Tours of the Black Clock (15 page)

Myself or the lady? I don’t know which lady he means, unless it’s one of the Spanish girls. It’s one thing to call me a freeloader, which of course I absolutely am, another thing to saddle me with responsibility for the lady. He shouldn’t have said that, actually; it was a bad move. He had me shamed until he came up with that lady bit. “Don’t worry about it, Wilfried,” I say, and get up out of the chair for the full effect, “don’t you have something better to concern yourself with? Aren’t there a couple of old Jews wandering around outside you and the boys can beat up, a crippled old gypsy woman you can lay out and fill up with rancid brown German cum?” The room seems to have gotten quiet, and I like it. I feel perfectly fine at this particular moment, I should have done this long ago. I’m almost certain at this moment I’m going to kill someone again; it seems like much too long since I last did it. This asshole’s perfect. He’s every little piece of German shit I’ve seen in the last eight months rolled into one, I’d crush him and grow a plant from him if the little white worms of his fecal matter didn’t make it impossible. The color of his face is just like the white of little worms, I see their little heads wiggling in his soulless pisscoated eyes. “Tell you what, Heinzly,” I say, “send the damned bill to your minister of propaganda, the little one with the foot that looks like horsemeat. See, he’s a
client
of mine. He works for me. Tell him I said to write you a nice big tip for licking every shithole in Wien where I’ve set my ass in the last eight months after blowing your pathetic soul-curdling goodlife right out the end of it. He’ll be glad to, that boy jumps when I say to,” snapping my fingers. “He may write your propaganda but I’m the guy who writes
his
. He reads it with one hand while he pops his wang with the other until your fucking Berlin drips with it.” Now the little white worms in his eyes are practically dancing on their tails, and while I refuse to tear my own eyes from his, I’m vaguely aware of the other men in the room around me beginning to stand; I gather they’re all Germans too. Also, by now they’re
certain
I’m Thierry, mysterious messenger of passion who’s led all of them to their respective moments of unfulfillment, which makes them even less happy about me.

“Now listen here,” I hear someone behind me, and without even turning I can tell it’s the English redhead, though for a moment it’s not certain which of us she’s talking to, if not both of us. Turns out it’s him. She comes up alongside me into my peripheral vision and says, “This gentleman is my guest, I thought I could count on this evening to show him what Viennese hospitality’s all about, my mistake obviously. Nothing wrong with the Viennese I suppose that one or two less
foreigners
wouldn’t take care of,” and she’s directing it at the German and he blanches, even though it’s completely crazy since she and I are a lot more foreign than he is. By now he regrets having brought up the whole thing, by now he wishes he’d just reached into his billfold and paid the God damn bill. I haven’t the slightest idea what the English girl’s up to except that she’s taken command of the situation, a nightclub full of excitable men, and though a few seconds ago my murdering this German seemed an enthusiastic inevitability, while she talks I start figuring that if she can get me out of this, so much the better. She steps right up to me, and without looking at me once, still staring the others down, she keeps talking while she reaches into the pocket of my coat lining. “As I see it you owe all of us an apology,” she says to the German, “but if you offered it we’d then be in the position of having to accept it, assuming we have more social grace than you deserve.” Out of my pocket she pulls a wad of schillings, pounds, Swiss francs, French francs, Italian lire, German marks, more money than I’ve seen or held in my life. It’s an amazing sleight of hand, and I probably look as stunned as everyone else. “Your lot may fancy itself fit to rule the world,” she says, “but you’re not fit to dine in public, so why don’t you just leave bloody civilized behavior to the bloody rest of us, all right?” and she casts the wad of money on the table like something she’s blown her nose with; half of it flies all over the room. No one has the shamelessness to pick it up, and no one makes a sound. She has me by the hand and, not too quickly, utterly self-possessed, leads me out of the club. The silence roars at our backs when, at the door, she whispers, “Let’s go, big boy. The trouble here is even bigger than you are.”

W
E GET OUTSIDE AND
she breaks for the Ringstrasse, pulling me behind her. We catch a cab and head for a section of town on the other side of the Wien-Fluss from Dog Storm Street; in the cab I’m breathing hard and feeling myself all pumped up. She’s looking out the window and then she’s looking at me from out of the dark of the backseat of the cab; we get to her place and she gets out. The door’s still open for me to climb out so I do. She pays the driver and off he goes; if I had plans to take the cab back to my flat, she clearly has other ideas. She hasn’t said a word in all this, she understands exactly what she wants, and what she wants is exactly what’s going to happen. She unlocks the door and we go up to her flat.

It’s a nice enough flat. In the light she unpins part of her hair, which is even redder and longer than it’s looked all night. “My name’s Megan,” she says, and begins to prepare tea. We’ll have little shortbreads too, I guess. “Banning Jainlight,” I tell her. “Make yourself at home, Banning Jainlight,” she says. She has a lovely little beestung mouth but other than that and the blizzard of freckles there’s nothing special about her face. From what I’ve seen so far nothing’s unnerved her in the least about the evening, she acts as though she manages her way through episodes like this all the time. She’s twenty-four years old and, more than once in our short lifetime together, the four years difference will feel profound.

We sit on a little sofa in the corner of the flat, something she finds cozy and I find like trying to cram myself into a doll’s house. We talk about this and that, the woman’s pulled me out of a tough spot; it would be rude of me just to get up and leave, wouldn’t it? Her father runs some sort of shipping empire out of London or something. I gather he owns half the boats on water these days, though in no way is she making a big thing of it. Somehow she’s totally in charge without seeming the least bit overbearing. I tell her I’m a writer but I suppose it’s clear I don’t want to go into it, what I write or for whom I write. She doesn’t press the matter at all, she’ll toss a line out if I want to bite, and if I don’t she reels it back in empty. “And what am I going to do with you now, Banning Jainlight?” she says.

“Do with me?” I say.

It’s not my fault, it’s seduction pure and simple. She’s brilliant at it, always giving just what I can handle at the moment, in fact giving just a little less than I can handle if you want to know the truth. I … I never forget you, though. I always have you in my mind, when she’s got her hands in my hair and her full little mouth on my face, you’re still there, though I’ve never seen your face so well in the shadows, and some time’s passed now since I saw you there in that window. My brain grasps for an image of you, and all it retrieves is your pink body in the black petals on my bed; and I try to hold that when she unbuttons her clothes. Her breasts float up enormous and white, I must look completely stunned because she laughs. “Now come on,” she jokes, “I just know they’re not too much for you.” And in that instant it’s all I can see, whatever else I want to see, whatever else the mind’s eye searches for; I’m lying back in this ridiculous little sofa and soon she’s straddling me and rocking back and forth. I’m so far up in her I can feel the tip of me tickling the underside of her heart. “Oh love love love love,” she moans.

And when I come into her, it’s then of course you come over me. You and I know it’s infidelity. There in the little sofa with her slumped over me I can hold grief and torment at bay only so long; when I feel her asleep I move her, pick her up and put her in her bed. She whispers in her red hair; I like her. I haven’t even begun to know what she’s worth. Ten weeks from now I’ll marry her, though at this moment it doesn’t remotely occur to me I’ll even see her again. I escape in anonymity. I return to Dog Storm Street, when I come into my room I’m sure you can smell her on me. The first thing I do when you come to me is trace with my finger your face so that never again will it defy my reach. Your banal mud brown eyes and your dirty blond hair, and in the corner of your mouth, for the first time it’s clear to me, the scar where you were struck by the rock that first day I saw you. It’s small and white, and sparkles like a diamond in your tooth. I open you beneath me and expect your reproach, but you’re happy. You already know that the seed left in the folds of a little English redhead has sanctioned that love in a way you would never choose: I would rather, you say when the window blows violently open, be your adulteress than your wife, it makes me fuck you ferociously. I would rather, you say as the window bangs open and shut, hold the part of your love that’s clandestine and damned, it’s what you created me for.

I deny it completely, my lie to you.

“Is there someone else?” Megan asks me later. Not at all, I answer, my lie to her.

Y
ESTERDAY I WENT TO
meet Petyr at our designated rendezvous point and he wasn’t there. I sent Kronehelm a message that I would be at the same place in the Karlsplatz the same hour today, but no one was there either. We’re left to our own devices, you and I, emancipated and gateless.

Tonight I sit down to my desk in the gray light of the moon; a car turns the corner of Dog Storm Street and pulls to the door downstairs. I can hear the bell ring several times and, peering over the sill, I see a box of long yellow light that appears in the road when the door opens. There’s some discussion, and the door closes; there are steps on the stairs. I turn in my chair just as the shadow of someone’s feet obstructs the glint beneath my own door; I wait for the knock. It’s one of the few occasions when I expect nothing.

The knock comes again and I get up and open the door, standing in the dark of my room. “Mr. Jainlight?” a man says. I hold my hand to my eyes to block the light, so as to make him out. I notice immediately the “mister” rather than the usual “herr.” He says, “My name is Holtz. May I speak with you a moment?” and only then do I detect the German accent. He doesn’t barge in like most of the Germans in Vienna these days, he actually waits for an invitation. I back away and hold open the door.

He doesn’t ask me to turn on a light, and I’d as soon proceed on my terms; my terms include sitting in the dark. He doesn’t take a chair until I push one toward him. Then he takes off his long coat and I see the uniform. I assume he’s a big shot. Not a field marshal but something fairly impressive. “Colonel,” he smiles in the dark, to the question I haven’t asked. I peer over the windowsill, the car’s still there and I assume someone’s in it. I assume someone’s standing at the door, too, though I can’t see. “However,” he says, “plain Holtz will do.” This is the most cordial damned German I’ve ever met. So far I haven’t said a word to him.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve come from Berlin,” he says, “I’ve come from Berlin to see you.”

“Hardly worth the fuss,” I tell him.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” he answers, “you underestimate yourself. You’re an author of real note in my country, sir,” he says, “your work has a significant following. I think you’re aware of that. Do you want me to come right to the point?”

“It’s of no concern to me one way or the other. Will it shorten the conversation?”

“I’ll come right to the point,” he says. He’s in his late thirties, early forties, but he speaks to me without condescension. I keep looking at the car outside. “Please don’t be concerned about the soldiers outside,” he says, “no one’s here to arrest you.”

“Why should I be concerned? This isn’t Germany.”

“Well, that’s certainly true for the moment,” he answers, and he finally sounds like a German. On the other hand, he sounds like a lot of Austrians these days too. He’s blank-looking, handsome in a way that has no distinction; his hair’s thinning a little in front. He lights a cigarette. Maybe as much for the light in the dark as for the cigarette. “For some months you’ve been doing work for an individual by the name of Kronehelm,” he says now, “who’s been placing the work with someone very, very powerful in the Chancellery. I believe you know this person as X, or Client X.” He waits for me to say something and when I don’t he continues. “The situation’s changed a bit on our end, though not on your end in any way except for the better, as you’ll see. To put it directly, Herr Kronehelm is no longer the intermediary in these transactions. Do you follow?”

“What’s to follow? You’ve eliminated the middleman.”

“What do you think of that?”

“I’m not happy about it.”

“Are you close to Kronehelm?”

“He’s a slug, actually, but that has nothing to do with it.”

“What bothers you about it?”

“Who knows? Who knows what bothers me these days and why? I’ve eliminated middlemen before, Kronehelm and I eliminated our own middleman as a matter of fact. But cutting out Kronehelm, well, it isn’t square, he had the contacts, he created the market and brought me to Vienna.”

“You just keep underestimating yourself, Mr. Jainlight,” Holtz answers. He’s looking for an ashtray so as not to drop the ash of his cigarette on the floor; I push a coffee cup toward him. “Thank you. You see, we’ll pay you what we were paying Herr Kronehelm. If it will mitigate your sense of loyalty let me just say that from our standpoint it was you who created the market, and that what Kronehelm was paying you was a fraction of what he was making off you.”

“Well, I guess the market developed … a more impressive clientele.”

Holtz just sits in the dark. He finally says, “You can’t even begin to know, sir.”

I say, “Maybe and maybe not.”

“Did Herr Kronehelm ever explain to you exactly who Client X was?”

“Has Client X died? It’s not on the radio if he did.”