‘DANIEL.’
The man in the chef’s white uniform and toque turns slowly to face me. It feels as if somebody else’s daydream has caught up with me. The long shining blade in his hands – it’s always been a lance or a sabre the way he wields it. Those remarkable eyes smiling at me. The peculiar masculine power of my husband’s face, undimmed by the unhealthy pallor and greying temples. Even now, so long after and with everything I know, I still can’t read his expression.
‘So Mr Khan found me.’
‘You’re still wearing a wedding ring,’ I blurt out.
He shrugs. ‘There are many lonely women on a ship. It makes it easier.’
‘Don’t do that.’ Nausea rises in me. ‘Are you coming home, ever?’
The ‘ever’ hangs between us, inadequate. I feel as if I might faint in that steamy ship’s kitchen surrounded by boiling pots.
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. The clock cannot be set back. C’est dommage.’
I search the face of love for a sign, the smallest tell-tale sign that love is still there, but I can’t find it. I think it’s the throwaway French phrase that finally does it. Like clouds parting from the moon. I realise there is to be no reprieve for any of us. He will not cook in the apartment kitchen any time soon.
But my genes carry the vestiges of a long line of hardheaded Catholics. ‘Simone is expecting you to come back some day,’ I say stubbornly, as if life is simple and accountable.
A different expression flits across his tired eyes. And in that moment of seriousness I see it: that he cares for her, that caring about her has surprised him, that he has done what he can to keep her safe from the relentless predators of youth and innocence. I see it all, and I don’t know if I can forgive him.
‘It’s better this way,’ he says quietly. ‘She’ll forget. Life goes on.’
‘It’s not so simple,’ I say, a thundercloud of pent-up rage. ‘You haven’t worked it out yet? That for every action of yours there’s a reaction? Who’s Diable, Daniel? Is that how you knew Simone was with Volkov? No bullshit, if you don’t mind. Please, the truth for a change.’
I’m ranting and I’m begging all at once. My husband, the man for whom my heart will not unbreak itself, sits on a high stool and mops his sweaty brow.
‘I do not know. The information was sent to me by somebody who preferred to remain anonymous.’
‘One of the children found out about RMI.’
‘Yes.’ He nods slowly, not looking at me. ‘We know he has contacted other children. Presumably to tell them. We are not certain of his intentions.’
I laugh at his discomfort, and my laugh is ugly, distorted. He makes me think of a character in a TV series with an addiction. ‘RMI’s nightmare come true. We, we, we. So you’re still with them.’
He does not contradict me so I keep going.
‘It was because this Diable boy egged her on that Simone kept looking, until she found your book under the floorboards in the cupboard in the study. And then she sent Lady Limbo to Olmi.’
Daniel takes a handkerchief out again and passes it across his sweaty, pallid brow.
‘She wanted to hurt you because she was furious with you,’ I say in a gentler voice. ‘And me, because of all the lies. Anyway, it gave Olmi something new to put in front of the judge. That’s how he got him to sign the extradition request.’
Daniel nods.
‘Wait until he sees your latest manuscript,’ I say. Daniel gives me a startled look as if he’s only just at that moment realised that that’s something I might do – show Olmi the draft material of Limbo’s Bride.
‘I haven’t, don’t worry. I meant when you publish.’ But I nearly did. I offered to give Olmi the rough episodes Daniel had posted to me. I would have done anything to get Simone out of there.
‘She’s still on that chat site with this Diable? Even after what happened with Volkov?’
‘It’s all gone quiet. We gave her the laptop back. She didn’t even move to another chat room – said it was pointless because she knew Igor would just hack into that one too. We’re monitoring but so far nothing else.’
‘For as long as it suits him,’ Daniel says grimly. I stare at him for a long, fascinated moment.
‘You wouldn’t be so worried unless …’ The water in the pots is boiling and there’s dance music coming from somewhere in the ship, but it’s suddenly very, very quiet, as if the two of us are in a flying car making its way through deep outer space. ‘You suspect he is your son?’
‘It’s possible,’ he says, finally lifting his head and meeting my horrified gaze. ‘It wasn’t just the face-to-face encounters − you know that − there was also the artificial insemination. Only the mother knows the answer to that question.’
‘Poor Daniel. Whoever it is they probably hate you. Isn’t that ironic? It’s a kind of hell on earth for you, I suppose, never actually being a real father.’
‘I don’t blame you for being bitter, Paola. I left it too late − trying to be a husband to the woman I loved. That was important to me, after what my mother went through, I want you to know that.’
‘You were trying to make it up to her? That’s what our marriage was all about?’
‘No!’ He cries out, and the hot steaming air seems to pulsate as if it is something monstrous and living. When he resumes, his voice is resigned. ‘Why do you think I sent you the rough chapters? It was like a stain I couldn’t get out of my life, as if my blood was poisoned and I couldn’t ever escape it after all. But with you next to me I could forget them − only sometimes I could not stop the dreams, and even Enid could not help me. You did not know this? That until I met you I hardly slept? It was always easier for me to sleep in the daytime.’
‘How could I know that? You never talked to me about anything that mattered, never mind what was keeping you awake. If I tried to talk about your nightmares you just sweet-talked me into thinking about something else. If you’d told me what was going on, maybe we wouldn’t be sitting in this shit-hole sauna of a ship kitchen! You were really, really good at the sweet talk, I’ll give you that.’
The beautiful green eyes smile at me. ‘You made me want my own kids − it seemed like it would make things perfectly right. After our marriage something happened to me, I was like a woman around a baby. A baby would bring me close to tears almost, you never noticed. Perhaps you couldn’t allow yourself to notice. It is not something a man is supposed to feel.’
‘I think you should finish the next book. Is it all true?’
‘Most of it.’ He shrugs.
‘The part about the women killing their own babies?’
Daniel sighs. ‘Sometimes it is the part that history does not record that is the most true. A stillborn child was not considered to have lived, so there was no punishment.’
‘And the letter to your mother?’
‘I discovered the letter from Amporia with the personal effects my mother left for me. I almost threw it away many times but in the end I sent it to Enid. She asked me to translate it into English for you, in case you should need it.’
‘You gave the letter to Enid? Why?’
He hesitates. ‘I thought it might have meaning for her. It was Enid who helped my mother to come to this country. After buying the ship tickets there was no money left; she found us a place to stay and gave us food.’
‘Is that why you did it? Going with all those women? To survive?’ The words make themselves out of thin air. It’s a question I’ve waited three years to ask. The alternative is to accept that I do not know or understand the man who once convinced me to marry him by making love on a mountaintop with eagles soaring overhead.
‘After she took us away, my mother struggled to find piano students. At the first proper school I attended when we came to South Africa, the mathematics teacher offered to help me catch up with private lessons. She was a lonely woman who had never married. Later she moved away to have her child. That was how it began.’
And to think I was once afraid of Jack’s tape getting into the wrong hands. My humiliation is now complete. It feels as if I am no longer afraid of anything – or at least as if fear is irrelevant, it no longer serves a purpose in my life.
‘Nobody will ever believe any of it anyway.’
He wipes his brow and smiles.
‘Sometimes I do not believe it myself, but for now being a fugitive takes up all my energy.’ Daniel removes the toque and runs a hand through his hair. Beads of sweat have formed on his forehead. ‘There is no more privacy. That French detective is intolerable. He is determined to put me in prison.’
I have planned for this meeting carefully, considering everything I need to say to satisfy the listeners and to achieve the outcome I desire.
‘You can’t stay here. That journalist resurrected the missing-person story.’
‘I know,’ he says gently. ‘But it will be a while before they get here. Listen to me, Paola.’
‘What?’
‘I have known the captain of this ship for a long time. When you want a divorce, bring the papers to Captain Hofmeyr and he will make sure I get them.’
‘That’s all you have to say?’
‘Je regrette tout.’
‘How about the Paris murders? Do you regret that too? Olmi says he has new evidence that links you to the dead women.’
He swats Olmi away with one hand. ‘The man is a cretin. There is nothing to link me with their deaths, only with their lives.’
‘You regret Roxy too?’
‘Mais oui, they are animals, to abduct a young girl to ensure my silence. But I’m a wanted man, so now they must distance themselves from me. They know they can get to me through you and Simone, but otherwise I will not show myself. If you had not managed to bring Simone back with you, I would have delivered myself into their hands.’
‘You would have done that? Done a swap of yourself for Simone?’
‘But there was no need, you are like the wolf mother – incroyable. It is a good thing for me we meet with Simone safely returned to you.’ He grins. ‘Do not tell me you had not thought of something similar?’
I smile back at him in spite of myself. Bartering with Olmi was the last card I would have played: the details of Daniel’s whereabouts in exchange for Simone’s freedom.
‘That’s what the divorce is about? That piece of paper will keep me and her safe?’
‘It is not over. It will never be over. You know that.’
‘So I can tell her that when it is over you will come back?’
‘Tempus volat, hora fugit,’ he says wryly. The Latin proverb makes my eyelids prick with tears; it makes me realise how I’ve missed my husband and his silly Asterix and Obelix jokes. ‘That is a safe enough promise,’ Daniel acknowledges, watching me.
‘Talking about legalities,’ I barrel on, to hide my distress, ‘my lawyer’s name is Hans Merensky. He has all the documents for Simone. He knows everything. You need to contact him if anything happens to me. Okay?’
‘Everything?’ Daniel asks carefully, his brow calm.
I allow myself to look at him now, unsure if I will be cut into pieces by what I see, because what if he’s somehow different from when I first set eyes on him? What if he’s shifted shape into another man? ‘Everything that is necessary to keep her safe.’
He nods. ‘Okay.’
In my eyes he is the same man. I must say what I have come here to say.
‘Daniel …’
‘Oui …’
‘There is a way for it to be over. You have to help Olmi to find Roxy and bring her back home. If you don’t stop this thing, your mother’s life will have been meaningless. You took the law into your own hands and then ran away again. They will say this proves you killed those women. And you will never be able to stop running.’
‘You want me to hand myself in?’ He is incredulous.
‘Contact Olmi and tell him you want to make a deal. You will tell him everything you know in exchange for a new identity in a country outside the jurisdiction of France or Belgium.’
‘I have made you hate me so much?’ he demands, his hand a fist around the knife’s handle as he raises it, his knuckles white as bone, making the movement look accidental.
‘If I hated you, I would have handed you in myself. Are you going to kill me?’
My logic is irrefutable; the hand relaxes.
‘I have never killed a woman,’ Daniel says haughtily. ‘And I do not know where Roxy is.’
‘They don’t believe you, Daniel.’
He stares at the row of fish on the wooden boards and suddenly the knife in his hand is chopping off fish heads at a frightening speed. When he is done, he tips the heads into a container and puts a lid on. ‘Flies are a problem,’ he says, as he washes his hands under a tap. He plunges the knife into a huge wooden block where it vibrates next to other knives.
‘They are right not to believe me,’ he says softly with his back to me. ‘You should not believe me either. I am guilty. Roxy is a defenceless child.’
‘This isn’t the time to fool around, Daniel,’ I say, my hand curled over the edge of the stainless steel counter for support. ‘What are you talking about?’ My heart is a clenched fist, my breathing shallow and ragged, and I have broken out in a cold sweat. It is the only thing that can save us, if I know what he has done, what it is that has driven him away.
He turns to face me, and his gaze is desolate.
‘I knew Jasmine before.’
‘What are you saying?’ I stare at him in consternation. How is dead Jasmine linked to missing Roxy?
‘When you brought the message to Nicky, I knew it must be her. I had met her through Sarrazin, my employer. It was chance that put her in my path again. She was Sarrazin’s lover and well known in the clubs for her limbo dance.’
‘You knew Sarrazin in Paris? You worked for him?’
‘Oui,’ Daniel says. ‘I went back to Paris many times and I did whatever he required me to do – but nothing violent. For that he had other people. It was my job to be discreet. Often all I had to do was deliver an envelope or collect an envelope. Sometimes I would collect a woman and bring her to him at a prearranged destination. Sometimes−’
The world stops spinning on its axis. There are only the two of us caught in suspension, two little dolls made of blood and sinew and nerves, one male and one female, catapulting around and around, unable to let our clasped hands go. I feel sick.
‘You owe me this much, Daniel.’
‘Perhaps you are right,’ he says. The green eyes darken and look away. ‘Sometimes I would be given the instruction to collect a girl from a hotel in Paris and take her to a farmhouse in the countryside. What happened to her after that it was not my business to ask …’ He shrugs. ‘I had seen it a few times at the cult − a new young girl would arrive, and she would become homesick and unhappy, but after a while she got used to how things worked and settled in. It did not seem much different.’
‘Did not … seem much different?’ I croak, in a kind of stupefied agony.
‘Non.’ But he will not look at me.
‘You … were a chauffeur … for the Sarrazins,’ I stumble over the words, stunned at his admission. ‘Like the chauffeur in my dream.’
A wave of nausea grips me, stronger this time, and I run unsteadily over to a dustbin against the wall. I yank open the lid and a thin stream of yellow puke runs out of my mouth. I gag and puke again, and when it is over I clean myself up with some tissues from my handbag and pour some water into a glass from the tap.
‘And then you talk about wanting children …’ I stammer out. ‘Have you ever thought that maybe that was part of why I didn’t want any? That there was always something about you that I couldn’t reach?’
‘Oui,’ he says, his voice sad and penitent. ‘It is all true.’
‘And then Simone arrived on your doorstep. That must have been a shock. What goes around comes around. Maybe they wanted you to deliver Simone somewhere? Is that it?’ I hurl words at him like sharp rocks. I want him to bleed and fall to the ground. If I could bury him under a pile of rocks, I would. Then I could walk away, knowing he was beyond saving.
‘No,’ he says. ‘The chauffeur work was something in my youth. It is how they start you, to see if you are discreet and can take instructions. I never knew where the girls went from the farmhouse. Sarrazin did not trust me for that work. Perhaps he sensed my reservations.’
‘From chauffeur to breeding stud,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure which one is worse.’
‘You have never done anything you regretted?’ Daniel asks, and his eyes implore me to understand.
‘I think maybe in this case regret doesn’t cover it, Daniel, maybe it requires shame … Only I haven’t seen anything about your chauffeur duties in the manuscript. If you think you know where Roxy has been taken, you have to tell them. Maybe that’s what missing. Restitution. Something like the truth−’
A great clanging sound startles us both.
‘My assistants will be here soon,’ he warns. ‘You must leave.’
I curse the interruption but power on. I have nothing to lose.
‘Daniel, listen to me. You have to get to Olmi and tell him everything. He can broker a deal with the French authorities and set you up in a safe witness programme.’
‘There is no witness programme that is safe from La Sarrazin,’ Daniel says sardonically. ‘She has informers everywhere and she has a long memory.’
‘You are Roxy’s only chance. If this were a novel,’ I plead, ‘it would be the only way to get your life back.’
‘Maybe you should write my novels,’ he says.
I keep going, trying to find the right words for both of us. ‘You are the key. Marcel Olmi and Klaus Knappman are good men but they can’t do it on their own. With a new identity and money you can go somewhere far away from cities and RMI, somewhere off the beaten track where Nada Sarrazin and her goons will never find you, and you can be a writer again.’
He runs a hand through his damp, thick hair, and the maleness of the gesture, seeing the inside of my husband’s wrist exposed, makes my knees almost buckle.
And I will lose you forever.
‘You must go now,’ he says.
‘You were on the inside of both organisations,’ I hurtle on desperately. ‘You can tell everyone how they operate, what the connection is. If you tell a judge what the cult did to you and your mother, and how they wanted to throw you out alone, then maybe they will investigate the cult and re-open the case on RMI.’
‘It is my word against theirs. It will make no difference.’
‘It’s not done until we bring Roxy back home. You can provide the information that makes that happen. Simone deserves a normal life with her best friend back with her family.’ Trust only Olmi. I mouth these words at him. And then I will him to understand me when he looks confused. Trust only Olmi.
‘You really love her,’ he says slowly, as if he has not quite believed it until that moment.
It is the opportunity I have been waiting for. I throw myself at him, pummelling at his chest in a staccato frenzy of fists and fury. ‘Yes, I do, damn you, I really do! And if you had any brains you’d know that one can’t just switch love off, it’s not like you walked out the door and I got to switch love off−’
It is impossible to know if surveillance cameras have been installed in the kitchen. In the few seconds I have I manage to take his hand and make him feel the thin wire earpiece under my shirt. His eyes meet mine with the comprehension of shock. I slip a note into the gap between the double-breasted panels of his chef’s jacket.
He pulls me towards him, ostensibly to stop my pummelling fists. We stay pressed against each other, my heat-scorched cheeks against the steam-soaked white cloth, membranes and nerve endings aflame with pleasure, lust rising savage and lovely in our veins, the way it always was between us. Then he lets me go and it is over. He runs his hand over his face and holds his mouth as if to prevent the spilling of words that might destroy us both.
I walk unsteadily over to my handbag. He will read the note and it will explain everything.
‘Goodbye Daniel.’
‘Adieu, Paola.’
I walk away through that broiling heat, willing one foot ahead of the other, and willing myself away from him.
I wait to hear him call out in the voice of love, ‘Paola, wait.’
I even imagine myself waiting.
I wait for the words ‘Je regrette tout, mais pas notre mariage’ but they don’t come.
That’s how I remember him now. Through a steamed-up porthole. Standing alone in a big cluttered ship’s kitchen, mopping his brow with a white handkerchief. If he’d said one small word calling me to him, I would have gone to him.
I walk down the gangplank off the ship and leave him there.
I imagine Daniel’s frown when he reads the note and recognises the familiar letters of his typewriter, the one that is still back in our apartment in his old writing den.
They are watching the ship. If you do not hand yourself in they will be waiting for you in St Helena to extradite you to France. You must leave the ship tonight. Olmi is waiting for your call.
My husband is the man in my dreams. Everything has changed and yet nothing has changed. We are what we are. Now I think I always knew.
Daniel is my beloved. Napoleon would have understood. War is life and life is war.