“And the Englishman didn’t love you?”
“You listen to people, Roland. I noticed that last night. And you say things that other people might think, but would never dream of voicing.”
“But, crucially, I don’t remember.”
“You’re right. He didn’t love me.”
“He left you?”
“After the accident.”
“That was bad.”
She shrugged.
“Who looked after you?” he asked. “Your parents?”
“My mother and her boyfriend.”
“Was your father already dead?” asked Schafer, unable to resist his instinct to pursue a weakness, and she nodded. “How long ago was that?”
“Four years.”
“So… before your accident.”
She brought her knees up defensively.
“You know, you sound like someone who has to ask a lot of questions… for your work,” she said. “But you’re not a journalist.”
“Why do you think that?”
“You don’t stroke me to get your answers,” she said. “And you’re brutal.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I ended up naked in a hotel room with a woman who’s as good as a stranger, with one leg, one eye, and me with no recollection of how we got here.”
“So when was the last time that happened to you?” she asked quizzically.
They nearly laughed, like people for whom humor had become an offshore island. He felt strangely calm, which he hadn’t for some time. His instinct was telling him he could relax, which was making him paradoxically more vigilant.
“When we left the restaurant, you asked me to come back to your hotel with you,” she said, “because you thought you were being followed.”
“I said that to you?”
“Yes, and amazingly, I still came back with you.”
“I’ve been a little paranoid lately.”
“You mean it isn’t true?”
“What do you think?” he said, squeezing some derision into his voice.
“I don’t know. I don’t disbelieve people just because they’re a bit weird because… I’m a bit weird myself. I know what it’s like to be disbelieved.”
“At least you’ve got a good excuse.”
“In the bookshop, we were on a sofa by the window and, when you weren’t staring into my head like my neurosurgeon, you were looking up and down the street as if your life depended on it.”
He blinked. No recollection.
“We were at a reading,” said Leena, to be helpful. “By an American writer called James Hewitt.”
“I know him. He writes spy fiction.”
“There were about twenty of us in the audience,” she said. “You drank two glasses of wine before the reading and another during it.”
“You were keeping an eye on me.”
“I like older guys,” she said. “Afterwards, I asked if you’d read James Hewitt and I bought you a glass of wine.”
“What were you doing there?”
“The owner of the bookshop rents one of my apartments. He invites me to readings, especially the ones with foreigners because of my English.”
“And after the reading?”
“Ten of us crossed the street to a restaurant where they’d laid on a late table for us. It was about ten-thirty.”
“We all sat together?”
“You were opposite me. I was next to James Hewitt. One of his friends was on your left, a musician with a long blond pony-tail. You told him you played the alto sax.”
That jerked him back in his chair. Nobody knew that. Not even his second and third wives. Nor his ex-colleagues in the Company. He hadn’t played music for more than twenty-five years.
“So you’re a woman of independent means,” he said, to cover his shock. “Did Daddy leave you a fortune?”
“You see what I mean? You listen in a way that nobody else listens and then you ask that question. You’re brutal. What do you do, Roland?”
“I’m a businessman.”
“Only if you’re what my ex-husband would have called ‘a bullshit merchant.’”
“What work did you used to do that journalists had to stroke you?”
“Don’t think I don’t know your game,” said Leena, tapping the side of her head. “I ran my own coffee import company from the age of twenty-one. I created a whole new way of packaging coffee. I was young and beautiful-an exciting combination for the media. Tell me about your military training.”
“How did your father die, Leena?”
“He shot himself.”
The wind buffeted against the building. The lamp hummed.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, softening, taking to her more now as the possibility of her being a Company recruit diminished. “A beautiful, wealthy woman in a hotel room with some sap who’s old enough to be your father.”
She stared at him with unblinking, fathomless eyes.
“I recognize damage,” she said.
The wail with a painting on it went grainy in his vision. The towel felt rough in his lap. He winced at a twinge in his side.
“Because you’ve been damaged yourself,” said Schafer uneasily. “I can see that.”
“The worst damage is never visible,” she said.
“Why did your husband leave you?” he asked, swerving away from her insight.
Tucked under the duvet, she looked at him like a small child, but with the eyes of a troubled adult.
“I wasn’t alone in the car,” she said quietly.
With that he was conscious of a terrible pain cornered in the room.
“My four-year-old son was in the backseat and he took the full force of the impact. He died instantly.”
Silence, with a heightened awareness of the two of them naked in a room in the water tower while the world obliviously churned out its future beyond the window He wanted to say something, but realized there was nothing to be said. He didn’t know what he would do with himself if his daughter died, let alone if he felt in some way responsible for it. He wasn’t sure how he was going to cope with her absence, given that by next week she would be unlikely to speak to him ever again. But at least she wouldn’t be dead.
“You’re the first person, outside the small circle of people I used to call my friends, that I’ve told that to,” she said.
“Why me?”
“Something’s ruined you in the same way that I’ve been ruined.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m an expert in guilt,” she said. “I recognize all the symptoms.”
He knew now why he was calm. Her recognition made him feel that he belonged again. His eyes were suddenly full. He blinked fast and swallowed to quell the emotion. And with that last attempt at control, a fatigue so profound it couldn’t possibly have been physical overwhelmed him, and he dropped into a lethal sleep.
Two men sat in a coffee shop a stone’s throw away from the Sternschanzenpark. They were gray men, made grayer by the cold and the coats that they were wearing. The older man, Foley, was skimming a report that the younger one, Spokes, had just produced entitled “Marleena Remer.”
“Did she inherit?” asked Foley.
“She got his sixty percent of the shipping company, the house in the country, and his apartment in the city, plus twenty million euros.”
“So she doesn’t have to work.”
“Her head injuries were severe,” said Spokes. “There was talk of brain damage and psychological problems. Her accountant sold the coffee company for her while she was still in the hospital.”
“Have you got a tax return?”
“There’s an income from the shipping company, but most comes from property. She lives in the top two floors of an apartment building which she owns, renting out the other apartments. She has a rental income of just under a million euros and investment income of about half that.”
“That doesn’t sound so brain damaged to me.”