LITMIR.BIZ

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Ajdini saluted Squire with some eagerness in her gesture, and the customary mocking note in her voice.

      ‘Are you looking for more flying saucers, I suppose?’

      ‘In search of the miraculous? Waiting for a sign?’

      She laughed. ‘I’ve seen too many signs in my life. They all point different ways.’

      ‘Ha! “What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws? Passion and reason, self division cause.”’

      If she recognized a couplet from one of Aldous Huxley’s favourite poems, she gave no sign, saying cheerfully, ‘If you are about to turn back to the hotel, Signor Pelli and I will walk along with you.’

      He smiled warmly at her, suddenly full of affection, loving that naked face, and reflected again on the beautiful curvature of her lips, only made possible by the topography of her lower jaw. How long would you have to live with Selina before you failed to notice those affecting proportions? Enrico was no doubt under the spell of them. He had given Squire no greeting. His face was clouded, his heavy brows drawn together, his back rigid. As he moved reluctantly to walk beside Ajdini and Squire, the latter thought, ‘So he’s been propositioning her hard, and had no luck.’

      And, as his gaze rested on her, ‘I wonder what luck I’d have?’

      ‘There’s a sailing boat moored by the harbour,’ he said, walking on the other side of Ajdini from Pelli, and addressing her left profile. ‘How pleasant to sail away now, before the moon is up, to forget all your responsibilities … To discover a little sunlit island no one had ever happened across, with a golden beach and no footballers …’

      ‘Footballers! How did they get there?’

      ‘They didn’t.’

      ‘And on the island …?’

      ‘Coconut palms …’

      ‘Your dreams are so standard. Better natural products are oil, wheat and whisky …’

      ‘I wasn’t planning to work or get rich.’

      ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘I’m not a bad sailor.’

      Outside a bar in a side alley, a broken sign burned, advertising a Belgian lager with the words ‘STELLA ART’ in blurred mauve neon. He took it as a good omen: there were islands somewhere, even if not readily accessible.

      ‘“All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by …”’

      ‘It would be a good alternative to listening to Herman Fittich, I’m sure.’

      ‘I like the man. I’m confident he will have something interesting to say.’

      She gestured. ‘His perpetual irony I cannot stand. A defeated man. But I don’t like the Germans in any case.’

      ‘They did make themselves a bit unpopular a few years ago.’

      She flashed him a reproving expression. ‘Don’t you start on the irony. You were safe in Britain when the Germans were killing off Europe. Me, I am Yugoslav by birth, or half Serbian and half Turkish, plus a dash of Persian.’

      ‘So you have reason to hate the Germans.’

      She gave a curt nod, and tossed her head.

      ‘I was a tiny girl when the damned Nazis invaded my homeland. Everyone fought them, young and old. No country was more brave, more determined, than Serbia. My father was killed by the Bosch, then my elder brother. So I can’t help hating them. An uncle and I escaped to the United States after the war, but one does not forget those times. They leave a mark.’

      Pelli said something to her angrily in Italian, but she silenced him with one of her quelling glances.

      ‘The Americans understand little of the rest of the world,’ she said. ‘But you see I am not like that, although I have American citizenship.’

      ‘Yugoslavia’s a magnificent country. If you’re so left wing, and you dislike the States as much as it seems you do, why don’t you return to Yugoslavia?’

      She appeared to undergo a sudden change of mood. As if dismissing the subject, she slipped a slender arm on which bracelets clattered through his arm, and made him look with her in a small lighted shop window. Pelli stood awkwardly by, hands impatiently on hips.

      ‘That handbag’s not bad, eh? I bet it was made in Milano. You know Yugoslavia, don’t you? You have lived there?’

      ‘Yes, I have.’

      ‘There are more job opportunities for me in the States.’

      ‘Thank democracy for that, Selina. Be grateful for what you’ve got.’

      She sighed and they walked up the street in silence.

      ‘Well, dear, dear. You see, Tom, I do really quite fancy you – much more than I fancy this sulky young man who wants only to go to bed with me and fortunately does not talk English. Well, I go to bed with whom I feel like and maybe tonight I feel like you if you are so inclined. So I don’t want to offend you. But you are – oh, so simple. The British are like Americans, they do not know the real world. Okay, there are more job opportunities in the States, but that’s only your debating point to be scored. You don’t see why there are all those jobs more.

      ‘Jobs are what capitalism’s all about – getting people to work for the bosses. That’s really why I hate capitalism, because it is just a huge business and industrial machine gone mad, with all the stupid “free citizens”, as they call themselves, really mere consumers, chained for life to support the machine, proud of their sharing.’

      He seized her wrist and shook it till the bracelets jangled, laughing in irritation. ‘At the risk of being left off your visiting list tonight, let me tell you that you are the victim of propaganda – outdated propaganda at that. If the world was as you say, it wouldn’t be worth living in! You’ve got a silly argument, like Krawstadt with his pinball machines. Work’s okay, work gives us identity. And do people cease to consume, to need goods, under other systems than capitalism? It’s just that other systems are less efficient at producing the goods.’

      ‘That may be, and the other systems may have their faults, but it is the efficiency of the capitalist system I also dislike. It exploits the world for the privileges of a few. Who needs an electric carving knife? That efficiency is itself a crime; I’ll give you an example.’

      She had got her wrist free from his grasp, and sank her long crimson nails into his arm with a sort of humorous cruelty.

      ‘We were talking about the Nazis. Okay. In the First World War, Germany had three important chemicals firms, Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst. You know all the names today. The Germans managed to synthesize ammonia and nitric acid in a successful industrial process. The British and Americans got millions of tons of natural nitrates needed for high explosives from Chile, and so their chemical industry fell behind Germany.

      ‘The three firms united to become I. G. Farben, a conglomerate which totally identified itself with the Nazi cause. It employed slave labour, it ran its own concentration camp, it manufactured Zyklon B to gas Jews with, as well as manufacturing the usual agents of mass-destruction. I could say its products killed my father and brother.

      ‘The bosses of I. G. Farben were tried at Nuremberg after the war, but they just got cynical sentences of two or three years’ imprisonment. Farben was dissolved, but Hoechst, Bayer, and BASF started up again. What’s more, they and their subsidiaries got reparation settlements from America, millions of dollars.

      ‘Now they have bought themselves into the American pharmaceuticals industry, so that Bayer, for instance, has forty per cent of its assets in the US. Isn’t that an international conspiracy? You see how criminality, murder, become legal as long as they serve the system. Big money is always linked with death in capitalism.’

      Squire shook his head. As he stared into the aquarium of the shop window in which five handbags drowned,

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