“Because you’re an emotional and maudlin old fool.”
He chuckled, then held his breath as he sprayed a tiny jet of adhesive on to one of the photographs. “There’s gray in your beard. You’re growing old, Paul, like me. Ah, good!” He pressed the photograph into place. “You’re going home, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“You’ve had enough, Paul, I can tell. You’re like an athlete facing his last and biggest race. You want to win, but you want to stop competing even more. Is it a woman?”
“Mine just left me. She went off with a rich married frog who promised to give her an apartment in Antibes.”
“You need a woman, Paul. You’re a very private man, but you can’t be so different from the rest of us. What do you plan to do? Settle in America and learn to play golf?”
“I’m too young to play golf.” That made him laugh. “Besides,” I went on, “who says I’m retiring?”
“I do. I know these things.” He bent close over his work. He had once told me that he had been a fine soccer player in his youth, but now Teodor had a withered right foot, a hump back, and a pencil drawing of his wife. She had died in Treblinka and all the photographs ever taken of her had been destroyed by the Germans. Teodor, years after the war, had gone to a police identikit artist and had patiently assembled a picture of his lovely Ruth which now hung framed above his work bench. “Of course she was not so pretty,” he had confessed to me, “but I remember her as even more beautiful.” Now he shot me a glance from under his thick white eyebrows. “You’ve been in Europe how long now? Almost ten years? Not many people last ten years, not in your kind of work.”
“You don’t know what kind of work I do, Teodor.”
He laughed softly. “I have deduced you are not an accountant. Nor are you one of those bureaucratic shits who live in Brussels off the taxes I take care not to pay. And despite what this passport says, Paul, I do not think you are a doctor. No, you are a man who keeps secrets, and that can be a very tiring profession. Not that it’s any of my business.” He straightened up. “Now come here, I need Dr. O’Neill’s signature. Three times, and with different pens. I have even made you a Visa card as a parting gift, see?”
I peered at the card under Teodor’s strong worklamp. “How the hell did you manage the hologram?” I asked in genuine admiration.
“Mere genius, Paul, mere genius. But it will all be for nothing unless you collect a few items to support the fiction. Buy some medical journals and send yourself a couple of letters addressed to Dr. O’Neill.” He held up a defensive hand. “I know! I know! I am teaching you to suck eggs. And let me give you this.” He fumbled through a drawer to find a pasteboard card printed with the American telephone number of an Alcoholics Anonymous group. “That always helps a doctor’s disguise, Paul. I use Alcoholics Anonymous for medical men and policemen, but if you were pretending to be a lawyer I would supply you with the business cards of massage parlors. These details count. Now, practise the signature before you sign. You’re a doctor, remember, so you scribble, you don’t write. Good. Again. Again. Better! Again.” Teodor was a perfectionist. “I can sell you a real credit card that will be good for nine months?” he offered. “Its owner is in a French prison and will take fifty thousand francs?”
I left him two hours later with a whole new identity safe in my pocket, then, in a rainy darkness, I drove across country to Nieuwpoort. The autumn wind had gone into the north-east to bring the Low Countries a foretaste of winter. I drove fast, but even so it was almost midnight before I reached home and parked the Opel in the alleyway opposite my apartment house. When I switched off the engine I could hear the clatter of metal halyards beating on the masts of the yachts berthed in the South Basin. It was such a familiar sound, and one I would miss when I left Nieuwpoort. The wind gusted down the street, bringing the smell of sea and shellfish. I locked the car, ran across the road, and pushed open the apartment block’s unlocked front door.
“Is that Mr. Shanahan?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” I reeled back from the shadow which suddenly rose inside the dark hall. Someone was waiting for me, someone who knew my name, someone who spoke in English, and I remembered my old training which had taught that, before making a kill, it was prudent to make the victim identify himself just to make certain it was the right person who was about to die.
“Mr. Shanahan?” It was a girl’s voice, American and unthreatening, which lack of menace did not mean she was not holding a silenced gun in the shadowed hallway.
“Who the hell are you?” I was crouched in the porch, holding my sea-bag as a shield to protect my chest from the half-expected bullet.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s just that the light bulb was broken in here, so I had to wait in the dark.”
“Who are you?” I straightened up, sensing I was not to be shot.
“Your secretary said you’d be back tonight. She’s real nice. Gee, I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just that I had to see you because I’ve got an Apex ticket and I can’t afford the penalty to change it, so I have to fly back to the States tomorrow and this was my last chance. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m real sorry.” The girl seemed to be more upset than I was. She had come to the doorway so that the streetlamp lit her face and I knew who she was, oh God, I knew who she was, and the venomous memories whipped into my consciousness. She looked so like Roisin, so achingly like the dead Roisin.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“My name’s Kathleen,” she said, and thrust out a tentative hand as though to shake mine. “Kathleen Donovan.” Even her voice was like her sister’s, like enough to bring a mocking ghost to shadow the rainswept darkness. I did not shake her hand. “I just wanted to see you,” she explained weakly, and took her hand back.
“What about?” I asked the question harshly for, though I knew the answer, I had to pretend otherwise. “Christ! Do you know what time it is?”
“It’s late, I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that…”
“You’ve got an Apex ticket.” I finished the sentence, then pushed past her into the hallway. “If you want to talk to me, Miss, what did you say your name was?”
“Donovan. Kathleen Donovan.”
“Miss Donovan. If you want to talk to me, then let’s talk where it’s warm.”
I did not want to talk to her, but she looked so like Roisin that I could not say no. I wanted to probe the old wound. Christ, I thought, but why did it happen? How could a woman turn a man’s blood to smoke and leave him forever miserable?
Kathleen Donovan followed me up the uncarpeted stairs and edged nervously into my apartment. She looked tentatively around, as if judging my soul from the bare furniture, scraped linoleum, and half-empty shelves. “Coffee?” I asked her. “Or something stronger?”
“Do you have decaffeinated?”
“No.”
“Then just a glass of water, please.”
I fetched her a glass of water and poured myself a whiskey. I took my time in the kitchen, for I needed to reestablish my equilibrium. God damn it! Why now, of all times?
I carried the two tumblers back to the living room where I gave her the water, put down my whiskey, then drew the curtains against the chill Belgian night. I lit the gas fire. “Sit down.” I spoke more gruffly than I intended, but I did not want her to know how she was unsettling me. She took off her coat and folded it over the sofa’s arm, then nervously perched herself on the sofa’s edge. She looked to be in her late twenties and was dressed in a sober tweed suit, a high-necked blouse and a string of plain blue beads. She wore no other jewellery, and I remembered how Roisin had hated glittering baubles. Kathleen had the same dark red hair as Roisin and the same long jawline and the same hesitant expression that suggested she was perpetually puzzled by the world. Indeed, Kathleen looked so horribly like her sister that it hurt just to be in the same room. “If you want me to make a marine survey,” I told her carelessly, “then you’re too late. I’m closing down the business.”