“Good morning Mr. Phelps.” He lifted his face and I saw the puffy boozer’s eyelids.
“You were working on Saturday on my behalf. I am in your debt.”
The old codger rubbed his foxy silver hair. “I would say that Mr. Croft has settled that, Miss Gehrig. He nearly killed me with his bleeding settlement, if you’ll forgive me saying so.”
I swatted my ID card. A second turnstile. The camera observed me, but there was nothing in my bag except a pashmina, purse, and Lorazepam. I carried emptiness. Doors opened. Another camera recorded my progress. Doubtless there were thousands of my days repeated thus, interred digitally in limbo. I ascended two steps with nothing to look forward to, and swiped my card one final time.
I opened my studio door to meet, not emptiness, but tea chests.
I think I made a small cry. Perhaps it was recorded. A moment later the rat’s nest of Daily Mail opened up its crumpled innards, and there were Henry Brandling’s notebooks in their careful raffia string.
At my bench, I found the first book completely filled with handwriting, every page. All the books, every one. In all that sharp sea of waving lines there was not one blank. Although I wanted all of them at once, I slid only four of them inside four ziplock bags and these I hid inside my handbag. Then I shifted the remainder to the high shelf above the fume cupboard where no one would ever think to look. There were precisely nine more instalments for me to read.
Only as I hung my booty on the hook behind the door did I realize things were not at all as they had been on Friday night. In the left-hand corner of the room, nearest to the door and therefore behind my left shoulder when I first entered, was an iridescent grey tarpaulin thrown across some objects, the largest one of which stood about four foot high.
I thought of a beached sting ray, some undead thing washed ashore in La Dolce Vita. When the rational brain woke up, I understood what must lie beneath the tarp—an upper and a lower cylinder driven by a weight, thirty levers that could be connected with different parts of the duck’s skeletal system to make it drink, et cetera, à la Riskin. This was not going to be a smoking monkey, that was clear when I took away the shroud. If, a moment later, I was replacing it, it was not because of the ingenious mechanism, but because of a wooden object placed beside it. Even that was nothing, of course, nothing at all. It was just a sort of wooden hull that had probably once contained the mechanism, but I was in a waking nightmare and the brain reported a failed cremation, a burned roast dinner, a black and formless fear. Professionally I understood the pitch-black underside, but what I saw was the shell of a huge bivalve, crusty, flaking, disinterred from tar. I smelled napalm, creosote, burned pig, death.
TO: e.croft@swi.ac.uk
FROM: c.gehrig@swi.ac.uk
SUBJECT: Bronchitis
Sorry. Diagnosis confirmed.
A very short time later I was signing out downstairs.
“You’re shivering,” Arthur said.
I hurried through the turnstile with my booty tight beneath my arm. I thought, Henry Brandling, what happened to you? How much money did they steal?
Henry
ALTHOUGH FIRMLY INTERROGATED, Frau Beck affected to have no memory of the man in the parlour.
“If Herr Brandling means the Englishman, that gentleman has settled his account. That is all I know.”
“I am the Englishman.”
“Yes Herr Brandling,” said Frau Beck (rhymes with peck, a pecking little person). “Mr. Brandling you are also an Englishman. But that Englishman.” She held apart her wiry little arms to indicate the scoundrel’s shoulders. “He paid.”
Clearly I had been duped by a confidence man of the type that preys on travellers. I slammed my hand down on the counter and this displeased Frau Beck.
“He was a German,” I said.
“No, an Englishman.”
I was eviscerated. I had abandoned my son for what? A playing card?
“What of the maid?” I asked.
The maid? What maid? Etc. Was Frau Beck a member of the gang?
“The maid of my room.”
“The maid of your room,” Frau Beck said, as if mocking my English grammar. “The maid of your room has departed.”
“Clearly,” I cried, seeking her behind her lenses. “Clearly, these criminals do not work alone.”
“Herr Brandling, it is the springtime. The maid goes to her family in the Schwarzwald. It is to be expected. Each year the same.”
“She has taken my plans to the Black Forest!”
“Herr Brandling, we know this is not possible.”
“It is so, Frau Beck, believe me.”
“And these plans, were they the same plans you showed Herr Hartmann?”
“They are my plans. I have no others.”
Dipping her pen in her ink well, Frau Beck dismissed me.
At home I would have sent a man to summon the police, and they would have frightened all the servants (as they did both times my wife lost her wedding ring).
I informed Frau Beck I was going to my room to write a complaint. I doubt she knew what I meant, and how could I know myself? What would I write? In English? To whom would I address my charges? No, I must bite my tongue. I had no recourse but to order new plans, and of course the firm’s draughtsmen would copy the London Illustrated News again, although my brother would make it clear to them that “Mr. Henry’s” request was even less welcome than the first.
And yet, was not my little boy himself the most important family enterprise? He was a Brandling, which is also the name of a salmon before it has gone to the sea, a parr, a pink, a smolt, a smelt, a sprag, or brandling. My brother must be made to see that Percy was our future. He had none of his own.
I returned to my eyrie and lay upon my bed. How long I slept I have no idea. I was roused by a mousey skittering as someone attempted to slide paper beneath my door. I was on my feet in a trice.
I surprised the maid’s son kneeling, envelope in hand, blue eyes wide with fright. I caught him by his long white wrist and hauled the limpy creature into the room. I felt his magnetic life surge as it shook my arm, jolting, kicking like a hare or rabbit in a trap. I booted the door shut as I shackled his other wrist as well—if he had lice eggs under his fingernails they would not find a home beneath my skin.
Trapped—my little criminal, in the middle of the white-washed room, shaking, crying, crumpled letter in his hand. Then it was knock knock knock and rattling on the handle and here was the accomplice, “The maid of the room,” a red kerchief around her wheaten hair. This second party required no dragging. Indeed she rushed to embrace her offspring. There, by the foot of the peculiarly austere bed which she had so recently made herself, she kissed his crown and glared at me. I was a brute. The boy pressed himself hard against his mother and regarded me with fear and hatred, his fierce eyes revealing a will much stronger than my own. I wanted him to like me even so, this tiny enemy.
The mother I had earlier thought to be quite pretty, but now I saw, in that wide and delicate mouth, the knowledge that all happiness was conditional. Her complexion was as fine as an English woman’s but her thief’s hands were used and hard.
“Give me back my plans,” I said.
She showed the perfect understanding of the guilty.
“Sir, your plans are safe,” she said, and the quality of her English was not of the natural order. That is, she was revealing herself to be a maid so dangerously well educated that, apart from the eccentric Binns, no one of my acquaintance would have employed her.
I said: “They will be safe when they are with their lawful owner.”
She dared to contradict me.
Said she, “They must not be allowed to remain in Karlsruhe.”