by Adam Roberts
‘No matter what they say,’ Marie declared, ‘they can’t guarantee they won’t snafu the nerve endings. That’s why,’ she added, a little smugly, ‘why I’d never let a surgeon poke a laser anywhere down there.’ She had had both her children by perineal caesarian precisely to obviate the necessity for too much subsequent surgery.
The waiter had swept up her bucket, and was about to shimmer off, when Marie raised her voice. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
He bowed towards her, murmuring something, interspersing it with several Madams and begged pardons. But Marie was unspooling one of her shriller tirades. George took his attention away from this, and instead poked the two-tine fork in amongst his food: shredded swan in yoghurt. The fibres of the meat were surprisingly thin for so large a bird. George separated several, and then combed them into parallel lines on his plate, like hair.
He wasn’t really very hungry.
The waiter had gone. ‘Off with a flea in his ear,’ George noted.
‘He didn’t even ask me!’ said Marie. ‘Just made to steal my bucket without so much as an excu-u-use me.’
George peered into the mouth of the bucket: a vomitous swill of chewed food in the thin medium of spat-out wine. There was a bit of a smell. Maybe the other diners had told the fellow to remove it. He thought about saying so to his wife, but, really, it wasn’t worth the grief.
A different waiter was approaching their table. ‘Either you scared the other one off,’ George noted with a chuckle, ‘or they’ve sacked him.’
‘It would be nothing more than he deserved,’ said Marie. ‘His hair all down the back of his jacket like that.’
‘It was in a queue, I thought?’
‘It was. But dangling outside the jacket. Like a horse’s tail. Couldn’t he tuck it in?’ She turned to take in the view again: the now dark flank of mountain drew a jagged upward graph-line of charcoal against the tomato-and-gold sunset sky behind. ‘It’s not as if there’s any sunlight left,’ using the fork as a baton to indicate the scene, ‘for him to feed upon.’
The new waiter was at the table, bowing. ‘Mrs Denoone? Mr Denoone?’
‘Mrs Lewinski,’ said Marie. She had a this-is-the-last-straw expression on her face. You know how she can be when she’s pushed too far by some careless insolence or other. George fancied a touch of something chocolaty to sweeten his mouth, and looked the waiter up and down to see what he had brought. But he didn’t appear to be carrying anything.
‘My apologies, Madam,’ he said, bowing again. ‘I must ask: you are the mother of Leah Denoone, Mrs Loving-ski?’
‘Lewinski, for crying out loud,’ snapped Marie, making fists out of her tiny hands and holding them a few inches above the table. ‘It is not hard to get right.’
George, though, had picked up on the fellow’s tone of voice. ‘We are her parents, yes,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Again my apologies Sir, Madam. I regret that I must interrupt your meal.’
‘Oh, what now?’ wailed Marie. ‘Evening’s been a complete disaster from start to finish!’
‘Would you be so gracious as to follow me?’ The man had a very narrow, prominent L-shaped nose. It stood out all the more startlingly against the die-cast cheekbones of his sucked-in face. His queue was at least decently tucked into the back of his shirt. Guinness-black eyes flitted from George to Marie, from Marie to George.
‘What’s the matter?’ said George.
‘Please, Sir, Madam.’
George’s chair sang the tuneless, mournful squeaking note chairs make when they’re pushed back over a polished floor. Like minor spirits in torment. None of the other diners gave them a second glance.
5
Leah had disappeared. Disappeared was the word they used. Marie insisted on precision in a loud voice – ‘What do you mean disappeared, exactly? What, exactly, does disappeared mean?’ – but they were unforthcoming. George and Marie were escorted to a huge office and a desk the size of a car. The head of security, a scrawny-framed woman with a large head and protuberant lips that looked, somehow, untucked, came round to the front of the desk as soon as they were ushered in. Arsinée was in a chair in the corner, clutching a sleeping Ezra to her body and weeping silently. ‘Mr and Mrs Denoone,’ the head of security said, bowing to each of them in turn, and then shaking their hands, one after the other. ‘My name is Captain Samira Afkhami, and I am head of hotel security.’
‘What?’ said George, meaning what’s going on? and meaning what’s happened to my daughter? The truth was he felt so discombobulated by the wine and the day’s dissipations that none of this felt real enough to pierce his bubble. ‘What?’ he said again, as if whatishness was the only concept his head could hold.
‘Please to sit down.’
‘I will not sit down!’ Marie cried, striking a blow against tyranny with her words. ‘You must tell me what has happened.’
‘Your daughter has disappeared.’
The phrase, already uttered several times, still made no real impact upon George’s consciousness. He flicked the touchscreen of his memory, and a variety of possible responses scrolled past. What he said was: ‘When?’
Captain Afkhami looked at the large-nosed man. ‘Saat kaç?’
The man gawped at her, and said something rapidly. The captain then apologized on his behalf. ‘This man thinks he is Irani, but he is Turk, and cannot understand me correctly if I speak Farsi to him.’
‘What?’ said George, again.
‘He insists on Farsi, but it is a sham,’ said the captain.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Marie. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’
‘There is no need for you to alarm yourself, Madam,’ the captain said. And to the other man, she spoke rapidly: ‘Az un khosh am nemiyad, agha. Sa’at chand e?’ When he did not reply, she turned to George, ‘I am asking him the time your daughter disappeared. He claims to understand Farsi, but you see the result. This shows that he is a sham. Rest assured, although there remain many Turks in this area. Nevertheless Ararat province is firmly under the legal authority of the Iranian Judicial system.’
The other man began to say something but the captain cut him off. ‘Gom sho! Gom sho!’ This seemed to mean ‘get out’, for the fellow drooped his head and left the office. ‘We do not need him,’ said the captain, to nobody in particular.
The horrible, yawning sense that something genuinely bad was awry in his life was percolating into George’s numb sensorium. The fear of something that money and influence could not simply undo. He directed his fuzzy gaze towards Arsinée, in the corner. ‘Arsinée,’ he said. ‘Where’s Leah?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ she said, sob-tremulously.
‘What do you mean you don’t know?’
Arsinée responded with two deep, shuddery breaths and a fresh outflow of tears. The captain, slapping the palm of her hand upon the surface of her desk, said: ‘It is a deeply regrettable situation! It is! Beyond all, and at the beginning, permit me to express the hotel management’s deep regrets.’ She stopped, felt her own chin as if reassuring herself that it was still there, and added: ‘I must also, for legal reasons, say: regrets is not an admission of liability or apology. I trust you understand what I mean.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said Marie, fiercely. ‘I don’t at all.’ In response to the ferocity in her mistress’s voice, Arsinée’s sobbing grew louder.
‘Why do you go on after that manner?’ asked George, with a sort of stupefied slowness. ‘Why don’t you just tell us where our daughter is?’
‘I answer your two questions from last to first,’ said the captain. ‘I do not tell you where you daughter is, and it is because I do not know. I stress the nature of the legal authority because you must know this, in terms of your possible legal redress, and such is complicated.’
‘How can it be complicated?’ flashed Marie. ‘You either know where she is or you don’t.’
‘It is complicated bec
ause of the region,’ said a new voice. Away in the far corner of the long room a heavy-looking man was wedged in an elegant chair. They hadn’t even realized he was there; but there he was, sunk in that chair. His face was grimly hairy; a black moustache possessing almost structural solidity and density, and little wiry hairs sparking in several directions from his long eyebrows. He was dressed in a nondescript suit, and his head – ostentatiously – was shaved down to a raincloud-purple oval of stubble.
Turning to face this man Marie asked: ‘Do you know where my daughter is?’ The stranger nodded slowly, as if in affirmation, but then spoke in a sepulchral voice from the chair to deny it: ‘No, Madam, no. Perhaps it seems callous, but this is the information you will need to master. Your daughter is no longer in the hotel. This means she is somewhere in the district.’
‘No longer in the hotel,’ said George, stupidly.
‘What do you mean?’ Marie said again.
‘We have, of course, sent out officers of hotel security to search,’ put in Captain Afkhami. ‘And alerted local police, and bosses.’
‘Bosses?’
‘Indeed. Bosses run the villages, police keep them in line. But,’ the deep-throated man in the chair continued, and his thrum appeared to fill the room, ‘we must alas, alas, face the possibility that such inquiries will be fruitless. Accordingly, you will need to know that this part of the world has a – complicated political history. This history has been complicated since Noah’s time, it has been so. It is one of the portions of the globe that humankind has squabbled over.’ There was a particular inflection, or accent, about the way the man spoke English, but George couldn’t quite place it. It sounded almost Irish, or perhaps Scottish. Not Scottish, no. That wasn’t it. ‘I am talking,’ the man said, ‘about Iranians, and Turks, and Kurds, and Armenians, and Russians too – we must not forget the Russians. Since Noah’s times. Since the time of Noah, but also more recently.’ There was some extra twist or flavour to the man’s Iranian- or Turkish-accented English. But it. George couldn’t focus his thoughts. But. ‘Since two decades now,’ the man said, ‘a form of Protectorate has operated.’
‘I don’t see,’ said Marie, in a high, loud voice, ‘what this has to do with anything.’
‘Only, Madam, that you may instruct your lawyer to hire Iranian experts,’ said the man, ducking his large, vaguely cubic, head so that his chin touched his chest. ‘And I shall say nothing more to intrude upon you at this difficult time. It is very sad that this has happened, but – mashallah.’
At this word Captain Afkhami looked sharply round at the man. George was still trying to find a way of understanding what he was being told; which is to say, of understanding on a more than merely semantic level. Something momentous had happened. This was a day, like any day, except that as this day slid innocuously past something shadowy and monstrous had risen from between the flower-dotted green hills in the background. What had come up was a head the size of the moon, and it had flashed sword-long teeth and bitten down into the tender flesh of George’s being-in-the-world. He didn’t really feel it; but, he reflected, sometimes people lost limbs, or suffered terrible gunshots, and felt nothing. Perhaps the numbness was actually an index to the enormousness of what had happened to his life. Prompted, possibly, by an obscure sense that he ought at the very least to act out the requirements of shocked bereavement, he said. ‘Marie, would you like to sit down?’
‘I do not want to sit down,’ his wife replied.
‘I think I need to sit down, at any rate,’ he said. A servant – another individual George had not even realized was in the room – was immediately at his side with a chair, and George settled his weight into it.
‘Of course it is a shock,’ said Captain Afkhami, blandly.
‘I want to go to her room,’ said Marie. George could hear in her voice – a voice whose emotional tenor he had, of course, become adept at decoding – that she had come down on the side of furious action, rather than furious melancholy. ‘I want to go straight to her room,’ she said.
‘Of course Madam,’ said the captain. ‘And anywhere else in the hotel you wish to look. But I assure you we have looked everywhere, and every room—’
‘I want to go to her room,’ said Marie.
‘—is covered by surveillance technology,’ the captain rolled on smoothly. ‘And regretfully your daughter is no longer in the hotel.’
Arsinée’s sobbing had the irritating regularity of an unoiled wheel. As if it had just occurred to her that she had another child, Marie suddenly strode to where the girl was sitting, hauled Ezra from her grip and clutched him tightly. The baby did not wake.
‘I suppose,’ said George, from his seated position, and speaking tentatively – since this was to articulate the ultimate surety of his peace of mind, the ground of his reality, and to articulate it was to risk having that surety, and ground, contradicted. ‘I suppose it is a matter of ransom?’
The captain looked round to the large man in the room’s far corner, and he in turn stirred in his chair, as if about to rise from it. He cleared his throat, and his corpulent torso quivered, and then he spoke, still seated. ‘I regret to say, not so, Mr Denoone.’
‘You regret to say,’ repeated George, dully.
‘Alas, no. If it were a matter of ransom then – well, then it would not be complicated. But I am afraid it is complicated.’
‘Somebody has kidnapped my child,’ said George, and as he spoke these words, for the first time that evening, it came home to his soul that this had really happened, that Leah had really been stolen from him. A trembling stirred the inert mass of muscle in his lower torso. ‘Somebody has kidnapped Leah, but they don’t want money?’
‘No, Mr Denoone. I fear they do not.’
‘I am a wealthy individual, quite wealthy,’ said George. ‘My wife is also wealthy.’ He felt he might be sick. He felt a horrible shudder in his stomach.
Both the captain and the man in the chair dipped their heads at this, in mute recognition of this brute fact of individual existence.
‘That must be why they’ve taken her,’ George repeated. ‘How much will they ask? What are the usual levels of ransom.’
‘I regret to say,’ the man in the corner repeated, ‘I do not believe that they will demand ransom.’
‘What then?’ asked Marie. ‘Political, is it? Is it political?’
At this thorny and non-specific signifier the captain and the man swapped glances. ‘To be plain,’ said this latter, across the room. ‘I should say: if whoever kidnapped your daughter wanted something for her, money or publicity or anything like that, then our job would be infinitely easier. But I fear the kidnapper wants nothing more than to disappear without trace forever into the wide districts of Anatolian anonymity.’
‘Are they personal enemies?’ George asked, his heart alternately thuddishly convulsing and lying still. ‘Do they have some personal grudge against us?’
‘With a certainty approaching the absolute,’ said the lady captain, ‘whoever took your daughter knows nothing whatsoever about you. They probably do not even know your nationality.’
‘All they knew,’ said the man in the corner, ‘was that you had a daughter. It was enough. They saw her, and they took her, and that is all.’
6
After this awkward, stilted interview, a period of several hours passed in a debatable and limbo-like state. First, still clutching Ezra, Marie stormed off to Leah’s room, with George, Arsinée and the captain in train behind her. But there was nothing to see. Then there was a ten-minute period of angry interrogation (or reinterrogation, for the girl had already told her story over and over to the authorities) of Arsinée herself. She curled herself up as if expecting blows, and reworked the same narrative in various different handfuls of grief-shaky words. She had put Ezra down for his night’s sleep; she had eaten a little something with Leah whilst watching children’s dramas; she had put Leah to bed – still awake, playing on one of her games, and then she had gone
through to her own cot to watch her own screen. She had dozed a little, but woken at nine with an uncanny sensation that something was wrong. Leah was not in her room. Discovering this, she had searched the suite, for sometimes the little girl liked to tease her carer by hiding. When it was clear she was in none of these rooms, and after Arsinée had (she said) made her throat sore with calling her name (but not too loudly, for she did not wish to wake Ezra), she had picked up the baby – for he could hardly be left by himself – and ventured out into the corridor. Up and down, calling Leah’s name, calling for the darling child, over and over. Meeting guests coming and going and asking if they had seen a small girl, in her pyjamas, to be met with incomprehension, or the brush-off, or hostility. She had been by her own admission ‘in a state’ at this stage, weeping and disordered and not knowing where to go. So she had gone barefoot all the way down to the Kidarium, because she knew Lah-Lah liked to play there sometimes. But it was all closed, and switched off, and the bubblepit looked sinister and enveloping in the dark; and the furry robots, some taller than she was herself, loomed alarmingly as if they were liable to come to life at a motion. So she had fled to the ice-cream café, on the same floor, and walked amongst the booths and through the crowds of people, crying Leah’s name and weeping; and the bright lights and the noise had woken Ezra and set him off wailing too, and still Arsinée had wandered, calling the name, until security had come over to see what the commotion was. The guards called their superiors, and when they realized that a guest’s child was missing they called their superiors. Pretty soon after this, the surveillance net was programmed with Leah’s details, guards worked systematically from basement to roof, and then back down again. By the time George and Marie had been approached in the penthouse restaurant, the grounds had been searched, and teams sent out along the most likely exit roads.