In Red (14 page)

“
Jamais
,” Rauch would reply. “Now it's certain. She's not coming back.”

He would conclude this line with a tragic chord. His stiff fat fingers would not obey him; they danced across the keys without grace, exactly the way Natalie Zugoff had once tried to describe it. In the early morning Rauch wept bitterly and, kneeling, kissed the white legs of the piano.

The one consolation given to him he found in the Hotel Angleterre. The maître d', bowing, would lead him to the best
table. Over the soup Rauch would choose an entrée, explaining his wishes to the waiter between mouthfuls.

“Double helpings of everything,” he would remind him.

He devoured double portions, getting gravy on the hem of the white napkin tucked into his collar. Before dessert he would fix his inconsolable gaze on the menu and return to the appetizers. Finally, as he was drinking his coffee and finishing his torte, he would reach for the menu one last time and look it over sadly, not finding anything more to eat. “Why do you never have artichokes?” he would ask in the end reprovingly.

By now he was so heavy he no longer wished to bear the weight of his own body. Since the time he had accidentally stepped on the Chinese lapdog and killed it, hired porters carried him everywhere, along with the upholstered armchair in which he spent his time from morning till late at night. At one in the afternoon he would be brought to the restaurant of the Hotel Angleterre to have lunch. He was taken from there around three, even heavier than before, and transported to the theater, though not through the lobby, as he didn't like to go that way, but instead through the side entrance that led to the dressing rooms. Dripping with sweat, the men lifted him and his chair up the narrow creaking stairs.

“Don't tip it!” Rauch would shout when they stumbled on the cramped landings. Half dead from the strain, they carried him onto the apron, where he could direct a rehearsal of the new program as he finally dozed in peace. The porters would sit
in the back row. Heads leaning against the back of the seat and mouths gaping open, they would catch some rest before their evening-time exertions: they had to endlessly move the armchair around the billiard table at Corelli's café so Rauch could play his daily round with the chief of police.

During this time the police were taking an interest in the local bureau of an American typewriter company, which was located in the Hotel Angleterre. There was an office and also a storeroom; locked cases were stacked against the walls, people came and went, packages were brought in and taken away. During their morning rounds the maids would sweep up flax fibers and a dull-colored powder. The bureau manager was missing part of his ear and also three fingers on his right hand, which according to the police must have made it difficult for him to demonstrate the merits of the American typewriters. A search warrant was obtained, and the door of the room was broken down. The manager was sitting at the table in a dirty undershirt, a watchmaker's magnifying glass in hand, tinkering with the innards of a music box.

“What's all this, can't a man take a look inside a music box?” he asked in a tearful voice. But he consented to open each case one by one. They contained brand-new, gleaming Remington typewriters. The invoices and licenses were in order. The Remington man giggled and offered the policemen American cigarettes. They each took one for later and set to work. They patted armchairs, moved wardrobes, crawled under the bed,
while he blew perfect smoke rings that rose all the way up to the ceiling, and expressed mocking sympathy for the difficult lot of the copper. Despite everything they persevered. Their labors were rewarded – aside from a dozen or more dismantled music boxes lying around in disarray, they found an entire collection of flintlock pistols. They removed the weapons one by one from a hiding place behind the stove, each wrapped carefully in rags soaked in grease. The Remington man stopped joking around; the cigarette fell from his hand.

“Let's go, Mr. Rączka,” the policemen exclaimed as they propelled him toward the door. In the hotel it was expected that the arrested man would immediately hang, but this did not come about. Someone swore they'd heard from a reliable source that the forensic experts split their sides laughing at the sight of von Treckow's flintlocks. Before Adaś Rączka was released, a bomb exploded at the police station, tearing the chief of police himself to pieces. He did not exactly look good.

The Remington company's hotel bill went unpaid. The desk clerk sold typewriters left and right under the counter. Mr. Lapidus preferred not to know anything about it. For at this time he was expecting a visit from Prince Belorukov-Mukhin. The prince, as his assistant had informed Lapidus by letter, desired to see the places where Natalie Zugoff had stayed, and to this end planned to sail to Stitchings from Buenos Aires on board the British liner the
Commonwealth
. But when this white craft, adorned with the flags of all the countries in the world, pulled
into port, it transpired that neither the prince nor his assistant was on board, and the hotel automobile came back empty. An Argentine by the name of Pedro Alvarez walked from the port on foot, bowed under the weight of tripods and cameras. At the hotel he referred to the reservation made by the prince. According to the letter he presented at the reception desk, he was Prince Belorukov-Mukhin's private photographer.

“Oh yes, prince have everything private,” he assured them in broken German. To compensate the proprietor of the hotel for his failure to appear, the prince had sent him a large portrait photograph in a gilt frame, signed with a flourish. He looked down from it with one bulging, lascivious eye. The other was covered with a black patch like a pirate's.

Pedro Alvarez took a nail and a small hammer from his traveling case and personally hung the prince's portrait over the reception desk, after which he showed them a Spanish-language newspaper in which, though they could not understand a word, they all could see the name of Natalie Zugoff outlined in mourning black.

“Funeral lovely as wedding,” the photographer recounted. “Was band, crowds, gold coffin, all covered in flowers white as snow, everyone cry.”

The proprietor of the hotel, perspiring and pale, had to ask whether Natalie Zugoff had really died in Buenos Aires.

“Oh no, she never come Buenos Aires. Prince long for her. Prince bury his longing.”

The photographer was in a hurry. He was immediately given access to Natalie Zugoff's room, where, attended by the hotel staff, he set up his tripod and mounted on it a box with a glass lens that protruded like Prince Belorukov-Mukhin's one eye. The shutter snapped over and again, preserving on negatives, from every possible angle, the bed piled with gowns.

“Prince, he love detail,” explained the photographer. Then he disappeared into the theater dressing room, amid still lifes of dried roses, tubs of powder, and tubes of lipstick. He concluded his work by taking pictures of the streets of Stitchings. Narrow and rather dark, they required long exposures. On the negatives the passersby left barely visible blurs; in places the semitransparent figure of a shopkeeper would appear in an open doorway, arms folded, his presence having been too brief to leave a clearer trace.

The people with whom Natalie Zugoff had had dealings in Stitchings were of no interest whatsoever to the prince. When the hotel maids pestered the photographer, to begin with he couldn't understand what they wanted, but when he finally realized, he granted their request. He stayed up all night developing pictures in a dark closet with the help of the pharmacist's boy. Just before he left he went down to the reception desk with a large group portrait still bearing the smell of reagents that was unsettling as the passing of time. The entire staff gathered in a moment, everyone wanted to see. In the back row they examined the figures of the desk clerk and the messengers, caps in
hand, staring gravely straight at the camera. In the middle row the bellhops sat stiffly on chairs, their mouths curled in sneers, while at the bottom of the picture the maids assumed the poses of grand ladies.

The work was concluded; the evidence the prince had wanted was locked in a small black valise, the cameras and tripods were loaded into the hotel automobile alongside the huge pile of Natalie Zugoff's cases. On the way to the port the axles broke. The police wrote a report. As the doctor was stitching the passenger's injured forehead, the
Commonwealth
was pulling out to sea, its decks empty. It could still be seen far off as it made its way over the waves, smoke trailing from its chimney stacks. Pedro Alvarez's return ticket was no longer valid. He sent a telegram to Buenos Aires. The reply came promptly: the prince requested above all that the black valise and its contents be mailed to him. But instead of doing so, Pedro Alvarez began furiously studying the train timetables and the brochures of the shipping lines. He kept them at hand on his bedside table; he made notes in the margins, staining the bedsheets with ink. He slept till noon. The chubby-cheeked maids would sit on his bed in their lace aprons.

“Don't worry, sweetie, I won't bite,” they would whisper to him, smiling and baring crooked incisors.

The desk clerk leaned to his ear and asked discreetly if he didn't like women.

“I like very much! Like black hair, burning eyes, rum-pum-pum!”
Pedro Alvarez replied emphatically. He made a shape with his hands in the air, put his arm around it, and his dark eyes flashed nostalgically.

In the hotel restaurant nothing was to his taste. He would fork up now a lump of kasha, now a slice of tongue, now a noodle; he would examine it closely then put it back on the plate.

“I hope he dies of hunger, the fussy so-and-so!” the cook would exclaim when the dishes were brought back untouched. In the evenings Pedro Alvarez would don a shirt with a frilly front. He would visit the famous Stitchings casino, which glowed with light pure as crystal, and where one can only break the bank once, for afterward one is never admitted again. He almost got out of Stitchings thanks to a connecting voyage to Genoa, where he could have transferred to the great transatlantic liner the
Giuseppe Garibaldi
, as a first-class passenger. He only needed to wait a couple of days, but he couldn't keep still. He yearned for the green baize, the colored chips, the past moment of triumph. Excluded categorically from the casino because of his excessive good luck, stopped politely but firmly at the entrance each time by the doormen in their white gloves, he began to frequent the dark gambling dens down by the port, from which the relentless chink of chips could be heard all night long. In those places the ball in the roulette wheel spun faster than anywhere else, the black and the red blurred together, and the losses never ended. At such moments Pedro Alvarez had no choice but to play on, if he did not wish to be stuck in Stitchings forever. He soon
discovered that his frilly shirtfront was too dazzling, and his eyes too dark, for him to be able to walk safely down Salt Street. But there was no other way from the Hotel Angleterre to the neighborhood of the portside gambling dens.

He departed for Buenos Aires in a casket lined with ice, a copy of the bill of lading stuck on its lid, a switchblade wound in his back. In the ports he was transferred from one hold to the next, borne effortlessly on the platforms of cranes. Along with the casket, the black valise and the photographic equipment were shipped too, all at the expense of the Hotel Angleterre. The invoice, sent to Buenos Aires in the hope that Prince Belorukov-Mukhin would cover the costs incurred, came back by return mail, crossed out with a flourish of the pen, without a word of explanation.

The group portrait of the hotel staff was mounted in the gilt frame that remained after the photograph of Prince Belorukov was torn to shreds. But the image began to fade from the light. One of the maids was the first to notice that the figures were disappearing in the gloom. Then later they could no longer be seen at all, as if night had fallen once and for all behind the glass.

“It's a bad sign, the worst there could be,” the maids would say in consternation.

“You silly things, he was just skimping on the chemicals toward the end, that's all,” said the pharmacist's boy, laughing at them. He knew what was what: he'd watched the Argentine
developing the negatives, and had even held on to a few of them on the sly as a keepsake.

Mr. Lapidus spent entire days locked in Natalie Zugoff's darkened room.

“Gone and buried,” he kept repeating.

“She fled,” he would say at other times. “Through a gap in the clouds. Only her suitcases were left behind.”

He would raise his eyes and let his gaze stray across the plaster rosette in the very center of the ceiling, over and over, as if he were bewitched. His meals were brought from the restaurant; he ate lying on the bed, the blinds down and the bedside lamp on, like a hotel guest who has forgotten why he came.

The doctor came to auscultate his painful heart.

“Am I alive?” the proprietor asked in a fading voice.

“You know perfectly well yourself, Mr. Lapidus,” the doctor replied as he put away his stethoscope. “Since you asked the question, you know the answer.”

The doctor assured him that he had encountered all sorts of strange cases in the course of his practice. He said that the heart can hurt for a long time after death.

“Life,” he would say, “in itself is neither bad nor good. It's the same with death. The key is getting the right proportions. Alas, my good sir, as with all things, so with this one, hardest of all is to find the right point.”

During this time the doctor was preoccupied above all else
by the typhoid fever that had broken out in the back buildings on Salt Street. Typhoid is a wartime disease, and in the corner stores along the street people were saying that since there was typhoid, war must be on its way. The housewives were once again sifting flour into impregnated canvas sacks.