The Club

by Takis Würger

  I leaned my back against the tree and beckoned to the girl. She laughed. I gave her Billy’s stone and closed her fingers over it.

  The woman came running over. “Get your hands off my daughter!” Her voice was high and metallic.

  I left without looking back. I walked to the station and knew I would never return.

  Hans

  On the table in Alex’s office stood three cups of tea, but no one was drinking. Charlotte was wearing a tracksuit; she was pale and her hair looked unwashed. I wanted to put my arms around her but didn’t dare, because Alex was standing by the window.

  I told them about the girl in the gold catsuit and put the little plastic bottle on the table.

  “Have you touched it?” asked Alex.

  “No, the fingerprints should still be on it.”

  Tears were running down Charlotte’s cheeks.

  “Probably liquid ecstasy,” said Alex. She explained that this was a sexual stimulant, and often had the effect of erasing your memory. Alex said she would have the bottle analyzed in a lab, and then she wanted to find the girl in the gold catsuit.

  “No judge will condemn anyone on account of a fingerprint and a crime that wasn’t committed,” I said.

  “We don’t need a judge,” said Alex. “I know the editor-in-chief of the biggest newspaper in the country. That’s enough.”

  Charlotte picked up her tea. The china cup clattered on the saucer.

  “It’ll be over soon,” said Alex. I wasn’t sure who she was talking to.

  “One more thing, Hans, and then we’ve got it all. I need a list with the names of all the Butterflies, past and present.”

  I looked out of the window.

  “Where am I supposed to get that from?” I asked; and as I did so I realized the deception, the betrayal, would be total. I grabbed my coat from the stand and left. Charlotte caught up with me on the stairs.

  “I’m sorry about the thing with your arm,” I said.

  “My fault,” said Charlotte.

  She stopped on the step above me and put her arms around my neck. I could smell her tears. I didn’t know whether I was supporting her or she me.

  “It’s all my fault,” she said.

  “Nothing’s your fault,” I said.

  I looked out of the staircase window and saw a couple of students going into the library. I envied them. Charlotte leaned her head on my shoulder. It was a small movement.

  As soon as I was alone I called Angus Farewell at his office.

  “It’s Hans.”

  “Hans, good to hear from you. Is there something the matter with Charlotte?”

  “She’s fine. I just wanted to ask if I could drop in to see you in London. In passing.”

  I listened to my voice and wondered whether it sounded different when I was lying.

  Two days later, Farewell picked me up in the car from King’s Cross Station. It would only have been a short journey to Chelsea by Underground and bus, but he’d said it was far too complicated.

  “How’s Charlie?” he asked when we got to a traffic light.

  “Fine. She’s on the last few pages of her thesis.”

  We were sitting in the Jaguar Charlotte and I had driven to Somerset a couple of months earlier. It felt like a long time ago. I ran my hand over the old leather of the seat.

  The journey took quite a while; it was Friday, rush hour traffic. Farewell parked the car on the gravel drive in front of the house. He said we could go out onto the terrace; Joyce would make us some sandwiches. The lawn had been freshly mown. I’d always loved that smell. We sat on chairs made of tropical wood.

  “So, what can I do for you?” Farewell asked.

  “I just wanted to see you again.” My heart was pounding.

  I pulled the new bow tie out of my trouser pocket. It was a bit crumpled, and for a moment I was slightly embarrassed. I turned it over until I found the yellow butterfly. Farewell took the tie from me and ran the silk through his hands.

  “A young Butterfly,” he said. His face betrayed no emotion.

  Joyce brought a silver tray with cucumber sandwiches and asked us what we would like to drink.

  “Just sparkling water,” said Farewell. I nodded. Neither of us ate anything.

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” I said.

  Farewell handed back the tie.

  “I am. I’m pleased for you. But I’ve been hearing some worrying stories. We were wild too, forty years ago, but what I heard sounded … different.”

  There was singing coming from the kitchen; it distracted me. Farewell took a deep breath.

  “We had our fun as well, but it was more the girls who made us do it. It was a sort of game among the women—bagging one of us, getting us into bed.”

  For the sake of something to do, I took a cucumber sandwich from the tray. I wanted to get away from here, away from this man.

  Farewell grabbed my arm. “Have you done something to a girl, Hans?” he asked.

  My chin trembled for a second. This was crazy; I didn’t know what to believe any more. I shook my head. Farewell nodded.

  “Some men go a bit peculiar when they’re accepted as one of us,” he said. “The power … some men can’t deal with it. Being powerful means having to take responsibility. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “It’s like boxing. We don’t just lash out if someone gives us a nasty look in the pub. There are some things you just don’t do.”

  The cucumber sandwich had stuck in my throat; I had to wash it down with sparkling water. Farewell said he would raise the subject at the next meeting of the Club. Students weren’t allowed to come to these meetings until after they had graduated, so perhaps they weren’t aware of who exactly was in the Club and how many people’s reputations would be damaged were they to be associated with assaults on young women. He said the word “assaults” very quietly.

  “Who exactly is in the Club?” I asked, trying and failing to sound casual.

  “I’ve already told you: important people whose reputations could be damaged if their names were to be made public. But seeing as you’re family, so to speak …”

  He named a few names. I could see how pleased he was with himself. Some of them I knew, some I’d never heard of. How easy it was to deceive a person.

  I finished my sparkling water, excused myself, went to one of the bathrooms on the ground floor and typed the names into my phone. I wasn’t able to remember them all. Before I left the bathroom I ran my hand over one of the gold taps, for the last time.

  Farewell talked a bit longer, about boxing, and said I absolutely must spar a few rounds with him. I said that my nose hadn’t yet fully healed; I would come back after the summer vacation.

  The cucumber sandwiches were drying up at the edges. Farewell offered to drive me to the station, but I insisted on taking the Underground. We shook hands and said goodbye.

  “Give Charlie a kiss from me,” he said, and smiled.

  I nodded, blushing slightly. As I was walking up the drive Farewell opened the door again.

  “How’s the dinner jacket?” he called across the forecourt.

  “Wonderful,” I called back. “Wonderfully soft, thank you.”

  Angus

  Early morning, no sun, a day that began like any other. I drove to the office. I hadn’t slept much the past two nights, but I’d got used to that since my wife died. It was now more worrying if I slept a lot; that made me feel old. The previous evening I had lain awake for a long time thinking about Stichler and the Butterflies. He’d seemed nervous, and I couldn’t explain to myself why that might have been. Were he and Charlotte a couple?

  At the office I had a telephone conference with my colleagues in Sydney. Increasing yields; everything was fine. In fact, everything was always fine: I’d grown used to it. I was browsing the theatre listings on my laptop when the phone rang. One of my secretaries told me an Alexandra Birk was downstairs in reception.

  There are call
s I dread receiving, which is why I often run through them in my mind. The policeman who calls to tell me Charlotte has been in a car crash. The doctor who calls and tells me I have blood cancer. I hadn’t dreaded this call from my secretary, but when it came I knew that I should have done.

  I closed my eyes for a moment.

  “Alexandra,” I said.

  “May I show her up?” asked the secretary.

  “No,” I said quickly.

  For a moment there was silence on the line. The secretary cleared her throat. “Miss Birk says I should tell you it’s about the butterflies.” She giggled as if it were funny. Still I didn’t speak.

  Finally I said, “Show her up, please.”

  The first time we spoke to each other was at a party at St. John’s College, forty years ago. We danced a bit, I remember it clearly. She wrote me long letters; I found her attractive and a little bit strange. She wore her hair short. She came to the boxing gym a few times and wanted to train. We even sparred once. She put a lot of effort into it; she had no technique, but I let her hit me a couple of times. She punched so hard and so wildly I had to put her in a clinch. She bit my ear and whispered, “Hitting you turns me on.”

  I slept with her on the billiard table in the back room of the Pitt Club. I hadn’t planned to, but, drunk and stoned as I was, I was happy to let her drag me off the dance floor.

  She had a muscular body and no pubic hair, which seemed exotic to me at the time. The sex was good. We kissed for a long time, and then I laid her on the table. When I took off her trousers she started hitting me. I hesitated for a moment, because I didn’t know whether she was resisting or whether, for her, that was part of the fun; but she didn’t say anything, just looked at me. She hit me, then she kissed me, and with that it was clear. She was an animal, but she turned me on. Afterwards my lip was bleeding and I was still aroused.

  The next day my bow tie was missing, and I went round to knock on Alexandra’s door because I wanted to ask her if she had it. I think I smiled at her, because we both knew what had happened the previous night; there was a red mark over my left cheekbone. I had a headache, and when I saw her standing in the doorway in a baggy white T-shirt that came down to her thighs I wondered whether I really ought to go in. I asked her to return the bow tie. To my surprise she started crying; she kept saying, “You shouldn’t have done that.” I decided there and then that this woman was too unhinged for me, however good the sex had been. I was sure I’d be able to calm her down. When I left I gave her a kiss on the forehead, and as she didn’t react it seemed to me everything was OK. I would keep out of her way in future. I walked back to my room, changed my clothes, and went to Ryder & Amies to remove the swatch from the book.

  After that, when I stood at the window of my room in the evenings, I would often see Alexandra lurking in the college library, in one of the high-ceilinged rooms on an upper floor, staring out at me. I threw her letters in the bin without reading them, and after university I forgot her.

  Many years later the nighttime phone calls began. The caller never spoke, and if my wife answered they immediately hung up. If I answered, they stayed on the line. I knew it was Alexandra; I thought I recognized her breathing, but I couldn’t say that to a policeman without sounding ridiculous. One day I saw her in Charlotte’s kindergarten, standing there talking to her. Another time she walked through my garden, looking in at the windows. At that point the court issued a restraining order banning her from coming within a five-hundred-meter radius of my person. The anti-stalking legislation was only a few months old at the time, and I had to make a lot of phone calls to keep my case out of the papers. Naturally I made sure Charlotte and my wife didn’t know about it.

  I heard nothing more of Alexandra until Charlotte told me who she wanted to supervise her PhD. I asked her not to do it, I begged her, but sometimes Charlotte can be as stubborn as her mother. I called Alexandra and told her she couldn’t do this, but she replied matter-of-factly that Charlotte had nothing to do with the past. I was reassured. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Alexandra since.

  A few months ago I got a call in the middle of the night. No one spoke; all I heard was that familiar, uneasy breathing.

  Alexandra kept her eyes lowered as she entered my office. Her nails were freshly manicured, her makeup understated. I was irritated to find myself thinking that she was still a beautiful woman, though perhaps a little too thin.

  “Alexandra,” I said, “I thought we’d agreed that you would get on and live your own life.”

  “Angus.”

  She just said my name, as if it were a spell or curse—I couldn’t interpret her tone—and gazed at me for several seconds. When she spoke again it was calmly, though it must have been a considerable effort. Her left eyelid flickered with every syllable.

  “I know all about the Butterflies. I know that you abuse young women. Just like you abused me back then.”

  I looked at the clock on the wall behind her. I had a telephone conference with my colleagues in New York in a quarter of an hour. I had to get her out of my office before then. I could manage that.

  “I didn’t abuse you.”

  “You shouldn’t have done what you did.”

  “You kissed me, Alexandra.”

  I sat on my desk. I’d been a businessman for too long to show any weakness when confronted. She had seen a yellow embroidered butterfly on my bow tie, many years ago. That was all.

  “Do you hear voices?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer, and for the first time she looked uncomfortable.

  “You know nothing, Alexandra, and no one will believe you. You’re not well.”

  She walked right up to me and whispered the names in my ear. The names of the most powerful Butterflies. CEOs, politicians, bankers. She took her time. Then she said the last name. Mine.

  I heard her breathing. My face grew hot. She stood in front of me and nodded.

  “You can’t do anything,” I said.

  “Oh, I can do a great deal.” She turned and headed for the door.

  “What do you want?” I shouted. The walls were thick, opaque glass, but I was sure my secretaries could hear me. I had never shouted in my office before.

  “Do you believe in chaos theory?” Alexandra asked quietly.

  “What are you talking about? You’re completely insane.”

  “It suggests that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  Her body was rigid with tension.

  “I am that butterfly.”

  “What is it you want?” I asked again, more quietly this time.

  She smiled and left the room.

  I sat down with my back to the window and looked around my office: glass, steel, a cherrywood table. I was sixty-one years old and I had achieved everything I wanted to achieve in life. I went out to speak to my executive secretary; as a rule I called her from my desk. She looked worried when I asked her to cancel all my appointments in the coming days; there was something I needed to deal with. I went downstairs in the lift and took the Underground to King’s Cross. Standing in the train I clung on to a grubby pole; it was crowded and hot, and someone was eating noodles from a cardboard box; the whole compartment stank of it. I tried to convince myself that things weren’t all that bad, and as I did so I knew that it was a lie. Behind me a child was sneezing.

  Alex

  I walked aimlessly through the streets. Angus had seemed genuinely surprised. At first he had inspected me as if to see how much I’d changed. There was nothing of that look left by the end. I would have liked to have stayed longer, just looking at his face.

  Angus, I expect you’re familiar with Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes. After all, it befits men of your status to know a little bit about art. Gentileschi was a woman, by the way, in case you didn’t know that. What I’m sure you don’t know is that the painting isn’t about the Old Testament story; it’s about the artist hersel
f. Artemisia Gentileschi was raped by one of her teachers when she was nineteen. He took her virginity, and during the trial that should have brought her rapist to justice she was humiliated a second time when the judges put thumbscrews on her and conducted a public examination to check her hymen. The painting shows the moment when Judith puts a dagger to Holofernes’s throat and starts to cut off his head. It is possibly the most beautiful instance of revenge that has ever been immortalized in a painting; the expression of power and the depth of color are unparalleled, and I think it’s no coincidence that this picture was painted by a woman. Wouldn’t you agree, Angus?

  I remember the first time he spoke to me, forty years ago, as if it were yesterday. He asked me where I’d gone to school and acted as if it didn’t matter that I’d come from a Northern comprehensive. I liked the way he danced. I went to boxing training. It turned me on.

  When I pulled him into the back room of the Pitt Club that night, I just wanted to kiss him. We kissed for a long time; it was nice. He took off my trousers. I didn’t want that, so I hit him as hard as I could. He was too strong. I wanted to scream in his face and call for help, but I was so frightened I couldn’t make a sound. I couldn’t scream, so I hit him in the face and on the mouth. He took my wrists, twisted my arms behind my back, and the more I tried to defend myself the tighter and more painful it got. At some point I gave up and just waited for it to be over. It took a long time. He bit the back of my neck; I concentrated on that to distract myself from the pain in my abdomen. I felt his saliva on my neck. I was afraid he might kill me, so I started kissing him again. I hoped I would pass out, but I didn’t, so I stared at the butterfly on the wall the whole time. I thought I must be rupturing inside. When he’d finished he fell asleep on a sofa. I took his bow tie, the tie with the embroidered butterfly. I had no ulterior motive.

  The following day he came to my room. I don’t remember why I opened the door to him. When he said goodbye he kissed me on the forehead, and I was so scared he might force himself on me again that I didn’t dare move.