Free Shroud by John Banville Page B

we looked out at the distant mountain ranges. "I think I have been found out," I heard myself saying, in a tone of laboured, unconvincing lightness. "I had a letter. Someone has been looking into my past. She is coming here." I glanced sidelong at Kristina, and smiling she returned my glance. "She?" she murmured, shaking her head. "Oh, Axel, have you been foolish again?"
    I was instantly abashed and angry at myself. I could not think why I had confided in her. She knew nothing about me or my past, the real or the invented one. What was she to me but an afternoon of mostly simulated passion in an overheated hotel room in a snowbound city I would never return to? I have always supposed it was those few hours in bed that had prompted the belated review she wrote of After Words. The review was a light piece, intended to be teasingly allusive; it had struck an incongruously frivolous note amid the weighty lucubrations of Débat. The letter of thanks I sent to her when the piece appeared had cost me much effort. I had sought to match her sly, arch tone, but the result was unsatisfactory in a way I could not quite make out. Her note in reply was all innocence and warm affection, with no mention of our tryst. Now I wondered uneasily if perhaps she did know more about me than she pretended, about my past, I mean, my interesting past. Well, what did it matter any more? That harpy even now on her way from Antwerp would likely be the end of me. I was, I realised, looking forward to the prospect of destruction. Yes, let it come, I thought, almost gaily, I shall welcome it! All at once, in place of the anger and self-pity of a minute ago, I had a sensation of incipient weightlessness, as if at any moment I might float upward, wingless and yet wonderfully volant, and drift away free, into air, and light, the empty, cold and brilliant blue.
    "I am dying, Axel," Kristina Kovacs said.
    She was looking at the floor with an almost girlish air of surprise and faint shame, as if it were some passionate secret she had blurted out. "Yes, I am dying," she said, more softly this time yet with more force, testing it, impressing on herself the incredible truth of it. I stared down at her. An aeroplane passed low above the building with a ripping rumble, and an instant later its vast shadow flashed across the glass walls. Kristina smiled, and shook her head ruefully, and said she was sorry, and that I must forget she had spoken. "Tell me about your girl," she said with awful, brave brightness. "The one who has found you out, I mean. You said it was a girl, didn't you? In the past it always was. What dreadful secret has she uncovered?" She laughed, not unkindly. I gripped the walking stick fiercely in my fist. How did she think she had the right to speak to me like this? I am Axel Vander. People do not say such things to me, with such impudence. She took a step nearer and put a hand on my arm, her grip at once urgent and infirm. I knew what was coming. I drew back from her touch. The air seemed suddenly thick, unbreathable. "Do you remember Prague?" she said. Prague, then, not Belgrade, not Budapest. I would say nothing. "So hot," Kristina murmured, her gaze blurring as she smiled into the past, "so hot, that hotel room…" This was intolerable. I looked about. Someone must rescue me. Where was that fool Bartoli, now that he was needed? "I'm sorry," I snarled, "forgive me," and wiping my mouth on my sleeve I turned from her abruptly and launched myself out across the sea-wide floor toward the door and escape. Franco Bartoli came hurrying after me, yelping. I brandished my stick, more in threat than farewell, and plunged on, a man pursued.
    When she came out of the train station the street lamps were still palely burning in the dawn light and the air was the colour of dirty water. A map of the city showed her that it was not far to the hotel where he was staying. She decided to walk. A tram came lurching along its line. She liked trams, the ungainly,