by Sarah Dunant
“Right the first time. That’s very good.”
“It was hard,” she said drily. “So, Mr. America, you like foreign women?”
“I like,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
“Good. I like you, too. Your country gives us money, now we’re on your side. Money and other things.” She laughed. “So how about I get you a drink instead?”
Her accent was crisp and clean, but, then, it would need to be, given her job. English is still the language of commerce, legal or illegal. He leaned back in his chair. “Fine by me.”
She slid her hand back toward her glass and lifted it to her lips, dragging her tongue along the surface of the liquid like a tiny spoon, scooping up a little mouthful: a deliberately provocative gesture. He nodded in approval. Then she put down the glass in front of him. “There you go, Yankee. This one’s on me.” And she turned on her heel and walked out of the café.
The bartender was pretending not to be watching. Jake waited till she was out the door, then got up to follow. He was halfway to the exit when the man’s voice reached him. “Hey, Mr. America?”
He turned back.
“The lady get you the drink, she not pay for it.”
By the time he got onto the street she was nowhere to be seen. Shit. He moved swiftly to one corner, then back along to the other. As he turned onto the main road he saw it happen as if in slow motion. Across the other side of the street a beat-up black sedan glided to a halt, the back door opening as it did so. They seemed to scoop her off the sidewalk, like a well-practiced move in an ice-skating routine. She didn’t even have time to struggle. Before the door was closed the car had accelerated and was moving away. He stood, the license-plate number going around and around in his head like a mantra until he ripped out a pen and a matchbox to scribble it down on.
That was the last he had seen of her. Until now. When he had got back to base the second watch told him the man had left the apartment ten minutes after the girl, en route to a hotel. He had looked just fine.
Twenty-four hours later a ticket to a locker at central station had been delivered to the office he was working in, his name on the envelope. The luggage attendant told him the metal box they found there had been left sometime that morning. He couldn’t remember who had done the leaving. But, then, as Jake knew, give enough money to a man who doesn’t earn much and you can wipe out whole layers of memory.
He took one last look at the mess, then turned away.
“Detective Biderman?”
He turned. The pathologist was standing in the doorway; gray hair, glasses, running to fat. He’d seen him before at half a million other murders. Bodies and their dissectors; they were the same in any culture.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“I have something for you. It was found in the lining of the box.”
“For me?”
“Yes.”
Jake followed him into a little cubicle off the main lab. Above the table, against a light, and held up at the corner by a tiny pair of tweezers, a sheet of lined paper was hanging. The words on it were big and scrawled, capital letters in English.
YOU’RE A LONG WAY FROM HOME, BIDERMAN. KEEP YOUR NOSE OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S BUSINESS. OR WE’LL CUT IT OFF. JUST LIKE HERS.
She took a swig of her coffee. The cappuccino froth was cold in the bottom of the cup. Not so much a translator gripped by her story as one tired of trying to make it less absurd. On first reading she hadn’t given it much thought, but now, playing with each word, she found Biderman’s behavior ridiculous. If he were half as good a cop as this story was trying to make him, he would never do such a stupid thing as approach the girl in the first place.
But if he hadn’t approached her he wouldn’t now be consumed with guilt that he might have contributed to her death. And guilt, of course, can be a powerful motivating force when it comes to getting the hero to slay the Minotaur. Especially the kind of Minotaur that eats blondes for breakfast.
As for the blonde herself, well, she was expendable. That had been clear from the moment she opened her legs to a stranger. For women like her the range of male emotions was limited anyway. Guilt was probably the best of them, with contempt and lust mixed too close to call. The Madonna and the whore. With the whore down, there was still the Madonna to go.
She pressed the save button. She might as well admit it, she wasn’t doing so well today. Like keeping Tinkerbell alive, you need to believe in some kinds of fiction to make it work. Cynicism just breeds bad translation.
She got up and arched her spine, using her hands to massage the small of her back. The computer table was too low for her chair, and with every page her body curled farther over. She looked out of her window. Her study was at the very top of the house. From where she sat she had a bird’s-eye view of other people’s gardens, though not, unless she stood up, of her own. In summer it made her the perfect Peeping Tom on an outside world—children playing, families barbecuing, old men tending their rhubarb patches, and the gay couple with the fenced-in roof terrace who sunbathed nude believing themselves to be private behind a forest of greenery.
Not now though. Now it was winter and the leaves had fallen from the vine. A woman to the far left of her view was taking in a line of washing, some of it standing up on its own accord with the cold, while three houses farther along a man in a hat and coat was doing something to the fence at the bottom of his garden. He’d have to hurry. It was only midafternoon, but the natural light had all but drained away. It would be dark soon. Earlier today than yesterday. Earlier still tomorrow. From the middle of November you could almost count the lost minutes of each day.
Tom had left in March, when the light was growing stronger. The best time to start again. This would be her first winter alone in the house. She had thought of going away for Christmas. When she had planned the translation schedule she had set herself a theoretical deadline of three hundred pages, followed by a week in the sun. But the brochures, with their cover photos of Nile sunsets and rose-red desert ruins, had lain untouched on her desk. There was no sun in this book. And somehow, already, she knew she wasn’t going anywhere either.
Her back still hurt. She lay down on the floor and uncurled her spine, trying to make the bottom of her backbone touch the floor. She lifted her legs slowly off the ground, keeping them straight until she could feel the ache singing up through the back tendons. Then, slowly, she lowered them to the floor. She did it again. Her stomach muscles joined the chorus of complaint. She decided not to listen to them. Maybe Sally and Tom were right after all. Maybe she had been spending too much time on her own.
Could that be what this whole thing with the CDs had been about? Solitude inducing a form of paranoia, turning the normal into the weird. Two missing CDs and a stereo left on overnight. Put like that it was nothing but carelessness and an overheated imagination. She could almost hear Patrick and Sally over their dinner table: “And then apparently she rang him at two o’clock in the morning, screaming into the phone. Accused him of trying to persecute her. Something about a record player being on when she got home. He said she was drunk, of course. But still, I mean, it’s hardly normal behavior. . . . Poor Lizzie.”
Was it really poor Lizzie? What if she had simply left the stereo switched on and Millie had brushed against it? What if the two Van Morrison CDs had genuinely got mislaid, slipped behind a kitchen cabinet or something? You hear such stories of women living alone—a culture of threat and fear manufacturing shadows where there are none. In a house full of people a lost CD would simply be someone else’s untidiness. Had Tom’s leaving turned her into some kind of lonely neurotic? She heard his voice again, concern taking over from anger. Maybe it was she who really needed the revenge. And this had been a way of allowing herself to be angry enough with him to take it.
Except I don’t feel like that, she thought. I feel okay. Better. More myself without him. So it’s made me antisocial. Some kinds of healing can be done only on one’s own.
Of course there were
other times, times when it hurt still, when the sense of loss and loneliness made her want to scream. But that was inevitable, wasn’t it? A part of the process of separating: another step on the long night’s journey into day. Underneath she was fine. Wasn’t she? Wasn’t she? . . .
Yeah, Elizabeth, and how do mad people really know that they’re mad?
She found herself amused rather than disturbed by the idea. In her case maybe the trouble had been sanity rather than madness. Being too nice and too normal for too long—fitting in, making allowances, behaving as she ought rather than as she wanted. Well, not anymore. So God help any burglar who saw her as an easy touch.
She got up and went back to close down the computer, but as she did so her eye was caught by a lazy sentence construction, made lazier by her loss of interest, and by the time she’d sorted it out, her appetite for the words had returned. She plowed on for another couple of pages.
The day ended and the streetlights came on. Jake spent hours in his office waiting for a body that never arrived. But, then, everything took longer in this damn country. Why use computers when you can just employ more people to fill more filing cabinets? Bill Gates was going to clean up around here. And with Gates would come the pirates. Give it a couple of years and there’d be as much profit in illegal software as in drugs. But where’s the buzz in chasing computer nerds? Who wants to be that kind of cop? Not Jake Biderman, that’s for sure.
Eventually, at around ten o’clock, they tracked down the kidnap car to a stolen vehicle taken from the suburbs. Except it wasn’t that easy. Right license plate, but wrong car. Simple enough trick in any language to switch the plates around. He kept thinking back to the snatch—the smooth, apparently planned way it had unfolded, how little she had fought back. He saw her glance up into the bar mirror in the café, the figure moving out of sight. Maybe it hadn’t been such an unwelcome pickup after all. Maybe they had spotted him as well as her. It wouldn’t be the first time an organization had killed their own carrier. Especially if they thought she’d been talking to the wrong people.
In the end, he gave up for the night and went back to his makeshift apartment, where the TV was playing American reruns with Peter Falk’s mouth moving out of sync with the dubbed dialogue, and where he felt suddenly homesick for the real thing.
She left him there, eating bread and sausages, worrying at the scar tissue of his dead marriage, and thinking, always thinking, of Mirka—her voice, her hair, and the way her breasts rode high, like the woman with the clever tongue and no eyes left under her sunglasses.
Suddenly she was hungry, too, but, like Jake, had no appetite for cooking. Or TV. She picked up the phone from her desk and ordered a pizza, arranging to collect it in half an hour, after a visit to the local video store. She grabbed a bag from the hall table and left.
At the news and video store she flicked through the racks, rejecting dozens of movies about police corruption and terminator cops, settling instead for one where Jeff Bridges escapes from a burning plane only to find himself unable to connect with the world afterward. Sally would no doubt see it as a metaphor. When she took it over to the desk, she realized the shop assistant had been watching her.
“You’re still living here?” he said as he took down her address in the book. “I thought when you canceled the papers that you’d moved.”
When was that? Eight, maybe nine months ago. There had been a time when she and Tom had been almost regulars—junk movies to go with junk food. A Monday night ritual. “No, no. Just busy.”
He nodded. “The Guardian, Observer, Independent on Sunday, and what was it? The London Review of Books. Fortnightly.”
She laughed. “Yes, that’s right. You’ve got a memory.”
He shrugged. “Never forget a paper round. So, what you got here?” He glanced at the cover of the video and looked pained. “Oh, dear.”
“Bad choice?”
“Well, it’s not my idea of fun for a Saturday night. We’ve got a comedy shelf, you know.”
“I’m working toward it.”
“How about romance? That geezer from ER. Makes the girls go weak in the knees. Or a good thriller. I could recommend a couple that would scare your socks off.”
I bet you could, she thought. “Actually, I’ve already got my head into one, thanks.”
He rang it up on the register and gave her her change. “Oh, well. Enjoy. Tomorrow by one.”
“What?”
“Back tomorrow by one. We close after lunch.”
As she left she felt his smile follow her out. See, she thought, I can do it. Normal life isn’t so hard when you get into it. All it takes is practice.
From the video store to the pizzeria. In the car the smell of the freshly baked pizza was exquisite. She sat, feeling its greasy warmth seeping through the bottom of the box onto her lap, and watched while a group of teenage girls lounged on the street corner, talking, laughing, self-consciously confident, as if the world owed them a living that they might or might not be bothered to collect. I was never like that, she thought. Never so sure or so flamboyant. Was it just me, or is there something about this generation that really couldn’t give a toss?
Across the street a young man walked past, slicked hair and Doc Martens. One of the girls wolf-whistled, while the rest of them shrieked, doubling up with that uncontrollable giggling that seems to be the preserve of pubescent hormone levels. The guy smirked, even blushed slightly. Sexual harassment: you couldn’t really do it to men, they liked it too much. She left them to it.
When she arrived home the pizza was already turning cool on her lap. She decided she would put it in the oven for ten minutes while she made a salad and opened some wine. A celebration of newfound normality. She noted with relief as she made her way downstairs to the kitchen door that there was no sound of Van Morrison to welcome her.
There was, however, something else.
She saw it as soon as she walked in, right in front of her, slap bang in the middle of the kitchen table like some bizarre art exhibit: a neat, shimmering stack of CDs, built with such precision that it reached like a miniature plastic tower block halfway up to the light fixture above. There must have been twenty or thirty of them, her whole collection, and they had all come from the same place, the same empty kitchen shelf by the stereo. A perfect musical migration.
“Oh, my,” she murmured, for one second as much in wonder as in fear.
Then, as she put down the pizza and reached for the phone, “Well, at least this means I’m not crazy.”
six
She waited in the kitchen, standing watch over the obelisk, as if without her vigil it might somehow disappear as fast as it had come, leaving nothing for them to see. They had promised to get there quickly and they did.
They turned out to be him. He was a young officer, a big man already going to flab, though the uniform helped, made him appear older, more solid. He studied the tower, asked a few questions, then checked the house, moving systematically from room to room, testing all the windows and the locks. He found nothing. She was, she realized as he told her, not entirely surprised.
“Though I should tell you you’re not particularly well protected here,” he said, rattling the French doors in the kitchen. “A committed burglar could get through these without much trouble. To be really safe you need bars. And I’ve seen more effective locks. . . .” He tested it again, lifting up the internal catch until it clicked, then turning the handle. The door opened. He looked out into the garden then closed it again. “You’re sure you didn’t . . .”
“Leave it open when I went out? Yes, I’m sure.”
“And nothing else has been taken or moved?”
“Nothing.”
He came and sat down opposite her, the exquisitely constructed little tower between them. He stared at it and at her for a moment, then flicked open his notebook, and jotted something down. He looked up. Just for the record . . . “How long did you say you’d been living here, Miss . . . er . . . Skvorecky?”
As pronunciations go it wasn’t worth correcting. “Three years.”
“And nothing like this has ever happened before?”
“No. Nothing. Not until the first incident with the CD.”
“And that was?”
“Late July. I think.”
“Right. And this boyfriend you mentioned. He moved out when?”
“Nine months ago.”
“And he no longer has a key.”
“No. Not now.”
“How did it . . . er . . . end?”
You’re too young to want to know, she thought. “Um . . . well, we didn’t get along for a while. But it’s better now. I mean, I really don’t think he has anything to do with this.”
“With this,” he repeated. “So let me get this straight. What we’re looking at here is two missing CDs, a stereo that was playing one night when you came in late, and these boxes, which have been, what, moved from a shelf onto the dining table, yes?”
“Yes,” she said, well aware of how absurd it sounded. “I don’t know about the first incident, but I’m pretty certain the second and third happened while I was out.”
“Right. But there was no evidence of forced entry at those times either?”
“No.”
“So, if no one’s breaking in, then we’re looking for someone with a key. Have you ever lost one? Had your bag stolen or mislaid it somewhere and not had the locks changed?”
She thought about it. “No. No, I don’t think so. When we bought the house the couple gave us all their keys. There were three sets. I’ve still got them all.”
“Yes, well, we do recommend that people change the locks anyway when they move. And I’d certainly suggest you do that now. Even if it’s just to set your mind at rest. Is there anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, doorbells ringing at strange times, phone calls, that kind of thing. Any sort of suspicious behavior.”
Should you count dead birds on the lawn and upturned flower vases in the middle of the night? “No,” she said. “Nothing.”