She had examined the camera swiftly: there was a roll of film in it, almost at its end. Its contents, developed during the day, were now spread across the table in front of her in the order they had been taken. Helena scanned them for the hundredth time, trying to unearth the story they might be telling.
The roll began with two photos of a small snowy clearing surrounded by trees. The land was flat.
She could attach no significance to these pictures, could not remember seeing the site, nor could she see make out if there might be anything wrong with the trees.
Then there were several photographs of a more familiar Bavarian landscape, snaps any tourist might have taken as mementoes: rolling hills and idyllic meadows, craggy mountains with awesome peaks.
These were followed by photos of the artificial lake he had already sent her a card of. She had read the book about the dam’s construction already. It was hailed as a marriage between nature and technology. There was nothing in the book, of course, to suggest that the dam might have intruded into the eco balance of the region in a significant way. But had it? Was that what Max was interested in? Did this explain why he had gone to the area? She would write to the Green headquarters in Munich and find out more. At least it was something to go on, though she felt she was grasping at straws when what she needed was a power digger.
Then there was a sequence of snaps of the house and grounds at Seehafen and the lake, including one of Johannes Bahr’s mural of Anna. The photos made her feel a little queasy, reinvigorated her suspicions and simultaneously brought Adam palpably into her mind.
Finally there was a group of photos which could have been taken from and around Max’s last stopping place, the isolated chalet in the hills: a close up of earth rich with pine cones; clusters of trees tall against a blue sky.
Repeated scrutiny of the photographs had filled her with despondency. There was either too much here that she couldn’t begin to understand or nothing more than they all already knew. Perhaps she should just, like James, resign herself to the fact that Max had suffered an accidental death.
The doorbell only cut into Helena’s concentration after several rings.
‘Hi there, hon,’ Claire hugged her, then stood back to examine her. ‘You poor old thing. Feeling wretched?’
Helena grimaced, ‘That too.’
‘I am sorry, you know. Even though I wasn’t exactly fond of him. Horrid to spend all that time looking, only to find him dead.’ She squeezed Helena’s hand. ‘Here,’ she dug into her bag and brought out two bottles of wine, ‘To drown your sorrows.’
Helena uncorked a bottle, filled their glasses.
Claire raised hers, ‘To Max.’
They drank, settled into the capacious sofa at the front of the room.
‘I want the whole story, you know. From the beginning.’
‘I want to talk, Claire. There’s something nagging at me about this whole business. It doesn’t smell right.’
Claire tucked her feet under her, ‘Slowly then, from the top. I’ve had an afternoon full of kids and my powers of concentration are at a new low.’
Helena smiled. ‘It’s good to see you, Claire. I need an injection of common sense. My mind’s reeling.’
Claire waved her on, ‘From the beginning.’
‘Okay, but I’m not sure where the beginning is. Though for me, it’s somewhere around the house,’ she leapt up and fetched some of the pictures which were spread on the table.
‘That’s it. That’s one of the first places I traced Max to, way back in February. These photos were taken by him.’
Claire glanced at the photos then looked back at Helena expectantly.
‘Well, the man who summoned me to Germany this time, the man who told me Max was dead, is the man who lives in this house.’ Helena paced, told Claire how Adam, though he claimed only to have met Max once, had taken an inordinate interest in the case, had a letter from him in the house which he had lied about. Told her how Max had been there on several occasions for no good enough reason. Told her of the purported circumstances of Max’s death, the inquest verdict which she didn’t trust, the lack of any notes though she was certain Max had been writing.
Her voice rose as she gathered momentum and her face grew warm as she pointed out how Adam seemed to have been stalking her movements from the very beginning. And stalking Max’s. How she felt he was somehow implicated in Max’s death. That there was something in the house.
‘And the whole thing is uncanny,’ Helena finished. ‘But I don’t have anything except hunches to go on. And nowhere to turn. It’s driving me slightly mad.’ She met Claire’s eyes, ‘Do you think I am?’
Claire surveyed her for a moment, then rose. ‘Let’s eat. It helps me think.’
‘Oh God, and I’ve probably burned all the food,’ Helena ran to the kitchen. ‘Only slightly charred,’ she placed a dish of lasagna on the table, tossed the salad.
‘So?’ she sat down and looked at Claire.
‘So based on experience, your hunches usually have something in them.’
‘Well, that’s a relief to hear - even though the public prosecutor didn’t seem particularly impressed.’
‘But…’
‘But what?’
Claire made a great play of digging into her food, exclaiming on the wonders of charred lasagna.
‘But what?’ Helena repeated.
‘But I also have this hunch that you just don’t want to let Max die and you’re masking grief, your anger and disappointment at his death, with detective work,’ Claire said too quickly. ‘It’s a way of mourning.’
‘I see.’
They were quiet for a moment.
‘Who is this man anyway?’ Claire said at last. ‘The one in the house.’
‘Adam Peters,’ Helena mumbled. ‘You remember, the man whose lecture we went to.’
‘That man! You mean the anthropologist!’ Claire gazed at her in consternation. ‘Helena Latimer, if that man has been stalking you, as you so emphatically put it, it’s because he’s interested in you. Why the way he was looking at you in the restaurant… If anyone looked at me like that, I’d be halfway to the bedroom.’
Helena emptied her glass hastily.
‘You have slept with him,’ Claire was staring at her.
‘He’s married.’
‘Others have been before him.’
‘I don’t approve.’
‘What? Of his marriage?’
‘No, of sleeping with him, silly.’
‘I didn’t ask you whether you approved. I asked you whether you had. Or wanted to,’ Claire pressed her. ‘Helena Latimer, the only time I have ever heard you speak so passionately about a man, he was a purveyor of DDT or some other noxious substance. Apart from Max, that is. And I presume you didn’t sleep with him.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well then, what about this Adam Peters?’
Helena flushed, ‘Yes, I went to bed with him. I didn’t know he was married. I…’
‘Sssh,’ Claire put a finger to her lips. ‘I’m not getting on a moral high horse and trying to trample you into the dirt.’
‘That’s a relief,’ Helena mumbled.
‘You do that quite well enough without any of my help. But let’s look at this whole thing again calmly.’
‘The fact that I may have slept with Adam has nothing to do with Max’s case,’ Helena interrupted her, ‘unless he was deliberately trying to pull the wool over my eyes in that instance, too.’
‘It was nice, was it?’
‘Claire!’
‘Okay, shush now. I’m thinking.’ she poured some more wine into their glasses, then rose to look at the photos at the other end of the table.
‘I suspect you wouldn’t be half so adamant about this anthropologist’s implication in Max’s death if you hadn’t already judged him duplicitous,’ she said after a moment. ‘Right?’
‘Maybe,’ Helena grumbled, ‘but the fact is that he’s been involved at every t
urn. Why, even when I landed in Munich…’
Claire overrode her, ‘And perhaps you’re suspicious of him only in order to clear your conscience about seeing him again, despite little wifey back at home.’
‘That’s utter nonsense,’ Helena was sharp.
‘Alright, alright, I was just speculating,’ Claire helped herself to salad. ‘But in any event, it seems to me that if you’re going to think clearly about the circumstances of Max’s death, you’ll have to imagine your Adam as some neutral figure, some matron of middle years, or wizened clerk, doing all the things he did or didn’t do. And then assess the links. After all you can’t condemn a man as a murderer just because he’s broken his marriage vows.’
‘I wasn’t talking of murder,’ Helena protested.
‘Just a little amorphous non-sexual foul play, alongside the sexual?’
‘Be serious, Claire.’
‘I am being serious. But now I’ll be blunt as well. Alright, I generally trust your hunches. In this instance, I’m not so sure. First of all, the whole thing is overdetermined. You’d begun to think Max might have been your father. Which makes his death far more difficult to accept than the death of an old man who was a friend, even a very good friend.
‘Secondly, the man you suspect is a lover. Well, we’re all rather prone to be suspicious of lovers. Finally, you have nothing to go on except an absence. An absence of explanation, of notes, of everything. And we tend to rush to fill up absences with imaginings.
Helena got up, began to clear dishes from the table.
Claire put a staying hand on her arm. ‘That having been said, if Max’s ghost won’t let you rest, you’ll just have to go to the source of your suspicions and play Mata Hari. She suddenly grinned, ‘And from the sound of it, that shouldn’t be too difficult.’
‘It’s impossible,’ Helena’s voice cracked.
Claire scrutinized her carefully, ‘As they say back at home in the USA, I think you’ve got it bad, sister. I’ve never seen you like this. Come on,’ she squeezed her shoulder, ‘let’s take it all over from the top. I haven’t been listening carefully enough. And you’re such an adept at hiding yourself.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
In the dusty pink glow of early evening, Manhattan rose from a curve in the road like some vast many-tusked beast with a thousand glinting eyes. A huge bloated greedy beast, who stripped the earth of its resources and whose days, like those of its kin - Tokyo, Sao Paolo, London - were numbered, Helena thought.
Nonetheless, seen like this, from a distance at night, the city never failed to work its magic on her. It was awesome, beautiful in the way that a great fire is, despite the havoc it leaves in its trail.
For the first time since she had promised James that she would attend Max Bergmann’s memorial service, Helena was pleased that she had done so.
She had spent the last month in something of a twilight zone, a hazy world of indistinct shapes, never quite obliterated by the dark night of sleep or the bright clarity of day. It was like a waiting state, though she couldn’t quite grasp what it was she was waiting for, except for the haziness to be dissipated.
She had worked of course, if anything more fiercely than usual. But it was more like a desperate holding on to what wasn’t lost, than a pleasure energetically engaged on.
She hadn’t returned to Germany. Claire’s analysis of her suspicions had taken their toll on them, so that she mistrusted her own motives. And if Claire had latterly been vociferous in urging her to confront Adam Peters, to do something, anything, Helena had increasingly seen the impossibility of it all. From Adam, of course, there had been no word. She had hardly expected any.
The obituaries had appeared in two British papers and a score of American ones. Their collective weight, their unanimous assertion that Max Bergmann had died tragically in a boating accident, created a wall of right thinking which it now seemed impossible to scale. Then too, her enquiries into the sites that Max had photographed had rendered no clear clues. The photos might as well have been holiday snaps.
The cab curved round Columbus Circle and pulled up in front of the awning of the Mayflower Hotel.
Helena pushed her bills through the slot in the grimy plexiglass window which shielded the driver from her and waited for the door to unlock. In London the internal window designated privacy; here, a prison. Nonetheless, the buzz and hurry of the street, the striking assortment of faces and styles and walk, was like an electric jolt and for a moment that omnipresent internal haze seemed to disperse.
She hoisted her bag over her shoulder and went to register. James had had the room booked. Apparently several of the out-of-towners were staying here. She had done so herself once on a previous occasion, but was happy to see that this time her room was on the tenth floor and overlooked Central Park.
She gazed out the window for a moment at the dark crests of trees and the graceful expanse of Central Park South. She would take a shower, then go for a stroll there, have a bite and tuck in at a reasonable hour so that jet lag didn’t have her wide awake at three in the morning.
It was when she had returned to the hotel and was making her way through the restaurant that she heard a familiar voice.
‘Helena Latimer, my angel of mercy, I thought it was you.’ A man with dark curly hair and laughing brown eyes leapt up from a table and hugged her forcibly. ‘But I wasn’t sure. I’ve never seen you dressed as a woman.’
‘Only when I’m in New York. Don’t let it go to your head.’ Helena chuckled.
Bumping into Rafael, the man who had entertained her all the way from Orion Farm to Boston, was like walking into a warm frothy bath after a month of cold showers.
‘It isn’t my head you have to worry about,’ Rafael chortled. ‘Now, sit down. I was just about to order and I can treat you to New York’s hundred and first best dinner. And a good bottle of wine. It’s the least I can do for my angel of mercy.’
‘Now that sounds like a very good idea,’ she smiled at him.
‘Don’t look at me like that, lady, or I won’t vouch for your chastity. And I imagine we’re both here on solemn business.’
They talked about Max, ate toasted goat cheese and sole in a lemon sauce, drank an exquisite Montrachet. The wine took its effect and Helena found herself telling Rafael about how she was still haunted by the notion that Max’s death wasn’t an accident. He listened intently, his mobile face mirroring her fears. When she had finished, he was quiet for a long moment.
At last he said, ‘Well, it has all the makings of a good thriller. But we’re dealing in the real, which is a very unfortunate genre. Even if Max was tipped overboard by the long arm of the big guys, you won’t prove anything for years. If ever. Not that I would put a little high adventure beyond him. He was a cagey old soul.’ He studied her face, ‘Whatever the case, Helena, you musn’t lose sleep over it. He’d scored a good many runs, our old friend, and at some point you have to strike out. Right?’
‘Right,’ Helena sighed. But she felt strangely better for having confided in a stranger. ‘You’re good to talk to, you know,’ she smiled at him.
His eyes crinkled, ‘I’m trying. But since you’re kind enough to mention it, what do you say we retire for a little more conversation to the comforts of my suite. Oh yes, a suite,’ he gestured grandly. ‘Some loons have bought a film option on my last book and I’m a rich man for a week,’ he winked at her humorously. ‘There’s a huge TV; We’ll get the gremlins to bring up another bottle of wine. And I should tell you that I give the best back rubs this side of Fifth Avenue, not to mention the fact that I’m really a sweet guy.’
She was about to demure when she suddenly thought, why not? Why ever not? She liked Rafael, liked his quick gestures, the humorous face, the dapper air. One man to wipe away the memory of another who continued to haunt her.
‘You’ve almost convinced me,’ she said aloud.
‘Only almost? Well, I always did like a gamble,’ he grinned ruefully.
Th
e suite was neither in the best of taste, nor the worst, but it was capacious and the TV as mammoth as Rafael had promised. On the desk next to a bucket of chilled wine lay a bulky typescript.
‘Yours?’ Helena asked.
‘My latest. I’m just reading it through before delivering it to the most important man in my life.’
‘Who is?’
‘My agent, who else? Uh uh, no peeking. But I’ll read you a bit, if you’re very good.’
Helena sat down on the leather chesterfield and crossed her hands with a great show of primness. ‘Good enough?’
‘Better if you cross your legs as well. Inspiration.’ He poured her a glass of wine, then cleared his throat with mock portentousness and began to read in a dry clipped voice.
‘No one lived in the town of Shoobin, Missouri. Not any more. Not since Ebenezer…’
Helena listened, found herself smiling, beginning to giggle as a tall tale unfolded, filled with fierce satirical portraits and flights of incisive fancy.
He stopped after a few pages. ‘Like it?’
She nodded, ‘Very much.’
‘Good,’ he beamed, ‘Because this is the moment at which - according to the stories they told me when I was a mere novice - the ladies are supposed to fall before my feet, murmur genius, and raise their hands to the height of my phallic power.’
‘I’m not the falling at feet kind.’
‘No?’ he glanced at her with overblown exasperation only to wink comically. ‘Give us a little kiss in any case then,’ he stretched his hand out to her and pulled her close.
Their eyes were on a level and he looked into hers intently as he stroked her hair back from her face, ‘You’re a very fine woman, my angel of mercy.’ He kissed her lightly, tasting her lips, nibbling, as if the banter of conversation could now continue in a different mode. Then he let her go, smiled, refilled their glasses.
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