Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  Live; live; live

  JONATHAN BUCKLEY

  New York Review Books New York

  This is a New York Review Book

  published by The New York Review of Books

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Buckley

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Gerhard Richter, Deckchair II, 1965; © Gerhard Richter 2020

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Buckley, Jonathan, 1956– author.

  Title: Live; live; live / by Jonathan Buckley.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books/Sort of Books, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020040782 (print) | LCCN 2020040783 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681375472 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375489 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6052.U2665 L59 2021 (print) | LCC PR6052.U2665 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040782

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040783

  ISBN 978-1-68137-548-9

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  LIVE; LIVE; LIVE

  Biographical Note

  For Susanne Hillen and Bruno Buckley

  Freilich ist es seltsam, die Erde nicht mehr zu bewohnen.

  [True, it is strange to be living on Earth no more.]

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  Duino Elegies: The First Elegy

  Many of the things that have been said and are still being said are not true. People have arrived at conclusions without knowing enough. It has been said that I have misrepresented certain situations and incidents. We all misrepresent; we misperceive and we misremember. This goes without saying – which is not to say that truthfulness is never possible. I want to be truthful; I try to be truthful, and Lucas knew this. I did not dissemble. We were on good terms, though I could not be persuaded to believe. I made no attempt to refute him; beliefs such as those of Lucas are not refutable. I was intrigued, and this pleased him. I was interested in what he said and what he did, and in the people who turned to him. There were many conversations, some of considerable length, some revealing, on both sides. He was aware that I might write about our discussions. In fact, he encouraged me. This is to his credit. He knew that I would not be convinced, yet he confided in me. The modesty of Lucas should also be noted. He would not have wanted me to advertise his achievements, because he did not think of them as achievements. He simply happened to possess an unusual faculty, he thought. Having been blessed with unusually acute eyesight, likewise, would be nothing to boast about.

  As for the archive – yes, I would have liked to explore it, to examine it. The files contain – or contained – many things that I would not be able to explain, Lucas assured me. But it was a question of confidentiality: he could talk about cases that had entered the public domain, and – changing the names – tell me something about a few others, for which absolute secrecy was not required, but he could not open the files. This was reasonable, and I accepted it. Erin’s sister argued for their destruction: it would have been understood by his clients that nobody other than Lucas would ever read these documents, she said. Against her, I suggested that the documentation should be donated to a relevant institution or organisation. This may or may not have happened.

  •

  For a while, briefly, I was involved with someone called Magda. I mentioned her once to Lucas, and for some reason I supplied her surname – Adamczak. Lucas was delighted.

  Several years earlier, he told me, he had been consulted by a family of the same name, in Walsall; the father was from Legnica, he recalled; his name was Jakub, and he had three ‘extraordinarily beautiful and brilliant’ daughters: Zoja, Krysia and Celina. ‘The Three Graces,’ sighed Lucas, allowing his gaze to become hazy. The mother, Marta, was the deceased. She had been an ‘exceptional’ cellist, and the daughters were talented musicians too: Zoja and Krysia played violin and Celina the piano. By profession, all three daughters were academics: Celina an anthropologist; Krysia a geographer; Zoja a musicologist. Zoja was working on a book about the musical life of Italian convents in the seventeenth century. It was to be noted that these highly intelligent young women had been grateful to Lucas. With Zoja, Lucas remembered, he’d had a ‘fascinating’ conversation about Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, abbess of the convent of Santa Radegonda in Milan, and a fine composer; when the plague struck Milan in 1630, the convent musicians had survived because they had effectively been in quarantine, Zoja had explained. Lucas had much to say on the subject of Zoja and the musical nuns; it was as though he had been with the Adamczak family only yesterday.

  ‘I’ll show you something,’ he then said, getting up. I followed him upstairs, to the door at the end of the landing. The door opened onto the drabbest of rooms: off-white walls, grey carpet, a single bulb in the centre of the ceiling, enclosed in a globe of frosted glass, dirty. So at last I saw the archive. Against the long wall, opposite the door, six filing cabinets stood side by side – grey metal, identical, each with four drawers. To the left, a radiator. To the right was the room’s sole window, with a Venetian blind, white. In front of the window, a four-drawer desk, black-topped, with thick steel legs. A pad of A4 paper, lined, occupied the centre of the desk; there was a pot of pens and pencils, beside a lamp, black. The chair, also black, was a standard item of bureaucratic furniture. Nothing mitigated the austerity of the room. The walls were bare. It could have been the workplace of a Stasi functionary.

  From the desk he took a key, to unlock the nearest of the cabinets, which bore a printed label: A–D. A hanging file was extracted; on the tab was written ‘Adamczak’. Lucas withdrew a yellow folder, and from the folder he withdrew a thin sheaf: ‘Marta Adamczak’ was the heading of the cover sheet. He showed me a page of notes on Jakub; Zoja, Krysia and Celina had documents of their own; another was marked ‘Transcript’; another ‘Report’. An envelope contained a cassette.

  For every client there was a file, he explained, gesturing at the array: Abney, Adams, Adkins, Akerman, Alvin, Attwater, et cetera. His pride in the archive seemed more like that of an employee than of a creator. He impressed upon me that each file was the same in format: a document for every subject and for every participant; a recording, plus a transcript of every word that was on the tape; a report. I was permitted to extract one at random, not to read its contents but to verify that it was as thorough as the Adamczak file. I was being asked to appreciate the rigour of the system; his scrupulousness.

  Lucas relocked the A–D cabinet. Taking a step back, he cast his gaze over these containers for the papers of the deceased. He smiled, as if seeing in his mind the ghostly ranks of the recovered dead, whose care was his responsibility.

  There were stories in these cabinets that would make even the most hardened sceptic pause, said Lucas. He regretted that he could not prove this to me.

  •

  Lucas had been reading a book about Helena Blavatsky. ‘Have you ever seen anything more ridiculous?’ he said, taking the book from the table, and opening it at a page of photos. Attired in a hooded and embroidered gown, resembling an end-of-the-pier fortune-teller, the figurehead of Theosophy, author of Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of Silence, gazed off to the left, into the invisible. From the fac
ing page, W. B. Yeats, with dandyish cravat and pince-nez, peered in the direction of the inspirational mystic. Lucas marvelled that so many supposedly intelligent people should have been duped by this character. Yeats, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, Scriabin – all had been fascinated by her. ‘Incredible,’ he said, as if they had been clients who had deserted him for the preposterous Blavatsky. ‘I mean – just look at her.’

  •

  The Showalter case – this has to be discussed. Online, ‘Lucas Judd’ + ‘John Showalter’ produces dozens of hits. Many of them credit Lucas with having solved the case in advance of the police. Here’s one: ‘Two weeks after the girl’s disappearance, the police were getting nowhere.’ Then, the story goes, Lucas arrived on the scene, and identified the killer in a flash of paranormal insight. Nobody believed him, of course. His powers were not recognised by the unimaginative officers of the law. Subsequent events, however, were to prove him right.

  On several websites Lucas is compared with the more celebrated Doris Stokes. Doris Stokes, one will read, not only solved two murders in her native country but also made headlines in Los Angeles, where she was contacted by the spirit of the murdered Vic Weiss, who divulged to Doris crucial information about the circumstances of his demise. But Doris Stokes did not in fact solve the Weiss case: according to the LAPD, all of the information that she gave them had already been made public. The Lancashire constabulary likewise were adamant that the psychic had made no contribution whatever to their investigations, as Lucas told me, having rectified the misunderstandings that had arisen from some reports of what had happened in Tavistock, with John Showalter. It was true that Showalter was singled out by Lucas a full week before his arrest, but there was nothing uncanny about what Lucas had done. Lucas himself insisted that there was nothing uncanny about it. He had paid close attention to what was visible, that’s all, he told me.

  He had visited the parents of the missing girl on a Sunday afternoon, and followed the usual procedure: a long conversation, involving the parents and the older daughter and her boyfriend; he had spent an hour in the missing girl’s room, absorbing. Nothing came of this procedure. There was no signal. The silence in itself, however, told him nothing. He had immediately ascertained that this was not a happy household. A show of harmony was maintained, but it was evident that there was friction between the mother and father, and that this friction had not arisen recently. Even more obvious was the parents’s disapproval of the older daughter’s boyfriend, and her resentment of this disapproval. And although nobody would admit to having argued with the missing girl, Lucas knew that there had been strong disagreements, involving everyone. In the climate of the empty bedroom, hostility was a powerfully present element. Therefore the absence of information in the air was not surprising. The girl, wherever she was, was not communicating with the house. But Lucas could not tell if she was alive or dead. He assumed the worst, as anyone would have done. A pretty teenage girl disappears; no sightings for two weeks – a happy ending was not to be expected. But there was no way of telling if she was living and uncommunicative or dead and uncommunicative, said Lucas. The living and the dead do not radiate different kinds of silence. Thus he did not know what had happened, not until he took a walk around the neighbourhood. An ‘immersion in the environment’ was often highly productive.

  For many people, including the police, the sister’s sullen boyfriend was the most plausible suspect. There were rumours, as Lucas had been aware before meeting the family, that there had been too close a relationship, briefly, between this young man and the missing girl. Jealousy and anger could be sensed during the conversation with the family, as could the boyfriend’s belief in his own allure. He was known as a drinker; several tattoos were indicative of an aggressive personality. Lucas had not liked him, and the antipathy was reciprocated. But the boyfriend was wrong to think, as he clearly did, that Lucas had convicted him on sight. Lucas knew within seconds that he was innocent, just as he knew right away, on encountering John Showalter, that he was looking at the guilty man.

  The encounter occurred at the end of the street in which the family lived. Lucas stood aside to let a man and his dog pass by. It was the beauty of the animal – a full-grown Bernese, a magnificent specimen, perfectly groomed – that made him speak to the man. It was impossible not to stroke this dog; Lucas asked permission, and did so. ‘A handsome beast,’ he commented. The man nodded, avoiding eye contact. ‘What’s his name?’ asked Lucas. The dog’s name was Mike. ‘Really?’ Lucas wanted to say; instead, crouching to peer into the eyes of the dog, he said ‘Hello Mike.’ Looking up, he saw the man glance up the street, in the direction of the house that Lucas had left a few minutes earlier. ‘You are quite something,’ he said to the dog, and gave its owner a smile of congratulation. The answering smile, said Lucas, might have seemed genuine to most people, but what Lucas saw in it was not friendliness: the smile informed him that this man was afraid – specifically, he was afraid that Lucas had been visiting the family of the missing girl.

  Lucas stood up, to face the man. Feigning a mild puzzlement, he said: ‘I think we might have met before.’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘A couple of months ago, at the station?’ Lucas invented a minor incident, of which he and the man had been witnesses. ‘You didn’t have Mike with you, but I’m sure it was you,’ he said.

  The man shook his head. ‘Wasn’t me,’ he said.

  Lucas increased the perplexity. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Hundred per cent.’

  ‘I could have sworn.’

  ‘Nope. Wasn’t me.’

  Lucas shrugged. ‘My mistake,’ he said. Then, having praised the dog once more, he turned on the man a final scrutinising look. Frowning deeply, he stated: ‘But I know you from somewhere. Definitely.’ And at this, he saw a flinch in the eye of John Showalter.

  He asked the parents if they knew of a man with a large Bernese dog. They did: he lived three streets away; his daughter had attended the same school as the missing girl and her sister, but nobody could remember anything about her except her name. Lucas suggested that the police should talk to him. The police had already spoken to him, as they had spoken to everyone living within a half-mile radius of the house. It was hard to believe that anyone could suspect John Showalter. A family man; a quiet man; someone who ‘kept himself to himself’, as they all do. For more than twenty years he had worked for a local timber supplier. Every weekend, without fail, he went to see his mother, even though she was no longer sure who he was.

  Two weeks later, after the discovery of the body, and the arrest and confession of John Showalter, a reporter rang Lucas, having spoken to the parents. Everyone was in shock. On John Showalter’s computer the police had found photographs of the murdered girl, and many more pictures of much younger girls, which would have been enough in themselves to get him imprisoned.

  Any competent investigator would have realised that something wasn’t right with that man, Lucas told me. It amazed him that John Showalter had been interviewed by two officers, neither of whom had observed anything that had made them wonder if it might be worth talking again, at length, to this dull-seeming little man. ‘It really didn’t need a mind-reader,’ said Lucas, shaking his head at the ineptitude. On several occasions, after the Showalter case, he had been approached by people who had lost faith in the instruments of justice. With apologies, he had declined most requests, urging patience and trust. Police work should be left to the police, he declared, to me. And Lucas had no desire to be a celebrity. ‘In my – métier,’ he said, settling on the noun as a label that would suffice for now, ‘there should be no celebrities.’ But he delivered the ruling as if I were interviewing him for a magazine profile.

  It was an extraordinary coincidence, I remarked, that John Showalter had happened to be walking his dog in that street at exactly the minute that Lucas was walking down it. ‘Quite,’ said Lucas, meaning that it was not a
coincidence at all. Killers often return to the scene of the crime, or to a locale associated closely with it. This is well known. It’s often a compulsion, or a taunt, or a way of inviting arrest.

  •

  ‘Who is that man?’ I asked, on passing Mrs Oliver and Lucas in the street. I must have been seven or eight years old. My mother said that he was a relative, she thought. Later, when he was at Mrs Oliver’s house almost every day, or so it seemed, she described him as a friend of Mrs Oliver’s; this was puzzling, because Kathleen Oliver was so much older than him; friends were always the same age as each other, more or less. Some afternoons, I looked out from my room and saw him in the garden, in a deckchair, reading, as if he were on holiday. ‘What does he do?’ I asked. His job was unusual, my mother answered. He helped people who have lost someone from their family; a detective of some kind, was what I imagined. I had the idea of asking Lucas Judd to find my father; we did not know where my father was living. Then my mother had to tell me that she had come to think that my father did not want to be found.

  Later, I could be told without evasion the nature of Mr Judd’s profession. ‘How does that work?’ I asked. My mother didn’t know, she told me, but she had some idea how other people did the sort of thing that Mr Judd did. She said something about séances, as if they were a special kind of experiment, organised by people who were trained to do what they did; I was not to think of it as nonsense. Mr Judd was a serious man; I could see that for myself. Then, at night, I would kneel on the bed and look at Mrs Oliver’s house; over there, on the far side of the wall, Mr Judd was raising the spirits of the dead, like a wizard. Some nights, thinking of the ghosts that were swimming around in that house, I could not sleep. I looked at the windows, hoping, with dread, to see in one of them the eerie glow that I imagined the spirits would give off. Occasionally, I would see Mr Judd carrying something from the fridge, or standing at the sink, washing a glass. It was vaguely sinister, this pretence of ordinariness. He knew that I could see him from my room.