The Drowned Detective

by Neil Jordan

  Then you just pretend she was me. I went missing.

  Do you live here?

  No one lives here but Madame. This is a place for fuck. You want to fuck?

  No, I said, but it’s important you tell me. How many girls are here?

  They come and go, she said. Four or five. What are you, cop? I don’t want no trouble.

  You won’t get it, I promise. Tell me their names.

  You don’t want to fuck, you must be cop. There is no Petra, I promise. And if you don’t want to fuck, let me jerk you off at least.

  Her hand reached once more for my belt and I grabbed it.

  Anya, Anya, Anya, Anya. Anya’s my name. You promise you’re not cop?

  I’m not, I said.

  You just want to talk?

  I just want to talk.

  You mind then if I do my thing?

  What thing?

  My drug thing?

  I shook my head, and touched the bruises on the inside of her arm.

  While we talk. Talk for an hour, then you leave, tell Madame you had good time. You promise?

  She opened the bedside-table drawer and took a pouch from it. She took a cigarette packet from the pouch.

  You mind if I smoke?

  I shook my head.

  Bad for you, smoking. Not like fucking.

  She took a spoon from the pouch, a needle, a rubber medical band.

  She lit the cigarette and did the business while it dangled from her lip.

  You leave now, you cause me trouble. Don’t want to fuck, I understand. Just don’t leave now.

  She was as dexterous as a medic with her works, and I found the spectacle compulsive. Numbingly compulsive. She heated the spoon with the cigarette lighter while the ash fell from her mouth. She filled the needle from a tableside glass, squirted it clear into the air, then drew the liquid from the heated spoon. She wrapped the rubber round her arm and whacked her vein into action.

  Hold this, she said, and gave me one end of the rubber tube.

  I saw the needle penetrate the make-up over her vein. A small cloud of blood puffed into the syringe before she hit it home. Then she sighed, a long exhausted sigh, and her head fell backwards against the bedboard.

  Petra, she said, and closed her eyes and there was a long silence.

  After an age her eyelids opened. Two pinned black pupils stared at me.

  Tell me about Petra.

  And so I told her. I told her everything. Something about those tiny pupils made it necessary. About the psychic and the burning map. About the girl I had pulled from the water. About the Bach cello suites. About Jenny’s imaginary friends. About the lost Petra and the brothel in the twelfth.

  Here, she said. The twelfth.

  Yes, I said.

  But, she said, there’s something you’re not telling me.

  And there was. There was the cufflink, the hotel bill, the therapist, the half-saved marriage. So I told her all of that too.

  You are lost, she said.

  Yes, I told her, quite lost.

  And Petra, she is lost too.

  She smiled, softly.

  And you, I said. You need help.

  I wish I was her, she said. Because I am lost as well. But if I was her, at least I would have been found.

  * * *

  Windsor, said the madam as I walked back out.

  Yes, I said. Sandringham.

  Balmoral, she said. All the royal places.

  Kensington Palace.

  You liked Petra? she asked. And maybe she had tired of the British place names.

  Yes, I said. Very much.

  You come back, she said. A good client is rare.

  I fly back to England tomorrow.

  Ah, she said. Salford.

  No, I said. London.

  London, she said.

  21

  Her list of place names had made me long for home. Southend-on-Sea. Harrow-on-the-Hill. Salford, to which I’d never been. London. I followed the road along the canal, which I felt sure must lead back to the river, and had Heimweh for England. Not only the England of warm beer and cricket whites and spinsters riding through the mist to Sunday communion. The England of cultures clashing, democratic chaos, of the next musical fad, the ageing punks around World’s End, pimpled youths on the tube, the wordless Pakistani grocer fingering out your change. The England of rain, of burnt-out summer piers, of the Chelsea mob baying their way through Soho, the politely lethal policemen hemming them in. I passed a demonstration in a square, of young girls in coloured balaclavas bouncing behind a mass of riot police, a bellowing group of youths outside them, punching the air, it seemed, all in time to a booming music track. And I felt that Heimweh again.

  So tell me, I said to Istvan, when I entered the office, about the coloured balaclava.

  What about it? he asked.

  I passed some kind of demonstration.

  Kind of pirate copy of pussy riot that can be reproduced at will. I blame the internet. Any bunch of pissed-off kids can put on the coloured balaclavas, get boombox and dance around municipal buildings, and what do you know? there is another.

  Another what?

  Another riot. Police come in with batons and whips, there is overreaction, demonstrations, for and against. The balaclava is a virus, a riot virus.

  The gun had not made its reappearance. He was cleaning his sunglasses now.

  I can see from your expression, he said to me, that it was a wild-boar chase.

  Goose, I corrected him. Wild-goose chase. And yes, there was no Petra. There was a madam, who was quite the anglophile.

  Anglophile?

  A lover of England, and its peculiar place names. There was a girl called Anya, who seemed in need of an intervention.

  She has a drug habit, I elaborated, to his raised eyebrows. If you could persuade the forces of law and order to raid the place, maybe someone could help her.

  Is she our concern? he asked me.

  She should be somebody’s.

  There are junkie hookers on every street corner. And at least this one has a room. Is it a small room that she cannot leave?

  It didn’t seem to be.

  So, I keep looking? For another hidden brothel in the twelfth?

  If you would.

  How English of me, I thought. And I checked my diary and saw I had an appointment.

  There were no coloured balaclavas on the boulevard, no whip-wielding Cossacks, just the unrelenting heat and the stalled traffic, and the sound of some fracas way beyond it. So when I made it to his office I was drenched in sweat and Sarah was already on her perch by the half-open window.

  You’re late, she said.

  Sorry, I said, to both of you. I got caught up.

  And where were we? the Viennese said, though calling him Viennese is disingenuous, but I’ll keep doing so, if I may.

  You mentioned the word contempt.

  Did I? he asked, and raised his eyebrows and for the first time I observed how outrageously luxuriant they were.

  You had detected a certain residual affection between us, which might be enough to save the marriage. And residual affection, you observed, was better than contempt.

  I don’t remember that word, said Sarah.

  Because, darling, you had already left.

  You remember everything, observed the therapist.

  Yes, I said. It’s part of my job. I remember every errant phrase, every crumpled receipt, every gesture of contempt or affection. I remember things, I brood upon them, I pick them apart, I look for signs and symbols in what I remember. I consider memory the cousin of jealousy and I am, sadly, a jealous man.

  And I remember that word, she said. Darling.

  Yes, I said. So English, isn’t it? It can act like a kiss or a slap in the face. One is never sure which. Do you miss England, Sarah?

  Do I miss what, exactly, in England, dear?

  The rain? The rationality?

  I miss umbrellas, she said, inconsequentially.

  W
ellington boots.

  Bicycles.

  It was fun, talking as if the Viennese wasn’t there. His enormous eyebrows shifted back and forwards, from me to her.

  Harrow-on-the-Hill.

  Is it on a hill? asked Sarah.

  Apparently.

  Always hated Harrow, she said. Pinner. The Metropolitan line.

  I understand, he said. The eyebrows nodded. You talk as if I am not here. Good.

  You approve? asked Sarah.

  My purpose, he said, is to make myself irrelevant.

  I understood your purpose to be different, Sarah muttered.

  Your understanding of my purpose is?

  If I may quote, the conversion of hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.

  Bravo, Sarah.

  Thank you, Jonathan.

  I think the phrase was ‘neurotic misery’, he said.

  Neurotic misery then, Sarah said. Let’s get back to that.

  So soon? I asked.

  We are paying, Sarah said and tried to hide her smile.

  And I felt he was offended, so brought the conversation back to what seemed was the subject. Misery.

  Is there a difference, I asked him, between neurotic and hysterical misery?

  Hysteria was a term Freud associates with women, he said.

  Hysteria, Sarah said. Womb. Hysterectomy.

  Pussy Riot.

  My behaviour, therefore, Sarah said, he would have termed hysterical.

  The conversation has moved on since then, the doctor said.

  I missed him, Sarah said. He was away and I missed him more. I befriended his friend to talk about him. And I end up missing him entirely.

  Which is why we are here?

  Is that a statement or a question?

  Both, I suppose. And his eyebrows were at rest for once.

  The thing about England that I miss, said Sarah, is Englishness.

  And there is such a thing?

  Well, she said, and tapped a coloured nail off one of her teeth, if there were, it would be to do with what’s missing in this room.

  And what is that?

  Understatement, she said. Certain things can be understood, and not necessarily . . .

  She raised her head. She examined her beautiful nail.

  Talked about.

  Can we understand what happens without talking about it?

  I can, she said. The question is, can he?

  22

  When I walked with her down the stairs, she held my arm. She kept holding it, walking down the hot boulevard, and we both seemed to take comfort for a while in saying nothing.

  It would be a relief, wouldn’t it? she said eventually.

  Not to talk?

  To be understood.

  She kissed me then, at the junction.

  I have to pick up Jenny, she said. And you?

  I have to work.

  You understood me once, she whispered.

  I watched her move off among the bobbing pedestrian heads and after a moment I began to follow. That blonde hair above the light summer dress was easy to keep track of and if she turned, though I knew she wouldn’t, I had two or three bodies between us behind which to lose myself. Would I understand her again, I wondered, if she led me to something unmentionable, to the thing she was so reluctant to talk about? She turned left then, down that warren of small cobbled streets, and I heard the cello playing and I stopped and let her disappear. She was on her way to pick up Jenny, and I was on my way, following that sound.

  Again, the arch with the ceramic tiles, the courtyard, the balconies above. The stone steps, leading up into a mouth of darkness, and the bowed sound echoing round. There was something oriental about that space, a touch of fantasy; it could have lived in Tbilisi or Samarkand. Again, my echoing feet on the stairs the lace curtain drawn and pulled, the Slavic face behind. I walked up slowly, as if I wanted to delay the moment. Again, the door was half-open and it creaked as it let me inside.

  And she was sitting on the couch, again, that woman-shaped instrument between her knees. The windows were closed for once and there was a scent in the air.

  You wear perfume, I said.

  She smiled. Laid aside the bow.

  Yes. I am a woman, after all. Why do you mention?

  My wife told me I smelt different.

  What’s your wife’s name?

  And for some reason I didn’t want to tell her, a reason I couldn’t fathom. Was it loyalty, guilt, or simple English manners? I asked her to play the thing again.

  The fourth suite, she said.

  Do you have a favourite? I asked her.

  No, she said. But when I get to the sixth . . .

  When you get to the sixth, what happens?

  Shall we wait and see?

  Do you have a husband?

  Why you ask?

  I asked because he was staring at me. Below on the street, on the opposite pavement, a dark slash against the sunlit wall.

  There was a man outside, I said, the last time I left. He’s outside again now.

  Tell me what he looks like.

  He’s in a suit. A dark suit. His hair’s growing thin. He wears patent-leather shoes.

  Grigory, she said, and put the cello to one side. First cellist in the orchestra. He was my teacher.

  Was?

  Before the love-thing happened.

  The love-thing?

  The love-thing, she said, is when you say, of all the people in the universe, I am bound to you. I give my memories to you, whatever I know of this world, I give my soul to you, I give you the possibility of hurting me, causing me infinite pain, grief, loss, the total sum of me will be known by you, and if one of us breaks this thing, the other is left unmoored, without reason, friendless, loveless, in a universe of hurt.

  Standing in the shadow of the wall below, he seemed a most unlikely repository of all that emotion. I remembered the smell of his towelly robe. And I thought to myself: there is no accounting for taste.

  You know the love-thing?

  It sounds terrifying, I said.

  It is.

  And why would anyone want it?

  They don’t, she said. It happens. You’re lying there. Afterwards. You look at the pile of clothes beside the bed. You think, don’t those clothes look good together? And you realise that your whole life has been a kind of waiting. For this moment. For this thing.

  You’re talking about him, I said.

  Am I? She turned her head towards me and away again, as if the thought upset her.

  And the child you lost was his.

  Now that, she said, is true.

  Do all women do this? I asked her.

  Do what? she asked.

  Talk about an absent man with a present one.

  Did your wife?

  I suspect she did.

  She began to stroke the strings again with the bow, softly.

  And which were you, she said, above the gathering sound, the absent or the present one?

  23

  He was present when I descended the steps, waiting in the shadow of the arch. I could have walked across the courtyard to the smaller exit, but I was tired, or I was curious, or just annoyed at being observed. So I continued, through the splash of late-afternoon sunlight, to the tiled wall against which he stood, and there was no cello playing, which I thought was odd. as I passed him he spoke again.

  Hey, he said. Or was it how, or you? It was a greeting, whatever he said, designed to arrest one, neither friendly nor unfriendly, just curt. I stopped of course and turned once more and realised I remembered nothing of his face. The clothes I had remembered, the suit, with dampened patches round the armpits now in the summer heat, but I knew nothing of the face and wondered had it been because my eyes avoided it.

  But there it was now, in the shadow, against the ceramic wall, dark, almost Levantine, slightly pockmarked round the cheeks and with a broad, full mouth. And I felt a pang of jealousy until I realised how absurd the feeling was.

  Y
ou. It was you, he said, not hey this time. So the hey must have come first.

  This was the love-object, yet another one. And I found myself wondering did he favour cufflinks.

  Yes, I said.

  No music today.

  Not now. It seems to have stopped.

  How can it just stop?

  It comes and goes, I said, and tried to move on my way.

  Please, he said. Tell me. What you do up there.

  And there was panic in his voice, or something like desperation. I realised, with a dull sense of surprise, that he might be jealous too.

  Nothing, I said.

  Nothing?

  I talk, I suppose.

  Just talk?

  And when I don’t talk, I listen.

  Talk about what?

  It would be impolite, I told him, to share that with you.

  I don’t know, he said. Impolite.

  It’s an English term, I told him.

  Perhaps you are being . . . foolish.

  I am sure of it, I said. And I must go now. If you’ll excuse me.

  And he did. He stepped aside, and let me pass. I walked through the arch, on to the blissfully shaded street, and found a corner shop and ducked inside. I bought some gum from the proprietress, and saw his dark hair move past the window, then I walked back out. And I did what I was trained to do: I followed him, and kept half a length of street between us.

  He made it through the cobbled streets to the wider boulevard and walked in the shade of the trees that flanked the traffic lane. I stayed on the pavement. I kept one eye on his dark suit as it appeared and disappeared behind the gleaming windows of the fitfully moving traffic.

  Following. I could write a book on it. I probably am. It is one of the basic pleasures of the trade, like the feel of wood to a carpenter or of engine oil to a mechanic; it has its rhythms, its own moods, its basic quotidian duties and its sudden surprises. There’s a kind of Zen peace to it, it works best in a city, of course, along crowded boulevards like this one, where the parallax of passing bodies, lampposts, trees and traffic provide not only a cover but a kind of intermittent beat, an interrupted rhythm to the follower’s eye. There are the city sounds, of course, the blaring horns, the click clack of passing heels, the murmured conversations between businessmen, friends and lovers with who knows what endearments, emotional, financial, collegial. World after world passes the follower by and he – or she – has one ear out for those snatches of contingent lives, with one eye always on the subject – generally beyond hearing. You fall into an observant lull, the kind of peace a child has when it plays in a lonely sandpit; you forget yourself, your name, your anxieties and cares, you immerse yourself entirely in that other, that thing that is not you, that walks these city streets with a purpose, a destiny, a home, a family, a lover, all of which it may be your duty to discover.