An Artist and a Magician Page 10

  ‘The rumble of the tumbril,’ Wilbur murmured.

  ‘Oh ha ha,’ Jim shook perfunctorily. ‘Yes. That’s just it. And so you see, that’s why I have to be a little bit careful. Because if I do move it’s going to be a terrific upheaval, and—’

  ‘And what?’ the bad-breathed Chuck said, entering the room behind Jim. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh heavens, I didn’t hear you come in’, Jim said, obviously very pleased by this intrusion, which promised to cheer up what was getting to be an extremely trying session.

  ‘About how expensive it would be if I decided to move from Rome.’

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ Chuck snarled. ‘You are so fucking cheap Jim.’ He turned then to Wilbur, as if he were a friend, or an ally, and went on, ‘Doesn’t he make you sick? Here are we selling our souls, peddling our asses, grovelling in the dust to pick up the few odd coins that are tossed our way, and he’s worrying about the expense of moving from one palace to another. My God, you make me puke Jim, you really do. Doesn’t he make you puke, Wilbur?’

  Wilbur forebore to give his opinion; and Jim, of course, staring delightedly at the tall, well built, ugly young man who was facing him with fury, simply—laughed.

  ‘Oh really Chuck,’ he trembled. ‘How can you be so facile? And I was just telling Wilbur how intelligent you were. Oh heavens. Oh ha ha ha. Oh do get yourself a drink, or smoke one of your funny cigarettes. Oh, what a way to live. Oh ha ha ha ha ha. Oh ha ha ha.’

  ‘I must be going I’m afraid, James,’ Wilbur said.

  Jim didn’t make him puke. Nothing, ever again, would make him puke, Wilbur thought as he went back into his own tawdry, ridiculous apartment, that only a couple of hours ago had been so original and wonderful, and now looked like the backstage of a third-rate repertory company. Pam had hungered for a new life; Jim was frightened of the communists; what would Betty and Bernard’s excuses be for denying him any further support—when and if he told them, or they discovered, that he wasn’t a murderer? Oh no, nothing would ever make him puke again, or shock him; not even the idea, which came to him as he flopped down on his bed, that maybe Pam herself had told him she wanted her money back simply in order to taunt him; to tempt him to do what he hadn’t done, but what everyone believed he had. Nothing was impossible any more….

  That was true, he told himself next morning, but it wasn’t true that he’d never be shocked again. Because after an almost sleepless night, which he had spent tossing in his bed, stroking and whispering to Philip, and thinking of what Jim had said about Rome being a magic city which he had invented—and he was right there, it was a magic city; a city of glorious appearance, of stunning façade; a city of glittering beauty, where most of even the poorest boys and girls, the most politically aware and the entirely uncommitted, masked the reality of their situation by dressing, always, in the latest fashion, whatever it was; a city where, indeed, fashion, appearance, facade were reality—he was woken at seven-thirty by the phone; and when he asked sleepily, crossly, who was calling, he was told to come immediately to the central police station.

  Oh why, he asked.

  He would be told when he arrived.

  Had something happened?

  Yes indeed.

  What?

  He’d be told when he arrived.

  But was it something that concerned him?

  Possibly. Or rather, yes. How quickly could he get there?

  Immediately, Wilbur muttered, and putting the phone down, got out of bed.

  *

  But when he got to the police station half an hour later, he wasn’t told at once what had happened. First of all he was shown into a grey painted office and sat down on a wooden chair and asked if he wanted a coffee.

  Then, with the coffee in his hand, he was asked, in English, what he had done yesterday.

  ‘I’m afraid I must ask you what all this is about,’ Wilbur protested, ‘before I answer your questions.’

  Yes of course, the grey haired man in a grey business suit, who was sitting on the other side of a paper-covered table, and obviously enjoyed keeping people in suspense, said; and then repeated his question. What had Wilbur done yesterday?

  Rome was a magic city; a dream city, where all—or most—that seemed, was. Rome was a nightmare city. And he had invented it. This was his nightmare he was in, Wilbur told himself, and only he had the power to wake himself from it; to wake up into the day. Except his power had deserted him, and he couldn’t wake up. The nightmare was the day. He said he would like to speak to someone from the American Embassy.

  ‘Yes of course,’ the businessman/policeman said, ‘though it’s really not necessary. All we would like to know is—what did you do yesterday?’

  ‘I got up at eight and went onto my terrace.’

  He would try, at least, to be facetious.

  But not even that worked. He was listened to with the most perfect courtesy.

  ‘Then I went into my kitchen, had a coffee, and fed Philip, my cat. Then I took a bath, and went into my study and worked on a novel for two hours. Then I did some translating, of a film script. Then I prepared lunch, and ate it.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘No, with my secretary, and with a most charming girl whose father was the Bulgarian ambassador to the Holy See before the last war. She—’

  ‘Were you with your secretary all morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What time did your friend leave?’

  ‘At three.’

  ‘And your secretary?’

  ‘At three, too.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I took a siesta for a couple of hours.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I took a taxi and went to have a drink with a very old friend of mine.’

  ‘Whose name is?’

  ‘James Simpson.’

  ‘Who lives?’

  ‘Just off Piazza Margana.’

  ‘And how long did you stay with your friend?’

  ‘An hour and a half maybe, two hours. I was home again at quarter to eight.’

  ‘What did you talk about with Mr Simpson?’

  ‘Oh good heavens,’ Wilbur protested, sounding, he heard, very much like Jim himself.

  ‘Did you ask him to lend you some money?’

  Wilbur started to feel faint. Jim—or more probably Chuck—had, as an appalling joke, told the police that he had killed Pam….

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured weakly.

  ‘Is Mr Simpson homosexual?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘He’s a very old friend of yours.’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘And has he been living with a certain Mr Chuck Collins for the last few months?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did Mr Collins hear you ask Mr Simpson for money?’

  ‘I don’t know. Possibly.’

  ‘Did you have a fight with Mr Simpson?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did Mr Collins?’

  ‘No. Not while I was there.’

  ‘Now tell me, Mr George. Did Mr Simpson make a ridiculous accusation that you were responsible for the death of a certain Mrs Pamela Winter?’

  Wilbur closed his eyes, and didn’t reply. He couldn’t.

  ‘Did he, Mr George?’

  ‘No,’ Wilbur barely whispered. ‘This old friend of ours, Mrs Winter, died last August. Mr Simpson and I had a sort of—running joke between us that I had—’

  ‘Killed her?’

  Wilbur nodded.

  ‘But it was only a joke between the two of you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Wilbur whispered.

  ‘And never any more than a joke?’

  ‘No,’ Wilbur whispered.

  ‘And Mr Collins never tried to blackmail you because of this joke—believing it to be more than a joke?’

  ‘Good heavens no,’ Wilbur said, quite strongly now. The idea that the unspeakable Chuck might even try to do such a thing had never occurred to him.

  ‘And
after you left Mr Simpson’s, and went home, what did you do?’

  ‘I rested briefly on my bed, and then had a quiet dinner party for two very old and dear friends from Alabama.’

  ‘And what time did they leave?’

  ‘About one o’clock.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I went to bed.’

  ‘And after you left Mr Simpson, you had no further communication with him—or with Mr Collins?’

  ‘No,’ Wilbur said; and then, realizing that they had left the subject of Pam’s death—which indeed this businessman playing the part of a policeman had defined as a ‘ridiculous accusation’—and no longer fearing quite so much that he might be the victim of some practical joke, suddenly guessed—or suspected—what the grey haired man on the other side of the desk was driving at.

  ‘Has something happened to Mr Collins?’ he asked.

  ‘To Mr Collins, no. He apparently left Mr Simpson’s house shortly after you did and didn’t return till two o’clock this morning. But to Mr Simpson, yes.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Wilbur breathed. ‘What?’

  ‘He’s been murdered, Mr George. Murdered. Some time early this morning. And murdered in the most horrible—and peculiar—way. He was tortured, blinded, stabbed with a knitting needle, and then had his heart cut out. And then whoever killed him put his heart on the electric spit in his kitchen—and grilled it.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Wilbur gasped. ‘Oh no. Oh no.’ And then, unable to control himself and completely hysterical, he burst into tears.

  SEVEN

  ‘The Ritual Murder’, the papers called it; and though most of them differed in the actual rites involved, none of them erred on the side of understatement. They also, all of them, after giving their detailed descriptions of the various horrors that poor Jim had suffered, had separate stories by the side of the main articles, which were headed ‘Black Magic?’

  And Wilbur, as he sat barricaded in his home, refusing to answer his phone, or see anyone apart from Lillian—who came, at his request, to sleep on his living room sofa for four nights, as well as spending all her days with him—did nothing but read all these stories, and nod his head in a distracted way at those questioning headlines. Black Magic. Black Magic … What else could it be? Pam had refused him money, and she had died. Jim had refused him money; and he had died. And oh, the papers could talk about the American chain-store owner’s predilection for delinquent boys, and say that undoubtedly it was at the hands of one of these that he had met his atrocious death—but he, Wilbur George, knew better. Well, maybe one of these boys—because it seemed the police didn’t believe Chuck was responsible—had been the material agent, but that didn’t mean much. For what dark angel had guided him in his madness; what evil spirit had possessed him, and inspired him to do what he had done?

  Sure, the communist papers could say that it was the obscene spirit of capitalism that had possessed the doubtlessly underprivileged, undereducated, underdeveloped killer, and destroyed Jim; and the right-wing papers could say it was the dark angel of moral degeneracy, of perversion, of corroded values and permissiveness. But these were merely prosaic explanations. Rhetoric for the dull. But it wasn’t the truth. It couldn’t be. No, Wilbur told himself hour after hour as he read the papers mechanically, ate mechanically, slept mechanically, and even stroked the cat mechanically; the truth lay here, in this apartment; in this plump and pale heap of flesh that came from Carolina. The truth lay in the poetry of his life and world; in the life and world that he had invented. And it was from this apartment, this flesh, that the spirits and angels of death had flown out, to find a home in the rough and unsuspecting body of some Roman street-boy; a street-boy who even now must be hiding somewhere, frightened, horrified, staring at his dirty-nailed fingers, and wondering dumbly what it was that had made them clutch the knitting needles and plunge them into the old American; that had made them rip open that heaving chest and drag out the living heart, to impale it, so grotesquely, on an electric griddle. Even now some poor if you like, underprivileged if you like, degenerate, corrupted, perverted if you like, but some, certainly, helpless street-boy, was wondering: ‘Why was I chosen?’

  Why indeed, Wilbur asked the paintings on his wall, and the wood and silver and papier mâché monkeys. Why indeed? He wouldn’t have had that boy chosen, whoever he was, for anything in the world. Yet he had been. He was the elected one. He had been made guilty….

  Oh no, Wilbur said, time and time again to his winged and mirrored clocks, to his lacquered and inlaid musical boxes, and to his rows of Persian camel bells. ‘Oh no,’ he said out loud, with tears running down his face: ‘don’t let that boy be guilty. Don’t let anyone be guilty. Let reality reverse itself and go back for a few days, and work itself out in a different way. Let it all be a dream. Oh don’t let Jim be dead,’ he cried. ‘Oh please, oh please, don’t let Jim be dead.’

  ‘Hush,’ Lillian said softly, and stroked the top of his head as he let it lie on his work table, soaking the pages of his novel. ‘It’s terrible, but tears won’t bring him back. You must try to calm yourself. You can’t go on like this.’

  ‘I know,’ Wilbur sobbed; and he did know.

  ‘Would you like a brandy?’

  ‘No thank you, dear child. I couldn’t drink a thing.’

  *

  And he didn’t drink a thing for four days; until he woke up that fourth morning too worn out to mourn any more, or even to struggle. All right, some insane youth whom Jim had picked up had murdered him in a fit of insanity. If that was the version the world wanted, that was the version the world could have.

  And telling himself that, he got up, had a bath, and asked Lillian to put a shot of brandy in the coffee she was preparing for him.

  ‘Oh I’m so glad, you’re looking better this morning,’ the girl lilted gently as she brought him the cup. ‘I’ve been so worried these last few days. You know you’ve been having a real breakdown.’

  ‘Yes, I know my dear. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for your help.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. In times like this we must all stick together.’

  ‘Yes indeed. Yes indeed,’ Wilbur said, and managed a faint smile. Oh if only she knew, he thought. If only she knew.

  ‘And there’s nothing anyone could have done.’

  ‘I know,’ he said—and thought, now; how wrong you are, dear child. There is something I could have done. I could have not released that spirit, not sent out—Stop it, he told himself. Stop it. Lillian was right. The papers were right. Even the radio, which had announced that morning on the news that a youth with a history of mental illness and violence was being held for questioning in relation to Jim’s death, was right. They were all right. There was no truth but the official truth; and there was nothing anyone could have done. It was sheer madness to think that he was in any way responsible. Of course he wasn’t. It had just been the shock of Jim’s death which had made him think that he was. A shock so great that, as Lillian had said, he had had a sort of breakdown. Now he was starting to get over it; and within a few days these absurd and horrifying feelings of guilt, these visions of dark angels, would have left him completely.

  *

  Or would they, he wondered wretchedly that afternoon as he opened the door to an unannounced and green-turbaned Betty. Because after she had excused herself for coming round without phoning first, and explained her coming by saying that she had been worried by his refusal to answer the phone, she looked at him gravely, as if searching for signs of—what?—and murmured, with studied, almost arch mournfulness, ‘Oh Wilbur dear, there are dark angels abroad in the world nowadays, aren’t there?’

  Oh God, Wilbur thought, she too. I can’t bear it. She, too, knows. Or if she doesn’t know, she suspects. But then, as he had earlier, he said to himself, stop it. To Betty he said, ‘Yes my dear. Though perhaps no more nowadays than there have always been.’

  ‘Oh, do you think so?’ She sounded unconvinced. ‘Maybe you’re rig
ht. But it just seems to me that before there was some sort of explanation for everything, however terrible. A historical or economic or something explanation. But now—oh, chaos seems so random.’

  ‘Oh come now, Betty. Take off your coat my dear, and sit down. And let’s not talk about—tragic events.’

  ‘Oh no, let’s not. Because really—’

  But of course it was hard not to talk about them. They hung over the afternoon like a dark cloud, and so dominated the silences—when they didn’t dominate the conversation—that it was easier, finally, to give in and talk about nothing else.

  ‘But why do you think a boy would do something like that,’ Betty sighed. ‘He must have been possessed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Wilbur agreed, ‘he must have been.’

  ‘If of course this one they’re holding did it. They probably just picked on some poor mentally retarded youth whom it would be easy to pin the blame on. To satisfy public opinion. They’ll probably never discover the real murderer.’