I wasn’t sure how long I stood there for.
At last I forced myself to walk. My legs were made of bamboo, with string in the middle instead of muscle. The hand that held the suitcase didn’t feel like mine. I gave my ticket to the man who asked for it and set out across the station concourse. The crowds parted before me. I passed along the tiled tunnel that led to the taxi-rank. A piece of paper fluttered over my face. I bent down, picked it up. There was handwriting on it. It was some kind of note, but the paper was torn; only a fragment was left. Five words were visible and my heart leapt because I knew they were intended specifically for me:
You were brilliant!
Well done!
The Hotel Kosminsky stood on the edge of the red-light district, behind the train station. I remembered it from before — the outside of it, at least. All flaky-grey, it had the look of cold roast pork. The windows were dusty, smoke-stained, often cracked. Above the entrance, a torn black canopy fluttered in the wind that always seemed to be tormenting that particular street-corner. Two brothers owned the place. I’d seen them once, climbing out of a foreign car. They had close-cropped hair and wore identical suits of grey silk. People said they had certain interests in the area — apart from the hotel, that is. I was banking on this reputation; the Kosminsky was dubious, and nobody I knew would think of looking for me there.
I found a bell on the reception desk and bounced my hand on it. A man appeared, his head and shoulders wrapped in cigarette smoke, his eyes filmy, blinder than mine. He looked me over.
‘You’re not planning on dying here, are you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not planning on that.’
‘We had someone die on us last week.’ He pulled on his cigarette and crushed it out in a tin-foil ashtray. ‘Seems people only check in here to fucking die.’ He opened a register, licked one finger. Turned the page. ‘We’ve got a single on the eighth floor. How long do you want it for?’
‘You got a monthly rate?’
‘Two-fifty.’
I paid the money in advance.
When he asked for details, I gave him the name of a boy who’d been in my class at school and the address of a girl I’d been in love with when I was twenty-one.
‘The lift’s on your left, Mr Polyak.’
The lift had wood-veneer walls and a carpet that was brown and pale-orange with a kind of leaf design in it. There was a narrow glass panel in the door so you could see each floor as you passed it, but only for about two seconds. The bell sounded and the door slid open. My floor. I stepped out. There was a strong smell of very old fried chicken. It took me a while to find my room. There didn’t seem to be any sequence to the numbers; they were arranged in the strangest manner, almost randomly.
The room was long and narrow, with a bathroom just inside the door, on the right. Beyond the bathroom door was a miniature fridge, a wooden table and a plastic chair that balanced precariously on slender metal legs. On the table, predictably, an ashtray, a bible and a telephone. A full-length mirror was bolted to the wall above the fridge. Along the left-hand side of the room there was a wardrobe and a single bed. A cheap oil painting hung above the headboard. Those oil paintings. Sometimes it’s a gypsy, sometimes it’s a kitten. This time it was a pierrot, a pathetic drooping creature, with one glass tear gleaming on his cheek. Between the bed and the table was a window. I pushed it open, leaned my elbows on the sill. I could hear the bells of a distant church, three notes endlessly repeating. The old city lay to the east. A glow arched over it, pale as the light that surrounds a galaxy. Below me I could see the humped back of the station roof, charcoal-grey and ribbed, a whale half-submerged. To my left, an abandoned warehouse, dark windows in a face of crumbling brick, and beyond it, concealed by the steeply slanting tiles, the river, thick as broth and garnished with weeds.
I turned back into the room. I picked up the telephone and listened: a dialling tone. I replaced the receiver, sat down on the bed. The air smelled of other people. The image of Smulders’ washing passed before me; I wasn’t sure whether it was the staleness of the room or the proximity of the railway station. I lit a cigarette, smoked half of it.
After a while I got to my feet. I reached up to the centre light, unscrewed the bulb and put it in the drawer of the table. I found the piece of paper that had blown past my face in the station passageway and tucked it into the bracket that held one corner of the mirror to the wall. Then I took my shoes off, stretched out face-down on the bed. It was second nature to me now not to put weight on the back of my head, but sometimes, when I was lying in that position, I felt victimised, powerless. I thought of the police, and what they do with people they’re arresting. I thought of soldiers, in a war.
A siren curled past the corner of the building eight floors below. It was a sound that seemed moulded, bent; somehow it reminded me of blown glass. But the sound died down and when it had gone, I heard church bells again, those three descending notes, repeating, endlessly repeating …
At one in the morning I unpacked the sandwiches my mother had prepared for me. As I ate I wondered whether Visser had heard about my disappearance yet. In a way, I hoped he had. I’d like to have seen his face. Was it part of a process described in those neurology textbooks of his? Or had I outwitted him once more? I thought back to our last conversation. He’d called me at my parents’ house in the middle of the week.
‘How are you, Martin?’
I remembered how my eyelids had burned. I couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour.
‘Fine, Doctor. How are you?’
‘You sound tired.’
‘I was asleep. You woke me.’
‘It’s a beautiful morning. You should get up.’
He’d be sitting in his swivel chair, the black leather creaking. I could imagine the sunlight enhancing the chestnut tints in his moustache. I saw the man in all his vanity.
‘Can I help you with anything, Doctor?’
‘No, no. I was just ringing to find out how you are.’
‘I’m fine. Really.’ I had to be careful not to overstate it, though. ‘I’m getting about a bit. You know, with my stick.’
‘Good, good. Just because you’re not at the clinic any more, it doesn’t mean we’re not concerned about you.’
‘No —’
‘I must say, I enjoyed our afternoon together, the walk and so on.’ He paused. ‘I hope you don’t think I was too hard on you.’
‘No. Not at all.’
‘Perhaps we could do it again some time. It’s important that we don’t lose touch.’
I was having trouble sustaining the conversation. I wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear.
Suddenly he was laughing. ‘You’re an extraordinary case, you see. Unique, in fact. We’ve never had anyone quite like you, Martin. As I’m sure you realise.’
Was I supposed to feel flattered?
‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll ring you again soon. In a week or two.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. And thanks for calling.’
‘Goodbye, Martin.’
A conversation that now seemed harmless, anodyne (certainly there was no suggestion that he suspected me of planning anything). A conversation that was supposed to take its place in a series of similar conversations. A conversation that would be instantly forgettable, in fact, were it not for my own preoccupations. On the afternoon he’d referred to, I’d had the feeling that there was something he wasn’t telling me. I had the same feeling now, in the hotel. I lingered on certain of his words: Important. Extraordinary. Unique. I stared at the remains of my sandwich on its sheet of greaseproof paper. I thought of the night I’d found myself, as chance would have it, looking down into his office. Visser at three in the morning, with a file marked HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL. X-rays of my skull pinned to the wall. What was it that was confidential? Why was I such a persistent source of fascination to him? It was as though, behind Bruno Visser, fifteen or twenty people were standing one behind the other. If I took a step sideways, I would see them right away. But I didn’t know how to take that step. That was how it was with Visser. I was constantly probing his faÇade for an ulterior motive, some hidden design. I imagined what his reaction would be, if he knew. ‘Martin,’ he would say, and he’d be laughing, ‘don’t be so suspicious!’