David Lodge - Small World (38 page)

“Here’s your Amex card, sir,” said the man. “Could I see your passport?”

“Sure.” Persse glanced at his watch. It was 9.15.

The man flicked open the passport, frowned, and thumbed through the pages very deliberately. “I can’t find your visa, sir,” he said at length.

Persse now knew, if he did not know before, what a cold sinking feeling was like. “Oh, Jaysus! Do I need a visa?”

“You can’t fly to the United States without a visa, sir.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

The man sighed, and slowly tore Persse’s ticket and American Express slip into small pieces.

Three whhheeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! The scream of jet engines rises to a crescendo on the runways of the world. Every second, somewhere or other, a plane touches down, with a puff of smoke from scorched tyre rubber, or rises into the air, leaving a smear of black fumes dissolving in its wake. From space, the earth might look to a fanciful eye like a huge carousel, with planes instead of horses spinning round its circumference, up and down, up and down. Whhheeeeeeeeeee!

It’s late July now, and schools as well as colleges and universities have begun their summer vacations. Conference-bound academics must compete for airspace with holidaymakers and package tourists. The airport lounges are congested, their floors are littered with paper cups, the ashtrays are overflowing and the bars have run out of ice. Everyone is on the move. In Europe, northerners head south for the shadeless beaches and polluted waters of the Mediterranean, while southerners flee to the chilly inlets and overcast mountains of Scotland and Scandinavia. Asians fly west and Americans fly east. Ours is a civilization of lightweight luggage, of permanent disjunction. Everybody seems to be departing or returning from somewhere. Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London. Or Ajaccio, Palma, Tenerife, Faro, Miami.

At Gatwick, pale-faced travellers in neatly pressed frocks and safari suits, anxiously clutching their passports and airtickets, hurry from the Southern Region railway station to the Air Terminal, struggling against a tide of their sunburned and crumpled counterparts flowing in the opposite direction, festooned with wickerwork baskets, dolls in folk costume, straw sombreros and lethal quantities of duty-free cigarettes and liquor.

Persse McGarrigle is carried along by the departing current. It is nearly a week since the debâcle at Geneva airport, during which time he has flown home to Ireland, found a substitute for himself on the Celtic Twilight Summer School and got himself a visa to the United States. Now he is on his way to Los Angeles, to look for Angelica, by Skytrain, the walk-on, no-reservation service that posters all over London inform him is the cheapest way to travel to the States. But the Laker checkin counters are ominously deserted. Has he made a mistake about the departure time? No. Alas, the Skytrain has been suspended owing to the grounding of the DC-10, the Laker staff explain to Persse with regret, sympathy and a certain incredulity. Is it possible that there is anyone left in the entire world who hasn’t heard about the grounding of the DC-10? I haven’t been reading the papers lately, he says apologetically, I’ve been living in a cottage in Connemara, writing poetry. What’s the quickest way for me to get to Los Angeles? Well, they say, you could take the helicopter to Heathrow, though it will cost you, and try the big nationals. Or you could go from here by Braniff to Dallas/Fort Worth, they have onward connections to LA. Persse gets the last standby seat on a Boeing 747 painted bright orange, which takes him to an airport so immense you cannot see its perimeter at under two thousand feet, baking like an enormous biscuit in a temperature of 104° Farenheit; shivers for three hours in a smoked-glass terminal building air-conditioned to the temperature of iced Coke; and flies on to California in a Western Airlines Boeing 707.

It is dark by the time they begin their descent to Los Angeles, and the city is an awe-inspiring sight from the air—a glimmering gridiron of light from horizon to horizon—but Persse, who has been travelling continuously for twenty-two hours, is too tired to appreciate it. He has tried to sleep on the two planes, but they kept waking him up to give him meals. Long-distance flying, he decides, is rather like being in hospital in that respect, and it wouldn’t have surprised him unduly if one of the hostesses had slipped a thermometer into his mouth between meals. He had scarcely had the strength to rip open the plastic envelope containing his cutlery for the last dinner he was offered.

He staggers out of the terminal into the warm Californian night, and stands dazedly on the pavement as cars and buses sweep by in an endless procession. A man strides to the edge of the kerb and waves down a minibus with “Beverly Hills Hotel” emblazoned on its side, which promptly swerves to a halt and springs open its door with a hiss of compressed air. The man gets in and Persse follows. The ride is free, the hotel room staggeringly expensive—clearly way out of Persse’s usual class of accommodation, but he is too tired to quibble or to contemplate searching for a cheaper alternative. A porter insists on taking his ridiculously small sports grip, which is all the luggage he has, and leading him down long, carpeted corridors decorated with a design of huge, slightly sinister green leaves above the dado, and shows him into a handsome suite with a bed as big as a football pitch. Persse takes off his clothes and crawls into the bed, falls asleep instantly, wakes up only three hours later, 2 a.m. local time but 10 a.m. by his body clock, and tries to make himself drowsy again by studying the entries under “Pabst” in the Los Angeles telephone directory. There are twenty-seven of them altogether and none of them is called Hermann.

But where is Morris Zapp? His non-appearance at Vienna excited little interest—people often fail to show up at conferences they have provisionally applied for. But at Bellagio there is considerable concern. Morris Zapp never returned from his jog in the woods that afternoon, after writing his letter to Arthur Kingfisher. The letter is recovered from the outgoing mailbox in the villa’s lobby and confiscated by the police as a possible source of clues to his disappearance; it is opened and perused and puzzled over and filed away and forgotten; it is never mailed and Arthur Kingfisher never knows that he was invited to the Jerusalem conference. Search parties are sent into the woods, and there is talk of dragging the lake.

A few days later, Desiree, vacationing at Nice, gets a telephone call in her hotel room from the
Paris Herald-Tribune
. A young, rather breathless American male voice.

“Is that Mrs Desiree Zapp?”

“Not any longer.”

“I beg your pardon ma’am?”

“I used to be Mrs Desiree Zapp. Now I’m Ms Desiree Byrd.”

“The wife of Professor Morris Zapp?”

“The ex-wife.”

“The author of Difficult Days?”

“Now you’re talking.”

“We just had a telephone call, Mrs Zapp—”

“Ms Byrd.”

“Sorry, Ms Byrd. We just had an anonymous telephone call to say that your husband has been kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped?”

“That’s right ma’am. We’ve checked it out with the Italian police and it seems to be true. Professor Zapp went out jogging from a villa in Bellagio three days ago and never returned.”

“But why in God’s name would anybody want to kidnap Morris?”

“Well, the kidnappers are demanding half a million dollars in ransom.”

“What? Who do they think is going to pay that sort of money?”

“Well, you I guess, ma’am.”

“They can go fuck themselves,” says Desiree, putting down the phone.

Soon the young man is back on the line. “But isn’t it true, Mrs Zapp—Ms Byrd—that you received half a million dollars for the film rights alone of
Difficult Days?
”

“Yeah, but I earned that money and I sure as hell didn’t earn it to buy back a husband I said good riddance to years ago.”

Desiree bangs down the phone. Almost immediately it rings again. “I have nothing further to say,” she snaps.

There is silence for a moment, then a heavily accented voice says, “Ees dat Signora Zapp?”

Persse has breakfast in a pleasant room on the ground floor of the Beverly Hills called the Polo Lounge, which is full of people who look like film stars and who, it gradually dawns upon him, are film stars. The breakfast costs as much as a three-course dinner in the best restaurant in Limerick. His American Express Card will take care of the bill, but Persse is getting worried at the thought of the debits he is totting up on the Amex computer. A few days’ living in this place would see off the remainder of his bank balance, but there’s no point in checking out till noon. He goes back to his palatial suite and telephones the twenty-seven Pabsts in the directory without finding one who will admit to having a daughter called Angelica. Then, cursing himself for not having thought of the expedient earlier, he works his way through the head offices of the airlines in the Yellow Pages, asking for Mr Pabst, until, at last, the telephonist at Transamerican says, “Just one moment, I’ll put you through to Mr Pabst’s secretary.”

“Mr Pabst’s office,” says a silky Californian voice.

“Oh, could I speak to Mr Pabst?”

“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting right now. Can I take a message?”

“Well, it’s a rather personal matter. I really want to see him myself. Urgently.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible today. Mr Pabst has meetings all the morning and he’s flying to Washington this afternoon.”

“Oh dear, this is terrible. I’ve flown all the way from Ireland to see him.”

“Did you have an appointment, Mr…”

“McGarrigle. Persse McGarrigle. No, I don’t have an appointment. But I must see him.” Then, “It’s about his daughter,” he risks. “Which one?”

Which one! Persse clenches the fist of his free hand and punches the air in triumph. “Angelica,” he says. “But Lily, too, in a way.”

There is a thoughtful silence at the other end of the line. “Can I come back to you about this Mr McGarrigle?”

“Yes, I’m staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” says Persse.

“The Beverly Hills, right.” The secretary sounds impressed. Ten minutes later the phone rings again. “Mr Pabst can see you for a few minutes at the airport, just before his plane leaves for Washington,” she says. “Please be at the Red Carpet Club in the Transamerican terminal at 1.15 this afternoon.”

“I’ll be there,” says Persse.

Morris Zapp hears the telephone ringing in the next room. He does not know where he is because he was knocked out with some sort of injection when they kidnapped him, and when he woke up, God knew how many hours later, he was blindfolded. From the sounds of birdsong and the absence of traffic noise beyond the walls of his room he deduces that he is in the country; from the coolness of the air around his legs, still clothed in red silk running shorts, that he is in the mountains. He complained bitterly about the blindfold until his captors explained that if he happened to see any of them they would be obliged to kill him. Since then, his main fear has been that his blindfold will slip down accidentally. He has asked them to knock on the door before they come into his room so that he can warn them of such an eventuality. They come in to give him his meals, untying his hands for this purpose, or to lead him to the john. They will not allow him outdoors, so he has to exercise by walking up and down his small, narrow bedroom. Most of the time he spends lying on the bunk bed, racked by a monotonous cycle of rage, self-pity and fear. As the days have passed, his anxieties have become more basic. At first he was chiefly concerned about the arrangements for the Jerusalem conference. Later, about staying alive. Every time the telephone rings in the next room, he feels an irrational spasm of hope. It is the chief of police, the military, the US Marines. “We know where you are, you are completely surrounded. Release your prisoner unharmed and come out with your hands on your heads.” He has no idea what the telephone conversations are actually about, since they are conducted in a low murmur of Italian.

One of Morris’s guards, the one they call Carlo, speaks English and from him Morris has gathered that he has been kidnapped not by the Mafia, nor by the henchmen of some rival contender for the UNESCO chair, such as von Turpitz, but by a group of left-wing extremists out to combine fund-raising with a demonstration of anti-American sentiment. The Rockefeller Villa and its affluent lifestyle evidently struck them as an arrogant flaunting of American cultural imperialism (even though, as Morris pointed out, it was used by scholars from all nations) and the kidnapping of a well-connected resident as an effective form of protest which would also have the advantage of subsidizing future terrorist adventure. Somehow—Morris cannot imagine how, and Carlo will not tell him—they traced the connection between the American professor who went jogging at 5.30 every afternoon along the same path through the woods near the Villa Serbelloni, and Desiree Byrd, the rich American authoress reported in Newsweek as having earned over two million dollars in royalties and subsidiary rights from her novel
Difficult Days
. The only little mistake they made was to suppose that Morris and Desiree were still married. Morris’s emphatic statement that they were divorced clearly dismayed his captors.

“But she got plenty money, yeah?” Carlo said, anxiously. “She don’ wan’ you to die, huh?”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Morris said. That was Day Two, when he was still capable of humour. Now it is Day Five and he doesn’t feel like laughing any more. It is taking them a long time to locate Desiree, who is apparently no longer to be found in Heidelberg.

The telephone conversation in the next room comes to an end, and Morris hears footsteps approaching and a knock on his door. “Come in,” he croaks, fingering his blindfold.

“Well,” says Carlo, “we finally located your wife.”

“Ex-wife,” Morris points out.

“She sure is some tough bitch.”

“I told you,” says Morris, his heart sinking. “What happened?”

“We put our ransom demand to her…” says Carlo.

“She refused to pay?”

“She said, ‘How much do I have to pay to make you keep him?’ “