The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 40

Words to characterise my behaviour:

Words to characterise Luca Evard:

He was not a man who had a drink with a strange woman in a strange city, however much she may have dressed herself for his delight. He was not a man to open up about himself, his life, his fears. That was not who he was.

Have a drink, I said. We’re both strangers in a strange land, we both read the same books. I’m an injured woman; have a drink with me.

Just one, he said at last. I don’t really drink in hotel bars.

On the third glass of wine I said, Are you single?

Yes, he replied, tongue loosened by good Australian wine. For the last three months.

I’m sorry, I said, feeling a flush of something that might have been… surprise? I hadn’t considered the possibility of anything in his life except his work — except me.

We drifted apart, he said. My work, her work — you know how it is. You?

Single, I replied. It’s how I like it. Tell me about this book — The Lemon and the Wave. Why have you read it so many times?

He smiled at nothing much, ate fried squid from a bowl, studied the room where we sat, taking in people, décor, sound, light. Every table was glass, blue lights ran beneath to cast strange shadows through the plates, lights brushing up the line of his chin and neck.

“I think it’s written by a killer,” he explained. “There was a spate of murders in Austria in 1989, four women and a man all killed the same way. One man came under suspicion. The police wanted to arrest him, but there wasn’t enough physical evidence, and they had to let him go. He left the country three weeks later, and then in 1993 this book came out, and though the names are different, the chronology, the manner of the murder, down to the finest detail, down to where the victims were left, the knots used in the nooses that strangled them, the size and make of the blade, everything, the same. The writing takes the point of view of a policeman, but he never catches the killer, comes to admire him by the end, becomes a killer himself, the policeman is transformed by what he sees into a murderer. I was part of the liaison, tried to trace the writer, this R. H. — but he’d moved on, somewhere in North America. We alerted the FBI, but again, what do we have? Nothing. A work of fiction. A killer laughing at the men who cannot catch him, perhaps. A flight of fancy from a twisted mind. You can’t arrest a man for fiction, can you?”

“If you can’t do anything, why do you read it so much?”

Surprise; the question almost too ridiculous to be asked. “As a warning,” he replied. “To remember. To remember the ones who died, whose killer we never brought to justice.”

Justice: the quality of being just, righteous. The moral principle of determining just conduct.

The administering of deserved punishment or reward.

I thought through my understanding of justice, and found no place for me in it. But then again, to do justice: to act or treat fairly. To acquit in accordance with one’s abilities or potential. It could not be denied that I was unrighteous in my life, but did I do justice?

Then Luca said, “I came here to find a thief.”

My eyes turned back to him from another place. He was the world, the universe, so big in my attention that, for a moment, I wondered if he wasn’t some fractured figment of my own imagination, a voice I had conjured for myself. But his eyes were elsewhere, his words came from some place in his soul that spoke for its own sake, not for mine.

“My superiors think she drowned. She stole from a museum. Forty years ago, the items would have been sold by the Chinese government to raise capital for tractors and shovels, but now China is reacquiring a taste for a glorious and opulent history. This is what gives the item value, more than its chemical composition.”

Emerald: a compound of beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate and trace amounts of chromium, which gives it its green colour.

“I think she came to Hong Kong to sell it. There’s a man, Bogyoke Dennis. He started out as a smuggler in Cambodia; now he kills his enemies with snake venom. He runs the prostitution and people-smuggling racket in the South China Sea. She should never have… but she must have got greedy, or arrogant, or just… stupid.”

Stupid: dull. Lacking quickness.

Stupid, the quality of…

… of being bloody stupid.

Just

stupid.

“You’re… sad, that she’s dead?”

“If she’s dead.”

“But you’re sad.”

He shrugged. “I’m always sad at a loss of human life.”

“Even a thief?”

“Still human.”

“Is that all?”

His eyes refocused onto mine, quick now, sharp, a drawing in of his features. “What do you mean?”

“You sound like you’ve been looking for her for a while.”

“For years. I know every detail of every crime she’s committed. I know how she likes to dress, how she does her hair, what kind of car she likes to drive, what food she eats. In Munich she scammed €75,000 from a lawyer whose speciality was getting drug traffickers off by accusing the police of corruption, and I was… a little bit pleased, God forgive me, but I thought that the crime had humour in it. She skimmed him while he was attending a fundraiser at the opera, scanned his credit cards, cloned his phone, and after she listened to two hours and a quarter of Verdi, I saw her on the security cameras, and again, photographed by one of the journalists there to cover the fundraiser, and she looked… You know, I find it hard to picture her face now, the details are… I know every part of her, but it’s so hard to find… She looked astonished. Held by music. I can’t… I remember thinking that’s how she seemed. I remember thinking those words. Now she’s probably dead; all that for nothing.”

Silence.

Then,

sorry, he said.

Sorry.

Didn’t mean to talk about…

sorry.

Silence.

I reached across the table, my hand on his, and he did not pull away.

I felt the blood in the veins on the top of his hand.

I felt the tendons under his skin.

Was this pulse in my fingertips his heart, or mine?

He looked down, like a man ashamed, and did not pull away.

“I have a terror,” he said at last. “I… fear.”

I waited. All he needed was silence.

“I fear sometimes that… she isn’t real. That she does not exist. It is irrational, of course; we have evidence, DNA, prints, her face, her MO, we have everything we need to convict her. But everywhere we go, every crime she commits, people cannot remember her. Is she a trick, an illusion? A fabrication, a puppet show performed for our delight, a cover for a conspiracy, an experiment, a witch? Why can’t people remember? I can describe her every feature to you and yet… the description is just words, rehearsed for hours on end in briefings — hair, height, weight, colouring — just… words. I look at you and you could be her, you fit the words, but I studied her picture, I know her face, you are not her, I would recognise her, I would know her instantly, I would know!”

Voice rising; pain, fear, confusion.

I pressed my hand tighter against his, my reality, his skin, my warmth, his blood.

“I received a file,” he went on. “I thought perhaps it was from her. How did she know about me? Perhaps she had it ready to send, in case the exchange went wrong. Perhaps she is using me from beyond the grave, vengeance against the men who killed her.”

“There’d be some justice in that, I think.”

The slightest of smiles. “Yes,” he conceded. “Perhaps a little.”

Justice. In Chinese the symbol is , yí, a pictogram I always thought looked rather joyous, full of hope. If I were to sign my name with a symbol, I think I would want it to be .

“Just because no one remembers seeing her doesn’t mean she died,” I said, and as he smiled at nothing, I added, “It seems like an extraordinary series of events.”

He looked at me again, or perhaps for the first time, and I wondered if now he was listing words that matched my features. My height, weight, skin, eyes, the slightly bulbous end of my nose, ears a little too large, high forehead, thick brows, deep black hair pulled back into a loose knot, a suggestion of freckles under my eyes. All these things could be described, annotated, he could stand in front of my photo every day and recite these qualities, and now he looked at me and perhaps, for the first time, attempted to annotate my face, categorise it and find a match. Did he see who I was?

Perhaps he did.

But he believed too much in his own rationality, and so at the very moment that his eyes widened and his lips parted in realisation, he turned his head to one side, pulled his gaze away, and informed himself perhaps that no, no — he knew the face of the thief, it was impossible to meet her now and not recognise her, not him, not after all this time.

And so the moment passed, leaving only him, me, now.

I said, “Do you want another drink?”

He shouldn’t.

He was… it wasn’t… he wasn’t that kinda guy.

“I was alone last night, I’ll be alone tomorrow,” I replied. “How about you?”

His hand, still beneath mine.

“Okay,” he said. Then, “Okay.”