‘I’m not sure where I belong anymore,’ Daniel murmured, for the man’s words reminded him of his mother. He felt a sudden dizziness at the depth of his words, at the unexpected abyss they opened up in him.
The man said, ‘You can see the old restaurant, if you want. The shop is only a frontage. I couldn’t afford to refurbish the whole place and there was no need. A tobacconist’s shop should be cosy.’ The man stood up from his stool, becoming in an instant extraordinarily tall. He opened a door behind the counter and Daniel entered the darkness of an enormous warehouse-sized room whose walls retained striped sections of what once might have been some sort of giant mural. There were round tables and a few chairs pushed against one wall, and he had a strange sense that he had stepped back in time, or at least into another dimension.
‘The whole place was done up to look like a circus,’ the man said, relighting his black cheroot. ‘The name of the place comes from a famous sideshow act with a dog. It was a popular place among intellectuals and students, a good cover for secret meetings and the passing on of information and microfilms and all the rest of it. You can still smell the smoke. That’s why I got it so cheap.’
‘If a woman comes in asking about a man, would you give her a note from me?’
The tobacconist nodded to indicate that Daniel should return to the shop. As he turned, Daniel heard, quite distinctly, a gasp or a cough. He glanced back but there was no movement. The shadows hung like frozen smoke, darkening with every minute that passed. The tobacconist gave him a little push and they went into the shop that had also darkened in their brief absence.
The proprietor closed the door and reached for a panel of switches on the wall while Daniel dug from his wallet the receipt the receptionist had given him. He scrawled his name on the back of it, along with the name of the dead man. He did not know the name of the woman and he told himself he had done all he could. She would come, or she wouldn’t. The lights flickered on and the tobacconist brushed a brown-stained forefinger over the words written on the receipt, but he did not read them.
‘If she comes, tell her I will come in again tomorrow in the morning,’ Daniel said. He thanked the man and went out into the street. He had walked several blocks before he noticed a small boy shadowing him. Clad in scruffy, too-big clothes of the hand-me-down rather than the American-street-cool variety, his skin was the colour of dark honey and his eyes liquid tar, the lashes as long as those of a newborn calf.
‘Want to go to circus?’ the boy asked, seemingly unabashed. Sair-coos, he said.
‘Circus?’ Daniel echoed, wondering if he had misheard. ‘What kind of circus is there in the middle of a city?’
‘A ver’ zmall sair-coos,’ the boy said, and they laughed together.
‘Why not?’ Daniel said, liking his cheek. The boy looked puzzled, so he added, ‘Yes.’
The boy beamed at him. ‘Okay!’
Daniel felt suddenly lighter. He had done the best for the dying man, after all. ‘Let’s go then,’ he said.
The boy took the lead, walking quickly. Several streets later, they turned into a lane that sloped down to a small square where, to Daniel’s amazement, he could see the dim yet certain shape of a circus tent, though it did not seem to be properly circular. There were lanterns swaying around its uneven rim, but they gave off very little light, so that he could only see the sections of the tent where they hung, blurring away into the growing darkness. The sight of it reminded Daniel of what the tobacconist had said about the decor of the café during the war, and he shivered a little at the coincidence.
The lane became wide, shallow, uneven steps and Daniel came along behind the boy cautiously, forced to concentrate on his footing. When he reached the bottom, he was startled to find his young guide had vanished. He hesitated, and heard music, long sobbing notes that roused in him an unexpected and potent hunger to be home, riding the flat red plains. Moving closer to the tent, he had the unsettling feeling that the longing evoked by the song was the same as his longing for