It was when they went back to Paris, and settled into their hotel rooms, that the shadow of Malasso struck again. No one was sure how it happened. When the crew converged at the hotel desk for dinner in the evening, it was discovered that Husk had gone missing. The hotel staff hadn’t seen her leave. Her key was not on the rack, but Sam said that he had seen her talking to a strange-looking man with hooded eyes and a black hat earlier in the evening. She had seemed distressed, he said, but he hadn’t been alarmed because she had been that way for most of the journey, agitated about something, and extremely irritable. Husk’s disappearance was very serious because she had all the schedules, the filming times, the appointments, and even the dinner arrangements for the evening at a nearby restaurant.
Husk’s disappearance caused a tremendous sense of unease among the crew. The strange man she’d been seen with brought fears of abduction, kidnapping, and possibly worse. The name Malasso was whispered again amongst the crew. Propr took it very badly indeed. He began grumbling and pacing up and down the hotel lobby in his shorts that revealed his bandy legs. His wrinkled face with comic moustache became very peevish. He muttered bad-temperedly about the dreadful company he was keeping, the stupid idea behind the journey, the incompetence of the crew, about Jim’s complete lack of leadership qualities, and the unprofessional nature of the whole expedition.
The crew members split up and went searching for Husk in the environs of the hotel. When they couldn’t find her they wanted to call the police. But Jim wanted to wait before taking such a drastic step. The last thing he needed was investigation and probing when so much was still uncertain, when any news in the press could wreck the entire project and end his film career which was already ending, it seemed, in disaster.
He tried to get everyone to calm down and suggested that they order drinks for themselves. No one calmed down. Sam kept fretting. Riley was jittery. Jute, convinced that tragedy was about to strike, began to see things, and spoke of catching glimpses of strange men spying on them, following them around. She claimed that they’d been followed all day, and that she had noticed a man with a black hat, hooded eyes, and a long scar on his left arm going into the train-driver’s house just after they left. No one paid her much attention.
Mistletoe sat at a table, sipping orange juice. She drew, in her large sketchpad, variations of a man in black with an exaggerated scar on his left arm. Lao remained oddly serene through all this, hardly saying a word, smiling in that faintly cynical manner of his. A profound unease dwelled among the crew. They avoided looking at each other. It could be said that because of so much that was unstated they had never disliked or distrusted one another as much as they did at that moment.