I don’t know how long I stood looking at the graffiti, but I was interrupted by a man who looked to be in a worse condition than me. A beard that had never been trimmed or washed, a frame so wasted I wondered how he managed to stand upright, and a smell that would not have shamed a skunk.
I never knew his name: but he was, he told me, the maker of the picture on the wall. It was easy to believe that. His desperation, his hunger, his confusion were all marks of a man who had seen Jacqueline.
If I was rough in my interrogation of him I’m sure he forgave me. It was an unburdening for him, to tell everything he’d seen the day that Pettifer had been killed, and know that I believed it all. He told me his fellow bodyguard, the man who had fired the shots that had killed Pettifer, had committed suicide in prison.
His life, he said, was meaningless. She had destroyed it. I gave him what reassurances I could; that she meant no harm, and that he needn’t fear that she would come for him. When I told him that, he cried, more, I think, out of loss than relief.
Finally I asked him if he knew where Jacqueline was now. I’d left that question to the end, though it had been the most pressing enquiry, because I suppose I didn’t dare hope he’d know. But my God, he did. She had not left the house immediately after the shooting of Pettifer. She had sat down with this man, and talked to him quietly about his children, his tailor, his car. She’d asked him what his mother had been like, and he’d told her his mother had been a prostitute. Had she been happy? Jacqueline had asked. He’d said he didn’t know. Did she ever cry, she’d asked. He’d said he never saw her laugh or cry in his life. And she’d nodded, and thanked him.
Later, before his suicide, the other gunman had told him Jacqueline had gone to Amsterdam. This he knew for a fact, from a man called Koos. And so the circle begins to close, yes?
I was in Amsterdam seven weeks, without finding a single clue to her whereabouts, until yesterday evening. Seven weeks of celibacy, which is unusual for me. Listless with frustration I went down to the red-light district, to find a woman. They sit there you know, in the windows, like mannequins, beside pink-fringed lamps. Some have miniature dogs on their laps; some read. Most just stare out at the street, as if mesmerized.
There were no faces there that interested me. They all seemed joyless, lightless, too much unlike her. Yet I couldn’t leave. I was like a fat boy in a sweet shop, too nauseous to buy, too gluttonous to go.
Towards the middle of the night, I was spoken to out of the crowd by a young man who, on closer inspection, was not young at all, but heavily made up. He had no eyebrows, just pencil marks drawn on to his shiny skin. A cluster of gold earrings in his left ear, a half-eaten peach in his white-gloved hand, open sandals, lacquered toenails. He took hold of my sleeve, proprietarily.
I must have sneered at his sickening appearance, but he didn’t seem at all upset by my contempt. You look like a man of discernment, he said. I looked nothing of the kind: you must be mistaken, I said. No, he replied, I am not mistaken. You are Oliver Vassi.
My first thought, absurdly, was that he intended to kill me. I tried to pull away; his grip on my cuff was relentless.
You want a woman, he said. Did I hesitate enough for him to know I meant yes, though I said no? I have a woman like no other, he went on, She’s a miracle. I know you’ll want to meet her in the flesh.
What made me know it was Jacqueline he was talking about? Perhaps the fact that he had known me from out of the crowd, as though she was up at a window somewhere, ordering her admirers to be brought to her like a diner ordering lobster from a tank. Perhaps too the way his eyes shone at me, meeting mine without fear because fear, like rapture, he felt only in the presence of one creature on God’s cruel earth. Could I not also see myself reflected in his perilous look? He knew Jacqueline, I had no doubt of it.