Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  Muriel was so enjoying this story that he’d forgotten all about the rest of the team, who were hanging about nearby. He was listening with a smile on his lips, and I saw his one eye glint as it did when he thought of a good idea for a plot or a scene.

  ‘So he escaped, just like that? He simply decided to be a fugitive for the rest of his life?’ he asked with a mixture of incredulity and hilarity. ‘He took a big risk, didn’t he? I know how puritanical the Americans can be, but it doesn’t seem such a very serious matter. I doubt that, in the worst-case scenario, he’d have been given anything more than a symbolic sentence. In the 1960s, vices were, I believe, viewed with a certain degree of understanding.’

  ‘No, he was quite right to leave America, it was lucky he did,’ said Lom. ‘He denies it now and laughs it off, but later, when he was out of the reach of American justice, he was accused of heading up a vice ring in the United Nations, and, given the political implications, that was infinitely more serious and dangerous: 1961 was a bad year for the Cold War. I’m sure you’ll understand that the United Nations building was not deemed to be quite the same as the apartment he shared with his mother, in which an ex-girlfriend was allegedly taking liberties behind his back. Always supposing that the second charge was true. Harry says that it wasn’t, and I believe him. And I do wonder why the FBI didn’t believe him to begin with, I mean, he’s always written scripts, so why wouldn’t he be immersed in one while Mariella was quietly getting undressed in the next room so as to make discreet, muted love with her boyfriend, after all, isn’t that what prostitutes and their lovers have always done? Knowing his incorrigible ingenuousness, I believe him, naturally.’ And Herbert Lom laughed loudly. He performed a final flourish with his handkerchief, which was very crumpled by then, and, realizing this, he flung it down on the floor. ‘Anyway, are we going to carry on filming today or not?’

  With the existence of the Internet, where you can find snippets of information about almost everything, I felt a kind of retrospective curiosity both about crafty Harry Alan Towers and about that whole story (after all, I had worked for him indirectly and he didn’t die until 2009); and I’ve learned that what we were told by Mr Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru (who will probably now have reverted to that name) was pretty close to the truth or what is known of the truth, because it still seems as incomplete, contradictory and confusing as the celebrated actor Herbert Lom warned us it would be.

  I read somewhere else that Towers’s interests in New York extended beyond what took place in his apartment, and that, during the time when he was supposedly aiming high and in a position to compromise influential people, his two main contacts had been, first, his mother (‘our producer has a most unusual mother’ Lom had commented in an enigmatic, rather casual manner), and second, ‘a certain Leslie Charteris’, whose identity was known to me already in 1980, again thanks to my cinematographic-televisual knowledge, as the author of the novels and stories on which several series of Simon Templar as the Saint were based. I was intrigued to learn that, for quite a long time, Charteris was denied permanent residence in America because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited immigration by persons of ‘fifty per cent or greater Oriental blood’, and that the real surname of the Saint’s creator was, unexpectedly, Bowyer-Yin (Bowyer being his mother, and Yin his father), and that he had been born in Singapore. This makes it perhaps still stranger that, in 1937, he translated and edited the famous book by Manuel Chaves Nogales: Juan Belmonte, Killer of Bulls. However, I found nothing to link Charteris with the United Nations or with any vice ring. I was also intrigued to discover that Lom’s Hollywood career was also cut short when the American embassy in London refused to issue him with a visa. He may have fled from the Nazis, but he was apparently considered to be a Communist sympathizer and fellow traveller. Almost everyone seems to have had problems with the American authorities at one time or another, it’s an old tradition.

  The reason I mention all this is, I think, by way of being a superstitious and hollow form of compensation, because I greatly regret that Muriel will never know about it. He loved such literary-cinematographic conundrums (he would have spent hours in front of the computer). We never grow used to not speaking to the dead we once knew, to not telling them what we imagine would have amused or interested them, to not introducing them to the important new people in our lives or to any possible posthumous grandchildren, to not giving them the good or bad news that affects us and that would perhaps have affected them were they still in the world and able to know these things. There are times, too, when one is selfishly glad that they can’t know: not just because they would have been upset or concerned, but because they would have been angry and would have cursed us and withdrawn their friendship, cut us dead and even tried to ruin and destroy us. ‘I got away with it while they were alive,’ we think, ‘and now they cannot see what they would certainly have seen as a betrayal. The person who dies will be forever deceived, because he cannot know what came afterwards or, indeed, what happened while he was alive and of which he knew nothing.’ In a way, it’s a positive thing that our loved ones disappear: we miss them horribly, but we also have the relief of unending impunity. There are various things that I’m glad Muriel never found out about, especially something that happened while he was alive and another that happened afterwards. The second was entirely unforeseeable, the first I was careful to conceal from him.

  On the other hand, I’m sure he would have enjoyed the description of Mariella Novotny written some years later by her colleague Christine Keeler – the main cause of the Profumo scandal that erupted in 1963 – because the next time we saw each other, he was still thinking more about Lom’s story than about what I had told him regarding Van Vechten, he was clearly dazzled by his false or transitory friend’s past adventures in the world of high politics and high-class prostitution.

  ‘What was it about that Novotny woman,’ he murmured, ‘that meant she could seduce or ensnare so many important men, always assuming Herbert Lom was telling the truth? Imagine, Juan, she probably slept with the two Kennedy brothers and their brother-in-law Peter Lawford, as well as sundry multimillionaires and who knows how many high-up UN officials. Getting people like that to run such risks isn’t easy, not even in the 1960s when people were less careful; it would take more than your average, run-of-the-mill whore to do that. There must have been something special about her, apart from her resemblance to Anita Ekberg.’ He sat thinking for a moment, then added: ‘You know, I imagine her as being like the wonderful Cecilia Alemany. Have we heard anything of her lately, by the way? I mean in the press or on the television, because when I’m away filming, I lose track of everything. She would certainly never deign to phone me, I know that.’

  A possible answer to those questions about Novotny is now available to everyone. In 1983, Christine Keeler wrote: ‘She had a tiny waist that exaggerated her ample figure. She was a siren, a sexual athlete of Olympian proportions – she could do it all. I know. I saw her in action. She knew all the strange pleasures that were wanted and could deliver them.’ Some have identified her as Maria Capes, Maria Chapman or Stella Capes. When telling us about her, Herbert Lom had even referred to her at one point as ‘Maria’. I now think he must have known her in person, since they were both of Czech origin and had been born in Prague. But I didn’t know that about him at the time and wish now that we could have asked him.

  Mariella Novotny was found dead in bed in February 1983, when she was forty-one, from a drug overdose according to the police. In 1978, she had announced that she was going to write her autobiography, in which she would reveal details of her work for MI5. In 1980, she went further, announcing that her book would include details of a ‘plot to discredit Jack Kennedy’. She added: ‘I kept a diary of all my appointments in the UN building. Believe me, it’s dynamite. It’s now in the hands of the CIA.’ The book never appeared. Christine Keeler later wrote: ‘The Westminster Coroner, Dr Paul Knapman, called it death by misadventure … I still
think it was murder.’ We need not necessarily believe Keeler, but Lobster Magazine said of Novotny that ‘… shortly after her death her house was burgled and all her files and large day-to-day diaries from the early 1960s to the 70s were stolen’.

  As a fan of the lurid and the fantastic, Muriel would have loved all that, as well as being able to see the few shots of Mariella or Maria or Stella that are available on the Internet, and it’s true, she did bear a resemblance to Anita Ekberg. The photo I like best, and which I know would have delighted him, is like a still from a film, but one made not in 1961, which is when the photo was taken, but even earlier. It’s yet another demonstration of the effect passing time has on reality, turning everything into fiction, and when we ourselves are long gone, any photos of us will suffer the same fate and we, too, will look like invented people who never existed. I’m already beginning to feel that way about pictures of Beatriz and Muriel, and in his case, the black eyepatch only reinforces the impression that what we’re seeing is a still from a film, or perhaps an illustration from a book, and yet I know that they did both exist and I know their tenuous history and have told it at least once.

  In the photo, Mariella looks thoughtful and slightly abstracted; she’s wearing a ridiculous and yet very modest hat, and her throat and neck are discreetly covered, it seems to have been taken at the moment of her arrest at Towers’s apartment or perhaps when she’s about to go into the police station shortly afterwards. The FBI agent with her is a heavily built man with a broad face, hard eyes and a scornful mouth. Perhaps he was the one who pretended to be a client and laid the trap for her, let’s hope not: she surely wasn’t that stupid, because it stands out a mile that he’s either a cop or some kind of thug. Or perhaps that’s what he looks like now, when time has covered them both with a large enough dose of unreality.

  Muriel, however, did not entirely forget about me nor why I had insisted on seeing him while he was in the middle of shooting a film, not even on the day when Herbert Lom commandeered our conversation. Before dismissing me so that he could do another take of the scene – he didn’t want any unnecessary people present, and so I never saw that great and fearsome actor give his speech – Muriel said to me in Spanish:

  ‘Listen, young De Vere, regarding what you told me: continue along that path, keep going. Try to draw the Doctor out about the past, ask if he ever managed in the past to have his way with a woman who didn’t want to but couldn’t say No, isn’t that what he said? I don’t much care what he gets up to now, these are different times, and people take things less seriously. So go ahead and have a good time with whoever you want, those young friends of yours are no concern of mine. See if he’ll tell you how he managed it back then.’ And as if offering a thread of hope, he concluded: ‘If it really did happen and he really did get away with it.’

  In marked contrast to the dark, angry look in his eye when he first mentioned to me his friend’s possibly indecent behaviour with a woman, I had been surprised to see a benevolent, rather amused glint in that same eye when he was told about Towers’s clearly indecent behaviour with several women, especially if the story of the vice ring at the UN proved to be true. None of this seemed to bother him in the least, not even the suspicion that those women had been used both to earn Towers money (while he, their pimp, sat back and did nothing), and to blackmail prominent individuals and celebrities, indeed, Lom’s story lent an additional fascination to the character of Towers, whom Muriel saw as a worthy subject of a work of fiction. He regretted now that Towers only rarely appeared during filming and was almost always travelling abroad somewhere, for while one of his projects was underway, Towers would already be planning the next one and seeking out new sources of finance. Muriel would like to have met his employer more often, to see if he could get the full story from the horse’s mouth and flesh out all the details of his shady activities in the 1960s and of his turbulent relationship with the FBI, to have him confirm or deny that his former, fleeting lover, Novotny, had screwed Kennedy and his brother Robert and their brother-in-law Lawford, to be told whether this was all true or mere fantasies and lies. One shouldn’t believe everything one finds on the Internet, but I did read somewhere that Mariella and another prostitute by the name of Suzy Chang once disguised themselves as nurses to provide the Presidential ‘patient’ with some physical therapy; if that’s true, Kennedy’s tastes were not so very different from those of any ordinary male. I was surprised at my boss’s reaction to Towers, but, in part, I understood it: like nearly all those in the world of cinema, including those who fancy themselves as intellectuals or artists, he was as much of a mythomaniac as anyone.

  I also noticed that in Harry Alan Towers’s very long and frenetic filmography, there is a gap following our failed project, as if his career had been somehow jinxed by Muriel’s failure and misfortune: his next title as producer does not appear, most unusually, until 1983. By then, however, he had already disappeared from our lives and we still more from his (well, I was never really part of it), transformed perhaps into a grim memory that was best left behind. It’s also possible that, by the time he had got rid of us, Towers was once again able to visit the country he had fled from and the forbidden city of New York. I suspect that the American authorities never actually allowed him to settle there, for I see that he continued filming in such out-of-the-way places as South Africa and Bulgaria, that he took Canadian nationality and moved to Toronto, where he died in 2009, at the age of eighty-eight. He certainly lasted a long time for someone who bore all the marks of having been an utter scoundrel, in the world of cinema and a few others. A scoundrel, however, who was instantly forgiven by Muriel.

  Muriel had little time to probe further during what remained of the project, what with Harry’s endless travelling and his own promise to Lom not to say anything about the matter unless Harry himself happened to mention those remote events; he didn’t have much chance to ask. Taking advantage of a visit by Towers to Madrid to see how everything was going and to view the rushes of what had been filmed in his absence, Muriel invited him to supper one night along with his wife, the Austrian Maria Rohm, Lom, Van Vechten and Rico (the last two could get by quite well in English, much better, of course, than Roy), the witty Oxford Hispanist Peter Wheeler, who happened to be visiting Madrid, a couple from the British embassy and two of the actresses from the film: the veteran Shirley Eaton, who achieved fame after being painted with gold in the James Bond film Goldfinger, and the very youthful Lisa Raines. And Beatriz, of course, whose irascible husband always expected her to be there to welcome guests and organize a proper supper and flatter any producer or hypothetical source of finance. Muriel intended to steer the conversation on to the topic of the political sex scandals of the early 1960s, and Wheeler’s presence suited him perfectly: like many Oxbridge dons, he knew all about MI5’s and MI6’s past shenanigans, and he had known Profumo well. Muriel was hoping thus to tempt Towers to challenge the mischievous, talkative Hispanist for the limelight and to boast and tell all, even if he gave only a watered-down version that showed him in a favourable light (depending on how you looked at it: favourable in the eyes of the police or a judge, less so at a sophisticated supper party), the version in which he proclaimed himself to be completely innocent, ingenuous and stupid.

  But it was entirely the hostess’s fault that the supper never happened, even though all the guests arrived and I opened the door to them and helped Flavia and Susana to greet them and show them in: I was, as usual, hanging about at the apartment and had been appointed to keep Lisa Raines entertained, since I was nearest in age to her; I hadn’t been invited as a guest, and so there wasn’t even a place for me at the table.

  VII

  * * *

  Beatriz had been going through a depressive phase, that at least is how I interpreted it. While he was filming, Muriel was rarely at home and often didn’t come back at night to sleep, either because he was on location somewhere or preferred to stay at a hotel, and despite their poisonous relationship, h
is absence probably contributed to his wife’s despondency or low spirits – we miss no one so much as our adversary, when we’ve grown accustomed to having to defend ourselves and to resist, to stand beneath the moon, persuading and imploring. Perhaps she saw in that void a warning of what the future might hold for her one day, when divorce finally became legal. She didn’t neglect her morning or evening duties as an English teacher, and she spent time with her children, her mirror-images, but otherwise I rarely saw her leave the apartment: not with Rico, nor to visit Our Lady of Darmstadt nor the Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca nor to set off on her motorbike going who knew where. On the other hand, I did hear coming from her side of the apartment the metronome ticking on and on, forty times a minute if not more, occasionally accompanied by a few chords, but usually by nothing at all, not a sound, apart from the pendulum beating back and forth like a noisy, heterodox clock telling something other than the time: the music unplayed or the words thought and stored away to the beat of the metronome, the beat of boredom or of a hesitant countdown, aborted and restarted again and again, over and over. Since Muriel was not there, it was clearly no longer a reminder to him of her existence, nor a threat or a complaint or a rhythmic representation of her sufferings, nor was it a drumming of fingers as a prelude to an explosion. Despite what my boss had told me (‘She takes her time, then gets distracted and falls asleep at the piano. As long as she’s there, she’s fine.’), I would get worried if, for a whole long hour, I heard only that ominous, unhinging tick-tock. I would stop what I was doing, go over and press my ear to the closed door that gave on to her side of the apartment, expecting to hear her moan or sigh or hum or exclaim or sob; or to perhaps hear her talking to herself or even cursing as mad people do or the lonely or those sunk in self-pity. And when I still heard only the metronome beating on, undaunted, I would at last get up the courage to knock very lightly, as Beatriz sometimes did on Muriel’s bedroom door, and when she answered: ‘Yes, who is it?’ or even, yearningly (I thought), ‘Is that you, Eduardo? Are you home?’ I would feel both relieved and ridiculous and say: