by Rose Tremain
I found other things on the table – my things. There was no kitchen knife and no wallet and no Concorde notebook. The men had been through my pockets and taken everything that could be useful to them or give them information. But they had put the rest of my stuff in a little pile on the table: a handkerchief that had once belonged to Hugh, a used métro ticket, one of Sergei’s dog biscuits, the sifflet du chasseur and Elroy. And then on a wooden chair, drawn up to the table, I found my clothes. My trousers and denim jacket were there, but every pocket was empty and my shoes seemed to be missing.
I put on the jacket. Then I picked up everything else and stowed the things in two pockets, including my book. Before I tucked Elroy away, I spoke to him, which was a thing I hadn’t done for years. I said: ‘War zone now entered.’
The jacket comforted me. I knew that this was what happened to people taken out of their lives and put into prisons or cellars or bombed-out buildings: they got attached to the tiniest thing, like a beetle or an empty tin or a pellet of fluff. And already, within an hour of finding myself in this place, I’d started to behave like one of them, almost crying with joy at recovering some of my clothes. I was sure that if anyone planned on torturing me I’d tell them whatever it was they wanted to know in five minutes.
I wished I knew what time it was – day or night. My Kermit alarm clock, with its luminous green hands and numbers, would have been a useful possession. When I was a child, I used to talk to the Kermit frog on the dial. I used to say, ‘Seven-thirty, Albuquerque,’ and Kermit used to reply, ‘Seven-thirty, Albuquerque!’ in his ace American accent. At that time I thought the word ‘Albuquerque’ was the most brilliant word in the English language.
With my jacket on and everything safe in the pockets, I continued my casing of the edge of the room. By my measurements, it was about four metres long by three metres wide. The door was wooden and had no handle on the inside. A metal plate had been screwed over the place where the handle had been. Underneath the door there was a tiny gap of air, about a centimetre high, but no light came in through the gap, so it was difficult to imagine where the door led. I still had the feeling that the room was underground, except that the hay could indicate that an animal had once been kept in it and you probably wouldn’t keep any animal in a cellar, in total darkness. And I still hoped that when the day came, a bit of light would get in somehow, from somewhere.
When I got back round to my mattress, I lay down on it. I knew it was old because it had a kind of mushroom smell about it. I thought, if I was going to kidnap someone, I’d at least provide them with a pillow. Then I got Elroy out and rubbed his balding head with my finger and thumb and went to sleep.
There was light in the room. It didn’t come from under the door or from a window; it came from above. The shape of the morsel of light was oblong and thin.
I lay on my side and stared about me. The table and the chair were just visible and there was some other object, under the table, that I hadn’t seen before. As far as I could tell, there was nothing else anywhere in the room.
I got up. I didn’t feel cold any more. I walked to the middle of the room and stared up at the sliver of light. It was grey-white and flat and no wider than a Mars bar. It was the sky.
As time passed, it got whiter. It cast a little replica of itself on the floor at my feet. Quite soon, it was enough to see everything by.
I was in an attic. The roof was quite shallow, made of wooden rafters, with wood batons laid over them and slates fixed to the batons. The covering of slates was solid except in this one place, where one slate had slipped free of its pin and moved, leaving this minute opening of sky. There was a window in the attic – not round, but small and square and boarded up from the outside, with no single gap or chink anywhere in the boarding.
But I knew that the bit of light in the roof was going to make a difference to my life in this place and I also thought, the kidnappers probably haven’t noticed it; they think it’s pitch black in here, and what I have to do is to guard the light and keep it secret from them.
First, I counted the number of slates from the top of the wall above my bed to the slate that had moved. I counted them twice, to be sure, and the number was eleven. Then, as quietly as I could, I moved the table to the middle of the room, exactly underneath the eleventh slate. The ceiling wasn’t very high, so I thought I might be able to reach it just by standing on the table, but I wasn’t tall enough. I fetched the chair and put this on top of the table and stood on that. Now, my head came up almost to the roof. I slipped my hand through the gap and felt the air touch my fingers. I could hear a solitary bird singing, quite far away. And I could hear another sound, that was like a small boat moving through water.
Next, I moved the slate. I could make the gap wider by a few centimetres, or close it off completely. With the gap closed, the thick darkness returned and I thought, counting the slates is no good, because when the gap of light isn’t there I can’t see them. I’d understood what was prime – my ability to locate the slipped slate – but not how to achieve it.
I made the gap of light as wide as possible and looked round the room. The object that had been under the table was a bucket with a lid and I supposed this was meant to be my toilet. I considered placing this toilet exactly under the slate, but I knew it would get moved from time to time by the kidnappers and I had to measure with something that never moved.
Then I remembered Elroy’s string. All I needed to do was run the string along the floor, out from my mattress to where the light’s reflection fell on to the floor, and tie a knot in it at the exact place. I noticed now that the floor was made of dusty tiles. The only area where they weren’t dusty was where I’d thrown up and the men had swabbed around with their bucket and mop. A tiny bit of colour was coming into things now and I could see that in the swabbed area the tiles looked brown.
I was about to climb down and fetch the vital string, when I heard, close to my mattress wall, the little knocking I’d heard before, like that of the knuckles of a hand, on the other side of the wall. I stood completely still on my chair and listened. This was the only noise in the building. I assumed, from the flat light, that it was still early and that the kidnappers or guards, or whoever they were, were still asleep.
Leaving the gap in the slates open, I climbed down and crossed to my mattress. I pressed my ear to the wall and I heard the knocking come again. Gently, I knocked in answer. I thought, if I’d learned Morse properly when Hugh wanted to teach it to me, I could send a message. But you often don’t know, in a life, what’s going to be useful and what’s going to turn out to be a complete waste of time.
‘Qui est là?’ I said. ‘Qui est là?’
There was a reply. But it was so quiet and tiny, it sounded like it was a beetle trying to speak.
‘Plus fort!’ I said. ‘Parlez plus fort!’
Nothing came, so I resumed knocking. I knocked in sequences, one-two-three, one-two-three. And then I heard, as if from far, far away, a voice saying my name, my English name, Lewis. And I knew it was Valentina.
We tried to have a conversation through the wall. It was difficult for me to speak, because a crazed feeling of joy was spreading through my heart. I put both my hands against the wall, as if that was going to bring Valentina nearer to me.
The wall was thick, like it was made of blocks of stone. Our voices seemed to go into the stone and stay there. ‘Why?’ Valentina kept saying. ‘Why?’
‘Why did they take me?’
‘Why you, Lewis?’
I was going to try to describe the way I’d pieced together the trail that led to the hospital, but I knew she’d only hear half of what I was saying, so I just said: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. Are you all right, Valentina? Have you got a blanket?’
‘What, darling?’
‘Are you all right? Have they hurt you?’
‘I can’t hear, Lewis . . .’
‘Did anyone hurt you?’
‘Hurt me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh no. They don’t hurt me. They just exasperate me. They think they’re big-time villains. They’ve read some crime novels, I expect. Alexis thinks they’re going to get away with this, but he’s wrong.’
I was about to ask who Alexis was, when I heard shouting. It came from underneath us and I heard a door open, so I left the wall and climbed as quickly as I could on to the table and then on to the chair and moved the loose slate back into position, so that the little block of light went from the room. Then I replaced the table and chair by the wall, where they’d been. The moment I did this, I realised I hadn’t had time to measure the distance from my bed to the slate. I’d just have to work patiently in the dark till I located it again.
I returned to my mattress and lay with my head close to the wall. I could still hear the men’s voices. Sometimes they spoke in French and sometimes in Russian. They sounded now as if they were arguing and cursing. I imagined Valentina lying very still on her mattress and listening to them too. I thought, her body is probably no further than half a metre away from mine.
How I imagined Valentina was exactly as I’d last seen her, looking smart, wearing her black-and-white dress and her ‘Ypres’ scarf, and smelling of her Giorgio perfume, going into the revolving door of the Hôtel de Venise. But three weeks had passed. They might have taken away her expensive clothes. They might have given her some old, horrible dressing gown to wear. They would have pulled off her rings and her bracelet and sold them. Nobody would have thought about letting her wash her hair . . .
The voices quietened down and then a door banged and there was silence. Then I heard Valentina knock on my wall again and I gave an answering knock. In the pitch dark, her voice, when it next came, sounded nearer than before.
‘Lewis,’ she said. ‘What’s happening outside? Where’s Alice?’
‘In the apartment. Alice is safe and your mother is safe and Sergei is safe.’
‘Thank God. Pauvre Maman . . . What about the money?’
‘Money?’
‘Yes. What’s happening about the money?’
‘What money?’
‘The ten million francs. Are they going to pay it?’
‘Who?’
‘Can you hear me, darling?’
‘Hardly . . .’
‘Money, Lewis. Ransom money. Can you hear? Are Bianquis going to pay it?’
I lay very still. I was about to say that no ransom demand had come, but then I suddenly realised that perhaps it had. It had and no one had told me! I’d thought I was way ahead of Carmody and Alice in my detective work, but all the time Alice was going to her meetings with the editor from Bianquis and what they were discussing was a ransom demand I knew nothing about. I thought, that’s why Alice wanted to tell me about her and Didier: she was getting too full up with lies and she had to make room for others.
‘I don’t know . . .’ I said.
‘Speak louder, darling. I can’t hear.’
I thought, I mustn’t invent anything. I must stay close to what I know, as far as I can. I said: ‘Alice had some meetings with Dominique Monod. That’s all I know. And the police have been told . . .’
‘The police?’
‘Yes.’
There was a moment’s silence, then Valentina said: ‘I warned Alexis . . .’
‘What?’
‘I told him that the police would be involved by now. He’s such a baby. He doesn’t know how the world works.’
When the kidnappers came into my room again, they were wearing masks. They were the kind of cheap plastic masks you could buy in toy-shops anywhere and the ones these kidnappers had chosen were monkey faces. It made them look really stupid. If I’d been a kidnapper, I would have chosen something evil like a skull.
They didn’t blindfold me or handcuff my wrists, because they knew they couldn’t be recognised through these monkey masks.
One of them gave me a tray. On the tray was a slice of baguette and a tin mug of coffee. The other one crouched there with the light, watching me. Then he suddenly laughed. It was a high, tittering laugh, like you could imagine a real monkey might have. ‘Le grand Meaulnes!’ he giggled. ‘English translator!’
I said nothing. I wanted to ask him to bring my blanket back, but I didn’t. I thought if I said anything or asked for anything, he might jump forward and snatch the bread and coffee away.
They went out and I heard them go next door, into the room where Valentina was. I put my ear to the wall and listened. The moment the men entered Valentina’s cell I heard a furious burst of Russian coming from her lips.
It was the guy with the tittering laugh who answered her. His voice was high like the laugh and he yelled at her, also in Russian, and both of them were just yelling and not listening to the other. Then Valentina screamed and I heard something fall on to the floor of her room. I wanted to call out to her, but I put my hand in front of my mouth. She was really yelling now, repeating a phrase that sounded like ‘yob tvoyu mat! yob tvoyu mat!’ and the man was laughing, just as he’d laughed at me. Then I heard Valentina’s door being slammed and locked and the men went away.
I knocked on the wall. ‘Valentina . . .’ I said.
‘Son of a bitch!’ she said. ‘How could he have done this?’
‘Done what?’
‘To capture you . . . how could they do such a stupid, terrible thing? I told Alexis he was slime . . .’
‘What was the noise? Did something fall?’
‘He threw the hot coffee over me.’
‘He threw the coffee?’
‘Yes. Exactly like a child, you see? I curse him. I curse the day I met him!’
I waited for a moment, then I asked: ‘Who’s Alexis?’
‘Alexis?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long silence. I reached out in the dark for my own coffee, not just to drink it, but to see how hot it was, to see how much I would have burned . . .
‘Alexis was my husband,’ said Valentina.
I remembered it all then: the young man in the photo album, the man with the wastepaper basket on his head, the man lying with his arms outstretched in the snow. I heard Mrs Gavrilovich say: ‘He was crazy, Louis. Just crazy.’
I ate the bread and drank the coffee. I thought, I shouldn’t be eating and drinking when Valentina has been burned by the scalding coffee, but I can’t help myself.
After that, I needed to pee, so I crept over to my bucket toilet and took off the lid. Inside the bucket were some sheets of newspaper, torn up. They were to wipe my bum with, like people in England had to do during the war. Grandma Gwyneth once said to me: ‘The secret was to scrunch the paper up, Lewis. You scrunched it up several times and this made it almost soft.’
I put the paper in a pile under the table. I thought, I must know exactly where everything is located, so that I can get to it in the dark.
In my whole life, I’d never peed into a bucket. In hospital, they made you piss into a sort of papier-mâché jar. But I knew that in certain prisons in Britain that was what the men still had to do – use a bucket as a toilet in their cells – like this was meant to be part of their punishment. But a prison inmate said in a newspaper interview I’d read that the thing he hated most, worse than the shit pails, was the boredom of every single day.
And it occurred to me now, now that we’d been given our breakfast, that I’d been expecting something to happen today, like I was anticipating that Valentina and I would be put into a car and taken somewhere, out in the air. But nothing was going to happen. That was the reality of our situation. Absolutely nil zero was going to happen. We’d just be left here, in these cold, dark rooms, for hour upon hour and day after day. There would be no variation whatsoever. We were hostages. We were in medieval time.
I thought one of the men would come and collect my breakfast tray, but he didn’t. After about an hour had passed, I moved the table and chair to where I thought the loose slate was and began to feel around to find it. It wasn’t so cold i
n the room any more and I thought, what may come through when I move the slate is sunlight.
Valentina had been silent for a while. I’d knocked gently on the wall, but no answering knock had come from her side. I wondered if she was asleep or whether she was lying there thinking, and, if so, what she was thinking about. In all the time that she’d been here with nothing to do, she might have been finishing her novel in her mind.
I tried to work out how much ten million francs was. I calculated it at about £1,200,000. And then I wondered: will Alexis ask for money for my life? Will Hugh and Alice have to sell the house in Devon and the car and everything they own? Suppose he asks them for a million pounds? What happens if a ransom just can’t be paid?
It took me quite a long time to locate the loose slate. Before moving it, I stayed still, listening, in case the monkeys were coming back, but there was no sound of them. I didn’t know whether they stayed in this place all the time, or whether, in the daytime, they just left us locked up and went back to their apartments and got on with normal life. I tried to remember what else Mrs Gavrilovich had told me about Alexis. I wondered what had happened to the wastepaper basket he’d once put on his head and whereabouts the snow had been falling when he lay in it.
When I moved the slate, just as I thought, a shaft of sunlight came in and seemed to light up my whole room. I felt so pleased and delighted, it was like the sunlight was a fucking crock of gold. I put my face up into the light and felt the warmth of it. I thought, I must never, never, let the kidnappers discover this.