TWENTY-ONE
She questioned them, trying to find the right words in Spanish. When, where? She translated for me. ‘A young woman came in recently who had the same tattoo on her hand.’
‘Ask how recently.’
The man was non-committal, said a couple of words, the wife spoke rapidly over him.
‘Not long ago,’ Mazarine said. ‘A young woman with dark hair.’
‘What about Joe? Ask if it was a couple.’
She brought out her phone and showed them the photo of Maya and Joe. They peered, conferred.
Mazarine pushed the phone closer; they both looked doubtful, made wary by her insistence. The man folded his arms, looked away. Finally, the woman said a few words.
Silence. The deliveryman tapped his clipboard with his pen.
‘What did she say?’ I said.
Mazarine was triumphant. ‘She says definitely to the photo. I think she says the young woman came in by herself.’
‘Mismo. Identico,’ the woman said to me, pointing at my hand.
‘Was she with him?’ I pointed at the picture of Joe.
‘No. Yes,’ she said, hesitating.
‘Yes?’
But the man now seemed to have decided we might be trouble, and shoved our change at us, glaring at the woman and refusing to engage further.
We stood outside, agitated and frustrated: what could we do? I felt the mad urge to run up and down the street shouting Maya’s name.
‘Could it be coincidence?’
‘Impossible. Not the same tattoo, in exactly the same place.’
We walked back to the apartment, endlessly going over the exchange. The woman had seemed to hesitate, to reconsider, she’d been about to say more but the man had shut her down.
At the door Mazarine, with a sudden burst of energy, announced she was going to ‘have it out with that fucking Nestor’.
I held her arm. ‘No, wait. What’s the point of that?’
‘He’s meant to guard the door. He’s supposed to know exactly who comes and goes, not sit in his flat watching bloody TV.’
‘Okay, so he’s a bit slack, there’s no point in yelling at him.’ I pushed her into the elevator. ‘Let’s not do anything, let’s just think for a moment.’
Silence. The lift rose.
She glared. ‘I hate feeling so helpless. I feel like breaking something.’ She went on cursing Nestor.
‘Yes, yes.’ Nestor’s laxity seemed a minor issue. I was too struck by our discovery to care about it.
After the surprise, relief was spreading through me. Maya had been here, that meant she’d got away from Paris. Emin had unnerved me; I hadn’t liked to think of my daughter near that harsh, menacing man. And if she’d been here in Buenos Aires that meant she was, as Mazarine had put it, halfway home, a safe distance from Europe and terrorism, and whatever it was that the ‘radicalised’ Mikail had been involved in.
Mazarine’s expression was tragic. The illness and tension, along with the constant walking, had exhausted her. She trudged into the apartment, went straight to the bedroom and lay down, an arm over her face.
Automatically, I carried the shopping to the kitchen and started unloading the bags, my elation receding under the inevitable slide of questions.
If Maya had been here, the fact that she was no longer in the apartment meant, presumably, that she’d left Buenos Aires.
I realised I hadn’t quite believed Mazarine when she’d said Emin had told Maya and Joe to leave Europe. What had she said exactly? She’d implied he’d intended to separate them from Mikail, from whatever it was Mikail had been involved in.
I went into the bedroom, where Mazarine was lying in silence, one hand cupped over her forehead.
‘Could they be with your mother?’
She lay there looking at me with one eye.
‘Where did you say your mother is?’
‘Punta del Este.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘It’s in Uruguay. No, I would have known if Mother had them, I’d have been able to tell when I rang her. She’s hopeless at lying.’
‘Uruguay!’ I pictured us grimly deplaning in Montevideo.
Mazarine got up, trudged to the kitchen and started cooking. We both felt paralysed; the new discovery only raised more questions, and made it even harder to figure out what to do next. I drank wine and paced, spent some time at my laptop, ate Mazarine’s meal without really tasting it; she received my polite compliments absentmindedly and then, to my surprise, fetched herself a glass, filled it with wine and took a huge swig.
‘We should celebrate,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘They’ve both been here, they’re away from Emin.’
I didn’t feel like celebrating.
‘You said you didn’t trust Emin to—’
‘Yes, but I know he would protect Joe.’
‘Not Mikail?’
She looked away with an expression of pain.
‘You have to tell me what Emin told you.’ I reached across, touching her arm, but she only upended her glass again and reached for the bottle, behaviour so unlike her that I felt unnerved.
I stayed up late at my computer, went to bed tipsy and entered a world of dreams. Mazarine and I climbed out of planes and wandered along jungle paths where giant cicadas hissed in women’s voices, Si si si. She stood at the base of a monument, wielding a pointer and delivering a lecture; butterflies zoomed and fluttered around our heads, and I followed a Mazarine Blue along a narrow path between stone walls, in and out of streets and through the years, to the marina at the port of Garavan in Menton, where Frank and I squatted on the hot rocks at the breakwater, squinting into the dancing water, the rippling light playing on the smooth sea floor. He stood up and pointed and said, ‘Look, Frankie,’ and I saw, in the distance, a cloud of glittering dragonflies.
My family in Menton that summer, how beautiful they were! Inez with her glossy black hair, the Judge with his charisma and his clever eyes, golden little Natasha, sweet-natured, enterprising Frank, and I the different one, who loved the story they made, and would hold them there in my mind, always. Through all those years, through anniversaries, birthdays, the recurring procession of cake-and-candles, I tried to sing their tune, and couldn’t. This was determined by fate; it was the story told by my DNA.
Opening my eyes I was awake and saw Maya at the end of the bed, opening my eyes I was awake and went out on the terrace, saw Mazarine outside the corner shop, speaking urgently to a woman with a turned-down mouth and brown hair; opening my eyes I was awake and saw the crack of light at the edge of the bathroom door, heard Mazarine’s tentative footsteps as she fumbled her way across the room in the blackness, felt her weight beside me, reached for her in the dark, my unreliable narrator, she whispered to me in the dark, Yes yes yes.
The story told by my DNA was a short one: much of it, you could say, was redacted. I once heard Inez describe it with a characteristic flourish: ‘It’s a few islands of fact in a sea of unknowns!’
There was the old man in the sunny flat by the olive grove, his attendant sitting by the chair and diligently translating the few pieces of coherent information he could produce. I followed the butterfly, the Mazarine Blue, heard dry thunder in the mountains above Menton, felt the stir of the summer storm that would set the dogs barking in the olive grove, and now, at last, I could visualise the old man’s face.
He was bald, with a hooked nose and long, gaunt cheeks, his eyes were startlingly intelligent, his mouth was turned down at both corners, and he spoke to me warmly, in words I didn’t understand, nor did I remember the translation, which went on incomprehensibly above my head, so fixed was I on the eyes of the old man who said—
A contact at the UN in New York had led Inez and the Judge to the first opportunity: the adoption of a third child. It was the same contact, some years later, who’d presented the Judge with news that a relative had surfaced, an old man who perhaps could add to the scant information t
hey’d received about their difficult, and disconcertingly alien, adoptee.
An exile or dissident, a writer perhaps, randomly washed up in the South of France, the old man burbled about his past, revealing details that later didn’t add up, or proved contradictory. He gave almost nothing of what he was being asked for: information about my real parents, and me. There was a merry glint in his eye, I later came to think. Perhaps he’d reverted to a survival habit, developed over a long life as a refusenik: when in a tight spot, make stuff up.
Surrounded by gaps, I tried to make sense of my life: it had to be a story of disconnection. Structurally, my mind was made of spaces, portals through which I passed, finding my way from past to present to future. I told it to Werner Bismarck who listened; I told my family, who wouldn’t hear it but closed their eyes and stamped their feet, and shouted No no no.
Werner said, If you can’t construct a life story, then you have no past, present and future. With no future self, you’re closer to making yourself permanently disappear.
Past self, present self, future self, writer. And never the twain shall—
‘Frances.’
I opened my eyes. Light through the windows, the winter sky, the massed shapes of the spiky pot plants on the terrace. Mazarine’s face in the grey morning air as she leaned over to hand me a cup of coffee. I remembered my first sight of her, standing at the front door, her expression evasive, looking beyond me.
She was wearing Raoul’s robe and a towel on her head; now she moved away, unwinding her turban, and sat in front of the mirror, skilfully putting on make-up: tinted moisturiser, lipstick. Her familiar smell reached me: shampoo, soap and some other musky scent of hair and skin that stirred a feeling in me so sharp it was almost like woe.
Examining her eye, tilting her head back to squeeze in some drops, she said, ‘You were talking in your sleep. You said a word.’
I thought how much I loved her voice, its beautiful tone and rhythm.
‘Dreaming,’ I said.
‘It sounded like grandfather.’
I sat up, flexing my fingers, glanced at the dragonfly on my hand, which had been roughened by the fierce sun in Paris. ‘Actually, I was thinking, I worried about letting Maya get that tattoo, but it was a good thing I did.’
She turned to reply and elbowed her coffee cup onto the floor.
‘Shit shit shit,’ she said, and ran out of the room for a cloth. Getting up to help, I saw she’d dropped her make-up bag. A compact had opened, its mirror cracked and the contents spilling out. I picked up the pieces, quickly replacing them on the dresser.
I could hear BBC World on the TV in the next room, and beyond that the throb of the clothes dryer. The smell of toast came from the kitchen.
She flew back in with a cloth and towel, and knelt on the carpet, sponging it. I looked at her shoulders, the blonde hair on the back of her neck, a freckle on the vulnerable skin.
I said, ‘But Maya’s still missing. If she’s not here in the flat, then she’s not in this city. I’m going back to London.’
Mazarine got up slowly. She sat without moving while I dragged out my suitcase and started sorting and folding clothes we’d recently washed in her mother’s laundry, actions that were symbolic more than anything, since I hadn’t even booked a plane ticket, but I’d made up my mind and I wanted her to know it.
‘Maya comes first,’ I said.
She straightened the items on top of the dresser: a vase, a coaster, a photo of Raoul. Her expression in the mirror was tense.
‘What makes you think she’ll be there?’
‘She works for Arlington Books, she has a flat, friends, a life. When her holiday’s over she’ll go back.’
She swivelled around on her stool. ‘But why would she come here, if it was all that simple?’
I dropped the clothes I was folding, raising my voice. ‘You tell me. If you don’t explain what’s happened, what Mikail was doing, then I have no choice but to go back, and also to go to the police. I don’t have to protect Mikail, and I wouldn’t want to if he’s a terrorist.’
‘Frances—’
‘Is that what we’re doing? Protecting your son so he can associate with jihadists, or whatever you do when you’re radicalised? Did you see the footage of the Bataclan attack? It was a disgusting slaughter, a bloodbath.’
She made a quelling motion with both hands. ‘Mikail’s not a terrorist.’
‘You said he was radicalised.’
‘That was a word you used, not me. He’s Muslim, yes. I think I said he was political. I told you he’d been hassled by police, that he was angry about that. I didn’t say he was a terrorist. That was your idea. Perhaps that’s the kind of prejudiced conclusion he’s been angry about.’
‘We all jump to conclusions. You don’t like Russians, for example.’
She shrugged, dismissive. ‘These things are all said in context. I said things to do with Russia make me nervous.’
I looked at her, my temper rising. ‘So, a whole nation of people makes you nervous. That’s irrational and racist, and you’re completely disingenuous. You said Mikail was involved in something, you said Emin sent him somewhere and Maya and Joe somewhere else — presumably here — because of it, and you won’t tell me what it was. Of course I assume he was involved in terrorism, and maybe Emin, too.’
She shook her head.
I reached for my laptop. ‘Right, I’m going to book a ticket.’ I added, ‘And maybe I’ll email Interpol while I’m about it.’ I had no idea whether that was possible, or what Interpol actually was, but I was furious.
Mazarine got up, put her arms around me, holding me, looking into my face. She raised her hands, put them on my cheeks, whispered in my ear:
‘Frances, please. If it is terrorism, it’s not the kind you think.’
I led her by the hand into the living room. She was, it seemed, only willing to tell me anything significant with her lips pressed against my ear, so I sat on the sofa, pulled her down beside me and held her close.
She stalled, snuffling around in my hair and making one of her cunning attempts to quell me with touch, stroking my arm, letting her hand fall onto my thigh, lightly brushing my neck with her nails.
‘It’s just that I find it hard to believe,’ she said in a sighing voice.
‘Believe what?’ I removed her hand from my thigh.
‘And if I do believe it, I find it too unnerving and don’t know what to do.’
I felt wetness on my cheek and turned to confirm, yes, she was actually crying. ‘Mikail,’ she whispered. Misery in her eyes.
I took her hand.
She said, ‘You have to understand. Emin and I don’t live together, but in a strange way, we always loved each other. It’s not just that we had the boys together. Our relationship was, I don’t know how to describe it, it was fierce.’
I listened, trying to accept what my mind protested against, Mazarine and that harsh, frightening man.
‘We respect each other, know each other, even if there’s enmity. There’s that fact, and the fact that we shared our boys. So, he confided in me, he told me what Mikail found out while working and studying for his degree.’
‘Did Mikail talk to Aiden Wood?’
‘Yes, to him and the woman, Angela Lang.’
‘And what did he tell them?’
‘I don’t believe it, but …’
Another pause.
‘Hurry up.’ I squeezed her hand.
‘Emin said the flash drive contains information.’
‘What about?’
‘A group of computer experts, in Russia and Chechnya, some Mikail knew who work doing fraud, industrial spying, that kind of thing.’
‘Okay …’
‘The file is about them and their Russian government backers. Emin said there’s a thread connecting them, made of money.’
‘Government? What were they doing?’
This is what I don’t believe.’
‘Try me.’ I was actuall
y grinding my teeth with impatience.
‘He said they’re working to disrupt elections.’
Silence, while my mind did a slow, laborious U-turn.
‘Elections. Disrupt how?’
‘I’m not sure exactly. Corrupting the process, altering outcomes.’
‘Which elections?’
‘The American, and also European ones. British. Any they think will be useful.’
‘The American election is in the future.’
‘Yes, but they’ve already started. With European elections, too.’
I snorted, incredulous. ‘Who do they want to win the American election? Which candidate?’
‘Maybe it says on the file. I don’t know.’
‘I can see why you find it difficult to believe.’
She drew in a breath, wiped her eyes.
I faced her. ‘So, just to get this straight, Mikail didn’t approve?’
‘Obviously not. If he approved he’d hardly pass the information on.’
‘So, he’s not a terrorist.’
‘He’s the opposite,’ she snapped.
‘I’m sorry.’
Another silence.
‘Should we tell someone?’
‘Why? No. Let other people deal with it. We can’t stop it.’
‘And Joe and Maya knew nothing about it?’
‘No. Absolutely nothing. Emin sent them away so they couldn’t get mixed up in Mikail’s problems.’
‘But you don’t know what Emin thinks, where he stands in all this.’ I hesitated. ‘Or do you?’
‘No, I don’t know. He would never tell me about his connections, or what he did when he went back to Chechnya, nothing.’
I said, more delicately, ‘You don’t know where he might have sent Mikail? Except you think Grozny?’
‘No.’ More tears.
I patted her hand, distracted, thinking.
She drew a breath, dabbed at her face. ‘It’s been so long since I saw Mikail. I tried last time, but he wouldn’t meet me. It’s painful.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
‘Emin told me something,’ she said in my ear, leaning heavily on my shoulder, her voice drowsy, clogged, as if she’d used up all her energy. ‘One of the candidates in the American election has a secret. It’s a serious health issue that should have been disclosed. They know about it, maybe they can use it to affect him or her, I don’t know how.’
Mazarine Page 24
