The Pearlkillers Read online

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Anders asked. ‘You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’

  ‘I never want it to happen.’

  ‘Everyone gets white hair. It’s like rotten teeth and bad eyesight. We all come to it.’

  ‘I won’t. And I’m probably not going to get that far, anyway. They told my mother I’d die young.’

  ‘Who told her?’

  ‘The seers.’

  ‘A couple of other charlatans like us? You’ll last another few years for sure.’

  ‘Who paid for the new things? How did you get it?’

  ‘The usual ways,’ Anders said.

  ‘You see? You’re a real man now. Before you met me, you’d never worked, had you? Everything was handed to you. All that network of family and inheritance kept you afloat.’

  It wasn’t completely true, of course. Anders had worked hard for years. He’d been a ship’s captain and a good one, but he didn’t say so. Arguments that didn’t go Sten’s way could make him frantic, so that he began to scream hysterically. And also, like so many things he said, there was at least some truth to the statement if you looked at it in a different light.

  At the end of the second year they bought a ramshackle building and set up a brothel. All their serious collisions with the police dated from that time. If they had tried to run an honest establishment, everything would have been all right. But Sten hadn’t wanted an ordinary house. He’d hoped to make more money through blackmail and the sale of information. He’d actually intended, from the start, to go against the law in several different ways. Anders knew almost immediately that they’d put themselves into a trap. And neither of them had realized that once you got into the business, it wasn’t so easy to get out again. They were no longer on their own. Other people depended on them and other people could get them into trouble. The house itself, which made the trade more profitable, put them in danger. Anyone would know where to find them again.

  There were fights in the house. Some of them began over money, although most of the time the cause was just drinking. Usually Anders managed to calm matters down before they got out of hand. Sometimes nothing worked and the police came in. They were paid to leave the place alone but if anyone outside called them in, they had to act on the complaint. Once there was a stabbing and the man, who turned out to be a respectable shop-owner, sent squads of uniformed men in the next day. The girls were driven away and Sten was arrested. It took Anders a week to get him out of jail and it cost him all their spare cash. They had to walk home from the prison.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Anders asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did they treat you badly?’

  ‘Of course. They always do.’

  ‘No friendly faces?’

  ‘Anders, the police aren’t interested in making friends. They like discipline and punishment, and they’ve got power over you as long as you’re inside. They’re also oafs, so they love taking it out on anybody that falls into their clutches.’

  ‘What’s happened to the girls?’

  ‘They’re all right, naturally. In fact, they stood between me and some of the trouble. It could have been a lot more uncomfortable.’

  Anders said he thought they had to go into the profession the way everyone else did, and make their accommodation with the law, or they’d better get out altogether, and try a different, less precarious line of work. They couldn’t, he said, keep on worrying about being sent to jail. They shouldn’t have their names – even their false names – on a police dossier, or have their faces known. ‘I’m still free,’ he said, ‘but you can be recognized by scores of policemen now. If they catch sight of you in a crowd, they’ll remember: they’ll think you’re worth watching, maybe they’d follow you to see what you’re up to. And then if anybody near you misses a coin or a button, yours is the shoulder they’d put their hands on.’

  Sten agreed, but he had no ideas about how to change their lives. Whenever they had any cash, he’d put it on a horse or a game of cards, and they’d lose. In the beginning they used to win half the time; now every stake went to other people. ‘It makes you think,’ Sten said one day, ‘that there might be something to the astrology business we used to peddle. It makes you wonder whether we’re under some unfavourable aspect of something-or-other, like standing in the shadow all the time while the rest of them are playing in the sun.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Anders told him. ‘That’s what happens to mountebanks – they see the effect it has on the credulous, and then they’re fooled by their own tricks. Most things will work for a little while. What we need to do is find a stable demand for something we can supply.’

  ‘We’ve got that already. The day people give up screwing is the day the world ends.’

  ‘I was thinking’, Anders said, ‘more along the lines of chocolate biscuits or beer. Less money in them, but it would be steady, and a lot safer.’

  Sten said all right – as soon as they got some capital together, they’d see about it. For once Anders believed in his good intentions. He talked the scheme over with a few of the girls and discovered that some of them would be willing to work in a bakery or a brewery. He didn’t ask all of them; some, he knew, were no good for anything else and liked the life for reasons that had nothing to do with the easy money or satisfying their own need; they would always revert to it because it was their method of wielding power over people they didn’t like and who they believed to be enjoying an unfairly superior station.

  They made plans to move at the end of the month. But before they could do anything, they were visited by something worse than the law: an epidemic went through the house. It appeared in many respects to be like the ordinary venereal infections they were used to dealing with all the time. But it also duplicated the characteristics of other diseases; it could go to the chest or break out as a skin rash, cause pain in the joints and glandular swelling. There were mild and severe cases. Most people ran a high fever for a short while at least. By the time Sten and Anders caught the infection, the girls – who had had it first and kept quiet about it – were too sick to work. Sten sold the house out from under them and rented another two-room apartment for himself and Anders.

  They were in the hands of the doctors again. Anders recovered quickly. He’d had only a few days of swellings and fever and he followed the medical instructions to the letter. The measles he’d contracted in childhood had been, as he remembered, much worse. But Sten didn’t do as he’d been told; he seemed to be cured, went out looking for trade, drugged himself periodically as the symptoms recurred, and then passed out drunk one night and couldn’t get up in the morning. They were sleeping in separate beds now, drinking from marked cups, using their own forks and spoons.

  Anders went to get the doctor – a young man, and a very good doctor – who never for a moment allowed Anders to think he considered him and his friend not worth saving; but he was extremely expensive and adamant about his fees, which were to be paid in advance. ‘I don’t treat society ladies for the vapours,’ he explained. ‘I’m a working physician and if I don’t have the money, I can’t cure anyone. I didn’t become a doctor to get rich. My family’s got money. All I have to do is break even. But to do that, I’ve got to be paid.’

  He took one look at Sten and said that it was serious. After the examination he told Anders that the recuperation was going to take a long time and that there was a danger of pneumonia. The most important thing at the moment was that on top of gonorrhoea and what sounded like the beginnings of a lung ailment, Sten had picked up a virulent case of some other type of venereal infection, which might be a kind of syphilis, although it evinced several peculiar characteristics the doctor hadn’t come across before.

  ‘We’ve had a lot of that,’ Anders told him.

  ‘This time it’s more complicated,’ the doctor said. ‘And if he doesn’t follow directions with this one, you know how it ends.’

  Anders nursed Sten for three weeks. He remained healthy while Sten coughed and choked,
couldn’t swallow solid food and broke out in red pustules.

  ‘It’s the smallpox, isn’t it?’ Sten asked, his eyes and voice full of terror. ‘I’ve seen it before.’

  ‘It’s just another symptom,’ Anders told him.

  ‘I’ll be marked for life. And blinded.’

  ‘You’ll get well again. At least, you’ll be unscarred. I don’t know about the rest. It might be one of those diseases that can turn around on you after twenty or thirty years and give you another lashing. So, you’d better do what he said. He sounded like a pretty good doctor. He’s right, too – it isn’t fair to ask for free treatment.’

  ‘What’s fair? Being alive isn’t fair. I’ve never understood that: how people can expect it.’

  ‘They hope for it. It’s a wish – a dream. I had a dream the other night that I was in Paris at that restaurant with the glass ceiling. I was having dinner with my parents.’

  ‘I had a dream that I died,’ Sten said. ‘I died and you were there, standing by my coffin. And you didn’t even cry.’

  ‘I had a dream,’ Anders told him, ‘that I walked out of this room and jumped on the first train leaving town, and left you to choke on your pills.’

  ‘Don’t get angry,’ Sten said, ‘I’m not strong enough. It’s going to kill me this time, I know it. I’m not worried about one more dose of the clap or whatever it is. It’s this other thing. Not being able to breathe. And all these – just like the smallpox, Anders.’

  ‘If you just stay quiet, we’ll get you over this stage of it, I promise.’

  Sten didn’t believe it. When he wasn’t throwing himself from side to side in the bed, he lay rigid and staring, waiting to be deformed by more sores and boils.

  At last, just as the money ran out completely, he was well again. ‘I’ll never forget this, Anders,’ he said. ‘You saved me.’

  ‘It isn’t over yet. You’ve got to be careful.’

  ‘We’ll find some other line of business for a while.’

  They tried to cheat a drunken farmer at cards. He was up from the country and was just as stupid as they had imagined. They had, however, underestimated his temperament. As soon as the man realized that he’d lost, he began to break up the room they were sitting in. Customers ran for the doors, chairs flew, the farmer bellowed for justice and the police were on the scene before Anders and Sten could move.

  This time they were both arrested. They pretended not to know each other, so Anders had a cell to himself. He thought the squalor wasn’t so bad, no worse than the decent poverty of much of the town outside; but when he was moved to the common cells, he changed his mind. And no matter how disheartening the physical conditions were, he was more profoundly shocked by the spiritual degradation among his fellow prisoners. He told himself that he had to get out of the city, of the kind of life he’d been leading, of everything; and that he’d never be able to do it with Sten in tow. In some way, without knowing it, Sten wanted to suffer, to keep losing his money and having to jostle and shove for it again, to have the drama of crisis and urgency always around him; he couldn’t chart his own course – he sought complex or unlucky events that would prod him into plans he couldn’t have thought of without them.

  Anders was freed within hours. It took six days of bribery to get Sten out too, and they were broke again. They went looking for work.

  As they were standing by a flowerstall one day, waiting for an acquaintance who used to drive the beer barrels into a tavern on the other side of town, Sten caught the eye of an old woman dressed rather ludicrously in finery of the latest fashion for women half her age. She pulled out a lorgnette and smiled at him. He moved away. Anders saw what was happening and let him go. He himself stayed on, to meet the driver and get the job. In the evening he expected to hear all the news, but Sten didn’t come back.

  He heard nothing till the morning, when a letter arrived for him. A banknote was enclosed and the message simply said, ‘We’re in clover.’ Anders went out to change the note, used half the money towards the back rent, and got something to eat. He didn’t give up the job until the next day, after Sten had returned home.

  The old woman was a baroness – an authentic one; and incredibly, sensationally, rich. She was also Hungarian, which always helped. And she’d taken such a fancy to Sten: she was going to leave him everything in her will; she’d bought him suits – you couldn’t imagine; and found him a little house – a real house, not just rooms: and everything was going to be wonderful from now on.

  ‘Do you make love to her?’ Anders asked.

  ‘A little. It’s not bad. She’s quite an interesting woman.’

  ‘But old. You’re the one who thinks age is so ugly.’

  ‘Nothing is ugly if you’re rich enough. And besides, you don’t have to keep your eyes open all the time, you know.’

  ‘You could catch it all over again.’

  ‘Yes, and your tongue could drop off. Stop giving me the bad warnings. Everything’s perfect now. Now’s the time to celebrate.’

  ‘Could you do something for me? Get a large amount of cash out of her straight away: make some excuse. I just don’t believe it’s going to last.’

  ‘It wouldn’t look right.’

  ‘I don’t care how it looks,’ Anders said. ‘I’ve got a feeling. These May-and-December unions last the longest when there’s no sex.’

  ‘Not this one. That’s what she wants me for.’

  ‘You’d have done better to go for the sentiment and a tenth of the money. In fact, you’d be much better off with a man again. Old women can be capricious as well as demanding. Is she alone in the world?’

  ‘She’s got a family that doesn’t appreciate her.’

  ‘Get the cash, Sten. If you have to, sell something she’s given you and say it was stolen.’

  Sten handed him the money the following day. Anders rented a new set of rooms for himself, bought some clothes and shoes, and put most of what was left into a bank. For the next few days he enjoyed himself thoroughly. And as the time approached when he thought he ought to decide between the cake shop and the brewery, he wasn’t surprised to hear that the baroness had sons and grandsons who – although not appreciating her – were determined that no one else should pretend to, and consequently appreciated Sten even less. Since the old woman was proof against all the stories they had raked up to discredit her lover, they were prepared to go to court.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Sten said. ‘She thinks they’re maligning me, even though I told her a lot of what they found out was going to be true, because I’d been unfortunate and had such a hard life.’ He sat on Anders’ new couch and hugged himself. There was no trace of his recent illness; he was only slightly underweight and in his new clothes looked as elegant and distinguished as one of the Eastern princes on holiday in the town that month.

  ‘We’re going to the races,’ he said, ‘and the opera, and – I’m late. I’ll see you soon.’

  ‘Watch out, Sten. If this one backfires, we may have to get out of town fast. I think we should make arrangements now to meet somewhere. Paris, say. Or Rome.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to either of them. I remember a lot of competition. What about Berlin?’

  ‘Not Germany. Too many people from home go there.’

  ‘But they’d never recognize you.’

  ‘I’m not taking the chance.’

  ‘St Petersburg?’

  ‘We wouldn’t live through the winter. It’s worse than home. Some other town in Italy?’

  ‘Maybe. I had a good time in Naples till they caught up with me.’

  ‘Marseilles?’

  ‘They know me too well there.’

  ‘This is what people mean when they say it’s a small world.’

  Sten laughed. He said everything was going to be fine. ‘When I get my hands on what she’s leaving me, we can really travel: Egypt, China, the Indies – America. We could buy land.’

  For the next five days
Anders was so excited about the idea of them both emigrating to America as rich men that he almost considered it a possibility. But his first fears turned out to be right. In a scene that should have been tragic or horrible, but which according to all the accounts afterwards was a comic fiasco, the baroness’s two sons, accompanied by lawyers, irrupted into her private apartments, where they discovered her and Sten entwined in the very act for which she had engaged him; and as from the silken recesses of the bed-curtains the old woman saw her boudoir invaded, she suffered a stroke, gave a single cry, and died. Sten was arrested, charged with murder.

  Anders went to see him in jail. He’d hired lawyers himself, he said, and despite the money on the other side, he was sure the family wasn’t going to want the scandal in open court.

  Sten looked deranged. He said, ‘They killed her – not me. I’m never going to forget this, never. I’ll get back at those two somehow, if it takes me the rest of my life.’

  ‘I’ll get you out,’ Anders promised. He had long discussions with the lawyers. They seemed to be talking him in circles. He came to believe that the law would keep leafing through its books and copying out pages of notes until all his money ran out, and then Sten would be at the mercy of the two sons.

  ‘I don’t know what to do next,’ he told Sten.

  ‘Anything. They’ll hang me if it comes to a trial. I know it. They’ll take one look and decide I offend their sense of propriety, the swine.’

  ‘The only solution I can think of is for you to break out.’

  ‘No. For you to grab me when they transfer me for the hearings.’

  ‘You really think that would work?’

  ‘I’ll tell you how to do it,’ Sten said.

  The rescue was planned down to the split-second. ‘And,’ Sten added, ‘make some provision for the thing going wrong. They could shoot me in the back and then they’d be after you.’

  ‘Or vice-versa. All right.’ They agreed on what to do if they were separated, wounded, or if either of them was killed. On the day, Anders’ hired men stepped in front of the guard, swung their clubs in all directions, but forgot that Sten was manacled to the warder. While two of the men were breaking the chain, another contingent of bullies – presumably allied to the old woman’s sons – converged on the growing crowd. Sten was knocked to the ground.