Goodbye Again (10 page)

‘Back at the hotel. We’ll – I’ll – go pick it up, and get some food.’ Ben turned to me. ‘Since you’re feeling tired, why don’t you stay here, darling, take a rest down in the cabin, while I do the chores. That okay, Geoff?’

‘Sure. Come up and fix the papers, then I’ll get my things and go with you.’ Geoff was in a hurry now and Ben more or less pushed me downstairs. He joined me a few minutes later in the cabin and closed the door. ‘What would you prefer?’ he said at once. ‘The men who got Martin-Beaumont? Or the guys in the Turkish baths? They’ll have friends. Or the police who went to see Harry? They’ll be looking for us now. Or those men back at the
Sorrento,
whoever the hell they are. We have to get out of Paris on this barge.’

‘We might get out some easier way.’

‘What way? The stations, airports, main roads out – they’ll be checking them, they know what we look like, we’re on video. This way, on the barge, no one will know.’

‘Great.’

‘We can get off at Bar-le-Duc, take a train, get straight back home from one of the channel ports.’

‘And your boat?’

‘Hell, that can wait. We can deal with all that when we get back safe on home ground. Just not get tied up here in France, with the police or with any of these other guys. That’s all that matters now. You got a better idea?’

‘No, I don’t. Just – frying pan, and now the fire.’

‘There’s no fire here. Geoff’s not going to make any trouble. He’s pissed already, and not the sort anyway.’

‘Ben –’

‘Either that or you can take your chances on your own.’

‘No, I was going to say – this is all really crazy. What are we doing?’

‘I’m not sure. You might know better than me.’ He looked at me pointedly. ‘I’ll leave with Geoff now, pretend I’m picking up our luggage and get some food and things.’ He tapped the Modigliani, secure in its bubble-wrapped parcel. ‘Keep an eye on this, Isobel.’ He put it under the divan, turned and left.

I looked out the porthole. Part of the quay was visible above me. I saw a couple of cops, and then another two, walking up and down, looking around. Christ, Ben would surely be caught. He wasn’t. I watched as they left the barge – Geoff with a big backpack and carrying another one. They walked along the quay, laughing, swaying, boisterous shipmates taking shore leave. The cops took no notice of them.

Ben was back an hour later, with tins of food, vegetables, wine, two T-shirts emblazoned with the legend ‘J’aime Paris’, two flimsy
windcheaters, a toothbrush and some toothpaste, all stuffed into a Euro Disney rucksack with a picture of Mickey Mouse on the back.

‘Sorry, they only had one toothbrush left in the pharmacy. We’ll have to share it.’

‘Thanks.’

‘They’re there – the river police, at the lock that leads out to the Seine at the end of the basin. Looking over all the boats leaving. Which means you’re going to have to hide below deck while I take her out of here disguised. There’s make-up back on a shelf behind the stage and loads of theatrical tat in a big skip there. So you’ll have to lie low somewhere, while I play the drunken sailor topside.’

‘Ideal casting.’

‘Look, I’ve had more bright ideas drunk than sober. We’re in a sheep or a lamb situation, and I don’t intend getting hung for either. See?’ He did his scowl-smile at me.

‘Okay, but it’ll be lambs to the slaughter.’

‘No it won’t. Come on.’

We went forward into the hold and up onto the little stage. The make-up, moustaches and things were there on a shelf. ‘Darken my face, anything, make me look swarthy. And that moustache is made for me.’ Then he opened the wicker skip. A terrible stale smell of old unwashed costumes emerged. He started to rootle round. ‘Look, this is just the job – French matelot costume, striped T-shirt, blue sailor’s cap.’

He got into the matelot costume. I brushed his face with some dark Leichner powder, stuck the moustache on. He added the cap, angled jauntily over his brow. He was certainly changed, and unsteady on his feet now. The drunken sailor, absolutely.

‘And where am I going to hide?’ I asked.

‘Not in that big laundry skip. First place a cop would look.’ He looked around the stage. In one corner was a tall wardrobe-like thing, colourfully decorated, with a sequin-bodiced woman in a
tutu painted on the door, two fencing foils attached to the side. He went over and opened the door. Inside was a circular platform with two full-length mirrors angled at the back against a central pole. Ben moved the platform a bit. The mirrors moved, displaying a hidden triangular space behind. He moved the platform back again. ‘Ideal. It’s an illusionist’s cabinet.’

‘A what?’

‘One of Geoff’s tricks. You disappear in it.’

‘No.’

‘Go on, get into it! I’ll turn the platform and you’ll be perfectly hidden, that’s the whole point of the trick.’

‘And those two foils? What are they for?’

‘I don’t know. Just get in, hurry! We need to be off.’

I got in and stood on the platform. Ben closed the door, and suddenly, with a snap of some mechanism, I was swished right round and hidden in a dark space at the back. ‘I can’t see a thing!’ I said. ‘How do I get out?’

‘Come to that later.’ I heard his footsteps disappear.

‘Christ,’ I said. I heard the engine start, a gentle throb, and we edged out into the basin. Then into reverse, forward again, a more powerful throb, and we were moving down towards the lock leading into the Seine. Then we stopped.

I heard footsteps coming down into the hold and up onto the stage. Ben’s voice, perfect French. ‘Nothing up there, officer, just our theatre stuff. We have a date up at Joinville tonight, meeting the other guys there.’

Someone drew the curtains, climbed onto the stage. I heard the lid of the skip thrown back. ‘Nothing there either, officer. Lot of old laundry.’

‘Smells like a load of dead rats,’ the cop said, then, walking towards the cabinet, ‘What’s in here then? This pretty girl on the door?’

‘Illusionist’s cabinet, but I’m afraid the pretty girl isn’t inside right now.’ The cabinet door opened. ‘See, no one inside.’ The door closed again.

‘And these foils? What are they for?’

‘Just to show the audience that the girl has really disappeared. You push them in, either side, those two holes.’

‘You do?’

‘Well, when I’m doing a show.’

‘But if there’s no one inside, why not?’

‘Well …’

‘Let me try.’

I pushed myself as hard as I could against the back of the cabinet. Was the cop going to impale me now? Kill me? I heard the foil swishing in behind my back. The second foil, from the other side, came through a moment later, faster, in front of me. I nearly shrieked.

‘See? Nothing inside.’ Ben’s confident voice again. I heard them climb down from the stage, their footsteps disappearing.

Five minutes later the engine throbbed again. We were moving into the lock. Silence. The lock gates clanging behind us. The boat falling in the water. The other gates opening. The boat moving out onto the river.

I was stuck, and absolutely furious. Ten minutes later the engine died, and I heard him mooring the barge, and after that his footsteps, running down to the hold, and shouting, ‘You okay?’

‘I’m not okay, you bloody fool!’ I shouted.

‘Then you are okay.’ He jumped up on the stage, pulled the foils out, fiddled with the door. Some mechanism cut in and I swirled round inside the cabinet. He opened the door. I got out, furious. He took no notice, just put his cap up at a jauntier angle. ‘Well, what would you have done,’ I said, ‘if one of those foils had gone through me?’

‘They wouldn’t have gone through you. That’s the whole point of the trick.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

We went up to the wheelhouse. He’d pulled the barge into one of the quays a little way upriver. Now he cast off the bow rope, returned, started the engine and we moved out onto the water. Soon we were chugging upstream, going east out of Paris, the twin towers of Notre Dame behind us, cut through with the bright shafts of a midsummer sun, falling in the sky, a flame over the bridges, way downstream.

He started to sing quietly. ‘“As I walk along the Bois Boolong, with an independent air, you can hear the girls declare, he must be a millionaire … He’s the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo!”’ He turned to me. ‘See, it worked.’

‘Yes, all very clever of you. I thought you were just a painter.’

‘I thought you were just a cookbook writer.’ He looked at me carefully. ‘
Isobel
.’

Con man? Killer? Or just a crazy innocent? I wasn’t sure. Then he took the gun he’d had from the guy in the Turkish baths from beneath the dash board. I’d forgotten about it. A small gun. He looked at it, then at me. He hadn’t been going to kill me with the foils. He was going to shoot me now. 

EIGHT

‘Don’t shoot! Let me explain!’

He was puzzled. ‘Shoot you? I was just moving the gun to a better hiding place. Explain what?’

‘Everything.’ I started to tell him what had happened to me and my father in Dublin a week before – the men who had visited us both, my father at home in bed, the morphine drip in his arm, which the nurse fixed up, morning, midday and evening, when she came to tend him.

‘They killed him that way?’

‘Yes, they tinkered with the drip – gradually pumped much more morphine into him than he needed – trying to get him to talk about where the art hoard was. He told them nothing, except that they were just making dying easier for him, but it was terrible for me. They made me watch.’

‘God, I’m sorry.’

‘So you can see why I was so nervous with you at the funeral reception and the next day. It wasn’t my father who told me to go
and see you – it was them, and they’d kill me if I didn’t or went to the police. They said your father must have known where the art hoard was hidden as well, and must have told you before he died.’

‘Well, he may have known, but he never told me.’

And then Ben told me everything. About the inventory in his father’s cabinet, and how it had emerged, and all that had passed between him and Harry Broughton that morning. We came clean with each other, or almost clean. I didn’t tell him about my finding the drawing of Katie in her journal on the boat that morning, that I knew she looked just like me. That could wait. The drawing and the journal were in my bag now. Meanwhile we talked and talked as the barge made its way slowly upriver into the coming darkness, and we emerged into something of the light together.

Later, when it was almost dark, and we hadn’t got out of the dreary outer suburbs of Paris, we moored for the night in an old industrial backwater in the shadow of ruined warehouses, near Joinville, wedged between the bows of two great derelict barges, where we couldn’t be seen from the shore or the river.

I was making a dish with what I’d found in the galley and Ben had bought in Paris, spaghetti puttanesca, with a hot Roman sauce of anchovies, olives, paprika and a tin of tomatoes. I was at the stove. He was at the galley door, still in his matelot costume, with a glass of wine.

‘Those men who got onto you and your father in Dublin, and in the baths this morning must be neo-Nazis, or hit men working for old ones. As I said, it fits in with everything Harry told me. How most of this art was looted in Poland by Dr Frank and his pals, then hidden somewhere towards the end of the war, then some of it brought over to Dublin in those crates of marble my father imported from Italy, then secretly sold over the years in that back room of your father’s Dublin shop. So my father and yours must have been well connected with the Nazis. Because there’s the
inventory of all Frank’s looted art in my father’s hand.’ Ben had showed me the inventory earlier.

‘Yes, but …’ But Ben rushed on.

‘We can’t get away from it, Elsa – my father and yours must have been involved in this business. Your father must have been a Nazi – in the SS or worse – and my father must have been involved with them all as well.’

‘Come on, Ben. Maybe my father was a Nazi – there were millions of them. Why worse? He, and your father, could just have been dishonest, dealing in this stolen art. Middlemen, no connection with this monster Frank.’

‘Yes, I’d thought just that.’

‘My father was in the ordinary German army, not the SS. He could have come on this hoard, hidden somewhere, at the end of the war, thought he’d have it as a nest egg afterwards, and teamed up with your father in Dublin when he came back from Auschwitz.

‘Okay, that’s a reasonable argument, but there’s a hole in it. How could just the two of them have fixed up all this on their own? Nearly everything in that inventory can be identified as Dr Frank’s loot, taken from private art collections, churches, monasteries – and Jews – in Poland and elsewhere. So at some point they must have been involved with Dr Frank and his SS thugs. There were a whole crowd of them, Harry told me. Especially a man called Pfaffenroth, an SS major, Dr Frank’s sidekick. I can’t buy the idea that your father or mine just stumbled on this hoard. They must have been involved with the SS in Poland so that my father was able to hide the loot for them, maybe in one of his Carrara quarries, and had the means to get all the stuff out from Italy to Dublin after the war, by boat, hidden in his crates of fine cut marble. I don’t know how he met your father, maybe in some DP camp in Europe after the war or in Dublin later on. But when they did meet, they had the means to sell it in your father’s Dublin
shop, to support them both after the war, having double-crossed the other Nazis in on the game, which is why they’re after us now, fifty years later, to get their share.’

‘That’s a worst-case scenario.’

‘Take the worst case first, and you can work back from that. Think of innocence first and you’re bound to be disappointed.’

‘That’s really cynical.’

‘Only because your father’s involved. So you have to deny it.’

‘No! You’re just a cynic.’

‘Facing a very likely truth isn’t cynical, it’s honest, and that’s our business, isn’t it? Being honest.’

‘Yes, but not this time. My father – innocent until proved guilty.’

‘You think I want to see my father as guilty?’

‘Seems very like it.’

‘A Jew in Auschwitz, who was involved in all this dirty business? I may have to face something worse than anything your father might have been up to.’ He turned away, fretting.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Anyway.’ He turned back. ‘There’s one sure thing. All these people are after us, and it seems they’re not likely to let go.’

‘Bastards.’ The olive oil was heating in the pan. I threw in some diced onions, letting them brown. ‘I didn’t want that man drowned in the baths. Now I hope he was. Just as that little squirt on the boat who cornered me told me. He said his friends were everywhere.’

‘Yes, and one of them is O’Higgins: he must be working with those two guys in the Turkish baths. All of them art crooks, and maybe working with neo-Nazis. In any case the police will be after us when they’ve seen that closed-circuit footage and talked to Harry.’

He put down his glass, rolled a cigarette. It was hot in the galley and he was sweating. The brown make-up had smudged and run down his face. He’d stopped acting. The show was over. He’d saved
us, for the moment, and that was great. He’d been great. He was no killer or crook. A bit raffish, mildly lecherous, but a good man. I liked him. But now I wanted out. Of everything – him, them, France, Dublin, the lot, just to go home to New York and try to forget about the whole business. The onions had browned. I threw in half a tin of tomatoes with them.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘So with all these people after us, now’s the time to get out.’ He didn’t reply, no agreement with this obvious point. The sauce started to bubble in the pan. I tipped in the anchovies, olives, diced red peppers, stirred them about. A pinch of oregano, paprika. A dollop of the red wine, turned the heat up, sweating myself. There was a roll of kitchen paper. I mopped my brow.

‘Have a glass of wine,’ he said. ‘I bought some white. It’ll be chilled in the fridge by now.’

He got the bottle out, opened it, poured me a glass.

‘Happiness!’ He held his glass up. ‘Like that first time, the reception in Dublin with that white Châteauneuf.’

I sipped it. ‘This is better. That was a terrible party.’

‘I told you I’m not good at parties, or deaths,’ he added. ‘My mother, well, that wasn’t a surprise. Katie – that was different.’

‘Yes, yes, I can see.’ I hadn’t told him yet about how I had his dead girlfriend’s journal and the drawing of her in my bag; how I knew she looked just like me. I didn’t want to talk about this. At some point I’d just give him back the journal, without telling him I’d seen the drawing.

‘So it all fits.’ He turned to me, intent now, serious.

‘Does it?’ I turned up the gas under another pan of water for the pasta, put in some salt, olive oil. ‘I’d say we’ve come to the end of the story now,’ I said.

He was fiddling with his roll-up. ‘Have we?’

‘It would be crazy to mess with any of these people. We’ve nothing to gain, and everything to lose. Get out of here now, any
way we can. You have the Modi. Sell it. No cash problems for you anymore. So we can both forget about it all.’

‘Yes, except I still want to know what my father was up to in the war. And, yes, okay maybe we can forget it all, but these other guys won’t. They’ll be looking for us – or me at least since they think I know where the stuff is hidden.’

‘Go to the police, then, when you get back home. They don’t know where you live in England.’

‘Easy to find out.’

‘Well, what’s your alternative?’

‘I don’t want to sell that nude. I like her.’

‘Okay, just go back home with her then, sleep with her under your pillow and keep your head under it too.’

‘And you?’

‘Me, the same. Go back to New York. Keep my head down. I can put the Killiney house on the market from there. I don’t want the house. I don’t want anything of that house again.’

‘Wait a moment, Elsa!’ He was roused now. ‘You’re saying drop everything. So you don’t care a damn about what our families were up to in the war? Well, we should care. We’re them.’

‘No we’re not!’ I was furious now.

‘Same flesh and blood.’

‘Okay, but that doesn’t make us anything to do with whatever they might have done in the war, and certainly not if it means getting killed for something they did and we were no part of.’

‘Christ! How could you live the rest of your life not knowing if your father was a Nazi war criminal or not?’

‘Very easily.’

‘Well, I couldn’t.’ He screwed up his eyes and some more of the sweaty make-up ran down his chin. He rolled another cigarette. ‘What about your olives and olive oil book?’

‘I tell you – I can surely do that some other easier time.’

He poured us both another glass of wine, and sniffed the air. It was full of anchovies, olives, tomatoes, peppers. A whiff of oregano, paprika.

‘Well, why don’t we do the olive groves tour now? Like we said we would in Dublin. Drop the boat at Bar-le-Duc, hire a car and go down south. They’ll maybe look for us back home, but they won’t look for us in the olive groves.’

‘No.’

‘I haven’t painted you yet, either.’

‘You left all your stuff on the
Sorrento
.’

‘Easy to buy some more paints, a canvas or two.’ He smelled his wine. ‘This isn’t bad, you know. Yes, let’s go south. “Where the vine and olive thrive and the Brussels sprout doesn’t grow at all.”’

‘No. I just want to get back to New York and eat some cheesecake from the deli round the corner.’

He drank the wine, came over to the pan, brushing past me, sniffed the mix. ‘This is good,’ he said.

I don’t know what made me instantly want to do just what he’d said – go to ground, down south, do what we said we’d do in Dublin, as if all this terrible business had never happened. Then I thought I knew. It was his brushing past my body, in the small space, glancing against my backside as he went over to smell the sauce. Oh, it wasn’t Martha brushing past me in our New York kitchen, on her way to sniff the supper I was making on the stove. It was a body. Of course I wasn’t going to go south with his body or anyone else’s, but the thought crossed my mind.

We nearly fell asleep over the tart’s spaghetti before we went to our separate cabins. I had the master cabin with the double bed, tepid shower, the Sanilav, and the gilded cupids. Ben had a cabin somewhere down the corridor. I couldn’t sleep. My life had turned so many strange circles in the last week, I barely knew where I was.
All I had was a past I knew about, where I’d been happy. I thought about it, looking for an anchor, lying beneath the gilded cupids, listening to odd sighs and murmurs of the water moving along the flanks of the barge outside the porthole.

I couldn’t concentrate on any one aspect of my old life, and what I most couldn’t focus on properly was my father. Even if what he’d been up to in the back room of his Dublin shop wasn’t
war-criminal
stuff, it seemed he’d been doing something crooked. This didn’t sit with my memories of my father at all. I’d loved him. He’d been a good man. If I believed Ben’s theories I had to hate him now, but I couldn’t.

If I hated my parents now I’d have to see my whole childhood and youth tainted. It was often idyllic, at home in Killiney, with the sea and the long crescent beach down the road, bathing and lolling about, gazing at the blue haze over Killiney Head in midsummer. All this should have seemed corrupted now, but it didn’t: you couldn’t corrupt the past if it had been happy for you.

My father – gentle, always courteous to everyone, and so
Catholic
, like my mother. Mass every Sunday and on holy days, fish on Fridays even when that ceased to be obligatory in Ireland. A quiet man, preoccupied with old books and manuscripts, playing the piano sometimes in the evenings, the easier pieces from Beethoven and Mozart. Dipping into Goethe and Schiller.