“Yes,” I replied. “At a second-hand place in Ho Man Tin. Have you read it?”
“Yes — many times.”
“I haven’t finished it yet, but it seems like a funny choice of book, I mean, if you’ve read it that often.”
“It’s not… it’s something to do with my job.”
“What’s your job?”
“Police inspector.”
“Oh, sorry, I had no idea! In Hong Kong?”
“No. Interpol.”
“Seriously? I didn’t realise Interpol had inspectors. I mean, sorry, that’s rude. I’m being very rude aren’t I? I just… can we try again?”
I am my smile.
I am beauty.
Luca Evard, a man who lived his life by ironed shirts and folded underpants, toothpaste squeezed from the bottom of the tube, looked at me, and looked at the sea, and perhaps in that moment thought of the thief he’d pursued halfway round the world, who’d been at Hung Hom Pier the night gunshots were fired, and wondered if she’d drowned that night, or if she lived still and was thinking of him.
And he looked at me.
And he said, “May I help you get to a cab?”
“No need — my hotel’s nearby.”
“Which one?”
“The Southern.”
“I’m staying there too.”
“Really? What a coincidence. In that case, you’d be welcome to help me get to the bar.”
Chapter 40
Words to characterise my behaviour:
• Obsessive
• Needy
• Unprofessional
• Stalker-esque
• Manipulative
• Cruel
Words to characterise Luca Evard:
• Conventional
• Tidy
• Driven
• Unrewarded
• Socially inept
• Lonely
• Obsessive
He was not a man who had a drink with a strange woman in a strange city, however much she may have dressed herself for his delight. He was not a man to open up about himself, his life, his fears. That was not who he was.
Have a drink, I said. We’re both strangers in a strange land, we both read the same books. I’m an injured woman; have a drink with me.
Just one, he said at last. I don’t really drink in hotel bars.
On the third glass of wine I said, Are you single?
Yes, he replied, tongue loosened by good Australian wine. For the last three months.
I’m sorry, I said, feeling a flush of something that might have been… surprise? I hadn’t considered the possibility of anything in his life except his work — except me.
We drifted apart, he said. My work, her work — you know how it is. You?
Single, I replied. It’s how I like it. Tell me about this book — The Lemon and the Wave. Why have you read it so many times?
He smiled at nothing much, ate fried squid from a bowl, studied the room where we sat, taking in people, décor, sound, light. Every table was glass, blue lights ran beneath to cast strange shadows through the plates, lights brushing up the line of his chin and neck.
“I think it’s written by a killer,” he explained. “There was a spate of murders in Austria in 1989, four women and a man all killed the same way. One man came under suspicion. The police wanted to arrest him, but there wasn’t enough physical evidence, and they had to let him go. He left the country three weeks later, and then in 1993 this book came out, and though the names are different, the chronology, the manner of the murder, down to the finest detail, down to where the victims were left, the knots used in the nooses that strangled them, the size and make of the blade, everything, the same. The writing takes the point of view of a policeman, but he never catches the killer, comes to admire him by the end, becomes a killer himself, the policeman is transformed by what he sees into a murderer. I was part of the liaison, tried to trace the writer, this R. H. — but he’d moved on, somewhere in North America. We alerted the FBI, but again, what do we have? Nothing. A work of fiction. A killer laughing at the men who cannot catch him, perhaps. A flight of fancy from a twisted mind. You can’t arrest a man for fiction, can you?”
“If you can’t do anything, why do you read it so much?”
Surprise; the question almost too ridiculous to be asked. “As a warning,” he replied. “To remember. To remember the ones who died, whose killer we never brought to justice.”
Justice: the quality of being just, righteous. The moral principle of determining just conduct.
The administering of deserved punishment or reward.
I thought through my understanding of justice, and found no place for me in it. But then again, to do justice: to act or treat fairly. To acquit in accordance with one’s abilities or potential. It could not be denied that I was unrighteous in my life, but did I do justice?
Then Luca said, “I came here to find a thief.”
My eyes turned back to him from another place. He was the world, the universe, so big in my attention that, for a moment, I wondered if he wasn’t some fractured figment of my own imagination, a voice I had conjured for myself. But his eyes were elsewhere, his words came from some place in his soul that spoke for its own sake, not for mine.
“My superiors think she drowned. She stole from a museum. Forty years ago, the items would have been sold by the Chinese government to raise capital for tractors and shovels, but now China is reacquiring a taste for a glorious and opulent history. This is what gives the item value, more than its chemical composition.”
Emerald: a compound of beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate and trace amounts of chromium, which gives it its green colour.
“I think she came to Hong Kong to sell it. There’s a man, Bogyoke Dennis. He started out as a smuggler in Cambodia; now he kills his enemies with snake venom. He runs the prostitution and people-smuggling racket in the South China Sea. She should never have… but she must have got greedy, or arrogant, or just… stupid.”
Stupid: dull. Lacking quickness.
Stupid, the quality of…
… of being bloody stupid.
Just
stupid.
“You’re… sad, that she’s dead?”
“If she’s dead.”
“But you’re sad.”
He shrugged. “I’m always sad at a loss of human life.”
“Even a thief?”
“Still human.”
“Is that all?”
His eyes refocused onto mine, quick now, sharp, a drawing in of his features. “What do you mean?”
“You sound like you’ve been looking for her for a while.”
“For years. I know every detail of every crime she’s committed. I know how she likes to dress, how she does her hair, what kind of car she likes to drive, what food she eats. In Munich she scammed €75,000 from a lawyer whose speciality was getting drug traffickers off by accusing the police of corruption, and I was… a little bit pleased, God forgive me, but I thought that the crime had humour in it. She skimmed him while he was attending a fundraiser at the opera, scanned his credit cards, cloned his phone, and after she listened to two hours and a quarter of Verdi, I saw her on the security cameras, and again, photographed by one of the journalists there to cover the fundraiser, and she looked… You know, I find it hard to picture her face now, the details are… I know every part of her, but it’s so hard to find… She looked astonished. Held by music. I can’t… I remember thinking that’s how she seemed. I remember thinking those words. Now she’s probably dead; all that for nothing.”
Silence.
Then,
sorry, he said.
Sorry.