Cut Throat Dog (7 page)

A lot of people wear shirts like that, Yadanuga tries to dampen down Shakespeare’s excitement, without success.

No, no! Shakespeare protests, the shirt had a white collar, and he was wearing a brown tie.

All that means is that he’s got terrible taste, Yadanuga demurs, but it doesn’t prove that he’s our man.

He’s our man, pronounces Shakespeare.

Where did you meet him? Asks Yadanuga.

In Manhattan, in an Irish pub. He was sitting there drinking muscatel, into which he poured creme-de-cassis from a flask he took out of the inside pocket of his jacket.

How did we come up with the name ‘Tino the Syrian’? Yadanuga wonders.

Don’t you remember? When they gave us his profile, they said that he had a lyric tenor, and he liked chansons from the thirties; and because he was called Anton, and he was one quarter Russian, we called him ‘Tino Rossi’, and later on, when we found out that he trained in Syria, and for a while he acted as a bodyguard to that old Nazi who lives in Damascus—we turned ‘Tino Rossi’ into ‘Tino the Syrian’.

Even if it is him, he’s no longer the same person. He must be forty-five today … Yadanuga reflects on all the years that have passed together with the secret
gloria mundi
of their stormy youth in the quartet of the ‘Cunning Cooks’.

Listen, Yadanuga, confesses Shakespeare. Weird things are happening to me. I need a break.

And Yadanuga, aware of every nuance in his friend’s voice, lays a beefy hand on Shakespeare’s shoulder and says:

Shakespeare, we’ll make a decision, and after that take a break, go where you want.

Where I must, corrects Shakespeare, if I take responsibility for my actions.

You take responsibility, if I know you, says Yadanuga, but now we have to come to a decision, and you, as the boss and the CEO of the firm—

I can’t sit there, Yadanuga. I can’t!

Those two yuppie pipsqueaks raise my revulsion level too, confesses Yadanuga, but we haven’t got a choice. Mona’s tending in their direction. You have to throw all your weight into the ring. Come on, let’s go down.

That’s not the point, Yadanuga. The revulsion level doesn’t bother me.

What is it then, Shakespeare? Talk, because you’re beginning to worry me.

Something’s happening to me, Yadanuga, and I don’t know how to tell you. I don’t even know where to begin.

Yadanuga doesn’t say a word. He takes a flat bottle of Knob Creek out of the pocket of his leather jacket, takes a sip of the whiskey, and hands the bottle to Shakespeare.

What’s this, says Shakespeare in surprise, you’ve changed to Kentucky straight bourbon?

Lately, says Yadanuga, I prefer whiskey without memories.

Shakespeare takes a sip of Yadanuga’s whiskey without memories, and in his head the expanses of Mid-west cornfields open up, with the country roads, and the isolated farms scattered between them, and on one of them, in the shade of the giant elm trees, in the place where he had parted from her for the last time, Bridget sits on an old wicker chair breast-feeding the small, pink Hugh. Before he drives out to the road, he waves to her from the car window and calls: Wait for me here, under the elm, and a the same moment the sentence rings in his head in French, in the voice of the Alsatian, the voice in which he would say softly to every corpse they parted from:
Attendez moi sous l’orme
, and he knew that he would never see her again, or the little son, who would grow up without a father. That’s the biggest favor you can do him, Shakespeare eased what remained of his conscience, and stepped on the gas, and drove away.

Yadanuga looks at him, draws on his whiskey bottle, and says to himself that he knows him like he knows himself. In other words, hardly at all. He is shrouded in absolute darkness, and out of the darkness pictures emerge like cars from the road tunnels in the North of Italy. One minute they’re racing along the road twisting between mountains stunning in their savage beauty, and the next they’re swallowed up again in the maw of the next tunnel. Sometimes he tries to attach names to these pictures. The names are very strange, and more than shedding light on the content of the pictures, they actually increase their obscurity.

One of these pictures now pops out of the dense darkness in Yadanuga’s head, labeled ‘Binbad the Bailor’, and he laughs.

Shakespeare looks surprised, and Yadanuga apologizes, explaining that all of a sudden, because of the way ‘Tino Rossi’ had turned into Tino the Syrian’, the words ‘Tinbad the Tailor’ had suddenly popped into his head. Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you and your crazy codes! To this day the French police are still puzzling over ‘Zinbad the Zailor’. How did you come up with it?

Shakespeare doesn’t answer. Shakespeare isn’t here any more. Shakespeare is already there. In the dark night, on the road climbing to the isolated villa near Nice, which said backwards is ‘Sin’, which gave birth to ‘Sinbad the Sailor’, and Stephen Dedalus, or perhaps Mr Bloom, gave birth to ‘Binbad’. And the pictures flicker and chase each other in the darkness. Four men in overalls get out of the French Electrical Corporation minivan and enter a dark isolated villa on a hilltop. Between the pines the lights of Nice, capital of the Azure Coast, twinkle in the distance, and Yadanuga sings softly ‘Tomorrow my friends we shall
sing as we go into battle’. The Alsatian silences him: If you have to sing, sing ‘Frere Jacques’. The armed goon stationed at the entrance to the villa shines a strong flashlight on their faces and overalls. What’s the trouble, the Alsatian inquires, and the goon explains that the electricity suddenly shorted, but all the fuses are okay. Where’s the fuse box here, asks the Alsatian, and the goon says, come with me. He turns into the entrance. Jonas raises his hand as if to scratch his head, and a terrible blow aimed at the back of the goon’s neck leaves the latter sprawled lifeless on the stairs. In the dim drawing room eight men are seated at a round table in candlelight. They raise their heads and look at the four technicians. Good evening, the Alsatian greets them, you’ll have your light back on in a minute. And indeed, light bursts in brief flashes from the toolboxes in the hands of the electricians accompanied by a dry hiccuping sound. Chairs turn over. The technicians hurry to the fallen men and take care of each of them personally. A flash and a hiccup for every head. The eyes of Shakespeare’s personal patient suddenly snap open. Shakespeare looks straight into the whites of his eyes and whispers: This is for Munich. And adds another flash and another hiccup, right into the aiming eye, which sprays onto the overalls emblazoned with the initials of the French electric corporation: EDF, ‘Électricité de France’.

Hey, Shakespeare, he hears Yadanuga’s voice and feels the weight of his hand on his shoulder, where are you?

In the villa in Nice, says Shakespeare.

It was brilliant, says Yadanuga. Connecting up to their phone, and then cutting their electricity, letting them dial the electric company and complain of a short, and the Alsation reassures them: Oui, monsieur, we’re sending you a team of technicians.… right away, tout de suite, monsieur! How did you think of it, Shakespeare?

I had the mind of a writer, Shakespeare mourns for Hanina, and I sold it. And now I’m paying the price.

Have you been diagnosed with something?

Diabetes, Tyrell the scriptwriter gives him the second answer that occurs to him. Never the first, banal one.

That’s nothing, Yadanuga tries to console him. If it’s only diabetes—

Neglected and deteriorating, Tyrell continues improving his new invention, examining its possible implications for what comes next. I walked around with it for years. Somehow I knew. This dissolving flesh showed the signs. Pins and needles in my feet. Attacks of numbness in my fingers. Attacks of blurred vision.

You didn’t go to a doctor? Yadanuga pretends to be surprised at his friend. In truth he is simply astonished at Shakespeare’s ability to set in motion improvisations in which he himself enjoys participating, without knowing where they will lead and where they will end.

Why go to a doctor? Shakespeare laughs. So that he’ll tell me that I should have died three hundred years ago? That the fact that I’m still alive is a medical scandal? That my cardiac arteries are a mess? That I have to stop ruining women’s reputations and drinking myself to death?

The question is if you prefer to go blind, Yadanuga goes on playing the game. Or to lose your organs one by one.

I hoped to croak before my body landed up in the hands of the butchers, Shakespeare plays another card, but my heart refuses to die.

I’m sorry I gave you the whiskey, says Yadanuga, and asks himself how and when the moment of truth, which ends every game, will arrive.

Don’t be sorry, Shakespeare laughs at himself, those drops won’t change anything now. And the best joke is, it’s caught up with me exactly when I’m suddenly dying to live,
and even if I’ve only got one more year, I’m not prepared to give up a single day.

We’ve finally come to the point, reflects Yadanuga. Now the guy’s beginning to talk about something that really happened to him. But he immediately warns himself: don’t forget you’re talking to someone for whom imagination is reality and reality is imagination. Now, go figure what happened in reality, what happened in imagination, and what happened in the no-man’s-land between the two, where this man lives his life.

What’s her name? Yadanuga mounts a frontal assault, which causes Tyrell to leap for his script and start scribbling a new scene:

Francesca, he throws out the first name that comes into his head, the devil knows where from.

A nun? wonders Yadanuga.

How did you know? Shakespeare begins with growing curiosity to reveal the biography of a woman whose identity is still unknown.

I don’t know, admits Yadanuga, a kind of hunch. How did you meet her?

Through a friend of hers. I was in Florence, I went to the Accademia to see Michelangelo’s David, there were two girls standing there, one of them in a nun’s habit and the other in the uniform of a novice.

Since when do you know the difference between a novice and a nun? Yadanuga tries to frustrate Shakespeare’s unexpected move with a clumsy mate.

I heard them talking, Shakespeare laughs at his contestant’s amateurish move. I heard the nun saying to the novice: Do it for me, Isabella. Find out what his business is. You can do it, I can’t. You haven’t taken your vows yet.

I didn’t know that nuns weren’t allowed to talk to men, Yadanuga marvels at his friend’s powers of improvisation.

They’re only allowed to in the presence of the Mother Superior, explains Shakespeare, and adds: And even then—they’re not allowed to show their face to a man, or if they do show it, they’re not allowed to talk.

What do you say, marvels Yadanuga.

To cut a long story short, the novice comes up to me and says: My friend, Francesca, took a bet with me that you’re a gynecologist. So I answer loudly, to let her friend hear too: What’s the problem, did your brother get you pregnant? And before the words are out of my mouth Francesca bursts into lewd laughter, and I felt as if midsummer was breaking out in the dead of winter in my heart.

Are you serious? marvels Yadanuga.

The laugh didn’t come from her belly, it came straight from her Diana-bud, which opened up and made the Cupid-flower blossom in my dormant garden. Suddenly I understood why Orthodox Jews are so afraid of a woman’s voice.

And what happened afterwards? inquires Yadanuga.

We began the evening with black cuttlefish soup and celebrated the night in her hotel room.

With the nun?

What nun? He laughs. If I tell you, you won’t believe it.

Spit it out, Shakespeare!

In good time, Yadanuga.

Whatever. And the next day you said goodbye—

The next day we got on a plane.

A plane?!

She took me to meet her parents in Vermont. They live in a big wooden house, in a forest of maple trees. They make maple syrup for a living. Maple wine. Maple liqueur. Their house is steeped in the aromas of maple and cinnamon.

Never mind the maple and the cinnamon, what’s the girl like?

The girl is maple and cinnamon too.

What does that mean?

Her hair is maple syrup. You never saw a color like it in your life. Not only on her head. On her mound of Venus too. And her lips—cinnamon. Reddish-brown.

Are you talking about her mouth or her pussy?

Both. But what drove me crazy were her eyes.

Cinnamon or maple syrup?

No no, Shakespeare gravely dismisses Yadanuga’s attempts at humor: Her eyes are something you’ve never seen. Their expression is the cleanest thing I ever saw. Clean as clean can be. The innocence of a child, and the sexuality of a woman of thirty-three. When she came to say goodbye to me, her hair was wet with rain. She was wearing a white shirt, and over it a man’s brown leather bomber jacket.

White and brown, Yadanuga reflects aloud. Hanina takes it in, but Shakespeare goes on telling his story without a break:

Her cheeks were flushed with running in the rain. She came into the room, sat down in an armchair, breathing hard with flared nostrils, and looked straight into my eyes. For fifteen minutes we sat like that, looking into each other’s eyes. I had such a hard-on I was afraid to move. In the end she stood up and said: I’ll miss you. I have to go to work.

What does she do, your nun?

She works for the police.

A cop?! Yadanuga is stunned by this completely unexpected turn in the development of the character. Where in the hell is he taking me, he wonders, is there a story of getting into trouble with the law behind this tale being spun by his compulsively fiction-fabricating friend? And aloud he asks: Are you trying to tell me that you’ve fallen in love with an American policewoman?

Not a policewoman. She’s a criminologist. She investigates particularly serious crimes.

What are ‘particularly serious crimes’? Yadanuga has a hard time hiding the suspicion awakening in his heart.

Exposed neck crimes, Shakespeare replies with a confidence that amazes Hanina, who suspects that this time even Shakespeare has reached a dead end. He hopes that Yadanuga will let it go, but Yadanuga is as stubborn as a Canaanite mule: