‘So how are you?’
‘Oh, you know. How is anybody these days?’
‘Mmmm.’
She turned to Düttmann, who took her dry martini off a waiter’s tray and passed it over to her.
‘Thank you so much. You probably didn’t know this, Tommy, but Gilbert and I are old acquaintances.’ (Her ‘probably’ she pronounced as a drawn-out ‘praaahhhly’.)
‘Really? You and – no, I confess I did not know that.’
‘We first met several years ago. Antibes. The French Riviera. How long ago would it have been, Gilbert?’
I had been straining to read what was written on a curiously shaped brooch – of a snake swallowing its own rear end – pinned onto one of the lapels of her grey slim-waisted cotton jacket, and it was only after I had at last made out the words (I think) ‘For All The Women of America’ that I replied to her question.
‘Actually, Meredith, if you think about it, it’s an easy enough calculation. You recall, it was just after September 11. A matter of days after, if I’m not mistaken. So: September 15, 2001, let’s say, to September 10, 2011. A decade almost to the day.’
‘And what a decade it was,’ observed our host.
Meredith smiled. Perfect teeth, natch.
‘You must understand, though, Tommy, that that first meeting of ours was not a success.’
‘No?’
‘No. We definitely didn’t hit it off. I have no desire to reopen old wounds but, as Gilbert rightly remembers, it was just after 9/11 and we were all good, patriotic, united Americans then, and to hell with our ideological quarrels. And no wonder. We thought it was the end of the world, and we wanted a President who would tuck us into our beds with a promise that the bogey man wouldn’t come and murder us in the night. It sounds kind of puerile now, even babyish, but it was real scary back then and I’m afraid Gilbert just didn’t get it. I can’t blame him any more – nobody who wasn’t American could have got it – and it was a long time ago and some of the things he said then, things that seemed obnoxious to me, have since come to make better sense – though if something’s true now it doesn’t necessarily mean it was always true, right? Anyway, even though it took us longer than all of you to see through that asshole President of ours, we finally did. My God, we finally did! As another President once said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’
I was half-expecting Sanary to inform us that the original of the Lincoln quote could actually be traced back to Chaucer, say, or The Faerie Queen; but, if he had such a notion, he was given no opportunity to share it. One of the ‘creative team’ discreetly raising a wrist, and a purple Swatch wristwatch, to Düttmann’s eyes, the latter requested us all to please finish our drinks and proceed to the lecture hall, where we were awaited by an expectant full house.
* Slightly to my regret, for I never tire of watching how bored tourists, most of whom have lost or else never mastered the art of meaningfully engaging with an exhibition of cultural artefacts in a museum setting, suddenly come alive again in the adjacent souvenir shop, purchasing the tawdriest trinkets and postcards with a gleeful gusto which contrasts conspicuously with the listless respect they have just shown inside the galleries themselves. Shopping is the only real, fully functioning culture left to us.
† Sanary’s English was very good but thankfully not quite perfect.
‡ For a comprehensive inventory of these Herrmannian borrowings, see Sanary’s article ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Hitchcock’, Sight and Sound, volume 18, issue 4, April 2008.
Chapter Four
The house was full. While the others were shown to a half-dozen reserved end-of-row seats, one of which, Umberto Eco’s I suppose, remained empty throughout, Jochen and I manoeuvred our tiptoeing way to the platform along a centre parting in which a half-dozen young people sat cross-legged on the wooden floor with bottles of mineral water on their laps. No applause as yet. Jochen spread his notes in front of him, tapped the microphone and, without, as they say, further ado, started to introduce me in German. Some laughter (I don’t know why), a smattering of applause at the end. He turned to me with an encouraging smile. I removed my glasses – I look better with but read better without them – opened my much-fingered copy of The Unpublished Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, took a last unfocused look round the hall, lowered my gaze and began:
The Giant Rat of Sumatra
‘It has long been an axiom of mine,’ said Sherlock Holmes, wearily glancing up from the formidable web of beakers and test-tubes which seethed and bubbled before his eyes, ‘that it is when we indulge ourselves in some pursuit of pure relaxation, not when we are at our labours, tedious and repetitive though they may be, that we are most receptive to the gnawing torments of ennui.’
I turned my head in his direction. Having just re-entered the lodgings in Baker Street that we shared, from several hours passed at the bedside of a gravely ill patient of mine, I had at once buried myself in the day’s newspapers, perusing them from cover to cover, and had in consequence paid little attention to either my companion or his activities. I contemplated him now. He had evidently chosen to perform one of his amateur experiments with acids and sulphates and, as was all too often true of his intense but also intensely volatile temperament, had come to tire of the pastime with the same sudden swiftness as he had undoubtedly embarked upon it. I myself could have asked at that moment for no more than to continue reading the news without interruption; but, being made belatedly aware that my day, although fatiguing in its exertions and still uncertain as to its outcome, had been filled with incident, I was bound to observe the soundness of his observation.
‘Consider, for instance, my own case,’ Holmes broodily went on, as he took down from the pipe-rack by the fireside what looked to be the oiliest and most ancient of his extensive collection of clay pipes and viciously tapped the dottle into the grate. ‘Here have I been, today, with all the leisure in the world to do with as I pleased, to commence the monograph I have been planning to write on the significance of the typewriter key in modern detection or else’ – and with his languidly tapering forefinger he indicated the instruments arrayed in front of him – ‘undertake this amiable if futile little experiment. And yet, I swear, time has hung far heavier on my hands than on those of the potboy or crossing-sweeper who, since he awoke this morning, has assuredly done nothing but curse the drudgery of his quotidian round. No, my dear Watson,’ he concluded, shaking his head, which was already enhaloed by a cloud of noisome tobacco fumes, ‘it is some holiday excursion, or at the racecourse, or at the Opera when neither Madame Tetrazzini nor the divine Melba is singing – it is there, I say, that we learn to our cost what boredom truly means!’
Long experience had taught me to recognise the symptoms. Only a few days before, Holmes had brought to a satisfying conclusion a sordid affair of blackmail involving as its innocent party one of the noblest, most exalted names in England, and he was at present feelingly aware of his idleness.
‘You have overtaxed yourself of late,’ I said. ‘Perhaps such enforced inaction is a blessing in disguise.’
‘Bah!’ he practically snarled at me. ‘If there is one thing I abominate, it is a blessing in disguise. Surely blessings of any kind are sufficiently uncommon not to have to don a mask? Besides, it is not a blessing in disguise of which I stand most in need, but a criminal in disguise. Alas! The whole city of London appears to have reverted to “the straight and narrer”, as our good Lestrade enjoys putting it. Where are they now, the Napoleons of crime? Languishing on Elba, I dare say.’