“Good Lord. Did you ever see him dance?”
“Only once,” I said. “The year the war broke out, 1914, at the old Palace Theatre in London. He did Les Sylphides. Stunning it was. He danced like a god.”
“I’m crazy to meet him,” Yasmin said. “When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “We have to keep moving.”
20
AT THIS POINT in my narrative, just as I was about to describe our trip to Switzerland to find Nijinsky, my pen suddenly came away from the paper and I found myself hesitating. Was I not perhaps getting into a rut? Becoming repetitious? Yasmin was going to be meeting an awful lot of fascinating people over the next twelve months, no doubt about that. But in nearly every case (there would of course be one or two exceptions) the action was going to be very much the same. There would be the giving of the Beetle powder, the ensuing cataclysm, the escape with the spoils, and all the rest of it, and that, however interesting the men themselves might be, was going to become pretty boring for the reader. Nothing would have been easier than for me to describe in great detail how the two of us met Nijinsky on a path through the pinewoods below his villa, as indeed we did, and how we gave him a chocolate, and how we held him in conversation for nine minutes until the powder hit him, and how he chased Yasmin into the dark wood, leaping from boulder to boulder and rising so high in the air with each leap he seemed to be flying. But if I did that, then it would be fitting also to describe the James Joyce encounter, Joyce in Paris, Joyce in a dark blue serge suit, a black felt hat, old tennis shoes on his feet, twirling an ashplant and talking obscenities. And after Joyce, it would be Monsieur Bonnard and Monsieur Braque and then a quick trip back to Cambridge to unload our precious spoils in The Semen’s Home. A very quick trip that was because Yasmin and I were in the rhythm of it now and we wanted to push on until it was finished.
A. R. Woresley was wildly excited when I showed him our haul. We now had King Alfonso, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Stravinsky, Proust, Nijinsky, Joyce, Bonnard, and Braque. “And you’ve done a fine job with the freezing,” he said to me as he carefully transferred the racks of straws with their labels on them from my suitcase freezer to the big freezer in Dunroamin, our headquarters house. “Keep going, children,” he said, rubbing his hands together like a grocer. “Keep going.”
We kept going. When Yasmin and I returned the next day to Paris, we collected Clemenceau, Foch, and Maurice Ravel, who was living alone out at Monfort-l’Amaury with a houseful of Siamese cats. After that, and it was the beginning of October now, we drove on south into Italy, looking for D. H. Lawrence. We found him living at the Palazzo Ferraro in Capri with Frieda, and on this occasion I had to distract fat Frieda for two hours out on the rocks while Yasmin went to work on Lawrence. We got a bit of a shock with Lawrence though. When I rushed his semen back to our Capri hotel and examined it under the microscope, I found that the spermatozoa were all stone dead. There was no movement there at all.
“Jesus,” I said to Yasmin. “The man’s sterile.”
“He didn’t act like it,” she said. “He was like a goat. Like a randy goat.”
“We’ll have to cross him off the list.”
“Who’s next?” she asked.
“Giacomo Puccini.”
21
“PUCCINI IS A BIG ONE,” I said. “A giant. We mustn’t fail.”
“Where does he live?” Yasmin asked.
“Near Lucca, about forty miles west of Florence.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Puccini is an enormously rich and famous man,” I said. “He has built himself a huge house, the Villa Puccini, on the edge of a lake beside the tiny village where he was born, which is called Torre del Lago. Now this is the man, Yasmin, who has written Manon, La Bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, and The Girl of the Golden West. Classics every one of them. He is probably not a Mozart or a Wagner or even a Verdi, but he’s still a genius and a giant. He’s a bit of a lad, too.”