The Complete Enderby (47 page)

‘
Moi
,’ said Enderby, pocketing the tan boot-polish, ‘
j’essayerai à le vendre ou, au moins, à l’échanger pour quelquechose de comestible
.’

‘
Tu sors?
’ said Ali Fathi, who already had Wahab round the neck.

Enderby did not like this familiarity. He nodded frowning. Yes, he was going out. The time had come to find out what was going on with respect to himself as regards the impending death of Yod Crewsy. For nobody back there in Scotland Yard seemed to be doing anything. There was the usual odd statement about investigations still proceeding, but most of the newspaper concentration now seemed to be on Yod Crewsy as a dying god, not one of the daily victims of common murderous assault. The butcher had become somehow shadowy and august, a predestined and impersonal agent of the dark forces, proud and silent in a Frazerian grove. But the police back there in England were brought up on Moriarty, not Frazer, and Enderby felt sure they were slyly about something. They might be grilling Jed Foot in under-river cellars. Or they might be here, raincoated, holding on to their hats in the Tangerine sea-wind. It was time to go to this Fat White Doggy Wog place and see if John the Spaniard had sent a letter to Enderby through his brother Billy Gomez, if Enderby had remembered the name right.

There were two other bedrooms on this floor, and these comprised the brothel part of the establishment, though, on busy nights, cubicles in the bar below were curtained off for the more urgent and perfunctory clients, and fat Napo’s kitchen had once or twice been used, since it had a stout table for table-corner specialists. The room that Enderby shared with Ali Fathi, Wahab, and Souris had not, so far as Enderby knew, ever been desecrated by acts of a heterosexual nature, but it was understood that, normally in the late morning, an occasional sharp act of commercial pederasty might be consummated there, Enderby and Ali Fathi (who were not supposed to leave the premises, Napo apparently not trusting them not to be caught) going into the backyard with the scrawny hens, there to smoke a soothing marijuana fag or two, given to them by Napo as a little reward for temporarily and gratuitously leasing lodgings for which they had paid in advance.

Out now on the landing, which had a naked light-bulb and a portrait of the King of Morocco, Enderby saw disgustedly that one
of
these other bedrooms had its door open. A couple of laughing male friends, both of a Mediterranean complexion, were preparing to engage houris – whose giggles agitated their yashmaks – on adjacent beds. Enderby angrily slammed their door on them, then went down the carpetless stair grumbling to himself. A scratchy record of popular Egyptian music was playing in the bar – the same theme over and over again in unison on a large and wasted orchestra. Peering through a hole in the worn curtain of dirty Muslim pink, Enderby saw Napo behind his counter. A man grosser than Souris, he had modelled himself on the Winston Churchill he had once, he alleged, seen painting in Marrakesh, but the baby-scowl sat obscenely on a face bred by centuries of Maghreb dishonesty. He was now arguing about the magical properties of certain numbers with a customer Enderby could not see: something to do with a lottery ticket.

Enderby went loudly to the lavatory by the kitchen, then tiptoed through the kitchen to the back door. It was a blue evening but rather gusty. In the little yard the hens had gone to roost in the branches of a stunted tree that Enderby could not identify. They laid on a quiet crooning protest chorus, all for Enderby, and their feathers ruffled minimally in the wind. Enderby frowned up at the moon, then climbed to the top of the low wall by means of an empty Coca-Cola crate and a couple of broken-brick toe-holds. He dropped easily, though panting, over the other side. It was an alley he was in now, and this led to a street. The street went downhill and led to other streets. If you kept going down all the time you eventually came to the Avenue d’Espagne, which looked at the plage. That dog place was down there, not far from the Hotel Rif.

It was very steep and not very well lighted. Enderby teetered past a crumbling theatre called the Miguel de Cervantes then, finding that the next turning seemed to take him some way uphill again, tried a dark and leafy passage which went unequivocally down. Here a little Moorish girl cried when she saw him, and a number of house-dogs started to bark. But he went gamely on, supporting himself by grasping at broken fences. Precipitous: that was the word. At last he emerged from the barking dark, finding himself on a street where a knot of Moorish boys in smart suits called to him:

‘You want boy, Charlie?’

‘You very hot want nice beer.’

‘For cough,’ said Enderby, in no mood for foreign nonsense, and a boy riposted with:

‘You fuck off too, English fuckpig.’ Enderby didn’t like that. He knew that this place had once belonged to the English, part of Charles II’s Portuguese queen’s dowry. It was not right that he should be addressed like that. But another boy cried:

‘You fucking German. Kaput heilhitler.’ And another:

‘Fucking Yankee motherfucker. You stick chewing-gum up fucking ass.’ That showed a certain ingenuity of invective. They were very rude boys, but their apparently indifferent despication of foreigners was perhaps a healthy sign, stirring in sympathy a limp G-string in his own nature. He nodded at them and, more kindly, said once more:

‘For cough.’ They seemed to recognize his change of tone, for they merely pronged two fingers each in his direction, one or two of them emitting a lip-fart. Then they started to playfight, yelping, among themselves. Enderby continued his descent, coming soon to a hotel-and-bar on his left called
Al-Djenina
. The forecourt had birdcages in it, the birds all tucked up for the night, and Enderby could distinctly see, through the long bar-window, middle-aged men drunk and embracing each other. Those would, he thought, be expatriate writers. He was, of course, one of those himself now, but he was indifferent to the duties and pleasures of sodality. He was on his own, waiting. He had written, though. He was working on things. The wind from the sea upheld him as he tottered to level ground. Here it was then: the Avenue d’Espagne, as they called it.

He turned left. A fezzed man outside a shop hailed him, showing rugs and saddles and firearms. Enderby gravely shook his head, saying truthfully: ‘
No tengo bastante dinero, hombre
.’ He was becoming quite the linguist. A gormless-looking boy, thin and exhibiting diastemata in the shop-front lights, offered him English newspapers. This was different. Enderby drew out dirhams. He tried to control his heavy breathing as he looked for news. The wind breathed more heavily, seeming to leap on the paper from all four quarters, as though it was all the news Enderby could possibly want. Enderby
took
his paper into the doorway of the rug-and-saddle shop. The fezzed man said:

‘You man like good gun. I see.’ That was not a discreet thing to say, and Enderby looked sharply at him. ‘Bang bang bang,’ added the man, indicating his rusty Rif arsenal of Crimean rifles and stage-highwayman pistols. Enderby read.
All Hope Abandoned
, a headline said Dantesquely. The end was very near now, a few days off at most. He was in a coma. Where the hell then, Enderby wondered, had that bullet struck him? Police would be treating case as murder, the paper said. Redoubling efforts, acting on valuable information, Interpol on job, arrest expected very soon. The wind pushed, with a sudden whoosh, those words into Enderby’s open mouth. Enderby pushed back and then looked at the date of the newspaper. Yesterday’s. He might be dead already, his gob, money-coining but not golden, shut for ever. The shopkeeper now showed a real golden mouth, like Spanish John’s (and, there again, how far was
he
to be trusted?), as he softly placed, on the newsprint Enderby held tautly at chin-level like a communion cloth, a specimen pistol for his inspection and admiration. Enderby started and let it drop in the doorway. One of its fittings clattered free and the shopman got ready to revile Enderby. ‘
No quiero
,’ Enderby said. ‘I said that before, bloody fool as you are.’ And then he entered the wind, looking troubled at flickering lights on headlands. He didn’t need his newspaper any more, so he threw it into the wind’s bosom. The wind, like a woman, was clumsy with it.

The sea.
La belle mer
. Why had he never realized that that was the same as
la belle-mère
, which – with some kind of French irony – had been forced into meaning ‘stepmother’? Well, he had come back to her for a brief time, belching and grousing over there, brewing strong green tea all day long, groaning in her bed at night. She had seen him taken off by a woman, and soon it would be by the police. Which was Rawcliffe’s place? Street-lamps showed the Sun Trap, with a kosher inscription, and the Well Come. They were in the dark; people moved inland with the night, to fat belly-dancers and bottles of alum Valpierre. There it was:
El Acantilado Verde
, a tatty yellowish place. Rawcliffe had had, apparently, several little Tangerine bars and tea-shops. This would be his last.

Enderby mastered his breathing before entering the bar-restaurant
that
had a shagged dog sign swinging, with its lamp of low wattage, in the paper-ravaging wind. The crossword, pathetically unsolved, rode and span briefly on the air at Enderby’s eye-level as he made for the closed door. There were deserted metal tables with chairs on top of them stretching along the pavement. From within came piano-music. He pushed the door open.

The piano was an upright, in tone tinny, scarred in appearance, on a platform made of old beer-crates, and the man who played seemed to be a North European. He played slow jazz with sad authority, sadly chewing his lips. He had suffered, his blank face said, but had now passed beyond suffering. An American, Enderby decided. All Americans, he thought, looking shyly round: it was to do with sitting postures of insolent relaxedness. There was a herbal smell on the air, an autumn smell.
Herbst
was the German for autumn, was it not? A poem, like the transient randiness felt when coming upon a gratuitous near-nude set in the pages of a magazine article one finds absorbing, twitched. These Americans would call it the fall. A fall of herbs, of grace, herb of grace. No, there were other things to think of and do, and he already had a poem on the forge. Still, he sniffed. Drugs, he tingled; something stronger than that harmless marijuana (Mary Jane, that meant: a mere kitchen-maid of narcotics) he had been given to smoke. A very thin young man in dark glasses mouthed and mouthed in a trance. A white-haired cropped man, also young, sat reading a thin, or slim, volume. ‘Shit,’ he kept judging. Nobody took any notice; nobody took any notice of Enderby. There was a man in the corner in a skin-tight costume as for ballet practice writing words shakily on a blackboard.
Braingoose
, he wrote, and, under it,
Rape of Lesion
. Enderby nodded with tiny approval. Literary exiles of a different sort. Which reminded him: that bloody book of that dying yob; here might they know? ‘Shit,’ said the white-haired man, turning a page, then laughed.

There seemed to be no waiter about. There was a wooden bar in the distant corner, its lower paint ruined by feet, and three barstools were empty before it. To get to it Enderby had to get past a dangerous-looking literary man who had arranged three tables about himself like an ambo. He had shears with which he seemed to be busy cutting strips out of newspaper-sheets, and
he
looked frowning at Enderby while he pasted some of these, apparently at random, on a pawed and sticky piece of foolscap. He looked like an undertaker, mortician rather; his suit was black and his spectacles had near-square black rims, like the frames of obituary notices in old volumes of
Punch
. Enderby approached diffidently, saying: ‘Pardon me –’ (good American touch there) ‘– but can anybody?’

‘If,’ said this man, ‘you mean aleatoric, that only applies to the muzz you embed the datum in.’ He sounded not unkind, but his voice was tired and lacked nuances totally.

‘What I meant really was a drink, really.’ But Enderby didn’t want to seem impolite; besides, this man seemed engaged on a kind of literature, correcting the sheet as he started to now with a felt-tipped inkpencil; he was a sort of fellow-writer. ‘But I think I see what you mean.’

‘There,’ said the man, and he mumbled what he had stuck and written down, something like: ‘Balance of slow masturbate payments inquiries in opal spunk shapes notice of that question green ass penetration phantoms adjourn.’ He shook his head. ‘Rhythm all balled up, I guess.’

‘I’m really looking,’ Enderby said, ‘for the waiter you have here. Gomez his name is, I believe.’ A man came out, somewhat dandyishly tripping, from behind a curtain of plastic strips in various primary colours. He had a greenish shirt glazed with never having been, for quite a time anyway, taken off, and thin bare legs that were peppered with tiny holes, as with woodworm. His face was worn to the bone and his hair was filthy and elflocked. To the scissored man he said:

‘He reckons he’s through on the hot line now.’

‘Any message?’

‘Fly’s writing it down. May I inquire whom you are?’ he then said to Enderby.

‘Something about Gomez, I guess,’ said the mortician.

‘Later.’ The other dabbled his fingers in air as in water. ‘He’s off till
un poco mas tarde
.’ The pianist was now working on some high-placed old-time discords, school of Scriabin. ‘Crazy,’ the dabbler said.

‘I’ll have a drink,’ said Enderby, ‘if I may.’

‘British,’ nodded the mortician. ‘Guessed so. Goddamn town’s lousy with British. Out here to write about tea with Miss Mitford, rose gardens in rectory closes, all that crap.’