Waking Caliban

by Mike Cartlidge

  That, though, was about as far as I could work things through. I made it back home without anyone else attempting to kidnap me and sat in the front room, reading George’s Sunday Times and doing my best to concentrate on its review of world affairs. Around me, sunbeams shone through a stained-glass panel in the front window and red and blue splinters of light flickered amongst the room’s eccentric fittings. After a few minutes, I realized I was reading the same paragraph of the newspaper for the third time and put it down next to the chair. Brabant poked his shaved head around the door and raised one eyebrow. I gave him a wave and he shrugged his great muscled shoulders and carried on with whatever he was doing.

  Eleven o’clock came and went and it was another twenty minutes before I heard the rap of George’s bronze knocker. When I opened the front door, Miranda was standing on the top step wearing a lightweight dress that molded to her waist and thighs. Yellow, again. Maybe she thought it was ‘her’ color. Her eyes fastened on mine and she smiled that intriguing smile, upturned corners of her mouth, dimples in her lower cheeks. She walked through the door like a languorous leopard, her perfume wafting over me, the back of her hand brushing against mine.

  I showed her into George’s salon, and poured us both coffee. When I invited her to sit, she shook her head and, holding her cup between her hands, went to stand in front of the big fireplace. I stood beside her. She studied my face. Without thinking about it, I raised my hand to the grazed skin on my cheek.

  “I had a disagreement with someone,” I explained.

  She pouted. “Poor dear. Someone you know?”

  “It could have been the local neighborhood support. They’re a militant bunch round here.”

  “The feared Vigilantes of Knightsbridge, huh?”

  “Scary dudes. Some of them are still below retirement age.”

  “Who were they really?”

  “I’d seen them before, but I really don’t know who they are. If I did, I’d pay them a return visit.”

  She placed the coffee cup down on a table and stepped closer to me. “I guess you figure…”

  “My friendly local muggers may have some connection with everything else that’s been going on since this all started? The thought had occurred.”

  “So how did they know where to find you?”

  “I think they were following me yesterday. I thought I’d shaken them off. Obviously they were a bit sharper than I thought.”

  “What do you think they were after?”

  “They wanted me to take a little ride with them so it’s possible they planned to take me somewhere quiet and see what they could get out of me. Either that,” I said slowly, “or they wanted to make sure I couldn’t talk to anyone else.”

  She frowned. Tiny lines appeared in the otherwise smooth skin of her forehead. “But you’re OK?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m pleased to hear that. I’ve become very attached to you, Hastings.” The frown disappeared and she smiled at me again. I asked myself how far I could trust her and decided it was about as far as I could drop-kick an Abrams tank. I wondered if it mattered. This woman seemed more fascinating every time I saw her. I had an almost-overwhelming urge to put my arms around her and told myself that there was nothing as pathetic as a lapsed cynic.

  “So,” she said, “when we spoke last night, you said you’d tell me whether you saw the late Dr Marr before he died.”

  “Actually, you asked me if I would and I didn’t get around to answering.”

  “You won’t hold out on me though, will you? We’re practically partners, Hastings. More than that. Soul-mates. Did you see him?”

  “The police asked me the same thing. I told them I’d never met him.”

  She grinned and stepped closer, running her fingertips along the collar of my shirt. Her lips were inches from my left ear. “So you did see him.”

  “How do you work that out?”

  “Why, I always think you should tell the police the opposite of the truth.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “If everyone told them the truth all the time, they’d have nothing to do, would they? No cases to solve. All the detectives would be out of work.”

  “It’s nice that you’re so considerate.”

  “I can’t help it. You see what a great girl I am? So, you got the Shakespeare papers from Marr…”

  “You’re jumping ahead. I still haven’t admitted anything.”

  She pursed her lips as if she was exasperated and moved back a few inches. I refused to feel disappointed and watched her as she looked around, her attention apparently caught by the rug that was spread out on the floor, in front of the fireplace. It was an Indian antique that George had found up in a bazaar in Calcutta: it depicted Hindu gods engaged in improbably gymnastic acts of sexual congress. I coughed and she raised her eyes slowly back to mine. The familiar strand of hair fell across her face and, abruptly, the temptress act vanished and, standing there in George’s salon, with a backdrop of velvet drapes, gaudy tapestries and lurid paintings, she looked innocent as a nun, fresh as a newly-minted angel. Even the statue of the young girl looked sordid next to her.

  “The papers won’t be much use to a layman,” she said. “According to my information, they’re mostly in Latin. I don’t suppose you learnt Latin at school?”

  “Actually, I did. But I was lousy at it. I always sat at the back and read comics under the desk.”

  “Dirty magazines, too, I bet. Shame on you. Still. I can get the papers translated for you, Hastings. I know reliable people.”

  “I’d be happy to give them to you if I had them.”

  She breathed out in frustration and turned towards the fireplace, standing with her back to me, twisting a loose strand of hair between her fingers.

  “What’s so special about these papers anyway?” I asked

  “If the papers are what I think they are, they include Shakespeare’s will, written in his own hand.”

  “What else?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said the papers ‘include Shakespeare’s will’. What else do they contain?”

  “I don’t know for sure. There could be other documents but my sources haven’t been able to tell me what they might be.”

  “This little parcel would be quite valuable, I suppose.”

  She turned back towards me. The ingénue act was gone now, her expression one of scholarly censure. “We’re talking about a discovery of unparalleled literary and aesthetic significance. It’s an artistic legacy that rightly belongs to the world. Trying to reduce its importance to mere dollars and cents is distasteful and unworthy of you.”

  “So it’s worth a bundle then?”

  She grinned. “Two bundles, with any luck.”

  “So, if I could lay my hands on these papers, it would be a good idea for me to take them to someone who’d know what to do with them? The British Museum, perhaps?”

  “Come on, Hastings, you’re offending my sense of fair play.”

  “What’s wrong with the British Museum?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s a fine institution, in its way. And I’m sure they’d reward you generously for your donation. Like, if you wanted to make enough to buy yourself a new moped, I’m sure you’d be half-way there.”

  “As it happens, I’ve been saving up to buy my own moped.”

  “Yeah, I picked you for the sophisticated road user right from the start. Look, Hastings, it’s like I told you the other night. I act as a broker for wealthy collectors. I know a man who’d be real interested in acquiring the papers.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s a collector. He’s also filthy rich, baby.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Wow, no, he doesn’t. I guess his parents forgot to give him one.”

  “So you’re not going to tell me who he is?”

  She crossed her arms and the fingers of her left hand beat a small rhythm on her elbow. “Yeah, like, spill everything
so you can go to him direct and cut me out of the deal?”

  “Do you think this man would know anything about the murders in Stratford?”

  Her face clouded. “He isn’t even in the country.”

  “That wouldn’t stop him hiring people to do his dirty work for him.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t him. My guess, though, is that he’d have a real good idea who it was. He’s a man who has his finger on the pulse, know what I mean? Work with me on this and you can ask him yourself.” She half-turned away again and I got the impression that she was considering what to tell me next . “That’s not all you can get from talking to him. This man told me that if the papers are genuine, he’d definitely want to buy them. He told me he’d pay two million bucks for them.”

  I walked across the room, ostensibly to fetch more coffee but more to give myself time to consider what she’d said. At that moment, a couple of the house’s girls strolled in, both of them stretching like cats fresh from a lunchtime nap. Ursula was wearing a dressing gown, all lace and black finery, but Helena wore only a baby-doll negligee, short and transparent. I introduced both girls to Miranda and she stepped away from the fireplace and shook their hands, her expression just the amused side of neutral.

  Ursula and Helena settled themselves in George’s expansive window seat and pulled a tasseled rope. I heard the ring of a distant bell and knew that, soon, maids would bring brunch through and the smell of food would rouse the rest of the house. I was hungry myself but I figured Miranda and I needed a private place to continue our discussion. I asked her if she wanted to go out for an early lunch but she declined, saying she’d promised to meet a girl-friend, so we refilled our coffee cups and I led her through the house to the back door.

  George had had the rear garden landscaped to match various of her favorite fantasy worlds. Previously, she once told me, it had been a neglected mess, patchy lawn and shrubs, flower beds overgrown with weeds, even the remains of an old World War Two air raid shelter. The shelter was still there, albeit out of sight: George had once taken great delight in pushing aside one of the statues of Greek gods she’d more recently installed to show me the looming entrance to the dank, cellar-like space below. Beside the Greek deities were gushing fountains and Thai-style pagodas. A collection of plaster models of cartoon characters gathered around a table and outdoor chairs. I led Miranda past Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and we sat under the shade of a umbrella emblazoned with pictures of Homer Simpson. The sun bled color from the surrounding rooftops. I could hear the voices of children playing somewhere, the strains of a brass band from the direction of the park and a distant car alarm: the sounds of summer in the city.

  “So,” I asked her, “who’s the dude with the millions?”

  She grinned and, reaching into her handbag, pulled out a pair of sunglasses which she pushed onto her nose. California beach girl was back. “Not so fast. I want a deal, OK? We take the money and split it eighty-twenty.”

  “Eighty per cent for me?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “Seventy-thirty.”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “Sixty-forty.”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “You just don’t get this bargaining business, do you Hastings? OK, we go halves.”

  “A million each?”

  “Sure. Go crazy. Buy yourself a gold-plated moped. Buy your friend here a giant-size statue of Roger Rabbit.” She leaned forward and rested her hand on my arm. “Listen, Hastings, you got the goods and I got the contacts. We need each other. What do you say? Partners?”

  I looked around at George’s garden of earthly delights. “OK,” I said, “you’ve got a deal.”

  “You have the papers?”

  “They’re in a safe place.”

  She squinted at me over her sunglasses. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “That’s pretty good coming from you.”

  “I only lied when I didn’t know you, Hastings. Now we’ve come to be so close I’d be devastated if you said you were still holding that against me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “That’s a great relief.”

  “So you must know you can trust me too.”

  She brushed her hand along my arm and smiled sweetly. “Reassure me anyway.”

  “I’m prepared to let you make all the arrangements and be by my side through it all. That’s about as good as I can offer you.”

  “You could let me have the papers now.”

  “That’s a great idea.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “They’re probably safer where they are.” I sat back in my chair. “So, who’s your buyer?”

  She withdrew her hand and pouted. “His name is Ghassan Salim. He’s a businessman and Shakespeare nut.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “He’s Lebanese, but he lives in the States now. Upstate New York.”

  “Safer than Beirut.”

  “I guess. If you can dodge the Deliverance-style in-bred locals.”

  A ladybird landed on my knee. I watched it crawl along the seam in my track pants and then pushed my finger in front of it so that it climbed up onto the nail.

  “My Mom always told me that was a sign that you had a faithful heart,” she said. “To have a ladybug land on you, that is.”

  “So,” I prompted. “Ghassan Salim?”

  “He’s heard about the papers.”

  “How would he have done that?”

  “When I last talked to him, on the phone, he told me that Robert Roden had told him all about them.” She looked across at one of George’s fountains which bubbled happily away, the water running from the genitals of a well-endowed Hercules into a small pond where plastic frogs perched on lily pads. She was as inscrutable as a Mississippi river boat gambler with a royal flush. “Mr. Salim believes there’s a possibility that the papers are genuine. He believes the will is one that Shakespeare copied out himself, when he was dying, and delivered to a friend for safe keeping.”

  “Hamnet Sadler.”

  She nodded. “Seems Sadler was a lifetime buddy of Shakespeare’s.”

  “What of the other documents?”

  “The most important of them is a testament of some sort that was attached to the hand-written will. There were rumors of the testament’s existence after Shakespeare’s death but the document’s never come to light.”

  “If Shakespeare had already written his will, then what was this ‘testament’ about?”

  “There are all sorts of theories. Salim thinks it records Shakespeare’s thoughts about his life, or about his philosophy or some such. The thing is, if he wrote about his life, the information would be amazingly valuable to scholars. Salim said it could solve a whole mess of mysteries about the man.”

  “And this character Salim is prepared to pay all that money to own these documents?”

  “He told me when I spoke to him on the phone that his interests are purely altruistic.” She paused and blew a small fly from the lens of her sunglasses before pushing them back onto her nose. “I guess you can make of that what you will. You’ll be interested to know that he also said that, if his experts could prove the documents’ authenticity, he’d donate them to the British Museum. He said he was getting involved because other people were trying to obtain the papers for their own private collections.”

  “And do you believe him?”

  She shrugged. The ladybird got tired with exploring my hand and, slipping its wings from under its carapace, fluttered off to land on top of a statue of Pan.

  “Two million dollars,” I said, “is a lot of altruism.”

  She gazed at me for a second. “I don’t care, Hastings. There. We’re being honest with each other, right? I’m a businesswoman. I don’t give a damn what Salim does with the papers, once he has them. All I’m interested in is getting an electronic transfer of funds from his bank account to mine. That’s what’ll make me happy.”

>   I let her stew for a moment, standing up and walking a short way away from her before turning back. “OK, how do we do this?”

  She stood up and walked towards me until she was almost in my shadow. I could smell her perfume again, faint as the essence of roses on a springtime breeze. She slipped off her sunglasses and her eyes held mine. “We go see him together. We do everything together. I’ll set up the deal and you make like a bodyguard and keep us safe. And when we’ve got the money, we’ll split it right down the middle.”

  She turned towards the back door, the beach girl act all gone and the brisk dealmaker in its place. “I’ll have to let you know the arrangements. I guess you’ve got an up-to-date passport?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  She paused by the back door and waited for me to catch up with her. “Like I said before, Salim lives in the States. He prefers not to travel. He’ll want us to go there.”

  “My passport’s current, all right. Trouble is, the Stratford police told me not to leave the country.”

  “And they’ll have your number in all their computers at the airport, huh? Gee, that’s too bad. You’ll have to give me the papers and let me go on my own.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “Where there’s a will…”

  She groaned. “That’s a terrible pun.”

  “It was completely unintentional but I apologies anyway.”

  Chapter 20

  I considered the likelihood that the police would have issued an alert on my passport and decided I’d become washing machine salesman Peter Millard for a few days. I took a taxi to Victoria Station and retrieved the false passport from the suitcase in the left luggage office, making sure the original Shakespeare papers were still safe in their hiding place.

  Back home in my room, I restarted my computer and, for the next four hours, laboriously copied words and phrases from the documents I’d scanned earlier onto a Word file. It was a difficult and frustrating task. The writing was hard to read and, even though my schoolboy knowledge of Latin began to return, it was hard to know whether or not my transcripts were correct. They would, however, have to do.