The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  I hadn’t been back in my room for long when the phone began to ring. I thought about ignoring it. But after it had rung perhaps ten times I reached over and picked up the receiver. It was Victor. He wanted to know what kind of trouble I was in. He promised not to tell Arnold.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Victor,’ I went on, ‘but it’s not me who’s in trouble, it’s a friend of mine. The police are looking for her. I’m helping them with their enquiries.’

  Putting the phone down, I shook my head. Victor.

  I turned the TV on: ballet on one channel, ice-skating on another. I turned it off again. I sat by the window on my plastic chair and smoked. Outside, it was snowing. In the distance I could hear the bells of the cathedral, those three descending notes, always descending. A kind of panic spread throughout my body, pushed against the inside of my skin. I remembered the story Nina had told me, the night I took her to the Metropole. I kept thinking of her standing on that road with the Big Wheel behind her, its brightly coloured cars lost in the mist.

  At ten o’clock I took the lift down to the lobby and walked out through the revolving doors. The taxi I’d ordered was waiting at the kerb.

  ‘Mr Blom!’

  I got into the car. ‘How are you, Millie?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘You know, I saw you on TV.’

  ‘Seems like everybody saw it.’

  ‘I thought you were great. Really great.’

  I thanked him.

  ‘I thought maybe you should make a career out of it,’ he said. ‘You know. Presenter.’

  I smiled at the idea.

  He pulled out into the traffic. ‘It’s the Elite again, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘TV,’ he said, a few minutes later. ‘One day I’ll be on it.’ The way he said it, he made it sound like a desert island.

  When we reached the club, I asked him to call back in half an hour, then I set out across the pavement. There were no helicopters flying this time. The weather was too bad.

  ‘It’s fifteen to get in.’

  A different man was on the door. If it had been the same man, he would’ve recognised me. That was something to be grateful for.

  ‘I want to see Greersen,’ I said. ‘Tell him it’s a friend of Nina’s.’

  Five minutes went by. Then another five.

  The wind sliced through the telegraph wires above my head. My ears were almost numb.

  At last the door opened. A man said, ‘I’ll take you to Greersen.’

  Inside, the music was loud and slack, and someone had been smoking grass. It was dark: just a couple of red table-lamps and a strip of ultraviolet where the bar was. A blonde girl in a spangled g-string was dancing up on stage. Her hair swung across one shoulder. A tattoo covered both her breasts. A bird, it looked like. An eagle. Wings beating as she moved. I wondered if she was Candy. But then I remembered Nina telling me that Candy was black. I tapped through the place with my stick. I’d decided to act blind. It might give me an edge. I knocked against somebody’s knee and almost fell. Then I apologised. You have to make it real.

  I followed the man through a velvet curtain and down a corridor. We climbed a flight of stairs. The music was muffled now, as though it had been gagged. Greersen’s office was on the first floor, at the back of the building. The room was brightly lit. I could smell dust burning on the naked bulbs.

  ‘I’m Greersen.’

  He had flat black hair and a thin moustache. His voice was thin as well. Two people were in the room with him, but I wasn’t interested in them.

  ‘My name’s Blom.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Is Nina here? Nina Salenko?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She been here tonight?’

  ‘She hasn’t been here for weeks.’

  There was always a perfect moment for a silence, and this was it. It was a technique I’d picked up from Visser. You could use it like a polygraph, to test the veracity of what had just been said. Greersen’s words hung on in the hot air of the room. He didn’t sound guilty at all, more curious – or mocking.

  I broke the silence first. ‘She said you were sleeping with her.’

  A woman was sitting on the sofa to my right. I saw the corners of her mouth turn down. Then she lit a cigarette.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ Greersen said.

  ‘I’m sleeping with her, too.’

  ‘Got nice tits, hasn’t she?’

  ‘The rest of her’s not so great,’ the woman said.

  ‘Who’s looking at the rest of her?’ a man behind me said.

  The woman didn’t say anything. Her paste ear-rings flashed as she reached for the ashtray.

  ‘She’s gone missing,’ I said.

  Greersen put his feet up on the desk. ‘You came all the way down here to tell me that?’

  ‘I happened to be passing.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the phone?’

  ‘I wanted to meet you. Face to face.’

  ‘It’s not exactly face to face, is it,’ and Greersen laughed, as if he’d just said something clever.

  ‘It’s good enough for me.’ I took a step towards him, my hand tightening on my cane. There was a sudden movement on my left. Someone’s arm, probably. Someone else’s arm restraining it.

  I took my dark glasses off and peered down at Greersen. I was doing it deliberately. I knew that it was hard to take. Those blank eyes peering, close up.

  ‘I wanted to get a good look at you,’ I said.

  There was a smell coming off him. You know that spinach you can buy, pre-washed, in sealed bags? Well, leave it for a week, then open it. That was Greersen. Except he was trying to hide the smell with a cologne. It wasn’t working. The smell squatted underneath the perfume like a toad.

  ‘Find out what kind of creep I was dealing with,’ I said.

  Someone was right behind me now. The man who’d brought me up the stairs, presumably. I broke out into a sweat that was slick and cold. He might have a gun, I was thinking. He might use it. The woman on the sofa was turning her cigarette in the ashtray. Turning it and turning it, sharpening the lit end to a point.

  ‘Get him out of here,’ Greersen said.

  Two men threw me out of the back door. My shoulder ached from where it had hit something on the way downstairs. I could see the shapes of cars in the darkness, cars drawn up in rows. The glimmer of radiator grilles, the curve of tyres. They couldn’t have done it better if they’d tried.

  I found my cane and brushed myself down. When I reached the front of the building again, Millie called my name. I crossed the pavement, opened the car door and toppled in.

  ‘What is it, Mr Blom?’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  I couldn’t say anything just yet. The scorched smell of the office was in my nostrils. My head felt like a bag of broken glass.

  ‘They roughed you up a little, didn’t they.’

  I nodded, let him examine me.

  ‘I’m taking you to my house,’ he said. ‘Get you cleaned up.’

  ‘That’s not necessary.’

  ‘But you’ve cut yourself –’

  ‘I’ve got a headache, that’s all.’

  I wanted to go straight back to the Kosminsky, but Millie insisted on driving me to a twenty-four-hour chemist first. He said the best pain-killer was codeine and he could get some for me. We wouldn’t need a prescription because a friend of his worked there. He didn’t charge me for the detour. He wouldn’t let me pay for the pills either.

  Just before I got out of the cab I touched him on the shoulder. ‘You know that TV show I’m going to have?’

  ‘What about it?’ he said.

  ‘I want you to be my first guest.’

  Sitting on the steps of the hotel, I dabbed at the cut with a tissue. Greersen. Maybe I shouldn’t have upset him. I couldn’t resist it, though. Sometimes if a pond looks too still you throw a stone in it. It had stopped snowing and the moon showed in the gap between two banks of orange cloud. I felt I could
see through the moon’s thin skin to the organs underneath. Its life seemed as fragile as my own.

  Someone was walking up the hill towards me. I didn’t think anything of it until he came and stood in front of me. I thought he was going to ask me for the time, or some directions, but all he did was say my name. I didn’t recognise him. Was this the moment I’d been dreading, the appearance of a person from my past? Or was it just another member of the public who’d seen me on TV?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘My name’s Robert Kolan. We met once, in the station café.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, we didn’t meet exactly. I was just leaving.’

  The blond hair parted in the middle and tucked back behind his ears. The creaking leather jacket. Robert Kolan.

  He wanted to talk about Nina.

  ‘Let’s talk inside,’ I said. ‘It’s warmer.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Right.’

  We sat in black vinyl armchairs, in the corner of the lobby.

  ‘Nina’s disappeared,’ he said.

  ‘I know. The police told me.’ I told Kolan what I’d told Munck and Slatnick, how Nina was always disappearing.

  Kolan interrupted halfway through. ‘This is different.’

  ‘What’s different about it?’

  ‘It was her father’s birthday on the twenty-ninth of December. She never misses her father’s birthday.’

  I realised that I’d never heard her mention her father (or her mother, for that matter). I had a sudden sense of how thoroughly she’d excluded me, not just from her apartment but from her life.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s really not my problem now.’

  ‘You don’t care what happens to her?’

  ‘I used to. She left me, though.’ I remembered what she’d said about Kolan. My closest friend. ‘I thought you would’ve known that.’

  ‘I did know.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, and opened my hands.

  ‘So she leaves you and suddenly you don’t care about her any more?’ He scraped his hair back behind his ears. He was leaning forwards, his eyes jumping between my face and the floor. ‘Just like that?’

  Suddenly he irritated me. All this talk about caring and friendship. This sanctimoniousness of his. He’d probably been dying to fuck her for years. I wanted to shock him.

  ‘Maybe I wish she was dead,’ I said. ‘Has that occurred to you?’

  I stared at the sofa opposite. I thought of Nina’s seat in the station café, which had kept her imprint after she was gone.

  ‘People who’ve been left by someone,’ I went on, ‘they often wish the other person was dead. That,’ I said, ‘is not uncommon at all.’

  ‘She meant that much to you?’

  I didn’t want to look at him. I looked at the carpet instead – meaningless swirls of orange, brown and black. I heard him light a cigarette. The sharp intake of breath as he inhaled sounded exactly like surprise.

  ‘Do you know Greersen?’ I asked.

  Kolan was silent.

  ‘I went to see him tonight.’ I paused. ‘I just wondered. Was Nina sleeping with him?’ Kolan’s silence lasted.

  ‘Greersen,’ I said. ‘The owner of that club.’

  ‘I know who you mean. She couldn’t stand the guy.’

  ‘So she wasn’t sleeping with him?’

  ‘No.’

  I believed him. Greersen had lied about it to get at me. That made sense. Why had Nina lied about it, though? And, if she was lying, who was the someone else that she was seeing?

  ‘You know what Greersen said?’ I went on. ‘He said he hadn’t seen her for weeks.’

  ‘Nobody’s seen her for weeks.’

  ‘Do you know who saw her last?’

  Kolan hesitated. ‘I thought it was you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s why I’m here. I thought you might know something.’ He leaned forwards and crushed out his cigarette.

  He told me he was over at Nina’s place on the Monday night. Nina had called me up. It was late, maybe three in the morning. She drove to the 14th district to meet me, dropping him off outside the station. Nobody had seen her since.

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t tell me anything?’

  I shook my head.

  He got up out of his chair. He parted his hair again with two hands, training it behind his ears. ‘I should be going.’

  ‘Have you talked to the police yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What will you tell them?’

  ‘What I told you.’ He paused. ‘Why? You’ve got nothing to hide, have you?’

  I watched him leave through the revolving doors, then I rose to my feet and crossed the lobby. Arnold was watching TV. A lit cigarette lay on a groove in the ashtray; the smoke made a series of spaced loops or coils, the way a spring might if you stretched it. He glanced round at me.

  ‘The lift’s out of order,’ he said.

  ‘You know why, don’t you.’

  Arnold shook his head. ‘Why?’

  ‘Sex,’ I said.

  It didn’t surprise me when he appeared not to understand. He understood all too well – but he would never admit it.

  I took the stairs.

  First floor, then the second. And, sure enough, there was the lift. Just standing there, with its doors jammed open. There was nobody inside it. But if you dusted the edges of the doors, at a point not too far above the carpet, you’d almost certainly find delicate deposits of human skin, the faint print of a woman’s hips.

  I glanced down the corridor. One couple fucking silently against the wall.

  A quiet night.

  The following afternoon, as I was shaving, the phone rang. I saw myself in the mirror, hesitating. I couldn’t hear the phone without thinking of Nina, without hoping that it might be her. It wasn’t her, though. It was Munck.

  ‘We found the car.’

  He wanted me to identify it for him. I’d mentioned certain features, he said. The so-called bullethole. The doll.

  Half an hour later he picked me up outside the hotel. He opened the door for me and I got in. There was one last pale streak of daylight to the south-west, but otherwise the sky was dark.

  It was cold in Munck’s car. He told me the heating was broken. He apologised.

  ‘A policeman’s salary,’ he said.

  Outside, the streets were wet, but the temperature was dropping; they would freeze during the night. There was a tension in the car, which I took to be anticipation.

  As we passed beneath the ring road, Munck told me where we were going. A suburb on the outskirts. Right on the edge of the city. I knew the area. Railway arches, scrapyards. High-rise slums. Children tortured cats in concrete corridors. Babies fell out of windows. It was always drizzling.

  I peered through the windscreen. We turned down a wide, deserted avenue. A park appeared on the left. The grass was littered with empty bottles, newspaper, women’s shoes.

  In ten minutes we were there. Munck jerked the handbrake upwards, then he faced me. I saw his teeth at close range. Not just the texture of celery, but the colour, too: palest yellow-green, a kind of chlorophyll.

  ‘Have you been here before, Martin?’

  I shook my head. ‘Never.’

  It wasn’t until he got out of the car that I realised it had probably been a trick question. Was I really here for purposes of identification? Or was I here to incriminate myself?

  Munck opened my door. ‘The car’s to your right.’

  He walked me towards it.

  It was just a piece of waste-ground, near a flyover. The seashell roar of traffic. Blocks of apartments loomed like prison ships. I glanced over my shoulder. Two motorways reared up and tangled with each other in the sky.

  ‘There’s tyre tracks stretching ten or fifteen metres,’ Munck said. ‘The car braked suddenly, for no apparent reason. Both doors are open, as if the occupants left in a hurry.’

  I moved s
lowly round the car, my white cane tapping on hard ground. I found the crack in the back window – a crazed area, something like a spider’s web, with a neat hole at the centre. Then I knew it was Nina’s car. I went on checking, anyway. I thought I recognised the dent in the bumper: Nina had reversed into a bollard one night, in the car-park of the Motel Astra. When I reached the door on the driver’s side I bent down and looked in. No Doris. But I remembered how she’d dangled from a piece of ribbon, and there was a bit of it still knotted round the rear-view mirror. I straightened up.

  ‘It’s her car,’ I said.

  Munck nodded. ‘Why would she come here?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Did she have any friends in the area?’

  ‘Not so far as I know.’ I paused. ‘But like I said, I didn’t know her very well.’

  I took a deep breath, turned away. And then, as I stared out across the waste-ground, I noticed him. He was standing some distance off, with his left shoulder propped against one of the concrete pillars that supported the flyover. He was wearing a herring-bone overcoat and a pair of black shoes; and he was holding both his gloves in his right hand. There was frost in his moustache.

  I must have looked strange because Munck took me by the arm.

  ‘Martin?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

  I couldn’t answer.

  Visser was looking right at me, with a smile on his face. It wasn’t a malicious smile; it wasn’t gloating or unkind. If anything, he seemed to be taking a kind of patriarchal pleasure in the sight of me. It was almost welcoming. But, at the same time, there was an edge to it that disturbed me: it was as if he’d seen a joke that I had yet to see.

  ‘You’ve gone as white as a sheet,’ Munck said.

  ‘I don’t feel very well.’

  ‘It must be a shock for you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked you to come.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I wanted to.’

  Visser watched me climb gingerly into Munck’s car. As we pulled away, he didn’t make any attempt to follow us. He didn’t even move. And the smile lingered – indulgent, strangely relaxed.

  On the way back to the city centre I started to explain what I thought had happened to me. In a sense, I was just elaborating on certain things I’d talked about in the hotel bar two days before. Ironically enough, it was Visser’s predictions that I was trying to remember and repeat, what Visser had told me I’d experience. I ran through the phases: numbness and shock; depression, self-pity, suicidal tendencies; the gradual emergence of a new personality (I made it sound natural but squeamish, a snake shedding its skin – as if, somewhere in the city, in a hotel room, perhaps, there was a transparent version of me, a twin, identical but lifeless).