The Truth and Other Lies

by Sascha Arango

  Even so, as things stood, it was only a matter of time before the company died a death. Honor Eisendraht’s quiet hope, that her time at Moreany’s side was approaching, evaporated when that woman—vain, ignorant, and far too young—entered the outer office with the manuscript of Frank Ellis under her arm.

  Honor put the woman at half her age. Betty was smooth and well rounded and beautiful. In an open declaration of war she was wearing a short black-and-white checked skirt. The gun barrels of her thighs were pointed straight at Moreany, who had gotten up from his desk when she entered his office. After a few words, Moreany shut the door, something he never did. It proved to be a horrifically long day. The woman stayed for four hours. Honor heard her boss on the phone. He didn’t have his calls put through from the outer office as he usually did, but dialed direct—another bad sign. In the end he came out, manuscript in hand, in a state of excitement, and asked her to go and get champagne. The smell of cigarettes and lily-of-the-valley perfume emanated from his office. Honor could see the toe seam of Betty’s stockinged foot bobbing up and down in Moreany’s Eames chair, which was usually reserved for guests of state.

  Honor went to the supermarket on the corner, bought the champagne, and then got a few glasses from the kitchen. She herself was not invited to have a glass of champagne. After closing hours she aired the outer office and cleared up Moreany’s room. She washed up the glasses, emptied the full ashtrays on Moreany’s desk, and counted the lipstick-stained butts. It was the twenty-third of March. Moreany had forgotten her birthday. Man is his own worst enemy; woman’s worst enemy is other women.

  The success of Frank Ellis changed everything. Moreany blossomed. Betty put in a daily appearance to discuss who knows what. After a deliberately patronizing “Good morning, Honor,” as if addressing a servant, she shut Moreany’s door behind her. Only her revolting, cheap-smelling lily-of-the-valley perfume lingered in the outer office.

  It is said that dragon trees grant unspoken wishes. Honor bought one and put it in the window of her office. The plant put out sword-shaped leaves like little daggers, and half a year later Betty’s visits did indeed grow less frequent. Honor saw the first sweet-scented flowers on the dragon tree. “Betty’s started to take work home with her,” Moreany explained, and he didn’t look particularly happy about it. Honor had absolutely no desire to know what kind of work. So he’d realized he was too old for her. Or, better still, Betty had found another man, some stupid young lout who’d succumbed to her lure. The door to Moreany’s office was left ajar once more—the dragon tree came into full flower.

  “Isn’t Betty here yet?” Moreany asked, paper in hand. Honor Eisendraht got up, went to the window, and looked down at the parking lot.

  “Her car’s not there.”

  Moreany was annoyed. Why had he betrayed the impatience of his heart instead of looking out the window himself? At that moment, Betty walked through the door. She was wearing a gray-green suit that accentuated her phenomenal waist. She looked a little tired, and paler than usual.

  “Sorry, Claus, my car’s broken down. I had to get a rental car.”

  Honor Eisendraht observed that Betty’s apology was not directed at her. It was a long time since the women had deigned to look at one another. Moreany withdrew into his office so as not to get wet, for as soon as Betty’s warm front met Honor’s cold front, it started to rain in the outer office.

  Betty shut the door behind her as usual and put two editor’s reports on Moreany’s desk. She took the inevitable menthol cigarette out of a packet; Moreany gave her a light.

  “I spoke to Henry yesterday,” said Moreany. “His manuscript will be finished in August. Has he called you?”

  “Me? No.”

  “It sounds as if he’s having trouble with the end.”

  Betty inhaled the smoke. “Doesn’t everyone? I mean, isn’t it necessary? Isn’t it normal?”

  “He can’t make up his mind.”

  “Is that what he said? What did he mean?”

  Honor brought in the coffee; the two of them waited in silence until she’d disappeared again. Moreany noticed grains of sand on Betty’s right heel. His gaze lingered on the little veins on her ankle.

  “Give him a ring, Betty. Maybe he needs help.”

  She shrugged.

  “I can try, but who can help Beethoven with the Ninth, eh?”

  Moreany laughed. Be my wife this instant! he wanted to shout. Let me kiss your feet, touch your breasts, comb your golden hair! But he didn’t speak. Betty stubbed out her unfinished cigarette in the brass ashtray that Moreany had put on his desk especially for her. He didn’t smoke himself. So far she hadn’t noticed.

  “What’s the matter with your car?”

  “It wouldn’t start this morning. Maybe I left the lights on.”

  “Do you have time to accompany me to Venice?”

  She didn’t seem overjoyed by the idea.

  “When?”

  The telephone on his desk began to buzz. The white light flashed. Honor was trying to put a call through. Moreany ignored it.

  “What’s the matter with your car?”

  “You just asked me that. It wouldn’t start, that’s all. Don’t you want to take the call?”

  Venice then.

  Moreany picked up the receiver. “Put him through, Honor.” He signaled to Betty that Henry was on the line, but she already knew.

  “Henry, old boy, how are you?”

  Moreany listened for a while; Betty saw his expression darken. She could hear Henry’s deep voice; he was speaking slowly.

  “I’ll come over at once.”

  Moreany hung up slowly, looking at the floor as if searching for a lost answer.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Henry’s wife has drowned.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “She’s drowned. He just told me. Just now.”

  “In the night? Last night?”

  Moreany looked up from the floor. “I must go to him straightaway.”

  Betty handed Moreany his coat, wondering whether Henry had already known Martha was dead when she’d returned Martha’s car. Would he have run up to her room to look, if he had?

  Honor Eisendraht came into the office and sat down ashen-faced in the Eames chair.

  “You must have heard everything, Honor. Please cancel my appointments, for tomorrow too. Betty . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ll have to postpone Venice. Would you accompany me, please?”

  From the window, Honor saw the two of them in the parking lot, getting into Moreany’s dark green Jaguar. He opened Betty’s door and let her get in first. Honor took her pack of tarot cards out of her handbag and shuffled them thoroughly. It was the Tower. A singularly inauspicious card.

  During the hour-long drive neither spoke a word. Moreany drove fast, concentrating. Decades ago he had come second in the Mille Miglia and was still an excellent driver. The car was quiet; only the turn signal ticked when he turned a corner. Betty felt a wave of nausea and wondered whether it was fear or just a symptom of pregnancy. Martha’s unexpected call had not been a goodwill visit. “You ought to know,” she had said even before she was inside, “that I don’t hate you. The man we both love is in a serious crisis. He can’t finish his novel; I see him suffering.” Martha had been so touchingly cheerful as she had sat with her on the sofa. She had spoken of the friendship that comes from love, of good times and of urgently required changes. It is well known that people in despair grow calm once they have decided to take the final step, their spirits soothed at the prospect of the sweet release of death.

  Betty lowered the car window. Why hadn’t Martha jumped into the sea before last night if she’d known everything for so long? Maybe it was revenge after all. She wanted to destroy our happiness by committing suicide, Betty thought. It was quite possible that Henry would blame her for Martha’s death. How would Moreany react when he
found out about it all? Venice would be just the ticket now. Far enough away to think things over, but near enough to get back to Henry in three hours. Again the violent twinge in her womb. His child. It was inside her, growing, communicating with her. She’d have it all to herself.

  8

  The corpse was floating facedown, its outspread arms parallel to the coast. A young cormorant landed on its back and spread its wings to dry its feathers. The bird drifted past Obradin’s cutter on the back of the corpse and was carried by the current toward the promontory, whose northern tip extended into the sea for miles.

  Obradin had gone out to sea, not in order to fish, but to collect his thoughts. He went slowly so as to spare the gasping engine. When the mainland was out of sight he turned it off and let the cutter drift. He sat down on the foredeck to smoke a Bosnian cigarette. He could have been mistaken, in which case it wasn’t Henry’s car he’d seen so clearly the night before. Then the man at the wheel wasn’t Henry either—or his double had just stolen his Maserati. It had been nothing but a disconcertingly detailed dream, right down to the butts that Helga had cleared off the windowsill and put on his bedside table.

  And even if he hadn’t been mistaken—and there was reason to believe that this was the case—a man is entitled to drive wherever he likes at night with his lights off, and his wife’s entitled to drown wherever and whenever she likes. Coincidence without connection, and nobody’s business anyway. But then there was that matter of the bike.

  Obradin had woken up before sunrise after only an hour’s sleep, and had gotten out of bed at once. He dressed quietly and drove to the harbor a few minutes later. The Drina lay rocking sluggishly at the pier. Obradin checked the ropes and the lashed-down nets, opened and closed all the hatches, made sure that the anchor was in place, jumped back onto the pier, and climbed over the concrete breakwaters that had been built by forced laborers in the last months of the war.

  The sun rose. Obradin covered the few hundred yards to the beach on foot. He saw Martha’s bike propped up against a rock; every day she rode it past his shop down to the bay. But never before lunchtime. Her neatly folded clothes lay next to the bike. He shielded his eyes from the intense rays of the rising sun. After searching the bay in vain for Henry’s wife, he returned to his cutter.

  Obradin gazed after the cormorant as it flew over the radio mast of his cutter toward the coast. Then he started up the diesel again. The current had pulled him a few nautical miles out to sea. He sailed slowly back to the harbor, moored the Drina, and was soon walking through the door of his fishmonger’s shop.

  “The diesel’s had it,” he said. “And without the cutter we may as well give up.”

  Without another word he strode past Helga (who as usual was on the phone instead of working), opened the wooden hatch in the floor, and disappeared into the cellar. He reemerged with a barrel of slivovitz on his shoulder and kicked the hatch shut.

  Helga covered the receiver with her hand. “What are you up to?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “What about the shop?”

  “We’re closing.”

  “What about the fish soup?”

  “There won’t be any.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  Obradin went around the fish counter to his Helga, stroked her cheek with his hairy fingers, and kissed her good-bye on the mouth.

  “You know when.”

  Only minutes later, Helga called the game warden and the doctor from the neighboring town. The two of them were to stand by at the ready; in about two hours it would be time to act again. The doctor packed his bag when he heard this; the game warden opened his gun cabinet and took out a special gun.

  ———

  Pale and unshaven, Henry stood outside the house in his rubber boots, his shirt hanging out of his trousers. He was leaning on a shovel when Moreany’s Jaguar came over the hill. The car was trailing a cloud of dust. Even from a distance, Henry could see that Moreany was not alone. Poncho ran to meet the car and leaped around, barking. Henry saw Betty in the passenger seat. She made no move to get out. Poncho stood up on his hind legs, curious, and sniffed at the window.

  The two men embraced in silence. Moreany’s smooth, rosy cheeks with their white sideburns smelled of Old Spice. Henry looked over at Betty. Why didn’t she get out? Had she already confessed everything to Moreany?

  Moreany extricated himself from Henry’s embrace with reddened eyes.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “What can one say?”

  “I asked Betty to come too. She was in my office when you rang.”

  Henry opened the door and held out his hand to Betty. The smell of her perfume flooded out of the car. She felt his firm, warning hold as he embraced her; his stubbly chin scratched her cheek. They kissed each other like brother and sister; she felt another fierce twinge in her womb.

  “Please try not to hate me, my darling.”

  “I love you. How’s our baby?”

  “It just moved. I can feel it.”

  “Have you told Moreany anything about us?”

  “Of course not. Are you sure she’s dead?”

  Disconcerted, Henry gave her an icy stare. “Do you want her to come back?” he whispered.

  Henry’s studio smelled of cold tobacco. The manuscript was next to the typewriter on his desk. A broken elastic band was rolled up beside his fountain pen. The slats of the blinds at the enormous picture window were half-closed. Notes and crumpled-up paper lay scattered all over the floor.

  Henry had spent all morning shuffling things around in his studio and decking it out with creative mess. To indicate the trace elements of complex thought, he’d made little stacks of unread books, inserting a bookmark here and there. He’d even remembered a half-full coffee cup and a chewed cigar butt. All the sports supplements and men’s magazines had vanished, and he’d rolled the drilling rig into a corner underneath the Botero painting of fat children. It looked like a place where work was done. Apart from the manuscript it was all his.

  Betty caught sight of the manuscript immediately and made a beeline for it, her hand outstretched.

  “Don’t touch!”

  She stopped in her tracks.

  “Please don’t. It’s not finished yet.”

  “Sorry. You work on a typewriter?”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “There is a copy of the text, isn’t there?” Moreany put in.

  “Not yet. That’s the original. It goes in the safe every evening.”

  Moreany and Betty exchanged glances. “That’s risky, Henry, to put it mildly.”

  Henry opened a bottle of single malt and filled three glasses. Moreany disappeared briefly into the visitors’ restroom, walking unsteadily. Betty looked around herself. The room had been very tidy when she’d examined it in the dark the night before. Now everything was a mess and it reeked of tobacco. She scrutinized the hairy dog blanket next to the desk chair and the wastepaper basket overflowing with rejected ideas, probably worth millions even half-full. In the darkness she’d discerned the drilling rig as an unidentifiable structure standing in the room. Now it had vanished.

  Moreany came back looking even worse, his hands smelling of soap. Henry handed him a glass.

  “Ice?”

  “One cube, if you have some.”

  “Martha didn’t leave a note.” Returning from the kitchen with the ice, Henry began his report. “Her bike was on the beach.”

  Moreany stirred the ice in his glass with his index finger. “Did you find her?”

  “No one’s found her. The current pulled Martha out to sea. Her rubber sandals, her things, the bike—everything was still there.”

  “On the beach?” Betty asked.

  Henry saw her astonished look.

  “Yes. Down in the little bay next to the harbor where she always goes swimming.”

  Henry took a large swig of scotch, sucked the ice cube briefly and spat it back into the glass. He didn�
��t seem to be suffering overmuch, Betty thought, but then what does suffering look like?

  “When she didn’t come back for lunch, I went to the beach. Down by the water there was a woman in Martha’s green parka, but it was someone else.”

  Again Henry saw Betty’s astonished look. “The wind had blown it over the beach and she was cold. She’d put it on.”

  “How old was she?”

  “A little younger than you.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “No. Does it matter?”

  Moreany cleared his throat. “Excuse me for blurting this out, but is it out of the question that Martha’s still alive? I mean, couldn’t something unusual have happened?”

  “And what might that be?” Henry asked.

  “Well . . . you live here without any kind of security at all. Isn’t it conceivable that Martha”—Moreany paused to formulate the thought—“was kidnapped in order to blackmail you?”

  “Who’d be that stupid, Claus? Any sensible person would kidnap me and then blackmail Martha, wouldn’t they?”

  Betty lit a cigarette and snapped the lighter shut with a flourish.

  “Such people exist, Henry. Stupid, evil people.”

  Henry didn’t like her tone. “And who might they be?”

  For a while it was quiet in the room. Henry saw smoke streaming out of Betty’s narrow nostrils like dragon’s breath. She was punishing him, because she knew he was lying.

  “Who called the police?” It was Moreany who broke the silence.

  “No one so far.”

  “I’m going to do it now,” Moreany said, patting his pockets.

  Henry put his glass down. “I think I’d better do that.”

  He went into the kitchen to make the call. He should have done it ages ago. How annoying. He had clean forgotten.

  Betty was playing with the hovawart in the garden while Moreany and Henry waited in the kitchen for the police. The dog jumped up at her; she threw a stick. Word must have gotten around among dogs that, if you bring human beings sticks or balls, they will throw them tirelessly. Betty’s immaculate skin shone in the sun; there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The two men watched her, each deep in his own thoughts.