Eileen St Claire I loved because she stood for Sin. But now I’d had the experience. I had known what it was to spend the night with falsehood and murder. It had been very pleasant, but my interest had waned, my sexual curiosity had been satisfied. And I felt quite sure I should never again yearn for the lips of that woman. If anyone had told me then that one day she would again become my mistress (and revealed in what circumstances) I should have thought him deranged.
I’ve no idea by what unconscious knack I manage it, but somehow every room I inhabit comes in no time at all to look hostile and abandoned. People say of rooms that you can tell immediately if a woman lives there: little knick-knacks, tablecloths, flowers, porcelain figurines appear, and personal toiletries suggest the warmth of the female body. My rooms undergo the opposite process. The knick-knacks vanish and the place becomes a cell. Piles of shabby books accumulate on every horizontal surface, their dusty monotony relieved here and there by a cheap pipe.
This time, as I entered, the room seemed particularly bleak. This might have been due to the still-made bed in which I had not slept, or to the fact that I was half-asleep and feeling cold. But the room seemed to be positively creaking with hostility. I was filled with an deeply unpleasant feeling.
And then, like a flash of lightning, I knew what it was, and rushed to the wardrobe. The lock had been forced open. I counted the Persian codices. They were all there. But the manuscript, the memoirs of Lenglet du Fresnoy for which the Earl had sent me to London, had gone. Someone had stolen it.
My first impulse was to jump out of the window. Then, at my wits’ end, I raced down to the ground floor to the manager’s office.
I explained what had happened and showed him the lock. He was distraught, but had nothing to add. So many people had come and gone. In particular, the previous night a horde of Scotsmen had pitched up, travelling half-price to the England-Scotland rugby match; in fact the whole town was swarming with bare-kneed Scots in their Tam o’ Shanters. But in any case the police should be informed.
“Yes, I’ll nip round to Scotland Yard,” I replied. With soaring hope, my petty bourgeois soul took refuge under the motherly wing of the Metropolitan Police. But then my innate pessimism took hold of me again. The manuscript was almost certainly no longer in the hotel, and it seemed most unlikely that such a thing might be found in a London of eight million people in an area the size of an entire county back home. Possibly it was no longer even in London. It could just as easily be on its way to the Southern Seas, via the mail plane to India.
But I’d go to the police station anyway. I went back up to my room, had a bath, shaved and put on my daytime clothes. I had a sudden sense of wellbeing: the fresh clothes, the sudden strangeness of everything, my various loves … perhaps the evil spell of the theft would be broken by a clean, soft collar? Perhaps everything would return to rational order again.
Down in the foyer there was a message for me. According to the porter, a boy had brought it fifteen minutes earlier. In typed lettering I read as follows:
Don’t do anything rash. If you want it back, be at the Café Royal at nine this evening. If you inform the police before then, you will never see it again.
The writer was probably correct in suggesting the police would never be able to trace the manuscript. And it would certainly not be the Earl’s way to have them called in. For a start, it would be in the papers the very next morning, which he would have hated above everything else. After much thought I asked the young bellboy to send him the following telegram:
MANUSCRIPT STOLEN BUT AM ON TRACK AND HOPEFUL LETTER FOLLOWS
Then I set everything down in a letter and despatched it by express delivery.
After that, I had lunch, took a sleeping pill and lay down to sleep. The world might be falling apart but I wasn’t going to give up my afternoon nap.
The Café Royal is effectively London’s only real café. It aims at Frenchness in every detail. As if the place had been built by Napoleon himself, the grand entrance, the doorman’s cap, and even the cups and spoons are adorned with a capital N crowned with laurel. Coffee is served in glasses; the air is so foul and the chairs so very uncomfortable it’s as if you really were in Paris. It was once the meeting place of the British intelligentsia, and the clientele has remained interesting to this day, consisting mainly of aspiring actresses and clever foreigners.
I sat beside the wall and waited, nervously. At nine fifteen a stranger approached me.
“Doctor Bátky?”
“Yes.”
He took a seat. I recognised him immediately. It isn’t every day that you see such an unpleasant, grey-green, corpse-like, degenerate face, with such deep rings around the eyes. It was the man I had seen with Eileen St Claire at Fontainebleau. The man who was said to be her doctor, who had caused Cristofoli such heartache.
“So, can we talk here undisturbed?” he asked, glancing around.
There was a vacant table next to us, but as he spoke a bearded Indian wearing a turban and his unusually tall lady companion seated themselves at it.
“If you’ve no objection, we’ll talk in German,” he muttered, in a thick English accent. “I don’t think our neighbours will make too much of that.”
“As you wish,” I replied.
“Intelligent people don’t need to say very much anyway,” he added.
I have to concede that his face, for all its repulsiveness, did look decidedly intelligent.
“The manuscript you came to London for is in my possession. We have precise information about everything. We knew even before you got here that you were coming for a document of particular interest to the Earl.”
“My congratulations,” I said. “But there is something I would like to mention, for the sake of brevity. Your next sentence will be: ‘Dr Bátky, you are a famous physician.’ Allow me to verify, by means of my passport, that I am not a medical doctor.”
“I am aware of that. We’ve got past that stage. But let’s take things in their turn. There’s no reason not to tell you candidly that the manuscript was a disappointment. I notice that it contains some references to the family, and to some of the bees in his Lordship’s bonnet, but nothing of interest to us.”
“And who are ‘us’?”
“I’ll come to that in a moment. What I came to say is that I don’t really need it at all. I would be happy to return it, on certain conditions.”
“So, you wish to blackmail me. I am not a rich man, sir, and none of this is my business anyway. I suggest you apply to the Earl of Gwynedd himself.”
“What an idea! Compared with us, the Earl is a penniless wretch. We don’t need his money. This is about you.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I’m asking you for the same thing as Eileen St Claire. Give us, in writing, what you recall of Maloney’s death, with particular regard to the person standing on the balcony when Maloney fell.”
“I have already said, sir, that I cannot do that. Especially as I did not see anyone on the balcony.”
“But I know, for absolute certain, that you did.”
“How could you know that?”
“Read this.”
“I had a clear view of Maloney as he stepped from his room in the castle on to the balcony just outside it and climbed up to the balcony immediately above. An extremely tall man dressed in a black costume came out and seized him. They struggled for a short while, then Maloney plunged from the balcony. He was dead before anyone got to him. No one mentioned the fact that his neck had been wrung. Only one person apart from myself saw the man on the balcony, the Hungarian doctor. He came out on to his own balcony just as Maloney uttered his death cry … ”