Out of the Dark (11 page)

According to him, the scene we'd just witnessed was a frequent occurrence. To tell the truth, Rachman found it all very entertaining. It was a way to take his mind off his neurasthenia. His life would have made a good subject for a novel. Rachman had arrived in London just after the war, among other refugees coming from the East. He was born somewhere in the middle of the tangled borders of Austria-Hungary, Poland, and Russia, in one of those little garrison towns that had changed names more than once.

'You should ask him some questions,' Savoundra told me. Maybe for you he would be willing to answer...' We had arrived at Westbourne Grove. Savoundra hailed a passing cab:

'Please forgive me for not walking with you all the way... But I'm dead tired ...'

Before disappearing into the taxi, he wrote his address and telephone number on an empty cigarette pack. He was counting on my getting in touch with him as soon as possible so that together we could go over my corrections to
Blackpool Sunday
.

We were alone again, the two of us.

'We could take a walk before we go home,' I said to Jacqueline.

What was awaiting us at Chepstows Villas? Rachman throwing the furniture out the window, as Linda had told us? Or maybe he was staking out the place so that he could catch her, her and her Jamaican friends.

We came upon a little park whose name l've forgotten. It was near the apartment, and I've often looked at a map of London trying to find it. Was it Ladbroke Square, or was it farther along, near Bayswater? The façades of the houses around it were dark, and if the streetlights had been turned off that night we would have been able to find our way by the light of the full moon.

Someone had left the key in the little grillwork gate. I opened it, we entered the park, and I turned the key from the inside. We were locked in here, and no one could ever come in again. A coolness came over us, as if we were following a path through the forest. The leaves on the trees above us were so thick that they scarcely let the moonlight through. The grass hadn't been cut for a long time. We discovered a wooden bench, with gravel spread around it. We sat down. My eyes grew accustomed to the dark and I could make out, in the middle of a square, a stone pedestal on which stood the silhouette of an animal that had been left there, and I wondered if it was a lion or a jaguar, or only a dog.

'It's nice here,' said Jacqueline.

She rested her head on my shoulder. The leaves hid the houses around the park. We no longer felt the stifling heat that for the last few days had been hanging over London, a city where we only had to turn a corner to end up in a forest.

YES, AS SAVOUNDRA SAID, I could have written a novel about Rachman. A sentence that he had jokingly thrown out to Jacqueline, that first day, had worried me:

'I'm sure you'll find some way to express your gratitude ...'

He'd said it as she took the envelope with the hundred pounds. One afternoon, I had gone for a walk alone in the Hampstead area because Jacqueline wanted to run some errands with Linda. I came back to the apartment around seven o'clock at night. Jacqueline was alone. An envelope was lying on the bed, the same size and the same light blue color as the first, but this one had three hundred pounds in it. Jacqueline seemed uncomfortable. She had waited for Linda all afternoon, but Linda hadn't shown up. Rachman had come by. He had also waited for Linda. He had given her this envelope, which she'd accepted. And I thought to myself that evening that she had found a way to express her gratitude.

There was a smell of Synthol in the room. Rachman always kept a bottle of that medicine with him. Thanks to Linda, I had learned what his habits were. She'd told me that when he went out to dinner at a restaurant he brought along his own dishes and toured the kitchens before the meal to be sure they were clean. He bathed three times a day, and rubbed his body with Synthol. In cafés he ordered a bottle of mineral water, which he insisted on opening himself, and he drank from the bottle so that his lips would not touch a glass that hadn't been washed properly.

He kept girls much younger than he was, and he put them up in apartments like the one in Chepstows Villas. He came to see them in the afternoon, and, without undressing, with no preliminaries, ordering them to tum their back to him, he took them very quickly, as coldly and mechanically as if he were brushing his teeth. Then he would play a game of chess with them on a little chessboard he always carried with him in his black briefcase.

FROM THEN ON we were alone in the apartment. Linda had disappeared. We no longer heard Jamaican music and laughter at night. It felt a little strange to us, because we had become accustomed to the ray of light streaming from under Linda's door. I tried several times to call Michael Savoundra, but the phone rang again and again with no answer.

It was as if we had never met them. They had faded into the landscape, and in the end we ourselves could no longer really explain what we were doing in this room. We began to feel as though we'd come here by breaking into the building.

Every morning I wrote one or two pages of my novel and went by the Lido to see if Peter Rachman might be sitting at the same table as the first time, on the beach, beside the Serpentine. No. And the man at the ticket booth, whom I had questioned, didn't know anyone by the name of Peter Rachman. I went by Michael Savoundra's place, on Walton Street. I rang, but there was no answer, and I went into the bakery on the ground floor, whose sign bore the name of a certain Justin de Blancke. Why has that name stayed in my memory? This Justin de Blancke was also unable to tell me anything. He knew Savoundra vaguely, by sight. Yes, a blond man who looked like Joseph Cotten. But he didn't think he was here very often.

Jacqueline and I walked to the Rio, at the far end of Notting Hill, and asked the Jamaican who ran it if he knew anything of Linda and Edgerose. He answered that he hadn't heard from them for a few days, and he and the other customers seemed suspicious of us.

ONE MORNING as I was coming out of the house as usual with my pad of letter paper, I recognized Rachman's Jaguar parked at the corner of Chepstows Villas and Ledbury Road.

He put his head out the lowered window.

'How are you, old man? Would you like to go for a drive with me?'

He opened the door for me and I sat down next to him. 'We didn't know what had become of you,' I told him.

I didn't dare mention Linda. Maybe he'd been sitting in his car for hours, lying in wait.

'A lot of work ... A lot of worries ... Always the same thing ...'

He was looking at me with his cold eyes behind his tortoise-shell glasses.

'What about you? Are you happy?'

I answered with an embarrassed smile.

He had stopped the car in a little street full of half-ruined houses, looking as if they had just been through a bombardment.

'You see?' he said. 'This is the sort of place I always work in ...'

Standing on the sidewalk, he pulled a ring of keys from a black briefcase he was holding, but he changed his mind and stuffed them into the pocket of his jacket.

'There's no point anymore …'

With one kick he opened the door of one of the houses, a door with peeling paint and nothing but a hole where the lock should have been. We went in. The floor was covered with debris. I was overcome by a smell like the one in the hotel on Sussex Gardens, but stronger. I suddenly felt nauseated. Rachman rummaged through his briefcase again and pulled out a flashlight. He moved the beam of light around him, revealing a rusty old stove at the far end of the room. A steep staircase climbed to the second floor, and its wooden banister was broken.

'Since you have paper and pen,' he said, 'you might take notes ...'

He inspected the neighboring houses, which were in the same state of abandonment, and as we went along he dictated information for me to take down, after looking in a little notebook he'd taken from his black briefcase.

The next day I continued my novel on the other side of the sheet where I'd written those notes, and I have kept them to this day. Why did he dictate them to me? Maybe he wanted there to be a copy of them somewhere.

The first place we had stopped, in the Notting Hill neighborhood, was called Powis Square, and it led to Powis Terrace and Powis Gardens. Under Rachman's dictation, I took an inventory of numbers
5, 9, 10, 11
, and
12
on Powis Terrace, numbers
3, 4, 6
, and
7
on Powis Gardens, and numbers
13, 45, 46
, and
47
on Powis Square. Rows of houses with porticoes from the 'Edwardian' era, Rachman told me. They'd been occupied by Jamaicans since the end of the war, but he, Rachman, had bought the lot of them just as they were about to be torn down. And now that no one was living in them anymore, he had come up with the idea of restoring them.

He had found the names of the former occupants, the ones before the Jamaicans. So at number
5
on Powis Gardens, I wrote down one Lewis Jones, and at number
6
, a Miss Dudgeon; at number
13
on Powis Square, a Charles Edward Boden, at
46
, an Arthur Philip Cohen, at number 47, a Miss Marie Motto … Rachman needed them now, twenty years later, to sign a paper of some kind, but he really didn't think so. In response to a question I had asked about all these people, he had said that most of them had probably disappeared in the Blitz.

We crossed the Bayswater neighborhood, heading toward Paddington Station. This time we ended up at Orsett Terrace, where the porticoed houses, taller than the last ones, adjoined a railroad track. The locks were still fixed to the front doors, and Rachman had to use his ring of keys. No debris, no mildewed wallpaper, no broken staircases inside, but the rooms showed no trace of human presence, as if these houses were a film set they had forgotten to take down.

'These used to be hotels for travelers,' Rachman told me.

What travelers? I imagined shadows at night, emerging from Paddington Station just as the sirens began to blow.

At the end of Orsett Terrace, I was surprised to see a ruined church that was being demolished. Its nave was already open to the sky.

'I should have bought that as well,' said Rachman.

We passed by Holland Park and arrived at Hammersmith. I had never been this far. Rachman stopped on Talgarth Road in front of a row of abandoned houses that looked like cottages or little villas by the seaside. We went into one and climbed to the second floor. The glass in the bow window was broken. You could hear the roar of traffic. In one corner of the room I saw a folding cot, and on it a suit wrapped in cellophane as if it had just come from the cleaners, as well as a pajama top. Rachman noticed that I was looking at it:

'Sometimes I come here for a nap,' he told me.

'Doesn't the sound of the traffic bother you?'

He shrugged. Then he picked up the cellophane-wrapped suit and we went downstairs. He walked ahead of me, the suit folded over his right arm, his black briefcase in his left hand, looking like a traveling salesman leaving the house to set out on a tour of the provinces.

He gently draped the suit over the rear seat of the car and sat down behind the wheel again. He turned the car around, toward Kensington Gardens.

'I've slept in much less comfortable places ...'

He looked me over with his cold eyes.

'I was about your age ...'

We were following Holland Park Avenue and would soon pass by the caféteria where I was usually sitting and working on my novel at this time of day...

'At the end of the war, I'd escaped from a camp ... I slept in the basement of an apartment building … There were rats everywhere .... I thought they'd eat me if l fell asleep ....'

He laughed thinly.

'I felt like a rat myself… Besides, for the past four years they'd been trying to convince me that I was a rat ….'

We had left the caféteria behind us. Yes, I could put Rachman into my novel. My two heroes would run into Rachman near the Gare du Nord.

'Were you born in England?' I asked him.

'No. In Lvov, in Poland.'

He had answered curtly, and I knew I would get nothing more out of him.

Now we were driving along Hyde Park, heading toward Marble Arch.

'I'm trying to write a book,' I told him timidly, to get the conversation going again.

'A book?'

Since he was born in Lvov, Poland, before the war, and had survived it, there was no reason why he couldn't be in the Gare du Nord neighborhood now. It was only a matter of chance.

He slowed down by Marylebone Station, and I thought we were going to visit another set of run-down houses by the railroad tracks. But we turned down a narrow street and followed it to Regent's Park.

'A rich neighborhood at last."

He let out a laugh like a whinny.

He had me write down the addresses:
125, 127
, and
129
Park Road, at the corner of Lorne Close, three pale green houses with bow windows, the last one half ruined.