Little Caesar Read online

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Linny Wallace said. ‘As though he’s sledding . . .’

  I said nothing about impacted anal glands, which a pair of expert hands could easily squeeze clean.

  A sort of cheerfulness settled down between us, we laughed at the many expressions of old, guttering life that could be seen around the village. God’s waiting room, it was sometimes called; Alburgh had the highest death rate in all of England. Paradoxically enough, that had to do with the favorable conditions one found here for carefree sunset years. The local shopkeepers lived in the calm certainty of uninterrupted revenues from countless pensions; restaurants and teahouses offered senior citizen discounts of up to twenty percent.

  I told her how, just yesterday, I had stood in the doorway of an off-license, looking at an old man standing beside his scootmobile and messing with his gloves. When I left the shop a few minutes later he was still there. He lived in a different time-space continuum, where you could take a hundred years to put on your gloves without growing impatient.

  From the old days, when I had walked these streets as a boy, I remembered the man who stood still at unexpected places. He always seemed to be deep in thought, in search of who he was and what kind of life he led. When he stopped he would wave his shaky hands out in front of him, carving mysterious symbols in the air or, with a bit of fantasy on the viewer’s part, conducting an orchestra of invisible mice.

  Alburgh had also gained a certain fame for the large number of hardwood benches in its public spaces. They were everywhere, along the esplanade, by the golf course, beside the pub; simple benches donated by survivors for the public good. The backrests bore inscriptions showing to whose memory the bench was dedicated.

  My loving husband, he loved Alburgh deeply.

  In view of sea and sail.

  To all those here, nipping at their pints. Think of Tom.

  Ginger Tooke, a spry little woman, had once given guided tours past the benches; she knew the stories behind many of the inscriptions. For all I knew, Ginger Tooke herself might meanwhile have passed on to her next incarnation as a hardwood bench along the esplanade.

  I had to get back to the hotel for my afternoon shift. Linny and I walked into the place like excited children. I ran upstairs to iron a shirt. On my voicemail I found another message from my former employer. The poison was not yet out of his stinger.

  ‘Ludwig? This is Peter. Hope you still remember me. You’ll never play here again. I sent a fax to the whole hotel chain. And, oh yeah, I’ve filed a claim against you. Violation of contract. I know what you’re thinking, but an oral agreement counts too. In court. You’ll hear more about it. Asshole.’

  I opened another little text folder. Mi amor. Where are you? I don’t deserve this. F.

  I had no idea who F. was. My telephone didn’t recognize her number. I thought about the Spanish salutation, but that didn’t really say anything: the language of love is a confusion of tongues. I deleted the message. The battery still showed one little stripe of energy.

  There were a few guests in the lounge, sitting in orange easy chairs and reading thrillers and newspapers. Two waiters had rolled the piano into the room. Linny Wallace was squatting down beside the stone hearth, poking up the glowing heart of the fire. The head waiter, a mere boy, was staring attentively at her ass. He was the liaison between bar and lounge. Children were playing on the olive-green carpet. I sat down at the piano and leafed through the bundle of sheet music. When I flagged him down, the waiter came over to me with a rather wobbly gait.

  ‘Could you bring me a daiquiri?’

  His knitted brow sank into a dip above the bridge of his nose; it looked as though he were about to ask huh?

  ‘I’m not sure we have that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a mixed drink, you can make it.’

  Finding out whether this was within the realm of possibility was something about which he didn’t seem particularly keen. The word itself, I suspected, would disappear from his mind halfway between here and the bar, like a copper falling out of your pocket.

  ‘Could you tell me the name again. Perhaps Mr. Leland knows what it is.’

  ‘Dai-qui-ri. I’m sure he does.’

  The boy shuffled over to the door, his shirttail hanging out of the back of his trousers. The look of his backside was as lifeless as the one on his face.

  I had copied the music onto A5 sheets, so I didn’t have to turn the pages as quickly. A few bits from Tchaikovsky’s ballets, for starters, ‘The Waltz of the Flowers’ from The Nutcracker, then a waltz from The Sleeping Beauty. My shoes creaked on the pedals, I really hated that sound. After Tchaikovsky I swung out into Mozart. In the pause between two Sonatines Viennoises, Leland came into the lounge.

  ‘What did you ask the poor lad for?’ he whispered. ‘A do-re-mi?’

  ‘A daiquiri,’ I whispered back.

  Leland shook his head.

  ‘A daiquiri, bloody hell.’

  He nodded deferentially to the guests who were peering at us over newspapers and the tops of reading glasses. A few minutes later the boy came in with a daiquiri in a cone-shaped glass, with a layer of sugar around the rim, just the way I liked it.

  Linny was thrilled by how I brought Mozart to life. Outside, the darkness slipped into streets and doorways; in the lounge, the dry logs crackled on the fire. I remembered a similar afternoon, long ago in Vienna. My mother and I had stayed there for a few weeks while she was doing Josephine Mutzenbacher’s 1000-and-1 Night. On that gray December afternoon, I had left our hotel on the Kärntner Ring and took the bus to the Sankt Marxer Friedhof, in search of Mozart’s cenotaph. I wasted so much time trying to find the right bus that it was growing dark by the time I reached the graveyard. The gate was already locked. Through the bars, the only living thing I saw amid the graves was a little white dog. Going around to the side of the cemetery, I scaled the low wall with the help of an elderberry bush. I wandered at random between the trees, with dark webs spun in their crowns. Here, somewhere, was where they had buried him after sunset, on 5 December 1791. The official burial act spoke of an einfachen allgemeinen Grab, but which plain grave it was, they had apparently forgotten right away.

  At an open spot where the last daylight was lingering I found a stone pillar, artfully carved, against which a mourning angel leaned its forehead. It was a friendly angel, one which, when I was gone, would lift its head and quietly sing Der Tod, das muss ein Wiener sein.

  The gray paving stones outside the inn shone in the soft drizzle; I took an umbrella from the stand by the door. As I passed the restaurant I looked in. It was still early, only a few of the tables were taken.

  Many of the little fishing cottages were empty, they were only rented out to tourists during bathing season. The occasional window was lit. There was no one else out on the street, the sign above a shop door groaned in the wind. I smelled coal burning, and sometimes wood smoke. The fishing cottages of Alburgh, piled up against the slope, gave the impression of gradual, organic growth – like a shelf fungus or a colorful fantasy design by the Viennese decorator Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The little houses looked as though a couple of strong men could pick them up, just like the beach cabins down by the pier. From a distance, Alburgh looked like a mille-feuille, pastel-colored structures growing on top of each other in layers. Two towers stuck out above it all, the conical white lighthouse and the belfry of St. George’s.

  The esplanade was covered in orange streetlight. The cold metal of the balustrade above the beach bit into the palms of my hands. This was the decor of my teenage years, it made me feel like a tourist at Pompeii. When I did come across people on the street, I avoided their eyes; I didn’t want to have to guess at what the good people of Alburgh remembered about Marthe Unger and her son, Ludwig.

  What I missed when I knocked on Joanna’s door was the deep woofing of Black and White, the one so black and the other so white that they looked like a single dog with its shadow. Instead, angry barking came from the
other side of the door. When it opened, the little dog flew at my legs. A Jack Russell, his little teeth flashing frighteningly.

  ‘Down, Wellington!’ said the woman at the door. ‘Down!’

  Wellington was going wild. He leapt up against me and seemed bound and determined to sink his sharp teeth into my balls.

  ‘Oh, bleedin’ Jesus . . .’

  She seized the animal by the scruff of the neck and, in an outburst of fury, threw it into the yard.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said, ‘Welly is so . . .’

  Then it clicked into place.

  ‘Ludwig!’

  ‘Hello, Joanna.’

  She spread her arms and wrapped me in a musty embrace.

  ‘Ludwig, it’s so good to see you. My lord, come in, come in. Welly, go fuck yourself !’

  She slammed the door. On the other side, Wellington was still going out of his mind, scratching his nails against the wood.

  ‘He’s such a dear,’ she said, ‘but so jealous. The children gave him to me. That way they don’t have to worry much about their old mother, they figure. I’ll let him in when he calms down a bit.’

  But on the other side of the door, Wellington was not giving the impression of a dog soon tuckered out. Joanna led me down the pine-paneled hallway to the tiny, low-ceilinged living room. It was hot inside. No windows were open.

  ‘Would you like some tea? Or is it already time for something more fortified? Would you . . . ?’

  I saw that she was doing her best to keep moving, to keep up the cheerful tone, not to drop a single stitch for fear that otherwise she would come tumbling down, once and for all.

  Before the window was an ironing board, on the TV screen the anchorwoman on Channel 4 spoke to me intently without a sound crossing her lips. I leaned down to look at the proliferation of picture frames on the sideboard. Three sons and a daughter, decked out with good saintly names, surrounded by their partners and children. I’d never had much to do with them, they were older than me; two of them had already left home by the time we moved to the hill. One photo showed Warren and Joanna with three children around them; a fourth one, still a baby, lay in Joanna’s arms. Warren had a short black beard and dark-framed spectacles – no trace yet of the tattered Viking king I had known. He only became that once he left Joanna for Catherine, and moved to number 17. Since then Joanna had flown the Union Jack, never at half-mast, never lowered. It was a minor diplomatic provocation, Joanna knew that ‘the Irishwoman’ could see the flag from her window.

  The war between Joanna and Catherine knew neither surges nor truces. It simply lasted as long they both would live. I knew that Catherine, who did not have a driver’s license, never allowed herself to be driven past Joanna’s house on her way to the supermarket or Alburgh’s Catholic church, but always went via Flint Road and on to the back route. I suspected that during the years they had both lived on the hill they had seen each other at close range no more than two or three times, and that they otherwise remained phantoms in each other’s eyes. Their jealousy was in perfect balance, and had to do with the factor of time: time that both of them had not spent with Warren. Catherine grew feeble with rage whenever she spoke of the time during which Joanna was married to him.

  ‘Twenty-five years she stole from me,’ I once heard her say.

  Every word of it was true. Warren reveled in possessing a woman who fought for every atom of his being.

  Joanna in turn would not have hesitated to poison the Irishwoman for letting Warren give her the rest of his days. That was the bitter heart of their conflict: time. About the days they had not woken up beside Warren, not heard him gargling with mouthwash, not heard the door click shut when he left for the office, not seen him cut the cold roast or seen him slurp down his infamous homemade jellied fish. (My God, sometimes as many as twenty jars appeared on the table at once, each one containing something different from what the label promised, each one preserved with his own hands. ‘Eat,’ Warren said, and you ate. What you were eating you didn’t dare to ask, you chewed with bated breath and swallowed it all down. That’s what you did.)

  ‘Oh, Ludwig,’ I heard her say behind me, ‘it’s so sweet of you to drop by and see me. I was dying to know whether you had come, with this situation and all. Where were you when you heard?’

  She put two mugs down on cork coasters. Through the smoked glass of the dining table I saw a pair of mangled slippers, newspapers Wellington had torn to bits.

  ‘Would you like some milk, love? I didn’t put any in it. You always did like my tea, didn’t you, Ludwig? Pour the boiling water right onto the leaves? And only first flush? You haven’t forgotten, have you?’

  I was startled by the dog, that suddenly jumped up against the window outside. It drew its nails down the glass, it looked as though there were a little trampoline beneath the window. A horrible thing to see, that leaping dog trying to wrest a position of honor among the humans.

  ‘Aw, poor thing, I’ll just let him in.’

  She left the room. The dog came storming in. Right away the animal resumed its animosity and began barking so shrilly that it hurt my eardrums.

  ‘Welly, stop that immediately!’

  Wellington moved back a few steps and shut his mouth. Joanna put the milk on the table.

  ‘Good dog, that’s a good boy, good Wellington.’

  I reached out and petted him gently on the head.

  ‘Don’t touch his ears!’ Joanna said in a fright.

  I yanked my hand back.

  ‘He’s very touchy there,’ she said. ‘I think it’s something traumatic. You can pet him wherever you like on the rest of his body, with the grain as it were, but he’s ever so touchy about the ears, aren’t you, Welly? Does Welly want a biscuit?’

  At the word biscuit, the animal rushed forward and leapt at the biscuit in her hand. The height of its jump, the perfect timing with which it snapped shut it jaws, was a wonder of precision. The biscuit disappeared without chewing. I tried to get a conversation going, about how she was doing, about the children, whether she still played golf, but Wellington never let me get a word in edgewise.

  ‘He demands a great deal of attention,’ I said. ‘You must be careful that a little dog like that doesn’t cut you off from the rest of the world.’

  Joanna nodded. From her eyes a river of love flowed in the little dog’s direction.

  ‘He must have been awfully lonely,’ she said. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t act this way. That’s what they all say. He’s overcompensating. The Jack Russell is such a people’s pet, they forget that sometimes. But it’s all in here.’

  She lifted a booklet from the top of a pile. Think Like Your Dog. Underneath it was a booklet from the same series, What the Dog Thinks of Its Master. Even more gruesome was Your Very Best Friend: Jack Russell.

  ‘Do you read all of that stuff ?’

  Joanna nodded vigorously.

  ‘I think you need to know what you’re bringing into the house. Most people have no idea at all, they just act.’

  ‘What happened to Black and White? Dead?’

  ‘They’re buried back in the garden. I had to put White down. That’s right, you knew them, the dears. Have you already been, up there?’

  The index finger pointing, not followed by the eyes, in the direction of number 17.

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘Yesterday. No, the day before. And you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t count anymore, they’ve wiped my name from the books. Isn’t that right, Welly? They don’t want the missus around, do they? I raised his children, but there’s no place for me.’

  The bitter lines around her lips grew deeper.

  ‘With all respect,’ she said, ‘you didn’t bear his children and you’re allowed to see him. So unfair, so cruel. They don’t want us around, do they, Welly? What they don’t know is how often he came down here, and not just for a cup of tea, oh no . . .’

  ‘Joanna . . .’

&n
bsp; ‘Would you like some milk? The English way, right, darling?’

  I couldn’t stand to watch this life in free fall any longer. After the tea, I left. Around my heart was a hand that squeezed.

  ‘Can you play something from Schindler’s List?’

  I looked up at the middle-aged woman. She was tapping her ringed fingers rhythmically on the piano’s frame. I raised my eyes to the ceiling and pretended to be turning an internal searchlight on the archives of my memory. Then I sighed deeply and said, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t seem to find anything from Schindler’s List.’

  She smiled as though I were a thing to be pitied. When the same woman came over later to ask whether I knew anything from Titanic, I was able to satisfy her with ‘My Heart Will Go On’, and asked her to forgive me for not sounding like Celine Dion. She looked at me as though the scent of my irony was not pleasing to her.

  Linny Wallace came back from the ladies’ room. A pair of blue jeans and a white blouse that shone like silk, with a high collar. Her lips gleamed like a polished apple. She had bound her straight blonde hair up in a knot.

  It was Saturday night, things were at their zenith. Saturday night was a ledge with on one side the week past and on the other the week to come – it was precisely atop that ledge with the steep slope of duty on either side that they felt free and came with their requests. The bar of the Schooner was transformed into a honky-tonk with the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, and a cluster of men at the bar sang along with the refrain to Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’. Oh yes, I was worth every penny. Linny was being chatted up by two men at the bar, they were in high spirits. Over the course of the evening the same boy who had waited on me that afternoon brought me two more daiquiris, sublimely mixed by Mike Leland. (I know there are those who say that you’re no credit to your profession if you drink while you’re playing. What can I say?) A nervous man came over to me and asked if I could play some Erroll Garner.