Downriver by Iain Sinclair Page A

that might have been rolled in human skin, stitched over a morbid blend of camel dung. He smiled effortlessly, but without meaning.
    Tenbrücke had accepted the Conrads, with sighs and shrugs, as part-payment in a currency deal that had gone sour. ‘You cut off a head only once,’ he remarked, ‘the gonads you can always squeeze.’
    These books meant nothing to him. His price would therefore be impossible to meet. It was the best method of milking some pleasure from the affair. He would hold out until the sweat wasrolling, in steel bearings, down Sileen’s neck; until his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. How Sileen knew this, ahead of the event, I could not begin to guess. He did his homework without leaving his fireside. He consulted the messages in the flames. He was inevitably putting the phone back on its cradle as you entered the room. He lived in whispers, behind closed blinds: at midnight, he took to the streets.
    Sileen never admitted to owning a car – it was my business to drive him – but now, as we passed one, parked with its nearside wheels on the pavement, he stopped and put a key in its lock. It could have been any car. He seemed to have picked this one simply because he was tired of walking. He was in second gear, and away, before I had worked out how to shut the door.
    II
    â€˜This house once belonged to Francis Bacon: a painter.’ Tenbrücke brushed aside any formal introductions and began lecturing us, as if we shared
exactly
his sense of the cynicism and venality of the world: a vision he tried, with scrupulous politeness, to mirror in all his dealings. ‘Left nothing behind him. Not a tube of any description, nor a knife. What did he do here? He never lifted a brush. Sat quiet with his back to the window. The river-light modelled his head with an interesting syphilitic effect; the dying claret going green at the edges. He looked as if he had been flayed.’
    Sileen and I, side by side, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, sat stiffly on the edge of a merciless Bauhaus shelf; polished leather thongs on an armature of brass. We were auditioning for something. Tenbrücke put a flame-thrower to his Brechtian cigar: with the relish of an interrogator.
    â€˜You don’t smoke?’ he stated, between slow puffs.
    â€˜Only cigars,’ I replied, hopefully.
    â€˜Ah, good. Very good.’ Tenbrücke nodded, without passingthe box. ‘You really should try these some time. A little shop in Amsterdam.’
    He wanted to show us everything: inscriptions, photographs, woodcuts of dockside crucifixions, autographed menus (authenticated with chicken fat), skulls in the rubble, sabre massacres, caricatures of vast hook-nosed profiteers fellating gold from the enslaved and mesmerized masses. He reared above these boxed and gilt-edged images. He caressed velvet; he fingered, he teased. He slid open drawers with well-rehearsed gestures. He oozed and glistened: his mouth melted with soft metals. He ran his hand inside a closely-buttoned suede waistcoat – a slash of hunting pink – to massage the heart of a slaughtered animal. Sugar-dusted lumps in a silver bowl were pressed on us. Rubber cubes disguising a kernel of pinewood.
    â€˜Saturday afternoons, do you ever visit the Porchester Hall Turkish Baths?’ Tenbrücke wasn’t ready to give Sileen an opening. ‘It helps to steam Farringdon Road out of the pores, I find. I’m not fit for anything else. I’m too old for Bell Street and Portobello. They’re all there.’ He laughed. ‘All the faces. Property, Television, Boxing, Snooker. All the agents, the brokers, Tin Pan Alley. Terence Stamp? Of course. Rolex watches? Oysters? Half-price, and better for cash!’ He bared his wrist.
    Sileen made for the window. He gave up on the shelves of black fetishes. There wasn’t a book in the place.
    â€˜Shoes?’ Tenbrücke gestured, pleased that he was finally getting to