Джералд Керш - On an Odd Note

“My successes have nearly always been with the wild, fierce ones: there is infinitely more satisfaction as your Shakespeare says in rousing a lion than in starting a hare. ‘The blood more stirs,’ I think he said. I am a big-game hunter—irritate, stimulate; wound if necessary; arouse interest; then out of the undergrowth comes your animal, with slashing claws and foam at the mouth. Poor wretch! Little does it know that I am here with a thunderbolt, quite unafraid, almost sorry for it. Then . . . Bang! —a rug for my study. For example, there was in a certain city a woman who was known as ‘The Golden’—gold hair, gold skin, gold eyes, and as good as gold. I will tell you details . . .” And Stavro told me details.

The lady to whom he referred was a famous beauty who had come out of a good family to marry into an illustrious one. She was the toast of her country, and her husband, the well-born and noble gentleman who adored her, was regarded as a fortunate man, since she remained unspoiled. The Emperor Franz-Josef had tried to lead her astray; her virtue was impregnable. Stavro, however, managed to assail that virtue. In the case of ‘The Golden’ it must have been the nostalgia for the mud, such as affects certain women from time to time. However it happened, Stavro succeeded. There was a hideous scandal. The lady’s husband blew his brains out. She had committed only social suicide, and lived on. She was ostracized; she went away, lived a gay life, ran through most of her money, lost the residue in the war, and went to the dogs. It was a nasty story.

“Good, eh?” said Stavro. I made no reply; I could feel again in my nostrils the sulphurous bite of smoldering Evil that goes on and on and ends God knows where. Stavro continued: “I tell you all these things because I regard you as my personal friend. You don’t know what you have done for me in lending me this money—” He touched his waistcoat pocket. “Tomorrow is a bad day in my life. Tomorrow is my birthday. All my troubles began on my birthday—I was born; if I had not been born I should never have had any troubles. On my fourteenth birthday I was punished by my father for something I never did. On my sixteenth I did something and was found out. On my eighteenth, after a certain incident, I had to leave home. On my twentieth I went to prison, and escaped a death sentence by the skin of my teeth. On my twenty-first birthday I did an important job for Zedoff, risking my neck and getting two bullets in the shoulder, and I never got paid because Zedoff, losing his nerve, ran away to America.

“All my life misfortune has followed me and has caught up with me invariably on my birthday; that is, tomorrow. And if I can, when the calendar tells me that it is here, I spend my birthday in a quiet place, in retirement. Your two pounds will enable me to do this: I shall go to a village near London and spend my birthday in bed. No harm has ever come to me in bed. What does your Bible say? ‘Cursed be the day . . .’ et cetera? Cursed be the day, cursed be the night . . . I am not a literary man. This arm, this good right arm, this piece of dead wood which I must carry with me to my grave—I got this on my birthday too. And here, by the way, my dear friend, is another little incident which might provide food for your satirical humor and material for your penetrating pen. (I am sorry, by the way, about that pen I sold you, and I will get you another, even cheaper and much better.)

“I knew it, I knew that if I started important business on my birthday I should come to grief. But there was no way out of it. I was under orders from Marko. It was, I may say, a big job, and I will give you the details of it later if you think you can use them. You have done me a favor and I will do one for you, and we will split fifty-fifty. It is true that you write it down, but without—for example, me !—what would there be for you to write about? Do you realize, my dear friend, that I , the man you see before you, I, Stavro— I was the man delegated to kill a dictator? I will not insult you by asking whether you have heard of Mustapha Kemal Pasha, the Gray Wolf. God only knows what that man has survived. If I were religious I should say that God had chosen him, that God is keeping him for some kind of destiny, since he is the only man who, given to me for killing, is not yet dead. There was big money in it too. If I told you that my own share, after everything had been weighed and paid, was to be thirty thousand pounds, perhaps you would call me a liar? Yet this is the case, I give you my word of honor.

“Marko had organized it. Kemal had to be at a certain place at a certain time, and when he got there, a certain gentleman (not a hundred miles from here) was to put a bullet out of a Mannlicher sporting rifle into him—a semi-hollow, soft-nosed bullet. And there was a crowd, actually and positively a multitude of reliable men hired and ready to cover my retreat. I tell you that there are fates, as your Shakespeare has it, destinies that have us in their power whatever we may do. Is it ‘Rough-hew our ends?’ or ‘Shape them as we will?’ I am no poet.

“It was all organized; organized, cher ami , so as to be foolproof—it couldn’t possibly fail. I may say that with me gripping that rifle, with my eye looking along that barrel, Kemal was as good as dead. And I as good as had thirty thousand pounds in the bank; I mean, in the Safe Deposit, because I don’t use banks. All I had to do was catch the boat train from Victoria, and I left half an hour earlier in order to make assurance doubly sure. As I left my hotel I realized that it was my birthday, and fear came upon me. You know what I mean when I say fear.

“I told the driver to drive with infinite care. He did, and a tire blew out. By the time we were ready to start again, a little time had passed and it was necessary to hurry. And then, taking a shortcut round Charing Cross and rushing through an absolutely empty street—what happened? Ha!

“Some drunken woman steps off the pavement, my driver spins his wheel, we hit the railings of the church across the road, I put up my hand to save my eyes and the shock of the impact sends it through a window; the glass cuts my arm into a fine fringe, and I am in hospital for two months. I lose my thirty thousand pounds; Mustapha Kemal lives; and I am a cripple! . . . There, for example, is my birthday luck for you.”

I said, “If your birthday is tomorrow, that makes it September the fourth, doesn’t it?”

Stavro nodded and replied, “ Too true.”

I bought him another drink. “Did you ever hear of the Monk Paphnutius?” I asked.

His eyes narrowed. “What makes you ask?”

I said, “Nothing. And as a matter of curiosity, my dear Stavro, did the lady known as ‘The Golden’ have a little scar on her face?”

Stavro, tense as a hungry cat and watching me closely, said, “On her left cheek. What then?”

I answered, “Nothing, nothing . . .”

The waiter, having dealt with his impatient customer, came back with a deplorably soggy portion of pie and, lingering, said, “And that other one, that one with the funny arm. Eh? M’sieur Gino, he didn’t like that one. And look what happened to him, eh?”

“Stavro?”

“That’s it, Stavro.”

“What happened to him, then?”

“It was in the papers. The police was after this man with this funny arm, this Stavro. So he goes to Waterloo Station. So he buys a ticket to Walton-on-Thames. So he puts down a pound-note. So it is a bad pound-note. A counterfeit, a forgery. So one thing leads to another—see?—so in the end, so he runs away, and —bomp! Right! into a motorcar. Smash-bang! . . . no more Stavro. Last thing he says is, ‘So this is my birthday?’ ”