By Light Alone Read Online Free PDF Page B

– that she had come down on the side of furious action, rather than furious melancholy. ‘I want to go straight to her room,’ she said.
    ‘Of course Madam,’ said the captain. ‘And anywhere else in the hotel you wish to look. But I assure you we have looked everywhere, and every room—’
    ‘I want to go to her room,’ said Marie.
    ‘—is covered by surveillance technology,’ the captain rolled on smoothly. ‘And regretfully your daughter is no longer in the hotel.’
    Arsinée’s sobbing had the irritating regularity of an unoiled wheel. As if it had just occurred to her that she had another child, Marie suddenly strode to where the girl was sitting, hauled Ezra from her grip and clutched him tightly. The baby did not wake.
    ‘I suppose,’ said George, from his seated position, and speaking tentatively – since this was to articulate the ultimate surety of his peace of mind, the ground of his reality, and to articulate it was to risk having that surety, and ground, contradicted. ‘I suppose it is a matter of ransom ?’
    The captain looked round to the large man in the room’s far corner, and he in turn stirred in his chair, as if about to rise from it. He cleared his throat, and his corpulent torso quivered, and then he spoke, still seated. ‘I regret to say, not so, Mr Denoone.’
    ‘You regret to say,’ repeated George, dully.
    ‘Alas, no. If it were a matter of ransom then – well, then it would not be complicated. But I am afraid it is complicated.’
    ‘Somebody has kidnapped my child,’ said George, and as he spoke these words, for the first time that evening, it came home to his soul that this had really happened, that Leah had really been stolen from him. A trembling stirred the inert mass of muscle in his lower torso. ‘Somebody has kidnapped Leah, but they don’t want money?’
    ‘No, Mr Denoone. I fear they do not.’
    ‘I am a wealthy individual, quite wealthy,’ said George. ‘My wife is also wealthy.’ He felt he might be sick. He felt a horrible shudder in his stomach.
    Both the captain and the man in the chair dipped their heads at this, in mute recognition of this brute fact of individual existence.
    ‘That must be why they’ve taken her,’ George repeated. ‘How much will they ask? What are the usual levels of ransom.’
    ‘I regret to say,’ the man in the corner repeated, ‘I do not believe that they will demand ransom.’
    ‘What then?’ asked Marie. ‘Political, is it? Is it political ?’
    At this thorny and non-specific signifier the captain and the man swapped glances. ‘To be plain,’ said this latter, across the room. ‘I should say: if whoever kidnapped your daughter wanted something for her, money or publicity or anything like that, then our job would be infinitely easier. But I fear the kidnapper wants nothing more than to disappear without trace forever into the wide districts of Anatolian anonymity.’
    ‘Are they personal enemies?’ George asked, his heart alternately thuddishly convulsing and lying still. ‘Do they have some personal grudge against us?’
    ‘With a certainty approaching the absolute,’ said the lady captain, ‘whoever took your daughter knows nothing whatsoever about you. They probably do not even know your nationality.’
    ‘All they knew,’ said the man in the corner, ‘was that you had a daughter. It was enough. They saw her, and they took her, and that is all.’

6

     
    After this awkward, stilted interview, a period of several hours passed in a debatable and limbo-like state. First, still clutching Ezra, Marie stormed off to Leah’s room, with George, Arsinée and the captain in train behind her. But there was nothing to see. Then there was a ten-minute period of angry interrogation (or reinterrogation, for the girl had already told her story over and over to the authorities) of Arsinée herself. She curled herself up as if expecting blows, and reworked the same narrative in various different handfuls of