The Way I Found Her (40 page)

They took three pictures. Hugh told me that the reason he gave up Polaroid photography was because the film is too expensive. All the pictures he took faded in time to pale green.

I thought the kidnappers were going to go away without taking off the handcuffs, but they seemed to remember them at the last minute. They were really rough with me, pushing me around. As they were going out, I said: ‘Je voudrais de l'eau, s'il vous plaît.'

‘Yes,' said one of them, ‘water. OK.'

And then I imagined one of their photographs of me arriving in Alice's post and her staring at it and knowing, finally, that things couldn't go on and that now she'd have to send for Hugh.

All morning, I could hear the monkeys hanging around in the house, quite near us, talking. I knew that if I put the chair in the right position, I'd be able to read by the tiny gap of light, but I made a rule for myself: I'd only open the hole in the roof when I was pretty sure they were downstairs or out of the place altogether.

I sat on my mattress, thinking. No one had taken away my breakfast tray or emptied my bucket and the water I'd asked for never came. I'd never been in a situation in my life before where I longed so badly for something as simple as water. I thought, millions of people could be dying of thirst at this moment, in countries like Violette's that I never even used to know the name of. I'd
known
about these millions out there somewhere. But, before, I'd never been one of them. At home, day or night, I could go into the kitchen and open the fridge and take out more or less whatever I wanted. Hugh and Alice always made sure there was a supply of Coke in there, just for me.

I remembered Hugh reading me a fairy tale when I was about seven, about a guy who's thrown out of his land for stealing some king's daughter. The story didn't say how he'd stolen her, only that he had, like you might steal a cabbage or a pumpkin from someone's field. But the punishment is she turns into a stone.

And then a wise fisherman or someone comes to the man, who's about to be driven out into a desert with no possessions at all, and says to him: ‘Pick up the stone and take it with you and the stone will become whatever you want it to become.' I couldn't remember all the things the stone became. It never became the princess again, or a night-club hostess. This story was written long ago, when writers and readers had innocent minds. But the bit I remembered now was where the guy had put the stone into his mouth and it had become water.

There were thousands of questions I wanted to ask Valentina and I tried to list these in my mind, to make me forget about my thirst. After the water, the thing I longed for most was to
see
Valentina. I knew she'd probably look quite bad and that she wouldn't smell like she used to smell, of perfume or wallflowers, but that wouldn't stop me feeling the way I did about her. I'd still want to touch her and lie down with my head on her breasts.

When I'd listed most of my questions and time was still going so slowly and the monkeys were still talking down below us somewhere, I imagined the moment when Valentina and I, instead of being separated by a wall, would have to share this cell and share our every waking and sleeping moment and spend our nights together on my mattress.

I went to sleep and had a dream about Hugh. He was lurking there, on the edge of some dark place, biding his time.

What woke me was Valentina knocking on the wall. I might have been asleep for five minutes or five hours, I couldn't tell. I listened. The house was quiet.

‘Lewis,' said Valentina, ‘how are you, darling?'

‘OK,' I said. ‘I was dreaming.'

‘You know you must walk?'

‘What?'

‘You mustn't just lie down, Lewis, or you will get very weak. You must walk round and round your room, to exercise.'

I didn't feel like exercising. I felt like lying completely still until someone brought me two litre-bottles of Orangina.

‘I'm thirsty,' I said.

‘They didn't give you water?'

‘No.'

‘I will tell Alexis. They must bring it to you. Now we are going to walk. Where shall we walk to?'

‘In our minds?'

‘Yes. Shall we walk to Switzerland?'

‘OK.'

She said I had to walk round my room twenty times, then knock on the wall, and she would do the same. Then we'd do another twenty and so on. She told me to imagine all the things I was going to see on my walk: cows with bells round their necks,
edelweiss
flowers, groves of larch, people chopping wood for the winter, the high mountains covered with snow. ‘Off you go,' she said.

I preferred to walk in daylight, so I moved the chair and table first and found the slate and let the sun in. The sun had moved and was hotter. It fell on to the floor in a slightly different place.

Then I began my journey round Switzerland. I tried to imagine grass under my feet and the smell of the high pastures. The sky was blue, but there were quite a few clouds floating on by. I was walking along one side of a valley. At the end of my journey, there was going to be a freezing spring running down through a gully of stones.

Some time in the course of the day, the monkeys brought me a meal and a bottle of water. Before I could eat anything, I had to drink almost all the water.

The meal had been cooked by someone: it was a sort of stew with bits of meat and vegetables in it. I wondered which of the men had cooked it or whether one of them had a wife, who had stood at a stove wearing a flowered overall like Violette's, cooking this stuff to keep us alive. I thought that being married to any one of these monkeys might be terrible. Because I knew what they were now and who, and what I learned was really seriously frightening.

I'd said to Valentina: ‘Why are they doing this? Are they pill-heads or something?'

‘They're all on heroin, darling,' she said in a matter-of-fact way. ‘I know two of the others, Todorsky and Shukov; they're users and dealers. They were in prison for a while and now they're out. That's why they need a big amount of money. A heroin habit is very expensive.'

‘How do you know them?' I asked.

Valentina let a long silence go by before she replied. Then she said: ‘I used them once.'

‘You were on heroin?'

‘No. Never. I just did a bit of cocaine and so on, you know. It was at a very unhappy time.'

‘Unhappy time?'

‘Yes. When I had that American translator living with me.'

‘The one you killed?'

‘I didn't really kill her, darling. I just assisted her.'

‘Assisted her how? What to do?'

‘I knew these people – Alexis and his friend Leo Todorsky. I paid them and I said, “You give her what she wants, as much as she wants . . .”'

‘Of heroin?'

‘Yes. Of course. Why help someone to live, if they are killing you?'

‘Killing you?'

‘Yes. Why help them if they are just ruining your life? Better to let them go.'

‘How was she “ruining your life”?'

‘Oh, you know, the way a person can.'

‘What?'

‘I was her plaything. She despised me. She knew my background, my poor education. She tried to alter things in my books, without my knowing. She kept forgetting the one thing I was good at was languages. She once smuggled a lover up to that junk room in the attic. She made me suffer – too much, you know . . .'

‘I thought she went back to the States.'

‘She did.'

‘So she didn't really die?'

‘She did die. She died a month after she left me.'

I was silent. Now I knew about the end of Gail O'Hara's life. I wondered what still remained on the files I'd never found. I couldn't remember now what Lisette-Marie had told Violette about the two women screaming. Had it been Gail who had done all the screaming, or Valentina, or both of them? I just couldn't bring Violette's words back into my mind.

My next thought was, well, it doesn't matter now. I can forget all that now. But I immediately understood that I shouldn't forget it. I shouldn't forget it because the fact that Valentina
knew
her kidnappers, not just Alexis, and they knew that she knew them and could just give them up to the police the minute they released her was the most sinister realisation of the whole business. It was
prime
! With me, they used their stupid monkey masks because they wanted to conceal from me who they were, so that I'd never recognise them. This meant that when they'd got their ransom money, they could let me go. But how could they ever dare to let Valentina go? They couldn't! It was absolutely naïve and stupid to think that they would. Even if they stopped operating in Paris and went back to Russia, or something, she could still guide the police straight to them and the whole kidnap would have been in vain. So they weren't planning on letting her go. That was the truth of it. The moment they got their money, they would kill her.

I lay in the dark, holding on to the plastic bottle they'd given me, taking small sips from the water that remained in it. I was waiting for the men to go further away, so that I could talk to Valentina, but all the while a voice in my head said: ‘You have to save her. There's only you who can do it. You have to think of a way.'

I talked to her through the night. I knew it was night because the slit in my roof gradually faded and got dark.

We'd walked about five miles across Switzerland and Valentina said she was tired and that her broken arm still hurt from time to time and this was one of those times. She told me that on her walk she'd seen an avalanche, way up above her on the snow line.

When I asked her whether she thought Alexis and his friends would kill her when they'd collected their money, she said in a sort of laughing voice: ‘No, darling. That isn't part of the plan.'

I asked her why, but all she kept saying was she just didn't think Alexis would let her be killed. Only after a long time had gone by and I'd watched the moon come sliding up into the tiny gap above me did she say: ‘You know the reason they will definitely release me, Lewis?'

‘Tell me.'

‘Because Alexis is a poet.'

She was talking very quietly and I could hardly hear her. I kept having to say ‘What?' She told me Alexis was the first poet she'd ever met and this was why she'd fallen in love with him and agreed to marry him. She wanted to live in what she called ‘the world of the poet'; she thought life would be different there. It was through Alexis that she'd first got the idea of becoming a writer herself.

I said: ‘Just because he's a poet doesn't mean he couldn't kill you or let you be killed.'

‘Yes, it does,' she said. ‘You don't know Alexis. How could he write about anything after that? And his poetry is the only thing left in his life – the only thing.'

As we talked, the moon crept away from the gap in the slates and the room started to go dark again. I thought, the moon often travels across the sky faster than you think; it's never in medieval time, but always hurrying along in the here-and-now of absolute night.

Alexis had brought me a blanket. I knew it was him because he referred to me again as ‘le grand Meaulnes' and laughed his high-pitched laugh. I was tempted to tell him that I wasn't Augustin Meaulnes, I was François Seurel, listening for voices on his attic stairs, with his schoolteacher father and the mother he called by her first name. But I didn't want to antagonise Alexis. I didn't want him to snatch the blanket away. He was wearing his monkey mask when he came in with the blanket, but I could see his silhouette in the bright light. He looked very thin and his hair was long, right to his shoulders. And he breathed differently from the others, like there was something in his lungs or something eddying on the air that kept making him gasp.

When he'd gone, I said to Valentina: ‘Tell me more about Alexis. What kind of poetry does he write?'

‘What kind of poetry? Well, you know, it's quite good. Or it used to be. Depressing, but not bad, you know?'

‘Can you remember any?'

‘Remember any?'

‘Yes.'

‘No. When something is so depressing, it doesn't stay in my mind.'

‘Not even one?'

‘There was one he wrote about my father. The title was
Ugolny Sklad
. That means “coal bunker” or “coal store”. He said in the poem that my father's heart was becoming hard and black and brittle, like the coal, because the burden of the coal was too great, too great . . . and that poem was right . . .'

The blanket Alexis had given me was less prickly than the one I'd vomited over. It was sort of softened by wear. I pulled it round me, right up to my face, and I remembered Valentina saying, on that first evening in the Place des Ternes, that she never wanted to be cold or hungry ever again, nor have to live in a horrible little room smelling of coal. I lay in silence for a few minutes. I thought, she said this because she had a premonition that this was where she was going to die, but now she's refusing to believe in the seriousness of what's happening.

After a while, I said: ‘Why does Alexis have that strange laugh?'

‘What, darling? Speak louder.'

‘Why does he have that peculiar laugh? Does he put it on?'

‘I don't know. It's got more strange as time has gone by. I think it's not a laugh any more, but a cry.'

‘A cry?'

‘Yes. Like an animal cry – a rabbit or a rat or something.'

‘What's he crying about?'

‘His life. What else?'

After the breakfast of coffee and bread, I had to have my first shit into the bucket. I didn't dare sit on the bucket, in case it fell over. I thought, if you know you're going to have to live with your shit, right next to it, in the very room where you are, you try your best to keep it inside you.