‘Wait fifteen minutes, then send the woman to me,’ Barron said.
‘Of course.’ Schialli went out.
Barron sipped the drink and moved around the room, which was furnished in an eclectic way with pieces purchased here in Venice. There might have been an uneasy juxtaposition of periods in the eye of an antique dealer, but Barron bought whatever appealed to him. A room was your own because you made it so. It was the same with the world, he thought. It was whatever you wanted it to be – if you had the power and the urge to shape it.
He wandered for a time, rippling the keys of a seventeenth-century spinet that occupied the window space where amber and claret brocade curtains hung. Possessions and belongings: one might enjoy them, but never to the point where they owned you. Everything was dispensable in the end. Everything could be returned to the auction room. He went back to the fireplace, the mantelpiece of which was littered with framed photographs.
There was a picture of Barron arm-wrestling with the late Ferdinand Marcos in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. In the shot Marcos is smiling, but behind the smile is the stress of a man whose machismo is on trial. There was another of him dancing with Imelda at her private disco in the Malacanang Palace during the dizzily surreal days of her reign when, taking time out from grandiose schemes of building monuments to herself, all she did was dance and sing ‘The Impossible Dream’. He still sent her Christmas cards, hand-printed for him by a small company in Macon, Georgia. A third photograph was of Barron with Fidel Castro in the courtyard of a whitewashed house in the Granma Province of Cuba. Fidel, unsmiling, has one hand laid on Barron’s arm in a gesture that appears to suggest restraint. The last picture was of Barron in the company of William J. Caan, the United States Ambassador to Britain. Good old Bill has his arm linked with Barron’s in the shot, the big breezy ambassadorial smile in place.
Somebody had once half-jestingly said of Barron that he knew everybody in the world. He was on first-name terms with a variety of pols and show-business sorts. He’d known Visconti and Truffaut. He’d spent time in the company of Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Jerry Brown. Barron seemed to exist in that shadowland of fame where politics and show business become one and the same, that place of dreams and power. He’d fallen under the spell of this hinterland; its landscape enchanted him. Men of power had about them a special presence. They moved through the world with a disregard for the banal demands of life. They rose above the commonplace; they ascended into their own heavens.
Barron saw his reflection in a mirror over the mantelpiece. No matter the season, he always had a suntan. He habitually wore white or beige suits to underline his bronzed features. He seemed never to age. Rumours of surgical adjustment were always smilingly denied. Despite his public image, he remained a private man. He was congenial, wealthy, handsome, he had a marvellously photogenic face – but what did anybody really know about him? Where did his bucks come from? How did he get to be such a high-roller?
On the dinner circuit that rolled from Gstaad to Aspen and then to Monte Carlo, there were those who said he’d inherited wealth, while others spoke of a portfolio – suspect, nefarious – put together over a period of twenty years; there was also a wildly implausible story in which he’d gained access to Marcos’s legendary cache of Japanese gold. None of these rumours had any basis in truth.
As for his origins, he always said he came from the obscure Californian town of San Luis Obispo, but he’d never been near the place, never seen pictures of it. In the end he was a mystery.
And that was precisely the way he wanted it.
He turned away from the photographs and unlocked the door of a small antechamber, a chilly space. An electronic world map, surrounded by a dozen clocks showing the time in different parts of the planet, was located on one wall. Here and there red, yellow and green cursors blinked. These indicated the status of any project at a given time; red was the colour for a dubious area, green represented a situation already in hand, yellow stood for those places where negotiations were under way. On the surfaces of the oceans white cursors tracked the movement of ships; presently one was located off the coast of Madagascar, another in the Caribbean a hundred miles from Cuba, still another in the Baltic, about seventy miles from Tallinn. A fourth was cruising the Adriatic. The direction of land traffic – trains, trucks – was indicated by orange cursors, which flickered in such places as South Africa, Guatemala, Angola and Afghanistan.
Shelves were lined with computer equipment, video consoles, a couple of laser printers, three fax machines. He had rooms similar to this in all his other properties; machines interfaced with other machines, as if in some form of electronic polygamy. Barron’s world was wired, and the wires carried all manner of information. He looked at the messages that had come in over the faxes.
These fell into four broad categories. Some were detailed accounts of incidents in various parts of the world – a mass grave of women and children freshly dug up in Bosnia, the resurgence of the Communist party in various parts of what had once been the Soviet Union, a bloody uprising of the People’s Army in the southern Philippines, the deaths of seventeen blacks at the hands of right-wing extremists in Durban, two hundred dead during ethnic violence in eastern Zaire: these reports might have come from an exceptionally well-informed wire service, except that the correspondents were not employed by Reuters or Associated Press. They were not from journalists accredited in any sense of the word.
The second category consisted of analyses created by experts paid by Barron; computer-generated predictions concerning the possible outcomes of crises in places like Georgia, Nigeria, the Lebanon, Bosnia, Somalia, Northern Ireland. Key figures involved in these disputes – politicians, dictators, potentates, warlords, gangsters and miscellaneous scum – were meticulously profiled. Barron always read these reports carefully.
The third category of message were requests for assistance, sometimes in the form of money. The final classification, no less important than the others, concerned logistics, the movement of trains and trucks and ships, timetables.
Barron regarded all these messages for a while. As he did so, he was struck by the range of human dreams and aspirations. He considered his own role a moment. He was the man who provided the fuel for dreams. What did the nature of the dreams themselves matter? He saw himself sometimes as an illusionist, a magician whose art lay in imbuing dreams with substance, a shaper of other people’s worlds. It was as if he were at the centre of some enormous board-game whose rules he had devised himself. He brooded over this board, shifted this or that piece, studied the consequences of each move; unlike other games, there were no black or white pieces, no forces set in opposition to each other, no sides he favoured.
He turned off the light, locked the antechamber. Inside the drawing-room the woman was waiting for him. He went toward her, took her hand and kissed it.
‘You’re cold,’ he said.
The woman smiled a little forlornly. He drew her toward a sofa in front of the fireplace. The material of her blouse was icy to his touch. He observed her beautiful face which, already lightly touched by the process of aging, had begun to show small lines – but these contrived to add a dimension to her loveliness. Some women were destined to spectacular maturity.
‘Drink?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I think not. I’m not in the mood.’
He finished his negroni. ‘What mood are you in?’
She shrugged. ‘Hard to say.’
‘Ambivalent.’
‘Call it that.’
‘You should never be ambivalent in Venice,’ he remarked. He observed her briefly. What this room needed was genuine firelight, flames that would enhance the woman’s features. There was some danger in her expression, a cutting brittle quality. He knew she was in a state of some withdrawal. She had these times in which she abandoned any known reality and retreated to a place of her own making. He could never quite follow her down these mazy trails. He could never altogether imagine the insi
de of her head. She was beyond classification, a caller from another planet.
He mixed himself a second negroni – campari, a splash of vermouth, a generous quantity of gin. The woman watched him and thought: How typical of Barron to come out with a remark like that. You should never be ambivalent in Venice. It had a quiet certitude to it. It was the way he said so many things. He was so sure of himself. Cocksure. She stood up, pressed the palms of her hands against her thighs, felt the lambswool of her navy-blue skirt create a friction against her legs. She approached him, laid her face against his shoulder. The bronze of his skin seemed to emit a form of energy.
He put his hand against the side of her face. She always sent little depth-charges through him. He wondered about the bizarre nature of chemistry, of human attraction, desire. He wondered about love, if it were merely a matter of musks that stimulated certain areas of the brain. Did he love this woman? The question was unanswerable. All he could ever safely admit was that she held a deep fascination for him, that when it came to her he’d developed an uncharacteristic blind spot, that he experienced unexpected urges to protect her, both from the world and from herself.
‘I’m not sure I’m enjoying your mood,’ he said. ‘You’re too introspective. Too languid. If that’s the word.’
She wandered away from him, studied the pictures on the mantelpiece. ‘Why do you need these things?’ she asked.
‘My public persona needs them.’
‘And is there really such a difference between the public Barron and the private one?’
He stirred his drink. ‘You know that by this time.’
‘I’m not sure I really know anything.’
He said nothing. She’d never asked about his life, his past, his origins. It was as if she wanted him to have no beginnings.
‘I always think these photographs suggest a weakness,’ she said.
‘Are you going to tell me something obvious about my base need for recognition? If you are, skip it. I know what the pictures mean. There’s no mystery about it. I have an ego, which likes being stroked.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You have an ego.’
He caught her hand and held it against his chest. He was muscled, angular.
‘As big as your own,’ he said.
‘Maybe so.’
‘Except you’re wayward. More theatrical.’
‘And you’re not? What would you call these?’ And she gestured toward the photographs. ‘You’re a collector of famous people. What could be more theatrical?’
‘My public image is useful to me,’ he said. He gestured in a vague way.
She broke free of him, strolled the room, then she paused at the foot of the spiral staircase which led to the bedroom above. She gazed up along the intricate design of wrought iron to the shadows overhead. She thought of Barron’s oversized bed, the silken canopy, the tapestry on the wall. Turning, she parted the curtains and walked out on to the balcony overlooking the canal.
Barron followed her. They stood together in silence for a time. A couple of tarpaulined gondolas shivered like glassy black coffins on the water. The moon was flint, frosty. The night had an immeasurable density to it.
He kissed her. She turned her face to the side, gently pushed him away, shook her head.
‘It’s worse than ambivalent, I guess,’ he said.
‘You taste of gin.’
‘Since when was that a problem?’
She ran her hand over the cold balcony rail. She peered out into the darkness. She sensed the night as one might sense nearby the presence of a large, dangerous cat. Venice seemed to have a peculiarly feline quality just then, its passageways and darkened campos the hunting-grounds of foraging leopards.
He took her hand, stroked it softly. ‘Let’s go inside. Upstairs.’
She hesitated before following him. She started up the spiral staircase, then stopped halfway. She turned to look down at him, at the impossibly tanned face, the exquisitely handsome features. The sheer perfection of him scared her in some way. Nobody had any right to look like Barron. His beauty was unreasonable. And how had he stopped his internal clocks from marking their passage?
She kept climbing. When she reached the bedroom she lay down, sprawled across the bed, one leg upraised. ‘I’m not in the mood, Barron.’
‘You keep saying so.’ He stood over the bed, gazing down at her. She looked vulnerable all at once. But the trouble with her vulnerability was how it could change and become hard-edged. She was in that sense like the weather. And he had no barometer for measuring her changes.
He lit a red candle on the bedside table, sat on the edge of the mattress, slid his hand up and down the lower part of her leg. ‘Tell me what you feel,’ he said.
‘What I feel …’
He cupped his hand around her kneebone. With his other hand he picked up the candle and held it over her.
She turned to look up into his face. She knew she’d succumb to him, she understood the inevitability of it all. She watched the flame. She felt the first drip of red wax on her arm and then, as he moved the candle, the second fell across her knuckles. The wax burned, hardened on her skin as the heat dissipated. She drew the hand that held the candle closer to her face, and the shapeless hot wax slid against her cheeks, drip drip drip, each touch of heat bringing her momentary pain. She thought she felt some mild resistance in Barron, as if he wanted to set the candle aside.
‘Nearer,’ she said. ‘Closer.’
He eased her blouse away from her shoulders; hot waxy rivulets slithered toward her breasts. He worked the tips of his fingers along her inner thigh, back and forward, a gentle brushing motion. She shut her eyes and concentrated on his touch and the way wax spluttered upon her skin. She could still see the candle in her head, could still feel the heat against her face and neck.
She was losing her breath. His hand moved across her stomach and rested in the smooth flat area below the navel. She brought her hand down so that it covered his and she manoeuvred his fingers between her legs. She half-opened her eyes, drawn into the hypnotic shifting flame. She raised a hand, seized Barron’s wrist, made him bring the candle closer to her nipples. She experienced the exquisite intensity of the flame’s core, wax running and stiffening beneath her breasts, rolling and congealing on the surface of her stomach. The flame was searing, brilliant. She wanted to be sucked down into the explosive heart of it – but he set the candle back on the table and lowered his face toward her stomach. She felt his lips on her skin, his breath in her navel, and she caught his head between her hands, pushing him lower, down into herself, down into the secrets that were no longer secrets to him, but places so familiar he might have drawn maps of them from memory alone.
As if she were blind, robbed all at once of a sense, she guided his face between her legs, felt his mouth, his tongue, his teeth. It was free fall now, that loss of will and wisdom, balances upset, awareness no more than a series of fierce jolts to her nervous system. She drew herself up, her eyes still shut, and then she kneeled, pressing her face down into his groin, her fingers moving quickly, it was all haste, everything was grounded in the possibilities of the moment. Making a soft funnel of her tongue, she took him inside her mouth before he brought her face up with a mildly persistent gesture.
He gazed at the fine hair of her eyebrows, then he undid the buttons of her blouse more slowly than she liked, so she hurried him, helped him, then the room was shimmering away out of control, tilting on an unlikely axis, a contrary turning of the world outside her senses.
She felt him at the edge of entrance, that second before penetration. She heard herself say something, but the voice that emerged from her mouth wasn’t her own, she was speaking as if for somebody else, a distinct entity that existed outside of who she was. She was a disconnected sequence of impulses and thrills, a thing fragmented like stained glass struck by a shotgun. She felt him enter her. A dark scented breeze blew through her mind.
She hung to him, held him, rocked furiously against him
. She clawed his spine, dug, wanted him deeper inside her, to feel him in her womb. Indifferent to anything around her, she had the feeling she might suddenly rise and go on rising from the bed, uplifted by an enigmatic current of air. She spoke his name aloud, hearing the syllables break inside her mouth, listening to the crazy collision of vowels and consonants. But passion had no grammar, no logic, no meaning beyond itself. She drifted out over a dark promontory, a place of madness. The fall was long and heartbreaking and when it was over she lay in the kind of silence that might be the aftermath of a dream, the juncture where waking thoughts trespass on the constructs of sleep.
She didn’t move for a long time. She was aware of Barron staring at her. She edged slightly away from him now, dismayed by the disarray of her clothes, by the sight of his cock glistening against his thigh, the dark crown of hair in his groin. Her appetites devoured her; she had no escape from the boundaries of herself.
She gazed at Barron, then looked into the flame of the candle. She ran her fingers through her hair. She hated that look of content on Barron’s impossible face. That satisfaction. It was as if she’d given him a gift she never intended. Rather, it was more like he’d plundered it, seized it from her.
‘Why do you make me behave like this?’ she asked.
He said, ‘I’ve never made you do anything you didn’t want to do.’
She got up from the bed. ‘You have a hold over me and I don’t understand it. But it makes me despise myself.’
‘What hold? You’re a free agent,’ he said. ‘I don’t own you.’
She laughed at this one. A free agent. ‘All I am, Barron, is your dirty little secret. The woman who comes and goes after dark.’
He picked a flake of wax from his fingertip and said nothing.
‘We never walk together in the daylight. We don’t go to restaurants. Theatres. What the hell. I don’t think I give a shit. Not in the long run. You want to be the hot-shot. You like to have people kissing your feet.’
Jigsaw Page 4
