By Light Alone (5 page)

‘How can it be complicated?’ flashed Marie. ‘You either know where she is or you don’t.’

‘It is complicated because of the region,’ said a new voice. Away in the far corner of the long room a heavy-looking man was wedged in an elegant chair. They hadn’t even realized he was there; but there he was, sunk in that chair. His face was grimly hairy; a black moustache possessing almost structural solidity and density, and little wiry hairs sparking in several directions from his long eyebrows. He was dressed in a nondescript suit, and his head – ostentatiously – was shaved down to a raincloud-purple oval of stubble.

Turning to face this man Marie asked: ‘Do
you
know where my daughter is?’ The stranger nodded slowly, as if in affirmation, but then spoke in a sepulchral voice from the chair to deny it: ‘No, Madam, no. Perhaps it seems callous, but this is the information you will need to master. Your daughter is no longer in the hotel. This means she is somewhere in the district.’

‘No longer in the hotel,’ said George, stupidly.

‘What do you mean?’ Marie said again.

‘We have, of course, sent out officers of hotel security to search,’ put in Captain Afkhami. ‘And alerted local police, and bosses.’

‘Bosses?’

‘Indeed. Bosses run the villages, police keep them in line. But,’ the deep-throated man in the chair continued, and his thrum appeared to fill the room, ‘we
must
alas, alas, face the possibility that such inquiries will be fruitless. Accordingly, you will need to know that this part of the world has a –
complicated
political history. This history has been complicated since Noah’s time, it
has been
so. It is one of the portions of the globe that humankind has squabbled over.’ There was a particular inflection, or accent, about the way the man spoke English, but George couldn’t quite place it. It sounded almost Irish, or perhaps Scottish. Not Scottish, no. That wasn’t it. ‘I am talking,’ the man said, ‘about Iranians, and Turks, and Kurds, and Armenians, and Russians too – we must not forget the Russians. Since Noah’s times. Since the time of
Noah
, but also more recently.’ There was some extra twist or flavour to the man’s Iranian- or Turkish-accented English. But it. George couldn’t focus his thoughts. But. ‘Since two decades now,’ the man said, ‘a form of Protectorate has operated.’

‘I don’t see,’ said Marie, in a high, loud voice, ‘what this has to do with
anything
.’

‘Only, Madam, that you may instruct your lawyer to hire Iranian experts,’ said the man, ducking his large, vaguely cubic, head so that his chin touched his chest. ‘And I shall say nothing more to intrude upon you at this difficult time. It is very sad that this has happened, but –
mashallah
.’

At this word Captain Afkhami looked sharply round at the man. George was still trying to find a way of understanding what he was being told; which is to say, of understanding on a more than merely semantic level. Something momentous had happened. This was a day, like any day, except that as this day slid innocuously past something shadowy and monstrous had risen from between the flower-dotted green hills in the background. What had come up was a head the size of the moon, and it had flashed sword-long teeth and bitten down into the tender flesh of George’s being-in-the-world. He didn’t really feel it; but, he reflected, sometimes people lost limbs, or suffered terrible gunshots, and felt nothing. Perhaps the numbness was actually an index to the enormousness of what had happened to his life. Prompted, possibly, by an obscure sense that he ought at the very least to
act out
the requirements of shocked bereavement, he said. ‘Marie, would you like to sit down?’

‘I do not want to sit down,’ his wife replied.

‘I think
I
need to sit down, at any rate,’ he said. A servant – another individual George had not even realized was in the room – was immediately at his side with a chair, and George settled his weight into it.

‘Of course it is a shock,’ said Captain Afkhami, blandly.

‘I want to go to her room,’ said Marie. George could hear in her voice – a voice whose emotional tenor he had, of course, become adept at decoding – that she had come down on the side of furious action, rather than furious melancholy. ‘I want to go
straight
to her room,’ she said.

‘Of course Madam,’ said the captain. ‘And anywhere else in the hotel you wish to look. But I assure you we have looked everywhere, and every room—’

‘I want to
go
to her room,’ said Marie.

‘—is covered by surveillance technology,’ the captain rolled on smoothly. ‘And regretfully your daughter is no longer in the hotel.’

Arsinée’s sobbing had the irritating regularity of an unoiled wheel. As if it had just occurred to her that she had another child, Marie suddenly strode to where the girl was sitting, hauled Ezra from her grip and clutched him tightly. The baby did not wake.

‘I suppose,’ said George, from his seated position, and speaking tentatively – since this was to articulate the ultimate surety of his peace of mind, the ground of his reality, and to articulate it was to risk having that surety, and ground, contradicted. ‘I suppose it is a matter of
ransom
?’

The captain looked round to the large man in the room’s far corner, and he in turn stirred in his chair, as if about to rise from it. He cleared his throat, and his corpulent torso quivered, and then he spoke, still seated. ‘I regret to say, not so, Mr Denoone.’

‘You regret to say,’ repeated George, dully.

‘Alas, no. If it were a matter of ransom then – well, then it would not be complicated. But I am afraid it
is
complicated.’

‘Somebody has
kidnapped
my child,’ said George, and as he spoke these words, for the first time that evening, it came home to his soul that this had really happened, that Leah had really been stolen from him. A trembling stirred the inert mass of muscle in his lower torso. ‘Somebody has kidnapped Leah, but they don’t want money?’

‘No, Mr Denoone. I fear they do not.’

‘I am a wealthy individual, quite wealthy,’ said George. ‘My wife is also wealthy.’ He felt he might be sick. He felt a horrible shudder in his stomach.

Both the captain and the man in the chair dipped their heads at this, in mute recognition of this brute fact of individual existence.

‘That
must
be why they’ve taken her,’ George repeated. ‘How much will they ask? What are the usual levels of ransom.’

‘I regret to say,’ the man in the corner repeated, ‘I do not believe that they will demand ransom.’

‘What then?’ asked Marie. ‘Political, is it? Is it
political
?’

At this thorny and non-specific signifier the captain and the man swapped glances. ‘To be plain,’ said this latter, across the room. ‘I should say: if whoever kidnapped your daughter wanted something
for
her, money or publicity or anything like that, then our job would be infinitely easier. But I fear the kidnapper wants nothing more than to disappear without trace forever into the wide districts of Anatolian anonymity.’

‘Are they
personal
enemies?’ George asked, his heart alternately thuddishly convulsing and lying still. ‘Do they have some
personal
grudge against us?’

‘With a certainty approaching the absolute,’ said the lady captain, ‘whoever took your daughter knows nothing whatsoever about you. They probably do not even know your nationality.’

‘All they knew,’ said the man in the corner, ‘was that you had a daughter. It was enough. They saw her, and they took her, and that is all.’

6

After this awkward, stilted interview, a period of several hours passed in a debatable and limbo-like state. First, still clutching Ezra, Marie stormed off to Leah’s room, with George, Arsinée and the captain in train behind her. But there was nothing to see. Then there was a ten-minute period of angry interrogation (or reinterrogation, for the girl had already told her story over and over to the authorities) of Arsinée herself. She curled herself up as if expecting blows, and reworked the same narrative in various different handfuls of grief-shaky words. She had put Ezra down for his night’s sleep; she had eaten a little something with Leah whilst watching children’s dramas; she had put Leah to bed – still awake, playing on one of her games, and then she had gone through to her own cot to watch her own screen. She had dozed a little, but woken at nine with an uncanny sensation that something was wrong. Leah was not in her room. Discovering this, she had searched the suite, for sometimes the little girl liked to tease her carer by hiding. When it was clear she was in none of these rooms, and after Arsinée had (she said) made her throat sore with calling her name (but not too loudly, for she did not wish to wake Ezra), she had picked up the baby – for he could hardly be left by himself – and ventured out into the corridor. Up and down, calling Leah’s name, calling for the darling child, over and over. Meeting guests coming and going and asking if they had seen a small girl, in her pyjamas, to be met with incomprehension, or the brush-off, or hostility. She had been by her own admission ‘in a state’ at this stage, weeping and disordered and not knowing where to go. So she had gone barefoot all the way down to the Kidarium, because she knew Lah-Lah liked to play there sometimes. But it was all closed, and switched off, and the bubblepit looked sinister and enveloping in the dark; and the furry robots, some taller than she was herself, loomed alarmingly as if they were liable to come to life at a motion. So she had fled to the ice-cream café, on the same floor, and walked amongst the booths and through the crowds of people, crying Leah’s name and weeping; and the bright lights and the noise had woken Ezra and set him off wailing too, and still Arsinée had wandered, calling the name, until security had come over to see what the commotion was. The guards called their superiors, and when they realized that a guest’s child was missing they called their superiors. Pretty soon after this, the surveillance net was programmed with Leah’s details, guards worked systematically from basement to roof, and then back down again. By the time George and Marie had been approached in the penthouse restaurant, the grounds had been searched, and teams sent out along the most likely exit roads.

Eventually, under the continued pressure interrogation, Arsinée just crumpled, and nothing more could be got out of her except tears. What game had Leah been playing? I don’t know. Which show did you watch, in your cot? I can’t remember. What time
precisely
did you last see Leah, before you went through? I’m not sure, I don’t know, not
precisely
. They stuck a tab on her wrist, and this showed Arsinée to have consumed perhaps half a glass of wine that evening. This revelation increased the flood of tears prodigiously. ‘It’s true! It’s true! I’m a terrible person!’ She had, she sobbingly confessed, sometimes carried away the leftovers from her employers’ discarded bottles, and drunk them in secret, in private, when the kids were abed, never very much, never enough to make her lose control, but just a taste. Beautiful wine, and the lovely confusion it made in the thoughts. This was exactly the sort of thing she had never had the chance to experience before Mr and Mrs took her on. And then more tears. It was amazing, in fact, that she was able to weep as copiously as she did without simply drying up like a raisin. Tears, tears, tears.

It was gruelling, extracting this testimony from the sobbing girl; and at the end Captain Afkhami smiled and patted her on the shoulder, before saying ‘And now I must arrest you.’ For George this was yet another mentally indigestible twist in the evening’s events. Marie had more presence of mind. ‘But who is to care for Ezra?’ she said, the baby still asleep on her shoulder.

The lady captain faced her. If the thought occurred to her
you are the child’s mother, and must care for him
, then she at least had the good sense not to say it aloud. Instead she said: ‘What arrangements did you have in place should your carer fall sick?’

‘Arsinée fall sick?’ Marie said. ‘The very idea.’

Once again, the captain had the look of a woman choosing not to say aloud something she was thinking. She said: ‘One of the hotel’s employees might be assigned, on a temporary basis. Perhaps from the crèche?’

‘Why must you arrest Arsinée?’ pressed Marie.

‘It is our experience that when a kidnap has been, uh,’ said Captain Afkhami, straightening herself, ‘performed. That when a kidnap has, has occurred, an insider is often involved.’