Bill nodded. “Cheers.”
“Emma?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine, thanks.”
I walked over to the bar, which was curved, fitting snugly into the corner of the room. The barman wore a black waistcoat and a spangled blue bow-tie. Behind him were rows of bottles on glass shelves, all illuminated from beneath. I edged between a man and a girl, and ordered two more beers.
I was staring down at my hands, I remember, when something moved at the edge of my field of vision. It was almost as if the air had warped for a moment, as if it had shuddered in slow motion. Then I saw a hair land on the bar, about six inches to the right of my right hand. The bar had a black, lacquered surface so the hair showed up clearly. It was about the length of a finger, with a slight curve to it. It was red.
I was standing so still now that I felt that the air around me was solid, enclosing me. Inside the stillness, my heart was beating loudly, and I saw the sound as a soft black circle appearing and disappearing before my eyes. . . .
As I turned to face the girl who was standing beside me, she stepped back from the bar and walked away. I watched her cross the room and sit down on a sofa, then I looked at the hair that had just fallen from her head. I touched it cautiously with my forefinger. A thrill of recognition darted through me.
“Two beers.”
I looked up. The barman had placed the drinks in front of me, and he was waiting for me to pay.
Back at the table, I sat down. The girl was behind me now, under the window.
Slowly I leaned back, looked round. She was sitting on a sofa with two other people, her face angled away from me. Not that her face mattered. She had Astrid’s body, and this confused me for a moment. I had always thought that it was Gertrude who had red hair. But then, given the state I was in when they held me in that room, was it any wonder if I had got things wrong?
“Are you all right?” Bill said.
I heard the words I had heard in the room, just after I had watched that red hair drift slowly downwards through the air. Tell me what you’d like for your reward.
I stood up. “Excuse me a moment.”
I walked over to the girl and stood in front of her. Her blouse was black, with long, see-through sleeves. Her skirt was also black. On her left thumb she wore a wide silver ring. She could have been in her early thirties, but, equally, she could have been twenty-five. She looked good. She had always looked good. Perhaps she always would.
“Don’t I know you?” I said.
Her eyes lifted to mine. They were shiny and utterly incurious. They didn’t waver. I watched her light a cigarette. The people she was with, a man and a woman, turned to each other and started talking. The man sounded American.
“We know each other,” I said, “don’t we.”
This time I wasn’t asking a question, but if she was surprised or disconcerted she didn’t show it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, inhaling. She let the smoke drift out of her nostrils, then, turning sideways, she tapped her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray.
I watched her slim forearm move beneath the gauzy fabric of her blouse. I watched her fingers, elegant but strong. I watched the ash fall from her cigarette and shatter into fragments. I was watching her closely, and nothing that she did seemed unfamiliar.
Then her face tilted upwards suddenly and seemed to open, revealing a much harder surface.
“Get lost,” she said.
Her two friends looked round sharply.
That flashed anger, the same as in the room. I smiled at her. Her eyes were a muddy green colour, the colour of camouflage. It seemed strange I hadn’t noticed this at the time. It was perfect, though. I smiled down at her and shook my head.
“I’ll call security,” she said.
Still smiling, I turned away. I sat down next to Bill, with my back to the girl, as before. Bill broke off in the middle of a sentence.
“What was all that about?” he said.
Emma was looking at me curiously.
“Do you know her?” Bill said.
I picked up my drink. My heart was beating again, but at least I could no longer see that soft black ball in front of me. I was thinking of all the women I had been with—and here she was, almost five years later, one of the women I had been looking for, one of the three. Now what? I was thinking. Now what?
I looked at Bill.
“I know who she is,” I said.
“Sounds mysterious,” Emma said.
“Yes.” I laughed. “Yes, it is.”
I drank some beer. It tasted warm and frothy, like saliva.
I left Bill and Emma talking on the sofa and walked out into the main part of the club. I had told them I was going to the toilet, but really I just wanted to be on my own, with no one watching me. I leaned on the matt silver railings that formed a gallery above the dance-floor and looked down at the people dancing below. The music was loud—funk and disco from the seventies. I wanted to be thinking clearly, but my mind felt tangled, slow. I couldn’t have been drunk, though. I had only had three beers.
Then, looking up, I saw the girl from the lounge. She walked out on to the gallery and then turned right, moving in the direction of the toilets. She hadn’t noticed me. She was alone.
I put my drink down and followed her along the gallery. I passed through a pair of black swing-doors. I found myself standing in a short corridor lit by infra-red. A thin man in a vest loped past me, scarlet cheeks and forehead, black hollows instead of eyes. The gust of air that hit me smelled of hash and bitter sweat and after-shave. Should I follow the girl into the toilets, or should I wait where I was?
I walked up to the door that said Women and pushed it open. It was a big square room with strips of ultra-violet in wire cages on the walls. The girl stood to my right, fifteen feet away. Otherwise the room was empty. I could hear the water spilling through her hands and down into the basin. More distantly, through the floor, I could hear the dull, muffled thud of music coming from downstairs. . . .
The girl had her hands over her face as I crossed the room towards her, as if she was playing a game, as if she was going to count to one hundred, then come and find me. She saw me in the mirror as I walked up behind her. I didn’t speak to her this time. I didn’t think there was anything to say. Instead, I put a hand over her mouth and pulled her backwards, into one of the empty stalls. Once the door was half closed, I grabbed at her blouse. It was a flimsy thing; it came away like paper. I could see her breasts. They looked familiar, but that wasn’t enough. I had to prove it to myself beyond all doubt. I needed solid evidence.
I reached for her skirt. The girl’s mouth was open, and I thought she must be screaming; somehow, I couldn’t hear it, though. And anyway I needed both my hands. I tugged hard on the skirt and something ripped. She was trying to fight her way past me, hands flailing at my face, sharp fingernails, but I forced her back against the cistern. She was straddling the toilet seat, off balance. Her pubic hair was abundant, almost black. I didn’t remember it. What about the coin-shaped scar? It had to be there—surely. Which leg, though? I pushed one hand against her throat as I bent down. There was no scar. Perhaps I had got it all mixed up. Perhaps it was one of the others who had had the scar. I heard water trickling out of a pipe, and I seemed to see the flow of it close up, twisting down into the cistern, swirling as it hit the surface. It had the beauty, the complexity, of blown glass.
My hand lifted away from the girl’s neck, and I stared down at her body, naked except for her skirt and tights, which clung to her knees, and the remains of her blouse, which hung in tatters from one shoulder, one cuff still buttoned, neatly enclosing her left wrist. The shape of her breasts, her hips, her thighs. . . . I stood in front of her, trying to remember. But there had been too many bodies. I was looking at this girl through the bodies of a hundred other girls. They were all still with me, inside my head, like interference. There was no clarity of signal, no clarity at all.
I heard voices in the room behind me, and somebody shoved hard against the door. I half fell against the girl, who was slumped on the toilet seat with one hand clasping her throat, a pose that struck me as incongruously refined, almost aristocratic. I stepped back, turned, opened the stall door. A man stood there, his face stupid with surprise. He wore a blue tartan shirt with the sleeves cut off. I thought I recognised him from the lounge.
“Hey!”
I pushed past him. Somebody shouted the Dutch word for police, and I began to run. Out into the infra-red, black holes instead of eyes. Through the swing-doors and along the gallery, one hand skimming the silver rail. Then down the stairs, too many people suddenly, too many faces, one drink spilled and then another, almost tripping, falling, but out on to the street at last, a shock as the cold air closed over me, it was January, after all, and I had forgotten to collect my coat.
I walked towards the lights of Rembrandtplein. I was shivering. My coat was in the club, on a blue velvet sofa, but I could hardly go back for it, not now. Perhaps it was that sense of loss, trivial though it was, that feeling of being separated from something that was mine, but I felt as if I didn’t know myself. I felt like somebody who had no name, no home. It wasn’t that I was outside myself and looking down, as people sometimes are when they’re close to death. I wasn’t outside, and I wasn’t inside either. I wasn’t anywhere.
I stopped walking and stood quite still, outside a sports shop. There were golf clubs and hockey sticks and skis. Tennis rackets fanned out like a peacock’s tail. I heard the trundle of a tram behind me, the clang of its bell. I instinctively stepped closer to the window of the shop. In that same moment I was struck between the shoulder-blades. Time blackened. I thought the tram must have hit me after all. But then I heard somebody swearing at me. The voice was behind me, above me. I recognised the accent. American.
I lay face-down on the ground, not feeling any pain, just cold. The street smelled of chewing-gum and metal. I could still see Rembrandtplein, though it was tilted on its side. Green neon, yellow neon. One sign had a cowboy on it. The cowboy drew his gun, and then leaned forwards. Then he was standing upright, with his gun back in its holster. Then he drew the gun again, leaned forwards. This would go on for ever, I thought, and there was nothing the cowboy could do about it. He would never actually fire the gun, for instance. He would never ride a horse. He would never stretch out on his bed-roll and tip his Stetson over his eyes and go to sleep. There were so many normal, ordinary things that he would never do.
I was lifted to my feet by two policemen. Their white car stood nearby, its blue light spinning in the street. They took told of me, one arm each, and led me back towards the club. The American walked slightly ahead of us and slightly to one side. Every now and then he turned and looked at me, and his face was bleached out, blank with anger. In a way, he was just like the neon cowboy.
A small crowd had gathered outside the entrance to the club. I wondered where Bill and Emma were. The policemen led me up the steep flight of stairs, past the ticket booth, then through a door into an office. Dark-red walls, grey blinds. Two yucca plants in tubs. The girl was sitting next to a water dispenser with a blanket wrapped around her. The policemen stood me in front of her, but she would not look up. She was twisting the ring on her thumb, twisting it and twisting it as if it had the power to change things, to transport her to another place, a different life.
“Is this him?” one of the policemen said.
I stared at the girl’s ring turning on her thumb. Round and round it went. I thought I could hear the sound of metal on skin—a faint chafing, like a fly rubbing its legs together.
The policeman repeated the question in the same quiet voice, and this time she looked at me quickly, for no more than a second.
“Yes,” she said.
FOUR
Look at a map of Amsterdam and you see it right away: the city is a fingerprint. The four principal canals form a series of concentric semicircles that are echoed further in by streets like Damrak and Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. Right in the middle, the area the red-light district occupies, is a slightly more compacted section, the whorled heart of the print, where the lines are no longer curved, but tightly packed together, almost parallel, as if they have been subjected to some kind of pressure: Warmoesstraat, Oudezijds Voorburgwal, Oudezijds Achterburgwal, Kloveniersburgwal.
The fingerprint is not complete, though. It is partial, smudged, the kind of print found on a window-frame or a door-knob or the edge of a desk drawer. Would it be enough to allow the police to make a positive identification? Probably not. Would it lead to a conviction? Unlikely. Whoever left that fingerprint behind, whoever committed the crime, would almost certainly go free.
There was a sense in which the city had been trying to tell me something all along. You’ll never solve this case. You might as well forget it. But I had not been listening, of course.
Look at the map. It’s all there, in a way.
The whole story.
•
I sat on a hard chair under bright fluorescent lights and waited. On the wall directly opposite me was a white electric clock. I watched the second hand sweep past the numbers, smooth as a knife spreading butter. Quarter to five.
They had taken me to a police station just behind Leidseplein. As I sipped the coffee they had given me, which was weak, black and scalding hot, I thought of my kitchen and how I should be sitting at the table, a pool of lamplight on the plain wood surface, the green walls shading into darkness near the ceiling. I could hear the gentle crash and rustle as I turned the pages of my newspaper. I could hear the chuckling of the water-pipes inside the wall and the creak of the window as cold night air leaned against the glass. I could see the dark bulk of the house across the street and, to the left of it, in the distance, I could see the blushing of car brake-lights on the main road. And if I leaned back in my chair and looked over my shoulder I could just make out the shape of Juliette sleeping in my bed—though not tonight, of course. . . .
I sipped the coffee. Five to five.
At last a police officer came over and told me I could not be registered until nine o’clock. He seemed almost to be apologising for the delay. He had bloodshot eyes and a face that was smooth and slightly shiny, as if he had just shaved. It would be best if I slept now, he said. Taking hold of my arm just above the elbow, he led me through a series of doors and into a cell that had one narrow bed in it and a metal toilet with no seat. He took my shoes, my watch and my belt, and dropped them into a transparent plastic bag, which he then sealed.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked him, fearful all of a sudden.
He misunderstood my question. “Nothing will happen,” he said, “until the morning.”
I suppose I must have slept because I remember that I jumped when they opened the door. When I realised where I was, a flash of heat passed over me. If only I could have dreamed the girl on the blue velvet sofa, the girl in the toilet stall, the girl wrapped in the blanket. And her smudged eyes lifting. Yes. That’s him. Surely it should have been the other way round. Me wrapped in a blanket, me accusing her. . . .
I couldn’t understand how things had gone so badly wrong.
I was shown into a large grey room that had no windows. I sat down and waited. My eyes felt more watery than usual, which was probably tiredness, and my knees and elbows were bruised from when I had been knocked to the ground outside the club. After a few minutes the smooth-faced policeman appeared. I was glad to see him. Somehow, I felt as if we had a bond. I watched him walk round the table. In his hand was a sheaf of forms and documents, which he arranged in front of him.
“A long shift,” I said.
He looked up. “Excuse me?”
“You work long hours.”
“Ah. Yes.” He studied me for a moment and smiled faintly, then he glanced down at his papers.
The door opened again, and another policeman walked in with a tray of Danish pastries and coffee, which he pl
aced carefully on the table between us. The smooth-faced policeman extended one hand, palm upwards, to indicate that I was free to help myself. I poured some coffee, added milk, then took a pastry. It tasted delicious, and, oddly enough, I was reminded of the beer I had drunk on the day of my release from the white room five years before.
While I was eating, the policeman informed me that, under Dutch law, I could be held in custody for one period of six hours, followed by two periods of twenty-four hours, starting from the time of registration. After that, I would either be released or charged. This was standard procedure. If I was charged, he said, I would be entitled to a lawyer. What he was saying sounded so reasonable that I just nodded, unable to think of any questions.
For the next half-hour he took down my details, filling endless boxes with neat, clear handwriting that had a slight forward slant to it. After the registration, I was fingerprinted and photographed, then I was escorted back to my cell. The policeman told me that I would be interviewed later that morning, and that I would be required to make a statement. It would be advisable, he said, if I prepared for this.
When I left my cell again, towards lunchtime, the mood in the police station appeared to have altered. One or two of the officers gave me thinly veiled looks of disapproval as they passed me in the corridor. Others studied me with a curiosity that seemed cold, aloof, as if I were a specimen in a laboratory. There was no sign of the smooth-faced policeman who had treated me with such consideration.
This time there were two policemen sitting at the table when I was shown into the grey room. One had a long face and narrow shoulders. His name was Snel. He was smoking a cigarette, exhaling through his nostrils in two disdainful streams. The other one, Pieters, was balding, with a square head. They both seemed exhausted, bored. They would rather have been anywhere but in this room, and their presence there was something for which they were holding me personally responsible. As I took a seat in front of them I felt guilty and on edge.
They wanted to hear my version of what had happened the night before. I gave them the bare facts, in so far as I could remember them. When I had finished, Pieters began to tap his biro on the notepad that lay in front of him. The top page was still unmarked, quite blank. I found it slightly insulting that he hadn’t bothered to make a single note. Snel rose to his feet and began to pace back and forwards with both hands thrust deep into his pockets. He was unusually tall, I noticed, and his body tilted forwards from the waist. Sideways-on, he looked like a ski-jumper in mid-flight.
The Book of Revelation Page 22