Ultima Thule, by Ashley Stokes
(Part Two of Two)
Later he found the bar at the rear of the hotel, an array of dark green padded alcoves and stained glass partitions that wheeled around a circular serving area. No one was drinking here, no other reps or lorry drivers. Kay was standing behind the counter in front of a wall of shining, yellow-tinged glasses and glimmering bottles and spirits. Around the walls were hung framed images of fairy-winged nymphs promoting aperitifs and infusions. As he approached, he felt that he was somewhere else, some other city and century. Prague maybe, 1921, or Vienna, Montmartre, Bourbon Spain. It was wrong, he knew, to think of the past as a more charged and exciting atmosphere. But what else was there to do with history? He didn’t want to think of it as Sexy Wars. Nor did he want it to be an accumulation of overlooked lives, the biographies of unsung boys and lonely girls in service to this or to that now defunct institution.
He pulled up a stool and ordered a single malt with ice. He was glad to be alone. He wanted to brood.
“You’ve had a terrible time getting up today,” Kay said. “And all for a cancellation, poor you.”
“Not a cancellation. A rearrangement.”
In the mirror beneath the optics he noticed her hand shake as she poured his drink. The ice cubes clattered against the sides of the tumbler. He had long since ceased to think of these trips as holidays or adventures. He was not Big Dump. All that kissing and telling. The not kissing and still telling. He was not, he hoped, going to park and ride. What were those lines in her eye? Would it be rude, intrusive to ask her? She put the tumbler in front of him and smiled again, this time as if she anticipated that he was going to suggest something.
“Kay,” he said, poking his finger at the ceiling. “Can I ask you something a bit private?”
“Fire away,” she said. She clapped her palms softly together, then wiped them on her hips and ended up dipping them into the back pockets of her jeans, a motion that pushed out her chest.
“You’re the owner, aren’t you?” he said. This had occurred to him earlier, considering that she was so far his small-talking concierge and now barmaid.
“Sort of,” she said. “Family business. We’ve been here for a hundred and fifty years. Just about.”
“That’s nice,” he said, and sipped as she began to tell him about the history of the Hotel Aachen, its beginnings as a coach house; the haunt of Red Hector, a famous highwayman; an Edwardian heyday; an inter-war reputation for integrity and cleanliness. He wasn’t really listening. He kept thinking back to Massena and the piece of old lace and Thule and manoeuvring Thule around to discussing a change of management.
“These pictures here,” said Kay, “are insured for …”
“Kay,” said Ansbro. “Do you know where Ultima Thule is?” She looked baffled and tapped her cheek with her thumb. “It’s a shop.”
“I could ask Dad?”
“He might know my client.”
“Mr. Tool.” She rested her elbows on the bar and leaned in close to him. The lines in her eyes were tiny lightning strikes radiating from a central core.
“Thule like hula,” he said. “Vidkun Thule. Like the unpleasant Norwegian.”
“So what does the unpleasant Norwegian do?”
“He’s not unpleasant. Or Norwegian. He’s going to offer me a job.” Staring into her eyes, he tried to catch his reflection there. He shouldn’t be doing this, and wanted to lean back but he couldn’t.
“Confident,” said Kay. “Like it. So we might be seeing more of you?” She lifted her shoulders and spread her arms along the bar and her knuckles paled either side of him.
“Maybe,” he said.
“More?” said Kay as she reached for his now empty glass. “Dutch courage for the interviewee?”
The light behind turned her hair to golden coils, and then he was certain of himself, of what was going to happen, and he didn’t care about anything else.
Upstairs, back in The Salon, he lay face down in the bed with his arm draped over the shape beside him. It was the middle of the night now. He couldn’t sleep. Things that had been said came back to him and he found himself sniggering in the band of grey moonlight that cut across the duvet. He kept mulling over a day in the office a few months ago. Two nights before Big Dump had swallowed a king prawn vindaloo and fifteen bottles of Oranjiboom with someone possibly called Norbert Pogrom from Beer Hall Putsch Books and Figurines in Frisby on the Wreake, Leicestershire. The king prawn then fought a dogged rearguard action in the Wookey Hole-like cave-system that was Big Dump’s bowels, morphing and mutating into a gigantic basalt millipede that slithered out segment by segment all morning and all afternoon, on and on while Ansbro was forced to take BD’s appointments. One of these was the pitching of a new list to Maggie Dunderness of the Broadside Naval History Bookclub in Leigh-on-Sea. When Big Dump returned from sentry duty he looked pinched and peaky. He said, “what you think of Maggie then?”
“Buff,” said Ansbro.
“No. As a woman. What did you think of her … as a woman?” He made a mauling, claw gesture.
“I was thinking about naval books,” said Ansbro, even though he hadn’t been.
“Wuss,” said Big Dump. “Me? I would have taken her to a lay-by and done her.”
Big Dump and his lay-bys and his stonk-on for Broadside Mags of all people. Even Mrs. Dump was a more attractive proposition, and she was a gas mask fetishist – she’d have to be, wouldn’t she? Each time he replayed the Lay-By Declaration Ansbro cracked up. If all went to plan he would never have to stomach this sort of idiocy again. The Codex was beside him, under the covers, safe and concealed. The Codex would now play a subtler role. He found himself laughing again, then heard something and stopped. Tentative footfalls approached in the corridor outside. He sat up and held his breath. He waited, sensing that the softened dark corners of the room had shrunk in closer to him. He mustn’t laugh. She would go. If it was her. Could be another resident, but he’d seen no one else. And she’d made him stay in the bar for so long and seemed crushed when he went off to bed. The steps trailed away. He started to laugh again. Tomorrow he would capture Ultima Thule.
Then the time was finally upon him. He was about to ring Ultima Thule’s bell, a big stubby black button that had in all likelihood once been the first ever, newfangled doorbell contraption in the once island city. Shoulders back, chest in, he focused on his breathing so he wouldn’t appear nervous or intimidated by Mr. Thule. He held the Codex in his left hand to keep his right one free for the introductory shake. The iron grill across the shop front was still in place, though there was a mess of slushy footsteps and zigzag bootprints around the doorstep. People had come in and out today. Buffs, probably.
It was dark now. Ansbro could make out even less of the interior than he had this morning. The window was so dusty that he could only imagine the shelves of bulky, cloth-bound spines and showcases for lead soldiers and dress-uniformed dummies that he was sure lived inside. He would get these windows cleaned. It would be the first thing he would do as manager. This had occurred to him during his earlier reconnaissance mission to find the shop. That had been at midday, after his lie-in and after he’d paused on the mezzanine and then tiptoed out swiftly while Kay was in her office, but before Big Dump called with some gruff threat about what would happen if Ansbro was having a day off at Bastion’s expense. To get off this topic Ansbro explained that he’d done the concierge in a lay-by last night. “Good drills,” said Big Dump and recommended a Mongolian All-You-Can-Eat in Crouch End. There was only an afternoon to waste before the launch of Operation Thule.
He’d walked the Codex around a snow-struck, half-hidden city deserted of people. He mooched cathedral cloisters and a covered market where the stalls were all shut for the day. Then in a fresh snow flurry on a hump-backed bridge he watched a wizened woman with her mouth smeared with thick red slap push a tricycle up the slope towards him. He thought then of the girl he was supposed to meet tonight – her name was Selina and she’d been to Peru – and he suspected that she would like him more if he could fix a lawn mower engine. He sent her a text and cancelled. He ate lunch in a pub called The King’s Shilling and pondered the Sexy Wars and how Lovestone thought that some wars were sex: Napoleonic, Zulu, World War Two in the West. And some were like a bad date where you got nothing because you couldn’t fix a lawnmower: Bosnia, Latin American death squads, Nazis off the leash in Belarus and the Ukraine. There were readers who got hot about nuts and bolts: caterpillar tracks and weird bits of kit and special spoons. He would ask Thule all about this. Thule would have an opinion. Thule, he imagined, was tall and lean with a tight slot-like mouth and unruly eyebrows and long, silvery hair. In a local paper Ansbro compared the rents of one-bedroom flats and flicked through stories about the snow and the closure of the schools. Someone had won twenty-five quid for a photo of a red setter going mental on a sledge. The incident on the line yesterday had been a fatality. There were still no trains south. He walked the streets in the late afternoon. The Codex no longer felt heavy. He’d become used to its weight. As the light began to fade and the sky became a blue screen he stood transfixed by an evening star, delta-shaped, an arrowhead, glinting and distorted. He sat in another pub and drank coffee and waited for seven o’clock and made plans. Now it was seven o’clock and he was outside Ultima Thule, pressing the doorbell, waiting for Mr. Thule to emerge.
On the yomp back it started to snow again. Unable to see, he nearly lost his footing twice and the handle of the case started to chafe the calluses that had long ago formed around the joints in his fingers. An upwardly swiping ache in his right shoulder blade became a spearhead of pain that had dug in around the top of his spine by the time he stumbled into the Aachen. The lights were off. The reception was unmanned. He dropped the case. The calluses stung and crinkled. His last girlfriend had complained that his hands felt scratchy when he touched her. An occupational hazard, he’d explained, when you heft a load of old cack around all day. When the case banged on the carpet the light in the outer office flashed on. He picked up the case and, head down, strode towards the stairs, his shoes greasy with snow and seemingly pressing on nothing. Halfway across, the spotlights above him sprayed the darkness beneath him electric blue. He kept on walking and didn’t look at her.
“Elliot,” Kay called out. “Oh Elliot … wait.”
Upstairs in The Salon he sat down on the bed, still in his coat and with The Product lodged between his ankles. He still couldn’t feel his feet and his hand stung. He should run it under the hot tap but didn’t have the energy. Snow pounded the porthole window again. He thought of the piano music, but this time saw himself smashing his elbows and chin on the stairs as he fell. He had rung the bell for an hour. He had thrown snowballs at the dim, upper storey windows. This was all a set-up. Big Dump knew Thule wasn’t here; or that Thule was a crank or dead or bound to muck about any minion of Leonard Lovestone. And all the time he’d thought there was something else over the escarpment, another promontory, something beyond or improved. Better.
He realized that he was going to have to go home. He would have to slouch into the office on Monday and explain this. Even if he didn’t end the day putting his stuff in a cardboard box he would have to keep this up, wander the streets and the shops and talk about books for Buffs and books for Grunts and Sexy Wars and nuts and bolts, and Big Dump would still lie about his conquests and his mobile phone would still have an 1812 Overture ringtone and his bowels would still be massive and Lovestone’s head would always be the shape of a sweet potato.
He’d left the door open. Kay said something courteous. He didn’t answer. Her footfalls approached and she sat down on the bed beside him. Her feet appeared next to his. She wore cute flat-soled, leopard print pumps.
“I’m sorry, Elliot,” she said.
“What on earth for?”
“What happened.”
“Happened?”
“You don’t know yet?” She took his hand, the left, uncallused one that didn’t throb. “I asked my dad about Mr. Thule this afternoon, and he did know him.”
“Did?”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Mr. Thule was the man who died on the track yesterday.”
His ankles clamped against the case. The snow outside the window seemed further away. Kay gripped his hand a little tighter.
“Apparently, he stopped trading ages ago and put all his money into stocks and that. Recently, you know, debts, nothing. Must have got on top of him. I am sorry.”
He bowed his head. Pressing his knees together compressed the case and hurt his shins. He tried not to, but couldn’t help it and pictured Thule on the track. The barren white expanse on either side. The snow. The oncoming rectangle. The blue smudge. The rails hum. Gravel jitters. Thule in Massena’s uniform as depicted by La Roche. He wondered whether in his last instants Thule considered himself fooled, perverted by spiel and oratory. He must have ended as tatters, wisps.
“I didn’t want this for you,” said Kay.
“You couldn’t have known.”
“No, but I didn’t want this for our last.”
“Last what?”
“Guest. We’re going, you know. Going under. All this time we’ve been here, and now …”
“I’m sorry to hear that. It’s a grand hotel.”
“I saw your name in the reservations, Elliot Ansbro. Bookseller. And I just thought, pull out all the stops, Kay. Make sure he has a great time.”
He sensed that she’d turned her head towards his, but he was staring at the case, the black oblong of it. He could sell the thing inside. Pawn it. Flog it to some second-hand merchant in the city. Cut some cash. Stay a few more days. Keep the Aachen open. He turned to her. There was still something in her eye.
She let go of his hand. They both sat there, hip to hip, and outside the snowflakes swirled, drifting down in the top panel of the porthole and then caught in an updraft in the lower half sped away out of view.
