John Banville - Mefisto

— I have to get out of this place, she said. Help me.

A bell was ringing, they would come in soon to say the rosary. I rose to go. She looked up at me, out of her dark, dazed eyes.

— Help me, she said.

Felix listened to me, he understood. That’s it, he said, that’s it! smiling and nodding, urging me on. To know, to do, to delve into the secret depths of things, wasn’t that what he had always urged on me? And now he would help me. He had contacts, he had influence. There were people other than the professor, there were other machines, too, bigger, and better, oh yes, yes, he would show me! I liked to listen to him talk like this, it set up a kind of excited hum inside me that had alarm in it, and presentiment, and dark pleasure. And if now and then I looked up unexpectedly and caught him watching me with a merry eye, smiling that artful smile of his, well, I didn’t care.

In the afternoon sometimes I walked about the city with him. We went to the zoo, one of his favourite haunts. He found everything irresistibly funny there. He would stand in front of the tiger’s cage, or in the torpid gloom of the alligator house, and fairly split his sides. The animals in their turn watched him with what seemed to me a puzzled, wary eye. Oh look, look! he would cry, in a transport, clutching my arm and pointing a trembling finger at a baboon picking at its purple arse, or a hippo trying to mount its mate.

— What a strange old world, all the same, he said, that has such monsters in it, eh, Caliban?

He met people there, they would step out from behind a tree, or lower a newspaper and look at him with a humid stare. There was something about them, an air of tension and vague torment, that fitted with the place. They might have been peering through invisible bars. When he spotted them he would laugh softly to himself and walk over rapidly and talk to them, keeping his back to me. He never referred to these encounters afterwards, but fell into step beside me again and blandly took up talking where he had left off. But some days I noticed him looking about with a watchful eye, and a trace of strain crept into his smile, and he kept to open ground.

— If you ever have to look for me, he said, you know where I’ll be, don’t you?

We were walking by an ornamental lake. The day was overcast, the air a sheen of damp pearl. He was eating a pink ice-cream cone, and kicking idly at the ducks crowding the churned mud of the water margin.

— I mean, he said, if you can’t find me, if I’m not around. When matters become complicated, a period of withdrawal is the best thing, I find.

He glanced at me and grinned. A black swan sailed past us in silence, with its chaste, bashful mien. The ducks gabbled. He tossed the last of his ice-cream into their midst and there was uproar. On a little island in the lake a pair of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches of a dead tree.

— We should stick together, Felix said. We’re two of a kind, you and me.

He linked his arm in mine then, and we went through the gate and up the hill to the bus stop. The city was below us, crouched under a lowering sky. We were stopped in traffic by the river when the rain came on, rattling against the side of the bus. It ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and a pale wash of sunlight fell across the rooftops and the shining spires, and at a great height a solitary white bird soared against a bruise-coloured wall of cloud. How innocent it all was, how unconcerned, I remember it, the drenched light, the spires, that bird, like a dreamy background, done by an apprentice, perhaps, while in front horses plunge and blackamoors roll their eyes, and a poor wretch is dying tacked to a tree.

In Chandos Street we found Liz huddled on the steps outside the front door. When we approached her she flinched and put up her arms to protect her face. There was a livid bruise under her eye, and her lower lip was split and caked with blood. She would not stand up, but cowered against the door with her knees pressed to her chest. I knelt beside her, but she turned her face away from me with a sob. Felix stood before her with his hands in his pockets, tapping one foot.

— Tony being impetuous again, is he? he said. That boy is so excitable.

Liz mumbled something. One of her front teeth had been knocked out, it was hard to understand her.

— Come again? Felix said, leaning down with a hand cupped to his ear.

— He’s gone! she cried.

There was silence, save for her muffled sobs. It was growing dark in the street. Felix considered her pensively, jingling coins in his pocket.

— Gone? he said softly. How do you mean, gone?

She squeezed her eyes shut, but the tears kept coming. Her lip had begun to bleed again. She held herself by the shoulders, trembling.

— They were waiting for us on the corner, she said. They made him go with them.

Felix looked up and down the street, then leaned down to her again, with his hands on his knees, and smiled.

— They, now, he said. Who were they, exactly?

She shook her head.

— Ah, he said. Strangers. Tell me, my dear, would you say they were, perhaps, seafaring gentlemen? Yes?

He glanced at me, still smiling.

— Well well, he said, a pair of jolly tars, no less. I wonder, now, who they can have been.

He skipped down the steps and stood on the pavement, peering about the street again, more carefully this time. Then he came back. He examined Liz’s face closely, squatting on his heels in front of her and shaking his head.

— You don’t look at all well, he said, do you know that? Not at all well.

She watched him warily, snuffling, running a hand through her matted, ash-coloured hair. He smiled at her and lifted his eyebrows, holding his head to one side.

— Tell you what, he said, how about a treat, to make it all better. What do you think? Wouldn’t that be nice?

He brought out from an inside pocket a tiny square plastic envelope and held it up for her to see, wagging it gaily under her nose. At once she sprang at him and tried to snatch it, but he drew back, grinning.

— Ah ah! he said. First, a question. What did they want, precisely, these sailor laddies?

She watched the little envelope, licking her broken lips.

— You, she said. It was you they were looking for.

He stared in mock astonishment, clapping a hand to his heart.

— Me? he gasped. Me? Good gracious!

He laughed, and rose from where he had been squatting and turned away from her. With a cry she scrambled after him on her knees, clutching at the tail of his mackintosh. He paused.

— Oh, your fizz-bag, yes, he said. Here.

He tossed the envelope on the step. She grabbed it, and clawed it open, and with her fingers drew down her swollen lower lip and shook the contents into the crevice between lip and gums. Then she crawled back and sat down at the door again, hugging her knees to her chest. She was crying, we could hear her as we walked away into the dusk.

At a phone box on the corner of the square Felix stopped. He cradled the receiver under his chin, holding the door open with his knee and winking at me as he spoke.

— Yes, Chandos Street, yes. I think she must have taken something, she looks very … What’s that? Me, officer? Oh, just a citizen, doing his duty. Bye bye, now.

He let the door bang shut behind him, and turned up the collar of his coat and rolled his eyes.

— The plot thickens, he said, eh, Watson?

It was in the final editions, foul play down the docks, the body of a young man taken from the river, severe injuries to head and face, unrecognizable. Police were keeping an open mind.

THE CITY I HAD THOUGHT I knew became transfigured now. Fear altered everything. I scanned the streets with a sort of passion, under the glare of it things grew flustered somehow, seemed to shrink away from me, as if stricken with shyness. They had never been noticed before, or at least not like this, with this fierce, concupiscent scrutiny. I saw pursuers everywhere, no, not pursuers, that’s not it, that’s too strong. But nothing was innocent any more. The squares, the avenues, the little parks, all my old haunts, they were a façade now, behind which lurked a lewd, malignant presence. Panic smouldered in me like a chronic fever, ready to flare up at the smallest fright. Walking along the street I would suddenly speed up my steps, until I was flying along, head down, heart hammering, my breath coming in little cries, yet when I stopped at last, exhausted, and looked behind me, there was never anything there, only a sense in general of low, gloating laughter. Twilight I found especially alarming, that hour of shadows and dim perspectives, I fled from it into the fluorescent sanctuary of the white room, where everything seemed its own source of light, and surfaces were impassive, without deceptive depths, and the atmosphere was neutral and inert, like a thin, colourless gas.