Dorian Malek

Dorian Malek is 38 and makes travel videos for people who cannot travel. He was born in Prague, the son of an engineer and an interpreter, and grew up speaking Czech at home, English at school and German with his grandmother. He studied film for two years, dropped out before the second and spent the next fifteen around the world with a camera in his backpack, filming beaches, markets and street food. He has an account with more than two hundred thousand followers, and none of them knows where he really lives.

He lives wherever the hotel is. In Kuala Lumpur he rents by the week a furnished apartment in a tower condominium, with a pool on the ground floor, a white-walled living room, an open suitcase beside the sofa and a tripod leaning in a corner. The kitchen has only a glass and a kettle. On the table, a plain-covered notebook where he jots down places and times, and a water bottle always half full. He talks to his parents by message, every three weeks, in Czech.

He has fair, slightly tanned skin, an angular, clean-shaven face and short brown hair combed back. He wears sunglasses hooked into the collar of a plain black designer T-shirt, an expensive sports watch and a camera bag on his shoulder. He smiles with constant courtesy, like a patient tourist, and looks at the person he is speaking to without blinking more than normal. He speaks three languages, moves from one to another effortlessly and never raises his voice.

About the morning at the terminal, his account is that of a traveler stranded by the storm: he is waiting for the 9:40 flight to Jakarta, which bad weather swallowed, and makes videos of beaches, markets and street food that, he says, are of no interest to the police. He told whoever asked that he passed the little glass room of the cafe and saw the security guard glued to a screen, shouting goal. He says the lobby was not his business and that he only wants to board.

Dorian knows that a foreigner with a camera in an empty airport is the kind of person the police take note of, and that smiling too much is as suspicious as not smiling. When the detective asks who he works for, the answer is amiable, polite and short, and the smile does not move. It may be the calm of someone who never did anything much. It may be someone who trained his face to say nothing. The detective will have to decide which.