The Way I Found Her (17 page)

‘What are you doing?' she said.

I turned and looked at her, then straight away looked back at the screen. These days, I was getting cold with Alice; I was giving her a chill of winter, a chill of death. ‘Writing a letter,' I said.

‘Did Valentina give you permission to use her computer?'

‘Yup.'

Then I had a bad shock. I spoke to the mouse in my mind: Get me out of here fast! Because I'd suddenly seen what APAL was. I arrowed the Close Box, clicked it and got a blank screen. My heart was pounding. I accessed a new file and wrote at speed:
Dear Dad, Bought Crime et châtiment from the bouquinistes. Brilliant beginning
. I knew that Alice must have noticed me get out of an existing file and into a new one, but she didn't say anything, only came a bit nearer to me, so that I could smell that she was wearing perfume – a thing she hardly ever did. And the perfume reminded me of home, of evenings when Alice and Hugh would go out to dinner and I'd be alone with my homework and my chess and my favourite TV shows.

‘OK,' said Alice after a moment in which she read the two pitiful lines of my letter to Hugh but made no comment on them, ‘I'm going out for a bit. Is there anything you want?'

‘Where are you
going
?' I almost said. ‘
What is happening in this house?
' But all I did was shake my head.

As soon as I heard the apartment door close on Alice, I put a Save lock on my letter and clicked open APAL.

It was like an essay that hadn't reached its end. And the essay had one prime subject and that subject was Alice. The acronym APAL stood for
A propos d'Alice Little
.

I began reading, translating as I went. It wasn't the kind of essay you whistled right through.

It started by describing Alice's beauty as ‘a fatal thing'. It wondered if ‘like Daphne she will get so tired of it, she will pray to be turned into a hedge'. It said nothing about Valentina's own fantastic snow-queen beauty – like it didn't recognise she had any – but only kept marvelling at how people in the street and in restaurants and everywhere kept craning their necks to get a glimpse of Alice. It was like a version of my
Exploding Peanut Theory
. It described a cyclist in the rue Saint-Ferdinand falling off his bicycle as Alice turned the corner towards him. He had a bag of apples tied on to his handlebars and the apples all rolled away into the gutter.

And then it said this: ‘The first fatality now occurs. The poor handsome roofer appears to have made the (existential!) choice to die of love for Alice Little. And, of course, the dying will be long, will be painful, and in our hearts we will sympathise, but in our heads we will say: “How extremely foolish. What more foolish thing could this young man possibly have done?”'

I was staring moronically at this last paragraph and getting a kind of pain in me, like I'd swallowed a stone, when the telephone on the desk did something of its own accord: it rang. Sometimes, when life feels intense, you forget the function of ordinary things; you can find yourself surprised that the wind moves the trees.

It was Hugh.

I couldn't have a conversation with Hugh in front of the words I'd just read on the computer screen, so I took the portable phone into the salon and sat down in a square of sunlight. As Hugh talked, I realised I was listening for something in the background and that something was the sea.

He asked me how I was and then
where
I was, so I told him I was on my own in the salon with Sergei and
Crime et châtiment
. I didn't tell him what I'd just seen. I didn't tell him that I was alone a lot of the time and that now I knew the reason why. When he asked if Babba was a ‘chess friend' I almost said yes because the idea of telling Hugh about the real Babba suddenly wore me out. But I told him nevertheless.

‘So,' he said sadly, ‘your only friend is the maid?'

‘No . . .' I said.

At this point, Grandma Gwyneth came on the line. She said they'd all just been into Sidmouth to buy Bertie a panama hat and that the hat made him look very jaunty and dashing, even at his age. I said, ‘How are my chess men?' and Gwyneth said, ‘Still black, still white. All lined up, ready and waiting, sweetheart.' And then the subject of the hut came along, as I knew it would.

Hugh got back on the line and said: ‘I wish you could see it, Lewis. Bertie's helping me now. We've become bricklaying junkies.'

‘Is it tall?' I asked.

‘Wait and see.'

‘Is it still just a hut, or is it a garden house?'

‘Oh, it's more than just a hut. We've ordered the weather vane. And now tell me, how is Mum?'

I felt a silence come. I listened and listened for the sea, but couldn't hear it. Then I stammered on about Alice working very hard. I told Hugh that she was only out of the apartment now because she'd gone to get books she needed from the library.

‘Which library?' he asked.

‘Oh,' I said, ‘the Bibliothèque Nationale.'

‘Ah,' he said, ‘the BN. Those little green reading lamps!'

I changed the subject to the bison and the philosophical question of a bison's ability to recollect a life it's never lived. Hugh said categorically: ‘Bison have no imagination, Lewis.' He didn't want the subject changed. He wanted a rundown on Alice's life. Was she overworking? Why had she written only one letter home? Was Valentina bullying her? Was it hard for her to concentrate in the hot weather?

I reassured Hugh that Alice's room was cool because of the air conditioning and the heavy curtains at the window, like theatre curtains with gold tassels, and that no one was bullying her except me: I had tried to bully her into buying a pair of birds and she had refused, like the sensible woman she was. And then I heard my father laugh and I remembered suddenly that I liked this sound and that when I was a child I'd often thought, if Dad is laughing, then everything's OK and the nuclear bomb won't be dropped on Devon tonight.

Then I said a surprising thing. After I'd said it, I couldn't believe I had. I asked Hugh if he could send Elroy.

I refused to think about Alice.

I closed the APAL file and sat at the desk, waiting for Valentina. But no one came and nothing stirred or changed or happened.

Later, I got through to Madame Sibour. She spoke French as though she had loose false teeth. She said: ‘Qui c'est, Babba?'

I tried to explain what she looked like, but my descriptive powers fizzled out and Madame Sibour decided I was a nuisance caller and hung up. Afterwards, I thought, why didn't I mention Pozzi and the bike? Those were the
prime
identifiers and I never used them.

I called again, but now the phone just rang and rang and rang and I imagined all the residents of the purple building – including Madame Sibour – huddled in the basement, decorating their makeshift voodoo shrines.

It was still only early afternoon, but to me it felt as though it should be time to get ready for supper. I ate three shrimp vol-au-vents from the fridge and drank a litre of Orangina. Then I set out with Sergei for the Hôtel de Venise.

I felt, as I walked, that it was a long time since I'd talked to anyone, so this was what I was going to say to Valentina: ‘I don't want to interrupt your days of love, but I'm lonely.' I thought both Valentina and Grisha would understand because they were Russians and would be capable of remembering what loneliness was, even in summer. In Valentina's only recollection of life in Russia, she might have been standing in that prickly maize field all alone.

When we got to the hotel, I hung about on the pavement, watching people going in and coming out, turning like weather-dolls in the revolving door. Then I walked round the building, hoping Valentina would lean out of a window and see me. The thought that she was there somewhere in the hotel and would eventually come out – if I waited long enough – began to console me.

She didn't appear. I sat down on the pavement, with my back to a Volkswagen, and Sergei lay down beside me. I stroked his head. I don't know how much time passed with me sitting, leaning against that car. It was like I dozed or something and then woke up because I saw that the sky was going that deep-blue colour that it goes here just before the night comes, and all the lights in the hotel were suddenly on.

My next thought was that Valentina was probably back at the rue Rembrandt by now, except that she couldn't have come out of the hotel without seeing me, so she had to be inside still and planning to stay another night in Grisha's room, and I thought, I don't want her to stay another night; I want her to sit on my bed and whisper her secret thoughts to me while I curve my foot, under the bedclothes, round the contours of her arse.

I saw that it would be difficult for Sergei to go round in the revolving door, it wasn't the right dimensions for him, so I tied him to one of the little trees outside the hotel and went in.

The desk person was a woman with long fingernails that she started tapping on the desk the moment I spoke to her. I asked her to call up the room of Monsieur Panin and she went away to look up the room number. At my elbow were some smart young blond Australian men in pale suits with tartan luggage. They smelled of men's perfume and their smiles were as wide as coral reefs and I could tell the woman with the fingernails wanted to get back to the desk to deal with them and not with me.

She came back fast. She flashed her own nice smile at the Australians and said to me in English: ‘Mr Panin has checked out.'

‘Are you sure?' I asked. ‘When did he check out?'

She sighed. Sighed and tapped. Then she went to a little computer under the desk and punched something in. I saw her staring at the screen. She came back and said: ‘He left yesterday evening.'

I knew this couldn't be right. I looked all around the lobby, like I expected Grisha to be there, so that I could point him out to this nail woman. Then I said: ‘Are you saying Mr Panin didn't stay in this hotel last night?' But she ignored me. She'd moved on to the Australians, who were going to be housed in suites with sitting rooms and conference facilities. I moved away from the desk and sat down in an armchair. My eyes kept swivelling round at everyone who passed, hoping to see Grisha or Valentina. I thought, OK, I need some kind of strategy.

I waited till the nail person went away for a moment, then I went up to a man at the desk – young and in a green uniform – and said: ‘What room number do you have for Monsieur Panin?' He went to the computer to check, just like the woman had done, then returned and said: ‘We do not have any Monsieur Panin.'

‘Yes, you do,' I said. ‘Monsieur Grigory Panin from Russia.'

He checked with the computer again. If you work in a hotel, you don't have to hold anything in your brain any more: you just ask the computer. I thought, one day, everybody in the Western world will have brains the size of Brussels sprouts. He came back shaking his head. ‘No,' he said. ‘No Monsieur Panin.'

‘When did he leave, please?' I asked. The young man shrugged and at that moment the Nail returned and saw me still there. She scowled at me, but I didn't let the scowl affect me. ‘This is extremely important,' I said. ‘I have to talk to Mr Panin and I know he's here. It may be possible that he's registered under the name of Gavril.'

The Nail tapped again at the computer. She and the young green man stared at it and shook their heads. ‘No,' said the Nail. ‘No Gavril.'

‘OK,' I said. ‘What room
was
Monsieur Panin in? Please could you call that room. This is very urgent.'

Tap, tap, went her hands. The colour of her nails was scarlet. ‘Number 257,' she said at last, ‘and there is a new guest in that room.'

‘Could you call it anyway?'

‘No,' she said. ‘I cannot call it. Monsieur Panin got a taxi to the airport at three-thirty yesterday afternoon.'

Alice was in when I got home. She was lying on the Louis XVI couch, listening to a Francis Cabrel song. In the soft lamplight, I noticed that the freckles on her face had become more dense, as though she'd spent all day out in a cornfield. I thought, she's maybe going to break Hugh's heart and Didier's and even scores of others' – but not mine.

I gave Sergei his supper and then came and sat beside Alice. I waited for the CD to end, then I said: ‘I want you to listen to me, Alice. Something's happened to Valentina.'

Alice turned her head lazily towards me and looked at me with her clever eyes. ‘What do you mean?' she said.

I told her I didn't know yet exactly what had occurred. I said: ‘I have a theory.' Alice was about to get up. She was going to put the music on again, but I stopped her. Then I said: ‘I think Grigory Panin captured her and made her go back to Russia with him.'

Alice threw back her thorny head. She was going to roar with laughter, but I put my hand over her mouth.

‘Don't!' I said. ‘Don't laugh.'

She looked at me tenderly, like I was her baby again. She touched my hand. ‘Lewis,' she said. ‘You worry about everything too much. You imagine things. Remember the German fighter pilot you thought was living in the cellar?'

‘I'm not imagining this. I went to the hotel where I last saw Valentina. She was going to have lunch with Grigory yesterday. That's all she told me. Grigory left for Moscow yesterday at three-thirty.'

‘So? Valentina went on somewhere else. Perhaps she has a lover?'

‘Grisha is her lover.'

Alice got up then. I didn't try to stop her. She went to one of the tall windows and looked out, turning her head this way and that, as though she were expecting Valentina to come walking along the street in the next minute.