* Except for Jochen, who had to fly off to Hamburg, where his presence had been requested at another literary festival the very next day.
† Sanary, strangely, had a voice that was both soft and metallic, even piercing at times, and, although I tried not to eavesdrop, I still couldn’t help hearing the essential of this latest bee in his bonnet. In case any reader is curious, it concerned the fact that in Hammett’s novel the eponymous thin man is actually the victim, the victim of the murder on which its plot revolves, and not the detective. Hence the titles of the five film sequels which followed the first adaptation itself – After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man and so on – made no sense whatsoever. For once I already knew that.
Chapter Eight
Dreams like hallucinations divine and speak to our fear of dying, and sleep, as many have written before me, is the green room of the hereafter.* That night I slept fitfully. On one of my room’s twin bedside tables I had earlier in the evening laid out a brand new sleeping-mask and a pair of boules Quiès, by then as grey and tough as wads of chewed-out gum. Now, wandering naked into the bathroom to brush my teeth, swallow a blood-pressure pill and take one last pee for the road, I switched on the alarm-clock radio and located a sort of classical-music channeclass="underline" Honegger’s Pacific 231 followed by the ‘big tune’ of a Rachmaninov piano concerto, etc. Although I had packed a snug little compact-disc player along with three favourite late-night discs, whenever I am about to sleep alone, away from home, I do prefer the radio to records. Somebody is out there.
It was close to midnight when I slid beneath the duvet. As predicted, I had to wrestle with the bolster, wedging it under the nape of my neck (which made me feel as though I were in a barber’s chair), piling a second bolster on top of the first (a dentist’s chair), then experimenting at length to discover whether it might be practical to dispense with the damn things altogether (a coffin). At last, faute de mieux, I arrived at a tolerable position by clasping one of them to my jawline like a violinist his violin.
Only after these and other such threshings, turning my face over on my left cheek then my right cheek then my left again, then, as a despairing last resort, trying to sleep flat on my back, my eyes sightlessly open under the already sticky mask, then getting up twice to fiddle with the radiator’s complicated thermostat – the room abruptly revealed itself to be suffocatingly warm, something I seemed not to have noticed before – only then did I succeed in losing consciousness. And I was no sooner asleep, so it felt, than I started to dream.
Now for me all dreams, all dreams, are nightmares; there is, I find, a denaturingly strange and suggestive something about the state-of-the-art scene-shifting of even the prosiest of dreamscapes, just as in the staidest of surrealist paintings. Hence, however unscary this dream of mine may strike the reader, it was from my point of view a nightmare none the less. I didn’t wake up screaming but, when I finally did surface, I feared at first I would have to vomit.
I dreamt I was in Switzerland (a less logical and realistic setting than it may appear, since the semi-self-aware ‘I’ who was doing the dreaming was not in Switzerland but in Notting Hill, dreams like mobile phones tending to adopt the default assumption that the dreamer is in his own territory). This dream-Switzerland was a picture-postcard platitude, from which not one of Hitchcock’s clichés was missing, not even the village-square dance, the whirl of dirndl, on which curtains used to rise in nineteenth-century operettas. It also had a Swiss-themed soundtrack, Rossini’s William Tell Overture.
Naked, then again sometimes fully clothed, I was being chased across a Tobleronish range of small, no more than knee-high, perfectly triangular mountains, the foothills of the infinite, by somebody or something whose contours I couldn’t at first make out with exactitude. The chase, moreover, was a very uneven one. For a while he, if he it were (but I gradually came to understand that my pursuer was indeed male), appeared to glide above the mountains in a sustained and seamless arc underneath a sky of tampons and rainbows, while I found myself obliged by my dream’s martinet of a metteur-en-scène to plod over the lovely, dark, deep snow (shades of Frost!) at the much more pedestrian pace of a cross-country skier. There couldn’t be any doubt, then, that he would catch up with me.
And he kept coming. Without even having to turn my head, I somehow knew that he was dressed in the garb – quilted anorak, its fur-lined hood reposing on his slightly stooped shoulders, old-fashioned khaki shorts and thick woollen stockings which nearly met those shorts halfway up his chubby legs – of a portly butterfly-hunter. In actual fact (if I can use that phrase about a dream), he wasn’t chasing me after all. Waving his long-stemmed net every which way, he was endeavouring to nab a colony of butterflies that waltzed insouciantly around his head as though dangled on as many strings. And it was only when he was about to overtake me that I realised that the butterflies weren’t butterflies at all but books, open books, their pages fluttering in the wind-machine breeze. I could even read their titles, about most of which, however, there seemed to me something not quite right. Pnun was one. Another was Son of Palefire. A third, which I caught sight of at the very instant he snared the book, was Adair or Ardor.
At that same instant, as Rossini’s overture swelled on the soundtrack and the shadow of my pursuer’s net cast its own net over me, he morphed into the Lone Ranger. Wearing a black sleeping-mask just like mine, brandishing in his right hand the butterfly-net with the captured and still vainly fluttering book inside it, the book which bore my name, digging a bejewelled spur into his horse’s tender haunch so that it reared up on its two hind legs, he cried out, ‘Hi-Yo, Silver!’ Then, accompanied by his faithful pard Tonto (now where had he sprung from?), he galloped away on thundering hoofbeats into the thrilling days of yesteryear and I awoke.
When I consulted my wristwatch, I was shocked to discover that it was twenty-five past eleven and that, oversleeping as I had, I risked missing altogether the Mayor’s reception which would already be well underway. I leapt out of bed, raced into the bathroom and, twelve minutes later, a personal record, had shaved, showered and dressed. Breakfast was no longer being served in the dining room, nor would I have had time to consume it even if it were, and my hope was that coffee as well as alcohol would be available at the Kunsthalle.
I rushed downstairs, through the lobby and out into the car park. Ignoring the appeals of my palpitating heart to take it easy, I ran straight to the Kunsthalle building, which I made out ahead of me every step of the way but which still felt unpleasantly distant for one as out-of-shape as I was.
As I drew closer, I saw a crowd of people with glasses of champagne in their hands, some I knew, others not, milling about on its front steps. I recognised Sanary, his blazer a black blot among so many pastel shades, and the ubiquitous Evie, and I heard a loud drawl – ‘I tell you, he’s ghaarstly, he’s perfectly ghaarstly!’ – which told me that Meredith too was of the company. A minute later I myself was among them.
‘What’s happened?’ I breathily asked.
As I might have foreseen, Evie was the first to reply.
‘It’s Slavorigin.’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s disappeared.’
‘Disappeared? What do you mean, disappeared?’
What I learned from her was that Slavorigin had so far failed to put in an appearance at the reception which had been organised in his honour. For a while everybody had sought to stay calm and convivial. By twenty-past eleven, however, it had become impossible to continue pretending that his ongoing absence was no cause for alarm, and somebody – ‘I fancy,’ she said, ‘it was Pierre here’ – suggested that Düttmann return at once to the Hilton to find out whether and when Slavorigin had left it. But just as he was preparing to go, who should turn up at the Kunsthalle but Thomson and Thompson, ‘neither of them a happy bunny’. At a quarter to eleven they had knocked on Slavorigin’s door to escort him to the reception, even though the Kunsthalle was just a five-minute stroll away. No response. They had then taken the lift back down to the ground floor to ask the receptionist whether Mr Slavorigin by chance had already gone. They were told no, that he would certainly have been seen crossing the lobby area. One of them – let’s say it was Thompson – took the lift back up to the twelfth floor while his twin remained behind at the reception desk. A couple of minutes later Thomson’s mobile phone rang. It was Thompson to say that there was still no response. Accompanied by Thomson, the manager himself then took the lift up and unlocked the bedroom door with his own set of keys. All three entered the room together. No Slavorigin. On which, alert to the implications of what they stubbornly refused to admit could have been their own professional negligence, the two low-rent minders set off for the Kunsthalle in the hope that their charge had somehow contrived to exit the hotel unnoticed.