Taste it, she said.
She held the decorative glass towards me, full of the green liquid.
Wheatgrass, she said.
No alcohol?
Too early for that. I could make you coffee, but I don’t drink the stuff.
There was a tiny scraping of heels from the kitchen and in walked the Pomeranian. She had a splint of some kind attached to her back leg. Her white hair flowered over the top of it, like some exotic plant.
How is the patella?
He is an excellent vetinarian.
Veterinarian, I corrected her.
Whatever, as they say. The joint is back in place.
And the dog limped towards me and stood staring at my ankles. I didn’t dare pick her up.
I’ve forgotten her name.
Jonathan, Jonathan, how could you? Her name is Phoebe.
Phoebe, I repeated, and bent down and tried to stroke that profusion of hair. But she took several tiny toy-like steps backwards.
So, to what do I owe the privilege?
My wife, I told her, still says she loves me.
I am psyckai, not therapist, Jonathan.
But you’re a good listener. And you know certain things.
Yes, I can tell, she said. There’s something dying inside you.
Dying?
Or something dead. Something has died. Present or past tense, I do not know.
You do not deal in tenses?
No, time is fluid with these things.
Ah. You deal in multiple timelines. Like a multiverse.
Don’t be clinical, Jonathan.
You meant to say cynical.
So I did. But there has been a meeting, and something has died. All I can tell.
In me?
Your marriage? Is it dead? Dying?
I hope not.
And you have therapist for that. Therapists deal with dead and dying marriages. I deal simply with the dead.
Can we talk of something else? I asked her.
Please. Because, we keep talking this way, I must charge.
I don’t mind paying, I said, but please talk of something else.
Are you that lonely, Jonathan? Is impossible, with that mouth of yours. It would have been my type of mouth, many years ago. When I had a type.
And I could well imagine. Gertrude, with some Sven or Alix, beautiful enough then to drive them quite insane. The cigarette dangling from her painted lip. And she took up an electronic version of it now, clouded herself in a puff of pungent smoke.
The little girl, Petra, she asked, have you found her yet?
My colleague, I said, and it felt odd saying that. What was Istvan anyway? Associate? Employee? Prevaricator? Anyway, he had plodded the twelfth district and found something.
Your colleague?
Istvan. Has found out there is a brothel, on several floors of one of those old apartment complexes.
So there is a reason for your coming here?
Yes.
But I never said brothel.
You said a small room she cannot leave. Which sounds like a brothel to me.
I pressed some buttons on my phone and brought a picture up. Of a fifties apartment block in an identikit row. A broken concrete path leading to it, with windows reflecting the evening sun. They gleamed, like so many blind-man’s eyes.
And how can I help?
I don’t know. How can you?
I need things I can touch.
I took out the Polaroid again from my pocket. Little Petra smiled at us both with all of the innocence of her ten years. Gertrude placed it between her palms and did her strange thing. Which consisted of her half-closing her painted eyelids and gritting her teeth together with an odd half-smile. Not quite a trance, I remember thinking. More of a meditation.
You are close to her, she said. And she opened those blue eyes.
A good detective.
You’re saying she’s here?
I’m saying you’re close. No more, no less. And for that, you must pay me. No receipts.