Killing the Emperors (6 page)
Hortense Wilde was long and thin with a face so elongated that she reminded the baroness of a Modigliani. Over drinks, there were polite questions about where she and her rather crumpled husband had moved from and why. The baroness, on her best behaviour, had affected interest even though she wasn’t the centre of attention. The trouble started over dinner when Hortense asked Amiss what he did. ‘Er, I’ve had quite a few jobs,’ he said, ‘but most recently, I’ve been writing a bit.’
‘What do you write?’
‘I do some journalism, but mainly I’m trying to concentrate on novels. Crime novels.’
‘And are you published?’
‘Yes. My first came out a few months ago and I’m finishing the second.’
She laughed tinnily. ‘I’m afraid I won’t have read you. I don’t go in for popular fiction. Is it all sex and sadism?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said the baroness, who had suddenly lost interest in the conversation going on to her left. ‘Robert doesn’t write penny dreadfuls. He writes entertainingly for intelligent people.’
‘I’m sure he does,’ said Wilde. ‘But I’m afraid I’m more interested in serious issues.’
‘Here’s a serious issue then,’ said the baroness, who was already spoiling for a fight and thought she might have spotted a promising foe. ‘Why is the art world peddling so much crap these days? Robert and I were in Tat Modern today and it was crammed full of rubbish. Now admittedly, that’s to be expected from the gormless artistic elite. But Martin told me a story just now about how far this disease has spread. Go on, Martin.’
Martin Simon, always a man to avoid any kind of confrontation, looked nervously at her. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Jack. Hortense mightn’t be interested.’
‘Any sane person should be interested. Nay outraged. Go on. Go on. If you don’t, I’ll have to give her a mangled version of it.’
‘Very well,’ he said meekly. ‘Jack was expressing an interest in contemporary art earlier, Hortense, so I told her about visiting the new National Museum of Art in Cardiff when I was there on business last week. I was particularly taken by the work of a distinguished eighteenth-century painter called Richard Wilson. However part of one of his interesting landscapes was obscured by a huge pile of small cardboard boxes—six-and-a-half thousand to be exact, as this was a reaction to the local council’s plan to build six-and-a-half thousand new houses. They were bird boxes, as the Welsh title meant something like “Birds of a feather flock together.” What amused me was that they came in flat packs and had to be assembled by the museum staff.’
‘It seems perfectly valid to me,’ said Hortense Wilde.
‘How can it?’ asked the baroness. ‘It’s a waste of money. It requires no talent, no skill. It’s utterly pointless. Surely you can see that?’
‘I think perhaps I see more than you do, Jack. I’m an art historian.’
Amiss saw his parents-in-law exchanging a grimace of embarrassment. The baroness, on the other hand, wore an expression closely resembling that of Plutarch preparing to stalk a tasty victim. ‘How interesting,’ she said silkily. ‘There are a lot of you about these days. Would I have read anything of yours?’
‘I don’t write for the general public.’ She repeated the tinny laugh. ‘I’m afraid the discourse in which I engage is above most people’s heads.’
‘I’ll never understand academics who think they should be paid just to talk to each other,’ snapped the baroness. ‘Shouldn’t your job be to make the obscure limpid and the profound accessible and generally help the ordinary person appreciate a great picture? Like Walter Pater or Kenneth Clark did?’
Wilde laughed again. ‘I don’t think either of those men left anything worth passing on to a modern generation.’
‘They introduced many to truth and beauty.’
‘Oh, really, Jack.’ Wilde raised her hands. ‘Truth!’ she said, as two fingers on each hand made air quotes. ‘Beauty!’ she said, and repeated the gesture. ‘These are really passé concepts. I am pleased to have played my part in ejecting this reactionary poison from the artistic consciousness. We have moved on from a belief in the socially constructed to an understanding of the inevitability of cultural relativism. But you wouldn’t understand that unless you move in intellectual circles,’ she added, with a kindly smile. ‘The analysis of trauma and the psycho-sexual in the field of postmodern feminist theory, for instance…’
The baroness groaned loudly. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘Spare me that PC pseudy clap-trap.’
‘Jack is nothing if not forthright, Hortense,’ interjected Hannah Simon brightly. ‘She is also the Mistress of St. Martha’s in Cambridge, so she does move in intellectual circles. But I think it would be best if you two agreed to differ and we talked about something else.’ She turned to Wilde’s husband. ‘We were having such a fascinating conversation about Hampstead, Gervase, that I didn’t have time to discover what you do.’
‘I’m an educational theorist.’
‘An academic?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which side are you on?’ asked the baroness.
‘Sorry?’
‘Which side are you on? Traditional or progressive?’
‘Progressive, of course.’
Hortense Wilde looked at the baroness with ill-concealed dislike. ‘Gervase has been a seminal force in helping to lead teachers away from notions of imparting knowledge rather than facilitating children to find out for themselves in their learning zone what interests them.’
‘Oh, dear God,’ said the baroness. ‘So I’ve him to thank for so dumbing down schooling that at St. Martha’s we have to provide remedial teaching for semi-literate undergraduates.’
‘Now, now, Jack,’ said Martin Simon. ‘I know you have strong opinions, but we don’t want a falling-out.’
Amiss gave way to temptation. ‘Really, Jack, I think you should hold back on this one. My wife’s a teacher,’ he said to the Wildes. ‘Darling, why don’t you tell Gervase and Hortense what life is like in your school.’
***
‘There were pools of blood on the carpet,’ Amiss told Pooley. ‘So naturally the following day Jack rang up without a care in the world to rejoice about having had so much fun. I mentioned that it was a bit difficult for the Simons to have their neighbours roughed up, and that while they thought they were terrible pills, they had reeled when she accused them of being Marxist throwbacks who leeched off the taxpayer while destroying the twin bedrocks of society and culture.’
‘Good old Jack.’
‘Indeed. She was thrilled to know she’d been so pithy. And Rachel hadn’t been much better. Anyway, that’s Hortense.’
‘Robert?’
‘Yes, Ellis.’
‘Has it occurred to you that since all these people have almost certainly been kidnapped by the same person, they are therefore presumably imprisoned together?’
‘Dear God,’ said Amiss. ‘I know this is a terrible thing to think, let alone say, but wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall?’
The baroness had once idly pronounced in a House of Lords debate that everyone should be forced at school to learn vast tracts of poetry by heart lest someday they might find themselves in solitary confinement and need to ward off madness. She now had a chance to test her hypothesis. While she had always claimed to be as happy in her own company as she was joyous in her own skin, by that she meant happy reading, writing, or generally being busy without anyone else around. This prison, however, did not run to books, paper, radio, parrot, or any diversions whatsoever.
Although only soap had been provided, she had managed to stretch her ablutions out to about fifteen minutes, after which she had looked for food and drink and found that all that was there was water that had to be drunk from the tap. She was starving, and thought of demanding food, but then concluded that since Sarkovsky was torturing her for his own reasons, she would not give him the satisfaction of showing she minded.
Not being of a meditative or spiritual disposition, she found sitting on a narrow bed contemplating white walls completely boring, so she marched up and down reciting. She began defiantly with Kipling’s
If
, and was relieved that she could remember all four verses. She shouted loudest the lines:
‘
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”’
There was Marvell. She was delighted to find she still remembered ‘To His Coy Mistress,’ and made much of ‘Let us roll all our strength, and all/Our sweetness, up into one ball:/And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Through the iron gates of life.’ With Keats, she triumphed again with ‘On Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’ making it right through from ‘Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold’ to ‘He stared at the Pacific—and all his men/Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—/Silent, upon a peak in Darien’ and doing a creditable imitation of stout Cortez.
She then fell into uncharacteristic melancholy during Byron’s ‘Youth and Age’: ‘
There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,/When the glow of early thought declines in feeling’s dull decay’, and had to flog herself to get to its dismal end, but she then cheered herself up by remembering Byron had died at thirty-six and therefore didn’t know what he was talking about. She raised her spirits further with Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Tarantella,’ ‘Do you remember an Inn,/Miranda?,’ and John Betjeman’s
‘A Subaltern’s Love-Song,’ and when describing Miss Joan Hunter Dunn’s exploits with a tennis racket, fell silent in happy recollection of a very satisfactory fling with a doubles partner in her sixth form. That triggered off an equally satisfying memory of what she had got up to with a mixed doubles partner in the local tennis club.
She was contemplating making a shot at ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,’ when she looked at the camera and decided on an experiment. Fetching the towel from the bathroom, she pushed her chair over to the corner, climbed onto it and covered the camera. Within a couple of seconds the lights began to flicker on and off again. She removed the towel: they stayed on. Sighing, she accepted she was under close scrutiny and climbed down. She had declaimed, ‘Awake! For morning in the Bowl of Night/Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight’, when she had a better idea. Damn them, if they were spying on her, they might as well suffer too.
The baroness loved singing, and she had the lungs and the diaphragm for it, but she knew that when she broke into song in the presence of friends they would clap their hands to their ears and beg her to stop. She was a realist, so she pretended but didn’t believe that the problem was that they were tone deaf rather than that she couldn’t hold a tune.
She considered her repertoire and decided that what circumstances required were Puccini arias. She always refused to go to operas unless they were performed in the original, but her own linguistic skills were so lacking that she had the greatest difficulty in learning any lines in a foreign language, so all she could offer were short extracts. Her rendition of the noisiest bits of
Nessun Dorma
were followed by a goodly chunk of
Si, mi chiamano Mimi
, but it took the high spot of Madame Butterfly’s misguided belief that Lieutenant Pinkerton would be back soon to provoke a reaction. The lights went on and off, the baroness went on singing, total darkness descended, but she reprised the passage over and over again until interrupted.
‘I’ll give you food if you stop singing,’ said a voice in an accent that she recognised from her occasional encounters with Sarkovsky’s bodyguards.
A deal was struck after five minutes of negotiation and with a clear understanding that the boss would not be told that she was being fed. The lights went on for long enough to allow the baroness to shut herself in the bathroom. After a few minutes, she heard a door open and close: the lights went on and she rushed out and grabbed the plate of food on the floor. She couldn’t remember when she had last enjoyed anything as much as the goat’s cheese and corn bread. She thought of her last angry meal with Sarkovsky and wished that she had taken heed of
Kai Lung’s wise words: ‘Better a dish of husks to the accompaniment of a muted lute than to be satiated with stewed shark’s fin and rich spiced wine of which the cost is frequently mentioned by the provider.’
When she had finished, she lay down on the uncomfortable bed and hoped that her friends would be quick about tracking her down.
Wherever she was.
***
Some of her friends were trying to do just that. The council of war was held at the Pooley flat that evening. Mary Lou was stuck at work and Rachel had gone to see her parents. ‘It’s not that I wouldn’t postpone if I could be of any use, Robert,’ she’d said, ‘but I can’t see that I’ve anything to contribute. Whereas you Three Musketeers have form. Good luck.’
Amiss, Pooley, and Milton sat round the kitchen table, ate take-away pizza and drank red wine. The mood was gloomy. ‘Now that Jim’s back and all these others are missing,’ said Pooley, ‘Jack’s disappearance is no longer being dismissed lightly.’
‘It’s got to be Oleg Sarkovsky who’s behind this,’ said Amiss.
‘I agree,’ said Pooley. ‘But I got nowhere when I suggested it to the AC.’
‘Oleg Sarkovsky?’ asked Milton. ‘Isn’t he some dodgy Russian oligarch? What’s he got to do with this? Hasn’t she got enemies closer to home?’
‘Well, of course she’s got enemies, Jim,’ said Amiss, pushing his almost untouched plate away. ‘We’re talking about Jack. But Sarkovsky’s the only serious one who comes to mind at the moment. Although I don’t like Sir Nicholas Serota and I doubt if he liked what she said about him in the culture debate in the House of Lords last week, he has a thick skin and plenty more pressing enemies than Jack Troutbeck. Besides, even Jack never suggested he was a criminal. Well, except culturally.’
‘So tell me about this Sarkovsky.’
‘You begin, Ellis.’
‘We had dinner with Jack some weeks back, when you were away. She was rather worked up about the iniquities of the contemporary art world.’
‘In other words,’ said Amiss, ‘she did a lot of ranting.’
‘Eventually, it turned out that this new obsession had been inspired by her relationship with Sarkovsky.’
‘Her relationship? What sort of relationship?’ asked a startled Milton. ‘I thought she and Myles were still an item.’
‘Well, yes, when she isn’t off having dalliances. Or him off adventuring in the Middle East. Which is where he is at the moment.’
‘She described Sarkovsky as her walker,’ said Pooley. He paused and considered. ‘No, she said she was
his
walker, but then modified it to trophy.’
‘As in trophy wives?’ asked Milton.
‘No and yes,’ said Amiss. ‘In such matters apparently he likes tall blondes half his age with big chests. He swaps a wife from time to time when she reaches what he considers her sell-by date. But being uneducated and sensitive about it, he was attracted by the idea of an intellectual trophy. Brain-candy, I guess. He met Jack at some social gathering where she was holding forth about the wonders of Western civilisation and presumably thought her the answer to an ignoramus’ prayer.
‘What with Jack being a baroness and the head of a Cambridge college, she enhanced his status just by being seen with him. But he also wanted her to educate him about culture.’
Milton was bewildered. ‘Why would she do that? Isn’t she too busy to be a tutor?’
‘The bait was luxury, Jim. Extreme luxury. You know our Jack’s a sybarite. She loves travelling in extreme comfort. And staying in the best suites in the most expensive hotels. She said we’d get the idea if we thought of a tutor on the Grand Tour with a rich, vulgar, and doltish spendthrift. They went to Venice on the Orient Express so she could introduce him to Byzantine art and architecture as well as to the Renaissance.’
‘And by private plane to Rome so she could teach him some classical history,’ contributed Pooley.
‘And cruised around the Greek islands in his yacht so she could tell him about the origins of democracy and recite Byron at him.’
‘I can see the appeal of all that,’ said Milton. ‘Do you want any more of that pizza, Robert?’
‘No, no. Have it. What an appetite you’ve got tonight.’
‘I’m busy.’ Milton reached across and cleared Amiss’ plate. ‘I live alone. I forget to buy anything. I get hungry. Married blokes have wives to force them to eat, I seem to remember. Divorced ones don’t.’
‘It’s not quite that simple, Jim. Ellis and I don’t exactly have wives wearing pinnies and cooking up a storm. I imagine we can both see the attractions of a fully-staffed yacht as well as the next man. And according to Jack it was opulent in the extreme. She said rather apologetically that Sarkovsky was in the second eleven on Planet Oligarch, seeing as how—unlike Roman Abramovich, of whom he was madly jealous—he didn’t own a football team and has only one yacht, which shamingly doesn’t double as an aircraft carrier or have an escape capsule. It does, of course, have the obligatory helicopter pad—a convenience she took to. And she waxed pretty eloquent about the virtues of the butler and the chef on duty on board, as well as their equivalents in Sarkovsky’s various houses.’
‘Was he paying her as well?’
‘No. Just picking up all the tabs. But she had hopes of extracting a tidy donation from him for St. Martha’s.’
‘So for heaven’s sake, what was the problem? It sounds like a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Why would he want to kidnap her?’
‘They were falling out rather often, particularly about conceptual art, which other billionaires were buying in truckloads and which she consistently ridiculed. She got the impression that he was furious that Abramovich’s girlfriend had set up a centre for contemporary art in Moscow and that he was harbouring similar ambitions to do the same in St. Petersburg, where he was born. So to make sure he stayed on the artistic straight and narrow she missed no opportunity to beat him up any time he said a kind word about what she thought was crap. You know how tactless she can be.’
‘I certainly do,’ said Milton.
‘And although she was firmly of the view that she was successfully pretending she enjoyed his company, she despised him and it showed. If you think—as she does—that apart from low cunning he has no intellect, it’s hard to disguise. I heard her on the phone once berating him for tastelessness and generally taking the piss out of him about everything from his baldness to his struggles with English, for which he seemed to have no aptitude whatsoever. I don’t think he’s a man who would take that well.’
‘If people got violent with Jack every time she was tactless,’ observed Milton, ‘she’d have been dead and buried a long time ago.’
‘Most people aren’t Oleg Sarkovsky. Tell him, Ellis.’
‘Jack asked me to find out how dodgy he was, but then refused to take what I found out seriously enough.’
‘He’s a real villain, you mean?’
‘As I said to Jack, Russian oligarchs made billions through ruthlessly taking advantage of the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Depending on their point of view, you could call them entrepreneurs or you could call them bandits. Sarkovsky was never going to be Robin Hood. The trouble is he turned out to be more like the Sheriff of Nottingham.’
‘Didn’t he usually lose out to Robin?’ asked Amiss.
‘I mean in the sense of robbing the poor for the good of the rich. And showing no mercy. Sarkovsky was notoriously corrupt as well as rough with his business competitors. Some of them ended up dead.’
‘What did Jack say to this?’
‘That Russia in the early nineties resembled the Wild West, and one can’t judge it by the standards of Little-Moreton-on-the-Marsh. So I added that the word was he’s a bit of a psycho. And won’t brook criticism. A journalist who was on his trail ended up dead.’
‘Did she listen to that?’
‘Up to a point. She listened, but then she asked how that murder could be pinned on Sarkovsky considering Putin has journalists rubbed out as often as he shoots bears. To which I said that it couldn’t, but there were very good grounds for suspicion. Also, his most recent ex-wife is on the record accusing him of beating her up.’
‘Jack’s reaction to that?’
‘She asked if the ex-wife’s accusations had netted her an extra few tens of millions in the divorce settlement. And wanted more evidence about the deaths he’s alleged to have ordered. She was procrastinating, if you ask me.’
Amiss shrugged. ‘There was a golden pot at the end of the rainbow for St. Martha’s, and that’s always Jack’s top priority.’
‘Doesn’t she mind where it comes from?’ asked Milton.
‘No. She long ago said fund-raising was prostitution and you didn’t demand that your clients had good conduct medals. Just as long as they didn’t give one the metaphorical clap.’