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98.4

Page 7

by Christopher Hodder-Williams


  I did so. And there was a lot of gurgling all round.

  ‘Don’t forget to wash behind the ears.’

  I was ready for her with a new tape in the Black Box. And decent. I thought she looked better. No mention was made of her spell in hospital ... in whichever sense.

  After agreeable preliminaries I asked: ‘Did you guess I was bugged?’

  ‘Yes ... when you didn’t answer. But what’s in that contraption?’

  ‘My heartbeat.’

  ‘Stop kidding me. You with your drainplugs.’

  ‘Interesting plumbing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Fascinating. Can you take me out? I want to shop at Harrods.’

  ‘Soon as I get dressed.’

  We went to that prim little health bar by the Flowers. Some vegetables were squelched in a whirring machine and I said: ‘You couldn’t have chosen a more dangerous place.’

  ‘I told you not to taunt Group Three.’ Two glasses were placed before us, the contents a brilliant green. Louise’s smile was catlike as she probed: ‘Are you saying they have spies in department stores?’

  ‘I didn’t mean them! It’s Ruth. She’s a compulsive Harrods shopper.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her expression cleared. Does she drink spinach?’

  ‘No. She buys flowers, though.’

  ‘To keep the butterflies in?

  I just gave her a look. ‘What are you going to buy?’

  ‘Nothing. You’re going to buy me a present.’

  ‘Somehow I guessed you were a woman. What present?’

  She became mysterious. ‘A record.’

  ‘Ah!’ I said. ‘I understand. A cache of Russian spies are issuing secret messages under the label of the Moscow State Orchestra. They start off all right, with a performance of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth —’

  ‘He’s only written ten.’

  ‘I know. That’s what makes it so sinister. Then, after the fifty-fourth bar, the music fades out and a voice says ‘This is Vladimor. Blow up Battersea Power Station and do the job thoroughly, this time.’ The music resumes and since only a Russian spy would think of ordering Symphony Number Fifteen nobody else gets the message.’

  She looked at me immobile with high good humour. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said, ‘you were such a nut.’ — The eyes were lovely. It was a rich moment because for five seconds everything else became unnoticeable to both of us.

  Then she got up. ‘Come on, let’s do the shopping.’

  We picked our way through a tight-mouthed posse of spoiled middle-class women. Their voices grated, exuding the harsh insensitivity of those who calculate their marriages without even knowing. They were bored and bitter and sadly underloved. One of them was ordering roses. The assistant had already a dozen in cellophane but the customer was laboriously selecting blooms she considered superior to those already bunched. The girl serving her had to unwrap the ones she had picked out, even though she had tried to point out that those of her choice would last longer. It was so easy to see that the assistant was getting bullied because she was younger, softer, prettier ... and, by some young man, worshipped.

  On the escalator I said to Louise: ‘But shopping with you is liable to be much too hazardous.’

  Why?’

  ‘That gorgeous get-up of yours looks distinctly expensive. You must have been living with millionaires.’

  ‘Many of them?’

  ‘Just a representative batch.’ Her dress was low-waisted and subtly loose, clinging only when and where elegant movements brought it in contact with contours.

  She said: ‘They really had to club together to get this. It was all of seven guineas!’

  ‘It should he illegal to Disturb the Peace with so little effort.’ I said.

  She turned face-front; but the view from where I was standing remained riveting. ‘You concentrate on carrying your conscience!’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what you’re carrying in your Black Box?’

  Then, when we reached the record department she became absorbed — almost cunning. She made me wait by a display while she crossed the floor — not towards the musical stampede of the pop-lovers as I’d expected but the haughty classics counter. Here she had a huddled conference with two girl assistants who gestured some acknowledgement, then called at somebody through the service door.

  A splosh of blond male hair bobbed over the top of it all. I thought I recognized it from somewhere. A record was slid from the rack and I was beckoned across. Then I saw who the young man was ...

  So this was how she was going to tell me things, then. Not by long explanations in words; but by pulling back a curtain, just showing a chink.

  The man was Michael Nobody.

  SIX

  He looked superciliously at the pair of us. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I would say this was a logical development. Come through.’

  Clutching the sleeve of a new long player he led the way to a special sound-booth. One or two others had drifted in with us, so this was evidently a demonstration that had been previously arranged. The time was exactly 11.30. Louise must have calculated our movements down to the second.

  While someone was putting on the record — it was a new label I hadn’t heard of — I asked Michael how long he had been working here.

  ‘I have a special arrangement with Harrods,’ he said. ‘This way I get a free audience reaction to my wares. You seem surprised, Nigel.’

  ‘I didn’t think you made classical records.’ — Was this the record I ‘ought’ to hear then? ... I couldn’t see the title on the sleeve.

  I glanced at Louise. She seemed disturbed now ... and that translucent quality of the skin revealed flecks in her complexion. It in no way marred her beauty yet my pulse went up in anxiety for her.

  Suddenly the music came.

  I have never heard mechanical reproduction with anything like the purity that this record achieved — and I thought I knew something about electronics. Nor was I the only customer in there to witness the difference between this sound and all others. An excited little gathering formed around the set and incredulous voices asked how long the record had been issued. Even the pop enthusiasts, formerly lingering at the Top Twenty rack, were drawn to it. A youngster with long hair whispered to me: ‘What is it they’re playing?’

  ‘The Planets — Holst.’

  ‘Man!’ he said. ‘What a sound!’

  Michael sidled up to me while Louise was out of earshot. He’d left his shop-personality at the counter and the former bitchiness showed through. ‘Stergen wouldn’t like it,’ he said, ‘if he knew you were here.’

  ‘Unless you tell him, why should he know?’

  ‘Oh, I play it alone. There’s something exquisitely tantalizing about watching people on a collision course. Your snooping doesn’t really worry me. You interested in my recording techniques?’

  ‘Who wouldn’t be?’

  ‘I’m flattered. I have a group doing a big TV special. It goes on the air next week, on Wednesday.’ He handed me a couple of tickets. ‘Bring Louise.’

  I pocketed them. ‘I might, thanks.’ — I was sure, now, that I’d seen Michael Nobody before the encounter at Elstree. You simply couldn’t miss the sheer arrogance in the face. ‘When,’ I asked him, ‘did you first go to Elstree? Did I see you around when I was with Group Two?’

  He answered with a great air of innocence: ‘The gates, by divine order of the gods, are kept quite exceptionally shut. But you know that.’

  ‘Still ... I did find your limerick on Stavely’s blotter.’

  ‘As I said, it’s done the rounds. Excuse me? — ’ He reapplied the salesman’s grin and slithered off. Soon he was talking to a group of visiting technicians. You could hear the shrill pitch of his voice lifting over the top of the others.

  Over in the main body of the listening room the music had reached that weird, incredible passage entitled Neptune. Employing a heavenly choir in the early 1900s long before movie moguls made such a habit of it. Holst had succeeded in triggering some remote nerv
e that vibrated from the extraordinary sense of spacial detachment he created. The hair on the nape of the neck tingled and I looked across at Louise, who held my gaze from a distance without revealing any response. Then the voices faded away, like a lost planet floating for ever out of orbit. Louise turned, walked slowly back towards the escalator, then waited for me at the far end of the record section.

  But when I caught her up her mood had clicked back to formal. She was a svelte, proud shopper and she met my enquiring look with a question of her own. ‘What were you saying to Michael?’

  We jumped on the escalator. Louise leading, and started the ride down. I told her the gist, and added thoughtfully: ‘In an odd sort of way he’s egging me on.’

  She said wickedly: ‘That would be odd indeed!’

  I grinned: ‘He loves me ... he loves me not. It’s a possibility. What I really meant was —’

  ‘I know what you meant. You mean he wants you to be interested in the recording angle’

  ‘ — rather than anything else? ... A sort of decoy — I wonder. But how the hell was that record made? It sounded almost more real than the real thing.’

  Her answer should have been a joke. What was missing was the smile to go with it. ‘They used an organic microphone when they took the recording.’ Somebody coming down the escalator dropped a parcel. Mechanically I picked it up. Louise waited, then went on: ‘A pair of human ears, wired in stereo.’

  ‘For that,’ I said, in the same factual tone as she had used, ‘you’d need virtually the whole human brain. Ears don’t work any other way:’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  The rumbling of the escalator seemed immensely significant at that point. That something purely mechanical could continue running exactly as it had provided something to cling to. Thorne had not been very much on my mind of late; I suppose the whole idea of messing about with people’s brains by means of surgery is so obscene that it doesn’t seem real.

  But I caught a look in Louise’s face just then that I hadn’t seen before ... a new brand of doom that was unique. Prior to this moment of truth her sophisticated personality — like her skin, which suggested a mythical pink avocado — had concealed what lay underneath. I had been only too happy to be deceived.

  I said soberly: ‘We’d better go and find a drink.’

  We did, in some bar; but there wasn’t long because the Black Box was running out of tape. She understood; and told me quickly that there was to be a live performance of The Planets at the Royal Festival Hall the following evening.

  The timing seemed far too much of a coincidence. And in any case, though she wanted to go with me, I felt that to appear in public together when there was obviously a link between the concert and all else was asking for trouble.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We could sit in different parts of the hall. Then meet afterwards.’

  I thought a moment. ‘Yes ... But I’ll have to take the official bleeper. If someone sees me there listening to music, only to find that I’m having some imaginary conversation, that’s that.’

  She said: ‘Simple, darling. Have Henry close to your heart for the concert, then switch to the Black Box afterwards. That can be in the car. You’d better tell me exactly where you’ll be parked.’

  ‘Will do ...’

  That kiss had me reeling and I shall never forget it.

  *

  A colleague of mine in army intelligence once told me he used to bring on nightmares deliberately if he wanted the solution to some problem. He would gobble huge quantities of cheese, slam all the windows shut and turn the heaters full on. Frequently a dream would symbolically present the answer. Personally I think he was a bit off his head. In my uneasy world of secrets you can get that way.

  All the same, I did have a nightmare that night and it did help me remember something.

  I dreamed I was trapped in that helical piece of hell in the underground place at Bishops Bight. Holst’s massive music was thundering around me and I came to the tunnel mouth where in the real situation I had been intercepted by Tim Fine.

  Instead of him, the dream substituted a horde of huge beetles. They entered the corkscrew in sequence, marching absurdly to the tune of Uranus and taking the twisting course of the helix which had now become a transparent plastic hose.

  At the abrupt fortissimo crash there came a panicky time-jump in the dream; and the ensuing sustenato sketched a floating, psychedelic world in which everything swirled.

  The picture gradually cleared; and now I saw two of the giant creatures strapped inside the two disembodied surgery-bubbles. They glistened there on their backs, while overhead the mechanical hands of the automated theatre probed them in ghastly mime to the music.

  Dimly I could see three faces peering from the glass window of the control booth. They were quite motionless and indistinct ... and at this moment without identity.

  Suddenly I saw that the beetles were without heads. I shouted something — a warning — which rang crazily around the Helical, getting progressively louder. And for some reason I dashed into the control room. Stergen wasn’t there. Instead there were three people — only they seemed to be like symbolic masks ... hollow, eyeless caricatures from the past. The one on the left represented Michael. On the right was a woman. Her face signified tragedy. I knew her. At centre was the corrupt, happy-mask of a Business Pimp — Vince Halliard. And with a Riviera grin on his face he slowly pointed towards me with a great elongated hand. ‘Welcome to St Tropez,’ he said. Only the dead mouth hadn’t moved.

  I awoke in a sweat bath, plied myself with coffee and prised off the masks. They belonged to my hidden memories. I was being forced back in time whether I liked it or not.

  *

  I started with the woman on the right. This was Jemma Schwartz — rich, American, miserable and screamingly neurotic. If you ignored the appalling state of her skin she was not ugly; if you ignored her drinking and the manner that went with it she was not unpleasant. You could lay her if there wasn’t a pretty girl around. She was like that.

  She’d summoned me to her sumptuous flat for a private drink. This place was all got up in white, too ...

  ‘You,’ she said, ‘are extremely unimportant ... Why, you’re almost the least important guy I ever met! Right now, I need to talk to you, mostly because of that. Am I drunk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She pulled a face as if deliberately to emphasize her plainness. ‘For this, I can’t afford to be.’ She picked up a gigantic gin drink with bits of fruit in it and slung its contents at the flowers. ‘There are things going on,’ she continued, ‘which you won’t understand. One for-instance is how heiresses get milked.’

  ‘Just one thing, Miss Schwartz’

  ‘— “Miss Schwartz”? — Now, come on!’

  ‘... Jemma. If you’re going to be indiscreet, don’t forget I’m supposed to take care of security in my company.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that? ... I’ve had your company bugged these last three months.’

  I said: ‘I didn’t know you were involved in the proposed merger.’

  ‘Nor,’ she exclaimed, ‘did I! At first. I knew certain things. I knew that your group — headed by the unimpeachable Lord Dineham —’

  Her sarcasm was so heavy I was startled. ‘You don’t trust him?’

  ‘Shut up and listen? — I knew on the one hand your outfit was after a big development contract with the United States. I knew on the other that the one-horse mincing machine of which Stergen turns the handle had the know-how. Thus and thus I knew that neither lot can place the order without the other. The question that poor old Jemma was asking herself, though, was why couldn’t they just kind of get together? What was to stop them merging just for the fun of it?’

  I said: ‘Because there are many companies tendering for the American contract and every one of them needs to own Stergen before they land the fish.’

  She nodded once. ‘I know that now. I know that Stergen, heavily disguised a
s a dedicated saint, is not only greedy but insanely ambitious. He wants power ... Listen! I’m rich and I have power and I hate it. It’s driven every man away for various reasons. All except one.’

  ‘Vince.’

  ‘Right. The athletic-looking aide-de-camp of the great Eustace Stergen. Listen ...’ She lurched towards the drink table as a reflex, stopped herself with a sardonic gesture, picked up a photograph frame and stared at the picture. From where I stood I couldn’t see who it was. ‘At first I thought Vince was simply living off me. And really he seemed’ — a futile gesture — ‘... quite cheap. He’d been adorning my apartment for a while and ... you know; I’m ugly and he’s pretty and we kind of made a deal where I got him trade price. I didn’t pick up enough checks while he played lover boy over me. And look at me!’

  ‘You’re not ugly. You’re out of hand.’

  ‘Thanks, but will you listen? ... From the first he milked me just enough to be insulting without being nearly enough to be commercial and I figured our Vince — our dear, dear Vince, who got your job and whom we will spare somewhat in this interview — was a puzzling one. He panned out wrong in the ratings list. And you sure get to rate them. The tall thin ones, like Vince, normally are expensive and the short fat ones are cheap.

  ‘I started trying to figure out why a high grade gigolo was available at a discount. He was okay sexwise and made love like everyone else makes love — adequately. How well do you make love?’

  ‘Adequately.’

  ‘Right. They all do. So what was wrong?’ Her screwed up little face showed torment. I could see from her look that the photograph wasn’t of Vince; on the contrary this was evidently someone she regarded as his victim. Now, she tapped the frame in bitter agitation. ‘I’ll tell you what was wrong! Vince Halliard, he makes deals that are so ugly he doesn’t need the respectable negotiations of any gigolo.’

  ‘What sort of deals?’

  ‘Wait a minute! It didn’t show so much, at first. In my Fifth Avenue little world there’s an unspoken code: you must be corrupt to a degree so that you do not embarrass everyone else by unwanted Puritanism. So you go just so far, right? I packed Vince in his cradle and nursed him over to New York a couple of times and he got on fine. He seemed no more and no less corrupt than anyone else. So I trusted him. Paid for his little ticket, dressed him up for the right parties and bought him a cute pair of trunks for Bermuda. He swam around, happy as a sandboy.’

 

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