Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

My father, who has been growing impatient, is surprised to find himself disarmed by Massimo’s smile.

Massimo orders a cappuccino. Someone is playing scales on a piano, the notes spilling from an upstairs window.

“Have you seen Kit?” my father says.

“Not for a while,” Massimo says. “She hasn’t returned any of my calls. I thought she might be in England.”

“She doesn’t seem to have been in our apartment — at least, not recently — and she’s not in Oxford either.” My father hesitates. “You don’t know anything?”

Massimo toys with a sachet of sugar. He wants to do right by my father — he probably wants to impress him — but he doesn’t respond well to questioning or pressure. He might be wondering if I’ve gone off with someone. He knows I’m capable of that. Little jagged shafts of jealousy might be going through him. It’s you I want .

“When did you last see her?” my father asks.

Massimo starts talking about the night we went to the club in Testaccio.

My father interrupts. “What date was this?”

“What date?” Massimo frowns. “It was a Wednesday. About three weeks ago.”

“What happened?”

“The usual things. We talked — and danced. There were a few of us. Then she came back to my place. I don’t remember too much after that. I was a bit wasted.”

“What about Kit? Was she ‘wasted’ too?” My father’s tone is acidic but Massimo doesn’t notice.

“No,” he says, “not really.”

“How do you know?”

“She rode home.” Massimo thinks back, then remembers. “I offered her some coke. She didn’t want it.”

My father gives him a look.

Massimo gazes off into the distance. Once again it’s possible that he doesn’t register my father’s disapproval — or if he does, he might murmur, Yes, I know. I really should stop .

He has no intention of stopping, of course.

“I had a feeling that night,” he goes on.

My father leans forwards. “Tell me.”

“She seemed — I don’t know — different …”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Not really. It was just a feeling.” Massimo smiles complacently.

My father sits back. Though inwardly infuriated by how calmly Massimo is taking the news that I’ve gone missing, he senses that Massimo knows something. What he needs to do is tease that knowledge out of him. It shouldn’t be a problem. He has done it hundreds of times, all over the world.

Then Massimo jerks upright in his chair. “I just remembered.”

“What?”

“She talked about going away, and I said, ‘You mean, to Oxford?’ And she said, ‘No.’ ” Massimo looks at my father. Massimo’s eyes have filled with tears. “You don’t think she’s —” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He can’t.

/

Back at the apartment on Walter-Benjamin-Platz, Klaus is perched on a high stool at the breakfast bar, working his way through a plate of profiteroles. His two mobiles and his reading glasses lie nearby. I watch him from the kitchen doorway, my arms folded, the TV muttering behind me.

“Is that supper?” I ask.

“It’s just something I found in the fridge,” he says. “How was your evening?”

“Good. How about you?”

“I stayed in. I was tired.” He rests his spoon on his plate. “Are you hungry?”

“No, I’ve eaten.”

Ever since our attempt at sleeping together, he’s had a guilty, embarrassed look. It’s not easy being on the end of it. And there’s another thing. My time with him was always going to be limited — I told him so at the beginning — but he has consistently refused to acknowledge the fact. There’s a stubborn wounded weight to much of his behavior, an insistence that won’t go away. He’s like someone who hammers at a door and goes on hammering, even though he knows it’s locked and nobody’s inside.

I stifle a yawn. “I’m tired too. I think I’ll go to bed.”

He looks at me for a moment longer and I feel I ought to give him another chance but I just can’t face it.

He spoons up the last profiterole.

“Sleep well,” he says.

/

On Monday morning the sky is dark. The air crackles, and my scalp seems to have tightened round my skull. Though I sense a storm is coming I decide to walk to Winterfeldplatz. When I asked Pavlo about icons at dinner on Saturday he was too distracted to tell me much. I want to find out more.

On entering the square it’s the Laundromat I notice first. I look through the window. A young woman is loading wet clothes into a dryer. Her dirty-blond hair is tied back in a ponytail, and her breasts push against a pink T-shirt that is a size too small. Gray sweatpants hang low on her hips. This must be Pavlo’s dream girl, Katya.

I move next door and ring the bell. After a few moments the Ukrainian emerges from a back room. He’s dressed in a white T-shirt and dark-blue jeans. The clothes look brand-new, as if he only bought them a few hours ago and has just put them on for the first time.

“Ah, Cheadle’s friend,” he says.

The gallery has plain white walls and spotlights in the ceiling, and there are about half a dozen icons on display. Behind it, through a narrow archway, is Pavlo’s office, as cluttered as the gallery is bare, with out-of-date computers, a dusty plant, and piles of unopened junk mail. Four mismatched chairs crowd round his desk, and several hands of cards lie facedown in a cleared space at one end, together with a couple of shot glasses and a full ashtray, smoke twisting upwards from a half-extinguished cigarette.

“Did I interrupt?” I say.

“Some friends were here.” Pavlo’s eyes drift past me to the open door at the back of the office and the cramped courtyard beyond.

Later, as I sip treacly Turkish coffee, he tells me that when he first started out he used to treat icons as simple merchandise. He just bought and sold. Did deals. Icons were known as “wooden dollars.” He chuckles. It was only recently that he began to look into their significance. I recall something he said at dinner about icons not functioning as paintings do, and ask him to elaborate. Icons are conduits, he tells me. Aids to contemplation. The person who truly “reads” an icon is able to pass beyond it and achieve a kind of spiritual communion with the prototype. For that reason people often refer to them as “windows on heaven.” For that reason, also, the names of icon painters are never mentioned, and are not to be found on the icons themselves. Painters are seen as servants of God. Mere vessels.

“There’s another aspect.” He ushers me back into the gallery and points at a Virgin Mary hanging a few feet away. “That Virgin, for example. Her gaze moves beyond you, into another world. Her world. It rebounds off reality, turns inwards. It’s like she’s looking in a mirror.” He steps closer. “You see the hand, how it seems to gesture? The Greek for it is hodegetria — ‘that which points the way.’ ”

I remember the outdoor screening in Rome, and how a random conversation between two strangers reflected me back into myself, revealing the path I needed to take.

A loud whirring starts up as a washing machine clicks into its spin cycle, and Pavlo’s eyes veer towards the wall his shop shares with the Laundromat.

“Did you see her?” he asks.

“She’s very pretty.”

“You think I have a chance?”

“No harm in trying.”

“How old would you say I am?” He stands up straighter, his chest swelling beneath his crisp white T-shirt.

“I don’t know. Forty-two?”

“Fifty-six!”

“You’re in good shape,” I tell him.

Eyebrows raised, he glances at his mobile, pretending my compliment is neither here nor there, but I see him carry it off to a place deep inside himself. He will pore over it later, in private.