Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (38 page)

And I would have succumbed to the habitual temptation of those first sessions when he used to question me about famous or unknown people scrutinised on video or in the flesh from the stationary train compartment or face to face, and often he would ask me very specific things about aspects of people that are usually impenetrable at first sight and even at last sight, even with those people to whom you are closest, for you can spend a lifetime by someone's side and watch them die in your arms, and, at the hour of their death, still not know what they were or were not capable of, and not even be sure of their true desires, if they were reasonably content in the knowledge that they had achieved such desires or if they continued to yearn for them throughout their entire existence, and that is what most frequently happens unless the person has no desires at all, which rarely occurs, some modest desire always slips in. (Yes, you can be convinced of something, but not know for certain.)

So I would have preferred to answer 'I don't know', the words no one ever wanted to hear and which were deemed almost unacceptable in the building with no name, in that new group, which, as I was becoming increasingly aware, was the impoverished heir of the old group, the words that never found favour, but met with scorn and blank rejection. And it wasn't just Tupra to whom they were unacceptable: they were unacceptable to Pérez Nuix, Mulryan and Rendel as well, and probably to Branshaw and Jane Treves too, who although they were only occasional collaborators would doubtless not allow such words to be spoken by their lower-ranking narks and informers. 'Perhaps' was allowed - it had to be - but it made a bad impression, it wasn't much appreciated and, in the end, was ignored as if you had made no real contribution or suggestion
at all, it had the same effect as a blank vote or an abstention, how can I put it, the attitude with which it was received almost never had a verbal correlative, but was equivalent to someone muttering: 'Well, that's a fat lot of use. Let's move on to the next subject'; and sometimes they would frown or pull an exasperated face. At that stage of my induced boldness and my carefully elaborated or developed powers of penetration, it would have been extraordinary for me to give such a reply to that final question about Reresby, shrouded, as he was, in his unending night: 'Perhaps. It's unlikely. It's not impossible. Who knows? I certainly don't.' And so I would have had to take a risk and, after considering for a moment, would at last have given my most sincerely felt verdict or wager, that is, the one I most believed to be true or, as people like to say, as I believed in my heart of hearts:
'I don't think it would have been easy for him, it would have been hard for him to do it, he would have tried to avoid it, that is, he would have given me at least one or two opportunities before unleashing the blow, the opportunity to desist. Perhaps a wound, a cut, a warning or two. But yes, I think he would have been capable of killing me if he had seen that I was determined and serious, or if it meant that I was stopping him doing what he had decided to do. He would have been capable of killing me because I was in his way and would not give up. Except that, as we have seen, he had not yet decided on an execution.'

'Do you mean you would have so enraged him that he would have lost control and lashed out murderously in a burst of impatience, pride or anger?' Tupra might have asked, perhaps offended by such a possibility.

'No, no,' I would have said. 'It would have been for the reason I gave before, because he takes it very badly if someone fails to do what, according to him, they should and could do. Something on which he has already reached a reasoned decision, based on his own or other people's reasons, which sometimes emerges after long reflection or machination and at
others very quickly, in a flash, as if his all-seeing eyes saw at once what there was to see and knew at a glance what would happen, with just one clearly focused glance, with no going back. I don't know how to explain it: he could have killed me for reasons of discipline, which is something the world has relinquished; or out of determination or haste, or as part of a plan; because he was used to overcoming obstacles and I had suddenly, gratuitously, superfluously, become an unplanned and, from his point of view, unreasonable obstacle.' But then I would have had to give voice to a last-minute doubt, because it was a real doubt, and added: 'Or perhaps not, perhaps he wouldn't have been capable of killing me, despite everything, for one reason only: perhaps he likes me too much and has not yet tired of that feeling.'

When we got up and went to fetch the overcoats, the Manoias' and mine, Tupra went back to the Disabled toilet. He didn't tell me he was going to, but I saw him do so. He indicated to me that I should accompany Flavia to the cloakroom, he gave me the tickets for the coats, and I saw him and Manoia head off in that direction, go through the first door and, I assumed, through the second door too, but I have no idea what happened next. I didn't have the energy to become alarmed and angry all over again: what had happened was bad enough, and the fact that De la Garza had not died - I realised - only made things marginally better. I had seen the expression on his face, the look of a dead man, of someone who knows he is going to die and knows he is dead. There were three or four or five times when his heart could have burst. 'Reresby is probably going to kill him now,' I thought without believing it, 'he's still got his sword with him. Or perhaps he's merely going to check that De la Garza has obeyed his orders. Or perhaps he wants to show his work to Manoia, to give Manoia or himself that satisfaction. Or maybe it is Manoia who has demanded to see the results of his labours and to give or withhold his approval, a
"Basta cos?"
or a "Non
mi basta".
Or, more likely, this Sicilian, Neapolitan or Calabrian isn't going there to check anything, but is going to
finish him off in person.' They did not take long, they were in and out in a trice, and when they rejoined us, our coats, Mrs Manoia's and mine, were still lying across the cloakroom counter. The fourth or the third possibilities were the most likely, either a case of accounts rendered or of pure vanity; I doubted it was the second possibility, Tupra knew as well as I did that De la Garza would not have moved an inch from his place on the floor. In that idiotic place, no one seemed to pay for anything, at least I didn't and I saw no one else pay either. Reresby must have an account there or else everything was always on the house or perhaps he was a member with a share. in the profits. Or, who knows, perhaps De la Garza had paid already behind our backs, before his last, interrupted dance, in order to seduce Flavia by that generous gesture. But that would have been most unlike him, nor would that dickhead have thought she was worth such a gesture.

The four of us got into the Aston Martin used on nights when the aim was to make a good impression or to toady up to someone, that night it had been the former; it was quite a tight fit, but we couldn't send the couple off in a taxi, we were the hosts, and, besides, it was only a short ride. We took them to their hotel, the opulent Ritz no less, near Hatchard's bookshop in Piccadilly, which I had visited so often following in the footsteps of past notables, Byron and Wellington, Wilde and Thackeray, Shaw and Chesterton; and not far from Heywood Hill, which I frequented more when I lived in Oxford, and not far either from the shops of Davidoff and Fox in St James's Street where Tupra probably bought his Rameses II and where I obtained my rather less magnificent Karelias cigarettes, from the Peloponnese.

When I said goodbye to Flavia, I had a presentiment - or was it prescience - that if she were still disappointed or disconcerted by the incident and the removal of the young man, after a while, in the darkness, when she and her husband were lying silently in their respective beds or together in their double bed, what she would remember most were the compliments paid to
her during the evening and she would fall asleep feeling calmer and more contented than when she had woken up that morning; and this meant that she could still wake up the next day thinking: 'Last night, I was fine, but will I be all right today?' So at least, in that one respect, I had done my job and had, indirectly and extravagantly — the best way - given her a further extension. (How she would love to have known that she had been the cause of violence.) One more extension before the day on which her first thought would be: 'Last night, I wasn't fine, so what will happen today?' She kissed both Tupra and myself and went inside, not noticing the commissionaire who held the door open for her and not waiting for her husband to finish saying his goodbyes. He wouldn't tell her off for that, and she must have been eager to study her
sfregio
in a magnifying mirror and in a better light, and to start summoning up the more pleasant moments of that long night, when she had still been in such excellent spirits that she could urge me in mock-reproachful tones:
'Su, va, signor Deza, non sia così antipatico.
Mi dica qualcosa di carino, qualcosa di tenero. Una parolina e sarò contenta..
Anzi, me farà felice.'

As for Manoia, he shook Reresby's hand in what passed for effusiveness in such a mild, anodyne, Vaticanish man - the mildness, of course, was phoney - and I assumed that they had, in the end, reached some mutually convenient agreement, or had got from each other what each of them had asked for or proposed or had imposed by dint of some unspoken threat.

'It has been a great great great pleasure, Mr Reresby,' he said in his heavy Italian accent: he probably didn't know how else to translate
'grandissimo'.
'An evening full of incident but no less of a pleasure for that. Be so kind as to keep me informed.' In contrast, he was extremely cold with me, indeed, he left the hand I held out to him hanging in mid-air and merely inclined his head slightly, like an old-fashioned diplomat (and 'inclined' is something of an exaggeration). He did not even look at me, or, rather, I could not see his dull, zigzagging eyes behind his large, reflecting glasses. He pushed his glasses up on his nose
with his thumb one last time, although they had not in fact slipped down, and said:
'Buona notte.'

Then he scuttled off after his wife, he probably found separation from her painful. He looked then more like a diligent civil servant than a rapist, not so much Mafia or Camorra or 'ndrangheta as Opus Dei or Christ's Legionnaires, or perhaps Sismi, whatever that was. But Flavia was nowhere to be seen in the lobby, not at least from the street. She must be in the lift, on her way up to their room, where she would lock herself in the bathroom for a while alone and thus postpone her husband's private reproaches. She would have warned him not to speak to her through the bathroom door, and in such matters he would doubtless have obeyed her.

He had not even added:
'Egrazie.'
Nor was there any reason why he should, he was unaware of my growing anger or my unease. He may even have believed that I had been responsible for handing out the beating whose result must have pleased him when he visited the toilet to check. He may have taken me for a mere henchman, an underling, a flunkey, a thug. And the truth is that, at that moment, I did feel like a henchman and an underling, and even like a flunkey too: I had placed Tupra's victim precisely where he had wanted him to be. But not a heavy or a hitman or a goon, not a thug, because I hadn't laid a finger on anyone and had no intention of doing so. Just as I hoped no one would lay a finger on me, with or without the benefit of a sword, even with or without a comb.

Anything I sensed or knew about him and anything he knew or sensed about me - since you cannot, at will or with impunity, crouched or invisible like someone watching from a house or like a ghost, decipher another person who is, in turn, studying and deciphering you - came from observing someone who was also continually observing me, someone equipped with identical faculties and with the same or similar or possibly superior weapons; or perhaps all that can emerge from such a situation is a kind of sterile, reciprocal neutralisation, an impenetrability, a blockade, a cancelling out and a blindness - a sort of Cold War peace and detente - the mutual defusing of curses or gifts, paralysed and rendered useless when confronted by another mind that also suffers or enjoys them, if he and Wheeler were right and were not lying and I really did live up to their predictions. I was still so unconvinced of this that I did not quite believe it, despite Wheeler having persuaded me -invoking the authority of Rylands which there was now no way of refuting - that I did possess such a gift, and despite having grown bolder with each day spent on our one-eyed task in the building with no name, goaded by the faith of the others or by their demands: 'Tell me what else, don't stop, what else do you see, just say whatever comes into your head, don't delay or linger, the next to last thing we want is for you to keep quiet, to hesitate, to watch your back, we don't pay for your prudence, that isn't why we employ you, and the very last thing we want is for you to know nothing and to say nothing. Everything has its time to be believed, remember, so never keep
silent, not even to save yourself, there's no room for that here and there's no cat either to get anyone's tongue, any of our five tongues, and you can't swallow it, not even if you wanted to choke yourself.. .' Or else: 'Why, you haven't even started yet. Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking. The really interesting and difficult thing is to continue: to continue thinking and to continue looking when you have the feeling that there is no more to think and no more to see, that to continue would be a waste of time. In that wasted time lies the truly important, at the point where you might say to yourself there can't be anything else. So tell me, what else, what else occurs to you, what else can you offer, what else have you got? Go on thinking, quickly now, don't stop, go on.' That was what my father used to say to us during any discussion, even from when we were very young.

And that possible situation of stalemate or of a draw and of resignation, of an absence of any duel, of holding back among one's peers, could happen not only with Tupra and, of course, with Wheeler, but with the other three, with young Pérez Nuix and Mulryan and Rendel, and who knows, even with Branshaw and Jane Treves, if it came to that. And possibly with Mrs Berry too.