And then there were the nights. “Lie down, Lira. Relax, breathe. It’s going to be all right. I’m here…” Nwankwo spoke to her like that each time the nightmares started again. She called, he came running. He would find her sitting up, sobbing. There was no point turning the light on. Nwankwo would sit beside her, holding her hand, in the big room with the double bed where he used to sleep with Ezima.
At first they had been awkward together, linked only by their rigid determination to continue, but that stage had now passed. He was no longer the hyper-tense and over-polite teacher, who seemed to deny the folklore and loud laughter of his own people. And she was no longer the kind of woman who couldn’t stand the emotions and tears of other women.
And so they did the best they could, clinging to one another. Nwankwo was caught between two worlds, two lives; Lira between her memories and the total darkness that surrounded her.
The empty house was now laced with pieces of string stretched between the rooms, a curious idea that Lira had borrowed from the old blind man in St Petersburg. During the day she would guide herself around by feeling the string with the tips of her fingers; at night he would run his finger along it – in his other, normal life he would have been stumbling over his children’s toys. Now he was woken up, not just by Lira’s nightmares, but by his own. At the faintest sound of an engine outside, or the smallest flicker of headlights he would be up and standing against the window of his room, which he had chosen because it was at the front of the house. Two targets in the same house – it was just too dangerous. The protection supplied by the British police would soon be withdrawn. Nwankwo was not sorry – he had broken his promise, and the police must know that.
They would have to leave.
Lira often heard him pacing up and down. She thought about something Dmitry had often accused her of: he said that all this activity of hers was simply away of escaping from intimacy and a private life, of freeing herself from the fear of actually having to confront real life. During the silences of her imaginary conversations with him she wanted to retort that where she was hiding now fear was a permanent condition, with hostile armies lurking among the shadows. But of course, deep down she knew that he was right. It wasn’t Louchsky’s plots that were making her cry out in the night, it was just her terrible loneliness.
And then there were the days. Each morning, in the privacy of her bedroom, Lira would rehearse a few movements, gestures of avoidance and defence which demanded total precision from her hips, ankles and hands. She had already broken a lamp with her karate moves but it didn’t matter; she gained a sense of continuity from the pursuit of these old exercises and challenges. She liked to believe that the half, quarter and full turns that she practised between these four walls would help her to walk straight ahead when the time came to set off alone along a street. But when would that be?
Félix arrived around eleven each morning, after an hour’s drive. The room was filled with his over-strong scent. “Well like that I always know you’re there,” Lira had said. She had let her hands wander over his shoulders, his face, his hair – “You know, I’ve never seen you”. They quickly got to work. Everything they had already known about the vast secret system, the international connections and complicit banks, but had been unable to prove – it was all there now in black and white. But there was an enormous amount of material and it all had to be deciphered. Félix sat in front of the computer on the dining-room table and read out the deposits, the withdrawals and, line by line, dates, names and figures. He spoke entirely in abbreviations. Lira sat curled up on the sofa, listening and repeating them to herself in whispers as though trying to imprint information that she could not read onto her brain. Nwankwo, for his part, took notes and drew arrows and diagrams. Of the three, he was the teacher: he had certainly trawled through plenty of bank statements during his career as an investigator.
“Forex means cash withdrawals,” he said.
They had quickly identified Finley’s accounts, and Louchsky’s as well. With one simple addition of four transfers from Lichtenstein into Finley’s account, Nwankwo was able to conclude with a sigh: “It’s like a subscription – eighty million dollars a year!”
“Meaning?” Lira asked.
“The petrol company drilling in the desert pays Finley a few centimes per litre and credits it to the Lichtenstein account.”
Sometimes his voice would fade away, as though crushed by all that money, and he would appear to be absent for a few seconds as his thoughts wandered back to his homeland; then he would once again pick up his pencil and get back to work on his arrows and bank accounts. A lot of the payments went directly to their recipient, revealing the sense of impunity that reigned at the top of the pyramid. Others went through under the cover of code names and offshore companies that Nwankwo noted down in order to check later on the Internet. Sometimes it was enough to look up old newspaper articles or accounts of past business transactions, and cross-check them with the bank statements to find out who had been involved in Louchsky or Finley’s business dealings.
As the day went by, the low table became covered in mugs, plates, crumbs, pieces of ham or cake left over from improvised meals. Nwankwo and Félix watched Lira, looking out for signs of fatigue showing through the dark glasses she wore to hide her lifeless eyes that were still circled with raw skin. She proudly insisted that she was fine, often mocking her own clumsiness and incapacity – “The poor blind girl would love a little more coffee,” she would say, as if by saying it about herself she could forestall them from thinking or saying it.
On the third day she became obsessed by a new name, a company called Hilar, which had received four large sums from Louchsky. There was nothing by that name on the Internet. Lira wondered out loud what was hidden behind the name. She had worked so hard in the last few years that she knew all the links and connections within the Louchsky empire. Looking at her you might have the impression that blind people either become possessed by their illusions or lose them entirely. She longed to be indispensable, impossible to fault, as nimble as Félix’s fingers on the keyboard or Nwankwo’s pencil on his notebook.
“Well, apart from the Minister of Defence’s dog, I’ve never heard that name…” Félix sighed finally.
“A dog, did you say?” Nwankwo asked.
“Yes it’s some kind of Labrador, he was always posing with it in Nice-Matin, that’s our local paper. But I’m talking about when he was regional president.”
“What sort of guy is he, your minister?”
“Arrogant, ambitious, part of the Élysée inner circle. He’s often talked about as the possible next prime minister.”
“It might be a possible track to follow…”
“What, because of his dog?”
“Sometimes the only things powerful men still love are their animals, you know…” Lira said.
A dog providing a powerful man with a hunter’s image. A dog leading a blind woman. A lot of images sprang to Lira’s mind, and she suppressed them as well as she could. The advantage of all these figures was that they in some way protected her by removing her from the normal world in which she no longer had a place, apart from that reserved for the disabled, exposed to the pitying stares of other people. The figures formed a dark circle around her; they were concealed, invisible to the rest of the world – only she, Lira, could see them. They seemed to produce sparks in her brain, and then she felt like David facing Goliath. At these moments she was bathed in a soft euphoria, but never for long: each point gained increased the risk they were taking, and then a kind of sticky fear would inhabit their minds and bodies – not just Lira’s but Nwankwo’s and Félix’s too. Fear affected them all and came between them.
Félix left at around six. The evenings were long after that. At first Nwankwo hadn’t dared turn on the television, for fear of seeming to taunt Lira, but then it was she who asked him to. After that the glowing screen made this strange, upside-down household sound much the same as all the others at that time of night. They would watch the news and talk about it. Lira, not being a child of the Commonwealth, did not understand everything, and Nwankwo would explain. Then he would often give her the remote, putting her thumb on the buttons so that she could clumsily surf the channels. She would usually stop on a music channel – the throbbing rhythms of rock music had always made her feel good.
In the evenings too she would dictate letters to Nwankwo to send to her daughter. They were in English, not even in their own language, and filled with lies – she said she was fine, and that they would meet soon. Lira ended by covering the letters with kisses and words they had used since Polina’s babyhood. She missed her and yet she dreaded seeing her; it was as though her daughter’s gaze would confirm once and for all the permanence of her blindness. Then Nwankwo would write the address on the envelope: “Poste restante. Nîmes. France.” Outside the nights were beginning to draw in. It was getting colder too. And there was no more police protection; only an emergency number in the kitchen, just in case.
US EMBASSY, COPENHAGEN
CONFIDENTIAL
SECTION 01.081685
SEPTEMBER 17
SUBJECT: MEETING BETWEEN AMBASSADOR AND SUNLEIF STEPHENSEN
BANKRUPT FAROESE BANKER SUNLEIF STEPHENSEN HAS ACCEPTED THE PROTECTION PROGRAMME OFFERED BY THE CIA. CEPTED THE PROTECTION PROGRAMME OFFERED BY THE CIA. HE WILL BE EVACUATED TO THE UNITED STATES.