“I don’t have policies. I have whims. I’m a total child, Edgar. All I do is play. In adult terms, I’m a dabbler. I can’t explain, but there’s something about scooping lettuce from a salad bowl that you carved yourself. Preferably lettuce from your own garden, but nothing grows in this godforsaken province other than peras peludas.
“In our case, these whims of mine have proved a funny antidote. Henry has a closetful of designer silk and Italian suede, but he’s much safer walking around in hand-sewn cotton. If I had the time he’d wear cloth I wove as well—from thread I spun, from cotton I ginned, but obviously there are limits. A homemade shirt might not hang quite right, but it’s a kind of protection.” She hung her head. “The last few months he’s gone back to the Calvin Kleins. I don’t blame him, but I think it’s dangerous.”
“Why’s that?” Edgar was completely out of his depth.
“I’m talking about the conservation of meaning,” she said passionately. “When you’re young, you take significance for granted. In childhood, every silly clockwork donkey, or your first garish pink lipstick, is important. Then the problem is the opposite: you’re overpowered by meaning, drowning in it. But later . . . Well, I can’t go buy Henry a present, can I?”
Edgar could only intuit vaguely that they had money troubles.
“Barrington understood,” she added sadly. “But Barrington collected meaning like lint. Like that Peanuts character: it followed him in a cloud.”
“You’re the only one I’ve met so far who mentions him in the past tense.”
“It’s a discipline.”
“I hope your, um, circumstances don’t mean you’ll have to clear out of this house,” said Edgar. “It’s cool.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve misled you. You’re new here, you must be knackered after your long journey, and here I’m being coy. Don’t worry about our being evicted, Edgar. We own this house and five others all over Europe. But I’m a little tired myself. If you don’t mind, we won’t get into it now.”
Dismissed and disconcerted, Edgar drifted back to the knot of gossips in the corner, his gate a bit unsteady. He’d switched to Heineken but eyed the brown bottles of Choque, curiously magnetic. The stuff was awful, punishing, but, much like the subject of Mr. Saddler, inexplicably difficult to leave alone.
At least when Edgar rejoined the group they’d moved on, which was probably the work of the visiting German from Der Spiegel. In his fidgety silence, Reinhold Glück had seemed impatient with ceaseless scuttlebutt on someone he didn’t know. Serious and bespectacled, Glück was doing a feature comparing O Creme de Barbear with German neo-Nazis. Edgar recognized the tone before penetrating the German accent; liberal indignation whiffled with the same strident huffiness all over the world.
“It is nothing but racism!” said Glück.
“We’re not talking about a handful of funny-sounding visitors,” said Trudy, crossing her legs. “What about all those Turks in Germany? What if there were more Turks than Germans? If they could vote your prime minister out of office—”
“Chancellor,” said Martha.
“Whatever. And you walk down the street and everyone’s talking Turkish? And it’s hard to find a Pilsner anymore, like, all you can find is, I don’t know, mead, or whatever Turkish people drink. Know what a place like that’s called? Turkey. There wouldn’t even be a Germany anymore. Wouldn’t that tee you off? Where’s your national pride?”
“The whole world has suffered for Germany’s national pride,” said Glück. “I have a different kind of pride.”
“Well, I have American pride,” said Trudy. “Us Floridians have Cubans, Haitians, and Mexicans up the wazoo. When I grab a cab, if I don’t know Spanish for ‘airport’ the cabby looks at me like I’m the nitwit. In Miami, I feel like a foreigner in my own country.”
“In a truly pluralistic society, all people feel equally foreign and equally at home. You are not talking about being American, but about being white and in control. It is the same in Barba. The fascists in O Creme only want to stay in power—”
“I’m with you in theory, Reinhold,” said Martha. “Still, nobody in crappy little Barba has power of any description to hang on to.”
“They do now,” said Ordway. “Whole bloody Western world is up in arms about immigration in crappy little Barba. That’s power. Look at us: we live here, we file from here, we’re consumed with local politics. And we’d never have considered so much as a bargain package holiday to this filthy bog five years ago.”
“That impresses you?” said Edgar.
“It is impressive, innit?” Ordway’s standard middle-class London accent was decorated with lowbrow touches. Translate: white geeks from Long Island lacing their conversation with yo! and I hear dat! like the brothers in the ’hood.
“The Sobs having murdered over two thousand people—that impresses you, too?” The journalistic penchant for calling members of the SOB the Sobs and their political counterparts in O Creme de Barbear Creamies had first jarred as swaggeringly familiar, but Edgar got a charge out of tossing off the jargon himself.
“Kellogg, don’t be so earnest!” said Ordway. “There must be some bloke side of you that fancies their flash. The Sobs have Interpol, the FBI, the CIA, the Portuguese Army, and the local coppers combing every pera peluda peel of Barban rubbish, and nobody can find a trace of them. Even Creamies keep their hands clean. They get lifted, but the next week they’re back on the street when nothing sticks. Other than the author of that sodding autobiography, I Was an SOB—a load of bollocks, in my view—no one’s dug up a single bona fide member of that lot in five years. That’s impressive, mate.”
“Only to little boys,” said Martha.
“Already, half the schoolchildren in the States are Spanish-speaking,” Trudy was preaching fervently to Reinhold. “And kids grow up. They’re taking over!”
“Majority status is no people’s right,” Glück insisted. “It is an accident, a lucky advantage. Like any advantage you want to hold on to it. But it is typical reasoning of privileged people to assume that just because you have something, ipso facto you deserve it. In truth, this ‘defense of borders’ is naked defense of self-interest—not of justice.”
“I still think Verdade has a point,” said Trudy sulkily. “If I were Barban, I’d sure get peeved with hordes of North African Muslims overrunning my home. These immigrants don’t have any money—”
“From what I have read, the Moroccans are much more industrious than the lazy native Iberians,” said Glück. “And Moroccans don’t blow up airplanes, either.”
“Okay, the Creamies are extreme,” said Trudy. Recrossing her legs, she added slyly, “But you gotta admit: Tomás Verdade is pretty sexy.”
“Violence puts an issue on the map,” Ordway was lecturing Edgar. “Sob tactics may not be pretty, but they’re sussed. No casualties, we’re not even having this conversation.”
“I’d concede that targeting world powers is smart,” said Edgar, beginning to get in the swing. “Terrorizing has-been Portugal wouldn’t work. No one would give a shit.”
“Yes,” Ordway droned wearily. “That observation has been made before.”
Edgar flagged the jaded response. By nature he had both a good feel for the trite and a special aversion to it. He could pinpoint the exact instant when having a “bad hair day” was no longer funny.
“Anyway,” said Ordway, “you’ll soon clue that your new profession is dull as ditch water unless someone gets hurt. I covered the Quebec referendum on secession: few punch-ups, a bit o’ shouting. Even my mum used the paper to line her kitty-litter box.”
“News isn’t entertainment,” said Edgar.
“News is exclusively entertainment,” said Martha, “according to Barrington.”
“Ten minutes, girls and boyos!” Ordway exclaimed, checking his watch. “A record.”
Chapter 8
Ninety-Nine Push-Ups and Cloudberry Shampoo
AT A PAT on his shoulder, Edgar jolted uprigh
t. Nicola laughed. “You look like a vento head!” she teased. “Can I drive you home?”
Unchivalrously, he accepted the lift. After Nicola went up to fetch her car keys, she met Edgar in the foyer with a significant glance. “Before I forget.” From the folds of her cloak, she withdrew an oversize brass skeleton key, its head cast with runes, as if it might open a chest of gold doubloons or a secret medieval torture chamber. The key was heavy, with a smaller, modern key attached, and so made quite a clatter when she dropped it on the flagstones. As she dived to scoop it up, Henry was walking up the stairs.
“No, let me,” said Edgar, lunging for the set. “My keys,” he said to Henry, “from the Record. Dropped them. Clumsy of me. Must be tired.”
Henry blinked. The key was distinctive. Something didn’t quite compute. Still Nicola looked, though whiter by a shade, relieved.
“That was quick thinking, in the foyer,” said Nicola, as they pulled off in her Land Rover. “Thanks.”
“You may be a dandy rug weaver,” said Edgar. “But when it comes to the art of deception, you suck.”
She smiled, tightly. “I’m not sure if I should be offended by that, or not.”
Edgar delivered a few slash-slash assessments of her other guests, but Nicola didn’t pick up, and Edgar feared that he’d just queered the goodwill of one of those if-you-can’t-say-anything-nice types.
“I’m sorry that your new home won’t have been tidied,” she said. “It was left more or less au naturel. Not that Barrington was a slob—I mean, he was, but after these big, impromptu dos of his a few guests were always eager to stay and clear up. Some nights—mornings, rather—they actually fought over the Hoover. I dare say there were certain young ladies who’d have scoured his toilet bowl with their own toothbrushes.”
“No, the real test,” Edgar mumbled, “is whether they’d use them after.”
“Funny, some people go missing for weeks, and no one notices until a frightful smell starts leaking from their flats. But the alarm went out about Barrington in a matter of hours. He was meant to dine at Trudy’s that night. She’d made beef Wellington, of all things, an all-day-in-the-kitchen affair that Barrington had once mentioned in passing that he fancied. Foie gras, wild mushrooms, goodness knows what else. She insisted on making the puff pastry from scratch; the leaves came out a bit thick. Me, I find it’s often the simplest . . . Oh, never mind.
“He was always late, of course, but he’d usually make an appearance. I’m afraid that Trudy’s having gone to so much bother would count for all too little, but there’s not that much to do here, and the rest of us were all at Trudy’s.”
“More to the point, you were at Trudy’s.”
Nicola ignored the insinuation. “By two a.m. she was hysterical. We all thought she was overreacting, upset about having made rather a hash of the beef (not to be unkind, but it came out a tad well-done, and there was no disguising that cutting the crust was hard work). We thought she was hurt that after all her talking up the dish he’d made other plans. The dear girl has made great capital since from her intuition that something ghastly was wrong. How she felt ‘a wash of cold air’ and ‘suddenly Cinziero felt empty.’ She claims she’ll never again eat beef Wellington—which she insists on calling ‘beef Barrington’ in tribute. Well. Not much danger, in Barba.
“I’ve only been back to Barrington’s once,” she continued. “And please don’t mention it to Henry. But I simply couldn’t bear the idea of the police smashing that lovely cedar door with a battering ram. So when Barrington became an official missing person, I rang the chief inspector and arranged to let him in.
“The detectives went through everything,” she explained. “All they found was some gibberish on Barrington’s computer disks. Nonsense, according to Lieutenant de Carvalho. There was only one part of the house I steered the police away from. A small tower; they never noticed the door. You’ve the key to its padlock. But Barrington told me not to go up there. So I haven’t.”
“Even Bluebeard’s wives didn’t play along with that shit,” Edgar slurred. “You always so obedient?”
“When I make a promise.”
Including to your husband? “What do you think’s up there, then? Bodies?”
“Maybe one. That’s the only place we haven’t checked for Barrington. But on the off chance . . . I guess I didn’t want to know.”
She pulled up to a long dark hulk and sat, with the Land Rover idling, hands in her lap. Though the villa was virtually invisible, she closed her eyes, as if for good measure. “It does light up,” she said dismally, all but spelling out: Though only when a certain someone was inside.
Edgar fumbled his good-byes and trundled with his bags to the dim front porch. The lock responded gladly to his skeleton key. Pushed by the Barban gale, the thick cedar door opened by itself, as if Edgar were expected.
After groping for a light switch, he had a vague, cockeyed impression of having infiltrated a deserted sheikdom. He bumbled upstairs to a king-size four-poster. An ironing board would have sufficed. Having dragged off his clothes, he plunged into a small death.
Edgar woke between royal blue satin sheets, under billows of goose-down duvets. Pillows buttressed his every side, as if he were packed for overseas shipping. Opposite, lemony late-day sunlight filtered between shifting drapes of crimson velvet, and upper panes of leaded stained glass dolloped red and green lollipops onto the bed. A sole reminder of where he was, a high hissing whistle sang through the window cracks. Panes rattled as if o vento insano were rapping to get in, and a faint, low-pitched moan groaned outside.
According to his diving watch—in his freelance poverty so discordantly showy, yet in the context of his immediate surroundings a dime-store trinket—he’d slept fifteen hours.
Edgar propped on the springy pillows, which puffed cool air onto his cheek at every readjustment. This was indeed a master bedroom. Laid with overlapping Oriental carpets, the floor was elevated a step under the bed. Raising the four-poster into a throne of repose, the dais made fifteen hours’ sleep seem his due. Edgar could easily see settling here for days at a time amid splayed half-read books, occasionally granting an audience or tinkling a clear brass bell for breakfast service. The image of broad trays (carved camphor wood, Edgar decided, with ivory handles) hovered over both tall side tables. Spread with embroidered cloths, they’d be littered with goblets of guava juice, crumbs of honeyed pastries, ornate cups of thick, sweet coffee, and filigreed silver spoons.
Disquieted, Edgar disentangled himself. He disapproved of sloth, and had a positive horror of honeyed pastries. The bedding was contaminated with another man’s fantasy life.
Edgar padded gingerly around the room, as if afraid to wake someone up—like himself. More crimson velvet canopied the bed, and velvet drapes hung on rings from the frame’s upper rail. The curtains could be pulled all the way around the mattress to make a private tent. The fragrant dark cherries and rosewoods of the massive furniture were carved into busty prows of women or tumbles of ripe fruit; the bureau shimmered with mother-of-pearl inlays. A mosaic of colored glass beads framing the mirror threw highlights on Edgar’s naked figure, making his chest look more finely muscled than it was and his complexion lustier than he felt. The reflection likewise elongated his frame to tower beside the bedpost, and Edgar was only five-foot-eight. It was a mirror made for self-deceit. What it must have done for Saddler, a much larger man by all accounts, well—he must have looked leviathan.
Penetrating scents of cedar, sandalwood, and the residual haunt of a woman’s perfume intoxicated Edgar with the giddy notion of going back to bed. Rubbing his eyes, he ambled to the cavernous en suite bath to splash his face in the black alabaster sink. Drying, he plunged into a white towel plush as rabbit’s fur; the nap buried his fingers to the first knuckle. Scoping out the sunken tub—round, black marble, and wide enough for laps—he drew himself a bath.
Edgar treated himself to warm-up hot-water blasts and picked through an array of toiletries—
saffron conditioner, mandarin-and-cloudberry shampoo, almond oil, truffle-and-musk mud-mask: effeminate frippery. Edgar inclined toward plain Ivory and timeless Head & Shoulders: man-stuff. Still. He tried the cloudberry shampoo.
The clothing he’d packed was clearly too summery, so Edgar was able to rationalize picking through rack upon rack of preposterous regalia in the walk-in closet: old-fashioned tails and cutaways, with magenta cummerbunds; kimonos whose dragons licked up the facing; quilted smoking jackets; flowing rayon shirts wide as kites, writhing with van Gogh sunflowers or flaming with foot-wide poinsettias; a charcoal woolen cape, lined with cream silk, fit for Bela Lugosi; some biblically voluminous caftans and togas; and a number of officers’ uniforms from foreign military outfits, whose appearance of authenticity was all the more reason not to prance around in them. None of the outlandish glad rags suited a man for writing, only for being written about. Although a smattering of standard Anglo fare—Burberrys, camelhairs, and tweeds from the finest London tailors—bespoke a journalist who occasionally did his job, the suspenders (braces, a voice whispered) marched with toy soldiers, and there wasn’t a tie to be found, just two dozen ascots.
Impetuously, Edgar slipped a dressing gown off its wooden hanger. The radiant golden robe faced with plum brocade might have costumed Apollo Creed.
Camp, sure. But somehow in their vastness all these garments stopped shy of kitsch. The lines of the finery were so drastic, their patterns so fantastic, their pretensions drafted on such a scale that they were rescued from ridiculousness by sheer audacity.
Except on Edgar. A foot too long, the nacreous dressing gown dragged like a wedding train. The shoulder pads drooped to his elbows, and the sleeves dangled inches beyond his fingertips. Even in the magic mirror, he looked like a Norman Rockwell: Junior Wears Father’s Bathrobe.
Fuck it. Edgar gathered the train and swirled out of the bedroom with a little transvestite flounce, assured that you could get away with anything so long as you did it with conviction.