The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (22 page)

He tried the door, found it locked and stood by it listening. Somebody was bumping about inside—housekeeper, valet or cleaning woman. One could not imagine Pozharski getting his own breakfast. When he heard the living-room door shut and movement in the hall beyond the front door, he jumped back and pretended to have just arrived and to be walking up the courtyard. The door opened. A respectable female in a black dress and a severe cloche hat came out and turned as if to shut the door behind her. Bernardo asked if Mr. Pozharski was awake yet. She regarded him with disapproval, no doubt partly due to his shabby appearance and partly because he knew that Pozharski would be sleeping late, indicating that he was some pimp or waiter with a bill from the previous night. She herself was obviously a superior servant, probably from one of the German districts of Transylvania.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve got a message for him.’

‘Mr. Pozharski has left orders that he requires no breakfast and will get up when he pleases.’

Bernardo, with the open door under his eyes, saw a chance. Beneath the Yale lock was a large, conventional latch worked by the door handle. If he slipped back the Yale lock she might not notice it when she shut the door behind her.

‘I will write it down and leave it if you can get me a piece of paper and a pencil.’

She went into the room on the left. Bernardo fixed the lock and when she returned was standing with his back to
it. He scribbled a few words of English, folded the paper and gave it to her. As soon as she had put it on the hall table he held the door open for her with a little bow of disarming courtesy. Then he followed her out and shut it.

‘You work for Mr. Pozharski?’ he asked as he strolled up the street with her.

‘I look after the house once every week when he is not here and attend him in the morning when he is.’

‘Does he often come to Bucarest?’

‘Mr. Pozharski’s movements cannot be foreseen.’

‘Depends on the opposite sex, I suppose.’

The remark seemed to release all her indignation at clearing up every time that Pozharski booked in at the Athénée Palace Hotel and did not sleep there.

‘A pig-sty! That’s what it is. A pig-sty! And good-bye to you!’

She stalked up the Boulevard Carol, outraged but no doubt well paid for it. Bernardo went off the other way. As soon as she was lost to sight, he returned to 16 Strada Spâtarului and let himself in.

To the left was the large living-room, expensively and darkly decorated in the style of Bakst and the Russian Ballet with the usual tiled stove in one corner roaring happily away. A double divan occupied most of a curtained alcove. The staircase faced him and he tip-toed up. There were only three doors—bedroom, bathroom and a small service kitchen.

Pozharski was fast asleep with an infantile smile on his face. His bedroom, in contrast to the living-room, was of almost military simplicity and blessedly warm from the tiled flue of the downstairs room which continued up to the first floor. Bernardo drew back the curtains, shut the window and slammed a hairbrush on to the dressing table.

Pozharski started straight up in bed and looked at him with amazement. He then snuggled down again with his hand under the pillow. Bernardo stood over him with the water carafe.

‘Take your hand out from under the pillow or I’ll crown you,’ he said, remembering Pozharski’s speed and accuracy with the champagne bottle and fearing that he might have learned a trick or two for dealing with unwanted visitors in bedrooms.

‘Dear Bernardo, you will spill that if you aren’t careful. I thought you were a nightmare—assuming one can be said to think with a slight hang-over.’

‘Sit up!’

Pozharski sat up. His white hair and emerald pyjamas radiated geniality. He was incorrigible.

‘That dressing jacket, if you would be so good, and a hairbrush ... thank you. And now, Bernardo, how did you manage to find me?’

‘You have been watched since your arrival.’

‘Nonsense! If you were ever anybody’s agent you’d have been dropped like a hot potato by now. God knows how you have managed to beat the cops without a word of the language! I shall have to tell them you called here in case they know it, but if a few thousand lei are any use to you meanwhile ...’

‘You can stick your money up your arse! And if it’s the last thing I do I shall tell Kalmody you’ve been fucking his daughter in Bucarest.’

‘What a word to use of the Baroness von und zu! You remind me somehow of far-off days at Eton. Fucked his daughter, Gave her twins and stopped her water. Unlikely, don’t you think, dear boy? Though these recent researches in gynaecology suggest that almost anything is possible.’

‘For you it is. And you have to be helped out by an American! I suppose you need it at your age.’

‘I do not. But I remind you that Americans are famous for their sandwich fillings.’

‘Haven’t you any decency at all? A Prussian Military Academy is where you should have been sent.’

‘I was never good-looking enough to get the best out of it.
Bernardo, do you think I could be allowed a brandy and ginger ale? You’re the boss.’

‘And don’t you forget it!’

‘Well, if you go downstairs, you’ll find all the doings in the ice box. That’s the what-not which looks like an altar.’

‘And leave you up here? No bloody fear!’

Pozharski sighed and rolled out of bed.

‘All right, we’ll both go. How’s that?’

Bernardo walked close behind him down the stairs. He was finding it harder and harder to deal with this intolerable Magyarised Pole as he deserved. Truculence consistently appeared as bad manners.

Pozharski politely pulled up a chair for him next to the stove, removed candles and altar cloth and poured out two pints of brandy and ginger ale.

‘Bernardo, didn’t I once ask you if you wanted to be cured?’

‘You did and I am.’

‘Well, that clears one awkward problem out of the way,’ Pozharski said cheerfully. ‘Any other favour I can do you?’

‘You mentioned certain circumstances....’

‘The circumstances, dear boy, were removed in good time. Her inside, she said—or perhaps I said it—was not going to be a mere collecting box for the Church. You had something obscure to do with her change of mind. She respected you. An excellent reason for bearing your little Pforzheim I should have thought. But one never can tell with Magda. She carried on as if it was she who had put you in the family way.’

‘Perhaps you were able to take over from me.’

‘You suggested that before, Bernardo. When you were so very hard hit, I could not attempt to explain. My relations with dear Magda are as frank as they are complex. If this gullible Viennese professor we hear so much of tried to analyse them, he’d blow a fuse. But let me assure you that the entrancing American was between us like a Statue of
Liberty, open, practically everywhere, to the desires of the downtrodden.’

Bernardo tried hard to suppress a chuckle.

‘What were you doing here anyway?’ he asked more cordially.

‘We came—myself as her cicerone—to arrange a visit to Pforzheim from a specialist. And Romania has the best. Here they have so much experience denied to others.’

‘Same chap you got for the Emperor Franz Josef, I suppose?’

‘Bernardo, your attitude to crowned heads is far too flippant for the dirty little agent you are believed to be. I cannot understand it.’

‘I did not kill Bobo.’

‘Well, the Spaniards say you did. If I were you, I should surrender to the Romanians. You can’t be extradited to Spain for crimes there while you’re doing time for crimes here.’

‘But the whole thing is absurd! My life in Bilbao was an open book.’

‘It was not. The police would like to know where you slipped off to alone every week-end and what you did there.’

‘I was praising God. Or that’s what a friend of mine would say. But you won’t understand.’

‘Oh, won’t I? I, who stood in my youth upon the top of Ararat? And what about the first time some perfection of a woman gives her mouth with all her desire behind it?’

‘I am sorry. Of course. How much have I got to answer if I give myself up?’

‘The biggest mistake you made, my boy, was in not taking a look at that cliff. It can’t be climbed. So they say you were on the top with Bobo all along looking out for the chap who tried to burgle Zita’s villa. And Bobo was about fifth in succession to the Russian throne, damn it! The Romanoffs ought to give you the Order of the White Eagle for services rendered.’

‘Count Kalmody believed I climbed the cliff.’

‘Istvan is in a black fury and incomprehensible. When I last saw him I listened to the most vituperative, obscure, classical Hungarian since the sons of Arpad were converted by St. Stephen. So far as I understood him, you and Bobo had been circulating forged French francs on behalf of the Vatican.’

Bernardo had read in the Romanian papers a sensational account of members of the Hungarian aristocracy being arrested for forging francs: column after column of excited Latin journalism on the former Hapsburg monarchy, the persistent criminality of Hungarians and mysterious enemies in general. It was so hysterical a story that he had not believed a word of it.

‘Somebody really did forge a lot of francs?’ he asked.

‘Somebody did indeed. Not Istvan, but he’s in the soup, too. The police dug up Nepamuk who was so shaken that he forgot to use his influence, and your escape became front-page news. The Romanians know that you and that groom crossed the frontier illegally and that you were both Kalmody’s people. Then out comes some connection between Zita, Bernardo Brown and the pancake that was Bobo—just the thing Istvan was trying to avoid by quietly removing you. And that leaves our young Bernardo either a Hungarian agent or a Bolshevik agent or both, with the French and Romanians very eager to pull out your toenails till you squeal.’

‘Where do the Bolsheviks come in? And may I have another drink?’

‘With pleasure. They come in because of your horsey friend.’

‘You mean, he got clear?’

‘The traditions of the conquistadores were too much for the effete frontier guards of Europe, Bernardo. When they arrested him, he set the guard house on fire, escaped in the excitement and crossed the river with the help of a Romanian officer. Nobody dared shoot.’

‘A traitor?’

‘Not at all. Success with Nepamuk must have given Perico the idea. He ripped the officer’s sword from its scabbard and swam him across the Dneister like a water buffalo with a goad at its rump, then delivering him to the Reds as evidence of good faith. So there’s a second motive for you assassinating Grand Dukes. You’re down in the books as a brutal thug, my boy. Look at the way you burst into my bedroom, intent on treating me as you did His Majesty’s representative! He has had to be sent home on leave.’

‘I didn’t kick him that hard.’

‘It was the shock to his public image rather than his private parts, dear boy. But never mind! They’ll probably appoint him Minister Plenipotentiary in Albania to make up for it. That’s the least of your worries. Look here, I’ve got a spare fur coat! If you rip my name out, it can’t be traced.’

‘I’m not quite as down-and-out as I look.’

‘Oh, I see. Yes, very wise. Well, now that you don’t think any longer that I’m going to shoot you on sight, how about a gentleman’s agreement? You keep your mouth firmly shut on the sandwich and I won’t say a word to the police.’

‘O.K. It’s a deal. Are you going to tell Magda?’

‘God forbid! She’s just enough of a democrat to have some disastrous question asked in the Hungarian parliament and make matters worse.’

‘And Kalmody?’

‘I’ll see whether I tell him. Not yet. He’s flaming angry with you about Nepamuk, though everyone else is delighted. And nobody can go frigging around with the Crown of St. Stephen and retain Istvan’s good will.’

‘About that attempted burglary, is he sure that Zita never missed anything?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘If you get a chance, remind him that the suitcase was full, not empty. He didn’t seem to pay much attention to that.’

‘We’ve been inclined to assume that you knew what was in it.’

‘If you could get it into your heads that my story was true....’

‘Up to the cliff it might be.’

‘For Christ’s sake, if you believe in the boat you must believe I climbed the cliff!’

‘The bloody gendarmes swear there was only one man in the boat—the chap Istvan shot.’

‘Because they couldn’t see as far as the end of the Lequeitio causeway.’

‘Bernardo, whatever you have to put up with, don’t get caught yet! Now may I without embarrassing you withdraw some money from my arse?’

‘If you’re sure you have plenty.’

‘I think there must be some left from the revels. When next you see a chance of calling on me safely, dear boy, give me time to go to the bank!’

Bernardo walked home with his identity and its purpose in a chaotic muddle. At last he had Magda in perspective; there was no longer any doubt about that. But having been Bernardo Brown for an hour David Mitrani was out of focus. Mitrani might not become a merchant banker—or was it now a cabaret impresario?—after all. He might vanish, as if by a trick of time, into a personality which had never yet existed, leaving not a soul to miss him but Nadya. He pulled himself together. The day-dream of resuming his true self by stages was extremely dangerous. When Pozharski had impressed on him that he must not get caught, he was warning him not to let their cordial meeting arouse any false hopes. No, he had to stick very firmly and with absolute conviction to David Mitrani. Garotting in Spain was a most unpleasant end, though said to be just as quick as hanging, if the public executioner was sober and his wrists in form.

Pozharski had insisted on giving him all the money he had, amounting to twenty thousand lei. He must have had a
packet on him when he started on the Alhambra’s champagne. If young Nadya had not left for her restaurant, it would have been fun to take her out on the town. She was always a quaintly original companion. He did not see enough of her except on afternoons when she had a few hours off and he had finished sleeping.