So saying, she beamed at me, beamed at Gauguin, turned, and walked away, closing the door behind her.
I looked at Gauguin, who looked away.
“Does she remember killing Rafe?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“But she’s—”
“She says she’s going to sue whoever ruined the party, and that she’ll need counselling. She used Perfection to find herself a suitable therapist — it can supply that sort of thing. She chose one in Paris, and received four thousand points when she booked a ten-week course. I had to cancel the booking — the police won’t let her go, with matters as they are — but though she lost the points, she didn’t say she was upset. Perfect people don’t cry. Crying is ugly.”
“You sympathise with Byron?” I mused. “With what Filipa did?”
“I… no. Byron is a murderer. Her cause — can we call it a cause? Cause is a righteous word, a word that implies…”
“Sufficient reason?”
“Sufficiency is lacking.”
“Agustin Carrazza,” I repeated firmly. “He likes to run.”
Three days was all it took to find our missing professor.
His mistake was stunning in its stupidity; he’d logged into his music collection from a computer in Guatemala, having concluded, perhaps, that it was worth risking his location in order to reclaim several thousand dollars’ worth of cloud-stored songs.
Gauguin flew to Guatemala the next day. I went on the same plane, but booked my own tickets. A hands-off approach, gentle and light.
He arrived at Agustin Carrazza’s door at ten p.m. in the middle of a rainstorm, knocked three times, waited, knocked three times again.
“Coming, coming!” snarled the professor, and opening the door, there he was, in a white vest and beige shorts, a pair of purple flip flops on his feet, hair and beard grown long.
Gauguin smiled. “May I come in?” he said.
He was in the house for twenty minutes, and two days later, he returned with company.
Luca Evard smiled as he looked through the kitchen window while Agustin made him coffee, and said, no, Interpol, the investigation has grown now, a possible link between Meredith Earwood and the attacks in Venice, you must have seen the news, you must have heard…
No, heard nothing, Agustin replied, nothing at all.
I listened through the microphone I’d planted in Agustin’s kitchen light. I would have put more in his telephone, radiators, computers, back of the TV — but Gauguin had got there first, the whole house wired, so I made do.
Luca was persuasive and kind, gently laying out reports of associations between Agustin and Meredith Earwood, connections that were tentatively being proven, the advantages of co-operation, the opportunities of helping to crack this case. The professor was an expert, of course, an expert, it would be so useful to get his input… and why had he moved to Guatemala?
The people, snapped Agustin, harder than he’d meant, and in the silence that followed I imagined the patient expressions on both Gauguin’s and Luca’s face, the smiles of two men who know that their mark has made a mistake, that he’s going to crack, but won’t say anything, won’t make a move, just waiting for him to unfold like an evening primrose, open up the petals of his truth and die in the light of day.
“Wonderful coffee, thank you,” said Luca, as they walked away. “I do see why you love it here.”
I watched at a distance as Luca and Gauguin walked back to their car, and followed on a stolen moped into the city. At a café hung with purple flowers, I sat two tables away and listened, as Gauguin said, “I believe I’ve been working with Why.”
Luca didn’t answer.
“Is that a problem?” asked Gauguin in the silence. “I wanted to tell you, but if it’s a problem…”
“Not a problem,” he replied, quickly. “Not a problem.”
Gauguin stirred sugar into his coffee, and nodding at nothing much, looked up, and saw me. A slight start, a jerk in his body as he stared. Was I the woman under discussion? He reached for his pocket, instinctively, then stopped himself, put his hand back on the table.
Luca Evard flew back to Switzerland the next morning, and I let him go.
Things I am:
I am my legs as I run through the rain.
I am darkness, broken.
I am a shadow of a figure beneath the light.
I am disturbance to the dreaming mind of a man who lost his job today, and who tosses and turns in his broken sleep and wonders, what now, what now, what now, and thinks he hears a woman run by, and turns over, and forgets.
I am a figment of a woman’s contemplation as she looks out of her kitchen window across the city, through the maze of telephone lines and jacked-up electrical cables that have been spun and threaded across the street like a spider’s web on LSD
she looks and sees the lights of the city and for a moment thinks she can conceive of a world of infinite possibility, of infinite lives, of hearts as real as hers, thoughts as clear, beating, living, moving against that light
and she looks down
and sees me
and I wave
and she waves back, a moment of connection, two strangers who are, for a moment, the same
but I run on
and she forgets
but I do not.
I am memory; I am the sum of my memories.
I am the sum of my deeds.
I am thoughts for the future.
Compilations from the past.
I am this moment.
I am now.
At last I think I know what that means.
Three hours after Luca left Guatemala, Gauguin called me on a disposable mobile phone.
“Is this Why?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Agustin Carrazza just dialled a number in London. He’s trying to reach Byron. The note says you’d want to know.”
Gauguin explains.
Carrazza dials a phone in London, the phone is answered by an unknown male.
The phone is in a Wapping solicitor’s office a few streets from the river. From there a young man in a white shirt with dog-head cufflinks writes down Carrazza’s message, folds it into a perfect little square, takes the DLR to the Isle of Dogs, foot tunnel under the river, ambles to Greenwich Market, buys deep-fried gyoza at a stall, which he eats with his bare fingers, walks round the edge of the hill, the observatory at the top, and finally slips into a public telephone, one of very few still left in London.
Inserts coins.
Dials.
Says, “The better days of life were ours, the worst can be but mine.”
If there is someone on the end of the line, they do not answer.
“Your cousin says hello from Trieste,” he continues, and proceeds to read out Carrazza’s message. When he is done, he hangs up the phone, puts his hands in his pockets, bends his head against the wind, and walks away.
Chapter 100
A phone in Greenwich.
Within three hours, Gauguin had everything he wanted on the phone, the number it dialled, the young man with canine cufflinks, the lot.
Said the guy with cufflinks: “Oh shit shit fuck shit I just answer the phone, man, like shit fuck that’s all I fucking do. Please, it was just a job, an easy job, I didn’t mean…”
Said Gauguin: “It’s fine. You’re fine. Now breathe. Okay? I want you to keep answering the phone, and tell me everything.”
A phone on the floor of a living room in Morningside.
Just a phone, set in its cradle in the middle of the floor.
Outside: snow. Grey Edinburgh snow not quite cold enough to settle, not yet, not on the paving stones, but clumping on the cars, thicker in the shadows, cold in the room too, an apartment near the Observatory that hasn’t been heated for months.
The landlady grumbled, “Well I rented it out nine months ago, and the rent all came in good, and if you just want to have a phone then who am I to complain, there were never any parties or loud noise or problems with the electricity bill!”