Saturn Over the Water (18 page)

I told the rather piggy white-eyelashed German girl who I was and that I wanted to see von Emmerick, whom I’d met at Mrs Tengleton’s in Westchester. She understood English, though we had to work a bit at Mrs Tengleton and Westchester. I was left sitting just inside the entrance while she took her fat little legs up a staircase. It must have been nearly five minutes before she returned, to take me up the stairs and into the presence of the Herr Direktor, who was sitting bolt upright in a large room that was half an office and half a missing scene from
Die Meistersinger
. He looked exactly as he had done that afternoon in Mrs Tengleton’s hothouse – the same carved old wood face, the same cold military eye that ought to have had a monocle; but this time he was wearing a linen jacket that might have made anybody else look informal. He gave me the impression I’d come to sell something he didn’t want. I realised this was going to be tricky, so I pulled out all the stops at once.

‘Probably you’ve forgotten meeting me that afternoon – there were so many people milling around – but I was with a girl called Marina Nateby – ’

‘I know Miss Nateby – yes – ’

‘Oddly enough I discovered she’s a friend of Rosalia Arnaldos. I’ve just been staying with Mr Arnaldos in Peru – I’m a painter, by the way – and either he or his granddaughter suggested I should come and look at this lake country down here – and pay a visit to Osparas – ’ That was about as much as I could manage, without some encouragement, and anyhow I felt a fool standing there still holding that silly little bag.

For a moment or two, after I’d dried up and he still stared at me in silence, he had me wildly guessing. Was he going to ask me to stay or was he about to ring for three SS types to throw me out? But then just as I was ready, in my despair, to start babbling again about Arnaldos or Rosalia or Marina Nateby or Mrs Tengleton, he smiled frostily.

‘You would like to spend a day or two with us here, Mr Bedford?’

‘I know I ought to have written to you first – but if it’s possible – and I won’t be a nuisance – ’

‘No, it is easily arranged. We have many guests here, a few even from London. But you will have to excuse me now, Mr Bedford. This is a busy time for me. I have a conference with my staff every working day at this time. I will ask one of my assistants to take charge of you. Then we shall meet again at dinner.’ He barked some German commands into the intercom thing, and after a minute or two they brought into the room a hefty pink young man, who behaved as if he were in uniform and not in grey flannels. His name was Otto Barlach and he had those pale empty eyes that are probably the most sinister things in Europe. As a matter of fact he’d never set foot in Europe, as he told me afterwards in his slow careful English. Three generations of his family had lived in the town of Valdivia, here in Chile. But he was German through and through, the whole
echt Deutsch
bag of tricks, including too much deference to his superiors, which fortunately included me at the moment, and too little consideration for his inferiors, girl secretaries and maids at whom he barked like another von Emmerick.

Otto took me across the street, wide enough to be called a square. Blue dusk was filling it now. Lights were flickering on. First, he showed me the building, like a Black Forest inn, where I would find the
Speisesaal
for the Herr Direktor’s guests, and also the Great Hall, in which at nine o’clock there would be music. ‘Not this night our music we make,’ Otto explained, ‘but discus – on a new machine – hi-fi stereo –
wunderba
r
!’ The small guest house was next door. After barking at a frightened middle-aged woman, Otto led me up two crooked flights of steps, for the house had been carefully designed to be quaint and higgledy-piggledy, and finally showed me into a room that was all polished wood and sweet-smelling and might have been intended for Hansel and Gretel. By pretending to be a vague genius, I managed to keep Otto for a few minutes answering questions. The setup, I gathered, did include a genuine
Gesellschaft
, with one of those long German names like a goods train passing, and it employed some first-rate chemists and was now manufacturing some new and expensive drugs, chiefly of the tranquilliser type. Though not a chemist himself, von Emmerick was head man, creator and now administrator of the whole Osparas Gemeinschaft, embodying, Otto said, the true old noble German spirit. I let it go at that, promising to be in the Great Hall, for a drink before dinner, at seven-forty-five.

I was a bit late, having had some trouble finding a bathroom in that elves’ nest, and when I went into the Great Hall about ten people were standing in front of a massive long table, knocking back sherries and
pisco
sours. The style was definitely Teutonic baronial. Göring could have used it as a hunting lodge. There were even antlers, swords and pieces of armour, shields with coats-of-arms painted on them. Or at least that was my immediate impression, the only impression I ever had, for I never saw the place again and I was only in it a few minutes. And I didn’t spend that little time looking around, for as soon as I arrived among those ten people I discovered that two of them were Sir Reginald Merlan-Smith and Countess Nadia Slatina.

Otto was there, ready to look after me, but I’d shakily lifted and downed two
piscos
, which God knows I needed, before I allowed him to start introducing me to anybody. And even after that he hadn’t to do anything, because when I turned from the table – there were Sir Reginald and Nadia smiling at me. His smile was the real thing, not friendly of course because he hadn’t it in him, but genuinely amused and perhaps a bit triumphant. But I thought, though I may have been kidding myself, that I detected a flicker of anxiety in Nadia’s smile.

‘Well, well, Bedford,’ said Sir Reginald, still the patronising patron. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here. Get around, don’t you?’

‘We all seem to do, don’t we?’ I said. ‘But then you said you were going to Argentina, which isn’t far from here, they tell me. And I’ve been staying with old Arnaldos up at that Institute of his. He’s a friend of my New York dealer, and I think he wanted somebody to tell him what was wrong with his granddaughter’s painting.’ I was rushing out all the stops again, of course.

Sir Reginald gave me another smile but his eyes told me I hadn’t a hope of fooling him. However, Nadia came in with some personal feminine stuff. She wasn’t as elaborately tarted up as she’d been in London, but in a thin woollen suit of pale indian yellow, setting off her soft grey hair and eyes, she looked as deliciously wicked as ever. ‘She is very stupid, don’t you think, that girl Rosalia?’ She used the same low seductive tone, as if we were exchanging the most intimate and delectable secrets. ‘She has no talent, no temperament. A spoilt child, don’t you think, Mr Bedford?’

‘She certainly didn’t take criticism very well. And the old man may have spoilt her. But I liked her better before I left. By the way, I met von Emmerick at a party up in Westchester, while I was staying with my dealer in New York. Sam Harnberg.’ I was looking at Sir Reginald again now. ‘You may know his gallery in
57
th Street.’

‘As a matter of fact I do. I bought a Jackson Pollock from him, a few years ago.’ He turned away for a moment because a very good-looking blonde youth was now offering him a drink. Nadia flashed a meaning look at me as he accepted the drink. It’s just possible that Sir Reginald sensed that we’d exchanged this look, because now his manner suddenly hardened and his voice was curt and contemptuous. ‘Look, Bedford, don’t work so hard trying to connect everything up socially, to explain why you’re here. You’re not so stupid, so why do you imagine we are?’ He moved away with the good-looking youth, who’d been waiting for him.

Nadia drew me away in the opposite direction, as if she wanted me to admire one of the worst pictures of the Rhine that can ever have been painted. ‘Pretend you are looking at it,’ she hissed in my ear. ‘I have been wishing to talk to you ever since that night in London. And now you are here it is very important. Point at the picture.’

I pointed. ‘Probably the most metallic greens of all time. Go on, Nadia. Where do we talk?’

‘After dinner there is music here and a lot of people. I will slip out and meet you outside the guest house. Let us say at quarter past nine. Now we must go back. You have seen the picture.’

Direktor von Emmerick, who had changed into a dark suit, now made a big entrance. I lost Nadia and accepted another drink from Otto, and then we all went along a corridor behind the massive table, to the dining-room. It was in the same style as the hall, though not quite so ambitious, suitable for a minor baron. Even so there was plenty of room for thirty diners, and as there were only a dozen of us, this evening, we were spread rather widely around one table. Otto showed me my place, which was on the inferior side of the table, facing the entrance from the kitchen, and of course not the side where von Emmerick, Nadia and Merlan-Smith were sitting. I had Otto on my right; on my left the middle-aged wife of one of the German chemists. By this time I was feeling hungry, otherwise I’d have felt I was in for a dreary hour, which wouldn’t pass any faster because I was impatient to keep this date with Nadia.

The first course, cold
hors d
’
œuvre
stuff, was already there in front of us. When we’d done, a waitress cleared away these plates. But then the next and main course came from the kitchen with some ceremony. It was brought in by three dark-faced men wearing short white jackets, and of course I had a good view of their entrance. The first two were so dark and leathery-skinned that they may have come from the Aurocanian Indians in the south. The third man carrying a loaded tray looked nearly as dark and had a close-cropped beard and moustache. But he hadn’t come from the south and the Aurocanian Indians. He’d come from the north, first from the Arnaldos Institute, and before that from the biochemical lab in Tenniscourt Street, Cambridge.

I’d found Joe Farne.

11

I don’t think I made any kind of noise. I just stared, though of course my eyes may have been half out of my head. But when Joe – and I was dead certain it
was
Joe – passed out of my sight and I looked across the table, I saw that both von Emmerick and Merlan-Smith were watching me. There was a bottle of Chilean red in front of me, and I spilt some of it, filling my glass. I’ll admit, I was shaken all right. And it wasn’t only seeing Joe Farne turned into an Indian waiter. It was also the hard long looks that came across the table from those two cold clever bastards, like frozen sneers at Joe, at me, at any kind of life we simple cods wanted to live. I felt like chucking my wine in their faces, but of course I didn’t, I drank it instead, and then gave them some sort of grin.

Joe didn’t serve any food on my side but I watched him across the table, both then and a little later, and I tried, without being too obvious, to catch his eye. But there wasn’t really an eye to catch. It was Joe Farne all right – I hadn’t the slightest doubt about that – but the Joe Farne I’d known wasn’t really there, he’d been lost somewhere between the Arnaldos Institute and that kitchen, so there couldn’t be any genuine eye-catching. I had to give it up. Yet Joe had written that letter to Isabel from somewhere round here, and had scribbled that list of names which clever Sir Reginald had had pinched while entertaining me, that list which I now carried in my head – one thing clever Reg Merlan-Smith didn’t know. I drank more wine. In fact, I drank rather too much.

If I’d had less, after being rattled so badly, I wouldn’t have behaved as I did after we broke up for coffee. Merlan-Smith – I’m tired of calling him Sir Reginald – came over to me, pulling at a big cigar as if he were doing it a favour. Now I’d noticed before that there’s one thing goes wrong with these smooth false types, always acting a part, when they feel they’re right on top of everybody and everything. They allow a sort of insolent contempt, which they probably feel inside all the time, to begin to show. They can’t resist letting some of it out. And of course by this time, like me, he couldn’t help playing up to all the drinks he’d had.

‘Well, Bedford,’ he began, ‘looks like being rather dull for you here, doesn’t it? I’m afraid you’ll find our friend von Emmerick monopolises Nadia, and there’s nobody else you know here, is there?’

‘Well, there’s you of course,’ I told him. ‘We could talk about that night when you asked me to dinner so that somebody could break into my studio. Nice gentlemanly job.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh come off it, Merlan-Smith. You were all so clumsy, right from the time Mitchell picked me up at Cambridge station. Everything stuck out a mile. You were intended to come into possession of that list of course, just to show you how you were slipping. If the people in our division were as slap-happy as you seem to be – I don’t mean just you but all of you – the whole organisation would be in danger.’

He didn’t know what to say. While he muttered: ‘Still don’t know what you mean. What organisation?’ his eyes were already asking more searching questions.

‘Come over here and I’ll show you,’ I said, hardly moving my lips. In point of fact where we were standing was just as good as the place I moved him to, a few yards away, but it’s no use half-doing the dramatic. ‘Now look at what I’m holding – quickly – and keep quiet.’ I opened my hand, only a few inches from his nose, and let him see the gold badge of the Wavy Eight that Danelli had made for me.

I had my money’s worth. If they’d shaken me with Joe Farne, now it was my turn. I thought for a moment he was about to choke. Then, as I put the badge back into my pocket, he began: ‘But – my God – Bedford – ’

‘Shut up,’ I told him in a sharp whisper. ‘And now stop being a dam’ fool. I’m here to find out how much Farne knows. What use is he to me serving meat and vegetables? You clowns between you may have ruined months of hard work.’

‘But – look here, Bedford – ’

‘Good night!’ He tried to stop me but I pushed past him, on my way out. I know it wasn’t clever. I’d risked pulling a big bluff, which could be called any time, just for the pleasure of wiping that insolent grin off his face. And I’d had to go and do it when at last, at the end of a long road, I’d found Joe Farne. No, it wasn’t clever. The fact is, that Chilean red wine, which seems fairly light and easy, can hit you hard if you drink too much too quickly.

It was only just after nine, and I hadn’t to meet Nadia until quarter-past. There was a side door in the corridor leading to the hall, which was already buzzing with people waiting for the music. Having the corridor to myself, I slipped out of this side door, then dodged back in a sort of yard, to peep through the uncovered windows of the kitchen department in the hope of seeing Joe Farne. There were about half-a-dozen people at work there, including the two Indian types in the short white coats, but I couldn’t see Joe. They weren’t using any Cambridge bio-chemists for the washing-up.