The Gloaming (24 page)

It took a moment for his pupils to dilate. The receptionist was a pretty, smiling girl. She wore a name tag identifying her as Alice. Her skin was perfect—smooth and clear so that it shone like polished wood. ‘Good afternoon, sir,' she said in careful English. ‘How may we help you today?'

‘I'm hoping I have the right hotel. A friend of mine is staying here. She recommended it.'

‘What is her name, sir?'

‘Pilgrim Jones.'

Alice eschewed the large gray desktop—blind and silent. She flipped through a battered Guest Registry book. On the wall above hung a notice promising ‘Wi-Fi in every r
m!' Who had drawn the smiley faces? Alice?

She triumphantly closed the book. ‘I remember her! A very pretty lady. She was here for only a few days. And then she went with Mama Gloria.'

‘Mama Gloria?'

‘She is very kind. She is trying to help the AIDS orphans.'

‘I see. That's good of her. How could I contact Miss Jones?'

Alice thought a moment, then opened a door to a closet-sized office. Inside, a young man hunched over a table of accounts. They conferred.

‘Miss Jones we don't know. But Mama Gloria. All the drivers know her. We all know her,' she waved a hand prettily, then pushed a registration form toward him. ‘You are staying with us now? In-suite room is fifty US per night, breakfast included.'

‘I'd like the same room as Pilgrim. If that's possible.'

Nodding, she selected a key and delivered it to him with a bright smile. However, this changed when she saw his money. She took one twenty and handed the other bills back. ‘Oh, sorry, sir.'

‘What?'

‘These dollars. Pre-millennium we cannot accept.'

‘Why not? They are legal tender. I got them from a bank in Switzerland.'

‘Do you have others? We cannot take these.'

‘I don't understand. Switzerland is the banking capital of the world.'

She smiled, a lovely smile that he realized was a wall. He could bash his head against it to zero effect.

Strebel rifled through his wallet and found notes that met her requirements. ‘Please be comfortable,' she said.

In his room—Pilgrim's room—he removed his clothes. He peeled them, for they stuck like eggshell to the damp, pale egg of his body. He strode hopefully to the shower in the small bathroom—the ‘in-suite.' There was a single tap. He turned it. The shower head sputtered, emitting a brief, violent jet the color of cola. Strebel wanted to shout and hit it, but there was nothing at hand except his bottle of shampoo.

Then the water came, cold and clear and steady. He stepped into it with deep gratitude that allowed him to comprehend the miracle of a tap. Why had he never considered how few people on the planet had experienced a shower?

* * *

He awoke later, abruptly, a copy of
Newsweek
stuck to his bare chest. He recalled only lying down, the overexcited squeak of the bed springs. Reading? An article about Sudan. Or was it Somalia? Terrible things, he couldn't comprehend—even as a policeman. The scale of atrocities frightened him because it implied original sin, rather than tightly contained circles of abuse. In Switzerland, specific excuses could be made: bad parents, mental illness. He had managed to fall asleep, mid-atrocity: gangs of men with mirrored sunglasses and guns committed the most gruesome genocide to court international attention.

Ingrid had recently told him that horror was inconvenient, coming at you on the TV news before dinner. You resent it, she'd said, and you feel bad resenting it, and wonder what you should do to not feel bad. But the only solution is to undergo some kind of fundamental change in how you live your life, to become a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières or a social worker for abused kids. At least stop buying goods made in Chinese sweatshops. It's so big, she'd continued, so impossible and awkward, and the easiest thing—therefore—is to feed the cat instead or make a note to buy more washing powder. And we always do the easiest thing, don't we?

She'd said this without looking at him, as if—he thought—she was talking to someone else. In fact, as if she was someone else talking to someone else, not Ingrid and Paul who talked of very little except, occasionally, the dunderhead son-in-law in a concerned, vaguely judgemental way. They never spoke to each other like this. She'd never ask him about his work. Long ago, they'd realized it was no subject for conversation.

After this odd outburst, she'd turned from him and quietly served up the sausages and
spätzle
.

Now he debated that she had meant something else when she'd said, ‘And we always do the easiest thing, don't we?' The
don't we
seemed specific rather than general. Seemed to be woman-speak for: I know you have this big moral code that you live by out there, Mr Policeman, but you always do the easiest thing at home.

Recently, he'd noticed she had bunions. She'd had lovely feet when they'd first met. He'd seen that right away, her delicate, neat, high-arched feet in sandals. The elegance of her bare footprints in the Greek sand. Did bunions appear overnight, or grow slowly? And when? And why? What, exactly, were bunions?

He was overdue to contact her. He turned on his phone, but it did not work. He turned on his computer, but could not find a connection. He dressed quickly and went downstairs to ask Alice.

‘I am sorry, sir, the Wi-Fi, it is not working.'

‘Yes, I know. But when do you think it will be working?'

She smiled shyly, nibbled the end of her pen. ‘I think later. Yes, maybe later. Or tomorrow.' She directed him across the street to a small internet café, but the power was down. He waited as the clerk started a loud petrol generator. By then the server was down.

For a brief period both power and server colluded. ‘Ingrid,' he wrote with lightning speed. ‘All fine here in Reykjavik, though very, very busy at the conference. Don't expect to have much time to phone or write. Hope you are well. Love, Paul.'

 

The driver was leaning against the car, waving his arms and smiling as if Strebel was an old friend. Strebel felt trapped. He wanted to pretend he couldn't see the man, that his attention was diverted—a pressing phone call, for instance. But it was too late for that: the driver was now in front of him, giant hand out for shaking. Strebel shook back.

‘Yes, yes,' the driver said warmly, then fished Strebel's twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and pointed at the date. ‘Banks not okay this!'

In a flourish of bonhomie, Strebel swapped the driver's bill for an acceptable version. The driver beamed, folded it carefully away.

‘Where we go?' he said, still grinning. ‘Where we go, doctor?'

‘I'm not a doctor,' Strebel replied, wondering what about him had a medical air. ‘Policeman.'

‘Polici?' Now the driver wasn't so sure. He even took a step back.

Strebel shook his head. ‘Not here. Back at home. Switzerland.'

‘Switz? Eh?'

‘Switzerland. Here,' he pointed to the ground, ‘holiday.'

Was this the sort of holiday policemen took? To a foreign country to engage in some light, off-the-books investigating? He could just as well have gone to Sharm el-Sheikh with a couple of Sergeant Studer novels.

‘German War Graves?' the driver asked. ‘Amboni Caves? Tongoni Ruins?'

Strebel took this moment to dig around in his bag, but, in fact, he was trying to level with himself. The lies he'd told to come here, the absurd risk to his marriage, his career: these had been battering at his brain since he'd left Switzerland, like flies against a window. And they were getting louder; soon they would be like pigeons, a Hitchcockian rain of them, hitting with terrible, insistent thuds.

He had told his boss he was visiting a sick uncle in Bruges. He had told Ingrid he was in Iceland. He had withheld evidence, the envelope with the little giraffe stamp. Because? Because? Because he wanted it to belong to him, wanted it to be a message from his lover intended for him. A summons: Come, I need to be rescued!

Because of the scent of her.

‘Pangani? Pangani good beach.' The driver looked expectant.

‘Mama Gloria.'

‘Ah, yes, Mama Gloria!' The driver clapped his giant hands and opened the back door with a flourish.

‘No,' Strebel countered. ‘Price first. And I'm sitting in the front.' He gestured to the ruined back seat. ‘There could be someone lost in there. Are you missing any customers?'

The driver didn't understand, but peered inside, carefully examining the seat. When this show was over, he stood up and said to Strebel, ‘Twenty.'

‘Five.'

‘Twenty-five.' The driver smiled.

‘Five,' Strebel held up his right hand. ‘Five dollars.'

They settled on ten.

‘My name is Mr Tabu,' the driver said.

‘Paul,' said Strebel.

As Mr Tabu drove along the shaded avenues, past shops and shacks, Strebel realized he was looking for her, a slim, graceful girl, on a bicycle or walking along the roadside. ‘Pilgrim,' he would call from the taxi, and she would turn, smile, run to him.

Counter-intuitively, he hoped he didn't see her, because he was a grown-up, at least in part of his brain. He glanced at the vegetable plots out the windows, gradually replacing the little shops. He was indulging a fantasy. He could not really delude himself that he would find her and they would run off together and be happy. But the
yearning
felt good, like the transfusion of a young man's blood. He wanted to be foolish enough to believe in such a romance, just for a moment, to suspend his relentless sense of duty. To be, yes, an old fool, undone, besieged by lust.

The taxi bounded down a dirt road. A pack of mangy dogs barked and chased the Corolla's bald tires. The road led on through a field of dust-bedraggled corn and dead-ended in the open yard of a cement bungalow. Strebel, so lost in his thoughts, was confused as to where he was.

He got out and went to the door to find a large American woman standing with eyebrows raised as if she had been expecting him. She was overweight in the way Europeans expected Americans to be, from eating too much—fleshy, soft, undisciplined. She was also a smoker, he could tell from the smell of her. He introduced himself politely. ‘I'm a friend of Pilgrim Jones.'

‘Are you now?'

Strebel smiled benignly. ‘I'm hoping to find her. My name is Paul Strebel. Are you Gloria?'

‘No. I'm Bo Derek.'

He assumed that she'd invite him in and they would have a friendly, helpful chat. But her body blocked the door, her weight implied a bullying protection. She was definitely hiding something.

‘I've come a long way,' he said. And gave her another smile.

‘Well, you're out of luck, cowboy. You've just missed her.'

She was a hard-used woman, Strebel thought, like the wives of his father's generation, left up in the mountains to cope with the ravages of storms and childbirth.

‘May I come in?'

Gloria tilted her head to survey him, then moved aside, ‘Sure.'

Her home was makeshift, as if she'd scavenged the furniture from departing expats. Nothing matched, but it was comfortable enough. He noticed the boxes of toys, the shelf of children's books. Ah—the AIDS orphans. She offered him a seat but nothing else. He hoped for a glass of ice water. A very large glass. Preferably so large he could climb into it for a long soak.

‘Look,' she said. ‘I got twelve kids arriving any minute now. So let's cut to the chase. What's this about Pilgrim?'

‘I'm trying to find her.'

‘So you said. You've just missed her, so I said. Do you want to have the same conversation all over again? I'd rather not.' She fidgeted, tapped her fingers. She badly wanted a cigarette, Strebel was sure. But there were no packs or ashtrays in evidence. Had she just quit?

‘Pilgrim left Switzerland just over a month ago,' he pushed on. ‘I have reason to believe she may be in danger.'

‘Here? Danger? From what? Falling mangoes?'

‘A man associated with her has also disappeared.'

Gloria made a shocked expression. ‘“A man associated with her.” What does that mean? Did they rob banks together?'

‘She was involved in a car accident in which the man's daughter was killed. It's possible he blames her and wants to harm her.'

‘That's terrible, just terrible, Detective—is it “Detective”?'

‘Detective Chief Inspector.'

She gave him the look of a deeply impressed woman.

‘How did you know I was a policeman?'

‘Your shit-colored aura.'

Strebel wanted to laugh because he found this genuinely funny. The shit had stuck after all.

‘Long way to come as a policeman,' she noted.

‘I'm not here in that capacity. As I said, I'm a friend.' He gave her a neutral smile.

‘I won't bother to argue that police can't have friends, although, personally, I think that it's impossible. So, yeah, I rented her a place out in Raskazone. The peninsula on the south end of the bay. Cutest little cottage.'