The Teleportation Accident (20 page)

‘I mean Stent Mutton, the writer.’

The man exchanged a bemused glance with the elderly Japanese fellow he’d been talking to. ‘Is this the start of a radio comedy routine? I am “Stent Mutton, the writer”. Who are you?’

‘I’m Egon Loeser. But you can’t be . . .’

‘I can’t be what?’

‘But where’s your knife?’ Loeser blurted.

‘If you want to cut a cigar there’s a guillotine in the drawing room.’

Stent Mutton was a scarred, hulking ex-criminal who only scratched out his raw narratives to exorcise the horrors through which he’d lived. Loeser knew this. But he was now trying to remember how he knew it. He was trying to remember whether he’d really read it somewhere, or whether he’d just promoted an assumption to fact.

‘I see you’ve brought one of my penny dreadfuls,’ said Mutton, pointing at the paperback that Loeser had forgotten he was still holding in his hand. ‘Did you want me to sign it?’

Loeser took a step back. He didn’t want this man defacing his book. A signature from the real Stent Mutton would have been marvellous. But not a signature from this impostorous dandy. He shook his head and hurried on into the house. Whereupon:

‘Egon! What an unexpected pleasure!’

‘No,’ said Loeser in German. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no.’

‘Aren’t you happy to see me?’ said Rackenham, who was holding a martini and looked almost parodically tanned and healthy.

‘What the fuck are you doing in Los Angeles?’

‘I’m supposed to be finding Adele Hitler and persuading her to go back to Berlin. But I haven’t got very far. And what are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’ve come for Adele too? I can see by your face that you have. But I presume you’re not getting paid by her parents, like I am. Have you really come six thousand miles just to have sex with her?’

‘Do you know where she is?’

‘Not yet. Were you in Paris, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘What a pity we didn’t cross paths.’

‘What a pity. How did you end up at this party?’ The gathering reminded him of an evening at the Fraunhofens’ before anyone got drunk.

‘I know Mutton from the Hollywood Cricket Club. He’s the only Yank on the team but he bats so well we can hardly make an issue of it. We’re playing the Australians next month.’

‘You’re already in a cricket club? How long have you been out here?’

‘Two or three months. No, it hasn’t taken me too long to find my feet, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Where are you living?’ said Loeser, because that, after all, was the sort of thing people asked at parties.

‘I’m now the Sorceror of Venice Beach. What about you?’

‘The Chateau Marmont.’

‘I presume you don’t intend to live in a hotel indefinitely?’

‘I like it there,’ said Loeser, thinking of the women around the swimming pool, ‘and anyway, I’m not going to stay in Los Angeles long enough to need a house of my own. I’m just going to find Adele, seduce her, and take her back to Berlin with me.’

‘Well, when that plan fails, I can recommend Pasadena. It’s heavenly.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘East of Hollywood. It’s where the millionaires live. And, more importantly, their wives.’

‘Like Wilbur Gorge?’ said Loeser, remembering what Blimk had said earlier.

‘Yes. How do you know Gorge?’

‘I don’t. Do you mean to say you do?’

‘Yes. I have the sort of easy, genial relationship with the Colonel that you can only have with a man you’re vigorously cuckolding.’

‘Could you introduce me?’

‘Why?’

‘I just want to meet him,’ said Loeser. ‘It doesn’t matter why.’

‘I could get you an invitation to dinner, but what would I get out of it?’

‘I’ll owe you a favour. All right?’

‘I suppose so. By the way, you know Hecht’s here?’

‘In Los Angeles or in this house?’

‘Both. He’s got a contract with Paramount. You might see Drabsfarben, too. And Gugelhupf.’

‘I already knew about Gugelhupf. But the others? You can’t be serious.’

‘Half the Romanisches Café is here, Loeser. Or at least on its way.’

Loeser felt a heavy squelch of dismay. ‘But the only thing I like about this place is that I don’t have to see anyone I know!’

‘Nonetheless.’

‘Fucking hell, this is like going to the Alps for a tuberculosis cure and finding out everyone else in the sanatorium is determined to reinfect you. Well, as long as Brecht doesn’t turn up, I won’t have to jump into the ocean. Thank God I’m going home soon.’

‘Mr Loeser! I’m so glad you could come.’ Mutton’s wife was radiantly at his side. ‘I see you already know Mr Rackenham.’

‘Yes. Mrs Mutton, before I forget, I don’t have a car and I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont and I’m not quite sure how I’m going to get back to my hotel . . .’

‘Oh, don’t give it another thought, we’ll have the butler drive you. Now, you must meet Mr Gould. He’s a recent arrival from Berlin, like yourself.’

She led Loeser back out to the patio, where Gould turned out to be one of the men he’d passed on his way in. A tall fellow with a smile as big as an almond croissant, he was talking to Stent Mutton and two women. Dolores Mutton introduced Loeser to everyone. ‘Yes, Mr Loeser and I have already met,’ said her husband, raising an eyebrow.

One of the other women said, ‘Mr Gould was just telling us about how he got out of Berlin.’

‘Yes. As I said, the Nazis had tried to ban my latest book of poems. So, like a fool, I went to the police station to insert a complaint. They told me if I waited a few minutes I could see the police chief. So I sat down. Then, by luck, I overheard another policeman mention my name to one of his comrades. There was an order out to arrest me. But they did not realise yet that I had just walked right into their clutchings. So I waited until no one was watching and then I fled straight to the train station. I did not even go home to pack a bag, I just purchased a suitcase on the way and carried it, vacant, so I would look like a realistic tourist.’

‘You sound so calm about it all,’ said Dolores Mutton.

‘Actually, never have I been so frightened!’

‘Knowing that you can have everything taken from you just because you happen to be Jewish . . . I can hardly imagine what it must have been like, Mr Loeser.’

‘Sorry?’ His attention had wandered during Gould’s boring anecdote.

‘Tell me, how did you get out?’ said her husband. ‘Was it just as perilous?’

Loeser’s old rule against lying about himself to impress had not formally been repealed. So he was about to inform the woman that he was not Jewish; that he ‘got out’ on a tourist visa, which had taken him ten minutes to acquire; and that never, in Berlin, had he felt himself in jeopardy, nor had he detected that anyone else was. But then he remembered Scramsfield. What punishment had ever befallen Scramsfield for his almost hallucinant level of dupery? Why should Loeser come all the way to Hollywood, where half the population punched their time cards every morning at the ‘dream factory’, and still stubbornly persist in correcting every flattering little misapprehension, while right now Scramsfield, a man who had shot his fiancée dead during sex and got away with it, was probably cheating his rent out of some tipsy dowager? Scramsfield swam in his lies like a penguin. Loeser waddled around damp and pretended to be dry. No more. Also, Mrs Mutton was far too beautiful to disappoint, and he’d already decided he didn’t like Gould and didn’t want him to win. So: ‘Yes,’ said Loeser. ‘My escape was quite dramatic.’

‘Go on.’

‘They’d been tipped off that I was going to try to get across the border into France. But, you see, I’m a designer of theatrical effects. So I used an invention of mine called the Teleportation Device. From one side to the other as easily as an actor circling around from stage left to stage right without being seen.’

‘How did it work?’ said one of the women.

‘I’m afraid I can’t say anything about my invention while there is still a chance it may be in use. My first loyalty must be to my tribe.’

‘Oh, yes, of course.’

The butler came to tell Dolores Mutton she was needed inside.

‘So you were in the theatre?’ said Gould. ‘What was your last production before you left?’

‘
Lavicini
,’ said Loeser, even though it had never actually been performed.

‘Oh. I did not see that. Still, I knew a lot of theatre persons – we must have crossed roads at some point. Were you at Brogmann’s party with all the stolen brandy?’

‘No.’

‘What about when Vanel directed the nude ballet at the beach?’

‘No.’

‘I do not remember you coming on the big camping trip that Klein organised.’

‘No.’ Not only did Loeser not take part in any of these things, he didn’t even remember getting invited to any of them. Who was this prick and why did think he could make Loeser feel as if he’d missed out on all this fun back in Berlin?

‘How extraordinary that the two of you had to come all the way to the edge of another continent to meet for the first time,’ said Stent Mutton.

‘And now you are out here you will work for the movies, I assume, Herr Loeser?’ said Gould.

‘Why?’

‘You are a set designer.’

‘Yes. For the theatre. Not for the movies. I despise American movies.’

‘That does not mean you will not be slurped in,’ said Gould. ‘I do not know why but the studio bosses seem to have a lot of respect for Germans. Like it or not, there is no better way for us to earn some livings in California. Look on Hecht. He is working for Goatloft.’

‘Who’s Goatloft?’

‘He directed
Scars of Desire
. Very powerful. So Hecht is making five hundred dollars a week now. That is fifteen hundred marks, almost. He certainly has not been making that in Berlin.’

‘Is it hard there, for writers?’ said Stent Mutton.

‘Sometimes. Especially if you do not get an allowance from your parents and you do not like living on credit. I used to work as a waiter.’

How fucking self-righteous, thought Loeser. ‘Where?’ he said.

‘The Schwanneke,’ said Gould.

To the assembled witnesses, what then happened was that somehow Loeser tripped over from a stable standing position. What actually happened, as only some sort of careful Muybridgean analysis could have made clear, was that he tried to thump Gould in the nose and instead threw a punch so inept that even its intended recipient could not confidently identify it as such. The problem was his legs, which were just beginning their slow transmutation into the elongated pine cones that can be found glued to the pelvis of anyone with Loeser’s desultory level of physical fitness who wakes up the morning after a four-hour hike, and were therefore in no condition to perform a sudden vengeful charge. Neither, really, was Loeser himself, who hadn’t had any warning that he was about to make an assault on Gould – he just heard ‘Schwanneke’ and without a word of internal debate he was forward, lunging, off balance, hand barely reconstituted into a viable fist. Scramsfield at Zelli’s was Max Schmeling in comparison. And what would have been really regrettable for Loeser here was if he’d fallen into the nearby swimming pool as a result of his botched left hook. But he didn’t, because Gould grabbed his shoulder to steady him. Then Loeser, confused, embarrassed, not wanting Gould’s help, tried to push him away, overcompensated, slipped on a slice of lime that had defected from someone’s gin and tonic, and fell into the swimming pool as a result of that instead. He hadn’t even had a drink yet.

After he’d climbed out, Mutton suggested he go to the bedroom for a change of clothes. ‘Take anything you want.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘At least borrow a shirt.’

Loeser went dripping into the house, trying to ignore the stares and chuckles, and through into the main bedroom, where he selected a shirt and slacks from Mutton’s enormous wardrobe. Just as in Blumstein’s house, there was a bathroom off the main bedroom, and he decided to go in there to change so he could lock the door behind him. As he dried his hair with a towel, he noticed a pair of expensive pistachio-green French knickers lying on the floor next to the bath, and with all their lace and frills and bows they looked comically out of place, a pathogenic gland transplanted into this functionalist cuboid, ready to infect the whole structure with blisters of purposeless ornamentation unless it was annihilated first by some swift Loosian immune response. Loeser, who dearly loved underclothes with lace and frills and especially bows, and sometimes came close to tears when he saw some on a washing line because of the way they made his sexual longing twinge like an old bone fracture, found himself mesmerised for a while by the thought that this silk had only recently been soured and sweetened by the loins of a woman as ravishing as Dolores Mutton, and because of this unavoidable delay he was still buttoning his collar when he heard that same woman’s voice through the door.

‘No. You’re asking too much this time. He’s still my husband. What if he found out? I know you think he won’t, but he’s smarter than you’d like to believe. He might. He easily damn well might. And I’m not going to put him through that. It would finish him. I know you don’t care, but what if he divorced me? Where the hell would we be then? You don’t want that any more than I do. I’m not saying we have to stop this, of course I’m not, I know better than that, but there have to be limits. It’s no good making threats, Jascha. I just can’t. I’m sorry.’