The New Republic. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ he felt. The reflection likewise elongated his frame to tower beside the bedpost, and Edgar was only five-foot-eight. It was a mirror made for self-deceit. What it must have done for Saddler, a much larger man by all accounts, well—he must have looked leviathan.

      Penetrating scents of cedar, sandalwood, and the residual haunt of a woman’s perfume intoxicated Edgar with the giddy notion of going back to bed. Rubbing his eyes, he ambled to the cavernous en suite bath to splash his face in the black alabaster sink. Drying, he plunged into a white towel plush as rabbit’s fur; the nap buried his fingers to the first knuckle. Scoping out the sunken tub—round, black marble, and wide enough for laps—he drew himself a bath.

      Edgar treated himself to warm-up hot-water blasts and picked through an array of toiletries—saffron conditioner, mandarin-and-cloudberry shampoo, almond oil, truffle-and-musk mud-mask: effeminate frippery. Edgar inclined toward plain Ivory and timeless Head & Shoulders: man-stuff. Still. He tried the cloudberry shampoo.

      The clothing he’d packed was clearly too summery, so Edgar was able to rationalize picking through rack upon rack of preposterous regalia in the walk-in closet: old-fashioned tails and cutaways, with magenta cummerbunds; kimonos whose dragons licked up the facing; quilted smoking jackets; flowing rayon shirts wide as kites, writhing with van Gogh sunflowers or flaming with foot-wide poinsettias; a charcoal woolen cape, lined with cream silk, fit for Bela Lugosi; some biblically voluminous caftans and togas; and a number of officers’ uniforms from foreign military outfits, whose appearance of authenticity was all the more reason not to prance around in them. None of the outlandish glad rags suited a man for writing, only for being written about. Although a smattering of standard Anglo fare—Burberrys, camelhairs, and tweeds from the finest London tailors—bespoke a journalist who occasionally did his job, the suspenders (braces, a voice whispered) marched with toy soldiers, and there wasn’t a tie to be found, just two dozen ascots.

      Impetuously, Edgar slipped a dressing gown off its wooden hanger. The radiant golden robe faced with plum brocade might have costumed Apollo Creed.

      Camp, sure. But somehow in their vastness all these garments stopped shy of kitsch. The lines of the finery were so drastic, their patterns so fantastic, their pretensions drafted on such a scale that they were rescued from ridiculousness by sheer audacity.

      Except on Edgar. A foot too long, the nacreous dressing gown dragged like a wedding train. The shoulder pads drooped to his elbows, and the sleeves dangled inches beyond his fingertips. Even in the magic mirror, he looked like a Norman Rockwell: Junior Wears Father’s Bathrobe.

      Fuck it. Edgar gathered the train and swirled out of the bedroom with a little transvestite flounce, assured that you could get away with anything so long as you did it with conviction.

      Nicola was right: the house was enormous. Edgar’s disgust that the National Record would coddle any correspondent with such palatial accommodations failed to undermine exultation at his own good fortune. Aside from the one tiny round tower, the villa rose only two stories high, but spread across what must have amounted to half a New York City block. Its Moorish architecture expressed the clean, wide lines of Frank Lloyd Wright fare, without the iciness of modernity. Hanging tapestries and Oriental carpet softened the perpendiculars of mosaic tile and marble parquet. Downstairs was constructed on a variety of levels, the floors landscaped into benches cushioned with rotund pillows. The dining area’s table, like the bath, was sunken.

      Though the western windows looked frosted, their panes were pitted irregularly: dulled by gale-borne sand. When the wind would poom a door against its frame, like a body slammed from the patio, it took practice not to jump.

      Edgar’s favorite room at ground level was the atrium: open and Romanesque, lit by skylights slit around the ceiling, and organized around a rectangular pool whose fountain still plashed in Saddler’s absence. The atrium called out for scantily clad slave girls offering fleshy grapes, palm-leaf fans, and a flow of red wine as ceaseless as the fountain. While Edgar formed an instantaneous affection for the hall, it also made him nervous. Lassitude! Indiscipline! Sloth!

      In fact, the entire villa was imbued with an indulgent sensibility to which Edgar was constitutionally hostile. The drinks cabinet clinked with a bonanza of top-shelf booze. Beckoning pillows plumping every room made Edgar’s head list and his eyelids heavy. Numerous guest bedrooms invited all-night social excess. The pantry, chock-full of absurd gift tins and jars—hazelnuts in Cointreau, glacé cherries, pickled quail eggs, smoked baby oysters—enticed three a.m. binges when no one was watching. Though the airy kitchen was fitted with every convenience, Edgar couldn’t picture Saddler chopping onions, and sure enough there was a Post-it note gummed to the Silver Palate Cookbook: “B, Could I leave this here for next time? See page 46—yum! —E.”

      Since Edgar could no more envision Saddler plowing through The Peloponnesian Wars in original Greek than slicing zucchini, the upstairs study’s glassed-in leather-bound library—rows of erudite European histories and biographies in multiple languages from Flemish to Hungarian—was expensive paneling.

      It was the study that showcased the got-the-T-shirt trinkets of a foreign correspondent, keepsakes that recalled the We Were There series that Edgar had devoured as a kid. In We Were There at Pearl Harbor … at Appomattox … at the Boston Tea Party, a pack of lucky brats always popped up at the right time and place. He should have told Wallasek that he quit being an attorney in order to jump between the covers of We Were There before it was too late, since no one was about to write a book about kids who serendipitously visit a corporate law firm in a season of hostile takeovers.

      At any rate, Barrington Was There. The room overflowed with souvenir booty: a rifle slug, a rubber bullet, a melted metal bicycle pump, a human skull with a patch of scalp sun-dried to the bone. A U.S. Army C-ration kit gritty in the crevices may have commemorated the Gulf War or the invasion of Panama; a tin ladle cleverly fashioned from a can of potted beef, marked “Gift of Finland,” must have been saved in fond remembrance of a famine.

      On the wide, curly maple desk sat a clear, catering-size mayonnaise jar, the sort coveted in primary school for terrariums. It brimmed with coins, from rands to bahts, including currencies, like the Zaire, that had become so devalued that its silver was no longer minted. Next to this cosmopolitan piggybank lay an unopened letter from Amnesty International addressed to Mohamed Siad Barre, a Spider-Man comic book in Russian, and a sheet of ghoulish “AIDS Has No Cure” postage stamps from Kenya. The left-hand desk drawer was brimming with electoral buttons: Vote for Marcos, Mengistu, Mobutu, Duvalier, Rabin … Mostly demagogues, plus Rabin had been assassinated: quite a cynical tribute to democracy. One file opened on the desk appeared to include every SOB atrocity claim and policy statement ever issued; another drawer rattled with microfloppies alluringly labeled SOB STORIES. The floppies could save Edgar some work.

      A set of three-ringed notebooks lined one bookshelf, and Edgar pulled the first volume: Saddler’s clip files. Edgar scanned the initial feature, an impassioned exposé about Thai prostitution—the slave wages, diseases, indentured servitude. Touching, if overwritten. But reading is the ultimate submission. Edgar shoved the notebook back. Turning gruffly from his predecessor’s accomplishments, Edgar started as a pair of eyes met his own.

      Well, well. The big, big, big man in the foreground of that black-and-white enlargement had to be none other than Himself. Saddler was seated on the downstairs ottoman, bulwarked by pillows. His barrel-chest burst with such self-satisfaction that it strained the rhinestone buttons of the tuxedo shirt. His eyes sparked with the sinister twinkle of Santa Claus paging kiddy porn. And his right arm was hooked in a virtual headlock around Nicola.

      Edgar was consternated. Sure, he’d caught the wink-and-nod in Wallasek’s office, but that was before he’d met her and before he knew she was married. Edgar was СКАЧАТЬ