In the Evil Day (5 page)
‘So you extracted my address from Riccardi.’
She laughed, not a confident laugh. ‘I have to say I didn’t do that. He offered the address, he said he’d ring you.’
‘Well I have to say I don’t have any disorder so you’re wasting your time.’
She nodded. ‘As you know, the symptoms can take a long time…’
‘When it happens, I’ll let you know. Until then there’s nothing I can tell you.’
They sat in silence. Anselm felt another bad sign, the urge to disconcert, didn’t care and looked at her breasts, looked into her eyes, looked down again. She was wearing a white shirt, fresh, well ironed, creases down the arms.
Alex Koenig looked down at herself, looked up at him.
‘They’re not very big,’ said Anselm. ‘Size means everything to tit men.’
He could see her slow inhalation, the slow expulsion.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘my body aside, my research is into the relationship between post-traumatic stress disorder and the life history and personality of victims.’
Anselm felt the dangerous light-headedness coming over him, the sense of trembling inside, knew he should end this encounter. He drained his glass, went to the kitchen and half filled it, no water, came back and sat down. The light from the table lamp lit one side of her face, emphasised her nose, the fullness of her lips.
‘Life history? That’s what you’re interested in?’
‘Yes.’
‘And personality?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got those. Both. Two out of three. Missing only the disorder.’
Silence.
‘Would you like to see my scrapbook? Stories from foreign wars?
Pictures of dead people? Mutilated bodies?’
‘If you’d like to show it to me,’ she said.
‘The shrink answer. If you’d
like
to. What would
you
like, Frau Koenig? It that Frau? Frau Doctor Koenig?’
‘Alex is fine.’
‘Alex is too informal for me, Doctor.’ He felt himself speeding up. ‘I think we need to keep a professional German distance here. Are you German? You don’t look German. Some kind of
Auslander
, perhaps? A member of a lesser race? That’s not quite an Aryan nose, not that I mind it, of course.’
‘My father is Austrian.’
Anselm drank, a swig. ‘Austrian? Of course. A psychiatrist, where else would your father be? The land of Freud, Jung and Adler. Adler never quite made it did he? A lesser light. I can’t quite remember where Adler went wrong. You’d know, wouldn’t you? Sorry, that might offend. Not an Adlerian are you, Doctor?’
‘No.’
‘Right. What about Jung? A Jungian. He was a big prick, wasn’t he? Saw this huge one as a child as I remember it. This massive phallus. In a dream. Is that right, Doctor Professor?’
‘I’m not a Jungian.’
Anselm couldn’t stop himself. He leaned forward. ‘Dream about massive phalluses too, do you? Monsters? Huge pricks with men attached?’
‘I’m not an analyst.’ Her smile was tight.
‘No? You’d be into drugs then. Terrific. I’m with you. The best approach is drugs. Just give the crazies drugs. For fuck’s sake, they’re deranged, shoot them full of drugs, that’ll keep the nuts quiet.’
Alex Koenig hadn’t taken her eyes off him.
‘Unfortunately I didn’t keep a scrapbook,’ said Anselm. ‘And I don’t remember much about my illustrious career. That’s got nothing to do with post-traumatic stress. That’s the result of being struck on the head with a rifle butt. But I do remember that trouble spots are all the same. Only the colours of the people change. Outside. Inside they’re all the same colours. Red and pink and white. The intestines, they’re a sort of blue, purply blue, the colour of baby birds, seen baby birds? Only they’re wet and slimy, like big worms. Big earthworms or the worms in swordfish. People worms.’
He sat back and smiled at her. ‘Well, so much for my life history. That leaves personality, doesn’t it? Is that in the ordinary meaning? Or is it
persona
we’re talking about? The mask, the actor’s mask? Your Jung was keen on that, wasn’t he? Stupid phallic fart that he was.’
He waited. The way she was looking at him, her silence, her neutrality, brought back the American military psychiatrist. ‘What kind of shrink are you?’ he said. ‘Are you a couch-type? Plenty of couches in this house. We could talk on a couch, how’s that? Both on it. Prone and supine. Which would you be?’
There was a long silence. Then Alex Koenig stood up, eyes on his, glass held in both hands, licked her lower lip, a slither of pink tongue. ‘I like both,’ she said. ‘I like to alternate. I like to fuck and be fucked. But you wouldn’t be much good either way, Herr Anselm. Your prick’s useless. Even if you wanted to fuck me, you couldn’t. You’re not a performer. You’re impotent.’
He sat in the armchair and heard the heavy front door close behind her. He stayed there, head back, massaging the fingers that wouldn’t work, and after a time he fell asleep, waking beyond midnight, stumbling to his cold unmade bed in the room where his grandfather had died.
ANSELM ALWAYS woke early, no matter how much he’d drunk, got up immediately, couldn’t bear the thoughts that lying awake in bed brought. Showered, dressed, some toast eaten, he wandered the house, watched television for a few minutes at a time, too early to go to work. There was always something to look at. Anselms had lived in the house since before World War One. It had been built by his great-grandfather, Gustav. Bits of family history were everywhere—paintings, photographs, books with inscriptions, letters stuck in them to mark pages, three volumes of handwritten recipes, an ivory-handled walking stick, diaries in High German, collections of invitation cards, wooden jigsaws, mechanical toys, there was no end to the Anselm relics. In the empty, cobwebbed wine cellar, he had found a single bottle stuck too deep into a rack, 1937 Lafite. He’d opened it: corked, undrinkable.
Today, he took the tape recorder to the kitchen, sat at the table. In the damp hole in Beirut, Anselm’s thoughts had often turned to his great-aunt Pauline. His first memories of her were when he was eight or nine. She was always very old in his mind, thin, wiry, always in grey, a shade of grey, high collars, strong grey hair, straight hair, severely cut. She smoked cigarillos in a holder. He had no memory of making the recordings. They had come from San Francisco, four tapes in a box with other tapes.
He pressed the Play button. Hissing, then the voice of great-aunt Pauline.
Of course this house has seem terrible arguments.
Then his young voice.
What about?
Oh, business, how to run the business. Times were difficult before the war. And
about the Nazis, Hitler.
Who argued about Hitler?
Your grandfather and your great-grandfather. With Moritz.
I don’t know anything about Moritz.
There was a long silence before Pauline spoke again.
Moritz was so foolish. But he looked like an angel, lovely hair, so blond, he
had the face of Count Haubold von Einsiedel, you know the portrait?
No, I don’t know it.
The von Rayski portrait? Of course you do, everyone does. I remember one
particularly awful evening. We were having a sherry before dinner, we always did,
I was fourteen when I was included, just a thimbleful of an old manzanilla fino.
Hold it to the light, my father said. See pleasure in a glass. I did. I went to that
window, it was summer. They seemed to last much longer then, summers, we had
better summers. Much better, much longer.
Another silence.
When was that?
When?
The awful evening.
Oh, I suppose it would have been in ’35 or ’36. Soon after Stuart’s death.
Stuart never wanted to be in commerce but he had no choice. Eldest sons were
expected to go into the firm. I don’t know what he wanted to do. Except paint and
ski. But his family, well, they were like ours. Two weeks in Garmisch, they thought
that was quite enough relaxation for a year. Anselms had dealt with Armitages for
many years, more than a hundred, I suppose. Many, many years. My father used to
say we were married to the Armitages long before I married Stuart. He was at
Oxford with Stuart’s father. They all did law. That was what you did. Of course,
the families had almost been joined before. My aunt Cecile was engaged to an
Armitage, I forget his name, Henry, yes. Henry, he was killed in the Great War.
The awful evening.
What?
The evening of the terrible argument.
What did I say about that?
Nothing.
Yes. Let’s talk about something else.
She talked about her childhood, about rowing on the Alster, birthdays, grand parties, dinners.
We always went to the New Year’s Eve ball at the Atlantic. So glamorous.
Everyone was there. They had kangaroo tail soup on the menu on New Year’s Eve
in 1940. That was the first time I went after Stuart’s death. Also the last year we
went. I went with Frans Erdmann, he was a doctor. Much younger than I was.
He died at Stalingrad.
After eight, he left for work, closed the massive front door behind him. The temple of memory, he said to himself. The only memory missing is mine.
ANSELM WALKED along the misty lake shore carrying his running gear in a sports bag. His knees were getting worse and his right hip hurt, but he ran home on most days. The long route on good ones, the slightly shorter one on others. The number of others was increasing.
Today, Baader was coming from the opposite direction, every inch a member of the
Hanseaten
: perfect hair, navy-blue suit, white shirt, grey silk tie, black shoes with toecaps. They all dressed like that, the commercial and professional elite of the
Hansastadt.
They met at the gates to the old mansion on Schöne Aussicht.
‘Christ,’ said Baader, ‘I was hoping that thing was an aberration.’
Anselm looked down at his windbreaker, a nylon garment, padded, quilted, red. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It’s football hooligan wear, that’s what’s wrong with it,’ said Baader.
‘I aspire to be a football hooligan,’ said Anselm. ‘Engage in acts of senseless violence.’
‘Join the police,’ said Baader. ‘That way you get a uniform and they pay you.’
They walked up the driveway.
‘What’s this walking?’ said Anselm. Baader drove a Porsche, a new one every year, sometimes more often.
‘Being serviced.’
‘I didn’t know you did that. I thought you bought a new one when the oil got dirty.’
‘Lease,’ said Baader. He had a long thin face, long nose, and a near-continuous eyebrow, just a thinning in the middle. ‘Lease, not buy. Deductible business expense.’
‘A joke, Stefan,’ said Anselm. ‘A very old joke. But on the subject, Brinkman’s in a state of panic. He says the kitty’s empty.’
Baader stopped, eyed Anselm. ‘Brinkman is an old woman,’ he said. ‘An old woman and a bean counter.’
‘Well, he says there aren’t many beans to count and some of your expenses aren’t deductible. He’s worried about illegality. He doesn’t want to go to jail.’
Baader shook his head, started walking again. Anselm thought that he knew what was going through the man’s mind: I gave this sad, drunken, amnesiac, neurotic prick a job when he was unemployable, too fucked-up even to commit suicide properly. I’ve put up with behaviour no sane employer would countenance. Now he’s the voice of conscience.
‘How was the honeymoon?’ said Anselm. He should have asked earlier.
‘I’ve had better.’
At the front door, finger on the button, not looking at Anselm, Baader said, ‘When there were just three people and I did the books, I made money. Now we have to have fucking super-computers that cost as much as blocks of apartments. Maybe I should go back to three.’
‘It’s worth a try,’ said Anselm. ‘Of course, you had fewer ex-wives then and it was pre-Porsches and apartments in Gstadt.’
Baader pressed the button, waved at the camera. From his cubicle, Wolfgang, the day security, unlocked the door.
They went upstairs to the big rooms on the second floor of the grand old building that housed the firm of Weidermann & Kloster. There was no Weidermann, no Kloster and the firm was no longer the publishing house the two men founded after World War Two. Now W&K’s business was looking for people, checking on people.
The biggest room was lit by a dim blue light. It held six computer workstations clustered around a bank of servers, a 1000-CPU supercomputer, state-of-the-art equipment. Two tired, stale-mouthed, gritty-eyed end-of-shift people were in residence.