And Then There Was No One полностью

She and I had got on well enough to begin with, in a discussion about some new French films which had just been released after the long hot hiatus of summer. Yet, even then, I couldn’t quite suppress the conviction that the almost overplayed attention she paid to my opinions derived not from any intrinsic interest they held for her but from her own avid consumption, to which she had slightly shamefacedly admitted, of gossipy literary biographies. My belief was that what she extrapolated from these was above all the fact that the secret of their subjects’ success as conversationalists had resided less in what they themselves had had to say, however witty, than in the flattering intensity with which they had attended to the discourses, however trite, of their gratified interlocutors. Thus, whenever it was my turn to speak, she would peer into my eyes as though nothing in the world mattered more to her at that instant than my recommendation of Resnais or Rohmer (Eric not Sax).

Since this was 2001, however, and mid-September to boot, the conversation had inevitably turned to the Twin Towers attack, which had taken place just five days before. Speaking about the atrocity and its global implications – and I acknowledge I was a touch, shall we say, premature – I had bemoaned the fact that the military reprisals we all knew would follow were at the mercy of a buffoon of a politician the like of whom not even the United States, never a nation famous for voting its intellectuals into power, had known.

For a moment the table was silent. Then Meredith suddenly screeched at me:

‘You little shit!’

‘What did you say?’ I managed to stammer out.

‘Who fucking gave you the right to insult our President?’

Our President? George Bush? Would I be caught dead calling Tony Blair ‘our Prime Minister’? And this from a self-styled radical left-winger.

‘But all I said was –’

‘Oh, can it!’ she spat at me. ‘I don’t have to listen to such Eurotrash garbage!’ Pulling a hundred-franc note from her purse, she tossed it onto the chequered tablecloth – ‘That’ll cover what I had!’ – stood up and stalked alone out of the restaurant.

If everyone present was as startled as I was by her behaviour, one of her compatriots did coldly chide me for having been flippant, which was simply not true, about an event of such magnitude, and actually went so far as to propose the eccentric theory that, the instant those planes ploughed into the Twin Towers, George Bush, ex-drunk, ex-deserter, ex-all-round-loser, had been alchemically transmuted into the Platonic essence of Presidential resolve. Whatever, the meal never recovered from Meredith’s coup de théâtre. Just fifteen minutes later, we all quietly and sheepishly trooped out of the restaurant without dessert or coffee.

Several years, of course, had elapsed since the Towers crumbled to dust, and one had to suppose that, like so many liberal Americans who had put their critical faculties on hold, Meredith had since had time and cause to qualify her once unreflecting support for the cross-eyed cretin in the White House. But what mystified me was why she had not only been invited to but had herself agreed to attend what promised to be a frivolous Conan Doyle bash. Then, glancing at her minuscule bibliography, I learned from it that she had recently published a ‘much-acclaimed’ book-length essay titled From Shylock to Sherlock and subtitled ‘Judaism, Patriarchy and the Forensic Imagination’. Ah.

The fourth speaker listed was G. Autry, a name calculated to stimulate critical inquisitiveness, like ‘B. Traven’. Nobody knew what the G. stood for, if anything. He had hardly ever been photographed (on the Festival’s flyer his photo had been replaced by a generic black silhouette against a plain white background), in recent years he had certainly never posed for a camera, and all he let be known about himself was that he was not related to Gene Autry, a once well-known singing cowboy whose horse would regularly rear up on its hind legs like that of a Spanish monarch in an equestrian portrait by Velasquez while he himself spun a lazy lasso above his head as though blowing a smoke ring. I had naturally never met him – who had? – but I had tried to read one of his novels, a sadistic thriller in the James Ellroy mode set in the racist Arkansas of the fifties. I laid it down again unfinished when the praeternatural vividness of its violence started to haunt my dreams.

Oddly enough, Autry’s work had always had a pulpy reputation until Sanary, of all people, published an eccentric defence of it with the amusing title G. est un Autry.† It was that essay which had prompted me to give his fiction a go. But I had, I repeat, so hated the novel in question that I only half-read it and, again, I couldn’t imagine why such a grouchy recluse would make one of his extremely rare public appearances at an insignificant Sherlock Holmes Festival in the Swiss Alps.