“They think he’s in on it. But he isn’t.”
“You ought to go now . . . Please, I’m asking you to leave.”
Louise smiled patiently. She’d known it would be difficult. Muller had a different attitude toward regulations, but he was also reasonable and understanding. He knew what was important and what was not.
So she tried to explain the situation. She had no idea what to expect at the Kanzan-an. One colleague was dead, another in intensive care. She wouldn’t be alone, she was meeting a Buddhist expert at the monastery. He was her responsibility, so she couldn’t go there without a weapon.
Muller said nothing. His helpless gaze strayed across the wall beside her to the holster, then to the photograph. Last year, with a jittery hand on her breast, he’d said, “We shouldn’t be doing this, we’re colleagues.” He’d been panting with excitement, but ultimately had succumbed to outdated bureaucratic rules. Now there was no prospect of an expectant vagina as a reward for his bad conscience.
She sat on the chair by the desk. Muller stared at her, helpless, speechless, spineless. She could see from his face how disappointed he was in her, and in himself. In a world that expected him to deal with these situations, but had not taught him how. She placed a hand on his. His fingers were cold and tense.
When the tension relaxed, she gave him a smile. Then she stood up and left.
On her map no roads were marked in the triangle of countryside between Zillisheim, Illfurth and Steinbrunn-le-Bas. She couldn’t see any signs. It was 2:50 p.m. She was heading toward Illfurth and decided to ask someone when she got there, but then she came across a narrow strip of asphalt that led into the forest on the left. She turned off the main road.
The trees were bare but densely packed. Immediately it grew darker. The forest floor was sprinkled with innumerable untouched patches of snow. All of a sudden the memory returned: the snow, the cold, Hollerer’s vacant stare. Niksch, his back lying against her, turning hypothermic with terrifying rapidity. His hair, still smelling of the cold and the dew. Niksch, the child. She thought she remembered wanting to kiss him after their kebab dinner. Now he would be buried.
Bonì stopped the car. The asphalt track led to a narrow gate of white light five hundred or six hundred yards away. In her glove compartment there were small bottles and one large one, all carefully wrapped in newspaper. Half of the weekend edition of the Badische Zeitung stolen from Ronescu’s mailbox. The first miniature was empty. As was the second. But not the third.
Mild temperatures of between forty-one and forty-six degrees were forecast for the next couple of days.
They’d all be there: Almenbroich, Bermann, Wallmer, Lederle. The entire department, probably half of Baden-Württemberg’s police HQ.
The chief of police.
There would be a speech or two. A policeman had been murdered.
Only Lederle had met Niksch. The others didn’t know him. They’d be putting a stranger in the ground.
Cry, damn it, she thought. But she couldn’t.
She rang the hospital. Busy. She tried again and got a community service assistant. Hollerer was over the worst. He was rarely conscious, but over the worst, at least. The assistant seemed glad to be able to give her information. He said his name was Roman and she should ask for him when she called again.
Lederle was not busy; he answered at once. “Oh, it’s you,” he muttered frostily. She apologized for yesterday. In a friendlier tone he said, “Well, the main thing is that you stay out of it.”
“Of course.”
“How’s Provence?”
“Beautiful. We’re doing a lot of walking.”
There were raised voices in the background. She heard hurried steps. Someone knocked at a door and called out something. Then there was a rustling, a squeaking and creaking. “I’ve got to go,” Lederle said.
“Wait, Reiner. When’s the funeral?”
“What funeral?”
“Niksch’s.”
Silence. Then Lederle said, “Don’t do it to yourself, Bonì.”
She heard him pacing around the room. More rustling. It sounded as if he was putting on his coat. “Has the body been released yet?”
“No, it’s going to take a few days.”
“Call me when you know more details.”
“Don’t do it to yourself, Bonì,” Lederle repeated and hung up.
She put her mobile on the passenger seat and closed the glove compartment. Then she drove through the gate of light.
Beyond the forest the road ran down a hill, then climbed again soon afterward. In three or four places a dirt track branched off, but as they were not signposted she stayed on the asphalt. She couldn’t see any houses or farms, not even a fence. No walkers, no farmers, no traffic. No cows. Just black birds and a light-gray cat on a rock near the side of the road, which kept its eyes fixed on the car as it drove past.
In a dip the road curved to the right. A weather-worn sign pointed to the left. Beneath Japanese or Chinese characters it read: KANZAN-AN.
Bonì followed a dead-straight dirt track with large potholes and scraps of snow. Stones rattled against the underside of her car. She forced herself to drive more slowly. It was 3:15. She wondered whether Landen would wait for her.
*
Five minutes later she caught sight of three cars parked in a row. Although she couldn’t see the Kanzan-an, the track ended here. She parked the Mégane beside a black Volvo and got out. The air was cold and damp. Just as in Provence, here too it smelled of snow.
The Volvo bore a Freiburg license plate. The hood was still warm. Inside the car she could recognize Landen’s fastidious tidiness. Did he ever leave traces that said anything about him? If not, she’d have to keep on drawing conclusions from the absence of things: dark windows, a faceless woman’s voice, Landen’s silence. Unfinished stories.
From the parking lot a straight, narrow path led into the forest. Flat stones had been sunk into the ground roughly a pace apart. Apart from the wooden sign these stepping stones were the first indication that visitors were not entirely unwelcome at the Kanzan-an.
She was freezing and soon felt out of breath. Once again images from Sunday evening reared in her mind. The sickly moon, the pale snow. Her hands covered in blood. Niksch’s dirty, lifeless face that could not have been Niksch.
The path led to a broad, hilly clearing, in the center of which stood a gloomy building with stone front steps. Scattered throughout the clearing were a handful of flat-roofed wooden houses. There was not a soul in sight. It was deathly quiet. No sound, no movement. Nothing to suggest that the Kanzan-an was inhabited.
Then Landen stepped out of the entrance to the main building.
They shook hands. Landen didn’t smile, but he wasn’t unfriendly either. The gray fleck on his eyebrow didn’t move. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, a brown corduroy suit and a black overcoat. This was how she imagined men looked in existentialists’ cafés in the 1950s. She suppressed a smirk. Her mother would have liked this man.
“My deepest condolences,” he said.
“What?” She looked at him in surprise. She was still trying to work out what he was referring to when the tears came. Furious, she let them run.
Landen narrowed his eyes and cleared his throat. One wrong word, she thought, and I will kill you. But he just watched her and said nothing, his hands in his coat pockets.
Then it passed. She blew her nose, dried her cheeks and said, “Let’s go in.”
“We have to wait; the monks are meditating.”
“How long does that go on for?”
“Nine years, if we’re unlucky.” He smiled. “That’s how long it took Bodhidharma.” His ornamental eyebrow rose into an arc. Landen had tried to cheer her up. She smiled.
“Then let’s take a look around.” She brushed his arm lightly.
They walked along the front of the three-story building. Nothing about the house gave it a Far-Eastern flavor. She thought it resembled the Freiburg S
taatstheater after renovation—a slightly rounded facade, tall windows that were semicircular at the top. It may have been beige a long time ago, but now it was brown. Cracks ran vertically down the plaster and the base of the building was covered in moss. The cold air carried the occasional whiff of mold.
She looked up. No balconies guarded by statues of Buddha like at the Kagyu House. But there was a child. At a window on the second floor stood a boy, she could see only his head and shoulders. He seemed to be staring down at them. She couldn’t make out his features in any detail, but he appeared to be Asian. Louise guessed he was three or four, but she had no experience with children from that part of the world.
Landen had noticed the boy too and had stopped. He waved awkwardly. She wondered whether Tommo/Landen had children. Nothing in their tidy kitchen suggested it. But perhaps their children left no visible traces either.
The boy waved back.
They walked on. Muffled strokes of a gong sounded in the distance, the first noises she’d heard from the Kanzan-an. They appeared to rise from the ground, or radiate from the masonry. Always the same tone, soft and steady.
“Is there any hope for Taro?” Landen said.
She didn’t answer immediately. Somewhere in her subconscious a thought was stirring. She tried to focus, but couldn’t grasp it.
More and more holes in her memory.
Fear raced momentarily through her arteries. A perforated brain. A sieve that caught only the biggest grains of rice.
She pushed her fear aside. “There’s always hope.”
Landen didn’t probe deeper. He seemed to have understood what she had wanted to imply: that Taro might already be dead. That she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
She looked at him. “What do the Japanese do when someone dies?”
“The Japanese, or Buddhists?”
“Buddhists.”
“They mourn.”
“What else?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how far down the path of Buddha they have gone. The greater their degree of maturity, the more easily they find it to accept death as part of life—as part of the cycle of reincarnation. I’d like to tell you a story.”
“Only if this one has an ending.”
“It has,” Landen said.
They stopped at the corner of the house. Another path of stepping stones led up the clearing to a simple wooden shelter, vaguely reminiscent of a homemade tram stop. Beside it was a garden gate, also of wood. Fifty yards beyond this, in the middle of trees, stood a shed with a low overhanging roof. Just in front of it she thought she could make out a fountain.
“Sukiya,” Landen said. “The teahouse.”
A stepping-stone path, a fountain, a wooden house. She wondered whether the barn in Landen’s snowy garden was a sort of teahouse too. “What about your story?”
“On his travels the Buddha met a woman whose child had just died. In desperation she begged him to bring it back to life. The Buddha said: All right, I will help you, but on one condition. Bring me a few grains of rice from a house in the area where nobody has ever died. Going from door to door the woman found only families who had already lost someone. She understood that death was inevitable and affected everybody. And so she learned to accept the death of her child and to let it go.”
The sounds of the gong had faded away. They were still at the corner of the main building, looking toward the little teahouse.
“Nice story. Do you have children?”
Landen hesitated. “No,” he said. “But soon we will.”
“What do you mean? Is your wife pregnant?”
He nodded.
As if from nowhere a dozen monks and nuns now emerged between the raised mounds of the clearing. They wore black habits and their heads were shaven. Around half of them were from the Far East. Silently they dispersed without looking over at Bonì and Landen.
Then the thought she hadn’t been able to grasp was suddenly at the front of her mind: children’s shoes. On the evening of Niksch’s death she had discovered a child’s footprints.
She turned around. The boy was gone.
“The roshi,” Landen said, touching her arm.
“What?”
“The master.”
An elderly Japanese monk came toward them, his arms folded over his belly. He was tall and walked slowly but with vigor. His cheeks were crossed with deep wrinkles which seemed to have been etched on the skin with a hard object and lent his face a terrifyingly stern expression. For a moment she expected him to expel them from the property. But then he gestured to himself and said in English, “Hello, Bukan,” and gave a friendly nod.
But far more important was the fact that Landen’s finger still rested on her arm.
Once again there was tea out of small, delicate bowls for people with a pure conscience. The tea was black, offering a distant reminder that this world contained dark abysses too. All the same she couldn’t bring herself to pick up the little bowl.
They were sitting on raffia mats and cushions in a tall room on the ground floor of the main building. Even though they had kept their coats on it was freezing cold. Bonì cupped her hands around the bowl without drinking. “No heater,” the roshi said softly in his idiosyncratic English. “No heater China of Kanzan, no heater here.”
She smiled. “Roshi . . .,” she began.
“Wait,” Landen said.
The roshi took a sip of tea, then said, “Kanzan-an founded thirty years back.” He raised his right hand and pointed over his shoulder behind him. “Founded in memory of Chinese Buddhist layman name Kanzan.” He smiled. “No electric light China of Kanzan, no electric light here. No car China of Kanzan, no car here.” He raised his finger. “Kanzan poet, we poet. Kanzan beggar, we beggar. Kanzan laugh, we laugh. Understand?”
“Yes, roshi,” Landen said.
“The tourist spiel,” Louise mumbled.
Landen said something in Japanese and laughed. The roshi laughed too. For a second the harsh lines on his face assumed a cheerful expression.
“What’s so funny?”
Landen looked at her. “Behave, or you won’t learn anything. You’re in a monastery. Irrespective of what you think of Zen, Japan or the roshi, he’s a dignitary. And so he deserves respect.”
The muffled gong strokes rang out, joined now by muted male voices. She turned to look at the window that gave on to the rear of the building. Two monks were kneeling at a stone fountain. The younger one looked Chinese, the elder was European. They were spreading mortar on the lower edge of the fountain and setting rectangular stones side by side. Next to them sat a light-gray cat, perhaps the same cat or maybe a different one.
She looked at Landen. Are you sure he warrants respect? she wanted to ask, but instead she said, “Why did you laugh?”
Before Landen could reply the roshi said, “Laugh important Kanzan. Kanzan hermit, Kanzan funny, Kanzan laugh. Taro no laugh. No laugh in Taro. In Taro doubt.” His right hand pointed to Bonì. “Doubt. Understand? Many questions.” He tapped his chest. “Soul inside man? Where is? What look like? Taro many questions. When Taro child, father die. Monks give rice and cake and fruit for sacrifice. Taro say: Father die, how can eat? Monks say: Soul of father eat. Taro say: Where soul? Soul in body of father?” The roshi rubbed his fingers together. “Taro say: Soul what made of? What look like? Many questions. Taro say: Buddha Shakyamuni say, everything emptiness. Shunyata. Everything nothing. But inside man something. Something can see, something can hear.” The roshi raised his palms. “Taro come Kanzan-an find answer. Maybe now Taro leave find answer.”
“No,” Louise said. “Taro hurt.”
The roshi leaned on one elbow. “You see Taro?”
She nodded. In German she explained the circumstances in which she’d met Taro. Then she described his wounds. Landen translated into Japanese. The roshi nodded as he listened, his strong hands that bore the signs of physical labor resting on his stomach.
She gave a somber grin. A sixteen-year-old. What weird path was she on?
Landen and the roshi looked at her. The roshi’s eyes were half closed. The wrinkles on his face looked dark. She wondered whether there was a connection between the boy at the window and the small footprints in the sodden earth to the east of Liebau.
“Taro hurt,” she said. “Old policeman hurt. Young policeman dead. Taro gone.”
“Taro Zensu, scholar of Zen,” the roshi said with sudden, barely restrained anger. “Zensu no harm people. Zensu look Buddha-nature. Look own-nature. Look shunyata.”
“I know, Roshi Bukan. But someone did it and I need to know who. If we don’t find out we may never see Taro again.”
After Landen had translated, the roshi lowered his eyes. Both hands were now on one knee and he was frowning. Four or five minutes went past without a word.
Finally she turned to Landen and asked, “What does ‘shunyata’ mean?”
“In Japan language shunyata name ku,” the roshi answered instead. “In English language shunyata name emptiness. Explain, please.” He nodded to Landen.
“‘Shunyata’ is Sanskrit and means ‘emptiness.’ The Japanese term for that is ‘ku,’” Landen said.
“I got that.”
Landen carefully reached for his bowl and took a sip. “Zen says that all living beings and things are merely ephemeral. They have no nature, no I; in this sense they are empty . . .”
Louise nodded. She watched in fascination the movements of the two-tone eyebrow, drifting up, drifting down, jackknifing at the gray part. She found it hard to suppress the urge to stroke it with a finger.
“. . . at the moment of enlightenment. The duality is eliminated, and by that we mean the division into subject and object—that which sees, and that which is seen. Now you perceive things as they are, you see their true nature.”
Zen and the Art of Murder Page 11