Alive, I thought, it’s what we all want to feel, as I descended the stairs, one or maybe two hours later. Alive meant time was a fluid river, so that a minute could last one hour, and an hour one minute. The curtain was pulled once more, to hide a dark, watching face. The courtyard with its cobbled surface seemed to rise to meet me and the metal balconies seemed to circle above, with their creeping, late-afternoon shadows. I walked back the way I had come, through the small stone archway, and there was no cello playing. And there was something else I was trying to forget now; it was to do with a blunt-heeled shoe and the instep of the foot beneath it, it was to do with the whisper of released clothing against skin, textures of linen and silk and the dust wheeling in the bands of sunlight coming through the window, above the sad mattress. It was a sad mattress, spread out on a frayed carpet of the floor of what you could hardly call a bedroom. There was the cello, perched on the sofa like an observant cat, and I imagined I was inside that cello, looking through one of the S’s cut into the wood at the open doorway and the broad beam of sunlight in the room beyond, above the mattress and the two bodies twisting in some kind of combat on it. It was a slow, luxurious kind of combat with the untwining of a limb or the rise and fall of a flank signifying capture or surrender. There were no winners, only losers in this field of flesh and muscle, and so I knew I should forget it, or remember it for ever. So I did my best to forget.
Forgetting meant walking, so I walked again. Through the small backstreets to one of the wide promenades that led to the river, and the yawning bridge above it. Two oriental tourists asked me to help with their photograph and so I held their camera and obeyed their instructions about what to include in the frame. Angels, they said, angels. So I took two steps backwards and tilted the camera upwards so that two of the statues above the parapet loomed above their smiling faces.
Do you know those angels are blind? I asked them as I showed them the digital image. They nodded with approval and thanks but with no understanding.
Stupid historical fact, I said, and handed the camera back.
And I nodded and smiled, and bowed and continued on my way to the other side.
Istvan was alone in the office and was wondering why that was the case. He was holding the map of the city with the burnt hole in it. He was wondering why that was the case too.
I had to let Frank go, I said.
Ferenc? he asked, and I nodded.
Should I ask why? he asked.
You already have, I said, and no, you shouldn’t.
I could tell, he said delicately, that things weren’t what they should have been.
You noticed a certain tension? I asked.
It is my job, he said, to notice things.
And this map, he said, with the burnt hole somewhere in the twelfth district . . .
Is it the twelfth?
It was the first time I’d become aware of that.
The twelfth, he said, with a small singed fraction of the fifteenth. Our city once had Parisian pretensions. Based on the Napoleonic arrondissements.
Did Napoleon get this far? I asked. And I was so intent on forgetting, I would have sat through a history tutorial.
Napoleon the Third, he said, not Bonaparte. And the Grande Armée never made it here. It passed to the west, on its way towards Moscow.
Istvan was plump, with an owlish face and a kind demeanour. What he most enjoyed was never getting to the point.
You have burnt a hole with your cigarette, maybe? When lacking a ballpoint pen?
I don’t smoke.
Ah. So the map burnt itself?
In a manner of speaking.
You are speaking in tongues.
His mention of biblical tongues made me think of angels. Eyeless and blind to the river below them.
You remember the parents? I said. Searching for their missing daughter?
You insisted we engage with them.
They went to a psychic. And the psychic did some business with that map.
She burnt it with her cigarette?
How did you know it was a she?
I remember the conversation. I was listening, in the other room.
Of course, he would have been. And it was his job, after all. I began to look forward, now, to life in these offices with just the two of us.
Gertrude. She claims the girl, Petra, is in a small room that she cannot leave. Somewhere in the burnt section of that map.
A brothel. In the environs of the twelfth and the fifteenth.
If they are the burnt bits.
They are, believe me.
All burnt now, and smoking. I imagined laser-guided missiles, broken buildings, charred bodies.
How long to find out?, I asked him.
There are brothels everywhere. But in the twelfth, the fifteenth? It depends on their status.
You mean legality?
They are all quasi-legal. I mean, how much above the radar. What they offer. If it is girls, under-age . . .
If it is?
It will take more time. And I pity the parents.
She went missing years ago.
Ah. On the legal end of things then, perhaps. And I still pity the parents. Maybe even more. All those years, and not knowing.
He folded the burnt map, carefully.
Give me three, four days . . .
You have it, I said.
Is this a punishment duty, he asked, or an enticement to a partnership?
A bit of both, perhaps. There’s only two of us now.
Yes. Two.