The Last Samurai полностью

The train reached Farringdon. I started reading the paper. Red Devlin had come out of hiding and was publishing a book about his experiences as a hostage. There was an article about nationalism and intervention. There was a short column about Mustafa Szegeti, who had been reprimanded by the authorities in West Papua for claiming to be Belgian consul and issuing a number of Belgian visas in that capacity. Suspicions had been aroused; the Belgian embassy in Jakarta had denied any connection with Szegeti, who was in fact of Egyptian and Hungarian descent and bridge correspondent for the Independent. When asked why he had impersonated a member of the Belgian diplomatic corps he had replied: Well, someone had to.

This was exactly like Szegeti. He had been arrested in Burma when I was six for claiming to be a delegate from the United Nations, and in Brazil when I was seven he had passed himself off as an American commercial attaché, and he had been self-appointed deputy director of the World Bank in Uganda and Bhutanese ambassador extraordinary to Mozambique. He had helped large numbers of people to escape death and torture and flee to reluctant asylums with imaginative documentation.

That was obviously not the way he made his living.

Szegeti had learned bridge as a boy from his parents, both avid players. His mother was Egyptian, his father Hungarian. They were wealthy, but compulsive gamblers, and had lived in constant uncertainty and excitement.

They had lived in magnificent hotels when they could afford it and often when they could not. On arriving they always insisted on having a grand piano installed in the suite so that his mother could play Brahms when she was not playing roulette. They ordered lavishly from room service. Sometimes Szegeti had not seen his parents for days at a time; sometimes they had not gone outside for a week, getting up to gamble and leaving the gambling to go to bed.

His mother wore only designer clothes. Once when she had pawned all her jewellery she pawned the clothes too. Men had to wear evening dress to the casino; women were not allowed to wear trousers. She put on her husband’s black tie. She did not even have the money to buy a false beard. She cut off her hair, and she glued a few wisps to her upper lip, and she went to the casino with the money raised from the clothes. She was gone for two days.

She came at last to the room. Instead of a two days’ growth of beard she had only wisps of black hair coming loose from the glue. Her black hair stood in spikes. She came to the room—they had not dared to call room service for two weeks, they had been living on half-finished boxes of chocolates and leftover breadsticks—and she threw one chip on the bed.

Then you lost? said Szegeti, and the boy, too, thought that she had lost.

I lost, she said. She went to the mirror and began to pull off the moustache.

I lost, and I lost, and I lost. And then I won.

From the pockets of the suit she took sheaf after sheaf of notes, and stacked them on the dressing table. Numéro vingthuit, she said, il ne m’a pas tout à fait oubliée. They were sheafs of 500 franc notes.

I must go to bed, she said. I have nothing to wear.

I thought: It’s not just the money.

I thought: I can always sell the heart another time.

I thought: I can’t wait to see the look on his face!

Being deported sounds rather traumatic but Szegeti had been through it so many times before I thought he would probably not let it interfere with his normal pursuits. I knew he played bridge a lot at the Portland Club, so I got off the Circle Line at Baker Street and went to the Marylebone Library to look up the Portland Club in the phone book. One should never despise the obvious, so I tried the residential directory first, but of course a man who wanted to avoid nuisance calls from the type of head of state who typically gets 99.9% of the vote from an adoring populace, not to mention the Bhutanese, American, French, German, Danish and now Belgian embassies, and not mentioning last but not least the World Bank, UN and WHO, was not listed. The Portland Club was at 42 Half Moon Street.

I took the Jubilee Line to Green Park and walked to Half Moon Street. It was about 1:30. I sat on the curb across the street from the Portland Club and began to peruse The Solid State by H. M. Rosenberg.

I thought: Who knows WHAT will happen?

Szegeti was not only a chronic diplomat and cardplayer, he had had dozens, hundreds or thousands of affairs depending on your source (Szegeti/The Sun/Sadaam Hussein). He couldn’t keep track of them all; for all he knew one of his exes might have had a child. He might accept me as his son! Perhaps I would be able to tell the story of the moustache as a story about my grandmother.

People went in and out of the Portland Club, but none looked like Szegeti. At about 4:00 a taxi drew up in front of the club and a man in a white suit stepped out. It was Szegeti.