Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Wendell might be in this very building by now, bribing yardveegs and deskmajoors, going through Bill Millefleur’s apartment, reading through his appointment book. Wendell was not the sluggish person his gross body suggested. If he had said he would wipe out Tristan Smith there was every chance that he would do it.

In this field, Jacqui had no expertise. She stood with her slender back against the terracotta wall, facing the french doors of the Great Room, standing as she’d seen bodyguards in front of prime ministers and presidents, their hands loosely by their sides, their eyes always moving.

If they took my life, she saw she would have to kill herself. She screwed her face up as against a bright and painful light.

She had the statue of that smirking little mole you know as ‘Singing Willie’. *She was now ready to use it against my assassins. When Wally Paccione approached her she could not spare him any more than her peripheral vision. He came slowly across the terrace, out of focus, black and white in his dress suit, tapping his cane, jutting out his unshaven chin. The aura of his own upset preceded him.

He positioned himself beside her, and began, immediately, to go through the elaborate ritual of rolling himself a cancerette. Jacqui could not look at him. She was staring into the dark of the Great Room where she could see figures moving in front of the paintings. A man in a sixteen-button suit came out into the light. If he had been an operative, she would not have known.

Beside her, Wally finally lit his lumpy cigarette. He inhaled, exhaled. She felt him turn his grey eyes on her.

Finally he spoke. ‘I don’t know who you are or what you want.’

The man in the sixteen-button suit was now talking to a woman in a blue-veiled hat. He accepted a glass of wine from the servant. This must mean that he was not an operative.

‘You’ve lied to me,’ Wally said. ‘You jerked me around. You might think you’re cute, but let me tell you, sweets — you know what you’ve done to him …’

‘You’ve got no idea. Papa.’

‘I’ve got every fucking idea,’ Wally said, his voice rising. ‘You think I’m blind?’

Jacqui scanned the party, the topiary, the waiters, the hazy skyline, she heard the Mouse’s two-pin voice. (‘ I live on air ,’ it said. ‘ I suck it in, I spit out the pips .’) Peggy Kram was laughing, shaking her head.

The old vulture edged himself closer to her. ‘You think that’s cute?’ he said, nodding at the Kram.

‘No.’

‘You think this is good for his self-esteem?’ He stood beside her, whispering in her ear in that way of his which she had always found off-putting.

‘If I’d wanted to hire a woman,’ he continued, ‘I would have advertised for one. I grew him up,’ he said. ‘We had one female santamarie, never again. God damn,’ he said bitterly, looking Jacqui up and down, her breasts, her legs, her face. ‘He has feelings.’

‘You think he’s fallen in love with Peggy Kram?’ Jacqui turned to look him in the face for the first time.

‘He’s a young man, for God’s sake. Sex is all he thinks about.’

‘Is he flirting with her?’

‘You don’t seem to understand — this isn’t funny.’

‘Mr Paccione.’ She turned and took his sleeve and held it. ‘I am standing here because I am expecting a man with a gun who wants to shoot Tristan.’

She saw his mouth open, saw his coated tongue. She saw the eyes reacting like living things exposed to acid. Suddenly, he looked so old. He began to wipe his hand over his head. The colour drained from his cheeks. He was an old man from a little town, far, far, far away. There was a helplessness about him she had never seen before.

‘He offended someone?’

‘It’s nothing he’s done.’

‘I hate this place,’ the old man said. ‘We should never have come. I put the idea into his head. We were happy where we were.’

‘Mr Paccione, please, be calm. Listen to me: it’s the DoS, the VIA as well.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Wally.

‘They have an agent at the Marco Polo. I talked to him this morning.’

‘We have POW numbers,’ Wally said, his voice breaking. ‘What does it matter if he wants to wear the stupid suit? Who is he harming?’

They stood together watching me. I was alight, aflame, drunk on celebrity and the smell of Peggy Kram’s hair as it brushed the surface of my Simi-shell.

*

Actually, Sinning Willie.

Jacqui and Wally were ready, on that night, to risk their lives to get me out of Voorstand. I should have listened to them, but I was like a drunk around a bottle. My death hung over me, and I would not see it.

Wendell Deveau, his belly sticking out in front, his shirt hanging down at the back, was prowling round the Demos Platz. Leona the facilitator was bugging Wendell’s room in the Marco Polo. And Gabe Manzini was sitting in a gondel off the Demos Platz tracing Wendell’s progress on an electronic monitor.

Meneer, Madam — my death did not disturb me. I barely noticed it. It was no more than the distant flutter of moths’ wings before the roaring of my need. I was twenty-three years old, crazy for life, the smell of a woman’s skin, the great bursting view through the topiary and down into the long shadows of Demos Park with its looping flights of red-winged pigeons.

I was standing in the place where Sirkuses are born, where the fabled city itself was either saved or damned. I was impressed. I was excited. Will the judges at the Guildcourt consider this when they attempt to determine my motive?

It is true I never revealed my true identity to those I met at Mrs Kram’s trothaus. But Kram herself never wished to name me. She said, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, and gave their names to me, never mine to them. This was not my deception. It was her respect. *This is how you introduce kings, princes, and stars of only the most dangerous types of Sirkus.

And they liked me, Kram’s friends. I listened to them. They listened to me. I quoted Seneca. I told them jokes in my two-pin voice, jokes I made up on the spot, and delivered with a physical technique the opposite of anything Stanislavsky would ever have thought possible.

I was Meneer, or Oncle, or Bruder, the last of these to Frear Munroe, who gave me his card and asked me to come and see him perform in court where — he whispered this into the great dead prosthetic he imagined was my ear — he would be called in to represent special interests in the case against the hapless Mayor, accused of many things, including selling public streets and parks to French and English corporations.

Did I like Frear Munroe? No. I did not like his smell, his bad-tempered face, the violence I saw brewing behind his eyes. But he had currency — he told me things, in such a way, that I felt I had been beamed into the white-hot centre of existence.

So even though my bones were aching and my ligaments torn, even though I was faint with hunger and my skin was itching and aspirin was singing in my ears, I was — with the Kram’s long hair brushing across the wall of my face each time she leaned down to tell me something — in some kind of wild heaven where I did not give a damn for anything except how to get more of whatever it was I had.

I did not think the next move. I took it as it came. I spoke the words and learned to trust the patch. It strained my face most terribly. It is no easy business talking solely from the throat, but the result: the bliss of eloquence. Meneer, Madam, did you ever have dreams of flying?

Peggy Kram smelled of herbs and wild honey. It was her golden Dutch hair, her French shampoo, waving through the air in front of me. She had good skin, slightly golden, and clear blue eyes that stood in total contradiction to her Mersault.