‘She told me I could come too.’
Kolan smiled absent-mindedly. Then he started to roll another joint. He had to keep scraping his hair back behind his ears, otherwise it fell over his face and he couldn’t see what he was doing.
‘Maybe that’s what she did,’ he said. ‘Maybe she just left and decided not to take me after all. Or she just forgot.’ The smile was still there — absent-minded, self-deprecating. ‘Keys in a car, it’s like clothes on a beach, you know what I mean? It’s a smokescreen. It’s the kind of thing she’d do.’
I thought about it for a while. I remembered what she’d said on the street that night, just before I turned away from her. There’s too much going on. I need some time. Then I remembered what had happened just before that.
‘What is it?’ Kolan said.
‘It’s something she said that night. I forgot all about it.’ A chill spread across my shoulderblades. It was in my hair as well, at the back. ‘She said there was someone staring at her. Following her. She said she’d seen him before.’ I looked at Kolan. ‘You think it was the same man?’
‘Don’t know. Could be.’
‘This man she told you about,’ I said. ‘She didn’t know him, but he had a picture of her.’
‘Right.’
‘What kind of picture was it?’
‘It was a photograph.’
‘How did he get hold of it?’
‘Who knows?’ Kolan stood up and walked over to the stereo. ‘She wasn’t really interested in the guy with the picture. Not in itself, anyway. It was what they meant, that’s what interested her. She saw it as a sign, an omen.’ Once he’d changed the music, he sat down again. He was holding his new joint between his fingers and looking at it. ‘Or maybe she saw it as a warning.’
‘Did she tell you what he looked like?’
‘You’re not listening, man. She wasn’t interested.’ He lit the joint and took his first hit off it, then he lay back on a pile of cushions. ‘She said there was something weird about him. The way he looked at her or something.’
When I got back to the hotel I called Munck. He didn’t answer. Well, perhaps that wasn’t so surprising, at five-thirty in the morning. I tried again just after sunrise. This time he was there, yawning into the phone. I told him what had happened at the railway station.
‘She seemed afraid suddenly,’ I said. ‘She asked me to walk her to her car.’ I paused. ‘I thought it might be important.’
‘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.’