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INSOMVITA. Psychological thriller with elements of a crime story. Oleksandr Dan
Читать онлайн.Название INSOMVITA. Psychological thriller with elements of a crime story
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9785005379559
Автор произведения Oleksandr Dan
Жанр Приключения: прочее
Издательство Издательские решения
Last night the club featured some band that was probably quite popular, judging by the two hundred young people who crowded the stage, singing loudly along with the vocalist to the deafening accompaniment of drums.
The thick blue and yellow beams of projectors caught the faces and hands of the fans in the crowd. Laser chasers were blinding Trevor, so he turned away from the stage and headed to the nearly deserted bar. The young bartender with short, bleached hair and a colorful tattoo took his order and poured a glass of whiskey. A girl sat alone at the other end of the bar, watching Trevor. When their eyes met she smiled and looked down. But then she looked at Trevor again with a tenacious, penetrating, somewhat inquisitive, even defiant look. Trevor slammed down his drink and confidently approached the girl.
In the morning, he could not remember her name, where she was from or what they had talked about at that club. The several glasses of whiskey he had consumed scorched his memories of that night, melting away all that was unnecessary and leaving only fragmented, disconnected shots of their embraces and kisses. Trevor could not remember how they left the nightclub, how they got to the hotel, to his room, but his memory shamelessly continued to show him moments of their lovemaking. Trevor remembered her as passionate, bathed in sweat in his arms, illuminated by a narrow ray of pale moonlight, and he smiled.
«Chloe!» The name of the stranger struck him like a bolt out of the blue. «I think that’s what she called herself? Right, it was Chloe.»
Trevor dressed and opened his wallet. A plastic window revealed an ID with PRESS written in big letters on it. He pulled out four hundred Swiss francs, placed them on the bedside table next to the girl and quickly left the room. Soon, he was outside the hotel on the street.
Christmas was fast approaching and the weather in Geneva was warm and autumnal. At night the temperature would fall to near freezing, which was unseasonably warm, but for Trevor, who had recently flown in from the Sahara, the weather was quite pleasant. The temperature in the desert at night also rarely rose above 3—4oC.
Beau-Rivage Hotel to Rue du Cendrier is about a twenty-minute walk along the city’s promenade.
Trevor felt very agitated before the second session. Until this point, he did not fully understand what had happened to him the day before. Over the past twenty hours, he kept thinking about the office of the psychologist Amanda, listening over and over to his own voice broadcast by the speakers of a small portable recorder, telling an incredible story of a part of his life that nobody knew about, hidden somewhere deep in his subconscious.
It had all started several days earlier, after an unexpected encounter and what he thought was an innocent proposal.
***
«Yes, Trevor, these are some fine rocks,» said an elderly jeweler, who was unable to roll his «r’ as he spoke, as he examined a round diamond the size of a hazelnut. «Take this one – pure perfection.»
A short gray-haired Jew with horn-rimmed glasses perched on his head had been inspecting the diamond for five minutes through a thick magnifying glass, holding it with fine tweezers in his white cotton gloves.
He carefully returned the stone and picked up another from the handful of nearly identical in size and shape diamonds scattered on a black lacquered table.
«Wonderful!» He was clearly admiring them. «The cut is amazing! The girdle on all of them is as sharp as a knife. The colors and purity are like dew from the sky…
Trevor was introduced to Lev Goldenberg, a jeweler and emigrant from the Soviet Union, by Rochefort, chief editor at Les Mondes, who often ordered jewelry from him.
Lev Goldenberg created remarkable copies of the best collections offered by the leading jewelry brands of Europe.
«Show me a photo of a masterpiece and I will make you one that is hundred times better at half the cost,» he loved to say every time potential clients approached him. Indeed, he was the finest craftsman.
«I have a client who can purchase all of these in one lot,» said the old jeweler as he eyed yet another rock. «If you negotiate well, he will pay five million right away, maybe more.»
«Lev, I wasn’t thinking of selling just yet. I just need a safe place to keep them for a while.»
«Teo, you don’t understand,» the jeweler said softly, prying his gaze from the diamond to give Trevor a piercing look. «Five million euros, not dollars. That’s a lot of money, my friend.»
«Lev, I need a safe place for a couple of days, until Christmas. I’m staying at a hotel and it would be extremely reckless of me to keep them in a safe there.»
– Tov5, my friend, all right,» said the jeweler somewhat dejectedly. He gathered the stones in a green velvet bag. «You know you won’t find a safer place. But if you do decide to sell, just let me know and I will arrange everything within two-three hours.»
Shortly after the conversation with the jeweler, Trevor was sitting on the open terrace of a small restaurant in the heart of Geneva, sipping coffee and reading the latest newspapers.
Military service was in the past, the only reminder being a pale tattoo of a skull on his left shoulder, a device of the Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Brigade of the French Foreign Legion headquartered in Algeria. The department of the French Press Institute at Paris II Panthéon-Assas University was also in the past. Now, he was a special war correspondent for Les Mondes.
Trevor remembered only bits and pieces of his childhood, as the family moved around a lot. His father was from Carpathian Ruthenia6 (territory of modern Zakarpattia region in Ukraine), a Ukrainian Ruthenian (Rusyn)7.
However, at the beginning of the Second World War, when Zakarpattia, then a part of Czechoslovakia, was occupied by the Hungarian army, his family fled first to Prague and after the war to France, where Trevor was born in the early 1970s. His father would converse with him only in the Rusyn language so that he would remember his heritage. Trevor’s mother, a teacher of French and French literature, tried to instill in him a love for everything French.
His father, an expert in hotel construction, had traveled regularly for work to different countries, and he would often take his family with him. That was why Trevor’s childhood memories were reduced to faded color and black and white photographs against the backgrounds of public markets in India, islands and temples of Thailand, sands of the Middle East, and the endless construction sites of Hong Kong, Dubai and Bangkok. As a child, Trevor got so used to moving around and the constant changes that even when he entered adulthood, he could not imagine himself as an office employee, working at the same desk day after day. That was the reason behind his fascination with journalism.
But then the accident happened.
When the boy was twelve, his parents died in a car accident. Trevor spent nearly a month in a hospital until his mother’s older sister, Anne Frachon, became his legal guardian and took him to Paris.
Aunt Anne was unmarried and gave all his love to Trevor. She was the one who insisted that Trevor enlist and later study journalism at university.
Over the past fifteen years, Trevor had traveled to nearly all the world’s conflict zones.
He received the Prix Albert Londres war correspondent award.
His career as a journalist began in 1999 during the Yugoslav Wars. He was sent there as a young, promising reporter by the newspaper in place of an experienced correspondent, who had unexpectedly fallen ill. As a former
Tov (Yiddish) — good, okay.
Carpathian Ruthenia (Czech
Rusyns (