‘No.’
‘It wouldn’t matter what she’d done — she’s irresistible. She and the filmmaker sleep together, after which we see him through the window waving goodbye and that’s it. We never find out why she stabbed her father twelve times.’
‘Maybe we don’t need to know.’
‘I think Antonioni left it that way so it would stay in our minds, unexplained and unforgettable. That’s OK in a film but this is real life and I need to know more about this woman who calls herself Angelica.’
‘Just remember that if a scene in a film doesn’t work they can take it out
‘But real life is full of scenes that don’t work and we’re stuck with them. I know what you’re saying.’
‘Be careful.’
‘I will.’
Oannes — deep-sea habitat — K getting in over his head? wrote Dr DeVere in Harold Klein’s folder. Then he slowly and carefully perused ‘Monica’s Monday Night’.
23 Death And Life
‘In Klimt’s painting Tod und Leben,’ wrote Klein, ‘we see the very essence of his mature art; he has emerged from the decorative excesses of his gold period and is now coming to grips with unadorned elementals; the grinning skeleton, ein Knochenmann (bone-man), in his cross-bedecked robe, wielding the red sceptre of his authority, feasts his empty eye-sockets on the living naked bodies (all but one with closed eyes) intertwined in love and procreation. In successive revisions of this painting from 1911 to 1916 Klimt changed the background to a non-space and removed the aura once worn by Death. This same Death, naked and lascivious, looks out, unseen, from the ardent and indolent bodies of the half-dressed and undressed women in his ghostly sketches: every one of these drawings is a matter of life and death; the snaky lines barely contain the transience of the flesh that cries out against the death that waits within, lusting for consummation.’ Klein sighed. ‘And in me too a death is growing; it’s getting bigger as I get smaller, and when we’re both the same size we’ll change places — I’ll be my death and my death will be me.’
He quit the word processor, went to the Internet, and put Angelica’s Grotto up on the screen. ‘Why can’t I be dignified in my old age?’ he said, and patiently trawled through the galleries in which Angelica did every possible thing in every possible position with partners of both sexes, singly and in groups. With his face close to the screen he lusted after the firm flesh in the photographs, flesh that could be touched and tasted, flesh in which Death nestled, cosy and warm and smiling. ‘What good is this?’ he said. ‘Why am I wearing out my eyes on it? Why am I insulting my intelligence with it? I’m pathetic’
Do something, said Oannes, speaking for the first time in a voice that seemed not to be Klein’s own. Was it a deeper voice? Were the words somewhat slurred?
‘I am doing something — I’m meeting Leslie at ten o’clock and he’s going to tell me Angelica’s real name. OK?’
No answer.
‘If that’s not enough, just tell me what else you want me to do.’
No answer.
‘All right, have it your way: maybe I’ll go out and do something really crazy and it’ll be on your head. Is that what you want?’
Klein dug around in a box where he kept tools and other ironmongery and came up with a hunting knife bought for a long-ago camping trip. He went down to the kitchen and sharpened it. Then he put it in a pocket of a shoulder bag, got his jacket, and went out.
24 Hoka Hey
At ten o’clock the van with Leslie at the wheel pulled up in front of where Harold Klein was standing in Surrey Street. Klein walked around to the driver’s side. ‘I’ve got the two hundred,’ he said. ‘Have you got a name for me?’
‘Melissa Bottomley,’ said Leslie as he took the money and pulled away.
‘Melissa Bottomley,’ said Klein. ‘Honey Bottom.’ He visualised her wearing nothing but her name. His hand closed on the knife in his pocket. ‘Stupid,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to stab anybody.’ He moved a little way up Surrey Street towards the Strand, muttering to himself, ‘For the first time I think of time as a sphere, as a globe on which, at various intersections of latitude and longitude, all things past and present are located, some near, some far from where I am. I’m thinking of Crazy Horse. On that great globe of Time, in western plains across the ocean, herds of long-gone buffalo make the ground shake and shadow hoofbeats sound down endless trails of sleep. Who am I that I should think of that strange one, the mystic, the great warrior who painted himself with lightning and hail and wore a little stone behind his ear? Riding into battle he shouted, “Hoka hey! It is a good day to die!” Now in the long yesterday of the place that once was his the visions flicker but there is no one to see them. In Paris at the Crazy Horse Saloon the naked dancers shake and wiggle for the tourists.
‘Melissa Bottomley,’ he said as he continued up Surrey Street, ‘could well be an academic; Monica was a lecturer at King’s.’ At the Strand he turned left and headed for King’s College. As always, the traffic seemed full of urgency and purpose, pressing westward between dark buildings that loomed speechless and strange in their nighttime mode.
‘DANGER, SLOW DOWN,’ said the sign at the barrier. ‘5 MPH. ALL DRIVERS HALT AT THIS POINT AND REPORT TO PORTER.’ There was no porter visible as Klein walked around the red-and-white barrier and went into the quadrangle beyond it. There were cars parked in almost all the spaces, and at the far end he saw the white Ford Transit, E621VGD. ‘Probably it’s locked,’ he said.
He tried the rear doors: not locked. He opened them. Inside were the mattress, a folded blanket, and the tripod and lights for the videocamera. ‘Is this a sign that I should do something?’ said Klein.
Hoka hey, said Oannes.
‘Oannes,’ said Klein, ‘you’re a hell of a guy; you’re a wild thing, you don’t care about consequences. If I get inside I can’t make myself invisible — they’ll get in and they’ll see me. Then what?’ His bowels indicated that they were on standby. ‘Forget it,’ he said, ‘I can’t go looking for a toilet now.’ Windows stared down at him from both sides of the quadrangle. ‘What am I going to say — that I’m a homeless person looking for a place to sleep? Any suggestions?’
No answer.
‘On the other hand,’ said Klein, ‘how much difference does it make what happens to me? I’m old, my health isn’t good; whether I ever finish the Klimt book isn’t really going to matter all that much to anyone. I could go at any time — heart attack, stroke, whatever.’ He heard hoofbeats on the plains, saw a blue sky in which a hawk circled. ‘Hoka hey,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s a good day to die.’ He got into the back of the van, covered himself with the blanket, and tried not to look like a little old man covered with a blanket.
‘Who will it be?’ he wondered. ‘Leslie and Al? Leslie and Melissa? Maybe the van belongs to somebody else altogether. Maybe they leave it here overnight.’ He listened to his tinnitus and looked at the pictures in his head until he heard voices and footsteps approaching, then the sound of the driver’s and passenger’s doors being opened and closed as the van shook a little.
‘I don’t know,’ said the voice of Melissa. ‘The money from Leeuwenhoek’s almost used up.’