Notorious Read Free Page B

a pitying look.
    I wonder what she will do when she sees me. Scream, try to run away? Or the shock will make her fall, ashen and trembling to the floor. Or she will be haughty. Maybe she will cry, ‘Thank you, thank you’. Maybe she will fling her arms around me. When I think this, I get the familiar pain beneath my ribs; acid washes through my stomach. Mitch thinks these are symptoms of the detoxification after Sicily. But I know they are not.
    The gravel purr of Edith Piaf climbs through the dry heat, wrestles with the slowly turning fan.
    Laforche says to me, ‘ Chanson réaliste : all about the misery of life and love. But like Piaf, we must regret nothing.’ The song swells, filling the room like clouds.
    He glances at me. ‘But maybe you do not want a love song? Maybe this . . . ’ He changes the record. A tremulous note begins, not a flute, some kind of pipe, and a woman’s voice, talking half in French, half in Arabic, her words grinding out to meet the eerie notes. Laforche watches me and I think of snake-charmers.
    ‘ Les heures et les fois ,’ he says. ‘The hours and the times.’ He begins to sing along, also in that dragging style, ‘ Dans le noir, je me réveille, seul et silencieux à la page blanche du désert. In the dark, I wake, alone and silent on the white page of the desert. Dans le noir, la solitude est sainte . Solitude is holy. That is you, yes?’
    He doesn’t wait for my response. ‘When I was allowed to run the generator at night, I swear the camels would come right up to the window to listen.’ He sways in time with the song. He asks me what music I prefer.
    ‘I’m a Beethoven man myself.’ I look at my watch.
    ‘Very correct.’ He sighs. ‘It is horrible not to be allowed to play music at night in the desert. It is like being without family. Or a woman.’
    ‘Maybe,’ I say indifferently. ‘I can do very well without women.’ I try not to think of the man on the surveillance tape who said, his voice breaking, Ravenous .
    Laforche raises an eyebrow.
    ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not. But the personal and this job don’t mix.’
    He shrugs. ‘I have a wife and five children in Casablanca. But, yes, I suppose. Go on.’
    ‘Well . . . ’ I don’t know what to say next. There is danger in talking about this. ‘You don’t need it, that’s all.’
    ‘There is always une prostituée .’
    ‘I would never visit a prostitute.’
    ‘You are a romantic,’ says Laforche.
    I can’t bear it any longer. My chair scrapes as I stand.
    ‘Yes, yes,’ says Laforche. He switches the record off, comes back to the desk, opens a folder and passes across a slim pile of black and white photographs.
    The photos are of clouds of sand, piles of dust. The light has an odd intensity, making shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows, the dark grey sky flaring into white. There are strange swirls like the imprints left in water by a trailing hand. The photos look like shots of an anti-land, the negative of a positive. I think I see my own face in some of them, distorted, like a beast.
    ‘Mirages,’ says Laforche. ‘She had been photographing mirages. The nuns think she has photographed ghosts. See – don’t you think that is a man on a horse?’
    ‘Heat distortions,’ I say. ‘The combination of light and hot air distorts the natural perspectives.’
    ‘Ghosts,’ says Laforche.
    I look at my watch. I swear the glass is dusty.
    ‘Yes, well.’ My voice booms over the tiles. ‘There is nothing that can’t be explained rationally. The Bermuda triangle? Nothing but the earth spuming methane, disorienting plane sensors, overturning yachts. Giant farting, that is all.’
    I say it again, louder. ‘Giant farts.’
    I take out my notebook in its titanium cover, uncap the zero-gravity pen from NASA.
    ‘She came walking out of the desert,’ says Laforche. ‘At first she was a speck on the horizon, like a black spot in her photographs, a piece of sand.’
    ‘She came walking out of the