Kleinzeit by Russell Hoban Read Free Book Online

deeply, blew out smoke, sighed.
    ‘I dreamed about you,’ said Kleinzeit again.
    ‘As I said before, no charge,’ said Redbeard.
    ‘There’s no use beating about the bush,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘What’s all this with the yellow paper?’
    ‘You police?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Bloody cheek then.’ Redbeard stared hard at Kleinzeit. His eyes were bright blue, intransigent like a doll’s eyes. Kleinzeit thought of a doll’s head lying on a beach, elemental like the sea, like the sky.
    ‘I picked up a sheet of yellow paper a couple of weeks ago,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘On it I wrote a man with a barrow full of rocks.’
    ‘Harrow full of crocks,’ said Redbeard without looking away.
    ‘“Morrows cruel mock,”’ said Kleinzeit. ‘What’s it mean?’.
    Redbeard turned, stared out of the window.
    ‘Well?’
    Redbeard shook his head.
    ‘You show up in my head,’ said Kleinzeit, ‘and you say, “Don’t come the innocent with me, mate.” ‘
    Redbeard shook his head.
    ‘Well?’ said Kleinzeit.
    ‘If I dream you that’s my affair,’ said Redbeard. ‘If you dream me that’s your affair.’
    ‘Look here,’ said Kleinzeit, ‘don’t
you
come the innocent with
me.
You and your flaming pretensions.’
    ‘What do you mean, “pretensions”?’
    ‘Well, what else is it, I’d like to know,’ said Kleinzeit, ‘when you go about dropping yellow paper so that barrows full of rocks come out of my typewriter and I get sacked.’
    ‘Harrow full of crocks,’ said Redbeard. ‘You keep on interfering with me and I may yet have to sort you out.’
    ‘I interfere with you!’ said Kleinzeit. ‘Flashpoint’s dying words were “Arrow in a box”. I bought my glockenspiel at YARROW, Fullest Stock. There was never anything of that sort before your yellow paper.’ He gave Redbeard a cigarette, lit it for him, lit one for himself. Both smoked, stared out of the window.
    Redbeard showed Kleinzeit his empty cup. Kleinzeit bought two more coffees and two more fruity buns. ‘Fruity buns, for that matter!’ he said. ‘The fat man ate fruity buns. What’re you, another ullage case?’
    Redbeard stared at him while he ate the buns. ‘You!’ he said when he had finished chewing. ‘You’re no better than a little sucking baby. You bloody want answers to everything, everything explained, meanings and whatnot all laid on for you. What’s it to me what the yellow paper does to you? Do you care what it does to me? Of course you don’t. Why should you?’
    Kleinzeit had no answer.
    ‘Right,’ said Redbeard. ‘There’s nothing to say. We’re all alone, those of us who are alone. Why do they have to lie about it?’
    ‘Who? About what?’
    ‘Newspapers and magazines. About how it is. Harry Solvent, for instance.’
    ‘The one who wrote
Kill for a Living?
’
    ‘Right,’ said Redbeard. ‘In the
Sunday Times Magazine
you see photos of him in his Robert Adam mansion.’
    ‘Pompwood.’
    ‘Right. There he is in the photos having a bath in a tub which is one of Tiepolo’s smaller chapel domes inverted, it’s about twenty feet across. The frescoes have been coated with perspex to make it waterproof. The drain plug, carved of pink coral, is fitted into Venus’s right nipple. The dome is set in a base of Parian marble blocks weighing twelve tons, from a temple of Apollo at Lesbos.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘I saw the photos.’
    ‘The caption under the picture of Solvent in his bath is: “Alone at the end of the day, Harry Solvent relaxes in his bath correcting the proofs of his new novel,
Transvestite Express”’
    ‘Yes,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘What about it?’
    ‘He isn’t really alone, you see,’ said Redbeard. ‘Why can’t they say: “While the eighteen members of his household staff are variously occupied elsewhere in the mansion, Harry Solvent, in the presence of his agent Titus Remora, his solicitor Earnest Vasion, his research assistant Butchie Stark, his secretary and p.a. Polly Filla, his