The Last Storyteller (12 page)

Silence everywhere. No answer to the long, echoing clang of the doorbell. I opened the door and, reacting to the house’s stillness, closed it behind me with no noise. No dog barked. No Annette bustled. No voice called.

I stood for a moment; how wonderful were those limestone flags in their big, regular squares. A great portrait, which I somehow hadn’t taken in previously, hung on the darkest wall: a benign man of considerable age, old enough for his blue eyes to have grown watery; his wooden chair
seemed a plain throne. No legend on the frame, just a date: 1786. An ancestor?

Somewhere, distant and reassuring, a human coughed. Through the farthest doorway in the hall’s corner I followed the sound, walking without weight. I recalled the corridor—to Randall’s studio. Another cough, closer now, led me to the studio door, ajar though less than half open.

Randall stood at his easel; Elma Sloane sat on the podium, which was as high and wide as a small stage. He had shown me this platform before; he’d had it built for tableaux when experimenting with painting historical pageants from Irish history. Sometimes, poets came and read from there.

I looked at Elma first—I stared. She sat upright, completely naked, as free as a child. Her arms rested on the chair’s arms, her feet squarely and wide apart on the floor, her head high but not falsely so. That Randall had posed her so explicitly seemed likely; that she had embraced the pose without question also seemed true—because an animation came off her, a lively sense of involvement, and even joy.

I craned my head to see his work. He had stretched a large canvas, maybe ten feet by six. Two splattered palettes sat on the worktable next to him, and innumerable knives and brushes, and rags as colorful as a clown. But although he glanced up at his model every few seconds, he wasn’t painting a great nude portrait. On his canvas, as large and silver as the river from which it might have come, gleamed a massive fish.

For several moments I stood at the door, looking in. It may not say much for my presence that neither Elma nor Randall noticed me. In fact, neither could see the door without a serious turn of the head. Naturally, my eyes kept going to her, and I found myself on edge. Her age never crossed my mind.

I knocked.

Randall called out, “Don’t come in!”

Elma, however, said, “It’s Ben.” I recall listening for some excitement in her voice.

“Randall, sorry if I’m interrupting.”

“Dear boy! Come in, come in. Not everybody is an interruption.” He nodded to Elma. She sat back in the chair and didn’t reach for a robe, though she did fold her arms and close her legs.

“Hiya, Ben, howya doing?” She had a smile as wide and bright as a window.

“I hope you’ll stay,” said Randall.

“May I look?” I asked. “Or are you superstitious?”

“I won’t seat thirteen people at my table,” said Randall. “But you may look.”

A score of questions raced into my mind.
Why is the salmon’s head on the left of the canvas and not the right? Does that suggest, say, that you are left-handed? How does a painter make such a decision? For what reasons? Did you work from colors on an actual fish to capture that iridescent pink that fades down? How did you remember how brilliant a fish’s body can be? Did you have to learn to put a dot of white in the eye to generate light? Or was that something you knew by instinct? The size of the fish in relation to the rectangle of the canvas: what powered that decision?

Over all these inquiries arched one question:
How did you paint a fish lustrous enough to make us gasp, while using as your model the naked body of a lovely girl not yet twenty?

I bit the bullet and asked. Randall had been standing beside me as I looked at the painting. It still had some way to go. He called to Elma, “Would you, like a good girl, resume the pose?”

She sat forward again, placed her feet very deliberately on the stage—I saw that he had set down chalk marks—and sat up with her elbows along the arms of the chair, her head once more high.

Randall said, “Look at her. Consider her as if you were going to paint her portrait.”

I looked. Beauty, desirability, excitement—I registered all of that, and after a moment felt any embarrassment slip away. She had a summer-colored face, all mallow and light and alabaster. Looking at her would have inspired any kind of portrayal, direct or unconscious.

Over dinner, Randall asked, “How long is it since you were here, Ben?”

No trace of bruising remained around the assaulted eye. He looked so like an eagle.

Elma answered my unasked question: “It’s great, Ben.”

I loved her natural happiness. Her bad family circumstances hadn’t raped her uncomplicated spirit.

“Elma, tell Ben the rules we established when we agreed that you’d stay here?”

“That I’d pose for his pictures.” She grinned at me. “Without any fuss or nonsense about being in the nude, that’s what he said to me. He told me he’d teach me all he knew.”

“And what else? Ben is to be trusted.”

“That I’d never tell the outside world what goes on here.”

I asked Elma, “What have you learned from Randall?”

She sought his approval; I saw the glance.
Is he exercising more control than he seems to be?

Randall said, “What do you want to know?”

Clever, putting the onus back on me. I said, “The most interesting thing you’ve learned.”

“That I’m up in the air,” she said.

Randall translated: “That she’s capable of anything at which she wants to excel.”

“And fix it all,” she said. “Always fix it.”

He translated again: “That there’s no such thing as a problem without a solution.”

“I’ll contradict that,” I said, and not quite knowing what possessed me, I told my story of the guns.

When I had finished my account of Maisie and how she had compromised me, and Jimmy Bermingham and the failed assassination, they
remained silent. Excitement danced in Elma’s eyes, and she said, “Randall would tell you that you already know what to do.”

Though I saw him nodding, I shook my head. “I don’t know what to do. What can I do? I’ve already breached the law. Christ, I can go to jail. You’ve seen the newspapers.”

Bombs had gone off. Men had been arrested.

Randall shook his head. “No. Let’s think.”

“That bloody gun. My fingerprints. Is there anything I can do?”

He said. “Dive back into the problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ramp it up.”

“Aren’t things bad enough?” I said.

“That woman got your fingerprints on the gun so that she could threaten you with the police.”

“Right.”

“So—pull her teeth. Go to the police. Neutralize her. Shoot her fox.”

“But won’t she and her gang—won’t they come after me?”

“How will they know?”

“Randall, they don’t need to. If they’re raided, they’ll say it was me. And the gun will be there. With my damned fingerprints.”

“Make a deal. Be a double agent. I’ll make the introductions for you.”

“This is unreal.”

“Life is unreal, Ben. Especially in Ireland. Now I have a question for you.” I watched him like a dog about to be kicked. “The newspaper cutting. Last time you were here.”

“Yes.”

Randall said, “Have you done anything about it?”

I didn’t want him raising this topic, and I shook my head.

“You should,” said Randall. “There was a goodness in her. It shone from the stage—and remember, I never saw her in anything but a rickety old village hall. But she could be acting from the back of a truck and you’d see it.”

“Did she die?” said Elma.

“For a long time I thought she did,” I said.

The next day, I said to Elma, “Come with me.”

She didn’t resist.

It was an enormous morning, of sun, wind, and heavy clouds.

“Can you guess where we’re going?” I asked her.

She said, “He’s still in the hospital.”

“How do you know that?”

“Things cycle by us out here,” she said.

As we parked the car, I remarked to her, “This is a great chance for you.” Her eyebrow asked the question. She wore a black knit top with three buttons falling like teardrops from the neck. “A chance to be kind,” I said. “A chance to make someone feel special.”

She took a deep breath, preparing for an effort. We walked quietly along the hospital ward; he sat alone between two empty beds; she hesitated.

I whispered, “It’s all right. I’ll move us out after a few minutes.”

Like some great, scrawny, mythical creature, he turned his head. His eyes lit up our path to his bedside.

“I knew it,” he said, struggling to sit higher. “I knew it, look out at the sky.”

By now the sun had gone high, and the clouds were racing past it like children past a teacher.

“Howya, Dan?” said Elma. She leaned in; I saw her fists tighten; she kissed him—on the forehead, on the cheek, and on the lips. Light and fast those kisses fell, and she stepped back to join me.

“Good girl!” I whispered.

She sat on the edge of the bed.

“Sit here beside me and let me look at you,” he said.

Twenty years began to fall away from this man’s face; a moment ago it had sagged like an old tent.

“Dan, you’re still in here.”

“Well, Elma, I had the damn ol’ heart attack,” he said, “and they’re lettin’ me home soon. Did you come all the way to see me?”

“I did, Dan, I did; a stray calf is what I am. Don’t tell my father.” She reached out and took his hand. “Look at you,” she said, and she spoke like a bossy woman. “Why aren’t you at home?”

He loved it. “Will you come with me?”

“Dan, I’d have to hoist different sails. I have a job now, a good job, working under a shiny kind of a man.”

“What’s England like?” he asked.

“Up the middle and down the sides,” she said. “Level enough. I’m living in a very nice place.”

And he said, “I didn’t know they had any nice places in England.”

“Ah, Dan, ’tis a long time since the English were here.”

“Stand up for me till I see you,” he said.

She rose. “Do you like my clothes?” she asked, and did a slow twirl.

“Ah, you’re the loveliest girl. I’d fight them all over again for you.”

I intervened. “They told us not to tire you out.”

He said, “And tell me again—did you come from England specially to see me?”

“I didn’t come to see nobody else,” she said. “I’m going straight back.” She took his hand and kissed it. “You’re to look after yourself, d’you hear me?” She held the hand as though it felt important to her. “How will you be any good to anyone if the devil takes your pay? You’re serious for us.”

“Will you come back to me?”

She said, “We’ll talk about that when you’re better.” I nudged her. “All right so, Dan.” And she kissed him again, forehead, cheek, lips. From the look on his face I knew that he had never been kissed in his life.

Then came the surprise. We walked down the stairs together. I glanced across at her. Elma Sloane had begun to weep.

“Ben,” she said, “will you marry me? Or will you get somebody to do the deed? Anybody?”

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s mistakes and mistakes,” she said. “If I don’t go to that old man’s house with him, I might be making the biggest mistake I’ll ever make. And I want to go and I don’t want to go. Did I go too close to him? Oh, God!”

I said, in my most sanctimonious voice, “There’s no such thing as too much kindness.”

“Oh, will you listen to Saint Ben,” she said.

The people in this next part of the story—you’ll come to understand if I give them no names other than “Man One” and “Man Two.” One of those names will change. To “Little Boy.”

“Randall Duff’s introduction,” I said when I telephoned the police station in Newbridge. I hinted at, outlined, a story of guns and shootings. For political reasons.

Both walked me away, to a quiet room. Both spoke like boors. Both jostled me.

Man Two said, “Saving your skin, is that it?”

Man One: “Any friend of that old bugger has no friends here.”

And yet, confident as cash, Randall had said to me, “They’ll greet you with open arms.”

Man One ran the county CID, Criminal Investigative Department; Man Two had come down from Dublin at the beckoning of Man One—who said, “You know they can hang you for this.”

“By the neck,” said Man Two. “Until. You. Are. Dead.”

“Your bowels empty out,” said Man One. “On the end of the rope.”

“And your prick stands straight up for all to see,” said Man Two.

How often in my life have I not known the right thing to do? Answer: over and over and over. It’s a terrible feeling—and I had spent years roaming Ireland not knowing what to do, slopping out cowsheds, weeding beets and turnips, long lines of them in appalling weather on my knees, in drills that ran, it seemed, for hundreds of yards, an old jute sack folded at the corner to look like a cowl over my head as the wind whipped up the wet earth into my face inches below where I was kneeling.

In other words, I’d had superb training in adverse matters, and it
made me superior to those two brutes. They could induce no bleakness of spirit, no fright, no fear I hadn’t already known.

“Spill it, pal,” said Man One.

I said, “I came here to ‘spill it’—but I’m changing my mind.”

Man One began to erupt, but Man Two, more experienced, held him back. They retreated a pace from their positions in front of me; they had stood me back against a gray and empty wall.

“Oh? Changing our mind, are we?” said Man One, and balled his fist into a club. “We can stop that happening.”

Man Two again put out a restraining hand. “What do you want?”

“Not this,” I said.

Man Two jerked his head at Man One, and they quit the room. I didn’t move. They came back within a minute.

“Okay. Tell us what you want.”

“Protection.”

“You want our protection,” said Man Two.

Man One: “People who ask us for protection always double-cross us.”

I said, “Is this Chicago or something?” My stomach ached with tension.

“Jerry, get us a few chairs,” said Man Two. When Man One had gone, he added in a more collegial tone, “The local fellows, they don’t know how to handle this kind of thing.”