The Way I Found Her (22 page)

Without looking up from my work, I said: ‘Because they wanted her out of the way.'

He tapped in a slate pin. His straight, shiny hair was getting a bit long and flopping over his glasses. ‘For what reason?' he asked.

‘Any number of reasons. Like she was getting in the way of what someone wanted to do. Don't you think that's possible?'

He shrugged. ‘I suppose so, yes,' he said. ‘That is always a possibility in any disappearance. But I'm sure this isn't a question of murder, Louis. I think that's just in your mind, isn't it?'

‘No,' I said. ‘I don't think it's just in my mind. On Tuesday morning at about twelve, she went out. I walked with her to a hotel where she was meeting Grigory, this Russian writer she knew. And she hasn't been seen since. So anything could have happened – including a murder.'

‘But perhaps not. Perhaps she will come back?'

‘That's what Alice keeps saying. But I know she won't. I know I have to track her down. And I
will
. I'm going to be the one to find her.'

I felt choked as I said this. I heard my voice begin to go odd. I didn't want Didier to notice, so I pretended to cough. I looked down at the hammer in my hands.

‘How are you going to set about it?' said Didier.

I didn't reply for a moment, then I said: ‘I'm making a plan.'

I saw Didier stop work and look tenderly at me. It was the sort of look I sometimes got from Hugh.

‘Better to let the police make a plan, isn't it?' he said.

Alice said to me that evening: ‘I had a call from Bianquis, Valentina's French publishers, today. They want to know when the book's going to be finished.'

‘What did you say to them?' I asked.

Alice was sitting on the Louis XVI sofa, where Valentina normally sat. I didn't like her sitting there and I'd been willing her to move, but she didn't move. Alice's own will is so strong, it can outmanoeuvre everybody else's.

‘I stalled,' she said. ‘I said Valentina's mother was ill and she was concentrating on that at the moment.'

Then she told me something interesting. She said that on our first day in the rue Rembrandt, Valentina had admitted to her what pressure she was under all the time from Bianquis, to produce the next book and then the next and the next, like she was a writing factory. And she'd said she knew this couldn't go on. It was wearing her out and she wanted it to end.

‘That couldn't be it, could it?' I said. ‘She couldn't just have decided to abandon the book and go to Australia or something . . . ?'

‘It's possible. She'd been very tetchy about the book. It didn't seem to me that she was enjoying writing it. She wanted it to be finished and done with.'

‘But what about us?'

‘What about us?'

‘She wouldn't have left us without a word.'

Alice sighed. ‘In Valentina's equation,' she said, ‘we're nothing. I do my job. You amuse her and you look after Sergei. She tolerates us in this apartment. But we're of no importance to her. She leads a smart, international life and she makes a lot of money. These are the only things that count: nothing else. We're like her servants – like Babba.'

‘No, we're not!' I blurted out. And what I wanted to describe were the things that had happened in my attic – the translation sessions and the present of the musical box – to show Alice that Valentina cared about me and my future and gave me things that were precious to her. But then I decided not to. These were secret matters and I didn't want Alice's cool mind dissecting them and reducing them to ruins.

‘That day when we went out without telling her, Valentina was upset,' I said. ‘That means she cares about us.'

‘Not necessarily. It means she needed us and was irritated when she discovered we weren't there. Again, it's the reaction of the employer towards the servant.'

‘It's more than that!' I said. I was getting upset now and I felt almost like I might cry. I swallowed and tried to calm myself down. ‘And anyway,' I said, ‘you've got Babba wrong. Her name isn't Babba. That's just a stupid name invented by people here. Her name's Violette and from now on we should call her Violette, which is her proper African name!'

Alice sat completely still on the Louis XVI sofa. She didn't move a muscle. Then she said: ‘Violette isn't African, Lewis. It's French.'

I got up and walked out then and went straight to my room and lay down. My heart was beating like a bongo drum. I thought, Alice is too much for me. I hope Didier takes her away, up into the sky.

When I went to Valentina's computer the next day, I found Mrs Gavrilovich in the study.

‘Louis, help me,' she said. ‘Your eyes are better than mine. I have a feeling we could learn something from what is in this room. So we should go through all the documents we can find. I'm searching for Valentina's passport, but I can't see it.'

I didn't say I'd accessed the computer files and that I'd found a piece about Anton and the stone house in Provence. I just said I would help search. I began on the desk where the computer stood and Mrs Gavrilovich started going through the drawers of a bureau, where I'd seen Valentina writing cards and signing cheques. There were also three filing cabinets in the room and about a mile of shelves.

After a bit, I wished I'd taken the bureau and given Mrs Gavrilovich the desk, because more interesting things turned up in the bureau. There was a bag of champagne corks with dates written on them, each date apparently corresponding to the publication of one of Valentina's books. There was a leather lizard stuffed with dry beans, a packet of Polish joss sticks, some broken amber beads, a town plan of Beijing, a bottle of Ambre Solaire, an old photo of nurses and prams in the Luxembourg Gardens, a collection of theatre programmes, a bottle of scarlet nail polish, a magnifying glass with a pearl handle, seven boxes of old Christmas cards, a Russian history book, a paper knife stamped Made in Iceland and bank statements for five different bank accounts. I put the leather lizard on top of the computer, where he gazed out at the room, while I worked through the desk drawers.

All I found in these were stacks of envelopes and typing paper, staples and paperclips and rubber bands and scissors. There were files of press cuttings and a stash of manuals showing Valentina how to programme her telephone memory, set up her video recorder and mend her vacuum cleaner, should it ever break down. I was going through these when I heard Mrs Gavrilovich say: ‘Louis, here's something,' and when I turned I saw that she was reading Valentina's Filofax diary.

‘Hospital,' said Mrs Gavrilovich. ‘On Tuesday, after lunch with Grisha, Valentina had an appointment at the hospital.'

I put down the instruction manuals and we both stared at the diary entry:
Déjeuner G. Hôpital i6h 10
.

‘Unfortunately,' said Mrs Gavrilovich, ‘we don't know which department . . .'

‘X-ray,' I said.

Mrs Gavrilovich took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes with her stubby fingers. Then she found the hospital number and dialled it. She had to wait to be connected to the X-ray department. I saw the leather lizard watching me. I felt really stupid that I'd forgotten all about Valentina's hospital appointment. Porphiry Petrovich would never have had such a fatal memory lapse.

Mrs Gavrilovich had a short conversation with the receptionist at X-ray, talking slowly in her heavy French. ‘This person says,' she said, ‘that she didn't personally check Valentina in when she arrived, but saw her in the waiting area. She remembers admiring her dress.'

I thought, that's right: nobody who'd seen Valentina in that beautiful black-and-white dress would ever forget it. And I saw her again, clear as light:
she goes into the revolving door of the hotel and she turns and she waves
 . . .

I tried to blank the image out. I said: ‘I guess this tells us that Valentina definitely left Grisha when he got into the taxi at three-thirty, or before,' but as I was saying this I was getting a new thought. ‘Suppose,' I said, ‘that the taxi which left the hotel wasn't going to the airport? Suppose the taxi was taking Valentina and Grisha to the hospital and then later, after the hospital appointment, Grisha somehow persuaded Valentina to go back to Russia with him?'

Mrs Gavrilovich stared at me and the lizard stared at us both. The
brigadier
had told Alice that all evening flights to Moscow on that day would be checked for Passenger Gavril, but I knew and Mrs Gavrilovich knew that this was more or less a waste of time; if Valentina had wanted to disappear, she wouldn't have travelled under her own name.

We talked about all this for a while, then drifted back to our search of the bureau and the desk. In the last drawer of the bureau, Mrs Gavrilovich found a photograph album. As she hauled it out, she said: ‘Come, Louis, now I will show you when we were younger.' She laid it on the bureau and I stood by her as she began turning the pages.

It was ‘the time of the café', she said. Twenty years ago, before Anton died. And there was Anton, looking handsome, with thick dark hair and a walrus moustache, smiling by the bar, smiling sitting on his coal cart, smiling in a garden, wearing his best clothes, smiling with his arm round a beautiful blonde girl. ‘Valya,' said Mrs Gavrilovich.

The girl was Valentina. She was wearing a white embroidered blouse. Her hair was long and piled up on the top of her head. She'd lain her head on her father's shoulder. I thought, it's not surprising that I'm in love with someone so fantastically gorgeous.

We spent a long time going through the album. I saw the coal yard where Anton had died and the little dog, Semion, he'd owned at the time. There were photographs of a New Year's Eve party in the café, where everyone looked drunk and Valentina was kissing a man wearing a wastepaper basket on his head. ‘Alexis,' said Mrs Gavrilovich. ‘Valya's husband, long ago. Crazy, he was. You can see it, no? Completely crazy.'

‘What kind of crazy?' I asked.

‘Just crazy, Louis. Valentina came to me about one year after the wedding and said, “Matushka, last night Alexis tried to burn down the flat.” So she left him and came back to live with us over the café.'

‘What happened to Alexis?'

‘I don't know. Valya divorced him long ago. Perhaps he's still living, still crazy somewhere, still poor. Who knows?'

By the last page of the album, Valentina was fatter and Anton's hair was going grey. Mrs Gavrilovich had lost one of her front teeth and the terrier, Semion, had a white muzzle. The café, which was called the Café des Russes, had acquired an awning and the old horse and cart used for the coal deliveries had been replaced by a second-hand Citroën pick-up truck. There was only one other photo of Alexis. In it, he was lying on the ground in the snow, looking up at the sky.

Tucked loosely into the back of the album were two pictures of a young woman, sitting at a desk. I recognised the desk: it was the one I was going through right now. There was a different, smaller computer on it, but it was definitely Valentina's desk. ‘Who's this?' I asked.

Mrs Gavrilovich glanced at the photos and then looked away. She shook her head. ‘Aach,' she said. ‘That girl! Put them away.'

‘What girl?'

‘Trouble, that one. Nothing but trouble for Valya. Put her away.'

I took the pictures over to the desk and laid them face down in a drawer. I thought, I'll do as she says now, but I'm not going to forget about them.

That evening, a rainstorm came. I stood at my round window and looked out of it for ages, remembering rain. There were a few people in the windows opposite, staring out too, like you'd stare if war had broken out, or if the street had caught fire.

When the storm was over, the air smelled odd, like damp wool. I felt lonely. I thought, the days are just passing. What if September comes and we have to go back to England and Valentina still hasn't been found?

I picked up
Le Grand Meaulnes
, which had fallen under my bed. It was getting dusty under there. It was a long time since I'd read a word of it; I'd been diverted by
Crime and Punishment
. But now I thought, I want to see how François is holding up. I knew what he'd called his ‘days of sorrow' could be coming soon and I wanted to see what he did to get through them.

He was on a quest to find someone. It wasn't really his quest, but Meaulnes', whose only single waking and sleeping dream was to get back to the ‘lost domain' where he'd glimpsed Yvonne de Galais and made friends with her brother, Frantz. François has never met either of these people. The only evidence he has that they exist is this silk waistcoat Meaulnes brings back with him after his adventure. But this is all François thinks about, too – helping Meaulnes to find them. He never says, ‘Listen, Augustin, perhaps you dreamt up this fantastic château and the dazzling Yvonne and the fancy-dress party and Frantz's fiancée who never arrives; perhaps you fell asleep in the cart when you got lost and had the most brilliant dream of your life?' He just makes all that the centre of
his
existence and then his first real ‘day of sorrow' arrives.

Meaulnes announces suddenly that he's leaving Sainte-Agathe, because he's heard Yvonne is living in Paris. He just deserts François and Millie and Monsieur Seurel and everyone and goes off with hardly a word. François watches his carriage disappear at the turn of the road, then he says: ‘For the first time in months, I found myself alone before the prospect of a long Thursday afternoon, feeling as though my adolescence had been borne away in that old-fashioned carriage for ever.'