Paul Theroux - The Family Arsenal

Hood took the envelope and rolled over to hide his face from the London sunlight which in mid-summer dawned as early as it had in Vietnam, dazzling the curtains and heating the dust in the room before he got out of bed. That same heat was mingled with the smells of carpets and varnish, the sound of flies. He said ‘Got it,’ into the pillow and heard her go.

It was simple enough, but everything was simple as long as you stayed anonymous: the man who had been told everything was safe because he was dead. The charade with the notes meant nothing; the painting had nothing to do with him. He was glad to have it in the house — it was graceful and indefinite. It warmed him like the sun’s curious hum and startled him each new time he saw it; but he did not feel responsible for it, only lucky that it was on the wall, a patch of order where he could rest his eye. It was a window, nothing more, accessible and well placed, but not his. Mayo always called it ‘My Rogier’; he called it ‘Death Eating a Cracker’.

The ransom notes: in them he saw all of Mayo’s futile diligence. He had sent an inch of the canvas himself and laughed when it was pounced upon by an art critic who saw in the theft and this ripping a terrible crime, as if he had posted the man a bloody finger or a victim’s nose. Then he had watched Mayo follow up with her ransom notes and a list of her demands; he was interested but detached, as the canvas strip, now verified as authentic, was sent an inch at a time. To The Times : Mayo said they had a knowledgeable art critic on the staff — even on the run, in hiding, she did not forget her snobbery. In the week Hood had followed the widow’s movements three notes had been sent, with a crusted fragment and a codeword in a plain buff envelope. They were mailed in different parts of the city, at Clerkenwell, Earls Court, Shepherd’s Bush, anonymous places, densely populated. But though the demands had grown insistent — she was promising to destroy the self-portrait — the response had become muted, and indeed there had been no recovery. ‘What if they ignore it?’ Hood had asked, and Mayo replied, ‘They wouldn’t dare.’ But it was a hollow certainty, since Hood guessed that she had placed a higher value on the painting than anyone else — higher perhaps than the person she’d stolen it from. And so the spate of notes: this was the fifth.

She had, almost from the moment they had met at Ward’s, kept Hood at the edge. They were lovers before they were conspirators, but she had another life, other friends, and though her casual allusions to them gave them the large-seemingness of the very obscure, this prevented him from knowing her well. Her secrecy made their friendship incomplete. She was over-anxious to reassure him, and so he imagined that her urgencies — sexual, political: she turned one into the other — could not but be adulterous. She used his affection like a pledge of purpose, and making love to her was only another aspect of this commitment: comrades became lovers, lovers conspirators and promises whispered to her in bed she repeated later as evidence of political involvement. ‘You told me,’ she once said to Hood, ‘that you’d never met anyone like me.’ He said, ‘Yes, in the sack.’ Their very intimacy excluded him; he was so close to her she could say, ‘All in good time,’ and keep him in the dark. Patience was the lover’s obligation. It would have been easier, he would have known more, if he had never been her lover, and while he mocked her secrecy she replied by criticizing his impatience. He sometimes wondered, like the cuckold, if he was being humoured, all the gentle foolery of occasional sex a cover for her betrayal.

He had been given one specific task. He saw it as trifling, she said it was important. ‘The Provos don’t change people,’ she said. ‘We have chemists, teachers, drivers — they’re all good at their jobs. The only difference is now they work for us. If a carpenter joins and says he wants to be a hit-man, we tell him to get lost. We’ve got enough of those. We want skills.’ So Hood, the consul, was ordered to prepare an American passport for the Provos. He had the necessary equipment, a stock of passport blanks he had stolen when he ran from Hué, with unrecorded and so untraceable numbers; the stamp, the official seal. He had been given a small photograph of the person — the prospective traveller — a bespectacled man with an old-fashioned hairstyle, almost certainly a disguise. He had glued in the picture, forged the passport, stamped and sealed it and given it to Mayo to deliver. ‘They like it,’ she said. And later: ‘They might have some more for you to do.’ But he wasn’t contacted again. He had brought the passport blanks to London almost as an after thought; he had only believed in his anger. He was told he could be valuable, he did not know if he was trusted; and though Mayo said, ‘They’re going to contact you,’ she said it in that remote wifely way and it did nothing to lessen his impatience. The passport business was the work of a morning, but he knew he had done nothing until he had killed Weech, and he wanted to do more.

‘Deal the cards,’ he heard Murf saying.

‘What else?’ said Brodie. ‘Was that all?’

‘Naw, the silly bitch put treacle on it and let everyone lick it off. She was stoned. Anyway, what about you? What’s the sexiest thing you ever done?’

Hood listened. He heard a giggle.

‘I wore five belts.’

‘Leave off!’

‘Straight. Tight as anything.’

‘Five flaming belts.’

‘And nothing else. But there was another one — she was a groupie, too — she had this plastic mac, the transparent kind. She’d put it on and they’d tie her up like a parcel. And then, you know, they’d do stuff to her.’

From the doorway Hood could see Murf ’s head, inclined forward, listening to Brodie. He looked like a bat; he had the ears and snout and the grey pinched mouse-face, the hunched bony shoulders that were like folded wings. There was a solemnity in the smallness of his head, and the gold ring and cross in his earlobe only called attention to the size of his ears, which stuck out enough for the sun to light them pinkly from behind and show the tracery of their veins.

Murf said, ‘Deal the cards.’

Hood entered the room, rapping on the door as he did so and noticing, above the two children sitting naked and crosslegged on their mattress — their sheets twisted about them — the Magic Roundabout poster tacked to the wall with felt pennants nearby (Souvenir of Brighton, Chelsea) . On the dresser there was a clothed doll — a stiff-armed Spanish dancer in a mantilla — some cigarette papers, a toy mouse, Murf’s hunting knife, a Chianti bottle with a red candle in the top, a record player and on the turntable a bag of toffees.

‘Rise and shine.’

Brodie turned, smacked a toffee in her mouth and said, ‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve got a surprise for you. Today, you’re going to leg a bomb in Trafalgar Square. This is the big stuff, right? Get Lord Nelson flat on his back and fry those lions. All you do is stick some jelly on the column and you’re laughing. What do you say?’

Murf said, ‘He’s garrity.’

‘Shut up, bat-face and get your clocks out.’

‘Leave him alone,’ said Brodie, glowering at Hood.

‘It’s your big day, sweetheart. Better than Euston — and this is only the beginning.’

‘Don’t pay no attention to him,’ said Brodie. She shuffled the cards, hit the pack on her knee, and flapping her elbows let the sheet fall from her breasts. They were small and very white behind the russet discs of her childish nipples. She scratched lazily at one with her thumb and said, ‘He’s crazy.’

Hood stayed in the doorway, watching Brodie cut the cards again. ‘If you think blowing up Nelson’s column is crazy why did you put the bomb in Euston?’