The Way I Found Her (39 page)

I returned to my mattress and lay with my head close to the wall. I could still hear the men's voices. Sometimes they spoke in French and sometimes in Russian. They sounded now as if they were arguing and cursing. I imagined Valentina lying very still on her mattress and listening to them too. I thought, her body is probably no further than half a metre away from mine.

How I imagined Valentina was exactly as I'd last seen her, looking smart, wearing her black-and-white dress and her ‘Ypres' scarf, and smelling of her
Giorgio
perfume, going into the revolving door of the Hôtel de Venise. But three weeks had passed. They might have taken away her expensive clothes. They might have given her some old, horrible dressing gown to wear. They would have pulled off her rings and her bracelet and sold them. Nobody would have thought about letting her wash her hair . . .

The voices quietened down and then a door banged and there was silence. Then I heard Valentina knock on my wall again and I gave an answering knock. In the pitch dark, her voice, when it next came, sounded nearer than before.

‘Lewis,' she said. ‘What's happening outside? Where's Alice?'

‘In the apartment. Alice is safe and your mother is safe and Sergei is safe.'

‘Thank God. Pauvre Maman . . . What about the money?'

‘Money?'

‘Yes. What's happening about the money?'

‘What money?'

‘The ten million francs. Are they going to pay it?'

‘Who?'

‘Can you hear me, darling?'

‘Hardly . . .'

‘Money, Lewis. Ransom money. Can you hear? Are Bianquis going to pay it?'

I lay very still. I was about to say that no ransom demand had come, but then I suddenly realised that perhaps it had. It
had
and no one had told me! I'd thought I was way ahead of Carmody and Alice in my detective work, but all the time Alice was going to her meetings with the editor from Bianquis and what they were discussing was a ransom demand I knew nothing about. I thought, that's why Alice wanted to tell me about her and Didier: she was getting too full up with lies and she had to make room for others.

‘I don't know . . .' I said.

‘Speak louder, darling. I can't hear.'

I thought, I mustn't invent anything. I must stay close to what I know, as far as I can. I said: ‘Alice had some meetings with Dominique Monod. That's all I know. And the police have been told . . .'

‘The police?'

‘Yes.'

There was a moment's silence, then Valentina said: ‘I warned Alexis . . .'

‘What?'

‘I told him that the police would be involved by now. He's such a baby. He doesn't know how the world works.'

When the kidnappers came into my room again, they were wearing masks. They were the kind of cheap plastic masks you could buy in toy-shops anywhere and the ones these kidnappers had chosen were monkey faces. It made them look really stupid. If I'd been a kidnapper, I would have chosen something evil like a skull.

They didn't blindfold me or handcuff my wrists, because they knew they couldn't be recognised through these monkey masks.

One of them gave me a tray. On the tray was a slice of baguette and a tin mug of coffee. The other one crouched there with the light, watching me. Then he suddenly laughed. It was a high, tittering laugh, like you could imagine a real monkey might have. ‘Le grand Meaulnes!' he giggled. ‘English translator!'

I said nothing. I wanted to ask him to bring my blanket back, but I didn't. I thought if I said anything or asked for anything, he might jump forward and snatch the bread and coffee away.

They went out and I heard them go next door, into the room where Valentina was. I put my ear to the wall and listened. The moment the men entered Valentina's cell I heard a furious burst of Russian coming from her lips.

It was the guy with the tittering laugh who answered her. His voice was high like the laugh and he yelled at her, also in Russian, and both of them were just yelling and not listening to the other. Then Valentina screamed and I heard something fall on to the floor of her room. I wanted to call out to her, but I put my hand in front of my mouth. She was really yelling now, repeating a phrase that sounded like
‘yob tvoyu mat! yob tvoyu mat!
' and the man was laughing, just as he'd laughed at me. Then I heard Valentina's door being slammed and locked and the men went away.

I knocked on the wall. ‘Valentina . . .' I said.

‘Son of a bitch!' she said. ‘How could he have done this?'

‘Done what?'

‘To capture you . . . how could they do such a stupid, terrible thing? I told Alexis he was slime . . .'

‘What was the noise? Did something fall?'

‘He threw the hot coffee over me.'

‘He threw the coffee?'

‘Yes. Exactly like a child, you see? I curse him. I curse the day I met him!'

I waited for a moment, then I asked: ‘Who's Alexis?'

‘Alexis?'

‘Yes.'

There was a long silence. I reached out in the dark for my own coffee, not just to drink it, but to see how hot it was, to see how much I would have burned . . .

‘Alexis was my husband,' said Valentina.

I remembered it all then: the young man in the photo album, the man with the wastepaper basket on his head, the man lying with his arms outstretched in the snow. I heard Mrs Gavrilovich say: ‘He was crazy, Louis. Just crazy.'

I ate the bread and drank the coffee. I thought, I shouldn't be eating and drinking when Valentina has been burned by the scalding coffee, but I can't help myself.

After that, I needed to pee, so I crept over to my bucket toilet and took off the lid. Inside the bucket were some sheets of newspaper, torn up. They were to wipe my bum with, like people in England had to do during the war. Grandma Gwyneth once said to me: ‘The secret was to scrunch the paper up, Lewis. You scrunched it up several times and this made it almost soft.'

I put the paper in a pile under the table. I thought, I must know exactly where everything is located, so that I can get to it in the dark.

In my whole life, I'd never peed into a bucket. In hospital, they made you piss into a sort of papier-mâché jar. But I knew that in certain prisons in Britain that was what the men still had to do – use a bucket as a toilet in their cells – like this was meant to be part of their punishment. But a prison inmate said in a newspaper interview I'd read that the thing he hated most, worse than the shit pails, was the boredom of every single day.

And it occurred to me now, now that we'd been given our breakfast, that I'd been expecting something to happen today, like I was anticipating that Valentina and I would be put into a car and taken somewhere, out in the air. But
nothing was going to happen
. That was the reality of our situation. Absolutely nil zero was going to happen. We'd just be left here, in these cold, dark rooms, for hour upon hour and day after day. There would be no variation whatsoever. We were hostages. We were in medieval time.

I thought one of the men would come and collect my breakfast tray, but he didn't. After about an hour had passed, I moved the table and chair to where I thought the loose slate was and began to feel around to find it. It wasn't so cold in the room any more and I thought, what may come through when I move the slate is sunlight.

Valentina had been silent for a while. I'd knocked gently on the wall, but no answering knock had come from her side. I wondered if she was asleep or whether she was lying there thinking, and, if so, what she was thinking about. In all the time that she'd been here with nothing to do, she might have been finishing her novel in her mind.

I tried to work out how much ten million francs was. I calculated it at about £1,200,000. And then I wondered: will Alexis ask for money for
my
life? Will Hugh and Alice have to sell the house in Devon and the car and everything they own? Suppose he asks them for a million pounds? What happens if a ransom just can't be paid?

It took me quite a long time to locate the loose slate. Before moving it, I stayed still, listening, in case the monkeys were coming back, but there was no sound of them. I didn't know whether they stayed in this place all the time, or whether, in the daytime, they just left us locked up and went back to their apartments and got on with normal life. I tried to remember what else Mrs Gavrilovich had told me about Alexis. I wondered what had happened to the wastepaper basket he'd once put on his head and whereabouts the snow had been falling when he lay in it.

When I moved the slate, just as I thought, a shaft of sunlight came in and seemed to light up my whole room. I felt so pleased and delighted, it was like the sunlight was a fucking crock of gold. I put my face up into the light and felt the warmth of it. I thought, I must never, never, let the kidnappers discover this.

Listening all the time for the return of the monkeys, I got Elroy's string and, fixing one of his arms to a tear in the edging of the mattress, ran the string out along the floor and knotted it where the light fell. I knew reflected sunlight can move; it can go in a kind of spooky arc around the walls, but at this time in the morning it would always be more or less exactly here.

Now that I could see the room better, I realised that it was incredibly dirty. The walls were rough-plastered and had once been whitewashed, but now the paint was flaky and there were stains and cracks and dirt everywhere. Some of this dirt was suspicious kind of dirt: it was dark brown. I wondered if the room where Valentina was being held was as dirty as this and whether she could see it.

I got down from my chair and began casing the room again, searching every inch of it, like people search every inch of ground in a murder hunt. Under the hay, I found some mouse droppings and the idea that there was a mouse in here with me was bad. And I didn't want there to be spiders, either. I found one, quite small, and killed it with my tin mug. I don't know what it had been living on. You never know with them; it's like they can live on dust.

I could hear a bird on the roof. I thought, if I get crazy with loneliness, I could talk to birds with my sifflet du chasseur. And it was thinking about this that made me realise that, if I could disturb a second slate, it might be possible to make a hole in the roof large enough to stick my head through. Then I'd not only be able to look at the sky, but also try to fathom out where this place was and whether we were still in Paris or out in the
banlieue
, or way off in the country somewhere, with fields and poplar trees round us, like on that woman's farm in the Auvergne.

So this is what I tried to do next, work on the slates adjacent to the loose one, trying to feel where each pin went in and loosen the slate around the pin. I worked from above and below. Anyone flying over this house could have seen my hand sticking out through the hole. But I couldn't get any other slate to move. I needed some kind of levering instrument, to prise the pins out from the batons.

I gave up for the time being and returned to my inch-by-inch reconnaissance. When I arrived at the sawn-off pipe, it suddenly had a new significance: where it turned and went into the wall, it had to arrive on the other side – in Valentina's room.

I knocked on the wall and she answered. ‘Lewis,' she said, ‘I promise you, you will get out of here, darling. I shall make Alexis release you.'

I didn't know whether she could ‘make' Alexis do things or not. I thought, people in captivity probably only have one kind of power over their captors and that's a sort of moral power. Even in their darkest hours, when they're being beaten or tortured, they still have it. But it's invisible, it's just in people's minds.

‘Listen,' I said. ‘Can you hear this?'

I got my tin mug and began drumming on my end of the pipe. The song I was privately drumming was
Le Temps des cerises
.

‘Yes,' said Valentina.

‘Does this pipe come into your room?'

‘Does it come into the room?'

‘Yes.'

‘Yes. It comes into the room.'

‘Where does it go? Does it go to a tank?'

‘It doesn't go anywhere.'

‘What? Speak louder, Valentina.'

‘The pipe doesn't go anywhere. It just sticks out of the wall and stops.'

‘It stops?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is the end open?'

‘No. It's been capped.'

We both heard it then, the sound of someone returning. Underneath us, there were some noisy stairs that sounded as if they were made of wood.

I scuttled over to the table and chair and moved the slate, shutting off the sunlight. Replacing the table by the wall always made a noise, as it scraped on the tile floor. I put the chair back and began winding in Elroy's string. As I was doing this, my door was unlocked.

The light shone in, as usual. There were two kidnappers and their masks were on. I was hauled to my feet and I felt the handcuffs going on. Then I was tugged several feet and slammed against the back wall. I thought, I hope they're not as rough as this with Valentina.

‘Stand up!' said the monkey who smelled of cigarettes. ‘Stand up, English boy!'

I saw him move away from me, just a couple of paces. I thought, now's the moment when something really bad is going to happen. I held on to the wall.

‘Stand up!' one of them shouted again. I wanted to say that I
was
standing up. Were they blind, or what? But I kept quiet.

They began photographing me. I heard the click and buzz of a Polaroid camera. When I was little, Hugh went through a passion for Polaroid photography. There I am in my Baby Bouncer, dangling from a doorway; there I am on the lawn, on a plastic tricycle; there I am in my playpen, staring through the bars . . .