The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  ‘Thanks so much for everything,’ she told Felipe. ‘Tomorrow I pay you back.’

  ‘I won’t…’

  ‘No protesting. I will.’

  She gave him a good night kiss on the cheek which made him blush. She slept very well that night in the room looking out on to the dusty tree, even though the curtain didn’t quite fit.

  ***

  Seeing Fist masquerading as the bony Crosbee at Middleburg’s house had brought her up short. Could it really be him, so far from Harwich and the kipper-smelling docks? It seemed entirely unlikely, but she had learned nothing was impossible with Middleburg. At least it gave her renewed hope of finding little Lily, though she shuddered at the thought of the man and his hammy fist. Of course, Middleburg would have him in his web. He could be outside the building even now.

  It was Middleburg who himself had come to claim her, no doubt liaising with Fist when she was lying sick nearby in the old hulk on the marshes. Fist’s presence in LA now added a physical dimension of fear, but she comforted herself with the thought that it would only be on a temporary basis. He would not want to be long removed from the house with the ruched curtains and oppressive central heating. He and his barley sugar neighbour surely could not long be parted?

  Meanwhile, what was she to do about her immediate survival in LA? Wherever Lily was, there was nothing she could do for her without some kind of centre to operate from and money to carry the project forward. She only had one thing that she could possibly pawn and it was not something she cared to part with. However, the more she thought about it, the less she could avoid doing what had to be done.

  Next morning, she woke late in her strange bed, and after an initial sense of dislocation tinged with excitement, moderated by alarm, she rose, washed under a cold tap and visited her teeth using the brush and toothpaste Felipe had kindly provided the night before. In the kitchenette, she boiled a kettle and made a cup of supermarket instant coffee which she found abandoned in a cupboard, then hurried downstairs and peered cautiously outside the front door. On seeing no Fist and, plucking up courage, she ventured out and hurried round the corner to find the pawnshop. She entered guiltily, as one does at pawnshops, feeling the ancient ring on her finger, pressing the door open wide under the swinging sign of the three golden balls and the legend ‘Pfeffer & Volkers, Pawnbrokers’ in faded gold type.

  This ring was the only tangible connection with the family she was heir to. It had caused her pain in the past and she was half glad to be rid of it now, though she knew that she shouldn’t be. It was her only possession, but there was nothing else for it. After all, she told herself – and all her ancestors if they were listening – she was only pawning, not selling, it.

  Mr Pfeffer was not easily impressed, nor was he known for his generosity – certainly not by Mr Volkers who had died ten years before – but even Pfeffer was blown away by the ring with the blood-red crest of Laval upon it as it lay on the counter behind the window of Pfeffer & Volkers at 127 Caraway Street. He expressed his interest in a rich soup of sound that mixed American with what was left of the ghettoes of Middle Europe.

  ‘How did you come by this?’ he asked her. ‘It is the design, what they call the device, of an old family. I have not seen a ruby like this in all my born days, and they are long and hairy. But something about it mystifies me. It is a very, very good stone.’

  Did he really say hairy? She rather doubted it but decided not to comment.

  ‘It was given to me by my great-aunt,’ she said. ‘We are supposedly descended from the Lavals whose crest it is.’

  ‘Then why are you getting rid of it?’ he hectored her. ‘Of course you will say it is not my business, but our ancestors are all we have. We carry them around in our blood and in our face, in our bone and in our belly, in our voices and in our hair if we have it.’

  ‘I am not getting rid of it,’ she corrected him. ‘I am pawning it because I need the money. How much will you give me, Herr Pfeffer?’

  ‘I will give you five hundred dollars,’ he told her. ‘Jewellery like this is not fashionable. The young girls will not wear him.’

  ‘History is always fashionable,’ she told him. ‘What other stone has such a history? Make it two thousand dollars. Did you know it once belonged to Bluebeard himself?’

  ‘You make that up. Foolish girl. You cannot pull the wool over old Pfeffer.’

  ‘Bluebeard was my father.’

  ‘You don’t even joke about such things.’

  ‘That is my family crest. It is five hundred years old.’

  Mr Pfeffer paled and made some kind of mid-European cabbalistic sign.

  ‘It is a cursed stone? You are a witch? I give you one thousand.’

  ‘It’ll curse you if you mess me around, but your customers will love a cursed stone. There are twenty different witches and earth magic societies in my street alone. Tell your clients it’s cursed and you’ll double the price.’

  The old man looked at her half-admiringly. ‘You want a job,’ he said. ‘You come and work for me here.’

  ‘I might at that,’ she joked.

  ‘I give you two thousand for the ring but you come back for it within a month or I sell him for five thousand.’

  ‘It is not worth five thousand dollars,’ she told him. ‘It is worth fifty thousand. It is priceless.’

  Marie tried to take the ring off her finger but found it curiously resistant. She had to go to the old man’s sink and put some soap on her skin before she could get it off. And when she put the ring on the counter, it fell on its side and rolled towards her. She thought she was imagining it, it was probably just silly, but she felt an immediate lightening of her spirit when it was gone as if it were a rune that had been cast against her. Perhaps, she thought, there is evil in it. She almost felt sorry for the old man as he counted out the fifty dollar bills. Would he be walking home, glancing over his shoulder at the thing that could be felt but not seen? Would it come leaping after him, impossibly fast, as he ran hopelessly over the sand and fell? Or would a hand like a spider come crawling towards him over his bedside table, wearing the very ring that he was now placing in the display window on its finger?

  ‘How much would you pay me if I worked for you?’ she asked, although she knew the old man was joking.

  ‘Don’t take the job,’ he advised. ‘You can do better.’

  ***

  The first thing she did was to return to Felipe’s studio. She found him drinking coffee and talking to Jaime, and she give him a hundred dollars. He looked at her as though she were a miraculous witch. There was definitely magic around today. But he shook his head and pressed the money back.

  ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘You have done more for me than ever I could reward.’

  ‘You need to live in this wicked city,’ he told her. ‘Money goes fast.’

  ‘I owe it to you,’ she said to Felipe. ‘If it hadn’t been for you I would be married soon to that terrible man.’

  ‘I promise your father I look after you.’

  ‘And you have done a great job of it. You have been a tower of strength,’ she said, and kissed him again. ‘You are an obelisk.’

  ‘That is the third time you kiss me. You make me blush,’ he said, happily.

  ‘And now,’ she told him, ‘I have to buy some clothes. I am going to try and find a job as a Merrymaid.’

  He looked profoundly shocked. ‘You cannot do that. Your father would not allow it. You show your titties to these sad old men?’

  ‘It’s not great but it’s all right. They pay good money and it makes them happy.’

  ‘And then they sleep you afterwards.’

  ‘No they don’t.’

  ‘Well, you know best. But as your father’s friend I am not happy.’

  ‘You will be happy if I bring you some vino and a nice big steak.’

  ‘It turn to ashes in my mouth. Maybe.’ He smiled at her, a sad little smile. She realised then that he was at the end of his strength. His time
in prison and yesterday’s activities had squeezed the life out of him. He had been through too much.

  ‘I will find information there at Merrymaids. A man they spoke of, called Grindlay, is a director of the company and a member of the club,’ she told him. ‘If I can win him over and talk to him, if I can trust him, I may learn more about my father’s money and what they have done with it, and about the company they have built.’

  ‘Well, that is different. But there are too many ifs. You go and bring back the nice big steak. But…’ and here his face clouded ‘…do not take lightly what I have told you. These people are not just very dangerous, they have the cunning of the devil – literally.’

  Marie could see he believed what he was saying, but she could not quite bring herself to agree. Middleburg and Brickville were essentially grey men. They exuded power and money – but she doubted they would have the appetite to encourage a man into savage and murderous debauchery in order to steal his fortune. There were easier ways than that to make money and rest in your bed. Was she being too highly strung – as Aunt Bertha used to say, too much of a taut Maxply – looking for more trouble than there was? There might be a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything that had happened. But of course that had been the downfall of her father: not believing the worst.

  ‘You may be right,’ she told Felipe at last, ‘but the game demands a move and my move must be to Merrymaids. I worked with these people once before when I had nothing, so I know what I’m letting myself in for. There is something I need to find out. Meanwhile, could you ask if anyone knows of a French castle up in the Sierra? I know it sounds unlikely but I heard of such a place at my last address.’

  ‘Nothing is unlikely in California.’

  ‘First of all, I am going shopping. I need clothes.’

  ‘Keep your eyes open. There will be people looking for you.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘And when you come back I will show you the last of the letters. The others were all destroyed by the guards as I escape. I tore my pockets on the wire and they fell out.’

  ‘Too bad but at least we have something. I will be some time, but back this afternoon and then we will talk.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ***

  She bought the clothes she wanted at a little store she found in Melrose Avenue where the prices were half those in the big stores and the clothes looked better. She guessed the regulation dress for LA was much the same as Pilgrim’s Piece, smart but sexy, and why not? She liked what she had chosen; even so there was a considerable dent in the two thousand dollars she had extracted from Mr Pfeffer.

  On her return to her apartment, she found a large envelope had been pushed under the door. There was no sign of Felipe. She poured herself a glass of water, threw her shopping bags on the bed and sat down to read.

  My dear daughter,

  If only I could undo those things that I have done to your detriment, but I cannot. It is useless to wish for favours from time, the most implacable of the gods. All I can do now is explain to you, whom I never met except when you were a tiny baby.

  I was brought up spoilt in circumstances of wealth, for we were – and are – a great family. The money came from my great grandfather who built railways (he was a sometime colleague of Brunel) and also from my American grandmother whose family owned coal mines and made steel. The Lavells, I believe, are descended from a Norman family who once owned a string of castles on the borders of Brittany. The name is thought to be an anglicised version of the French Laval. Forgive me if you know something of this already. I will come back to it later.

  I never had to bother about money. We were supposed to be above all that sort of thing. It was considered déclassé even to talk about it. A gentleman was either a sportsman or a scholar. I chose the latter pursuit, fool that I was. If only I had raced a great yacht or followed the hounds and bagged the grouse and stalked the red deer…

  I went up to Oxford in 1934, as young men were encouraged to do in those days. I wasted much of my time but I did become interested in my subject of History. I was especially intrigued by the fifteenth century which, along with the sixteenth, seems a sort of no man’s land buffer zone between the high Middle Ages and the New Age of art, politics and enlightenment; a time where magic and science intermingle, where Joan of Arc met and admired our supposed ancestor Gilles de Rais.

  I didn’t do enough work at university but my interest in the subject kept me from being too abject a failure. I achieved a reasonable Second. After taking my degree, I still had no idea of what I really wanted to do. It was summer, I drove down to the Riviera in my Bentley with a friend from Oxford, and we fooled around for a month or two, generally having a good time.

  And then I met this lovely girl. You know, occasionally, if you’re lucky, you meet someone you seem to have known before, someone who seems to know you inside out. It was like that with Amélie. Her family came from near Rouen, but she was on holiday. She was French, of course, and looked like a dark angel, caramelised by the sun and made all of good things. She was adorable. We could not be parted from each other. I asked her to marry me.

  Normally, I would have taken her home to meet my parents, but I had hardly seen them since I was at school. They were divorced. My mother lived in Rome and my father ran the family businesses in London and New York. I had more than enough money, I was with the girl of my dreams and there seemed no hurry to go home. We had a year or so of happiness together. We moved back to England, married, and bought a house near Henley, and then the war started.

  I was a young officer in the Light Infantry during the war. I went to France, narrowly escaped at Dunkirk, snatched a little leave, and then I was off to Africa, saw action at Tobruk. Got blown up in Alamein, was off duty for a while and then I found myself, towards the end of 1944, home on leave. That is when Amélie and I made you. Then I went back to France. We fought our way into Germany. Saw some things as we advanced that I will not tell you about. They stay with me to this day. Then at last I was home again and Amélie and I picked up where we left off.

  Of course it wasn’t the same old England. Austerity was round the corner, but in 1945 everyone was happy that the war was over and won. There were dances, dinners, parties and shows in London. Amélie was visibly pregnant but she didn’t let it stop her. She gave birth to you halfway through the year You were the best thing that ever happened, and we quietened down a lot… We found a wonderful nanny for you. I even started to do a little research with a view to a book on the English in France in the fifteenth century, but the call of leisure was still strong. And then, coming home from dinner one evening with some friends – I was driving – a car came round a corner on the wrong side of the road, we crashed and Amélie was killed. We were laughing at something – she died laughing. The other driver was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison.

  For six months, I was in despair. I took to drink. And I started an affair with drugs that led me down to hell. Facilis descensus averno: the road to hell has a gentle slope. I will come to that later.

  I missed her terribly, every moment of every day. I woke missing her and I missed her still as the waters of sleep closed over me. My dreams were full of her and sometimes I dreamt that she was still alive and I woke to a desolate morning. Sometimes I thought I could hear her voice talking to me just out of earshot. I neglected you shamefully; yes, I almost blamed you for the accident – we could have stayed the night but she wanted to come home to you. Your nanny was wonderful, but the truth was, I could not bear to see you. I am so sorry to have to tell you that, but I feel it might help to explain my hurt and despair. Tiny though you were, you reminded me too much of your mother.

  I went to hell on a succession of handcarts. Drink, drugs, low life, low company, mountebanks, gambling and spongers. And then at last one day, waking up in a strange bed with no idea where I was, I made a decision; it had to stop. I would become a recluse and a scholar and I would devote myself to the period of histor
y that interested me.

  I plunged into it with the same addictive devotion that I had shown for debauch. You and Nanny were sent up to a small castle our family had in Scotland, with instructions that I was not to be interrupted in Oxfordshire. Meanwhile, I had come across a distant cousin of mine called Middleburg (God knows where he came from – the Burgundian or Alsace side, I think he said) in some casino or bar who made himself obliging to me, a necessary man and excellent researcher. We worked together well for several years which is why I trusted him. He helped me with research into this Gilles de Rais who, it seemed to me, might have suffered a gross injustice at the hands of his enemies and of history itself. As I looked deeper and deeper into the past, this Middleburg, my cousin, became indispensable at tedious things like admin; he paid bills for me, signed cheques, stood in for me at board meetings, I really didn’t have time for all that sort of thing. In the end, he made the suggestion that I should move to the United States and, most especially to California, since my previous low life, followed by my present bookish ways, had engendered a lung infection that refused to clear up. The desert air, he said, would prove remedial. We were concerned that I might become consumptive – even in the forties, it was an inconvenient disease. I embraced the idea since California in those days still had a certain promise about it, a promise bleached by the sun, uncluttered by memory.