Rupert Thomson - The Insult

The next evening, just after sunset, I left the hotel. The police headquarters was located in the 2nd district, on the west bank of the river. I took the most direct route, over one of the city’s famous bridges. There were old-fashioned street-lamps, which gave the stonework a deceptive warmth, and on the balustrades there were statues of nineteenth-century statesmen and generals. I was thinking of Visser as I walked along. He hadn’t shown his face since that evening with Munck in the suburbs. He was following me, though. I knew that much. What else would he have been doing on that lonely piece of waste-ground at six o’clock on a Tuesday evening? Halfway across the bridge I stopped and leaned on the parapet. I looked down. Currents twisted like muscle in the slow green body of water. Weeds floated by in clumps. Broken branches, plastic bags. Was Visser watching me now? And, if so, what would be going through his mind? Did he think I was suffering? Did he think I might jump? I glanced over my shoulder. Stranger after stranger walking past.

When I arrived at the police headquarters I was told to wait. It was a grim eight-storey block, with metal grilles fixed like cages over the ground-floor windows. The radiator next to the front entrance had been covered with a piece of carpet. I thought it was probably because the police didn’t want to hurt offenders accidentally on their way into the building. They’d rather hurt them deliberately, in a room with no windows, somewhere higher up. From where I was sitting I could see an officer in dark-green fatigues, with his back against the wall and his legs on a bench. He was reading a comic-book that Victor sometimes read. A man walked in off the street and sat down opposite me.

‘All right?’ he said.

I nodded. ‘How are you?’

He wore a soiled check jacket and trainers, and he had a deep cut on his forehead.

I waited almost half an hour. At last a metal door scraped open and Munck emerged. It could only have been Munck. Each step he took, his foot flicked at the air, then slapped down on the floor. The way he walked, it always sounded as if the floor was wet. But there was someone with him, someone I didn’t recognise.

Munck shook my hand. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you, Martin.’ He turned to include the other man. ‘This is Jan Salenko. Nina’s father.’

Salenko took my hand awkwardly and shook it for too long. ‘I just arrived in the city this morning,’ he said, ‘by bus.’

He was one of those people who say too much, either out of nervousness or a desire to please.

‘I thought we’d go round the corner for a drink,’ Munck said. ‘Mr Salenko?’

‘Yes. A quick one, maybe. Thank you.’

I asked Munck if Slatnick was coming.

‘No,’ Munck said. ‘He’s off sick.’

Psychological problems, I imagined. That stone-age buckle of bone above his eyes, that shot-gun nose. It couldn’t be easy.

Munck took us to a place called Smoltczyk. He liked it, he said, because it was entirely without character. There was nothing to look at. No pictures, no hunting-horns, no china donkeys. It was just a bar, with drinks in it. I nodded. Salenko nodded, too. We ordered three brandies.

‘That should keep the chill out,’ Munck said.

As soon the drinks came, Salenko leaned forwards, both hands round his glass. ‘I understand from the detective here that you were the last person to see …’ He hesitated. ‘To see my daughter.’ He couldn’t bring himself to say her name.

‘So they tell me.’ I stared at him, but I couldn’t establish any physical resemblance. Then I remembered what Karin had said. Of course. Why would Salenko resemble Nina?

‘That’s what I’m told,’ I said.

‘How was she? Did she seem,’ and his hands opened, showing me his glass, ‘upset?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Actually, it was me who was upset.’

My answer seemed to take Salenko by surprise. It took me by surprise as well. But I’d been asked the same question so many times. There was what I’d felt, and I was tired of walking round it.

‘I’d been going out with her for about six weeks,’ I went on. ‘That was the night she told me it was over.’

I wasn’t looking at Munck, but I knew his eyebrows were halfway to his hairline. This was the first he’d heard of my rejection.

‘I’m sorry,’ Salenko said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I was sorry, too.’ I sipped at my brandy, felt the warmth spread through me. ‘Strictly speaking,’ I said, ‘you’re not her father, are you?’

‘Not strictly speaking, no.’

‘You know who is?’

‘No. I never asked.’

I watched Salenko carefully. The silence seemed to embarrass him.

‘I just treated her like my own,’ he went on, ‘and she grew up believing it. She was only a few months old when we were married, her mother and me. Not even talking yet.’ He paused, thinking back. ‘First word she ever learned was Dad.’ He smiled sadly, looked down into his drink.

Then he roused himself. ‘Karin, she never told me anything. She didn’t like to talk about the past. If it ever came up, she’d throw things. Or she’d drink. Or leave the house.’ He tilted his glass on the table and watched the brandy climb the side. ‘I didn’t want to lose her, I suppose.’

‘But you did,’ I said.

‘Did what?’

‘Lose her.’

‘In the end I did,’ he said, ‘but that was later.’

He took a deep breath. When he breathed out, I could hear his heartbeat in it.

‘Something you’ve got to understand,’ he said. ‘I didn’t deserve her. That’s what I felt when I first set eyes on her, and I never stopped feeling it the whole time we were married.’

There was a river outside the village where he lived and one day he was standing on the bridge. A truck was parked at the far end, facing away from him. He saw a girl climb into the back of it, over the tailboard. Her dress looked handed-down — too big for her, anyway; it swirled around her skinny legs, made climbing difficult. She was about eight years old. Then a man walked out of the field and up the grass bank, and the truck lurched with his weight as he got in. The girl was standing in the back, both hands on the metal rail that ran along behind the cab. The man shouted something from the window, probably, Hold on, then the engine caught and the truck set off down the road, heading west, and that was all there was to remember, think of, dream about: that girl clinging to the rail as distance claimed the truck, her brown hair loose and streaming against the shoulders of her ill-fitting, pale-blue dress. Afterwards he was still standing on the bridge, only the road was empty now, and the wires that linked one telegraph pole to the next, the sun was shining through them, and the way their shadows fell across the tar, it looked as though a car had braked hard, as though there’d been some kind of accident.

By the time she was fifteen — the age he’d been that morning on the bridge — she was the prettiest girl in the county. She didn’t seem to know it either; it was as if she’d never looked in a mirror, or even in a window, or a pond. He was nothing special, though. He won a memory contest once by reciting an entire page of the local telephone directory, not one name out of order either, but where would that get him with a girl who could turn his stomach over like a ploughed field just by looking at him? And besides, his memory was something people mocked him with. There was a rhyme that everybody in the village knew:

Jan Jan

The Memory Man

Remember remember

As much as you can

Remember you’re ugly

Remember you’re weak

Remember that rubbish