To be honest, all this left me fairly cold, although it did make me think that somewhere there must be a proper file on me, with dates and information, verifiable facts and detailed characteristics, along with my conventional CV (or, who knows, my unconfessable one), and with rather less ethereal and unverifiable observations and descriptions. There must be files on all of us, it would have been strange if there weren't, and I promised myself that I would one day quietly seek them out, those on Rendel and young Nuix might be of interest to me, though not so much Mulryan's; and Tupra's, of course, assuming he had a file. Before closing the drawer, I rested my thumb on the upper edge of the files and riffled through a few of them, not too quickly, just out of curiosity, stopping occasionally at random. I came across some very famous entries: 'Bacon, Francis', 'Blunt, Sir Anthony', 'Caine, Sir Michael (Maurice Joseph Micklewhite), 'Clinton, William Jefferson "Bill"', 'Coppola, Francis Ford', 'Le Carré, John (David Comwell)', 'Richard, Keith (The Rolling Stones)', 'Straw, Jack' (the British Foreign Minister, formerly Home Secretary, the one who so shamelessly let Pinochet go, he was the person I needed information on that morning, about his improper past), 'Thatcher, Margaret Hilda, Baroness' . Those were the files that my thumb stopped at, some were already dead. A lot of other names meant nothing, being unknown to me: 'Booth, Thomas', 'Dearlove, Richard', 'Marriott, Roger (Alan Dobson)', 'Pirie-Gordon, Sarah Jane', 'Ramsay, Margaret "Meta", Baroness', 'Rennie, Sir John', 'Skelton, Stanyhurst (Marius Kociejowski)', 'Truman, Ronald', 'West, Nigel (Rupert Allason)' , my gaze fell on them, how many people there were who called themselves by other names, and I have an excellent memory for names.
It was pleasing that, in such company, they should take so much trouble over me; that they should want to get to the bottom of me, that they should take notice. The thing I found most intriguing was the moment in the report when the writer or thinker, whoever it was, openly addressed another person, indicating that his impressions or conjectures were directed at someone in particular: About me, about you, about her', he said. 'He knows more about us than we ourselves do,' and, by a process of elimination, I thought that young Nuix must be 'her', although I couldn't be absolutely sure. But who was that 'you', who was that 'I'? There were various possibilities, but there was no way I could find out. Nor could I imagine who it was, therefore, who believed I should be feared, that too struck me as very odd, because I didn't myself believe it at the time. (Unless the 'I', 'you' and 'her' were metaphorical, hypothetical, interchangeable, as if the expression had been 'It's almost frightening to imagine what he knows, how much he sees and how much he knows. About Tom, Dick or Harry.') Needless to say these notes were unsigned, like all the others in the file, or at least those in that drawer. They seemed to have been written rapidly, judging from the brief time I dared to spend looking at them, when my thumb lingered over some: the notes on me were as vague and speculative as were those devoted to ex-President Clinton or to Mrs Thatcher, which I glanced through quickly.
'Yes, I think he could,' I replied, having given a few seconds' thought to Tupra's questions regarding the host of that celebrity supper (the host was himself a singer-celebrity, I'll call him Dick Dearlove, one of the unknown or unlikely names I had seen in the file, and who, I learned, was a very high-ranking, very important civil servant in some ministry or other, I had only read a couple of lines about him, but with a surname like that he should really have been a great idol of the masses treading the boards of a thousand stages, like our ex-dentist singer-host). 'In a dangerous situation, he would, of course, get his blow in first, if he had the chance. Or even beforehand, I mean before the risk to his own life was imminent and certain. The mere suggestion of a grave threat would turn him into a man of excess, render him almost uncontrollable. He would, I believe, be quick to react violently. Or, rather, he would anticipate that violence: I don't know if the saying exists in English, but in Spanish we say that he who gives first gives twice. But that wouldn't be the reason, he wouldn't react in a calculating fashion, or out of bravery, or even out of nerves or, strictly speaking, panic. He's so pleased with his own biography and with the life he leads, so astonished and proud of what he has achieved and continues to achieve (he can't as yet see it ending), his fairy-tale is turning out so picture-perfect that he couldn't bear for it all to be destroyed in a matter of seconds, prematurely, by mistake and through bad luck, through recklessness or some unfortunate encounter. It's the idea he couldn't bear. Let's say burglars got into his house, ready for anything; or if he was mugged in the street; no, he wouldn't ever walk down a street. Let's say his car broke down while he was driving through a really rough area, that it conked out late one night as he was returning from his country house, alone at the wheel or accompanied by a bodyguard, he probably always has at least one with him, he wouldn't go a hundred yards without some protection. And that the moment they stepped out they were surrounded by a large, aggressive, armed gang, a band of desperadoes against whom two men could do nothing, especially when one of them was accustomed only to being flattered and pampered and to a complete absence of nasty surprises.'
'They would immediately call for help on their mobile phones or would already have done so on the car phone, to the police or whoever,' Tupra said, interrupting me. It amused me the ease with which he joined in or participated in my fantasies. I think he rather enjoyed listening to me.
'Let's say that the car phone died at the same time as the car did, and that their other phones were out of range, or had been taken off them before they had time to use them. I don't know about in England, but in Spain that's the very first thing criminals steal, they go for your mobile first and then your wallet, and that's why all muggers, even the really pathetic ones still clutching a needle in one trembling hand, all have mobiles. You won't see a single pickpocket in Madrid, or even a beggar, who hasn't got his own mobile phone.'
'Really,' said Tupra, tempted to smile. He was familiar with my exaggerations, and did not really disapprove of them.
'Yes, really. Just go to Madrid and you'll see that I'm right. Well, in that situation, if Dearlove was carrying a knife, or even a pistol (he'd be quite capable of owning one, licence and all), he would probably start shooting or lashing out without even trying to negotiate and without gauging the precise nature of the threat, the degree of the desperadoes' desperation or hatred, they might well turn out to be admirers of his who, when they recognise him, would end up asking for his autograph, it could happen, you can't overestimate his popularity. He's a huge star in Spain as well, especially, as you may or may not know, in the Basque Country.'
'I can imagine. Nowadays any buffoon is guaranteed universal acclaim,' said Tupra. 'Go on.' At the time, he used to call me Jack, although I still called him Mr Tupra.
'What Dearlove could not bear,' obviously I didn't call him Dearlove, but by his real name, 'is that his life should end like that; in short, he would find the manner of his death almost more unbearable than death itself. He would, of course, be terrified to see his successful existence truncated and to lose his life, as would anyone, even if that life had been a failure; what's more, I don't, as I said, believe him to be a brave man, he would be terribly afraid. What most horrifies Dearlove, though, as it does other show-business people (although they may not know it), is that the end of his story should be such that it overshadows and darkens the life he's lived and accumulated up until now, eclipsing it, almost erasing and cancelling out the rest and, in the end, becoming the only fact that counts and will be recounted. If he were capable of killing (and I believe he is), that would be the reason, narrative disgust, if I can put it like that. You see, Mr Tupra, if someone like him were killed by a group of criminals in Clapham or Brixton, or, even more conspicuously, if he was lynched, that kind of death would create such a scandal, it would so shock the world, that it would be brought up every time his name was mentioned, on every occasion and in every circumstance, even if they were talking about him for some other reason, because of his contribution to the popular music of his time or to the history and heyday of buffoons, or because of the vast fortune he amassed with his voice or as one of the more worrying examples of mass hysteria. It would make no difference, they would still always mention the tale of how he was lynched in Brixton due to some awful misunderstanding, or in Clapham one fateful night along with his best bodyguard, or at the hands of a few unspeakably cruel felons from Streatham. A time would come, indeed, when that would be all that was remembered of him. Mothers would even use it to scold their children with when they strayed into the wilder parts of town or into other dodgy areas: "Just you remember what happened to Dick Dearlove, and he was famous and had a bodyguard with him." A real posthumous curse, for someone like him I mean.'
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