The Teleportation Accident (18 page)

There was something about the eyes of Picquart’s biggest cat had always made Scramsfield feel sick, and at that moment he realised for the first time that they were the same pale yellow-green as a medicine he’d been given for an ear infection as a child.

‘
Erstaunlich
,’ said Loeser. ‘May I ask one more question?’

‘If you wish.’

‘What happened to Lavicini? What was the Teleportation Accident, really?’

‘You suspect that was “black magic”, too?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘No. It was an assassination attempt. Gunpowder. When the Théâtre des Encornets collapsed, it was nothing to do with Lavicini’s machine. It was because Louis was in the audience that night. After he moved the court to Versailles, he hardly ever came to Paris. So if you wanted to kill him, you had to take every chance you could get. Even if you killed a lot of others in the process.’

‘Who was it?’

‘
Aucune idée
. Could have been the English. Could have been the Spanish. Could have been anyone. Louis had a lot of enemies, even more than the average tyrant. Sauvage had a son who disappeared around that time. Sons are vengeful. Does that answer all your questions?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘Loeser, Picquart and I have a bit of business to do,’ said Scramsfield. ‘You may as well go.’

‘All right. See you at Zelli’s, Scramsfield.’

After Loeser had left, Scramsfield said, ‘Was all that true? What you told him?’

Picquart shrugged. ‘
Bof
. All theories. Villayer, Sauvage, Lavicini – it was all three hundred years ago.
Personne n’en saitrien
. But he didn’t want theories, he wanted facts. So I gave him facts.’

A few days later, just before one o’clock, on one of those cruel April mornings that are spread out across the sky like a Norb etherised upon a hotel chaise longue, Scramsfield sat outside the café on the Rue de l’Odéon writing a letter to his parents. A blond man walked up to the door of Shakespeare and Company, but instead of trying the handle, he just took out his watch. After wiping his front teeth with a napkin, Scramsfield got up, hurried towards the man, slowed to a saunter before he got near enough to be noticed, and then carried on past. A few steps further on, as a considerate afterthought, he paused, turned, and said, ‘Looking for Sylvia? She’s closed until two.’

Scramsfield watched for the gratitude in the man’s face, but there was none. ‘I’m not, actually,’ the man said. ‘I’m meeting someone here.’ That explained it: he was English. ‘Who are you?’ he added.

‘Just a friend of Miss Beach’s.’

‘And you make it your business to loiter outside the shop, informing every potential customer of its opening hours? Does she pay you for that? Odd sort of friendship.’

‘I just happened to be walking past—’

‘No, you weren’t. I saw you in that café. Are you about to sell me something? You have that air.’

Scramsfield was taken aback. ‘I’m not some sort of confidence man, if that’s what you’re implying.’

‘I wasn’t implying anything so glamorous. But perhaps that is how you regard yourself. I suppose you were hoping I was a rich American?’

‘Look here, I’m very well respected in Paris—’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes.’ Scramsfield drew himself up to his full height. ‘In fact, the one man in Paris I don’t know is the man who can give me a decent American haircut.’ But this time he didn’t get the tone of the joke right, so that it sounded as if he were affirming the existence of a specific individual of that description whose acquaintance he believed it morally unsound to make.

‘I see. In that case, did you ever meet Adele Hitler?’

Scramsfield did remember the name, but for once he was afraid to exaggerate. ‘I don’t think so. Who is she?’

‘A rich girl I know from Berlin. Pretty little beast. She ran off to Paris, so I arranged to be introduced to her parents, and then I talked them into paying for me to come out here and hunt her down and bring her home like Urashima Taro.’

‘Have you found her?’

‘After about three minutes of asking around, I found out she’s not in Paris any more. Apparently she decided to go on to Los Angeles. But I haven’t told the parents yet because they’re paying my expenses. I think I can string it out here for about another week. Then I might see if they’ll send me to America. You see, I’m a parasite of sorts too. It’s not so shameful, if one plays the game with some conviction. Which I’m afraid you don’t.’

‘If you know where she is, why are you still asking about this girl?’

‘I’m told she didn’t have enough money to have her luggage sent on after her,’ said the Englishman. ‘So it’s still in Paris. But no one seems to know where.’

‘Why do you need her luggage? To send back to the parents?’

‘No. At the Strix the night before last I met a certain scion of the House of Grimaldi who became friendly with Miss Hitler while she was in Paris but couldn’t persuade her to stay here with him. He’s offering several thousand francs for a parcel of her unlaundered underwear.’

Scramsfield scratched his ear. ‘Is that right? Well, nice to meet you. I’d better get back to . . . uh, I’d better get back.’

Relieved that the encounter was over, Scramsfield returned to his table at the café. After a few minutes he saw a second fellow walk up to Shakespeare and Company and greet the Englishman he’d just spoken to. They embraced and then ambled off together, just as Scramsfield remembered where he’d first heard the name Adele Hitler.

After they’d parted at Picquart’s apartment, Scramsfield hadn’t particularly expected ever to see Egon Loeser again. He didn’t like to stay friends with people who had seen him at his worst. But if he found Loeser and told him about Adele Hitler going to Los Angeles, then surely the German would have to buy Scramsfield a steak. Or at least a few brandies. And for once Scramsfield wouldn’t even have to lie.

The first place he looked for Loeser was the Flore. But the bar was nearly empty, and he was about to make for Zelli’s when he felt a tap on the shoulder. The scent of peppermint was so strong that even before he turned he knew it would be Dufrène.

‘Hello, Fabrice.’

‘Scramsfield,
pauvre con
, what is this the Armenian says about you and the cheques?’

‘The Armenian?’

‘Someone bails him. He comes looking for you. He says it’s your fault he goes to jail in the first place.’

‘That’s ridiculous. It was just rotten luck. I did everything I could.’

‘You should tell him, then. Because he’s angry. He says he’s killing you. He says he’s ripping your balls off.’

How apt, thought Scramsfield. ‘Just a misunderstanding. Thanks for letting me know, buddy. I’m going to go and find him right now and tell him what really happened and then we’ll both be laughing about it. Simple as that.’

‘I hope so. For your sakes.’

Outside the Flore, Scramsfield looked around, but to his relief there was no sign of the Armenian, just two curly-haired boys in sailor suits poking a dead tabby cat with sticks. He decided it might be best if he got out of Paris for a while. A nice impromptu countryside vacation, just a month or two, working on the novel, until the Armenian calmed down. (Or got taken back to jail.) In principle, there was nothing to stop him leaving a message for Loeser about the girl before he got on the train. But then there would be no way for Loeser to buy him that steak. No, he’d give him the news when he got back. Paris was a joy this time of year. It wouldn’t do Loeser any harm to wait a little while.

Part II

Ten pins in a map

4

LOS ANGELES, 1935

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.