‘Sure.’
When he was gone, Alec switched off the television. Out of the quiet came the sound of his mother’s coughing, a muffled hacking and retching that reached its crescendo, then slowly died away. He hurried into the garden, crossing the lawn and gulping down lungfuls of milky air. In the summerhouse he struck a match, lit the storm lantern and set it on the shelf by the portrait of Lázár. Then he sharpened his pencils, opened the manuscript of Oxygène, and for twenty minutes performed a kind of mime of work until the deception was no longer tolerable, and he leaned back on the rear legs of his chair to watch the insects that came to the light through the open window, among them a pair of large butter-coloured moths that knocked the dust from their wings on the glass waist of the lantern and flew like manic angels around the playwright’s head.
A little before midnight, Larry returned, crooning some country-and-western number as he clambered over the stile and weaved his way back to the house. Alec extinguished the flame in the lantern and sat on in the dark, long enough, he hoped, for Larry to have got to bed. He didn’t want to speak to him again tonight. Though they had made their peace, he was still shaken by the row in the kitchen, could still feel where Larry had jabbed his shoulder. And where were you hiding? Go to hell! They had fought often enough as kids, as teenagers, passionately against each other for half an hour. But tonight he had seen something new, an anguish that mirrored his own, a depth of trouble he knew nothing about and could not have explained. Kirsty had been right the evening he called San Francisco (and he had been wrong): people change. And how credulous of him, how unthinkably naive, to imagine that his brother would just go on the same, untouched by the disorder that found its way unerringly to others lives – to every life in time. But how was he to understand himself now? What more telling definition of himself could he hope to find other than being what Larry was not? He had never questioned it. Had anyone? It was the easiest way to think about him. So what now? If Larry wasn’t ‘Larry’ any more, who was Alec?
At a quarter to one he recrossed the garden. Flower-heads showed silvery against the dark of the foliage, and the night felt heavy, liquid, the stars not quite in focus. Perhaps it meant a change in the weather, a heavy dew tomorrow. He locked the terrace doors, drank a glass of tap water in the kitchen, and was on the point of switching off the lights in the living room when his attention was caught by the card table in the alcove beneath the stairs. He had put the table there the day after Alice came out of hospital, and at the same time had put the pieces of the little conjuring game back in the box. But now they were out again, the three red cups in a line across the centre of the table. He went closer. Who had taken them out? Larry? Why should he? Certainly not Kirsty. Ella, then. Ella, of course. If nothing else, her obsessive nature betrayed her: the intervals between the cups must have been uniform to within a centimetre or two. But when? And who had she wanted to play with? He crouched, studying the cups in turn, then lifted the middle one.
‘You win,’ he whispered. He picked up the right-hand cup. Still there was nothing. He turned over the last.
Nestled on the baize, like the egg of some giant hornet or dragonfly, was the capsule – shiny blue and shiny red. He picked it up. It was almost weightless, its little load of pharmaceuticals just visible through the slightly dented glycerin skin. The hair prickled on the back of his neck, and he swung round as though expecting to catch Larry or Ella or, God knows, Alice, standing by the door, watching him, seeing the expression on his face, and knowing what he must be thinking. But he was quite alone. Nobody was going to disturb him.
He placed the capsule between his lips, tore a strip from the evening paper, wrapped the capsule, and slid it into the breast pocket of his shirt. Then he put away the cups, closed the box, turned out the lights and went upstairs, pausing for a moment, in a kind of passion, outside his mother’s room.
10
At 8.45 on a morning of dazzling sunlight, László Lázár stepped down on to the platform at Westbahnhof. In one hand he carried his old blue ‘pilot’s’ bag; in the other a black holdall of tough imitation leather handed to him at the Gare de l’Est the previous evening by a middle-aged man he had never seen before.
It was not, of course, the money – that would come later – and when he had looked inside it, locked into one of the toilets on the train, he had found it to contain nothing but a dozen newspapers – Le Monde Diplomatique – and two large white bath towels, presumably for the sake of bulk. In Vienna he kept it with him, depositing the blue bag at left luggage and taking a taxi to the Opera House, killing time in Kärntner Strasse, Singer Strasse, the Hoher market. Several times he paused to watch the street in a store window, trying to catch from out of the animated sheen of passers-by a glimpse of any figure that stopped when he stopped, but the only persistent face, the only face his trick surprised into a guilty stillness (a face like milk splashed on dark wood), was his own.
At 12.30 he returned to Westbahnhof and took a seat in the station restaurant, a table between a pillar and a large pot plant, from where he had a clear view of the glass and steel doors. There were still twenty-five minutes before the rendezvous, but this time he did not intend to be startled by an unseen approach, as he had been at the station in Paris, turning to find a face too close to his own, a stare like a policeman’s, a voice reciting, ‘Françoise said to give you this,’ in an accent he was starting to be familiar with.
The waitress came, a plump girl, profoundly bored, and stood beside him with her pad of paper. He had no appetite – the fag of tramping with the holdall through a hot city he had little affection for had triggered a nagging headache – but he selected something at random from the menu and ordered a bottle of Kaiser beer. She brought the beer immediately. It was cold and it seemed to do him some good. He relaxed a little, closing his eyes, trying to come to terms with the fact that he was here at all – in Vienna! – when in a saner, more orderly world he would be at his desk in Paris, picking at lines of dialogue and starting to wonder what there might be in the fridge for lunch.
The rhythms of the train were in his blood still, a sensation distantly familiar to him, for he had once known the night train well. Four or five times a year he had taken it to visit his mother and Uncle Ernö. ‘The Orient Express’ – an exotic name for a conveyance that was neither luxurious nor even particularly fast. Six berths to a compartment, eleven compartments to a car, and along the length of the carriage a narrow corridor where people smoked and leaned at the windows, gazing moodily at dark blue fields and the lights of strange towns.
And there was always some incident, some curious encounter. On this trip he had spent an hour somewhere in Eastern France calming the fears of a red-haired American girl who had heard, or perhaps read in one of those tedious guidebooks no one seemed capable of leaving home without, that there were criminal gangs who sprayed knockout gas into the sleeping cars in order to rob, or even to murder, the unconscious passengers. His English – unused since San Francisco – was shaky, and she spoke nothing else, but with the help of some schnapps he had at last succeeded in making her see the absurdity of her fears, though privately he suspected that farther to the east (Romania?) such gangs did indeed exist, for these were desperate times.
Once the girl was asleep, and the Frenchman on the berth below her ceased to grind his teeth, László had stretched out on his own bunk, and thought back to to his last journey on the Orient Express, the winter of 1989, when he had come to Vienna to watch his mother die. János had flown in from New York (where his marriage to Patty was ending in the divorce courts), and the pair of them had carried on a three-day vigil at their mother’s bedside in the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, János muttering in László’s ear about justice and love and private detectives, while László watched the February snow, silver and dark, building drifts on the sill of the narrow window above his mother’s head.