“I’m not sure…”
He remembered how relief had mingled with regret when he said goodbye to Naemi outside the private members’ club on the night of their first meeting. At the time, he had found his relief bewildering. It had seemed out of character, and out of place. He hadn’t understood why he should be feeling such a thing. Now, though, it occurred to him that he might have had some sort of premonition. Perhaps, after all, relief was appropriate, and valid. Perhaps he should simply let her go. And yet…
As he stared through the windscreen at the street vendor, the air began to look busy, almost pixelated. The rain was coming down, just as he had predicted. In a matter of seconds, it became torrential. The vendor was no longer visible.
“Johnny?” he said.
“Yes?”
“There is one thing you could do.”
* * *
—
Mist rose off the road, and he drove through it, the rain loud on the roof of the car, a constant, brutal roar. He felt slightly sick, as though he had eaten something that was past its sell-by date. On reaching the Embankment Building, he parked directly opposite and sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead. Gradually, the rain began to slacken off. He switched on the radio and listened to the news.
He had been waiting for about twenty minutes when he saw a bulky, middle-aged woman in gray overalls trudging up the street, head lowered. She had a toolbox in one hand and a company logo stitched above her breast pocket. He got out of the car and hurried over the road.
“Did Mr. Yu send you?” he asked.
She looked at him. “You locked yourself out, apparently.” Her hair was plastered flat against her head, and water dripped from her eyebrows and the tip of her blunt nose.
He led her through the lobby, noting the letters EB set into the floor in charcoal gray. To the left was a makeshift wood-and-glass structure that housed the concierge. There was a CCTV camera on the top, but it seemed unlikely that it worked—and even if it did work he would have been prepared to bet that nobody ever so much as glanced at the footage. It was a huge building, with hundreds of tenants. People came and went unchecked all the time.
They took a lift to the seventh floor. When the door opened, he was faced with a corridor that stretched away in both directions. The walls were painted a dull institutional green, and the air smelled of stale food and dust. Fat silver heating pipes clung to the ceiling. Which way should he go? When he was lying on his back in bed a few weeks before and imagined coming to the building, he had been unable to locate Naemi’s apartment, and there was part of him that wondered if it even existed, but he chose to walk to the right, and there, after a few paces, was number 710. Stopping in front of the solid matte-black door, he noticed that it was fitted with two expensive-looking locks. Something about the feeling of anonymity and the enhanced nature of the security measures confirmed the fact that this was Naemi’s apartment. The locksmith put down her toolbox and examined the locks from close-up.
“State-of-the-art, these are,” she said.
Since the door was set deep in the wall, she was able to work without being seen, but Zhang stood guard, just in case. If someone came along, he would use the story he had told Johnny to use: he was looking after the apartment while his friend was away, and he had mislaid his keys. There was no reason why anyone would think to question that. The locksmith hadn’t. If someone who actually knew Naemi happened to pass by, he had no idea what he would say.
But nobody appeared.
It took another half an hour to dismantle and replace the locks, but at last the door was open. The locksmith gave him a new set of keys, then put her tools back in the box. He counted out some notes and handed them to her. She counted them again, the tip of her tongue showing in the corner of her mouth, then she nodded to herself. Turning away, she started back towards the lift.
When she had gone, he entered the apartment, pulling the door shut behind him. From the small, square hallway, with its row of coat hooks, he walked into a room that had the dimensions of a loft. The walls were the same matte-black as the front door. So were the pillars that supported the ceiling. The floorboards had been painted with a deep red Chinese lacquer, and the traditional wood furniture was upholstered in stiff slub silks and dark brocades. Probably it had come with the apartment. The effect of the somber palette used throughout—even the cushions on the sofa were plum- or damson-colored—was to create a kind of hush. He moved on into the center of the room. There were windows all along one side, the view of the city simplified by the mist, its trees and buildings reduced to soft gray shapes.
He began to look around. Naemi’s departure may have been sudden, but it had obviously been planned. He sensed the calmness and efficiency of somebody for whom the severing of all connections was familiar. Would that be overstating it? He thought not. He moved on, looking for clues as to where she might have gone, but everything he found belonged to a present that was already past—a Flying Pigeon bicycle with a yellow frame, a shelf of Art Island catalogues, a large-scale street map of Shanghai. Gradually, though, he realized that he was learning something after all. The kitchen, which was built into the back wall, and separated from the main living area by a granite-topped counter or breakfast bar, looked brand-new, as if it had been fitted only days ago. He ran a finger along the inside of the oven door. There wasn’t even a suggestion of grease. He opened the fridge. Not just empty, but pristine. It wasn’t that the appliances were clean. They had never been used. He had heard of people who didn’t like their apartments to smell of cooking. Perhaps she was particular in that way, preferring to eat out—though, come to think of it, he couldn’t remember seeing her eat anything at all. It was in the bedroom, however, that he made the discovery that puzzled him the most. Like the rest of the apartment, it had been painted black. There was no bed, though. If the apartment had been rented furnished, surely there ought to have been a bed. As he crossed the room with his head lowered, deep in thought, he became aware of something gritty underneath his shoes. Squatting down, he touched the varnished floorboards. Tiny particles of earth stuck to his fingertips. It looked as if somebody had tried to sweep it up, but he still found traces in every part of the room, as if, at some point, the entire floor had been covered with it. It didn’t look like the kind of earth that might collect on your shoes if you went for a walk in the country, the kind of earth you might accidentally track into your home. It was more like soil. The soil you found in potted plants. But why was it scattered all over the floor? A chill went through him, and he stood up quickly, rubbing one hand against the other.
He returned to the living room. As he stood in the middle of the vast space, his phone began to ring. He looked at the screen. Unknown. If this had happened a week earlier, he would have assumed it was Naemi. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. He had the sudden conviction that if he answered, he would be allowing something harmful into his life, just as the opening of an attachment can admit a virus. He pressed Decline. It was only midday, but the light had faded, and as he looked towards the bank of windows the whole apartment seemed to shudder and leap sideways, shadows appearing, then disappearing, the floorboards bright as glass. There was a thick silence, as if the walls were padded, then thunder exploded overhead. On the street below, a car alarm went off. He remained quite still, skin prickling. He had sensed something behind him. He turned slowly. There she was, in the bedroom doorway. She was wearing a black shift dress. Her arms and legs were bare. There was blood around her mouth, and blood had spilled down her front, shiny and wet, dark stains on the darkness. More thunder rolled across the roof.