By Light Alone (4 page)

4

He and Marie spent an hour together in the shops; and then played a game of echo-ball in the holographic suite. It was perfectly pleasant. Then they made their way to the Arabian Eatery, and sat at a little table on the balcony. They had a very nice view. The angling sun played splendidly over the pyramidal southern flank of the mountain: conjuring not only light-effects of gold and plum and grape-pink and cherry-red on the planes of snow itself, but creating the most extraordinary shadows too. The shadows were perhaps even more beautiful than the lit areas, George thought: lines and wedges of the most extraordinary deep-sea blues and purples, bruise-greys, darknesses tinted green and ochre, slotted intricately into kaleidoscope tessellations.

Marie had lately taken up the California habit of ordering a container alongside the table for her evening meal, so that she could, after chewing and tasting the various morsels, spit them out. Lunch for nutrition, supper for the taste. The fashionable mantra. George didn’t mind this, not really; although perhaps he was a
tad
annoyed by the way Marie pretended that this had
always been
her habit – he would have testified in court that she had started it no more than a week earlier. Of course these little quirks and petty fictions are part of the tapestry of marriage. Of course they are. We wouldn’t love our partners so much without their little eccentricities and peculiarities.

They finished the last of the Hormoz White with a clink of glasses.

‘Your health Mr Denoone,’ said Marie.

‘Your health, Mrs Lewinski,’ he replied.

The waiter brought a second bottle of wine, an Indonesian vintage; and the shrimp-and-pomegranate purée arrived, two murex-coloured lumps. A memory passed through George’s mind of Ysabelle’s dark little breasts set firmly upon her powerful ribcage. And Marie, as if she were reading his thoughts – as perhaps she was, for long-married couples do acquire that quasi-telepathic ability – Marie asked him:

‘So did you boink Ysabelle?’

‘I did,’ he said. ‘This Indonesian stuff is rather nice, don’t you think?’

She squished a mouthful through her teeth, like mouthwash, and spat it into the bucket. ‘Not bad at all.’ Then she stuck out the tip of her tongue, and drew it back in again. ‘A little bit rhubarb, maybe. Do I mean rhubarb? The green one.’

‘The long, tubular green one?’

‘No. Round.’

‘Apple.’

‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’

They both tasted the purée, and Marie spat hers into the bucket with a retching noise.

‘Took her a long time,’ said George, shortly.

‘What?’ said Marie. ‘Ysabelle, you mean?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Really?’

‘My legs were achy anyway, from the skiing. It was hard work, really.’

‘I’m somehow surprised it took her a long time to come,’ said Marie, absently. ‘She’s so athletic. She does everything so quickly – she skis like the devil is after her. She’s one of life’s sprinters.’

‘She told me she had work done on her hoo-haa,’ he said, taking another slurp of wine. ‘After the birth of her, eh, son.’ He couldn’t recall the boy’s name. A boy, though, for certain. Was it? George thought so. ‘Talked about it as if she was super-pleased, but I reckon it mucked up her responsiveness.’

‘No matter what they say,’ Marie declared, ‘they can’t guarantee they won’t snafu the nerve endings. That’s why,’ she added, a little smugly, ‘why I’d never let a surgeon poke a laser
anywhere
down there.’ She had had both her children by perineal caesarian precisely to obviate the necessity for too much subsequent surgery.

The waiter had swept up her bucket, and was about to shimmer off, when Marie raised her voice. ‘What do you
think
you’re doing?’

He bowed towards her, murmuring something, interspersing it with several
Madams
and begged pardons. But Marie was unspooling one of her shriller tirades. George took his attention away from this, and instead poked the two-tine fork in amongst his food: shredded swan in yoghurt. The fibres of the meat were surprisingly thin for so large a bird. George separated several, and then combed them into parallel lines on his plate, like hair.

He wasn’t really very hungry.

The waiter had gone. ‘Off with a flea in his ear,’ George noted.

‘He didn’t even ask me!’ said Marie. ‘Just made to steal my bucket without so much as an excu-u-use me.’

George peered into the mouth of the bucket: a vomitous swill of chewed food in the thin medium of spat-out wine. There
was
a bit of a smell. Maybe the other diners had told the fellow to remove it. He thought about saying so to his wife, but, really, it wasn’t worth the grief.

A different waiter was approaching their table. ‘Either you scared the other one off,’ George noted with a chuckle, ‘or they’ve sacked him.’

‘It would be nothing more than he deserved,’ said Marie. ‘His hair all down the back of his jacket like that.’

‘It
was
in a queue, I thought?’

‘It was. But dangling
outside
the jacket. Like a horse’s tail. Couldn’t he tuck it
in
?’ She turned to take in the view again: the now dark flank of mountain drew a jagged upward graph-line of charcoal against the tomato-and-gold sunset sky behind. ‘It’s not as if there’s any sunlight left,’ using the fork as a baton to indicate the scene, ‘for him to feed upon.’

The new waiter was at the table, bowing. ‘Mrs Denoone? Mr Denoone?’

‘Mrs
Lewinski
,’ said Marie. She had a this-is-the-last-straw expression on her face. You know how she can be when she’s pushed too far by some careless insolence or other. George fancied a touch of something chocolaty to sweeten his mouth, and looked the waiter up and down to see what he had brought. But he didn’t appear to be carrying anything.

‘My apologies, Madam,’ he said, bowing again. ‘I must ask: you are the mother of Leah Denoone, Mrs Loving-ski?’

‘Le
win
ski, for crying out loud,’ snapped Marie, making fists out of her tiny hands and holding them a few inches above the table. ‘It is not
hard
to get
right
.’

George, though, had picked up on the fellow’s tone of voice. ‘We are her parents, yes,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Again my apologies Sir, Madam. I regret that I must interrupt your meal.’

‘Oh, what
now
?’ wailed Marie. ‘Evening’s been a complete disaster from start to
finish
!’

‘Would you be so gracious as to follow me?’ The man had a very narrow, prominent L-shaped nose. It stood out all the more startlingly against the die-cast cheekbones of his sucked-in face. His queue was at least decently tucked into the back of his shirt. Guinness-black eyes flitted from George to Marie, from Marie to George.

‘What’s the matter?’ said George.

‘Please, Sir, Madam.’

George’s chair sang the tuneless, mournful squeaking note chairs make when they’re pushed back over a polished floor. Like minor spirits in torment. None of the other diners gave them a second glance.

5

Leah had disappeared.
Disappeared
was the word they used. Marie insisted on precision in a loud voice – ‘What do you mean disappeared, exactly? What,
exactly
, does disappeared
mean
?’ – but they were unforthcoming. George and Marie were escorted to a huge office and a desk the size of a car. The head of security, a scrawny-framed woman with a large head and protuberant lips that looked, somehow, untucked, came round to the front of the desk as soon as they were ushered in. Arsinée was in a chair in the corner, clutching a sleeping Ezra to her body and weeping silently. ‘Mr and Mrs Denoone,’ the head of security said, bowing to each of them in turn, and then shaking their hands, one after the other. ‘My name is Captain Samira Afkhami, and I am head of hotel security.’

‘What?’ said George, meaning
what’s going on?
and meaning
what’s happened to my daughter?
The truth was he felt so discombobulated by the wine and the day’s dissipations that none of this felt real enough to pierce his bubble. ‘What?’ he said again, as if whatishness was the only concept his head could hold.

‘Please to sit down.’

‘I will
not
sit down!’ Marie cried, striking a blow against tyranny with her words. ‘You
must
tell me what has happened.’

‘Your daughter has disappeared.’

The phrase, already uttered several times, still made no real impact upon George’s consciousness. He flicked the touchscreen of his memory, and a variety of possible responses scrolled past. What he said was: ‘When?’

Captain Afkhami looked at the large-nosed man. ‘
Saat kaç
?’

The man gawped at her, and said something rapidly. The captain then apologized on his behalf. ‘This man thinks he is Irani, but he is Turk, and cannot understand me correctly if I speak Farsi to him.’

‘What?’ said George, again.

‘He insists on Farsi, but it is a sham,’ said the captain.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Marie. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘There is no need for you to alarm yourself, Madam,’ the captain said. And to the other man, she spoke rapidly: ‘
Az un khosh am nemiyad, agha. Sa’at chand e
?’ When he did not reply, she turned to George, ‘I am asking him the time your daughter disappeared. He claims to understand Farsi, but you see the result. This shows that he is a sham. Rest assured, al
though
there remain many Turks in this area. Nevertheless Ararat province is
firmly
under the legal authority of the Iranian Judicial system.’

The other man began to say something but the captain cut him off. ‘
Gom sho! Gom sho!
’ This seemed to mean ‘get out’, for the fellow drooped his head and left the office. ‘We do not need
him
,’ said the captain, to nobody in particular.

The horrible, yawning sense that something genuinely bad was awry in his life was percolating into George’s numb sensorium. The fear of something that money and influence could not simply undo. He directed his fuzzy gaze towards Arsinée, in the corner. ‘Arsinée,’ he said. ‘Where’s Leah?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ she said, sob-tremulously.

‘What do you
mean
you don’t know?’

Arsinée responded with two deep, shuddery breaths and a fresh outflow of tears. The captain, slapping the palm of her hand upon the surface of her desk, said: ‘It is a deeply regrettable situation! It
is
! Beyond all, and at the beginning, permit me to express the hotel management’s deep regrets.’ She stopped, felt her own chin as if reassuring herself that it was still there, and added: ‘I must also, for legal reasons, say: regrets is not an admission of liability or apology. I trust you understand what I mean.’

‘I
don’t
understand what you mean,’ said Marie, fiercely. ‘I don’t at all.’ In response to the ferocity in her mistress’s voice, Arsinée’s sobbing grew louder.

‘Why do you go on after that manner?’ asked George, with a sort of stupefied slowness. ‘Why don’t you just tell us where our daughter is?’

‘I answer your two questions from last to first,’ said the captain. ‘I do not tell you where you daughter is, and it is because I do not know. I stress the nature of the legal authority because you must know this, in terms of your possible legal redress, and such is complicated.’