House of the Lost (22 page)

Theo went into the dining room, his mind already leaping ahead to Matthew.

But it was not Matthew who was waiting for him, it was Zoia. As Theo began to type, he found himself curious to know if Zoia would be able to cope with Annaleise’s demands about spying.

Romania, early 1960s

At first, Zoia thought she would not be able to cope with Annaleise’s demands about spying. Stripped of the fancy words and honeyed tones, it boiled down to Annaleise wanting Zoia to pry and snoop and tell her all she discovered. Annaleise explained it in detail, saying there were rebels and dissidents everywhere.

‘But how will I recognize them?’ Zoia asked. ‘How will I know which ones to watch?’

‘You’ll recognize them. I’ll give you some pointers, but they’re usually easy to spot. They’re arrogant; they walk round as if they own the world. They’re dangerous and must be stopped, taught a lesson, removed from circulation if necessary. I hope you understand, Zoia.’

She reached out a hand to caress Zoia’s breast as she said this, and Zoia, her body leaping with the familiar desire, gazed longingly at Annaleise and said she understood it very clearly. What happened to these people? she said.

‘They aren’t all guilty, of course,’ said Annaleise. ‘Most of them are, though. My masters in the Communist Party are very clever and very watchful and it’s not often they get it wrong. The innocent are let go, of course.’

‘And the guilty?’

Zoia thought Annaleise hesitated, then she shrugged and said it was necessary to think of the common good. The guilty ones were taken to suitable places to be kept out of the way for a while. That was really all Zoia needed to know.

‘Prison?’ said Zoia.

‘That’s a harsh word. But whatever’s done is for the common good. Such people are a danger. The sensible, logical thing is to put all the rotten eggs in one basket.’

‘Yes, I see that,’ said Zoia thoughtfully.

‘There is one egg who is very rotten indeed,’ said Annaleise. ‘Someone I would like very much to bring to justice. It’s up to the Party to make the decision, of course, but I’m preparing evidence, a little here and a little there. I shall persuade my masters to investigate her in the end, though, because she’s a very dangerous lady indeed. Very much of a threat to us.’

‘Who is she?’

‘You knew her at the university,’ said Annaleise and her lips thinned with hatred. ‘But she has since married. Her name now is Elisabeth Valk.’

The present

The shrilling of the doorbell shattered Theo’s absorption, dragging him out of Zoia’s dark and unhappy world. The bell was followed by a cheerful tattoo on the door knocker, and Theo opened the door to the locksmith. He let the man in and explained the requirements, after which the locksmith proceeded to clatter breezily round the house, whistling to the strains of a minuscule radio which he switched on as soon as he started work. ‘You don’t mind, do you, squire? I like a bit of liveliness while I work.’

‘Not at all,’ said Theo, closing the dining room door firmly, and trying to recapture Zoia and that intriguing reference to Elisabeth Valk.

‘No one really knows what happened to Elisabeth,’ Mara’s grandmother had said. ‘And no one knows where she is either, not now, not for sure.’

Elisabeth Valk, who had laughed out of the photo on Andrei’s desk – the photo Matthew had liked – and whom even the ungenerous Zoia had said grudgingly was beautiful and clever. Theo began to write a description of Elisabeth who was starting to look as if she could be a major player in the story, but was interrupted again by the locksmith who had finished his work and wanted to explain the workings of the locks.

‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long, squire, but these old places are real shockers to work on. Oh, I had to plane that kitchen door a bit to get the new lock on properly. I’ve swept up the wood dust, but you might want to run a vacuum over it as well. Here you are – three keys for each door, and that’s your five-lever for the front, so you’re safe as houses. Had a bit of trouble with snoopers, I expect.’

‘Just a bit.’

‘That’s murder for you,’ said the man philosophically. ‘No offence and all that if you were related to the lady, but people like a murder. No accounting for tastes, I say.’

Theo said there was no accounting at all, paid the modest account, added a substantial tip to cover the planing of the door, and returned to Elisabeth and Zoia.

Romania, early 1960s

If Elisabeth Valk had not been so vividly alive, she might never have come to the attention of Annaleise, and subsequently to Zoia’s. But at university, Elisabeth had been a leader, an innovator, at the centre of everything. She had not been called Valk then – Zoia had never known her maiden name and it had not really mattered, because if anyone ever said ‘Elisabeth’ people had always known who was meant, and had smiled. Zoia had never smiled though. She envied Elisabeth who was beautiful and clever and possessed of the indefinable gift called charm, and because of that she had disliked her without knowing her. She had thought, in a vague way, that it would be deeply satisfactory to teach such a vain, privileged little madam a lesson. Was she now going to get the chance to do that?

Zoia’s departure from the university did not cause much comment; if anyone noticed they assumed she had gone because she had no money to continue, or because of some man. These things happened and the awkward angular female had never really been a part of student life. After leaving she worked mostly in cafes and bars; a couple of months in one town, a few weeks in another, going wherever Annaleise thought would be most useful. She had expected to dislike snooping and prying, but when it came to it she found it deeply exciting and for the first time she understood properly the saying about knowledge being power. She had knowledge of the people with whom she worked or who came into the cafes and the bars; she found out their secrets and that gave her power over them.

She went about her work diligently because it was for Annaleise. She eavesdropped and became a sympathetic listener to people’s troubles. She found that people who went into bars to get drunk were apt to disclose their most private thoughts to the waitress or barmaid. After a little while she hit on the idea of inventing a large mythical family, nothing like her real family, consisting of relations who had similar troubles to her customers. It created a bond; people opened up far more when they heard that the sympathetic girl serving their wine or food had a cousin or sister or aunt who was in the exact same situation. Several of them even invited Zoia to their houses or apartments, saying how wonderful it was to talk to someone who really understood. On more than one of these visits Zoia contrived to read their letters or bank statements.

She loved it when she could take a really useful piece of information to Annaleise. Perhaps someone might be receiving rents for land or property they ought not to own – there were sections of the community who were prohibited from owning land nowadays but some people found ways of dodging the law. Sometimes there were people who wrote what was called sedition – inciting others to rebel by means of articles or pamphlets. Often these were students who came into the bars and talked indiscreetly after a few glasses of wine.

When Annaleise was pleased with some particular nugget of information she would take Zoia to an expensive restaurant and smile at her across the table, and afterwards take her back to wherever she or Zoia might be living, and cause the longed-for explosions in Zoia’s body and mind. Zoia lived for these meetings and, after a time, if the supply of information about people’s plans and secrets was sparse, she made things up. This one was writing a pamphlet, that one was forging land ownership papers. It was extraordinarily easy to find out what Annaleise’s masters wanted to know and fashion information accordingly. In the beginning it worried her slightly in case these made-up tales resulted in official interrogation or even a spell in prison, but after a time she ceased to care. The guilty would be punished and the innocent would be able to prove their innocence. All that mattered was pleasing Annaleise and, in any case, who ever said life was fair? It had certainly not been fair to Zoia.

A few times she approached other women, curious to know if they could give her the same explosive pleasure as Annaleise. She was careful about who she approached. Sometimes she got it wrong and the woman would recoil from her, but mostly her instinct was right. The trouble was that once in a bed – or more likely a quiet back street or a deserted park – all other women were disappointments as far as Zoia was concerned. They knew the mechanics, some of them were very expert indeed with fingers and tongues, and one or two possessed devices shaped for female pleasure – it was Zoia’s first experience of these. Some demanded money afterwards, which she generally refused to pay. Usually she got away with this, although on a couple of occasions the women attacked her and one sent a shifty-looking man to beat her up. Zoia recovered from the beating which was not much more than bruises and cigarette burns to her arms, and was more wary about who she approached afterwards. In any case, none of them created the wild throbbing of the blood she sought.

Once, curious for further knowledge, she picked up a man in a late-night cafe and went into a nearby park with him. She did not much like it; his penis forcing itself inside her was hard and thick, and it took her back to the nights in the cottage when her father unbuckled his belt to thrash her and her sisters, one hand wielding the belt, the other hand moving with rhythmic urgency between his legs. Still, she thought she might as well know this side of the sex act, so she endured the man’s banging thrusts to the finish and tried not to flinch. Back in her own lodgings, she washed for a long time in lukewarm water from the chipped enamel basin on her washstand. The man’s climax, when it finally happened, had been messier than she had expected and she could not bear the smell or the feel of him on her skin. But the exercise had not been entirely without its value, because now she knew what men were like. He had assumed she was a prostitute and given her money.

She had been living like this for almost a year when Annaleise came to the small apartment where Zoia was living, her face flushed with uncharacteristic colour, her eyes blazing.

‘The Party have agreed to officially investigate Elisabeth Valk,’ she said.

Elisabeth had married at the end of her final year at the university: her husband was a lecturer from another college. His name was Andrei Valk, and he was several years older than Elisabeth, and said to be intelligent and fairly well-off.

‘As much as anyone is well-off these days,’ Annaleise said curtly.

Elisabeth and Andrei Valk had left the university town after their marriage. Annaleise had not yet found where they had gone, but it was said to be not very far.

‘It will be easy to find the exact address,’ said Annaleise. ‘Andrei took up writing as a profession, so we might be able to trace him through his books. But a couple like that would stand out in any community.’

She had read one of Andrei’s books and said she thought it pretentious.

‘He dedicated his first book “To my beloved Elisabeth, who possesses all the graces”. Can you believe that? Nauseating, isn’t it?’

Zoia agreed. She remembered how the lecturers had looked at Elisabeth with proud fondness while Zoia herself had barely earned a second glance from them and she was pleased to think Madam Vanity was about to be taught a lesson. ‘I have a great deal of information about her,’ said Annaleise. ‘But so far nothing quite damning enough for the Party to take action.’

Zoia thought how marvellous it would be if she could get the final damning evidence Annaleise wanted.

And exactly two months later, she did get it.

It happened completely out of the blue, and was due to one of the customers in the bar where she had been working for the past three months. He was a youngish man who came in every Saturday night to wait for his girlfriend and sometimes they had a meal in the tiny dining room. Zoia had cultivated a cautious friendship with them, not because there was any indication that they might be grist for Annaleise’s mill, but because she had learned by now that almost everyone could be made use of in some way.

On this particular night something emerged from the casual talk that could be used very definitely indeed.

‘I was listening to the wireless before I came out,’ said the young man, accepting the glass of beer he always drank before his girl arrived, clearly relaxed after his week’s work and looking forward to the evening ahead. ‘Remarkable, isn’t it, the things people manage to get broadcast nowadays.’

Zoia, polishing glasses, said she supposed it was.

‘Brave of them, when you consider it,’ he said. ‘The way they speak out against—’ He glanced furtively over his shoulder to see who was in earshot, and drew nearer to Zoia and the bar.

‘Against whom?’

He gave a small shrug and drank some more of his beer.

Zoia’s mind had sprung to attention by this time. Trying another approach, she said, ‘What do you mean, brave? What was the programme?’

‘One of those protest radio stations,’ he said. ‘There’ve been a few of them over the years but this was the first one I’d ever heard. A mistake, of course,’ he said hastily, looking round to see if anyone had heard this statement. ‘I was trying to find a play I wanted to hear and I tuned in by accident. The October Group, it calls itself. Of course, I switched off almost as soon as I realized what it was.’ He said this fairly loudly.

‘But what was it exactly?’ asked Zoia, her heart starting to pound, the palms of her hands suddenly clammy with sweat. Was this going to be a really big lead? A protest radio station, she thought. That’s something Annaleise’s people would want to know about.

‘What it was,’ said the young man, taking a deep draught of his beer, ‘was sedition, nothing less. Clear as a curse. They were publicizing a meeting – a rally to freedom they called it – and asking questions most of us wouldn’t even dare to think, if you take my meaning.’

‘Such as?’