The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘A new personality?’ Even Munck found it hard to believe.

  I laughed. ‘I don’t think I’m quite there yet.’

  I introduced a few variations on the theme, lurid variations of my own. I told him about migraines, rushes, panic. I blamed it on the titanium plate. Maybe sub-zero temperatures affected it. Nobody really knew. I was a unique case, I said. An extraordinary phenomenon. I was like those people with shrapnel in their legs who always know when it’s about to rain.

  Munck was nodding now. I thought he was beginning to understand. And, gradually, I brought the subject round to Visser, which had been my intention all along.

  ‘Did you ever meet him?’ I asked Munck innocently.

  Munck looked as if he was trying to remember.

  I prompted him. ‘He was my doctor. At the clinic.’

  ‘I think it was Dr Visser who gave us permission to see you,’ Munck said. ‘Yes, I think I must’ve met him.’

  ‘You don’t know him, though?’

  ‘Oh no. I only saw him that one time. The second time, it was a nurse. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just curious.’

  I asked Munck to drop me outside Leon’s. I didn’t want Visser knowing where I lived – though it occurred to me that, in order to be standing on that piece of waste-ground, he must have been following Munck, and if he was following Munck he must have seen me walk out of the hotel that evening. Possibly he already knew all there was to know. Still, I wasn’t going to hand it to him on a plate.

  I looked up and down the street. There was no sign of that salt-and-pepper overcoat, no sign of any shiny shoes. I watched Munck drive away, then I turned and walked through the glass-and-metal door, through the heavy vinyl curtain, into Leon’s. Loots was sitting in the corner. He called me over.

  ‘Was that a police car?’

  I hadn’t seen Loots for a day or two and he knew nothing of Nina’s disappearance. I repeated most of what I’d learned from Munck. Then I told him where I’d been that evening.

  ‘That’s a bad area,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  He bought me a coffee and a brandy, and brought them over to the table.

  ‘Thanks, Loots.’

  ‘I never did meet her, did I?’

  ‘She was hard to meet,’ I said, ‘even for me.’

  Not all the news was gloomy, though. On New Year’s Day Loots had seen Anton. The circus hadn’t folded after all. They’d found a contortionist known as The Rubber Man who could pass himself through a piece of garden hosepipe. The crowds were back.

  By the time we left the restaurant, it was one in the morning and the city was deserted. Street-lamps spread a thin metallic light. At the bottom of the hill, one last tram curved past the station, its yellow windows almost empty. I doubted Visser would be following me tonight. It was too cold to stand in the shadows or sit in a parked car. It was just too cold. Outside the hotel Loots wrapped his arms around me.

  ‘Don’t worry. She’ll turn up.’

  I said good-night, then turned and walked to the entrance. The doors were spinning slowly when I reached them. I waited a moment, then stepped forwards, moving in time with them, as if we were a couple dancing.

  The coast, out of season – there’s a smell to it. Briny, damp. It’s everywhere: in hotel rooms, in taxis, in cafés. I’d never liked the coast much; I always seemed to slow right down, as though my ankles were caught in seaweed.

  I’d eaten in a small place by the train station. The man who ran it was a foreigner. He wore a pale-blue suit and white patent-leather shoes with gold buckles, and he had that clammy seaside skin. I ordered chicken salad and a beer. He stood in front of me, staring down with slightly bloodshot eyes, a sack of gelatinous flesh beneath his chin. When he spoke, his words blurred on his tongue.

  ‘Your first time here?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘You like?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me also,’ the man said. ‘I don’t like.’

  He dropped his shoulders, moved away. At the bar he picked up a hand-mirror and studied himself for a long time with no change of expression. Then he began to pluck his eyebrows, a faint pop each time a hair came loose. I imagined the root of every hair he plucked; I saw the tiny pellet of skin they were embedded in. I drank my beer, but left most of the food.

  Karin Salenko lived in a modest stucco building on the seafront. I leaned against the balcony outside, the plaster flaking away beneath my hands. I could hear breakers behind me, like something being dynamited. Why had I come here? Was it to get away from Visser? (Could he have followed me?) Was it because I was curious about Nina’s life, a life I’d been excluded from? Or did I think I was some kind of detective, trying to unearth the truth about her disappearance? I brushed the dust off my hands and turned to face the apartment. Maybe I just wanted to hear somebody talk about her. Maybe all I wanted was to hear her name. I knocked on the door. When it opened, the security chain was still in place.

  ‘Karin Salenko?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name’s Martin Blom. I called you yesterday.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Karin Salenko unhooked the chain. ‘Come in.’

  Once I was settled on a sofa in the lounge, she asked me if I’d like a drink. Something cold, I told her. Anything, really (I wanted to wash the taste of that restaurant out of my mouth). She brought me a beer from the fridge. Then she sat down opposite me, with the light behind her. I thought she must be working later, at the casino, because she was wearing a glittery, skin-tight turquoise dress that was split to the thigh. Eye-shadow, too. Mascara. And then there was her blonde hair, back-combed and lacquered at the front, and falling in a sheen of gold past her right shoulder. She had a tall glass in her hand.

  ‘You wanted to know about Nina.’

  I nodded.

  ‘There’s not much to tell,’ she said, ‘not recently. I haven’t seen her for a while. We talk sometimes, you know, but, well …’

  She had a lazy voice, but there were edges to it. She knew how it sounded, the lazy part. Maybe she even pushed it a little. It wasn’t hard to see how it might work with men. The edges, she couldn’t do anything about. The edges were memories. Things that hadn’t gone right, things that had taken too long. Things that had never happened at all. I don’t know. Maybe I was reading too much into it.

  ‘When did you see her last?’

  ‘August. I was in the city, for a convention.’ She looked at me. ‘I’m a croupier.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Where did you meet? Her apartment?’

  ‘No, we had lunch together. A Chinese restaurant she knew. We argued about Christmas.’ She smiled faintly. ‘We always argued about Christmas. And Easter.’

  ‘What was it about, the argument?’

  ‘She didn’t want to come and see me. She wanted to go to her father’s place. I said she was always going to her father’s place. She was there in the summer, for instance. “That’s right,” she said. “I was.’” Karin Salenko lowered her eyes.

  ‘So you argued about it?’

  The ice-cubes rattled in her tall glass as she drank. ‘You have to understand. She adores her father. When I left him, she blamed me for everything.’

  ‘And you haven’t seen her since then?’ I said. ‘Since August?’

  ‘That was the last time.’ Suddenly she began to cry.

  At first I didn’t realise she was crying because she cried in a way I’d never seen before. She kept her head very still, level, too, and stared out across the room. She didn’t try to hide the tears. I asked her if she was all right. If I could get her anything. She didn’t answer.

  ‘You see, I have a bad feeling,’ she said eventually.

  She pushed the knuckles of her left hand into her eye.

  I saw the car standing on that piece of waste-ground, both doors open, like an insect on the point of flying. But it didn’t move.

  ‘How did you find out that she’d disappeared?’ I said. />
  ‘My ex-husband rang me up. She hadn’t sent him a birthday card, that was the reason. He’d called her three nights in a row, but she was never there. He wondered if I knew anything.’

  ‘You didn’t, though.’

  ‘No.’ Karin Salenko reached behind her neck with both hands and, lifting her hair off her shoulders, twisted it a couple of times and then released it. I’d seen Nina do the same thing. ‘I was almost happy when he told me. I was glad. But then I started thinking, she’d never do that, not Nina. She’d never forget his birthday.’

  I took the address book out of my pocket and handed it to her. ‘Your ex-husband,’ I said. ‘Could you tell me if his address is in this book?’

  She stared at the book for a moment before she opened it.

  ‘Yes, it’s here,’ she said. ‘Jan Salenko.’

  I held my hand out for the book. She hesitated, then gave it back.

  ‘Other people walking around with her things,’ she said. ‘It’s like she’s dead or something.’

  ‘I was a friend of hers,’ I said, ‘before all this.’ I paused. ‘I loved her.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  I wanted to change the subject. I was looking down at the book I’d stolen, a dark shape on my palm. ‘You kept his name.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You still call yourself Salenko, even though –’

  ‘Oh, I see. Yes. Well, I never liked my name before.’

  She left her chair and walked to the window. Her feet were silent on the carpet. All I could hear were the ice-cubes in her glass. The sound of her moving behind me was the sound of a chandelier in the wind.

  ‘We’re not a close family,’ she went on. ‘Sometimes it seems like we tried to get as far away from each other as we could.’

  ‘You too?’

  She was staring out into the darkness. ‘Especially me.’

  When she talked about her family, the words seemed to curdle in her mouth and, just for a moment, she reminded me of myself. She’d had some kind of bullet fired at her. The way she was behaving now revealed it. The path of the bullet, the rhythm of the knife.

  Thunder rolled on the horizon. It was so continuous, so unbroken, it could have been a plane circling in the sky, waiting for clearance.

  At the window, Karin Salenko shivered. ‘I think it’s going to storm.’

  I thought I should leave. I rose to my feet, but didn’t move towards the door. I just stood in the middle of the room. The carpet was deep-pile, ice-blue. I drew a pattern on it with my stick.

  ‘I had her when I was sixteen. It was too young.’ The edges in her voice, they’d taken over. ‘In that part of the world,’ she said, ‘you know, people …’ She tailed off again, in that way she had.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  I didn’t, though. I didn’t even know what part of the world we were talking about. She went to the fridge and brought me another beer. I hadn’t asked for one. It was because she wanted a drink herself. I watched her drop new cubes into her glass.

  ‘You don’t have to drink it,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll drink it.’ I sat down again.

  She stood over by the window, as before.

  ‘It’s ironic, really,’ she said. ‘He isn’t even her real father.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’

  ‘Jan. Jan Salenko.’ The ice-cubes jangled as she drank. ‘I already had her when I married him.’

  ‘So who’s her real father?’

  She turned to me, her dress flashing in a hundred places as it caught the light. ‘You don’t understand. I was raped.’ She was laughing. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.’

  Because I was blind? Because she was drunk? I didn’t know either. I was still drawing patterns in the carpet with my stick.

  ‘Did Nina know?’ I asked her.

  ‘I always kept it from her. But maybe she found out. Maybe that’s why she disappeared –’

  ‘Found out?’

  ‘The truth.’

  I hesitated. ‘Which is what?’

  She didn’t answer. She’d lowered her head and she was shaking it from side to side.

  ‘You can’t talk about that?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t talk about that.’

  ‘Can anyone?’

  She lit a cigarette. It was a long cigarette, with a white filter. When she spoke again, her voice was bitter, almost vitriolic. ‘My mother. Edith Hekmann. She’d probably tell you.’ She took the smoke into her lungs, then blew it out as if she hated having it inside her. ‘Up there in the mountains. It’s like a different century up there.’

  ‘Where?’

  She mentioned the name of a village. I’d never heard of it.

  She stared into the corner of the room. The tears came again. I waited for a moment, and then I muttered something about my train. I heard her follow me across the room.

  ‘No, that’s the kitchen,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve never had much of a sense of direction,’ I told her with a smile. ‘Ever since I was young.’

  ‘Is that when you went blind? When you were young?’

  ‘No, no. It happened last year.’

  At the front door she touched me on the arm. ‘You came all this way. And I behaved so – I just cried the whole time.’ She fumbled in her bag and handed me a card. ‘It’s a special discount voucher for the casino,’ she said. ‘You get a pile of free chips to start you off.’

  I looked down into her face, which was eager suddenly, her eyes bright behind the smeared mascara. ‘Do people ever say that you and Nina look alike?’

  ‘They used to,’ she said. ‘When Nina was thirteen, fourteen. They used to think we were sisters. But it was probably just because we were so close in age.’ She studied the end of her cigarette for a moment. ‘Inside, we’re not alike at all.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘About what happened.’

  She nodded quickly, sniffed. ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  Outside, the wind was stronger. Clouds sliding past the rooftops like the world was under ice and moving fast.

  She’d told me there were always taxis on the seafront. I flagged one down. All the way to the train station there was that smell. The smell of things wedged under rocks. Things in shells.

  I left the voucher on the seat. There’d be someone who’d appreciate it. Who knows, maybe they’d even get lucky.

  I’m on my way to Nina’s apartment. It’s not far from the flower market. When I reach the street, it’s dawn and people are unloading vans. The stalls are open, colourful. The cool morning air has seams of fragrance running through it.

  I walk into a courtyard, pass beneath an archway. I climb a narrow winding staircase. It’s on the third floor. A dark wooden door on an even darker landing. Part of me’s excited. So this is where she lives. Her house-keys are warm, almost illicit in my hand. And yet I feel as if I know the place, as if I’ve climbed these stairs before, with her, after a dinner out somewhere, or a party, our arms around each other, drunk.

  Then I’m in her bed. The pillow smells just like her skin. I lift my head. She’s standing by the window.

  She’s wearing a long, dark-blue dress; her arms are bare. There’s an expression on her face I can’t decipher. It’s not surprise at seeing me in her apartment, or anger. It’s not even curiosity.

  ‘Nina?’ I say.

  She’s standing by the window, looking down into the street. The wall behind her is plaster: grey and cream and pale-pink. A slab of bright, white sunlight falls across it.

  ‘Nina?’

  ‘I used to be,’ she says.

  I’m crying out as I wake up. There were two people in the compartment with me before I fell asleep. I begin to apologise.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘a nightmare –’

  Then I look around and realise I’m talk
ing to myself. The compartment’s empty. By the time I reached the Kosminsky it was almost two in the morning. Three messages were waiting for me at hotel reception, all of them from Munck. Upstairs in my room I dialled his number at police headquarters. It didn’t surprise me when the switchboard put me through. I’d already identified Munck as a man who worked late into the night. Either he’d never been married or he’d been married too long. He’d forgotten how to go home.

  ‘Munck,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, Blom,’ he said. ‘Feeling better?’

  ‘Much better, thank you.’

  Two youths had been arrested, he told me. They were to be charged with the theft of Nina Salenko’s car. He described them for me. They were both fourteen years old. One wore a denim jacket with the arms cut off. His hair was light-brown, shoulder-length. The other one was thin, with cropped hair and a speech impediment, a kind of lisp.

  They didn’t sound like anyone I knew.

  Munck described part of the interrogation. Both youths were shown a photograph of Nina. The one in the denim jacket took a long, close look.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind a bit of that,’ he said.

  Munck asked him if he’d seen her before.

  The youth grinned. ‘Didn’t know we was here to talk about girls.’

  Slatnick came up behind the youth and clouted him on the head with the back of his hand.

  ‘You should’ve seen Slatnick,’ Munck said. ‘Like the shadow of a cloud, he was, the way he came up behind that boy.’ He chuckled. ‘The boy never knew what hit him.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I said.

  Munck described how the youth bellowed, as much in shock as pain, and clamped one hand over his ear.

  ‘You’ve never seen her before?’ Munck asked the youth again.

  ‘I told you. No.’