Walking in Darkness

As soon as he had walked past her she put the door back on the chain. ‘I was just going to make some coffee – d’yer want some?’

‘I’d love some.’ He could smell something delicious; frying onions, or garlic, or both. He followed Lilli Janacek into a tiny kitchen. There was a pan on the stove. Lilli stirred its contents, poured in steaming pale golden liquid from a jug, stirred again, then turned down the heat and put a lid on the pan.

‘Chicken stew,’ she told Steve, turning round.

‘Smells wonderful.’

She smiled. ‘It’s an old recipe my mother taught me.’

‘Czech?’

‘No, my mother was American – it was my father who was Czech. How do you like your coffee?’

‘Black and strong, no sugar. Thank you. Any idea where Sophie can have got to? The press conference ended an hour ago. Would she have gone to her office?’

‘What office?’ Lilli Janacek asked with heavy sarcasm. ‘She works from here. You don’t think that old skinflint of a Czech would cough up for an office? Before Sophie came, a friend of mine, Theo, worked for Vladimir, using his own home as an office, and being paid in peanuts. The monkeys in Central Park Zoo have better pay and conditions. Every cent Sophie spends she has to account for – she can just about pay my rent and her fares. If I didn’t feed her once a day, she probably wouldn’t eat.’

Handing him a mug of coffee, Lilli led the way back across the little corridor into a sitting-room so small it just had room for a couple of armchairs and a TV, a dining-table squeezed into a corner with two chairs pushed under it and a set of narrow bookshelves running below the window. The threadbare carpet was a dingy beige but there were jewel-coloured little rugs scattered across it, and the walls were lit by red glass globes which gave the room a warmth and glow that made it look inviting.

‘I don’t allow smoking in here,’ he was firmly informed.

‘I don’t smoke.’ That got him a smile.

Steve asked her, ‘What do you do? Are you a journalist too?’

‘I’m an artist, but I do the odd article for trade magazines. You know the sort of thing; pieces on modern art, on New York galleries, anything to bring in some income. Every little helps.’

Sipping his coffee, Steve began to prowl along the shelves, looking at the books. Hemingway, Thurber, Wallace Stevens, Dorothy Parker, Jack Kerouac, Scott Fitzgerald.

‘Are these all yours, or are some Sophie’s?’

‘Sophie keeps her books in her bedroom. Those are mine, and before you ask, I don’t read contemporary authors, they bore me,’ Lilli told him. ‘Except for Toni Morrison. She’s so good it hurts, but most writers today, they got no style and nothing to say worth reading.’

‘Who does Sophie read?’

‘Are you in love with her?’

He went red and laughed shortly, taken aback by the directness. He was used to giving out questions like knives, not getting them. ‘I only just met her today.’

Lilli’s smile was mocking, a little cynical. ‘So what? It doesn’t take but a minute to fall in love. She’s quite a looker.’

‘She certainly is!’ Steve tried to sound very casual. ‘Has she got a boyfriend?’ Lilli might know about Don Gowrie, might have all the answers to the questions buzzing around his head.

Tartly, she told him, ‘Ask her. I’m not gossiping about her to a guy I only just met.’

He saw he wouldn’t get anything out of her. Undeterred, he asked, ‘How long has she been in America?’

Lilli gave him a narrow stare. ‘What is this? The Spanish Inquisition? You can ask her that, too.’

Steve shrugged and wandered over to the dining-table, stared down at a large black sheet of paper covered with white circles arranged in a wheel, a black and white image of a face in each, in the centre a lightly sketched outline of Sophie’s face which had the same spectral look, and between the circles a vividly painted border in the art nouveau style. The effect was mysterious and striking. ‘What’s this? Did you do it?’ he asked, bending to look at the circles.

‘Yes, I’m doing it as a Christmas present for Sophie. I photocopied old photos she has of her family, going back a hundred years.’

‘The copies are very faint,’ he observed,

peering at the face of an old man with a long grey beard. You could only just see his features, whereas another man, in a rather crumpled white shirt, open at the neck, could be seen quite clearly.

‘They are copies of copies of copies – Sophie had modern copies of old family photos. The originals are in the Czech Republic, in her family home. Before she went to London, Sophie borrowed them and had a photographer make copies. When I started my wheel I photocopied them, then I kept copying the copies, to make them even fainter if the person was dead.’ Lilli stood beside him and put her long, slightly grubby finger on another circle. ‘For instance, this is her sister, Anya, a little girl who died before Sophie was born.’