I moved slowly round the car, my white cane tapping on hard ground. I found the crack in the back window — a crazed area, something like a spider’s web, with a neat hole at the centre. Then I knew it was Nina’s car. I went on checking, anyway. I thought I recognised the dent in the bumper: Nina had reversed into a bollard one night, in the car-park of the Motel Astra. When I reached the door on the driver’s side I bent down and looked in. No Doris. But I remembered how she’d dangled from a piece of ribbon, and there was a bit of it still knotted round the rear-view mirror. I straightened up.
‘It’s her car,’ I said.
Munck nodded. ‘Why would she come here?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Did she have any friends in the area?’
‘Not so far as I know.’ I paused. ‘But like I said, I didn’t know her very well.’
I took a deep breath, turned away. And then, as I stared out across the waste-ground, I noticed him. He was standing some distance off, with his left shoulder propped against one of the concrete pillars that supported the flyover. He was wearing a herring-bone overcoat and a pair of black shoes; and he was holding both his gloves in his right hand. There was frost in his moustache.
I must have looked strange because Munck took me by the arm.
‘Martin?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’
I couldn’t answer.
Visser was looking right at me, with a smile on his face. It wasn’t a malicious smile; it wasn’t gloating or unkind. If anything, he seemed to be taking a kind of patriarchal pleasure in the sight of me. It was almost welcoming. But, at the same time, there was an edge to it that disturbed me: it was as if he’d seen a joke that I had yet to see.
‘You’ve gone as white as a sheet,’ Munck said.
‘I don’t feel very well.’
‘It must be a shock for you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked you to come.’
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I wanted to.’
Visser watched me climb gingerly into Munck’s car. As we pulled away, he didn’t make any attempt to follow us. He didn’t even move. And the smile lingered — indulgent, strangely relaxed.
On the way back to the city centre I started to explain what I thought had happened to me. In a sense, I was just elaborating on certain things I’d talked about in the hotel bar two days before. Ironically enough, it was Visser’s predictions that I was trying to remember and repeat, what Visser had told me I’d experience. I ran through the phases: numbness and shock; depression, self-pity, suicidal tendencies; the gradual emergence of a new personality (I made it sound natural but squeamish, a snake shedding its skin — as if, somewhere in the city, in a hotel room, perhaps, there was a transparent version of me, a twin, identical but lifeless).
‘A new personality?’ Even Munck found it hard to believe.
I laughed. ‘I don’t think I’m quite there yet.’
I introduced a few variations on the theme, lurid variations of my own. I told him about migraines, rushes, panic. I blamed it on the titanium plate. Maybe sub-zero temperatures affected it. Nobody really knew. I was a unique case, I said. An extraordinary phenomenon. I was like those people with shrapnel in their legs who always know when it’s about to rain.
Munck was nodding now. I thought he was beginning to understand. And, gradually, I brought the subject round to Visser, which had been my intention all along.
‘Did you ever meet him?’ I asked Munck innocently.
Munck looked as if he was trying to remember.
I prompted him. ‘He was my doctor. At the clinic.’
‘I think it was Dr Visser who gave us permission to see you,’ Munck said. ‘Yes, I think I must’ve met him.’
‘You don’t know him, though?’
‘Oh no. I only saw him that one time. The second time, it was a nurse. Why do you ask?’
‘Just curious.’
I asked Munck to drop me outside Leon’s. I didn’t want Visser knowing where I lived — though it occurred to me that, in order to be standing on that piece of waste-ground, he must have been following Munck, and if he was following Munck he must have seen me walk out of the hotel that evening. Possibly he already knew all there was to know. Still, I wasn’t going to hand it to him on a plate.
I looked up and down the street. There was no sign of that salt-and-pepper overcoat, no sign of any shiny shoes. I watched Munck drive away, then I turned and walked through the glass-and-metal door, through the heavy vinyl curtain, into Leon’s. Loots was sitting in the corner. He called me over.
‘Was that a police car?’
I hadn’t seen Loots for a day or two and he knew nothing of Nina’s disappearance. I repeated most of what I’d learned from Munck. Then I told him where I’d been that evening.
‘That’s a bad area,’ he said.
‘I know.’
He bought me a coffee and a brandy, and brought them over to the table.
‘Thanks, Loots.’
‘I never did meet her, did I?’
‘She was hard to meet,’ I said, ‘even for me.’
Not all the news was gloomy, though. On New Year’s Day Loots had seen Anton. The circus hadn’t folded after all. They’d found a contortionist known as The Rubber Man who could pass himself through a piece of garden hosepipe. The crowds were back.
By the time we left the restaurant, it was one in the morning and the city was deserted. Street-lamps spread a thin metallic light. At the bottom of the hill, one last tram curved past the station, its yellow windows almost empty. I doubted Visser would be following me tonight. It was too cold to stand in the shadows or sit in a parked car. It was just too cold. Outside the hotel Loots wrapped his arms around me.
‘Don’t worry. She’ll turn up.’
I said good-night, then turned and walked to the entrance. The doors were spinning slowly when I reached them. I waited a moment, then stepped forwards, moving in time with them, as if we were a couple dancing.
The coast, out of season — there’s a smell to it. Briny, damp. It’s everywhere: in hotel rooms, in taxis, in cafés. I’d never liked the coast much; I always seemed to slow right down, as though my ankles were caught in seaweed.
I’d eaten in a small place by the train station. The man who ran it was a foreigner. He wore a pale-blue suit and white patent-leather shoes with gold buckles, and he had that clammy seaside skin. I ordered chicken salad and a beer. He stood in front of me, staring down with slightly bloodshot eyes, a sack of gelatinous flesh beneath his chin. When he spoke, his words blurred on his tongue.
‘Your first time here?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘You like?’
‘No.’
‘Me also,’ the man said. ‘I don’t like.’
He dropped his shoulders, moved away. At the bar he picked up a hand-mirror and studied himself for a long time with no change of expression. Then he began to pluck his eyebrows, a faint pop each time a hair came loose. I imagined the root of every hair he plucked; I saw the tiny pellet of skin they were embedded in. I drank my beer, but left most of the food.
Karin Salenko lived in a modest stucco building on the seafront. I leaned against the balcony outside, the plaster flaking away beneath my hands. I could hear breakers behind me, like something being dynamited. Why had I come here? Was it to get away from Visser? (Could he have followed me?) Was it because I was curious about Nina’s life, a life I’d been excluded from? Or did I think I was some kind of detective, trying to unearth the truth about her disappearance? I brushed the dust off my hands and turned to face the apartment. Maybe I just wanted to hear somebody talk about her. Maybe all I wanted was to hear her name. I knocked on the door. When it opened, the security chain was still in place.