Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (10 page)

'Couldn't your father sell something, his house or whatever else he has left?' Pérez Nuix's look, a flicker of impatience despite her inferior or disadvantageous position (she had now started asking me the favor), made me realize that such a solution was impossible, either because the house had been sold already or because she wasn't prepared to leave her father without his own home, which is the one thing that consoles and calms the old and the sick when the time comes to rest, however fond they've been of wandering. I didn't insist, I changed tack at once. 'Well, if what you're saying is that you're afraid they'll beat him up or knife him, I don't see what they'd gain from that, the banker or his front man. The corpse of an elderly man turning up in the river.'—'I've seen too many old films,' I thought then. 'I always imagine the Thames giving back swollen, ashen bodies, rocked by the waters.'

'The front man would pay the banker, so the banker's no longer involved, you can forget about him; he merely triggered the whole thing, and although the money comes from him, it doesn't any more.'—'According to that theory,' I thought, 'matters are not triggered by the person doing the asking, but by the person who grants the request; I'd better take note'—'As for the front man, he might suffer a loss on this occasion, but on others, he'll have made a profit and will continue to do so. What he can't allow is for there to be a precedent, for someone not to keep their word and for nothing to happen to him. Nothing bad I mean. Do you understand?' And again there was that note in her voice, perhaps it was more incipient exasperation than anything else. 'Not that they'll necessarily inflict physical harm on my father, although that can't be ruled out at all. One thing is sure, though, they will seriously harm him in some way. Possibly through me, if they can find no better way of teaching him a lesson, or, from their point of view, of applying the rules, penalizing non-payment and seeing justice done. They couldn't let a bold seafarer who has failed to pay the toll go unreprimanded. Besides, that isn't what most worries me, what might happen to me I mean, and it's unlikely they would turn on me, they know that I know some influential people, that on some flanks I'm protected and can look after myself; I'm not protected against a beating or a knife attack, obviously, but they wouldn't take that route with me, they'd try instead to discredit me, to make sure I didn't get to work again in any of the fields that interest me, to ruin my future, and doing that to a young person isn't at all easy, the world keeps turning and sometimes, inevitably, things right themselves again. What I most fear is what they might do to him, physically or morally, or biographically. He walks so proudly through life that he wouldn't understand what was happening to him. That would be the worst thing, his confusion, he would never recover. I don't know, they would spoil what remains of his life, or else shorten it. Always assuming, of course, touch wood, fingers crossed, that they don't decide simply to take his life.' And she touched wood and crossed her fingers. 'It's very easy to ruin an old man, or indeed, heaven forbid, to kill him.' And she again crossed her fingers. 'He'd fall over if you pushed him.'

She fell silent for a moment and sat looking at her empty glass, but this time she preferred not to or didn't even think to push it closer to me. She used the same two fingers to stroke the base of the glass. It was as if she could see her blithe, frivolous, fragile father in that glass, and you would only need to tip it over to shatter it.

'But what can I do about it? Where do I come into all this?'

She glanced up at once and looked at me with her bright, quick eyes, they were brown and young and not yet overburdened with tenacious visions that refuse to go away.

'The man you're due to interpret the day after tomorrow or the next, or at the latest next week,' she replied, barely letting me finish my second question, like someone who has spent a long time in the fog waiting for the lighthouse to appear and who cries out when she does finally spot it. 'Well, he's the front man, our problem, the problem. And he's another Englishman with a strange surname. He's called Vanni Incompara.'

Vanni or Vanny Incompara, that, she said, was how he was known, although his official name was John, and he was presumably English, but she wasn't sure whether he was so by birth—she was currently trying to put together facts about his past, but the search kept throwing up unexpected lacunae, and he was turning out to be a most elusive man—or by virtue of a very rapidly acquired citizenship, thanks to influential contacts or to some strange secret subterfuge, and so she didn't know whether he was a first- or second-generation immigrant, like her and Tupra, who had both been born in London, although for all she knew, Bertram might be third- or fourth- or nth-generation, perhaps his family had been settled on the island for centuries. She had never asked him about that, nor about the origin of his strange surname, she didn't know if it was Finnish, Russian, Czech, or Armenian—or Turkish as I guessed and as Wheeler had suggested to me the first time he mentioned the person who would later become my boss, slighdy mocking his name before I had even met Tupra—or, as she suddenly suggested, Indian; the fact is she had no idea, perhaps she would ask him one day, he never mentioned his roots, nor any relatives alive or dead or distant or close, that is, blood relatives—she must have been thinking about Beryl when she added this, and I, of course, thought of her too—as if he had sprung into being by spontaneous generation; although there was no reason why he should mention his roots, in England people tended to be reserved if not opaque when it came to personal matters, he sometimes talked about himself and his experiences, but always in vague terms, never giving a place or a date to his exploits, recalling each one with almost no context, isolated from the others, as if he were showing us only tiny fragments of shattered tombstones.

It was possible that this John Incompara had arrived in England not that many years ago, which might explain why he still liked to be called by the diminutive form of his Italian name, Giovanni, she explained, didactic and helpful, just in case I hadn't picked up on that. Anyway, his activities had only come to light fairly recently, and he was clearly an able fellow: he had quickly made himself some money—or perhaps he had brought it with him—and some relatively important friendships, and if, as was likely, he was breaking the law, he was careful to disguise or camouflage any illegalities with other entirely legitimate deals and to leave no proof or evidence of the more drastic, more brutal actions he was suspected of carrying out. She could find nothing incriminating, or, rather, nothing she could use as a negotiating tool to persuade him to write off the paternal debt. The only thing she had now was me. Vanni Incompara was going to be examined, studied and interpreted by the group and I had been assigned to do this work alongside Tupra. As far as she knew, this report had been commissioned by a third party, by some private private individual who was doubtless considering doing business with Incompara and wanted to be extra careful and find out more—to what extent he could be trusted and to what extent he would deceive, to what extent he was constant and to what extent resentful or patient or dangerous or resolute, and so on, the usual thing. In turn, should the opportunity arise during this probable encounter with Tupra, Incompara wanted to try and establish the beginnings of a relationship or even friendship with him, for he knew that Tupra had excellent contacts in almost every sphere and could prove a fruitful introduction to many celebrities and other wealthy people. What Pérez Nuix was asking of me was no big deal really, she said. It would be a huge favor to her but would not require much effort from me, she said again, despite my earlier protests, now that she was explaining what would be required. I merely had to help Incompara—insofar as this was possible and prudent—to emerge from this scrutiny with a Good or a Pass; to give a favorable opinion about his trustworthiness, his attitude towards associates and allies—could he prove dangerous, did he hold a grudge—his ability to resolve problems and overcome difficulties, his personal courage; but neither must I exaggerate or diverge too much from what Tupra saw in him or from what I believed Tupra saw (he didn't tend to give his own opinion in our presence, instead he would ask us and urge us on, and that way we would guess where he was leading us and where he was heading), but introduce shades and nuances—which would be easy enough—so that I would not present our boss with a picture lit by only one light or painted all one color, which he would be inclined to distrust on principle because it was far too simple; I must, in short, in no way prejudice Incompara's chances. And if I happened to notice the slightest hint of affinity or sympathy between the two men, I should foment and encourage this later, although again unemphatically, discreetly, even indifferently; just a quiet echo, a whisper, a murmur. 'The tranquil and patient or reluctant and languid murmur,' I thought, 'of words that slip by gently or indolently, without the obstacle of the alert reader, or of vehemence, and which are then absorbed passively, as if they were a gift, and which resemble something easy and incalculable that brings no advantage. Like the words carried along or left behind by rivers in the middle of a feverish night, when the fever has abated; and that is one of the times when anything can be believed, even the craziest, most unlikely things, even a nonexistent drop of blood, just as one believes in the books that speak to you then, to your weariness and your somnambulism, to your fever, to your dreams, even if you are or believe yourself to be wide awake, and books can persuade us of anything then, even that they're a connecting thread between the living and the dead, that they are in us and we are in them, and that they understand us.' And immediately I remembered more or less what Tupra had said at Sir Peter Wheeler's buffet supper by the River Cherwell in Oxford: 'Sometimes that moment lasts only a matter of days, but sometimes it lasts forever.'

'But if this man won't even write off the debt of a defenseless old man,' I said to Pérez Nuix after we had both fallen silent for a few seconds; I had rested my right cheek on my fist while I listened to her, and I was still in that same position; and I realized that she had done the same while she was talking to me, both of us in that identical posture, like an old married couple who unconsciously imitate each other's gestures, 'and if you believe him capable of brutal acts and if that's what you most fear about him in your father's case; and if he's not the dissembling type, as you said a little while ago ("I know this, I know him," you said), then I don't see how I could possibly persuade Tupra not to see what is glaringly obvious. Maybe you're attributing to me gifts I don't possess, or too much influence, or else you take Bertram for a scatterbrain and a greenhorn, which I find hard to believe. He's far more experienced than I am, not to mention more knowledgeable and more perceptive. Probably even more than you, more experienced, I mean.' I made this unnecessary clarification, thinking of Tupra's own views on her abilities, at least according to Wheeler, and also because I didn't want to downgrade her. She didn't, however, pick up the indirect compliment.

'No, you haven't fully understood me, Jaime,' she replied, again with that instantly suppressed note of desperation or exasperation. 'I didn't explain myself properly when I said that. I've been with Incompara, I've met him a couple of times now, to see what I could get out of him or what could be done for my father, to try and calm him down and gain time, to see what he's interested in and to see if I have some bargaining chip in my hand I wasn't aware of, and it turns out I do have one. If you will help me. It's true, he's not the dissembling type. By which I mean that you can tell at once that he'll have no scruples he can't set aside if he needs to. And that he's probably brutal about it. Not personally perhaps (I can't imagine him beating anyone up himself), but in the orders he might give and the decisions he might take. There's his rigidity about any agreements he makes, the obsessive importance he gives to obligations being met, in a way he's a stickler for the rules, although that might just be an act he's putting on for my benefit to justify his intransigence in my affair. He only cares about other people meeting their obligations, of course, not about meeting his own. A characteristic he shares with far too many people nowadays, never have so many eyes been so contented to wear their beams with pride.' She didn't use the Spanish word '
vigas
' here, but the English 'beams'; this happened very rarely, but it did happen now and then; as she herself said, she was, after all, English. 'But none of these things is necessarily bad or negative or off-putting in a prospective colleague. On the contrary, and that's precisely why he's used by people like Mr.Vickers, an honorable man who simply doesn't want to bother with or know anything about the confusing or unpleasant details. Bertie will, of course, see all of that in Incompara, and you won't say anything to contradict it, because you'll observe that too and there would no point in arguing over something so obvious. No doubt about it, Incompara is a frightening guy (if he wasn't, my situation wouldn't be so serious),and in that respect it's not a matter of him dissembling, that would be extremely hard for him to do. I'm not really asking you to lie about anything very much, Jaime, especially when there would be no point. There's no point to any lie unless it's believable. Well, unless it's believed. Forgive me for insisting so much on this, but while I'm really not asking you for very much,
I
would gain enormously.'

'What would you gain exactly?'

'Vanni Incompara would be willing to write off the entire debt in exchange for this.'

'In exchange for what exactly?' I asked, repeating the word "exactly." 'What would satisfy this man? What would the consequences be? What would your part in all this be? And do you believe him?'

'Yes, I do in this case. He wouldn't hesitate to teach my father a lesson or anyone else who didn't keep his word, but I'm also sure that he would always rather save himself the bother. He won't mind not getting the money back if he's compensated for it with something worthwhile; he's got plenty of money. He knows that someone has asked our group to assess him, I mean, that they've asked Bertie, since he's the one who receives instructions from above as well as most of the private commissions, those of any substance. I don't know who has asked for the report, Incompara hasn't told me, but that doesn't matter to us, does it? We don't usually know anyway. Whoever they are, it's important to him that he wins their approval and that they don't reject him, or that he reaches an agreement with them or strikes a deal or gets to participate in their projects. He'd consider the debt paid off entirely if I made all or any of those things happen—if he's accepted by the people who are submitting him to this examination, that's all he needs. He would, he says, put it down to my intervention, to my collaboration, however partial, as long as it did the trick; he's obviously not a hundred percent sure of himself, he must know what his weak points are and will imagine a trained eye would detect them, well, we all feel that way under scrutiny. It would take a few days to know the result, perhaps a week or more, but meanwhile . . . well, at the worst, we would have bought my father a deferment.' Yes, her Spanish was decidedly bookish: she didn't manage '
vigas
,' but she did use
'escarmentar
'—to teach someone a lesson—
'entablar negocios
'—to strike a deal—and '
enjundid
'—substance. She had made the matter her own, she wanted to leave her father out of it as much as possible, to spare him even the negotiations, she had taken on his debt, which is why she had said 'He'd consider the debt paid off entirely' and 'my situation' and 'my affair.' No 'we' or 'our.'