The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (58 page)

Meneer, Madam – my death did not disturb me. I barely noticed it. It was no more than the distant flutter of moths’ wings before the roaring of my need. I was twenty-three years old, crazy for life, the smell of a woman’s skin, the great bursting view through the topiary and down into the long shadows of Demos Park with its looping flights of red-winged pigeons.

I was standing in the place where Sirkuses are born, where the fabled city itself was either saved or damned. I was impressed. I was excited. Will the judges at the Guildcourt consider this when they attempt to determine my motive?

It is true I never revealed my true identity to those I met at Mrs Kram’s trothaus. But Kram herself never wished to name me. She said, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, and gave
their
names to me, never mine to them. This was not my deception. It was her respect.
^*
This is how you introduce kings, princes, and stars of only the most dangerous types of Sirkus.

And they liked me, Kram’s friends. I listened to them. They listened to me. I quoted Seneca. I told them jokes in my two-pin voice, jokes I made up on the spot, and delivered with a physical technique the opposite of anything Stanislavsky would ever have thought possible.

I was Meneer, or Oncle, or Bruder, the last of these to Frear Munroe, who gave me his card and asked me to come and see him perform in court where – he whispered this into the great dead prosthetic he imagined was my ear – he would be called in to represent special interests in the case against the hapless Mayor, accused of many things, including selling public streets and parks to French and English corporations.

Did I like Frear Munroe? No. I did not like his smell, his bad-tempered face, the violence I saw brewing behind his eyes. But he had currency – he told me things, in such a way, that I felt I had been beamed into the white-hot centre of existence.

So even though my bones were aching and my ligaments torn, even though I was faint with hunger and my skin was itching and aspirin was singing in my ears, I was – with the Kram’s long hair brushing across the wall of my face each time she leaned down to tell me something – in some kind of wild heaven where I did not give a damn for anything except how to get more of whatever it was I had.

I did not think the next move. I took it as it came. I spoke the words and learned to trust the patch. It strained my face most terribly. It is no easy business talking solely from the throat, but the result: the bliss of eloquence. Meneer, Madam, did you ever have dreams of flying?

Peggy Kram smelled of herbs and wild honey. It was her golden Dutch hair, her French shampoo, waving through the air in front of me. She had good skin, slightly golden, and clear blue eyes that stood in total contradiction to her Mersault.

Her hands were small, not perfect, indeed a little plump, but who am I to speak to you about perfection? She touched my ‘ears’, held my ‘hand’. ‘I’m going to keep him,’ the Kram said to beaming Bill, repeatedly.

Of course she knew I was not a mythic beast. On two occasions she clearly communicated her wish to not know who I was. Why was this? She did not tell me. She is what is called in Efica a stoppered bottle, a private person. She lived alone, so Frear Munroe told me, had no lovers, had her corporation boardroom in this trothaus, and the only thing he knew about her was that she had been a Sirkus widow who made her money, like so many, when her husband fell from the St Catherine’s Loop and crushed his head in front of a house of two thousand.

‘I want him,’ she said to Bill Millefleur, and thus produced a peculiar expression on my father’s handsome face.

It was not unnatural that my father should feel uneasy. He needed her approval as much as anything, and yet I was his son. He was galloping forward while reining himself in. He was on the slack wire, eighty feet above the ring.

‘Well, Peggy,’ he said. ‘This is not for me. I really think you have to discuss this with the Bruder himself.’

‘I want you here,’ Peggy Kram said to me, directly, frowning, and pushing her hair out of her eyes. ‘I won’t permit you to go home.’

You see my porpoise rise, you think you see where this is leading. That is your history, perhaps, not mine. In my history there can be no climax, no conclusion, no cry in the dark, no whispers on the pillow.

‘My dear,’ I said, and my voice was so intelligent, so clear, so damn
sophisticated.
‘My dear Mrs Kram, you couldn’t deal with me.’

‘Oh, I could handle you,’ she said.

I knew her, knew her imperious, self – doubting little soul. I whacked her on the bum, not gently either.

This made her face red, Bill’s ashen.

‘Is this how you act with Madam Mouse?’ she asked me. Her eyes were wet and bright.

‘Madam Mouse is dead,’ I said.

‘Dead?’ she said, colouring more. There was a way she spoke, with the tip of her tongue always forward in her mouth. It gave a slight cloudiness to her diction but made her mouth, always, wonderful to watch.

‘Quite dead,’ I said to Mrs Kram, playfully elbowing my anxious father in the thigh.

‘Mrs Kram,’ said Malide to Wally, ‘is asking, would Bruder Mouse here like to stay with her?’

‘How did she die?’ asked Peggy Kram.

‘She was assassinated,’ I said, ‘by agents of a foreign power.’

There was a long, long silence on the roof. I saw Frear Munroe, standing by the parapet alone, turn his square head. ‘They came and hanged her by her neck,’ I said.

‘Stay,’ Wally said. ‘It’s too late to go.’

‘He should definitely stay,’ Jacqui said.

‘Meneers, Madams,’ I said, looking at them gathering around me, out to Frear Munroe and Elsbeth Trunk, ‘do I not have voice to speak? Can I not speak on my own account?’

What I liked, what made me giddy, was the way not only my friends but six of the most powerful personages in Saarlim turned their heads, lifted their chins, parted their lips, how they listened, how they waited. I had no idea what I would say.

I had fallen asleep on the bed Kram’s servant had, rather formally, introduced me to. I woke at two in the morning. I was stiff, hurting, hungry. I needed drugs: Sentaphene,
^*
Butoxin,
^†
Attenaprin,
^‡
but they were all in my bag in Bill’s apartment.

The glowing thermostat beside my reading lamp was set at a cool 65 degrees, but it was stinking and steamy inside the suit.

As I tried to stretch my painful hamstrings I knocked an envelope on to the floor. It fell with a heavy thwack. Later I would discover it to be a letter from my father, but at the time I was too stiff to think of bending for it. I was more interested in anti-inflammatory drugs, a bath, disinfectant, a bed where I could feel sheets against my skin. I left the large tan envelope on the bedroom floor and shuffled to the bathroom where I used the zip Jacqui had expediently sewn in the previous morning.

That aside, I was imprisoned by the Mouse.

I went looking for someone to release me, but the layout of the trothaus was more complex than the blockhouse exterior of the Baan suggested. The passageways were full of nooks, crannies, alcoves, reading rooms, small libraries of Sirkus art and so on. Twice I found dark rooms in which I heard the sound of breathing, but I did not know whose breathing it was. I retreated, and was soon lost again.

Finally, in the lobby by the elevator, in an austere straight-backed chair, in a lighted alcove which had previously accommodated the
Dog-headed Saint, I discovered Wally Paccione. There he sat, like a Folkghost in white pyjamas, his eyes bright, his mouth dark and toothless, a piece of looped wire held in his ancient liver-spotted hands.

‘Sssh.’

He jerked his head in the direction of the elevator. I could hear the car moving in its shaft. Together we watched the numbers light up above the door. They stopped at the fourth floor.

He held up the wire, grinning. The inside of his mouth was black, the sunken cheeks bright white. Now I know it was a garrotte which he had made from ivory chopsticks and piano wire. But at the time I misunderstood.

‘The DoS piano,’ he said. And I imagined it was a primitive musical instrument from Kram’s collection.

The lift clunked and rose up to the fifth floor. ‘Don’t stand there. Get behind this screen.’

I did what he said. I moved away from the lift doors and pressed myself between a Neu Zwolfe triptych and the wall. From behind these dark, worm-eaten panels I could peer out across the roof garden and into the softly illuminated kitchen.

‘Can you help me out of my suit?’

‘Turn that stupid thing off,’ Wally hissed. ‘I can’t bear you talking like that.’

‘I can’t turn it off.’

I heard him spit. ‘You know what a mess she got us in, that spy?’

‘Where is she?’

‘How the fuck do I know? You sound like a rucking Voorstander. If she told you that sound was glamorous, she’s working for the governor. I promise you, my son, we’re getting out of here. As soon as I deal with this fellow, we’re getting out. We’re leaving all these spies behind. We’re going home.’

‘Which fellow?’

‘Christ!
Don’t you pay attention to anything except your dick? There is an Efican stooge coming to kill you. I’m going to kill him.’

‘No, Wally …’

‘You think I can’t? You don’t know anything about me.’

‘No, of course not.’ I came out from behind the screen. ‘Please, Wally …’

‘Get
back
,’ He screwed up his face, and the lights in the alcove made the wrinkles deep and black.

‘I really hate that voice,’ he said when I’d retreated.

The elevator clunked again. I was reduced to looking out through a crack between the triptych panels. I could watch the illuminated numbers as the elevator descended to the ground floor.

‘No one knows the things I’ve had to do,’ Wally said. ‘Not your maman, not anyone.’

‘You stole some stuff,’ I whispered. ‘You never
killed
anyone. I don’t want you hurt.’

‘Murder is much more common than you’d think.’

The elevator made a whirring noise, then stopped on the fifteenth floor.

‘You don’t know much about me,’ Wally repeated. ‘For all the time we’ve spent together, you don’t know what I’ve done. When I’m dead, you won’t know,’ he said bitterly. ‘You’ll say good old Wally, but you won’t know who “Wally” was. You don’t even know where I was born.’

‘You were the Human Ball,’ I said.

‘I hate that voice,’ he said. ‘You’re like another person.’

‘You never wanted to talk about yourself,’ I said. ‘You can’t blame me. Who did you kill? Tell me now.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘It was the person who put the cigarette burns on your arms,’ I said.

Wally said nothing.

‘It was your father, wasn’t it?’

‘This is not the first time someone tried to knock you off. It’s much more common than you think.’

The elevator creaked and we both heard the doors in the distant lobby close. I could see the lights as it rose towards us:
16, 17
.

‘There were two times in your life,’ Wally said as the elevator stopped. ‘The first time was when you were born. The doctors wanted to kill you then. They wanted to take you away, but your maman would never let them. They sent the Gardiacivil after you but that made no difference to her. So she saved you the first time. But you knew this.’

‘How did she save me?’

‘She never let you go,’ he said. ‘She never let anyone look after you except me and Vincent and Bill and her.’

‘When was the other time?’

‘You know the other time.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Roxanna tried to kill you.’

‘I cut myself with the glass,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

‘No, listen to me: Roxanna tried to kill you.’

‘I know you loved her, Wally. I’m so sorry about Roxanna.’

‘She tried to
kill
you with Thallium, you dope. You were so sick. I told you you had Cuban flu, remember? There was no fucking Cuban flu. There never was such a thing. You wouldn’t leave the Feu Follet, so she began to poison you. She kept feeding you little sweets, chocolates. She was injecting them with Thallium. You were nearly damn well dead by the time I got you to the Mater.’

‘When I came back she was gone.’

‘Damn right, she was gone. She was gone to damn jail is where she was gone. Roxanna was insane, Tristan. She tried to kill you so I’d go away with her.’

‘Poor Rox,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, and his voice sounded old and cracked. ‘Poor Roxanna.’ A moment later he asked, ‘You wanted a bath? Is that what you were looking for?’

‘I’m OK.’

‘Why don’t you ask Mrs Kram to give you one?’

‘Very funny.’

But then the elevator was travelling again. I watched the numbers, my mouth dry.

‘Listen,’ Wally said when it had stopped. ‘Please, don’t flirt with her. It’s embarrassing.’

‘I’m flirting with who? Mrs Kram? You’re embarrassed? Why would you be embarrassed? Don’t answer, because I know. I know what’s embarrassing.’

‘It’s not you,’ the old man said. ‘It’s her.’

‘It’s like in Zeelung. You got in a panic about the flower.’

‘She’s not a normal woman. What woman flirts with a Mouse?’

‘It was just a flower. You think I’m still fourteen years old. You got in a panic, and you rucked everything up. You ruined it. You know that, don’t you, Wally? The truth is: we lost our money
because of you. You’re in a panic any time I like a woman.’

‘I’m standing here,’ he said, ‘protecting your life, and you’re
blaming
me for getting robbed.’

‘Forget it,’ I said. I was in a passion. It was not pretty, not nice. ‘If that’s your attitude towards me …’

‘You’re
blaming
me?’

I stepped out, out from behind the screen. ‘It was just a fucking flower.’

Wally threw his garrotte on the ground and walked out into the garden. I stood there for a moment, and then the elevator began to move and I went to my room. There was nowhere else to go.