by Ned Beauman
‘Elisalexa!’ shrieked Margaret Norb. She hurriedly and ineffectually rearranged her petticoats, then turned and slapped Dr Voronoff so hard in the face that he nearly fell over sideways.
‘Where is he?’ said Elisalexa Norb, totally uninterested in what her aunt was doing. Scramsfield had just caught sight of the lizard in the opposite corner of the room, so, like an idiot, he pointed. The girl hurled herself towards the iguana, but her legs were still muddled, and she tripped, bounced off an armchair, and collided finally with Dr Voronoff’s trolley, knocking it to the ground with a crash and sending the birdcage flying through the air. It slipped its black sheet, landed by the Japanese screen, and rolled to a stop.
The silence afterwards was so total that you could hear the little brass creak of the empty cage’s door as it fell slowly open.
‘Perhaps we’d better be going,’ said Scramsfield to Dr Voronoff. And, with some haste, they were going.
The two men were out of the Concorde Sainte Lazare and around the corner before Loeser said, ‘What the hell were you doing with her in there?’
‘I could ask you the same question,’ Scramsfield panted, making a dance step to avoiding getting tangled in somebody’s dog leash.
‘I said no but she insisted.’
‘Yes. Mine too. Champagne and nembutal. Must remember that. “Scramsfield’s Patent Aphrodisiac Serum”.’
‘Oh God, don’t talk like that, we sound like rapists.’
‘Rapists? We’re not rapists. They’re the rapists.’
‘I’m not going to debate free agency with you, Scramsfield.’
They passed a pharmacist with an unsettling window in which nine plastic pelves each demonstrated a different herniary bandage. ‘Come on, buddy, I’ve heard how you all do things in Berlin. Are you telling me you never used dope and booze to get a girl to go to bed with you?’
‘I’ve never done that.’
‘And you never tried?’
Loeser coughed. His right cheek was still pink. ‘When are we going to see Picquart?’
‘We can go now if you want. He’s always at home.’
Picquart lived on the fifth floor of a dirty building in the Latin Quarter with a staircase so hellishly steep and narrow that halfway up you began to wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier to try your luck with a drainpipe. Scramsfield knocked on the door.
‘Quoi?’
‘It’s Scramsfield.’
‘Bien.’
They went inside.
Heraclitus taught that all is change. Scramsfield knew this from his first semester at Yale, and he was sure Picquart’s three cats would agree with the Greek. The entire apartment was crammed with piles of old books, often with only the narrowest of pedestrian corridors between them, and these piles were continually being rearranged, relocated, or removed, so that after every nap the cats woke up to an entirely unfamiliar topology, like a tribe dwelling in some impossible mountain range that rumbled every hour with random, hyper-accelerated geological convulsions. Yesterday, they might have found a nice ledge, hidden between two volumes of a dictionary, which caught the morning sunlight through the window; today, it would be gone, or it would be too high to reach, or it would topple as soon as they set paw on it. The cats didn’t seem to leave the apartment very often, and Scramsfield imagined it was because they found the great city outside to be eerily, almost unbearably static. However, Picquart said they did sometimes go outside to mate. Heraclitus taught, also, that all things come into being through strife, and Scramsfield hadn’t believed this in Boston, but he believed it in Paris, because the sound the local cats made when they fucked on the roofs in the middle of the night was really enough to persuade anyone.
Picquart himself was a wiry and warty old man with a nose like an eroded cathedral gargoyle. They’d met in a prison cell when Scramsfield had been arrested for running away from a restaurant without paying the bill and Picquart for swearing at a policeman. The next morning they both got out and Picquart now sometimes bought stolen books from Scramsfield. They didn’t particularly like each other.
‘What do you have for me? Who is this?’
‘I don’t have any books today, Marcel. This is Egon Loeser. He’s an old pal of mine.’
‘Un Allemand?’
‘Yes.’
‘What does he want?’
Loeser took out the letter from Lavicini to Sauvage, along with a box of cigars they’d bought on the way, and gave both to Picquart. ‘Scramsfield said you might know what this character Sauvage is talking about there,’ he said.
Picquart read the letter, then looked up. ‘What do you think he’s talking about?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. But I wondered if it might be…’
‘Oui?’
‘Some sort of black magic.’
Picquart laughed. ‘Black magic? Non. You’re an imbecile.’
‘What, then?’
‘This isn’t about the devil. This is about Louis XIV. Do you know what Villayer was doing in the Cours des Miracles?’
‘No.’
‘He was trying to build a post office.’ Villayer, Picquart explained, was a politician, a shrewd and particularly disloyal member of Louis XIV’s Council of State. Every day, as a consequence of his position, he sent his servants out to deliver hundreds of messages and pick up hundreds of replies: political, commercial, philosophical, social, and sexual. But the bigger Paris grew, the more expensive and complex this network became, and the more obsessed Villayer became with its failures, drawing diagrams and annotating maps late into the night — many of his friends grew used to receiving notes that just read ‘This is a test’ — until at last he realised that the only constituency with which he now spent any real time was the pulsatile village of his own couriers. He decided that the capital needed a universal postal service, if only so that he could go back to being a real politician. Around that time, the journalist Henri Sauval was working on the Sun King’s behalf to make every respectable citizen of Paris believe that the Court of Miracles was full of criminals and cultists. Really, it was just an impoverished square like any other, but Louis was in the process of reshaping the city by finding excuses to evacuate and demolish every section, no matter how small, that wasn’t under his power. And Villayer saw that if he put Paris’s main post office in the middle of the Court of Miracles, he could expose Sauval’s manipulations, and perhaps save the Court’s inhabitants from losing their homes. He not only signed his own death warrant, therefore, but countersigned it too: Louis didn’t want a postal service in Paris, because he didn’t know if he could control it, and he especially didn’t want a post office in the Court of Miracles. So he had Villayer snatched on his way home from a banquet and beaten to death.
Lavicini learned all this because through de Gorge he’d met several of the King’s closest advisors. And when Lavicini warned Sauvage in the letter, it was because Sauvage was about to make a very similar mistake. The first public transport in Paris was a fleet of carriages that Sauvage himself had installed. Half a dozen strangers could ride together and they only had to pay five sous each. He’d paid Blaise Pascal to design the routes, working from some of Villayer’s old maps, so that they would be optimal down to the yard, an endeavour that Pascal later spent an unsuccessful week trying to adapt into a strategic board game. But the carriages were still slow. The streets of Paris were too crowded. So Sauvage had the idea of using the abandoned quarries under the city for the world’s first underground public carriage system. Once again, Louis didn’t want that because he didn’t know if he could control it. ‘Lavicini was warning Sauvage that if he carried on with the plan, Louis would have him killed just like he had Villayer killed,’ concluded Picquart. ‘ “If you persist in your intention to conquer those dark lower depths, then you will soon find yourself entombed in them.” Comprends? And that is just what happened. A hundred years later, de Crosne started burying our dead in the Catacombs, but Louis and his assassins were avant-garde in that respect.’
There was something about the eyes of Picquart’s biggest cat had always made Scramsfield feel sick, and at that moment he realised for the first time that they were the same pale yellow-green as a medicine he’d been given for an ear infection as a child.
‘Erstaunlich,’ said Loeser. ‘May I ask one more question?’
‘If you wish.’
‘What happened to Lavicini? What was the Teleportation Accident, really?’
‘You suspect that was “black magic”, too?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No. It was an assassination attempt. Gunpowder. When the Théâtre des Encornets collapsed, it was nothing to do with Lavicini’s machine. It was because Louis was in the audience that night. After he moved the court to Versailles, he hardly ever came to Paris. So if you wanted to kill him, you had to take every chance you could get. Even if you killed a lot of others in the process.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Aucune idée. Could have been the English. Could have been the Spanish. Could have been anyone. Louis had a lot of enemies, even more than the average tyrant. Sauvage had a son who disappeared around that time. Sons are vengeful. Does that answer all your questions?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Loeser, Picquart and I have a bit of business to do,’ said Scramsfield. ‘You may as well go.’
‘All right. See you at Zelli’s, Scramsfield.’
After Loeser had left, Scramsfield said, ‘Was all that true? What you told him?’
Picquart shrugged. ‘Bof. All theories. Villayer, Sauvage, Lavicini — it was all three hundred years ago. Personne n’en saitrien. But he didn’t want theories, he wanted facts. So I gave him facts.’
A few days later, just before one o’clock, on one of those cruel April mornings that are spread out across the sky like a Norb etherised upon a hotel chaise longue, Scramsfield sat outside the café on the Rue de l’Odéon writing a letter to his parents. A blond man walked up to the door of Shakespeare and Company, but instead of trying the handle, he just took out his watch. After wiping his front teeth with a napkin, Scramsfield got up, hurried towards the man, slowed to a saunter before he got near enough to be noticed, and then carried on past. A few steps further on, as a considerate afterthought, he paused, turned, and said, ‘Looking for Sylvia? She’s closed until two.’
Scramsfield watched for the gratitude in the man’s face, but there was none. ‘I’m not, actually,’ the man said. ‘I’m meeting someone here.’ That explained it: he was English. ‘Who are you?’ he added.
‘Just a friend of Miss Beach’s.’
‘And you make it your business to loiter outside the shop, informing every potential customer of its opening hours? Does she pay you for that? Odd sort of friendship.’
‘I just happened to be walking past—’
‘No, you weren’t. I saw you in that café. Are you about to sell me something? You have that air.’
Scramsfield was taken aback. ‘I’m not some sort of confidence man, if that’s what you’re implying.’
‘I wasn’t implying anything so glamorous. But perhaps that is how you regard yourself. I suppose you were hoping I was a rich American?’
‘Look here, I’m very well respected in Paris—’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes.’ Scramsfield drew himself up to his full height. ‘In fact, the one man in Paris I don’t know is the man who can give me a decent American haircut.’ But this time he didn’t get the tone of the joke right, so that it sounded as if he were affirming the existence of a specific individual of that description whose acquaintance he believed it morally unsound to make.
‘I see. In that case, did you ever meet Adele Hitler?’
Scramsfield did remember the name, but for once he was afraid to exaggerate. ‘I don’t think so. Who is she?’
‘A rich girl I know from Berlin. Pretty little beast. She ran off to Paris, so I arranged to be introduced to her parents, and then I talked them into paying for me to come out here and hunt her down and bring her home like Urashima Taro.’
‘Have you found her?’
‘After about three minutes of asking around, I found out she’s not in Paris any more. Apparently she decided to go on to Los Angeles. But I haven’t told the parents yet because they’re paying my expenses. I think I can string it out here for about another week. Then I might see if they’ll send me to America. You see, I’m a parasite of sorts too. It’s not so shameful, if one plays the game with some conviction. Which I’m afraid you don’t.’
‘If you know where she is, why are you still asking about this girl?’
‘I’m told she didn’t have enough money to have her luggage sent on after her,’ said the Englishman. ‘So it’s still in Paris. But no one seems to know where.’
‘Why do you need her luggage? To send back to the parents?’
‘No. At the Strix the night before last I met a certain scion of the House of Grimaldi who became friendly with Miss Hitler while she was in Paris but couldn’t persuade her to stay here with him. He’s offering several thousand francs for a parcel of her unlaundered underwear.’
Scramsfield scratched his ear. ‘Is that right? Well, nice to meet you. I’d better get back to … uh, I’d better get back.’
Relieved that the encounter was over, Scramsfield returned to his table at the café. After a few minutes he saw a second fellow walk up to Shakespeare and Company and greet the Englishman he’d just spoken to. They embraced and then ambled off together, just as Scramsfield remembered where he’d first heard the name Adele Hitler.
After they’d parted at Picquart’s apartment, Scramsfield hadn’t particularly expected ever to see Egon Loeser again. He didn’t like to stay friends with people who had seen him at his worst. But if he found Loeser and told him about Adele Hitler going to Los Angeles, then surely the German would have to buy Scramsfield a steak. Or at least a few brandies. And for once Scramsfield wouldn’t even have to lie.
The first place he looked for Loeser was the Flore. But the bar was nearly empty, and he was about to make for Zelli’s when he felt a tap on the shoulder. The scent of peppermint was so strong that even before he turned he knew it would be Dufrène.
‘Hello, Fabrice.’
‘Scramsfield, pauvre con, what is this the Armenian says about you and the cheques?’
‘The Armenian?’
‘Someone bails him. He comes looking for you. He says it’s your fault he goes to jail in the first place.’
‘That’s ridiculous. It was just rotten luck. I did everything I could.’
‘You should tell him, then. Because he’s angry. He says he’s killing you. He says he’s ripping your balls off.’
How apt, thought Scramsfield. ‘Just a misunderstanding. Thanks for letting me know, buddy. I’m going to go and find him right now and tell him what really happened and then we’ll both be laughing about it. Simple as that.’
‘I hope so. For your sakes.’
Outside the Flore, Scramsfield looked around, but to his relief there was no sign of the Armenian, just two curly-haired boys in sailor suits poking a dead tabby cat with sticks. He decided it might be best if he got out of Paris for a while. A nice impromptu countryside vacation, just a month or two, working on the novel, until the Armenian calmed down. (Or got taken back to jail.) In principle, there was nothing to stop him leaving a message for Loeser about the girl before he got on the train. But then there would be no way for Loeser to buy him that steak. No, he’d give him the news when he got back. Paris was a joy this time of year. It wouldn’t do Loeser any harm to wait a little while.
PART II
Ten Pins in a Map
4. LOS ANGELES, 1935
The Chateau Marmont
The splinter of reflected sunlight in the drop of water that clung trembling in the breeze to the thin blue nylon of a swimming costume just at the spot where it stretched tautest over the apex of the mound of Venus of a redhead in tortoiseshell sunglasses who la
y smoking a cigarette on a reclining chair beside the oval swimming pool of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard: that was Loeser as he stood in his underpants at the window of his hotel room on the morning after his arrival in Los Angeles. He, too, hung in that drop of water, every parameter of his lust encoded in the coefficients of its surface tension, quite ready, if it dried up in the sun-doubled skin-heat, to dry up with it. Then the redhead noticed him and he dived out of sight so fast he nearly twisted his ankle.
Had Loeser ever had sex? He supposed he probably had, but the memory was by now so dim that he almost wondered if in fact someone else had just described sex to him once and he’d gradually come to miscategorise it as an experience of his own, as one sometimes does with incidents that took place in childhood. At this point he couldn’t quantify his sexual frustration any more than he could weigh his own brain. Perhaps it directed everything he said and did. There was no way to be sure. It was too much a part of him. Unlike his penis, which he now regarded as a sort of ungrateful hitchhiker, a fatuous vestigium.
He sat down on his bed. Since he couldn’t go back to the window for a while, he decided he might as well set the clock to Midnight at the Nursing Academy. Although he hadn’t intended to stay more than a short time in Paris, he didn’t like to be separated from the photo album even for a day, so he’d taken it with him when he left Berlin and now it had unexpectedly come with him all the way to America. Last night he’d checked into the hotel so late that he hadn’t bothered to unpack, so it would still be in the suitcase, which lay unfastened on the floor beside the bed like a drunk passed out with an open mouth, hidden there between his second-favourite white shirt and his third-favourite white shirt.
