The Way I Found Her (31 page)

I ignored everything Alice had said and walked past some lettuces and tomatoes towards the largest of the hothouses. Alice called after me, but I didn't turn round. I just went on into the hothouse and began looking at the rainforest plants, as if I were on my own. The heat in there was damp and smelled of earth and almost all the trees and cacti in it were vast and I felt my habitual admiration – of the kind that I felt for the Eiffel Tower – for enormous things. I should have been born a beetle.

By one of the ponds, there were some tiny turtles on a stone. They were so immobile, I thought they were made of plastic or something. Then they began slipping and sliding into the pool and swam down into the murk of it and out of sight. I thought, one of the thousand things human beings find difficult is staying absolutely still.

I saw Alice lurking on the other side of the pool. For once, she was looking at me anxiously, almost tenderly, but I didn't want to speak to her, so we each went round the hothouse alone, until we met up behind the waterfall and Alice said: ‘Did you see the turtles?'

‘Of course I saw them,' I answered.

We couldn't stay in there all day, it was too hot. There was sweat on my T-shirt and I began to feel thirsty. I walked out, knowing Alice would follow, and went to a little stall selling junk food and bought a can of Coke. Alice came up and offered to pay for it, but I said I'd already paid. Then, when I'd drunk half of it down, gulping like a frog, I announced: ‘I'm staying till Valentina's found. Dad can't make me go home and nor can you.'

‘No one's “making you” do anything,' said Alice calmly. ‘Hugh just gets the impression you're not happy here. Is that right?'

I told Alice this was an absolutely stupid idiotic question. Of course I wasn't ‘happy' when, at any time, we could get a call from Carmody telling us that Valentina's body had been found in a forest or dumped in a lime quarry. How could anyone be ‘happy' under circumstances like these?

Alice gave me one of her scrutinising looks. You could tell her brain was whirling with questions, and to forestall the one that was going to come out of her mouth next I said: ‘I want to know something. Did you show Grigory Panin Valentina's manuscript?'

There was a silence, during which Alice blinked. She hadn't expected me to come up with a question of my own.

‘No,' she said.

‘Did he ask you to show it to him?'

‘No. He asked me to tell him what it was about, that's all.'

‘And did you tell him?'

‘Yes.'

‘In detail?'

‘No. There wasn't really time. Just the thrust of the story, as far as I've got . . .'

‘And how did he react?'

Alice shrugged. ‘He wanted to clarify a few things. He seemed interested in it, more so than I would have expected. Why do you want to know all this, Lewis? It was you we were talking about . . .'

We began to walk on. We were going in the direction of the menagerie, where we'd first seen the bison and the cocktail trolley. I said that I didn't want to talk about me, that I had no remembrance of the me Alice was referring to, it had existed so far back in time. Then I added: ‘If you send me back to Devon before I find Valentina, she stands no chance of ever coming back.'

‘The police will find her,' said Alice gently.

‘No, they won't,' I said. ‘They don't have enough facts. They don't know what's important and what's useless. But I know. And one thing I think is, she could only be in Russia with Grigory
if
Grigory has seen her new book, so I hope you're not lying to me about that.'

Alice shook back her thorn-tree hair. She said she was surprised how I spoke to her these days, so rudely. We were in the
allée
of limes now and in this lovely shade I wanted to whisper that I was only rude because I knew she'd started lying to me. I felt cool and deadly, as if, without the least effort, I could dance along here, like a kick-boxer, laying waste everyone who got in my way.

I ran on a little way. My legs and feet felt light and I called back: ‘I don't mean to be rude to you. I just want to get at the answers, that's all.'

It was then that we came upon the bear. I don't know why we'd never seen him before; he must have been lurking in his tunnel under the ground, ignoring the sunlight and the world. But he was there now, in his pit, twenty feet below us, a yellowy-brown bear with his long nose always pointing towards the people above him, trying to smell them and work out what creatures they were. The young kids called to him and held their arms over the wire. They thought he was something they could take home with them and put into their beds on winter nights to keep them warm.

Alice and I hung over the pit and stared. There was almost nothing in the pit except a pathetic tree-sculpture the bear was meant to feel happy about climbing, but you could tell he didn't feel happy about anything; he wanted to be out of this awful place and back on a Canadian mountainside, munching bees. His world was empty of everything except the smell of people and this smell confused him and kept him wandering round and round the pit, with his nose lifted into the air.

The bear made me feel ridiculously sad. I actually felt like holding on to Alice and weeping. Some of my sadness was for the bear and all the rest was for me. After enduring this choking feeling of misery for several minutes, I said: ‘I don't know why this had to happen!'

‘I know,' said Alice.

She didn't ‘know', of course. She couldn't have begun to imagine. If I'd told her one half of what I felt about Valentina, she would have just thought my brain was overheating, like it did when I was a child and imagined the German paratrooper alive in our cellar.

I didn't want to stay in the Jardin des Plantes after seeing the bear. I wanted to be back in the flat, so that I could call Carmody and continue my search for the disks. Alice suggested we go to a café and have a meal, but for once I didn't feel hungry. I said to Alice: ‘We can't just act normally, you know, going to cafés and things, when Valentina could be dead.'

‘Lewis,' said Alice firmly, ‘don't be such a prig.'

Then we travelled all the way home in total absolute silence. As usual, men on the métro stared at Alice, but instead of keeping watch over her I turned my face to the window and let the sooty tunnels and the bright stations alternate in front of my eyes.

The flat was tidy when we got in, with all Valentina's underwear and the musical boxes put away. Violette had also polished the parquet and the floors were gleaming and slippery again, like in the days before Valentina's broken arm. I didn't know whether Violette was getting paid any more or if she was working for nothing until the day when Madame walked back into the apartment and I ran towards her and put my arms round her.

There was a message on the answering machine. It was from Dominique Monod at the publishers, Bianquis, inviting Alice to supper that evening ‘to discuss the situation vis-à-vis Mademoiselle Gavril'. It said a car would call for her at seven-thirty. I said to Alice I thought it sounded more like a summons than a charming invitation to dinner, but all Alice said was: ‘At least she's sending a car.'

I wasn't invited, needless to say, so Alice gave me some money and told me to go to Prisunic and get some food. In the old days of our life in Devon I never had to get my own meals, but now everything was altering all the time.

I took Sergei with me and tied him up outside Prisunic, where he started barking at the bird whistler, and as I went into the store I heard the bird whistler bark back.

Alice hadn't told me what food to get. Valentina would have devised some delicious concoction for me, using ingredients you never imagined putting together, like, say, petits pois and anchovies. But now I just walked along the shelves, staring at tins of vegetables and packets of meat and cartons of yoghurt and felt my brain go numb. I wished I were Sergei and could make do with a tin of dog meat. The idea of cooking anything without Valentina's step-by-step instructions felt much too difficult.

In the end, I just got two litre-bottles of Orangina, a packet of crisps, some bread and some ham. I knew this was pitiful and that, when the time for supper came, I'd wish I'd bought Mexican chicken wings and oyster mushrooms and sour cream or something, but I just didn't understand the
science
of cooking, and that was that. I couldn't see what the connection was between a raw leek, say, and leek soup. I couldn't envisage what it was that the leek had to undergo.

On the way home, I approached the bird whistler. I said: ‘Show me what you do,' and he took out of his mouth a tiny little plastic gizmo, the shape of a half-moon, and coloured pink to match his tongue. ‘Sifflet du chasseur,' he said, ‘pour imiter la perdrix, la caille, le merle, la grive et le cri du lapin.' I'd never noticed rabbits had a cry. But I didn't mention this to the whistle-seller; I bought one of his whistles instead, with the rest of the supper money given to me by Alice, and all the way home, with the whistle pressed against my tongue and the roof of my mouth, pretended to be a bird. I don't know what kind of bird I was pretending to be.

When I got back, I put my food away. Already, it looked hopeless and unappetising and even the bread was hard. I began wondering if Moinel was a good cook and whether, once Alice had left, I could invite myself to supper next door. Then, thinking about Moinel, I began to reconstruct our visit to the hospital and I knew, suddenly, what had been nagging at my mind on our way back from there: the second receptionist we'd approached had asked us a question without using a definite article – exactly the mistake that Grisha made all the time. She'd said: ‘Etes-vous police?' And it was this phrase that had stayed in my mind, hidden just under the surface of consciousness. But my French simply wasn't perfect enough to know, for certain, whether it constituted a linguistic error or not.

I went to ask Alice, but the door of her room was locked. When I knocked on it, Alice called out to me that she was sleeping. She told me to go away. I got the suspicion that, just as I had moments of wanting to drown my parents, so Alice had moments of wanting to drown me. But I needed an answer to my question now, so I said, ‘Just tell me, if you wanted to ask someone, in French, if they were from the police, how would you phrase the question?'

There was a silence, into which I knew Alice was fitting a sigh. Then she said: ‘You'd either say: “Etes-vous de la police?” or “Etes-vous des policiers?”'

‘Could you never, ever, say: “Etes-vous police?”'

‘You could say it but it wouldn't be correct.'

‘So no French person would ever make this mistake?'

‘I doubt it. Now please go and play chess or something, Lewis. I'm feeling really tired.'

I went up to my room and opened my Concorde notebook. Sometimes I can write something down that I didn't know I knew and I hoped this would happen now – that I'd suddenly see the significance of there being a Russian receptionist at the very desk where Valentina had or had not checked in for her X-ray appointment. I knew it had to be important, but I couldn't see why. All I wrote was:
Second receptionist was (probably) Russian. Her behaviour was rude. She didn't want to take the photo of V. Why?

I picked up Elroy absent-mindedly and we both stared vacantly out at the room. After about ten minutes had passed, something dawned on me. Perhaps this Russian receptionist hadn't wanted to take the photograph of Valentina
because she'd recognised her
! She'd recognised her because Valentina
had
reported for her appointment on that Tuesday afternoon. The Russian receptionist had been the one to check her in. And then Valentina had disappeared. She had disappeared
from the hospital
. The Russian receptionist had been involved in the disappearance.

In this way, when the time came for her to be called in to Dr Bouchain's consulting room, she was no longer there. At this point, a different receptionist was at the desk. In the crucial ten or fifteen minutes between Valentina arriving and being called to go in to see the doctor, the shift at the desk changed, and so the new (non-Russian) receptionist looked around and called and told Dr Bouchain that Valentina had never arrived.

I scribbled down this hypothesis. I thought, if I'm right, everything will hinge on the lack of a definite article. But the question remained: if Valentina had been abducted from the hospital, who had taken her and how? Had she been called to the phone? Had someone come in posing as a doctor? Who, apart from Dr Bouchain, knew she had an appointment with the X-ray department that afternoon? Was Dr Bouchain himself involved? Was the Russian receptionist definitely the one who had led her away? And what happened next? Assuming she left the hospital, where was she taken and how?

My brain felt a bit exhausted, as if I were in the middle of a difficult chess game. I hesitated between two actions – calling Carmody or going straight to the hospital, myself, now. I just sat where I was, hesitating, mainly because, for some reason I couldn't actually express, I felt frightened by both things.

Didier had explained to me that when an existentialist is faced with two choices and can't decide between them, and so does nothing, he is still making a choice:
he is choosing not to choose
. He said: ‘But we can't take refuge in a non-decision, Louis. A non-decision is a decision of a kind. We have to take responsibility for whatever comes from it.'

I didn't want to make a non-decision. In one of my reports, the head teacher Mr Quaid had written:
Lewis is a person of resolution
. So I decided to call Carmody. It was still only mid-afternoon and I was fairly sure he'd be in his office. Calling him frightened me less than going to the hospital. It was like I knew that if I went to the hospital I'd see something I'd rather not see.