The Truth and Other Lies

by Sascha Arango

  The Peugeot ended up lying on its roof. A shower of glass pelted down onto the road. Henry sprinted the hundred feet to the remains of the car. He nearly tripped over the fat brown briefcase that was lying in the road. Paper came fluttering out of it. The wrecked car hissed like a wounded dragon. A mixture of fluids flowed out of its gaping metal jaws and down the road. The roof was in shreds; one door and all the windows were gone; the rear right wheel was still turning. Henry took off his jacket—first things first—and knelt down in the iridescent pool to look inside the smashed-up car. First he saw the arm, the fingers on the hand twitching, and then the man, lying twisted and whimpering on the backseat. He was still alive, but he didn’t know a lot about driving.

  Henry took hold of the arm and pulled. The man groaned. Henry let go, crawled into the wrecked car as far as he could, clasped the man around his bloody chest, and pulled him out. With no resistance to speak of, the body slid onto the road. The eyes were open, but the man didn’t seem to understand; his face was already beginning to swell; a trickle of blood ran out of his ear. Sticking out of the right-hand side of his chest was the broken-off shaft of a headrest. Henry put his ear to the open mouth of the injured man and heard his gurgling breathing.

  Henry grasped the shaft in his chest and pulled it out; the ribs cracked. He listened again. After a few breaths the gurgling grew fainter; the man’s chest rose and fell quickly. There was now a lot of blood gushing out of the wound. Henry ripped a strip of cloth from his favorite shirt and pushed it into the hole in the man’s chest with his finger, the way you might fill a pipe.

  At the five-mile marker, only a short distance from the junction where the forest track led off to the left toward the cliffs, Henry took a right in the direction of town. Fasch was lying on the backseat, his head on the briefcase, which Henry had been considerate enough to rescue. A bloodstain was spreading around the bag on the soft napa leather. Fasch’s legs were raised up and sticking out of the back window. He was whimpering softly, but was not conscious. The traffic was growing heavier. Henry was in complete control of the car at every overtaking maneuver—it has to be said that he was driving the race of his life—and he reached the hospital in under twenty minutes.

  An ambulance was parked outside the emergency department with its rear doors open. A paramedic in fluorescent orange was sitting on a gurney reading a newspaper as Henry rolled up the ramp tooting his horn. “I’ve got an injured man!” Henry called out of the car window.

  Stoically and without a single superfluous movement, the paramedic folded his newspaper. He saw a dozen injured people every day, dead people and dying people, delirious drunks, weeping mothers—and not for one damn minute was he left in peace to read his newspaper. Without a word he helped heave the unconscious man onto a gurney and push him into emergency.

  Tired, and uncertain whether or not he could still be of any use, Henry got back in his car and wondered whether he should call Jenssen to cancel his appointment at forensics. He was now dreading the thought of seeing Martha’s body again. It would have begun to decompose. All the same, he did want to see her face, to touch it. He quite simply owed it to her. No doubt her expression would reflect the horror of the final moment, when she had realized her mistake. For all her synesthetic sixth sense and her great knowledge of human nature, she’d been wrong about him. Wrong out of love for him, until the cowardly moment he’d come up from behind and pushed her into the black water. It had been murder, even if it had been a mistake. Who else but he would see the disappointment on her face?

  There was a knock on the window. A young doctor was standing at the car. Henry got out again.

  “Are you injured?”

  Henry looked down. It was only now that he noticed his stained trousers, and remembered ripping a strip off his favorite shirt. Its sleeves were stained with congealed blood.

  “The blood’s from the other man. Is he still alive?”

  The doctor nodded. “There’s a fair amount broken, including his skull, and he’s lost a lot of blood, but he’ll pull through. Did you bring him here?”

  ———

  He was given a glass of water. In the doctor’s room in the emergency department, Henry washed the blood off his hands and described where the accident had happened and what he’d seen and done. He didn’t mention the fact that he’d lain in wait for his pursuer around the corner—why should he? On a table Henry saw half-full cups, and partly eaten salami sandwiches, abandoned in the rush to help others.

  “Did you pull anything out of his chest?”

  “Yes, there was a piece of metal in it—it was bubbling terribly. I thought it might get in the way of his breathing.”

  “He has a collapsed lung; he would have suffocated.”

  “Then it was the right thing to do?”

  “You saved his life.”

  Henry produced his ID. A statement was drawn up, which Henry signed. A pretty nurse brought his jacket from the car. Her white smock suited her fantastically well. Why is it, Henry wondered, that men love women in uniform?

  “The police will be in touch with you, Mr. Hayden.”

  “I daresay they will.”

  He looked at the clock. Time was running short; too much was happening. He could still make his appointment at forensics, because he’d set off early. But should he drive to his own arrest in this state?

  “You don’t happen to have a pair of trousers and a clean shirt for me, do you?” The doctor disappeared briefly into the room next door and returned with trousers and a shirt. “These are the consultant’s; the shirt’s mine.” They both fit, although the trousers were a little tight. “Just send everything back to the hospital afterward.”

  As Henry was walking along the gray corridor of the emergency department, the nurse came running after him. She was bringing him his jacket for the second time.

  “You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  “And you?”

  “If I could write like you I certainly wouldn’t be a nurse. My condolences, Mr. Hayden.”

  “What for?”

  “Your wife. I saw it in the newspaper. Can I take a photo of us?”

  “Another time. When I’m wearing something appropriate.”

  Henry put his jacket on after he got back in the car. He unwound the blood-encrusted bandage on his wrist and dropped it onto the floorboard. He examined the wound where the marten had bitten him. The skin around it was reddened and slightly swollen. For a moment he considered going back to emergency to have the scratch looked at, but then he rejected the idea. It was too ridiculous. Just now he’d pulled a stake out of a stranger’s chest; there was his dead wife lying in forensics, and he had life imprisonment to look forward to. When Henry set off, his memory of the accident was already fading, like a dream that is blotted out when you wake up.

  He had no concrete notion of what awaited him. He would make no confession when he was arrested, but wait and see what charges were brought against him. A defendant should say little in court. Or, better still, keep silent. You can lie too. An accused person enjoys the rare privilege of being allowed to lie. Besides, you’re the center of attention. It’s no rare thing for criminals in the dock to feel a sense of endorsement and a genuine interest in them and their mucked-up lives for the first time. Some of them are so taken with this that they confess more than is necessary, for the sole purpose of having people listen to them. It is possible that people of this type would never have become criminals if they’d been given a taste of the precious elixir of recognition a little earlier. The victims of a crime, the bereaved, wait to be acknowledged in vain, for it is well known that the reward for suffering consists in evading punishment. Recognition is rarely just.

  Henry had all the time in the world now. He would spend the rest of his life waiting and remembering. Maybe he’d even write a book and become a better person. He would also, of course, have his regrets.

  The Institute of Forensic Medicine was a gray roughcast building, plain and functio
nal, without any kind of ornamentation at all. Jenssen was sitting on the front steps with a plastic coffee cup in his hand, leafing through a thin folder. When he caught sight of Henry, he put the cup down on the steps and walked toward him with an outstretched hand. His eyes took in the Maserati, then Henry’s shoes.

  “What happened?”

  Henry examined his blood-smeared shoes. There you are, he thought, you forgot about them. That’s how quickly it happens.

  “A road accident in front of me. It’s not my blood. Shall we go in?”

  Jenssen refrained from asking any more questions. A thoroughly agreeable trait of character. “You don’t have to do this,” he said to Henry on the stairs. “We could just wait for the results from the DNA analysis instead.”

  “Of course we could. But I’d like to see my wife. I’m grateful to you for calling me up straightaway. Does she look terrible?”

  “I haven’t seen her yet either. To be honest, I’ve never seen a drowned body.” Jenssen scratched himself. “But there’s a first time for everything, eh?”

  That’s what you want in a police officer, Henry thought. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about human nature, and yet he remains a decent guy, sympathetic, open to basic emotions and not indifferent to other people’s suffering.

  “Where’s your charming colleague who looks a bit like . . .”

  “An opossum?” Jenssen laughed loudly. Henry nodded. “She really is the spitting image of an opossum. She never comes to forensics. She says it stinks too much for her.”

  Jenssen realized this was less than professional, and he became serious again. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “Maybe later,” Henry replied. “Let’s get it over and done with.”

  Jenssen let Henry go on ahead. Henry suspected that Jenssen’s exceptionally polite treatment of him had little to do with respect and a lot to do with his investigative techniques. A locked door opened with a buzz, they crossed a corridor where a vending machine was humming and stopped in front of a sheet of glass. Behind the glass sat a woman who was scowling. No wonder—it would put you in a bad mood, sitting in that glass box all day long, being stared at like a monkey. The corridor smelled of cleaning agent and instant coffee, and there was something else unidentifiable in the air, rising up from the basement.

  Henry signed another form, cast a glance back toward the daylight coming in from the window, and passed through blue double doors. A flight of stairs led down to the basement to a changing room where Jenssen handed Henry green plastic overshoes and overalls. As Henry was putting on the overalls, he noticed the other man observing him. But he wasn’t going to make it that easy for him.

  “What happened to your wrist?”

  A delayed question, Henry thought. So Jenssen had noticed the wound earlier on. The question came later, as a surprise. Part of his tactics, Henry thought; I must make a note of that.

  “Something bit me.”

  Henry followed Jenssen into the Hades of the morgue. The smell of putrefying flesh was intense. This is the place where death delights to help the living read an inscription on the wall. Jenssen laid a hand on Henry’s shoulder.

  “May I give you some advice?”

  “By all means.”

  “You might as well start breathing through your nose now.”

  No previous knowledge is required to know how death smells. There’s no smell like it. When you enter a morgue you can’t shake a sense of grim foreboding.

  No corpse is beautiful. First Henry saw the feet. The toes were black and swollen. The corpse lay, oddly bulky, on the farthest of four big, clean, stainless-steel tables under a vertical light. The chest was already open. The head lay on a plastic block; something dark covered the face. At the table stood a woman of about fifty with short hair and stained overalls, who was putting something soft—we don’t want to know what—into a steel dish. The forensic pathologist had adopted the somber air of the autopsy room to delight in helping death in this place. A few paces from the autopsy table, Jenssen paused again and held Henry back.

  “Just a moment, please.”

  He hurried on ahead and spoke to the pathologist in a low voice. Henry saw her quick glance, then she nodded, took a green cloth, and laid it over the open chest of the corpse. Now Henry noticed the swollen hand sticking out at one side from beneath the cloth. The crisp, black skin on the fingers had cracked open. Flaps of skin had peeled off and hung down at the sides. Parts of the bone could be seen. The ring finger was missing.

  Jenssen came back and stood between Henry and the corpse. He had grown noticeably paler.

  “You must excuse us, we weren’t quite sure when you were coming. You can see for yourself, they’ve already started the postmortem, and the face is . . .” Jenssen couldn’t find the words to complete his sentence. “It’s better if you don’t see it.”

  “Please, I want to see my wife.”

  Jenssen stepped aside and Henry walked past him to the table. The pathologist pushed something that looked like a spatula under the torso. The skull had been sawed open, the brain lay in a dish beside it. The face had been pulled down from the forehead like that of a furry animal that’s been skinned. The severed ring finger lay in a little dish next to the brain, a gold ring gleaming on it. The pathologist reached into the corpse’s copper-green hair with her latex gloves and, with an unsentimental tug, pulled the face back over the skull.

  “Your wife drowned,” the pathologist explained.

  My wife? Henry thought. The face of the drowned body looked like a quattro stagioni pizza topped with seasonal ingredients such as you might dig into at the Italian restaurant on the corner. A doughy black tongue bulged out of the mouth; the eyes had sunk to shriveled olives; the nose had opened out like an artichoke, exposing two black holes. None of it resembled Martha. Her features weren’t even remotely recognizable. This face, dehumanized by rot, belonged to a stranger, as did the rest of the bulky body.

  Although he was already quite sure, Henry also had a look at the cracked-up finger in the dish. The ring it wore was broad and less beautiful than the one that Henry had slipped onto Martha’s finger in the clerk’s office. A DNA test was hardly necessary. It wasn’t her.

  Henry turned away, shaking his head. “That’s not my wife.”

  Jenssen nodded in agreement, as if Henry had just said it really was Martha. “You’re right. It doesn’t look like your wife anymore, but it is.”

  Jesus Christ, Henry thought, if I say the truth, no one believes me. “What did she have on?” he asked, knowing quite well that this might be a major blunder.

  “She was fully clothed.”

  “Then how can it be my wife? I found her clothes on the beach. And besides, my wife’s petite, and this lady here”—Henry pointed at the corpse—“is massive. And the ring on the finger there isn’t Martha’s wedding ring.”

  Jenssen glanced in his folder. “There’s nothing here about a ring.”

  He leafed through the pages, as if the missing clue might be there. Then he looked across at the pathologist.

  “The ring was concealed under the epidermis on the palm,” she remarked matter-of-factly.

  Henry held up his hand to show his wedding ring.

  “I chose our rings; they’re identical and narrower than that one. We had our names engraved on them. Her ring ought to have my name on it.”

  For the first time in years he pulled off his ring—it hurt a little—and handed it to Jenssen, who looked at the inscription of Martha’s name on the inside, and then went over to the table and bent over the finger in the dish.

  The pathologist took some pincers and pulled the ring off the bone tissue. Not a nice noise. She rinsed the ring in clean water and passed it to Jenssen. To look at the inside, Jenssen had to hold the ring right up to his eye. It can’t have smelled good. There was no inscription. Shame and irritation at having notified Henry in such a premature and unprofessional way made Jenssen blush. “Damn!” he stammered, “I’m so sorr
y.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Henry took the opportunity to reward the detective’s kindheartedness. Anyone can make a mistake, after all. “Do you know what, Jenssen?” he said, putting his hand on his shoulder. “You’ve convinced me that my wife’s still alive and I’m grateful to you for that. Would you like a coffee?”

  Everything was up in the air again. No one suspected him; no one was going to arrest him. He didn’t need the toothbrush or the book, and he would drive home a free man. Like sunshine piercing the clouds after a storm, artificial light fell from the ceiling of the autopsy room onto the lady lying open on the table. Henry felt sympathy for the dead woman. What was it that had driven the poor thing into the water? Had she been tired of life, or fatally ill? Did she have children? Who was waiting for her now, in vain?

  It later turned out that the dead woman was a retired police officer who’d fallen off a bridge trying to take a photo of a seagull.

  Henry treated Jenssen to a coffee from the vending machine in the corridor. They stood next to each other for a while without speaking, sipping from their plastic cups.

  “Sometimes people disappear,” Jenssen said after quite some time. He took a gulp of coffee and scrunched up the cup in his fist. “And some return.”

  Henry flinched. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, just recently we had a guy turn up—he’d been gone fourteen years, no mean feat, completely vanished, because, he says, his children got on his nerves.”

  Jenssen giggled. Henry remained serious. A man who knows how hard it is to disappear doesn’t find that kind of thing funny.

  “It’s ten years now since he was pronounced dead, his wife has married the man next door, and now the mongrel comes back and wants his wife to pay him his life insurance. He’s even brought charges against her—can you believe it?”