‘A Burberry for the wife? I’m serious.’ Tenbrücke mistook Sileen’s snarl of rage for a smile. ‘Guess how much? Go on. As new, never worn. On my life, we’re not talking “seconds”. A hundred notes? A hundred and fifty? Forget it. Sixty. Sixty pounds, and I’m down to the garage to open the boot. Did you clock the Merc, on your way up? Nipped over to Germany in the spring. Business and pleasure. Only twelve thou on the dial, and she runs like quicksilver.’
I was beginning to enjoy this, wondering how long Tenbrücke could keep the Sidney Tafler routine going. He was well over the Race Relations limit, and drifting into pure pastiche. But it served its purpose. It turned Sileen into a wolf-man. He was ready to bite.
‘Some advice, boys.’ Tenbrücke had nailed his victim to the floor. He was ready to wind up the sideshow. ‘Never buy anything but the best, the brand-leaders. I’m robbing myself, but I’m going to let you walk away with the pair of Burberrys for a oncer. Keep the girlfriend happy, and save the other for your wedding anniversary. This is vitaclass="underline" make sure the ladies in your life take the same size. It stands to reason. Your slag will pay her way in discounts.’
Tenbrücke yawned. And, for a moment, his eyes went dead. Then he took a small ivory box from his desk, and threw back a handful of pills, which he chewed noisily. The box was the real thing. It had cost some narwhal a tusk.
‘Every Saturday, Porchester Row. We hear everything before it begins to happen.’ He spoke automatically, like a dying tape. His spirits always sank with the sun, but he was incapable of making a move to bring light to the room. Sileen had won. He had to wait a few moments more: stolid, immovable, but unwilling to be the one to broach the business that was the sole purpose of our visit. Waiting was what Sileen did best. The Thames would freeze before he would be diverted from his self-imposed quest.
Now the combatants battled into the night in a monumental drinking bout. Tenbrücke fought his ‘black dog’ mood with cases of sweet yellow German wine. Sileen threw back whatever was put in front of him, grim-jawed, expressionless: the experience seemed, if anything, to sober the man. But, as bottle succeeded bottle, Tenbrücke’s coarse humour was activated. He frisked again. He unlocked cupboards; he fiddled with wall-safes. He laid tissue-leafed folders in Sileen’s lap; gently, like virgin brides. Nobody spoke. The world retreated. Remote sounds drifted from the river, as from another empire; muffled by glass and heavy drapes. Sileen could be neither shocked, nor provoked. The etchings were spread on the table in front of him: a dangerous challenge to an already replete gourmet. Men, women, children; freaks and beasts — in every possible combination. A terrible grimoire of possibilities, taken to its logical conclusion. The living savaged the dead. The unborn were mutilated.
Tenbrücke’s mouth was liquid with excitement. His pink thyroidal eyes bulged in a net of broken veins. His cigar butt was black with gingivitic drool.
I realized that if I, as the disinterested party, did not act fast, we would be condemned to stay here for ever; witnessing this obscene and absolute self-exposure. Tenbrücke was a sick soul, begging us to forgive him — by sharing in his sickness. He was describing himself by showing us each and every object that he had collected. I attempted to pull him back from the brink, by the magical act of naming. ‘Teodor Korzeniowski,’ I said, ‘otherwise, Joseph Conrad.’
It was enough. The very sound of it bored him. ‘A dreary fellow, this Old Man of the Sea. A bourgeois mandarin. I never deal in Poles. I don’t want herrings. I don’t want promises. I want gold bars, furs, fine art. Sell these books, if you can, to the pug in the Holy See. Life’s too short to haggle with silk-knickered wops.’
But we have to understand that, naturally, the items in question cannot be given away. Without respect, a deal has no meaning; it would not be binding. Tenbrücke’s hand swallows Sileen’s cheque, only to drop it with a pained shrug. Sileen had dated it ‘1888’. ‘A final drink, gentlemen. And away.’
I carry the boxes out to the car. The one-legged man, kicking out his customized limb, swivels, grinning, down the spiral staircase.
III
Todd Sileen had captured, for this era, a couple of council properties, tucked away between blocks of undeveloped industrial warehouses and a spate of wild gardens. His sense of when to strike, and when to move on, was unmatched — and would have made him a rich man in some purer sphere of speculation: land, drugs, literary brokerage. Sileen didn’t need wages. Without apparent income or occupation, he moved freely over the country and the continent, just as the seasons took him. And all the time, the body of Joseph Conrad — as it could be excavated from documents, letters, and sketches — was re-forming around him. He was nailing himself inside another man’s shroud. He was willing Conrad’s physical immortality; turning this Wapping hutch into an immaculate death-barque. When the very last item in the bibliography was secured, Sileen would cease to exist; and the thing he had made would be there through all the lives of the unsuspecting speculators, rushing to their doom on the river.
He was also working hard at taking over the redundant public library — the rest of the public having obediently decamped — to make it his own. To this end, he brandished his deformity as a credential; crawling into the Borough Housing Office on his hands and knee. But points on that waiting list were an unnecessary luxury. The council had taken power by offering an ear to every Valium-gobbling fanatic. They put themselves forward as the shock-absorbers of disenfranchised anguish; then dutifully dissipated the pain by identifying the most popular scapegoats. And passing out the brickbats. Renegade socialists muttered in pubs that these scoundrels were the barely acceptable face of skinhead fascism in ‘liberal’ drag. The party championed ‘local’ issues; when, in truth, there was no locality left. Employment was a sentimental memory: the whole corridor from Tower Bridge to the Isle of Dogs was in limbo. It was waiting to be called up. A cold wind ruffled the drowning pools, the labyrinthine walkways, the dumping pits. A few sponsored artists kept a window on the riverfront polished for the developers. There were lofts of hand-made paper waiting for the best offer.
Sileen was in clover. One of these days they would buy him out. If today’s councillors were caught with their fingers in the till, there were plenty more to replace them. Meanwhile, he cultivated his balcony: an explosion of green life, lovingly watered by his amiable provincial girlfriend. She tolerated all his foibles, and cooked with such natural artistry that loungers hung about on the street corner soliciting a dinner invitation. Her life, shared only in certain areas, remained robustly independent in all others. Her presence in the flat humanized the unmannered bluntness of Sileen’s dogma.
I watched, awed, as Sileen sank, puffing out his coarse sporran-moustache, into the swamp of an old armchair. He savoured these newest treasures: books to be slotted into place on the shelves that ran out from his shoulders like a benevolent crucifixion. I knew he did not have to read these things, or even handle them. The particular arrangement, by colour and texture of cloth, conferred power. Their touch was stunning to the skin.
Sileen opened a goatskin volume and, without needing to search for the place, tapped out a letter from Henry James. ‘The news of Conrad’s collaboration with Hueffer is to me like a bad dream which one relates before breakfast, their traditions are so dissimilar. It is inconceivable…’
The letter was plucked from my hands. And replaced by a late photograph, executed by Boris Conrad: his father, leaning back, eyes firmly closed in a transport of exquisitely simulated agony. He offered me an autographed schooner, waiting on the tide. I admired, in turn, postcards of rivers, forts, crocodiles, ivory poachers. I slowed to the asthmatic breath of this Edwardian domesticity. Salvaged chairs emitted comfortable tobacco-replays; released from their depths carelessly incarcerated farts.