'What was your father's name, I mean, what is his name?' I asked, correcting myself at once. I had been influenced by her temporal oscillations, 'He maintains, and always has,' 'He said, he says,' 'He was, he is,' I imagined that she kept slipping into the wrong tense because her father was old, and she would find it harder and harder to see in him the father of her childhood; it happens to all of us, we take the fathers and mothers of our childhood to be the real, essential and almost only ones, and later, even though we still recognize and respect and support them, we see them slightly as impostors. Perhaps they, in turn, see us like that, in youth and adulthood. (I was absenting myself from my children's childhood, who knows for how much longer; the only advantage, if that banishment were to prove prolonged, would be that, later, we would not see each other as impostors, they would not see me that way, nor I they. More like uncle and nephews, something strange like that.)
'Alberto. Albert. Or Albert.' The second time, she said the name as it would be pronounced in Catalan, with the stress on the second syllable, and the third time as it is in English, with the stress on the first. I deduced from this that she must have ended up pronouncing her father's name in that third way in his adopted country, and that this is what friends and acquaintances would call him, and his second wife when they were at home, and how the child Pérez Nuix would have heard him addressed before she relinquished that pretentious hyphen. 'Why do you ask?'
'Oh, no reason. When someone is talking to me about a person I don't know, I always get a clearer idea of them if I know their first name. Names can be very influential sometimes. For example, it's not insignificant that Tupra is called Bertram.' And with my next words, I took advantage of my temporary position in the control seat, it was an attempt to make her feel insecure, or to instill in her a sense of now unnecessary haste, I was used to the situation now and to her agreeable presence, my living room was infinitely more welcoming with her inside it, and more entertaining. 'I still don't know why you're telling me all this about your father. Not that I don't find it interesting, mind. Plus, of course, I'm interested in you.'
'Don't worry, I haven't really been beating about the bush, or not entirely, I'm getting to the point now,' she replied, slightly embarrassed. My words had had an effect, sometimes it's very easy to make someone feel nervous, even people who are not the nervous type. She was one such person, as were Tupra, Mulryan and Rendel. And presumably I was as well, given that they'd made me a member of the group, although I didn't believe that to be a virtue I possessed, not at least that I was aware of, I often feel like a real bundle of nerves. Of course it might be that we were all pretending or that we simply kept our cool at work, but were less successful at doing so outside. 'Anyway, since my mother died, my father has spent the last six years more out of control than ever, more desperate for activity and company. And after a certain age, however sociable and charming you might be, getting both those things can cost money, and without my mother there to keep a check on him, he's been spending it hand over fist.'
'You mean he let her manage his affairs?'
'Not exactly. It's just that the money was largely hers, she was the one with the income, from her family, and all more or less in order and assured. Not that she was rich, she didn't own a fortune or anything, but she had enough not to suffer any financial difficulties and to spend a life, or even a life and a half, in comfort. His earnings were sporadic. He would plunge optimistically into various risky businesses, film and television production, publishing houses, fashionable bars, would-be auction houses that never got off the ground. One or two went well and brought him large profits for a year or two, but they were never very stable. Others went disastrously wrong, or else he was cheated and lost everything he'd invested. Either way, he never changed his lifestyle, or went without his usual entertainments and celebrations. My mother did try to curb his excesses and ensure that he didn't squander so much money that it constituted a danger to her finances. But that ended six years ago. And about a month ago now, I found out that he's incurred enormous gambling debts. He's always loved the races and betting on his beloved horses; but now he bets on anything, whatever it might be—and he's widened the field to the Internet where the possibilities are endless; he frequents gambling dens and casinos, places where there's never any shortage of overexcited people, which for as long as I can remember is what has always attracted him, and so those places have become his principal way of keeping the party going, given that for him, the world is one long party; and to go to those places, he doesn't have to charm anyone or wait to be invited, which is a great advantage for a man getting on in years. Then he took to disappearing from home for long periods, and I'd hear nothing from him until it occurred to him to call me up one night from Bath or Brighton or Paris or Barcelona or from here in London, where he'd taken it into his head to book into a hotel, in the city where he has his own house, and a very nice house too, simply in order to feel more a part of the hustle and bustle, to wander through the foyer and strike up conversations in the various reception rooms, usually with absurd American tourists, who are always the keenest to chat with the natives. I also learned that, up until only a few months ago and for decades now, he'd been renting a little suite in a family-run hotel, the Basil Street Hotel, which isn't luxurious and a bit old-fashioned, but, still, imagine the expense, and imagine what he must have used it for, and hospitality is the thing that always costs most. At least that debt has been paid, the people at the hotel were very understanding and I came to an agreement with them. That isn't the case with the gambling debts, of course, which have got completely out of hand, as tends to happen to innocent aficionados, especially those who like to ingratiate themselves with their new acquaintances, and my father loves to keep refreshing his circle of friends.' Young Pérez Nuix paused for breath (albeit unostentatiously), she uncrossed and crossed her legs, inverting their position (the one beneath on top, and the one on top beneath, I thought I heard the run advance still further, I was keeping my eye on it), and she pushed her glass towards me an inch, propelling it forward by its base. I would have preferred her not to drink so much, although she seemed to hold her drink well. I pretended not to notice, I would wait until she insisted, or until she pushed it a little closer. 'Fortunately, the debts aren't too widely spread, which is something. So he doesn't entirely lack sense, and he borrowed money from a bank, well, from a banker friend, on a semi-personal basis, the banker was really a friend of my mother's and only my father's friend by proximity and association. However, this gentleman, Mr. Vickers, brought in a front man, in order, I understand, not to involve his bank in any way: he's a man with very varied business dealings, he's into lotteries and betting and a thousand other things, including acting as an occasional moneylender. The sums always came from the banker in this case, but the front man was charged with delivering the money and recovering it, along, shall we say, with the bank's interest. And if he can't recover the money, then he'll have to answer to Vickers and pay him the money out of his own pocket, now are you beginning to get some idea of the mess my father is in?'
'I'm not sure; they'd report him, wouldn't they? Or how does it work? Can't you come to some arrangement with this man Vickers, if he was a friend of your mother's?'
'No, that isn't how it works at all, you don't understand,' said Pérez Nuix, and in those last few words there was, for the first time, a hint of desperation. 'The money is originally his, but to all practical effects it's as if it wasn't. It's as if he had given the order: "Lend this gentleman up to this amount and have him return it to you with this much interest and by this deadline, and if he doesn't return it, bring me the money anyway." Officially, he doesn't even touch it, when it comes to handing it over or to recovering it. It's not up to him to worry about the transactions, these are the responsibility of the front man from start to finish, and the banker exercises no control over them whatsoever; and that is precisely how he wants it; consequently, he refuses to intervene, nor would he wish to. He doesn't e
ven want to know if the money he receives on a certain date comes from the debtor or not; he will receive it from the person who received it from him in the first place, which is how it should be. That's all. The rest is not his responsibility. And so my father doesn't have a problem with Vickers, but with this other man, and he's not the sort to go to the police to make some pointless formal complaint. It isn't like it was in Dickens' day when people went to prison for the most paltry debts. What would he gain by that anyway, putting a seventy-five-year-old man behind bars? Assuming that were a possibility.'
'Wouldn't they first impound your father's goods or something?' 'Forget about all those slow, legal routes, Jaime, this man would never resort to anything like that in order to settle an outstanding bill, and I assume that's why Vickers and other people use him, so that no one has to waste time and so that everything turns out as planned.'
'Couldn't your father sell something, his house or whatever else he has left?' Pérez Nuix's look, a flicker of impatience despite her inferior or disadvantageous position (she had now started asking me the favor), made me realize that such a solution was impossible, either because the house had been sold already or because she wasn't prepared to leave her father without his own home, which is the one thing that consoles and calms the old and the sick when the time comes to rest, however fond they've been of wandering. I didn't insist, I changed tack at once. 'Well, if what you're saying is that you're afraid they'll beat him up or knife him, I don't see what they'd gain from that, the banker or his front man. The corpse of an elderly man turning up in the river.'—'I've seen too many old films,' I thought then. 'I always imagine the Thames giving back swollen, ashen bodies, rocked by the waters.'
'The front man would pay the banker, so the banker's no longer involved, you can forget about him; he merely triggered the whole thing, and although the money comes from him, it doesn't any more.'—'According to that theory,' I thought, 'matters are not triggered by the person doing the asking, but by the person who grants the request; I'd better take note'—'As for the front man, he might suffer a loss on this occasion, but on others, he'll have made a profit and will continue to do so. What he can't allow is for there to be a precedent, for someone not to keep their word and for nothing to happen to him. Nothing bad I mean. Do you understand?' And again there was that note in her voice, perhaps it was more incipient exasperation than anything else. 'Not that they'll necessarily inflict physical harm on my father, although that can't be ruled out at all. One thing is sure, though, they will seriously harm him in some way. Possibly through me, if they can find no better way of teaching him a lesson, or, from their point of view, of applying the rules, penalizing non-payment and seeing justice done. They couldn't let a bold seafarer who has failed to pay the toll go unreprimanded. Besides, that isn't what most worries me, what might happen to me I mean, and it's unlikely they would turn on me, they know that I know some influential people, that on some flanks I'm protected and can look after myself; I'm not protected against a beating or a knife attack, obviously, but they wouldn't take that route with me, they'd try instead to discredit me, to make sure I didn't get to work again in any of the fields that interest me, to ruin my future, and doing that to a young person isn't at all easy, the world keeps turning and sometimes, inevitably, things right themselves again. What I most fear is what they might do to him, physically or morally, or biographically. He walks so proudly through life that he wouldn't understand what was happening to him. That would be the worst thing, his confusion, he would never recover. I don't know, they would spoil what remains of his life, or else shorten it. Always assuming, of course, touch wood, fingers crossed, that they don't decide simply to take his life.' And she touched wood and crossed her fingers. 'It's very easy to ruin an old man, or indeed, heaven forbid, to kill him.' And she again crossed her fingers. 'He'd fall over if you pushed him.'
She fell silent for a moment and sat looking at her empty glass, but this time she preferred not to or didn't even think to push it closer to me. She used the same two fingers to stroke the base of the glass. It was as if she could see her blithe, frivolous, fragile father in that glass, and you would only need to tip it over to shatter it.
'But what can I do about it? Where do I come into all this?'
She glanced up at once and looked at me with her bright, quick eyes, they were brown and young and not yet overburdened with tenacious visions that refuse to go away.
'The man you're due to interpret the day after tomorrow or the next, or at the latest next week,' she replied, barely letting me finish my second question, like someone who has spent a long time in the fog waiting for the lighthouse to appear and who cries out when she does finally spot it. 'Well, he's the front man, our problem, the problem. And he's another Englishman with a strange surname. He's called Vanni Incompara.'
Vanni or Vanny Incompara, that, she said, was how he was known, although his official name was John, and he was presumably English, but she wasn't sure whether he was so by birth—she was currently trying to put together facts about his past, but the search kept throwing up unexpected lacunae, and he was turning out to be a most elusive man—or by virtue of a very rapidly acquired citizenship, thanks to influential contacts or to some strange secret subterfuge, and so she didn't know whether he was a first- or second-generation immigrant, like her and Tupra, who had both been born in London, although for all she knew, Bertram might be third- or fourth- or nth-generation, perhaps his family had been settled on the island for centuries. She had never asked him about that, nor about the origin of his strange surname, she didn't know if it was Finnish, Russian, Czech, or Armenian—or Turkish as I guessed and as Wheeler had suggested to me the first time he mentioned the person who would later become my boss, slighdy mocking his name before I had even met Tupra—or, as she suddenly suggested, Indian; the fact is she had no idea, perhaps she would ask him one day, he never mentioned his roots, nor any relatives alive or dead or distant or close, that is, blood relatives—she must have been thinking about Beryl when she added this, and I, of course, thought of her too—as if he had sprung into being by spontaneous generation; although there was no reason why he should mention his roots, in England people tended to be reserved if not opaque when it came to personal matters, he sometimes talked about himself and his experiences, but always in vague terms, never giving a place or a date to his exploits, recalling each one with almost no context, isolated from the others, as if he were showing us only tiny fragments of shattered tombstones.
It was possible that this John Incompara had arrived in England not that many years ago, which might explain why he still liked to be called by the diminutive form of his Italian name, Giovanni, she explained, didactic and helpful, just in case I hadn't picked up on that. Anyway, his activities had only come to light fairly recently, and he was clearly an able fellow: he had quickly made himself some money—or perhaps he had brought it with him—and some relatively important friendships, and if, as was likely, he was breaking the law, he was careful to disguise or camouflage any illegalities with other entirely legitimate deals and to leave no proof or evidence of the more drastic, more brutal actions he was suspected of carrying out. She could find nothing incriminating, or, rather, nothing she could use as a negotiating tool to persuade him to write off the paternal debt. The only thing she had now was me. Vanni Incompara was going to be examined, studied and interpreted by the group and I had been assigned to do this work alongside Tupra. As far as she knew, this report had been commissioned by a third party, by some private private individual who was doubtless considering doing business with Incompara and wanted to be extra careful and find out more—to what extent he could be trusted and to what extent he would deceive, to what extent he was constant and to what extent resentful or patient or dangerous or resolute, and so on, the usual thing. In turn, should the opportunity arise during this probable encounter with Tupra, Incompara wanted to try and establish the beginnings of a relationship or even friendship with him, for he knew
that Tupra had excellent contacts in almost every sphere and could prove a fruitful introduction to many celebrities and other wealthy people. What Pérez Nuix was asking of me was no big deal really, she said. It would be a huge favor to her but would not require much effort from me, she said again, despite my earlier protests, now that she was explaining what would be required. I merely had to help Incompara—insofar as this was possible and prudent—to emerge from this scrutiny with a Good or a Pass; to give a favorable opinion about his trustworthiness, his attitude towards associates and allies—could he prove dangerous, did he hold a grudge—his ability to resolve problems and overcome difficulties, his personal courage; but neither must I exaggerate or diverge too much from what Tupra saw in him or from what I believed Tupra saw (he didn't tend to give his own opinion in our presence, instead he would ask us and urge us on, and that way we would guess where he was leading us and where he was heading), but introduce shades and nuances—which would be easy enough—so that I would not present our boss with a picture lit by only one light or painted all one color, which he would be inclined to distrust on principle because it was far too simple; I must, in short, in no way prejudice Incompara's chances. And if I happened to notice the slightest hint of affinity or sympathy between the two men, I should foment and encourage this later, although again unemphatically, discreetly, even indifferently; just a quiet echo, a whisper, a murmur. 'The tranquil and patient or reluctant and languid murmur,' I thought, 'of words that slip by gently or indolently, without the obstacle of the alert reader, or of vehemence, and which are then absorbed passively, as if they were a gift, and which resemble something easy and incalculable that brings no advantage. Like the words carried along or left behind by rivers in the middle of a feverish night, when the fever has abated; and that is one of the times when anything can be believed, even the craziest, most unlikely things, even a nonexistent drop of blood, just as one believes in the books that speak to you then, to your weariness and your somnambulism, to your fever, to your dreams, even if you are or believe yourself to be wide awake, and books can persuade us of anything then, even that they're a connecting thread between the living and the dead, that they are in us and we are in them, and that they understand us.' And immediately I remembered more or less what Tupra had said at Sir Peter Wheeler's buffet supper by the River Cherwell in Oxford: 'Sometimes that moment lasts only a matter of days, but sometimes it lasts forever.'