The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  ‘I wanted to tell you,’ said Clare. ‘I tried to.’

  He shrugged. ‘The more the merrier.’ He asked Fiacc if she had eaten. She said she wasn’t hungry.

  ‘I’ve brought you something,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I tried to tell you,’ said Clare.

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Your sister called me,’ said Fiacc. ‘Or did you think we never spoke to each other? I told her I had seen something and asked her if she thought you had seen it too. I was concerned that in your hideaway the great world was passing you by.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Clem.

  ‘I was going to tell you,’ said Clare, softly. ‘I wanted to...’

  ‘I thought,’ said Fiacc, ‘it would be more the thing if I told you myself. Showed you.’

  She dug in one of the pockets of her mac and took out a small square of folded newspaper. She held it between two fingers and straightened her arm towards Clem. He took it from her. It was a foreign-news round-up piece, an unadorned paragraph explaining that a man wanted in connection with the atrocity at N— had been detained in Brussels. He had been living in the Matongé district of the city. Apparently he had family there. The man’s name was given and Clem read it several times. There was no doubt about who it was.

  ‘I dare say,’ said Fiacc, ‘they’d let you get a sight of him. Your monster. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

  Clem folded the paper again, carefully. He studied the carpet, then looked up at Fiacc. He had not seen her so happy before. ‘The date?’

  ‘Wednesday’s Scotsman,’ she said.

  ‘Wednesday’s?’

  ‘Wednesday’s.’

  He thanked her. She told him he was welcome.

  PART THREE

  That same night Theseus did as he was told; but whether he killed the Minotaur with a sword given him by Ariadne, or with his bare hands, or with his celebrated club, is much disputed. A sculptured frieze at Amyclae shows the Minotaur bound and led in triumph by Theseus to Athens; but this is not the generally accepted story.

  Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

  21

  Six hours after Fiacc had handed him the piece of newspaper, Clem parked the white Ford on Faraday Road and walked to his flat. On his desk he had a book, old, the binding held together with silver gaffer’s tape. Anyone who had been useful to him—night editors, hotel doormen, managers of car-hire companies, staff at an embassy, at an airport—anyone who might be useful again, was noted down in the dog-eared pages of the book. By the light of the desk lamp he found Kirsty Schneider’s name. Four or five years ago, their lives overlapping between jobs, they had spent a dozen evenings flirting in various West London pubs, a non-affair that had ended with an embrace on a street corner and the exchange of unfulfilled promises to stay in touch. She was an economist writing freelance for the broadsheets. She had moved to Brussels to specialise in Community finances and Community fraud, he knew that much, and had seen her pieces, part technical, part satirical, lodged between Obituaries and Sport. In the book there were two numbers for her. The first was defunct; the other, a mobile number, she answered after four rings. She was on holiday, she said, having told him how nice it was to hear from him again, a village near Arles with her husband Hein and her little girl Beatrice.

  ‘I hadn’t even realised you were married,’ said Clem.

  ‘A wife and mother,’ she said. ‘I adore it.’

  He congratulated her.

  ‘Is this business or pleasure?’ she asked.

  ‘Business,’ he said. ‘Business mostly.’ He asked what she had heard about Ruzindana.

  ‘The crimes against humanity thing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Only that they arrested him, then had to let him go again.’

  ‘Let him go?’

  ‘Something technical with the warrant. Perhaps they misspelled his name. Isn’t this a story you did with Frank Silverman?’

  ‘I want to find this man,’ said Clem. ‘Can you help me?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be on holiday,’ she said.

  He said he was sorry.

  ‘There are a couple of people I can try tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Els Claus at De Morgan might have something.’

  ‘Anything you can get.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can, but no promises.’

  He apologised again. She told him to forget it. ‘A story’s a story,’ she said. ‘We’re all addicted.’

  They wished each other a good night. Clem took out his wallet and found the scrap of paper with Silverman’s cellphone number on it. He copied it into the book below the New York number, then rang the cellphone. A voice—a voice he had grown half used to in Toronto—informed him that the handset he was trying to connect to was switched off. He took a shower, tried again an hour later but got the same message. He went to bed.

  In the morning he bought milk and bread, margarine, three tins of tuna fish, four newspapers. He sat on the floor of the living room drinking tea and eating tuna sandwiches. He spread the papers over the carpet and read carefully through the foreign news but there was nothing to help him. From the bookshelf he took down his copy of 501 French Verbs. He started to test himself—blesser, blesser à mort, demolir, se demolir, mordre, moudre—then started translating in his head paragraphs picked randomly from the papers on the floor. Clare, who had carried on with the language at university as part of her art-history degree, who had lived in the country for over a year, was proficient in a way he was not and would never be, but he had, he believed, all that he would need.

  Kirsty Schneider called at one fifteen. She had spoken to her contact at De Morgan. ‘Els thinks they’ll pick him up again soon,’ she said.

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘A couple of weeks. Probably less.’

  ‘Did she have an address for him?’

  ‘Afraid not. But she gave me the number of someone who might. Have you got a pen? A woman called Laurencie Karamera. She’s a relative of Ruzindana’s. A cousin, a niece, I’m not sure. Works at one of the lobbyist associations, a place called the FIA. They have an office on the rue du Sceptre, just outside the EU quarter.’

  She read out a number. Clem wrote it down in large numerals on the paper in front of him.

  ‘Do you know a place called Matongé?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s an African section,’ she said, ‘near the avenue Louise. They took the name from one of the suburbs of Kinshasa. Pretty lively. Some good bars.’

  He thanked her.

  ‘Hope it works,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is.’

  When she rang off he stared a while at the piece of paper on the desk. In the past there had always been someone else to make these contacts—Facey, Gentellini, Keane, Silverman, someone; it had not really occurred to him before that there might be some specific skill in what they did.

  He picked up the receiver, added the code for Belgium, and dialled. The woman who answered told him that Laurencie Karamera was not back from her lunch. Clem left his name and telephone number, then went to his bank in Notting Hill and wrote a cheque at the counter for four hundred pounds. He didn’t know what he had in his account, he thought perhaps he had nothing at all, but the bank was busy and the teller knew his face. She counted out the money in twenties, flicking the notes with the stained rubber thimble on her index finger. At a second counter he changed a hundred pounds into Belgian francs, then went to one of the cut-price travel shops on Queensway and bought a return flight, Heathrow-Brussels, leaving at ten a.m. the following morning.

  It was four o’clock when he got back to the flat. No one had called. He drank a glass of tap water and pressed the redial button on his phone. A woman again, but a different woman.

  ‘My name is Glass,’ he said. ‘I called earlier. I would like to speak to Laurencie Karamera.’

  ‘What is it,’ asked the woman, ‘that you wish to speak about?’

  ‘Are you Laurencie Kara
mera?’

  She paused; he felt her search for some way of probing him without declaring herself, but finding nothing, as unpractised it seemed as he was himself to the feints and ruses of the game, she finally confessed her identity and repeated her question.

  ‘I’m looking for Sylvestre Ruzindana,’ said Clem.

  ‘I have never heard of this man,’ she said.

  ‘The former Bourgmestre of R—, wanted by the International Tribunal on a charge of complicity in genocide. I understand he is a relation of yours.’

  ‘Understand? From whom?’ A voice outraged.

  ‘I want to see him,’ said Clem. ‘I want to meet him.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I have given you my name.’

  ‘You are a journalist?’

  ‘I’m somebody interested in the truth.’

  ‘You have made a mistake,’ she said. ‘I have nothing to say to you. Do you understand? Nothing to say to you.’

  She broke the connection.

  In the bathroom Clem put red Cellophane over the shaving light, set up his chemical trays, plugged in the enlarger, and made a set of prints from the negatives he kept in the black folder on the bookshelf. He washed the prints and clipped them up to dry, then went to his bedroom, unpacked the case from Colcombe, threw the dirty clothes into a corner of the room, and packed the bag he had taken with him to Canada. He put the bag, his passport and the plane tickets by the front door of the flat. He tried Silverman again but the handset was still off (lost? stolen?). For a moment he was tempted to call Laura and had typed in half the area code before he changed his mind. He had no right to task her with some manner of snooping mission. Clare would be as safe with Fiacc as she had ever been with him—Fiacc who had been there at the beginning, who had helped at the beginning. He pictured the two of them snug beside the cottage fire. Pictured Fiacc cooking in the little kitchen where Ray’s good-news cards were propped on the shelf. Then Fiacc in his bed, or in Clare’s perhaps (would they fit?), a pair of middle-aged women soothing each other in a child’s bedroom.

  He checked the prints and took off the last of the moisture with a hairdryer. He looked at them in the only way he was able to: a disengaged and tensionless focus that kept the images on the surface of his eyes, no deeper. He found a plastic folder for them, then slid the folder into one of the side pockets of his bag. There was still time to change all this. Time to unpack, to put things away, to take some quite different path. He was not fated to any of this; nor was he being goaded on by ghosts, that company he had imagined following him as the plane made its descent to Toronto. Whatever he was doing now he was choosing it. The consequences, the responsibility, were purely his own. He lit a cigarette, rolled the smoke over his tongue. It was the last few minutes of the dusk. On the other side of the Grove, thin lines of light showed between the drawn curtains.

  22

  He had picked the hotel from a sheet supplied by the tourist desk at the airport, selecting it because it was close to Matongé and because its rates were reasonable. The sheet described it as ‘clean and modem’ and this was exact. The corridors were pale grey, his room also, a Magritte print (bowler hats, rain) on the wall over the bed. The view—he was on the fourth floor at the back of the building—was of tall windows opening on to balconies, a narrow, quiet street below. He lay down and shut his eyes, then roused himself, sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the phone.

  ‘I’m in Brussels,’ he said.

  She said she didn’t care where he was. She threatened to call the police.

  ‘How did the police behave with your uncle?’ he asked.

  ‘He is not my uncle!’

  ‘This man you have never heard of?’

  She rang off. Clem unfolded a map of the city (his gift from the tourism office), smoothing it out over the counterpane. He found the me du Sceptre, found his own street, Matongé, the EU quarter. Around each of these he drew a careful circle, then called Laurencie Karamera again.

  ‘Don’t put the phone down,’ he said. ‘All I want you to do is help me to meet Sylvestre Ruzindana.’

  ‘And why should I do this? Why should I help you?’

  ‘You know what he is accused of. You know how serious it is. That must mean something to you.’

  She paused. ‘But it is not my business,’ she said. ‘You understand? I know nothing about this. Why are you trying to make this my business?’

  He sat a moment with the phone in his hand, then slowly put it down. He looked again at the map and went out. At the end of his street he turned left and walked until he came to the Porte de Namur Metro at the edge of the Boulevard de Waterloo. He picked out a black face, a man he thought was about Ruzindana’s age, and followed him. He knew very well the man was not Ruzindana but hoped there might be a café or social club where men of that age went to gossip and play cards. They headed away from the boulevard and had walked for less than ten minutes before they crossed into Matongé. Suddenly, Clem was among scenes, scents, accents he had left behind in May, though then it had been the ruin of such scenes, with empty stores and silent markets, and underfoot a litter of broken glass and cartridge cases. Here in Matongé the shops had sacks full of sweet potatoes for sale, maize, red chillis, stalks of sugar-cane, dried locusts, palm leaves, dried fish like the soles of old sandals. There were bolts of vividly dyed cloth on display, tresses of false hair, a heavy jewellery of gold or mock-gold. Along the pavements, men in slacks and safari shirts, a few with dreadlocks, a few in ankle-length robes of light cotton, were gathered in animated conversations, shaking hands, holding hands, laughing open-mouthed at each other’s stories. Clem, distracted, lost sight of the man he had been following, his target. For an hour he explored the place, entering the tatty arcades, losing and finding his bearings at street-comers, then stepping into a bar and ordering a bottle of beer that came with the print of an elephant on the label. He flicked through an African newspaper (Le Phare), listened to the twang of Soukous and Juju on the radio. The whole quarter had something lush and improbable about it, like those tough, brilliant flowers that cling to the soot-blackened walls of old railway cuttings. A community—more recent, he thought, more improvised than its equivalents in London—arriving piecemeal on cheap flights from the south and threading itself on to strings of nineteenth-century Bruxellois real estate. He ordered a second beer. The waitress who served him was a waddling, laughing, yellow-toothed woman with a purple and gold turban on her head. She winked at him. He wondered what would happen if he mentioned the Bourgmestre to her. Did she know him? Did everyone know him? Did she see him walk by her windows in the morning, an unlucky figure she glanced away from?

  He went back to the hotel. It was mid-afternoon. For a third time he dialled the number of the FIA. A man answered: a young man’s voice, suspicious, ready for a fight. Clem asked for Laurencie Karamera.

  ‘She cannot speak on the phone now,’ said the voice, decisively.

  ‘She’s occupied?’

  ‘What is it you want to talk to her about?’

  ‘Not knowing who you are, that is not something I can discuss.’

  ‘You’re the journalist, yes?’

  ‘Is she still at the office?’

  ‘Shall I tell you what I think of journalists? Of people like you?’

  ‘Why don’t you give me your name?’ asked Clem. ‘You have mine.’

  ‘Worse than dogs.’

  ‘Are you a colleague? A friend of hers?’

  ‘You can kill a street dog with an axe. Nobody cares.’

  ‘Is that what you would do?’

  ‘Nobody cares what happens to them.’

  Clem took a bath, then performed some vaguely remembered yoga exercises in the space between the foot of the bed and the cupboard where the television was stored. At half past five he rang again. The phone was not answered and no answering-machine clicked on. He turned on the television and channel-surfed, looking for news. He heard the news in French, in American, in Flemish. He tu
rned off the television, dressed, and went out. It surprised him how chill it was; he only had his denim jacket for warmth. He walked quickly, then stopped at a bar to drink a brandy. The man beside him had pale eyes in a long, bearded face, a northern face, like some stem northern smallholder or predestination elder of the Kirk. In French, Clem asked for directions to the city centre. The man answered him in English, sketching the route in the air with the stem of his pipe. ‘Twenty minutes,’ he said, but Clem, stopping at two more bars on the way, took an hour to reach Grande Place. There, he toured the square with several hundred others from the despised and leaderless army of tourists, trudging under the spotlit guild-houses, peering up at their blank windows, their stone insignia, and remembering the gross geometries of Toronto’s financial district; remembering too, with something like a flash of panic, that he had still not spoken to Silverman, had not been advised or warned off, was navigating alone.

  Behind the square he found a restaurant and sat at his table writing notes on whatever clear paper he found in his pockets. The restaurant—small, underlit—had a ripe and oily perfume of fried onions, fried fish, garlic, tobacco smoke. He wrote: Is Europe finished? A well-run corpse, maggoty. He ordered six oysters, steak frites, a bottle of house red. Who is the man who threatened me today? His connection to LK? What am I doing here? This is not journalism! I know less all the time.

  The oysters were over-chilled, his steak bloody and hard-sinewed. He chewed on it and drank his wine, then ordered coffee and brandy. On the card wallet of his airline ticket he wrote, ‘I am lonely’, then very carefully scrubbed the words out. He settled his bill and went on to the street. The city was busier, noisier. A gang of Scotsmen in their kilts roared and staggered, though without much menace. Clem moved away in what he hoped was the right direction for his hotel. He tried to wave down a taxi but it sped past. On the side of a bus-stop he found a street plan and studied it profitlessly for many minutes before travelling on, trusting to instinct and drunk’s luck. The streets he turned into now were quieter. He recognised a cobbled square, a statue, a bar he thought he had been into earlier. He went in (it was not the same place at all), found a stool and studied the names of the beers. Kwak, Brigand, Judas, Faro, Bonne Esperance. Was there a meaning to any of this? A young pianist played tangos on an old piano; a pregnant waitress gathered glasses. Clem talked expansively to a girl who was waiting at the bar, then caught sight of his face in the mirror, jabbering, feverish. He slid from the stool and made a clumsy exit, unsure whether or not he had paid for his drink, not caring much. It was beginning to rain. He turned up his collar. Tall windows, iron balustrades, here and there a gleam of light but mostly darkness. The rain grew heavier. Water pooled in the gutters of his ears. He sheltered for twenty minutes in a doorway, then realised that the building on the other side of the street with the halffamiliar glass frontage was his hotel. The doors were locked. He couldn’t find a bell. He tapped on the glass until the night porter came, a man of middle years, a boatless Charon, who let Clem pass without a word.