Instruments of Darkness. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ girl with close cropped hair and a long neck was playing some Billie Holiday and looking out to sea through the arched windows. There was nothing out there except the dark.

      At the bar, balancing on one leg of a four-legged stool, was a Lebanese guy in his early twenties. He had his palms flat down on the bar, his head hung at a level which gave him a perfect view of the whisky in his glass as he spun from one side to the other on the axis of the bar stool’s leg. A Togolese girl was drying some glasses and looking at her single customer with concern and disdain. I stood at the bar and the Lebanese looked at me from under his armpit. His lips hung slackly.

      ‘Charlie?’ I asked the girl.

      The Lebanese swung his head up to look at her too quickly and too hard and it took several adjustments for him to focus. The girl shrugged at me with her eyeballs. The Lebanese gave me an exaggerated translation which was too much for his tenuous equilibrium. The stool spun violently on the axis of the single leg and sent the Lebanese crashing against his back into the bar. The stool slipped away from him and entangled itself in his legs, impairing his recovery so he had to throw himself on the mercy of two other bar stools who wanted nothing to do with him. He came down hard on the tiled floor with the chrome bar stools bouncing around him like a street gang. The pianist stopped, swivelled around on her bottom and gave us a clanging discord with her elbow on the middle section of the piano keys. It had been a very quiet evening.

      The Lebanese needed plenty of help but looked as if the exercise might sober him up. I walked to a door at the end of the bar, opened it and caught a faceful of sea air. It was only four or five yards across some damp, hard ground to Charlie’s house. There was a light on. I closed the door on the Lebanese who was finding new ways to say putain merde. Billie Holiday resumed.

      Charlie’s maid answered my knock as if she’d been waiting on the other side of the door all evening. I stood in the hall which had a single light in it, shining down directly over a plinth with a slim-necked pot on it which spouted a flower with a long green stem and a head like a bird with an excited comb.

      I was trying to work out what this image was saying to me when Charlie’s maid returned and led me down a dark corridor to the living room which, like the bar, looked out through arched windows on to the sea. There was no sound of air conditioning but it was very cool in the room, and although there was no smoke, the smell of Gauloise was strong.

      Charlie was sitting on the edge of a ten-foot white leather sofa, right in the middle with his legs apart, his forearms resting on his thighs and his large hairy hands dangling in between his knees. There were two women each sitting in a corner of an identical sofa opposite him. There was a tiger skin rug laid out diagonally between the sofas held down by a large glass-topped table with three glasses and an ashtray the size of a cymbal on it. One of the women had her bare foot in the tiger’s mouth; a long canine slid in and out in between her big and second toes.

      ‘Bruce! My God!’ said Charlie in his expansive American businessman’s way. ‘How ya doing?’ He came over and clapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand in his strong paw. Charlie looked shorter than he was only because of his width. He was six foot and a little slimmer than a brown bear but with no less body hair. It would be a big mistake to say he was fat and an understandable mistake to think it. He had a covering. Something for the winter, he would say as we sat outside on a December evening in ninety-five degrees, sweating like pigs, drinking dry martinis made with gin and an olive and held in the general direction of Italy for the vermouth.

      He was bald and employed no techniques for disguising it, although I’m sure he could have trained some hair up from his shoulders and worn his collar up if he’d wanted to. His bare head was tanned dark brown and shone like polished teak. His remaining black hair was cut very short. He had strong black eyebrows which you would have thought would meet in the middle but didn’t, and a thick bristly moustache. His eyes were dark green with long dark lashes, his cheekbones high, his jawline solid and square at the chin with a dimple on the point. The bottom lip of his mouth was full and tanned so that when he licked it, as he often did, it was the colour of fresh liver. Like most Americans, he had ten thousand-dollar teeth which were all his own but didn’t look it.

      Charlie had a big head, a big tanned head for a big hairy body. He was very strong but with no use for his strength other than drumming figures into a calculator. He was benign when sober, hard but not unpleasant when he was doing business, affable and charming when he was being social, but when he was drunk there were probably only a couple of things in the world more unpleasant – a fighting bull that’s caught your eye in an open street is one of those things that springs to mind. He was wearing a pair of dark blue chinos, a yellow short-sleeved shirt and no watch. He kept that in his pocket on a long chain connected to his belt.

      He introduced me to the two women who had both looked up with their eyes. Jasmin, who had her tanned foot in the tiger’s mouth, had very long legs inside some equally long, baggy blue jeans. She wore a white T-shirt with what looked like her DNA on the front. She had short, straight blonde hair, very big blue eyes, a long and pointed nose and a mouth full of £25.50 teeth which were all her own and looked it. She had to be English, which she was.

      Her arms were long and slender with small hands, one of which played with a lighter, the other held a cigarette. She smoked like a schoolgirl, the cigarette held at the very tips of her fingers and puffed at like a pecking hen. She was nervous despite the relaxed sprawl. There was a lithe sexuality to her boyish body and a surprised innocence to her eyes which I am sure triggered off base thoughts in the minds of a lot of men. I realized that she was the woman I’d seen on horseback that morning on the way to Ghana.

      Yvette, who sat at the other end of the sofa from Jasmin, had more sophistication than the rest of us put together. She had very dark, shoulder length brown hair, styled with a nostalgia for the fifties movie star. You could see the same head of hair with one of the non-hats and some netting that they used to wear in those days. Her eyes were quite wide apart and, although large and rounded, narrowed at the edges with an Oriental sharpness that wasn’t done with make-up. They were violet in colour and made her look more feline than any woman I’d ever seen. Her nose was small for her face, which had high wide cheekbones and a wide, full-lipped mouth with a pronounced cupid’s bow. She wore a pale purple lipstick and her teeth were small and white with a gap between the front two which she had a habit of tickling with the tip of her tongue. Her skin was perfect white with not even the first hint of a line or a crease. I was looking too hard and too long.

      ‘Did I miss something shaving?’ she said to me in a deep, cracked voice with a French accent.

      ‘No,’ I said, taking the opportunity to look over her face again. ‘Very close, no cuts. Perfect…not the first time, right?’

      She threw her head back and laughed through some gravel in her throat which trembled the white skin and light blue veins of her neck.

      I sat down opposite her and took another look while Charlie did something about everybody’s drinks and looked over his shoulder at Yvette – a lot. She wore a pink crêpe jacket, and a blood orange crêpe sarong which was split to mid thigh. The jacket wasn’t fastened and I could see from her exposed waist that she was naked underneath it. A long orange and pink silk scarf dropped down from around her neck and covered her breasts. Like Jasmin, she sat low on the sofa, her legs crossed at the knee, and her bare feet nodding. She smoked an untipped Gauloise, thick and fat as a chalk stick, with the relish of a true professional. Charlie handed me a Scotch with ice and sat on the sofa next to me.

      ‘Yvette tells me they don’t believe in marriage in France,’ Charlie said as he sat down. ‘Says they have this thing concubinage instead.’ He strained his whisky through his moustache. ‘Sounds kind of interesting, you know, concubines and that. Sounds to me as if you could trade ‘em.’

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