“What are you doing over there?”
The voice from the other side of the dark room went through him like a cold spear. He even tottered back the few inches to the wall. Someone else is in the room? The stupid logic resounded.
A movement.
“Don’t turn the light on,” he said quickly, an order.
“I’m just reaching for my water… OK?”
Female voice. Perfect English. Very slight German inflection. What the hell is she doing here? He sniffed the air. No smell of woman.
“You don’t remember a thing, do you?” she said.
Nothing from him.
“Hey, dark matter,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Black hole. You don’t remember a thing, do you?”
“No,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Leena,” she said. “Who are you?”
“Didn’t I give you a name?”
“A name,” she said. “You’ve got different ones for each port of call?”
Silence. An even worse start to the usual horror of consciousness.
“You did tell me your name,” she said. “But why wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” he said, trying to think which one he would have used.
“Roland Schafer,” she said. “Your surname means ‘shepherd’ in Old German. Did you know that?”
He did. An image of his father flashed through his mind: shepherding him and his sister to the International School, where they were being prepared for the American educational system. He had his hands on their heads. He could even remember the pressure of his father’s touch, and rather than being comforted by it, he felt strangely ashamed.
“And what sort of a name is Leena?” he asked.
“It’s short for Marleena.”
“Like Dietrich?”
“Nearly. You’re showing your age now, Roland,” she said. “We met in a bookshop. Do you remember that?”
“No, I don’t,” he said, but he did; he just had to play things carefully for the moment.
“You did drink a lot. I mean, really a lot,” she said. “I almost had to carry you back here.”
“Where do you live?”
“Not far, but it was very cold last night, and once I got you up here and undressed and into bed I thought… what the hell?”
“What the hell what?”
“I might as well sleep here,” she said. “Can I turn on the light yet?”
“I haven’t got a towel.”
“I’ve seen it all, Roland,” she said, and clicked on the standard lamp, which cast a light onto the empty armchair next to him. He slid into it, ran his hands through his gray, wire-wool hair. Shook his face free of any tells.
Her hair was long and blonde. She was maybe just touching thirty, which was all he could tell from the darkness of her corner. She threw off the duvet. Her nudity startled him. Upturned nipples. She swung her body around, picked up something from the floor, and fiddled with it while his view was obscured by her naked back.
“I’ve got to pee,” she announced, and walked past him without the slightest self-consciousness.
She was nearly muscular with defined shoulders and her breasts in no need of a bra. Her abdominal muscles were well delineated above black panties. The mechanics of her thighs’ sinews were evident, and her buttocks had a declivity at the side. Only as she headed to the bathroom did he see a slight difference between her right and left leg.
“Were you an athlete?” he asked.
“I was,” she said, and disappeared.
His paranoia cut in sharply. Who is she? What is she doing here? Who sent her? Do they know something?
She returned, throwing him a towel, and got back into bed. This time, because he knew where to look, he saw that her right leg was a prosthetic from the knee down.
“The surgeons didn’t think I’d ever walk again,” she said. “But they always say that to make you more determined.”
“Did we cover this last night?” he asked.
“You know, you drank nearly a whole bottle of grappa single-handed.”
“Grappa?”
“It wasn’t an Italian restaurant, if that’s what’s confusing you.”
Memory wipe. Too much of that lately Pity it only wiped the present clean but not one bit of the past.
“I used to be an athlete,” she said. “Before the car accident.”
“Track and field?” he guessed.
“Not bad,” she said. “I was a pole-vaulter. You look like someone who keeps himself in good condition… or at least used to.”
“Yes,” he said. “I do weights. I used to play football.”
“You should get back on them before it’s too late,” she said.
“You’re going to have to tell me what happened from the top,” he said. “I don’t remember a goddamn thing.”
“I remember it all,” she said. “That’s my problem. Photographic memory. I even remember unconsciousness-the four days of coma I had after the car accident, although that wasn’t too bad because they were the best four days of my life. They had to wrench me out of that world and back into this one.”
“Why?” he asked, surprised to find himself interested.
“Because I was loved by a man for the first time in my life.”
“Did you know him?”
She blinked at the question because she’d always assumed it.
“Yes,” she said. “I felt I’d known him my whole life.”
“Then he must have been your father,” he said, letting the paranoia kick back in again, didn’t want to drop his defenses this early in the game.
“You didn’t notice the leg last night, either,” she said, swerving away from the ugly little ditch he’d opened up in front of her, “but I was wearing trousers. You did notice other things, though.”
“What?” he asked, looking at her closely.
She threw back the duvet again, crawled to the corner of the bed nearest him, and pulled her hair away from the left side of her face.
“Remember?”
He didn’t and he would have done. She had a dent in the left side of her head, and there was scar tissue in front of her left ear around the temple. She traced a line with her finger that went across her left eye.
“It’s glass,” he said.
“They wanted to reconstruct the dent but I’d had enough of operations by then,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “Fifteen on my arms, legs, face, and brain. I said I’d wear my hair long. Have you ever had sex with an amputee?”
“I’m not operational in that department at the moment,” he said.
“You’re in the military,” she said.
“What makes you think that?”
“‘I’m not operational in that department,’” she repeated. “And you didn’t answer my question. Two classic military conversational gambits.”
“I’m off sex,” he said. “And I’ve never had a physical relationship with somebody who’s lost a limb. Was your father in the military?”
“My father?” she said, and paused as if she could categorize him in a number of ways. “My father was the chief executive officer and owner of Remer Schifffahrtsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, Hamburg.”
“Was?”
“He’s dead.”
“Do you like older men?” asked Schafer, more calculating now.
She cocked her head to one side, sized him up.
“I like them,” she said, shrugging, so that her breasts quivered. She fell backward and rolled under the duvet as if for protection. These questions about her father got under her skin.
“When did you have this car accident?” he asked.
“Four years ago. I was twenty-six, married, a successful businesswoman driving to work, and I got hit by a bus from the side. I was four days in a coma, six months in the hospital. I had to learn to walk and talk again.”
“Your English is perfect.”
“I was married to an Englishman. It was strange, because after the accident I had to work at my German.”