Malcolm Bradbury - Doctor Criminale

‘So, a woman,’ said Cosima Bruckner very thoughtfully, as we drove back in the car towards the Hotel Zwingli, ‘A woman who somehow has access to Criminale’s special account. Who do you think? Miss Belli?’ ‘Possibly,’ I said cautiously, ‘It could be any one of dozens. Sepulchra, Gertla, Pia, Irini . . .’ ‘Who are all these people?’ asked Cosima. ‘Oh, his wives and so on,’ I said, ‘Criminale was close to a great many women. It was one of his specialities, to be honest.’ ‘So that is all you know?’ That’s all,’ I said. ‘Well, you too have been very helpful,’ said Cosima, ‘Evidently we were just too late, but it is not your fault.’ ‘Anything for Europe,’ I said. ‘If you do think of anything more, if you discover anything else, please call me at the Hotel Movenpick,’ said Cosima, ‘At any time of day or night.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, getting out of the black car outside the Hotel Zwingli, ‘But I’m afraid that’s everything I know.’

But I knew, of course. I knew that when I went up the stairs Ildiko’s room would be empty, all her scattered things cleared up and gone. I knew that the shops of Lausanne would have returned by now to their usual Swiss calm and sobriety, and that Ildiko would almost certainly be somewhere quite different, probably with a large proportion of Bazlo Criminale’s Western royalties stuffed somewhere into her ever-expanding luggage. The door of her room was unlocked, so I walked in. The room was bare and unwelcoming, the bed stripped to essentials, ready for the next unfortunate guest. I walked slowly upstairs to my own room, thinking I probably knew very well what had happened, and why Ildiko had gone to such trouble to come to Lausanne. I also knew that I missed her already, and desperately wanted to see her again. I unlocked my bedroom door and went inside. In the middle of the bed a small brown object lay: my wallet. I picked it up and opened it, wondering whether not only Bazlo’s royalties but my entire credit-card collection had left town with Ildiko.

Paper showered on the floor: extraordinary paper, crisp new paper, paper in coloured rectangles, paper that was more than paper, paper in numbered denominations, that special kind of paper that we call money. I picked up the Swiss francs that lay around everywhere, stacked them, and after a moment began to count. It added up to around a hundred thousand francs, give or take a piece of paper or two. I wasn’t sure what that amounted to, but it was, I knew, a very large sum. Amid this potent paper was another paper, a folded white note, equally valuable to me. It read: ‘Francis, Something for you under the table. You see I really do like to pay you back for this shopping in the end. Also to thank you for a very nice journey, Francis. Spend this how you like, but think of me when you do it. Be lucky with your televisions programme. Criminale is more interesting than you think. I believe I am also. Take care! and please try hard now to be a little bit more Hungarian. Love + kisses, Ildiko.’

I sat on the bed and looked at both: the wad of money, Ildiko’s little note. I had lost her, and how I regretted it. It could have i been my fault, but I didn’t know that; probably I had never had her in the first place. I tried to imagine what had happened at the bank that day. I had seen Ildiko clean out my own credit-card account; maybe that kind of thing was a habit with her. So had that been the point all along? When she first met me in Budapest, was she already out to trick the great philosopher, reach his Lausanne accounts, clear out his holdings? I had thought she’d truly enjoyed travelling with me, but when it came to it even I had to admit that a large secret hard-currency bank account made a much more convincing lure. She’d been his publisher known his international accounts, maybe even set some of them up in the first place. Or perhaps it was Bazlo’s flight from Barolo that had decided her that now was the time to cut her losses and take her cut. At any rate, I had little doubt that Ildiko was by now, far off in some safe place, shopping away to her dear heart’s content.

But if this was right, that meant the money I was holding in my hand was funny money, not the kind of money I ought to be holding in my hand at all. How much was there, what was it worth? I went down to the lobby, peered over the dour receptionist, and checked the Change board on the wall. Then I went into the terrace café and checked through my wallet again. The stuff I had in there came to more than forty thousand pounds, a vast amount more than even Ildiko could possibly have drawn on my credit-card accounts, even if just for luck you added in a high rate of interest. I glanced round, looked at it again. There lay the great wad of notes, paper that was so much more than paper; folded into them was the other note she had left there. Both paper texts were, I realized, equally hard to interrogate, decipher, deconstruct. Both of them could be read in two quite different ways. Perhaps they were both deeds of love, acts of fondness, expressions of a generosity far greater than any I had managed to show to her. Or perhaps they were gifts under the table in a rather different sense. Could it be that I was being bought off, welcomed into the same world that, I now began suspecting, Bazlo Criminale had been living in for years? Was the point that I should really learn how to be Hungarian – keep silent, ask no more questions, take my winnings, disappear home?

So what could I – a fine upstanding young man, remember – do with this suspect, perhaps poisoned chalice? Sitting there on the same terrace where I had sat with Ildiko just the evening before, I found it strangely hard to decide. I could of course go to Cosima Bruckner, apparently available either by day or night just along the promenade at the Hotel Movenpick. But that meant betraying Ildiko Hazy, and that was not something I cared to do. Or I could go along the promenade in the other direction to the Hotel Beau Rivage Palace and hand the money to Bazlo Criminale, presumably its rightful owner. But was he its rightful owner? If he was, why was Cosima Bruckner investigating his accounts with such zeal? The more I thought things over, the more I saw I’d been blind in almost every way. While I’d been conducting my small quest for Bazlo Criminale, far more serious and terrible pursuits had been happening, one of them right under my nose. As the note in my hand said, both Bazlo and Ildiko were far more interesting – their lives far more complex, obscure, and no doubt deceitful – than I had troubled, in my innocence, to imagine.

Later that night I walked along the promenade towards the Beau Rivage Palace, visiting its splendours for the very first time. I went into the bright downstairs brasserie, the place where the jeunesse dorée of Lausanne evidently gathered, as you could tell at once from the exotic machinery lined up outside. There they all were, the beautiful young, talking and laughing and kissing and groping each other with what, by strict Swiss standards, must surely have been the gayest abandon. I ordered a beer, then several more. Well, why not? For once I was not on a very tight budget, and could freely afford it. I wasn’t, in fact, in the least sure just what I meant to do next. But, after a while and a beer or several, I got up and walked through into the main lobby of the hotel. White-robed sheikhs passed by; a frock-coated clerk stood dignified behind the vast reception desk. There, posing as exactly what I really was, a visiting British journalist, I explained that I’d just come a long way to arrange an interview with Doctor Bazlo Criminale, who was, I understood, a guest in the hotel.

The clerk looked at me, said, ‘Un moment, m’sieu,’ and opened a thick register on the desk. Behind him on the wall was a large board, headed ‘Rates of Exchange’; I looked down it and considered the value of my wallet again. More than forty thousand pounds; for once I was entitled, entirely entitled, to be a client of the Beau Rivage Palace. ‘Doctor and Madame Criminale, oui?’ said the clerk, looking up. ‘Actually if he’s not there it doesn’t really matter,’ I murmured. ‘No, m’sieu, I am afraid you are just a little too late,’ said the clerk, ‘They checked out of the penthouse suite this afternoon. It was a little sudden, I understand.’ ‘Really,’ I said, ‘My editor will be disappointed.’ ‘Quel dommage, m’sieu,’ said the clerk. ‘I don’t suppose you know where they’ve gone?’ I asked, opening my wallet wide. The clerk glanced inside and said, ‘Well, m’sieu, I believe to India. I think if you go there you will find them somewhere.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said, handing over a note. ‘You are most gentil, m’sieu,’ said the clerk; evidently I had been extraordinarily generous. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said, and walked out of the hotel and across to the lakeside promenade.