The Pearlkillers Page 11

  ‘Let her go,’ Gerda said.

  At the piano Ursula stopped playing. She lifted both hands from the keyboard in a concert-hall flourish. She looked at Carla. ‘Your mother’, she told her, ‘betrayed her family.’

  ‘She married an outsider, that’s all.’

  ‘We always marry Germans.’

  ‘Or if you don’t, you don’t get married?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s better than ending the way she did.’

  Carla stood up. Gisela, slowly, tried to follow; she scolded Ursula for her tactlessness.

  Carla moved quickly from the room. Behind her she heard the piano starting again. Ahead of her Agnes – large-nosed, thin-lipped, with her hair scraped into a bun and a smirk on her face – reached for the screen door.

  ‘Carla dear, please wait,’ Gisela begged.

  As the old woman came wheezing up to her, Carla turned and held out her hands. ‘Aunt Gisela, it’s been really nice meeting you,’ she said, ‘but not the others.’

  ‘They don’t understand. They don’t see anybody all year long. They forget how to behave. I’m the one who deals with everything. They haven’t been out of the house and garden for over twenty years. I think your mother’s engagement party was the last time they went out. And that was only to make a big scene and say they wouldn’t come to the wedding. You have to understand. They’re old.’

  ‘Were they wonderful and kind when they were younger?’

  ‘Well, I suppose they’ve always been difficult.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Carla said.

  ‘Yes, please. Please, Carla. I want to ask a great favour of you. There’s something I want you to get for us. My cousin, Theo, took it. It didn’t belong to him – it belongs to us. You will promise, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll come see you tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go now.’ Agnes swung the door ahead of her.

  She ran down the steps and away.

  *

  She lay on the bed in her motel room and wondered if she’d have the nerve to pack up and just get out in the morning, leaving one of those messages that said, ‘Called away suddenly’. But that was what other people had done to her all her life; she couldn’t be the one to do it to someone else. She especially shouldn’t do it to Aunt Gisela, who didn’t deserve to be treated like that. Aunt Gerda would be a different matter. And the other one, Ursula: sane but nasty.

  She also wished that she had a very large drink. She should have bought a bottle someplace. She wasn’t the kind of woman who went into bars on her own. She didn’t really want to go swimming alone in the motel pool, either, but if she just stayed sitting in her room, she might start thinking about her ex-husband again. She might even imagine how her divorced mother had felt after she’d left her child with its grandparents. Her mother had checked into a motel room – maybe a room very similar to that one: and had ended up cutting her wrists.

  The view from the windows showed a parking lot and beyond it the old jetties. Across the river stood abandoned brick warehouses and behind them, pine trees. The sky was a firm, northern blue, only just beginning to darken. Even in her aunts’ neighbourhood, among the large houses and plush green lawns, the sky had that look. It reminded you that nearby were the lakes as big as seas, and the unbroken miles of evergreen forest that used to be the country of the Indians.

  Her telephone rang. When she picked it up a man’s voice told her that he’d had a call from her great-aunt Gisela and he’d like to talk to her for a few minutes, in person, if she didn’t mind. His name was Carl Raymond.

  ‘That sounds like two people,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When did you want to meet?’

  ‘I kind of thought right now. I could take you out for supper and we could talk. My uncle George is your aunts’ accountant.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. The information meant nothing, if true, but it persuaded her.

  She took a shower and changed into a dress that was still slightly wrinkled over the skirt.

  He was waiting at the reception desk. He’d been gossiping and joking with the clerk, who said to her, ‘I didn’t know you were a friend of Carl here, Miss.’

  ‘We’ve never met,’ she said. She put the key down on the counter and held out her hand; Carl shook it. He said he was glad to meet her: they had a lot to talk about. ‘First of all, some food.’

  ‘What’s wrong with here?’ the clerk asked.

  ‘Go on,’ Carl said. He took her by the elbow and led her out to a car. He told her, ‘It’s a long story, and I’ve just come off work. I’m going to need a drink before I can get it straightened out.’

  ‘That’s fine by me,’ she said. She began to perk up. Always, she thought, just when she was ready to throw in the towel, something nice turned up. And she still hadn’t learned that it always would: the pleasant and unpleasant ran in tandem. But whenever she began to feel dejected, she forgot: the bad times seemed to be going on for ever. Maybe it was possible that she’d inherited the predilection from her mother.

  He parked the car and took her in to the kind of bar and grill that made the customers put on ties. The lighting was subdued enough to hide her badly-ironed skirt.

  They each had two drinks. She got a good look at him while he was ordering the meal: he was tall and well-built, about her own age and had a squarish head, pale blue eyes, a strong-featured face, small regular teeth. His hair was straight and light, clipped short – almost like a crew cut, which made his ears appear to stick out a little. Most people would have considered him a good-looking man. She thought he was all right: nice but rather uninteresting. She’d grown too used to her husband’s dark, frizzy-haired, ugly-romantic looks.

  ‘Carl and Carla,’ he said. ‘That’s sort of a coincidence, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. We sound like a comedy team.’

  ‘Well, some kind of a team, anyway. I’ll drink to that.’

  ‘So you’re an accountant?’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m in real estate. It’s my uncle George who’s their accountant. At least, he’s still your aunt – your great-aunt – Gisela’s, but there’ve been arguments with the other two. Maybe you didn’t know it, but your aunts have a big reputation in this neck of the woods for—’

  ‘Eccentricity?’

  ‘And general cussedness. And when they don’t have much to occupy their time with, they get on the phone and try to strike points against each other through a third person.’

  ‘Uncle George.’

  ‘And Uncle Bertram at the bank and my father, before he picked up and moved. He was in the same firm as one of their lawyers, Sandy Howe. Mr Howe used to say it was a lean week when one of them didn’t want to change her will. Anyway, I guess they’re an institution by now. Life wouldn’t be so colourful without them. And they went through quite a lot during the war; during both wars, there was a lot of anti-German feeling.’

  ‘But they’ve lived here for a hundred years.’

  ‘They didn’t mix. They wouldn’t talk English. They wouldn’t marry anybody who wasn’t from a German background. My family was mostly German, too. A lot of this town was. But nobody else thinks of it that way. We’re all American. Your aunts aren’t. They never wanted to be. And they told everybody about their titles.’

  ‘That wouldn’t have made them disliked. That’s something everybody laughs at. Even the mailmen.’

  ‘It isn’t democratic.’

  ‘If it’s true.’

  ‘Oh, it’s certainly true.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Without a doubt.’ He began to tell her about the family’s holdings in Eastern Europe.

  Their food came and he continued to talk. She could see he was a man who could be driven to frenzy by the idea of large stretches of saleable land. She wondered if perhaps the three old women had decided to bamboozle him just for fun.

  Over coffee he went on to tell her about the houses and estates they still had in countries that recognized t
heir ownership. ‘They’re millionaires,’ he said. ‘Multi-millionaires.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘I just wanted you to know that if there’s any difficulty about the estate, you could fight it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re the heir, aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Surely.’

  ‘Not at all. They cut my mother right out of their lives when she married.’

  ‘Your mother, but not you.’

  ‘Me too, I’m sure. It’s what they call Sippenhaft.’

  ‘I think you’re the heir. And if you weren’t, you could claim it. You could certainly claim it against the parlourmaid.’

  ‘Agnes? What’s she got to do with it?’

  ‘She’s one of the ones who’s put into the wills and taken out again every week. It’s how they keep her there. They make a promise and then they fight and they break it, and so on.’

  ‘What a life. How can she stand it?’

  ‘Not much choice, I guess.’

  ‘But how can she believe it? Obviously it’s a game they play.’

  ‘Nope. If they sign all the right stuff, it’s real. It’s binding. You could try to prove afterwards that the way they kept changing their minds was a sign of mental decay, and that they were being taken advantage of; but you’d have to fight it through the courts. You couldn’t just throw it out.’

  ‘Well, it’s no stranger than anything else. I don’t think it has anything to do with me. But thanks for the information.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Just thought you ought to know.’

  He took her back to the motel, walked her to her room, waited till she’d unlocked the door, and then pulled her back and kissed her on the mouth before saying goodnight. She went inside, shut the door and stayed looking at it. It was too short an acquaintance for him to be kissing her. And it was a long time since anything like it had happened to her.

  *

  As she was getting ready to go in to breakfast, her phone rang. Aunt Gisela was on the line. She sounded a lot more quavery than Carla remembered.

  ‘Please, dear, I know it must have been upsetting yesterday, but I’m not feeling very well – I don’t have the time to smooth things over the way I used to. Would you come over, please?’

  ‘All right,’ Carla said. ‘After I’ve had my breakfast. But just you. Not the others.’

  ‘They’re very sorry.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I said I don’t believe it. Ursula did the dirty work and Gerda thought it was a scream. They got a lot of pleasure out of hurting me. And I’m not letting myself in for a second dose.’

  ‘Oh, no. I’m sure—’

  ‘I mean it. If I see them, I’m walking out again. Agreed?’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Aunt Gisela said.

  Carla felt that she had taken action and made everything clear. Before the divorce she’d never spoken harshly or even decisively to anyone. She ate a large breakfast. Over her last cup of coffee she remembered that the evening before, she’d been ready to get out altogether. Now she really didn’t know what she was going to do except that when Carl had kissed her at the door she’d been given the impression of having a lover again. She could even have asked him in. It all started so easily, she thought. Again. She’d been sure she never wanted anything else to happen ever again.

  Aunt Gisela arrived panting in the front hall. She hadn’t been quick enough for Agnes, who whipped the screen door open and afterwards deliberately slammed it so that it twanged like a harp.

  ‘The humidity today,’ the old woman said, her breath whiffling; ‘or perhaps the pollen.’ She drew Carla down a side corridor and into a pleasant study overlooking part of the garden.

  ‘This used to be Albert’s room,’ she said. She waved her hand at a leather armchair large enough to have been the favourite reading-chair of a fairly big man. Carla sat down in it.

  Gisela seated herself bolt upright in a straight-backed wooden chair. ‘I must tell you some more about the family‚’ she said.

  Carla leaned forward. Her aunt’s narrative came out without pause, partly in English, partly in German, both broken by laboured breathing and a whistling from the lungs. Carla didn’t dare interrupt. It seemed like the kind of speech people gave when about to be executed – it appeared to cover everything Gisela had ever thought or remembered about the family, and included statements to the effect that: they were all under a blight; they had done many great wrongs to several other large and important families hundreds of years ago; they had lost kingdoms, or places as good as kingdoms; they were of royal blood; some of the family, led by cousin Theo, had managed to swindle the others out of a very great deal of money and property and were living it up on their ranches in South America; Theo had absconded with something called ‘Count Walter’s Treasure’, but it belonged to her – Gisela; he had ruined her when she was a girl and then laughed at her, and if there had been any consequences, she’d have had to – well, Carla knew what she’d have had to do. ‘And now getting old,’ she sighed. ‘But if you get the Treasure back, Count Walter’s, I’ll be well again. And it’s yours after me, you know. A part of your German inheritance.’

  ‘I’ll try‚’ Carla said. The old woman was in such distress that she’d have promised almost anything to calm her down.

  ‘I’ll pay all expenses, naturally. Carl is seeing about the tickets now. And he’s agreed to chaperone you. It wouldn’t be right for you to go alone.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He’ll be in Germany at this season. Or possibly in one of his Italian villas.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Then it’s all arranged. I’m so glad.’

  ‘Aunt Gisela, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Priceless. I’ll be well again when you’ve got it.’

  ‘I don’t even have my passport with me.’

  ‘You remember the number?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. We’ll be able to do something.’

  ‘How? That kind of thing takes time. And doesn’t Carl have a job someplace?’

  He’s saved up a lot of vacation-time. You don’t understand about Theo. Soon it’s going to be too late. I’m too old now. We’ve got to have it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If we die without the treasure ….’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t want to tell you.’

  ‘When you say it’s going to make you well: how’s it going to do that?’

  ‘By touch.’

  ‘Is it a kind of relic or something?’

  ‘Exactly. That’s the word. Isn’t it stupid – when I forget a word nowadays, I lose it from both languages. Occasionally I can get it again through the French or Italian. The mind is so weak, Carla. When you start wearing out.’

  ‘And Carl would go, too?’

  ‘He handles a lot of our business affairs now.’

  ‘What happened to his father?’

  ‘I believe they call it “mid-life crisis”. He started to want young girls instead of his family.’

  ‘Is Carl the only one?’

  ‘There’s another boy and a girl.’

  ‘And their mother?’

  ‘She’s still here, complaining. You can see why he went. But she wasn’t like that before he left. She’s become a different person.’

  Something made of metal clanked on to the floor just outside the door. It sounded like a bunch of keys. Aunt Gisela rose with an easy smoothness surprising in her condition. She opened the door.

  Agnes stood outside, not looking in any way bothered; she said, ‘Are you going to want lunch or what?’

  ‘A light luncheon for two, Agnes. In here. And then you may leave us.’

  ‘OK,’ Agnes said. She slouched away.

  Carla was on her feet, protesting that she had to go, she had to make phone calls about her business, she certainly couldn’t spend more than a week on vacation.
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br />   Gisela over-ruled her. She said quietly, ‘Yes, dear, yes,’ patted her hand, smiled charmingly and added, ‘but you know that I’m the one who really doesn’t have time, I can see it running out as clearly as if it were sand in an hour-glass. Just this one thing for your old aunt, little Carla.’

  *

  The phone woke her up early. She’d swum back and forth in the motel pool for twenty minutes the evening before, had had a large drink with her salad-bar meal and slept like a log. They weren’t supposed to give her a morning call; she had an alarm clock with her. It was still almost dark.

  ‘Yes?’ she said into the receiver.

  ‘It’s Carl. I’ve got some bad news.’

  She thought something must have happened to Gisela – a stroke or collapse of some kind. Or, maybe after all the excitement of the day and the amount of talking she’d done, actually her death.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the sirens?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  At some time around midnight, her aunts’ large house had burst into flames. Carl had been wakened, since his family lived so near. Half the town had been there, and the whole of the fire department. The house had burned for hours. In fact, it was still on fire. And as far as anyone knew, there were no survivors. That meant her three aunts, a cook, two parlourmaids and Agnes, who – the police were assuming – had been the one who had started the blaze.

  ‘Oh,’ Carla said in the dark. ‘Oh. I can’t take it in.’

  ‘Go back to sleep. I only called up because I didn’t want you to hear through somebody else. My uncles are going to be handling most of the paperwork, I guess.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I go out there?’

  ‘No. There’s nothing you could do. There’s just a big crowd of people watching the place burn to the ground. It’s OK about the passport, by the way. Or maybe you won’t want to go, now that they’ve passed on.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’ She said goodbye and lay back in the bed. She wondered about Agnes and whether the act of arson had been revenge for being cut out of a new will. She thought about the three old women surrounded by fire, then she pushed that thought away and went to sleep again.

  *

  In the first week they covered north and middle Germany and were headed towards the south. Uncle Theodore was always at some new address; he’d also sold a lot of his former property. Gisela evidently hadn’t kept up with his movements as well as she’d imagined. All the telephone numbers Carl had unearthed were out of date. Even the exchanges were different. Sometimes the new occupants they met would become interested and dispense friendly information and advice, none of which was of any help in tracking down the missing relatives; or, at least, not during those first few days. But Carl usually managed to get another address out of the people they interviewed – his German was better than hers – and so they moved south.