And Then There Was No One (13 page)

It was to me he spoke next.

‘Gilbert, what did you think of it?’

‘I liked it a lot. I particularly admired the way you write, or plan to write, on a theme which is very close to you, even autobiographical, yet you manage to distance yourself from that theme through the novel’s form and also, I presume, its language.’

‘Autobiographical, eh? Perhaps. Except that I haven’t been murdered.’

For a brief instant the word ‘yet’ seemed to hover between us.

‘Mrs Trubshawe?’ he said to Evie.

‘Oh, delightful, quite delightful!’ she trilled. ‘If a bit over my head, you know.’

‘Sanary?’ (Hugh’s opinion, probably to Hugh’s own relief, seemed not to interest him.) ‘Is this yet another of my “borrowings” in your view?’

‘No comment,’ Sanary silkily answered him. ‘But please,’ he added, ‘don’t take that personally. It’s my nature. Rather, it’s my nationality. Like all of my compatriots, I was born neutral. If I offered you an opinion, I would instantly cease to be Swiss.’

‘In other words, blah blah blah.’

He finally turned to Autry.

‘What about you, laughing boy? Have you nothing to say?’

‘Well, okay, I’ll tell you,’ Autry eventually replied, removing the toothpick from his mouth. ‘I read your book.
Out of a Clear Blue Sky
? Yeah, I read it all right. We all did. And, you know what, I felt a lot of hatred in that book, a
lot
of hatred. What they call self-hatred.’

‘Self
-hatred?!’ echoed a stupefied Slavorigin.

‘That’s what I said. For me it was a book by somebody who really
loves
America, but hates himself for loving it.’

Although I myself thought this to be pure dollar-book Freud, I overheard Sanary whisper to Evie,
‘Nom d’un nom!
I think he is – how you say? – right.’

After dinner we were all, Meredith excepted, chauffeured back into town and, as had been promised by Düttmann, on to its one and only disco. A disco, I call it, but it was no ordinary disco. By coincidence, considering the setting of
Slavorigin’s new novel, what was danced there, by men and women, by men and men, also by women and women, was the horniest dance in the world, the Argentinian tango.

We commandeered a ringside table, ordered what everybody else seemed to have ordered, Bacardi-and-Cokes all round, and settled down to enjoy as we could the smoky spectacle.

But even before we were served our drinks, an almost hiplessly slim young stranger, not effeminate though obviously gay, wearing a white vest that clung wetly to his breastplate of a chest and a pair of chinos so loose about the waist we could read the brand name of his white underpants, approached our table and asked Slavorigin if he cared to dance. Thomson and Thompson were having a quiet drink at the bar, but their charge turned to the rest of us as if we had some sort of right to mind. We, or some of us, managed to eke out glassy smiles of benediction and, hands clasped, they strode onto the floor.

God, they were good! Slavorigin really did know how to dance. I watched him as he and his partner clamped themselves onto each other’s now electrically taut, now sensual and yielding torso. I watched how, his head tossed back, he would brusquely stamp his feet in a ferocious tango tantrum while his partner raised a single black boot behind him, casting a furtive glance at its heel as though in fear that he might have trod on something unmentionable. I watched too how, glissando after glissando, every joint and pivot of their
bodies would click magnetically together, before terminating in a perfectly timed four-legged splits.

When, still hand in hand, they walked back off the floor, Slavorigin whispered in the ear of the sweaty young stranger, who began smiling and nodding, just smiling and nodding. Then, as they were about to reach our table, they abruptly unclasped hands and went their separate ways. Watching his partner disappear into the crowd, Slavorigin reclaimed his seat beside us, his long legs sprawling sexily under the table.

I myself slipped unobtrusively away half an hour later, and I have no idea when the evening ended for the others.

Dreams like hallucinations divine and speak to our fear of dying, and sleep, as many have written before me, is the green room of the hereafter.
*
That night I slept fitfully. On one of my room’s twin bedside tables I had earlier in the evening laid out a brand new sleeping-mask and a pair of
boules Quiès,
by then as grey and tough as wads of chewed-out gum. Now, wandering naked into the bathroom to brush my teeth, swallow a blood-pressure pill and take one last pee for the road, I switched on the alarm-clock radio and located a sort of classical-music channel: Honegger’s
Pacific 231
followed by the ‘big tune’ of a Rachmaninov piano concerto, etc. Although I had packed a snug little compact-disc player along with three favourite late-night
discs, whenever I am about to sleep alone, away from home, I do prefer the radio to records.
Somebody is out there.

It was close to midnight when I slid beneath the duvet. As predicted, I had to wrestle with the bolster, wedging it under the nape of my neck (which made me feel as though I were in a barber’s chair), piling a second bolster on top of the first (a dentist’s chair), then experimenting at length to discover whether it might be practical to dispense with the damn things altogether (a coffin). At last,
faute de mieux,
I arrived at a tolerable position by clasping one of them to my jawline like a violinist his violin.

Only after these and other such threshings, turning my face over on my left cheek then my right cheek then my left again, then, as a despairing last resort, trying to sleep flat on my back, my eyes sightlessly open under the already sticky mask, then getting up twice to fiddle with the radiator’s complicated thermostat – the room abruptly revealed itself to be suffocatingly warm, something I seemed not to have noticed before – only then did I succeed in losing consciousness. And I was no sooner asleep, so it felt, than I started to dream.

Now for me all dreams,
all dreams,
are nightmares; there is, I find, a denaturingly strange and suggestive something about the state-of-the-art scene-shifting of even the prosiest of dreamscapes, just as in the staidest of surrealist paintings. Hence, however unscary this dream of mine may strike the reader, it was from my point of view a nightmare none the
less. I didn’t wake up screaming but, when I finally did surface, I feared at first I would have to vomit.

I dreamt I was in Switzerland (a less logical and realistic setting than it may appear, since the semi-self-aware ‘I’ who was doing the dreaming was
not
in Switzerland but in Notting Hill, dreams like mobile phones tending to adopt the default assumption that the dreamer is in his own territory). This dream-Switzerland was a picture-postcard platitude, from which not one of Hitchcock’s clichés was missing, not even the village-square dance, the whirl of dirndl, on which curtains used to rise in nineteenth-century operettas. It also had a Swiss-themed soundtrack, Rossini’s
William Tell
Overture.

Naked, then again sometimes fully clothed, I was being chased across a Tobleronish range of small, no more than knee-high, perfectly triangular mountains, the foothills of the infinite, by somebody or something whose contours I couldn’t at first make out with exactitude. The chase, moreover, was a very uneven one. For a while he, if he it were (but I gradually came to understand that my pursuer was indeed male), appeared to glide above the mountains in a sustained and seamless arc underneath a sky of tampons and rainbows, while I found myself obliged by my dream’s martinet of a
metteur-en-scène
to plod over the lovely, dark, deep snow (shades of Frost!) at the much more pedestrian pace of a cross-country skier. There couldn’t be any doubt, then, that he would catch up with me.

And he kept coming. Without even having to turn my head, I somehow knew that he was dressed in the garb – quilted anorak, its fur-lined hood reposing on his slightly stooped shoulders, old-fashioned khaki shorts and thick woollen stockings which nearly met those shorts halfway up his chubby legs – of a portly butterfly-hunter. In actual fact (if I can use that phrase about a dream), he wasn’t chasing me after all. Waving his long-stemmed net every which way, he was endeavouring to nab a colony of butterflies that waltzed insouciantly around his head as though dangled on as many strings. And it was only when he was about to overtake me that I realised that the butterflies weren’t butterflies at all but books, open books, their pages fluttering in the wind-machine breeze. I could even read their titles, about most of which, however, there seemed to me something not quite right.
Pnun
was one. Another was
Son of Palefire.
A third, which I caught sight of at the very instant he snared the book, was
Adair or Ardor.

At that same instant, as Rossini’s overture swelled on the soundtrack and the shadow of my pursuer’s net cast its own net over me, he morphed into the Lone Ranger. Wearing a black sleeping-mask just like mine, brandishing in his right hand the butterfly-net with the captured and still vainly fluttering book inside it, the book which bore my name, digging a bejewelled spur into his horse’s tender haunch so that it reared up on its two hind legs, he cried out, ‘Hi-Yo, Silver!’ Then, accompanied by his faithful pard Tonto (now where
had he sprung from?), he galloped away on thundering hoofbeats into the thrilling days of yesteryear and I awoke.

When I consulted my wristwatch, I was shocked to discover that it was twenty-five past eleven and that, oversleeping as I had, I risked missing altogether the Mayor’s reception which would already be well underway. I leapt out of bed, raced into the bathroom and, twelve minutes later, a personal record, had shaved, showered and dressed. Breakfast was no longer being served in the dining room, nor would I have had time to consume it even if it were, and my hope was that coffee as well as alcohol would be available at the Kunsthalle.

I rushed downstairs, through the lobby and out into the car park. Ignoring the appeals of my palpitating heart to take it easy, I ran straight to the Kunsthalle building, which I made out ahead of me every step of the way but which still felt unpleasantly distant for one as out-of-shape as I was.

As I drew closer, I saw a crowd of people with glasses of champagne in their hands, some I knew, others not, milling about on its front steps. I recognised Sanary, his blazer a black blot among so many pastel shades, and the ubiquitous Evie, and I heard a loud drawl – ‘I tell you, he’s ghaarstly, he’s perfectly ghaarstly!’ – which told me that Meredith too was of the company. A minute later I myself was among them.

‘What’s happened?’ I breathily asked.

As I might have foreseen, Evie was the first to reply.

‘It’s Slavorigin.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared? What do you mean, disappeared?’

What I learned from her was that Slavorigin had so far failed to put in an appearance at the reception which had been organised in his honour. For a while everybody had sought to stay calm and convivial. By twenty-past eleven, however, it had become impossible to continue pretending that his ongoing absence was no cause for alarm, and somebody – ‘I fancy,’ she said, ‘it was Pierre here’ – suggested that Düttmann return at once to the Hilton to find out whether and when Slavorigin had left it. But just as he was preparing to go, who should turn up at the Kunsthalle but Thomson and Thompson, ‘neither of them a happy bunny’. At a quarter to eleven they had knocked on Slavorigin’s door to escort him to the reception, even though the Kunsthalle was just a five-minute stroll away. No response. They had then taken the lift back down to the ground floor to ask the receptionist whether Mr Slavorigin by chance had already gone. They were told no, that he would certainly have been seen crossing the lobby area. One of them – let’s say it was Thompson – took the lift back up to the twelfth floor while his twin remained behind at the reception desk. A couple of minutes later Thomson’s mobile phone rang. It was Thompson to say that there was still no response. Accompanied by Thomson, the manager himself then took the lift up and unlocked the
bedroom door with his own set of keys. All three entered the room together. No Slavorigin. On which, alert to the implications of what they stubbornly refused to admit could have been their own professional negligence, the two low-rent minders set off for the Kunsthalle in the hope that their charge had somehow contrived to exit the hotel unnoticed.

And that’s where things stood when I arrived. Düttmann, I saw, was talking in whispers to an extremely tall, straight-backed man in a double-breasted suit, a sort of General De Gaulle with some of the excess air let out, whom I took (correctly) to be the Mayor. G. Autry, in an outfit not unlike that worn by the Lone Ranger in my dream, minus mask and revolver, was being spoken at by one of Düttmann’s assistants, a gawky, bespectacled, pony-tailed brunette whose fidgety smile testified, even from as far away from them as I myself stood, to her fear of being reprimanded for having left one of the Festival’s guests, if only for a few minutes, to his own devices. Meredith, who kept darting glances at me, was feigning interest in what a gesticulating Hugh had to say to her. (Though I found it hard to credit, particularly under the circumstances, it did cross my mind that this might be a new attempt of his to borrow the ten thousand pounds he was so direly in need of.) And the two bodyguards were looking woebegone indeed.

What was to be done? After a deal of verbal to-ing and fro-ing, it was Sanary who came up with a sensible suggestion.

‘We should,’ he said, ‘take a look in the Museum.’

‘Why do you say the Museum, Monsieur Sanary?’ Düttmann asked, his gammy eye blinking violently.

‘In this town there is nowhere else, it seems to me, that he could have gone. It’s the Museum or the Falls. And since the Museum is the nearer of the two, that’s where we should proceed first.’

Although nothing audible was said for or against his proposal, the general babble that followed sounded more approving than not and we all began to shuffle across to the Museum, which, like virtually everything else in Meiringen, was located just six or seven hundred yards away.

A queer thing occurred
en route.
I was walking between Evie and Meredith, and I spotted, on the far side of the narrow street, the twin toddlers from the flight whom I had already seen twenty-four hours earlier, seated with their parents on the café terrace. What startled me on this occasion, what really rather disturbed me, was that they were unchaperoned. A pair of foreign two-year-olds alone in the main street of a Swiss resort? What could their parents be thinking of? And where in God’s name were they? As warmly wrapped up as before, matching little bobble hats on matching little heads, the twins waddled happily along the pavement in the direction opposite that in which our party was headed, towing in their parallel wakes two identical wooden Donald Ducks with wheels instead of feet and heads which would metronomically nod, up and down, up and down, as they advanced. Perhaps they also quacked; I was too far
away to hear. As I tried to point out to my not at all interested companions, it was most extraordinary.

Our stroll to the Museum took six minutes. Just as had been the case when I visited it with Düttmann and Spaulding, the box-office was unmanned, a dereliction of duty which elicited tut-tuts from the Mayor and his entourage. We started to file in one by one, there being a turnstile to manoeuvre, one we might have expected to prohibit entry to us visitors without tickets, but in fact it didn’t. I was fifth in the queue. Düttmann, two of his female assistants and somebody else I couldn’t place were in front of me; Hugh, a plume of his chain-smoker’s breath coiling about my earlobes, behind me; Evie and Meredith, if I remember aright, behind him.

Suddenly we all heard Düttmann cry out. One of his assistants began screaming and the queue heaved up with a judder. I had already squeezed through the turnstile and now hastened into the main gallery, that room-size replica of the Baker Street rooms that Holmes shared with Watson. At first I could see nothing but the unnaturally stiffened postures of those who had preceded me and who were standing stock-still in a little semi-circle. Düttmann’s two young assistants were holding their hands cupped over their mouths, the profiles of their frighteningly white faces made visible to me by their both having turned away in horror from whatever spectacle it was that confronted them. Düttmann himself was trembling; and as I rather blunderingly, I fear, pushed
past him to see what they had all stumbled upon, he sought momentary support from the high-backed chair that served Watson’s mahogany writing desk.

Deaf to the confused hubbub behind me, as the others continued to step gingerly into the cramped room, I looked down at the figure on the carpet. It was of course Slavorigin. As soon as I saw him, I knew why people said ‘as dead as a doornail’. It was almost as though his body had actually been nailed to the ground. The beautiful face lying sideways, half on the carpet, half on the exposed surround of the wooden floor, was expressionless: no terror, not even a hint of surprise, could be detected in features more serene than I ever remembered them to have been in his mostly angry life. Clearly, he never knew he had died and was still none the wiser.

Gustav Slavorigin dead! What an almighty stink this would cause! But the worst was to come. The din inside the room was now indescribable, as everybody in turn got an eyeful of the corpse, reacting with a shriek or a muffled moan or a stammered ‘Oh my God!’. Evie, who had been here before, as it were, albeit only between the covers of my whodunits, looked much more squeamish than I had described her in print, even in
A Mysterious Affair of Style,
whose murder victim was, after all, supposed to be her oldest and dearest friend, and I heard Autry muttering a guttural ‘Jesus!’ again and again under his breath. Then quite by chance, as if the reels of Time were being changed, there
came upon us all one of those unheralded instants of synchronised hush, the whole room falling silent at once, and Sanary pointed downward at the body and said in a bold clear voice, ‘Look!’