The potholes in the gravelly road were filled with rain and melted snow. The lot was empty. She got out and looked around her. The cat was nowhere to be seen. For a moment her mind turned to Landen, but she thought it best to forget him.
She’d tried several times to visit Hollerer again, or at least speak to him on the telephone. But Hollerer hadn’t wanted any visits or calls. Nobody, not even Ponzelt or friends from Liebau, had managed to get through to him. Roman, the hospital volunteer, said he was suffering from severe depression. As soon as he’d been fit to travel he’d had himself admitted to a hospital in Kaiserslauten. At the end of February he’d been transferred to a rehabilitation center.
But she wasn’t going to allow Hollerer to vanish from her life too.
The sight of the Kanzan-an brought tears to her eyes. From a distance the monastery looked the same as ever. Even the gray cat appeared on cue in the hilly meadow.
She stood by the entrance and looked up at the window at which she’d first seen Pham. She didn’t have to worry about him or the girl from Poipet. The girl had been accommodated with friends of Barbara Franke. Pham would stay with Bermann and his family. But he wasn’t called Pham anymore; his new name was Viktor. He had become a symbol.
For Bermann the order had been restored. The case was solved and they had won. The dead, the disappeared, the open questions were forgotten. Bermann was a master at focusing on what was in front of his nose and ignoring anything that wasn’t. He’d assembled all the pieces of the puzzle they’d investigated, and written off all those that were still missing. You could barely tell that the picture which emerged at the end was incomplete, or even that it wasn’t 100 percent accurate. It reflected the visible reality. That was all that counted.
Bermann called it “data rationalization.” Anything redundant was eliminated. This maintained the effectiveness and operational readiness of the department. The next crimes had already been committed. The next dead bodies and missing people were waiting to be forgotten. That’s how the system works, Bermann said, by which he meant society, the media, the West, life. The fact that fifty-six children from the Far East between the ages of one and nine were unaccounted for, that some of these children were suffering regular sexual abuse, was of no long-term importance for him or the system. It was an abstraction. The children didn’t have faces. Those without faces didn’t exist.
Bonì looked at the teahouse. This time she couldn’t hear the sound of the gong. She wondered where the roshi was. On the phone Chiyono had said that half the monks and nuns had left over the past few weeks due to the events surrounding Asile d’enfants. Only she, Georges and a few others had stayed—as well as the roshi, of course.
We drink tea, we talk. She resolved to tell the roshi about the children and ask him Lederle’s questions.
She found Chiyono in the small office. The nun bowed, then they shook hands and sat down. “I wasn’t sure you’d actually come,” Chiyono said. Her hair was a bit longer than the last time. A new Band-Aid held the frame of her glasses together.
“Me neither. But I’m here now. And I’ve got time.”
“I’m happy to hear that.”
“I’ve got lots of questions, I warn you.”
“Excellent! It’ll do me good to be asked questions again. It keeps you young and makes you reflective. By the way, there was a man asking after you a few days ago.”
“A man?”
Chiyono smiled faintly. A tall, slim man in a black coat. He spoke to the roshi in Japanese for a while, before the roshi sent him to her. The man asked whether Chiyono had heard anything about her, Louise. Whether Louise had called or been back to the Kanzan-an. She wasn’t able to help him and he had left.
“He might come back,” Chiyono said.
Louise nodded. She thought of Landen’s “Then” and how this “Then” still seemed to be of importance to him. “Tomorrow,” “later,” “then” . . . What a man! “If he does, he does,” she said.
“And then what will we do?”
“Talk to him.”
Chiyono laughed. She got up and went to the door. “Follow me. We’ve prepared a cell for you in the nuns’ wing.”
Bonì grinned. So she had ended up with the nuns. If only for the beginning.
Dear Reader,
The following short story, “Dark Death,” recounts the Calambert case repeatedly referred to in Zen and the Art of Murder. For Louise Bonì it’s a traumatic case that’s largely responsible for placing her where she is: right on the edge of the abyss. For this reason I long toyed with developing the ideas that crop up in the first two Bonì novels into a story in its own right, as a sort of prequel. When the Welt am Sonntag asked whether I would like to write a short story featuring Louise Bonì as part of a small crime series, the opportunity had arrived.
The story solves one or two of the puzzles surrounding the character of Louise Bonì and I suspect it makes her more understandable for the reader.
I hope you enjoy it.
Oliver Bottini
Annetta was fourteen when she disappeared. A wild girl, teeming with energy, still too much of a girl and already too much of a woman for one body and one soul. She was bursting with contradictions and she contradicted at every opportunity. As if it were the flag of her own little country, she held out before her everything she thought and wanted, and who she liked and who she didn’t. Truth was her only friend. Nobody followed her too closely; they kept their distance.
“She’s tricky,” her mother said.
“She can never keep her mouth shut,” her father said. Louise Bonì looked from one to the other; she knew the thoughts that were going through their minds and made them speechless with shame: the truth spoken once too often, the wrong person provoked, the child’s causing trouble again. They were sitting in her office at police HQ in Freiburg—serious crime squad—for the third time since the wild girl had disappeared. On a good day you could see the Vosges from the window up here; when it was snowing, like today, you could barely make out the old post office building opposite.
“Are you going to find the bastard?” the father asked. He was short, round and important for a number of reasons. His gray three-piece suit rustled in a rather frosty way and had the whiff of an internationally renowned couturier. Her gaze wandered across perfect seams and sublime creases. His cheeks were glistening with sweat. When a child was abducted it turned a lot upside down, perhaps even the rest of your life. But his right hand was holding on to his left index finger with such desperation that she detected even in this man some goodness and vulnerability.
“Yes.” What she neglected to say was that generally they found the perpetrators, but the victims did not always return.
Annetta’s mother, even shorter than her husband but slim and wiry, muttered, “We’ve been having problems with her.”
Bonì nodded. She knew about these kinds of difficulties from neighbors, Annetta’s teachers and friends. Many thought it possible that Annetta had had enough and from now on had decided to lead her life without her parents.
“But she wouldn’t have just run away with a man,” the mother said.
“Running away is cowardly,” the father said. “Our daughter may be many things, but she’s no coward.”
“She would have told us straight up.”
“She’d have said, ‘Papa, Mama, I’m leaving.’” The father gave a weary smile. There was a hint of admiration in his voice.
Louise suspected the parents were right. Girls like Annetta didn’t run away in secret; they looked for a fight. She glanced at her conversation notes and at once understood why she was so affected by this case. The parents had described their own daughter, but also her: Louise Bonì, forty-one, chief inspector at Freiburg Kripo, on a journey to nowhere.
Everyone was still unsettled by the changes in security since the September 11 attacks. The snow and the exhaustion did the rest. Although Rolf Bermann, head of the department, had been reinforcing the “Annetta” task force, non
e of the investigators was getting enough sleep. Whenever they were outside, the snow assaulted their eyes, and when the light had vanished from the short winter days they moved through the seemingly perpetual darkness to follow up the dozens, hundreds of leads from the public.
“Are you bearing up?” said Bermann, handlebar moustache and chauvinist—the last of his kind in Freiburg, for the time being at least.
“Of course,” Bonì said.
“Maybe a case like this helps. It’s a distraction. Less time to spend at home.”
She frowned. “Who was that blonde who came to meet you the other day? One of your wife’s cousins?”
“Alcohol is never the answer,” Bermann said.
“Nor is extramarital sex.”
He laughed.
No, alcohol wasn’t the answer, just a sort of cleaning fluid. Was there still a Mick stain on the bedroom carpet? Use a bit of alcohol and the stain was gone. After almost six months there were far too many Mick stains and residues in the apartment. On the floor, on the walls—the ones on the mirrors were particularly stubborn and those that lingered in the odors were especially painful. She couldn’t cope without her cleaning fluid at the moment, four weeks before the date. “You should move,” Bermann had said in the summer.
Where do you expect me to get the energy for that, asshole?
Then the snow came. The sad winter light mercilessly revealed stain after stain and all the residues that a cheating husband could leave behind in the pores of a half-shattered life. Suddenly there was always something to drink at hand.
I went to lunch with a friend, Louise said.
It was a neighbor’s birthday party last night, Louise said.
New perfume, not great is it? Louise said.
When Annetta vanished, everything else went out of focus. The parents rang after twelve hours, after twenty-four the case landed on Bonì’s desk, after forty-eight Bermann assembled the task force.
Soon afterward they found out where it had happened.
In the picturesque Fischerau district a tall, handsome man had been leaning against the railings of the canal. He called out to a girl who was skating over the ice. The girl had laughed, so had the man. “Oui, oui!” he’d said.
Two witnesses had heard the man speak French. A further witness had noticed a white Peugeot 306 with notchback in a nearby parking lot. Its license plate ended in “75”—Paris. Another witness had seen a tall, handsome man and a girl get into the Peugeot.
Louise called her colleagues in Paris. They promised to keep their eyes open. A tall, handsome man driving a white Peugeot, who hadn’t gone to work or come home for three days. Graying, unshaven, wearing a dark parka, jeans, blue sneakers. Louise pictured the man and Annetta skating to the car together.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Paris said.
Hopes? Far too risky in this life. Louise survived only on anger, energy, determination and overindulgence.
The snow fell and the memories of Mick’s confession the previous winter crept coldly beneath her skin.
And every day Annetta’s parents came.
“You promised,” the father said.
“We’ll get him.”
“I don’t care,” the mother said. “The main thing is that nothing’s happened to our child.” Three days, four days, five days. Everything had happened to the child, except perhaps the worst thing. Louise said nothing. The mother asked no questions, wanted no answers. All she wanted was hope.
“Does Annetta speak French?”
“Yes, very well,” the father said. “We’ve been to France a few times, which was enough. She’s got a great talent for languages.”
“I imagine she’s making a long trip,” the mother said. “We can’t see her, but we know she’s there somewhere.” She raised her hands toward the window. “And at some point she’ll come back and maybe she’ll tell us about her trip, but maybe not.”
“He’s killed her,” the father muttered. His eyes had landed on the photograph of Annetta in the file open in front of Louise.
“A sea voyage.” The mother smiled behind tears.
“If someone like that is after money then they . . . torture and kill.” The father bowed his head and stayed in that position for several seconds. Louise heard him moan softly and his virtually bald head twitched.
The mother stood up and went to the window. “My girl’s strong,” she said in a kind voice. “My girl’s alive.”
Louise looked at the photo. Annetta on a sofa in a yellow flowered dress buttoned to the neck, a pretty, intelligent fourteen-year-old, large eyes, serious mouth, and yet you sensed she was about to laugh out loud, she was just posing for the family album and then she’d jump onto a skateboard in cutoff jeans.
The mother sat down again. The parents looked at Louise in a detached way. “Don’t give up hope,” she said.
“She’s dead,” Bermann said late that evening and his words reverberated in the deserted corridor. His eyes were staring at her from deep sockets, his face was gray. It was the first time Louise had seen him like this, no longer a speck of healthiness or freshness in this bear of a badly brought-up man. “How can you think she’s still alive?”
“Some people just aren’t so easy to kill.”
He shook his head in disbelief, unamused. “I’ve rarely heard such crap. Go home, Luis, and get some sleep.”
Back home she crouched by the cupboard below the sink and counted, using different rhythms and melodies, the endless empty bottles until the counting had become a sweet game and the terror had dissipated. For a while she fell asleep where she was, on the kitchen floor. When she woke up a ghostly Mick was waltzing through the apartment, talking of children and a little house out of town, and the date had come one day closer.
Hey, who’s that? Mick asked in a low voice.
She struggled to her feet. On the countertop was the photograph of Annetta. Pretty girl, Mick said, and now, in her dark delirium, a fourteen-year-old girl was added to all those secretaries, cashiers, cleaning ladies, saleswomen, waitresses and the writer, who he’d itemized in his confession on the chairlift in Scuol.
Early in the morning the telephone rang.
“Someone saw him yesterday,” said Reiner Lederle, her favorite colleague. “The Frenchman with the blue sneakers.”
A tiny grocer’s in a village on the way to the Rhine, hidden beneath the snow. Behind the counter a wrinkled old lady, Hermine Schwarzer. In front of her a copy of the Badische Zeitung, open at the page with the request for information from the public.
“I remember because I can’t speak a word of French, and he couldn’t speak a word of German.” She tapped the paper with tiny, withered fingers. “A tall, slim man, not dressed warmly enough for minus twenty, but he was good-looking and very, very tired. He had a car, a light car, yellow or white.”
“A Peugeot?” Bermann asked.
Frau Schwarzer shrugged.
“Did you manage to catch sight of his shoes?”
“Dark and soaked through.”
“What did he buy?” Louise said. She was standing in the narrow passage by the counter, wedged between Bermann and the smaller Lederle, who always smelled a little of illness and decay.
“Fruit, bread, cheese, biscuits. Lots of biscuits.” Lederle wrote it all down. “Toilet paper. Tissues. Cough drops. Tampons.” Louise felt Bermann and Lederle tense. Annetta was alive.
A helicopter came from Stuttgart, a hundred uniformed officers from Lahr, and there were dogs too. Starting at Hermine Schwarzer’s grocery, they checked and searched houses, farms, sheds, meticulously combed white woods, icy valleys, increasing the radius yard by yard, terrifyingly slowly, far too slowly for Bermann, who like everyone else knew that it was now all about hours and minutes, and he was barely able to contain his anger. Bonì was pleased this was the situation, that everyone was captivated by his energy, because it meant no one was paying any attention to her minor afflictions. The shaking, the lapses of concentration, disorientat
ion, cold, hot.
“Coffee?” Lederle said, filling his cup from a thermos.
“No, thanks.”
A break to warm up in the car with the engine running at the end of a thoroughfare where the village came to an abrupt end. The white plain merged with the white sky. Perhaps there were a few invisible white trees over there, maybe a few white houses, and maybe not. Maybe this was where the world came to an end, it could go no further. Lederle hummed a tune to himself—this nice, sincere man was always cheerful, Louise thought, even here, even now. Where did this cheerfulness and confidence come from? But his humming was slow and measured, and she could tell how tense he was. “I need the bathroom.” She got out and ran back through the burning cold to the warm, narrow shop. Lock de-icer? No, she didn’t keep anything like that, said Frau Schwarzer, at a loss. Oh, don’t worry, Louise said, alcohol sometimes did the job, high-percentage alcohol. A miniature would be perfect, it’s more portable.
Becalmed and yet heavyhearted, she ran back to Lederle thinking, Jägermeister—master of the hunt—weren’t they hunters right now, masters amongst hunters? You see? Everything was relevant somehow.
Lederle had got out and hurried a few yards in her direction, the car door left open. Into the muffled afternoon he yelled, “Munzingen!”
He was driving through villages and across the countryside, leaving more and more traces, a tall, handsome Frenchman dressed nowhere near warmly enough for this arctic spell, buying food for two, but only ever seen alone, shopping, in a supermarket car park, in his white Peugeot. Three witnesses over the past few hours, he seemed to be getting panicky, there was no method to his route: around the Tuniberg, as if he couldn’t get away from Freiburg from where he had abducted Annetta. Yesterday evening Frau Schwarzer’s village, this morning the L134 near Gündlingen, then Bötzlingen and most recently close to Munzingen.
Zen and the Art of Murder Page 26