Imperium by Christian Kracht Read Free Book Online

Christ as martyr. Engelhardt was the spitting image of the Redeemer in those portraits. She smiled blithely and for a few seconds sank away into that golden, long-bygone afternoon after the visit to the church of San Marco, into that discreet tryst at the little pensione not far from the Arno.
    As a nearly unbelievable coincidence would have it, Engelhardt had in fact also been in Florence at that very same time. After the obligatory visit to the Santa Croce, he had wanted to climb up to San Miniato al Monte, but since the dismal poverty of the Italians beyond the city gate of Porta Romana rattled him—he saw heavyset, leather-aproned butchers with their cleavers, hacking into pieces of meat riddled with yellow fat; people were throwing excrement out of their windows into the Via Romana at night, as if still in the depths of the Dark Ages—had sought a shortcut through the Boboli Gardens and sat there on a stone bench to rest, slipped off his sandals, and then languorously stretched out his feet. Somewhere unseen, an amateur had been practicing the trombone. On the hills beyond the city, cypresses shot abruptly into the hyper-blue sky like black flames.
    Sitting across the way on this side of the gravel path had been a gaunt, ascetic-seeming man wearing a small pair of steel spectacles, whose visage the Florentine Easter sun had already burnt a deep nut-brown hue; he had been reading from a book and was, please note, not an Italian, but likely a Swede or a Norwegian. Each had seen the other; the novelist—for that was what he probably was, and not a Scandinavian, but a Swabian—had sized the young bearded man up with interest, before deciding not to address him, although the gentleman who had been so appraised seemed to hope he would. And then both had gone their separate ways, Engelhardt up to San Miniato al Monte and the Swabian writer off to a simple tavern in the San Niccol ò district, where, ensconced in a cool corner, he had ordered a piece of cured ham and a quarter liter of blood-red Valpolicella, continued work on a manuscript with the somewhat plain title Gertrud , and quickly forgotten the young man.
    Engelhardt finished his tea, glancing at the thin, precious Chinese porcelain of the cup in his hand and the rich woman smiling obligingly there on the canap é before him, and heard the word Kabakon whispered ever so softly in his mind. He placed the cup back onto the tray carefully and said he would take the island, sight unseen; he would pay sixteen thousand marks in cash, borrowing the rest, if she wouldn’t mind, against his own production. Queen Emma did not deliberate for long; here a wispy little Jesus was coming to her wanting to pay sixteen thousand marks for a worthless islet without haggling and, on top of that, pledged to sign over his entire yield to her for two years—a quick, rough approximation—and all this for a little piece of land she had inveigled from a Tolai chief for two old rifles, a crate of axes, two sails, and thirty pigs. She offered her hand rather entrancingly, without getting up; Engelhardt took it, and they shook in agreement.
    A contract was drawn up, copies were sent back and forth between Villa Gunantambu and the Hotel F ü rst Bismarck, secretly perused by Hotel Director Hellwig (who quite inappropriately stuck his red-veined nose and his single ear into everything), signed by Engelhardt, and adorned with an inky blue thumbprint. Long walks were taken, several jars of iodine, three mosquito nets, and two steel axes were purchased, and arrangements were made to send his crates of books after him; otherwise, Engelhardt took nothing over from this prosaic world into his own.
    The sun shone, oh, how it shone. The passage over to Mioko with the steam launch proceeded quickly and without incident. Upon arrival there, a taciturn German-Russian agent named Botkin gestured with his thumb toward a sailing canoe hoisted up onto the beach and at the ready, and revealed to Engelhardt