I speak to the young woman at the Thomas Cook counter who assures me the cheques can be replaced quickly so long as I have their numbers, which are supposed to be kept separately. I explain that I have inadvertently packed the list in my baggage, which is checked through to my final destination and might even have gone on ahead.
‘That is against regulations,’ she tells me primly. ‘The bags must travel with the clients. Always.’
I say nothing, knowing as she does that bags sometimes travel without their people, just as shadows sometimes travel alone. It isn’t meant to happen, but it can. The announcement for my flight to board comes over the air.
‘I will get the cheques once I arrive,’ I tell her.
‘You can’t mean to go there without money,’ she exclaims. The genuine concern in her tone reminds me of the mysterious nature of my trip, and it comes to me that this mishap is a sign that I am failing to understand.
The young woman mistakes the confusion in my eyes and leans over her smooth counter to explain. ‘In a country like that, you must have money. Everything is for sale. Everything costs and you are safe as long as you can afford the price. Safety has a price, just like comfort or food or coffee.’
I sense that under these words she is telling me something important, but I cannot seem to understand. My mind feels numb. I insist that I have decided to go on. Surely this is the most unreasoned response to what has happened, and therefore the most apposite. Maybe it is even a kind of test. At my request, she writes the address of their office, saying there is a cheap bus to the centre. Upon arrival, I can walk to the office from the stop. Alternatively, I could take a courtesy bus to one of the bigger hotels – the Hilton, for instance – where they would quite likely sort out the lost cheques for me.
She is kind, but I have no desire to stay in a hotel like the Hilton. I will get a bus to the centre of the city after changing the little remaining cash I have, and walk about until daybreak. Then I will get the cheques replaced and find some suitable accommodation.
I check back with the airline attendant who reiterates that no one has handed in the wallet, then give him my landlady’s number in case it should appear. I dislike doing this, but I have no forwarding address to give and no one else’s name to offer other than my previous employer’s, and he is not the sort to maintain warm connections. Indeed, he made it abundantly clear that the severance payment was generous to ensure that I would not expect anything more from him.
Boarding the small plane that will carry me on the last leg of my journey, I wonder what my boss would think if he knew I was on my way, without money, to a city full of shadows and danger, where everything has a price.
On the plane I eat the small club sandwich offered, and drink as many cups of coffee as I can manage during the short flight, for I am beginning to feel very empty and it will be some hours before I can eat. The coffee makes my head spin and the sense of disorientation assailing me increases.
The face of the customs official at the airport is flat and severe, but his eyes are the same soulful brown as the man in the television room of my apartment house. As he takes my passport, I wonder absurdly if they could be related.
‘Reason for visit?’ he asks. His thick finger taps a blank space in the form I filled out. He slides a pen through the small window separating his official niche from me. I take it up and notice my fingers are trembling. I try to focus my thoughts. It is incredibly difficult, for even though I have understood the question I cannot seem to think how to answer it. I look at the official and find him staring hard at me, as if he is cataloguing my features for a report to be added to a file of suspicious foreigners.
I can feel sweat crawling from my armpits. I force myself to write.
‘Research,’ he reads. ‘What kind of research?’
I feel I might be about to faint or have some sort of convulsion. All of my glassy calmness seems to rupture. My heart beats in jerky, arrhythmic spasms. Then suddenly, with a feeling of delirious clarity, I understand that my reaction is a premonition connected to my ailment, and to my arrival in this country. I simply tell him why I am here. I feel as if I have peeled my skin off in front of him. I feel that, having told him my secret, I cannot draw breath without him permitting it. I feel a drowning, tremulous gratitude, as if I have put my life in his hands. I have a powerful urge to kiss his hands.
‘Your shadow,’ he says, and I realise he has not understood the word. His English must be regulation minimum and solely connected to his job. He stamps the passport and slides it back to me with the visa folded on top. As I take it up, I feel as if I have shown myself naked to a blind man.
By the time I walk out into the night carrying my bag, I understand that this has been a necessary encounter, an emotional procedure to be endured, perhaps no less vital for entry to this country as acquiring a visa. I feel stronger, though more detached than ever.
From the timetable, it seems as if I have missed the last bus to the city. A short, swarthy man sidles over and asks if I want a taxi.
‘Special taxi. Very cheap for you.’ He has grasped the handle of my bag and is trying to wrest it from me. I hold on and he ceases pulling at it. Perhaps he is surprised at my strength.
‘It’s impossible,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t want to take a taxi.’
He looks around furtively, and I have a memory of the Thomas Cook woman warning me about taxis in this city before we parted. She claimed the majority were run by a vicious local mafia and that many of the drivers pimp for gypsy prostitutes. She had told me of a taxi driver leaping out of his cab and beating two American tourists with a truncheon because they had crossed the street too slowly in front of him. Such fearless brutality suggested a level of lawlessness that ought to have made me wary, but the man holding onto my bag does not exude any air of power or malignancy. He looks more desperate than anything else. His clothes are ill-fitting and grubby, the cuffs of his jacket and trousers badly frayed. In fact, I wonder if he really has a taxi, or merely seeks to lure me to a discreet corner of the car park to mug me.
‘I don’t have the money for a taxi,’ I tell him. He stares at me in sullen bewilderment and so I make a dumb show of the day’s events, reaching for my wallet and discovering its loss.
He releases the bag. ‘No crown? You no want taxi?’ This possibility appears to confound him.
‘Later,’ I say, pointing away from myself as if to some distant future. Then it occurs to me that the best way out of my dilemma might simply be to ride about in a taxi until morning, when I can visit a Thomas Cook office, then pay him.
‘I would like to make a tour of the city,’ I tell him.
‘Tour? Now?’ He gapes at me.
I nod firmly. ‘An all-night tour. Fixed price. No meter.’
‘Tour,’ he says, sucking the word to decide if he likes the taste of it. He nods judicially. ‘Fixed-price tour. Cheap. You come.’
I make him name a price, then let him take my bag. He runs ahead into the misty darkness, and I try to calculate the hours since I last slept, but am defeated by the time difference between my country and this one, and by daylight saving on top of that. Did they bother saving daylight here, or did they save night instead? I realise at some level that I am becoming dangerously light-headed. My nostril hairs seem to be on the verge of freezing and the air is so cold it hurts to breathe it in.
He is standing by a beaten-up blue Skoda. ‘No taxi,’ he says earnestly. ‘Tour car.’
I take off my jacket and climb into the car.
He drives quickly and it seems to me it is uncannily dark outside. There are no lights along the highway, and no moon or stars. I tell myself it is overcast, yet I cannot help but feel the darkness is thicker here than back home, congealing at the edges. He does not slow as we reach the outskirts of the city. I stare out at the streets that flicker by like a jerky old black-and-white movie. Everything looks grimy, as if the night is slowly rubbing off onto the city.
‘Metronome,’ the driver
comments, nodding at a set of dark steps leading up from the roadside and pointing up. ‘Up,’ he says.
‘A metronome?’ I ask doubtfully. We have circled the city several times now, and it is very late. We move swiftly because there are few cars on the road, mostly taxis or delivery trucks or great dark multi-country transit buses full of sleeping passengers. The castle is ahead of us again but I can no longer see it, and a vaporous mist is rising along the course of the river. No doubt the driver is weary and beginning to make up sights. I do not blame him.
‘Doesn’t work,’ he says. ‘Stops and starts.’
Another car roars past us. It is yellow and a lit sign on its roof proclaims it a taxi. Its red tail-lights burn like coals in the misty air. ‘Taxis very bad here,’ the driver mutters. ‘All criminals.’
All at once we round a sharp bend only to find our way blocked by the taxi that passed us. Or perhaps it is another taxi. It is blocking the road completely. My driver stands on his brakes and tries to turn, but he is going too fast. The car slews around and mounts the pavement with a great thump that at first makes me think we have struck someone. Before I can speak, there is the sound of running footsteps and the front door is wrenched open.
The driver utters a thin scream as two huge men drag him out of the seat and begin punching him savagely. He does not fight back. He merely holds his hands over his face, and when he falls, he curls into a foetal ball. I cannot see what happens next, because another of the assailants is blocking my view. I grope for the door but the lock button has been removed. There is a lot of shouting outside, then an ominous silence filled with heavy breathing.
The big man whose back has blocked my view climbs into the front passenger seat of the Skoda and turns to look at me. His hair is bleached white, but his eyebrows are dark and almost join over the bridge of his nose. A thin man with dark, greasy-looking hair slides into the driver’s seat and turns the key. As the car moves off, carefully backing to avoid colliding with the abandoned taxi, the big man continues to stare at me expressionlessly. Then he points solemnly through the window. As I turn to look I catch a glimpse of my old driver lying on the ground, before a blow to the head, and a second, deeper night, consumes me.
I wake to find myself lying full-length along the back seat of the Skoda. My jacket has been thrown over me. From that position, I can see nothing except that it is still night. Gathering my strength, I sit up. Outside the car windows the darkness speeds by. There is no sign of the city or of any buildings. We are on a straight, open highway, driving very fast.
The driver says something and the big man turns and lifts a truncheon. I shake my head.
‘There is no need for that,’ I tell him.
I do not know if he understands me, but he lowers his arm and studies me as if my calmness interests him, then he says something in his own language to the driver. The other man shakes his head and begins to shout. The big man says nothing until his companion falls silent, then he turns back to me and points through the front windscreen.
‘Káva. Coff-ee,’ he says.
Looking down the road, I see he is indicating a faint illumination on the horizon. The brightness grows until I see it is an all-night petrol station attached to a fast-food café. The car pulls off into an access road and curves round to come to a grinding halt in the gravel car park. There are only two other cars parked alongside the restaurant. One is very new and red.
‘You come,’ the big man says. He says something else in his own language that sounds like a warning, and I nod.
They walk either side of me as we approach the door. The driver points at the bowsers and the big man shrugs, steering me deftly through the shining glass doors. The brightness of the light hurts my eyes and I am glad of the thick paw on my shoulder, steering me. He pushes me into a booth, takes out a phone and moves away to make a call.
‘I just wish you wouldn’t bring up the war,’ one of the men in the booth opposite says with an American accent. ‘It’s a sore point with these guys. They think we betrayed them.’
‘You did,’ the other man snorts in laconic German-accented English.
The thin driver sits down, and gives the other men a dangerous look, but they are too much involved in their conversation to notice. The big man shakes his head at the thin man.
‘All of that is ancient history. It’s in the past.’ The American’s tone is irritated.
‘Nothing is past here. Haven’t you learned enough to know that?’
Silence falls between them, and I wonder what happened to my original driver. Had he been killed? The driver squints at me and I sense that he is wondering why I do not make an attempt to escape or call for help.
‘We could have got coffee closer to the border,’ the German says.
‘Coffee, sure.’ The American’s voice is ironic. ‘We’ve got a deadline, Klaus. Why don’t you wait until we get somewhere civilised to buy a woman?’
‘You don’t understand,’ the German says with friendly contempt. ‘You don’t understand anything but disinfectant and prophylactics. You’re afraid of everything, including your own shadow.’
The word shadow galvanises me. The thin man opposite notices and narrows his eyes, then he smiles and a gold tooth winks at me. I have the mad desire to laugh, for it seems I have exchanged one sort of farce for another.
‘Aren’t you afraid of getting a disease?’ the American asks, fastidious but curious too. They do not imagine anyone can understand their words. They have not even looked at me, and what would they see if they did?
The German laughs. ‘The danger makes the pleasure more intense. Darker. In fact, you might say that darkness is the specialty of this place.’
‘This place is no place,’ says the American almost plaintively. ‘A stretch of godforsaken highway where the snow looks like dirty sperm. And those women. The way they just loom up suddenly in the headlights with their black leather skirts and fishnet tights and fake fur coats, their eyes like petrol bombs about to blow up in your face. They scare the hell out of me. How can anyone stop? How can you get aroused by that?’
‘They wouldn’t be there if no one stopped,’ the German observes almost coyly. ‘I’ve stopped every time I pass this way, and every time I do, I am afraid. Nothing is more terrifying than to stop and invite one of these women into the car. They take me down into the dark so deep I don’t know if I’ll ever come up, if there is enough light in me to come back.’
‘But they’re just whores, terrible rough whores with scars and thick thighs. I read in Time Magazine that they’re the worst, most dangerous prostitutes in the world.’ The American’s voice is lace-edged with hysteria.
‘It is true,’ the German murmurs.
‘It’s the disease that scares me . . .’ the American says.
The German calls for the bill. As he pays, the big white-haired man returns, dropping the phone into his pocket. He nods at the two men as they pass, then slides into the booth beside me. It occurs to me that the phone call was about me. Will they now kill me or beat me up and leave me for dead? Will they try to ransom me? Or use me as a hostage? These thoughts flutter distantly though my mind, like leaves blown along a tunnel.
The waiter brings us three espressos. The white-haired man must have ordered them. I drink, enjoying the cruel strength of the dark liquid. I have never tasted such bitter coffee before, like the dregs of the world. The caffeine hits me like a punch to the heart.
An hour passes and the phone rings. The waiter glances at our table in such a way that I see he has recognised my assailants. Or perhaps he has recognised their type. Perhaps he guesses that I have been abducted, but he will do nothing. The big man moves away with the shrilling phone to take the call. He nods. He shakes his head. He shrugs and says a few words. He nods again, then puts the phone away and comes back to the table with an air of purpose. He says two words to the driver, who lights a cigarette. Neither of them speaks to me. Neither of them looks at me.
A strange tension de
void of emotion fills me. ‘What do we do now?’ I ask.
The big man tilts his head. ‘We? There is no we.’
I hear the sound of an engine approaching. Both men look away through the glass towards the approaching vehicle. The noise increases until the headlights loom and fuse with the light from the petrol station. The car has tinted windows so it is impossible to see who is inside. The horn sounds and the big man rises from the seat beside me and nods to the driver, who reaches into his pocket and withdraws the keys to the Skoda. He throws them down on the shining formica in front of me.
‘You have your own business to complete now, eh?’ the big white-haired man says, nodding away into the darkness, and he goes up to the counter and pays the bill. The two men saunter out the glass door and climb into the waiting car, which sends up a spume of gravel in its wake as it departs.
Another car pulls in. Two young people emerge and stretch. They enter and I watch them slide into the booth where the American and German sat. Their bodies touch all along one side from shoulder down through the hip and thigh to the heels, their connection far more intimate than if they had been wound together explicitly.
I slip and now I am walking into the freezing night. I glance back at the blazing block of cement and glass. It looks like some outstation at the end of the world. It begins to snow lightly, white flakes swirling against the blackness. Climbing into the driver’s seat of the Skoda, I insert the key. The strangeness of sitting on the wrong side of the car strikes me dimly. The engine fires the first time, despite the rapidly dropping temperature. I let the engine idle a moment, then put the car smoothly into gear. I feel no impatience or confusion. No fear. My hands are steady as I drive out onto the verge of the highway, remembering to keep to the correct side of the road. I have no idea which way is the way back to the city. Then I realise I am beyond choosing. I drive in the direction the white-haired man nodded, gliding into the unknown with the sudden inexplicable certainty that I am getting closer to my shadow. I shiver, though the heater has warmed up the interior of the car quickly. The snow is still falling, yet blackness presses against the car so hard I fancy it is slowing me down. After several kilometres, I realise that the car is slowing. The petrol gauge shows the tank is empty.