We Know You Remember (105)

“What’s her real name?”

“I don’t know. Never asked either. I have to respect a woman’s desire to be whoever she wants to be, you know?”

“Absolutely,” said Eira.

“And what is a name anyway? It’s just a label slapped on a person. She called herself Simone because that was who she wanted to be—after Simone de Beauvoir. And that’s who I fell for. Didn’t care what her name was before.”

“Where did you meet?”

“In real life. None of that Tinder crap. She came into my deli one day, asking for a job. Told me it would have to be unofficial . . .” He glanced at Eira. “Obviously I told her we only employ people properly, on the books, but we clicked and I invited her to lunch, then we met again. She’s more vulnerable than she wants to let on, I knew that right away, and then I found out just how tricky her situation was. But I can afford to support a woman, and Simone wasn’t the type to have a problem with that.”

He got up and walked out onto the lawn, stroked his shaved head, lit another cigarette.

“I thought we loved each other, but the minute I got serious about wanting a future with her, she cleared off.” Ivan took a few steps in one direction, then turned and walked back, pacing like an animal in a cramped cage. “When she didn’t answer the phone and I found out she’d canceled the prepaid card, I went to a few of the places where I knew she used to work, in town—the kind of places that hire people off the books—and I saw her. Followed her. But then she met up with some slick bastard, kissed him right there on the street. And that was that. I knew she wasn’t in a ditch somewhere, that she’d just met someone else. It didn’t even take her a week.”

“Do you know who he was?” asked Eira.

Ivan shook his head. “I was going to follow them, but then I saw myself reflected in a shop window and realized I was turning into someone like him. Her ex. So I walked away. Haven’t seen her since.”

“Do you have any photos of Simone?”

“She hates having her picture taken. It’s because of her fears, she’s worried someone will upload it somewhere. I liked that about her, that she wasn’t fixated on pictures of herself. But I still took a few, of course. In secret, when she wasn’t looking.”

“Would you mind showing me?” asked Eira.

Ivan Wendel had stopped his pacing and stood quietly for a moment, just looking at her.

“I don’t have them anymore,” he said. “My phone died. The same day she left me.”





Chapter 62





It was good to have a book in hand when you went to a restaurant alone. Certainly better than showing up and waving a police badge in a place that employed people off the books.

That was why Eira had bought one as she passed through Central Station. By chance she had spotted the very book she had promised herself she would read, her mother’s favorite: The Lover by Marguerite Duras.

She was now sitting at a table in the window, with a view of both the restaurant and the street outside. Eira couldn’t concentrate on the plot, about a girl and her significantly older lover in Saigon, and just read a little from time to time to make it look like she was enjoying herself. A passage caught her eye, describing the people strolling along the street and into the middle of the road, completely oblivious to the cars and cyclists zigzagging around them.

The way they go along together without any sign of impatience, in the way they are alone in a crowd, without happiness, it seems, without sadness, without curiosity, going along without seeming to, without meaning to, just going this way rather than that, alone and in the crowd, never alone even by themselves, always alone even in the crowd.



“Are you ready to order?” The waiter was a young man with long hair on one side, his head shaved on the other. “Or maybe you’d like to start with something to drink?”

Eira ordered two small plates and a glass of wine. If this didn’t lead anywhere, she could have a main meal at the next place. Ivan had given her the names of three restaurants Simone had mentioned, places she had previously worked.

This one, in the Vasastan area of the city, was the one he had seen her leaving the last time he saw her, where she had kissed a man outside.

“Is Simone working tonight?” she asked the waiter when he returned with her wine.

“Who?”

“Simone, doesn’t she work here? She’s in her forties, blue eyes . . .”

“I’m new here, so . . .”

“Maybe you could ask?”

“Sure.”

Alone in the crowd, she thought. How easy—or hard—was it to hide in a big city? To fly under the radar, never fully visible. In a country that had perhaps the most thorough system of registration in the world, where a personal ID number was everything. If you never used a debit card, never went to the bank, worked only off the books. Found men you could move in with, who were willing to look after you and pay for everything, maybe even arrange to see a doctor if you got ill.

But for twenty-three years?

Maybe she had a fake ID. Simone, who had fled the minute her boyfriend mentioned marriage, as soon as the old Lina case reared its head, who never allowed anyone to take her photograph.

Did she know that Ivan had taken her picture in secret?