The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

  At the seventeenth this seems stupid.

  Eighteenth floor.

  At the nineteenth you see a chance to link life and art, to comment on the view. But ‘Like a De Kok’ is not accurate, and you cannot think of the name of the Saarlim painter whom the view recalls.

  ‘Do it,’ Jacqui said to me on the nineteenth floor. ‘Just Caliban.’

  ‘What Caliban?’ said Kram, instantly alert, her blue eyes flicking between the pair of us. ‘What’s up?’

  The doors slid open into a mirrored foyer. I saw myself reflected in a gilded frame – a myth, a legend, a beautiful woman on either side of me, my entourage behind.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Kram.

  There was nothing I could answer. Instead, I took the Kram’s little hand inside my own. Then, with Jacqui walking behind in long black skirt and bright blue blouse, I walked in stiff, bow-legged majesty, head high to Mrs Kram’s gold-belted waist. I left Wally and Malide and Bill to follow me into the splendour of our hostess’s Saarlim life.

  You have seen photographs, perhaps, of Peggy Kram’s trothaus. On the page it is what you’d expect. In life, in my Efican life anyway, it was simply unbelievable: the elevator opening on to the marble lobby with a little dog-headed Saint inside an illuminated niche, and thence to the succeeding parlours, with their Dutch and Flemish Masters, on to the so-called Great Room with its high windows opening out on to a garden with trimmed hedges – high, deep green topiary in the shape of ‘The Least of God’s Creatures’, the Dog, the Duck, the Mouse, their soft and leafy forms silhouetted against the pale blue sky above the fabled city.

  Someone wanted to kill me?

  Let them try.

  We stood in the sunshine above Demos Platz while Kram’s ‘Man’ (an elderly Egyptian whose loose-fitting, dun-coloured clothing reinforced his status as a POW) emerged from the throng of earlier arrivals and offered drinks to those of us tall enough for him to notice. Peggy Kram excused herself.

  ‘Don’t hate me,’ Jacqui said as soon as she was gone. ‘I’m going to get you out of this.’

  Her anxiety was delicious. I felt it, smelled it, a kind of aphrodisiac. She leaned out and touched my arm. I felt the contact in my neck, my toes.

  ‘Don’t hate me,’ she said.

  Hate her? All I heard in her voice was her remorse, concern.

  ‘We’re safe up here for the moment,’ she said. ‘Please say something to me,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  The two-pin voice patch had cost her every Guilder she possessed, as much as a Neu Zwolfe crucifix or a first-century Bruder mask. Now she needed to see the power of the gift: she wanted to see it unwrapped.

  I would have said something, but you should have seen her in the skirt, the line of her back, the erotic grief in her eyes. I feared my voice would boom out of me, too loud, too hot, and we were not the only visitors gathered on the terracotta tiles of Peggy’s trothaus. Clive Baarder was there once more. Also Martel Difebaker. Dirk Juta, the Mayor of Saarlim, Frear Munroe the lawyer, the comedienne Elsbeth Trunk. You’d know the names, not personally perhaps, but from the zines. I heard the ascetic Martel Difebaker once again playing expert witness on my nature. But as it turned out, I was not the only curiosity.

  The Mayor, Dirk Juta, being daily in the Bankruptcy Court, was also the subject of much attention, as was the celebrated lawyer, Frear Munroe.

  This Frear Munroe was, as they liked to say in Saarlim, bigger than life. He had a broad chest, a deep voice, a slight Anglo accent, a ruddy complexion and fair hair which he parted to one side and which, with the daily application of pomade, had become slightly green in colour.

  He stood over the Mayor who, unlike any Efican politician I had ever seen, was a dainty man with thin brown wrists showing from his crisp white shirtsleeves.

  ‘So, Dirk,’ Frear Munroe trumpeted.

  The Mayor smiled sadly up at him.

  ‘So, is our dear old Saarlim to be declared bankrupt or not? Will we have a police force next week? Or should we make some new Simi-cops and put them back on the streets instead?’

  ‘I’m pleased this is amusing to you, Frear,’ the Mayor said.

  ‘You misunderstand me, Dirk – I was not joking.’ Frear smiled, pleased with himself. ‘Perhaps this is a mythic moment – don’t you know your Badberg? The barbarians are not without the gates. They are within. The God-fearing are being set upon by unimaginable odds. Rape and pillage is a daily occurrence. If we were true to the beliefs of our fathers …’

  He gestured to the Mouse, the sort of hammy gestures certain Saarlim advocaats like to make.

  ‘One mo nothing,’ he said in a rough dialect. ‘Next mo, there was Bruder Mouse …’

  ‘In all his furry finery,’ said Martel Difebaker.

  ‘Solid as a miller’s wheel,’ said Frear Munroe.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Wally. ‘Do me the favour.’

  ‘Solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning,’ said Elsbeth Trunk, whose dialect was considerably better than Frear Munroe’s.

  ‘There are various similes,’ the lawyer said. ‘But perhaps this is, Elsbeth, don’t you think, the mythic moment? Your honour’ – the lawyer turned to me, placing his veined square face very close to my snout-’oh, little being,’ he declaimed.

  The others laughed. Not Wally. He did up the button of his now rather rumpled dinner suit. His eyes were closed to jailyard slits.

  ‘Oh, small beast.’ Frear Munroe knelt before me, mockingly, so close that I could smell his herring breath.

  Wally tapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t let you speak to him like that.’

  Frear Munroe blinked at the stooped bald-headed man, but he was already in full flight and did not have time to ponder his significance.

  ‘Oh Bruder Mouse,’ he cried. ‘Thebes is in such desperate plight that we have come to you, the least of all God’s Creatures, that you might tell us what to do, oh little club-footed thing.’ He stood, his face contorted with his own laughter. ‘Oh dear,’ Frear said, wiping his eyes and dusting off his striped black trousers. ‘I don’t know if those legs are mythic.’

  As the offensive fellow turned his back Wally took two fast steps forward. ‘Enough’s enough,’ he said in broadest Efican. Then he kicked Frear Munroe up the arse.

  The lawyer lurched. His glass flew from his hand and shattered.

  Frear Munroe, although gone to fat on port and hunning cheese, was still a well-built fellow. Now, as Bill Millefleur hid his bowed head in his hands, the lawyer turned to raise his fist at Wally.

  It was then that Wally lifted his stick to ward him off, then also that I made the twelve-word speech which, I discovered later, was to be quoted all over Saarlim for a week.

  ‘One mo’ step,’ said Bruder Mouse. ‘One mo’ step and I’ll tear your throat out.’

  47

  Jacqui had been waiting to protect me from the DoS. Now, as the lawyer raised his meaty fist above my head, it was no great stretch for her to pick one of Kram’s small lead figurines from a niche in the garden wall. It was a statue of a mole, and when she closed her hand around the chunky little weapon, she felt her soul rushing towards the extremes of action that had attracted her all her life.

  She took two fast paces forward before she had time to consider what she would do next. Frear Munroe was solid and slab-sided, much taller than the nurse. As Jacqui came behind him, he turned. His eyes were pale blue, small and lonely in that big red face.

  It was something of a shock to see that he was afraid of Tristan Smith.

  ‘Some Bruder,’ he said, but when he tried to smile his lips were wobbly and misshapen.

  It was such a moment, a beautiful moment, but there was no time to relish it for Peggy Kram came rushing out and ran right through it and ruined everything. She entered, her servant at her tail, all that golden hair shaking, laughing, a peach cocktail splashing over her ringed hand. Jacqui felt a great shiver of dislike move through her slender frame.

/>   Kram took the Mouse by its gloved hand. Jacqui watched her kiss it on the nose.

  ‘Ohmygod,’ Kram said, ‘you savage little thing.’

  Her friends all laughed too loudly, but Jacqui could have slapped her face. She could not stand the proprietorial attitude towards something she did not understand. But Mrs Kram now drew yours truly to one side and squatted down before me. Jacqui watched me bow. She saw Frear Munroe grin and turn away to find a listener for a story about his threatened throat.

  Then she watched me appear and disappear amongst the creatures of the topiary. As I was taken from guest to guest, she heard the voice she had given me. She saw me shake the hand of the Mayor and she imagined me, Tristan Smith, inside the sweaty suit, stinking like over-ripe apricots.

  Wendell might be in this very building by now, bribing yardveegs and deskmajoors, going through Bill Millefleur’s apartment, reading through his appointment book. Wendell was not the sluggish person his gross body suggested. If he had said he would wipe out Tristan Smith there was every chance that he would do it.

  In this field, Jacqui had no expertise. She stood with her slender back against the terracotta wall, facing the french doors of the Great Room, standing as she’d seen bodyguards in front of prime ministers and presidents, their hands loosely by their sides, their eyes always moving.

  If they took my life, she saw she would have to kill herself. She screwed her face up as against a bright and painful light.

  She had the statue of that smirking little mole you know as ‘Singing Willie’.* She was now ready to use it against my assassins. When Wally Paccione approached her she could not spare him any more than her peripheral vision. He came slowly across the terrace, out of focus, black and white in his dress suit, tapping his cane, jutting out his unshaven chin. The aura of his own upset preceded him.

  He positioned himself beside her, and began, immediately, to go through the elaborate ritual of rolling himself a cancerette. Jacqui could not look at him. She was staring into the dark of the Great Room where she could see figures moving in front of the paintings. A man in a sixteen-button suit came out into the light. If he had been an operative, she would not have known.

  Beside her, Wally finally lit his lumpy cigarette. He inhaled, exhaled. She felt him turn his grey eyes on her.

  Finally he spoke. ‘I don’t know who you are or what you want.’

  The man in the sixteen-button suit was now talking to a woman in a blue-veiled hat. He accepted a glass of wine from the servant. This must mean that he was not an operative.

  ‘You’ve lied to me,’ Wally said. ‘You jerked me around. You might think you’re cute, but let me tell you, sweets – you know what you’ve done to him …’

  ‘You’ve got no idea. Papa.’

  ‘I’ve got every fucking idea,’ Wally said, his voice rising. ‘You think I’m blind?’

  Jacqui scanned the party, the topiary, the waiters, the hazy skyline, she heard the Mouse’s two-pin voice. (‘I live on air,’ it said. ‘I suck it in, I spit out the pips.’) Peggy Kram was laughing, shaking her head.

  The old vulture edged himself closer to her. ‘You think that’s cute?’ he said, nodding at the Kram.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You think this is good for his self-esteem?’ He stood beside her, whispering in her ear in that way of his which she had always found off-putting.

  ‘If I’d wanted to hire a woman,’ he continued, ‘I would have advertised for one. I grew him up,’ he said. ‘We had one female santamarie, never again. God damn,’ he said bitterly, looking Jacqui up and down, her breasts, her legs, her face. ‘He has feelings.’

  ‘You think he’s fallen in love with Peggy Kram?’ Jacqui turned to look him in the face for the first time.

  ‘He’s a young man, for God’s sake. Sex is all he thinks about.’

  ‘Is he flirting with her?’

  ‘You don’t seem to understand – this isn’t funny.’

  ‘Mr Paccione.’ She turned and took his sleeve and held it. ‘I am standing here because I am expecting a man with a gun who wants to shoot Tristan.’

  She saw his mouth open, saw his coated tongue. She saw the eyes reacting like living things exposed to acid. Suddenly, he looked so old. He began to wipe his hand over his head. The colour drained from his cheeks. He was an old man from a little town, far, far, far away. There was a helplessness about him she had never seen before.

  ‘He offended someone?’

  ‘It’s nothing he’s done.’

  ‘I hate this place,’ the old man said. ‘We should never have come. I put the idea into his head. We were happy where we were.’

  ‘Mr Paccione, please, be calm. Listen to me: it’s the DoS, the VIA as well.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Wally.

  ‘They have an agent at the Marco Polo. I talked to him this morning.’

  ‘We have POW numbers,’ Wally said, his voice breaking. ‘What does it matter if he wants to wear the stupid suit? Who is he harming?’

  They stood together watching me. I was alight, aflame, drunk on celebrity and the smell of Peggy Kram’s hair as it brushed the surface of my Simi-shell.

  *Actually, Sinning Willie.

  48

  Jacqui and Wally were ready, on that night, to risk their lives to get me out of Voorstand. I should have listened to them, but I was like a drunk around a bottle. My death hung over me, and I would not see it.

  Wendell Deveau, his belly sticking out in front, his shirt hanging down at the back, was prowling round the Demos Platz. Leona the facilitator was bugging Wendell’s room in the Marco Polo. And Gabe Manzini was sitting in a gondel off the Demos Platz tracing Wendell’s progress on an electronic monitor.

  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. I
t 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.’