Duties

1

I had no idea if the story was true, but I believed it might be. I didn’t know whether I was the only person he ever told it to, and I supposed it was more a confession than a story. With most stories, we assume that we aren’t the exclusive listener, while with confessions, we are more inclined to assume exclusivity. If I believed I was the only person who knew about it, this rested on the nature of what he said, on assuming it was a confession and not just a story. He told me that twenty-five years earlier, he had murdered someone.

This murder took place in a country somewhere in Eastern Europe, at a moment when crime was common, but he assumed murder was not. He said the killing was both cold-blooded and warm-blooded, an act of passion carried out very deliberately. He was not from the country where he committed the murder, but a neighbouring one that may at the time have been equally lawless. He couldn’t say because he had murdered no one in his home country, nor anywhere else, and had murdered no other person than this one individual, who may well have deserved to die. But that would indicate, Aleksandr said, he was carrying out some civic duty, when what the murder revealed was its absence.

I had recently started working as a night porter in a hotel in London when he told me this, and he was one of the guests who I assumed had been there for weeks, months, perhaps years. I would usually see him each morning as I set out the breakfast things before the end of my shift, and he was going off to swim at the hotel pool in the basement. It was only fifteen metres long, but he would usually be away for forty minutes; it was sufficient exercise. He would nod to me without a smile on the way there, and smile and say hello on the way back. I didn’t doubt that swimming kept his mind in good shape, as well as his body. While he ate breakfast alone, he would speak often and convivially with the waiting staff.

I almost never saw him in the evening. I started my shift at ten and finished at eight, and guessed he was usually in bed by the time I arrived, knowing that he would be up around six. On the two or three occasions I saw him at night, he would come in just after I started work. He nodded before usually disappearing upstairs. One evening, we spoke for a minute, and I offered a flippant reply when he asked me if I liked working at night. I’d been at the hotel for three weeks, and this was the first time I’d taken such a job. It seemed to make sense — I was thirty-one, had for ten years taken photographs that only occasionally made me any money, no matter if I’d been lucky enough to have a few exhibitions, and it seemed I couldn’t find any work that didn’t mean working with the public. I’d worked in bars, in shops, as a security guard and in telesales and telemarketing. I wanted a job where I could hide from the public, which is why I moved from bar work to shop work, from shop work to security guard work and from security work to telephone jobs. Yet no matter the employ, I seemed to face a public I increasingly detested, and in many instances I guessed it was mutual. People hated you for throwing them out of pubs at closing time; they were annoyed at price increases in the shops, paranoid that you were following them around seeing if they might steal something, and so on. Often in telesales, people would hear your voice, swear at you, and put the phone down. Yet there was another reason why I wanted to keep my distance from others. I owed about 9,000 on a student debt, and changed my name by deed poll to escape it. I was no longer close to any friends from university, nor any from school, and it was as though I needed time as far away from society as I could manage, before figuring out what I wanted to do, as though I didn’t quite know who I was under my assumed name.

So I decided to work nights and see hardly any members of the public at all, a solution that I was amazed I hadn’t proposed to myself earlier: I’d always been nocturnal, and I would rarely fall asleep before one or two in the morning. Now I would just have to stay awake for a few more hours. Sometimes I would take a seat at around 330 and find my head bobbing towards sleep while I tried to concentrate on the words in the book I was reading. But tiredness was a better feeling than tedium, and these hours resisting rest were joyous next to eight during the day fighting off ennui.

What made it easier wasn’t only the books I would read and the films I could watch — usually on my laptop — but the guests who would come in drunk after the pubs and clubs closed. They weren’t ready to end their night, and though the bar was closed, I could serve them tea and coffee, give them leftover sandwiches and biscuits. Of course, people would on occasion plead with me to sell them alcohol. There the bar was, with liquor aplenty - why not? I would tell them we didn’t have a licence to serve booze after eleven. In every instance, people accepted this rule, but on quite a few occasions, it was as if they concurred if I wouldn’t only make them tea or coffee, but would join them for a chat as well. The night wasn’t over, they believed, and it would have been were they to sit on their own, or with just the company they’d been out with. By joining them for a while, I could give the impression that the night was continuing.

After three months working there, I must have had chats with about twenty people. In time, I no longer hated the public, and the public, it seemed, no longer hated me. I would never have thought taking a night porter job would serve as a rehabilitation exercise, but there I was each night wondering whether anyone might come and sit and chat in reception. Before I started, I might have believed it would have been an intrusion and a hassle to serve tea or coffee and sandwiches at 2 in the morning, but it was often a pleasure, and I noticed people would usually request things with an apologetic tone rather than an expectant one. In my day jobs, I frequently believed I was there to do as I was told. Working at night, it seemed anything I did beyond sitting reading my book or watching a film was a generous act for which others were grateful. The guests would see me individually and ask me questions, and, in turn, I  would recognise their individuality, asking questions too. They wondered why I took a night job, whether I found it difficult to stay awake, even if I was frightened to be alone at night. In response, I asked them whether they had difficulty sleeping, why they were visiting, and whether they found it odd chatting to a stranger at 3 in the morning. I sometimes felt a little like a therapist: not only due to the disclosures I would sometimes hear, but also in the situation’s asymmetry: I was being paid and they were paying. It was as though even if the discussion was dull (and it rarely was), I was being paid anyway. The chats were engaging, sometimes intimately revealing and occasionally enjoyably amusing. But of all the people I met and the discussions I had in the fourteen months I worked in the hotel, only one could be described as memorable, and that was the story about the murder in an Eastern European country.

2

I would have been working at the hotel for around five months when, for the first time, I saw Aleksandr late at night. He came through the main door and towards reception, asking brusquely if I could get him a sandwich and a coffee. I said we had cheese or chicken left. He opted for the cheese. I put the coffee in a takeaway cup, assuming he would be taking it up to his room, but instead he sat in the bar area. After I came over with the beverage, he asked me politely if I would like to sit down, and for the first time I had the chance to look at him close up, and what I saw was a man in his early fifties with a firm body and a lined face, a perfect set of teeth that nevertheless never allowed for an easy smile, and a head of bristly hair, greying, but still generally dark. He looked like a man who exercised most mornings, ate well and slept enough, and that was how he described himself when I asked him why he had been living in the hotel for so long. It was the first question I asked after twenty minutes of discussing the city, his work and his daughter, whom he was going to visit in a couple of weeks. She was studying in Paris. He never saw the mother, but saw as much of his daughter as he could. He said he had been living in hotels for ten years and liked their anonymity. He came to realise quite a few years ago that what he needed was a room, a desk, a bathroom, and, ideally, facilities nearby where he could wake up and immediately swim. Hotels like ours provided all this,  and he said he was unsure whether it was the height of luxury or the realisation of stoicism, whether he wanted to live without washing a single dish, or to live without thinking of buying expensive items for an apartment. He added that he did wash the cup he often drank from when making tea in his room. It was a mug he bought at a pottery shop in the city, an item that he would take with him when he moved. He smiled, offering the first of those sentences, and the smile left his face promptly when he offered the second. His teeth were still on show, but the smile turned into a grimace.

He then explained why he arrived at the hotel so late, saying earlier in the week he had met a woman in a coffee shop who was visiting the city, and was from a neighbouring country. They both spoke the same secondary language, though their primary one was subtly different. They were both born into the same regime, though she was fifteen years younger. They talked about their childhoods under oppression that they both admitted wasn’t so oppressive, while also acknowledging that they wouldn’t be sitting in the cafe they were sitting in, in a foreign country, if their countries had remained as oppressive as they were. They laughed a lot, and he had laughed very little in years. He asked her if he could see her again. Tonight, he said, he had done so. He wished to talk about something, but couldn’t, and said that was why he was talking to me.

Of all the people who had passed through the hotel doors in the months since I’d been employed, the last person I would have expected to get personal with me was the man sitting there. He had appeared so formidably self-contained, and I suppose he was, but he also wished to unburden himself and chose a person who had no links to his country, no grasp of his language, no likelihood of him telling the authorities about the story I was about to be told. He more or less said this, and added he saw no reason to mistrust me, just as he saw no reason to trust me. I could choose to take his confession as a moment of immense honesty or elaborate fabrication.

And so he told me that twenty-five years earlier, he had murdered someone. He was involved in selling counterfeit goods in Western Europe, goods made in a couple of small factories that during the last years of communism were producing items that everybody ought to have wanted but didn’t, after a governmental policy that saw many items left cluttering up the place. After the system collapsed, the factories were closed for six months. Someone in the town proposed that if they couldn’t sell transparently what people didn’t want, they could perhaps sell covertly what people did want. The machines started again, and sixty people were employed making training shoes, jeans, sweatshirts and other items that carried brand names but had nothing to do with the company whose brand names were emblazoned on the items. Initially, the cheapest materials were used and the shoddiest work done to produce as many goods as quickly as possible. After a while, both the orders in the factory and people like himself that were selling the goods in France, Germany and the Netherlands demanded better quality. They all insisted to the boss that they could still compete with the official items as they didn’t have advertising costs, nor a huge corporation eating up the profits, paying CEOs, executives, and others. Aleksandr said he didn’t like selling inadequate items held together by little more than dissembling salesmanship, and he knew that when he was first selling the goods, it would have only taken the purchaser comparing Aleksandr’s items with the authentic ones to illustrate how poor the imitation was. In time, and with better quality materials and production, he may not have quite felt pride in his work, but he no longer believed he could be humiliated while doing it. If someone brought out a brand trainer and compared it to his, they would see no difference in quality at all. He was also, after a year, no longer driving a car likely to break down, with dents on the side and rust in various places. He bought a second-hand BMW in good condition and saw no reason why it wouldn’t have been real. He knew of no car manufacturing in the country that was counterfeiting vehicles, but he did wonder on a few occasions if he might move towards opening one, and may well have done so if there were disused car factories. Yet this Eastern European nation never made any during the communist period.

He worked as a salesman of counterfeit items for over four years and would have done it for longer if he hadn’t killed one of his rivals, and might not have killed him if the rivalry weren’t also romantic. Aleksandr said that after the success of the counterfeit factories in his town, people from another sixty miles away started to turn one of their disused factories into one producing counterfeit goods too, though items that weren’t being counterfeited by those in Aleksandr’s town. He supposed they didn’t copy the same items out of fairness or decency (and his townsfolk could hardly sue the others for copyright theft) but out of pragmatics. They saw a gap in the counterfeit market and exploited it by making handbags, coats and shoes by well-known higher-end brands than those Aleksandr was plagiarising. They supposed they would sell fewer items but at a much higher price. This rival had a girlfriend who was said to be beautiful and who, some claimed, all but alone, managed to turn the business into a successful one. She often accompanied Dario on his trips and wore the clothes so elegantly that no one would be inclined to believe she was wearing anything less than branded items. She was like a catwalk model without the catwalk, and Aleksandr said to me that if models were seventy-five and 160 cm, squat and walked with a limp, no matter how good the quality of the items, who would be buying them? He offered it ruefully, saying he didn’t want to disparage the old, the infirm, the heavy and the tiny — it was the reality of fashion. Lina was a wonderful example of that reality.

For many months, Aleksandr had heard of this woman’s beauty but had never witnessed it and was sure it was exaggerated, and perhaps it was. But when he did meet her, he almost didn’t care how beautiful she was comparatively (people had said she was the best-looking woman in the country; someone who could compete with those on Paris and Milan catwalks). No, he was simply sure she was to be his future lover, perhaps wife, and, in turn, if so, the mother of his children. He didn’t believe this egoistically, he insisted. He didn’t think he should be with this woman because he wanted to steal her from another man, and deserved someone so lovely. It was an affinity he insisted, and was certain she felt it as well.

3

They met at a social event in the country’s capital, a business dinner that brought together about a hundred people, those seen as moving the country from devastating post-communist poverty to increasing prosperity. Aleksandr shouldn’t have been there, but the factory boss picked up a food bug the day before and, as Aleksandr was already in the capital for business reasons, the boss asked if he would attend instead. He supposed, when Lina first saw him, she assumed he possessed more status than he did; everyone else there owned factories or businesses that employed at least fifty to a hundred people. He employed no one, and though he had earned enough money in a year to buy a German car, and hoped within the next year to buy a house, he was an employee. When he arrived, this initially made him self-conscious, but he realised that many assumed he was in charge of the company, and he saw no reason to tell those he mingled with that he wasn’t. He was also only twenty-five; many of the others were fifteen to thirty years older than he was, and were wearing suits that weren’t ill-fitting because they lacked sartorial finesse; more that they lacked the shape to wear them well. Many were overweight and stooped; men who carried within their bodies and their body language late communist despondency. His springy physique was one born out of the new capitalism.

There were other equally young people there, but they were mainly women whose success wasn’t based on their business acumen. It was based on their ability to hang off the arms and on the words of the men with whom they were keeping company. Some were wives, others lovers, but none of them carried in their body language the conviction Lina possessed. He would describe it as contempt, as though aware that she could have slept with any man in the room if she so wished, and would have, in other circumstances, if women were given the chance these men had been given, made as much money as any of them. Perhaps she initially gravitated towards him when he hovered nearby, while she chatted to three businessmen and her partner, because she wondered how he had made it into this inner sanctum of corruption and illegality while twenty years younger than most of them. Indeed, this is what she said when he looked at her a little too lingeringly, and she returned his gaze with a smile that nobody would have called winning or supplicating. While other women in the room, he believed, saw the measure of their worth in the man they were with, Lina saw hers in all the other men she could have seduced if she had so wished.

Of course, she didn’t say this to Aleksandr that evening. She was bold but not a fool, and whatever confidence one may have projected during this period contained within it a wary assumption that many weren’t to be trusted and a few could do active harm. It gave the affair, when it started a week after the party, a greater intensity than it might have had during the midst of communism or in an established capitalist country. But this was a moment where he believed everything contained risk. As they talked for twenty minutes at the gathering, others came over, yet there seemed to be an atmosphere around them that rejected the company of others, and it was only interrupted by Lina’s partner returning after discussing a business deal he hadn’t wished to curtail. As he came over and put his arm in hers in a gesture that in other circumstances might have seemed fond, Aleksandr saw in it possession that could have quickly turned aggressive.

Lying in bed after initially having sex, Aleksandr asked Lina whether she believed her partner could become violent, and she said he already was, just not yet with her. She offered it as though it would become inevitable, and Aleksandr wasn’t quite sure if she meant it would become so because eventually everybody would become a victim of his force, or that the situation they had just created made that violence likely. As she said it, she slipped her hand down the sheet that was lying over their nether regions, but had left their sweat-sheened chests bare, working him once again hard. It took only a few seconds, and they were again ferociously at each other’s flesh, somehow mimicking the savagery that they had a few seconds earlier invoked could be administered by her partner. He was aware that while there may have been feelings of love between them, it almost never took the form of tenderness, and it was almost inevitable they would seek to extend this forcefulness towards this man she said she no longer wished to sleep with, whose breath disgusted her, whose swollen tummy and double chin, his sparse hair and his hirsute chest, annoyed her or embarrassed her.

They would usually meet in a hotel in a town between the capital and where Aleksandr lived. It was a village that was quiet in the winter and busy in the summer, and while it wasn’t always easy to get as nice a hotel room as they might have liked during these first  months of their affair that stretched from May to September, they worried more that in the out-of-season months their presence would become conspicuous. They would be people staying in a hotel, with their cars perhaps the only ones parked outside. Would her partner hear of people who were taking a room in winter, and would he pay far more attention to Lina’s movements? Dario did so even during that summer period, but he also knew Lina’s parents lived a few miles from this holiday village and that, from the very beginning of her relationship with him, she had made clear she visited her parents regularly. She told Aleksandr she had no more love for her parents than anybody else, but knew that she might need an alibi were she to have affairs, develop her own financial interests, or just to escape a man who was likely to be overbearing in his affections. She was pleased that the lover she chose lived in the direction of her parents’ home. She might have had to choose another lover if he hadn’t. She said it ironically but also with mockery, in a tone that indicated Aleksandr was lucky to have her, and part of that luck was based on the rudiments of place.

4

In those first few weeks together, he didn’t know how much of her cynicism was based on a performance, though he would now think that most affairs are based on playing a role. I asked him to say more, as he offered it in what appeared to be no more than a parenthesis. He said that cheating on a partner is an abdication of personal responsibility, so most probably either stop and return to themselves and their values, or continue and take on a secondary identity. It is and isn’t them, but it is perhaps an exacerbation of one aspect of their personality that is turned into the entirety of it. He supposed it was evident when an actor played a pure villain, and performed the role with the relish of singular feeling. He supposed this was how Lina acted when she was sneaking away from a boyfriend who adored her and would give her anything he wished. Yes, he was a criminal, but this was a lawless environment, and her partner was no worse than any of the others, as he was known to be more generous than many when it came to paying his employees. Lina knew she couldn’t justify the affair morally, on the basis that he was an especially bad man, but she could act in such a way that allowed her to play up her role as the bad woman. She did it well. Aleksandr added that what he was telling me now, he didn’t quite know then: didn’t quite see how terrible a person Lina may have been at that time, how much of a game she was playing, and that it is with hindsight he was offering the claim that her partner was a fairer man than many. During their affair, he would have seen Lina’s moments of cynicism as self-hatred, her disdain for her partner as acknowledging the man’s cruelty, and her desire for him as passionate love. He came to believe none of this was true, even if he couldn’t doubt there was self-condemnation in her harshness towards others, that Dario must have had moments of ruthlessness given his position, and that, at the very least, the sex Aleksander and Lina had was passionate. However, had he been more lucid about the situation he was in, he doubted he would have murdered a man.

He did so four months after he started seeing Lina, and partly because their affair was likely to become more difficult as they moved into the Autumn months, and because he saw an opportunity to do so when Aleksandr’s boss asked him once again to go to a meeting in his place. He had heard how well Aleksandr conducted himself in the earlier one, and this time the various heads of these new liminal businesses —  somewhere between legitimacy and illegality — were gathering in a country for three days across the border, where they would meet kindred spirits (he used the English phrase with irony). During one of these meetings, in Russian, after Aleksandr had made a few remarks, Dario said he was wary of taking seriously the position Aleksandr offered, since he was at best a mouthpiece for his boss and, at worst, someone who was offering an opinion he wasn’t entitled to make. He couldn’t quite tell whether Dario was aiming to make a valid point or was trying to undermine him, aware somehow that he knew he was having an affair with Lina. 

Most responded to Dario’s comment with approval, believing that Aleksandr’s boss had shown disrespect by sending him rather than coming himself. Dario added that they shouldn’t have to deal with a minion, and it was this word (almost the same in Russian) that left Aleksandr convinced that Dario knew this was Lina’s lover.

Lina was not there — she was in Paris buying clothes with Dario’s money and visiting, too, friends who had moved there — but he also suspected she wasn’t around because Dario wouldn’t have wanted her at all implicated in the murder Dariowas going to commit. Over the years, he would often wonder whether he believed this was likely or created the possibility in his mind, all the better to feel less guilty over doing the deed. He made the assumption that Dario must have known about the affair, was besotted with Lina, and that this was a moment in history when all wishes and desires could be met with criminal and violent activity. Why wouldn’t Dario want him dead? And thus, why wouldn’t Aleksandr want primitively to protect himself and kill the man who was going to kill him? And so he murdered Dario.

5

As he talked, I only very occasionally interrupted him. He told the story lucidly enough and with all the necessary details that I had little need to ask for clarification, and this is partly what made me wonder if I was really the exclusive beneficiary of this tale, or even whether the story he told was one he made up for reasons that I couldn’t discern. All I knew was that when he told me he had murdered a man, my heart was beating faster than I would have liked. There I was sitting opposite him in a hotel, in the middle of the night, with all the guests in bed, and my purpose was to be the security person who had to protect everyone from any unwanted intruder. Was the person I needed to protect first and foremost myself, and from the man who had been staying in the hotel for months? This might have been an irrational feeling, but I could hardly call it misplaced. He may have been unlikely to have killed me then, but anyone who tells you they have murdered someone is hardly a figure of trust. I would have much preferred the feeling to have been based on distrusting the story he was telling, rather than trusting that he could kill again.

Yet as he spoke, there was no sense that he was violent before or after. He made it clear he had been a criminal and that it was a violent milieu, but his work involved manipulating others with his brain, not bullying people with brawn. There were plenty capable of doing that, and they rarely moved beyond the lower rungs of the corrupt establishment they were employed by. When he would go back home, he would see them around: arthritic before their time, nursing stiff fingers and unable to clench the fists that had once beaten people black, blue, and yellow, as their victims’ bruises began to heal. They drank too much and talked too little, growling away in the dark corner of bars that they may have once believed would be drinking holes they would leave behind for sophisticated restaurants and bars. Violence was central to getting things done, but they were mistaken in believing that by meting it out, they were destined to benefit very much from their thuggery.

It was within this aggressive world, though, that Aleksandr thought he could kill, aware that he could have found another person to dispatch Dario, but wanted to do so himself for two reasons. Firstly, it was a matter of honour — he believed that if Dario was going to murder him, Dario was going to get one of those pre-arthritic heavies to do it. Aleksandr wanted to do so with responsibility, to be his own man, so to speak. Secondly, in doing it alone, no rumours could link it back to him. He would not even tell Lina about the killing.

The day before the end of the three-day gathering, he took a bus to a town about fifty miles from the city where the event was taking place. He paid a second-hand car dealer the equivalent of several hundred pounds for a car that he then drove back into the city. When the conference finished, he parked the car a few hundred yards from Dario’s, which was next to the hotel Dario was staying in, and he waited. He knew most of the delegates weren’t going to stay another night and, sure enough, after about an hour of waiting, Dario got into his car and started driving back across the border. It was around twenty miles from the border that Alksandr accelerated towards Dario as they were driving along a narrow, high mountain road. He drove him over the crevice. He could see Dario furiously trying to steer his car in the opposite direction of the mountain edge, but it was too late, and the car tumbled down a ravine several hundred feet, where it exploded.

6

Aleksandr didn’t need to tell it vividly. I’d seen many such images in various films and wouldn’t have been surprised if he took the method for dispatching Dario from one of them. He admitted he couldn’t have killed Dario any other way - he couldn’t have shot him or stabbed him, drowned him or pushed him over a cliff with his bare hands. It was as if he destroyed a car, not killed a person. As I sat opposite him, I was mildly reassured that, as I didn’t drive, I needn’t worry about my life. But he also insisted again that this was the only person whose life he had ever taken. He knew he might have been making excuses, but saw it as a combination of two factors: his infatuation with Lina, but even more the environment at that time in certain Eastern European countries. 

If he might have believed Lina wanted him to kill Dario, then she reacted in a way contrary to that expectation. After she heard of what had been perceived as an accident, she no longer wanted to see Aleksandr. There was no suggestion in this refusal that she believed he had killed her partner. When he did meet up with her in a cafe, a few weeks after the crash, she explained why she couldn’t see him again. She was dressed in black, a colour she would often wear, and that became her. But the attire was sombre, while before it was dashing, with often a flash of scarlet or blue used to offset the threat of sobriety. She looked like she had lost even more sleep than Aleksandr, who wasn’t sure whether he had slept so little since the murder because of the deed or because he could no longer see Lina. Lina told him that afternoon she didn’t realise until he died how much she loved Dario, and said that while it was true she didn’t desire him as as she desired Aleksandr, Dario was the person whose children she would have wanted, whose perspective she always trusted, and who whenever she went anywhere without him would take photographs that she afterwards wanted to show him. She had a hundred pictures from Paris, and yes, she acknowledged, she could now show them to Aleksandr, but she saw no reason to do so. Yes, she had acted badly, but that was a game. Now her life seemed very real and also empty. Aleksandr couldn’t fill it.

He realised then that she didn’t believe Dario’s death was an accident, nor a murder, but a suicide. She suspected he knew of her affair and took his own life. Aleksandr thought of telling her and alleviating her guilt, but couldn’t have trusted her to keep the murder a secret. Instead, he tried to convince her that it was an accident, and when she refused to believe him, he even hinted that it might have been a murder, proposing that, at the conference, there may have been people who saw him as a threat. He wished to reassure her that she needn’t feel guilty and was even willing to implicate himself just a little if it meant she would feel less bad about herself. Yet of course, he wasn’t willing to alleviate that sense of guilt altogether and tell her he was responsible for the deed. He would think about this often in the years afterwards, and didn’t at all regret being more forthcoming, and didn’t regret either that he proposed it was a murder. Rates were far higher than before in these years after communism’s collapse, and there was no reason why she would assume he had been Dario’s executor. By the time they parted, two hours later, she accepted it was possible Dario had been killed, and while he was happy that he’d lifted a little the burden from upon her, he hoped that she wouldn’t then try and investigate what actually happened.

During their discussion, there seemed to be no desire on her part and, as a consequence, little on his. Had she shown relief that Dario was dead, he believed it would have exacerbated the torrid affair they had started, and at the same time diluted any feeling he had for Lina. Instead, while he wasn’t at all aroused during their meeting (and on every other occasion he had been), he felt far more love towards her as he saw this was a woman caught in the circumstances of her time, but not so completely that she couldn’t feel love towards a man who loved her and was dead.  He wouldn’t quite say that this was the day he fell in love with Lina, and at the very moment when honesty would have led him to prison, but he did know that he still would often think about her, and far more often as the woman dressed all in black that day in the cafeover all the other occasions when they lay in a lustful embrace.

7

He never saw Lina again. She moved to Paris, and he heard that initially she was sharing a flat with friends who were already there, and that she  worked in a bar. He had no more news after that, and he sometimes wondered, when he visited his daughter in the city, if he might pass her on the street, and wondered too if he would recognise her, and she him. He had hoped to see her and hoped they would recognise each other. He would also have moments of great sadness when he believed they may have passed each other, but without recognition. To do so without a hint of it would have indicated that they had changed physically, and perhaps also their minds had too — weakened memories meeting altered bodies and people who once knew each other so well becoming strangers in each other’s eyes.

Looking at Aleksandr, listening to him speak, I saw someone who probably hadn’t changed that much, and whose mind seemed sharp and his memory acute. But I could imagine that Lina had changed, and Aleksandr might have been responsible for it. I could envisage a woman who moved to Paris and never quite recovered from Dario’s demise, and that Aleksandr’s remarks hadn’t alleviated the problem but made her see his death as more monstrous than it was. All she knew was that his body had been burnt so badly he was hardly recognisable, and she may have wondered if, before being killed, Dario might have been tortured as well. Did they kill him after getting the information they needed, perhaps seeking the cash that was stored in places deemed safer than banks? She never knew where that money was kept, Aleksandr said, and murdering him had nothing to do with cash, even if now he couldn’t quite say why he did it. Was it really so terrible what Dario said to him at the meeting? Was he so in love with Lina? Was it really likely that Dario would kill him? He concluded that he did it because he could at a moment when violence was frequent, corruption inevitable and murders rarely given more than a cursory investigation.

What it did give him was a belief in the law, and it is a troublesome society indeed if one comes to this knowledge only through breaking the law and recognising the absence of consequences. It wasn’t even as if Dario’s gang members were interested in solving it. Instead, they were involved in a power struggle that left no deaths but two maimings, and it was after he heard of these that he left the country for several years. Aleksandr's boss wanted him to stay, saying that he’d offered to buy out the factory Dario owned  at a very cheap rate. 

He said Aleksandr could run it. Aleksandr refused, saying he wanted to work abroad for a while, though he wondered for a moment if the boss suspected he had killed Dario and was offering him the factory as a reward. As for Dario’s money, if he had found out where it was, he doubted he would have taken the cash. It was as though he and Lina found their decency only after the murder, but couldn’t quite find it before. In other circumstances, in a different time, they might have made a lovely couple. He offered it with an irony he couldn’t deny, but with a sadness that went a lot deeper. I almost wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, but the idea of reaching out to a killer, to lay a finger on a murderer who, I felt, might turn at any moment, made me shrink from the gesture I would in other circumstances have offered. I knew at that moment I believed his story.

8

Aleksandr said he lived for the next-twenty- years in what he supposed were law-abiding countries: Germany, the United States and Britain. He didn’t want to claim they were without fault; only that next to his home and neighbouring countries, there were assumptions made and laws in place that ruled out the sort of lawlessness which meant he could get away with murder and suffer no consequences. Most of the time, he worked, as he still does, as a commodity broker, shaving tiny percentages off large transactions and living very comfortably indeed.

I asked him why he hadn’t tried more actively to find Lina. Didn’t he know the village where her parents lived? Couldn’t he have asked them? He said he might have been able to do so in the few years after he left, but when he did return more than a decade later, he visited the village, enquired about her parents and was told they were both dead. She had one brother, but nobody knew where he was. He was almost relieved he couldn’t trace Lina, perhaps partly because if she had changed, he might have felt responsible, and also because he’d sworn to himself that if he did find her, he would have to tell her he killed Dario.

He went silent for a while. It was now 2.30 in the morning. Usually, I would start doing a few minor chores and then rest up, reading and half-sleeping. I thought he was going to say good night. Instead, he asked if I was tired. I said a little — but my job was to pretend I wasn’t. It wasn’t in my job title that I was obliged to talk through the night to repentant murderers, but he could potentially have put in a complaint saying I was rude to him if I were to end the conversation abruptly. It was also true that I only noticed my tiredness when he stopped talking for a moment. I was interested in his story, and if there was more to it, I was sure I wouldn’t have difficulty staying awake.

He said he might not have seen Lina again, but he did wonder if he might have seen her daughter. My mind once again moved back to incredulity. Aleksandr convinced me that he had killed someone; now he expected me to accept an enormous coincidence. Yet I was intrigued more than disbelieving, saying he should continue. On his previous visit to Paris, he said, he met his daughter in a cafe in the 5th arrondissement near where she was studying. At a nearby table was someone who looked a lot like Lina, and not a little like himself. She was around his daughter’s age, perhaps two or three years older, and was with four or five other people in an animated conversation that he couldn’t quite hear and would only have partially understood. He spoke mainly German or English with his daughter, the two languages apart from his own and Russian, which he understood well. He sometimes also spoke to his daughter in his own language, even if she didn’t speak it fluently. He asked her if she could make out what they were saying; she said they were discussing a political documentary about the assassination of an African political figure in the sixties. He tried to concentrate on his unequivocal daughter as she discussed aspects of her course, but he couldn’t stop looking across at this young woman whom he believed may well have been Lina’s child, and not impossibly also his.

He recalled that when he and Lina would have sex, they usually used protection, but there were several occasions when they did not, whether due to a rush of passion or an insistence on her part that it would be safe, or at least safer: she was menstruating. Did she become pregnant then? He knew his thoughts made little sense: might the child have been Dario’s as readily as his, and was it not more probable still that she met someone in Paris and had a child with this man? And wasn’t it yet more probable that this young woman reminded him of Lina and nothing more? Yet he also saw himself in this woman, in the shape of her nose and in a gesture that Lina would mock but found herself adopting. It was a slow shaking of the head when disagreeing with what someone was saying, and he wondered if it had become Lina’s and if she had passed it on to her daughter. There were nebulous claims, but they wouldn’t quite go away, and he was seized by a compulsion to find out more. But how?

When his daughter had to rush off for a class, he stayed at the cafe just as the group discussing the film ordered more coffees and beers. He got a decaf and took out a book that he hardly read while he kept looking across at the other table. It was as if he were hoping this young woman would notice, perhaps even be offended and confront him. He could then ask about her mother and say he wondered if she might have been from his home country. It would be madness, of course, but better than assuming he was ogling this young woman with lustful intent. She never did look across and, after they finished their drinks, they went off, presumably to a lecture or class.

He was in Paris for a week, and every afternoon he returned to the cafe hoping she would be there. The way a couple of them had spoken so familiarly with the waiter indicated the cafe was a place they regularly frequented and, sure enough, three days later, she was there again. There were only three of them this time, and he sat at the table next to theirs. When the others left, and she stayed, he wondered on what premise he could start a conversation. He didn’t need one. She asked him a question in his own language and said, the other day, she had overheard him speak it briefly with the person he was with. Apart from with her mother, she never used the language at all, and it was odd to be using it now in public. He asked her a few questions, and she asked him a few in turn, including his name. But, as she wasn’t fluent, they started to fall into English, and continued speaking for another hour as she discussed her life. She said it was strange talking to him about certain things, but credited it with a sense of complicity the initial comments in the language gave their conversation. She told him that her mother left the country when she was in her early twenties, that her father died just before she came to Paris, and her stepfather hung around long enough to see her through her early teens, leaving her mother for someone not much older than herself, after that. She found herself thinking far more of her biological father when her step-dad was no longer around, and she started to quiz her mother about him. Her mother said little, yet when she researched those years in the early nineties, criminal activity was frequent and, while murder was not so common, the threat of it was, as violence was commonplace. People would disappear either because someone took them out or the person had the good sense to take off. Florence believed her father might have been one of the latter, and wondered if one day she might come across him, just as she supposed she had come across Aleksandr.

He said as she offered this remark, he felt the strongest of frisson. Yet I received it as the moment when I found his story most implausible, and wondered if this was a problem with what he was saying or the problem with fiction. Haven’t we  been trained in reading stories to assume that coincidence has little place? And there he was offering one when he seemed to be insisting he had met Lina’s daughter. Yet I suppose this wasn’t quite what he was claiming; he said it could be her and didn’t deny this was what he wanted to believe, and knew also that perhaps it was best if he left it as no more than a possibility. While he may often have wished to find Lina and tell her that he was Dario’s murderer, what if this young woman was Lina’s daughter? She would almost certainly have also been Dario’s or his. Would he have to say to Florence that he had murdered her father, or was the father she never knew because he wouldn’t take responsibility for killing her mother’s partner? There he would be doing so many years later, and when he would no longer face punishment, though he would certainly be inflicting pain? 

He told me that afternoon he was ready to walk away, to never again have any further contact with this young woman who may have been his offspring, may have been the daughter of the man he murdered, may have been the child of a woman who was frequently on his mind. Yet, as she said she needed to go in a few minutes, she made a request. She asked if she could have his daughter’s details. She said there were maybe no more than a thousand people in France who were from the country, and though there was a tiny institute in Paris, she had never gone in, feeling that she was hardly from the nation, and hardly spoke the language. His daughter seemed similar - they might have a few things in common. Aleksandr saw her request as carrying the weight of the deterministic, and there was nothing he could do to prevent events unfolding as they must. That moment of choice had come over twenty years earlier, and now he would have to allow whatever truths that came out as greater than his own will, even if it led to revealing his culpability.

9

He supposed he was telling me all this because he was going back to Paris in a week, and felt far more trepidation in doing so than in any of the visits he had made to his home country in recent years. He suspected as well that he wouldn’t continue living in hotels, but thought he might move to the French capital and embed himself within the small community from his homeland. He had always liked people, enjoyed being around them, but often shrank from their presence. Yet he supposed guilt made him often asocial. He wondered what made me so, working nights and seeing hardly anyone at all. He added he was wealthy enough to be of use, he supposed, but much would depend on whether Florence was Lina’s daughter. When she first started speaking to him, he hoped she was; the more thought he gave to it, the more he wished she was not. 

It was time he came out of the shadows, he insisted, and mentioned again the figures he would see when he returned home and saw people he suspected had been involved in those dark years after communism, and would look bitter, wrecked and ruined, falling apart as their country was not, with roads being built, housing constructed, businesses developing. He had escaped the ravaged state of these men, though his crime may have been greater than theirs. He was a healthy and wealthy man, someone who could swim each morning in a pool at a luxury hotel, and never worry about food on the table or even feel the need to cook it. He was an outward success; he wouldn’t deny it, though he would hardly boast about it either. He was no less culpable than those he saw in cafes and bars at home, but he did have a lot more money, and he might as well spend it making amends. He would do so financially and as part of the community if Florence wasn’t Lina’s daughter. If she was, he would leave them with a large sum of money, leave a note of confession and remain on the move. I would perhaps see him again sometime, swimming laps each morning, a man of wealth and self-distaste. It was now 3.30, and he said he should sleep, but he also thanked me for listening. No, he added — that was too weak a sign of gratitude. He was grateful, immensely grateful. He suspected and hoped he would never see me again, but insisted he would send me a postcard, telling me whether his fate had been sealed or his life renewed. I said I looked forward to it and gave my full name as he requested.

10

I didn’t expect he would write to me; I assumed he said it to round off his extended confession, to give to the moment a polite closure while containing within it the false promise of further communication — the way someone says we will meet soon when parting. Over the next couple of weeks, I thought about Aleksandr a great deal and whether the story he told me was true. The facts he offered seemed to be, as I checked the number of people from his homeland in France; also how violent and lawless the place had been before he left it. Nothing I could verify was made up, but a good storyteller blends fact with fiction. Yet why would he have spun a yarn to a night porter in a hotel in the early hours? And why was I the recipient of this important confession?

I had no full name for Aleksandr and suspected he booked into the hotel under a false one, so I had no idea if he had checked out. In the following days, in the early morning, I didn’t see him go down to the pool, and didn’t see him as I occasionally would coming in shortly after I’d started my shift. Did he go to Paris earlier than intended or book into another hotel? Was he still here but avoiding me, venturing for his daily swim later than usual, and taking his breakfast elsewhere? Was he spending time with the woman he told me he had started seeing? I suppose if I were to tell someone in a hotel one night that I was a murderer, I wouldn’t want to see the person again. I probably wouldn’t stay in the hotel either.

I knew I wasn’t going to tell the police what happened, and there might not have been much point. From what I’d read online in the days following the conversation with Aleksandr, the authorities weren’t always so interested in investigating far more recent crimes committed by those from former Eastern Bloc countries, even when the person dead was wealthy and a British citizen. As I became fascinated with the murky presence of money from the East propping up a western economy, as London benefited enormously from post-communist cash, so I believed that Aleksandr’s story was true, though the legitimacy of his money-making suspect. I started to read his story through the prism of Russian oligarchs and former communist KGB officers who had turned into mobsters. Yet I couldn’t imagine any of these figures I read about sitting in a hotel lounge and offering their life story to a person who was paid little above minimum wage to keep the place safe. The more I thought about, the more plausibility met with unlikelihood; probability with the unconvincing.

Yet three weeks after that evening, I received an envelope with a postcard in it. There was also a letter and 10,000 pounds. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised he sent so much money through the post as he wouldn’t have missed its loss. But I did think if somebody had opened the letter and pocketed the cash, they probably wouldn’t have sealed it up and allowed the postcard and letter to continue  on their onward journey. I even wondered if he might have put the cash in it in the odd hope that the envelope wouldn’t reach its destination. He would have honoured his commitment, promising the postcard, but it wouldn’t have been his fault if it hadn’t arrived. This was surely a nonsense thought, but Aleksandr’s existence seemed to invite so much speculation that he fuelled the most outlandish of hypotheses. I almost expected him to tell me in the letter that he had made the whole story up; the £10,000 was for winning first prize in a gullibility contest.

11

Instead, the letter thanked me for being a stranger he could talk to more openly than many a friend. He had tried over the years to discuss the incident with friends, but the better he got to know them, the harder it became to speak about what was on his mind. They became people who knew well, but they didn’t know a side of him at all, and this left him in a state of quiet, devastating solitude. It was lifted that night, speaking to me, and he knew he was now ready, were he to meet Lina again, to tell her that he was responsible for Dario’s death. He was relieved to discover that Florence wasn’t Lina’s daughter, and now she and his daughter had become friends, without the problem of discovering that they were also related. He met Florence’s mother at a cultural event in the institute, and if Lina happened to be there as well, she must have become unrecognisable in the intervening years. He was sure she wasn’t present, and when he mentioned her name, nobody seemed to know anybody who went by that nomenclature. He felt both relief and sadness, but at least one other person was aware of his past misdeed as he thanked me again.

He supposed I might have been wondering why I became the recipient of his confession, and he reminded me of what I’d said when we chatted for only a minute or two the first time. He had asked me whether I enjoyed working nights, and I had replied with some flippancy that I enjoyed the shadows, liked the idea of retreating just a little from society. He said he knew what I meant and said nothing more until we talked properly that evening. He suspected I had a confession of my own to make, and maybe it is with those who have something to hide we can best reveal what we no longer wish to conceal.

He added that when he committed the murder of course he knew what he was doing was wrong, but he supposed he saw it as a wrong criminally and not morally, seeing that the state at the time was so ineffective that he would get away with it, and that Dario, no less aware of the weakness of the justice system at the time, could have got away with killing him. Of course, after doing the deed he did feel he might have been caught, but that feeling faded, and a moral or ethical one increasingly replaced it. He found himself wondering if, in a perverse way, everybody needed to kill someone to realise the depth of one’s wrongdoing. He exaggerated, of course, but wondered if the people best placed to comment upon and pass judgment on others are those who have committed some crime, as if a healthy society finds the duties it must live by in the exceptions that reveal why these obligations are necessary. He supposed most people fear authority and thus conform to justice’s demands. He certainly knew that when the legal system was at its weakest, many didn’t abide by the law. Yet he also admitted that what made him understand duties was the alienation he felt in the years afterwards, keeping a secret to himself. When he was involved in counterfeiting, he never felt more sociable, and in a different way, no less so in his affair with Lina. In each instance, he had complicity within duplicity, and afterwards, after the murder, he was alone with his actions and, in time, came to comprehend the importance of a transparent set of demands everyone in the culture ought to conform to.

When he spoke to me, he believed I also understood the need to retreat from society, and inferred in my few remarks that I might have something to hide as well. He didn’t for a moment think that it was of a magnitude equal to his. But he was sure I was someone he could reveal his past to without assuming I would inform the police, or judge him without listening to what he had to say. He thought this partly because he could see culpability in my eyes, in my demeanour.

Almost everything he said in the letter was true: it was as though he even knew what my crime was and how he could help me rectify it, as the sum he gave me was a little more than I owed on my student debt. Would I now pay it off and return to society as Aleksandr never quite could? His was an irrevocable act, and mine was revocable as I believed that while Aleksandr may have been right to propose that the criminal is best placed to regard the nature of a crime (aside from the victims, who are also involved in the crime, innocently), this lesson is perhaps only of value when the crime can be rectified. Stealing and fraud usually can be; murder and grevious bodily harm that leaves a victim maimed doesn’t. For that, only a tortured conscience will suffice, or a capacity for denial that manages to convince the guilty that they were forced into a position where they might have been harmed if they didn’t harm their counterpart. I suspect Aleksandr survived balancing these two elements, well aware that Dario had a reason to kill him, and yet at the same time had no evidence that he was likely to do so. All I had to do was pay off my debt under my old name, and I could live with no need, twenty-five years later, to find myself discussing with a night porter how I destroyed someone else’s life and perhaps ruined my own.

There was no return address on the letter, and thus no way to contact Aleksandr to thank him. But I did consider, after paying off the debt, spending the rest of the money on a trip to Paris and finding him there. I would go to his country’s institute and ask for him just as he asked for Lina, but I believed I wouldn’t have much luck, suspecting that he, like he suspected Lina, had changed his name, just as I was sure the name he gave me wasn’t the one he went under before leaving his country. I even found myself wondering if he believed Lina changed her name when she moved to France under the assumption that people may have believed she was involved in Dario’s death, and someone might have tried to seek her out. All I knew, was that I had enough money to pay off my debt and might soon return to my old name in what seemed like the most victimless of crimes, and could do so because someone else had been a very victimful one.