Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

“Don’t tell him.”

“Isn’t that bigamy or something?”

Cheadle laughs so loudly that people at the nearby tables turn and stare at us.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I’d take better care of you than he does.” A prawn cracker explodes between Cheadle’s teeth. “I’d probably leave you more money too. You’d be better off all round.”

“What’s in it for you?”

He stops chewing and I realize I’ve impressed him. Perhaps that’s what he likes about me: the quickness, the unpredictability — the cheek.

“Nothing,” he says. “I’m a philanthropist.”

“In the great American tradition.”

“Right.”

“No small print? No hidden clauses?” I’m thinking of Klaus’s promise of privacy. “No strings attached?”

Cheadle opens his raincoat, like a man about to try and sell me watches. “No strings.”

“Where are these Russians, anyway?”

“They said they’d be here at ten.”

I glance at my watch. It’s twenty past.

“So you’ll think about it?” Cheadle says.

When you’re young, a lot of older people have a grasping quality, like vampires. They’re all over you, even if it’s only with their eyes. They used to be like you, though you usually can’t see it. That’s why they need you around. They want to siphon off a bit of what they’ve lost. Because you’ve got plenty and you don’t even know it — or if you do, you take it for granted. I don’t think Cheadle’s any different, though he’s more adept at disguising it.

A metallic-sounding guitar starts up, bright chords with surf crashing and hissing underneath. Cheadle takes out his phone.

“I spent a lot of time in Santa Cruz,” he says.

He puts the phone to his ear and stares past me at the wall. He says yes and no, and very little else.

When the call’s over, he tells me that his Russian friends aren’t coming after all. “Still, Pavlo should be here soon.”

“Who’s Pavlo?”

“He runs a gallery on Winterfeldplatz. He sells icons. Beautiful things.” Cheadle pauses. “Pavlo’s from Sebastopol.”

“That’s not Russia.”

Cheadle shrugs. “Close enough.”

Actually, I think, you’re wrong. It isn’t.

/

Pavlo is a small muscular man with a closely trimmed gray beard and mustache. His clothes are sober — a black jacket over a black V-necked sweater — but he has a pumped-up, skittish quality, like a thoroughbred before a race. The moment he sits down he tells Cheadle he’s in love.

“Who’s the lucky girl?” Cheadle asks.

Pavlo ignores the sarcasm. She’s twenty-three, he says. From Lithuania. Her name is Katya. She works in the Laundromat next to his gallery. For the next hour he talks about nothing else, his eyes welling up when he describes her.

It’s not until we order coffee that the conversation turns to icons. Most of the pieces he acquires have a Russian provenance, Pavlo tells me — or sometimes they come from Greece. They tend to date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s always been profitable, he says, but he would never have been able to open a gallery if Cheadle hadn’t come in as a partner.

“So he really is a rich American,” I say.

“Rich?” Pavlo’s mouth turns down. “I don’t know. All I know is, he invested in my business.”

Cheadle reaches into his inside raincoat pocket, takes out a piece of paper, and passes it to me. It’s a bank statement. The account is in the name of J. H. Cheadle, and the balance is in excess of one million euros.

“Believe me now?” he says.

I’m not sure what to believe, but Cheadle seems to feel that he has proved a point.

Later, when Pavlo has left, Cheadle walks me to the nearest U-Bahn station. We pass a shop that sells electrical equipment. There must be forty or fifty TVs in the window, all tuned to CNN. I come to a standstill, shock waves spreading outwards from my heart. It’s a moment before Cheadle notices I have stopped.

“You want a TV? I’ll buy you a TV.” He steps back and stares at the sign above the shop. “I’ll buy the whole damn place.” He drank beer and whiskey with dinner, and his eyes have a fanatical glitter.

I point at the window. “That’s my father.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I am. It’s him.”

We stand in the gauzy Berlin drizzle and watch my father talk into a microphone with the earnest controlled enthusiasm so typical of TV journalists, his royal-blue shirt thrown into beautiful relief by the sun-blasted landscape behind him. With his free hand he gestures to lend emphasis to the point he’s making. Once or twice he half-turns to incorporate a heap of rubble, a burnt-out car. Reading his lips, I decipher the words chemical weapons .

“You don’t look anything like him.” Cheadle sounds disgruntled.

Ordinary everyday reality isn’t good enough for my father. He has to appear to me in HD. I turn from the window and walk over to the gutter. Trees line the curb. Are they maples? Limes? I ought to know.

“He doesn’t even know you’re here,” Cheadle says.

A dark van races past, its tinted windows closed. From inside comes the thud of hip-hop, as if the van is an animal. As if it has a heart.

Cheadle swivels on the pavement, jaw tilted, truculent. “I’d be a better father.”

Now the TVs are showing golf.

My collar up, my hands in my coat pockets, I peer down the road. Two sets of traffic lights glow red.

“Where’s this U-Bahn station?” I say.

/

Waiting on a damp platform, I replay the scene outside the TV shop. Not one image of my father. Dozens. So perfect, that. The duplication questions — or even mocks — the idea of an intimate relationship, and then there’s the fact that I watched him from outside, on the street, that we were separated by at least two sheets of glass.

I didn’t notice if his report was live or not but I feel he must be on his way to Rome by now. Those shock waves round my heart again. I suppose I have been waiting for this moment the way a bullet waits in its chamber, cold and snug, for someone’s finger to squeeze the trigger. That sudden burst of speed, a lightning transition from cool oiled darkness to a world that is brilliant and odorless. It won’t be long before he notices my absence — if he hasn’t already. After all, it’s his job to sense when something’s not quite right. Who will he call first? Adefemi?

“I haven’t seen her, Mr. Carlyle, not for months.”

“Really?”

“We broke up.”

“Oh.” My father pauses. “I’m sorry to hear that.” And he is sorry. He likes Adefemi.

“We broke up in May.” Now it’s Adefemi’s turn to pause. “She didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

An awkward conversation, which only lasts a minute or two.

A cul-de-sac.

My father will contact my friends and it will rapidly become apparent that none of them knows where I am. They will be disconcerted, bewildered; they might even feel betrayed. Massimo is the only one who might be able to help. Intuitive and oddly transparent, he’s always spilling people’s secrets, things he doesn’t even know he knows. My father might pick up on this tendency in him. If Massimo is still in Rome my father will arrange a meeting — probably at his favorite café, in Campo di Fiore.

Late September. The sunlight a tarnished gold that turns the shadows purple. Cut flowers in buckets. My father sits outside with a black coffee and a paper. He thinks Massimo is lazy and spoiled. What do you see in him? he always says. I don’t know what you see in him .

Massimo is half an hour late.

“Mr. Carlyle.” He drops into a chair next to my father and runs a hand through his unruly dark-brown hair. “It’s good to see you.”