Kronk

CHAPTER THREE

They fed the cats. But before they did so, Gabriel received one or two interesting surprises.

1735, Babscastle Boulevard, was not an apartment as he had imagined. It was a large, detached house, mid-twentieth century rococo, standing in its own grounds surrounded by high walls. It must have cost the late Professor Eustace Greylaw a stack to buy or even rent the place. Maybe he’d been a forger, or a Member of Parliament, or even a bounty hunter.

Camilla led the way up the drive and placed her thumb in the id ring. The front door opened.

There, waiting to greet her, was a Bengal tiger. To Gabriel, it suddenly seemed as if suicide was no longer a matter of serious decision-making. Camilla, however, remained unagitated.

So did the tiger. A grey squirrel sat calmly on its back, cracking a hazel nut.

“Hi, Diddums,” said Camilla. “You missed me, didn’t you, fat old pussy? Say hello to the nice gentleman who snatched me from the Thames.”

The squirrel cracked the hazel nut. The tiger purred and held out its paw.

“Diddums likes you,” said Camilla.

“I like Diddums,” croaked Gabriel, the sweat pouring down his face. He had read somewhere — probably in an old book he had been sculpting — that animals could smell fear.

With supreme courage, he put out his hands and shook the extended paw. The tiger opened his mouth and yawned. Gabriel fainted. When next he returned to consciousness, cushions had been placed under his head and Camilla was trying to get him to drink something.

He held the attention of an admiring audience. One tiger, one squirrel, one lion, one lamb, one panther and one fat white rabbit. He tried to faint again, but without success.

“I should have told you,” said Camilla. “How stupid of me. I should have told you. But I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“It was a surprise,” admitted Gabriel. “Yes, there was definitely the element of surprise.”

He recovered sufficiently to sit up.

Camilla looked at the ring of animals. “Go away! Shoo! Shoo! The gentleman and I want to talk to each other without being interrupted by silly creatures like you. Go on, all of you, back to the basement.”

She drove the animals from the room. The lamb bleated, one of the cats sneezed with subdued thunder. Then there was the sound of a closing door.

Gabriel got to this feet and looked around. He was in what had once been a rather splendidly furnished room. But there were tooth marks on the grand piano and rabbit droppings on the unchewed sections of the Indian carpet. The long tapestry curtains by the french windows hung in tattered rags. The settee and easy chairs also had not been greatly improved by the frolicking of the big cats; and the squirrel, evidently, had chosen to secrete various hoards of nuts in the most improbable places.

Camilla returned. “I have left the garden door open so they can get a bit of exercise… Now, we’ll have a drink and a talk. You will help me to feed them, won’t you? I simply don’t like handling lumps of raw meat.”

“Whether I help you or not really depends on how convincing your story is. At the moment, as an ex-suicide I just feel very lucky to be still alive.”

“The procs introduced us, so I shall call you Gabriel and you shall call me Camilla. They are rather nice names. We should have met about two years ago, before I knew Eustace. Will you stay with me tonight? Do you drink whisky? Oh, and what is a book sculptor? It sounds dreadfully clever.”

“Do you always fire questions in salvoes?”

She laughed. “I’m sorry. Eustace used to say that I reminded him of Marilyn Monroe with a black thatch.”

“Eustace couldn’t have been that old.”

“He was, nearly. I mean he was about fifty years older than me. That’s why he married me -

because I reminded him of Marilyn Monroe. He had tapes of all those quaint old movies I think they worked on him like an aphrodisiac or something because he always — what did you say about the drink?”

“I drink anything. And frequently. At the moment, I feel most regrettably sober. Probably the result of trauma.” He watched her unlock an antique cocktail cabinet, the mahogany panels of which had not entirely been destroyed by playful wildlife, and pour the drinks. Big ones.

Looking at her, he decided that Camilla Greylaw was somewhat like the ancient sex goddess of the flicks — not so much in form, though there was enough of that to substantiate the claim, but more in manner. She had the same kind of impossible, wide-eyed, outrageous innocence — the childlike spirit imprisoned in a delicious instrument of orgasm. He liked her. It was quite possible that Fate or Kismet or that Great Computer in the Sky had rigged the rendezvous so that Camilla Greylaw and Gabriel Come might together stamp a few wild footprints in the sand.

She gave him the drink.

“Yes, I will stay the night,” said Gabriel. “It’s already late enough for students and bounties to take more than a passing interest in a lone traveller, hopefully once more pissed. Book sculptors, incidentally, make sculpture from books. Logical, creative, even useful. Who reads books any more? They only take up space, collect dust and feed bugs.”

“Students, yes. Bounty hunters, surely not. They have to wait till you’re dead, don’t they?”

“The more ambitious groups arrange matters for themselves… I think I would like another drink, please. Then you shall tell me what you said you should have told me. The drink may help me to believe it.”

Camilla downed her own whisky and refilled the glasses. “Let’s sit down,” she said. “The cats make a mess of everything. But the settee is still sittable. They will have to go, of course.

I can’t live alone with a menagerie.”

“The best place to begin,” he suggested, “could be the beginning.”

“That means Eustace. At least for this beginning. There were other beginnings, but they didn’t involve cats and suicide.”

“They will keep until this one ends. That reminds me — where did you get that five-kilo weight? It has been worrying me. I think we left it on the bridge.”

“Eustace used it for weighing cat meat… It was quite romantic, I suppose. We met eighteen months ago in St. James’s Park when I was feeding the ducks and being attacked by a swarm of prepubes. I didn’t realize they came out before sunset. But it was winter, and that might explain it.”

“Did the little people want something special?”

“Just the usual. Money, jewellery, clothes. I don’t think they really wanted to hurt me. The eldest was a terrifying child with two great scars on her cheeks, about ten years old.”

“What did Eustace do — call the procs?”

“No, he dropped a gas egg. He always carried one or two with him. He was a very gentle person. He just couldn’t stand violence… The gas hit us all, I think. When I woke up, I was here, still half undressed, and Eustace was watching Marilyn Monroe on the plate. I told you it did things to him. He saw I was awake, then he just looked at me and went mad.” Camilla took another sip of whisky and laughed. “Poor Eustace! White hair, a Siggy Freud beard, striped trousers. He hadn’t had a woman ever, I think. What a mess he made of it! I didn’t know whether to mother him, show him how to do it or sit in the deep freeze. Afterwards, he spent practically all night crying and saying how sorry he was and how rich he was and conning me into a two-year marriage agreement.”

Gabriel drank some more whisky to slow down his confusion. “And you married him because you felt sorry for him?”

“No, Gabriel. I married him because I felt sorry for myself. Before Eustace came along, I’d had a sort of drifting time. With men, I mean. Everybody seemed to want to bounce me, but nobody wanted to keep me. A lezzylove I used to sleep with when I was off the hot rod kick hit it right on the dildo. She said I was too intelligent and too stupid.” Camilla also drank more whisky. “Too intelligent for the meat men and too stupid for the think tanks. I was the little doll they took to bed at night and put away in the morning. The trouble was, I could never afford a bed of my own.”

This time it was Gabriel who poured the drinks. “I hope we are not more than half a bottle away from the pacifist tiger bit.”

Camilla yawned. “Shouldn’t think so. But there’s a problem. I’m in the prommy phase, which is phase one, and whisky makes me more prommy, anyway. But you can’t do it because of the dread disease.”

“What disease?”

“V.D. Actually V.D. P 939, silly.”

Gabriel felt dazed. Very dazed. It seemed long long ago since he had been innocently corrupting a raven at the Albert Memorial. He thought it high time he got a grip on reality. He thought it high time, also, that Camilla resolved various mysteries before too many others accrued. Eustace was a key word. So was marriage. He tried them.

“Eustace. Marriage.”

“Yes, well, it was a two-year thing with five thousand on signature and five thousand on completion. Completion, by the way, is/was two or three months off. I told Eustace I wasn’t going to renew.” Camilla sighed. “Perhaps that’s why he sliced himself on the Circle Line… I thought it was a reasonable offer, because ten thousand pounds will buy a fair amount of time and freedom and things, when you consider. Besides, I wasn’t going to spend anything during the two years. Eustace had promised clothes, holidays, everything. He was a dear, really. I didn’t even mind the Marilyn Monroe tapes and the fabulous fumblings. Left to his own devices, he could usually manage an orgasm after an hour or two. No, the one thing that really threw me was when he started turning the love nest into a refuge for bent animals.”

“Where did he get them?”

“Coming, coming, coming to it,” announced Camilla. She rolled her eyes. “Better not give me any more whisky, archangel mine, otherwise the wondrous tale will fizzle… Yes, he stole them. That’s why top shriek — top secrecy. Do you know anything about mollycollybology?”

“Try again.”

She tried. Hard. “Molly-cular-by-ology.”

“Molecular biology. No. There was something about it, I think, on the buttock of my last reclining nude. But I didn’t trouble to read.”

“Ever the gentleman. Well, do you know anything about D.N.A.?”

“To surprise you, yes. It’s a nucleic acid containing a sugar called deoxyribose. Further it lives — if one may flog the term — in the cell nucleus. Moreover, it is a double helix molecule which is the very stuff of life… I read that bit on the breast… D.N.A. Yes, I’m for it, on the whole.”

“Don’t confound me, Gabriel. Because I don’t know anything at all about molecular biology, D.N.A., enzymes or anything else that goes bump in the lab. But Eustace did. In fact, when he wasn’t getting hot about Marilyn Monroe and sweaty about me, he was away in his stunt house practising all sorts of perversions with bacteria, hard radiation, Petri dishes and God knows what other sex substitutes… But the message is as follows: he finally designed — he was fond of that word design — an interesting little creature called P 939. Its base model, he told me glowingly, was the bacterium that causes syphilis — a spirochete, I think he called it.

But according to Eustace, P 939 was the best and latest venereal disease in the business. No really nasty effects. Except that if you caught it, you couldn’t be beastly any more. I’ve changed my mind. I need another drink before I lose it all.”

Gabirel poured some more whisky into each glass, and was saddened to find that, as a result, the bottle was empty.

“What do you mean, you can’t be beastly any more?”

“The aggressive instinct goes phut. P 939 inhibits aggression. You can’t make war, you can’t knock people about, you can hardly bear to upset them, even. That’s what P 939 does to us. Fiendish, isn’t it? When Eustace was sure he’d pulled it off, he thought he was Jesus Pasteur and Mahatma Einstein all rolled into one.”

Gabriel drank some more whisky and looked at Camilla. He was in no shape to concentrate further on the saga of P 939. He was, however, able to decide that it would be a good and charitable act to offer Camilla Greylaw some consolation for her recent bereavement.

He kissed her. Camilla dropped her glass.

“It is all immensely interesting, but the rest of the story will keep. I fear I have an urgent engagement.”

“Where?”

“In bed with you.”

“The cats. You promised to help feed the cats.”

“What will happen if we don’t feed them till morning?”

“They’ll cry. I couldn’t bear them to cry. I suppose it’s because I’ve got P 939 myself. And that’s another reason why we shouldn’t make love.”

Gabriel sighed. “All right, the cats first. As for the dread disease, my dear mother at the Yurkuti Embassy used to say that a trouble shared is best shared in the most enjoyable way possible… Eustace had a limited imagination. You are more than Marilyn Monroe. You are Ayesha, Helen, Cleopatra, Elizabeth of Austria.”

Camilla stood up, swaying a little. She felt weak at the knees, but it was a weakness not entirely due to the whisky. Gabriel held her close, remembering how he had held her on the bridge. Suddenly he was full of fierce possession. He had saved her from death and now she would repay with life. Big joke.

Camilla seemed to be shivering. “Let’s deal with the cats quickly,” she whispered.

“Elizabeth of Austria is in season.”