I stared at him.
‘Do you think I’m mad?’ he said.
I didn’t know what to say.
‘Slatnick thinks I’m mad.’
‘Life-forms,’ I said. ‘On the moon.’
‘They’re very advanced,’ he said. ‘They’re beyond anything we can imagine. And they’re watching us right now, the same way we watch ants —’
‘How come the astronauts didn’t notice them?’
‘What? A couple of bouncing men in big white suits?’
Slatnick sniggered.
‘All they did was pick up stones,’ Munck said, ‘like children. And that’s what we are, by comparison. Children.’
‘I see what you mean,’ I said.
‘They’re sophisticated. They’re where we’ll be in a millennium — if we last that long.’
‘So they’re watching us?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which explains why we feel paranoid sometimes?’
‘Exactly.’ Munck paused. ‘You, though. You’ve got a reason of your own.’
There was a long silence, which I didn’t understand.
‘You mean, because I was shot?’ I said eventually.
The two policemen stared at me.
‘Is that what this is about?’ I said.
‘No.’ Slatnick popped his chewing-gum. ‘It’s nothing to do with that.’
‘It’s just a routine enquiry.’ Munck consulted one of his sheets of paper. ‘It concerns a Miss Salenko. Miss Nina Salenko.’
‘What about her?’ My heart had lurched at the mention of her name. Or was it simply that I’d been expecting something else?
‘She’s disappeared,’ Slatnick said.
I almost laughed. ‘What? Again?’
Another silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ Munck said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Now that it seemed I wasn’t the subject of the investigation, I became quite talkative. I told the two policemen that she was always disappearing. I mentioned the evening that she was supposed to meet me downstairs in the lobby. How she never arrived. And how she didn’t call either, not for five days.
‘Were you a friend of hers?’ Munck asked.
‘Yes, I suppose I was.’
‘A close friend, would you say?’
‘It depends what you mean by close.’
‘Did you know her,’ and he cleared his throat, ‘intimately?’
Slatnick stopped chewing for a moment and looked at me sideways, across his right shoulder.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We slept together a few times. I wouldn’t say I knew her very well. We only met two months ago.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘It was a Tuesday night. About ten days before Christmas.’
‘Did she seem upset?’
‘No, not especially.’ I wanted to tell him that I was the one who was upset, but I checked myself. Now was not the time — as Munck himself might have said.
‘She didn’t say she was going anywhere?’
I shook my head.
‘And you can’t think of a reason why she might have wanted to leave the city?’
‘No.’
I remembered standing at the bottom of the hotel steps and hunting through my pockets for an imaginary key. Her calling out. Martin? The sudden shriek of tyres as she pulled away. That was the last time. I’d tried to phone her since New Year, but she was never there.
‘What about her car?’ I said.
‘She had a car?’
I nodded.
‘I don’t think we knew that.’ Munck glanced through the papers in his folder. ‘No, there’s no mention of a car.’
I described the car for him as best I could: the make, the colour — the naked woman dangling from the rear-view mirror.
‘A naked woman?’ Slatnick’s mouth had fallen open.
‘A doll. One of those little plastic ones.’ I smiled. ‘She called it Doris.’
Munck took up the questioning again. ‘Did she like driving?’
I remembered that Munck was fond of habits, but I didn’t want to mention the motels so I generalised. I told him that she loved driving. She was always driving places, often in the middle of the night. She was impulsive, some might say reckless.
‘In which case,’ Munck said cautiously, as if he was trying the flavour of a new idea on his tongue, ‘this might all be a fuss about nothing.’ He paused. He didn’t seem to like the way the idea tasted. ‘It was her mother who reported her missing. Do you know Mrs Salenko?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve never met her?’
I shook my head. ‘Never.’
‘Attractive woman,’ Munck said. ‘Still young. She’s a croupier.’ He paused again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think that’ll be all. For the time being, at least.’ He straightened the papers in his folder. ‘Oh, one last thing. You registered under a false name …’
I had to admire his technique. That quizzical smile of his told me the positioning of the question was deliberate, thought-out: he’d waited until the interview was over and I was off my guard.
I returned his smile. I tried to explain how the shooting had affected me. I told him that the life I used to live was dead. I was living a new life now, as a blind person. I’d adopted the false name because I thought it might help me to adjust. If I had a different name, I’d feel different. That was the logic. It was a symbol of my determination to leave the past behind, to begin again.
Though pleased with my improvisation, I was aware that what I was saying sounded suspicious, guilty even, and I wasn’t sure how the two policemen took it. Munck, at least, seemed satisfied. He shuffled his papers once more and then stood up.
‘May I ask you something?’ I said.
‘Certainly.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘You were on Miss Salenko’s answering-machine,’ he said. ‘Well, you left the name of the hotel and the number of your room.’
‘You didn’t know it was me, though?’
‘I had no idea.’
‘It must’ve been quite a surprise.’
‘Yes.’ Munck smiled. ‘Yes, it was.’
We passed through the door of the bar and out into the corridor. The two policemen thanked me for my assistance. I wished them luck.
‘If you hear anything,’ I said, ‘will you let me know?’
‘Of course,’ Munck said.
I took the stairs back to my room. I was thinking about Nina’s address book. Without it, Munck’s investigations might be hampered, but I couldn’t bring myself to hand it over. Not yet, anyway. Was I obstructing justice, I wondered, by holding on to it?
When I reached the fifth floor I put my bag of clothes down and leaned on the windowsill. I didn’t know what I felt, exactly. On the one hand, there was relief: nobody was after me. On the other, Munck knew where I lived. And Slatnick.
And then there was Nina, missing …
I was looking out over the side street where she’d parked her car that night. It was dimly lit, deserted — two transit vans, a stack of oil-drums, some wooden pallets. Then I saw him, in silhouette against the sky. He was on his bicycle, as usual, only this time he was riding through the air, and uphill, too, from the curved, wrought-iron roof of the railway station to the clock tower of a nearby church. He was at least twenty metres above the ground, and yet he seemed nonchalant, one hand on the handlebars, the other in his pocket. There had to be a line strung between the two buildings, but I couldn’t make it out. I thought of calling to him, then decided against it. He probably wouldn’t hear me anyway; he’d be concentrating, in a kind of trance. As I resumed my climb I could’ve sworn I heard him whistling. Loots, I thought to myself. The Great Loots. And I too began to whistle.
I hadn’t been back in my room for long when the phone began to ring. I thought about ignoring it. But after it had rung perhaps ten times I reached over and picked up the receiver. It was Victor. He wanted to know what kind of trouble I was in. He promised not to tell Arnold.