The Fear Index

nightclub covered in a flaking skin of peeling fly-posters: Le Black Kat (XXX, FILMS, GIRLS, SEX). Wincing, his hands on his hips, a sharp pain in his side, he leaned over the gutter trying to recover his breath. An Asian prostitute watched him from a shop parlour window no more than three metres away. She wore a black corset and stockings and sat cross-legged on a red damask chair. She recrossed her legs, smiled and beckoned to him until abruptly some unseen mechanism drew a blind across the scene.
    He straightened, conscious of being observed by the girls and their pimps. One rat-faced man, a bit older than the others, with pockmarked skin, was looking at him and talking into a mobile. Hoffmann set off back the way he had come, scanning the alleys and courtyards on either side in case the man had slipped into one of them to hide. He passed a sex shop, Je Vous Aime, and retraced his steps. The window contained a halfhearted display of merchandise: vibrators, wigs, erotic underwear. A pair of crotchless black panties was stretched out and pinned up on a board like a dead bat. The door was open, but the view of the interior was obscured by a curtain of multicoloured plastic strips. He thought of the handcuffs and ball gag the intruder had left behind. Leclerc had said they might have come from such a place.
    Suddenly his mobile chimed with an incoming text: ‘Rue de berne 91 chambre 68’.
    He stared at it for several seconds. He had just passed the Rue de Berne, had he not? He turned around and there it was, right behind him, close enough to read the blue street sign. He checked the message again. The sender was not identified; the originating number was unavailable. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching him. The fronds of plastic fluttered and parted. A fat, bald man wearing braces over a dirty vest emerged.
    ‘ Que voulez-vous, monsieur? ’
    ‘ Rien .’
    Hoffmann walked back up the street to the Rue de Berne. It was long and shabby but at least it was busier – two lanes, with tram cables strung above – which made him feel safer. At the junction was a fruit and vegetable shop offering an outdoor display, next to it a forlorn little café with a few empty aluminium chairs and tables set out on the pavement, and a tabac advertising ‘ Cartes telephoniques, Videos X, DVDs X, Revues X USA ’. He checked the street numbers. They ascended to his left. He walked, counting them off, and within thirty seconds had migrated from northern Europe and entered the southern Mediterranean: Lebanese and Moroccan restaurants, swirls of Arabic script on the shop fronts, Arabic music blaring from tinny speakers, a smell of greasy hot kebabs, which turned his stomach; only the freakish absence of litter betrayed that this was Switzerland.
    He found number 91 on the northern side of the Rue de Berne, opposite a shop selling African clothes – a dilapidated seven-storey building of peeling yellow stucco, perhaps a hundred years old, with metal-shuttered windows painted green. The building was four windows wide, its name spelt out down the side, almost from top to bottom, by individual letters protruding over the street: HOTEL DIODATI. Most of the shutters were closed, but a few were half-raised, like drooping eyelids, the interiors hidden by a greyish-white cataract of thick net curtains with a floral design. At street level there was an ancient and heavy wooden door that reminded Hoffmann incongruously of Venice; it was certainly older than the building, and elaborately carved with what looked like masonic symbols. As he watched, it swung inwards and from the dim interior a man emerged wearing jeans and trainers, with a hood pulled over his head. It was impossible to see his face. He put his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and set off down the street. A minute or so later the door opened again. This time it was a woman, young and thin, with fluffy dyed orange hair and a short black-and-white-checked skirt. She was carrying a shoulder bag. She paused on the doorstep and opened the bag, searched it, retrieved a pair of sunglasses, put them on and then moved off in the opposite direction to the man.
    There was never a moment when Hoffmann made a definite decision to go in. He watched for a while, and then he crossed the road and lingered outside the door. Eventually he pushed it open and peered inside. The place had a stale smell, emphasised rather than disguised by a joss stick burning somewhere. There was