‘Sorry to disappoint you, Victor,’ I went on, ‘but it’s not me who’s in trouble, it’s a friend of mine. The police are looking for her. I’m helping them with their enquiries.’
Putting the phone down, I shook my head. Victor.
I turned the TV on: ballet on one channel, ice-skating on another. I turned it off again. I sat by the window on my plastic chair and smoked. Outside, it was snowing. In the distance I could hear the bells of the cathedral, those three descending notes, always descending. A kind of panic spread throughout my body, pushed against the inside of my skin. I remembered the story Nina had told me, the night I took her to the Metropole. I kept thinking of her standing on that road with the Big Wheel behind her, its brightly coloured cars lost in the mist.
At ten o’clock I took the lift down to the lobby and walked out through the revolving doors. The taxi I’d ordered was waiting at the kerb.
‘Mr Blom!’
I got into the car. ‘How are you, Millie?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘You know, I saw you on TV.’
‘Seems like everybody saw it.’
‘I thought you were great. Really great.’
I thanked him.
‘I thought maybe you should make a career out of it,’ he said. ‘You know. Presenter.’
I smiled at the idea.
He pulled out into the traffic. ‘It’s the Elite again, right?’
‘Right.’
‘TV,’ he said, a few minutes later. ‘One day I’ll be on it.’ The way he said it, he made it sound like a desert island.
When we reached the club, I asked him to call back in half an hour, then I set out across the pavement. There were no helicopters flying this time. The weather was too bad.
‘It’s fifteen to get in.’
A different man was on the door. If it had been the same man, he would’ve recognised me. That was something to be grateful for.
‘I want to see Greersen,’ I said. ‘Tell him it’s a friend of Nina’s.’
Five minutes went by. Then another five.
The wind sliced through the telegraph wires above my head. My ears were almost numb.
At last the door opened. A man said, ‘I’ll take you to Greersen.’
Inside, the music was loud and slack, and someone had been smoking grass. It was dark: just a couple of red table-lamps and a strip of ultraviolet where the bar was. A blonde girl in a spangled g-string was dancing up on stage. Her hair swung across one shoulder. A tattoo covered both her breasts. A bird, it looked like. An eagle. Wings beating as she moved. I wondered if she was Candy. But then I remembered Nina telling me that Candy was black. I tapped through the place with my stick. I’d decided to act blind. It might give me an edge. I knocked against somebody’s knee and almost fell. Then I apologised. You have to make it real.
I followed the man through a velvet curtain and down a corridor. We climbed a flight of stairs. The music was muffled now, as though it had been gagged. Greersen’s office was on the first floor, at the back of the building. The room was brightly lit. I could smell dust burning on the naked bulbs.
‘I’m Greersen.’
He had flat black hair and a thin moustache. His voice was thin as well. Two people were in the room with him, but I wasn’t interested in them.
‘My name’s Blom.’
‘So?’
‘Is Nina here? Nina Salenko?’
‘No.’
‘She been here tonight?’
‘She hasn’t been here for weeks.’
There was always a perfect moment for a silence, and this was it. It was a technique I’d picked up from Visser. You could use it like a polygraph, to test the veracity of what had just been said. Greersen’s words hung on in the hot air of the room. He didn’t sound guilty at all, more curious — or mocking.
I broke the silence first. ‘She said you were sleeping with her.’
A woman was sitting on the sofa to my right. I saw the corners of her mouth turn down. Then she lit a cigarette.
‘What’s it to you?’ Greersen said.
‘I’m sleeping with her, too.’
‘Got nice tits, hasn’t she?’
‘The rest of her’s not so great,’ the woman said.
‘Who’s looking at the rest of her?’ a man behind me said.
The woman didn’t say anything. Her paste ear-rings flashed as she reached for the ashtray.
‘She’s gone missing,’ I said.
Greersen put his feet up on the desk. ‘You came all the way down here to tell me that?’
‘I happened to be passing.’
‘What’s wrong with the phone?’
‘I wanted to meet you. Face to face.’
‘It’s not exactly face to face, is it,’ and Greersen laughed, as if he’d just said something clever.
‘It’s good enough for me.’ I took a step towards him, my hand tightening on my cane. There was a sudden movement on my left. Someone’s arm, probably. Someone else’s arm restraining it.
I took my dark glasses off and peered down at Greersen. I was doing it deliberately. I knew that it was hard to take. Those blank eyes peering, close up.
‘I wanted to get a good look at you,’ I said.
There was a smell coming off him. You know that spinach you can buy, pre-washed, in sealed bags? Well, leave it for a week, then open it. That was Greersen. Except he was trying to hide the smell with a cologne. It wasn’t working. The smell squatted underneath the perfume like a toad.
‘Find out what kind of creep I was dealing with,’ I said.
Someone was right behind me now. The man who’d brought me up the stairs, presumably. I broke out into a sweat that was slick and cold. He might have a gun, I was thinking. He might use it. The woman on the sofa was turning her cigarette in the ashtray. Turning it and turning it, sharpening the lit end to a point.
‘Get him out of here,’ Greersen said.
Two men threw me out of the back door. My shoulder ached from where it had hit something on the way downstairs. I could see the shapes of cars in the darkness, cars drawn up in rows. The glimmer of radiator grilles, the curve of tyres. They couldn’t have done it better if they’d tried.
I found my cane and brushed myself down. When I reached the front of the building again, Millie called my name. I crossed the pavement, opened the car door and toppled in.
‘What is it, Mr Blom?’ he said. ‘What happened?’
I couldn’t say anything just yet. The scorched smell of the office was in my nostrils. My head felt like a bag of broken glass.
‘They roughed you up a little, didn’t they.’
I nodded, let him examine me.
‘I’m taking you to my house,’ he said. ‘Get you cleaned up.’
‘That’s not necessary.’
‘But you’ve cut yourself —’
‘I’ve got a headache, that’s all.’
I wanted to go straight back to the Kosminsky, but Millie insisted on driving me to a twenty-four-hour chemist first. He said the best pain-killer was codeine and he could get some for me. We wouldn’t need a prescription because a friend of his worked there. He didn’t charge me for the detour. He wouldn’t let me pay for the pills either.
Just before I got out of the cab I touched him on the shoulder. ‘You know that TV show I’m going to have?’
‘What about it?’ he said.
‘I want you to be my first guest.’
Sitting on the steps of the hotel, I dabbed at the cut with a tissue. Greersen. Maybe I shouldn’t have upset him. I couldn’t resist it, though. Sometimes if a pond looks too still you throw a stone in it. It had stopped snowing and the moon showed in the gap between two banks of orange cloud. I felt I could see through the moon’s thin skin to the organs underneath. Its life seemed as fragile as my own.