Now Clavdia came to him less often, and when she did, she was at war with herself and consequently with him. She came late in the evening, after Tintin, despairing of her company, had finally gone to sleep. She would slip into the room quietly and slide under the covers silently and remain still, hoping he did not notice her entry and would be satisfied, on his waking, simply to find her there. But for all her calculations, once asleep, Clavdia was unable to maintain her aplomb and cried out his name from the depths of her dreams, and sometimes she unconsciously reached out to him, pressing herself against him, he who smelled of milled wheat and blond honey.
Small satisfactions arrived unexpectedly and soured quickly. Little Tintin arrived one day with a wife in hand. Tintin and Clavdia were happy to see their son settled, given over to conjugal pursuits. But they soon learned that while he had intended to travel no longer and plant himself and family (two of the children would visit Marlinspike over the next school holidays) firmly at home, he had plans for the reconstruction of Marlinspike itself. It was too large, too expensive, too feudal. "Too elitist," May, his wife, added. They would break up the huge manor and divide the rooms into convenient housing units for hundreds. Of course, anyone could do that, it took no special talent to imagine such worthy renovations, but — and here was the great novelty — Little Tintin would flood the estate with seawater and dam it to produce power and electricity by utilizing the ocean's tides.
Thus the Marlinspike compound would be self-sufficient from the energy standpoint and serve as a model of efficiency to the world. There were even additional advantages. Whatever excess power the station generated would be sold at reasonable rates to surrounding parts of the country, ensuring a modest profit above that derived from rents. These profits would prove indispensable at a time when costs of education and of educating Tintin's and Clavdia's grandchildren were mounting. Not to speak, offered May, of the huge expense of clothing two teenagers, of the costs of insurance for their cars and the money needed for their summer holidays.
Admirable in its outline, most especially the part dealing with the nonpolluting use of sea power to create energy, the plan did not take into account certain factors, Tintin and Clavdia replied. For one, there was the issue of Marlinspike's present tenants, not to mention the shepherds, gardeners, chauffeur, cooks, house servants, and all those others whose livelihood derived from the well-being of the estate. Then there was the matter of the land itself, its orchards, tomato and basil patches, hills, and trees — some very ancient — its English gardens, and mysterious alleys of French hedges so carefully tended, and the livestock, where would they go?
All under the sea. And what of the nonfunctional value, the elusive matter of beauty? Was not Marlinspike a work of beauty, and did it not give consolation and serenity to all those who knew and who in generations to come would know it?
A vast park open to all was what Tintin and Clavdia had planned for Marlinspike after their deaths. For the present, Little Tintin had vast sums in his own fund; he wouldn't even have to dip into principle to live at the highest level. As for the future, Little Tintin and his family would be richly provided for in Tintin's and Clavdia's wills, and as for money for the children, why, there was plenty to be had for the asking. Ask.
Having money was not the same, Little Tintin rejoined heatedly, as putting his plans to effect in his own country, the first in the world to have such a complex of sea power and housing.
"Father" — Tintin recoiled from the unfamiliarity of the appellation applied to him — "I shall not be impeded. I shall take the matter to the courts, if need be."
The courts and their battles, words hurled in an official room, humans pinpricked by words and bled to a slow and expensive death.
Where were the sandy dunes he had crossed on thirsty camel, where the oceans he had sailed on ship and shipwreck's raft, where the prairies he had ridden and the sky he had slept under, where the intricate networks of criminals' tunnels and caves under unsuspecting cities he had traversed, where the craggy islands and brooding castles he had explored, where all his explorations and exploits now but winnowed down to acrimony over property? The blows were coming from everywhere and from everywhere closest to him, better the jungle with its claws and poisonous stings than this.
The matter was still unresolved when Little Tintin and May sped away in their car. A long drive through the countryside and a stop at the local pub and café for a pint and a glass of calvados, that would clear his head and temper his injured heart, Tintin thought, making his way to the garage.
The garage doors were already open. From within came loud banging noises, shouts and cries. Stepping inside, Tintin saw two men dueling. The chauffeur, armed with a tire iron, and the gardener, equipped with a short rake, lunged and parried and beat their weapons against each other, iron bar clanging against iron tines. Each had been struck, for blood ranged down their faces and covered their hands, and cries of their pain mixed with curses and threats.
"Bestial I break open your face."
"Schweinehund! I twist out your eyes."
Tintin shouted for them to halt, and they did immediately, more in surprise at seeing their employer than for their wish to obey him.
"This time we finish everything once and for all," the chauffeur said.
"An end to his infamy and lies," countered the gardener. Tintin pleaded with them to put down their weapons and discuss the issues infuriating them. "Never! We've talked enough."
"We've said everything already."
"Then I fire you both here and now," Tintin said.
"Who cares a fig, so long as the other dies," the gardener said.
"Yes, fire me and watch how death resigns him," the chauffeur added.
They picked up their weapons and charged each other with renewed vigor. Tintin tried to place himself between the two, but they would allow nothing to interrupt their fury, saying they would join together to fight him rather than terminate the battle with each other. To make their point yet clearer, the combatants brandished their weapons in Tintin's face.
"All right," Tintin said finally, "let be what is. Either calm yourselves or slaughter each other, but end it here, for I have no wish to see either of you again." (Not true his ultimatum, for he knew he would always want to see them, have them enlarge his mind, his perspectives and views.)
He had hardly finished his words when the two, with fiendish grins, resumed the attack.
Tintin retreated to the manor house, thinking to tell Clavdia about the mad pair in the garage, whom he had finally recognized as Naptha and Settembrini in disguise, but he remembered, painfully, that Clavdia had left him some while ago to live with Peeperkorn, who, discarding the pseudonym Pimento, had retaken his former name. Perhaps it was the bloody scene he had just witnessed that inspired the impulse, for now Tintin thought of bloodletting and murder, too. He would go down to the city and kill Peeperkorn and rid himself of him once and forever and reclaim Clavdia once and forever. Why had he not thought of it before? Why had he waited so long to have the thought visit him and to admit its entry?
Cowardice, perhaps. No, not that. He had faced death openly many times and would still beard it, but it was easier to die than to kill, and he had never killed before, not even in self-defense. But he would now, in spite of all the injunctions against it, in spite of all the horror he felt in doing it, for Peeperkorn-Pimento had not merely threatened his life — he had threatened it many times in the past — but he had robbed him of half his soul, the Clavdia share, without which now he was truly dying before his death.
A wonderful rage was in him and would cease only when its object had been smashed, not killed, simply, but made broken and bleeding, head split open, brains steaming on the tile or sinking in the carpet. Violent death, pounding and painful death, teeth kicked out of the head, internal organs bruised and anguished death. Nothing less would do now. Tintin found his old pistol and a small blackjack the captain used to carry when they went prowling among wharves at
midnight. A small, hand-size thing it was, black leather covering a lead sinker, the braided handle hard and pliant, quick to strike; it could snap a man's head open as if it were a chicken's egg.
He knew where to find them; they had left him an address, dismissing in that gesture all sense of his being a threat. But what was meant for his humiliation was now their danger. He would relish the surprise on their faces when he appeared, pistol in one hand, snapper in the other.
Not a word, no recriminations or denouncements, no trying to wring fear and remorse from them, just a bullet or two for Peeperkorn, in his guts, to subdue him; then he'd let the blackjack do the remaining brutal, crunching work.
A Georgian house, naturally. Clavdia's choice, of course. Her taste ran to that, Georgian silver, Georgian tea service, Georgian furniture, Georgian portraiture. Unlike him, Clavdia shunned the Second Empire in all its physical forms and would not allow a stick from that period into their home. Not that he himself was so much in love with Second Empire — but that was another matter. What would he do with Clavdia, now that he was here, standing before this Georgian house? Not kill her, no. Wither her with coldness? Not effective; she would merely grow colder. Rage against her and blame her for the mayhem she had caused (pointing at all times to the battered mess that was once Peeperkorn)? She would merely grow sleepy, rage being her narcoleptic trigger.
The door opened. A woman in livery addressed him. "You must be Monsieur Tintin, is that you?"
Tintin nodded.
"Yes, Madame Clavdia thought she spied you through the window just now. Madame Clavdia waits for you upstairs."
The woman conducted Tintin to the doorway of the bedroom. Clavdia rose from the seat beside the huge bed where Peeperkorn lay wheezing, mouth open, hand on his chest. "How did you know to come?'' Clavdia asked with wild glee.
The man in bed made choked noises, his head jerking spasmodically.
"He's too weak to speak now, but he understands everything, Tintin, my love."
Clavdia rushed to Tintin's side, took his face in her hands, kissed him.
"Clavdia!" Tintin exclaimed, drawing back from her, pistol sighted toward Peeperkorn.
"No, Tintin, don't you see he's dying?"
"No matter," Tintin said dreamily, "I still need to destroy him." He returned the revolver to his pocket and drew out the blackjack from the other.
"I've done that for us," Clavdia cried. "I've been poisoning him forever, and now he's finished. His muscles and nerves are paralyzed; his windpipe's constricting. Look at his face: He can't breathe, he's strangling."
Clavdia sat at the edge of the dying man's bed and motioned for Tintin to sit beside her and witness Peeperkorn's last pain-filled minutes. "He'll go blue, then purple," she said, half laughing, half pitched to hysteria, "and then he'll go to hell."
(Blue to purple, yes, he'd splash some bruised purple on Pimento's face with his snapper, a whack and a thwack across the cheeks and a little something between the eyes.)
Clavdia shuddered and cried long, tear-pearls until Tintin held and calmed her. Thus comforted, she was eager to unfold her tale. Her tale: No sooner had Pimento come into the household under his contrite persona than he threatened to kill Tintin and every living person and thing related to the estate, sheep, horses, dogs, flowers, orchards, the captain, Tintin's son — in short, to murder their world. She thought he was both mad and bluffing, but he explained to her how he had mined the manor house and the dwellings on the estate so that at his will the all of it would blast into flaming splinters, and he had mined, too, the dams and causeways to the sea so that the great salt ocean would rush and flood the land and with its great wet saltiness forever kill the earth and its lovely pear trees and rose beds and basil patches and drown duck, lamb, sheep, walking mutton, kid, and kine and drown again all creatures walking or crawling atop or inching below the land down to the last bug and worm.
To prove his power, Pimento exploded the roots of a huge oak in the park beneath Tintin's study window — did Tintin remember that tree, the noble one that grew there before Columbus ever crossed the gangplank to the Americas? — and promised that unless she slept with him that hour, he'd blow Marlinspike to the clouds. And so she did, and so, too, did his demands increase each passing day. (She was asked things too loathsome for the telling, things a gentleman such as Tintin would never have dreamed!) She accommodated and waited, waited for the time when she would be in position to find the former brigand and faux shepherd vulnerable, acceding slowly to each and every demand, suffering the thought of how Tintin was hating her and was suffering, too. Finally she maneuvered Pimento out of Marlinspike and into the present domain, where he believed he could control her completely and dominate all future prospects with the high card of his threat. But she planned otherwise. She took with her a vial of poison, a potent nerve paralyzer and life suffocater, a souvenir of her and Tintin's Amazon expedition, when they lived among the Xingú river people, and fed the poison to him in minute fractions of droplets ever so slowly over months and years until he became the present wreck in the bed. Of course, Pimento was suspicious of his failing health, watched her for signs of her doing exactly the mischief she was in fact doing, but finding no indications of her complicity in his waning powers, he became a devotee of the doctor's office, dragging himself and her along with him to one medical examination after another.
His blood and urine tests showed nothing to indicate he was being slowly poisoned — such was the virtue of this magnificent, subtle, and occult substance — showed only that he was, along with the rest his age, growing old and subject to the numbing, debilitating infirmities of his human kind.
The history of his medical adventures would make quite a story in itself, if one had the time to recount it and could find an auditor sufficiently interested, but an aspect of it might appeal to Tintin. His patience worn out by the normal and dead-end routes of Western medical science, Pimento tried the East, becoming the patient of a Chinese doctor of great obscurity and Mandarin presence whose herbs, roots, powdered deer antlers, smelly brackish brews, and gleaming acupuncture needles seemed actually, and from her standpoint disastrously so, to improve the sick man's condition. But the doctor left the country and his small windowless office just when Pimento seemed most in remission from his aches and creaks, his disorienting fatigues, all of which returned to him in greater than ever force once the Chinaman had departed.
Wheezing and gasps interrupted Clavdia's account. Pimento, she noted, was in condition blue and would shortly proceed to the purple, the color that portended his final round.
For the moment, Tintin hardly noticed Pimento's coloration, so struck was he by Clavdia's loquacious narrative and its meanderings or rather by Clavdia's remarkable, discursive, newly found, rotund voice. Had she lain with the master of words for so long that she now spoke with his tongue? No matter, now it was the master himself who needed attending to, the deadly blush of plumpurple glowing on his otherwise immobile face.
"Clavdia," Tintin said, "we can't let this go further."
"Do you wish that I give him the antidote and restore him to life so that he can rejuvenate his actions against us? And perhaps succeed where last he failed?"
Of course, not that, but they could not let him die this way either. They had never taken a life before, and this burden for their freedom from Pimento would be too crushing to bear. They continued this exchange until at last they hit upon a scheme.
Clavdia injected a clear white liquid into Pimento's arm that had the effect of returning his complexion to blue, then to a faint pale egg-white blue, then within the hour to its normal florid color. The spreading poison had been halted, and some of its effects had been reversed but not to the point where all of Pimento's functions had returned or would ever return. And thus they brought him back to Marlinspike, a large man with a white beard unable to speak or walk, unable to move all but his head, and that ever so slightly. He lived in a wheelchair or sometimes remained merely propped up on some di
van or chaise longue in some foreign part of the manor.
Little Snowy enjoyed looking at the immobilized creature and would stare at him for hours, an occupation that left Tintin wondering at the dog's intelligence, though he would not allow himself to believe that in the transition from one generation of dog to another anything at all had been altered. So much of the old life had changed at Marlinspike that in desperation to maintain the illusion that little had changed, Tintin pretended Little Snowy was in fact Snowy père and would talk to him about events and adventures that occurred before the junior dog was born. Among other fictions Tintin promulgated, one concerned the former gardener and chauffeur, both of whom had vanished before the reunited couple returned to their conjugal life chez Marlinspike. The garage where Tintin had last seen the combatants was left in pristine state: Waxed and polished cars gleamed as new; spare tires stood straight in their racks; wrenches and tools were aligned in perfect order along the workbench wall. Only one blemish marred the spotless scene. The concrete floor where the two antagonists had battled was blotched by a hand-size reddish stain, which remained stained after several vigorous washings. Finally Tintin had the garage floor painted marine blue, making the cars appear to be floating in a grotto pool.
Either one had killed the other and had removed himself and the corpse from the premises or both had left to live or to fight elsewhere or to die elsewhere. Wherever they were, he missed them. Although they had long been replaced — a Japanese man with wife and children supervised the gardens (banishing from them basil, eggplant, and peppers), and a Brazilian from Belem, who drove at breathtaking speeds heedless of Madame's gasps and cries, took over the wheel or the wheels — Tintin spoke of the absent antagonists as if they were still present and still functioning in their respective positions.
Tintin in the New World: A Romance Page 7
