The Chateau Marmont
The splinter of reflected sunlight in the drop of water that clung trembling in the breeze to the thin blue nylon of a swimming costume just at the spot where it stretched tautest over the apex of the mound of Venus of a redhead in tortoiseshell sunglasses who lay smoking a cigarette on a reclining chair beside the oval swimming pool of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard: that was Loeser as he stood in his underpants at the window of his hotel room on the morning after his arrival in Los Angeles. He, too, hung in that drop of water, every parameter of his lust encoded in the coefficients of its surface tension, quite ready, if it dried up in the sun-doubled skin-heat, to dry up with it. Then the redhead noticed him and he dived out of sight so fast he nearly twisted his ankle.
Had Loeser ever had sex? He supposed he probably had, but the memory was by now so dim that he almost wondered if in fact someone else had just described sex to him once and he’d gradually come to miscategorise it as an experience of his own, as one sometimes does with incidents that took place in childhood. At this point he couldn’t quantify his sexual frustration any more than he could weigh his own brain. Perhaps it directed everything he said and did. There was no way to be sure. It was too much a part of him. Unlike his penis, which he now regarded as a sort of ungrateful hitchhiker, a fatuous vestigium.
He sat down on his bed. Since he couldn’t go back to the window for a while, he decided he might as well set the clock to Midnight at the Nursing Academy. Although he hadn’t intended to stay more than a short time in Paris, he didn’t like to be separated from the photo album even for a day, so he’d taken it with him when he left Berlin and now it had unexpectedly come with him all the way to America. Last night he’d checked into the hotel so late that he hadn’t bothered to unpack, so it would still be in the suitcase, which lay unfastened on the floor beside the bed like a drunk passed out with an open mouth, hidden there between his second-favourite white shirt and his third-favourite white shirt.
Except he soon found that it wasn’t.
In a state of overflowing panic not unlike the one that had accompanied his loss of Adele Hitler at the corset factory all that time ago, he flung item after item out of the suitcase until there was nothing left to fling, and then he started clawing idiotically at the suitcase’s inner corners. It was gone. But he was sure he’d packed the book that last afternoon in his steamship cabin. And he was sure he hadn’t taken it out of the suitcase since then. The only time he’d lost sight of his travelling companion was when he was going through customs at New York Harbour, just before asserting in a questionnaire that he was not insane, leprous or syphilitic, that he did not live by prostitution, and that he had no intention of assassinating the President of the United States.
They’d stolen it. The custom officers had rooted through his luggage like organ harvesters through a torso, just as they were entitled to do, and found the book, and then instead of reporting it as contraband, they’d stashed it in a locker, to take home or sell on. He should have bribed someone. And now it was too late.
Loeser had owned Midnight at the Nursing Academy for nearly seven years. He’d had a far longer relationship with the delightful women in that book than he’d ever had with any human female. He knew, by heart, like a poem, every beckoning expression, every obliging pose. He often felt he owed it his sanity. The loss of it was unthinkable, somewhere on the scale between a wedding ring and a first-born child. He would definitely be willing to assassinate the President of the United States over this. Or at least forcibly infect him with syphilis.
Trying to stay calm, he smoked a cigarette, got dressed, and left the hotel. Outside, on Sunset Boulevard, a bungalow sat in the middle of the road. At first, Loeser couldn’t work out what he was seeing, and then he realised that the house had been jacked up on to a steel frame and attached to a flatbed lorry. As the lorry turned a corner, one corner of the house’s beige tiled roof had snagged on a telephone pole, and now two men in overalls stood beside it, arguing about what to do, as a queue of cars built up behind the surreal blockage. What were the penalties, Loeser wondered, for being drunk in charge of a family home?
Even in this part of Hollywood, where exhaust fumes hung thickly around the palm trees, Los Angeles smelled unnaturally good. Loeser didn’t understand it. The whole city felt like an apartment for sale, which the estate agent had sprayed with perfume just prior to a viewing. The sun here was strange, too. You found yourself locked in a staring contest with the daylight, waiting for it to blink, but it never did. Meanwhile, there was both a remarkable clamour of signs and advertisements on every building and a remarkable proportion of pedestrians mumbling to themselves as they went past, as if nothing in this nation was capable of holding its peace.
Cut-Rate Books
In rebellion against its habitat, the shop was gloomy, malodorous, and almost as disordered with books as Picquart’s apartment in Paris. A short-wave radio hummed jazz as if it had forgotten the tune. By the door was a rack of magazines: Broadway Brevities, Smokehouse Monthly, Police Gazette, Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang, Artists and Models, Spicy Romances, Jazza-Ka-Jazza, Hot Dog, Paris Nights. Loeser picked up a paperback at random from a pile: An Encyclopedia of the Carnal Relations Between Human Beings and Animals by Gaston Dubois-Desaulle. He picked up another: Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence.
‘You looking for anything in particular?’
Loeser looked up. The man behind the counter had a strong jaw like an actor but also a mesh of acne scars on both cheeks. He wore glasses with thick black frames and a wool tie. ‘Yes. A book called Midnight at the Nursing Academy.’
‘Publisher?’
‘I can’t remember,’ said Loeser, realising that this was like knowing someone for years and never bothering to ask where they grew up. ‘It’s French. Hardcover. Twenty-eight photographs.’
‘Never came across that one.’
‘Where do you think I could get it, then? I’ll pay anything.’
The man took a sip from a cracked mug of coffee. ‘You might have some trouble. Stores like this can’t carry books like that. Anything “deemed flagitious by general consent”, you got to take your chances with the international mail. Might be a few copies in private collections but that’s probably about all.’
‘Private collections?’
‘Yeah. Plenty around. But people don’t tend to advertise them. There’s a few everybody knows about, like the Gorge library, but those ain’t a hell of a lot of use.’ He had one of the most brutally cacophonous American accents Loeser had ever heard; no one who spoke like this, surely, could ever have any success in life.
‘What’s the Gorge library?’ said Loeser.
‘Wilbur Gorge. The automobile-polish guy. His collection’s supposed to be the biggest in the country — maybe the biggest in the world. Up at his mansion in Pasadena. I don’t know anybody who’s ever seen it, though. Might be bullshit. But if anybody has your book, he probably has it.’
‘I see. Thank you for your help.’ Loeser was about to depart when he noticed a copy of Stifled Cry by the cash register. ‘You stock Stent Mutton?’
‘Very popular with our customers.’
‘What’s his latest?’
The man took down a title called Assembly Line.
‘What about Rupert Rackenham?’
‘Nothing by him, no.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ It wasn’t yet noon, but Loeser hadn’t had breakfast, so he said, ‘In addition, I want to try an American hamburger sandwich. Which is the best?’
‘The best in Hollywood or the best in Los Angeles?’
These two designations were not yet quite distinct in Loeser’s mind, but he had an idea that the latter was more comprehensive. ‘The best in Los Angeles.’ Should he have said the best in California?
‘For my money, that’s Nickel’s over in Pacific Palisades.’ The man took a business card out of his jacket pocket, wrote on the back with a pencil, and handed it to Loeser.
‘12203 Sunset Boulevard,’ Loeser read. ‘And I’m on Sunset Boulevard already. So it’s just further on west from here?’
‘Yeah, it’s a pleasant drive.’
Drive! Loeser had heard about this: the bizarre American hatred of travelling anywhere on foot. They would think nothing of getting in their car even if their destination was on the very same street. ‘I shall walk,’ he said.
‘Wouldn’t do that. It’s a long way.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m from the Old World. I’m used to walking.’ As he strolled whistling out of the shop, Loeser heard the proprietor shout something after him, but he ignored it. The business card was still in his hand, so he turned it over to read the other side: Wallace Blimk — Bookseller. Before he had lunch, he thought, he would work up a decent appetite. Four hours later, he collapsed by the side of the road.
Sunset Boulevard
As a result, no doubt, of some bureaucratic oversight, Sunset Boulevard had a beginning and a middle but no end. The coast was not far now, but Sunset Boulevard probably just rolled on down the beach and into the water and onward to Shanghai. Quite early on, Loeser had realised that the numbers he could see on the buildings were nowhere near 12203, but since they seemed to rise every block in random increments, that hadn’t, unfortunately, been enough to discourage him. So he had carried on, more determined with every step to eat the best hamburger in Los Angeles, and by the time he fainted, just next to a sign advertising a pet cemetery, he had already walked further than he’d ever walked in his life. For long stretches, there had been houses but no pavement, or not even houses, just orchards and an occasional petrol station or diner, and he’d trudged over grass or gravel, as cars zoomed mockingly past. The sun beat like a gin hangover, and on his right the mountains had caught the afternoon light, dandled it, and released it again. Who had designed this set and why had no one told them they were going much too far?
‘Are you all right?’ A spaniel-eyed woman in a gingham dress was touching his shoulder. ‘Do you need a glass of water? My house is just here. I think you dropped your book.’
Embarrassed and unsteady, braised in his own brine, Loeser got to his feet, picked up Assembly Line, and followed the woman to her porch.
‘Where’s your car?’ she said when he was gratefully seated. As well as the glass of water, she’d brought him a chocolate chip cookie.
‘I don’t drive.’
‘You lost your licence?’
‘No. I never learned.’ She gave him a look of concern as if she were wondering whether he was defective or just poor, so he added, ‘I’m from Germany.’
‘Oh. How do you like America?’
‘It’s preposterous.’
On his forced march, Loeser had realised that the great advantage of living in this senselessly stretched-out place would be that you would never bump into anyone ever again. Years before, as an optimistic recent university graduate, he had thought that the best thing about Berlin was that you couldn’t so much as go out for a coffee without coming across half a dozen people you knew. Within a few months, he had concluded that this was actually the worst thing about Berlin. There, if you humiliated yourself trying to get someone to go to bed with you, you would then have to see them twice a week for the rest of your life — a welt on your world. Here, they would just vanish. Every ex-girlfriend, rival, creditor, parasite: avoiding them would only be a matter of not specifically seeking them out. It would be such a secure, logical way to live, fortified by dispersion against coincidence. He was proud enough of this observation that he had begun to compose a paragraph about it for his next postcard to Achleitner. Unfortunately, it was about to be ruined. ‘Is that a Stent Mutton you’ve got there, by the way?’ the woman said. ‘I’m nuts for Stent Mutton.’
‘Me too!’
‘My husband knows him a little. They met at the Athletic Club. I hear his wife is awfully pretty. Their house isn’t far from here.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. Down there just this side of where the canyon meets the beach. You can’t miss it. Looks like a sort of greenhouse.’
Loeser didn’t know what he expected to find at Mutton’s house, but just visiting the holy site would be enough to justify the day’s ordeal. He drained his glass of water and looked out to sea.
The Mutton House
The sun was in Loeser’s eyes as he walked west, so it wasn’t until he was quite near by that he got a good look at his destination, and beheld an implausible snag in the ontology of this foreign land. There, on a rise that sloped affably down to the beach, was the Blumstein residence in Schlingesdorf — tugged all the way from Berlin, it seemed, by some tireless amphibious cousin of the lorry he’d seen stuck on Sunset Boulevard. In every dimension it was identical, and yet the weird light of this land had done something to it, parsed it as a homonym, the same structure with a different result: back in Berlin, even in summer, the house was a jar for pickling clouds, but here in the glare the glass walls looked aqueous, unsolid, a cage of refraction. On the patio, next to the swimming pool, a blonde woman sat at a redwood dining table writing a letter. She looked up as Loeser approached.
‘Is this Stent Mutton’s house?’ he said.
‘That’s right. I’m his wife.’
‘My name is Egon Loeser. I’m from Berlin. I’ve come to see Mr Mutton.’ Which was not quite a lie, thought Loeser, because he would very much have liked to meet the author, but was also not quite honest, because it rather implied he had an appointment, perhaps that he had crossed the Atlantic expressly for this long-scheduled colloquy.
‘You should have called ahead. I’m afraid he’s not seeing anyone today. He’s resting inside. We just got back last night and the journey was a horror.’
‘Got back?’
‘From Moscow.’ Mutton’s wife took off her sunglasses in an interrogative sort of gesture. When the woman in the gingham dress had said she was awfully pretty, that had been an almost slanderous understatement. And there was a sugary, heliotropic ripeness to her body that made her look as if she couldn’t have been cultivated in any other climate. ‘You’re from Berlin, you said? How long do you plan to stay in Los Angeles?’
‘No more than two weeks.’
‘You’re an artist of some sort. Or a writer, maybe.’
‘I work in the theatre. How did you know?’
‘You have that look. My husband and I know only a little about the situation in Germany, Mr Loeser, but we know it’s very difficult.’ What did she mean? Difficult to get laid unless you were Brecht? Was she about to invite him to pillage her quietly in the bushes? ‘I don’t know what kind of welcome you’ve had out here so far, but I can assure you we’re both very sympathetic to exiles. Especially those of you who simply want to continue your creative work in peace. I wonder if you’ve heard of an organisation called the Cultural Solidarity Committee of California?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ Loeser was feeling a bit insulted about being described as an exile.
‘My husband and I are founding patrons. And that’s not because we’re saints, by the way.’ She smiled. ‘We have ulterior motives. I can’t count how many fascinating men and women we’ve met through the Committee. As it happens, we’re having a small reception here this evening. Perhaps you’d like to join us. You could see my husband then. I’m sure we’d both love to hear about your escape. Each story we hear seems to be more exciting than the last.’
‘I’d be delighted,’ said Loeser. (Escape from what?)
‘Until tonight, then. A pleasure to meet you, Mr Loeser.’
‘Before I go: I’m curious about your house.’
‘Yes, aren’t we lucky? We’ve only just moved in. It was finished while we were in Russia. The architect is a compatriot of yours named Gugelhupf. We brought him to Los Angeles last year so that he could adapt the design precisely to the terrain and the climate. He’s very scientific.’
‘I see.’
‘And afterwards he decided to stay in America. We took that as a compliment! You may be able to meet him later.’
Instead of walking back up to Sunset Boulevard, Loeser decided to go for a stroll along the beach. The tide was going out and big spaghetti clods of yellow seaweed lay drying on the sand. After a while he came to a hotdog stand from which he bought three hotdogs and a bottle of Coca Cola, and then he took off his shoes and sat down just beyond the limit of the waves to read Assembly Line, salt foam snapping at his feet like a tethered animal.
Holidays to Moscow, cultural charities, afternoon naps in an auto-plagiaristic Bauhaus villa: Loeser had begun to worry that Mutton’s gorgeous wife might have neutered him. But he was reassured by this latest novel, which was Mutton’s most savage yet. His industrialists and aristocrats had never been so grotesque, nor his narrator so remorseless. Loeser read it through twice, by which time the sun had started to slump into the sea, and he spent the next hour watching the sky like an opera, hardly able to believe that he’d been reduced to slack-jawed tears by something as trite and self-congratulatory as a Pacific sunset.
By the time he’d recovered his composure it was nearly nine. He’d heard parties started early in America, so he walked back up to the luminescent fishtank. Sure enough, there were a handful of people standing on the patio, and as he approached he caught a few sentences of the nearest conversation. ‘… And I told the man, I don’t want synthetic violets in my cologne any more than I want synthetic lemon juice in my gin fizz! I don’t give a damn if it smells the same and I don’t give a damn if “everyone uses it”, I’m not spraying myself with something called methyl heptin carbonate, it sounds like poison gas. Then I gave him that line from Midsummer Night’s Dream — you know, “but earthlier happy is the rose distilled”, and so on — but he didn’t know what I was talking about. I don’t think I’ll be going to that store again.’ The man talking wore a powder-blue three-piece suit with pearl buttons; a white shirt with a collar pin; a bow tie, pocket handkerchief, and socks that were all red with white polka dots; and black patent leather brogues with perforated uppers. He spoke in a professorial and mildly self-mocking drawl. When he caught sight of Loeser coming up the slope, he broke off and said, ‘Now, what do we have here? A beachcomber?’
‘I’m a guest of Mrs Mutton,’ said Loeser. ‘Do you know where she is?’
‘Oh, you’re one of my wife’s charming pet Europeans! I believe she’s in the kitchen.’
‘Actually I’m looking for Mr Mutton’s wife.’
‘Yes, as I say, Dolores is in the kitchen.’
‘I mean Stent Mutton, the writer.’
The man exchanged a bemused glance with the elderly Japanese fellow he’d been talking to. ‘Is this the start of a radio comedy routine? I am “Stent Mutton, the writer”. Who are you?’
‘I’m Egon Loeser. But you can’t be…’
‘I can’t be what?’
‘But where’s your knife?’ Loeser blurted.
‘If you want to cut a cigar there’s a guillotine in the drawing room.’
Stent Mutton was a scarred, hulking ex-criminal who only scratched out his raw narratives to exorcise the horrors through which he’d lived. Loeser knew this. But he was now trying to remember how he knew it. He was trying to remember whether he’d really read it somewhere, or whether he’d just promoted an assumption to fact.
‘I see you’ve brought one of my penny dreadfuls,’ said Mutton, pointing at the paperback that Loeser had forgotten he was still holding in his hand. ‘Did you want me to sign it?’
Loeser took a step back. He didn’t want this man defacing his book. A signature from the real Stent Mutton would have been marvellous. But not a signature from this impostorous dandy. He shook his head and hurried on into the house. Whereupon:
‘Egon! What an unexpected pleasure!’
‘No,’ said Loeser in German. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no.’
‘Aren’t you happy to see me?’ said Rackenham, who was holding a martini and looked almost parodically tanned and healthy.
‘What the fuck are you doing in Los Angeles?’
‘I’m supposed to be finding Adele Hitler and persuading her to go back to Berlin. But I haven’t got very far. And what are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’ve come for Adele too? I can see by your face that you have. But I presume you’re not getting paid by her parents, like I am. Have you really come six thousand miles just to have sex with her?’
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘Not yet. Were you in Paris, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘What a pity we didn’t cross paths.’
‘What a pity. How did you end up at this party?’ The gathering reminded him of an evening at the Fraunhofens’ before anyone got drunk.
‘I know Mutton from the Hollywood Cricket Club. He’s the only Yank on the team but he bats so well we can hardly make an issue of it. We’re playing the Australians next month.’
‘You’re already in a cricket club? How long have you been out here?’
‘Two or three months. No, it hasn’t taken me too long to find my feet, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Where are you living?’ said Loeser, because that, after all, was the sort of thing people asked at parties.
‘I’m now the Sorceror of Venice Beach. What about you?’
‘The Chateau Marmont.’
‘I presume you don’t intend to live in a hotel indefinitely?’
‘I like it there,’ said Loeser, thinking of the women around the swimming pool, ‘and anyway, I’m not going to stay in Los Angeles long enough to need a house of my own. I’m just going to find Adele, seduce her, and take her back to Berlin with me.’
‘Well, when that plan fails, I can recommend Pasadena. It’s heavenly.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘East of Hollywood. It’s where the millionaires live. And, more importantly, their wives.’
‘Like Wilbur Gorge?’ said Loeser, remembering what Blimk had said earlier.
‘Yes. How do you know Gorge?’
‘I don’t. Do you mean to say you do?’
‘Yes. I have the sort of easy, genial relationship with the Colonel that you can only have with a man you’re vigorously cuckolding.’
‘Could you introduce me?’
‘Why?’
‘I just want to meet him,’ said Loeser. ‘It doesn’t matter why.’
‘I could get you an invitation to dinner, but what would I get out of it?’
‘I’ll owe you a favour. All right?’
‘I suppose so. By the way, you know Hecht’s here?’
‘In Los Angeles or in this house?’
‘Both. He’s got a contract with Paramount. You might see Drabsfarben, too. And Gugelhupf.’
‘I already knew about Gugelhupf. But the others? You can’t be serious.’
‘Half the Romanisches Café is here, Loeser. Or at least on its way.’
Loeser felt a heavy squelch of dismay. ‘But the only thing I like about this place is that I don’t have to see anyone I know!’
‘Nonetheless.’
‘Fucking hell, this is like going to the Alps for a tuberculosis cure and finding out everyone else in the sanatorium is determined to reinfect you. Well, as long as Brecht doesn’t turn up, I won’t have to jump into the ocean. Thank God I’m going home soon.’
‘Mr Loeser! I’m so glad you could come.’ Mutton’s wife was radiantly at his side. ‘I see you already know Mr Rackenham.’
‘Yes. Mrs Mutton, before I forget, I don’t have a car and I’m staying at the Chateau Marmont and I’m not quite sure how I’m going to get back to my hotel…’
‘Oh, don’t give it another thought, we’ll have the butler drive you. Now, you must meet Mr Gould. He’s a recent arrival from Berlin, like yourself.’
She led Loeser back out to the patio, where Gould turned out to be one of the men he’d passed on his way in. A tall fellow with a smile as big as an almond croissant, he was talking to Stent Mutton and two women. Dolores Mutton introduced Loeser to everyone. ‘Yes, Mr Loeser and I have already met,’ said her husband, raising an eyebrow.
One of the other women said, ‘Mr Gould was just telling us about how he got out of Berlin.’
‘Yes. As I said, the Nazis had tried to ban my latest book of poems. So, like a fool, I went to the police station to insert a complaint. They told me if I waited a few minutes I could see the police chief. So I sat down. Then, by luck, I overheard another policeman mention my name to one of his comrades. There was an order out to arrest me. But they did not realise yet that I had just walked right into their clutchings. So I waited until no one was watching and then I fled straight to the train station. I did not even go home to pack a bag, I just purchased a suitcase on the way and carried it, vacant, so I would look like a realistic tourist.’
‘You sound so calm about it all,’ said Dolores Mutton.
‘Actually, never have I been so frightened!’
‘Knowing that you can have everything taken from you just because you happen to be Jewish … I can hardly imagine what it must have been like, Mr Loeser.’
‘Sorry?’ His attention had wandered during Gould’s boring anecdote.
‘Tell me, how did you get out?’ said her husband. ‘Was it just as perilous?’
Loeser’s old rule against lying about himself to impress had not formally been repealed. So he was about to inform the woman that he was not Jewish; that he ‘got out’ on a tourist visa, which had taken him ten minutes to acquire; and that never, in Berlin, had he felt himself in jeopardy, nor had he detected that anyone else was. But then he remembered Scramsfield. What punishment had ever befallen Scramsfield for his almost hallucinant level of dupery? Why should Loeser come all the way to Hollywood, where half the population punched their time cards every morning at the ‘dream factory’, and still stubbornly persist in correcting every flattering little misapprehension, while right now Scramsfield, a man who had shot his fiancée dead during sex and got away with it, was probably cheating his rent out of some tipsy dowager? Scramsfield swam in his lies like a penguin. Loeser waddled around damp and pretended to be dry. No more. Also, Mrs Mutton was far too beautiful to disappoint, and he’d already decided he didn’t like Gould and didn’t want him to win. So: ‘Yes,’ said Loeser. ‘My escape was quite dramatic.’
‘Go on.’
‘They’d been tipped off that I was going to try to get across the border into France. But, you see, I’m a designer of theatrical effects. So I used an invention of mine called the Teleportation Device. From one side to the other as easily as an actor circling around from stage left to stage right without being seen.’
‘How did it work?’ said one of the women.
‘I’m afraid I can’t say anything about my invention while there is still a chance it may be in use. My first loyalty must be to my tribe.’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’
The butler came to tell Dolores Mutton she was needed inside.
‘So you were in the theatre?’ said Gould. ‘What was your last production before you left?’
‘Lavicini,’ said Loeser, even though it had never actually been performed.
‘Oh. I did not see that. Still, I knew a lot of theatre persons — we must have crossed roads at some point. Were you at Brogmann’s party with all the stolen brandy?’
‘No.’
‘What about when Vanel directed the nude ballet at the beach?’
‘No.’
‘I do not remember you coming on the big camping trip that Klein organised.’
‘No.’ Not only did Loeser not take part in any of these things, he didn’t even remember getting invited to any of them. Who was this prick and why did think he could make Loeser feel as if he’d missed out on all this fun back in Berlin?
‘How extraordinary that the two of you had to come all the way to the edge of another continent to meet for the first time,’ said Stent Mutton.
‘And now you are out here you will work for the movies, I assume, Herr Loeser?’ said Gould.
‘Why?’
‘You are a set designer.’
‘Yes. For the theatre. Not for the movies. I despise American movies.’
‘That does not mean you will not be slurped in,’ said Gould. ‘I do not know why but the studio bosses seem to have a lot of respect for Germans. Like it or not, there is no better way for us to earn some livings in California. Look on Hecht. He is working for Goatloft.’
‘Who’s Goatloft?’
‘He directed Scars of Desire. Very powerful. So Hecht is making five hundred dollars a week now. That is fifteen hundred marks, almost. He certainly has not been making that in Berlin.’
‘Is it hard there, for writers?’ said Stent Mutton.
‘Sometimes. Especially if you do not get an allowance from your parents and you do not like living on credit. I used to work as a waiter.’
How fucking self-righteous, thought Loeser. ‘Where?’ he said.
‘The Schwanneke,’ said Gould.
To the assembled witnesses, what then happened was that somehow Loeser tripped over from a stable standing position. What actually happened, as only some sort of careful Muybridgean analysis could have made clear, was that he tried to thump Gould in the nose and instead threw a punch so inept that even its intended recipient could not confidently identify it as such. The problem was his legs, which were just beginning their slow transmutation into the elongated pine cones that can be found glued to the pelvis of anyone with Loeser’s desultory level of physical fitness who wakes up the morning after a four-hour hike, and were therefore in no condition to perform a sudden vengeful charge. Neither, really, was Loeser himself, who hadn’t had any warning that he was about to make an assault on Gould — he just heard ‘Schwanneke’ and without a word of internal debate he was forward, lunging, off balance, hand barely reconstituted into a viable fist. Scramsfield at Zelli’s was Max Schmeling in comparison. And what would have been really regrettable for Loeser here was if he’d fallen into the nearby swimming pool as a result of his botched left hook. But he didn’t, because Gould grabbed his shoulder to steady him. Then Loeser, confused, embarrassed, not wanting Gould’s help, tried to push him away, overcompensated, slipped on a slice of lime that had defected from someone’s gin and tonic, and fell into the swimming pool as a result of that instead. He hadn’t even had a drink yet.
After he’d climbed out, Mutton suggested he go to the bedroom for a change of clothes. ‘Take anything you want.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘At least borrow a shirt.’
Loeser went dripping into the house, trying to ignore the stares and chuckles, and through into the main bedroom, where he selected a shirt and slacks from Mutton’s enormous wardrobe. Just as in Blumstein’s house, there was a bathroom off the main bedroom, and he decided to go in there to change so he could lock the door behind him. As he dried his hair with a towel, he noticed a pair of expensive pistachio-green French knickers lying on the floor next to the bath, and with all their lace and frills and bows they looked comically out of place, a pathogenic gland transplanted into this functionalist cuboid, ready to infect the whole structure with blisters of purposeless ornamentation unless it was annihilated first by some swift Loosian immune response. Loeser, who dearly loved underclothes with lace and frills and especially bows, and sometimes came close to tears when he saw some on a washing line because of the way they made his sexual longing twinge like an old bone fracture, found himself mesmerised for a while by the thought that this silk had only recently been soured and sweetened by the loins of a woman as ravishing as Dolores Mutton, and because of this unavoidable delay he was still buttoning his collar when he heard that same woman’s voice through the door.
‘No. You’re asking too much this time. He’s still my husband. What if he found out? I know you think he won’t, but he’s smarter than you’d like to believe. He might. He easily damn well might. And I’m not going to put him through that. It would finish him. I know you don’t care, but what if he divorced me? Where the hell would we be then? You don’t want that any more than I do. I’m not saying we have to stop this, of course I’m not, I know better than that, but there have to be limits. It’s no good making threats, Jascha. I just can’t. I’m sorry.’
‘Jascha’! Could it really be Drabsfarben? Loeser pressed his ear to the door, but if there was a reply, it was too low to hear.
‘Well, you picked a fine time to tell me that,’ said Dolores Mutton after a while. ‘It’s crazy that we’re even talking like this. You’re always saying I need to be more discreet. Come here on Thursday morning, Stent’s going to be out at the Herald offices most of the day. Now go. I’ll follow you in a few minutes.’
Loeser heard the bedroom door open and close. Then the handle of the bathroom door turned until it clicked against the lock. ‘Is somebody in there? Hello?’ Loeser considered waiting until she went away, but that might turn into a siege. He unlocked the door. ‘Oh, hello, Mr Loeser,’ said Dolores Mutton. There was enough ice in her voice for a serviceable daiquiri. ‘Perhaps I should have mentioned that we prefer our guests to use the other bathroom.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Mutton, I was just changing my shirt.’
As he walked past her into the bedroom, she caught his arm, gripping hard. ‘I don’t know what you may have heard just now, but …’ She paused. Part of him was mindlessly excited that her warm skin was on his. ‘I don’t care for gossip, Mr Loeser, and neither does my husband. Not at our parties, not in our home. I hope you will think about that before you say anything you may come to regret.’ Then she released his arm, went into the bathroom, and slammed the door behind her. Loeser, shaken, decided to leave the party and walk down to the beach so he could think.
How could Jascha Drabsfarben have allowed himself to get tangled up with Dolores Mutton? In Berlin, a lot of girls had lusted after the composer, and, as far as Loeser could tell, it was because they knew that nothing they did could ever make him lust back. Hannah Czenowitz had once drunkenly confessed a fantasy in which she was on her knees sucking Drabsfarben’s cock while he was composing at a grand piano and he was so absorbed in some complex non-standard key signature that he didn’t even notice. There was some debate over whether he masturbated, and the consensus was that he probably did, about once a month, for reasons of psychological tidiness, but quickly, so he could get back to his music. Therefore occasional utilitarian intercourse didn’t seem out of the question — but a furtive affair with a married woman would be far too distracting. Drabsfarben would never tolerate the drain on his time.
Then again, Loeser had heard that a lot of foreign writers found themselves blocked when they came to Hollywood. So perhaps Drabsfarben had lost his inspiration out here too, and for the first time he was trying to use a woman as a muse. You could certainly write symphonies about Dolores Mutton; you could write at least a scherzo about her cleavage alone. And however implausible it all seemed, Loeser knew what he’d just heard. The real question was whether to tell Stent Mutton. Yes, the man was a loathsome fraud. He’d lied to Loeser, albeit in a way Loeser couldn’t really explain. But Loeser still loved his books. Knowing the truth about Mutton didn’t make Mutton’s characters feel any less real; in fact, maybe they seemed more real now, because if they couldn’t be understood as mere analogues of their creator, then they could only be spontaneous births with a sort of mystifying independent life. And there was no question about what a Stent Mutton hero would do about all this. He would just walk over. Say what had to be said. In very short sentences.
Loeser went back to the house and found Stent Mutton on the patio next to the big barbecue grill.
‘I see you found something to fit you all right.’
‘Yes. Look here, Mr Mutton, I need to talk to you in private.’
‘About what?’
‘It’s very important.’
Mutton followed him a short distance up the hill, away from the guests, into a forum of crickets.
‘Well?’
‘Just now, while I was changing, I overheard a conversation in your bedroom. It was between your wife and Jascha Drabsfarben, who’s an old friend of mine from Berlin. I think they’re having an affair.’
‘What?’
Loeser was already beginning to realise that this was going to cause even more trouble than the last time he’d eavesdropped on Drabsfarben, but it was too late to turn back. Also, there was something about a conversation of this kind that made him feel enjoyably authentic and masculine. ‘Your wife is being unfaithful to you with Drabsfarben,’ he said. ‘I heard enough to be sure and I thought you deserved to be told.’
‘Is this another comedy routine?’
‘No, Mr Mutton. I’m perfectly serious.’
Mutton sighed. ‘This is the trouble with marrying a girl like Dolores. Most men realise they wouldn’t know what to do if they had all that beauty to themselves, so they can’t believe I do, either. They think I must let her share it around a little. But actually, Mr Loeser, my wife is devoted to me. She’s not perfect and neither, goodness knows, am I. But we love each other as deeply today as we ever have. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could persuade her to betray me sexually with another man. If I know anything, I know that. You’re wrong. And I strongly suggest you leave this party before you do any more eavesdropping.’
Probably Wilbur Gorge was just as confident, thought Loeser, and meanwhile Rackenham was ploughing his wife. If life up to this point had taught him anything, it was that everyone else was having sex with anyone they wanted, all the time, and it was naive ever to hope otherwise. ‘If you’d heard what I heard—’
‘I don’t care what you think you heard. Please get off my property. I’m perfectly serious, too.’
Loeser hesitated.
‘What now?’ said Mutton.
‘It’s just that I don’t have a car and your wife said your butler could drive me back to the Chateau Marmont.’
‘Goodbye!’ Mutton growled. Then he turned and went back to his party.
It was nearly ten. Loeser knew he couldn’t walk back to Hollywood, unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life confined to a wheelchair, so he decided to go up to the corner of Sunset Boulevard and hail a cab. He’d left all his cash in his wet trousers, which were still hanging over the towel rail in the Muttons’ bathroom, but he could pick up some more at the Chateau Marmont. However, after a long wait, he still hadn’t seen a single vacant taxi, and anyway the traffic here was probably going too fast for anyone to see him and pull over. He would just have to cross the road to the diner he could see on the east side of Sunset Boulevard and ask them to telephone a cab company for him.
Loeser made several attempts at this, and each time he got less than halfway across the moat of tarmac before he saw some diesel-powered megalodon bearing hungrily down on him and he had to hurl himself back to safety on the shore. And of course there was no crossing visible in either direction. But what else was he supposed to do? Sleep under a bush? He was standing there on the grass, feeling a rising crepitation of despair, when he saw an unthreatening green car coming east up the perpendicular road. He stuck out his thumb and tried to look respectable.
The car stopped beside him, and the driver rolled down his window. ‘Need a lift?’
‘I’m trying to get to Hollywood.’
‘I’m going all the way to Los Feliz.’
The driver leaned over to unlock the door on the passenger’s side.
Loeser cleared his throat. ‘Actually, I need to sit in the back.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t ride in a private car unless I pretend it’s a taxi.’
‘Are you going to pay me?’
‘No.’
The driver shrugged. He had the cleftest chin that Loeser had ever seen. ‘Suit yourself, pal.’
So Loeser got in the back of the car. Even with this indulgence, he felt too uncomfortable to make conversation, so he just looked out of the window. They were soon passing the same roadside totems that Loeser had seen on the way here, great papier-mâché lemons and sausages and rabbits and candy canes and cowboy hats advertising various drive-in amenities for the easily pleased. In the afternoon sunlight they’d seemed flat, primitive, ridiculous, but now, at night, illuminated from below by bright bulbs, looming into view at forty miles an hour, they achieved a sort of fuzzy megalithic grandeur. Perhaps Achleitner had been right, Loeser thought with disgust. Kempinski’s Haus Vaterland really was the future. California itself was nothing but a Kempinski colony, an amusement complex propagated into a republic. But then it occurred to him that if all your potential customers were whizzing by in their automobiles, then of course you had to make sure that your function could be apprehended from a distance in an instant. Hence this childishness. He remembered what Wagner had written to his wife on a visit to Venice a hundred and fifty years after Lavicini’s death: ‘Everything strikes one as a marvellous piece of stage-scenery. The chief charm consists in its all remaining as detached from me as if I were in an actual theatre; I avoid making any acquaintances, and therefore still retain that sense of it.’
Cut-Rate Books
Loeser shut the door quickly behind him to avoid contaminating the shop with sunlight or fresh air.
‘You make it to Nickel’s yesterday?’ said Blimk.
‘No. I met Stent Mutton, however.’ Last night, by the time he got into bed, he’d been so tired that just closing his eyes had produced a plunging sensation, like the leg of a stool snapping beneath him. This morning he’d woken up late. He’d wanted to read for a while, but the only novel he’d brought with him to America was Berlin Alexanderplatz, and although after three hundred and nine pages it really felt like it might be about to get going, he thought he might need something more potent to distract him from the women around the swimming pool, so he’d come back to the shop.
‘What’s the guy like?’
Loeser was about to tell Blimk the awful truth about Stent Mutton when he noticed a pocket book on a pile near by and found himself drawn almost involuntarily to pick it up. It was called Dames! And how to Lay them by Clark Snable, and the cover had a childlike drawing of a woman lying naked in a bed, rumpled sheets exposing one enormous breast with a nipple that pointed upward and outward as if it were tracking the position of the moon. ‘Tired of feeling like a cast-iron chump?’ enquired the back cover. Loeser was definitely tired of feeling like a cast-iron chump. ‘Want to learn all the famous secrets of sexually romancing huge quantities of toasty eager dames with real class any night of the week even Monday like it was easy?’ Loeser definitely wanted to learn all the famous secrets of sexually romancing huge quantities of toasty eager dames with real class any night of the week even Monday like it was easy. He started to read. The paper stock was so cheap it felt almost moist, in the same way that dollar bills could feel moist, as if the book itself were gently sweating. After a while Blimk said, ‘You want to sit down with that?’
‘I promise I’ll pay for it,’ said Loeser.
‘Don’t mean to hassle you. Honestly, buddy, it’s just nice to have somebody in here who isn’t trying to jerk off all surreptitious.’
So Loeser sat down next to Blimk in his nest behind the counter. ‘Have you read this?’ Loeser said.
‘No,’ said Blimk.
‘It’s amazing. Apparently you can seduce any woman in under five minutes if you tell her a story about eating a peach on a rollercoaster, which makes her unconsciously think of sex, and then imply she’s fat while touching her knee.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘No, it’s proven. This man Clark Snable says he’s done it four hundred times.’
Blimk grunted. He sat with his elbows on the counter and his head resting so heavily in his palms that his whole face was smeared into a melty grimace of total engrossment, so Loeser asked what he was reading. Blimk held up a magazine. It was called Astounding Stories, and on the cover was a lurid painting of a big green blob with lots of eyes and tentacles chasing two explorers through an icy cave, above a banner advertising a serial called ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ by H.P. Lovecraft.
‘Who’s H.P. Lovecraft?’
‘Fella from Rhode Island. Writes stories about monsters from other dimensions. Cults. Human sacrifice. Alien gods. They’re pretty good.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. And some people think it ain’t just fiction.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Some people think it’s all true.’
‘But he writes for a magazine called Astounding Stories.’
‘Yeah, but they think that’s ’cause what he says is so shocking no newspaper will publish it in case it causes a panic. So the only way to get the truth out is to dress it up in a cheap Hallowe’en costume.’
‘Who could possibly think that?’
‘People in high places, I heard. Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State. He trusts Lovecraft more than he trusts his best military intelligence. He really thinks America is being menaced by ancient beings from beyond Euclidean space. That’s the scuttlebutt.’
‘That is absurd.’
‘Yeah, maybe, but you can’t blame a fella for wondering if there ain’t more things in heaven and earth, et cetera et cetera. And I don’t mean what you read in a Bible. Other things. Worse things.’
Loeser thought of Lavicini and all the mysteries of the Teleportation Accident. ‘I suppose not.’
Blimk took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Loeser. ‘Smoke so much these days I need a chimney in here.’ He nodded up at a brown discoloured patch on the ceiling above his nest. ‘Think I’m growing a stalactite.’ They both lit up. ‘Where you from, don’t mind me asking?’
‘Germany,’ said Loeser.
‘Oh yeah? What took you to Hollywood? Nazis kick you out?’
Loeser decided if he could be honest with anyone, he could be honest with a pornographer. ‘Nothing to do with that. I’m looking for a girl.’
‘She run off with somebody?’
‘We were never actually attached.’
‘You just like her a lot?’
‘Yes.’
‘You came all the way to America ’cause you had a crush on a girl? My mother’d call that sweet.’
‘I’d never thought of it like that before. Yes, I suppose it is sweet. In a manner of speaking.’
‘Romantic.’
‘Genau.’
‘Find her yet?’
‘No. They have a whole shelf of California telephone directories at my hotel, and I went through all of them this morning. She’s not listed. But she might have changed her name. Especially if she’s going into the movies.’
‘Think that’s likely?’
‘She’s certainly pretty enough. And she’s ambitious. I may have to ask around at the studios. I don’t know what else to try.’
‘You should hire a private dick. I know a fella down the block, you give him a week, he can find anybody in LA.’
Blimk wrote the address on another business card and Loeser paid him for Dames! And how to Lay them. ‘Do you have anything by that Lovecraft fellow?’
Blimk went into the back room, looked through a filing cabinet, and returned with a magazine. ‘This one’s my favourite. “The Call of Cthulhu”. You can borrow it but I need it back after.’ It was a tattered copy of Weird Tales from 1928. This time, Lovecraft’s name was only listed in small type on the cover, the editors apparently having been more excited about an opus called ‘The Ghost Table’ by Elliot O’Donnell, which was illustrated with a picture of a man with a pistol protecting a woman in a blue dress from a malevolent clawed heirloom. They would never have stood for that sort of thing at the Bauhaus, thought Loeser.
The Bevilacqua Detective Agency
The detective, whose office was above a cigar shop, had a smile that looked as if his mouth were being pulled back at the corners by fishing hooks. ‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Wallace Blimk recommended you,’ said Loeser. ‘I’m trying to track down a girl. She only arrived in Los Angeles a few months ago.’
As Loeser spoke, Bevilacqua had unwrapped a cherry lollipop and put it in his mouth. When he wasn’t sucking it he rested it carefully in an ashtray. ‘She making any special effort not to be found?’ he said.
‘I doubt it.’
‘Should be straightforward, then. Cost you twenty dollars a day plus expenses.’
‘Is this mostly what you do? Missing persons?’
‘About half that. And about half adultery. Someone thinks their spouse is having an affair and I find out for them.’
‘You do a lot of that?’
‘Plenty,’ said Bevilacqua, in a tone suggesting there was barely a marriage west of the Rockies he hadn’t helped to snuff out.
‘Tell me: when you tell a man that his wife is sleeping with someone else, what’s his reaction?’
‘Furious,’ said Bevilacqua, making an emphatic gesture with his lollipop. ‘But only until they see the proof. After that, they’re just grateful. Real grateful. It’s pathetic, sometimes. Embarrassing. The women, they just go quiet, in my own personal experience. Now, let’s get down to business. What can you tell me about this girl?’
‘Her birth name is Adele Hitler. She’s twenty-two. Black hair, blue-green eyes. Speaks good English with a heavy German accent.’
Bevilacqua looked up from his notebook. ‘Cute?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Is she good-looking?’
Loeser was silent for a moment, then he got up. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind. I hope I haven’t wasted too much of your time.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Goodbye, Mr Bevilacqua.’
Loeser hurried out of the office. There had been something in the expression on Bevilacqua’s face just then that had made Loeser certain that if he found Adele he would fuck her. After all, in Stent Mutton books, private detectives always fucked every single woman involved in the case, from the client’s daughter down to the nearest hat-check girl. After what had happened with Rackenham, he wasn’t going to hand Adele over to another blithe predatory male if he could possibly avoid it. Unless he could enlist a private detective who was certified by three reliable doctors as impotent, he was just going to have to find her without help. He looked around at the bustle of Sunset Boulevard. Just as a past drought would show for ever in the rings of a tree, the Depression was still there in Berlin under the new bark if you knew where to look, but Los Angeles did not feel as if it had ever gone thirsty.
The Mutton House
Carrying his new camera on a leather strap around his neck, Loeser cut diagonally across the prosperous scrubland at the side of the road so that he would be at least partially occluded by bushes as he approached the patio of the house. At first, there was no sign of Dolores Mutton, but when he got closer he saw her through the glass, in the kitchen, eating an orange; all of a sudden the Gugelhupf design seemed as if it were specifically intended for easy surveillance. Drabsfarben evidently hadn’t arrived yet, so Loeser sat down in the shade of a tree, brushed the dust from his trousers, and waited. Dozing emeraldine on a rock a few feet away was a lizard not unlike Mordechai. The smell of the ocean came in on the breeze, such a mild musk for such a huge animal.
Just before noon, a car drew up outside the house and the composer got out and went into the house. Crouching very low, Loeser moved towards the patio. Drabsfarben and Dolores Mutton stood in the sitting room, both already in postures of anger as if they had never interrupted their argument from the party two nights ago. Loeser took a few photos, but he needed them at least to kiss if he was going to force Stent Mutton to admit he was wrong and then luxuriate in the gratitude that Bevilacqua had insisted would follow.
‘What the heck are you doing?’
Loeser’s heart bounced like a tennis ball. He turned. A stocky boy in a denim shirt stood there with a big brown paper bag under one arm.
‘I’m a friend of the Muttons,’ said Loeser.
‘Sure you are,’ said the boy. Then he grabbed Loeser by the collar with his free hand and led him roughly down the slope towards the house, shouting ‘Mrs Mutton! Mrs Mutton!’
Dolores Mutton came out on to the patio. ‘What is it?’
‘I was on my way here with your groceries and I saw this creep hiding up there taking pictures. He’s a prowler or something. He sounds foreign.’
‘Thank you very much, Greg. I know this man. He’s bothered us before. You did just the right thing.’
‘Want me to wait here while you call the cops?’
‘No, there’s no need. I’ll deal with him. Just leave the groceries.’
Greg put down the bag and she took five dollars out of her purse and gave it to him. When he was gone, Loeser whimpered, ‘I just came for my shirt and trousers.’
‘Why were you taking photos of us?’
‘The house. It’s such an architectural—’
‘Like hell.’ She snatched the camera from him, then hurled it against the barbecue grill. It hit with a clang and then dropped to the tiles. The sunlight writhed in her blonde hair like a trapped thing. ‘Let me tell you something, Herr Loeser. I have watched Jascha end a man’s life. Have you ever cut a pomegranate in half and turned the halves inside out to get at the seeds? Do you remember the sound that it makes? Jascha can end a man’s life with a sound not too different from that, and certainly no louder. I was there once and I heard it. If you ever try anything like this again — if you speak one more word out of turn to my husband — Jascha will kill you and make it look like an accident. I wouldn’t be able to stop him even if I wanted to. That camera is going in the trash with your clothes, and I don’t want to see you within a mile of this house as long as you live. Got that?’ Loeser was too shocked to reply, so she repeated, louder, ‘Have you got that?’
‘Yes. I see. Fine. Thank you. Goodbye.’
Loeser turned and ran.
He was terrified, but he knew he shouldn’t be, because what he’d just heard from Dolores Mutton was only a figurative threat. Surely. A vivid, detailed, persuasive, and chilling but still one hundred per cent figurative threat. Drabsfarben wasn’t a murderer. Loeser was certain of that. Then again, he’d been certain that Drabsfarben wasn’t a fornicator. He didn’t know anything. Still, what kind of lunatic would risk the electric chair to cover up a transgression as minor as infidelity? Maybe a Stent Mutton character. But no one in the real world. If only he could ignore the piano wire he’d heard tightening in her voice. ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, awed because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.’ That was Rilke. Obviously at some point old Rainer had crossed Dolores Mutton.
The Gorge House
By now Loeser was all too familiar with California architecture and its vacuous hybrids of Gothic, Tudor, Mission, and so on, but the enormous red-roofed Gorge mansion was such an arbitrary and oxymoronic pidgin of styles that it might have been assembled as part of a game of Exquisite Corpse. Everywhere there were columns, turrets, arches, trellises, balconies, arabesques, and gargoyles, none of which seemed to have any reason for existence beyond making you thirsty for a tall glass of iced Gugelhupf. Still, it did have a strange charm, and the garden at the front of the house was elated with flowers. Waiting on the verandah after he rang the bell, Loeser thought for a moment that he saw someone watching him from the driver’s seat of a black Chevrolet parked at the end of the street, but before he could be sure the front door swung open and he was shown into the house by Gorge’s personal secretary, an epicene fellow called Woodkin.
‘Colonel Gorge is in his study, but he will be down in a moment. Please come through to the parlour.’
The previous afternoon, on his return to the Chateau Marmont, Loeser had been given a telephone message from Rackenham: ‘I’m having supper with Gorge tomorrow night and I’ve told him I’m going to bring a guest. Short notice but you have no friends here so I assume you’re available. Come at seven and try not to be too dour.’ Partly because of that last instruction, and partly because it would justify having accidentally packed the absurd item, he was wearing a tie his great aunt had given him, which had an ugly repeated pattern of clock faces. He didn’t really have a plan for the evening. (‘Yes, Colonel Gorge, I should be delighted to have a tour of the house. Will it by any chance include your legendary giant vault of “rare books”?’) ‘Am I the first to arrive?’ he said.
‘No, Mr Rackenham is already here. Would you like anything to drink?’
‘Whisky, please.’
‘I’m afraid Colonel Gorge does not allow liquor in the house.’ Woodkin’s diction was so gracefully servile that it didn’t sound like he was speaking out loud so much as just drawing your attention to a particular combination of semantic units that he wondered if you might find appealing.
‘What do you mean?’ said Loeser.
‘No alcohol whatsoever. He’s very strict.’
‘O brave new world. Well, I mean, do you have any cologne? Surgical spirit? Cooking wine? Anything of that kind?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘What do people normally drink here?’
‘The Colonel prefers ginger ale.’
The ‘parlour’ was about the size of a cathedral nave. Rackenham stood at the opposite end, practically out of earshot, studying a portrait of a muscular grey-haired man with a grim, almost demented gaze and the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest. There were ten such portraits hung around the room, and as he waded through the thick golden carpet to join Rackenham, Loeser happened to pause and look around him, and realised that the steel spokes of their regard converged on an invisible axle precisely where he stood. He let out an involuntary squeak of fear and hopped out of the way, then hurried on. Rackenham nodded hello, and Loeser saw that the engraved brass label on the frame of the nearest portrait read ‘Hiram Gorge: 1854–1911’. He glanced at its peers on the left and right. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘The face in all of these paintings is the same. I mean, it’s not just a family resemblance — they’re identical.’
‘I’m sure you can guess the explanation,’ said Rackenham.
Loeser gasped. ‘Mein Gott, you mean Gorge is some sort of immortal undead being like Dracula?’
‘No, not quite. Our host can trace his ancestry back to the seventeenth century, but no original portraits survive. So he had all these commissioned when he built this house. He sat for all ten of them in different period costumes. The artist was rather good — you’ll notice the physiognomy does become subtly more atavistic as they go back in time. Of course, there’s also no hint here that his grandfather’s mother was a Mexican girl. Or that he has some Creole blood from a generation or two before that.’
Loeser trudged across the room to look at the portrait next to the door, the ‘oldest’, which showed Gorge in a powdered wig and lace cravat, with the label ‘Auguste de Gorge: 1638–1739’.
‘No! Gorge is descended from Auguste de Gorge?’
‘Yes,’ said Rackenham. ‘Most of us are, probably. De Gorge had an extraordinary number of children. Mostly illegitimate, however. Wilbur Gorge’s branch of the family tree was almost the only one to retain the family name.’
‘How can he have lived to be a hundred and one?’ said Loeser, trudging back again.
‘Old for his era, yes, but still no Dracula.’
‘I thought he was ruined after the Teleportation Accident.’
‘He was. It didn’t kill him, though. Very little did, it seems.’
Woodkin came in with Loeser’s ginger ale. When he’d gone out again, Rackenham took a pewter flask out of his pocket, unscrewed it, and poured a few measures of gin into Loeser’s glass. Loeser thanked him, sipped, winced, and gave the improvised highball a stir with his little finger. ‘This house is erstaunlich.’
‘It’s not even the biggest on this street. This is Millionaire’s Row.’
‘Still. Did he inherit the money?’
‘No. Gorge’s father died penniless in Albuquerque. Sky-Shine paid for this monstrosity.’
‘But how rich can you possibly get selling — what is it? Car polish?’
‘Of every ten tins of car polish that are sold in this country, Gorge’s firm makes seven, under various different brand names. “You doll up your wife, why let her ride in a shabby car?” And each tin sells for a dollar but costs ten cents to make. That’s what his wife told me. You can get unbelievably bloody rich selling car polish. But there’s no heir. The Colonel and his wife only have a daughter, and they haven’t shared a bed in a decade. No male cousins, either. The last one went down on the Lusitania. So ten generations after Auguste de Gorge, the name dies in this house.’ If Gorge’s wife wouldn’t fuck him, thought Loeser, that was obviously why he’d started his famous collection. Rich and powerful as he was, the sort of man who drank ginger ale at dinner was probably too morally squeamish for physical infidelity, so, like Loeser, he’d devoted himself to the only release that was still available to him. Loeser found this at once depressing and comforting. No doubt it gave Gorge the sort of ‘satisfaction’ that a man might feel after being fitted with the world’s most advanced and expensive catheter.
‘So what’s it like? To “cuckold” him?’ He had never used the word in English before.
‘Have you ever persuaded anyone to betray their husband or wife with you?’ said Rackenham.
‘No.’
‘There’s really nothing more satisfying than the first time you manage it. I was fourteen, I think. After that it’s routine, of course, and Pasadena is a long drive for me. But the boys on Venice Beach don’t have any money, the cocaine trade here seems to be run by surprisingly circumspect Mexicans, and I’m not about to take a job for the first time in my life. Gorge’s wife likes to buy me things, but unlike the other women of Millionaire’s Row, she won’t ever give me cash, because she’s worried I’ll feel like a gigolo. As if I’d be measly-minded enough to give a damn. So I just pawn everything. She won’t come down tonight, by the way. Amelia doesn’t like to see her husband and me in the same room. She always counterfeits a headache.’
‘What’s the daughter like?’
‘Mildred? One of the most disagreeable females I’ve ever met in my life.’
‘Ugly?’
‘No, in fact she has rather a cud duck, as we used to say at school. It’s not that. You’ll understand if you ever meet her. Now, I may as well warn you, there is one other thing about Gorge,’ said Rackenham. ‘He’s not all there.’
‘What do you mean?’
Rackenham was about to explain when Woodkin ushered two more guests into the drawing room, so instead he just smiled at Loeser and murmured, ‘You’ll soon see.’
Woodkin introduced the new arrivals as Ralph Plumridge, Assistant Public Utility Liaison at the Los Angeles Traffic Commission, and Wright Marsh, Vice Chairman of the Executive Council at the California Institute of Technology. Loeser’s heart sank. In Berlin he’d always gone out of his way not to socialise with people with real careers. They were impossible to talk to.
‘We just happened to arrive at the same time, you understand,’ said Plumridge to no one in particular. ‘We’re not a couple of queers!’ In fact, the two bureaucrats’ mutual aversion was obvious from the absurd way they had positioned themselves not quite side by side but instead angled slightly outward, like two secret agents confining each other to peripheral vision.
‘Hey, Marsh, I heard one of your biologists got his tenure revoked last week.’
‘Not that I’m aware of.’
‘Yeah, he did. The other fellows at the department said he was faking his fieldwork. He submitted a paper describing something that none of them had ever heard of in their lives.’
‘What was it?’
‘It was like a man, he said, but with these two big lumps on its chest, and no dick! Ha ha ha!’ Plumridge slapped his thigh.
When Wilbur Gorge came in, he looked just like all his portraits, although they hadn’t been able to capture his bisontine bulk. Before acknowledging anyone else, he circled the room, greeting all nine patrilineal ancestors by name, then apparently checking the symmetry of his moustache in the final portrait of himself as if it were a mirror. At last he joined his three-dimensional companions. ‘Marsh,’ he cried. ‘Plumridge. Rackenham.’ Then he glared at Loeser.
‘Colonel, this is the fellow I was telling you about on the telephone,’ said Rackenham. ‘Herr Loeser from Berlin. He’s an old friend of mine.’
Gorge shook Loeser’s right hand in a way that made Loeser glad he wrote with his left, and then said, ‘All wrong, your clocks.’ Loeser looked down at his tie and smiled dutifully at the joke. But Gorge’s expression was oddly serious. ‘Hours out. Can’t stand a bitched clock. Wind ’em for you if you like. Don’t know why you’ve got so many. Just need one, most cases.’ Loeser hesitated, and Gorge reached out and started to scratch at his tie. ‘Can’t seem to find the knob,’ said Gorge. ‘Bolted on, are they? Glued?’ His eyebrows were so bushy they looked almost tumorous.
‘That is merely the pattern of Mr Loeser’s necktie, sir,’ said Woodkin, handing him a glass of ginger ale.
‘Necktie! Right. Beg your pardon. Marsh! Wife?’
‘Her sister called just before we left. Some minor emergency. Sends her apologies.’
‘I didn’t know you were married, Marsh,’ said Plumridge.
‘Yes. Last month.’ Marsh took a photo out of his wallet and passed it around.
‘Congratulations, pal, she’s just your level,’ said Plumridge.
‘Hello, Mrs Marsh,’ said Gorge politely. But then when Marsh made to put the photo back in his wallet, Gorge grabbed his wrist. ‘God’s sake, man, don’t stuff her back in there! No air. Sure to suffocate. Don’t you care a snap about your wife?’
‘It’s only a photograph, sir,’ said Woodkin.
‘Photograph! Right. Pardon me.’
‘Will the Gorge ladies be joining us?’ said Plumridge to Gorge.
‘No. Upstairs with her skull. Off at Radcliffe. Stag tonight.’ After a moment’s analysis, Loeser took Gorge to be referring respectively to his wife, his daughter, and the occasion. Gorge turned to Woodkin. ‘Tell Watatsumi nix the tuna. No need for damsel food.’ Woodkin nodded and went out. ‘Nazi, Loeser?’ said Gorge.
‘Pardon me?’ said Loeser.
‘Nazi?’ repeated Gorge, as if he were offering Loeser some sort of hors d’oeuvre.
‘No, Loeser is not political,’ interceded Rackenham. ‘He is very happy, I’m sure, to have escaped all the unpleasantness going on in Berlin.’
Loeser thought of Brecht and nodded.
‘When Professor Einstein last came to the Institute, he told me he thought it might be a very long time before he could go home,’ said Marsh.
‘What’s he like?’ said Rackenham.
‘Fascinating. You know, last year, a woman donated ten thousand dollars to the Robinson Laboratory in exchange for meeting him. Worth every cent, I should say.’
‘Talk much, him and Bailey?’ said Gorge.
‘They did, yes. Which is unusual. Professor Bailey is normally quite secretive about his work.’
‘Why would a CalTech physicist need to be secretive?’ said Plumridge. ‘He’s juggling atoms, not patenting a toaster.’
‘I believe he’s just reluctant to disseminate even the first hints about his researches until he’s quite sure they will develop into something worthwhile.’
‘Field?’ said Gorge.
Marsh hesitated. ‘Physics.’
‘Know that! Branch?’ Marsh didn’t answer. ‘Theoretical or applied?’ said Gorge. Marsh still didn’t answer. ‘Don’t know or won’t tell us?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Marsh at last.
‘You mean to say you don’t have even the faintest idea what your top scientist is working on?’ sneered Plumridge. ‘Except that it’s “physics”? Doesn’t he talk to anyone about it?’
‘He does have one research assistant,’ said Marsh. ‘But he chose someone from outside the faculty — a non-specialist, in fact — so as to cut down on departmental gossip. All I know is that he’s in touch with some top men at the State Department. Quite a lot of our physicists are, to tell the truth. Although I shouldn’t say any more than that.’
‘Weapons,’ said Gorge.
‘Perhaps,’ said Marsh. ‘As you know, Dr Millikan is normally very much against federal involvement in the sciences, but he believes an exception should be made for defence research.’
‘Made an investment, why I ask. Take an interest.’
‘Of course.’
‘The Colonel just gave CalTech a lot of money,’ explained Rackenham to Loeser.
‘Million dollars for the Gorge Auditorium,’ said Gorge. ‘Put on some plays. Can’t stay in labs all the time, the students. Ran an opera house in Paris, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Ran a dirty puppet show in New Orleans, my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Family tradition. Not my own game but damned proud of it.’
‘When it’s finished, the Gorge Auditorium will be one of the finest buildings on campus,’ said Marsh.
‘Oh, what an achievement,’ said Plumridge.
Woodkin came back into the drawing room. ‘Watatsumi tells me dinner is about to be served, sir.’
‘Mess hall!’ said Gorge, and the five of them followed him to the dining room, in which a crystal chandelier hung galactically over a long table. They all sat down except Woodkin, who stood behind his employer like a valet. Two maids brought in five silver serving dishes, inside each of which was a cheeseburger and a china bowl of frenched potatoes.
Loeser saw that Rackenham, who was seated next to him, had taken out a fountain pen and was sketching some sort of spotty cucumiform entity on his napkin. He then gave the napkin to Loeser and whispered, ‘Say to Gorge you don’t like pickles so does he want yours.’
‘Why?’
‘Just say it. You don’t like pickles so does he want yours. He’ll like it. I promise. You don’t understand American table manners yet.’
Loeser cleared his throat. He didn’t want to do this but he was only here because of Rackenham so he wasn’t sure he could refuse. ‘Colonel Gorge, I’m afraid I don’t happen to care for pickles, perhaps you’d like to—’
But Gorge had already snatched the napkin out of his hand. ‘More for me!’ he cried cheerfully, and stuffed it into his mouth. Then as Loeser watched in horror the tycoon began to chew.
Woodkin stepped forward. ‘That is not a pickle, sir, that is only a drawing of a pickle in black ink on a napkin.’
Gorge spat out the sodden wad of cotton. The action of his jaw had been so powerful that it was already frayed at the edges. ‘Napkin! Right. Beg your pardon.’ He laughed industrially. ‘Fine prank, Krauto. Damned fine prank.’
Woodkin, who had presumably observed Rackenham’s guilt and Loeser’s innocence, said: ‘Actually, sir, it might be that not everyone at this table is quite familiar with the details of your condition.’
‘Oh? All right — explain: can’t tell the difference between pictures and the real thing. Got it? Just can’t. See the difference, not blind, just don’t realise it. Damned confusing. Have to get Woodkin to remind me. Used to be all right, but it’s the polish. Sky-Shine. Huffed too much of it over the years, working on the formula, testing the product, sleeping in store rooms. Polished part of the noggin clean away. Don’t know what to do, the doctors. Don’t blame ’em. Why I can’t drink: makes it even worse. Get by all right, though. Still whip smart at everything else. Except spelling. Never could spell, though, since I was a cub — nothing to do with the polish, that. Waste of time, anyway, spelling. Waste of fucking time!’
‘As Colonel Gorge says, his severe visual agnosia has not affected his business acumen,’ added Woodkin. ‘He is simply required to work in an office with no photographs, diagrams or figurative art of any kind.’
‘Right. Can’t have pictures of anything. Just like the damned Musselmans! Can’t go to the movies, either. Went to see Shanghai Express couple of years ago. Shouldn’t have, but Dietrich. Tell ’em what happened, Woodkin.’
‘When the film started, Colonel Gorge assumed he must have been drugged, kidnapped, and taken to China. He assaulted one of the popcorn boys, fled, and found himself outside on Hollywood Boulevard. Thereupon he observed an advertisement for a depilatory product that made comical use of an image of a mountain gorilla, and attempted to wrestle the animal to the ground before it could endanger a nearby lady.’
‘Saw my mistake pretty soon after that, of course. Felt like a fool. Paid for all the damage.’ Gorge applied seven or eight spoonfuls of mustard to his hamburger and then turned to his newest acquaintance. ‘Living whereabouts, Krauto?’
‘The Chateau Marmont,’ said Loeser, who had hoped he might have misheard the first time Gorge called him ‘Krauto’.
‘I don’t know how you can stand to live in a hotel,’ said Marsh. ‘There’s no privacy.’
‘Yes, he should certainly move. Don’t you have a few properties near here, Colonel?’ said Rackenham.
‘Think so. Woodkin?’
‘Only one at present, sir. You own a house in that inconvenient triangle of land between your tennis courts and the Sprague mansion. It is currently untenanted.’
‘Why the hell untenanted?’
‘It’s quite small, sir, and there is nowhere to a park a car.’
‘Want it, Krauto?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Want to rent it? Work out a price with Woodkin. Needn’t pay much. No use letting it sit empty.’
‘Hold on, Colonel, not everyone wants to live in Pasadena,’ said Plumridge. ‘You haven’t even asked him.’
‘Good point. Want to live in Pasadena, Loeser?’
‘It’s nice here, but a bit out of the way,’ said Plumridge.
‘Not if you work at the Institute,’ said Marsh.
‘But he doesn’t,’ said Plumridge.
‘Loeser, may I say this,’ said Rackenham. ‘Everyone else who arrives in Los Angeles from Berlin seems to be settling in Pacific Palisades. And there is hardly any part of Los Angeles further from Pacific Palisades than Pasadena.’
Just then Loeser began to make out something now that he had first glimpsed in the shadows as he fled Bevilacqua’s office: the fear that he wasn’t going to find Adele tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that — that dispersion fortified you not just against coincidence but against serendipity — that two blind men wandering in a village square might die before they collided — that no amount of desire or determination could overcome the sheer brainless size of this place — that even though he’d extracted more than enough from his parents’ trust for a holiday to Paris, if he stayed on at the Chateau Marmont he would soon run out of money and have to go home with nothing to show for his sojourn.
All this was probably true. But he didn’t care. There was no way he was staying out here in this nonsensical country for one day longer that he had to. ‘I’m sorry, Colonel Gorge,’ he said, ‘but as I’ve already told Rackenham, I won’t be in California long enough to require a house of my own. I’m going back to Berlin soon.’
‘Tell me, Herr Loeser, what are the streetcars like in Berlin?’ said Plumridge.
‘Fantastic,’ said Loeser with some fervour. Apart from Nerlinger, who made paintings of the S-Bahn, no one at home ever seemed to want to talk in detail about public transport.
‘You fellows had the first electric trams in the world, of course.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Sure. Siemens. Beautiful engineering. I used to have one of their radios. Had to throw it out, though. They’re bankrolling the Nazis and my wife’s family are Jewish.’
‘I rode one of your American streetcars this morning,’ said Loeser. ‘It was adequate.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Hollywood to Pacific Palisades.’
‘On the Santa Monica Air Line, I guess? Second oldest line in California. Used to run all day, Red Cars, USC to the coast. Now it’s just for rush hours, and barely even that. Damn shame. You know, Los Angeles used to have the finest public transportation system in the whole country. Now we’ve got squat, practically.’
‘I heard it’s General Motors who are killing the streetcars,’ said Rackenham. ‘Some sort of conspiracy.’
‘Red propaganda!’ said Gorge, slamming the table so hard with his fist that Loeser thought he saw his half-eaten burger separate momentarily into its constituent vertical sections.
‘Our host is just about correct,’ said Plumridge. ‘The streetcar companies are dying for plenty of reasons, but a conspiracy’s got nothing to do with it. The main point is, people hate them. And so they should. Those companies run the minimum number of cars they can get away with. They don’t give a thought to safety or hygiene. They cheat and bribe. A lot of them only got started to manipulate real estate values, anyway. And even if they were a consortium of saints, they couldn’t last much longer. The traffic’s the problem. Who’s going to take a streetcar when it has to wait in downtown jams like any other jalopy? You can’t turn a profit like that. Hard enough before, and then the Depression came. No, we can’t leave anything to the streetcar companies. The city has to do it. Pittsburgh just bought up all their private railway companies, and they’re going to run them at a loss for as long as it takes to turn them around.’
‘How can the city afford to buy up the streetcar lines?’ said Rackenham.
‘It can’t. The streetcar companies overstate the value of their assets to keep the banks and the shareholders happy. But even if they’d give us a fair price, it wouldn’t be worth it. We’ll just let them fail. Meanwhile, we start fresh. Los Angeles isn’t Pittsburgh. We have to be a hell of a lot more ambitious. First and foremost, the lines have to be elevated to beat the traffic. We would have gotten elevated lines in twenty-six if it weren’t for Harry Chandler.’
‘Who’s that?’ said Loeser.
‘The tyrant of the LA Times. Back then, the railroad companies wanted to build the new Union Station at Fourth and Central. They had right of way there in every direction, so it could have been a terminal for the elevated lines. But Chandler had real estate holdings at the Plaza, by the old Chinatown, so he wanted Union Station there instead. He put the Times to work, and now Union Station’s at the Plaza, which nobody can run streetcars into.’ A land deal, Loeser thought, just like Louis XIV murdering Villayer so that Villayer’s post office couldn’t redeem the Court of Miracles. Perhaps that was just what cities were: land deals built on top of land deals built on top of land deals, with a few million warm bodies as mortar. ‘Anyway, this time, we won’t let Chandler kill the plan. Rackenham, can I borrow your pen? Thanks.’ Plumridge unfolded his napkin on the table. ‘We won’t try to build the terminal downtown, we’ll build it up in north Hollywood, at the foot of the hills. And then we’ll connect up every suburb in Los Angeles.’ He sketched out a map of the city, with a big box at the junction of Sunset Boulevard and North Kings Road, and routes looping off in every direction. ‘For instance, Rackenham, you could get from Venice Beach to Pasadena in thirty minutes if you took an express. How long did it take you today in the traffic? Sixty minutes? Ninety minutes?’ Then Marsh, reaching across the table to point out an error, knocked over Loeser’s ginger ale so that it splashed across the napkin.
‘Flesh of Christ!’ screamed Gorge, jumping up from his seat. ‘Telephone, Woodkin! Newspapers! Ambulance! Thousands drowned!’
‘It’s just a map, sir. It’s not really Hollywood itself.’
Gorge coughed and sat down. ‘Map! Right. Pardon me. More ginger ale for Loeser.’
‘We’ll make it fast and cheap and modern like nobody’s ever seen,’ said Plumridge. ‘We’ve got all kinds of ideas. Some of the cars, the roof will come off when it’s sunny, like a convertible. Fit them out with soda fountains and magazine racks, like a drugstore. Coffee. Maybe cocktails in the evening. Jazz bands. Soon enough, people get used to going out without their Packards. They know that wherever they end up, they can catch a streetcar home, and they won’t be stranded. So they try walking. And then they start to realise how goddamned cracked it is that they’ll get in a car and drive an hour in traffic just to eat a steak. Maybe they’ll go to the place on the corner instead. You know, my wife comes from New York. She used to walk everywhere, since she was small. She can’t stand it here. Maybe one day we can make Los Angeles feel like New York.’
‘New York is a filthy, old-fashioned city,’ said Marsh as the maids cleared the plates. ‘New York was built for the horse and cart. We have electricity now. Telephones. Automobiles. Proximity is no longer a relevant parameter. The modern city is like water. It finds its own level in the volume it has available.’
‘But if that’s the case, why did we ever need to make a law against tall buildings in downtown? If people here want sprawl so much, why do we expressly have to forbid them to build skyscrapers and penthouses?’
‘Because next time there’s an earthquake we don’t want the same carnage as San Francisco had. Or Lisbon, for that matter. The lesson is not new. You’ve read Rousseau’s letter to Voltaire? “It was hardly nature that there brought together twenty thousand houses of six or seven storeys.” ’
‘Hundreds of years go by between earthquakes like that. The law is draconian. All it proves is that people crave density! The truth is, the “modern city” isn’t like water, it’s like oil. It spreads and slicks and stains. You know, if we don’t do something about it, in a few decades’ time, four fifths of downtown will be parking spaces. Four fifths! What kind of human being will be willing to live in a city like that? I know there’s plenty of space here. I know people love their cars. I know it seems like there’s no other way it can go. But think about how Los Angeles got started. There’s no reason for a town here. There’s no harbour, there’s no river. There’s not even enough water to drink. It’s nuts. But the place just willed itself almost arbitrarily into being. And if it can do that, it can do whatever it wants. This place is still a kid, after all. If it wants to grow up to be like New York, it can. Like New York, but with avocado groves.’
Marsh shook his head scornfully. The maids returned with pudding, which was strawberry pancakes with vanilla ice cream and maple syrup. Loeser had never encountered this delicacy before in his life, and the sheer rushing pleasure he got from the first mouthful was so great that it seemed to overflow the aqueduct delimited for it in his brain’s hedonic plumbing and slop sideways into the dried-up sexual reservoir that was adjacent, giving Loeser what felt like the closest thing he’d had in four years to a non-self-administered orgasm. He ate the rest so greedily it was only afterwards that he realised he’d been audibly grunting, and his stomach felt like wood. He had always hated the period towards the end of a meal when long gaps opened up between utterances: there was something repulsive and undignified about that shared awareness of the human animal’s basic inability to think and digest at the same time. The conversation torpidly returned to Marsh’s work at the California Institute of Technology, where, he said, he was being distracted from his proper administrative duties by a problem so unpleasant that he couldn’t bring it up over dinner. Then Gorge forced him to, of course. So: ‘We keep finding dead dogs all over the place,’ he said. ‘Six now. Mutilated and, uh, disembowelled.’
‘Is the cafeteria food that bad?’ said Plumridge.
Marsh ignored him. ‘The heck of it is, we know who’s doing it. We have a janitor called Slate. Odd fellow. Can’t look you in the eye. And he’s always sneaking around at night. Once, somebody even found a bloody rag in his mop cart. But we don’t have any positive proof.’
‘Find some pretext,’ said Gorge, passing out cigars from a box. ‘Fire him that way.’
‘I want to, but Millikan won’t have it. He knew Slate’s father, or something like that. And Slate does his job pretty methodically. So unless we actually catch him standing over a dead beagle with a linoleum cutter in his hand, there’s nothing we can do. A lot of the students are very frightened. And I have to worry about it all day — when I should be concentrating on the Gorge Auditorium.’
Too late, Loeser realised that a dinner without wine was not likely to last long after the last course, and he was still no closer to Midnight at the Nursing Academy. He could excuse himself to go to the lavatory, but the house was far too big to search. For all he knew, Gorge’s collection might be down some secret tunnel. The only plan he could think of was to wait awkwardly until all the other guests had left, then find some way of raising the subject with Gorge. Could he bring himself to do that? Before he made up his mind, Marsh and Plumridge had finished their cigars and were making their excuses, and then Rackenham said, ‘You know, Colonel, Loeser doesn’t have any way of getting home.’
‘Woodkin: sled.’
So Loeser got a lift back to Hollywood in the back of Gorge’s limousine, which he made sure to think of as a taxi. As they were turning off Palmetto Drive, Loeser said, ‘Colonel Gorge seems to be in remarkably vigorous health for a man of his age.’
‘Yes,’ said Woodkin. ‘He attributes it to an operation he had a few years ago.’
‘What sort of operation?’ said Loeser, with the feeling that he already knew the answer.
‘It was the invention of a French surgeon. He passed through California in twenty-six and the Colonel engaged his services. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? Dr Sergei Voronoff.’
‘No. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that name.’
‘The operation normally involves the transplantation of certain primate glands into the human body. But the Colonel didn’t believe anything that came out of a “little chimp” would be of any use to him.’
‘Where did he get the glands, then?’
‘From a coyote. The Colonel shot it himself.’
Loeser decided that this was his last chance to get anything useful out of the evening, so he needed to be bold. ‘Is hunting one of Colonel Gorge’s hobbies?’
‘Yes. He is very proficient with a rifle. And a bow. And a tomahawk. And his hands.’
‘Does he have any other hobbies?’
‘Several.’
‘Do they include … A mutual acquaintance told me that Colonel Gorge has a very impressive collection of…’
‘Yes?’
‘Of specialist incunabula, I suppose you might say.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not sure what you might be referring to. The Colonel is not a particularly keen reader. His hobbies are mostly of the outdoorsman type. By the way, Mr Loeser, if you change your mind about the Pasadena house, you only need to telephone. Mr Rackenham comes by the mansion often, so I can give him the keys and he can drop them off with you on his way back to Venice Beach. I won’t have time to show you the house myself, I’m afraid, but you can go and inspect it whenever you want. If you like it, you can simply move in. If you don’t, you can bring the keys back, no harm done. We could let you have it for thirty dollars a month. As Colonel Gorge says, it’s wasteful to leave it empty.’
Even Loeser, with his tenuous grasp of the value of the American dollar, knew that was a cheap rent. Still: ‘That’s kind of you, but it won’t be necessary.’ He could tell he wasn’t going to get any further with Woodkin, and for the first time he wondered if Blimk’s gossip might be baseless after all. Perhaps he’d been wasting his time tonight. But then, all at once, he made the connection that he should have made an hour ago. If Gorge and his wife didn’t sleep together any more, the neglectful party wasn’t necessarily female. A man with Gorge’s neurological defect would have an extraordinary appreciation for certain types of photographic stimulus. In fact it rather dizzied Loeser to think of quite how much you could enjoy a book like Midnight at the Nursing Academy if you were lucky enough to have a disorder like visual agnosia. Of course you would start a collection. Of course you would keep adding to it until it was the biggest in the world. Of course you would be distracted from your wife. Loeser almost wanted to snort a gallon of polish himself. He’d never have to worry about rejection again.
Not that anyone ever really said no in this city, he’d noticed. Probably even if you came right out and begged a girl to let you fuck her, she’d say, ‘I’m awfully sorry but right at this time we just don’t have a suitable vacancy. However, we’ll keep you in mind, and something may develop shortly. And we do appreciate your applying and are aware of your fine qualifications.’ As they paused for a minute at some traffic lights, he could see by the side of the road, just next to a school playground, a copse of oil derricks in those black wooden frames like lifeguard towers on the beach. They were everywhere in this city, always nodding, nodding, nodding, an endless dumb affirmation. Perhaps when the big earthquake was about to come, they’d all finally start shaking their heads.
The Chateau Marmont
Loeser was awoken by the telephone. Every night that he’d slept in California, his eyes had produced almost geological quantities of dried rheum, like a waste product of his body’s slow adjustment to the climate. He rubbed them clear and then reached for the receiver. ‘Hallo?’
‘This is Dolores Mutton.’
‘I have not been nowhere near of the house!’ screeched Loeser, so alarmed that his grammar started to tilt.
‘Yes, about that. I’m calling to apologise, Mr Loeser. I can’t tell you how rotten I’ve been feeling about how I behaved yesterday. You’d only come to pick up your clothes and take some pictures and I treated you like some sort of vagrant. And I was just as bad before that at the party. I can be a real ogress when I’m in the wrong mood, and I don’t come to my senses until it’s too late. You can’t imagine how many friends I’ve lost over it. Poor Stent bears the brunt, of course. If you’ll ever forgive me, then I want you to know that you’re welcome at the house whenever you like. It goes without saying that I’ll replace the camera and the clothes. By the way, I suppose you’re wondering why your friend Jascha was at the house that day. I should have explained. Jascha is on the board of the Cultural Solidarity Committee. We were having a little meeting over coffee. And in fact, Mr Loeser, your name had already come up that morning. There is an empty seat on the board, which we’d very much hoped to fill with someone of your race. Not to be too blunt about it, but most of the refugees coming to America are Jewish, and yet we don’t have one Jewish board member — it’s a real embarrassment. I don’t suppose you’d be interesting in joining the Committee? We can’t offer much money — just a token stipend, about thirty dollars a month — but the duties are very light and we’d be honoured to have such a distinguished artist among us. What do you say?’
Loeser was excited to realise he was being bought off. Evidently, Dolores Mutton had conferred with Drabsfarben, and they’d decided that bribes would be safer than threats. He hoped they wouldn’t go back to the threats when he turned down the bribe. ‘I’m grateful for the offer, Mrs Mutton, but I won’t be in Los Angeles nearly long enough to take up any kind of job.’
‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Yes. So let’s just consider the whole matter permanently closed, shall we? The whole matter,’ he repeated significantly.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘I see. Thank you, Mr Loeser. Goodbye.’
Loeser decided to have breakfast in the hotel restaurant. He dressed and went downstairs, picking up a copy of the Los Angeles Herald from the sideboard as he found a table. There was a story about some musicologists who had measured the wave frequency of traffic noises at various spots throughout the city and discovered that the tonal pitch of Los Angeles was F natural.
Flipping past the international politics and the Hollywood gossip, he came to an article by none other than Stent Mutton, who had a long account of his trip to the Soviet Union. The prose was so different to his novels that it was almost hard to believe that this was the author of Stifled Cry and Assembly Line. He explained that he had arrived a sceptic but after a fortnight he was a convert. ‘The citizens of Moscow joke about minor inconveniences, usually if not always with complete good humour, but they never think of allowing these shortcomings to blind them to the big things that life in the Soviet Union alone can offer. How sturdily and with what calm confidence do they face life, feeling that they are organic parts of a purposeful whole. The future lies before them like a well-defined and carefully tended path through a beautiful landscape.’ Mutton had toured a prison, which he found clean, comfortable and humane. ‘So well known and effective is the Soviet method of remaking human beings that criminals occasionally now apply to be admitted. An eventual disappearance of wrongdoing is expected by Soviet authorities as the mental habits produced by the socialist system become established in Soviet life.’ He’d even had a short audience with Stalin. ‘A lonely man, he is not influenced by money or pleasure or even ambition. Though he holds enormous power he takes no pride in its possession. His demeanour is kindly, his manner almost deprecatingly simple, his personality and expression of reserve, strength and poise very marked. His brown eyes are exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.’ Loeser felt he ought to cut the article out and send it to Hecht. Except that Hecht couldn’t be a communist any more if he were out here making five hundred dollars a week at a film studio. Could he?
He finished his breakfast and went out on to Sunset Boulevard, where a hearse was inching down the street so slowly that it looked as if someone had merely forgotten to put on the handbrake. The air smelled of pasteurised honey. He planned to spend the day talking his way into casting agencies to find out if they had anyone matching Adele’s description on their books. If he hadn’t found her in thirty days, he would give up and go home. He couldn’t bear to stay here any longer than that. Nothing could be allowed to change his mind. One month, and then back to Berlin.
The Loeser House
When Loeser came inside and saw the lipstick on his writing table, it struck him that he had been living with his ghost for nearly three years now and, like the husband in an arranged marriage, he still didn’t really know her. He put down the three letters that he’d taken from the mailbox outside, picked up the lipstick, and took it over to the antique wooden chest where he kept everything the ghost left in his house. Only once had the ghost ever taken anything back: a pearl necklace that he’d found underneath the sofa. Perhaps she’d changed her mind about him keeping it — if, after all, these things were indeed gifts, and not, as he was coming to believe, merely droppings, secretions.
His ghost was making him gullible. Last year, wandering along the beach near the Muttons’ house before a party, he’d seen a strange white scattering in the distance like a flock of baby seagulls come to rest on the sand. When he got closer he saw that they were condoms, thousands of them, every one still slimily tumescent as if stretched around an invisible penis. Here was all the sex he ever hadn’t had in his life, he thought, the counterfactual rubber wraiths of every stolen chance and near miss, come here to haunt him, as mocking as the lingerie brought to him by the lodger in his house. Next time he tried to talk to a pretty girl, there they would be, squelching around his shoes, wriggling up his trouser legs, bellyflopping like giant maggots into his glass of wine. He stamped on one angrily and it collapsed with a fecal burp. Surely his domestic ghost didn’t look so ugly, if she had a form at all. Only later, at the party, did he find out from Stent Mutton that there was a sewage line hidden further up the beach, and every few months, after a Saturday night, a glob of used condoms would get trapped in a pipe then washed out all at once on to the sand, inflated by methane and ammonia. So in fact Loeser had only one prophylactic spectre in his entourage — the Trojan in his wallet that had expired the previous April. He decided to bury it in its wrapper.
No, Loeser still hadn’t got laid. He’d mostly given up hope. Time, like space, could rush so peremptorily past. The monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece, he had read, were supposed to be the holiest places in the world because no women had set foot on the island for a thousand years, and by that odd criterion he felt his penis should be venerated as a relic on a par with the incorrupt cadaver of Saint Athanasios the Great. In the Greek Orthodox Church to which those monasteries belonged, there were bishops who said that Hell was just being without God’s love; Loeser could never take seriously the idea of hell as a mere privation, but life without sex did feel like hell, and either way at this point he would have swapped an eternity of God’s love for one middling blowjob. He had developed a habit of clenching his left hand into a fist whenever he saw something that made his frustration jolt: a bare shoulder, a giggling couple, a swimwear advertisement in a magazine. Then one morning he was looking at himself in the mirror before getting into the bath and his left forearm seemed visibly more muscular than his right. Horrified, he took out a tape measure, and found a difference at the thickest point of nearly half an inch. He went to his desk, searched through his papers, found an example of his signature from 1935 on a carbon copy of an immigration form, and wrote his name again next to it. His new ‘Egon Loeser’ slumped broad and clumsy compared to the old. Lust had deformed his body. He couldn’t sign a cheque without confessing it. There was a Venetian proverb from around the time of Lavicini: ‘The first sin is to be born desperate.’
After seven years, he still thought about Marlene Schibelsky a lot. The memory of his last girlfriend seemed to have chased him around the world as doggedly as Loeser himself had chased Adele. This was partly, of course, because she was the last woman he’d slept with, and the most enjoyable ever, but also because Loeser, unlike the reader of a biography, did not have the luxury of referring back to an earlier chapter to remind himself of the circumstances of his parting from Marlene, and so he had allowed himself to patch the narrative into something a bit more — well, sorrowful and noble, to use Scramsfield’s conjunction. All memories, after all, were implausible ghosts, bad historical novels, as tawdry and convenient as Signor da Vinci in The Sorceror of Venice, as dank and dead as the giant sloths dredged out of the tar pits south of the Chateau Marmont. And so Loeser had decided, in squinty retrospect, that he’d loved Marlene, and he hadn’t really wanted to break up with her, but he’d hoped it would be best for the both of them. (Or something like that.) Since leaving Berlin, he’d thought often, inexplicably often, of the men she’d fucked before and after their time together, Klugweil and the waiters at the Schwanneke and all the others. The thought of it hurt him, although the pain, at least, had begun to lose its spikes, plotting a curve of much the same shape that certain greater pains once had. He found it odd, in fact, how dispassionately, how empirically, he could verify its continued presence by calling on specific recollections, as if his nostalgia were a doctor tweaking a dislocated joint and asking, ‘Does that hurt? What about that?’ And the pain really did feel as if it were located somewhere in the torso, although Loeser would not really have placed it in the heart, as in the anatomical doctrine of cabaret songs, but just behind the lungs, snuggling there like an unwanted gland transplant from some especially dolorous species of mollusc (a ghost condom with a shell). Once Marlene had told him an anecdote about where she’d taken ‘boys’ when she still lived with her parents and it was difficult to find a place to make love. He was supposed to find it funny, and at the time he had, but now all he could think of was that word she used, ‘boys’. She probably just meant two or three, but he had no way to know, and, as it was, Cantor himself could not have conceived of an infinity big enough to enfold that plural. All those boys. Them instead of him. He thought about that and it made the gland throb softly, reliably, and sometimes he had to clench his fist, even though he was trying to give that up.
Loeser’s favourite book in Blimk’s shop, where he spent most of his afternoons, was still Dames! And how to Lay them. He referred to it constantly, like a psalter, with an inexhaustible excitement at the notion that it was possible to seduce a woman just by following a rigorous system of instructions. The problem was, there wasn’t much in it that he felt he could put to practical use. ‘Want to impress a dame the morning after the night before? Run to the kitchen while she’s still snoozing fit to bust, and come back with what I like to call the Egg Majestique. That’s one of every type of egg on a tray: a soft-boiled egg, a hard-boiled egg, an egg over easy, an egg sunny side up, a poached egg, a devilled egg, a pickled egg, a coddled egg, a scrambled egg, a one-egg omelette, and a shot of egg nog for the hangover. No dame will be able to believe you know so many ways to cook eggs. Egg protein is good for the manly function, and after you’ve pulled off the Egg Majestique, you’ll probably need it, if you know what I mean.’ This sounded pretty authoritative to Loeser but he just wasn’t quite sure.
His amity with Blimk was of an unfamiliar kind. They’d never been drunk or hungover together; they had no one to gossip or complain about; and they were of such different backgrounds that they didn’t feel even secretly competitive. In other words, they had brought together none of the essential constituents of a friendship, and yet the result was still recognisably a friendship, which to Loeser was by definition an avant-garde achievement, like Duchamp’s urinal. When he was still living back at the Chateau Marmont, it was only really out of boredom that he had first got into the habit of visiting the shop, but Blimk had seemed to appreciate the company. Now, they often sat reading together for hours at a time inside a companionable silence so sturdy that customers looked almost apologetic when they had to interrupt it to buy a book. On Sundays, to Loeser’s faint disbelief, they played tennis.
In April the previous year, word had reached Blimk that H.P. Lovecraft had died of intestinal cancer at his aunt’s house in Providence. By that time, diligent as a seditionist, Blimk had collected nearly all the fiction Lovecraft had ever published, swapping decade-old issues of Weird Tales and Amazing Stories in the post with a network of eight or nine other Lovecraft obsessives. Often Loeser would read out a story from beginning to end so that Blimk, who couldn’t type without glaring at the keys, would still have a copy after he was obliged to pass on the original magazine. One of his correspondents was a Professor of classics at Harvard, another was an inmate at Attica prison in New York, and another was a congressional aide in Washington, from whom Blimk had first heard that rumour about the Secretary of State’s complete faith in the scientific accuracy of these ‘stories’. To Loeser, Lovecraft’s work seemed to be in flight from its own unlikelihood. How on earth could one plausibly account for the presence of ancient evil in a country as young as the United States of America? In New England and Rhode Island, Lovecraft could just about sustain it, but if he had lived in sunny, modern Los Angeles, Loeser sometimes felt, the man could never have become a writer.
But of course it was wrong to assume that, as with some obsolete make of spark plug, the production of ghosts had been discontinued. There could be ghosts in new places, in airports and automats and amusement parks. Loeser had become aware of his own ghost within a week of moving into Gorge’s spare bungalow in Pasadena. In the middle of the night, he had been awoken from a dream about pencils by a thumping and scratching above his head, loud and wild as if something was about to smash through the ceiling. Terrified, he pulled on a dressing gown, got a torch from the kitchen, and went out on to the patio to see what was on the roof. But there was nothing there. When he went back to his bedroom, the thumping had stopped, but a few hours later, just as he’d finally calmed down enough to doze off, it started again, even louder. He slept on the sofa that night, hearing only the snores of the icebox motor. The following morning, he decided he ought to venture out as usual — this was when he hadn’t yet run out of ideas for how he might find Adele — so it wasn’t until he got home that evening, and made a thorough investigation of his bedroom, that he discovered what the ghost had left for him: a pair of dark stockings, expensive ones, stuffed down behind the headboard of his bed like the discarded cocoons of two great pedigree silkworms. Doing his best to be sceptical, he tried to think of other ways they could have got there. But all the doors and windows had been locked when he went out and they still were when he got home. The house had no secret tunnels. There was no way any human being could have got in. And ever since then, he had heard the same thumping and scratching about once a week, and found a physical deposit from the ghost in some odd hidden place about every few months. They were almost always feminine in nature, which is how he’d decided the ghost itself was a woman. He didn’t want to bring it up explicitly with Woodkin in case Woodkin thought he was a lunatic, but he had at least managed to ascertain that the house had never had any female tenants, murdered or otherwise.
Were ghosts moored to structures, he sometimes wondered, or to spatial coordinates? If he had his house jacked up on wheels and towed to Venice Beach like that house he’d once seen on Sunset Boulevard, would the ghost be dragged with it, or would it continue inanely to haunt the same triangle of land even after it was empty? If you could have a ghost ship, could you have a ghost tram? Could the ghost be Scramsfield’s fiancée, the one he’d strangled to death in that Boston art gallery, passed on to Loeser by some ritual invocation over the champaggne?
He decided to open his post. The first letter was his monthly cheque from the Cultural Solidarity Committee of California. The second was from Achleitner. And the third was from Blumstein. He hadn’t heard from the director since he’d left Berlin.
Dear Egon,
Perhaps you are surprised to find me writing to you. It has been so long now since our friendship was interrupted. After you dismissed my first & only attempt at reconciliation, it would have been unpleasant for both of us if I had pressed the matter. So I decided, unhappily, to respect your wishes. If I am to explain why I have altered that policy now, I want to do so without using a melodramatic phrase like “last chance”. I will only say that I truly believe that we in Germany are approaching some sort of rupture, some sort of chasm, in our history. From this side of the chasm, I can still speak to you. From the other side of the chasm, there is no way of knowing. So I write to you now, hoping you will indulge my letter.
Perhaps you are already sceptical. I know you never believed in politics, or in history. For a long time, I didn’t either. So there is no point repeating the bare facts that you must already have read in the newspapers, because I know it won’t make any difference. I think the only way to persuade you that my concerns are real may be to tell you about something that happened to me yesterday. It was what finally inspired me to write to you.
I was on a tram to Schlingesdorf. It was the middle of the afternoon & the tram was quite empty. Everyone had distributed themselves evenly among the available seats, as they always do, so that nobody had to share an armrest with anybody else. There was also a man in Nazi uniform, I think he must have been a member of the Schutzstaffel, who was standing up near the front of the tram even though there were all those seats available.
We came to a stop & a man got on. He wore a shabby overcoat & shoes with the soles almost falling off, & he had one of those faces that, even to another Jew, seem so characteristically Jewish that they almost approach caricature. He gave the Schutzstaffel man an uncomfortable glance, then carried on past him, twisting his whole body so that he couldn’t even be accused of brushing against the man’s uniform. He sat down next to an old woman with some shopping bags. The Nazi watched him for a while, sneering, & then said ‘Jew. Why do you assume that a good citizen like that will be willing to sit next to you?’ The Jew shrugged & asked the woman if she objected. The woman shook her head. Then the Nazi said ‘Jew. You are intimidating her into silence. Unless she specifically tells me that she is willing to sit next to a dirty Jew, I cannot allow you to sit next to her.’ The Jew obviously didn’t wish to make life difficult for the old woman, so he got up & moved to another seat, next to a businessman. The Nazi said ‘Jew. Why do you assume that a good citizen like that will be willing to sit next to you?’ But the Jew didn’t want to be made to move a second time, so he looked at the businessman in hopes of support. The Nazi said ‘Sir. You must say “I am willing to sit next to a dirty Jew.” Unless you say those exact words, I will conclude that he is intimidating you into silence, & I will insist that he find another seat.’ The businessman hesitated & then looked down at his newspaper. The Nazi said ‘Jew. Find another seat’ but the Jew didn’t move, so the Nazi said ‘Jew. Unless you find another seat I will arrest you.’ So the Jew asked where he could sit, & the Nazi said ‘Well, I don’t know. Is anyone on this tram willing to sit next to a dirty Jew like this?’ I raised my hand.
The Nazi turned to me & said ‘Say it out loud.’ I said ‘I am quite willing to sit next to that Jewish gentleman.’ The Nazi said ‘Is that because you are a Jew yourself?’ I said ‘I am Jewish, yes.’ So the Jew came & sat next to me. He didn’t thank me & I didn’t want him to. For a few minutes, there was silence on the tram — silence like you’ve never heard on a Berlin tram! And then the Nazi began the second act of his production. He said ‘Do you two Jews realise that young couple sitting opposite you now have no choice but to look at the two of you? You are right in front of them.’ Neither of us answered, so the Nazi continued ‘Why do you assume that two good citizens like that will be willing to look at you?’ Again, neither of us answered. ‘Unless they specifically tell me that they are willing to stare at two dirty Jews, I cannot allow you to sit opposite them.’ Egon, I have dealt with bullies before, and I decided I had had enough. I got to my feet and
Loeser crumpled up the letter and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. It went on for pages and pages and frankly he had better things to do. It was just like his former mentor to tell some long, convoluted, implausible anecdote about public transport because he thought it would get him some sympathy — undignified for a man of his age. He started on Achleitner’s letter.
Egon,
Sorry I haven’t written for so long. I’m back in Berlin now and you wouldn’t believe how hectic things are here. You were right — my long holiday in the castle couldn’t last for ever (although it did seem to last about nine tenths of for ever). We’ve been expelled from paradise. Buddensieg’s been called back to the city and he insisted we all come back with him. It’s all right, though, because he’s given me a job, so I can pay my rent. And I reveal the following in confidence, Loeser, because I deduce from the tone of your last letter that you need a bit of cheering up, but you’d better not tell Hecht or Gugelhupf or Ophuls or any of the others out there with you: I have to wear a uniform! Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? But at least I don’t really have to do anything — much the same as your cushy post on that committee, or so it sounds. Oh, you’ll never guess who I saw in the street the other day. Blumstein! Yes, the old bore’s still around. I went up to say hello but after he saw the uniform he wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Probably still wishing the November Group years had never ended. Well, they have. They really have. So how are things in the Golden State? Have you found Adele yet? No, I thought not. I hope you’ve at least found somebody willing to reset your stopwatch, as it were. I’m surrounded by vigorous men in riding boots so as you can imagine I couldn’t be happier. Well, I suppose I should go, we’ve got a reception in a minute for some lunatic who says he can see psychic runes or something. Stay out of the sun, it never agreed with you.
Hugs!
Anton
The Gorge House
Over the huge Georgian fireplace in Gorge’s billiards room was the stuffed head of a grizzly bear, its jaws fixed open in a way that made it look not so much ferocious as just very impressed. ‘Sit down, Krauto,’ said Gorge, who reclined in an armchair with a glass of strawberry milkshake. ‘Anything to report?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘Still German?’
‘I believe I am, yes.’
‘Can’t be helped. Job for you, if you’ll take it. Should damn well take it. Reek of idleness, Krauto, don’t mind me saying. No room for idle men on Gorge land. Now, Marsh — remember him? From CalTech. Building my auditorium.’
‘The fellow from the Executive Council. Yes.’
As he spoke, Gorge kept glancing over Loeser at the bear’s head. He had an expression as if some kind of turbid struggle was going on in his brain. ‘Heap of delays, but theatre’s finished now. This Christmas, first play. Needs a director. Want to put you forward to Marsh. Couldn’t refuse you, Marsh, if I did.’
‘First of all, Colonel Gorge, I’m not a director, I’m a set designer, and second, even if I were to direct for the first time, a Christmas play at a university theatre…’
‘Doesn’t matter. Not about the play, this job. Look here: gave a million dollars for that theatre. Enough to get invited to the banquets at the Athenaeum Club, all that horseshit. But doesn’t get me any closer to the scientists. Need to find something out about this man Bailey. Met him, but he’s zipped up. Need a party on the inside. Scrape up some intelligence.’
‘In other words,’ said Woodkin, whose telephone call had summoned Loeser to the mansion, ‘Colonel Gorge hopes that if you are accepted into the community of the Institute, which is only three miles from here, you may have a good chance of harvesting some information about Professor Bailey and his activities. Colonel Gorge is very interested in these—’
But then Gorge jumped from his seat with a roar and ran out of the room. Before Loeser even had time to give Woodkin a puzzled glance, he had returned carrying a double-barrelled shotgun with an engraved bronze stock.
‘No, sir!’ cried Woodkin.
Gorge stopped, raised the weapon, and took aim. Loeser dived to the floor. There was an explosion and the bear’s head tumbled from the wall.
‘Got the fucker!’ said Gorge in triumph, barely audible over the ringing in Loeser’s ears. Then he looked at the perforated trophy on the carpet and blinked several times in confusion. Motes of cotton stuffing swirled in the air. The wall above the fireplace was speckled with a halo of buckshot. One of the bear’s glass eyes lay like some sort of ominous cocktail olive in a puddle of pink foam where Gorge’s half-drunk milkshake had been knocked over. ‘How do you think he got in the house?’
‘That was not a live bear, sir,’ said Woodkin, calm again. ‘That was merely the head of a bear that you shot once before in Montana.’
‘Head! Right. Beg your pardon.’ He looked at Loeser, who was returning tremulously to his seat. ‘Should have explained, Krauto. Noggin’s gotten worse. All sorts of trouble. Tell him, Woodkin.’
‘Colonel Gorge’s condition has deteriorated further. Some of the doctors are now calling it an “ontological agnosia”. As well as confusing representations with the objects of those representations, he now has difficulty distinguishing, for instance, the living from the dead.’
‘Won’t even tell you what happened at McGilligan’s funeral the other day. Almost as bad as the time I met that fellow with all the tattoos.’
‘I can only apologise, sir,’ said Woodkin. ‘It should have occurred to me to remove all items of taxidermy from the house the moment the doctors informed me of your condition’s progress.’
‘Well, matter in hand: what say, Krauto? Want to take on this play?’
Loeser didn’t. But although he’d had dinner with Gorge regularly since moving into the house near by, he still hadn’t reached the level of intimacy with his landlord where he could ask about Gorge’s collection. And he still missed Midnight at the Nursing Academy like a lost love. He’d experimented with literally hundreds of different publications borrowed from Blimk’s shop, some of them with contents that alarmed/baffled even him, but nothing had ever satisfied him in quite the same way. If he did this job for Gorge, then perhaps he could finally ask for the reward he really wanted.
The California Institute of Technology
Explore this university in a few thousand years’ time like the narrator of Lovecraft’s ‘The Nameless City’, thought Loeser as he approached on his bicycle, and you might take it for a grand complex of temples and mausolea: although he knew from Woodkin that almost no part of CalTech was more than two decades old, these buildings were the first he’d observed since he’d come to Los Angeles that one could plausibly imagine as ruins. The laboratories and libraries and lecture theatres — delineated with the clarity of architectural drawings under the noon sun by the hard black shadows of their own cornices and pilasters, lushly interspersed with paths and lawns and fountains and rows of cypresses — had a gravity that made them seem far more sacral than, say, the typical Californian Methodist church. Also, the campus, like most of the surrounding city, felt almost deserted, except of course CalTech did not have the excuse of everyone being locked up in their cars, and the proportions of its halls seemed to redouble its emptiness. No necropolis was ever so quiet. If it was term time, where were all the students? Not working, surely?
Loeser had arranged to find Marsh at the entrance of Throop Hall, an imposing domed administrative building in the local Spanish Colonial style. The breeze nuzzled an American flag on a tall pole not far from its portico, and the sky above was full of ribbons and ruffles and loops and bows and threads and all the other clutter of a dressmaker’s table. He waited in the shade next to his bicycle for twenty minutes before giving up and going inside.
‘I’m looking for Dr Marsh,’ he said to a woman behind a desk. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting him here.’
For a moment she looked reluctant to answer. ‘I’m afraid Dr Marsh isn’t available.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s missing. He didn’t show up for his eight o’clock budget meeting this morning. We called his wife, and she said he never came home last night. We think he may still be somewhere on campus. There’s a search going on. What did you need him for?’
‘My name is Egon Loeser. I’m going to be directing a play at the Gorge Auditorium. Dr Marsh was going to give me a tour of the university.’
‘Well, in the circumstances, I’m sure we can find another member of the faculty who’d be happy to show you around. In fact …’ She waved to somebody behind Loeser. ‘Excuse me, Dr Ziesel? Do you have a minute?’
This time, Loeser wasn’t even that surprised. Although his duties as the only ‘Jewish’ committee member of the Cultural Solidarity Committee of California had turned out to be pleasantly non-existent, he still went to receptions at the Muttons’ house about twice a year, and every time there were half a dozen anxious new arrivals from Berlin, most of whom he recognised. He’d almost resigned himself now to this toxic seepage of his old life into his new one. Still, Dieter Ziesel — that was going too far. Loeser noticed that he’d put on even more weight.
‘Egon!’ said Ziesel, before continuing in German. ‘What a delight. I’d heard you were in Los Angeles but I wasn’t sure when we might meet.’ He switched to English. ‘This is my colleague Dr Clarendon.’ Loeser shook hands with the scientist at Ziesel’s side, who was a tall gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves. His hair was steel grey and his palm was very smooth and cold. ‘What brings you to the Institute?’ asked Ziesel.
Loeser repeated what he’d told the woman at the desk.
‘I wondered if you might fill in for Dr Marsh, if you have time,’ said the woman.
‘I have always time for an old friend. Would you like to join us, Dr Clarendon?’
‘I’m afraid I ought to get back to the lab.’
‘Oh, shucks,’ said Ziesel, confusingly. He said goodbye to Clarendon and then switched back to German. ‘Now, Egon, is there anything in particular you want to see?’
Loeser didn’t want to take a tour with Ziesel, but he could hardly turn round and demand that the woman at the desk find him a less odious replacement. ‘I need to see the Gorge Auditorium. Obviously. And—’ Loeser hesitated. He couldn’t be too obvious about Gorge’s agenda for sending him here. On the other hand, Ziesel was probably too doltish to be suspicious. ‘I’d very much like to meet Professor Bailey.’
Ziesel grinned. ‘I bet I know why!’
‘What do you mean?’ How could he possibly know?
But Ziesel just winked and then led Loeser back out of Throop Hall. ‘Up here’s the Athenaeum Club,’ he said, pointing, as they walked north along the path. ‘It’s supposed to look like something out of an Oxford or Cambridge college — a bit pretentious if you ask me. Over there’s the Dabney Hall of the Humanities. And that’s the Guggenheim Laboratory of Aeronautics.’
‘How long have you been in America?’ said Loeser.
‘Nearly a year. Back in Berlin I published a paper on the subatomic properties of thorium that caused a bit of a stir — perhaps you came across it?’
‘Funnily enough, I did not.’
‘Well, anyway, I owe my job to that paper. They offered me a research fellowship out here and naturally I jumped at it — you of all people don’t need me to explain why! It’s supposed to be temporary, but they’ve told me in confidence that I can stay as long as I like. I would rather have gone to Princeton, but the weather here is better, and of course if I’d gone to New Jersey I never would have met Lornadette.’
‘Who’s Lornadette?’
‘We do have a lot to catch up on! Lornadette is my wife.’
Loeser stopped dead. ‘Your wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re married?’
‘Yes.’
‘To a living, human woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is she physically or mentally deformed in any way?’
‘Quite the opposite.’
‘Did any money change hands? Was it anything to do with a visa or a work permit?’
‘No! We met and we fell in love and … it all just happened very fast. I’ve never been so happy in my life.’
‘Does she let you have sex with her?’
Ziesel blushed. ‘Egon, I mean to say—’
‘You’re married. You’re actually married. I, Egon Loeser, haven’t got laid in half a decade and you, Dieter Ziesel, come out here and straight away you find a wife.’
‘Been a bit arid lately, has it?’ said Ziesel, and chuckled. ‘Well, we’ve all gone through periods like that.’
‘Firstly, Ziesel, it is not funny. I know that, to people who have regular sex, the thought of someone else not having sex always seems like an amusing trifle incapable of inducing any genuine sympathy, but if I tell you that the closest I’ve come to sex in seven years is half undressing an erogenously narcotised maiden aunt, you should react as if I’ve just told you I’ve got stomach cancer. All right? Because that’s what it’s like. It’s the worst thing in the world. It attacks you on every level of your being. It is not fucking funny. And secondly, “we” haven’t “all gone through periods like that”. Don’t say that as if we’re the same. We are not the same. I deserve to be having sex. You, on the other hand, should be grateful you’ve ever had sex in your life. You must have got used to chastity a long time ago. I am not used to it and I never will be.’
Ziesel pursed his lips. ‘Look, Egon, do you want to go to Professor Bailey’s laboratory or not? I should have thought you’d be excited. Especially after what you’ve just said.’
‘Meeting some physicist is not going to make up for this fucking unspeakable injustice, and I don’t see what it’s got to do with anything I’ve just said. But, all right, we may as well hurry along. Lead the way, uxorious Dieter. Oh, by the way, did Heijenhoort come with you?’
‘No, he stayed in Berlin.’
Bailey worked in the Obediah Laboratories. This was a building, Loeser’s favourite yet, that resembled a sort of stone dam built by Aztecs trained at the Bauhaus.
‘Where are all the white coats?’ said Loeser as they went inside.
‘That’s chemistry,’ said Ziesel. ‘Physicists don’t wear white coats.’ He led Loeser down a corridor to a room that was labelled only ‘11’. The door was ajar, so he knocked softly and then pushed it open. ‘Professor Bailey? May we come in?’
‘He just just just left.’
Loeser looked inside. The man who had spoken was standing at the laboratory’s sink, soaping the taps with a washcloth. Loeser could see him in profile, except that he didn’t have a profile, which is to say, his face was a flat plane — his chin and forehead murally vertical, his nose squashed back against his skull, his mouth lipless, his eyes pasted on so far forward that they could have winked at each other sideways. The configuration was unnatural enough that it could surely only have been the result of some grim natal mishap involving a steel table or a concrete floor. He wore baggy grey overalls and had straggly black hair that looked as if it had spent a few days hexagonally loomed across a shower drain before he even grew it.
‘Oh, hello, Slate. Do you know where he went?’
‘Him and Miss Miss Miss Miss Miss—’
‘His assistant, yes.’
‘They went to the the the the basement to get get something from a supply cupboard.’ Slate didn’t look up from the taps as he spoke. Around him, the laboratory seemed surprisingly neat — lots of electrical instruments, lots of notebooks, and a large shape in the centre of the room concealed by a dust sheet, but none of the clutter that Loeser associated with science — except that on one of the desks there was for some reason a toy steam engine.
‘Thank you, Slate,’ said Ziesel.
‘Christ, he’s the sort of person that haunts your dreams,’ said Loeser in German as they went downstairs.
‘He’s a decent fellow, really.’ They turned a corner. ‘Oh, yes, here is Professor Bailey. Are you forgetting your keys?’ Ziesel asked in English.
‘No, the door’s jammed.’ Bailey must have been around forty, but he already had the tinge of late middle age: short, balding, and pot-bellied, he also swayed a little on his feet, reminding Loeser of one of those round-bottomed wooden toys that it is impossible to knock over. He wore a bushy moustache and the lenses of his glasses were so thick that, like an astronomer observing Neptune, he was probably seeing several minutes into the past. ‘Thankfully some younger, nimbler hands have taken over.’
His assistant, a girl with short black hair, had her back to them as she rattled the lock. ‘I think I’ve nearly got it, Professor,’ she said. Her voice was familiar from somewhere.
‘Well done, my dear.’
‘Egon, this is Professor Bailey, one of our most distinguished physicists,’ said Ziesel. ‘Professor Bailey, this is Egon Loeser, an old friend of mine from Berlin. He is very keen to meet you.’
Bailey smiled and shook Loeser’s hand. ‘And why is that?’
‘Well—’ Ziesel started to say.
Just then Bailey’s assistant cried, ‘There!’ as the lock finally submitted. But the steel cupboard door swung open with twice the force she must have been expecting, because there was a weight leaning against it from the inside. She tumbled backwards, and the weight tumbled down, and Loeser saw simultaneously that the girl was Adele and the weight was the man he’d dined with more than once at Gorge’s house. Marsh was dead, and Adele was here, and there was a great messy gash in his chest like an apricot with the stone gouged out, and she’d cut off her beautiful long hair, and the hole was so deep that part of his ribcage must have been demolished, and she looked almost like a grown-up now, and his mouth had drooled a rivulet of blood, and her skin was still as pale as a Berlin winter, and his eyes were wide and unblinking and dead and ghastly with terror, and her eyes were wide and unblinking and alive and gorgeous with shock, and someone shouted, ‘Dear God!’ and it was Adele, it was Adele, it was Adele, it was Adele, it was Adele.
She got unsteadily to her feet, and for a long moment all four of them stood there, silent, as if in a gallery, studying a sculpture they did not understand. Finally Bailey said, ‘Dieter, take Miss Hitler away’ — except it sounded like he’d mispronounced her name — ‘and tell Slate to go for help.’
‘I’ll go too,’ said Loeser. If everyone thought he wasn’t man enough to stay there with the body, then so be it. He couldn’t let Adele out of his sight. So they trooped upstairs, and Ziesel went to find Slate in Bailey’s laboratory, and Loeser went out into the sun with Adele.
‘When I was living in Hollywood,’ she was saying, ‘there was an accident right outside my apartment, I didn’t see it happen but I ran to my window, and some guy had gone through his windshield and into this parking meter and he was wrapped around it like he was hugging it, and then they pulled him off it and…’
‘Adele, it’s me. You can speak in German.’ She didn’t seem to hear him. Slate ran out of the Obediah Laboratories and on past them towards Throop Hall. His gait was lopsided, as if the lawn were sloping steeply under him. ‘There’s so much I want to ask you.’ Loeser himself had never seen a dead body before, but none of this felt real yet — they were all just theoretical particles on a blackboard.
‘Jesus, Egon, not now! Didn’t you see him? How could someone do that to Dr Marsh?’
‘I’ve been looking for you for five years.’
‘You shouldn’t even be here now. You’re nothing to do with CalTech. They’ll want to find out what happened and you’ll get in the way.’
‘But I’ve only just found you!’
Finally, irritably, Adele switched to German. ‘Listen, Egon, if you really want to talk, come back at eleven o’clock tonight. I’ll be in the laboratory.’ Three boys in baseball jackets walked past, laughing as they swapped impersonations of Slate’s stutter.
The Loeser House
‘Hallo, hier ist Loeser?’
‘Oh, Mr Loeser, it’s Dolores Mutton. Did you have a pleasant morning at CalTech today? It’s such an interesting institution.’
‘It was not a pleasant morning for anyone. How did you know I was at CalTech?’
‘A little bird told me. I was wondering if you might have been introduced to a particular member of the faculty — Professor Bailey? The physicist?’
‘Yes, I was, actually.’
‘My husband and I would be so keen to meet Professor Bailey. We’re told he’s a magnificent intellect. I know he’s not an exile, but we’d love to have him at one of our receptions. Perhaps you could bring him along next time?’
‘But I’ve only just met the man. We’re not friends.’
‘Still, we’d be so grateful.’
‘I really don’t know, Mrs Mutton. As I said, I’ve only just met the man.’ Loeser could smell his lamb chop beginning to char.
‘I see. Well, perhaps we’ll have a chance to discuss this further. Goodbye, Mr Loeser.’
The California Institute of Technology
At night the paths were lit by old-fashioned-looking streetlamps on tall black posts, and sometimes one of these was close enough to a cypress that from a certain angle the post could hardly be seen and the white bulb shone out through the crush of leaves like some hot lactescent fruit the tree had borne. Leaving his bicycle at Throop Hall again, Loeser wandered lost for a while until he found the entrance to the Obediah Laboratories. The door wasn’t locked. He was planning to go straight to room 11 to find Adele, but then something drew him to the basement. Until he went back to where Marsh’s body had been and confirmed that it had been taken away, part of him would feel as if it were still lying there.
At the bottom of the stairs, not far from the storage cupboards where the corpse had fallen, Loeser had the sense that he was not alone. ‘Hello?’ he said, wondering if he should turn back. What took place after that, he could only recall later as a sequence of terms in a geometric progression of sheer terror. First, the curl of light reflected off a glass-fronted firehose cabinet on the wall near by; second, the abrupt disappearance of that light; third, the snipping sound that made Loeser think of an insect with sharpened steel mandibles; fourth, the humanoid shape coming forward out of the gloom; fifth, the light shining from that shape’s eyes and casting jagged shadows across the ceiling; sixth, the claw that the shape had at the end of its left arm. Loeser raised a hand, half to block the glare and half to shield his face from attack. And then:
‘Mr Loeser, if I remember correctly?’
Loeser realised that the shape was not Marsh as a monstrous revenant but rather Dr Clarendon, the colleague of Ziesel’s that he’d met earlier. He was wearing a miner’s torch on a strap around his head and in one hand he held a big pair of wire cutters. ‘I’m sorry,’ Clarendon added, ‘is this too bright?’ He pulled off the miner’s torch and held it dangling in his other hand so that it poured out a more diffuse downward glow. Loeser looked past him and could see now that he’d apparently been installing some sort of machine, with a metal case and lots of dials and and switches and exposed wires, about the size of a radio set.
‘What are you doing down here?’ Loeser said, his heart still spinning in his chest like the rotor in a gyroscope.
‘An experiment,’ said Clarendon, as if nothing could be more natural. He had that odd conversational manner of some scientists and mathematicians that is so doggedly awkward that it sometimes seems to verge upon the flirtatious.
‘Why are you doing an experiment in the dark?’
‘We don’t know much about ghosts, Mr Loeser, but we know that they don’t care for the light.’
‘Ghosts?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you doing a seance?’
‘No. Seances are unscientific. I’m testing my phasmatometer. There aren’t many deaths on campus, so I don’t often have the opportunity. It may take me a few days to calibrate it, but if the phasmatometer is working properly, I will soon be taking precise measurements of the residual presence of Dr Marsh.’
‘To find out who murdered him?’
Clarendon raised an eyebrow as if he hadn’t even thought of that. ‘Not in particular. If any direct communication takes place, that will only be an accident. Still, I expect Dr Marsh will be very pleased to be the subject of such an important experiment — an apt conclusion to his career. Eventually I hope to refine the phasmatometer to the point where I can turn my work over to the State Department.’
‘What do they want with it?’
Clarendon replied with a shake of the head. ‘Anyone could be listening, Mr Loeser,’ he said softly.
Loeser wondered who could possibly be listening. He also wondered why the State Department should care about ghosts. Perhaps the hope was that, when a communist passed into the next world, whether he was a NKVD Colonel or a double agent from Michigan, he would switch his allegiance to a more godly nation, and the phasmatometer would allow him to be thoroughly debriefed. The defector might even be able to reduce his time in purgatory, like a plea bargain. Or if he were unwilling, you could set the machine to wallop the ghost with a Bible and then dunk his head in a bucket of holy water. ‘So it would work anywhere?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Because I happen to have a ghost in my house.’
‘Really? Well, if you wish, I could bring the phasmatometer and take some readings. Some fieldwork under less controlled circumstances might be a useful supplement to my experiment with Dr Marsh.’
Perhaps Clarendon could finally reveal what his ghost wanted, Loeser thought. ‘Can you come tomorrow evening? I live in Pasadena. Not far.’
‘Yes. Seven o’clock. Leave your address at Throop Hall.’
‘They already have it. Thank you, Dr Clarendon.’
Loeser went back up the stairs and turned right down the corridor towards where Bailey worked. On the way, he passed a room with its door ajar, lit only by the cellophane glow of the moon, and he felt himself horripilated by the strange tension, the negative hum, of a physics laboratory at night: all these machines — all these precise little lanterns whose job it was to shine into the cracks between atoms, between moments, between universes — caught, after hours, enjoying the dark; inert as anvils until you flipped just one switch and turned just one dial and then they’d probably slurp enough electricity to cut the power in Gorge’s mansion. Nonetheless, the bite of this atmosphere, even in aggregate with the scare he’d just got from Clarendon, could barely stand comparison with the cosmic intensity of finding himself, after all this time, alone in a room with Adele, who stood beside one of the larger instruments in room 11, making notes on a clipboard. ‘Back to work already?’ he said in German, trying to sound casual.
‘It takes my mind off things.’ She put down the clipboard and boosted herself up on to a table to sit down. ‘You didn’t say what you’re doing in Los Angeles.’
‘I was looking for you.’
‘But I’ve been here nearly four years.’
‘You’re not in the telephone book.’
‘I am. But I changed my name. I got bored with people asking me if I was related. I’m Adele Hister now. Did it really take you this long to hunt me down?’
‘I didn’t. Hunt you down, I mean. This was just chance. How did you end up here? You never even studied science.’
‘I got thrown out of my apartment in Hollywood so I moved in with my friend Dick. He’s the most darling queer boy from Wisconsin, and he’s a graduate student here. One day he took me to a party at the Athenaeum Club, as his “date”, and I met the Professor. We talked all evening. He was looking for an assistant — someone from outside the Institute. And I still don’t quite know why but he gave me the job.’
‘Even though you don’t know anything about physics?’
‘Dick gave me some lessons. It’s not so hard. And the Professor wanted a non-specialist. He says most of the students here have too many prejudices about reality.’
Loeser remembered his assignment from Gorge. ‘What is Bailey working on?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
He could tell she wanted to brag. She always did. ‘Adele. Come on. I’m your oldest friend in this country.’
‘Well, you musn’t say anything to anyone.’ She leaned forward. ‘The Professor is building a teleportation device.’
‘What? Like Lavicini?’
‘No, a real one, not a theatrical effect. You put an object in the chamber, you set the controls, it disappears, and it reappears somewhere else. He’s very close to completing a prototype.’
‘What sort of lunatic believes that teleportation can really happen?’
‘Jews call it Kefitzat Haderech. Muslims call it Tay al-Ard.’
‘But that’s mysticism. It can’t be scientifically possible.’
‘It is, Egon. It’s happened in this building. Of course, it’s difficult. I don’t think anyone but the Professor could have done it, not even Einstein. The point is, you can’t just delete the subject in one place and create a copy in another. If you did that to a human being, all you’d be doing is murdering someone and replacing them with a clone a few minutes old. That way, no one who believed in a soul — like my parents, for instance — would ever be willing to set foot in a teleportation device. So instead you have to move the object itself, really move it. But it can’t move through the intervening space. It has to be in one place, and then, snap! Suddenly in another. It has to change its position all at once. Well, what’s position, anyway? It’s not a function of space. There’s no more such a thing as space than there’s such a thing as the ether. Space is just objects, and position is a function of those objects. So if you can — the Professor always warns me against the Pathetic Fallacy, but it’s so hard to avoid sometimes — if you can make an object forget its old position, and then persuade it of its new position, then that’s teleportation. But how do you do that? Well, the Professor once said to me, “Adele, what’s the one thing in the world that can uproot almost anything?” ’
‘What is it?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me the answer. He’s secretive sometimes. But I know. I worked it out. It’s love, Egon. Love can uproot almost anything.’
‘You think love makes the Teleportation Device run?’
‘Yes. The reason it works is that … Oh, Egon, I love him!’
‘Who?’
‘The Professor, of course. I love him! He’s the most wonderful man I’ve ever met. He’s so clever and kind and honest and dedicated.’ Just talking about it seemed to make her squirm into herself with pleasure like someone trying on a new fur coat for the first time. ‘And now I know he’s brave, too! You saw how he was, after what happened. And then after you left I started crying and he came upstairs and he knew exactly what to say. I love him so much. I go to bed thinking about him and I wake up thinking about him and then I’m allowed to spend all afternoon with him. I’m so lucky he works here at the weekends, too — I can’t stand my days off.’
‘So you’re fucking him?’
She snorted. ‘No, I am not, you reptile! We’ve never so much as exchanged a significant glance. He doesn’t even suspect how I feel.’
‘Why don’t you tell him?’
‘I couldn’t. I’d be too humiliated. I know a genius like him would never be interested in a girl like me. He’d be nice about it, of course, but if he ever found out, I’d just wither away.’
‘But, Adele, you’re the most exquisite girl I’ve ever met. He’s only a boring scientist.’
‘That shows you shallow you are, Egon. He’s a great man. He’s invented a teleportation device.’
‘So have I, as it happens.’
‘But this one is going to change history.’
‘And it works because you’re so in love with him. So who is he in love with?’
‘No one,’ replied Adele, showing a crackle of hypothetical jealousy. ‘He’s too wedded to science.’
‘So how does it work for him?’
Adele bit her lip. ‘It doesn’t.’
‘It doesn’t work for him?’
‘No.’
‘But if it runs on love, and he doesn’t know that you love him, how does he explain the fact that it works for you and not for him?’
‘He doesn’t know.’
‘What do you mean?’
She couldn’t meet his eyes now. ‘He thinks it does work for him. I always perform the experiments for him and he’s so adorably absent-minded so sometimes when he’s not paying attention I…’
‘You fake the results?’
‘Yes. Oh God, Egon, don’t look at me like that. I coax the results along a bit because I couldn’t bear him to be discouraged. I’m not deceiving him, really. He thinks the Teleportation Device works, and it does. I know it does because I test it myself every night. I put things in it and they disappear, just as they’re supposed to.’
‘How do you know someone else isn’t meddling with it while your back is turned?’
‘That wouldn’t be possible. I’ll show you.’
She got down off the table, led him to the back of the room, and swung open a heavy steel door that looked as if it had been installed more recently than the lab’s other fittings. The chamber beyond was about the size of a lavatory. Its walls, floor and ceiling were all lined with grey rubberised panels, and in the centre was a small platform.
‘Can I go inside?’ said Loeser.
‘Just for a minute.’
He stepped through. ‘What’s the point of all the rubber?’
Adele followed him in. ‘Electrical insulation. And behind the rubber there’s lead. The Professor still has no idea what the radiation in there might do to a human body. That’s why the door’s on a time lock.’
‘Like a bank vault?’
‘Yes. Once it’s closed, it can’t be opened until the cycle is over. So no one can blunder inside.’
A prototype teleportation chamber would be a pretty memorable place to fuck someone, it occurred to Loeser. ‘So if someone were to shut it now, we’d be trapped in here together for hours?’
‘The time lock’s synchronised to the ultramigration accumulator, and there’s no experiment running, so it won’t operate. I just wanted you to see how I can be sure that no one else is interfering with the things I put in here.’
‘What sort of things do you mean, by the way?’
‘Just … things. It doesn’t matter. But it works. It’s only a question of making it work for the Professor as often as it works for me. And that will happen, I know it will, if he just carries on a bit longer without getting put off by these petty shortfalls.’
‘But if these things disappear, aren’t they supposed to reappear as well? Isn’t that the point of teleportation?’
‘They do reappear. Somewhere. I’m certain. But at the moment, I can’t quite control it, so I don’t know where. I think it’s because I can’t control my heart, either.’
‘You used to be such a little demon and now you talk like somebody’s simpering chattel. If Bailey is Hephaestus, you’re one of his robotic handmaidens.’
‘Well, at least I don’t go to bed with other men any more. Isn’t that what you always used to object to so much?’
‘Yes, I suppose there is that. Still, you’ve changed so much. I don’t like it, Adele.’
‘That’s the promise of this country, isn’t it? To come here and reinvent yourself? I’m always reading that in the editorial column of the Herald.’
‘Why would I want to reinvent myself? I’m happy as I am.’
‘You don’t seem very happy.’
‘That’s temporary.’ Except, he realised, it was supposed to be temporary because he hadn’t found Adele yet. And now he’d found her, and she wasn’t exactly pole-vaulting into his arms. Still, if she wouldn’t fuck him in the teleportation chamber, maybe one day he could at least do a few lines of coke off the platform.
‘You shouldn’t be in here,’ said Adele, perhaps presciently.
Loeser followed her back out to the laboratory. ‘Do the police know who killed Marsh?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Because I’ve been thinking about it. It’s Ziesel.’
‘What?’
‘It must be. Ziesel is a man to whom terrible things are destined to happen. It’s intrinsic to his character. Yet here he is with a job and a wife, loved and respected. It can’t be as simple as that. There must be something else going on that we don’t know about, to spoil things. And this fits perfectly. He obviously has some compulsion to murder. The only reason he has such a perfect life at the moment is so that it will be all the more painful when he gets dragged off to some verminous lunatic asylum.’
‘You sound as if you positively long for his life to be a catastrophe.’
‘No, I don’t, I’ve got nothing against him, I just mean that there are some people for whom things must always go wrong, or the universe isn’t working properly. Ziesel is one of those. You can tell as soon as you meet him. So unless he’s got some other disturbing secret, he must be the Monster of CalTech.’
‘But, Egon, everyone knows it was Slate.’
‘Just because of his two-dimensional face and his speech impediment?’
‘No. He murdered all those dogs. There was never proof, quite, but everyone knew it was him. And they were found in just the same way — chests torn open, hearts missing.’
‘Jesus Christ, Marsh’s heart was missing?’
‘Yes. Slate has no alibi. And I know better than anyone, because I’m always here at night, and Slate’s always here too. He’s not cleaning. He’s just stalking around. He’s not even supposed to work after six, but I’ve seen him here at two in the morning. He tries to hide from me sometimes.’
‘Aren’t you scared?’
‘No. It sounds absurd, but the way he looks at me — I can just tell he wouldn’t hurt me. He might hurt anyone else, but he wouldn’t hurt me. I’m sure of it.’
‘I saw Dr Clarendon in the basement.’
‘Yes, he often works late too. I can’t understand why he’s not more afraid, after this morning — alone down there in the dark.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Egon, I need to take some more readings. You should go home. You’re not safe here either.’
‘Has Ziesel gone home?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then we’re both safe. Don’t be silly. It can’t be Slate. That would be too obvious. I’m definitely not going home yet. What is it? What are you looking at?’ Loeser turned, and then let out the sort of noise a Pomeranian makes when you tread on its tail. Standing there in the doorway of room 11 was Slate himself, who for some reason gave a long, slow shake of the head and then hobbled on down the corridor and out of sight.
‘I think I might go home after all,’ said Loeser hoarsely. He waved goodbye to Adele, hurried out of the Obediah Laboratories, and sprinted to his bike.
As he cycled back down Del Mar Boulevard, he thought about Bailey’s Teleportation Device. Could it really run on love, as Adele claimed? He found the idea insipid. Loeser himself hadn’t been ‘in love’ since he was at university, and he’d long since forgotten what it felt like; the notion was as abstract to him now as it had been when he was a child. But desire was another matter. It was desire, not love, that had uprooted Loeser, that had brought him all the way to California. Desire, he believed, could uproot almost anything. Adele had probably just confused the two, as people did. But if the Teleportation Device ran on desire, then that implied that Adele felt some tremendous voltage of lust for wobbly old Professor Bailey. And that was just as implausible. Still, if she really did, did that mean he’d got to her too late? Something leaden settled in his stomach at the thought. What use was Dames! And how to Lay them now? Perhaps, as they said in English, ‘that ship had sailed’. Or perhaps, with Adele, the ship had never even docked. Perhaps there was no ship. Perhaps there was no harbour. Perhaps there was no sea.
China City
At the corner of Ord and Spring a huge iron gate led to a winding street calling itself Dragon Road. Past the gate, every roof had a pagoda, every surface was painted red or gold, and every nail held up at least one long string of paper lanterns or silk flags. Men in conical straw hats pulled rickshaws back and forth, shouting for business.
‘What is this?’ said Loeser as he stepped down from the bus.
‘China City,’ said Blimk. ‘It just opened and I been wanting to see it.’
Last night, after he got home, Loeser hadn’t been able to sleep. Marsh’s disheartened corpse had jigged in his mind with Slate hunched in the doorway, so that he found himself almost wishing for the familiar scuffling of his ghost over his head. So that morning — having tossed and turned for so long that his sheets had cycled through every possible permutation of rumple and were somehow actually neater when he got out of bed than when he got in — he dressed, abolished a pot of coffee, and took an early streetcar to Blimk’s shop. By the time he arrived, a plumber was already at work on a leaky pipe next to Blimk’s desk, and he was making too much noise for either of them to concentrate on their reading, so they decided to close the shop for a few hours and take a bus downtown. Blimk did have a car, but he was considerate about Loeser’s transport anxiety.
One of the consequences of Harry Chandler using the influence of the LA Times to make sure Union Station was built at the Plaza, Blimk now explained, was that the old Chinatown with its brothels and opium dens had been demolished in 1933 to make way for it, and for five years now the Chinese population of Los Angeles had not had anywhere in particular to live. But now there were two neighbourhoods competing for their favour: China City, built by a wealthy San Francisco socialite (and friend of Harry Chandler) called Christine Sterling who’d already converted nearby Olvera Street into a ‘Mexican’ tourist attraction, and New Chinatown, a few blocks north-east, built by a businessman called Peter Hoo Soo who was President of the Chinese American Assocation. Sterling’s development was a good deal more ornate: she’d leased studio props from Cecil B. DeMille and she’d had the town hall decorated by a set designer called Wurtzel to look like a Chinese pirate junk.
‘I knew him in Berlin!’ said Loeser.
‘He works on a lot of Goatloft’s movies now,’ said Blimk.
‘But I can’t actually see any Chinese people here. Except waiters and rickshaw drivers.’
‘Would you live here, if you were a Chink?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
At the Muttons’ parties, the most recent Jewish arrivals always complained about how first they’d been dismissed from their jobs and then they’d been forced out of their homeland. They said it had broken their hearts, and they claimed to miss every little thing about Berlin. Loeser now imagined stuffing them all into Germany City: a square mile of freshly painted beer halls and art galleries and cabarets, with its own miniature Potsdamer Platz and and its own miniature Romanisches Café and even its own miniature Kempinski’s Haus Vaterland (which like the real one would have its own USA-themed bar, which would have its own Los Angeles, which would have its own Germany City, and so on ad infinitum). They’d probably like it better than Pacific Palisades. Christine Sterling’s China City, he saw, was as if Paris had been rebuilt by a set designer who’d only heard about it from Herbert Wolf Scramsfield and The Sorceror of Venice; and yet it still didn’t feel any more obviously artificial than the rest of Los Angeles, even though Los Angeles wasn’t imitating anything except itself. A man with a gentle case of Gorge’s agnosia could walk down Dragon Road and believe he was really in Peking. What if that literalist walked down Sunset Boulevard? Would he understand this cosmopolis better than anyone, or would he be trapped in a recursion? When Loeser heard the exiles whine, he sometimes thought to himself that he, too, had been dismissed from his vocation and forced out of his homeland. His vocation was sex. His homeland was the female body. He felt just as lost as they did, but no one was ever sympathetic. And as he turned left down Lotus Road with Blimk, it occurred to him that China City was to China exactly as Midnight at the Nursing Academy was to a living, breathing girlfriend. The simulation might seem laughable at first, but perhaps after seven years away from home, an immigrant from Guangdong would come here and weep with guilty relief, because it was the nearest thing he had left to what he remembered. They passed a restaurant that advertised its chef as knowing ‘100 Different Ways to Fix a Chicken’ (but did not explain how the chicken was faulty), and Loeser said to Blimk that they should stop for chop suey because he’d never had it before. Blimk told him that chop suey didn’t even exist in China. And Loeser decided that Chinese food invented by Americans was exactly what he wanted to eat that morning.
‘Couple of fellas came into the store yesterday,’ said Blimk after they’d sat down and ordered. Loeser had nearly asked for a starter of turtle soup but then he had thought of Urashima Taro. ‘Wanted to know what rent I paid, how long I’d been there. Asked them who they were and they said they were from the Traffic Commission, just wanted to check some facts. Can’t see what my rent’s got to do with the traffic. Didn’t know better, I’d be worried about Eminent Domain.’
‘What’s the Eminent Domain?’ said Loeser. It sounded like an old-fashioned euphemism for the afterlife.
‘When the government buys your property out from under you without asking, for a highway or a railroad or something. That’s how they got the Chinks out of Chinatown to build Union Station. I ever lost my store like that, think I’d just go back to Brooklyn and live with my sister. Not even worth relocating, amount I make. Can’t be Eminent Domain, though. I’m up in north Hollywood, and they already got a Union Station. Asked my landlord and he doesn’t know shit about it. Probably just want to put a tax on parking or something.’
‘Probably,’ said Loeser. And it wasn’t until their bowls of chop suey arrived, and Loeser unfolded his napkin on his lap, that he noticed the dragon embroidered on it in black thread, and was reminded by its shape of the map that Plumridge had drawn on one of Gorge’s napkins at that dinner in 1934: the network of elevated streetcar lines conjoining in Hollywood at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Kings Road. He hadn’t heard anything of the plan since, and he’d assumed it had come to nothing. But just then, for the first time, he realised that Plumridge’s proposed terminal would occupy the very same block as Blimk’s bookshop.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Blimk. ‘Ain’t hungry now you’ve seen the food up close?’
The Gorge House
Gorge’s cigar gave off a smell like a village being razed by retreating infantry. ‘Sit down, Krauto,’ he said. ‘Got to CalTech?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘It seems that …’ The sentence was so absurd that Loeser almost couldn’t finish it. ‘It seems that Professor Bailey is trying to build a teleportation device.’
Gorge waved his hand impatiently. ‘Know that. Known that since thirty-six.’
‘Then why did you send me?’
‘Want to know if the fucking thing works, of course.’
‘Why?’ said Loeser. And then all at once it seemed obvious. ‘You think that if Bailey completes his Teleportation Device, it will replace the car. You want to destroy Bailey because you think Bailey will destroy your car polish business.’
‘Destroy Bailey? Never heard such horseshit! Say Bailey’s Teleport Gizmo is real. Say I destroy him. Next year, have to do the same thing to some other son of a bitch. Next year, dozen more. Invented one place, soon be invented everywhere — general rule. Can’t do a fucking thing about it.’
‘But what about your car polish business?’
‘1948: Teleport Gizmo in every house. Millions of ’em, all over the country. Think people won’t want their Teleport Gizmo shiny? Think people won’t want to buff ’em up every day? Sell just as many tins as before. Won’t cost me a dollar, the Teleport Gizmo.’
‘So you want to know if Bailey’s Teleportation Device is real’ — another sentence, this, that jammed its elbows in the doorframe until it could be dragged outside — ‘so that you can pre-emptively corner the market in teleportation device polish?’
‘Woodkin: mongoloid?’
‘On the contrary, sir, I believe Mr Loeser is of above average intelligence,’ said Woodkin.
‘Hard to believe. Listen here, Krauto. Remember Plumridge?’
‘Yes. He wanted to build an elevated streetcar network,’ said Loeser.
‘Can’t have it. Tell him, Woodkin.’
‘Colonel Gorge believes there are two reasons why an elevated streetcar network would be undesirable for Los Angeles,’ said Woodkin. ‘The first is that mass transit of any kind tends to promote authoritarian socialist leanings in its users, whereas drivers of automobiles tend to be committed free market capitalists. New York’s subway, which carries more passengers than all the other heavy rail systems in America combined, is only one example of how ubiquitous mass transit can pervert a city’s political tendencies. The Marxian uprising in this country, if it ever comes, will begin on a crowded commuter carriage. The second reason is that Colonel Gorge believes the wars of the future will be fought with weapons so mighty that at present we can hardly imagine them. Think of a bomb so big it could vaporise a whole town, perhaps by harnessing cosmic rays, or some other new spark from Vulcan’s forge. Drop that bomb in the centre of New York, and you would kill millions. Drop that bomb in the “centre” of Los Angeles, and you might only kill a few thousand. In any given urban area, high-capacity mass transit promotes concentration. Automobiles promote dispersion. If America is to win its next war, perhaps against Russia or China, without being crippled by a single surprise attack against its civilian population, it must spread its urban areas out as evenly as it can. Mr Plumridge may only be an Assistant Public Utility Liaison at the Traffic Commission, but that title belies his true significance. He has some very powerful interests behind him.’
‘If you hate his plan so much, why did you invite him to dinner?’ said Loeser.
‘Friends close, enemies so close you can see right down their throats,’ replied Gorge. ‘Saying goes.’
‘And what’s Bailey got to do with Plumridge?’
‘Teleport Gizmo works, no need for streetcars. Redundant. Bad for Plumridge, bad for Reds, good for America. Teleport Gizmo doesn’t work, have to save Los Angeles myself. No choice. But can’t just have Plumridge stomped. Same principle as Bailey: queue of other bastards behind him. Spend every cent I had, thought it would help, but no use with this kind of government horseshit. Delay it, best I can do. Piece of cake if I owned a newspaper, but don’t, and Harry Chandler hates my guts. Have to go straight to Norman Clowne.’
‘The Secretary of the Traffic Commission,’ interjected Woodkin.
‘Only bureaucrat powerful enough to sink these fucking streetcars for good. Says he’ll do it, Clowne. But wants my girl.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Loeser.
‘Wants to marry my daughter. Doesn’t deserve her. No other way, though.’
‘You’re going to hand over your daughter to Clowne in exchange for him sabotaging Plumridge’s elevated streetcar plan?’
‘Duty as a patriot,’ said Gorge. ‘Doesn’t mean I have to like it. Why I need to know if Bailey’s a shyster or not. Teleport Gizmo’s real, can tell Clowne to fuck himself. Teleport Gizmo’s a flop, have to start sewing Mildred’s trousseau.’ He leaned forward. ‘So?’
A line came into Loeser’s head from Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Blimk’s favourite of the late author’s stories and the only one that had ever been published in its own bound edition instead of in a monthly magazine: ‘I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley, and motor-coach.’ That, really, was what got the narrator into trouble in the first place. Still, Loeser knew that a new public transport system, like an orthopaedic brace to correct the city’s bad posture, was the only thing that was ever going to make Los Angeles a tolerable place to live. He should just tell Gorge what Adele had told him: the Teleportation Device worked. Whether or not it really did, it would mean Plumridge could go ahead with his plan, without Gorge bothering to defeat it through Clowne.
But that would also mean that Blimk, Loeser’s only real friend here, would lose his shop and probably move back to Brooklyn. The streetcars might make Los Angeles tolerable for every other Berliner, but they would make it intolerable for Loeser.
Plus, Plumridge had seemed like a total prick at that dinner.
‘Well, Krauto?’ barked Gorge.
‘I’m sorry but I don’t know yet,’ said Loeser. ‘I went to Bailey’s lab and I met him and I met his assistant. But I didn’t see any of his experiments myself. So it’s still too early to say.’
Gorge leaned back. ‘Good. Hoped you’d say that. Don’t want you pretending you’re sure when you’re not. Come back when you’re absolutely fucking certain. Not one minute sooner. Daughter’s pussy at stake.’
The Loeser House
Clarendon began to unpack his heavy combination-lock briefcase full of phasmatometric apparatus. ‘Are your houseguest’s manifestations concentrated in any particular part of the residence?’ he said.
‘Not really,’ said Loeser, ‘although I mostly hear her in the bedroom.’
‘ “Her”?’
‘Oh, that’s a hunch of mine. Did you have any luck with Marsh last night?’
‘I haven’t yet made any precise kinetic measurements,’ said Clarendon, bending to plug part of his ghost hardware into the electrical socket by the door. ‘But the readings I took gave unmistakable signs of his presence.’
‘I’m still intrigued as to what the State Department has to do with your experiments. I shouldn’t think anyone can eavesdrop on us here. Well, except the spectre, of course.’
Clarendon looked up at him. ‘How fast is this house moving, Mr Loeser?’
Loeser glanced at the window and thought of the bungalow on Sunset Boulevard. ‘I’m not sure that it’s moving at all.’
‘Incorrect. Add together the rotation of the earth, the motion of the earth around the sun, the motion of the sun through our galaxy, the rotation of our galaxy, and the motion of our galaxy through the universe, and relative to a certain arbitrary framework this house is moving at nearly two million miles an hour, or five hundred miles a second. The reason we are not left behind in space is that fortunately we are all moving at the same speed. The most important gift your mother ever gave you was momentum. However, there can be no transfer of momentum between a fresh corpse and its affiliated ghost, otherwise all energy would eventually leak out of our plane of existence into the ghost’s plane of existence, which would in some novel sense violate the first law of thermodynamics. Therefore, in order to keep pace with the locus of its haunting, a ghost must have its own means of accelerating to two million miles an hour — and, indeed, maintaining that speed, if the substrate of the ghost’s plane is not frictionless — by drawing on some massive, perhaps infinite source of energy. My hope is that it will one day be possible to build a machine to trap this energy — something between a treadmill and a turbine, existing half on our plane and half on the ghost’s. The machine will exert friction on the ghost, but since the ghost cannot be slowed down, the ghost will continuously pass energy into the machine. Even if it is only possible to drain a tiny fraction of the ghost’s terajoules, I estimate that a few hundred ghosts would be enough to power the entire continental United States, leaving our annual production of oil, gas, and coal available to our armed forces, and our cities smogless. As you will no doubt already have noted, my calculations rely on the assumption that in the afterlife ghosts retain considerable mass. My evidence for this is that victims of decapitation carrying their own severed heads have been observed to complain about the weight.’
‘I see.’ Loeser’s main concern about the Eminent Domain was that he would arrive to find all his ex-girlfriends there and there wouldn’t be any drugs to get him through it. ‘Do you think everyone gets an afterlife, even if they don’t believe in it?’
‘God will allow no man to escape the reward or the punishment that he deserves,’ said Clarendon, putting an odd stress, Loeser thought, on the word ‘punishment’. ‘On earth as it is in heaven. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to concentrate for a few minutes while I calibrate the equipment.’
‘Take your time. Do you want a drink?’
‘No, thank you.’
Loeser made himself a whisky and soda. Outside a fire engine screamed down Palmetto Drive. He thought about Marsh. Was there really a laboratory ghost haunting the California Institute of Technology? And then he realised that Marsh wouldn’t quite be the only one of that species. The whole state of California was a laboratory, a room for testing new theories, measuring new forces, designing new gadgets. So Loeser himself — uneasy and pale, detached and misplaced, a spilt drop of something old and cold — what was he, while he lived here, but another laboratory ghost?
After a while, Clarendon frowned and said, ‘There’s no ghost here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘According to my readings, there is no ghost in this house.’
‘But I’ve been living with her for three years. I’m sure of it. Couldn’t your equipment be unreliable?’ Then the telephone rang. Loeser made an apologetic gesture and went to answer it. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s Adele.’
He switched to German. ‘Adele! I don’t remember giving you my telephone number.’
‘I got it from Mrs Jones at Throop Hall. Egon, I think I know who killed Marsh.’
‘I thought you were sure it was Slate.’
‘It wasn’t Slate. It can’t have been. There have been other murders.’
‘What?’
‘Last year, one of the cooks from the cafeteria. And the year before that, one of the gardeners. Hearts gone, same as Marsh. Millikan covered it up each time so there wouldn’t be a panic. But he couldn’t do that with Marsh because there were too many of us there when we found the body. And now the rumours have got out. I heard about it from Dick. When the cook was killed, Slate wasn’t even in California. He was visiting a sister in Alaska. He’d already been gone for a week and the corpse was only a few hours old when they found it.’
‘I was right! It was Ziesel!’
‘No, not Ziesel,’ said Adele, and then said the inevitable three syllables.
‘Clarendon?’ repeated Loeser without thinking, and then bit his lip. The phasmatometrist presumably didn’t speak German but of course he could recognise his own name.
‘Yes. He’s building a machine powered by ghosts, and he’s under pressure from the State Department to finish the machine before this war in Europe starts, and he needs to test it first, and he can’t just wait for people to die in accidents. I think he’s killing people himself! He’s breeding ghosts like biologists breed mice!’
‘How do you know so much about his research?’
‘The Professor told me. And listen to this: Dick said all the bodies have turned up in or near the Obediah Laboratories. That’s where Clarendon works. Ziesel is all the way over in Robinson.’
‘Adele, he’s in my house.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s here. Now. With me.’ Loeser didn’t dare look round.
‘God, why?’
‘He’s testing for a ghost here.’
‘So he has all his machines with him? And the two of you are alone? Loeser, what if he’s there to kill you and capture it on the phasmatometer?’
‘Adele, for Christ’s sake, call the police! Tell them to come here!’
‘I will, but they may not get there in time. Egon, you have to get him out of your house.’
Loeser put down the phone and turned to find Clarendon standing there only a few inches away, holding the same big pair of wire cutters that he’d had in the basement last night. ‘I was wondering if you might unlock that window,’ Clarendon said. ‘Sometimes I use an aerial to detect possible electromagnetic disturbances from the Heaviside Layer. It’s the most accurate way to compensate for them.’
To unlock the window, Loeser would have to turn his back on Clarendon again. Just the thought made the nape of his neck wrinkle with fear. He thought he saw Clarendon’s grip tighten on the handle of the tool. ‘I thought there was no ghost here.’
‘It’s worth a second try. I’m confident that my apparatus is reliable, but in any experiment there are unanticipated factors.’
‘Dr Clarendon, I really don’t want to take up any more of your evening. I’m sure your apparatus got it right the first time. I must have been wrong about the ghost. I’ve always been a bit jumpy. Now, as it happens I have two dozen people coming to dinner so I’m afraid—’
‘It will take just a few more minutes, Mr Loeser, if you’ll just oblige me by unlocking that window. I can’t seem to work the catch.’
For a long moment, Loeser stared at Clarendon, wondering if he could possibly overpower him without losing a finger. The rhythm of his heart seemed to be drumming out, ‘Please/don’t let/him eat/me please/don’t let/him eat/me.’ Then, for the second time that day, the doorbell rang.
Drunk with relief, Loeser dashed to the door and flung it open, hoping that it was burly policeman with a revolver, a nightstick and perhaps for good measure some sort of medieval halberd.
But it wasn’t. It was someone even more formidable than that. It was Dolores Mutton.
‘Mrs Mutton!’ he cried joyfully. ‘Hello! Hello!’
‘Good evening, Mr Loeser.’ She walked past him into the house and looked Clarendon up and down. ‘Oh, I see you have company.’
‘This is Dr Clarendon.’
‘A pleasure to meet you. Now, I assure you I wouldn’t usually interrupt like this, Dr Clarendon, but I have some very important Cultural Solidarity Committee business to discuss with Mr Loeser. It’s awfully kind of you to cut your visit short.’
‘In fact I was hoping to stay and take a few more—’
‘Awfully kind of you,’ repeated Dolores Mutton, combining a perfectly gracious smile with a voice that suggested she wouldn’t need to resort to a pair of wire cutters to relieve him neatly of his thumbs. Clarendon blanched and then with some haste started packing up his equipment. Nobody spoke until he’d finished, after which he scurried out without saying goodbye or picking up his hat. Loeser was pleased but unsurprised to observe that the terrifying angel had the same efficient effect on other men that she’d once had on him. As soon as the door was closed, she said, ‘I don’t think you understood me on the telephone last night.’
‘About Professor Bailey?’
‘Yes. You’re going to start bringing him to our parties.’
‘I told you, Mrs Mutton, I don’t know him well enough.’
‘I’m not giving you a choice, Loeser. You’ll do it, or Jascha and I will destroy you. And because of your predictable greed, we won’t need to resort to violence to do that. You’ve been embezzling from the Cultural Solidarity Committee of California for the last three years. Unless you do as we say and arrange for us to become friends with Professor Bailey, we’ll give the evidence to the cops, and you’ll be tried and convicted, after which you’ll serve time in jail and then be deported back to Germany.’
‘Embezzling? What do you mean?’
‘You’ve siphoned over a thousand dollars out of the Committee’s funds.’
‘But that was my salary.’
‘For what?’
‘I’m on the board. You said you needed a Jewish board member.’
‘But you’re not Jewish, are you, Mr Loeser? And you’ve never been to a board meeting. In fact, there’s no record of your ever being offered any type of post on the Committee. You just used your friendship with my husband and me to betray us by stealth.’
‘You sent me those cheques every month.’
‘You may never have noticed, but those cheques were made out in your own handwriting. Apart from “my” signature on them, which you are obviously not very good at faking. Any good graphologist will confirm that.’
Dolores Mutton’s unpredictable alternation between friendly and aggressive over the past three years had been like a slow version of one of the advanced procedures from Dames! And how to Lay them, and Loeser could hardly take all this in, but nonetheless he was struck just then by a triumphant thought. ‘So you copied my handwriting. Or Drabsfarben did. What did you copy it from?’
‘Several years ago, in Berlin, you sent Jascha a letter about a play. You wanted him to write the score.’
‘The Teleportation Accident. He said no. But he brought that old letter all the way to America?’
‘Jascha maintains an extensive library of handwriting samples. It often comes in useful.’
‘Well, you’re not as clever as you think, Mrs Mutton! My handwriting has changed since then. “Any good graphologist” will confirm that, too. Your cheques won’t fool anyone.’
‘Actually, that will make them all the more convincing, because it will look like you tried to contrive a different scrawl, but didn’t succeed in masking your real one.’ She shrugged. ‘In any case, if our preparations don’t work out, that will be a pity, but it won’t be a problem. We’ll just go back to how we would have done it before. We’ll run a risk.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Jascha will kill you and make it look like an accident. Goodnight, Loeser. You know what you have to do.’
‘Wait — how long do I have?’
‘Like you told me, you’ve only just met the Professor. And we’re reasonable people. We can give you six months.’
‘Why is this so important? What are you going to do with him? Is this about the Teleportation Device?’
‘Don’t worry about that. Just get us Bailey.’
After she shut the door behind her, Loeser stood there paralysed for so long that he still hadn’t shifted when his doorbell rang for the third time that night. He opened the door to a policeman in uniform.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ said the policeman. ‘We had a report of an intruder at this residence.’
‘I’m fine. There’s no one here.’
‘So you didn’t call us?’
‘No. I’m sorry. Perhaps it was a nuisance call.’
‘So there’s nothing wrong here at all?’ said the policeman.
‘No,’ said Loeser. ‘There’s nothing wrong here at all.’ And at that moment, as the policeman peered past him into the house, Loeser watched two young deer running down Palmetto Drive, nacreous in the twilight, ghosts on a frictionless plane.