The Drowned Detective Read online

  Let’s not talk about Sarah, I said.

  But I can feel it from you, she murmured, and took a sip of her greenish liquid. Something burning inside.

  What is that? I asked her. Crème de menthe?

  With a mixture of wheatgrass. Quite disgusting, she said.

  So, I said, you’d better tell me what you know.

  You’re septical, she said. I can feel it.

  Sceptical, I corrected her. And I’m not, not really.

  I cannot work with sceptical.

  Was I sceptical about Sarah?

  No, she said. You were burning. Still are. With gelozie. But about this little Petra, you are septic.

  Sceptic, I corrected her again.

  Whatever, she said. My English is bad. But if you suspend your disbelief, I can try for you.

  Try what? I asked.

  Map-reading, she said.

  So I sat, finally, and stroked the Pomeranian’s fluffed hair until the whining stopped.

  You will take her to vet for me? she asked, with a hint of a smile. And she was clever, dear Gertrude.

  Yes, I said. I will take her to the vet for you and suspend my disbelief if you agree to try.

  Map-reading, she said again. And she laid down her cocktail glass of green stuff and unrolled a map from her dresser.

  The city, she said.

  I can see that.

  North, south, east and west. The river between.

  You said the east side.

  Yes, she said, the old industrial side.

  It was the new industrial side, in actuality. Or it had once been planned as new, gleaming avenues of serried concrete structures that now sat peeling, crumbling and never quite abandoned. Pools of oil-slicked mud in which children rode their bicycles, parks overgrown with ivy and weeds, the copper-coloured river flowing beneath them. But they had their own poetry, these places; the symmetry of their rectangular windows, the broken window panes and the rusting window frames retreated in a perfect perspective which promised a future that would never arrive.

  And I wondered, was it that promise that had dragged me here in the first place, as she smoothed the map with her still-billowing electronic cigarette? I was a sentimentalist, a severe one. I followed instincts that I only got to understand when they were past, long past. And the clove-scented perfume of her electronic cigarette was making me queasy. I felt sick most days, but was in danger now of being nauseous.

  Could you, I asked, and pushed it gently aside.

  You would prefer I smoked a real one?

  If you want, I said.

  And of course she then did it, she lit a real one and offered another to me. I took it, again for sentimental reasons. And as the odour of real tobacco conquered the odour of fake tobacco, she sat back and smiled, the cigarette dangling from her crimson mouth.

  She looked like an ageing Marlene Dietrich and she knew it. All she was missing was the eye-patch, the one Dietrich wore as she gazed through a wisp of curling smoke at the sagging hulk that was Orson Welles. They were both old then, and almost past it, and they knew it, too. And Gertrude now fluffed through her lips in that old movie way and took the Polaroid of little Petra between her old dry palms and began to rub it, as if to warm the girl who was no longer there.

  In Haitian voodoo, she said, they are afraid of photographs. And you know what? they are right.

  They are?

  Most certainly. The chemical – what’s it called?

  The acetate.

  The acetate. The crystals. The accretions of the light. They are jealous crystals. And they keep a little of the image they display.

  You mean the soul? I asked. I was ready for anything now, even philosophical exegesis.

  The crystals know something we don’t. They know the face we present is just a shadow and they retain a piece of – how do you say—

  The reality? I ventured.

  If we can admit to such a thing.

  And she rolled the Polaroid in her hands again, as if it was a tobacco leaf and she was in some Haitian basement, preparing a cigar.

  And I can feel it now.

  What can you feel?

  The heat, she said. The real Petra.

  So she may be alive, I thought. If I was to believe in this charade. And as I had promised to suspend my scepticism, I had no option but to believe. And the charade, if charade it was, had its own logic, its own rituals and its own absolute persuasiveness. It would have been hard, standing beside her, not to be convinced of something. Gertrude was, if nothing else, a convincing actress. Like that old Marlene.

  Hold the map, she said, flatten it, over table.

  And I did so. I smoothed all the crinkles from the old parts of the city and the once new ones. The broad snake of the river between both sides, the wide bridges over it, the grids of the grand avenues and the filigreed mazes of the little streets. I made the city flat and manageable, with my own palms, and held it down at the edges as she laid the Polaroid to one side and moved her own palm slowly over it.

  Her hand was as steady as a piece of metal. And I could not help but be impressed by the rigour of it, as it moved, slowly and inexorably as a mechanical lathe, over the monochrome shapes of the city streets. If she was ever to be a junkie, I remember thinking, she would have no trouble finding a vein. Because they were raised, like pulsing iron cords, over the bone structure of her hand. The skin on the hand was pale, and I could see a hint of a red edge around the palm. Too much alcohol, I remember thinking, too much crème de menthe.

  And I was engrossed in particularities like these when I caught the smell of something burning, which wasn’t tobacco smoke.

  It was paper.

  She raised her hand a little. There was a tiny brown singed spot somewhere to the east of the river, amongst the regimental grids of the industrial suburbs. And there was a small whorl of something like smoke coming from it.

  And I knew it had to be a trick and I knew it wasn’t a trick, and both certainties were battling for precedence when she spoke again, softly blowing out tobacco smoke.

  Somewhere here, she murmured.

  Her eyes were half-closed, and the cigarette stayed between her lips and a small tumble of ash fell from it.

  Down, down, down, she murmured again. And maybe she was talking about her hand, because she lowered the palm again, ever more slowly.

  The curl of smoke rose from the city map. And I could smell something like paper burning.

  She pulled her hand away with an involuntary gasp, and I saw the small burning hole in those city streets and put my own hand down on it, before the whole map caught fire.

  There, she said.

  Where? I asked.

  She is there, somewhere in those buildings.

  The burnt ones?

  It is the map that burned, not the city.

  Can you be sure? I asked.

  And I could picture a portion of the city aflame now. It made as much sense as what had happened in this room did.

  You try to joke, she said. Joking won’t help.

  So where is she? I asked.

  Somewhere, she said, in those burnt streets.

  A brothel? I asked.

  Who said brothel? I said a small room that she cannot leave.

  Sounds like a brothel to me, I said. And to her father too, I thought.

  And I am done for the day, she said. With you, with Phoebe and with little Petra.

  Could you do the same, I asked, on Google Maps?

  No, she said. I am an analogue kind of girl. No digital for me. I will rest now, if you don’t mind. You take Phoebe to the veterinarian’s for her luxating patella and Gertrude will charge you nada.

  Nothing?

  Free. How you say? Gratis.

  4

  And so I walked back across the metal bridge with the map folded in my pocket and the fluffed-out Pomeranian in my arms. She whined with each step I took. Buskers looked at me and grinned. Young girls stopped to stroke her fur. The large stone angels that s
at above, beside the suspension cables, seemed to have turned their heads away in silent contempt. I had a better job, I remembered again, a more urgent profession, a function even. It was to do with weaponry and rough interrogation, but that was in the old days and that war continued without me in it. I was married now, in a different city, with a daughter I loved and with a business partner who wore cufflinks.

  The water below the bridge flowed with its brown lazy patterns and I suddenly remembered the colour blue. I was from a seaside home, near Penzance, where the pirates came from, and the colour blue reminded me of happiness. Blue skies, blue seas, white foam. I remembered the house, the promenade, the pier around the back of it where the swans pick their way through the mud of low tide. They looked better when the sea came in, the harbour was full, blue or fresh seagreen and glistening with reflections, each swan like a large pregnant letter S with their reflected S beneath them. I had sisters who had married, brothers who had wandered and the last of them all was my sister Dympna whose beauty was marred by a harelip that made her kind, to me in particular, and we had shared a bubble of kindness through our early days until the surgical techniques were developed that allowed her to be rid of it, so that her beauty became a fact that was acknowledged by everybody, where previously I seemed to have been its sole witness. So I had been tutored in jealousy from an early age. It was odd, to resent a vanished harelip. But it meant she was pursued then, by boyfriends, some of them even friends of mine, and our tiny shared chrysalis of emotions was shattered, though for a time neither of us could bring each other to acknowledge it. Until one day I found her in the garden shed with an older friend of mine, Peter, and got a glimpse of her beautiful thigh as his hand drew her dress above it. I’m looking for the fork, I said, since my father had asked me to dig lugworms for a night’s fishing. OK, she said, and shifted her body and I could see the fork on the ground beneath the bench she was lying on. Work away, I said stupidly, as I reached for the fork, knowing I would hate Peter with a vengeance now and regretting the absence of that slash on her upper lip which had been, to me, quite beautiful. He never found her beautiful before, I remember thinking. But now that others did, he did too. And I wondered, would beauty always confuse me, in its confounding, beautiful way?

  My father played the accordion with the oompah-oompah bands that drew crowds on the holidays on the bandstand on the promenade. He mended them too, which seemed to be his real job, so there were always tiny reeds laid out on the brown paper on his workbench. His workroom was off-limits to everyone but me, who liked to blow the reeds and identify their pitch and it gave him particular pleasure when I got the note right. C sharp, I would say, with the reed in my mouth, listening to the sound that was already dying, and he would say, got it in one, sailor, perfect pitch. Sailor was his word for me, and he had been a sailor once. But he belonged now to that meeting between land and sea, the eroded shore, and his house behind the harbour was right on the edge of it. He was a widower, and my mother had been for some time a dim memory. But the accordion sometimes brought her back, the wheeze and flap of it and the ripples of melody he would draw from it, the hornpipes, the polkas and the marching tunes. And occasionally one of those old laments that came from the instrument’s bellows like the memory of a once beloved, exhausted breath. He grew tired in the end, my father, tired of memory, tired of life, tired of everything but me. Whatever you be, be a man, he would tell me. Because he had been a man in his time.

  The memory of blue and fresh breezes. There were neither of them here, in this landlocked city, on this moulting continent, in this hot summer. And the dog in my arms was whining again, so I stroked its damaged kneecap as I walked. I left the metal bridge, passed through the stalled traffic on the other side and made my way to the address she had given me.

  West or east always confused me here since I gauged them by the sea as a child and here there was only the river to divide things. West was on the right side, east on the left, facing the grotesque pile of marble that was the parliament, downriver. And I found the veterinarian’s eventually, in one of those nineteenth-century courtyards on the left-hand side of things.

  I had to climb a staircase to get there and found the waiting room thankfully empty, with the vet in his chamber adjacent.

  Why do I know this animal? he asked.

  Phoebe, I said, belongs to Gertrude.

  Ah, Gertrude, he repeated. And how is she doing with the smoking?

  Badly, I told him.

  I cannot help her there, he murmured.

  Maybe nobody can.

  But to little Phoebe I can perhaps be of help.

  It’s her patella, I said. It is – what is the word again?

  Luxating, he said and seemed to relish the vowels.

  And he took the dog from my arms, to my immense relief. I felt somewhat renewed by its absence. Perhaps the rest of the day would not be so bad, perhaps all of those things I had forgotten were not of any real importance. And perhaps I might be relieved of little Phoebe and her patella problems indefinitely.

  There are four grades of luxation in the patella, he told me. Grade one can be treated manually and can be popped right back in.

  And he fondled the kneecap that was hidden by the mounds of fluffy hair.

  Grades two to four need surgical treatment.

  His fingers moved through the hair, as if testing a damaged screw.

  And Phoebe, I’m saddened to tell you, is a grade four. She must rest here overnight.

  I was learning more about miniature dogs and kneecaps and luxating joints than I had ever imagined. But I had other concerns. Not least the burnt hole in that map. So I thanked the veterinarian, asked him to call the clairvoyant Gertrude and explain the admittedly tragic circumstances to her.

  And break the news gently, I added.

  Then I went on my way.

  5

  She was sitting across from me in the therapist’s office. She was by an open window, maybe to take advantage of the breeze from outside. And it was hot in that city, that summer. The breeze blew her hair across her cheek and reminded me of things I didn’t want to be reminded of. Of an advertisement, stupidly, of a woman turning towards the viewer with brown hair blowing across her cheek, for a hair product the name of which I don’t remember. It reminded me of Sarah, when I imagined she wanted to be looked at by me. It reminded me of rushes by a riverbank, an inlet near the sea, of a kingfisher darting through the rushes, the colour blue, again.

  It also reminded me of that dusty, scorching room full of shell-shocked rubble where we first met. I was part of the detail to secure the wrecked museum. She was there to catalogue what was left of it. Abyssinian brooches from the first century BC. Sumerian tablets from even earlier. She was by a window then too, a ruined one that showed the burnished river and what remained of the smoking city outside. It fell to me – or did I choose the task? – to keep track of her movements and her presence there, to be the last one to leave when she did, to wait patiently in the Mesopotamian night, sweating rivers under the flak jacket, while her small oil-lamp still burned inside among the ruins.

  There is something comforting, she told me one night, driving back to the compound, in being watched.

  It’s my job, I told her, and of course never said what I was thinking, that I would have watched her for ever, if I was allowed.

  And was it not your job, she asked, to prevent all of this ruin in the first place?

  No, I said, and tried to smile, that was someone else’s job.

  The military’s, she said, and gave a matching wry kind of smile.

  Yes, I told her.

  So our job, she replied, is to pick up what we can of the pieces?

  No, that’s your job, I said. My job is to see that you remain in one piece.

  You’ve managed well, this far, she said.

  Thank you, I told her, and was aware of boundaries already being crossed.

  We had a drink that night and she told me about Eridu and Urak, the world�
�s first cities, about Gilgamesh and Nimrod and the historical Babylon, epics of destruction that were dwarfed by the current destruction all around us. I pretended to listen and to learn, but then, as now, was just watching. The way that hair fell over her well-cut cheekbone.

  And now the therapist sighed, from his seat by the bookcase, and began once more, in his tentative, heavily accented way.

  So the problems have not yet resolved themselves.

  You can tell?

  And that was me, trying to fill the silence. I never liked long silences.

  I can sense a certain . . . reluctance . . .

  Please, said Sarah, and brushed the hair back from her cheekbone. But to no effect, since it slunk back again immediately. As it always had done.

  You have both been under a lot of stress, lately.

  Ten out of ten, she murmured.

  And why is that?

  Please. Isn’t that your job? And isn’t this shrink city?

  That would be Vienna, he said, delicately.

  Aren’t you from Vienna? I asked, stupidly, since it was of no consequence either way.

  I will admit to training there.

  He obsesses, she said. About those damned cufflinks. He obsesses, constantly.

  It’s my job, I said, and it already sounded lame. I am employed to obsess about all sorts of things.

  But about me? she asked.

  Well, you are my wife, I said.

  You know, I do remember that. Occasionally.

  Some kind of forgiveness, said the Viennese, would be a beginning of kinds.

  So, get him to say it then.

  What?

  That he forgives me.

  For what? I asked. I have to know for what.

  For whatever the fuck it is you’re assuming.

  He is assuming . . . some kind of intimate betrayal, the therapist murmured.

  One, I said. Or many.

  I won’t admit to that.

  Why not, Sarah?

  And this was me. It would have been some kind of comfort to hear her say it, at least.

  It’s unmanly of you, she said. You used to be manly.

  What exactly is unmanly?

  This jealousy. This watching. I used to love the way he looked at me. Now I hate it.