Famous Last Words (4 page)

And all through what remained of Mauberlev’s journey—

walking; lying flat on the tops of trains; crawling in and out of the backs of trucks; wading through water one day, snow the next—Mauberley thought of these words and was grimly amused. The image was so clear in his mind of Ezra, hunched

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and glowering above his microphone, fingering his pages like the pages of a menu—d la carte or table d’hote: ivhat shall 1 feed you today—all you out there who are starving for my wisdom? And sometimes he ladled it with silver spoons and other times he mounded it, gross, on forks; and sometimes, like an animal that feeds its young by force, he chewed it up and spat it out across the airwaves: all his warnings—panaceas—blasts—pronouncements…

Well.

If Mauberley could speak with Ezra now, he would tell

him categorically; you cannot get through hell at all.

Every inch of the way—from the woods at Verona to the

forest at Merano—Mauberley sensed he was being followed by the woman in the moleskin coat.

He knew of course what she wanted. It was the contents

of the cardboard valise and the attache case—the only thing of value he possessed: his notebooks, his years and years of jottings and annotations.

Whatever else he was, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was a

compulsive witness. In all his life he had never been able to refrain from setting things down on paper, recording the lives of those around him, moment by moment—every word and every gesture instantly frozen in his private cipher. To those who knew of their existence, Mauberley’s notebooks were feared like a morgue where the dead are kept on ice—

with all their incriminating wounds intact. Not that it would matter greatly if the men and women lying there were nameless.

But Mauberley’s friends were anything but anonymous.

All his testimony had been drawn from years of privileged relationships with people whose lives could now be ruined—

or ended—by the information contained in his notebooks.

The woman in the moleskin coat wanted not only to kill

him; she wanted to kill his words as well.

But in whose behalf? Whose creature was she? Was she

von Ribbentrop’s? Or Schellenberg’s?…Or worse…

When Mauberley had left Rapallo, he had presumed his

route would lie through the Brenner Pass. But now. within

striking distance of the Brenner, he realized that was the last way he should go. To begin with, it would be clogged with the retreating army. And it would be the route to safety expected of him.

The unexpected route to safety would be to turn where

he was, strike out across the foothills, and tackle the face of the mountain.

The Grand Elysium Hotel stands over UnterBalkonberg in

the Tyrol looking down eight hundred feet into the emerald waters of the Otztalsee. Ten thousand feet below it on the other side is the valley of the Adige winding off towards the Gulf of Venice. To the east, the Brenner Pass; westward, the mountains standing in the way of Switzerland. Balkonberg itself is known as the southern esplanade of Austria, rising fourteen thousand feet above the floor of Italy. The old hotel provides a spectacular vantage point from which to view these distances and, before the war, its Rhenish turrets and its Gothic towers, its terraces and palisades had been the subjects of a million photographs, magazine covers, travel brochures and even of a postage stamp. Isadora Duncan,

Greta Garbo, Somerset Maugham and Richard Strauss had

all come up the famous tiers of marble stairs, crossing the lobbies to sign the registry and collect their keys. Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson had danced incognito in the Winter Garden. It had been in those days that Mauberley had known the hotel first. He had been there twenty times. Or more. He could not remember. What he could remember was the place; the scent of its trees; the sound of its waterfalls; its walls of windows blazing in the sun; the terraces with chairs and tables: the great, winding drive by which one normally arrived to be greeted by Herr Kachelmayer, the concierge, who

made a point of greeting everyone. And by the time you

were half way up the steps beneath the portico, Herr Kachelmayer had told you who among your friends was in

residence and who among your enemies… .

Now at the foot of Austria, all Mauberley could see before him was the great stone face of the Balkonberg, fogged and

clouded, mellowed in the foreground with trees. This was the climb he must make.

It snowed. And underneath the snow there was mud.

Mauberley’s skin had not been dry in days. And behind him was the woman, waiting to pull him down—with her razor in her pocket. And he could not climb. He could not even think of climbing. For one thing, the cardboard valise was already beginning to disintegrate and turn to mush and the metal corners of the attache case had become his enemies.

And even if he could climb, even if he got there, nothing would await him but the old hotel itself. Just a vacant, frozen star—with private room and bath.

But if I destroyed the notebooks now, he thought, I could bring the whole pursuit to a close. I could climb out of Italy—

free. I would be left with nothing then but my mind. And no one can have my mind. She can’t cut it out and put it in a bag and carry it away. She can’t make it speak or spill its contents. Not if I spill the contents first—and burn them.

So he waited in the snow beneath the trees, feeling like an animal deserted by its herd, left ailing for the wolves to find.

But no wolves came and well after nightfall he went back out towards the nearest road where he stole some petrol from a German army truck that had sunk to its axles in

yesterday’s mud. Its driver sat behind the wheel, iced over in the moonlight, dead of a heart attack brought on by rage.

It was this man’s helmet Mauberley used to carry the petrol back to his hiding place amongst the trees.

Quickly he dumped the notebooks into a hollow he had

made in the snow. Mostly it was the backs of the books he saw, but he saw some pages, too—imagining their shorthand scrawl, the cipher he had devised of signs and symbols and his own private way of telling the date. He closed his eves and fell to his knees and poured the petrol over the books.

One swift gesture would do it.

Matches.

There were two.

He fumbled the first and watched it fizzle in the snow.

He removed the cotton gloves that Dorothy had given him

and rolled them carefully—slowly—into a ball and stuffed them into his pocket.

Then he prayed. And struck the second match.

When it caught, he watched it burning for an instant before he threw it down amongst the pages.

Nothing.

And then a “pop” and a great, green flame shot up against the palms of his hands and his hair was on fire.

Mauberley rocked back onto his heels and fell away towards one side. His mind was burning: twenty-five years—

a quarter century of private thought. Suddenly he flung himself—like a sack of earth—onto the flames.

For half an hour he lost all consciousness—and when he woke there was darkness everywhere and not a trace of fire.

Beneath him, once he had dug down through the numbness

of his hands, he could feel whole pages at his fingerends and the bulk of volumes that seemed to be either complete or partially so. He drew himself up and sat with his feet in the ashes and knew both he and the books—some part of

each—had survived.

He sat that way all night.

The next day—and the next—he climbed into Austria, sleeping one night on the mountain, and made his way successfully into the courtyard of the Grand Elysium Hotel, where

he found the concierge, Kachelmayer, sitting in a blanket in the sun.

“Is it you, Herr Kachelmayer?” said Mauberley, setting

down his cases on the ice, but unable to uncurl his fingers.

“Yes, but of course it is me,” said Herr Kachelmayer,

rising, clutching the blanket. “Just as I trust that is you, Herr Mauberley.”

It was.

Mauberley noticed a certain nervousness in Kachelmayer.

He also noticed a certain amount of “scurrying” off in the background, whether of people or of dogs he was not quite able to tell.

“You have come from the mountain side,” said Kachel—

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mayer. “You have come without a motorcar… -You have corr>e without your chauffeur, your friends…” Kachelmayer had what is known as an eye for the obvious. “Are you all right?”

Mauberley said; “is there any chance we might go in? I

have been in the cold a very long time.”

Herr Kachelmayer was hesitant.

“The Hotel Elysium,” he said, “is closed for the season.”

“Nonsense, Herr Kachelmayer.” Mauberley was already

stooping, picking up his cases with his fingers already shaped to hold them. “I want a suite of rooms—as always—on the second floor.” He began to cross the courtyard, making for the well-remembered steps, the great glass doors, praying that Kachelmayer would follow him.

He did.

“But Mister Mauberley—Herr Mauberley—sir—”

Babble babble babble.

In the end, they struck the bargain Mauberley had all along intended. He would pay to live almost alone in the great hotel, and Kachelmayer would have the five thousand

Reichsmark Mauberley had set aside for just that purpose.

There were bonuses as well. It seemed that Kachelmayer

had been keeping a store of the best of his wines and brandies and Schnapps, together with a hoarding of everyday foods such as eggs and milk and sausage, even some vegetables, in the expectation and fervent desire that someone of rank—

a colonel, or a general—might turn up on his doorstep wanting somewhere to rest or even. God forbid, to hide. Many

troops had already been withdrawn through the valleys but the Hotel Elysium was out of the way of the retreating army and it would take a personage of rank to know of its existence.

. .a personage of wealth.

Mauberley thought of a fat Uriah Heep as he watched Herr Kachelmayer’s performance in the middle of the grand lobby.

The hands did not even pause to change direction once they had started their twisting and turning: round and round and round. He might as well have spent the energy in kneading bread or wringing out sheets as waste it on Mauberley’s ego.

The one thing he did not ask—arid the one thing he should

have asked, of course.—was how it was that Mauberley could be in Austria…the American writer…the great American expatriate…the great American…before the Americans had arrived. But perhaps he did not want to ask. The answer might retard the advance of the five thousand Reichsmark.

Mauberley heard, ^ce again, the strangely disconcerting noise that sounded li^g a dog—or, rather, like a pack of dogs.

“Are we alone, Herr Kachelmayer?”

“But of course… ,”

The noises were repeated; something scurrying out of

sight; something falling with an awful series of bumps like a sack of potatoes emptying its contents down a staircase.

Herr Kachelmayer shrugged and smiled.

“Die Ratten…”

“Rather loud rats, aren’t they‘1’”

“Ja.”

A small, white fac^e appeared very close to the floor near the edge of the registration desk.

“And rather large,” said Mauberley.

Kachelmayer made a gesture with his arm—“ivhisht,

whisht,” he said. Ai^d 3 child aged four or five, perhaps a girl, made a dash ac rogg {he marble towards the kitchens.

“How many are t here?” said Mauberley. “Please, don’t

tell another lie. 1 haven’t the patience or the time.”

“There are four, F^err Mauberley.”

“Four… .And wt^y are they?”

“My children.”

“Aside from that, are we alone?”

“There is my wif^” Herr Kachelmayer said, apologetically.

Kachelmayer turned and went across to the desk—rather

too quickly, Mauberley thought—and rummaged for some

keys.

“You may have thťg suite you have always occupied. Third door down on the l^gft. It will take some time to open the pipes and restore thŤe water service to the second floor. Perhaps by this evening . As for light: you must draw the curtains just in case…. and .”

“Food.”

“Yes. at once.”

“And drink. I will have some brandy and some wine as

well… .”

Mauberley started over towards the lift, as if by habit. But when he saw its doors with their metal designs and the bars enclosing the shaft, he decided to walk. He must beware of cages.

He began to climb the stairs.

“Herr Mauberley…?”

“Yes?”

Herr Kachelmayer was standing in his blanket, right in

the middle of the empty lobby, looking up at him. Smiling.

“It is so good to have you come back,” he said.

“Thankyou, Herr Kachelmayer. Thankyou. It is good to

be here.”

After he had turned the key in the lock and had opened the door, Mauberley put his arm across his face and closed his eyes—more afraid of seeing who might kill him than of being killed.

But there was no one. Of course, there was no one. The

fear was habit.

The salon was empty. The windows had not been opened

for weeks. The air was as dry as a biscuit tin. The carpets smelled of civilized dust and the chairs and sofas, though covered with sheets, had all been arranged for conversation—not confrontation. In the bathroom, one of the gigantic

taps was already banging—dripping real water into which Mauberley dipped a finger, licking it like someone finding honey in the bottom of a cup; and in the bedroom was a

bed—under which he could hide when the walls began to

fall.

It was heaven.

Later, after about an hour, Kachelmayer appeared himself with a smallish blond boy in tow who carried a tray.

The tray was set on a table and the sheets removed from the chairs and sofas.

Kachelmayer handed the boy some towels and a bar of

soap—already used, but nonetheless a bar of soap. He v, „ v c.i|