The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘This man,’ Munck said. ‘Did she say anything about him?’

  ‘She’d said she’d seen him before.’

  ‘She didn’t describe him to you, though?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘I don’t know. I forgot all about it.’

  Munck didn’t say anything.

  ‘You don’t think she was just imagining it, do you?’ I said. ‘I mean, that’s what I thought at the time.’

  ‘Excuse me, Martin.’ Munck spoke to someone who was in the room with him, then came back on the line. ‘We’ll check with Central Station, see if they can tell us anything.’

  After he’d hung up, I lay on my bed thinking about what Kolan had told me. What I realised was this: for all her unpredictability, Nina was a still point. She was attractive, in the literal sense: people were drawn to her. She was the box of matches for their stack of firewood. This could be good or bad. There was loyalty and then there was obsession. They shared the same root. He’d kill someone if I asked him to.

  My eyes were closing. I could have slept, but I resisted it. I had the feeling I was getting somewhere.

  So. Things collected around her. Things accrued. I imagined she was often surprised when she found out. No, more than surprised. Astonished.

  Even, sometimes, frightened.

  That was one way her disappearance could’ve come about. The man with the photograph was a blueprint for it. Leave that magnetic quality in place, but change the situation, change the details. Funny. I’d always thought of her as somebody who made things happen. I’d thought that was her brand of magic, her particular gift. I’d thought that was her. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  What if you turned the whole thing round?

  Suddenly I saw her as the centre of an area of ignorance. She was ignorant of how she was being affected, and ignorant, in turn, of her effect. You could map it like an earthquake. Where she was, the ignorance was at its most intense. It wasn’t stupidity exactly; more a simple lack of knowledge or awareness, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

  Just before I fell asleep, a question floated to the surface. I’d been thinking about Nina, yes – but hadn’t I also, in some indirect way, been thinking about myself?

  The next night I sat in the Elite drinking beer. Beside me, there was a stool with no one on it. The stool unsettled me. I didn’t know who was going to sit there first, Nina or Bruno Visser. I tried to distract myself by looking round. A girl was dancing on the low stage to my left. She had the fixed smile of an air hostess as she drew a pale feather boa between her legs. There were the usual men, middle-aged and nondescript, their faces absorbed but, at the same time, curiously bland and empty of expression.

  I saw the dark car back away from me, its tyres like treacle on the tarmac. Towards the end of my last conversation with Munck I’d asked him if I was under surveillance. ‘Not so far as I know,’ he’d replied. But if it wasn’t the police, then surely it had to be Visser, didn’t it? I saw him propped against that concrete pillar in his expensive winter coat. Of course he could always claim that he was merely concerned for my welfare. What had he said on the phone once? It’s important that we don’t lose touch. But following me in a car with the lights switched off? Wasn’t he taking things a bit far?

  I sifted my memory for something he might’ve let slip, a casual moment, a careless phrase. You’re an extraordinary case. We’ve never had anyone like you. You’re unique. He was good, though. He was very good. Everything he said could be taken two ways – innocent or implicated; if he stood accused of one, he could always take refuge in the other. He’d mastered ambiguity. I thought of all the time I’d spent, either tranquillised or under anaesthetic, time that had been explained away by words like neuro-surgery, post-traumatic amnesia, and depression. Technical jargon. Generalisations. Vagueness. I’d have given anything for a detailed account of my stay in the clinic. Maybe Nina was a centre of ignorance. But, in that case, so was I.

  ‘And now, the gorgeous … the talented … Miss Can-dy!’

  I turned towards the stage. I could only remember one thing Nina had said about Candy. Nina was sitting on a motel bed at the time, sheets tangled around her waist and legs. She was holding a breast in each hand and looking from one to the other. ‘They’re not bad,’ she was saying. ‘They’re not as good as Candy’s, though. You should see Candy’s. She’s got great tits.’

  It was true. She did.

  Candy was wearing leopardskin chaps and a stetson, and that was about it. She had a bullwhip in her fist. There was a half-naked man kneeling in front of her. It was some kind of dominatrix routine. She stalked round the man, cracking the whip, light skidding off the high gloss of her skin.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  I didn’t even have to look round. I recognised the smell. ‘What’s it look like?’ I said. ‘I’m drinking a beer and watching the girls.’

  ‘You’re fucking blind. How can you watch girls?’

  I turned, looked Greersen up and down. His tie was too wide and his shoes were grey. ‘Who says I’m fucking blind?’

  My nostrils filled with the stench of rotten spinach. I thought Greersen must be like a skunk: he released foul odours when he was furious or scared. He seized me by the collar of my jacket and pulled me off my stool.

  ‘This guy’s a friend of mine, Greersen,’ a girl’s voice said. ‘I invited him.’

  Greersen swung round. ‘I thought you were dancing.’

  ‘It’s my break. Listen, he’s a friend of mine. Let me take care of it, OK?’ She took me by the arm and led me through a curtain and down a corridor. ‘You’re Martin, aren’t you,’ she said. ‘Nina told me about you. I’m Candy.’

  She showed me into her dressing-room behind the stage. It was a bare room, with mirrors along one wall. I could smell hot light bulbs and hair-spray. ‘You all right?’ she said.

  ‘I’m fine. Thanks for rescuing me.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’ She sat in front of the mirror and began to wipe the make-up off her face. ‘I don’t have long,’ she said. ‘I have to go on again in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘You won’t get in trouble, will you?’

  ‘Trouble?’ She chuckled. ‘Not me.’

  ‘I don’t think Greersen likes me very much,’ I said.

  ‘I hate the little shit. He’s always throwing his weight around, what there is of it.’

  I grinned.

  ‘You heard anything about Nina?’ she said.

  ‘No, not really. What about you?’

  ‘Not a thing.’ Candy dropped a ball of cotton-wool into the waste-paper basket. ‘How long’s it been now? Three weeks?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You know, it’s probably none of my business,’ she said, ‘but I think you made a mistake with her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You scared her.’

  ‘Scared her?’ I said. ‘Oh, you mean because I’m blind?’

  ‘No, she liked you being blind.’ Candy laughed. ‘No disrespect, but she always did go for the strangest men. No, what scared her was when you told her you could see.’

  ‘I don’t remember her being scared.’

  ‘Yeah, well. She probably, you know, disguised it. You get pretty good at that, working in a dump like this.’ She lit a cigarette. She was one of those people who put the filter to their lips and seem to drink from it. ‘One night, in some hotel, you stared at yourself for an hour, apparently. That really freaked her out. A blind man staring at himself in the mirror.’

  I thought I remembered it. I’d just told Nina my secret. Then we had sex. She insisted on it; she seemed desperate, violent, almost possessed. It exhausted me and I fell into a deep sleep. Towards morning I woke up suddenly. I’d had one of my dreams. I left the bed and sat on a chair in front of the mirror. It was what I did sometimes, to calm myself. But Nina was asleep the whole time. I looked at her every now and then, and her head was
under the covers, only her dark hair showing on the pillow and the fingers of one hand. What Candy was saying made no sense to me.

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it, really.’ Candy stood up, touched her hair. ‘We got on pretty good, Nina and me, but I can’t say I ever understood her.’ She put her cigarette out, half-smoked. ‘I’m black,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘Yes. Nina told me.’

  ‘Once, in the club, there was this guy. I don’t remember where he was from. Anyway, he saw me and Nina sitting at a table together. You know what he called us?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Night and Day.’ She laughed, and this time it was soft, like water from sprinklers falling on a lawn.

  There was a pay-phone at the end of the corridor, outside the toilets. It was depressing down there. The walls were bare brick and the ceiling leaked. On the floor there was a puddle with cigarette butts floating in it. The phone smelled of other people’s breath. I fed two coins into the slot and dialled Munck’s number.

  ‘About the man in the station,’ he said.

  I asked him what he’d come up with.

  ‘Not much. Somebody saw a man behaving oddly.’

  ‘How do you mean, oddly?’

  ‘Staring through the café window.’ I heard Munck shuffling his papers. ‘Tall man, apparently. Pale hair.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone who looks like that.’

  ‘Well,’ Munck said, ‘we haven’t been able to trace him, anyway.’ He sounded weary. I could hear the melancholy slap of his feet as he paced the office.

  ‘Is there any other news?’ I asked.

  He’d spoken to Karin Salenko again. This time she’d come clean. She’d seen her daughter at the beginning of December. On that occasion it appeared that she had told Nina that Jan Salenko wasn’t her real father.

  I leaned my head against the cold brick wall. So Karin had lied to me. All those sentences that tailed off, that was Karin running out of the truth. But Munck was still talking.

  ‘The feeling here is, it’s some kind of family crisis.’

  I stood in the draughty corridor and thought it through. Nina had learned the truth about her father – or part of it, at least. It had been a shock to her and she’d gone away to try and come to terms with it (it had upset her enough to make her forgetful: she’d left the keys in her car). The theory fitted the facts, such as they were.

  ‘And anyway,’ Munck went on, ‘she’s over twenty-one. If she wants to go off somewhere without telling anyone, that’s well within her rights.’

  ‘So you don’t still think I did it?’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Did away with her,’ I said. ‘Because I was jealous.’

  Munck was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t think anyone did it,’ he said, ‘not until there’s a body.’

  I felt a sudden rush of affection for this tired, disillusioned policeman. ‘Maybe we should have another drink sometime,’ I said. ‘We could go to Smoltczyk again.’

  He seemed surprised by the idea, but not unreceptive.

  After I’d hung up, I tried Karin Salenko’s number. I wanted to tell her that I knew she’d lied to me. But the phone rang fourteen times and nobody answered.

  I waited at a tram-stop not far from the club. By now it was late, and when the tram came it was almost empty. Just a couple of drunks and a teenage girl wearing a pair of clunky workman’s boots and a nose-ring. Through the window I saw a circus poster on the corrugated-iron wall outside a building site. CIRCUS ROKO, it said. In the picture there was a clown and an elephant and a woman with a snake. There was also a man emerging from a hosepipe. Across the poster, in bright-blue letters on a yellow background, was a flash: INTRODUCING THE INCREDIBLE BALDINI! MASTER OF CONTORTION!

  In the Kosminsky Arnold was flicking through a magazine, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside him. The smoke spiralled past his shoulder, thick and rope-like, something he could almost have climbed. Arnold slid my key across the desk. The lift was working for once; I didn’t have to think of any jokes.

  I punched 8 and waited. Up I went. When the doors opened, I stepped out. Then stopped, rooted to the floor in shock. There, standing in front of me, was Visser. He was wearing a brown tweed suit and black shoes. I saw him first, and he was smiling. But when he saw me, his smile stiffened, and he started to back away, down the corridor.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  He didn’t answer me. He just kept backing away, almost on tiptoe, his eyes fastened on mine, and I knew then that it must’ve been him behind the wheel of that mysterious car. I thought I knew what he was doing, too. He was pretending he wasn’t there. He was trying to hypnotise me into thinking I was imagining it all.

  I walked towards him. ‘What are you doing here, Visser? What do you want?’

  Suddenly he turned away, began to run. I ran after him.

  ‘Visser?’ I shouted. ‘Visser?’

  Keeping up with him was hard. Like pistons, those black heels of his. It surprised me that he was fit, that he could run so fast.

  There was one moment when I almost grasped one of the flapping tails of his jacket, but I overbalanced in the attempt and lost valuable ground. I didn’t know where he was making for. The fire exit, maybe. Or the service lift.

  I was shouting at him, telling him to stop. Doors were opening up and down the corridor. People stood around in their pyjamas, complaining. I ignored them.

  Then I was on my back on the carpet. I could see explosions to my left. And there was something sliding down my face. I tasted it. It was blood. I must’ve tripped and hit my head.

  I looked round. The corridor was deserted. Visser had got away.

  Lights pulsed in front of my left eye.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  It was Gregory’s voice. His sweat a subtle distillation of cod, his hair floating above his head like mist.

  ‘Did you see him?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  Sometimes I couldn’t believe Gregory. I just could not believe him. The man was fucking blind. He had to be. He couldn’t even see things when they were going on right under his nose.

  ‘No wonder Harold got off with your wife,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I took a tissue out of my pocket, held it against the left side of my face. ‘Smoke, listen,’ I said. ‘There was a man –’

  ‘I didn’t see anyone.’

  No, of course not. Jesus Christ.

  ‘You shouldn’t be running like that,’ Gregory was saying. ‘Not someone in your condition. You could really hurt yourself.’

  I left him standing in the corridor and took the lift back down to the lobby. Arnold was still flicking through the same magazine, as if nothing had happened. There was a cigarette in the ashtray, and it was resting at the same angle, but it was longer than before. A different cigarette, then. He’d kill himself at this rate.

  I asked him if anyone had left the hotel in the last five minutes. Not that he’d noticed, he replied. I leaned on reception, thinking. Visser was wily. He must have used the back door.

  I tried another approach. ‘Did you notice anyone come in?’

  ‘Lots of people’ve come in.’

  ‘I mean, someone you haven’t seen before …’

  Arnold fell silent.

  ‘Someone with a brown moustache …’

  ‘Nobody like that.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’ Arnold seemed to hesitate. ‘You’re bleeding.’

  ‘I know. It was an accident.’

  I took the lift back to the eighth floor. Gregory was nowhere to be seen. I double-locked my door and lay down on the bed. The lights were still pulsing. They reminded me of Leon’s Christmas decorations. Then the room began to spin.

  I thought I might be sick, but I wasn’t. I made my way to the bathroom and took two codeine with a glass of water. When
I returned to my bed, it was painted white. A glossy, creamy white.

  I lay down again.

  All the hookers on the second floor were blind. Visser patrolled the corridors in his black shoes.

  If I looked out of my window I knew what I would see.

  Three beautiful trees.

  I must have slept, because suddenly it was afternoon. I couldn’t open my left eye at all. I touched it gently with the fingers of one hand. There was a flaky substance that I couldn’t explain. Then I remembered my fall in the corridor and how I’d hit my head. It had to be blood.

  I hauled myself from my bed. As I stood in the bathroom, gripping the edge of the basin, my stomach convulsed. I leaned over, retching. All that came up was bile. It was the colour of pearl light bulbs and thick as old-fashioned paper-glue. I spat and spat, but couldn’t seem to rid my mouth of it.

  I’d seen myself in the mirror. My left eye had closed completely; the skin above and below it was tight and fat. My nose and left cheek were swollen, too. Blood had spread across the left side of my face, then it had dried into a brittle crust and cracked, like glaze.

  I sank down on to the ice-cold tiles next to the toilet and put my head between my knees. I heard a clock somewhere strike five. It would be dark by now.

  Eventually the nausea passed.

  I saw Visser on that piece of waste-ground, an image I’d returned to in perplexity a hundred times. I saw him closer, on the eighth floor of my hotel. The knowing way he’d looked at me both times. His interest in my case – obsessive, almost pathological: he’d actually been following me. My secret power, I thought. What if it wasn’t a secret at all? Or rather, what if it was a secret everybody knew about except me? What if it was actually a secret I’d been excluded from? And what if it was being monitored? What if it had been monitored all along? The questions broke over me, one after another, remorselessly, like waves; I felt I was being flattened on some barren shore.

  At last it came to me, as I sat on the cold tiles, weak, and wet with sweat, and shivering. It came to me. He knows I can see. He’d known all along. That was why he’d been following me, with that smile on his face. He knows.

  The thought was chillingly magnetic. It attracted instant evidence. The endless consultations. That visit to my parents (two hundred kilometres from the clinic!). The file marked HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL. Those things he’d said. Extraordinary case. Unique. Well, of course. I would be, wouldn’t I?