Rex Read Online Free PDF Page A

turn and see them. Should I walk in the opposite direction, through the gate, out into the street, lean back against the wall and study this object that serrated the airaround it? Or turn and shout, “A diamond! Here in the grass!”? The air lapping at my pants, the sea breeze (or it came from inland, I don’t know) blowing at my back, the light touch of a god, the zephyr. To understand it, assent to it: “All right, but, how? Flee? Run away because of a diamond in the rough? Because of an uncut diamond in the grass?”
    That question in my eyes, pulling myself up over the wall without taking my eyes off the sea, the sea that moved slowly toward the coast, time and again, a secret hidden in its folds, starfish and sea creatures seen in cross-section in its blue mass. Rolling across that mass, inside it, was the answer to my question: Who were they? What had I gotten myself into? What should I do now? I knew what to do. I understood immediately. Leave, Petya, leave your parents’ house, get out of there and go far away, taking care not to trample on the other houses. Like a giant striding away across the line of the horizon. Without looking back, without stopping to find out who they were. Contract killers. International blackmailers.
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    False, therefore, what the Commentator says. As if the Writer could have lacked the subject matter for an original or primary novel about anything at all, ancient or modern, a young man’s arrival in the south of Spain, in Marbella, at the home of some Russians (or Russian mafiosi) where he takes a position as a child’s tutor and comes under the spell of the owner’s wife and finds himself involved in the most incredible of stories. Isn’t that enough for an original book, a straightforward book, written out point by point, without flashbacks or commentaries, should anyone, a primary writer, be disposed to do so?
    There was enough there in the story to fill several slim volumes, blonde women on their covers with eyes round as dinner plates, smoking guns. Seven paperbacks could easily contain it, there was matter enough to generate seven thrillers, or a series of seven little novels, each a hundred pages long, about the question of all the money the two seemed to have, the strange figure of the Buryat, the father’s frequent and inexplicable trips away from home, and Nelly, the chatelaine, the abandoned beauty.
    All of it told from the tutor’s point of view, easily and comfortably, as if written in the 1920s when tutors were commonly employed (though still today, even now, I myself), with complete innocence and no need for commentary or any weight given to the detective stories and thrillers already written. Setting out to write it, should anyone ever try to write it, would he really have to eschew the frontal, vehement, anddirect narration that the Commentator claims, or seems to claim with the whole body of his work, is now impossible?
    I could write, for example, that I did not know the source of that money (the gem in the garden!). I imagined various possible pasts, your father’s fists pumping in and out of a stomach, a man flying back, doubled over by the blows. Your mother had told me, had lied to me, that both of them were scientists: “Vasily, my husband, is a scientist.”
    In the sense—I suppressed a smile—that a famous bank robber is nicknamed “the Professor” for his habit of arriving at heists, bank vaults, long after midnight with a white lab coat over his shoulders and a leather case in which the security camera records not Herr Professor’s stethoscope but the lock picks and rubber gloves of his trade, though there is a stethoscope, too, which he speciously applies to the iron chest of a Mosler with ten combinations. In that sense a scientist. The pair of con artists who, after years of sustaining their performance, have been completely swallowed up by their roles: the big strong man and his