On an Odd Note Read online

  The bar was filling. Gino said, “Dear lady, you are always welcome, but since you are excited you had better go and rest a little.” On the verge of tears she exclaimed, “And a little while ago I could have employed this creature to brush my shoes, and he would have been honored!” But she walked out, pushing the revolving door so violently that it thudded fifteen times. A few seconds later we heard a woman’s scream, a screeching of brakes, and a smashing clangor of metal and glass. Everybody looked at everybody else. The door revolved again, very slowly, and the Countess came back trembling, with a pale face. “It just missed me,” she said.

  The chasseur, following her, said that she had missed death by inches, having stepped off the pavement in front of a speeding car which, swerving in order not to hit her, had skidded across the street into some railings. The Countess was ordering a drink. Gino, shaking his head at the barman said, “No, dear lady, this is all—no more. Just one last drink with me, for your nerves, and then God bless you! You must not come here any more.” She wept: “The Monk Paphnutius looked into my eyes . . . and I, who rule an Oriental Empire, that I should be spoken to like this, oh . . . oh . . .” Gino nodded and said, “Yes, Madame la Comtesse, even you, good-bye for God’s sake. You have an Empire, I have a License—enough is enough!” She went away, trailing her old-fashioned handbag, and Gino said, “Monks! Eyes! Empires! Licenses! I wish to God Almighty that I was an American sitting on a flagpole.”

  I never saw the Countess again . . .

  The waiter came back with the cutlets. They were burned on the outside and raw within. He was unconcerned. While a man at an adjacent table stamped his feet and beat hideous noises out of a crust with his knife handle, the waiter talked of Gino and of what a man he had been.

  “Except somebody sometimes he liked everybody always,” he said. Then the manager came and almost dragged him away.

  . . . I knew one of the men whom Gino did not like: a ruffian out of the Balkans, a man with a withered arm, who always had something to sell—a silk handkerchief, for example, with somebody else’s monogram or a fountain pen, fine today, oblique tomorrow, marked with any name but his own. He answered to the name of Stavro, and he was an unscrupulous villain, an unmitigated blackguard, and a swindler by vocation. His right arm and hand were bent into something like the shape of a tired rattlesnake. This deformity appeared to be the result of some recent injury, for the first time I saw him, in the spring of the year of Gino’s death, the arm was caught up in a black silk sling and he had the drawn look of a man suffering persistent pain. Even so, he was handsome in a dark, pantherish way; one sensed the man’s power over women and hoped that God would have mercy upon any infatuated creature that fell into his grip, for Stavro would have no mercy at all.

  I never saw a stonier pair of bright black eyes. He was short but beautifully proportioned, a sort of vest-pocket Hercules, unquestionably a dangerous man in a rough-house for all his fastidiousness of dress and manner, and his gentleness of voice. For no definable reason I also detested him; with Gino it was hate at first sight. Stavro had a disconcerting way of looking at you—he gazed right into your eyes with the hungry, immovable, wide-eyed stare of a pervert or a watching cat. He seemed to be having trouble with a match and a cigarette, so I offered him a light. He thanked me graciously and said, “This is nothing, this arm. I am almost ambidexterous. I can write with my left hand, even. Look—” He took out a fat green fountain pen, unscrewed the cap with the help of his fine white teeth, and scribbled Stavro on the marble-topped table “—Do you like my pen?” he asked.

  “It is very nice.”

  “You can have it for two pounds if you like. It cost me three guineas.” He was lying, of course; he was not the man to pay good money for anything. I wondered what he did for a living and concluded that he got a risky livelihood on the fringe of the underworld, buying things on credit and selling them quickly for cash, walking off with other people’s luggage . . . always moving quickly and quietly, elusive, a Disappearing Man in a conjuring trick, here today, gone tomorrow; best left alone. Later Gino said, “I am an old man and you are a young man. Allow me to warn you; keep away from that dark one. He is no good, he is a pomp.” He meant “pimp” and was not far wrong at that.

  Stavro went on talking, purring out self-glorification: “My left hand is as good as my right. I will show you something. There are not many men you know can do this—” He whisked an elegant pearl-and-silver fruit knife out of a waistcoat pocket, opened it with two fingers and his teeth, turned his head and pointed to a small wooden sign two yards away, which advertised somebody’s Highland Whisky in elegant gold lettering. “Which do you prefer? The dot over the i in Highland or in Whisky?” I did not know what he meant. He explained, “I will dot you the i in Highland.” Then, with a casual snap of his powerful fingers he flicked the little knife away. The point buried itself in the center of the dot he had specified. “Have I earned a drink?” he asked, retrieving his knife and putting it away. I said that he had, indeed, and I bought him one. In the end I bought his fountain pen.

  Stavro frequented Gino’s Long Bar for several weeks. His arm, free from the sling, was permanently distorted, fixed in its peculiar, weary, reptilian droop. He told me that all the tendons and muscles had been cut to pieces so that he would never use that arm again. He hooked himself on to me, and to others also. I was not sorry when Gino told him to go and stay away. “No,” he said one morning, as Stavro came in, “you are not coming here any more. Get out and keep out; I don’t want you in my bar . . . Why? . . . Because I don’t like your face in the first place, and in the second place you are keeping nice people away. Go, please.” Stavro, smiling with his mouth while he murdered Gino with his eyes, bowed and walked out. It is odd that, thinking of Gino, I should think of the only two customers whom I saw sent away from the genial and kindly atmosphere of his bar. Mourning Gino, I remember his enemies. It is strange.

  . . . As I have said, I never saw the Countess again, but I did meet Stavro once, nearly twelve years later. He had changed, so that I was almost sorry for him. Although he was still elegantly dressed and carried himself, as always, like a gentleman, he had got fat. All his feline litheness, all his supple charm, were dead and buried under an extra hundred pounds of flesh. I recognized him first by his right arm, which was still withered and useless, and then by his eyes, which were still bright and wicked. He, with his swindler’s memory, remembered me immediately, and greeted me as if we had parted only a day or two before. He asked me how the fountain pen was working. I had given it away ten years ago, cursing myself for having been hypnotized into buying it. I told him so and he laughed, and then we went to a nearby wine bar for a glass of sherry.

  I looked at Stavro in a mirror, as Perseus looked at the evil face of the Gorgon, and it occurred to me that while some great men may die with their best songs unsung, this fat crook was destined to go to the grave with most of his evil unconsummated. This idea filled me with a strange sense of peace; I knew, then, that while there is certainly a Devil, there is unquestionably a God. I said to Stavro, “Can you do with a couple of pounds?” He looked at me, stunned with astonishment. “Do I understand that you are offering me money?” he asked. “Without rancor, as man to man,” I said. He was touched. He took the money, bought me a drink with one of the notes, and put the change in his pocket. Then he said, “I accept your money in the spirit in which it is offered. I love frankness, openness, and candor between man and man.” He was a born liar. He went on: “And for this two pounds I will give you something worth two thousand. I will tell you the story of myself.” Stavro looked at me with expectancy, and made a protective gesture with his good hand, as if he feared that I might be thunderstruck and utterly overwhelmed by his magnanimity. But, observing that I bore up, he plunged straight into the great drainpipe of his past.

  He had been a very bad man indeed, worse than I could have guessed. Among other things, he had been a professional killer, an assassin employed by one o
f the political murder associations of the Balkans. I know that the man was a liar, yet what he said rang true; I remembered, for example, the terrifying little trick by means of which he had first aroused my interest, that trick with the knife. He was not, he told me, one of the directors of political assassination; he was an operator, an agent. He might work, for example, with a few underlings; he might, perhaps, train and arm a boy like Princip, the crazed student who fired the shot that started the first World War. Stavro had nothing to do with Princip, but he was involved in similar affairs. Several gentlemen (never heard of in Western Europe) big names in the Balkans, met their deaths through Stavro. In important cases he, Stavro in person, with his deadly right eye and terrible right hand, dealt with the killing.

  He was one of those men who have the knack of pointing a gun as you or I point a finger. He never missed. As for his nerves, he had none. It was not that he was fearless; he lacked the capacity to feel fear, just as he was incapable of understanding the meaning of pity. If it was necessary to torture somebody, Stavro would torture him, quite dispassionately. He was not a sadist; he found no pleasure in inflicting pain—it was all a matter of business, as far as he was concerned. I believe that in telling me all this he had in mind some rakeoff from a fat fee such as the Sunday newspapers were paying for stories like his own. He became explanatory, almost eloquent. With a passionless wink he told me that he knew perfectly well how nothing was any good without a love interest; and if I wanted love interests, good Lord, he could embarrass me with the richness of his love-life: he was Cupid, the indiscriminate gunman.

  He said, “There is, though I say so who should not, my dear friend, something in me to which women are—or have been—drawn, I tell you, as iron is drawn to a magnet. I was known as irresistible. Why? I will tell you why. With women, it is pretty much the same as with hunting wild animals; more often than not they run away a little ahead of the noise you make while approaching. Irritate them, and—in the case of fierce, proud animals—they will charge you in order to destroy you; and then, if you are a man with a clear eye, a cool head, and perfect confidence in yourself, the animal that charges you delivers itself into your hands. In other cases, for example shy and bewildered creatures, it is necessary to gain a certain advantage . . . to creep up, having calculated the wind. But that is neither here nor there.

  “My successes have nearly always been with the wild, fierce ones: there is infinitely more satisfaction as your Shakespeare says in rousing a lion than in starting a hare. ‘The blood more stirs,’ I think he said. I am a big-game hunter—irritate, stimulate; wound if necessary; arouse interest; then out of the undergrowth comes your animal, with slashing claws and foam at the mouth. Poor wretch! Little does it know that I am here with a thunderbolt, quite unafraid, almost sorry for it. Then . . . Bang!—a rug for my study. For example, there was in a certain city a woman who was known as ‘The Golden’—gold hair, gold skin, gold eyes, and as good as gold. I will tell you details . . .” And Stavro told me details.

  The lady to whom he referred was a famous beauty who had come out of a good family to marry into an illustrious one. She was the toast of her country, and her husband, the well-born and noble gentleman who adored her, was regarded as a fortunate man, since she remained unspoiled. The Emperor Franz-Josef had tried to lead her astray; her virtue was impregnable. Stavro, however, managed to assail that virtue. In the case of ‘The Golden’ it must have been the nostalgia for the mud, such as affects certain women from time to time. However it happened, Stavro succeeded. There was a hideous scandal. The lady’s husband blew his brains out. She had committed only social suicide, and lived on. She was ostracized; she went away, lived a gay life, ran through most of her money, lost the residue in the war, and went to the dogs. It was a nasty story.

  “Good, eh?” said Stavro. I made no reply; I could feel again in my nostrils the sulphurous bite of smoldering Evil that goes on and on and ends God knows where. Stavro continued: “I tell you all these things because I regard you as my personal friend. You don’t know what you have done for me in lending me this money—” He touched his waistcoat pocket. “Tomorrow is a bad day in my life. Tomorrow is my birthday. All my troubles began on my birthday—I was born; if I had not been born I should never have had any troubles. On my fourteenth birthday I was punished by my father for something I never did. On my sixteenth I did something and was found out. On my eighteenth, after a certain incident, I had to leave home. On my twentieth I went to prison, and escaped a death sentence by the skin of my teeth. On my twenty-first birthday I did an important job for Zedoff, risking my neck and getting two bullets in the shoulder, and I never got paid because Zedoff, losing his nerve, ran away to America.

  “All my life misfortune has followed me and has caught up with me invariably on my birthday; that is, tomorrow. And if I can, when the calendar tells me that it is here, I spend my birthday in a quiet place, in retirement. Your two pounds will enable me to do this: I shall go to a village near London and spend my birthday in bed. No harm has ever come to me in bed. What does your Bible say? ‘Cursed be the day . . .’ et cetera? Cursed be the day, cursed be the night . . . I am not a literary man. This arm, this good right arm, this piece of dead wood which I must carry with me to my grave—I got this on my birthday too. And here, by the way, my dear friend, is another little incident which might provide food for your satirical humor and material for your penetrating pen. (I am sorry, by the way, about that pen I sold you, and I will get you another, even cheaper and much better.)

  “I knew it, I knew that if I started important business on my birthday I should come to grief. But there was no way out of it. I was under orders from Marko. It was, I may say, a big job, and I will give you the details of it later if you think you can use them. You have done me a favor and I will do one for you, and we will split fifty-fifty. It is true that you write it down, but without—for example, me!—what would there be for you to write about? Do you realize, my dear friend, that I, the man you see before you, I, Stavro—I was the man delegated to kill a dictator? I will not insult you by asking whether you have heard of Mustapha Kemal Pasha, the Gray Wolf. God only knows what that man has survived. If I were religious I should say that God had chosen him, that God is keeping him for some kind of destiny, since he is the only man who, given to me for killing, is not yet dead. There was big money in it too. If I told you that my own share, after everything had been weighed and paid, was to be thirty thousand pounds, perhaps you would call me a liar? Yet this is the case, I give you my word of honor.

  “Marko had organized it. Kemal had to be at a certain place at a certain time, and when he got there, a certain gentleman (not a hundred miles from here) was to put a bullet out of a Mannlicher sporting rifle into him—a semi-hollow, soft-nosed bullet. And there was a crowd, actually and positively a multitude of reliable men hired and ready to cover my retreat. I tell you that there are fates, as your Shakespeare has it, destinies that have us in their power whatever we may do. Is it ‘Rough-hew our ends?’ or ‘Shape them as we will?’ I am no poet.

  “It was all organized; organized, cher ami, so as to be foolproof—it couldn’t possibly fail. I may say that with me gripping that rifle, with my eye looking along that barrel, Kemal was as good as dead. And I as good as had thirty thousand pounds in the bank; I mean, in the Safe Deposit, because I don’t use banks. All I had to do was catch the boat train from Victoria, and I left half an hour earlier in order to make assurance doubly sure. As I left my hotel I realized that it was my birthday, and fear came upon me. You know what I mean when I say fear.

  “I told the driver to drive with infinite care. He did, and a tire blew out. By the time we were ready to start again, a little time had passed and it was necessary to hurry. And then, taking a shortcut round Charing Cross and rushing through an absolutely empty street—what happened? Ha!

  “Some drunken woman steps off the pavement, my driver spins his wheel, we hit the railings of the church across the road, I put up
my hand to save my eyes and the shock of the impact sends it through a window; the glass cuts my arm into a fine fringe, and I am in hospital for two months. I lose my thirty thousand pounds; Mustapha Kemal lives; and I am a cripple! . . . There, for example, is my birthday luck for you.”

  I said, “If your birthday is tomorrow, that makes it September the fourth, doesn’t it?”

  Stavro nodded and replied, “Too true.”

  I bought him another drink. “Did you ever hear of the Monk Paphnutius?” I asked.

  His eyes narrowed. “What makes you ask?”

  I said, “Nothing. And as a matter of curiosity, my dear Stavro, did the lady known as ‘The Golden’ have a little scar on her face?”

  Stavro, tense as a hungry cat and watching me closely, said, “On her left cheek. What then?”

  I answered, “Nothing, nothing . . .”

  The waiter, having dealt with his impatient customer, came back with a deplorably soggy portion of pie and, lingering, said, “And that other one, that one with the funny arm. Eh? M’sieur Gino, he didn’t like that one. And look what happened to him, eh?”

  “Stavro?”

  “That’s it, Stavro.”

  “What happened to him, then?”

  “It was in the papers. The police was after this man with this funny arm, this Stavro. So he goes to Waterloo Station. So he buys a ticket to Walton-on-Thames. So he puts down a pound-note. So it is a bad pound-note. A counterfeit, a forgery. So one thing leads to another—see?—so in the end, so he runs away, and—bomp! Right! into a motorcar. Smash-bang! . . . no more Stavro. Last thing he says is, ‘So this is my birthday?’ ”