Frewin Sixty-Three Closure

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-84243-619-6
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 343 Seiten

After a close friend's apparent suicide, Christopher Cornwell receives several photos the friend mailed prior to his death. Cornwell subsequently discovers by chance the presence in one of the photos of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. But how could Oswald be photographed in a small Hertfordshire market town when he was supposed to be living in Russia as a defector at the same time? As Cornwell investigates the story behind the photos he unknowingly becomes the target of an investigation himself, by a shadowy agency as determined to maintain its secrets now as in 1963.

Anthony Frewin was born in London and lives in Hertfordshire. He was assistant film director to Stanley Kubrick for over 20 years. He has written three novels published by No Exit Press, London Blues, Sixty-Three Closure and Scorpian Rising.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Frewin, Anthony

Leseproben

PROLOGUE

ARE YOU BEING REAL?

YOU PICKED UP THE NEWSPAPERS yesterday and read about me, didn’t you?

Disregard that stuff. It was all lies. All of it. The ‘quotes’ attributed to me in the tabloids were invented and the speculations in the ‘quality’ papers that I’d salted away a fortune in Holland and Switzerland were fantasy.

So, if we know where it ends or, rather, where it has got to now, then the next inevitable questions are – why and how did it begin?

I’ll say it began with three photographs …

The three photographs.

The three photographs.

That’s when it really began.

But before that there was the telephone call, and before that there was the green paint. That’s the true beginning for me, the real genesis, as those were the last moments of my un-knowing.

The green paint.

I could hear it peeling off the walls.

The whole room was covered in this light green paint, including a bulwark of a radiator, probably dating from the early 1930s, situated under the window. The sole window.

All green. Bilious green.

It must have been the Party’s Paint of the Month some time way back when there was a Party. Even the floor was green – some ersatz linoleum: chill and reflective and unforgiving.

The hotel room was like a cell in a mental institution … and, indeed, it was a mental asylum before it became the Hotel Pauli, or so the girl in the cigarette kiosk downstairs said in her fractured English. And she should know, being the daughter of some highly placed but now disgraced Party flunkey.

The window overlooks a tram wrecking yard that is encircled by drab commercial office buildings put up in the 1960s. Beyond these I can just make out the twin spires of the cathedral of SS Peter and Paul.

The Hotel Pauli. Brno’s worst hotel, I’d guess. The production company back in London had said they’d booked me into a ‘pretty good place’. In fact, a shit heap of a place. The Czech Republic’s second largest city couldn’t do much worse.

January here … very cold … but plenty of cheap vodka. A bottle a day is dead easy. At weekends I can double that, almost.

I don’t piss around any more. No glasses or paper cups. I take it straight from the bottle, whenever I’m alone that is, or if nobody is looking.

I’ve spent the last two months out here scouting locations for an American-financed feature film with the title Blue Lou. We’ll do the interiors back at Pinewood Studios and the exteriors here. All I need is the OK on the last lot of photos I sent back and I’m out of here … but until then, I’ll drink myself insensible. There isn’t a lot else to do. And it’s so fucking cold. And there’s another reason too – I’m holding a one-man wake for Dizzy Gillespie who died last week.

I take another hit from the bottle.

There’s a knock on the door. A hard crack, like a Sid Catlett snare drum rimshot. Insistent.

‘Yeah?’

The door creaks open. It’s Ernie, the floor porter. Ernie isn’t his name, I just call him that. He’s Jiri or something. He’s in his mid-sixties and looks on a good day like someone who has spent the last week sleeping rough. On a bad day he looks like one of the mummified monks in the Capuchin tombs downtown.

Ernie stares at me from the doorway, then glances down at the vodka bottle. He knows I drink and I know he drinks.

He takes two steps forward, removes a cigarette from his lips with his thumb and forefinger, coughs and says Tele-fon, tele-fon! And continues to stand there transfixed, like a shop front mannikin.

Díky, I say to Ernie. Then I take a swig of vodka and follow him out and down the corridor. An interminable corridor with grubby carpet running the whole length and framed photographic portraits of long-forgotten Czech notables on the wall. And, like the rest of the hotel, it always smells of cabbage.

We arrive at Ernie’s under-the-stairs sort of office.

The heavy black handset of the phone is on the desk. Ernie points to it and says again, Tele-fon. I get the message.

This is the call that puts me back on the plane to London, thank God. Out of here and gone.

‘Harry?’ I say.

‘Christopher?’

‘Uh-huh. Harry?’

‘No, Christopher. It’s Dick.’

‘Dick?’

‘It’s me, yes.’

Dick? My mate in Hitchin? My mate I grew up with? ‘What are you doing calling me out here?’

‘I needed to talk to you … something has happened.’

‘What? Barbara OK? You OK?’

‘No, everything’s fine that way. I need your help … on something.’

‘And what’s that, dear boy?’

‘When are you back here?’

‘Soon, I hope. I’m waiting for a call. Next few days. Why?’

‘I’m being followed.’

‘What?’

Is Dick having a mid-life breakdown or what? I call Ernie who is sitting the other side of the desk making roll-up cigarettes for his little tin case and point to his bottle of vodka on the filing cabinet He obligingly hands it to me. I need a drink.

‘Followed, huh?’

I take a big swig that gives a burning feeling to my lips and throat. Strong spirit this.

‘That’s right, I’m being followed.’

‘You been giving it to somebody else’s wife, huh?’

‘No. This is serious.’

What? My old friend Dick North who still lives in the town we grew up in, who is a headteacher and an active member of the local antiquarian society, who married the boring Barbara Bradley back in the early 1970s and who hasn’t fucked another woman since (save perhaps Rachel Green, Laura’s friend, a couple of years ago at a party in Letchworth), who is just about to complete volume one of An Ichonography of Hitchin.

He is being followed?

‘Tell me something, Dick – who is following you?’

I wave the bottle at Ernie who raises his tumbler full of vodka. Cheers to both of us!

‘They’ve got something to do with … they’re serious.’

Who is following him? Dwarfs, or little green men from Mars, or the Illuminati, or the Freemasons, or Nazis from South America, or the CIA or KGB (whatever remains of them), or even agents of the Knights Templar?

‘Dick, is this some kind of put-on or what?’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘You need, Dick, a damn good drink. Know that?’

‘Listen, I’ve found something out. Things aren’t what they appear to be. There’s something strange going on.’

‘Are you being real?’ I said.

There was a lengthy silence the other end of the phone and then I heard a Yes, a long sigh, and the line went dead.

I took another mouthful of Ernie’s vodka. This time I noticed it was flavoured. Similar to but not cherry.

‘Good stuff, Ernie, good stuff,’ I say, pointing at the bottle.

Ernie gave me one of his rare toothless smiles and nodded his head and said, ‘Eh, gooood stoufff.’

‘Very good stuff, yeah.’

‘Gooood stoufff.’

Ernie waved me to sit down and then produced a small glass from his desk. I handed him the bottle and he filled this glass and his to the brim. I gave him a Marlboro and took one myself.

‘Cheers!’

‘Chhh-earrrs!’

I downed the glass in one and then saw something on the wall behind the desk that I hadn’t noticed before. An old photograph, cut out of a magazine and taped to the wall, of Premier Khrushchev and President Kennedy shaking hands, way back in the good old Manichaean days of the Cold War.

‘Chhh-earrrs!’ said Ernie.

[2]

I got the call from Harry. The photographs were fine and I was free to return to London. I flew back but I can remember nothing of the flight. I can’t even remember leaving the hotel. I was in an alcoholic daze the whole time. Totally out of it.

I started to come to in a taxi cab on the Westway somewhere, but even then the rain and the greyness conspired to make me think I was still somewhere in the Czech Republic, rather than in London. I looked down at my lap expecting to find a Nikon cradled in my hands and instead I found an empty bottle of vodka. Nothing else. Sic transit.

As soon as I got back to the flat in Tufnell Park I headed for the bathroom and began throwing up – gallons of vodka and bile and God knows what else. I was retching my guts up. I then passed out and remained unconscious until the next day when I awoke to find myself floating in a sea of vomit. It stank. I stank. The whole place stank.

I put the percolator on and began tidying the place up. Then I have a strong coffee and stumble back to the bedroom and fall on the bed and pretty soon I’m asleep.

[3]

The telephone.

It continues ringing and while I know I’ve got to answer it I cannot move my arms just yet. Give me time.

Somehow I manage to pick it up. ‘Hello?’

‘Christopher?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Laura. You’re back. I thought you would have called me.’

‘I was going to.’

‘When did you arrive?’

‘Soon.’ What do I mean, soon? I can’t even talk straight.

‘Soon? What does that mean?’

‘I don’t mean that … I mean I just got back … you know?’

‘Don’t you ever listen to your answering machine?’

‘I was going to … I –’

‘You didn’t get my message then?’

‘I guess not …...