The Pearlkillers Read online

  ‘It’s like the treasure-hunts my grandfather used to invent for us,’ Carla said. ‘At Easter, when we were children: you began with a poem that was a riddle. It led you to a certain place, where you’d find the next clue. And at the end there was a present.’

  ‘Lots of candy? A chocolate egg?’

  ‘No, we had that anyway. The present was usually a book.’

  ‘Bavaria next,’ Carl said. ‘We’ve even got castles on the agenda.’

  ‘Aunt Gisela told me the really big estates were in the east. Some of them were in Poland and Czechoslovakia.’

  ‘So they’re all collective farms by now?’

  ‘One of them’s a sanatorium and another one’s a kind of health farm, where people can do their exercises in beautiful surroundings. It had a famous park.’

  ‘Doesn’t it make you feel strange to know that your family owns those places – that they’re actually part of your inheritance?’

  ‘No,’ Carla said, ‘definitely not. One ordinary apartment is going to be plenty for me. What makes me feel funny is knowing I’ve got all these relatives like Uncle Theodore and Aunt Regina, and I’ve never met them. And now I can’t even find them.’

  ‘We’ll get you there,’ he assured her. ‘Plenty of time. I’ve got six weeks.’

  ‘Five, now.’

  ‘And we’ve got two good clues: Munich and Naples. Maybe we should split up for a couple of days. That might cut down on the time. How’s your Italian?’

  ‘It isn’t. Only phrases from operas: Ah, patria mia. Perfido amore. And so on. That’s about it.’

  ‘And I can ask what time the train goes and how much things cost. What do you think? I could go there and phone you in Munich. OK?’

  She thought it over while they ate lunch outdoors on a terrace crammed with iron tables, each of which had a striped parasol sprouting from a central bar that went up through the middle of the tabletop like the trunk of a tree. They were surrounded by Scandinavian and American tourists. Carla figured that she could find her way around another German city all right, but she wouldn’t have any idea how to go about making a phone call from one country to another, between two languages, neither one of which was her own.

  ‘All right,’ she agreed.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said.

  She smiled. He meant that he’d miss sleeping with her. All the time they were still in America, nothing had happened. And on the first night they’d spent in Germany, he’d come into her hotel room and that was that.

  They’d visited one or two places not on the list: she’d always wanted to see Heidelberg, so they’d gone there and had their picture taken together with what seemed like hundreds of other tourists; there were Americans all over the town, even though the summer was almost over.

  And they’d made a detour to a little church they’d been told about, which was supposed to be architecturally interesting. As they’d approached the place in their rented Volkswagen, Carla had suddenly seen the building; it stood on the top of a hill, among other gently rounded slopes planted with wheat that had already been harvested. The stooks were lined up in the fields, the sky embellished with puffy clouds, and the whole day was like an illustration from a volume of nursery rhymes. The church itself was of a dark, honey-coloured stone; the front looked like a Carlsbad clock one of her father’s aunts had owned.

  Most of the other tourists there had been German. They were taking photographs of the outside, and talking in lowered voices inside. As she and Carl entered, the change from bright light to the murky interior was abrupt. Carla had stood still. With one hand she’d held on to Carl. With the other she’d twiddled nervously at the small ruby ring her grandmother had given her in the spring.

  ‘This way,’ Carl had whispered. She’d followed him until they stood side by side, looking into a glass box let into the church wall. Inside the box was what Carla at first took to be a ceremonial robe laid out in splendour. And then all at once she realized that within the robe was a corpse. There had been fourteen of the things, each in its private showcase, all around the inner walls. They were supposed to be saints.

  ‘I’ll miss you, too,’ she told him.

  She got so lost in Munich, and so often lost, that she ended up taking taxis everywhere. It was pointless in any case; the two houses she was looking for, and of which she had several fine photographs, didn’t exist. In one instance, the street itself was no longer apparent. Everything had been bombed and built over.

  She walked around the museums and in the evening went out to a performance of a ballet. When she got back to her hotel, there was a message that Carl had telephoned. He called again at midnight.

  ‘Any news?’ she asked.

  ‘Lots. And I’ve talked to Uncle Theodore.’

  ‘Well, finally.’

  ‘Not completely. I talked to him on the phone. He’s in South America.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘And he wants us to come see him.’

  ‘Just hop across—’

  ‘And he’s arranging the flight and paying for everything. And,’ he added, ‘he says he’s just dying to see you.’

  *

  They walked out of the airport into a thrashing crowd as noisy as a political demonstration. A lot of the people looked as if they were in fancy-dress. Everything suddenly seemed utterly strange to Carla – almost as though she’d been put into a different century. She didn’t even have the sense that she might have known the place from pictures in newspapers or on television.

  Carl held her by the arm. He had a way of nipping her upper arm with his hand so that his thumb made a large, painful bruise. She didn’t complain. She thought that if he let go, they might become separated. And if that happened, she wouldn’t stand a chance. The noise and crowd and heat would overwhelm her. She felt nearly ready to pass out as it was.

  He found a porter and then a cab. They drove away from the airport, through part of the city and to a highway. She sat silent, his arm around her shoulders. The taxi turned off the main road and started to climb. They were going up into the mountains.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  She made an attempt to take in the landscape and the views, but she was too tired to appreciate anything. She tried to sleep. She wished they hadn’t left Europe.

  It was evening when she woke. The taxi had stopped and their luggage was being moved to a horse-drawn carriage. Carl shook her as she began to close her eyes again. When she saw the horses waiting and got a second look at the carriage, she said, ‘My God, it’s like one of those fairytale things.’

  They both wanted to sit outside, up with the coachman, who kept signalling back towards the doors with his whip and repeating some instructions.

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  Carl told her, ‘He wants us to get in.’

  ‘Why?’

  The man put the whip down and made flapping movements with his hands.

  ‘Owl?’ Carl asked.

  ‘Bats,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet that’s what it is. Let’s go.’ She climbed into the coach and sat down on the seat. As soon as Carl joined her, the wheels rolled forward. She said, ‘This is unbelievable.’

  ‘I guess the roads aren’t very good.’

  ‘If they’re no good for a car, they’d be a lot worse for one of these things.’

  ‘Pretty comfortable, actually. If Clark Gable could do it in a phone booth—’

  ‘We could fall out on the doorstep before we realized we’d arrived. I could have bruises in a lot of new places.’

  The night came down around them, the road grew bumpy. At one stage, while they were negotiating a sharp turn, something slapped hard against one of the windows from the outside. Carla was suddenly wide awake.

  ‘A bat,’ Carl said in a sinister voice. ‘Coming to get you.’

  ‘Couldn’t have been. It was huge. Maybe it was a condor. Or a big rock.’

  ‘A rock would break the window.’

  ‘It’s so dark,’ s
he said. ‘There isn’t a light anywhere.’

  They drove for half an hour more before they saw lights, which seemed from the outline to be coming from a castle of some kind.

  ‘They don’t have castles here,’ he told her.

  ‘Well, a big house. An enormous house. See?’

  Carl put his face to the window. He didn’t speak.

  She said, ‘I’ve got a feeling it’s like something I’ve seen before. It looks a little like one of those photographs. Maybe they built it that way on purpose, as a copy of what they’d left behind. Carl?’

  ‘It’s big, all right,’ he said.

  *

  ‘You slept well?’ her great-uncle Theodore asked. In daylight he didn’t look so peculiar. When she’d arrived – cold, sleepy, stumbling into the light – he’d struck her as odd, and incredibly old, and irretrievably foreign. She and Carl had been introduced to the entire indoor household, who were lined up in the front hall to meet them. The other great-uncle, Erwin, had appeared senile and dwarfish rather than – as now – diminutive and charming. And her great-aunt Regina, in a floor-length green and black dressing gown, had given an impression of dramatic malevolence; she now seemed merely grumpy and theatrical: a heavy-faced old woman who dyed her hair black, as she must have been doing for nearly forty years. She also wore, even at breakfast, a great deal of strong-coloured make-up. Another woman – a frail figure in white, who had gestured tentatively from a landing the night before – still hadn’t come downstairs.

  ‘I slept like the dead,’ Carla said. ‘Isn’t Carl up yet?’

  ‘Roderigo is showing him the estate. He woke early, with the others.’

  She sipped her coffee. The first thing they’d done as she’d sat down was to warn her about the strength of their coffee.

  She wondered why Carl hadn’t come to her room. She didn’t even know where he was sleeping. As soon as the servant had shown her to the room she was to have, he’d hurried Carl down the corridor, and that was the last she’d seen of him. She thought it was strange. He was only a recently acquired boyfriend, but the others didn’t know that; they had been told that she and Carl were engaged. That was supposed to make the whole question of bedrooms easier and perhaps less offensive, if anyone thought that way about it.

  ‘Was Roderigo the man with the moustache?’

  ‘The manager, yes. They’ll be back for lunch. And in the meantime, perhaps Kristel –’

  ‘Kristel is in her study,’ Regina said.

  ‘Or Regina?’

  ‘I have to do my exercises.’

  ‘And I, unfortunately, am occupied with business matters, but –’

  ‘I should be delighted’, Erwin said, ‘to show little Carla the house and gardens.’

  Erwin was waiting for her in the hall when she came down from brushing her teeth. She was beginning to get a better idea of the structure of the house. It was built in storeys, on several levels of the mountainside. The gardens too climbed up and down screes of rock into which stone steps had been cut. There was a wooden handrail that would have been useless if anybody had really needed to lean on it. Uncle Erwin skipped along nimbly at her side. For a man of his age he appeared astonishingly agile and supple in his movements. All the great-uncles and aunts of the family must have been hitting eighty at least, possibly ninety and upwards.

  ‘Did the family build the house?’ Carla asked.

  ‘No, it was here before. It was a convent, or a monastery, or something like that. And a fortress. So often these places are like that: they have some treasure, and so they have to be in a position to defend it. There are a great many sacred buildings in the area from the same period. Most of them are partly ruined. They were lucky to have water here. That’s why they survived so long. We added a lot, of course. Look.’ He raised his arm towards the windows and towers above them. He started to explain which walls had been added when. Carla lost interest.

  He went on, ‘There are three main gardens. Everything else is extra. The vegetables are over on the other side. Now, be careful and watch where you put your feet. The mist comes up and makes the rock slippery. And there’s a kind of moss – that can be just like ice when it’s raining.’

  He led her down a stone staircase between two walls dappled green and grey with lichen, and into an arcade of white-blossomed bushes. Everything in the first garden was white. The second garden was almost all full of red flowers, though there were pink and orange shades too, and some yellow. The last garden was purple, blue and grey. ‘We wanted black,’ Erwin said, ‘but so few flowers are truly black and the only ones we could think of won’t grow here.’

  ‘A black garden? Why?’

  ‘Because of the flag, of course. Red, white and black.’

  ‘I thought the flag here was –’

  ‘The German flag, Carla dear.’

  ‘Oh? Well, I guess now you’ve got the American flag instead. And England and France.’

  ‘Yes. Unfortunate, but it will have to do.’

  He walked her down to the front of the house, where they climbed into a carriage. The sides of the vehicle were open but there was a canvas top. Erwin gave orders to the driver in a language Carla didn’t understand. As they started to move, she told him about the night before and about the bird, or whatever it was, that had bumped into them.

  ‘Probably an owl,’ Erwin said.

  ‘We thought it might have been a bat.’

  ‘Bats never make a mistake like that. They have their own system of radar. But an owl, or another kind of bird, might have been caught by the shine of the windows.’

  ‘Do you get a lot of bats around here?’

  ‘Thousands. And they’re the real thing, you know – the vampire bats. They come into the fields at night and attack the cattle. And also the horses. We have to be careful. Of course the local people here say that we’re vampires, too – our family.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘It’s a figure of speech. Because we’re rich. We suck the blood from the poor. At least, according to them. The truth is that we’re civilized and educated and they’re just ignorant peasants. And we pay them to do work for us.’

  ‘You own the land they live on?’

  ‘That’s right. And so do you. You’re a member of the family.’

  She was shown a model village, a rug-weaving factory and a fish farm. The workers were Indians of all ages. A lot of them were very light-skinned. Most of the adults, both men and women, had a scar on their foreheads. Carla didn’t hear a single laugh, or even any talking, among them. They worked slowly, with concentration.

  Erwin made a detour so that she could see what was happening in a pool at the other end of the hatcheries. He led her up close. A large, jittery crowd pressed forward behind her. When two men emptied a pail of scraps into the water, the pool appeared to boil with activity. The crowd moaned, at once sickened and gratified. ‘It’s the fish,’ Erwin said. ‘They’re like piranhas.’

  ‘You breed them?’

  ‘Not really. We like to keep the pool full. Everybody knows what can happen to whatever falls in. The idea of being deliberately pushed in, or even thrown, is one that fascinates our employees. They seem to regard it as a form of insurance we hold over them – a warranty of their good behaviour. I understand that mothers even threaten their babies with it.’

  ‘But, that’s terrible.’

  ‘No, no. It’s like a legend now. It’s, ah, a focus of attention to which other things are referred. You understand?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Carla said.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just say – everyone would miss the pool if we decided to get rid of it. And the people who’d miss it most of all are the ones who are the most afraid of getting thrown into it.’

  They spent the rest of the morning looking at meadows and pastures and views that spread away from them like an ocean of cultivated land. The family holdings appeared to be of about the same acreage as the state of Connecticut, or poss
ibly even more extensive than that.

  ‘And the forests,’ Erwin added. ‘We sometimes speak of them as the jungle. And all the places where you can find butterflies. Kristel is our great lover of butterflies. She can show you.’

  ‘Was that the woman in the shawl?’

  ‘That was the housekeeper, Maria. Kristel didn’t come downstairs last night. She hasn’t been well.’

  ‘Oh? I hope it’s not serious.’

  ‘It’s never serious,’ he said. ‘She likes the pose. Her mother was an invalid – romantic and glamorous: had hundreds of lovers. One always assumed that her fatigues were brought on by an excess of amours. Or perhaps a heightened artistic sensibility. I remember her very well – a marvellous woman. Poor Kristel isn’t quite up to that standard. And she doesn’t have the acting talent.’

  ‘Oh,’ Carla said again. Erwin gave directions to the driver to turn the horses and they went through a gully that was bursting forth in yellow bushes even high up, where it didn’t look as if the roots would have anything to hold on to.

  They reached the house again and were let off near another walled garden, so that Carla could be shown the vegetables. She stepped over a low-growing branch of pink flowers and clutched at the corner of a stone outcrop. They had followed the paths around to the other side, where the vegetables joined up with the flower gardens. The blue air beyond rose above them like another mountain. The combination of flowers and talk and the steep climb between dangerous turnings was beginning to confuse her. She said, ‘You know, I think I’ve still got a little jet-lag left over. I feel sort of dizzy.’