They had come to the office four or five days ago. A country couple, on the other side of middle age, with the same lines of endurance etched on both of their faces. Their Petra had gone missing twelve years ago, in one of those resorts along the Black Sea. I had walked back into the office from a session with the therapist. Did I mention that I needed a therapist? Anyway, I had walked back into the office trying to forget the thing I couldn’t forget. And he was there, Frank, and I remembered it all again. He was speaking to them in the language I was still trying to understand.
I was telling them, he said, that we do missing husbands, wives, doctored bank accounts, counterfeit vodkas and handbags. But what we don’t do is missing children.
His tone of voice was neutral, matter-of-fact. He wanted them out of there, rather quickly.
There are police departments for that, I added, with a hint of what I hoped came across as solicitude in my voice.
But the mother’s eyes responded. The father stared at his feet.
Police don’t care, she said, in her bad English.
Police do fuck all, added the husband, spitting on the worn carpet by his ancient shoes.
And in a moment of weakness, or a moment of vengefulness – probably the latter – I took the Polaroid from Frank’s cufflinked hand and saw little Petra for the first time.
Frank always wore cufflinks. They were one of those traces I was trying to forget. I had found one of them in questionable circumstances and, as he must have known about it, it would have been politic to change his habits of couture. But some habits die hard, I knew that too.
Why come to us, I asked them, after all this time?
Dream, said Mrs Pavel.
A dream? I asked.
A dream, the husband said, and he seemed weary of it all. She had a dream.
I saw her, said the wife.
You saw Petra?
Yes. She said help me. She was as pretty as the day she left.
She was a little girl, in this dream?
I lifted up the Polaroid to the light coming through the window. I heard Frank’s exasperated sigh. And I must admit, it gave me some satisfaction.
My sweet little girl.
And then they went to, would you believe, a psychic, Frank muttered wearily.
He was handsome, Frank, in a kind of annoying, indeterminate way. He was ex-special forces, of some army that used to be. He also shaved his chest.
A psychic, I said. Mildly surprised. I had recently visited a psychic. But I would have been embarrassed to admit the reason.
Was her name Gertrude?
Gertrude, the mother said. How did you know?
Maybe because he’s psychic, Frank said, wearily, and I, almost to my own surprise, found myself drawing the line at his tone.
And what did this psychic tell you?
That she’s somewhere in the city. In a small room she cannot leave.
And the father spat out a word that I recognised.
Bordel.
A brothel, said Frank. He thinks she’s in a brothel.
I have a daughter, I said, that age. I couldn’t bear to lose her.
No? Frank said, and he gave that tight smile that I imagined Sarah knew all too well.
I wondered idly, did my daughter know it too? But she couldn’t, I thought. Or maybe I hoped. That was a line that Sarah wouldn’t cross.
You think they should go to the police?
I know they should.
And what will the police do?
Make a file. Stick it in a drawer. But it will be their drawer, not ours.
But I knew she would haunt me, little Petra. And we had Gertrude in common. And I would have placed any inconvenience on Frank’s shoulders. This particular one seemed heaven-sent.
There are pivotal moments, I know that now. Moments where the world turns, after which everything is different. Moments where we say, later, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s where it began. And they are often tinged with the shabbiest of motives. One small, recalcitrant emotion gives the world a gentle push. And that emotion was, in his language, gelozie.
Tell them we’ll look into it, I said as my eyes moistened a little with what I hoped was a show of paternal solicitude and a sense of infinite regret.
You can’t be serious.
But I can, I told him.
Why? he asked.
Because, I told him, as I held up the Polaroid, I have a daughter that age.
Her blonde hair and her hopeful eyes. The girl I knew absolutely nothing about.
Because, I told him, this face will haunt me for ever if I don’t.
I waited to understand what I could of what he told them. And when the mother kissed my hand and the father stood, with ancient weariness, as if to begin a journey that should have ended long long ago, I knew he had told them rightly what I had said. And I asked him, with apparent courtesy, to make a file of the relevant details.