The Melting Man

Although the place was full of people there wasn't a sound to be heard. There were about fifty of them — men and women, more men than women, some black, most white and a few yellow. Their dress was everything from evening gown and tiaras, court dress, rough old working suits, shirt sleeves and denims, military uniforms to national costumes. Some of them were sitting, some standing, and one couple were down on one knee in the act of obeisance, and they were all looking towards the far end of the room. Not a muscle among them moved because they were all made of wax. Nearest to me was a woman in a low-cut evening gown whose shoulders wanted dusting.

At the far end of the room was a raised platform, half-crescented at each side with a pierced marble balustrade. Three low steps ran upwards to a final dais on which was an enormous throne-chair in gold stucco with a back that ran up into a kind of baldachin affair overhead from which fell silver-and-gold curtains. On either side of the throne-chair stood a pair of seven-branched candelabra, all the candles lit. In the chair sat a wax figure, double life-size, of O'Dowda. The big head was decked out with a chaplet of laurel leaves, a purple toga swathed the huge body, and there were gold sandals on the big feet. One fat hand held a silver drinking goblet and the other a long roll of parchment. Take the parchment away and stick a lyre in it and you could ring the changes: Caesar or Nero, according to mood.

Just at that moment, having got over the shock of the Madame Tussaud collection in the room, I was wondering what was the particular mood of the man who sat on the edge of the platform below the effigy. Normally it might have been difficult to guess. It could have been his day to be Caesar, Nero, Hitler, Napoleon, Karl Marx, Sam Goldwyn or Kruschev. But it wasn't. He was all togged up from ankle to neck in one of those blue siren suits Winston Churchill used to wear, and there was a fat cigar stuck in his mouth and a fat scowl overhanging his eyes. In his right hand he held a whippy little cane with which he was gently smacking his right leg.

He just stared at me across a hundred yards of marble floor, waiting for me to speak, I imagined. But I knew my place. You do not speak to royalty until they speak to you first. I knew something else, too. Despite this show, he wasn't mad. He wasn't even eccentric. Everything he did, he did from reason; cold, hard, cash-registering reason. Only the failures in life go mad. It's their way of opting out of the rat-race.

He got up and slowly made his way down the room. He stopped once alongside the figure of a London policeman and gave the blue serge of the man's seat a whippy slash with the cane.

Then, coming up to me, he said, careful all the time to keep the scowl on his face, 'Know why I did that, Carver?'

I said, 'I should think because years ago he was the one who around midnight nobbled you as you came out of the neighbourhood grocer's with the contents of the till in your pocket.'

O'Dowda grinned, but he still managed somehow to keep the scowl going.

'Bad guess. Sure, before I had real hairs on my chest I knocked off a till or two. How the hell do you get capital to start otherwise? No — he nobbled me for drunken driving when I was twenty-two. Licence taken away for six months, meant I couldn't drive the van. Business kaput. They're all like that.' He waved the cane around the crowd.

'You brought me all the way up here to tell me about the people who've crossed you in your life?'

'You'll learn why I brought you up here soon enough. Sure, yes, they are all people who crossed or tried to cross me. I like to come in here sometimes and talk to them, let 'em see where I am now. You know how much one of these figures costs?'

'No.'

'Kermode does them. Clever sod, is Kermode. Used to work for Tussaud's once. Two hundred quid, he charges me.'

'You could save money by having them done in miniature. Keep 'em all in a glass case. That way the dust wouldn't settle on them.' I ran my finger down the V-back of the tiara number and showed the tip to him. 'Now stop trying to impress me.'

'You're fired, boyo.'

'Splendid.'

'You were going to cross me up.'

'You should have let me do it — then you could have stuck me in here. I'd have sent you one of my old suits to make it authentic'

'Watch your tongue when you speak to me. You're just the hired man.'

'You fired me a moment ago. Remember? Anyway, hired or fired I speak as I find. Stop playing games, O'Dowda.'

For a moment I thought he was going to hit me with the cane. He stood there and bulged his big face at me, little blue eyes boring at me, the afternoon sun sparkling on the short copper scruff of his hair, the end of his cigar glowing like a Stop light. Then he wheeled away and went up to the figure of a coloured gent wearing a tarboosh and ten yards of white Manchester cotton robe and swiped the tarboosh off with his cane.

'What did he do?' I asked. 'Sell you a dud lot of dirty photos?'

'As a matter of fact it was a dud lot of industrial diamonds during the war. He lived to regret it. And don't think I'm trying to impress you. For me this is therapy. Every so often I like to review 'em, talk to 'em. Afterwards I fell as clean and pink inside as a baby. And when I'm not here they still have to face me.' He nodded towards the outsize Caesar figure.

I said, 'You should open it to the public. Cover your costs in a couple of years. Kermode could sell hot-dogs and ice-cream on the terrace.'

He scowled at me.

'You're fired,' he said.

I turned and made for the door. He let me reach it, and then said, 'Don't you want to know why?'

I looked at him over my shoulder. 'If you feel you've got to tell me — okay. But in that case let's do it over a drink and a smoke.' I fished out my cigarette case. 'The drink,' I said, 'is up to you.'

He gave me a grin then.

'You're a lippy bastard. But it's a change. You're still fired, though.'

He went back to the other end of the room, smacking the odd rump and shoulder here and there and stopped in front of what was probably a Louis-the-something console and produced brandy and glasses. Again, he gave himself the bigger helping. I went up and sat in an armchair with an elderly diplomatic type in court dress resting one elbow nonchalantly on the back. (He'd probably blocked O'Dowda's bid for a knighthood.)

I breathed the brandy aroma, sipped, let the liquid roll around my mouth like a mixture of ginger and fire, swallowed it, and felt it like the beginning of a young volcano in my stomach.

I said, 'This is bloody awful stuff.'

O'Dowda said, 'You think I'd waste my best brandy on a man I've just fired?' I said, 'Why am I fired?'

'Because, Carver, when I employ someone I demand complete loyalty for my money. Nobody has to love me for it. But they have to earn it.'

'So far as I know I haven't even got round to cheating you on a hotel bill yet. But I'll make a note to do so when you reinstate me.'

He whipped the cane through the air in front of him angrily and said, 'Bejasus, you try me hard.'

I said, 'You're the first Irishman outside of a music-hall I ever heard say Bejasus. Just let me have a few facts about my disloyalty.'

'Two days ago I had a visit from a black number called Alakwe—'

'Was this in England or over here?'

'Why?'

'Because then I'll know whether it was Jimbo Alakwe or Najib.'

'In London.'

'Good old Jimbo, still trying hard. Don't tell me — I can guess the kind of line he would take. I've taken a bribe of, say, two thousand guineas, not pounds, to double-cross you by letting him know before you where the Mercedes is when I find it? Something like that?'