Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘Find out what kind of creep I was dealing with,’ I said.

Someone was right behind me now. The man who’d brought me up the stairs, presumably. I broke out into a sweat that was slick and cold. He might have a gun, I was thinking. He might use it. The woman on the sofa was turning her cigarette in the ashtray. Turning it and turning it, sharpening the lit end to a point.

‘Get him out of here,’ Greersen said.

Two men threw me out of the back door. My shoulder ached from where it had hit something on the way downstairs. I could see the shapes of cars in the darkness, cars drawn up in rows. The glimmer of radiator grilles, the curve of tyres. They couldn’t have done it better if they’d tried.

I found my cane and brushed myself down. When I reached the front of the building again, Millie called my name. I crossed the pavement, opened the car door and toppled in.

‘What is it, Mr Blom?’ he said. ‘What happened?’

I couldn’t say anything just yet. The scorched smell of the office was in my nostrils. My head felt like a bag of broken glass.

‘They roughed you up a little, didn’t they.’

I nodded, let him examine me.

‘I’m taking you to my house,’ he said. ‘Get you cleaned up.’

‘That’s not necessary.’

‘But you’ve cut yourself —’

‘I’ve got a headache, that’s all.’

I wanted to go straight back to the Kosminsky, but Millie insisted on driving me to a twenty-four-hour chemist first. He said the best pain-killer was codeine and he could get some for me. We wouldn’t need a prescription because a friend of his worked there. He didn’t charge me for the detour. He wouldn’t let me pay for the pills either.

Just before I got out of the cab I touched him on the shoulder. ‘You know that TV show I’m going to have?’

‘What about it?’ he said.

‘I want you to be my first guest.’

Sitting on the steps of the hotel, I dabbed at the cut with a tissue. Greersen. Maybe I shouldn’t have upset him. I couldn’t resist it, though. Sometimes if a pond looks too still you throw a stone in it. It had stopped snowing and the moon showed in the gap between two banks of orange cloud. I felt I could see through the moon’s thin skin to the organs underneath. Its life seemed as fragile as my own.

Someone was walking up the hill towards me. I didn’t think anything of it until he came and stood in front of me. I thought he was going to ask me for the time, or some directions, but all he did was say my name. I didn’t recognise him. Was this the moment I’d been dreading, the appearance of a person from my past? Or was it just another member of the public who’d seen me on TV?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘My name’s Robert Kolan. We met once, in the station café.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, we didn’t meet exactly. I was just leaving.’

The blond hair parted in the middle and tucked back behind his ears. The creaking leather jacket. Robert Kolan.

He wanted to talk about Nina.

‘Let’s talk inside,’ I said. ‘It’s warmer.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Right.’

We sat in black vinyl armchairs, in the corner of the lobby.

‘Nina’s disappeared,’ he said.

‘I know. The police told me.’ I told Kolan what I’d told Munck and Slatnick, how Nina was always disappearing.

Kolan interrupted halfway through. ‘This is different.’

‘What’s different about it?’

‘It was her father’s birthday on the twenty-ninth of December. She never misses her father’s birthday.’

I realised that I’d never heard her mention her father (or her mother, for that matter). I had a sudden sense of how thoroughly she’d excluded me, not just from her apartment but from her life.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s really not my problem now.’

‘You don’t care what happens to her?’

‘I used to. She left me, though.’ I remembered what she’d said about Kolan. My closest friend. ‘I thought you would’ve known that.’

‘I did know.’

‘Well,’ I said, and opened my hands.

‘So she leaves you and suddenly you don’t care about her any more?’ He scraped his hair back behind his ears. He was leaning forwards, his eyes jumping between my face and the floor. ‘Just like that?’

Suddenly he irritated me. All this talk about caring and friendship. This sanctimoniousness of his. He’d probably been dying to fuck her for years. I wanted to shock him.

‘Maybe I wish she was dead,’ I said. ‘Has that occurred to you?’

I stared at the sofa opposite. I thought of Nina’s seat in the station café, which had kept her imprint after she was gone.

‘People who’ve been left by someone,’ I went on, ‘they often wish the other person was dead. That,’ I said, ‘is not uncommon at all.’

‘She meant that much to you?’

I didn’t want to look at him. I looked at the carpet instead — meaningless swirls of orange, brown and black. I heard him light a cigarette. The sharp intake of breath as he inhaled sounded exactly like surprise.

‘Do you know Greersen?’ I asked.

Kolan was silent.

‘I went to see him tonight.’ I paused. ‘I just wondered. Was Nina sleeping with him?’ Kolan’s silence lasted.

‘Greersen,’ I said. ‘The owner of that club.’

‘I know who you mean. She couldn’t stand the guy.’

‘So she wasn’t sleeping with him?’

‘No.’

I believed him. Greersen had lied about it to get at me. That made sense. Why had Nina lied about it, though? And, if she was lying, who was the someone else that she was seeing?

‘You know what Greersen said?’ I went on. ‘He said he hadn’t seen her for weeks.’

‘Nobody’s seen her for weeks.’

‘Do you know who saw her last?’

Kolan hesitated. ‘I thought it was you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yeah. That’s why I’m here. I thought you might know something.’ He leaned forwards and crushed out his cigarette.

He told me he was over at Nina’s place on the Monday night. Nina had called me up. It was late, maybe three in the morning. She drove to the 14th district to meet me, dropping him off outside the station. Nobody had seen her since.

‘I didn’t realise,’ I said.

‘You can’t tell me anything?’

I shook my head.

He got up out of his chair. He parted his hair again with two hands, training it behind his ears. ‘I should be going.’

‘Have you talked to the police yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What will you tell them?’

‘What I told you.’ He paused. ‘Why? You’ve got nothing to hide, have you?’

I watched him leave through the revolving doors, then I rose to my feet and crossed the lobby. Arnold was watching TV. A lit cigarette lay on a groove in the ashtray; the smoke made a series of spaced loops or coils, the way a spring might if you stretched it. He glanced round at me.

‘The lift’s out of order,’ he said.

‘You know why, don’t you.’

Arnold shook his head. ‘Why?’

‘Sex,’ I said.

It didn’t surprise me when he appeared not to understand. He understood all too well — but he would never admit it.

I took the stairs.

First floor, then the second. And, sure enough, there was the lift. Just standing there, with its doors jammed open. There was nobody inside it. But if you dusted the edges of the doors, at a point not too far above the carpet, you’d almost certainly find delicate deposits of human skin, the faint print of a woman’s hips.

I glanced down the corridor. One couple fucking silently against the wall.

A quiet night.

The following afternoon, as I was shaving, the phone rang. I saw myself in the mirror, hesitating. I couldn’t hear the phone without thinking of Nina, without hoping that it might be her. It wasn’t her, though. It was Munck.