‘Yes, details. Nothing but details,’ Youde snapped. ‘I really can’t be expected to give my mind to them now. And listen, Jervis, why don’t you keep your fucking prole nose out? Haven’t you heard of the right to remain silent?’
‘Oh, thank you, Art,’ Jervis replied. ‘Thank you so much. That your attitude, you’ll get nothing more from me.’ He turned his face away. ‘I tried to give only help, of full, bona fide quality. But from now on it will be like I’m not even here.’
‘You said that before,’ Youde answered. ‘But listen to you.’
‘Your sodding loss, Dr Youde,’ Jervis pointed out. He faced Youde again.
‘Lionel is already out in Jimma,’ Lepage said.
‘Lionel? Who the hell’s Lionel?’ Youde asked. ‘How many has she been giving a welcome to, for God’s sake? Pirie there, too?’
Jervis said: ‘Now you do look like high-voltage panic, Art. That dribble swinging from your chin? I’d deal with it good, if I was you. What you definitely want to keep out of is an African loony bin.’
When Youde had gone, Jervis said: ‘This is what I mean, you see, Director – a hardly suspected spectrum of duties comes my way: one day Security, the next giving Art familial and sex advice.’
Lepage’s phone rang. Calls had been switched through direct because his secretary was out buying a Hulliborn wedding present for Ursula and Falldew. When Lepage answered a man’s voice said: ‘Tip, here.’
‘What?’ Lepage replied. There was a famous and influential US politician called Tip O’Neill, wasn’t there? God, had Kalamazoo got him involved somehow? ‘Tip?’ Lepage said.
‘City,’ the voice replied.
‘I don’t—’
‘City Tip, Benediction Street.’
‘Rubbish?’
‘Right. And you are Dr Lepage, Museum Director?’
‘Yes.’
‘Someone here says he knows you. Gave your name as reference.’
‘Yes? For what?’ Lepage asked.
‘Trouble, Director?’ Jervis whispered. ‘Anything I can do? I’m used to all sorts in this post, you know.’
Lepage mouthed: ‘It’s all right, Keith.’ Then into the phone he said: ‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘Entirely forgivable, sir. It’s a strange situation. A Mr Indippe?’
Lepage heard stern muttering in the background.
‘Sorry,’ the tip said, ‘Professor Indippe. Bernard?’
More muttering.
‘Bernard. From the States. Kalamazoo, Michigan.’
The name came back to Lepage slowly, part of the Sally Jill Ash correspondence. Wasn’t he their thoroughgoing archivist and researcher? ‘Professor Indippe? Yes,’ Lepage replied. ‘Is there a woman with him, name of Ash?’
‘You do know this man, sir?’
‘Well, I know of him.’
‘Do you think you could come down, sir?’
‘To the tip?’ Lepage said.
‘He’s being obstructive. We don’t want to call the police.’
‘Police?’ Lepage replied.
Jervis frowned and squared his shoulders. ‘Can you handle this, Director?’ he said in another whisper.
‘This man’s making an exhibition, Dr Lepage – professor or not.’
‘An exhibition?’ Lepage asked. ‘What kind of exhibition on a tip, for God’s sake? Is the woman with him – a Mrs Ash?’
‘A nuisance exhibition. No, we’ve come across no woman. He’s been taunting seagulls, waving sandwiches far up on the tip. Are there usually two of them, then? You’ve come across this sort of thing before? So, what’s the game? Something to do with the Green Party?’
‘Is it an offence?’ Lepage replied.
‘What, sir?’
‘Well, to make a show of sandwiches on a tip,’ Lepage answered.
‘He shouldn’t be up there.’
‘Can’t you summon him back? Haven’t you a megaphone for shouting warnings and so on?’
‘He ignores instructions. We really don’t want to resort to physical force. That’s not in our remit.’
‘Very well, I’ll be there,’ Lepage said. He put down the phone.
‘I deduce a crisis, Director,’ Jervis remarked. ‘There’s something in my make-up that can sense such challenges. Whatever and wherever, I must obviously accompany you.’
‘No, no, Keith. It’s something entirely routine, as a matter of fact. You’re needed here. Dr Youde, very stressed; and, now, myself absent for a while.’
Jervis followed him to the door of his room. ‘But what I have to come back to as a topic, Director, is, is it fair to ask me to fill the breach like that, take over the bridge, when I’m only—?’
‘I’m going to think about full-time and staff status, Keith, think very seriously,’ Lepage promised over his shoulder as they hurriedly went down the spiral stairs.
At the bottom, Jervis shook Lepage’s hand. ‘I ask no more, Director. I am content. For leaving this matter with you is like leaving it with the very spirit of the Hulliborn itself, and that’s enough for me.’
‘God,’ Lepage groaned to himself in the car, ‘but who or what is the spirit of the Hulliborn, and do I bloody care? Roll on early retirement. No, quicker than roll on, and earlier than early. Much. Both.’
A few minutes later, as he climbed the gentle, uneven slope of Benediction Street tip towards the solitary, arms-twirling figure of Indippe, he saw a gull swoop majestically and snatch a piece of sandwich from the professor’s grip, then a second bird, then a third, all screaming at him on their downward plunge. Others circled noisily, and Indippe looked very spattered. And yet, because of the enormously wild, but disciplined, vigour of his movements, played out so starkly against a grey-sky background, it looked as if Indippe were the attacker, not the birds. Near his feet he had a large, closed, black tin box, the kind of container people left in bank depositories, presumably loaded with more sandwiches.
‘You Lepage?’ Indippe yelled when they were still quite a distance from each other. ‘A name native to the Auvergne region of France originally, I believe. Fine to make your acquaintance, Director. Grateful you’ve shown up. I’m only just starting here. Negative results to date, but well worth the trouble, I think.’
Pausing with his brogues on a sealed plastic bag of something disturbingly soft and slippery, Lepage replied with a shout, into which he put some fine affability of tone – probably, he thought, the most affable tone ever heard at this height on a tip: ‘Yes, lovely to see you, Professor Indippe.’
‘Oh, please,’ he yelled back, while freeing himself from a sheet of old greaseproof paper which had been blown against his face, ‘could we, perhaps, become less formal? Call me Bernard.’
‘Well then, I’m George.’
‘OK, George.’
‘And is Sally Jill—?’
‘Ah, Sally Jill,’ he cried, smiling very warmly. ‘Come on, then, you fucker, come on then! Wound me! Rip me! Come on, PUNK!’
Lepage saw he was shouting at a black-headed gull that remained hovering, instead of diving in for the food Indippe held. Lepage began to climb towards him over well-compacted vegetable matter, old foam rubber and paint pots.
‘I thought you’d ask about Sally Jill,’ Indippe said. ‘People do.’
‘What age is she?’
‘She’s up in London with Frank W. Not true it stands for wanker, but I don’t know why not. You have that word, “wanker”? But maybe this is presumptuous of me and it’s Brit to start with: infinitely the more mature culture, after all. Sally Jill and Frank W. have some business-enhancing talks on – Ministers involved, the whole big rigmarole. Ah, so you’ve made it!’
Lepage was close now.
‘Great,’ Indippe said. ‘Sort of Sherpa Tensing of the shit-heap. I won’t shake hands. Mine are not too spruce, I guess. About twenty-nine, Sally Jill. Maybe less. They make trouble down below – the functionaries? I told them it was merely scholarship and to do with someone immensely distinguished
who had been based locally – Sir Eric – but I think they feared I’d run off with their best treasures. I believe there’s a word for it in Britain – recovering stuff from tips?’
‘Totting.’
‘Let me note that,’ Indippe said. He put the remains of a sandwich down at his feet and pulled a pad and a pencil from the inside pocket of his magnificent long green leather overcoat, streaked badly front and back over the left shoulder area, but easily cleanable. He wrote the word and a definition, smearing the page with matter from the sandwiches. He put the writing materials away, and as he bent to pick up the food, a gull swung in at him, yellow beak open and menacing, seemingly set on an infuriated rip at his head, face or neck. Delighted, Indippe held the position, turning his profile provocatively towards the creature, while nibbling ecstatically at the sandwich and making loud noises of satisfaction to enrage the bird more. But, suddenly, the seagull obviously realized this was a tease, maybe a trap, and pulled out of the dive without touching the food or Indippe. ‘That was heartening,’ he said. ‘Almost a success. Perhaps it is possible then.’
‘You’re checking on Butler-Minton’s face scar – the origin of?’
‘If he says he was attacked on a tip, one has to consider that he might have been speaking seriously. Did he have a reputation for irony? Well, it is the British disease, I’m told, so perhaps it’s wrong to read too much in. But to do the actual field work is the only way I know of digging out truth. I don’t have to tell you, do I, someone so experienced in reading the past? Oh, sure, there are reeks here, sure there is ugliness, but who said truth was going to be sweet? Not St Augustine. It looks as though the sculpture project might be on for Kalamazoo again, doesn’t it, Director, so I need to get my research in place? I’ll give it another couple of hours. First, I’ve got to get these birds to think only “sandwich, sandwich, sandwich” when they see me, so I make a big show of coming from the States especially to give them treats – cheese and pickle, tuna, sweetcorn in a range of goodies. Then, I’ll start disappointing them, hiding the snacks, maybe eating some of it myself in full view, just like now. That’s going to turn them malevolent, if anything can, and so we might mimic the circumstances when Flounce got savaged – if he ever did.’ He gazed down. ‘We’re at quite a height here. Nice view of the town.’
Far below some men were shouting and waving, ordering them back, but Indippe ignored all that. ‘Of course, there are other theories about the scar to be checked: Enteritis, the cat, Lady Butler-Minton, or a duelling wound. I favour Enteritis. I’ve heard good, confirmatory information of its savagery.’
In a while, he stopped wielding the sandwiches high above himself like semaphore flags and, instead, pushed them very slowly and ostentatiously into the outer pockets of his gorgeous overcoat. Immediately, the gulls in the sky grew confused, even bitter, and their din became fierce. Indippe stared up at them and started haranguing again: ‘What’s keeping you, then? You yellow? You all noise, you wheeling, drifting, squitting nothings? George, pity it isn’t steeper. From below I’d look like Prometheus.’
‘You must have a lot of research on Flounce,’ Lepage replied.
‘You said it, George. I’m going to be writing up my notes for a long time. There’s been a great deal of travel, I can tell you. That Mrs Cray material! And the killing at the Wall. So much. She Satan, you think?’
‘You’re into Mrs Cray?’
‘What else? Once I started I had to go on. The haversack straps. It all falls into place, you see.’
‘Yes?’
‘Oh, sure.’
The men below seemed to think Indippe had been shouting to them, not at the gulls, and were yelling back, asking what he wanted to say.
‘I brought this black box for my notes,’ Indippe remarked. ‘And the notes of one other. They’re going to have to be under strict lock and key. “Sensitive” is not the word!’
So, not more sandwiches.
For a little while, Indippe gave up the bellowing and switched to a gentle, wooing voice to entice the birds, the way people talked to babies or kittens. ‘Here we are then, my sweeties, see what Bernard has brought for you. Come on, my little chicks, come, come, come.’ Then he spoke to Lepage, ordinary voice. ‘Of course, Sally Jill and the whole Butler-Minton Society in Kalamazoo were very upset when they heard Her Ladyship and Trudy, the researcher, might get together to destroy his image. Some countering had to be arranged. Well, you can see why Sally Jill and the rest of the Society, myself included, grew disturbed: here they were, striving for the right to sponsor a monument to him, really working on your government after that initial refusal by the museum’s Conclave, and then, suddenly, they hear somebody is going to say he was nothing, or worse. No, not just somebody. Two bodies, both of which he had known extremely well. Incidentally, the Bible belt in the States is going to find it very difficult to understand how two women join together like this, when the husband of one of them was adulterously fucking the other. Anyway, it became even more imperative to discover the real facts, and to protect Eric Butler-Minton’s name.’
Around the base of the tip men seemed to be gathering in a posse.
Indippe looked up at the gulls, though. ‘I guess I feel a kind of connection with Flounce out here,’ he said. ‘It’s a thrill. Do you get that feeling, too, George? As if we were sort of linked to him by the sandwiches? Well, not just linked. For myself, I have the sensation now and then that I actually am Flounce, an alter ego able to engage in aspects of his very life. It’s as if I have been, oh, sort of flooded by him, like a blood transfusion. But perhaps you wouldn’t regard that as very scientific. I’d have to concede the point.’
The birds seemed to have lost interest. They still circled, but further off now, and their cries were less frequent and not so committed: there might be a general objection to being used willy-nilly in an experiment. Indippe had taken one of the sandwiches from his pocket and was displaying it again. The gulls gave it the big ignoral. ‘Bastards,’ he muttered. ‘Ungrateful horde. Think of Flounce, you jerks.’
Lepage felt startled. ‘“Think of Flounce”? Why should they? Who or what is Flounce to them? These wouldn’t be the same birds who attacked him, if any did.’
‘They’re so damn choosy. So damn pampered.’
‘Whereas?’
‘Whereas Flounce – try to imagine, George, what he’d have given for a sandwich like this – even a fragment of a sandwich – at the worst moments in the Mrs Cray sequence. Oh, yes.’
‘I don’t think I follow this, Bernard. Are you saying Butler-Minton was in some ways a victim of Mrs Cray?’
‘Oh, sure, eventually – for a while.’
‘We’ve heard rumours, of course, but there’s never been any suggestion of that sort. Is this what you meant when you asked whether she was Satan? Most of us have thought that if there was any villainy it most probably came from Flounce, though everything remained terribly vague – some involvement of a whippet, and haversack straps, but no detail of what this involvement was.’
‘And the air-sock. Did you hear of that?’
‘The air-sock, yes. Flounce apparently muttered about these things on his death bed. A nurse heard him. Lady Butler-Minton had slipped away to the betting shop. The stuff is garbled.’
‘I think they’re coming, George,’ Indippe replied.
In a wide arc the men who’d been waving and shouting from the base of the tip began to climb towards them. It was late afternoon, and in the dwindling winter light they looked sinister, threatening. But for the absence of baying bloodhounds it might have been a manhunt scene from one of those old Devil’s Island movies.
‘They don’t understand,’ Indippe said. ‘I tried to explain to them, but they’d never even heard of Butler-Minton. Doesn’t that of itself plead the cause for the monument, George? This was a man who, on his own, without the help of your MI6 or the CIA, attempted to rescue from behind the Wall one of the greatest … Of course, suddenly, months ago, the Wall came down
– is only a memory. It’s increasingly difficult for people to recall its appalling effects, and the dangers it brought to those deemed to be disloyal and rebellious, even the most distinguished scholars. But …’ Spinning around he confronted a gaggle of gulls who were lying off behind him, obviously interested in the food, yet remaining at a distance. ‘Come on, come on, you craven crew,’ he called. He’d given up the soft approach. He glared at the birds, and his chubby, lined face with its tight little NCO’s grey moustache had grown sombre, even vindictive.
‘Flounce attempted to rescue a great scholar?’ Lepage asked.
‘A great and unforgivably subversive scholar, as the East German regime saw him.’
Lepage’s memory got to work. ‘You’re talking about Uwe Koller, are you? But I’d always thought—’
‘Shot by guards on the Wall when he tried to make a dash to the West. Koller had been in hiding in East Berlin. Flounce knew him well – camaraderie of scholars – and was trying to get him out. The East German authorities rightly suspected Butler-Minton had secret knowledge about Koller, including his hideaway. They took Flounce in for interrogation, sometimes in East Berlin, sometimes in Rostock, up on the Baltic. Koller seems to have thought that Sir Eric would betray him. Koller panicked and had a go at escape himself. It failed.’
‘Koller? But, look, I thought—’
‘You believed Koller was given away by Flounce and eliminated in a deliberately fixed incident? I’m very familiar with the disgusting rumour, obviously, though I haven’t found where it started – not yet. Would Mrs Cray deliberately spread disinformation? It’s possible. She’s a Brit, a widow, but very fond of the old East German regime – employed by it in some high secret-police post. I gather Flounce would never talk about what actually happened. He hated failure, even a failure brought on by the errors of others. It’s possible this biog by Penny Butler-Minton and the researcher will use the same old misinformation.’