He woke at half past five in the morning. Sleep was all around him, sticky as cobwebs, heavy as clay, and he had to fight his way free of it. He forced his eyes open. Was that his alarm? No, the sound was wrong. He reached for his phone. Someone was calling.
“Mr. Zhang?”
“Yes—” The word came out strangled. He cleared his throat.
“It’s Torben Gulsvig.”
Zhang put his feet on the floor and sat with the phone pressed to his right ear.
“I’m sorry to be calling so early,” Gulsvig said. “I couldn’t wait any longer.”
Gulsvig told him that although there was some evidence to suggest that Nina had studied in England—the University of London had a record of her enrollment—he could find no trace of her in Finland. No trace whatsoever. She wasn’t currently registered as a voter. In fact, she never had been. She didn’t have a social security number or a driving license. She had never paid tax. He hadn’t even been able to find a birth certificate for her—or a death certificate, for that matter.
“I’m utterly bewildered,” Gulsvig concluded. “It’s as if she didn’t exist outside my knowledge of her, and that makes me feel like I imagined her. Like I imagined the whole thing.”
The darkness in Zhang’s bedroom pulsed and prickled. Dawn was still half an hour away.
“Last time we spoke,” he said, “you told me Nina’s boyfriend died.”
“What about it?” Gulsvig said.
“I don’t know.” Zhang was still trying to think. “In all the time you knew her, did you ever feel you might be in danger?”
There was a silence on the other end.
“In danger,” Gulsvig said at last, and slowly, as if to taste the words, or test their relevance. “From her, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you ask?”
“A friend of mine warned me against Naemi,” Zhang said, “and now he’s dead.”
Another silence.
“It was an accident,” Zhang said. “He fell.”
“But Mr. Zhang,” Gulsvig said, “Nina and Naemi are two completely different people.”
“I know. But there seem to be certain—similarities…”
“You think they’re connected in some way?”
“I don’t know. I can’t prove anything.” Zhang paused. “But you didn’t answer my question. Did you ever feel you might be in danger?”
“Actually, there was one time,” Gulsvig said.
At the end of their second year at university, he and Nina had flown back to Helsinki for the summer holidays. Not long after they arrived, a friend hosted a party at his parents’ villa, which was on a small island on the outskirts of the city. Like everyone that evening, he drank too much. Towards midnight, he found himself sitting on a wooden jetty, looking out over the Gulf of Finland. Since he was some distance from the house, he assumed he was alone, but then a movement in the half-light had him glancing to his left. A blonde girl in a white top stood at the water’s edge. His heart rose up inside him, and he called out to her.
“Nina?”
Her face turned in his direction. “Torben? Is that you?”
She came along the beach and climbed up onto the jetty and sat down next to him, her legs dangling over the water. The night seemed to sharpen into focus, and he had the sudden, keen sense that he was at the heart of things, the very center of the world. This was all her doing. He wondered what it would be like to have that kind of power.
“Sorry if I interrupted,” he said. “Did you want to be alone?”
“It’s all right.” She looked at him sideways, through her hair. “What are you doing out here?”
“Sometimes things get a bit much for me and I have to get away.”
“I know that feeling.” She was wearing a miniskirt, and her hands gripped the edge of the jetty, on either side of her bare legs. “But I often feel lonely too. I can’t seem to get the balance right.”
“How are things with Peter?” He felt he had to ask. He would not be a proper friend to her if there were parts of her life that he refused to address, or even countenance.
“Peter.” Her voice was amused, but also despairing.
“Do you miss him?”
“Sometimes.” She peered down into the water. “The sex is good—when he’s not too stoned, that is.”
Listening to her talk about her love life was the most hateful part of the role he had devised for himself, but he was her confidant, and her adviser. It was the price he had to pay.
“He wants too much from me,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“He can’t seem to get close enough. Sometimes it’s as if he wants to climb inside my skin.” She gave a little shudder.
Torben found Peter arrogant and condescending—Peter came from an aristocratic English family—and he was secretly hoping that the relationship might soon be over, though he was aware that there would be other Peters, and aware also that he would never be among them. But perhaps he could find some satisfaction in the thought that he might outlast one of her lovers, and that he might even, in his own modest way, outlast them all.
“I spoke to him earlier, on the phone,” Nina was saying. “He wants to know where I am, and who I’m with. He wants me to be with him all the time.”
“Sounds claustrophobic,” Torben said—though he could imagine wanting exactly the same thing.
“It makes me wish he was out of the way.” She turned to him for the first time since she had sat down. Her eyes were black and silver, and there was a smell of carrion suddenly, as if something was decaying nearby. “Have you ever had the feeling that someone is so close,” she went on, “that you might have to kill that person just so you can breathe?”
Kill that person.
The night stepped back. In that moment, it seemed to him that she wasn’t a human being at all. She was an animal, pretending to be human. He didn’t know where the idea had come from, only that it was there, and it was so vivid, so present, that he felt at risk. Like prey. She must have seen something in his face because she spoke again.
“I’m sorry, Torben. Did I frighten you?”
“A little, yes.” It was probably a gamble to admit it, but somehow he had to tell the truth.
She gazed out across the water. Though it was the middle of the night, the sky above the horizon was a pale blue that had some green in it, like the flames in a gas fire. She looked so sad just then that he wished he could put an arm round her, but he was worried she might misinterpret it.