Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘And now, the gorgeous … the talented … Miss Can-dy!’

I turned towards the stage. I could only remember one thing Nina had said about Candy. Nina was sitting on a motel bed at the time, sheets tangled around her waist and legs. She was holding a breast in each hand and looking from one to the other. ‘They’re not bad,’ she was saying. ‘They’re not as good as Candy’s, though. You should see Candy’s. She’s got great tits.’

It was true. She did.

Candy was wearing leopardskin chaps and a stetson, and that was about it. She had a bullwhip in her fist. There was a half-naked man kneeling in front of her. It was some kind of dominatrix routine. She stalked round the man, cracking the whip, light skidding off the high gloss of her skin.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

I didn’t even have to look round. I recognised the smell. ‘What’s it look like?’ I said. ‘I’m drinking a beer and watching the girls.’

‘You’re fucking blind. How can you watch girls?’

I turned, looked Greersen up and down. His tie was too wide and his shoes were grey. ‘Who says I’m fucking blind?’

My nostrils filled with the stench of rotten spinach. I thought Greersen must be like a skunk: he released foul odours when he was furious or scared. He seized me by the collar of my jacket and pulled me off my stool.

‘This guy’s a friend of mine, Greersen,’ a girl’s voice said. ‘I invited him.’

Greersen swung round. ‘I thought you were dancing.’

‘It’s my break. Listen, he’s a friend of mine. Let me take care of it, OK?’ She took me by the arm and led me through a curtain and down a corridor. ‘You’re Martin, aren’t you,’ she said. ‘Nina told me about you. I’m Candy.’

She showed me into her dressing-room behind the stage. It was a bare room, with mirrors along one wall. I could smell hot light bulbs and hair-spray. ‘You all right?’ she said.

‘I’m fine. Thanks for rescuing me.’

‘Don’t mention it.’ She sat in front of the mirror and began to wipe the make-up off her face. ‘I don’t have long,’ she said. ‘I have to go on again in fifteen minutes.’

‘You won’t get in trouble, will you?’

‘Trouble?’ She chuckled. ‘Not me.’

‘I don’t think Greersen likes me very much,’ I said.

‘I hate the little shit. He’s always throwing his weight around, what there is of it.’

I grinned.

‘You heard anything about Nina?’ she said.

‘No, not really. What about you?’

‘Not a thing.’ Candy dropped a ball of cotton-wool into the waste-paper basket. ‘How long’s it been now? Three weeks?’

I nodded.

‘You know, it’s probably none of my business,’ she said, ‘but I think you made a mistake with her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You scared her.’

‘Scared her?’ I said. ‘Oh, you mean because I’m blind?’

‘No, she liked you being blind.’ Candy laughed. ‘No disrespect, but she always did go for the strangest men. No, what scared her was when you told her you could see.’

‘I don’t remember her being scared.’

‘Yeah, well. She probably, you know, disguised it. You get pretty good at that, working in a dump like this.’ She lit a cigarette. She was one of those people who put the filter to their lips and seem to drink from it. ‘One night, in some hotel, you stared at yourself for an hour, apparently. That really freaked her out. A blind man staring at himself in the mirror.’

I thought I remembered it. I’d just told Nina my secret. Then we had sex. She insisted on it; she seemed desperate, violent, almost possessed. It exhausted me and I fell into a deep sleep. Towards morning I woke up suddenly. I’d had one of my dreams. I left the bed and sat on a chair in front of the mirror. It was what I did sometimes, to calm myself. But Nina was asleep the whole time. I looked at her every now and then, and her head was under the covers, only her dark hair showing on the pillow and the fingers of one hand. What Candy was saying made no sense to me.

‘I didn’t realise,’ I said.

‘I don’t know anything about it, really.’ Candy stood up, touched her hair. ‘We got on pretty good, Nina and me, but I can’t say I ever understood her.’ She put her cigarette out, half-smoked. ‘I’m black,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’

‘Yes. Nina told me.’

‘Once, in the club, there was this guy. I don’t remember where he was from. Anyway, he saw me and Nina sitting at a table together. You know what he called us?’

I shook my head.

‘Night and Day.’ She laughed, and this time it was soft, like water from sprinklers falling on a lawn.

There was a pay-phone at the end of the corridor, outside the toilets. It was depressing down there. The walls were bare brick and the ceiling leaked. On the floor there was a puddle with cigarette butts floating in it. The phone smelled of other people’s breath. I fed two coins into the slot and dialled Munck’s number.

‘About the man in the station,’ he said.

I asked him what he’d come up with.

‘Not much. Somebody saw a man behaving oddly.’

‘How do you mean, oddly?’

‘Staring through the café window.’ I heard Munck shuffling his papers. ‘Tall man, apparently. Pale hair.’

‘I don’t know anyone who looks like that.’

‘Well,’ Munck said, ‘we haven’t been able to trace him, anyway.’ He sounded weary. I could hear the melancholy slap of his feet as he paced the office.

‘Is there any other news?’ I asked.

He’d spoken to Karin Salenko again. This time she’d come clean. She’d seen her daughter at the beginning of December. On that occasion it appeared that she had told Nina that Jan Salenko wasn’t her real father.

I leaned my head against the cold brick wall. So Karin had lied to me. All those sentences that tailed off, that was Karin running out of the truth. But Munck was still talking.

‘The feeling here is, it’s some kind of family crisis.’

I stood in the draughty corridor and thought it through. Nina had learned the truth about her father — or part of it, at least. It had been a shock to her and she’d gone away to try and come to terms with it (it had upset her enough to make her forgetful: she’d left the keys in her car). The theory fitted the facts, such as they were.

‘And anyway,’ Munck went on, ‘she’s over twenty-one. If she wants to go off somewhere without telling anyone, that’s well within her rights.’

‘So you don’t still think I did it?’

‘Did what?’

‘Did away with her,’ I said. ‘Because I was jealous.’

Munck was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t think anyone did it,’ he said, ‘not until there’s a body.’

I felt a sudden rush of affection for this tired, disillusioned policeman. ‘Maybe we should have another drink sometime,’ I said. ‘We could go to Smoltczyk again.’

He seemed surprised by the idea, but not unreceptive.

After I’d hung up, I tried Karin Salenko’s number. I wanted to tell her that I knew she’d lied to me. But the phone rang fourteen times and nobody answered.

I waited at a tram-stop not far from the club. By now it was late, and when the tram came it was almost empty. Just a couple of drunks and a teenage girl wearing a pair of clunky workman’s boots and a nose-ring. Through the window I saw a circus poster on the corrugated-iron wall outside a building site. CIRCUS ROKO, it said. In the picture there was a clown and an elephant and a woman with a snake. There was also a man emerging from a hosepipe. Across the poster, in bright-blue letters on a yellow background, was a flash: INTRODUCING THE INCREDIBLE BALDINI! MASTER OF CONTORTION!