‘Perhaps. If you are interested in this company, Finn, you must have a reason. Perhaps there is something to look into further. Here. Here’s the boy’s name and address.’ He handed the scrap of paper across the table. ‘Perhaps you’re right. My friend just said that the boy is scared of something.’
Finn pockets the scrap of paper after a brief glance.
‘The address is across the bridge, a street behind the railway station,’ Frank says. ‘Let me know what happens. I will look in my files over the next few weeks. See if we have any Exodi for you, Finn.’
15
FINN PREFERS TO WALK. Even when he was in Moscow in winter, when even the moderately rich and relatively rich don’t go anywhere without their cars, he preferred to walk. While they kept their chauffeurs running car engines for hours outside bars and restaurants simply to imply the status of urgency, Finn walked. He likes walking. Walking is the appropriate pace of humanity, he says, everything else is too fast for the brain. He always liked the French word for ‘day’–journée- because of its original meaning, the distance a man can walk in a day.
Like so much about Finn’s own analysis of himself, however, this represents only part of the truth. He likes walking because, as well as giving him time to think, it also delays the moment when he arrives. For Finn the journey- the journée- is always more enjoyable than to arrive. As if somehow his expectations were never quite met.
Walking also delayed the moment when he needed to act. There was now a reluctance in Finn, as so often on a job. There is a period of time he needs in order to steel himself to act, even in the most trivial actions, even going to the shops or telephoning his aunt. This reluctance reflects the deepest, most concealed aspect of Finn’s nature–a lack of simple, fundamental self-belief that comes from his childhood, from the shocking few minutes of being ringed with adults, the shouting, his childish tears. As an adult he overcame the rising fear by sheer willpower. Most people never saw it.
So he walks from the main square of Luxembourg’s city and across the long, wide bridge over the gorge that once protected the ancient fortress, until he comes to the Rue de Grèves on the far side of the gorge, behind the station.
The address is a five-storey, grey-stone building that rambles a long way back. There are twenty or so bells at the main doorway with nameplates that for the most part have no names written on them; small flats or studios for the more modest citizens of Luxembourg, a building for students, perhaps, or older people who have fallen through the net of Luxembourg’s wealth.
The flat number Frank has written on the scrap of paper is number ten. Finn walks past the door once and then retraces his steps and pauses at the steps leading up to the door. He looks at an estate agent’s sign and copies down the telephone number. He casually scans the street. He thinks about walking up the stone steps, but if he rings the bell now, he risks a rebuttal before he can even get inside. The boy is scared, Frank has said. Why would he let a stranger in?
There are few people on the street. Finn crosses back over it and studies a few signs belonging to other house agents. Then he settles on the far side of the street, half concealed down some cellar steps, and waits.
After more than an hour standing in the damp cold, and with several false starts, he sees a man who appears to be approaching the main door of the block that interests him. He is a young man and he carries a small brown bag of groceries. Slowing as he approaches the stone steps, the man fumbles in his coat pocket and halts completely as he reaches the foot of the steps up to the door of the building.
Finn crosses the road. He is leaping up the steps behind the man as the man reaches the door and, still fumbling, inserts a key.
Finn stands at the young man’s shoulder, with a genuinely grateful and somewhat foolish smile on his face, and looks with all the charming appeal he possesses into the man’s eyes.
‘Thank goodness you’ve come,’ he says, stamping and shaking with cold on the step below him. ‘I’ve been waiting nearly an hour and I haven’t got my key.’
The young man turns, the door half-open now as he juggles the key and the bag of groceries, and stares at Finn. He’s a student perhaps, Finn thinks, a temporary lodger in the building, and with the carelessness of a student who believes no doors, anywhere, should ever be locked, he silently shrugs and Finn enters after him. They climb the first staircase one after another and then the young man peels off down a corridor on the first floor without a backward glance and, without pausing, Finn climbs up further to the floor above before he stops to check his whereabouts.
He must be quick. He looks at the first numbers. Eight, nine. Ten is around the corner of a dingy corridor. He walks along a faded, worn red carpet until he stands outside a door with ‘10’ painted roughly in white paint on its peeling blue wood. He hears music playing from behind it, the muffled wailing lilt of a female singer singing a Portuguese song.
Finn pauses, catches his breath. Then he knocks twice before he detects the occupant of the room walking towards the door across a wooden floor. A lock is snapped, the door opens a few inches on a chain, and revealed is a tired, pale face with a wispy orange beard that looks like thin tumbleweed.
‘I’m from the property agents,’ Finn says. ‘Come to check the windows.’
‘The windows are fine,’ the boy says.
‘I’m sure they are. But we’re painting the outside. If you wouldn’t mind, I need to make my report.’
There is a pause while the boy thinks and makes the decision between risking letting a stranger inside and risking offending the property agents. When the latter has overcome his evident reluctance, the boy pulls the chain off its slide and opens the door.
The room has an old carpet that was once olive-green, Finn guesses, but now wears the scars of many tenants who’ve had no interest in the apartment’s long-term welfare. Dirty net curtains hang off a pole in front of the windows, there is an unmade futon on the floor, a shelf of books above it, and the main part of the room consists of a desk covered with laptop computers, papers, wires, boxes of software and coffee cups. Finn looks around.
‘Comfortable here?’ Finn says.
‘The windows are over there,’ the boy replies. Finn shuts the door behind him and stands still in front of it.
‘Having trouble paying the rent?’ Finn says.
‘How would you know?’
‘That’s exactly what I would know.’
‘Who are you? What’s your name?’ the boy says nervously.
Finn takes a small transparent plastic packet from his pocket and holds it out. ‘That’s three months’ rent,’ he says.
The boy doesn’t move.
‘We have about ten minutes,’ Finn says, ‘before anyone watching the outside of the building wonders what I’m doing here.’
He wastes no time now.
‘You have a number to call if anyone asks questions about Exodi?’ he snaps.
The boy looks like he’s been hit.
‘Maybe,’ he says faintly. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘The longer I’m here, the more anyone watching will think you’ve told me. It’s in your interests to be quick. When I leave, call the number they gave you. Tell them exactly what happened. Say, of course, what I asked you and that you told me nothing. Say I was persistent and that it took you ten minutes to get rid of me.’
Finn throws the money on to the futon but doesn’t move from the door. The boy looks paler than ever.
‘What did you do at Exodi?’ Finn says. ‘What was your specific job?’
The boy doesn’t reply.
‘I’m not from here,’ Finn says. ‘I’m not from Luxembourg. I’m nothing to do with them. But if you don’t talk to me, I will tell them you did talk to me. Got it? You have a few seconds to start answering my questions. After that…it’s up to you.’