By Light Alone (8 page)

George began to weep. The tears surprised him, dribbling from his eyes.

‘They’ll find her,’ said Peter, looking away. ‘They’ll find her, for sure.’

You’re thinking: but when a person cries it is a ticklish calculation as to what proportion of tears are for the putative object of grief, and what is simply drawn from the infinite well of self-pity we all carry within us. Alcohol facilitates the emission of tears. That’s right.

Ach! Ach! Ach!

Afterwards Ergaste, with hitherto-unsuspected tenderness, linked arms with George and walked him up and down the balcony outside. As they strolled, the Englishman gave him – for some reason – a detailed account of the rituals of the Catholic Church. George didn’t understand why, but he listened as attentively as his drunkenness permitted, and found a strange comfort in the older man’s chatter. The eating of little coins made of bread, the drinking of wine, which is after all only a sort of investment of grapes over time from which the compound interest of alcohol has been earned. Prayers that are said. The priest in his expensive robes. George breathed the chill air, and watched the various artificial lights blur and smear as his gummy eyelids opened and closed. An unoccupied row of chair lined the space, pretzel-seats and double-
logo-shaped backs.

A snowbike roared and sped over the snow beneath them, from left to right. It carried before itself, jutting from its headlamp, a jouster’s lance of light.

9

Day succeeded night. The following morning, waking alone in his room, George lay in bed, ill as ill could be. Not virus-ill, of course; hangover ill. For a while all he did was let his eyes rest on the large, planed flank of sunlight that fell through his wide window. The brightness shook colour from the carpet. Everything shimmered. He was alone. Everything trembled. He got himself to the shower room somehow, and stood for a long time inside the teepee-shaped zone of falling water. What he felt, he thought, was not depression. Because depression was something that had always seemed to him to be a mind-state of enormous complexity, compounded of anger and repression and ornate tourbillons of soured self- and other-relations. Despite superficial similarities, what he felt right now was something much simpler, purer almost. It was a kind of default inertia. A body at rest resisting the efforts of the outside universe to dislodge it. After a while he sat down on the ceramic pimples of the shower floor. He leaned his back against the tiled wall and let the water fall noisily into his lap.

What did the day hold?

Today he was to go to Do
ğ
ubayazit, the nearest sizeable town, and meet some bigwig policeman to receive a report on the investigation into Leah’s disappearance. George shut his eyes. He imagined stepping into a broad, cool room with shutters on the window, and a perfectly rectangular desk in the middle. He imagined a moustached policeman saying, ‘We have found your daughter – here she is.’ Then – what? Turning to see a door being opened by a functionary, and there Leah would be standing, with a beaming smile on her face (but Leah
never
smiled!), tripping and trotting across the floor to – but this was no good, he couldn’t remember what she looked like. He closed his eyelids tighter, as if the memory could be physically squeezed out of his eyes. He remembered Marie’s serene face.

George opened his eyes.

Captain Afkhami accompanied him in a hotel flitter. Flying twenty metres or so above the ground, they swept down the mountainside and passed from the white clarity of the snowfields to a dusty, grubby-looking scrub. The beige was occasionally intersected by dark-water canals, or roads running straight as ruled lines. It was easy to make out the giant rectangles that had once been farmers’ fields, each one now a mass of scribbly weed and low bushes scattered upon mustard dust. Occasionally a tractor, rusted to the colour of dark chocolate, stood up to its hips in undergrowth. Barns stood roofless.

Occasionally, George saw people, of course: sitting mostly, occasionally loping slowly along the side of the overgrown road, their long black hair marking them as have-nothings.

The sun sparkled upon the curved window of the flitter. The sun pressed the landscape flat.

Soon enough the low rise sprawl of Do
ğ
ubayazit emerged over the horizon; and almost at once George began to see sunbathers in proper numbers. A week at the hotel, insulated from the baseline fact of existence, you might have thought they were a rare breed. But, no, here they were: the life of the ordinary man and woman in the raw. People lay in recliners, or on their backs on the ground, long arcs of black hair fanned out. George began to count them in rough tens, but soon – as the flitter passed over a wide municipal park – there were too many to process numerically. Every roof contained a number of indolent human beings, lying perfectly still, hair carefully spread like lizard cowls.

‘Lots of Ra-worshipping,’ he said to the captain.

‘Sunny day,’ she replied.

Moments later they landed in a parkyard and George climbed out of the flit into a pliable wall of heat. ‘This way,’ said Afkhami. ‘Here we are.’

They were parked alongside a three-storey block building, with
Do
ğ
ubayazit Polis
upon its plate-glass frontage. There were four other flitters in the park, none of them in very good condition.

Antique traffic thundered along the nearby road.

‘Shall we go in?’ The captain smiled, and the sunlight burst in little stars upon her dark lenses, and that was the moment George understood that her confidence had deserted her. Her distraction during the flight here, the various little hints of her body language, and her tone of voice as she said
shall we go in
? – it passed a tipping point in George’s mind. It occurred to him that, beyond the borders of her specific domain, she was as out of her depth as he was himself.

They made their way round to the main building entrance. Reflected cars and vans hurtled left–right and right–left within the glass of the Police Station frontage. There was such violence in the wheeled rush of their passage it seemed amazing they didn’t shake the glass to shivers. When George pushed the swing-door open this frenzy of motorized movement tipped, alarmingly, as if to pour itself inside with them. But inside was quiet, and cool: a marble lobby, and the clacking of their shoes over the cold floor. They announced themselves to the man behind the desk, and then they waited in leather chairs for a quarter of an hour. George found he had no conversation at all; nothing to say to Afkhami. He ought to have been able to conjure some pleasantry, or benign question, or bland observation, but he literally could think of nothing. Finally a functionary led them through to a spacious marble office, and they sat down opposite the police chief.

Police chief. He was a canny-faced man of fifty or so: two earth-brown eyes, a neat grey moustache the shape of an orange segment on his top lip. There were lines running vertically, fanning across both cheeks, perhaps up-down knife-scars from some youthful criminal investigation, perhaps simply the creases where his flesh folded as he pressed it into the pillow as he slept.

‘I am Commissioner Mehmet Sahim,’ he said. His accent was more noticeable than Afkhami’s.

‘My name is George Denoone,’ George said. ‘I am the man whose daughter has been kidnapped.’ It felt strange stating this fact so baldly, for it had not previously struck George that this would now, in all likelihood, be the horizon of people’s knowledge of him from this point on:
Oh, he’s the man whose daughter was kidnapped at Ararat
. But Commissioner Sahim’s reaction surprised him.

‘You are one of very many,’ he said.

George’s eyes clicked wide open. ‘Many?’

‘I deal with dozens every week.’

‘Dozens of kidnappings?’

‘Dozens of children taken.’

‘Dozens?’

‘Of course, rarely from the tourist resorts, such as your hotel. But dozens, weekly.’

‘Oh.’ George said. Dozens? He pondered how this piece of news made him feel; but the truth was that it made him feel
resentful
. Losing his daughter was bad enough; must he now lose his sense of the
uniqueness
of his loss? Nobody likes to discover that they’re not as special as they thought; even if their specialness was of a tragic cast. ‘Dozens? That’s a lot.’

‘The number,’ said the commissioner, ‘is perhaps larger.’

The best George could do with this information was to look at Afkhami, and then back at the commissioner, and then back at Afkhami. ‘I had no idea,’ he said, uncertainly.

‘Mr Denoone,’ said the commissioner. ‘Child theft is the main business of the police. The bosses control most other crime effectively enough, in their villages I mean. But they close their eyes to child theft – for obvious reasons.’

‘The bosses?’

‘The village bosses.’

‘They close their eyes to child theft for reasons that are – obvious?’ George said, meaning it as a question. But the commissioner took it as agreement.

‘Indeed. You can understand why. Naturally it makes my job very difficult, for without the partnership of the bosses the investigation of crime is almost impossible.’ He pronounced this last word the French way. ‘I do not mean to discourage your heart, Mr Denoone,’ he went on, smoothing his hand across the immaculate and polished desktop. ‘You
are
an unusual case.’

George perked up to here himself so described. ‘Really?’

‘Of course – you are a wealthy Westerner. This is not usual. Usually it is Turkish and Irani children who are stolen. Sometimes Kurds and Armenians, but they more rarely.’

From this sentence it was the word
wealthy
that popped up and rat-tatted George’s consciousness. He leant forward in his chair and said, in something of a gabble: ‘Money is not an object. If there is a ransom to be paid, we’ll gladly pay a ransom. If they want ransom, you will please tell them that—’

The commissioner employed a placidly forceful manner of interrupting this flow, saying, without raising his voice: ‘They will not contact me, Mr Denoone. There will be no demand for ransom. These kidnappings are never about
ransom
. Of course I will speak to the local bosses. I will speak, and we will see.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said George. ‘How can it not be about money?’

‘Money,’ said Captain Afkhami, ‘
may
be required.’

The commissioner opened his eyes wide, and then narrowed them again. ‘Oh money
will
be required,’ he confirmed, in an
I took this to be understood
tone of voice. ‘We will need to grease the bosses’ wheels.’

‘Money is not a problem,’ said George. It was, in truth, the one sure thing on which he could draw, his sole possible contribution to the situation. He could be forgiven for stressing it. ‘We can transfer any sums required – to whichever chips are needful.’

‘This money will not be to pay any
ransom
, though,’ said the commissioner.

Unable to comprehend this, George only repeated. ‘Money is no object.’

‘I must banish you now,’ said the commissioner, mildly; although perhaps his command of English led him into a more alarming utterance than he intended, for he shook hands with both the captain and George, and promised to contact them as soon as he had information.

Back outside, they made their way back to the flitter and clambered inside. ‘What did he mean, no ransom?’