The Insult (28 page)

‘This is going to sound strange,’ I said.

I started with the missing bone, the part of my skull that had been shattered by the bullet. I described the operation to replace it with a specially measured piece of titanium. I saw Loots wince and look away. I waited a moment, then asked if he’d ever heard of people who had so many fillings they could pick up radio stations on their teeth. Yes, he thought he’d heard of that. I told him that was what was happening to me, only it was more sophisticated. The titanium plate, I said. They were using it to experiment on me. It was a device that allowed them to transmit images directly into my brain. I looked at Loots. His eyes had filled with water. I had frightened him.

‘Images?’ he said.

I spoke more softly now. ‘Pictures,’ I said. ‘Like on TV.’

The man responsible for the experiment, I went on, the man in charge, was my neuro-surgeon, a certain Dr Visser. I described Visser’s unhealthy interest in my case. He had a file on me, for instance, which was marked HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL. He’d been following me, too.

‘He even appeared at the Kosminsky.’ I shook my head; I still couldn’t believe it. ‘That’s why I had to leave so suddenly. That’s why I was sitting on your doorstep the other morning.’

Loots poured us both another drink.

‘I never heard of anything like this before,’ he said.

We both drank.

He asked me what I was going to do. I reached down into my travelling bag. I took out two pairs of gardening gloves, a torch,
and a tool for cutting glass, and I laid them on the table in front of him.

‘You’re not a thief, Loots. You told me that.’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

I left another silence, then I spoke: ‘How do you feel about breaking and entering?’

As Loots drove through the city, I felt a pleasant tension, a kind of burning, in the pit of my stomach. I pictured Visser in his swivel chair. He looked tired, dispirited. I thought I detected a trace of grey in his moustache. I’d spent weeks trying to fathom his motives and his strategy, weeks attempting to evade him, out-manoeuvre him. Now I could sense the tables turning. Now, for the first time, I was taking the initiative. And it was the perfect night for it. There was no moon. The sky was cloudy, almost brown. When we stopped at traffic-lights, I felt the car rock on its suspension. It was the wind, gusting out of the east. That would help us, too. Any sound we made, the wind would cover it.

I talked for most of the journey. Partly it was to reassure Loots, to drive away any remaining doubts he might have. Partly it was my own adrenalin. Visser had a secret file on me. I wanted it. That was all. We had to break into the clinic in order to steal the file, but we would do as little damage as possible. It wasn’t revenge I was interested in, but proof. Proof of the way I’d been exploited. Proof of the crimes that had been committed against me. We weren’t the criminals. They were.

‘Do you see, Loots?’ I said. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, Martin. I do.’

We drove north, through the wide, grey streets. The puddles on the pavements had iced over. It was almost three o’clock in the morning.

The clinic was on a main road. We parked in a quiet, residential street directly opposite. I could just make out the building, with its towers and chimneys, black against the dull brown of the sky. We
walked towards it through the shadows. I turned to Loots, saw the tightness in his shoulders and in the muscles near his mouth.

‘We’re not the criminals,’ I told him again. ‘Remember that.’

We found a section of the clinic wall that wasn’t overlooked, then we pulled on our gardening gloves. Loots made a step out of his hands and I clambered over. He clambered after me. On the other side, we crouched in the bushes. Listened. The only sound was the trees dreaming above our heads.

We crossed a wide expanse of grass. The wind dropped and I thought I could hear crows in the distance like old doors opening on rusty hinges, doors in horror films. Then only the keys in Loots’ pocket and our breathing. A sudden whiteness sizzled through the air in front of me. I had to stop and hold my head.

‘What is it?’

‘I can’t see.’

Loots didn’t say anything.

‘It’s almost like he knows I’m coming,’ I muttered. ‘Like he’s making it difficult for me.’

I’d been expecting a TV programme to follow that flash of white, but it didn’t happen. Instead, I could see the grey lawn reaching down towards the lake.

‘Do you remember where his office was?’ Loots said.

‘Not really.’ I tried to think. ‘There was a walkway outside. A metal walkway …’

Trees surrounded us. I glanced up into their branches, bare of leaves. I would like to have explained their significance to Loots, but there wasn’t time. A clock somewhere was chiming the half-hour. Loots tightened his grip on my arm. We were passing the main entrance.

He chose a window in the west wing of the clinic. It was more isolated, he said. No lights. He cut a small hole in the glass and knocked it through into the room. After waiting a moment, he cut round the edge of the pane, next to the window-frame. He put one hand into the hole and gripped the glass, then tapped on it sharply
with the other. The pane came loose. He reached in, turned the handle.

‘You first,’ he said.

We stood in a room that smelled faintly of methylated spirits.

Loots crossed to the door and opened it. I asked him what was out there.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just a corridor.’

I warned him about the corridors – their labyrinthine qualities, their disturbing acoustics. If he thought he heard somebody behind him, he was not to worry; it was probably just his own footsteps, echoing. I spoke of the scale of the building, too and, while I was on the subject, I mentioned Kukowski’s memory techniques. Not that they’d ever helped me much, I said, but maybe he’d do better. It was important to remember which way we went in case we had to leave in a hurry. Loots listened with a slightly lowered face. He seemed to be absorbing everything I told him.

We left the room and began to walk. We were in a part of the building I didn’t know; I didn’t recognise the corridors at all. Every now and then a sizzle of white moved across my field of vision. That sudden, blinding wash of magnesium light: it was as if I’d put my face inside a photocopying machine. I didn’t want game shows, not now. I didn’t want the nervousness, the hysteria.

Once, we heard footsteps. It was a good example of what I’d been talking about, and I was just going to point it out to Loots when he opened a door and pushed me through it. I began to protest, but he put a hand over my mouth. I heard the footsteps grow louder, move past us, fade into the distance.

‘It was a nurse,’ he whispered.

A nurse? It could have been Maria Janssen on the early morning shift. What would she have said if she’d discovered us? Was she aware of what they’d done? I saw her walking among the pear trees with Visser. It was possible. When she was first assigned to me, they might have thought it best to let her in on it. Perhaps that explained her initial awkwardness with me. There’d been times when she seemed to
be floundering, out of her depth … It might also make sense of the night when she took off all her clothes. That strip-tease could even have been part of the experiment.

Our luck held. We found ourselves passing a series of doors, and on the wall beside each one there was a plaque with a doctor’s name on it. Loots read them out to me. Metz … Czarnowksi … Feleus …

‘… Visser!’ he exclaimed.

The door wasn’t locked. When we were both inside the office, he switched his torch on and began the search. There were no files lying around, he said. No X-rays either. The room was neat and orderly, with every surface cleared of paperwork. He checked the drawers of Visser’s desk, but all they contained was stationery, a few memoranda, some business correspondence. The only place left was the filing cabinet, which was locked. I took this to be a good sign.

‘We’re going to have to force it,’ I said.

I handed Loots the screwdriver I’d brought with me and watched him work it between the drawer’s edge and the framework of the cabinet itself. The lock snapped open. The drawer slid forwards on its rails.

I paced the room impatiently as he searched the contents of the cabinet. ‘Have you found it?’ I asked him, every fifteen seconds. I couldn’t help it. So much depended on it.

At last Loots sat back on his heels and sighed. ‘It’s not here.’

‘It must be.’

‘They’re not files,’ he said. ‘They’re articles. Some of them Visser wrote himself, but most of them are by other people. There aren’t any files in here at all.’

I thought we should go through the desk again.

‘There aren’t any files in the desk either,’ Loots said. ‘I’ve already looked.’

‘Maybe he’s got a safe …’

Loots stood up. ‘There’s no safe.’

‘We’ll have to look somewhere else then.’ I went to the door and peered out. The corridor had a familiar shine to it, a mocking emptiness, like a mirror with nobody looking into it.

‘It’s almost six,’ Loots said. ‘It’ll be light in an hour.’

‘I don’t care.’

A sizzle of white and this time pictures followed it. I saw rows and rows of beds, with wounded men in them. Men with their heads wrapped in bandages, men with limbs missing. They could have been refugees from my dreams. Through the hospital window pillars of black smoke were visible. Grass lay flat as a helicopter came down. A man in a uniform was searching the hospital. There were stretchers everywhere. One had a girl on it. Her face floated beneath his distracted gaze for a moment, her dark hair pushed back from her forehead, her skin pale, drained of blood, her eyelids closed.

‘Nina?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘Nina? Is that you?’

Loots seized me by the arm. ‘Quiet, Martin.’

‘I thought I saw Nina.’

‘She’s not here.’ Loots was shaking me. ‘There’s nobody here.’

‘OK, OK,’ I muttered. ‘It’s just a film.’

But the girl on the stretcher had looked so like her.

We were half-walking, half-running now. Loots was afraid that someone might have heard me shouting. Fighter planes swooped through the smoke. Their guns sounded like people typing. Somehow Loots found his way back to the same room. We climbed through the open window, dropped to the ground below. He took my hand. ‘There’s only lawn in front of us. Just run.’

I ran. But it was difficult. Shells were landing all around me. Flashes of white light and then fans opening in the air, fans made out of earth. I wanted to throw myself down on the grass. I might get killed otherwise. But Loots still had me by the hand and he wouldn’t let go.

Once, he stopped and stood there, panting. ‘I thought I heard something.’

‘I can’t hear anything,’ I said.

How could I? The hospital had just been hit. A fireball engulfed it, orange edged in black. A cauliflower of flame.

We ran on, plunging through some bushes. At last we reached the
wall. Loots gave me a leg-up, as before. I waited for him on the other side, but he didn’t appear.

‘Loots?’ I whispered.

There was no reply. Only a startled, anguished cry and then Loots came scrambling over the wall. He rushed me across the road. It took him three attempts to open the car door. I heard another cry.

‘What
is
that?’ I said.

But Loots wouldn’t speak. He didn’t say a word until we’d driven fast for several minutes. ‘I dropped my keys,’ he said. ‘It happened when I was helping you over the wall. I looked around a bit. Found them. The next thing I knew, there was a man …’

The man asked him what he was doing. He must have been the nightwatchman or the gatekeeper. He was standing up against a tree. Loots quickly drew one of his knives and told him not to move. He thought he’d pin the man to the tree by the arm of his coat. Slow him down. Discourage him from taking any further action.

‘Good thinking, Loots,’ I said.

‘He moved,’ Loots said.

‘What?’

‘He moved. Only a fraction, but it was enough.’

‘He shouldn’t have done that,’ I said. ‘He shouldn’t have moved.’

‘I know. I feel strange about it, though. It’s against the principles of knife-throwing. Knife-throwing,’ and Loots paused, ‘the whole point is, you’re supposed to miss.’

I turned and looked at him. There were helicopters flying through the place where Loots should have been.

‘Where did you get him, Loots?’

‘I wish he hadn’t moved. It would’ve been all right if he hadn’t moved.’

‘Where did you get him?’

‘In the ear.’

‘What?’

‘I pinned his right ear to the tree. Didn’t you hear him yell?’ Loots began to laugh. High, thin spirals of laughter. Then he stopped.

‘It wasn’t your fault.’ I thought for a moment. ‘How come you had your knives on you?’

‘I always carry them. For luck.’ Loots laughed again. Only once this time. Bitterly.

‘Can they be traced to you?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said.

‘What about the man? Did he see you? Clearly, I mean?’

‘I don’t think so.’

I settled back in my seat. ‘I’m sorry about all this.’

‘I’m sorry, too. We didn’t even get your file.’

I was staring at a battlefield – shelled farm buildings, burned-out army vehicles. Smoke rose from a blackened tree-trunk into the thin grey air. One soldier was helping another across the devastated landscape. They both looked close to collapse. The words THE END appeared.

I couldn’t believe that was the end. I just couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t there have been an exchange of weary smiles between the two soldiers? Or a symbolic close-up of a green shoot in the mud?

What about the future?

What about hope?

‘Ah, Martin,’ Visser said. ‘Still getting cable?’

I smiled, then sat down. A waitress appeared at my elbow. I ordered tea, with lemon.

To arrange the meeting had taken some courage on my part. In the time that had elapsed since our last encounter – more than two months – Visser had assumed a different persona (rather as I was supposed to have done). He’d become more unpredictable, more threatening. More veiled, too. I no longer had the slightest idea what it was that he intended. In our conversation on the phone I’d offered to meet him, but only under certain conditions. It had to take place after dark. He was to come alone. And the venue should be a neutral one. To all of this he agreed. I’d chosen the café with great care. It was located in the old quarter of the city, the 7th district, which was famous for its maze of narrow, winding streets and its clandestine squares. And I had Loots standing by, with his car. As soon as I stepped out of the café, he would draw up alongside me, I’d jump in, slam the door, and we’d be gone. Visser would be left on the pavement, too stunned even to have noted down the number-plate. It had been like planning a bank robbery; in fact, I’d been inspired by a film I’d watched at the weekend.