Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

by Russell Hoban

  Katerina held up her right index finger and made it go from side to side like a windscreen wiper. ‘So – which way is the needle pointing now?’

  ‘You mean, towards male or female?’

  ‘What you like – maybe life or death, I don’t know.’

  ‘Death, I guess.’

  ‘Mr Rinyo-Clacton, what in your mind does he represent?’

  ‘Death, I guess. But he’s no one I’m attracted to.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, every kind of thing goes on in the mind all the time. Say more about the story.’

  ‘Well, if Death is out to get you there’s no escaping, is there. It’ll find you in Earl’s Court or Piccadilly Circus or Belgravia or wherever. Maybe when it’s time you put out signals without knowing it and Death homes in on them.’

  ‘Say more. Look at Melancolia. Look at her face, the polyhedron, the dog. What about that winged infant perched just behind her? A boy, do you think? Is he asleep? Sulking? Is he the child of Melencolia?’ She held both my hands tightly. ‘Maybe – no, I don’t want to put thoughts in your head. Is she sexy, Melencolia? She’s well-built, not? Her eyes, how they burn, eh?’

  We were quiet for a while. Upstairs Berlioz, like a musical Delacroix, moved on to the next part of his crowded canvas, the tenebrous waltz of the second movement – a cast of thousands, all of them shadows. I was thinking of Mr Rinyo-Clacton and my death that I had seen in his eyes. I remembered the sound of his weeping and tried to move my mind away from it. In the print on the wall the eyes of the winged woman burned with … what? What was she thinking of?

  ‘Eros and Thanatos,’ said Katerina.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I don’t know; my mind is a big confusion and words come out of my mouth. So rarely is anything separate from anything else. Nothing is simple. Sometimes we move towards what we think we move away from.’

  The white walls seemed to vibrate. Her hands felt full of the voices of the dead. I closed my eyes and tried to see Serafina but I couldn’t. Katerina pulled her hands away and as I opened my eyes she was covering her face. ‘What is it?’ I said.

  She removed her hands; her eyes were very big. For a moment I saw her as a young woman, a woman to fall in love with. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think I can do any more today. I don’t know whether I’ve helped you at all.’

  ‘You have, in some way that I don’t quite understand.’ She looked awfully tired. God knew knew what she had to deal with at twenty-five pounds a time. As I paid her I felt a surge of pity for her, that this woman who had worn, perhaps danced in, those snakeskin shoes, should have to do this for a living. ‘Can I come and see you again?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want any more money from you – just come and talk to me when you feel like it, yes?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ I kissed her hand.

  ‘Such gallantry!’ she said with a bewitching smile. ‘I see you out.’

  As we left the room I noticed a box of sheet music on the floor with something by Debussy on top. On the worn carpet were several places that looked less worn. ‘You play the piano?’ I said.

  She flushed. ‘I sold it. I like to play late at night and people bang on the door and shout.’ At the front door she took my hand in hers for a moment. ‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Come safe to your house.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘See you.’ As I left, Berlioz was into the fourth movement, and the muffled thunder of drums announced March to the Scaffold.

  10

  The Oasis

  As I came down Katerina’s front steps I saw Desmond in evening clothes but no Daimler. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring the car around.’

  ‘How’d you know where to find me?’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  When the car pulled up and Desmond opened the door, I got into it. Right, I said to myself, it’s only a matter of life and death – just go with the flow. As we moved smoothly eastwards I leant back against the leopardskin and closed my eyes and remembered the oasis dream.

  October was, in one way or another, always a big month for Serafina and me: we met in October and she left me in our fourth October. The dream was a year ago, in our third October. For me the name of the month has in it a leaning forward, a striding, the sound of a stick rattling along iron railings, a hastening towards year’s end and the dreeing of one’s weird.

  We were in Paris for a long weekend. The days were mostly bright, the weather mild. We went up and down the Seine on a bateau mouche while a relentless taped commentary in four languages told us what we were seeing on the Left Bank and the Right. ‘You’ll get a stiff neck,’ said Serafina as we passed under the Pont des Invalides and I admired the natural endowments of the pneumatic bronze river-nymphs on the bridge.

  We went to Sacré-Coeur and rode a little fun-fair sort of train from Montmartre to Pigalle under a grey sky. In the Place Pigalle between a Ciné video and a boulangerie there was the vacant shell of what must have been a tavern or some kind of drinking-place. Its bulging face was shaped like a barrel, with indications of hoops and staves. Two deeply recessed barrel-shaped windows were its eyes; its clownish nose was the bottom of a barrel with the name Au Tonneau weathering into blankness on it; its mouth was a Gothic arch with its peak just below the nose. The eyes were shuttered and blind, the mouth sealed; the colour was the brownish-grey of forgottenness. From the pavement to just below the eyes Au Tonneau was palimpsested with tattered and fading posters heralding events long gone: Harry Belafonte! That empty barrel whose wine was long since spilt, its face kept looking at me.

  We went to Nôtre Dame, climbed the spiral stone stairs of the North Tower and photographed each other with gargoyles; we went to the Musée Rodin and agreed that we liked Camille Claudel better. We dared to use the Métro and never once got lost. We did many tourist things, walked many miles with bottles of mineral water in our rucksacks, and chewed and swallowed many baguettes. But the dream –

  On our last full day in Paris, the day of the Musée Rodin, we walked back by way of the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Our hotel was in the Rue de la Bastille. We were footsore and weary but not in the mood for going indoors, so we headed for the Place des Vosges.

  Having thoughtfully provided ourselves with two glasses, we bought a bottle of unchilled sauvignon on the way, tried to buy some ice at a café but were given it free of charge, went to the Place des Vosges, and found an empty bench. With the corkscrew on my Swiss Army knife I opened the bottle. I poured; we clinked glasses and drank the cold brightness of the wine that seemed to contain the whole mystery of our mingled selves. We drank the roundness of the day, the gold and the blue of it, the pang of October and Time’s iron railings.

  In the arcade over the road a little band of buskers were playing speeded-up jazz and standards but we heard them slowly: ‘Petite Fleur’; ‘Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?’; Thelonious Monk’s ‘Well, You Needn’t’; ‘Caravan’; ‘The Sheik of Araby’; and others. Ours was a back-to-back double bench; several shifts of couples came and went in various languages and friendly smiles.

  The sun declined with Hesperidean tints; I went back and bought a second bottle and we put it away silkily and with heightened appreciation of the music and everything else. The day had become archival and permanent and we recognised the specialness of it. We looked at each other not only with love but with new liking for the kind of person each of us was. When we left we crossed the road to where the buskers were packing up and I gave them money. Harmoniously we wove our way back to the hotel, made love, and fell asleep.

  That was when I had the dream: Serafina and I crossing a lion-coloured desert until the oasis mysteriously appeared, the feathery palm trees real in a way that only palm trees in dreams are; there were wild asses drinking at a shining dark pool in which the palms were reflected.

  I woke up around eight o’clock in the evening an
d when I sat up Serafina woke too. ‘Such a strange dream I had,’ she said: ‘there were donkeys drinking at a pool…’

  ‘Wild asses,’ I said.

  ‘How can you tell the difference?’

  ‘It’s just one of those things you know in a dream. And there were palm trees.’

  ‘Yes, feathery palm trees – it was an oasis, and the desert all around us. You and I had crossed that desert.’

  The Daimler had stopped. Desmond opened the door for me. ‘Royal Opera House,’ he said.

  The foyer was quiet and empty except for staff. I showed an usher Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s card and made my way to his box.

  11

  Yes or No

  ‘We’re in act two now,’ whispered Mr Rinyo-Clacton with his mouth close to my ear. ‘Mélisande’s not happy at the castle, she wants to go away, she thinks she might not live much longer. She’s nothing but trouble, that girl.’

  ‘Why do you keep coming to this opera then?’

  ‘I love it – there’s so much death and mystery and darkness, so much uncertainty in the music. You never know for sure what’s what in that story. It’s like the sea: you never know what’s coming up from that deep, deep chill beneath you.’

  I was surprised at how accurately he was describing my state of mind and my feelings about my own story. The music and the voices rose and fell like the sea as I tried to call up the oasis dream but my mind gave me the dead blind face of Au Tonneau, then the brooding Melencolia with her hammer and tongs and her greyhound. Other pictures also it offered but I looked away.

  Act Two became Act Three, and again Mélisande let down her hair and Pelléas sent his kisses up it while I pitied the doomed lovers and tried to think about what I was going to do; I wanted to talk to Serafina to find out if there was any chance of getting back together before I went further down the road with Mr Rinyo-Clacton. And I wanted to ponder the many Samarras where Death appeared at the appointed time. A million pounds! There was applause, the curtain fell on Act Three, the house lights came up, and Desmond entered the box with champagne and caviare and toast. He poured and withdrew, his hands disappearing last, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

  Mr Rinyo-Clacton extended his glass. ‘Salud, pesetas, y amor, y tiempo para gustarlos,’ he said with a wink and a grin. I watched my glass go out to meet his and we clinked.

  ‘Speaking of salud and tiempo,’ I said, ‘I find myself wondering about last night.’

  ‘Mmmm!’ He kissed his fingertips with a smacking sound. ‘For me it was special; you were absolutely wonderful with your virginal, somewhat reluctant, submission to my desire and your own – as I think about it I’m getting excited all over again.’ He gripped my thigh with his very strong ugly hands, showed his very good teeth, and breathed his bad breath on me. ‘How was it for you?’

  ‘Worrying. I’m going to ask you a straight question and I want a straight answer.’

  ‘Oh, dear, it’s come to that, has it?’

  ‘Just tell me, are you HIV positive?’

  ‘Jonathan, please! Do I ask you questions like that? Our pleasure was the more exciting because it was edged with uncertainty and dread. Be a man, Jonny! Don’t wimp out on me after such a promising start.’

  ‘The short answer, then, is that you’re not going to tell me?’

  ‘The short answer is, I have no idea. If I were the worrying sort I’d take precautions to begin with. As I’m not and I don’t, you surely don’t expect me to observe a three-month period of chastity and then go for an HIV test, do you?’

  ‘Arsehole roulette,’ I said.

  ‘If you like, and I think you do. In any case, such trifling worries are scarcely appropriate for a man who’s considering the sort of offer I’ve made to you.’ He refilled our glasses and clinked his against mine again. ‘Tonight’s the night, my boy.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For you to say yes or no. We can’t go on meeting like this indefinitely – no such thing as a free lunch and all that. What’s it going to be?’ His mouth was wet, possibly from the champagne.

  ‘You’re offering a million pounds,’ I said.

  ‘And a year to enjoy it.’

  ‘Why would you want to do this – buy my death? If you want somebody’s death, why can’t you simply go out and kill somebody like an ordinary murderer?’

  ‘It’s sexier this way: if you agree to these terms it’s the ultimate submission: mmmmmm, yes! Dark pleasure! Secret joy!’

  ‘I think you must be crazy.’

  ‘Crazy? The word is meaningless, read the papers and tell me that we live in a sane world. In any case, don’t attempt to understand me – you’d find yourself well beyond your depth. Just tell me whether you accept my offer or not.’

  I tried to picture a million pounds. As far as I knew, the biggest banknote was a fifty. A million pounds would be twenty thousand of those. I thought of films in which people opened attaché cases full of money neatly stacked. Sometimes they got shot, stabbed, or blown up. I thought of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the empty cloth bags and the gold dust blowing in the wind down the mountain. Quite a few films with banknotes blowing about too. I thought of Serafina humming to herself contentedly in a custom-built kitchen. No yachts, no flash cars for me, only the power to do as I liked, to carve the potential me out of the rock of nothingmuch. Serafina and I could live a whole lifetime on a million pounds – if I had a whole lifetime. She’d talked sometimes of how it might be to own her own restaurant. I could see it vividly: The Omnivore. With potato pancakes on the menu along with choice cuts and a dessert trolley with not too many healthy things on it.

  But! Would the million pounds really make any difference to Serafina? It wouldn’t cancel my infidelities. Or would it? I knew what life was like without a million pounds but I had no idea what it might be like with. Surely, I thought, it must make a difference in everything, in ways I couldn’t even imagine. The very way in which you opened your eyes in the morning must be different; the way you walked and talked; the way you saw yourself in the morning mirror and the way others saw you – yes! If I saw myself differently, as I must, then Serafina would see me differently, yes? I wasn’t sure of that.

  A year! If Mr Rinyo-Clacton kept his word. Would he? Hard to say – his idea of honour and truth might be idiosyncratic. Desmond appeared and filled my glass which I seemed to have emptied. How could I protect myself against the possibility of Mr Rinyo-Clacton breaking his word? A document of some kind to be left with my solicitor and Mr Rinyo-Clacton to be informed of it:

  Be it known that I, Jonathan Fitch, have entered into an agreement with the man known as T. Rinyo-Clacton who resides at such and such an address. For the sum of one million pounds Mr Rinyo-Clacton is entitled to take my life at any time after one year from this date. If I should meet with death before this date, the police are to be notified of this arrangement.

  I didn’t actually have a solicitor and it seemed ridiculous to engage one expressly for the Rinyo-Clacton business; even if I did, telling Mr Rinyo-Clacton that such a document existed seemed unlikely to guarantee me the promised year. More and more I felt that he was a man who did whatever he liked whenever he liked and never got caught.

  ‘I can hear the wheels in your head grinding,’ he said, ‘and I can assure you that anything you can think of has already occurred to me. I expect you’ll want to protect yourself with some sort of document left with your solicitor and of course I’ll do the same. Although my intention is to buy your death I am well aware that the conditions of the agreement will give you a powerful incentive for terminating me. Makes the whole thing more of a sporting proposition, I think – adds a little spice to both our lives.’

  I was certain then that he’d done this before. I found myself thinking of an old black-and-white film, The Hounds of Zaroff, in which Count Zaroff on his remote island lures yachts to their destruction with false beacons. Survivors who reach the shore are wined and dined, then given a day’s start before he hunts t
hem down and kills them for his sport. ‘You’re not a very nice man, are you?’ I said.

  ‘Nice is boring; I like excitement. So do you, or you wouldn’t be here. Now are you going to give me your answer or are you going to keep dithering while you drink my champagne?’

  I opened my mouth and watched the worods, the woordos, the words walk out into the peaceful murmur of the Royal Opera House interval. ‘My answer is yes,’ said the worods and the woordos and the words. ‘You can buy my death for one million pounds and a year to enjoy the million.’

  Mr Rinyo-Clacton gripped my thigh. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said, and chortled in his joy.

  ‘How do we …?’

  ‘Consummate our bargain? Back at my flat after the opera.’

  ‘You’ve got a million pounds in cash back at your flat?’

  ‘I always like to have a little cash on hand. But first we have Acts Four and Five before us, and Pelléas and Mélisande are finally going to pull their fingers out and declare their love. In real life they’d have been having it off days ago out in the woods or down at the boathouse but this is opera and they’ve got to sing their way around it for a while before he even gets to stick his tongue in her mouth. And his stupid brother, Golaud, maybe he’s meant to symbolise something because dramatically he’s unbelievable: Mélisande’s had wet knickers for Pelléas all this time and Golaud’s not taken any notice till now. Well, women are built for deception, aren’t they?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Think about it – when a man doesn’t want to do it he’s going to have difficulty rising to the occasion, but all a woman’s got to do is spread her legs and and fake an orgasm. Actually, Mélisande’s pretty much of a pain in the arse altogether. In real life one or the other of the brothers would have straightened her out smartish. Maeterlinck could have done better with the text.’

  ‘How many times have you seen it this year?’