The Combinations, page 53
binbag. Němec limped over to the bottle. If he didn’t rush it, he could build a
decent breakfast out of the dregs. Which was what he’d been thinking before the
phone rang, he now remembered. He’d woken up not knowing where he was &
stumbled out on the stairs & down in the courtyard the caretaker had been
sipping at a bowl of garlic soup. The smell of it wafted all through the place, fit
to ward off a whole coven of vampires.
For some reason the smell of garlic soup had reminded him of the
Bugman’s story, about Geldzahler & his rotten luck, & then about the Prof,
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whose luck hadn’t been so rotten but hadn’t been exactly rosy either. The Prof &
his mystery book & Kircher’s letter & Faktor & the secrets of the Jesuit Order &
Roger Bacon & Rab Löw & Eddie K & why not Daffy Duck as well? The
whole thing made Němec feel lousy. He slumped down on the packing crate and
grabbed the bottle, getting it to his lips without shaking too much. Glumly he
stared at the binbag sitting in the middle of the room.
At some stage of his drunkenness the previous night he’d repented &
gathered up the mess he’d made of the Prof’s notebook. Bits of abortive engines
of flight driven head-on into a wall. There might even have been some sort of
allegory in that, he didn’t know, he was probably the wrong person to ask. Well
what chance did he have of deciphering the mysteries of the universe when he
couldn’t even make a paper aeroplane that flies? Time to take stock, like
Schliemann, making an inventory of the buried Trojan city he’d just demolished
with bulldozers while trying to dig it up. Well, what difference, if you played the
odds or the odds played you? No end of ways open to a dedicated loser.
Němec dug out an Aaron Copland recording of Mahler’s th* from his
box of vinyls & put it on the recordplayer, then found a working powerpoint to
plug it into. He took another swig of the bottle & tried to let his mind go blank
while he listened to the music, but it wouldn’t, & there on the floor in front of
him was still the binbag with the remains of the Black Book stuffed in it & there
was no way he could make the thought of it go away. Guiltily he reached over
with his walkingstick & pulled it towards him.
At some point during the night remorse’d set in & he’d tried to undo the
damage. But now that he saw it in the painful light of day… Wads of paper
higgledy-piggledy stuffed between the covers, the massacred binding, torn,
crumpled, dust-smeared, threatening at any moment to spill out all over the
place. It was less a book than a ruin of a book. For the next hour Němec sat on
the floor rearranging the mess he’d made, straightening, flattening, making a
semblance of order out of it. He stared at the frontispiece: Heaven & Hell, the
temptation of the flesh too-willing, the agony & ecstasy, symbolism even a
halfwit could grasp. What was it doing there, in that gnomic addressbook?
His head ached, his leg ached, his guts ached. He rationed out the
remaining slivovice. One sip at a time, he told himself , will get you through. At
least, once he’d done penance, he’d be in better shape to go down the street &
* Dedicated to our own dear Golem City no less, where its maiden performance took place —
sometime back when. [:]
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get some more. Get in some supplies while he’s at it, some candles, soap maybe,
milk for the coffee, some bread to soak it all up with, whatever. The longer he
worked operating on the remains of the Black Book, the more a kind of inertia
crept over him. It was like an ailment, he thought. All you had to do was touch
the damn thing & your brain started coming unhinged.
He focused on getting the pages in alphabetical order according to the
lists of names. As matters stood, at least half the salvaged pages were nothing
but lists of names & numbers, but the rest could’ve been anything, random
doodlings & bits of gibberish that looked just like that, gibberish. Wondering
why the hell anyone would go to the trouble. But no reason on that account to jump
to conclusions, eh, kiddo? A dozen or so contained nothing but vertical &
horizontal lines, with numbers & letters seemingly scattered about — as if the
Prof had tried to cram as many games of Noughts & Crosses onto the page as
possible, while at the same time keeping track of their order with different letters
of the alphabet, sometimes numbers, like there was some system being worked
through. Some sort of hypothesis, or a puzzle. The kind of thing, it occurred to
Němec, you’d find in the back of the Sunday papers next to the funnies. The
solution didn’t require too much brain work, though. On one of the pages a key
had been sketched out: there was nothing mysterious about it at all, it was the
type of code every kid knows from school.*
Němec grinned unconvincingly at himself, conjuring an image in his mind
of the Prof bent over his little Black Book, studiously playing a type of Masonic
ticktacktoe with himself, in the pursuit of the Great Conundrum. The Noughts
& Crosses were really letters arranged in different combinations — refinements
of the basic set-up, working it seemed by trial & error. A lightbulb switched on
* The code works with three small grids of nine “squares.” Each “square” is assigned to a letter of
the alphabet — leaving the very last position in the third grid blank — & these in turn are made to
correspond to a pair of numbers, or coordinates, obtained from a matching grid. Thus the letter A
corresponds to grid , position () — the letter Z to grid , position (), & so on.
[:]
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momentarily in Němec’s head. There, on one side, was the Prof’s tick-tack-toe,
& on the other a list of names with telephone numbers. Maybe the numbers
were bogus, maybe they were really an encrypted sequence of letters. Or maybe it
was the names. Intrepidly, Němec chose a phone number at random & plugged
it into one of the tick-tack-toe arrangements. Needless to say, he couldn’t get
anything out of it. His head ached more than ever. Maybe the answer was
simple & they really were just phone numbers? It would’ve been easy enough to
find out. Or maybe it wouldn’t. But that didn’t answer the question of what the
Book was for.* Well, what d’you call a lock, kiddo, when there ain’t no key? Or the
other way around for that matter.
Then an obvious thought occurred to him. He went back through the book
searching for something he should’ve looked for the first time around. When he
found it, it hardly seemed remarkable at all. On one side of the page was the
date, .X.. On the other, between ⊕ FABER & ⊘ FRANK
, was written ⊗ FAKTOR . Why wasn’t his name crossed
out? And what was the little circle with the cross in it meant to be? Němec
scanned down through the lists of names again — some of them, like Faktor,
had a symbol drawn beside them. There was a ⊖ GELNER , a ⊙
HERZL , a ⊚ JUNGER , a ⊛ KAMMLER
( Kammler, too!), & a ⊜ LAGNER .
The symbols had to’ve meant something. Němec stifled a yawn, flipping
back & forth. Mene, mene, funny symbols. Within this circle, blah blah blah…
Eventually he came back to FAKTOR. . It looked like a Golem City
telephone number alright. Maybe he should give the mad bastard a ring, hehe,
see how his heterocosmic conspiracy was coming along. (No point trying
Kammler, he was dead. Hello! That’d be a funny coincidence, the Wunderwaffe
* Ah yes, elementary indeed, my dear Němec! Might the names have belonged to people the Prof had actually known? Business associates, debtors, old friends, casual acquaintances? Was Němec’s task,
then, to find someone in particular? Or was the whole thing part of a more elaborate code? After all, a perfect cipher would either be perfectly camouflaged among elements of the everyday & in every
aspect identical to them, even to the point of verifiability — actual names & actual phone numbers, real pieces of information that would add-up if required to. An open lie, concealed so-to-speak in plain
view, like a, er, neurosis, hehe, & thereby, as the Good Doctor says, virtually invulnerable, as invulnerable as reality itself? ( Now yer suckin’ diesel, kiddo!) [:]
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Man in the same address book as dear old Faktor. Mmm.)* Something about
those symbols, too, all circles & suchlike, but it was the names they belonged to
— all Kraut names. Except Faktor. Faktor could’ve been anything. And then
there was the date. What did October have to do with Faktor, or any of the
others?
Němec glanced dubiously at the little black Buddha squatting in the foyer.
It seemed all so simple yet all too elaborate, like some secret ritualised intention
complicating the obvious. And Faktor, that purveyor of horoscopes &
conjurations — spleen of bat, eye of worm, hedgehog’s ear, crow’s foot, cock’s
comb. Němec could picture him, even now, with his hunchbacked dwarf
doodling symbols with a stick in the dust, casting shadows by candlelight, robed,
clovenhoofed, donkeyheaded, pouring dark libations upon some unsuspecting
virgin, bound in a posture of supplication upon an Egyptian alter, the winged
demon summoned from the depths by strange theremin-like emanations, etc.
But what if the Prof really had been tied up with something? And what if
Faktor wasn’t really the clown Němec had taken him to be? What if Faktor’s name
really was a clue he’d been meant to find? The question marks kept massing
against him. Němec felt suddenly like a man overboard in the middle of an ocean
— he could see no shoreline for the waves, while beneath him yawned an
immeasurable abyss. He drew a deep breath & glanced around the room to
reassure himself.* The record, almost without him realising it, had come to an end.
Everything else was as it’d been before. Everything except the Black Book. He
breathed out. Faktor, Faktor, Faktor. The name was like some terrible mantra. The
only thing to do, he decided, putting the issue to rest, was to make the call.
He went to the phone, lifted the receiver & dialled the number. Two-seven-
nine-eight-nine-six-one-eight. He listened. Nothing happened. The line was dead.
* � Chapter . Take a sneak preview, why the hell not? Němec already has. [:]
* Yep, it was still right where it’d been before, though funnier if it hadn’t. [:]
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27
___________
UNTERMENSCHEN
The entrance was down a steep flight of concrete stairs behind the boarded-up
château at the southern end of Shooters Island. A faint light was all that
identified it. The island, in the middle of the river, beneath the stone arches of
Legion Bridge, was to all appearances otherwise deserted, this as every other
night. A casual observer would’ve had no way of guessing there was anything
there at all but a ruin among the trees.
Němec found the doorbell and rang it. A heavyset doorman in dinner
jacket & tie peered out at him through a Judas-hole in a rusty steel door. Němec
held the calling card up so the doorman could see it, ROTAS OPERA etc., & a
bolt slid back on the other side. A green vapour spilled out onto the steps.
Crossing the threshold was like stepping onto the surface of an alien moon.
Behind the steel door, a dark curtain parted to reveal a kind of antechamber in
moth-eaten green chintz, its air musty with cigarette smoke & damp. There was
a dirty green carpet on the floor, threadbare green velvet drapes & half-a-dozen
tired green lampshades. Under one of which the doorman was standing
motionless & at attention, like an automaton awaiting its next set of
instructions, eyes slightly kinked: the spitting image of Tor Johnson in one of
those films, though something womanly about the set of the jaw, the cast of
those enormous yet finely boned hands.
The steel door seemed to close all by itself. Němec couldn’t help
wondering if he’d walked into some sort of B-grade production. House of the
Green Ghoul, maybe. He glanced around to get his bearings, read the signs.
There was a door to his left, marked
• P R I V A T E •
like a death notice in fancy lettering. On the right, a coatcheck half-hidden in an
alcove with empty racks making shadows on the wall. A couple of drapes divided
the space at the far end of this antechamber — voices were coming from the
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other side of them. Němec hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps in their
direction when a large toad of a woman, dressed in a frock & stole that
reminded of a bishop’s cassock, came through the doorway & barred his path.
There was a peacock’s feather stuck in a bird’s nest of dyed hair, loose strands of
which hung across a toadlike face smeared with an excess of Max Factor. The
creature’s mouth leered at him like a painted rictus —
‘Wilkommen mon ami, in zee Grünegast.’
Němec blinked. He supposed the Toad was meant to be a kind of
usherette. Or whatchamacallit? Maître d’. Or maybe “Madam” was the word you
were meant to employ in a place like that, figuring the Grünegast was some kind
of bordello with pretensions, a bit of the ol’ Old World & on the QT, like
something out of an UFA-era potboiler with Marlene Dietrich’s legs in the
staring role. He decided to play along, as if he had any sort of choice in the
matter. After giving him the once-over with a moneychanger’s appraising eye,
the Toad signalled to a scrawny-looking transvestite who’d materialised from the
back of the cloakroom, to come & sell him a ticket. Němec felt somehow
reluctant to part with his change, like paying the ferryman upfront. The
transvestite fidgeted with something behind the counter & handed him a
celluloid bow-tie & a slip of green paper with a number stamped on it. He
blinked questioningly at the tie.
‘Yer meant to stick it on yer collar, wiseguy. Dress code of the house.’
Němec fiddled with a pin at the back of the tie & somehow got it to stay
on his collar, its corners tickling his chin.
‘And the lid, buster.’
Němec made the face of someone who didn’t understand the language.
‘C’mon, hand it over,’ the transvestite snapped, pointing at the bowler
perched on Němec’s head.
He grimaced, stepped back beyond the transvestite’s reach.
‘What are ya, some kinda Zhid? Phoowee! Joint’s got no class no more.’
Saying so, the transvestite sashayed out of the cloakroom humming
something in a bored way. The Toad cackled salaciously at Němec’s elbow,
taking hold of his jacket sleeve with a beringed hand that would’ve made
Liberace, though perhaps not Göring, blush.
‘Mein Herr,’ the Toad croaked, as she guided him forward between the
drapes, ‘you air ’ere jist een time für zee Schauspiel.’
She widening her eyes a little to reveal a pair of lopsided green irises. There
was so much mascara on the eyelashes that to blink must’ve required real effort.
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‘Aye yam Meestress Veecaryoos, zee ostess, und toonight vee ’ave
quelquechose sehr spetzial…’
Her eyes widened a little more. Němec shivered. He felt like a fly being
ogled by a carnivorous plant — what the night’s “special” might entail, he didn’t
care to imagine.
The spectacle presenting itself on the other side of the drapes was at no
risk of being upstaged by the Toad’s entrance. The gilded bestiary calling itself
La Fée Verte was quite something to see. In its pursuit of kitsch, no visible effort
had been spared. Whoever designed it obviously intended to make a statement.
‘It ees zee first time you kommen ere?’ the Toad’s eyes glittered.
He nodded vaguely.
‘First time for everything,’ he said to himself without the Toad hearing it.
Němec took in the general layout. The place looked like it was supposed
to be some kind of cabaret, a throwback to something that’d probably really
never existed but who’d know, like a screenwriter’s idea of the Weimar Republic,
circa Kurt Weil. In amongst the elaborate gaudiness were the usual amenities.
At one end a cocktail bar with a fleet of doe-eyed “Ziegfeld” lookalikes perched
on stools making bored faces while they stirred their drinks with little plastic
