When he got back to the hotel, he was greeted at the reception desk by two gentlemen who looked like twins and introduced themselves as Hugin and Munin – the former was Peter, the latter Paul, as they informed him in the bar, where the three men sat down together.
He was unable to conceal his surprise when Hugin put a photograph on the table, taken a few hours earlier at the main station, and Munin claimed in a confident tone, ‘We know you had never met her before, but she may have revealed something to you.’
‘She said nothing remarkable,’ he muttered reluctantly, as he gazed at the photograph, in which he was handing his beautiful fellow passenger her case, ‘and anyway, what is this about? Am I being accused of something?’
‘You soon may be,’ said Munin gruffly.
Before he had a chance to react to this incredible impudence, Hugin whispered almost ingratiatingly: ‘If we ask for your discreet cooperation, it is because this woman’ – he tapped a finger on the photograph – ‘is a particularly dangerous terrorist.’ Hugin gave a friendly smile, at which Munin immediately hissed: ‘There’s no joking, any detail might be important to us. Did she talk to anyone on her mobile phone? Did she send any text messages?’
He looked at Munin, then at Hugin with sincere doubt.
‘If she really is a terrorist, there can be no texts or conversations you aren’t already aware of. Why are you questioning me?’
‘She is a terrorist in a special sense of the word,’ said Munin.
‘A very special one,’ added Hugin.
‘She might have confided something,’ Munin continued, ‘which in your view is not of the least significance, but as we have known her for years, we are perfectly aware that in a conversation with a stranger she can sometimes say something about her plans.’
‘Unwittingly,’ put in Hugin.
‘Exactly,’ agreed Munin. ‘For instance that tomorrow she would be performing. Didn’t she say anything like that?’
‘No. She just asked how to get to the hotel. Can you please explain what this is about?’
‘Not just yet,’ said the plainly disappointed Munin. ‘But in any case, we would be grateful for your discretion. For understandable reasons.’
‘If she were to accost you in the corridor, let’s say, or at breakfast in the restaurant,’ said Munin, handing him a business card on which there was nothing but a phone number, ‘if she were to say anything at all, please call, alright?’
‘But you are not from the police,’ he stated confidently, ‘are you? What strange machinations. Perhaps I should actually call the police? I am a foreigner here and I came on business. I don’t want any trouble.’
After saying this, he stood up and headed for the lift without looking behind him. On the third floor, as he was walking down the corridor to his room, he saw the stranger. She was walking towards him, dressed in a blue coat and a lovely, old-fashioned pillbox hat.
‘Excuse me,’ he said almost in a whisper. ‘Please be careful. I was stopped downstairs by two fellows, I think they’re detectives. They questioned me. At the station, as I was handing you your case, they took our picture.’
‘Really?’ She did not look surprised. ‘And what did you tell them?’
‘Nothing. I told them to get off my back. After all, I don’t know you in the least.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘it’s very kind of you. Please don’t let it bother you. They probably said I’m a terrorist.’
‘Yes, how did you guess?’
‘Because I know them. Luigi hired them. I wonder how they introduced themselves?’
‘Hugin and Munin, Peter and Paul, or maybe vice versa.’
She giggled. As she walked off to the lift, she waved to him and loudly added: ‘You can sleep in peace. I don’t plant bombs!’
Standing behind the open drapes he saw the stranger through the window, getting into a taxi in the hotel forecourt. Moments later, Herr Hugin and Herr Munin were piling into the next one. Only now did he notice that he could see the neon sign for Franz Carl Weber’s toy store from this window. He decided that tomorrow, on his way back from the Rossets’ office, he would drop in there and inspect the model trains. He wouldn’t buy anything – his son was already over twenty – but he would certainly ask for a catalogue.
It would be an extraordinary thing, he thought, if at one of the counters I were to find an express train set, just the same as the one my brother and I drove so many times from Geneva to Ostend, though it was rather unlikely: since that era, long ago, everything had undergone radical changes, including the outside appearance of passenger and sleeping cars.
He was the sort of person on whom travel fatigue and new impressions do not have a soporific effect, but quite the opposite, and now, in a state of extreme tension, he could not get to sleep. After a shower, as he lay on his back in the comfortable bed, idiotic thoughts kept coming into his head. For instance, if Sebastian Rosset were to throw up his hands tomorrow and say that unfortunately he wasn’t going to pay him the money because some scrap of paper was missing, would he stay here a couple more days, or leave Zurich and Switzerland at once? Or if Herr Hugin and Herr Munin were to force their way into his room right now and subject him to elaborate tortures in the bathroom, for how long would he protect the stranger from the other side of the wall by concocting some ad hoc fibs?
Her scent was strong, but also had something very subtle about it, which reminded him of Grandmother Maria’s garden in the south of Poland. On August days, intense with light and heat, the odour of some plants, especially the flowers, hung around the solid block of the house like an invisible cloud, and towards evening, when its sun-warmed stonework began to return the warmth to its surroundings, those invisible waves of strong fragrance would float into the sitting room through the open windows, the large doors onto the veranda and the glass walls of the conservatory almost fully unfolded. That was why, as he now realised, his fellow passenger had instantly seemed close to him. However, although he very much wanted to, he couldn’t remember the actual name and species of flowers whose scent was the main ingredient of her perfume. Phlox? Wild rose? Carnation? Definitely not lily-of-the-valley, because those flowers bloom in spring, and he was only ever at the house in the south in summer, during the school holidays.
Briefly, under his closed eyelids he saw her figure amid a broad strip of irises. She had a sari flung about her. Just then in the garden an oriole began to sing, and turning towards the bird, the stranger let the floaty white fabric fall to the lawn.
He lit a cigarette and extracted a small bottle of claret from the mini-bar. If her naked body looked like that in reality, he thought, as he went back to bed with a glass of wine, she is quite simply beautiful. Extremely beautiful.
But he did not want to surrender his imagination to the mercy of unrealistic sexual desires. He tried to think about anything else. It wasn’t easy. For a while longer her face, reflected in the train carriage window, continued to tempt him with the shape of her brightly painted lips. Only a little later did he manage to summon up a different image from his memory: he and his brother were sitting on the floor of their small bedroom, amid railway tracks, stations and junctions. His brother opened the world atlas on his knees and announced: ‘Chile, highest railway line in the world. Thirty-six tunnels, fifty-three viaducts. Let’s go across the Andes! All aboooard, we’re off!’
With the aid of a compass and ruler they calculated the length of the route, and then painstakingly divided it into the number of circuits. They already had Africa under their belts, numerous journeys to Istanbul, the Trans-Siberian line from tsarist times, the route from London to Edinburgh, and also a long journey across the prairies on the United Pacific line.