The Drowned Detective

by Neil Jordan

  Is Mummy going to leave you?

  Why would you think that? I asked. And I immediately knew why she would think it.

  Because she says you don’t look at her any more.

  I never tire of looking at her.

  So why does she think you don’t?

  Don’t what?

  Look at her.

  You’re not making sense, Jenny.

  I know. That’s what Mummy said. Sometimes things stop making sense.

  She played a little more with the soggy star-shaped cereal. The pastel colours were all merging into a pink soup.

  And if she does leave you, will I go with her or stay with you?

  That’s not going to happen, darling.

  Melanie thinks I should go with her. But then Jessica thinks I should stay with you.

  So they were back, and performing some therapeutic function for her. Cheaper than our Viennese, I thought.

  You shouldn’t listen to imaginary friends.

  I don’t have real ones to talk to.

  You have, I tried to reassure her. You have plenty of friends in school. And we had better hurry now, or we’ll be late.

  She returned to the theme as we sat in a traffic jam, approaching one of the bridges over the river.

  It’s not as if my friends don’t talk, but they speak English funny.

  She was at the Lycée International, with children of diplomats, businessmen and various bourgeois transients. And she had many friends; I could see it every time I dropped her off, when they crowded round her like some exotic specimen.

  So you prefer imaginary ones?

  Only ones I can understand.

  And I decided to leave it at that. The traffic finally shifted, and I pulled in by the little faded park across from the municipal exterior. It had been a government building once, with art deco columns, decorative brickwork and with muscular versions of an ideal proletariat carved on the door. But it now housed the Lycée.

  I kissed her and told her I would pick her up at three.

  For music, she said. I forgot my case.

  But I didn’t, I said. I had it perched in the passenger seat beside me. It’ll be waiting here.

  And she ran, then, with a sudden outburst of childlike enthusiasm and was soon surrounded by a flock of real, chattering friends on the broad, churchlike steps.

  10

  Pussy Riot, said Frank. Coming this way.

  I remembered the whip-wielding Cossacks at the Sochi Olympics, the business inside the Moscow church, the girls in coloured balaclavas playing fake guitars.

  Not the originals, he said. Kind of cover version.

  We were walking through a market in the burnt-out cathedral, the immense ruined nave of which enclosed an endless bazaar of improvised stalls. He had stopped by one stall selling balaclavas coloured in playful pink, yellow, blue, every pastel shade of the spectrum.

  They’re selling like hot cakes.

  Who buys them? I asked.

  Kids, he said, who want to imitate the pussy aesthetic.

  Which is?

  You must know. That punk S&M LGBT whatever.

  We passed another stall, selling black balaclavas and ex-army fatigues.

  Patriots and Russophiles, they wear the black.

  But we’re not chasing coloured balaclavas.

  No, he said. We are chasing the fake Gucci.

  He walked on through that ruined cathedral of stalls. He struck gold then, behind a huge hexagonal stone pillar. Bags, of every designer variety, on display.

  I fingered a pink calfskin one with an elegant bamboo-type handle. With Made In Italy embossed in a half-circle beneath the zip, above the Gucci logo.

  Two hundred, said the kid behind the counter. Good present for your lady.

  Why so much? I asked him.

  Why you think? he said. Genuine Gucci.

  Give you a hundred, I told him. Though why I was bargaining, I had no idea.

  One seventy-five.

  One fifty.

  OK, one fifty. Cash.

  And so I counted out the notes. I took the unwrapped bag and we walked on.

  Perfect copy.

  There’s a little piece of Italy just outside Tbilisi.

  So we have to go to Georgia?

  No, I said. Someone else can do that. We send this bag to Gucci. Send them a bill.

  We left the market by the rear of the cathedral with its broken flying buttresses and I could see the river flowing by again behind the small, ruined graveyard.

  What is it about this place? I asked him. They do things the old-fashioned way. They fall in love, they kiss in metros, they hire detectives to follow errant spouses and psychics to find lost children.

  You could call it retro, he said.

  Maybe it’s something to do with communism?

  But that’s all gone now.

  Like in a horror movie. The ghost always comes back.

  We should talk, he said.

  Isn’t that what we’re doing? Talking.

  I mean have a drink, talk.

  Like the old days? No.

  Look, I know there’s—

  You know I know you were teaching my wife the language.

  She doesn’t need lessons.

  I’m going to have to let you go.

  There was a long silence. He moved from one foot to the other on the grass.

  When did you decide that?

  Just now. We’ve done the Gucci thing. And I’m letting you go.

  Does it feel good, saying it?

  Actually it does. Clear out the desk. The situation is untenable, wouldn’t you agree?

  He said nothing. He leaned against a yew tree and adjusted his cuffs. He stared straight ahead at the flowing river, the cufflinks showing underneath his jacket. He always wore a jacket, whatever the heat. The cufflinks were star-shaped today, with the tiny glint of what probably was a fake diamond. He must have had several pairs. His handsome face showed no emotion, and there was a certain dignity in the way he didn’t throw even a whisper of a glance towards me. I felt a sudden rush of a feeling that I didn’t fully understand. Guilt, maybe, shame at a basic lack of human courtesy. The situation may have been untenable, but perhaps it deserved more conversation. Even the condemned man is given the opportunity to explain. But I felt an unruly freedom as well, as I left him there and walked through the broken graves towards the roadway and the river.

  Some kind of bird screeched to my left, a gull, maybe, but we were so far from the sea, how could a gull be possible? I kept walking, knowing I should leave the office empty for the afternoon, giving him time enough to clear out his things without further embarrassment. And the bridge then loomed up before me, with the giant blind angels guarding the river below. I turned right and walked across it and felt a fresh wind from the water underneath and wondered once again, was it time to leave this place and return to blue sea and salt sea breezes? And as I reached the other side I heard the sound of music through the grind of gears and the sounds of the crawling vehicles. Maybe there was a radio playing from an open window, and I became aware of one, the tub thump of some kind of hip hop from a car window through which a woman dangled a hand with a lit cigarette. I walked on and all I could hear was music now, a cacophony of clashing worlds coming from each traffic-jammed car. I crossed between the bumpers to get to the other side, and walked up the stone steps underneath the metal arch and found myself on the promenade by the cheap hotels and tourist restaurants where the hookers strolled by night. And it was crowded too, with young backpackers and agile pensioners with walking sticks, so I turned into the warren of streets beyond and heard music again and recognised the sound of a cello, rich and dark. I walked underneath a cement passageway and found myself in one of those old courtyards, which I didn’t recognise at first. But the cello sounded from somewhere above, languorous and familiar. And I crossed the courtyard and found the same stone steps and realised I was at the building that she had led me to last night, but that I had approach
ed it from the other side.

  But it was the same, without a doubt, the decorative tiling above the arch and the open grilled gate leading to the quiet street outside. The traffic was nothing but a distant murmur and seemed to be there just to create a bed of sound over which the cello could soar. It was another one of those Bach suites and I made a mental note to familiarise myself with them, so I could recognise one from the other. There were six of them in all, I remembered from the booklet with the Casals CD, each with a prelude, a saraband, a gigue and whatever else they called that succession of baroque dances. I wondered if Jenny could learn them one day; could they be transposed to the child’s violin she played? And I began climbing the stairs, following the resonant sound, and when I saw the same woman’s face staring at me through the lace-curtain windows, I knew I was back at her door.

  I stood there for a while, feeling those eyes behind the glass on me. Then I heard the sound of a curtain pulled, and I placed one finger on the door.

  It was unlocked and it opened with a slow creak of wood. The cello came through, richer and fuller. It was as if whomever was playing it had hit a more intense vein of emotion. Or maybe the door had been impeding the sound. It swung open, wide enough for me to walk through. And she was there on the sofa, the broad wooden shape between her knees, drawing on the bow.

  She allowed the bow to scrape to a slow halt when she saw me. The residual sound echoed round her like a broken promise.

  Hello, she said.

  You remember me?

  I remember. You came to see was I still OK?

  No. I found myself on the street outside. I heard the music playing. I followed it up.

  I was practising. The cello suites.

  Which one was that?

  The second. In D minor.

  You’re a musician?

  I would hope so.

  I mean a professional?

  I was. I’m on sabbatical, from the opera.

  The state opera?

  Is there another one?

  They had them in every breakaway republic. The roads might be in ruins, the streetlamps barely flickering, one could set one’s watch to the blackouts, but somewhere, on a once-elegant street, the state opera still functioned. Generally a late-twenties façade of constructivist concrete and marble, or, in this case, a fin-de-siècle wedding-cake architectural fantasy, with broad steps and carved granite caryatids and fractured orchestral flurries drifting from it in the daylight hours. I had passed it many times with hardly a thought.

  You like opera?

  Hush, she said. If you want to stay here, hush and let me finish.

  So I walked past her and the sofa to the window. I saw the street outside that we had walked down, wet and in last night’s darkness. Was it really last night? It seemed months ago, suddenly. The pavement was cut in half by sunlight, a boy led a thin horse down it, pulling a cart loaded with abandoned tyres. His head was blunt and dark and he could have pulled the same horse two or three decades ago. And maybe it was the music that placed the street outside time, because she was finishing now, with two held chords that seemed to clutch the hours between their fingers. And then she released them and the sound was gone.

  Is that the end? I asked.

  Of the prelude, she said.

  Oh, so there will be more. And I waited for time to do its trick again.

  There’s an allemande, courante, saraband, minuet. No, wait, two minuets.

  I waited for her to start again, but she didn’t.

  My wife, I said, played them for me last night.

  You have a wife? Of course you do.

  Why of course?

  Because I saw the ring, falling into the water.

  I rubbed my finger and thumb around the bone of my third left-hand finger. It felt naked without it.

  She plays this thing too?

  And I smiled. That would have been the strangest trick of all.

  No. She played a CD. What’s his name. Pablo Casals.

  You came here to talk about your wife?

  No. I came here quite by accident.

  A happy accident.

  You think?

  She leaned her head towards my hand, as if she needed something to rest on. She was tired, I thought, and my hand accepted the weight of her head. I brought my other hand to the other side of her face, but her hair was falling backwards, so it touched her cheek.

  Enough of that, she said. Let me practise.

  You want me to go? I asked.

  Stay as long as you want. But I have to play.

  She brought her lips briefly to my finger. For a moment I thought she might bite it.

  Sit over there. Close your eyes.

  Won’t I distract you?

  No, she said. You remind me that I’m alive.

  11

  Alive, I thought, it’s what we all want to feel, as I descended the stairs, one or maybe two hours later. Alive meant time was a fluid river, so that a minute could last one hour, and an hour one minute. The curtain was pulled once more, to hide a dark, watching face. The courtyard with its cobbled surface seemed to rise to meet me and the metal balconies seemed to circle above, with their creeping, late-afternoon shadows. I walked back the way I had come, through the small stone archway, and there was no cello playing. And there was something else I was trying to forget now; it was to do with a blunt-heeled shoe and the instep of the foot beneath it, it was to do with the whisper of released clothing against skin, textures of linen and silk and the dust wheeling in the bands of sunlight coming through the window, above the sad mattress. It was a sad mattress, spread out on a frayed carpet of the floor of what you could hardly call a bedroom. There was the cello, perched on the sofa like an observant cat, and I imagined I was inside that cello, looking through one of the S’s cut into the wood at the open doorway and the broad beam of sunlight in the room beyond, above the mattress and the two bodies twisting in some kind of combat on it. It was a slow, luxurious kind of combat with the untwining of a limb or the rise and fall of a flank signifying capture or surrender. There were no winners, only losers in this field of flesh and muscle, and so I knew I should forget it, or remember it for ever. So I did my best to forget.

  Forgetting meant walking, so I walked again. Through the small backstreets to one of the wide promenades that led to the river, and the yawning bridge above it. Two oriental tourists asked me to help with their photograph and so I held their camera and obeyed their instructions about what to include in the frame. Angels, they said, angels. So I took two steps backwards and tilted the camera upwards so that two of the statues above the parapet loomed above their smiling faces.

  Do you know those angels are blind? I asked them as I showed them the digital image. They nodded with approval and thanks but with no understanding.

  Stupid historical fact, I said, and handed the camera back.

  And I nodded and smiled, and bowed and continued on my way to the other side.

  Istvan was alone in the office and was wondering why that was the case. He was holding the map of the city with the burnt hole in it. He was wondering why that was the case too.

  I had to let Frank go, I said.

  Ferenc? he asked, and I nodded.

  Should I ask why? he asked.

  You already have, I said, and no, you shouldn’t.

  I could tell, he said delicately, that things weren’t what they should have been.

  You noticed a certain tension? I asked.

  It is my job, he said, to notice things.

  And this map, he said, with the burnt hole somewhere in the twelfth district . . .

  Is it the twelfth?

  It was the first time I’d become aware of that.

  The twelfth, he said, with a small singed fraction of the fifteenth. Our city once had Parisian pretensions. Based on the Napoleonic arrondissements.

  Did Napoleon get this far? I asked. And I was so intent on forgetting, I would have sat through a history tutorial.

  Napoleon the Third
, he said, not Bonaparte. And the Grande Armée never made it here. It passed to the west, on its way towards Moscow.

  Istvan was plump, with an owlish face and a kind demeanour. What he most enjoyed was never getting to the point.

  You have burnt a hole with your cigarette, maybe? When lacking a ballpoint pen?

  I don’t smoke.

  Ah. So the map burnt itself?

  In a manner of speaking.

  You are speaking in tongues.

  His mention of biblical tongues made me think of angels. Eyeless and blind to the river below them.

  You remember the parents? I said. Searching for their missing daughter?

  You insisted we engage with them.

  They went to a psychic. And the psychic did some business with that map.

  She burnt it with her cigarette?

  How did you know it was a she?

  I remember the conversation. I was listening, in the other room.

  Of course, he would have been. And it was his job, after all. I began to look forward, now, to life in these offices with just the two of us.

  Gertrude. She claims the girl, Petra, is in a small room that she cannot leave. Somewhere in the burnt section of that map.

  A brothel. In the environs of the twelfth and the fifteenth.

  If they are the burnt bits.

  They are, believe me.

  All burnt now, and smoking. I imagined laser-guided missiles, broken buildings, charred bodies.

  How long to find out?, I asked him.

  There are brothels everywhere. But in the twelfth, the fifteenth? It depends on their status.

  You mean legality?

  They are all quasi-legal. I mean, how much above the radar. What they offer. If it is girls, under-age . . .

  If it is?

  It will take more time. And I pity the parents.

  She went missing years ago.

  Ah. On the legal end of things then, perhaps. And I still pity the parents. Maybe even more. All those years, and not knowing.

  He folded the burnt map, carefully.

  Give me three, four days . . .

  You have it, I said.

  Is this a punishment duty, he asked, or an enticement to a partnership?