Accurate fumbling shakeScarcely had he done this than the danger of the situation dawned upon him. The waiter might of course know him, for he might already have met the man, God knows where, but it was a distinct possibility, or alternatively the waiter might know Mortimer. That the staff in the entrance hall didn’t was beside the point, for the staff might have changed, or there might be another shift on duty, especially at night. So, if a room bell was rung, the waiter was not to know, even if he had met Mortimer previously, that the person now in the room should be Mortimer; the bell had simply rung for room number such-and-such, and when the waiter entered and encountered someone other than Mortimer, why should he suspect that he, Sponer, was impersonating anyone! In the morning, however, at checkout, staff who knew Mortimer might well be on duty. He, Sponer, would of course just hurry past themand get in the car, but all the same, someone could notice that the person getting in was not the Mortimer he knew. The car would of course immediately drive off, but the busybody trying to match Sponer’s appearance with that of Mortimer’s would be puzzled, questions might be asked, and if it later turned out that Mortimer had disappeared, everyone would say, “Yes, we, too, found he looked quite different,” and they’d follow this lead and enquire what time he had arrived, why only after midnight if the train was in before seven p.m., and then they’d enquire further and ask who haddriven him from the Westbahnhof, and the drivers would come up for questioning again. Damn! However, so much time would have elapsed, days and weeks probably, before they’d discover Mortimer’s disappearance that they’d no longer be able to establish who had been at the station that time… What, however, if they found out sooner that he had disappeared? Perhaps people were already expecting him, he might have acquaintances in the city, perhaps he’d actually been here before, of course, otherwise the porter wouldn’t have… I light the gas oven and put in the food before selecting cutting boards and knives to cut vegetables for the salad. I rinse off the lettuce, and my eager eyes wander to the bottle of wine standing open on a small table by the couch where Edda’s lying. It’s Hei?ur’s wine, not mine, and the French rascal said to wait. They’re doing their own thing — he out in the wild, she in a huff in her room — while I work on making dinner for them and my indescribable daughter, who now has a sprained ankle on top of everything else, wrapped up by a French male nurse who could, for that matter, be a disguised member of Doctors Without Borders in search of Icelandic patients out on the road. I’m not heeding orders any longer. I’ll have red wine when I feel like it. 6 “I’m broke, Lew,” I said. “No stocks, no bonds, no cash, no property. Theon wasted it all. Or maybe he stole it — I don’t really know.” accurate fumbling shake I lifted one of the showjumping poles and panicked woodlice scurried down its length. The grass underneath was moulded into a curd-white channel speckled with slugs. I could have broken the pole in two over my knee, it was so rotten. Most of the paint had flaked away but it was still possible to tell that it had once been striped white and blue. I had painted those stripes on myself, setting out my little trap to lure the jodhpured girls. Life was simpler then. I’m scared shitless of your sister. And he did. But seeing Karinger’s story in print — even though the pages were only in a Kinko’s box — made falling asleep impossible. I kept rereading Karinger’s fear, how he didn’t want his kid to grow up without a real story of his dad. When Theon couldn’t make it to pick me up at the airport or accompany me to one of the dozens of porn industry galas, Jude would show up in his vintage BMW dressed in just the right clothes. I heard Hei?ur take a deep breath when Dietrich finished the last note ofThe Organ Grinder, which she’d smugly informed me was the last song in Schubert’sWinter Journey. It was Duncan’s turn to shudder as the native spoke of great men he had known, all Iroquois, all dead. “Steal a god from Onondaga,” Duncan suggested. Larkin urged him to read the last passage again.“About our blood,” the old ranger prompted. “-has caused the Blood of those Sons of Lyberty to recoil with them,” Duncan recited. Then the dames would have been in trouble. A car door slams, right outside the house. I didn’t hear a car drive up. “Sign the papers on the kitchen table, will ya, babe?” How many times had Theon said that to me? I hated legal mumbo jumbo, so I rarely read, and never understood, what I was signing. ‘Why is that funny?’ There came a pattering on the roof as hailstones fell. At least, we hoped they were hailstones. It sounded like a handful of earth being sprinkled on the lid of a coffin. The focal point in the Portakabin shifted upwards. We both looked at the panelled ceiling, and then we looked at each other, two men on the edge of an abandoned building site, trapped in a container of sour air, and a giant X on the rampage outside. A giant X who could see us, but whom we couldn’t see, since the windowpane revealed only our stark reflections. ‘Where’s the chandelier?’ “Your papers. Gabriel had an air of playacting today. I don’t think it was out of perverseness that he made us strip off our clothes.” “How do you tell?”. |