I chased him for quite a while. Marcus was just a fleeting black form, some kind of human beetle. I was grateful for the black trousers and pullover that he wore, because otherwise it would have been impossible for me to see him through that fog, thicker than butter. Even so, he got further and further away from me. Those passageways were truly diabolical. I turned a corner and just had time to see him before he was lost again around the next corner. Sometimes the path forked and I couldn’t find him on either side. In those cases I chose the route with less rats, supposing that Marcus must have scared them off on his way through. I didn’t want to give in. But my nature made the decision for me.
All of a sudden I felt something breaking in my ribcage. I didn’t know what had happened but I knew it was something very serious. I could barely breathe. The slightest movement was unbearably painful, as if my ribs were boring into my chest like red-hot irons. I slumped right there, leaning back against a container as large as a train carriage. (The next day the doctors told me that my lungs had collapsed. I needed an entire month of rest for them to weld together again.)
I don’t know how long I sat there, hopelessly. If it hadn’t been for the whisky, I would have howled in pain. The cold that November was particularly pernicious. And Marcus had escaped.
I looked up and noticed it was raining. But it was too narrow a stream to be rainwater. It took me a few seconds to realise that the liquid falling into my eyes was Marcus’s urine.
He was on top of the container. He pissed for a very long time, calmly emptying his bladder. I didn’t have the strength to stand up. I just moved my head so that the liquid fell onto the nape of my neck instead of my face. Then, as he buttoned up his fly, he asked me, ‘Do you mind telling me why you are following me? Do you want me to kill you?’
The vapour from his mouth mixed with the fog. But his breath was shinier and greyer. And I could smell it. Each one of his words had a different smell. That voice was nothing like the one I knew. It had the tone of a criminal who knows he is invincible as long as he stays in his world of degradation.
‘I talked to Godefroide,’ I said. ‘I’ll make them reopen the case!’
Marcus didn’t seem very impressed. ‘My only crime was treating Englishmen like Negroes.’ He spat with the wind and said, ‘And you won’t reopen anything, you idiot.’
‘Yes I will,’ I said defiantly. ‘They’ll hang you!’
He opened his eyes wide and laughed loudly.
‘Me? But I saved the world! Don’t you remember?’
He laughed like a hyena. Then he fell silent. When he opened his mouth an icy voice came out, ‘If you come back around here, I’ll eat your kidneys. And then I’ll kill you. You don’t know what the Congo is like.’
He jumped into mid-air and disappeared. I was still saying something, I don’t remember exactly what. His acid voice replied. Through the night fog I heard him say, ‘Norton, idiot! Norton!’
THIRTY
THE STORY OF THE death of Stanley, the great explorer of Africa, has always provoked contradictory feelings in me. Stanley was in his deathbed, from which he could hear the bells of a clock tolling. And one evening, after the last stroke of midnight, he mumbled, ‘And that’s time … it’s so strange …’
Those were his last words.
Sometimes I can understand Stanley’s insight: the most important thing about time is that time can decide not to be time. Sixty years ago I sat on the ground in the docks, humiliated, surrounded by fog and rats, with my lungs detached. It was sixty years ago and only a paragraph ago.
For an interminable hour I was unable to move my back from the wall of the container. I couldn’t and I didn’t want to. I didn’t care about anything. The cold, Marcus’s urine that ran down from my ears, even the rats, who had grown used to my presence and scampered around my feet. I thought about everything and I thought about nothing. It was as if my mind was a desert: I could have walked for entire days inside my head and the landscape would have always been the same.
But if at any point Thomas Thomson did anything that could be considered brave, it was that night when he stood up and headed towards Edward Norton’s house. I could have gone back to the boarding house, but I chose to go to Norton’s house. I couldn’t get Marcus’s last words out of my mind. ‘Norton, idiot! Norton!’ Now I wasn’t sure if it had been Marcus or the wind. Whatever it was, Norton had some explaining to do.
I brushed back my hair with my hands and wiped away the yellow drops that fell from my nose with my sleeve. I moved mechanically. I had to stay straight and stiff, as if I had swallowed a broom, with one hand supporting my chest and the other supporting my back. Otherwise the pain was unbearable. Imagine that your thorax had become a bag of keys. It was a miracle I made it to Norton’s office.
The sun hadn’t yet come up, but a tenuous light began to overtake the city. If he was keeping his usual hours, Norton should be up.
He opened the door and said calmly, ‘Do you know what time it is?’
I replied, ‘Do you know who I just spoke with?’
He looked at me and knew immediately what had happened.
‘Come in, Mr Thomson,’ he said with textbook courteousness. ‘After all, we haven’t celebrated the success of our enterprise.’
When Norton closed the door behind me, I said, ‘I would like to kill you.’
‘Don’t do it,’ Norton replied, cool-headed. ‘They’d hang you. And do you know why? Because the only barrister that could save you would be dead.’
He looked me over without speaking, and he concluded, ‘No, you don’t want to kill anyone. What you want is an explanation.’
He extended his arm towards the sitting room door and I went in. I sank into a wing-backed armchair. I was a wreck. Norton, on the other hand, had been interrupted in the middle of getting spruced up for the day. He turned his back on me for a moment in order to adjust his tie in front of the mirror. I took a good look at him and saw a more smartly dressed Norton than usual. His sock garters were silver, and his tie-pin was gold. Norton always wore an elegant waistcoat over his shirt, but I saw that this one was more expensive-looking.
‘How do I look?’ he asked, opening his arms. He must have read my face because Norton hastened to say, ‘Have patience. You wanted an explanation of everything. Well, you’re about to get it.’
I interrupted him. ‘Why did you do it, Norton? What exactly did you get out of it? That’s all I want to know.’
But Norton didn’t want to listen to me. He was paying much more attention to the door and to the clock that sat on the mantelpiece. Without looking at me he said, ‘Now I will ask you a question. What moves the world, Mr Thomson?’
I didn’t say anything. Norton approached my armchair from behind. With all my weight still in it, he moved it a little, until it faced the door. He was standing beside one of the wings. He knelt down until his mouth was at the height of my head and he whispered, ‘This race is extremely punctual.’
The clock marked seven in the morning. And the last stroke, in effect, coincided with the doorbell. As if in a dream, I heard Norton say, ‘Come on in, my darling, the door is open.’
I had never stopped to think of something so basic: that besides Marcus Garvey and me, a third person knew the whole story, Edward Norton himself. Why couldn’t he have fallen in love with Amgam as much or more than I had?
A thin black tower advanced towards us. Its hat looked like a gateau from which hung a black veil like a miniature theatre curtain. When the woman saw me she stopped cold. But Norton’s gallant arm pointed to the armchair opposite mine while saying, ‘Sit, my darling, he is a friend.’
I wanted to die. If Garvey had explained the story to Norton, his barrister, it was also logical that he would have put him in contact with her. While I dreamt of her, smoking on my bed in the boarding house, Amgam was sharing office hours with Norton. At night, while I suffered for the sentence that had not yet been handed down, Norton was sleeping with her.
N
orton left his position beside my armchair and took an equivalent one beside hers. He raised the veil with four delicate fingers, slowly. The world stopped. The only thing that moved was the veil. And when it was raised, Norton asked me, ‘You know her, don’t you?’
I curled up a bit more inside my seat. Of course I knew her. At the Times of Britain I had written the caption to many photographs where that woman appeared, accompanied by her husband or alone. It was Berit Bergström, the wife of the Swedish businessman imprisoned for his treachery. It wasn’t Amgam.
‘Now you have your answer,’ said Norton. ‘Prestige moves the world. And now I’m the barrister of the Garvey case. The Garvey case has turned this practice into the one with the best reputation in London. My clients are the crème de la crème of the country. Mrs Bergström is an example of the new clients I now attend to. She even went to the trial one day to be sure she had hired a good barrister. By the way, did you know that Mrs Bergström’s husband is awaiting trial in the same prison as Garvey?’
There was a long satisfied pause until he resumed, ‘Prestige, Thomas, prestige. Barristers want prestige to be successful. In a certain way they complement each other, don’t you think?’
I couldn’t take my eyes away from Mrs Bergström, I was transfixed. Without looking at Norton, I said, ‘I thought that you were only moved by money.’
‘It is prestige that moves money. If you were a multimillionaire with serious legal problems what practice would you turn to? And how much would you be willing to pay to be freed from prison?’
He sighed happily. ‘If one wants to get rich one should never go after money, one has to get money to go after him. And do you know something, Mr Thomson? Renown is the shepherd of capital.’
A vestige of professional curiosity led me to ask him, ‘Marcus didn’t make up the story about the Tectons all by himself, did he?’
‘No,’ confessed Norton. ‘Garvey was an incredibly limited person. He followed my instructions.’
He was talking about Garvey as if he didn’t exist, as if he had vanished from the world long ago. For Norton, for whom reality was confined to legal files, perhaps that was the case. Norton looked out the window. A ray of sunlight entered the office, announcing the new day. He sat in a third armchair, alongside Mrs Bergström. He threw his head back and stared at the ceiling. Now he spoke with his eyes closed.
‘We had no chance of winning the case. So I thought of an extralegal strategy. It occurred to me to raise public opinion in our favour. A remote possibility, but the only one within our reach. In that sense the book was the last recourse that came to me. I explained the story to Marcus in chapters. He rehearsed them in his cell. He rehearsed over and over again, until he was convincing. When you think about it, he didn’t have much else to do. When he was younger he had been an actor and I convinced him to act well. His life was at stake. I made it very clear that we had no other possibility besides the book to get out of this one.’
Norton opened his eyes and, without blinking, told me in the most inhuman voice I had ever heard, ‘If the book wasn’t successful enough and didn’t stir public opinion, they would just hang Marcus. But if it was successful, I would win the case and legal glory.’
I didn’t have the energy to say anything. I felt like an oil stain in the middle of an ocean. And oil stains don’t speak, they just float. I looked at our companion. The woman had gone to prison to visit her husband. She hid under mourning clothes, simply, because people don’t like to be recognised when they are in a queue at a prison. Especially the rich. The mysterious friend that visited Marcus wasn’t Amgam, it was Norton, who dictated chapters to Marcus. The woman wasn’t Amgam. Marcus Garvey was a murderer. Norton was an ambitious barrister, so ambitious that the financial gain from the book wasn’t enough for him. With the fame he had acquired from the Garvey case, rich clients would make him richer. Nothing more.
Norton made his familiar finger pyramid. And he said to me, with sincerity, ‘I felt great literary admiration for the chapters you gave me. The story that I explained to Marcus was very thin. But you had an immense capacity to endow it with force. You raised it to its natural ceiling. The human soul is extraordinarily subjective. That’s literature, I suppose: turning the dregs of humanity into gold. This case deserves an essay.’
I should have said that the essay was our book. I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything. Maybe I hadn’t had enough time to hate him. Or maybe, I was simply exhausted and hung over. Norton took a step forward, trying to defend himself from an accusation I didn’t make.
‘You should know that I am protected by many arguments. On one hand, I am genuinely against the death penalty. A British court would never have done justice in a case like this. And I believe that any European should be exonerated for what he has done in exotic latitudes, just as the judge said. As for the rest, I’m sorry to have involved you, I couldn’t explain all this to you until you had finished the book. You had to be excited about the story, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to make it credible. And the only weapon I had to assure me that you would give it your all was elevating the book to a just cause.’
Mrs Bergström coughed slightly. Besides that, it was as if she weren’t there. I asked, ‘And the woman?’
But Norton was too engrossed in his world of arguments. He continued explaining and reflecting, avoiding me, looking at the wall as if he were defending himself from a vague accusation, without any real substance, and thus impossible to refute.
‘You left me no choice but to redo Marcus’s story,’ he asserted. ‘That day, when you told me that you had given a copy to the Duke of Craver, I was forced to change my strategy. Until Mr Tecton appeared it was all more or less true.’
We had reached a point where principles such as justice, truth and liberty mattered very little to me. I insisted, ‘Yes, but what about the woman?’
He wasn’t listening to me. He was contemplating, rubbing his chin with one hand.
‘That doesn’t change the fact that we have freed a murderer, obviously … On the other hand it was a murderer of murderers in a time of murders …’
Norton had lowered his voice so much that his last words were practically inaudible. Suddenly he turned to me, as if he had just woken up, ‘The woman? Pardon, what woman?’
And I, with a patience, kindness and delicacy that left my own mouth hanging open, insisted, ‘The woman in the book. The protagonist. Where did she come from?’
‘Oh, yes. The woman,’ said Norton, as if he were recovering a lost thread, running two fingers over an eyebrow. ‘I stuck her in as I went along.’
I remember that I stammered a bit. I wanted to say something, but it seemed as if my mouth had been injected with poison. Miraculously I was able to articulate, ‘Some day everyone will know that it was all a lie.’
Norton shook his head.
‘People aren’t interested in the facts fitting perfectly to the truth,’ he said. ‘What they want is to be moved.’
‘But they’ll know it was all a lie,’ I insisted. ‘Before or after.’
‘After what?’ said Norton, surprised. ‘There is no after. The case is closed.’
But I didn’t give up. ‘Some day,’ I said, ‘they will fully explore the centre of Africa. And they won’t find any trace of the Tectons.’
‘Yes, Tommy, someday,’ said Norton. Now he spoke with grave compassion. ‘And that day they will continue congratulating you for the book’s literary merits, not me. And if some day, although I doubt it, they decide to accuse someone of false testimony or falsified documentation, it will be Thomas Thomson, not me. Because you are the author.’
Norton looked at me in a new way. It made me think of an eagle that has eaten too much, looking down from his perch on a rabbit far below. He flattened his thin moustache with a finger and said, ‘I remember that the objective of your last visit was to demand your legitimate rights as the author. Isn’t that so?’
Even when he said that, I couldn’t hate him. I
felt a strange moral apathy. As if the truth had the virtue of liberating me from any passion. What’s more, I understood that for someone like Norton disloyalty was just one of the forms his deviousness assumed. He had nothing against me, of course.
I could only look at Mrs Bergström. She was a tall Nordic woman, nothing more. While I observed her I asked myself if my lack of response was due to something more than fatigue and pain.
‘But you are a man without imagination,’ I said. ‘How could you think up such an elaborate story?’
‘Who? Me?’ asked Norton, sincerely surprised. ‘I didn’t think up anything. I am a man without imagination, as you say. Besides legal documents I am uninspired.’
‘And so?’
‘Well, you, one day, told me about the primordial function of the literary outline. So I used a book by Doctor Luther Flag as a literary outline. And I did it as faithfully as I could.’
‘Doctor Flag?’
‘Yes. Pandora in the Congo.’
When I remember that moment, sometimes, I hear the bells of Big Ben tolling. Was it that way or do I just remember it that way? Did the clock strike just as Norton revealed that he had followed a secret outline, an outline called Pandora in the Congo? I don’t know. It’s been a lifetime since that encounter, and I am no longer certain of the details.
‘The day we set up our contract I showed it to you, don’t you remember?’ continued Norton. ‘You were the author. It seemed adequate as a manual. I only had to retouch the characters. I adapted Marcus to the missionary who suffered a spiritual crisis. Simba the lion, the main character’s friend, turned into Pepe. The Cravers are the two legionnaires that defend the camp to the death. In Pandora in the Congo the pygmies were tree dwellers. In the book I changed them into Tectons because I don’t know anything about African tribes, and I was afraid that Garvey would make too many ethnographic mistakes. But what African race could I choose? None!’ protested Norton, suddenly indignant. ‘Any tribe that he could mention would surely be the specialty of some anthropologist. I consulted the encyclopaedias, and even the most remote tribes in central Congo were well researched. I couldn’t take the risk that Marcus would say something stupid that could be refuted in the trial by some suspicious Africanist. And I thought, “Where can I hide a tribe that no one, not even the anthropologists know about?” I could only come up with one solution: if the pygmies were tree dwellers, the Tectons would live below ground. I have interrogated too many witnesses not to have learned a singular lesson: that the most credible lie is always the biggest one … Why are you looking at me like that?’