The Mule

by David Quantick

  Inside, I found Frant surveying the lobby with a disapproving eye.

  ‘Pokey would be the appropriate word,’ he said.

  ‘We’re not staying for very long,’ I said, ‘and luxury ill befits a scholar.’

  I tried to stop the words leaving my mouth but it was too late. I was now starting to sound like Frant, which was not a good thing. Fortunately, he didn’t appear to be offended by what I’d said but seemed to be taking it as a compliment.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said as graciously as he was capable of. ‘The ascetic life is always the most appropriate. Come, to our rooms.’

  I was amused that he had assumed I could afford separate rooms. In this case, though, he was right; money was for once no object and there was no way in hell I was bunking up with this maniac. Declining the offer of a porter, I shoved our luggage into a lift and we went up.

  * * *

  My room was not attractive. There was a single bed, a bedside table made out of a curved piece of white plastic that was covered in melted troughs where previous occupants had used it as an ashtray, a plywood desk and a television that, for reasons known only to the management, was bolted to the wall in the furthest corner of the room just under the ceiling, and therefore required the user to operate it by raising the remote control in a form of a Hitler salute and clicking it, or would have done had the batteries not expired some time ago. The shower, toilet and washbasin were also moulded from one piece of plastic, and appeared to have suffered grenade damage at some point in the recent past. There was no chair. My one consolation was that Frant’s room would be identical. Indeed, a minute or so after I had inspected my surroundings, I could hear him on the phone to reception, demanding a better room with – if his muffled swearing was anything to go by – no success.

  I began to unpack. I had scarcely tipped the contents of my bag onto the bed when there was a furious knocking at the door. I opened it and Frant squeezed his way angrily past me and dumped himself like the contents of a trash can onto the bed.

  ‘Your room is much nicer than mine,’ he said, which was such an enormous lie that for a moment I imagined him in a bare cupboard, or perhaps an iron maiden.

  ‘All the rooms in this price range are identical,’ I said calmly. ‘Could you please not sit on the bed, I’m trying to unpack.’

  Frant stood up and moved towards the window, which offered a fine view of a nearby office block’s heating system.

  ‘This hotel is insufferable,’ he said after a while. Clearly he had tired of the ascetic life.

  ‘I agree it’s not particularly pleasant,’ I said. ‘Give me five minutes and we can go to a bar.’

  Frant brightened so much at this that I wondered if he might be a drunk. If so, I bet he was a mean drunk. ‘There’s an excellent place two streets from here,’ he said, and gave me the name. ‘I’ll see you there.’

  I finished unpacking my clothes and put my toothpaste and toothbrush in the bathroom. I hadn’t brought any soap or shampoo, but the hotel had provided two tiny bottles of what smelled like solvent, so I guessed I could make do with those. I was about to leave the room when I saw the notebook had fallen onto the floor. I bent down and picked it up and was about to put it into a drawer when it occurred to me that it might be better to keep the notebook with me. I was sure even the most dedicated hotel room thief would be unlikely to steal an old notebook, but there was always a chance a cleaner might throw the book away, if, that is, this hotel employed a cleaner.

  Before I left the room – I was in no hurry to meet Frant in a bar, reasoning that five minutes not enduring his company was five minutes well spent – I sat on the edge of the bed and opened the notebook once again. I had not yet puzzled out the significance of the first two reviews, and another thought had occurred to me: why had I been unable to find anything about Carrie and the Legions on the internet, when the reviews I’d read suggested that the band were at least worth noticing? I wondered if perhaps these were regional articles or – more likely – pieces from a college magazine. The student papers I’d seen in my own university days had been hotbeds of opinion, testing grounds for would-be writers of the future. And they would, thinking about it, be less likely to end up reproduced on the internet.

  I was slightly disappointed by the results of my logic. If all Carrie’s reputation amounted to was some favourable notices in college papers, then perhaps the ‘success’ alluded to was entirely minuscule. I don’t know why, but I realised I couldn’t help hoping that Carrie, whatever her music was like, was a talented person whose abilities had been recognised. The reviews certainly seemed to say as much. I decided that as soon as I was able to go online again – my laptop was presumably now in the hands of the police, its hard disk scoured for evidence of murder, and I couldn’t get my mobile phone to surf the net in France – I would redouble my efforts to find out more about Carrie and the Legions. But for now, I felt slightly let down by the notebook. Once it had promised me a thrilling tale of either rags to riches or decline and fall, but now it was looking like nothing more than some student posturing. Nevertheless, curiosity is a powerful force and, disappointed though I was, I decided I should stick to my guns and read on in the notebook, so I opened it at the place I had carefully marked with my train ticket stub and turned to the next page. What I saw there transfixed me.

  It was a transcription of a press advert. At the top were the words ‘THE SONG EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT’. Beneath that were some quotes, presumably from various critics. One said, ‘Remarkable’, another, ‘The tour de force to end all tour de forces’. I mistook the third for a censored obscenity until I realised that ‘****’ was just a score. Beneath these accolades was a photograph which I recognised instantly. Lying on a bed, a rose on her chest and a gun by her side, was the girl I had met in the bar that night. I knew the photograph because she had shown it to me; it was one of the images in her book, the translated Alice.

  Underneath the photograph was a caption. ‘THE MURDERED GIRL,’ it said, ‘THE BRAND NEW RELEASE BY CARRIE AND THE LEGIONS.’

  * * *

  I must have sat on the bed for a few minutes. I would probably have sat there for an hour or more had my phone not begun to trill out its new European ringtone. I woke from my stunned state and answered. It was Frant, with the full address of the bar, which he pronounced in a French accent so exaggerated that I had to ask him to repeat it several times. Eventually, we achieved mutual comprehension and I found I had shaken myself out of my trance-like state.

  There was nothing to be done about this shocking image that I wasn’t already doing. I was in Paris, the apparent current resting place of my only clue to the whole business of the girl and her disappearance. I still had no idea if what I was doing was right – in fact, I had no idea what I was doing – but the sooner I saw this Von Fremdenplatz book and was able to work out what connection, if any, it had to events, the better. I put the notebook back in my pocket and left the hotel room.

  The bar was a lot further away than I had anticipated, and I suspected that Frant did not really know where he was. Unfamiliar cities are easy to get lost in, and one part of Paris – bar, boulangerie, café, bar – can look remarkably like another. I must have walked for about half an hour before I found the place Frant meant, having first picked up a small and annoyingly uninformative tourist map of the city.

  Frant was on a stool at the counter. I knew why he was doing this, but he was still keen to tell me.

  ‘I am sitting here because they charge more at a table,’ he said. ‘This is a traditional Parisian zinc and I don’t want to be treated like a tourist.’

  As he had placed his fedora on the next stool and removed his brown paisley scarf, I surmised that he was at least making the effort to look more normal, but it wasn’t entirely successful. True, he resembled no tourist I had ever seen, unless he was a tourist who was also a poet who dressed in the dark. To fit in even more, Frant was drinking something purple. I didn’t ask him what it
was, because I was afraid he might tell me, so I ordered a beer for myself and sat down next to the fedora.

  ‘Why are you here?’ said Frant suddenly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said. The question had taken me by surprise. Not only was it somewhat direct, but also Frant had never expressed an interest in my motives before.

  ‘The question is a simple one,’ said Frant. ‘Why are you here? Pourquoi êtes-vous ici? Why have you come to Paris?’

  ‘For the same reason as you,’ I said.

  Frant looked at me quizzically. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘I am here because of a scholarly interest in the Von Fremdenplatz documents. As an author of fabulist texts, this quest pertains directly to my own interests. The text that came into your hands – a text, moreover, whose acquisition you have not fully accounted for – is germane to my work and, if I am successful in using it as a key to the Von Fremdenplatz, will help to secure me my rightful place in the world.’

  He paused to sip his purple drink. ‘You, however, have none of these motives,’ he continued. ‘You are a hack translator, a man whose interest in words is entirely pecuniary. Where I bring imagination and creativity to the world of language, you merely offer the workaday skills of a drudge. And yet you have left the security of your ordinary life for this undertaking. Again, I must ask you – why are you here?’

  Frant did have a point. There was no way I was going to tell him the truth, obviously, but now I came to think of it, it must seem peculiar from his point of view that I had decided to accompany him. I was sure, too, that Frant must be aware from our previous work together on his awful Chronac that I wasn’t a fan of his made-up languages and silly fantasies. I knew he was vain enough not to heed any slights but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have registered them on some semi-conscious level.

  ‘I agree that I am only a translator,’ I said, ‘and I acknowledge that I don’t have your creative gift. But this whole business strikes me as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’

  ‘How so?’ said Frant, and his eyes narrowed slightly.

  ‘The credit for connecting the Alice text to the Von Fremdenplatz documents is entirely yours,’ I said. ‘And the task of translating the Von Fremdenplatz is one I can only assist with. But that said, the discovery of the Alice text is mine alone.’

  Frant’s eyes had now narrowed so much they looked like a snowman’s, two little bits of coal under his idiotic eyebrows. I knew I had him now.

  ‘So you mean to profit from this venture,’ he said. ‘Your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is an opportunity, in your eyes, to ride on my coat-tails.’

  I didn’t mention that without me he would still be sitting in his weird apartment surrounded by boxes of unsold books, nor that I was sure he had his own well-developed financial instincts. But if I could make him believe that I was here solely to profit from his genius, that was all well and good. The truth was none of his business.

  ‘I just want to help,’ I said disingenuously.

  ‘Very well,’ said Frant. ‘I’m sure some crumbs from the table will fall in your lap in due course.’

  He gave me a disapproving look and the subject was closed. I decided to move on.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ I said. ‘Shall we go to wherever the Von Fremdenplatz is and have a look at it tomorrow morning?’

  Frant gave me a peculiar look. ‘You are clearly not well versed in this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘You cannot just “go and have a look” at the Von Fremdenplatz. That would be like saying that anyone who wishes can just walk in off the street and go and have a look at the Mona Lisa.’

  ‘You can just walk in off the street and go and have a look at the Mona Lisa,’ I said. ‘It’s in the Louvre.’

  Frant pursed his lips into a fishy pout.

  ‘Well, then, the Von Fremdenplatz is clearly more special than the Mona Lisa,’ he said. ‘For a start, it isn’t in the middle of some sweaty public gallery for everyone to gawp at. It is not on public display at all.’

  ‘Where is it then?’ I said. ‘In a private collection?’

  ‘No,’ said Frant, then, having actually taken in what I had said, ‘Yes, it is in a private collection. It can be seen, but it must be viewed by appointment only. And even then only those with the appropriate professional qualifications will be successful in their application. It took me several hours on the telephone to convince the relevant authorities of the sincerity and importance of my visit.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, wondering what the big deal was. The Von Fremdenplatz was just some made-up item after all, with no actual historical or artistic value.

  Frant must have sensed what I was thinking because he came out of his huff to say, ‘I realise that for the likes of you, for whom all art must be pre-delivered cut and dried, a masterwork such as the Von Fremdenplatz is an unknowable quantity. After all, it has no famous name on the cover, no reviews from high-faluting critics, and has not been accepted by one of the so-called major publishing houses.’

  I suspected from the strain in Frant’s voice as he all but spat out his words that he was thinking not so much of the Von Fremdenplatz as his own, even more obscure, unknowable quantities.

  ‘But how can it be a work of art if nobody knows what it is?’ I said. ‘Yes, it could be a masterpiece as you say, but it could equally be some random nonsense.’

  Frant’s expression soured. ‘Some random nonsense?’ he squealed, his face almost as purple as his drink. ‘Some random nonsense?! Look!’

  He pulled out some sheets of paper from his jacket. They were computer-printed excerpts from the Von Fremdenplatz.

  ‘Observe the wealth of detail!’ he all but shouted. ‘Realise the effort that has gone into this! Oh, it might be random nonsense to a plodder like you, but to the discerning eye this is a significant contribution to art and culture!’

  I took one of the sheets of paper from his trembling fingers. ‘To the undiscerning eye,’ I said, ‘it appears to be a mishmash of old photographs and paintings, with funny writing underneath.’

  Frant went up another shade on the purple spectrum. ‘All art is useless!’ he shouted. ‘Oscar Wilde said that!’ Signalling for another drink, he turned away from me. I shrugged inwardly – a moment’s peace and quiet, however fraught, was always welcome – and studied the print-outs again. There were footnotes appended by a third party, which fortunately for my sanity were written in a real language. While favourable to the Von Fremdenplatz, they were also written calmly and clearly, and made no claims for the documents to be a cornerstone of Western civilisation or anything like that. The anonymous author did, however, make several points in the documents’ favour. They drew the reader’s attention to the quality of paper used, the attention to detail, and the sheer epic nature of the work – apparently the documents were over 1000 pages long, with a style and orthography both more consistent than that used in the King James Bible.

  Even if it was, as I had suggested to Frant, complete nonsense from start to finish, it was complete nonsense on a scale that was both highly professional and almost luxurious in its scope. I could see the appeal of the documents, and how their mysterious nature and – I supposed I had to admit – peculiar beauty might cause people to become fascinated with them. Much to my surprise, I found that I was looking forward to seeing the Von Fremdenplatz documents. I said as much to the back of Frant’s head, and was rewarded with a grunt.

  A few seconds later, he turned around and said, ‘I suppose even a philistine can see the attraction of a diamond in the dust.’

  ‘Yes, quite,’ I said. ‘Now it’s getting late. Shall we go back to the hotel and get some rest?’

  ‘I was just about to suggest that,’ said Frant. ‘I shall telephone the institute tomorrow morning and confirm our appointment.’

  I couldn’t be bothered to ask him what ‘the institute’ was, and anyway I guessed I would be finding out for myself in the morning, so I finished my drink and paid up (Frant’s money belt was obviously inaccessible at that
moment).

  We left the bar and walked down the street back towards our hotel. Frant had clearly decided to forgive me for my earlier remarks and was in an effusive mood, probably because he’d had a lot of purple drinks.

  ‘Do you know what the French call this time of night?’ he asked.

  I assumed he was being rhetorical and hadn’t just forgotten what I did for a living. I must have been right, because almost without a pause he answered himself.

  ‘Le crépuscule,’ he said. ‘Such an odd word, don’t you think? It does double duty for both “sunrise” and “sunset”, which suggests to me not so much a linguistic idleness on the part of les Français as a typically Gallic indifference to an irrelevant distinction. The French are saying, it seems to me, that it makes no odds whether le crépuscule occurs at day’s end or its beginning. What concerns them it is its intrinsic nature, which is itself contained in the word crépuscule, a shadowy, sinister-sounding combination of syllables to my ears.’

  I agreed with him about the sunset part, but found it hard to see anything sinister in sunrise, which generally gives way, as its name suggests, to the arrival of the sun and the removal of shadows. But he was enjoying himself and wasn’t actually insulting me, so I let him burble on all the way back to the hotel, where he hiccuped, tipped his fedora to me, and said goodnight.

  I wasn’t particularly tired, so I asked at reception if there was a bar in the hotel. The concierge jerked a finger in the direction of a tiny corner with a potted plant and some tables, and I went over and ordered a martini. I still had the Von Fremdenplatz print-out in my jacket and so I sat down at a small table and flattened them out in front of me. Creased and blurry from Frant’s cheap printer, the images on the sheets of paper before me were still impressive in their range and imaginative scope. I couldn’t imagine what sort of person would devote years of their life to putting something like this together – and it would clearly have to be years, judging by both the quantity and the quality of the documents.