The Secret History - Donna Tartt [170]
I brushed my teeth, dressed, and hurried outside, where the first familiar person I spotted was Julian on his way up to the Lyceum.
He drew back from me in innocent, Chaplinesque surprise. “Goodness,” he said, “what happened to you?”
“Have you heard anything this morning?”
“Why, no,” he said, looking at me curiously. “That eye. You look as if you were in a barroom brawl.”
Any other time I would have been too embarrassed to tell him the truth, but I was so sick of lying that I had an urge to come clean, on this small matter at least. So I told him what had happened.
I was surprised at his reaction. “So it was a brawl,” he said, with childish delight. “How thrilling. Are you in love with her?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know her too well.”
He laughed. “Dear me, you are being truthful today,” he said, with remarkable perspicuity. “Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn’t it? Just like a fiction.… By the way, did I tell you that some men came round to see me yesterday afternoon?”
“Who were they?”
“There were two of them. At first I was rather anxious—I thought they were from the State Department, or worse. You’ve heard of my problems with the Isrami government?”
I am not sure what Julian thought the Isrami government—terrorist state though it is—should want to do with him, but his fear of it came from his having taught its exiled crown princess about ten years before. After the revolution she’d been forced into hiding, had ended up somehow at Hampden College; Julian taught her for four years, in private tutorials supervised by the former Isrami minister of education, who would occasionally fly in from Switzerland, with gifts of caviar and chocolates, to make sure that the curriculum was suitable for the heir apparent to his country’s throne.
The princess was fabulously rich. (Henry had caught a glimpse of her once—dark glasses, full-length marten coat—clicking rapidly down the stairs of the Lyceum with her bodyguards at her heels.) The dynasty to which she belonged traced its origins to the Tower of Babel, and had accumulated a monstrous amount of wealth since then, a good deal of which her surviving relatives and associates had managed to smuggle out of the country. But there was a price on her head, as a result of which she’d been isolated, overprotected, and largely friendless, even while a teenager at Hampden. Subsequent years had made her a recluse. She moved from place to place, terrified of assassins; her whole family—except for a cousin or two and a little half-wit brother who was in an institution—had been picked off one by one over the years and even the old Minister of Education, six months after the princess was graduated from college, had died of a sniper’s bullet, sitting in the garden of his own little red-roofed house in Montreux.
Julian was uninvolved in Isrami politics despite his fondness for the princess and his sympathy—on principle—with royalists instead of revolutionaries. But he refused to travel by airplane or accept packages COD, lived in fear of unexpected visitors, and had not been abroad in eight or nine years. Whether these were reasonable precautions or excessive ones I do not know, but his connection with the princess did not seem a particularly strong one and I, for one, suspected that the Isramic jihad had better things to do than hunting down Classics tutors in New England.
“Of course, they weren’t from the State Department at all but they were connected with the government in some way. I have a sixth sense about such things, isn’t that curious? One of the men was an Italian, very charming, really … courtly, almost, in a funny sort of way. I was rather puzzled by it all. They said that Edmund was on drugs.”