"I am dying, Axel," Kristina Kovacs said.
She was looking at the floor with an almost girlish air of surprise and faint shame, as if it were some passionate secret she had blurted out. "Yes, I am dying," she said, more softly this time yet with more force, testing it, impressing on herself the incredible truth of it. I stared down at her. An aeroplane passed low above the building with a ripping rumble, and an instant later its vast shadow flashed across the glass walls. Kristina smiled, and shook her head ruefully, and said she was sorry, and that I must forget she had spoken. "Tell me about your girl," she said with awful, brave brightness. "The one who has found you out, I mean. You said it was a girl, didn't you? In the past it always was. What dreadful secret has she uncovered?" She laughed, not unkindly. I gripped the walking stick fiercely in my fist. How did she think she had the right to speak to me like this? I am Axel Vander. People do not say such things to me, with such impudence. She took a step nearer and put a hand on my arm, her grip at once urgent and infirm. I knew what was coming. I drew back from her touch. The air seemed suddenly thick, unbreathable. "Do you remember Prague?" she said. Prague, then, not Belgrade, not Budapest. I would say nothing. "So hot," Kristina murmured, her gaze blurring as she smiled into the past, "so hot, that hotel room…" This was intolerable. I looked about. Someone must rescue me. Where was that fool Bartoli, now that he was needed? "I'm sorry," I snarled, "forgive me," and wiping my mouth on my sleeve I turned from her abruptly and launched myself out across the sea-wide floor toward the door and escape. Franco Bartoli came hurrying after me, yelping. I brandished my stick, more in threat than farewell, and plunged on, a man pursued.
When she came out of the train station the street lamps were still palely burning in the dawn light and the air was the colour of dirty water. A map of the city showed her that it was not far to the hotel where he was staying. She decided to walk. A tram came lurching along its line. She liked trams, the ungainly, earnest look of them. She waited on the pavement as it passed, her bag in her hand, her raincoat over her arm. She felt like a figure from an earlier time, with that coat and bag, her plain dress and old-fashioned shoes, the eager, untried younger self of someone who in time would be famous, famously tragic, perhaps. Often she saw herself like this, in other guises, other possible lives, and so vividly it seemed she must have lived before. She shivered a little, and put on her raincoat; she had expected it would be warmer, this far south. Later the sun would come out. She had hardly slept on the train, huddled in a corner seat in a crowded compartment with her bag under her feet and her folded raincoat for a pillow. The train had kept stopping at deserted stations, and would stand for long minutes creaking and sighing in the night-deep, desolate silence, before setting off again with a series of loud clanks. Once she had pressed her face to the window and peered up and had seen that they were racing along beside a range of high, jagged mountains, whose sheer bases came to within a yard or two of the track. She had supposed they must be the Alps. She could glimpse their peaks, sparkling and unreal so high up there in the moonlight. She remembered being in the mountains once long ago with her father; he had pulled her up a slope on a sled, and afterwards had let her take a sip of his mulled wine. In the dark hour before dawn she dozed for a while; it was less like sleep than one of those fretful night fevers of childhood, and she woke repeatedly with a start, thinking one of the other passengers had touched her, or tried to interfere with her belongings. As they were arriving at last a fat man had stood up too soon and when the train stopped he had pitched forward and almost fallen on her, and to save himself had clapped a huge hand on her shoulder, hurting her. He had smelled faintly of vomit. Now, shaky and light-headed, she set off across the broad avenue. In the piazza before her the starlings were waking noisily in the trees, and a great flock of pigeons rose up, their thousand wings making a noise like derisive applause.
She did not know what she would do when she got to the hotel. It was still early, and she would have to wait at least an hour before she could think of announcing her arrival. She would not mind waiting in the lobby, but she was not sure the hotel people would even let her come inside at such an early hour. The voices in her head started up then, as she had known they would, as they always did when she was uncertain or nervous, seizing their chance. It was as if a motley and curious crowd had fallen into step behind her, hard on her heels, and were discussing her and her plight among themselves in excited, fast, unintelligible whispers. She stopped for a moment and leaned against a shuttered shop window with a hand over her eyes, but with the world blacked out the din of voices only intensified. She took a deep breath and went on.
Dozing in the train she had dreamed of Harlequin in his half-mask. Then she had roused herself and brought out her notebook, her fountain pen. H. the headman, his mask and bat. Maistre on the executioner: "who is this inexplicable being…?" Rip the mask from his face to find – another mask. Father father father.
The phantoms behind her fell back.
And now already here was the hotel, with a laurel bush in a pot at the foot of the steps. The glass door swung open automatically before her, and she wondered if instead of approaching it at the measured pace that was demanded she had run at it full tilt would it have still managed to open in time or would she have been too quick for the mechanism. She saw herself sprawled there on the marble step, amid big lances of shattered glass, the blood pumping from her throat and wrists. It struck her how like hospitals hotels are. A young man in a smart black suit behind the reception desk smiled at her non-committally. She walked past him with her gaze fixed straight ahead and her back arched, trying to look as if she had a perfect right to be there. She had never understood exactly how hotels work, or what the rules of hotel living are. For instance, how would paying guests be distinguished from the other people who would drift in and out here during the day, casual visitors, people coming for lunch, or for assignations in the bar, suchlike? Would that young man at the reception desk know she was not staying here? She had not asked him for a key, but she might have one, all the same, might have got it earlier from one of his colleagues, before he came on duty, and taken it with her when she went out. There was her bag, of course, but it was not very big, and might be a shopping bag, for all he knew. But why would she have gone out with a shopping bag at dawn, when no shops were open, and how could she be coming back now with it full?
The lobby was all gleaming marble surfaces, with hidden lighting and a low ceiling. There was a sort of pond in the middle where water splashed among ferns, soothingly. She took off her coat and sat down at one end of an uncomfortable leather couch that she knew the backs of her legs would stick to even through her dress. A large, indifferent silence hung about her. She wondered if the ferns in the pond were real or made of plastic; they looked suspiciously genuine. She was trying not to think of the voices; often, just thinking of them was enough to set them going. The young man from the reception desk came and asked, in English, with cool politeness, if she wished for anything, some coffee, perhaps, or tea? She shook her head; she did not know what the procedure for paying would be; she imagined herself offering him money only to be met with an offended stare. He was handsome, like a film actor, dark and smooth and poised. He smiled again, this time with a shadow of irony, she thought. As he was turning away he glanced at her bag and lifted an eyebrow, in a way that told her he knew she was not a guest. She wondered enviously how he had decided. Perhaps everyone checking in was photographed in secret, and the pictures were kept in a file under the desk, and he had gone through it and not found hers. More likely he had known just by the look of her, the way she was sitting, so straight, with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap; that, and the fact that she had not gone up in the lift, to her room, the room that she did not have. She looked at her watch and sighed. A single, gloating voice began whispering in her head.