‘Have you read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye?’ Werner said. He talked about self-hatred, ingrained racism, how among dark-skinned families he’d worked with on his sabbaticals in the US there was discrimination between the darker and the lighter members, the lighter having greater value.
Well, he was German, so everything boiled down to racism. To a carpenter with a hammer, every problem is a nail. To Werner, all roads … I’m German, I always feel guilty.
‘Explain Frank’s fixation with his ceiling tiles then,’ I said.
He had an answer for that. Something along the lines of, my brother has an unstable sense of self. I thought about that. My brother doesn’t know who he is. Well, writing fiction, which I’d done since I was a child, I sometimes wondered if I had a self at all, inhabiting other lives and points of view so compulsively.
All our talk of selves, though, where did it get me? If I went back to that room, Werner’s office, would I ever locate the real me?
‘I’m a good mother,’ I told him. I showed him pictures of Maya: with friends, laughing, clowning around, pictures of her hugging, posing cheek to cheek with a girlfriend. It was not how someone ‘too different’ would have looked at twenty-one.
Aged twenty-one, before I met Patrick and reinvented myself, I was a wild, erratic nervous wreck and Frank was obsessive compulsive, eccentric and an addict. Yes, when you lay it out so starkly, we were quite fucked up. Was it so surprising then, was it so wrong, that in the end I tried to find out why? Any system, any State that suppresses questioning, can only last so long …
I told Werner, ‘Everything I did with Maya was in order not to have her turn out like me. Every word, every action.’
Werner said he believed me; he could see it was true Maya was a happy girl. It was the only validation I wanted — no wonder I was so fond of him.
Now, from the King’s Cross Inn, I called Mazarine, and got no answer. But there was a message on my iPhone from an unfamiliar Gmail account: [email protected].
Frankie! Sorry. Things have been crazy. We’re getting it together. See you soon.
At the end were two emojis: a heart and a dragonfly.
The message had a powerful effect on me, first an outpouring of tears. Then it was all I could do not to wreck the room.
From a café near King’s Cross, I rang Sophie Greenaway, and when I got no answer I started walking. In the City, I found the investment bank, Gillmans, barged in and asked for her, telling the receptionist I had an appointment.
The woman checked her clipboard and said there was a mistake, and I insisted, asking her to check with Ms Greenaway, it was of the utmost importance, gravely urgent, etcetera. I didn’t have much hope I’d get in, but thought I’d give it an hour or even two, since the air conditioning was fantastic and there was a water cooler.
No one questioned me, or asked me to leave. I sat on a sofa with my eyes closed, rolling a paper cup of freezing water across my forehead. Time passed. Lulled by the chill air, I drifted, may even have dozed.
‘Hi Frances,’ Sophie said.
I blinked and looked at her shoes: expensive, elaborate, high-heeled, with tiny bows.
We went for coffee in an atrium, a tall internal glass-lined cylinder open to the sky, with café tables and a fountain surrounded by plants in concrete urns.
‘They make flat whites here,’ she said.
The acoustics were oddly muted, the fountain, fringed by potted ferns, made a silver wall of sound. I admired a stand of bamboo with tall, thick shoots, its fronds waving against the sky.
‘Can it be real?’ I asked.
Sophie was pale and distracted, with dark shadows under her eyes, having come out of a meeting that had already lasted two days; her team was involved in a complex commercial transaction for British Aerospace, and it was only by chance she’d got the message about a person insisting on some fake appointment, anyway, she’d come down for a cigarette break, and there I was looking like—
‘Something the cat dragged in,’ I finished. Really, how fatuous I’m capable of sounding. Not that it mattered with Sophie, who was checking a diary and barely noticing what I was saying.
‘Mmm.’ She smiled without warmth. ‘No, not really.’
Putting the diary away, she made an effort suddenly, talked about Aiden: a group of his old friends were getting together to rent a farmhouse in Suffolk, it would be a week of swimming and picnics, there was a music festival nearby, I should come, there would be room, she’d drive down with her friend, a man called Hugo or Hugh, I could hitch a ride with them, she’d introduce me to nice people, some would remember Patrick, we would be two antipodean widows.
She smoothed the top of her coffee with a spoon, not drinking it. I watched a lift sliding up the side of the glass building like the inner workings of a syringe.
‘You could bring Maya. The house has a swimming pool. And there’s a river.’
‘It sounds great,’ I said.
She checked her watch. ‘Look, I have to go.’ She took off her sunglasses, squinted at me.
‘Wait, Sophie, you remember the flash drive you gave me.’
‘Oh yes?’ She looked vague.
‘You don’t know what it is, what’s on it? It’s encrypted.’
‘No, nothing to do with me. Only, Aiden said it was interesting, or confidential. Some young guy gave it to him, some jihadi.’
‘A jihadi?’
She waved her hand. ‘Well, maybe not, it’s just that he was from the place in Belgium where the terrorists came from, you know. That hotbed. Molenbeek.’
‘So not really a terrorist. Necessarily.’
‘I don’t know. Remember I told you, I didn’t even know who the Taliban were.’
‘It wasn’t the man called Dominic who gave the thing to Aiden?’
She glazed over for a second, then turned to me with sudden focus. ‘Frances, Aiden didn’t tell people, but he was bipolar. The lithium was poisoning him and it made everything dull, so he started looking for an alternative drug, only nothing else worked. He tried mindfulness meditation, yoga, all kinds of stuff, as well as other milder drugs. But still he’d get manic. When he gave me the flash drive he was very up. He was drinking too much, talking non-stop, really intense. He told me about the man he and Maya met, the hacker, he called him the idiot savant. He said he was the kind of person Angela lined up to take the blame.’
‘Take the blame for what?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t remember. But the flash drive came from a young Muslim guy.’
‘Who was he, the Muslim guy?’
She turned palms up, shrugged. ‘That was all he said, just someone from Brussels.’
‘Why didn’t you give the flash drive to Angela Lang?’
She looked at me sharply, grimaced, looked away.
‘Didn’t they work together?’
‘Well. Yes. To be honest, Frances, I didn’t want to give it to Angela.’
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t stand her. She commandeered my husband.’
‘Commandeered?’
She shrugged. ‘Sure.’
‘You mean they had a relationship?’
‘Yes.’
‘A close one? For how long?’
‘About two years. I’m not exactly fond of Angela. That’s why I egged Aiden on to tell me things, to try to make him tell me her secrets. I did that when he was up, when he was manic, vulnerable. So it was bad of me. I feel guilty. You know?’
‘Yes, I understand. Why didn’t he give her the flash drive?’
‘Because she was away being a security correspondent.’ She leaned forward, suddenly animated, a sour expression. ‘D’you know, Angela once came to our flat carrying a Kevlar vest. It was like, Oh yeah, I’ve just come from Heathrow, I didn’t have time to, you know, pop home and change. What an action woman. Anyway, she was away in some war zone, so he gave it to me to put in a secure document safe at work. Made use of me, in other words, until she could get back. Th
en he died.’
Silence. Spray rose from the fountain, a plane crossed the circle of sky, its jet trail tapering into curved lines.
‘I don’t see why I should do anything for her,’ Sophie said.
‘No. I understand.’
She sighed. ‘I’m assuming it’s another bestseller.’
‘A bestseller?’
‘On the flash drive. Won’t it be a manuscript? The Muslim guy’s life story. I thought you could give it to Maya, and she could carry on the project. The book, the movie.’
‘I guess so.’
‘God, the time. Look, I have to go.’
She pointed me towards the exit, then stepped into a lift, waved, and rose up the side of the building.
Above, the sky was a hot blue disc, the white, thinning jet trails scrolled across it like calligraphy.
That night in the King’s Cross Inn I dreamed of Mazarine, we were in the Normanby, she was naked again, wet from the shower, and looking at me with an intense expression, and I reached for her, put my arms around her.
It was a dream so erotic, so full of completely uninhibited sex, that I woke with the impulse to put up my hands, as if surprised in the dark with a torch beam in my face: Fair cop! How strange and unexpected this was, like entering a foreign city. My own face in the mirror, primly round-eyed at such wantonness, and surprised even more by the welling emotion, more shocking than mere lust, that accompanied it. A voice in my head said her name, repeated it, assented.
Mazarine. What else could I do but confess?
SEVENTEEN
The fields were no longer yellow, the rapeseed had bloomed and gone; the land was baked and faded by the summer heat, and now, early morning, I was flying over the brown land, only slowing for the area near the Tunnel, the terrain crossed by fences topped with barbed wire, then the smooth ride underground, the crossing so quick you almost didn’t notice, concrete walls hiding the refugee camp known as the Jungle, the cellphone sending a text, Vodafone welcomes you to France.
The sky was a vast blue bowl, there was a haze over the fields, dust blowing, small towns whizzing by, the swing of wires between pylons. I saw a child walking along a pipe, birds flying up ahead of him in a wave, a car crash on a highway, a small crowd milling, smoke rising, birds flying in a V formation above.
Behind the counter of the bar, where I stood lurching and swaying and trying to drink a tiny bitter coffee, the two French workers were in such hysterics it made my own mouth twitch. Cracking each other up, they were hilarious to watch, so I bought another coffee and did so, glancing along the carriage both ways. I hadn’t stopped looking for Nick Oppenheimer.
The Eurostar workers went on being convulsed, even though a stern superior had arrived and was issuing orders. I lurked near them, with some kind of hope their hilarity would warm me. Maya and Joe were like that sometimes; it was one reason why I’d accepted Joe. If he could make her laugh, he had to be all right.
Back in my seat I looked at Maya’s email, puzzled over it, heartened and maddened. She’d used ‘we’. If it was from her, then perhaps she’d stayed with Joe after all, and her friend Cara had got it wrong about them splitting up.
When she was a young teenager and keeping in touch by text, I’d send her messages in code, checking, as I put it to her, that she hadn’t been abducted, and that I was actually talking to her. I sent her questions only she could answer; it was a game that dealt with my slight unease about the anonymity of texting, and with the fact that her generation refused to talk on their phones. After a while it boiled down to a few cues, an easy shorthand. In the course of her texted request for permission to stay the night at a friend’s, if I texted a cue, she would text a corresponding emoji. It was coded banter between us.
Her latest email was hopelessly inadequate, but if she was in a hurry, preoccupied, travelling, then the emojis might seem to her enough to signal that all was well. She’d told me email was outdated, that no one who wasn’t a dinosaur like me used it; if so, perhaps she’d forgotten how to write a detailed message, and what I regarded as brief and terse might seem to her hopelessly verbose. Soon we would all communicate using symbols or images: Snapchat, Instagram. Was there any hope for the written word in this visual age?
Anyway. As Mazarine had pointed out, how could I tell the police my girl was missing when she’d emailed me twice?
It was strange, the effect her message had had on me. Joy and then rage, so extreme, that I smashed a glass against the brown wall of the room at the King’s Cross Inn. Picking up the bits, I cut my finger. I was exhausted, affected by my raid on the hotel minibar, frantic with worry, but it was more than that.
I didn’t know who to trust, who to turn to. I’d considered ringing Werner Bismarck, yet I wasn’t even sure he was real — he and his distant rooms had the insubstantial flavour of a dream. I didn’t trust Nick obviously, by now I almost feared him, and anyway, according to Maya, my notion of him had been completely fictional. My family, Inez, the Judge, Frank, Natasha, enough said.
Maya — I knew and trusted absolutely. And suddenly the frustration sent me into rage, the kind, come to think of it, I used to feel with Inez when I was a child. I raged at Inez because she didn’t love me; I sent her running for the Judge, pointing, trembling, telling him in a hushed voice that I was raving mad …
I assumed Maya had set up the Gmail address, but how could you tell? There was the emoji of a dragonfly, a reference to our mutual tattoo, the use of my nickname, Frankie. This had to be Maya. Unless it was Nick.
I tried to get a sense of the timing. I must have met Nick around the time Maya met Joe, when she was nineteen, far too old for text banter. I probably took up with Nick because I’d seen that Maya was getting very attached to Joe, and guessed that soon I’d be living alone.
The train rushed on, towards the capital. There was no reply from Mazarine.
Outside Gare du Nord, army trucks were blocking the street. I walked past families of homeless people, small children playing on strips of dirty cardboard, wizened grannies, desperate women with babies. The state of emergency was still in force and the streets were patrolled by soldiers, young men with their hair done Hitler Youth style, shaven up the sides and longer on top, a look that chimed with xenophobia, blowback from the destruction of Iraq and the implosion of Syria, the desperate crowds pouring out of the war zones into Europe. Whoever decided, way back when, that the Iraq war was a good idea should be down in Greece now, I thought, pulling dead babies out of the sea.
I’d found an Airbnb studio flat in Montmartre, an area where I’d stayed many times with Patrick. On the steps below Sacré-Coeur, dark-haired girls with clipboards and pens surrounded me, clamouring. I felt hands on me and hung onto my bag, elbowing them off. I went into a shop for supplies and when I came out police had the girls against a wall; they’d collected the scruffy clipboards and were stamping on their pens with heavy boots, grinding them into the pavement, the girls silent, watching.
In the tiny studio apartment, drinking wine, at a loss, I googled Mikail Libard: no entries. Also Mikail Khasanov: nothing relevant. I looked up Dominic Hay-Godwin, the memorial page and then some old news references to the convictions for which he’d served a stretch: selling stolen identities, crimes that involved mass spam, and something complicated to do with stocks. He was connected to the Conways, a known London crime family. I googled them, looked at pictures of villains, found references to court appearances by this one and that one, a variety of crimes: fraud, drug dealing, violence.
In a desultory haze, I searched among the listed friends of Hay-Godwin’s memorial page, a trip down a rabbit hole, into crap and trivia and weirdness, the junkyard of data that people choose to share online.
What else? I looked up Nick Oppenheimer: nothing. He didn’t exist. No professional profile, no listing on a company website, no Facebook, no LinkedIn. He was a phantom.
Emin Khasanov was profiled online as a member of the academic staff of the linguistics department at
Paris-Sorbonne University. There was a short biography, no photo, and no other information to be found.
I rang Mazarine, reached her voicemail, asked her to call. I texted. She didn’t reply. For a long, stalled moment I stared out at Paris spread out below the hill, the buildings insubstantial, wobbling in the brown heat haze.
The landline phone by the bed was large, clunky and covered in a film of dust. Once I’d discovered how to plug it in, it took me even longer to work out how to use it. I went down and asked the concierge, but my French wasn’t good, so the man summoned his English-speaking son, who told me how to ring out.
I checked my contacts, found her number, stabbed the sticky phone buttons. Mazarine answered straight away.
‘You’re avoiding me,’ I said. A drop in my stomach, the sting of rejection like grief, a memory of rage too, smashing the glass in the King’s Cross Inn.
‘Frances.’ Her voice was tiny and far away.
‘Where are you?’
‘In a café,’ she said, evasive.
‘Have you talked to your — to Emin?’
‘He’s away until tomorrow.’
‘Mazarine, I’m in Paris. I need to talk to you. Can we meet?’
A long pause.
‘I’m in a studio in Montmartre. It’s a nice room. Good facilities. View of the whole city.’
I waited.
‘I’m paying,’ I added.
She sighed.
Another silence until she finally said, ‘Okay, tell me where. I’ll come to you.’
I was so agitated then that I couldn’t keep still, went out and walked fast around the narrow streets, threading my way through crowds of tourists, the tour guides with the flag up, the processions of sun hats and selfie poles. The gutters were full of rubbish, kids with cornrows sat on the wall outside the hair lounge, young men jostling, shouting, Where you from?
Mazarine Page 18
