The Eyes of Lira Kazan (18 page)

“Not really, just another client on the Côte d'Azure.”

There were some awkward silences, and a certain solemnity, hardly broken by the sound of glasses and cups clinking behind the counter. Charlotte kept touching the lobes of her ears as though she had lost her earrings, or was trying to avoid the issue. They were both wary, although not necessarily of one another. The embarrassment was almost tangible – the stakes were so high, after all.

“Isn't there anyone, a friend perhaps, who could introduce me to her?” Félix asked.

Charlotte MacKennedy shook her head. She didn't give him Nwankwo's name. And Félix didn't tell her what he had. Conversation soon ran out. Finally she asked him for his details, just in case. Félix pulled out a notebook, tore out a page, and wrote down his number, asking her to get in touch if she heard anything. She did the same, pulling a fat diary out of the chaos of her handbag and handing him a card, held between red-varnished fingertips. They separated on the pavement. He watched her as she walked back towards the office, turning round occasionally to make
sure he wasn't following her. Her shopping bag swung on her arm. It was certainly heavy…

Suddenly Félix realized that the shampoo he had seen sliding by on the mat was for blondes, and Charlotte MacKennedy was a brunette! That was why the pants she had bought had been out of character. She wasn't shopping for herself, it must be stuff for Lira. All he needed to do was wait for her to come back out of the office and then follow her. The journalist would lead him to Lira.

Two hours later Charlotte MacKennedy reappeared on the pavement. Félix had had nothing to do but simply wait all that time, brooding and puzzling, thinking about the shampoo for blondes on the mat. He realized now that he couldn't go back to the law courts and become clerk to another judge. It was impossible, he had slipped his moorings. Charlotte crossed the road and walked a little way down. Nwankwo was waiting there in his car. He took the bag. Félix watched them from the corner of the street. They were talking through the window, which meant he was about to drive off at any minute. He would lose sight of him when he could quite clearly lead him straight to Lira. It was now or never. He would tell Nwankwo what he had with him.

He walked quickly along the pavement opposite the car, planning to cross in front of it to stop it from setting off. Charlotte only spotted him at the last minute. She opened her eyes wide, and Nwankwo turned around, alarmed. Félix put his hand in his pocket, to take out a card, or the memory stick, to show that he must be heard. What he had not foreseen was Nwankwo's police guards who, seeing him digging into his jacket, thought he had a gun and leapt on him, forcing him to the ground.

Charlotte shouted: “Don't hurt him, that's the man I was just telling you about.” Nwankwo got out, and told the policemen to release him. He helped Félix up, checked that he wasn't armed and suggested that he get into the car. Charlotte hesitated, but Nwankwo told her to go back to her
office. “The less you know the better.” He set off, but only drove a few yards and parked the car a bit farther down the street. He was already regretting the presence of his police escort, who were protecting him, but also watching him.

Félix told Nwankwo everything: where he had come from, what he knew and above all about the documents in his possession. He spoke factually and precisely like the clerk that he was, but sometimes his voice broke and he seemed to be begging: let me get close to you, come with you for the next few days, join my powerlessness to yours; let me help you, we've both lost a lot, let's put what we have left together. He felt no reciprocal warmth from Nwankwo, who stared at him fixedly, trying to gauge what sort of person he was.

“If what you say is true, you're mad to wander around London alone.”

“You know where she is.”

This, from Félix, was a statement, not a question.

“Lira is blind, she can't help you.”

“You have no idea what's in here – thousands of names, transactions, it's dynamite!”

“Have you got a mobile?” Nwankwo finally asked. “Turn it off and remove the battery. I'll take you there. Lira will be happy to know that there's someone who needs her.”

Lira was in the garden, barefoot on the grass, her legs slightly apart, her arms hanging loose, her fists closed tight. She slowly advanced one foot and then the other, then raised her fist, advanced again and punched. She willed her body to remember the moves; she recited a kata, one of the very first sequences she had learnt. She looked like someone walking on a tightrope, or in their sleep. It was slow and soft compared with what she had been able to do in the past, but she understood more clearly than ever what these gestures in the void really meant: imaginary combat was all she had left, an imaginary combat with herself, with invisible enemies in front, behind, to the side. She had to keep turning, taking her bearings in the space around her. She repeated the same gesture five, ten times over, each time a little faster. The policeman from Scotland Yard, instructed by Nwankwo to stay there, watched in amazement.

Eventually Lira paused, her body unsteady. She asked the policeman:

“Tell me, is the house on that side?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. She still knew where she was. She could feel the house near her, not just as a shadow but as a solid mass. She walked straight forwards, her hands before her, balancing with her arms. When she reached the door, she sat gently down on the porch steps. With her eyes hidden behind her huge dark glasses she could have been just an ordinary woman catching the last rays of the sun.

She didn't know anything about this house that Nwankwo had brought her to, just that it was normally lived in by a family with children. On the first evening he had run her a bath. He had put two chairs next to the bathtub, a towel
on one, the other for her to sit on. He had led her there, helped her sit down, taken off her shoes, and folded the jumper she handed to him. Then he had gone out, promising to stay just the other side of the door in case she needed help. She had undressed and groped her way into the hot water, holding on tight to the edge of the bathtub. On the bottom she could feel one of those rubber mats put there to stop small children from slipping. He had left it there for her. She must have stayed too long in the water: when she tried to get out the heat of the bath combined with the darkness and steam around her had made her dizzy and she lost her balance. She had called out and he had come back in. She was naked and dripping, crouched prudishly against the bathtub, laughing so as not to cry. He had picked up the towel and wrapped it round her, had helped her to get up and sit down.

“Sorry to inflict the sight of a cripple on you,” she had muttered.

“That wasn't what I saw,” he had replied.

She was now trying to make herself familiar with this refuge. She imagined it having flowery lampshades, armchairs with high armrests, glass-fronted walnut cupboards – what she saw as a typical English interior, or any typical interior. She had never been interested in decor, always thinking that there would be plenty of time for that when she was old and unable to do much outside. Now it was too late. Back at home in St Petersburg there were photographs that would never be framed, naked light bulbs, curtains that wouldn't be changed, walls with yellowing paintwork… She went back there in her mind, guided by memory and regrets. She wandered like a ghost through her rather chaotic flat, along the bookcases with photos of Polina along their edges. September 1989, the year she was born – a beautiful baby in a pink cardigan with red flowers knitted by her mother. Next to that, the following year, Polina was sitting on a wooden horse on an old-fashioned carousel, held by
Dmitry's invisible hands. Lira went from one photograph to the next, from one year to the next. She wanted to hold on to them all, trying to remember the date, the place, the colour of the sky, the clothes in each one; she worked on her memory as though it was a muscle, she was determined not to forget. Her memories would be her eyes.

She could clearly see the photo of herself at thirteen, en pointe, a perfect little girl in a tutu, her hair in a gleaming chignon, her large blue eyes raised to the ceiling. She had just won the first prize at the Conservatoire. That photo had been at her parents' house for a long time, until they replaced it with the one of her wedding to Dmitry. They only liked pictures of their daughter in fancy dress.

Dmitry must have called them. Her father would be sighing, complaining that she had never done the right thing. Her mother, as usual, would be secretly crying and supporting her. Lira banished these thoughts from her mind. Another photo: last winter, she was laughing on a windy seashore by the Baltic. The person who took it must have loved her to make her look so beautiful, and yet the affair hadn't lasted long.

Beyond the bookcase was the leather armchair and the big mirror with the chipped gilt frame. Lira might have been a busy woman who didn't bother with much make-up, but she would glance at herself in it morning and evening, moving her head, adjusting her hair, moistening her lips, doing everything to like what she saw. All that was over. She had lost sight of herself now.

She was learning now to plunge down into her memories as others plunge into sleep. She blocked sadness off, biting back the rising tears, tried to avoid brooding on the question that tormented her: would it have been better if she had died? The simplest solution would be just to collapse, everybody would understand. But crying was forbidden. She would remain upright before all these mirrors that now served no purpose.

A car stopped. Two doors slammed, there were two people walking across the gravel. Lira stiffened.

“It's me, Lira!” Nwankwo shouted, guessing how frightened she would be. “I've brought the string you wanted. And we've got a visitor.”

Lira got up slowly, her hand on the wall of the house. She didn't very much like the smell of this visitor, but she liked his first words.

“I've been looking for you,” Félix said.

 

New Scotland Yard.
Report From Detective Inspector Dave Smith.
15th September

 

 

 

 

Nwankwo Ganbo has installed the blind Russian journalist Lira Kazan in his house at 22 Dawson Street, Oxford.

She does not often leave the house, occasionally spends some time in the garden.

Ganbo stays with her.

For the last two days another man has joined them in the morning.

His first name is Félix. He is French. Photo attached.

They shut themselves in the sitting room. They seem to be working.

Microphones have been installed.

And then there were the nights. “Lie down, Lira. Relax, breathe. It's going to be all right. I'm here…” Nwankwo spoke to her like that each time the nightmares started again. She called, he came running. He would find her sitting up, sobbing. There was no point turning the light on. Nwankwo would sit beside her, holding her hand, in the big room with the double bed where he used to sleep with Ezima.

At first they had been awkward together, linked only by their rigid determination to continue, but that stage had now passed. He was no longer the hyper-tense and over-polite teacher, who seemed to deny the folklore and loud laughter of his own people. And she was no longer the kind of woman who couldn't stand the emotions and tears of other women.

And so they did the best they could, clinging to one another. Nwankwo was caught between two worlds, two lives; Lira between her memories and the total darkness that surrounded her.

The empty house was now laced with pieces of string stretched between the rooms, a curious idea that Lira had borrowed from the old blind man in St Petersburg. During the day she would guide herself around by feeling the string with the tips of her fingers; at night he would run his finger along it – in his other, normal life he would have been stumbling over his children's toys. Now he was woken up, not just by Lira's nightmares, but by his own. At the faintest sound of an engine outside, or the smallest flicker of headlights he would be up and standing against the window of his room, which he had chosen because it was at the front of the house. Two targets in the same house – it was just too
dangerous. The protection supplied by the British police would soon be withdrawn. Nwankwo was not sorry – he had broken his promise, and the police must know that.

They would have to leave.

Lira often heard him pacing up and down. She thought about something Dmitry had often accused her of: he said that all this activity of hers was simply away of escaping from intimacy and a private life, of freeing herself from the fear of actually having to confront real life. During the silences of her imaginary conversations with him she wanted to retort that where she was hiding now fear was a permanent condition, with hostile armies lurking among the shadows. But of course, deep down she knew that he was right. It wasn't Louchsky's plots that were making her cry out in the night, it was just her terrible loneliness.

And then there were the days. Each morning, in the privacy of her bedroom, Lira would rehearse a few movements, gestures of avoidance and defence which demanded total precision from her hips, ankles and hands. She had already broken a lamp with her karate moves but it didn't matter; she gained a sense of continuity from the pursuit of these old exercises and challenges. She liked to believe that the half, quarter and full turns that she practised between these four walls would help her to walk straight ahead when the time came to set off alone along a street. But when would that be?

Félix arrived around eleven each morning, after an hour's drive. The room was filled with his over-strong scent. “Well like that I always know you're there,” Lira had said. She had let her hands wander over his shoulders, his face, his hair – “You know, I've never seen you”. They quickly got to work. Everything they had already known about the vast secret system, the international connections and complicit banks, but had been unable to prove – it was all there now in black and white. But there was an enormous amount of material and it all had to be deciphered. Félix sat in front
of the computer on the dining-room table and read out the deposits, the withdrawals and, line by line, dates, names and figures. He spoke entirely in abbreviations. Lira sat curled up on the sofa, listening and repeating them to herself in whispers as though trying to imprint information that she could not read onto her brain. Nwankwo, for his part, took notes and drew arrows and diagrams. Of the three, he was the teacher: he had certainly trawled through plenty of bank statements during his career as an investigator.