Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

Muriel was so enjoying this story that he’d forgotten all about the rest of the team, who were hanging about nearby. He was listening with a smile on his lips, and I saw his one eye glint as it did when he thought of a good idea for a plot or a scene.

‘So he escaped, just like that? He simply decided to be a fugitive for the rest of his life?’ he asked with a mixture of incredulity and hilarity. ‘He took a big risk, didn’t he? I know how puritanical the Americans can be, but it doesn’t seem such a very serious matter. I doubt that, in the worst-case scenario, he’d have been given anything more than a symbolic sentence. In the 1960s, vices were, I believe, viewed with a certain degree of understanding.’

‘No, he was quite right to leave America, it was lucky he did,’ said Lom. ‘He denies it now and laughs it off, but later, when he was out of the reach of American justice, he was accused of heading up a vice ring in the United Nations, and, given the political implications, that was infinitely more serious and dangerous: 1961 was a bad year for the Cold War. I’m sure you’ll understand that the United Nations building was not deemed to be quite the same as the apartment he shared with his mother, in which an ex-girlfriend was allegedly taking liberties behind his back. Always supposing that the second charge was true. Harry says that it wasn’t, and I believe him. And I do wonder why the FBI didn’t believe him to begin with, I mean, he’s always written scripts, so why wouldn’t he be immersed in one while Mariella was quietly getting undressed in the next room so as to make discreet, muted love with her boyfriend, after all, isn’t that what prostitutes and their lovers have always done? Knowing his incorrigible ingenuousness, I believe him, naturally.’ And Herbert Lom laughed loudly. He performed a final flourish with his handkerchief, which was very crumpled by then, and, realizing this, he flung it down on the floor. ‘Anyway, are we going to carry on filming today or not?’

With the existence of the Internet, where you can find snippets of information about almost everything, I felt a kind of retrospective curiosity both about crafty Harry Alan Towers and about that whole story (after all, I had worked for him indirectly and he didn’t die until 2009); and I’ve learned that what we were told by Mr Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru (who will probably now have reverted to that name) was pretty close to the truth or what is known of the truth, because it still seems as incomplete, contradictory and confusing as the celebrated actor Herbert Lom warned us it would be.

I read somewhere else that Towers’s interests in New York extended beyond what took place in his apartment, and that, during the time when he was supposedly aiming high and in a position to compromise influential people, his two main contacts had been, first, his mother (‘our producer has a most unusual mother’ Lom had commented in an enigmatic, rather casual manner), and second, ‘a certain Leslie Charteris’, whose identity was known to me already in 1980, again thanks to my cinematographic-televisual knowledge, as the author of the novels and stories on which several series of Simon Templar as the Saint were based. I was intrigued to learn that, for quite a long time, Charteris was denied permanent residence in America because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited immigration by persons of ‘fifty per cent or greater Oriental blood’, and that the real surname of the Saint’s creator was, unexpectedly, Bowyer-Yin (Bowyer being his mother, and Yin his father), and that he had been born in Singapore. This makes it perhaps still stranger that, in 1937, he translated and edited the famous book by Manuel Chaves Nogales: Juan Belmonte, Killer of Bulls . However, I found nothing to link Charteris with the United Nations or with any vice ring. I was also intrigued to discover that Lom’s Hollywood career was also cut short when the American embassy in London refused to issue him with a visa. He may have fled from the Nazis, but he was apparently considered to be a Communist sympathizer and fellow traveller. Almost everyone seems to have had problems with the American authorities at one time or another, it’s an old tradition.

The reason I mention all this is, I think, by way of being a superstitious and hollow form of compensation, because I greatly regret that Muriel will never know about it. He loved such literary-cinematographic conundrums (he would have spent hours in front of the computer). We never grow used to not speaking to the dead we once knew, to not telling them what we imagine would have amused or interested them, to not introducing them to the important new people in our lives or to any possible posthumous grandchildren, to not giving them the good or bad news that affects us and that would perhaps have affected them were they still in the world and able to know these things. There are times, too, when one is selfishly glad that they can’t know: not just because they would have been upset or concerned, but because they would have been angry and would have cursed us and withdrawn their friendship, cut us dead and even tried to ruin and destroy us. ‘I got away with it while they were alive,’ we think, ‘and now they cannot see what they would certainly have seen as a betrayal. The person who dies will be forever deceived, because he cannot know what came afterwards or, indeed, what happened while he was alive and of which he knew nothing.’ In a way, it’s a positive thing that our loved ones disappear: we miss them horribly, but we also have the relief of unending impunity. There are various things that I’m glad Muriel never found out about, especially something that happened while he was alive and another that happened afterwards. The second was entirely unforeseeable, the first I was careful to conceal from him.

On the other hand, I’m sure he would have enjoyed the description of Mariella Novotny written some years later by her colleague Christine Keeler — the main cause of the Profumo scandal that erupted in 1963 — because the next time we saw each other, he was still thinking more about Lom’s story than about what I had told him regarding Van Vechten, he was clearly dazzled by his false or transitory friend’s past adventures in the world of high politics and high-class prostitution.

‘What was it about that Novotny woman,’ he murmured, ‘that meant she could seduce or ensnare so many important men, always assuming Herbert Lom was telling the truth? Imagine, Juan, she probably slept with the two Kennedy brothers and their brother-in-law Peter Lawford, as well as sundry multimillionaires and who knows how many high-up UN officials. Getting people like that to run such risks isn’t easy, not even in the 1960s when people were less careful; it would take more than your average, run-of-the-mill whore to do that. There must have been something special about her, apart from her resemblance to Anita Ekberg.’ He sat thinking for a moment, then added: ‘You know, I imagine her as being like the wonderful Cecilia Alemany. Have we heard anything of her lately, by the way? I mean in the press or on the television, because when I’m away filming, I lose track of everything. She would certainly never deign to phone me, I know that.’

A possible answer to those questions about Novotny is now available to everyone. In 1983, Christine Keeler wrote: ‘She had a tiny waist that exaggerated her ample figure. She was a siren, a sexual athlete of Olympian proportions — she could do it all. I know. I saw her in action. She knew all the strange pleasures that were wanted and could deliver them.’ Some have identified her as Maria Capes, Maria Chapman or Stella Capes. When telling us about her, Herbert Lom had even referred to her at one point as ‘Maria’. I now think he must have known her in person, since they were both of Czech origin and had been born in Prague. But I didn’t know that about him at the time and wish now that we could have asked him.