The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  But Vince Smith chuckled, enjoying the bon mot. Maybe it was Gavin’s dry, Aussie savoir-faire that had impressed him in the first place. Maybe he expected no less.

  Then he turned his head and looked at me.

  Everybody had said it was his eyes that did it and I was no exception. In the dim light of the little cellar bar I couldn’t make out the famous violet colour, but I could see how deep and still they were, like pools.

  ‘And you are, sir?’ he said.

  ‘E-Eddie,’ I stammered, ‘Eddie Bracknell.’

  He moved the cane over his legs, from his right hand to his left. ‘I take it you know who I am, then, Eddie.’

  I nodded, dumbstruck. Started to wonder if I was hallucinating, if that cherry brandy’s mystical powers were just kicking in. Or if I had actually gone to bed hours ago in an alcoholic stupor and was merely dreaming all this.

  He nodded and turned back to the bar, said something in Portuguese that I couldn’t follow. A couple of seconds later, he was passing over bottles of beer. ‘It’s a local brew,’ he said to me. ‘I think you’ll like it.’

  Then he turned back to Gavin. ‘You approve then,’ he said, ‘of my manor?’

  Gavin shifted slowly from one foot to the other, a tiny sign of unease. ‘It suits you,’ he said.

  Vince smiled and his face became amazingly illuminated, like a thousand flashbulbs were going off around him. I remembered a line I had read about Joan Crawford once, that she always brought a full rig into a room with her. The brightness of real stars.

  ‘I thought you would,’ he said. ‘Although they don’t have the live music here on a Thursday, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow night for that.’

  He looked back at me. ‘There’s a guy here, a local guy called Paulo Borges, as in the popes of infamy,’ he said. ‘Looks a lot like Roy Orbison, sounds like him too. You ever heard Fado singing, Eddie?’

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling incredibly stupid and small.

  ‘You’d love it,’ he said, his eyes slowly wandering up and down my Hawaiian shirt and Chinos. ‘You look like a guy who knows his Dean Martin. You know those old Neapolitan love songs he used to do, in Italian, when he really used to sing like he meant it? Well, they’re a bit like that, full of loneliness and yearning. The Portuguese have a word for it that doesn’t exist in any other language, they call it saudade; nostalgia for a time that never really existed. I have a feeling you know all about that, Eddie.’

  His deep blue eyes bored into me as if he could read every thought I had ever had. I had a strange feeling then, like the ground was falling away from under me. I grabbed hold of the bar, felt Gavin’s arm come underneath my left shoulder.

  ‘Steady, mate, are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘Y-yeah, just felt a bit light-headed.’ I shook my head. This was all too surreal.

  ‘It’s a bit hot and close in here,’ he said, over my head to Vince. ‘Maybe we should get some air.’

  He sounded a bit menacing, as if he realised Vince had been playing with me and didn’t like it.

  Vince raised his bottle and took a swig. ‘As you like,’ he said. He put the empty back down on the bar and slid gracefully off his stool, turning to bid the barman goodnight in slurred language that sounded like a drunken Sean Connery.

  We followed him back up the steps and out into the Barrio, which was now so chocka as to resemble Soho on a Saturday night. It was lucky he was wearing that white suit or we would probably have lost him in the maze of winding streets so thronged with people now, the bars that had been shut earlier now pumping out loud music, bleeping electronica that sounded abrasive to my ears. Luckily, Gavin kept his hand on my shoulder, steering me through it all. I had one of those odd, comforting, pissed thoughts that he and Vince were the tallest people here, so of course they could follow each other. The Portuguese seemed pretty small, mainly.

  After a while I realised that we were on that promenade bit again, over the harbour.

  ‘Do you feel all right now, mate?’ asked Gavin.

  Vince was standing under a palm tree, some way ahead, gazing out to sea. He looked like the perfect colonial gentleman in his white suit and cane and I wondered if he did that deliberately to provoke a reaction. But why would he, if he was trying to keep a low profile?

  ‘I should stop drinking,’ I told Gavin, ‘I can’t seem to handle it any more. But I wasn’t expecting any of this to happen.’

  Gavin shook his head. ‘I think situations like these are better done drunk,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I could have said if I was sober.’

  ‘Fair point.’

  We drew level with Vince. He was smiling softly as he stared across the bay, the lights dancing on the water as a big cruise liner slowly pulled out of its dock, sounding a mournful horn like it was sad to be leaving. Was he glad to have been found at last? Had this all been some kind of game? Would he soon be regretfully leaving Lisbon too?

  ‘I suppose you’d like to see my hideout,’ he said, turning to face us, the smile still creasing the corners of his mouth.

  ‘One of these stately piles along here, is it?’ Gavin asked, gesticulating to the clifftop houses we’d been admiring earlier.

  ‘He really is like Sherlock Holmes, isn’t he?’ Vince looked at me delightedly. ‘I mean, I’m sorry, Eddie, I’m sure it could so easily be the other way around. Only you look a lot more like Dr Watson.’

  ‘And I wondered why I missed you,’ said Gavin.

  Vince’s house was actually set back from the clifftop, a slightly crumbling-looking villa surrounded by rambling wisteria and a tangle of palm trees, as if it was deliberately shutting itself off from the world around it. It certainly looked like the perfect hideout.

  There were steps up to the front door where two stone lions, cracked with age, sat one on each side of his doorway.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Gavin. ‘Looks like you could do with a few servants or something though, eh, mate? Keep the place in order a bit?’

  He was doing his best to joke, but he sounded strained, nervous. Like I was feeling. I wondered if we should make some excuses and ask to meet up with Vince tomorrow. But then, of course, by tomorrow he would probably have vanished all over again. Fate had brought us here now. We had to see it through.

  Vince opened the door and snapped on a light. There was a long corridor with a marble floor and panelled walls, illuminated by a dusty chandelier. The place smelled old and dusty, like no one had been living in it for years. Vince put his cane down in an elephant’s foot stand, in which there was also an umbrella. I noticed that the silver top was fashioned into the shape of a skull.

  ‘This way,’ he said, snapping on another light and leading us into his lounge.

  Unlike the musty corridor, this really did look lived in. It was a big room, with great, high ceilings and bay windows framed with long, red velvet drapes. At first sight, everything in the room seemed red, or red and gold to be more precise. From the dark crimson wallpaper flecked with gold fleur-de-lis, to the velvet chaise longue, chipped rococo chairs and the huge gilt-framed mirror hanging over the fireplace that reflected the whole scene back. Standing right in front of that was a three-foot-high plaster Madonna.

  There was another chandelier hanging from the ceiling, an actual leopardskin rug on the floor. A huge stone gargoyle was propped up next to the fireplace and, by the window, one of those massive round candle holders like they have in churches that look almost like medieval torture devices. Next to that was a grand piano.

  An odd assortment of canvases adorned the walls. Some of them were old pictures, scenes of Lisbon, probably, that he must have collected while he was here. But the one that dominated was an oil painting of a woman with long, flowing hair and huge sad eyes, painted in shades of violet.

  Vince saw me look at it.

  ‘You know who that is,’ he said. ‘That’s my wife.’ He spread his arms wide and bowed towards it. ‘To whom I owe it all.’

  Me and Gavin traded sideways g
lances. It was like we had entered the room of a mad old aristocrat in a Hammer horror movie. Christ knows what he was expecting but I still thought I would wake up any minute in my room in the Best Western, blaming it all on the cherries.

  ‘Drink, anyone?’ Vince had moved to the far corner of the room now, where there was an old fifties bar. It was a perfect specimen. Red, gold and cream, decorated with martini glasses and cocktail shakers. From behind it, our host pulled a green bottle and three glasses.

  ‘The Green Lady,’ he said. ‘Lisbon’s most infamous export. Have you tried any yet?’

  Absinthe. I had been trying to avoid that stuff ever since James and Jocasta had started going mad for it about three years ago, when it had finally been made legal in Britain, if only without the wormwood that was the whole point of it in the first place.

  Vince picked up one of those vintage soda siphons and examined its contents, then blew a little into a glass. ‘Ah, good,’ he said to himself. ‘It still works.’ He looked up at us.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ he urged, ‘make yourselves at home. After all, you’ve done an excellent task so far, you deserve rewarding.’

  I looked at Gavin.

  ‘Play along with him,’ he whispered. ‘I think he’s completely out of it.’

  I sat down gingerly on one of the old chairs. Vince was arranging things on a tray. Once he seemed satisfied he had everything he came over with it, pulling a little table round in front of us and then drawing up a chair of his own.

  ‘What I really love about this stuff,’ he informed us, ‘is the whole ritual that goes with it. What you do is this: first, pour some absinthe into each glass,’ he meted out the pale green liquid between three antique-looking glasses, with thick, square bases. ‘Then, you take this special instrument.’ He raised up an old, battered silver spoon so that we could see the slots in the middle of it and the scorch marks underneath it. ‘Put a lump of sugar on it.’ He demonstrated, picking up a lump with a pair of tongs out of a little round bowl. ‘Then melt the sugar into the absinthe.’ He extracted a Zippo from his top pocket, put the flame to the spoon. ‘Actually, a candlestick works better, but still, you get the idea. Then, when all that’s done, you add water to taste.’

  He squirted each glass with his soda syphon. ‘Et voilà! See the Green Lady dance.’

  He proffered a glass to Gavin and me. I realised Gavin was right, Vince did seem totally out of it. His pupils were enormous. It made me feel better about being in this strange house with him, because a loaded man surely wasn’t a dangerous man, even if he was being more than a tad eccentric, showing us this bizarre ritual that was so much like cooking up.

  I took the glass from him. It was big and heavy and had been beautifully cut. The green liquid shone beguilingly within it. I took a sip. It tasted like vile, sweetened Pernod. Another reason I had never bought into the absinthe fad back home. I had never liked that aniseed taste.

  ‘Good, yes?’ said Vince, tipping his own back.

  ‘Fucking vile, mate,’ said Gavin for me. ‘Don’t you keep any cold ones around here?’

  ‘You always were a philistine,’ said Vince mildly. ‘Will a bottle of port do you? Another thing they do rather better around here.’

  After more rummaging behind his bar, he came back with a dusty bottle and three more, smaller, more delicate glasses.

  ‘I hope you won’t have the indecency to complain about this,’ he said.

  It looked a whole lot better, deep, ruby red. It was really too sweet for my palette, but even so, immensely preferable to what had gone before. Once Gavin and I had made approving noises, Vince sat back in his seat, looking satisfied.

  There was a long, not-at-all-comfortable silence.

  I stole a glance over at Gavin. He was staring at Vince with an expression halfway between hurt and admiration. Vince himself was staring at his glass of absinthe, holding it up to the light as if he could see the green patterns of the Lady dancing around the room.

  Well, fucking hell, Eddie, I thought to myself. I think you’ve got yourself a dynamite ending. In the court of the Mad King of Nothing…

  Then Vince leaned forward suddenly, sharply. ‘So now we’re all comfortable,’ he said, looking straight at me, ‘I wonder where you think this story ends.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I started, in a voice not unlike Mother’s.

  Vince grinned. It reminded me of that grin Christophe was wearing in the pub that day. Satisfied. Satanic.

  ‘I mean, I know why you’re here,’ he said. ‘Or should I say,’ he flicked a glance over to Gavin, ‘why you think you’re here.’

  His eyes sparkled like the drops on the chandelier. I felt that faint feeling again, like my blood was slowly draining out of me.

  ‘You’ve been writing a book about me, haven’t you? With the help of Gavin here, of course, my oldest, most faithful fan. He convinced you that because I had disappeared so long ago that by now I was probably dead. Only you are a journalist, aren’t you, Eddie? You’re not prepared to take anyone’s word when there’s always another possibility. That’s good,’ he said, his eyebrows raising. ‘That’s what a journalist should do. After all, you don’t want to come out with any old shitty cut-and-paste job, do you? I should think not. I deserve better than that.

  ‘So you did a bit of digging, talked to a few people. Started to think otherwise. That it was possible to find me. Et voilà! Here you are. Well done, Eddie. Tell me, who was it who finally tipped you the wink?’

  ‘It was Pascal,’ said Gavin gruffly. ‘That old detective from Paris. Would you believe, he’s still alive? Tony found him again.’ He shook his head. ‘Tony never gives up the faith.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Vince, leaning back into his chair again. ‘Is that right, Eddie? The old Frenchman who couldn’t find me in his own city actually managed to find me here. Most impressive.’

  I tried to swallow. As surely as he seemed to have been reading my mind all evening, I knew that Vince knew there was more to it than that. He knew who had told me. It was only Gavin who didn’t and I sure as hell didn’t want to fall out with Gavin now. ‘Yeah,’ I said feebly. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So,’ said Vince, ‘what do you think happens now? Do you get the comeback interview with me, bring me back to a world that had chosen to forget me, rehabilitate me like Rick Rubin did with Johnny Cash? Because my kind of music is very popular again, isn’t it?’

  He examined my slack-jawed face, my bewildered, nodding head with an expression of intense satisfaction. ‘I can read the Internet just as well as you can, Eddie,’ he said, as if explaining it to a child. ‘I can see all the potential you can. I could become an icon, couldn’t I? A greater star than I ever was in my youth. And I dare say poor old Steve and Lynton would be so overwhelmed to see me that they’d be back in the band like a flash. Although,’ he grimaced and waved his right hand dismissively, ‘I doubt Kevin would be so keen. Though, he could easily be replaced, couldn’t he? I gather Rat Scabies is still doing the rounds…’

  I looked over at Gavin. He appeared frozen in his seat, his knuckles white around his glass of port.

  ‘Yes, it would be marvellous, wouldn’t it? I would be a star, you would have a bestseller, and good old Anthony could make another million quid off his back catalogue. Everyone’s a winner, right?’

  He smiled that full-beamed smile at me again, raised his glass to me and drank the green liquid down in one.

  ‘Only,’ and his face fell theatrically. ‘There’s just one problem about all of that.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he nodded grimly and stood up. ‘She,’ he said, pointing to the portrait of Sylvana, ‘she wouldn’t like it.’

  Oh dear, I thought, he is out of his head. Not to mention, totally mad. We should get out of here.

  ‘Look,’ I said, standing up. ‘If that’s the case, then forget about it. We never found you, we never came here. The book ends with you disappearing into the Paris night and nobody’s any
the wiser. Me and Gavin will meet up with our contact tomorrow, you won’t be where he thinks you are, it will all peter out. But we will have written a tribute to you anyway. To Blood Truth, the greatest band that never was. After all, you said we deserved some reward for finding you. Right, Gavin?’

  Gavin looked up at me. His eyes were bloodshot. He must have had too much of that port on top of everything else.

  ‘He’s quite poetic, isn’t he?’ said Vince. ‘I can see why you make a good writer. But please, sit down, Eddie, let me finish. After all, you can’t come all this way without finding out the end of the story.’

  I sat back down slowly, aware of little stars dancing in the corner of my eyes. Gavin had his head in his hands now. Maybe I’d end up carrying him home after all this. If my own legs would still carry me.

  ‘Now, Eddie,’ Vince stood under the portrait of his wife. ‘How do you think it was that I came by all this wealth?’

  ‘Drugs,’ I said. ‘That’s what Pascal reckoned. You and that Marco, or Mert, or whatever his name really was. International drugs dealers,’ I said it as if I was having one of my Goodfellas conversations, but even as the words left my mouth I realised the potency of them. ‘Well, of course, I can understand why you wouldn’t want any of that coming out,’ I backtracked furiously. ‘But you know, Gavin would never betray you about that and neither would I. None of that would be mentioned. None of that at all.’

  ‘Oh, Eddie,’ groaned Gavin. ‘You doofus.’

  But Vince waved his hand, as if dismissing the subject.

  ‘Of course I know that, Eddie. And romantic though your ideas certainly are, I’m afraid the answer is much simpler. It’s been staring you in the face all along.’ I followed his gaze up to the portrait of Sylvana. ‘You did your research on her, I hope,’ he said.

  ‘I thought I had,’ I said.

  ‘Sylvana,’ said Vince slowly, ‘was an heiress. A proper heiress. She wasn’t just a little pixie princess, making up pop songs for a living. When her grandmother died, which she did when I was on my last tour of Britain, my lovely wife came into a multimillion dollar fortune. And when God, in his infinite mercy, came for her so quickly after that, I, as her distraught next of kin, automatically inherited that fortune from her.’