, as a considerate afterthought, he paused, turned, and said, ‘Looking for Sylvia? She’s closed until two.’

  And there it was on their faces, as always, the moment of relief so deep it seemed almost carnal: the tourist’s hopeless gratitude for a friendly American voice, an honest American face, an ally against this conspiracy of waiters and concierges and policemen and taxi drivers and beggars and shopkeepers and train conductors. One of the women was young, blonde, pretty enough, but all her features a little askew somehow, like paintings haphazardly hung; the other was older, greying, not similar enough in the face to be the mother, perhaps the aunt but more likely the governess. ‘Oh,’ said the older woman. ‘Thank you. Who is Sylvia?’

  ‘Don’t you know Miss Beach? She runs the store. She’s an American, but the French close for lunch, so she does too.’

  ‘That’s awfully irritating. We’d hoped to buy a copy of Ulysses.’ She had an upper-class Boston accent not unlike Scramsfield’s own.

  ‘You picked a good week. The fifth edition’s just out. Jimmy’s over the moon about it. He says they’ve finally chased out most of the typographical errors. He’s punctilious about those typographical errors.’

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Jimmy Joyce,’ said Scramsfield, as if it were obvious.

  The older woman exchanged a glance with the younger one. ‘You know Mr Joyce?’

  Scramsfield shrugged. ‘Sure. Everybody in Paris knows Jimmy. I had dinner with him and Sylvia just last night. He still hasn’t found a single restaurant in France he can tolerate.’ Then, in an accent that was Irish or at least Scottish: ‘ “I’ve eaten headache pills with more blood in them than this steak!” ’ Both women laughed delightedly, which was when Scramsfield saw the younger woman stroking the head of a poodle she had in her handbag, except that the poodle was tiny and green and hairless and wore a white lace bonnet and, in conclusion, just wasn’t a poodle, even though he knew he wasn’t nearly hungry enough yet to be hallucinating. ‘Well, say hello to Sylvia for me when you see her,’ he said, doffing his hat as two curly-haired boys in sailor suits ran past rolling bicycle wheels with sticks.

  ‘We will,’ said the older woman. Then, as Scramsfield turned to walk on, she called after him, ‘Oh, but I don’t believe you told us your name.’

  Scramsfield turned back for the second time, smiley and mechanical as a chorus girl. ‘You’re right. How blockheaded of me. Herbert Wolf Scramsfield.’

  ‘How do you do, Mr Scramsfield? I’m Margaret Norb and this is my niece Elisalexa Norb.’

  ‘And this is Mordechai,’ said Elisalexa, grabbing her iguana by the throat, pulling it out of her handbag, and holding it out in front of him. ‘He’d like to shake your hand.’

  The reptile was sprinting in the air, and in its eyes was a plea for rescue, but Scramsfield still reached out and took one of its clawed feet between finger and thumb. A long yellow dewlap hung from its lower jaw like a monkey’s vacant pouch. ‘How do you do, Mr Mordechai?’ he said solemnly.

  A short while later they were all sitting down for lunch at Le Beau Manchot on Rue des Saules, and Scramsfield was telling the Norbs about his time as an ambulance driver in the Italian army, where he first met Hemingway. ‘You can’t believe anything Hem tells you about those days. He says he saved my life at Schio. I know it was the other way around. But the only reliable witness was Sidney Howard and he’s dead now.’ When the undercooked trout arrived Scramsfield made sure it wasn’t obvious how famished he was from the way he ate, recalling one particularly desperate occasion here when in his haste he had swallowed half a baked lemon and surprised the whole restaurant with a high wail of shock like an operatic lamento. They soon got on to the subject of their common home town, and Scramsfield was relieved when it became clear that the Norbs did not know his parents. ‘And you don’t know Phoebe, either? That’s a shame. She’s my wife. She’s coming out here to join me in a few weeks.’

  Elisalexa’s father made industrial chemicals: sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid and so on. He’d got through the first years of the Depression by cutting his workforce right down, Margaret explained, and although a few poor souls did make for the vats after the first round of firings, Mr Norb had made sure to install safety nets by the time of the second. That sort of logical leadership, and his preference for government bonds over corporate stocks, had left the family’s fortune almost intact after the crash, which was how the Norb women were able to afford their educational trip to Europe.

  Over dessert, Scramsfield told the Norbs about apogee, his literary magazine, which had been the first to publish T.S. Eliot, and The Sorrowful Noble Ones, his debut novel in progress, which Jimmy Joyce simply wouldn’t be allowed to look at until it was finished. Elisalexa had not spoken at all during the meal, except to Mordechai, and she now occupied herself stuffing morsels of cake into the lizard’s mouth with the back of a spoon before holding his jaws shut to make sure he swallowed. He had chocolate all over his bonnet and some in his eyes. Everyone was getting on very well. Afterwards, Margaret wouldn’t let Scramsfield pay any share of the bill, despite all his protests. She spent a short while trying to calculate the tip before Scramsfield told her it ought to be at least a hundred francs.

  ‘That sounds like quite a lot.’

  ‘That’s just how it works here, I’m afraid. The only reason they can sell the food so cheap is because they know we’ll pay the waiter’s salary ourselves.’

  ‘Well, the food was awfully cheap.’

  In fact, twenty francs of that would go to the waiter, thirty francs would go to the manager, and fifty francs would go towards paying off Scramsfield’s tab here. The only reason he’d brought the Norbs to Le Beau Manchot was this arrangement, which was replicated in half a dozen establishments around Paris.

  As they were leaving, Scramsfield happened to mention that if they should want to meet Hemingway, he was almost certain to be found at the Dingo. Margaret said they’d planned to go shopping at Lanvin and Molyneux this afternoon but she would much rather meet Hemingway and she was sure Elisalexa would too. So they went to the Dingo, but Hemingway wasn’t there. Scramsfield said they should wait, so while they were waiting they made a list of the other notables that the Norbs would like to meet: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Picasso, Chanel, and above all Diaghilev, because Margaret was a great lover of ballet. Scramsfield assured the Norbs that these introductions could hardly be easier for him to arrange. After a few rounds of drinks – whisky for Scramsfield and citron pressé for the Norbs, who paid the bill again – Scramsfield decided that perhaps they ought to try the Dôme. Hemingway wasn’t at the Dôme either, so next they tried the Rotonde, then the Closerie des Lilas, the Coupole, Lipp’s, the Strix, and finally the Falstaff Bar, by which time they were all hungry again, so they went to dinner at Le Maison d’Or. After a few glasses of pinot noir it became clear that Margaret Norb had something to confide.

  ‘As it happens there is one other gentleman I’d like to meet, Mr Scramsfield.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Norb?’

  She leaned in closer. Her face had soaked up the red wine like blotting paper, and there was a large dark mole on her forehead that seemed to Scramsfield to
be staring directly at him. ‘I’d be awfully eager to meet this Dr Voronoff. I’ve heard he can take thirty years off your age, you know. I don’t understand quite what it involves but it’s something to do with glands. Monkeys’ glands. Very scientific.’

  Scramsfield was somewhat taken aback until he remembered something Margaret had said about how Mr Norb didn’t care to have newspapers in the house because even the Wall Street Journal was full of socialism. He’d drunk a lot of whisky and at this stage he had to be especially careful not to say anything which might give the mistaken impression that he wasn’t absolutely on the level. ‘I know Dr Voronoff quite well, Miss Norb. I’m sure a free consultation for a friend of mine would be no burden at all.’

  ‘Good heavens, Mr Scramsfield, is there anyone in Paris you don’t know?’

  ‘There is one man in Paris I don’t know, Miss Norb, and that’s the man who can give me a decent American haircut!’

  Laughter.

  After he’d coaxed Margaret into leaving another two hundred and fifty per cent tip, he tried to get the Norbs to the Flore for just one more drink, but the aunt was already visibly stewed, and kept burbling about how they needed to get back to their hotel so that Elisalexa could be put straight to bed. They agreed to reconvene for lunch at Le Beau Manchot the following day, where Scramsfield intended to make a proposal to the Norbs: merely to shake hands with Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Joyce or Picasso or Chanel or Diaghilev might be enough for the average gabbling sightseer, but what about if they could tell their friends and relations back in Boston that they’d hosted a stylish and historic dinner for all six at once? They need simply advance a little cash – say five thousand francs – for the food, the wine, the staff, and the hire of the dining room, and Scramsfield could get it all ready for the day after tomorrow. And he would do his honest best. He always did his honest best. He wasn’t some sort of con man. But if by any chance it turned out that the guests weren’t all available, so the dinner couldn’t go ahead, and he’d lost the ticket stub on which he’d written down the name of the Norbs’ hotel, so he couldn’t return the money, then he would have more than enough in his pocket to bail out both the Armenian and his typewriter.

  On his way out of Le Maison d’Or, Scramsfield felt a hand on his shoulder and flinched. ‘Excuse me?’ With some reluctance, he turned – but was pleased to see that the author of this intervention was nobody he knew. Before him was the sort of man who could, when necessary, adopt an easy posture and receptive face, but the moment he was given permission to relax would fall back gratefully into his natural configuration of hunched shoulders, cocked head, folded arms, locked knees, knotted brow, narrowed eyes, pursed mouth, gritted teeth, clenched fists, and curled toes; the sort of man with blood pressure so high you could send him to the bottom of the ocean without a diving bell. A few years younger than Scramsfield, he was quite thin and quite pale, with black hair parted at the side and a dark grey suit that fitted him well but was beginning to emancipate its threads. He spoke with a German accent and had a distracted, impatient intelligence that seemed to hover a few inches to his left.

  ‘Yes?’ said Scramsfield.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t have eavesdropped, but I was eating alone at the table next to yours and I heard that woman saying something about how you know everyone in Paris. Is that true?’

  This fellow had presumably also heard Scramsfield’s barber joke and he couldn’t immediately think of a substitute, so he just shrugged.

  ‘I’m looking for a girl called Adele Hitler. Do you know her?’

  Scramsfield tried to remember if he’d ever heard the name. Nothing came to him. ‘Sure, I know Adele. She usually drinks at the Flore. I can take you there if you like.’

  ‘I don’t want to trouble you.’

  ‘I was going anyway. Maybe you can buy me a drink when we get there.’

  ‘I’d be pleased to. My name is Egon Loeser.’

  ‘Herbert Wolf Scramsfield.’ They shook hands.

  Adele Hitler wasn’t at the Flore but, as he had with the Norbs, Scramsfield said they ought to wait, so they each had a brandy. Lucienne Boyer sang from a gramophone. The bar was still packed with the early crowd – so different from the late crowd – still so full of optimism, exuberance and youthful good looks – still so unburdened by nostalgia for their distant and irrecoverable salad days of four hours earlier.

  ‘Did you really come all the way to Paris just to find this girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Loeser.

  ‘She must be a knock-out.’

  ‘Yes.’ He’d hoped to arrive several months earlier, he elaborated, but he’d had difficulty extracting from a family trust some money without which he couldn’t afford to travel.

  ‘What do you do in Berlin?’ said Scramsfield.

  ‘I’m a set designer for the theatre.’

  ‘Terrific. A man devoted to his muse. I’ll drink to that.’ Scramsfield told Loeser about apogee and The Sorrowful Noble Ones. Loeser didn’t look very interested, so he changed the subject to local restaurants, but Loeser didn’t look very interested in that either, so he asked Loeser what was in the brown-paper parcel that he carried under his arm. The German unwrapped the parcel to show him. Inside was a very old edition of Dante’s Inferno, bound in dark red leather, so saggy and crinkled that it looked almost viscous, like cured strawberry jam.

  Scramsfield allowed his attention to wander during the explanation that followed, since any story that began with a dead man’s book collection was unlikely to end with a dirty punchline, but the basics were as follows. Because Loeser didn’t think he had much chance of bumping into Adele Hitler before the bars filled up at night, he’d been spending his afternoons finding out what he could about a hero of his called Adriano Lavicini who’d once lived in Paris. And by good luck he’d discovered that there was a rare-book dealer in the Marais who had acquired in an auction several books that had once belonged to this fellow. By now, though, only one of those books was left in the shop, and it was the least desirable of the whole lot, not just because at some stage in its long life it had spent several months drinking from a leaky roof but also because there was no reason to think that Lavicini had ever even parted the covers: it had originally belonged to a friend of Lavicini’s called Nicolas Sauvage, and when Sauvage died, he left Lavicini some of his books, but then Lavicini himself died only a few months after this inheritance. Loeser bought it anyway, and when he examined it over dinner at Le Maison d’Or, he was thrilled that he had. Evidently neither Lavicini nor, centuries later, the book dealer had noticed that about halfway through the Eighth Circle, Sauvage had stashed a letter that Lavicini had sent him in January 1679.

  ‘What’s in the letter?’ said Scramsfield.

  Loeser took a blank envelope from his pocket and slid out the old folded letter. ‘ “Dear Nicolas” ,’ he read, going slowly so that he could translate as he went, ‘ “I could not sleep at all the night after we parted because I was so concerned that you had not taken my warnings with . . . due seriousness. I do not know what good it will do to repeat them but I cannot think of any other recourse. So allow me once again to be plain: if you proceed with your plans, you ought to fear for your life, and the lives of your family. You know what happened to Villayer when he tried to match himself against forces he could not help but underestimate: he met his death in the Cours des Miracles” – Court of Miracles. “I do not pretend I am a wiser man than Villayer. But the choices I have made have brought me closer to the heart of this malevolence than any man should ever have to come. Therefore, I know its power, and its reach. I hesitate to say any more in a letter, but please, Nicolas, my dear friend, mark this: if you persist in your intention to conquer those . . . dark lower depths, then you will soon find yourself entombed in them. I know it is your proud belief that man should be free to make these” – I haven’t been able to work out quite what this next phrase means – “unprecedented travels”? Anyway: “to make these unprecedented travels, just as Villayer
believed that he should be free to make his unprecedented communications,” or whatever that is, “but until our own strength can match that of those who oppose us – and until the current order of things is utterly upset, we both know it never will – it is a . . . doomed and desolate aim. Blaise is sensible enough to comprehend this – why can you not?” I think that must be Blaise Pascal – he and Lavicini knew each other. “For the hundredth time, I beg you to desist. Pray write back as soon as you receive this letter. Adieu.” Then a postscript at the bottom: “I neglected to enquire at dinner: de Gorge is looking for a good barber for his dog – do you know of one?” ’

  They ordered some more brandy. ‘Who was Sauvage?’ said Scramsfield.

  ‘He was a carpenter. But a very good one. He helped Lavicini with some of his mechanical stage designs. Villayer was a politician. And you know Pascal, of course.’

  Scramsfield nodded. He didn’t. ‘What was the Court of Miracles?’

  ‘Gringoire the playwright goes there in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.’ The broad, unpaved cul-de-sac next to the Filles-Dieu convent, Loeser explained, had become a sort of criminal sovereign state, a Vatican City of misrule, full of burglars, pickpockets, highwaymen, and prostitutes, who had their own laws, their own king, and even their dialect. The Court of Miracles got its name partly because as soon as the beggars went home there at the night, the crippled would ‘miraculously’ walk again, the blind would ‘miraculously’ see, the pustulent would ‘miraculously’ wash off their sores, and so on; but also partly because it was supposed to be full of fortune-tellers and witches and devil worshippers. ‘There was one cult that would eat parts of an animal while the animal was still alive in order to become like that animal.’ Scramsfield thought of Voronoff. ‘Later on Louis XIV got the police to clear it out and then ran a boulevard straight through it.’