14
Only the paranoid survive.
Hoffmann had managed to hail a taxi on the Rue de Lausanne, one block away from the Hotel Diodati. Afterwards the taxi driver remembered the fare distinctly for three reasons. First because he was driving towards the Avenue de France at the time and Hoffmann needed to go in the opposite direction – he asked to be taken to an address in the suburb of Vernier, close to a local park – which meant he had to perform an illegal U-turn across several lanes of traffic. And second because Hoffmann had seemed so edgy and preoccupied. When they passed a police car heading in the opposite direction, he had sunk low in his seat and put up his hand to shield his eyes. The driver had watched him in the mirror. He was clutching a laptop. His phone rang once but he didn’t answer it; afterwards he turned it off.
A sharp breeze was stiffening the flags above the official buildings; the temperature was barely half what the guidebooks promised for the time of year. It felt as if rain was coming. People had deserted the pavements and taken to their cars, thickening the mid-afternoon traffic. Consequently it was after four when the taxi finally approached the centre of Vernier, and Hoffmann abruptly leaned forward and said, ‘Let me out here.’ He handed over a one-hundred-franc note and walked away without waiting for the change: that was the third reason the driver remembered him.
Vernier stands on hilly ground above the right bank of the Rhone. A generation ago it was a separate village, before the city spread across the river to claim it. Now the modern apartment blocks are close enough to the airport for their occupants to be able to read the names on the sides of the descending jets. Still, there are parts of the centre that retain the character of a traditional Swiss village, with overhanging roofs and green wooden shutters, and it was this aspect of the place that had stayed in Hoffmann’s mind for the past nine years. In his memory he associated it with melancholy autumn afternoons, the street lights just starting to switch on, children coming out of school. He turned a corner and found the circular wooden bench where he used to sit when he was early for his appointments. It girdled a sinister old tree in vigorous leaf. Seeing it again, he couldn’t bear to approach it but kept to the opposite side of the square. Nothing much else had changed: the laundry, the cycle shop, the dingy little cafe in which the old men gathered, the chapel-like maison d’artisant communal. Next to it was the detached building where he was supposed to have been cured. It had been a shop once, a greengrocer’s maybe, or a florist’s – something useful; the owners would have lived above the premises. Now its large downstairs window was frosted and it looked like a dentist’s surgery. The only difference from eight years ago was the video camera that covered the front door: that was new, he thought.
Hoffmann’s hand shook as he pressed the buzzer. Did he have the strength to go through it all again? The first time he hadn’t known what to expect; now he would be deprived of the vital armour of ignorance.
A young man’s voice said, ‘Good afternoon.’
Hoffmann gave his name. ‘I used to be a patient of Dr Polidori. My secretary was supposed to make an appointment for tomorrow.’
‘I’m afraid Dr Polidori spends every Friday seeing her patients at the hospital.’
‘Tomorrow is too late. I need to see her now.’
‘You can’t see her without an appointment.’
‘Tell her it’s me. Say it’s urgent.’
‘What name was it again?’
‘Hoffmann.’
‘Wait, please.’
The entryphone went dead. Hoffmann glanced up at the camera and instinctively raised his hand to cover his head from view. His wound was no longer tacky with blood but powdery: when he inspected his fingertips, they were covered with what looked like fine particles of rust.
‘Come in, please.’ There was a brief buzz as the door was unlocked – so brief that Hoffmann missed it and had to try a second time. Inside it was more comfortable than it used to be – a sofa and two easy chairs, a rug in soothing pastel, rubber plants, and behind the head of the receptionist a large photograph of a woodland glade with shafts of light falling from between the trees. Next to it was her certificate to practise: Dr Jeanne Polidori, with a master’s degree in psychiatry and psychotherapy from the University of Geneva. Another camera scanned the room. The young man at the desk scrutinised him carefully. ‘Go on up. It’s the door straight ahead.’
‘Yes,’ said Hoffmann. ‘I remember.’
The familiar creak of the stairs was enough to unleash a flood of old sensations. Sometimes he had found it almost impossible to drag himself to the top; on the worst days he had felt like a man without oxygen trying to climb Everest. Depression wasn’t the word for it; burial was more accurate – entombment in a thick, cold concrete chamber, beyond the reach of light or sound. Now he was sure he could not endure it again. He would rather kill himself.
She was in her consulting room, sitting at her computer, and stood as he came in. She was the same age as Hoffmann and must have been good-looking when she was younger, but she had a narrow gully that ran from just below her left ear down her cheek all the way to her throat. The loss of muscle and tissue had given her a lopsided look, as if she had suffered a stroke. Usually she wore a scarf; today not. In his artless way he had asked her about it once: ‘What the hell happened to your face?’ She told him she had been attacked by a patient who had been instructed by God to kill her. The man had now fully recovered. But she had kept a pepper spray in her desk ever since: she had opened the drawer and showed it to Hoffmann – a black can with a nozzle.
She wasted no time on a greeting. ‘Dr Hoffmann, I’m sorry, but I told your assistant on the phone I can’t treat you without a referral from the hospital.’
‘I don’t want you to treat me.’ He opened the laptop. ‘I just want you to look at something. Can you do that at least?’
‘It depends what it is.’ She scrutinised him more closely. ‘What happened to your head?’
‘We had an intruder in our house. He hit me from behind.’
‘Have you been treated?’
Hoffmann bent his head forward and showed her his stitches.
‘When did this happen?’
‘Last night. This morning.’
‘You went to the University Hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they give you a CAT scan?’
He nodded. ‘They found some white spots. They could have come from the hit I took, or it could have been something else – pre-existing.’
‘Dr Hoffmann,’ she said more gently, ‘it sounds to me as though you are asking me to treat you.’
‘No, I’m not.’ He set the laptop down in front of her. ‘I just want your opinion about this.’
She looked at him dubiously then reached for her glasses. She still kept them on a chain around her neck, he noticed. She put them on and peered at the screen. As she scrolled through the document, he watched her expression. The ugliness of the scar somehow emphasised the beauty of the rest of her face – he remembered that as well. The day he recognised it was the day in his own opinion that he started to recover.
‘Well,’ she said with a shrug, ‘this is a conversation between two men, obviously, one who fantasises about killing and the other who dreams of dying and what the experience of death would be like. It’s stilted, awkward: I would guess an internet chat room, a website – something like that. The one who wants to kill isn’t very fluent in English; the would-be victim is.’ She glanced at him over her glasses. ‘I don’t see what I’m telling you that you couldn’t have worked out for yourself.’
‘Is this sort of thing common?’
‘Absolutely, and every day more so. It’s one of the darker aspects of the web we now have to cope with. The internet brings together people who in earlier years thankfully would not have had the opportunity to meet – who
