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Back The Double Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Acknowledgements

Then there was the other thing that had niggled at him ever since he’d first viewed Kiraly through the binoculars. Something in the man’s face or posture stirred to life a glimmer from the past. Though he was sure he’d never met Kiraly before, a certain look about his eyes and the slope of his forehead was familiar. The ghost, perhaps, of a memory from a long-ago sighting in a Paris cafe. Or a brief encounter while passing through the train station in Geneva. Though he seldom thought about his youth, now decades in the past, he never forgot a face.

As he lowered the binoculars, he felt a prickle of shame for spying on a man who believed he was alone. Seated cross-legged on the polished teak floor, he closed his eyes and tried to still his mind with a few moments of meditation. Except for a small round cushion and a bronze statue of the Buddha by the window, the room was bare. Years ago, he’d carried that statue, a gift from a Tibetan monastery and wrapped in layers of sackcloth, all the way back to Switzerland. The trip to Tibet was a desperate attempt to find solace during a dark period in his life, after he’d stumbled upon the truth about his parents in a cache of documents concealed in the attic.

As a young boy, he’d been abandoned by his mother, who failed to return from a trip to the village market, leaving him to be raised by the people they were staying with in Switzerland, who later adopted him as their own. It was his mother’s gold wedding ring he’d been after, set with a row of tiny diamonds, to present to the woman he wished to marry. But having unwittingly discovered some unsavoury details about his past that were meant to stay hidden, he’d plunged into a black hole of despair, nearly impossible to escape.

In Tibet, he’d hoped to find comfort in the stark beauty of that sacred land. But not even the old monk, who radiated a beatific peace and acceptance of all that is, could help him. Having failed to find the consolation he’d sought in the Himalayas, the experience resulted in one good thing: it started him on the path of his life’s work.

He closed his eyes and tried to still his mind, but the face of Vidor Kiraly infiltrated his thoughts. Tomorrow, his therapy would begin in earnest, and as Gessen slowly picked apart the threads of Kiraly’s life, perhaps the troubling feeling that they had crossed paths before would be put to rest.

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