Absolute Friends (37 page)

Herr Frinck has prepared a list of Mundy's many creditors. Herr Doktor Eisner has run his eye over it. Herr Frinck wishes to make a statement in view of the presence of sleek Herr Brandt from head office. The behavior of Mr. Mundy throughout this whole matter has been exemplary. Mr. Mundy had every opportunity and indeed encouragement to declare himself legally bankrupt. To his credit he resisted. Now everybody, including the bank, can be paid in full. It is most gratifying, says Herr Frinck. It is admirable. Interest may safely be charged at the full rate, a most rare outcome in these circumstances.

Herr Doktor Eisner declares Mr. Mundy to be a true English gentleman. Herr Frinck seconds this. Mr. Mundy says, in that case he's the last of a breed. The joke is either not appreciated or not understood--except by handsome Herr Brandt, who is moved to inquire, in the lightest possible of tones, where in heaven's name Mr. Mundy got all this money from.

"We are looking at three transfers," Herr Brandt announces. He has them among the papers before him as he speaks, in three separate folders of transparent plastic which he now passes to Mundy for his inspection. "From United Chemical of Guernsey, two hundred thousand, per order of client. _Voilà!__ From Crédit Lyonnais in Antigua, two hundred thousand per order of client. _Voilà!__ From Morgan Guaranty Trust, Isle of Man, one hundred thousand, also per order of client. Big banks in small places. But who are the clients, Mr. Mundy?"

Grateful that Sven, Richard and Angelo have briefed him for this eventuality, Mundy pulls a regretful and, he hopes, convincing smile. "Don't think I can entirely answer that one, Herr Brandt. The negotiations are at a rather delicate stage, to be frank."

"Ah," says Herr Brandt, disappointed, and inclines his handsome head to one side. "But a little bit, maybe? Off the record," he suggests. Winningly.

"The money's by way of an advance. Start-up money," Mundy explains, using Sven's term.

"Against what exactly, Mr. Mundy?"

"Reopening the school on a profitable basis. I've been conducting some rather confidential talks with an international foundation. I didn't want to tell the bank till it was pretty much a done thing."

"Wonderful. Well done. So what is actually the orbit of this foundation? This is really _most__ interesting, I must say," Herr Brandt adds aside to his two colleagues, with the enthusiasm appropriate to a man from headquarters visiting his troops on the ground.

"Well, _one__ thing it does is foster the spread of English," Mundy replies, drawing again on his briefing. "English as Esperanto, basically. Giving the world a common language as a means to international understanding. They've got big institutional money riding on it."

"Excellent. I'm impressed." And Mundy can tell from Herr Brandt's sunny smile that he really is. "And they have selected your school here for development? As part of their scheme?"

"Among others, yes."

"How far have your talks progressed, if I am not being indiscreet?"

Mundy is aware that his briefing has about run its course. All the same, he hasn't endured ten years of the Professor's probings, not to mention months of hard sweat at the Edinburgh School of Deportment, without acquiring a few skills.

"Well," he begins boldly. "I'd say, give or take a bit--you can never be sure of anything, of course--we've just about arrived in clear water. We're not talking about what you'd call hard-nosed professional negotiations, obviously, but even a non-profit-making foundation has to satisfy its own criteria."

"Naturally. And what criteria are we considering here, if I may be so curious?"

Never hesitate. "Well, for openers, the proportion of non-Caucasian students we take. It's a global foundation, so naturally they're looking for diversity."

"Naturally. And what else, please?"

"Criteria?"

"Yes."

"The syllabus, clearly. The culture content. The level of attainment we hope to reach after a specific period of instruction. Performance generally."

"Religion?"

"What?"

"You are not a Christian organization?"

"Nobody's talked to _me__ about religion. If we're multiethnic, presumably we're multifaith."

Herr Brandt has flipped a file open with a smack and is peering into it with an expression of cheerful confusion.

"Listen. I tell you what we did, okay?" He treats Mundy to a radiant smile. "You let us into your secret, we let you into ours, okay? We mounted a little exercise. Sometimes we do that. We traced one of these payments back to its roots--only one--not always easy, okay? All the way back to the bank behind the bank behind the bank. It took a lot of guesswork at first, but we did it. From Guernsey we went to Paris. From Paris to Athens. And from Athens to Beirut and from Beirut to Riyadh. End-station was Riyadh. Maybe you see now why I ask you about religion."

_If they try to put you in the dock, slam back at them. The truth is what is demonstrable.__

"I've no doubt these people bank all over the world," Mundy retorts testily. "For all I know they've got Arab backers, why not?"

"Arab backers who support the spread of _English?__"

"If they're interested in furthering international dialogue, why not?"

"And use such complicated banking routes?"

"Shy, probably. You can hardly blame them these days, can you, when every Muslim is by definition a terrorist."

Herr Frinck is clearing his throat and Herr Doktor Eisner is fidgeting ostentatiously with his papers, lest Herr Brandt from head office has forgotten that Mr. Mundy's common-law wife is a Turk. But Herr Brandt's handsome smile takes care of everything.

"And you have a contract, obviously, Mr. Mundy," he says comfortably.

"I told you already. We're still negotiating the small print," Mundy replies, by now on the edge of indignation.

"Indeed you did. But in the meantime you have a short-term contract, no doubt. Not even the most benevolent foundation would provide so much money without a contract of some sort."

"No."

"Then, an exchange of letters."

"Nothing concrete that I'm able to show you at this stage."

"Is the foundation paying you a salary?"

"They've costed in an initial fifty thousand dollars for staff fees. I get ten thousand of them. That's two months' pay in advance. Once the school reopens, they'll raise me fifty percent."

"And your appointment is residential?"

"Eventually. Once the house is ready."

"Plus expenses?"

"Presumably."

"And a car?"

"Down the line. If it's necessary."

"So not a bad salary for a teacher with your financial record. I congratulate you. You are clearly a very tough negotiator, Herr Mundy."

Suddenly everybody is standing. There is work to be done: checks to be signed, securities to be released and pledges redeemed. Herr Doktor Eisner's department has everything prepared. Shaking Mundy's hand and gazing reverently into Mundy's eyes, Herr Brandt is anxious to reiterate his heartfelt admiration for Mundy's acumen. It was purely a head office exercise, nothing personal; a bank these days lives with one foot in the law courts. Herr Frinck confirms this. So does Herr Doktor Eisner. Speaking as a lawyer, Eisner confides to Mundy as he leads him upstairs, he has never known a time when the banking industry was so beset with legal pitfalls.

The schoolhouse is still there. It hasn't, like Number Two, The Vale, disappeared; no builder's board offers family homes on a ninety percent mortgage. It's the same faithful old aunt it always was, frowning down at him from its ivy-clad bay windows and slate-clad turrets and bell tower with no bell. The same arched front door with coach bolts like cardigan buttons awaits him. He advances shyly. First, he must open the padlock on the front gate with its wishing-well canopy. He does so, then walks slowly up the brick path to the six steps leading to the porch, where he stops and turns, and confirms as if he doubted it that the same magical view is also intact--across the river to the old city with its spires, then upwards, and upwards again, to the red ruined castle stretched along the Kaiserstuhl.

The house had been an idiotic choice from the start. He knows that now. Half of him knew it at the time. A commercial _school,__ stuck on a hillside--parking for three cars only, the wrong side of town, convenient for nobody? Yet it was a fine roomy house. And a snip at the price, as Des would say, provided you were prepared to roll your sleeves up, which Mundy was, even if Egon preferred to sit and fiddle the books in the conservatory. The front garden had four good apple trees--all right, you don't buy a house for its apple trees. But there's a vineyard at the back, and once the school took off, he was going to make his own Château Mundy and send a few bottles to old Jake to put down.

And above the vineyard runs the Philosophers' Path--he can see it now through the apple trees. And above the path, the Heiligenberg, and some of the best woods in Germany to walk in--if you walk, which admittedly not all mature students do.

Or look at the literary associations--weren't _they__ worth anything? Hadn't Carl Zuckmayer and Max Weber lived a couple of hundred yards from here? The very street named after Hölderlin? What more does today's upwardly mobile young executive want from a language school, for heaven's sake?

Answer, unfortunately: a great deal.

The latchkey turns, and when he puts his weight against the door it yields. He steps inside and is ankle-deep in junk mail. He closes the door and stands in three-quarter darkness because of the ivy over the windows, and for the first time in months allows himself to remember just how much he loved the place, and how much of himself he invested here only to look on helplessly while it all slipped away from him: the money, the friend he trusted, the dream of getting it right at last.

Lost in marvel at his own folly, he picks his way through the wreckage of his too-recent past. In the central hall where he is standing, the pupils assembled for classes and were sorted according to need into four tall rooms. The splendid staircase got its light from the art nouveau skylight, and if the sun was up as you crossed the hall, colored shards of red and green and gold slid over you. His old classroom is bare: desks, chairs, coatracks, all gone, sold. But his writing is still on the blackboard, and he can hear his own voice reading it: _As a valued customer of British Rail, we would like to apologize to you for the presence of the wrong kind of snow on the line.__

_Question: Who is the customer?__

_Question: Who is the subject of the sentence?__

_Question: Why is this the wrong kind of sentence?__

He is perching as if by magnetic power on his old spot in the window bay: just the right height for a beanstalk like me, and a nice bit of evening sun while you're waiting for your last class to arrive.

End of reverie. The past isn't what you came for.

Dimitri told you his money stinks. So now it does. Does that make him a liar?

All right, slipping half a million bucks to a washed-up language tutor may not be normal business practice to some anally oriented apparatchik from head office. But it could be all part of the day's work for a fellow who buys and sells ships out of his back pocket.

Assuming Herr Brandt _is__ a senior executive from head office, of course. That quick confiding eye and overready smile of his could come out of quite a different stable. There was more than one occasion during our uncomfortable pas de deux when I wondered whether I might be back in the Presence.

For twenty minutes or more Mundy lets his thoughts drift free-range through his head. Many surprise him, but they often do. For instance, that he is mysteriously underimpressed by his newfound affluence. If he could transfer himself by magic wand to anywhere in the world just now, he'd either be in bed with Zara in the flat, or closeted in the woodshed with Mustafa, helping him finish off a chaotic model of the Dome of the Rock in time for his mother's birthday.

Mundy jumps to his feet and swings round. A thunderous banging has broken out behind his right ear.

Recovering his composure he is delighted to find himself staring at the gnomic features of old Stefan, his former gardener and boilermaster, floating six inches away from him on the other side of the glass. It is a sash window. In a trice, Mundy has prised open the central lock, stooped, grabbed the brass handles and with a great unfolding of his body sent the lower half of the window rattling up its ropes. He stretches out his hand, old Stefan seizes it and, with the agility of a gnome half his age, vaults into the room.

A tumult of breathless small talk follows. Yes, yes, Stefan is fine, his wife Elli is fine, the _Söhnchen__--he means his hulk of a fifty-year-old son--is _excellent__--but where has Herr Ted _been,__ how is _Jake,__ is he still studying in Bristol? And why has it taken Herr Ted so _long__ when we all _miss__ him, nobody in Heidelberg bears him a grudge, for God's sake, the little matter of Herr Egon is _long forgotten!__...

And it's while all this is being thoroughly gone over that Mundy realizes that old Stefan was not hanging around the garden by chance.

"We have been _expecting__ you, Herr Ted. We knew two weeks ago that you would soon be here."

"Nonsense, Stefan. First I heard of it myself was ten days ago."

But old Stefan is tapping the side of his nose with his crooked finger to show what a shrewd old gnome he is. "Two weeks ago. Two weeks! I told Elli. 'Elli,' I said. 'Herr Ted is coming home to Heidelberg. He will pay his debts like he always said he would, and he'll take back the villa and start the school again. And I'll work for him. It's all agreed.'"

Mundy keeps his tone light. "So who slipped you the news, Stefan?"

"Your surveyors, naturally."

"Which surveyors are they? I've got so many."

Old Stefan is shaking his head and squeezing up his twinkly eyes while he tut-tuts in disbelief.

"From your mortgage company, Herr Ted. The people who are giving you your loan, of course. Today, nobody can keep anything secret, it's well known."

"And they've been here already?" Mundy says, managing to sound as if he was expecting them, and is perhaps a little irritated to have missed them.

"To look round, naturally! I was passing, I saw some figures in the window, a little light moving about, and I thought, Ahah! Herr Ted's back. Or maybe he's not back and we've got some burglars. I am too old to die, so I banged on the door. A nice young fellow, a good smile, overalls. A flashlight in his hand. And in the background some other fellows I didn't see, maybe a woman. Women these days are everywhere. 'We are surveyors,' he tells me. 'Don't worry. We are nice people.'

'For Herr Ted?' I say. 'You are surveying for Herr Ted?'

'No, no. For the mortgage company. If the company lends him money, your Herr Ted will come back.'"

"What time of day was this?" Mundy asks, but the person he is really listening to is Kate, the day she came home early from school and saw shadows in the window at Estelle Road: _Light on their feet... moving back and forth across the doorway.__

"Morning. Eight o'clock. It was raining. I was on my way to Frau Liebknecht's garden on my bicycle. In the afternoon, on my way back, five o'clock like now, they were still here. I'm so nosy it's ridiculous. Ask Elli. I'm incorrigible. 'What takes you so long?' I ask them. 'It's a big house,' they said. 'It will cost a lot of money. A lot of money takes a lot of time.'"

He has done walks like this in Edinburgh. They went this way: _All right, Ted, in a minute you're going to step out of the front door of this house and you're going to the main railway station. You can use any public transport you like barring taxis, because we never take taxis, do we?--not the first one that comes along, not the second nor the third nor the thirteenth. Not when we've got our ears up. And by the time we reach the railway station, I'll want to know whether we're being followed and who by, and I__ don't _want to know__ they _know__ you _know. Are we clear on that? And I want you at the station within half an hour because we've got a train to catch. So don't start giving me the scenic route by way of Edinburgh Zoo.__

He walks and lets Heidelberg take him into its protection. Back into the lane, and a careless look at the surrounding cars and windows: Oh how I love this little square with its leafy villas and secret gardens! Across the main road, down to the river's edge, and are those the same lovers who were canoodling on that bench when I came up here? Then over the Old Bridge, which was blown to smithereens in 1945 in a vain effort to halt the advancing American army, but everyone's forgotten that, and a lot don't even know it, least of all the schoolkids and tour groups that walk up and down it, admiring the barges and the statues, much as Mundy does as he leans over the parapet waiting to see who stops behind him to light a cigarette, study a guidebook or take a photograph. The day is hot, the Hauptstrasse, which is a pedestrian precinct, is as usual jammed with slowly moving crowds, so Mundy improves his speed as if he has a train to catch, which indeed he has, but not quite yet, and keeps an eye on shopwindows for anyone who might recall a forgotten engagement and similarly accelerate. He keeps going fast, cycles overtake him, and perhaps his followers called for them because following a six-footer going at full throttle when you are a few sizes shorter and also a pedestrian is a mug's game. He leaves the old town and enters the flat industrial ghetto of gray-block houses and logo cafés. But by the time he reaches the station, all he can tell his absent Edinburgh instructors is that, if he is being followed, he's being given the VIP coverage, which comprises everything from road sweepers to satellites, and the squirt of all-day hair spray on your shoulder that in the words of one eloquent instructor makes you glow like a fucking firefly on their grubby little television screens.

In the station concourse he goes to a public phone and with his head stuffed inside an enlarged helmet calls home. Zara has left for work. She will be at her café in an hour. He gets Mustafa, who howls. What - about - Dome - of - Rock - Ted? You - very - bad!

"We'll give it a double dose tomorrow night." He does the banter. Yes, yes, I'm tucked up with my girlfriend.

Zara's cousin Dina comes to the phone. Dina, I've got to spend the night in Heidelberg, there's another meeting with the bank tomorrow. Can you explain to Zara, please? Can you try and get Mustafa into bed before midnight, please? Don't let him use the Dome as an excuse. Dina, you're a brick.

He calls the Linderhof, gets the machine, pinches his nose and leaves a message saying he won't be in tomorrow: flu.

The train to Munich leaves in forty minutes. He buys a newspaper, sits on a bench and watches the world go by while he wonders whether the world is watching him.

What were they doing in the schoolhouse all day? Measuring it for deep-pile carpets?

_Nice. Young. Good smile. Overalls. Flashlight in his hand. No, we are only surveyors.__

It's a local train and takes forever. It reminds him of the local from Prague the time he sat with Sasha in the guard's van with their bicycles. At a tiny station in a flat field he alights and moves back two carriages. A couple of stations later he moves further back. By the time he reaches Munich there are six people left on the train, and Mundy is the last by fifty yards to leave it.

The parking garage has an elevator but he prefers the stairs, although they stink of piss. Men in leather haunt the half-landings. A black prostitute says twenty euros. He remembers Zara joining him for breakfast at the outdoor café on the day his life began again. _Please, sir, would you like to go to bed with me for money?__

His Volkswagen Beetle is on the fourth floor, in the corner bay where he left it this morning. He walks once round it, checking the doors for smear marks; and for clean patches where smear marks have been wiped off; and for new scratch lines on the fascias of the locks. _Good lad, Ted. We always said you were a natural and you are.__

Affecting to look for oil leaks, he crouches front and back, gropes for clever boxes, homers, and whatever else he can think of that was in fashion thirteen years ago. _Always try to focus your fear, Ted. If you don't know what you're scared of, you'll be scared of everything.__