The apartment consisted of two small rooms, a kitchenette and a minuscule bathroom. An old man lay resting on a bed.
“I don’t even know your name,” Wallander said, accepting the coat-hanger she held out for him.
“Vera,” she said. “You’re called Wallander.”
She said his surname as though it had been his first name, and it occurred to him that he barely knew what to call himself at the moment. The old man on the bed sat up, but when he was about to stand up with the aid of his walking stick and shake hands, Wallander protested. That wasn’t necessary, he didn’t want to cause any inconvenience. Vera produced some bread and cold meat in the little kitchen, and he protested again: what he was looking for was somewhere to hide, not a restaurant. He felt embarrassed at having to ask her to help him out like this, and guilty about the fact that his own apartment in Mariagatan was three times the size of the space she had at her disposal. She showed him the other room where most of the space was taken up by a large bed.
“Close the door if you want some peace,” she said. “You can rest here. I’ll try to get back from the hotel as soon as I can.”
“I don’t want to put you in any danger,” he said.
“When something is necessary, it has to be done,” she said. “I’m glad you came to me.”
Then she left. Wallander slumped down on the edge of the bed. He’d gotten this far. Now all he needed to do was to wait for Baiba Liepa.
Vera got back from the hotel just before 5 p.m. By then Wallander had had tea with her two children, Sabine aged twelve and her elder sister Ieva, 14. He had learned some Latvian words, they had giggled at his hopeless rendition of “This little piggy went to market,” and Vera’s father had even sung an old soldier’s ballad for them in a shaky voice. Wallander had managed to forget his mission and the image of Inese shot through the eye and the brutal massacre. He had discovered that normal life existed away from the clutches of the colonels, and that was precisely the world Major Liepa had been defending. People were meeting in remote hunting lodges and warehouses for the sake of Sabine and Ieva and Vera’s ancient father.
When Vera got back she hugged her daughters, then shut herself in her bedroom with Wallander. They were sitting on her bed, and the situation suddenly seemed to embarrass her. He touched her arm in an effort to express his gratitude for what she had done, but she misunderstood the gesture and pulled away. He realized it would be a waste of time trying to explain, and instead asked whether she had managed to contact Baiba Liepa.
“Baiba is crying,” she said. “She is mourning her friends. Most of all she is crying for Inese. She had warned them the police had stepped up their activities, and pleaded with them to be careful. Even so, what she most dreaded came to pass. Baiba is crying, but she is also possessed by fury, just like me. She wants to meet you tonight, Wallander, and we have a plan for how to proceed. But before we do anything else, we must have something to eat. If we don’t eat, we have as good as given up all hope.”
They managed to fit themselves around a dining table that she folded down from one of the walls in the room where her father had his bed. It seemed to Wallander that it was as if Vera and her family lived in a trailer. In order to make room for everything, meticulous organization was essential, and he wondered how it was possible to live a whole life in such cramped conditions. He thought of the evening he had spent in Colonel Putnis’s mansion outside Riga. It was in order to protect their privileges that one of the colonels had instructed his subordinates to undertake an indiscriminate witch-hunt for people like the major and Inese. Now he could see how great the differences were in their lives. Every transaction between these people left blood on their hands.
The meal consisted of vegetable stew produced by Vera on her tiny stove. The girls set the table with a loaf of coarse bread and beer. Wallander could sense the tremendous tension in Vera, but she succeeded in concealing it from her family. Yet again he asked himself what right he had to expose her to such risks. How would he ever be able to live with himself if anything happened to her?
After the meal the girls cleared the table and did the dishes, while the old man went back to bed to rest.
“What’s your father’s name?” Wallander asked.
“He has a strange name,” Vera told him. “He’s called Antons. He’s 76 years old and has bladder trouble. He’s spent the whole of his life working as a foreman at a printing works. They say old typographers can be affected by some kind of lead poisoning that makes them absentminded and confused. Sometimes he seems to be living in another world. Maybe he’s been affected by the disease.”
They were sitting on the bed in her room again, and she had drawn the door curtain. The girls were whispering and giggling in the tiny kitchen, and he knew the moment had come.
“Do you remember the church where you met Baiba after a concert?” she asked. “St. Gertrude’s?”
He nodded; he remembered.
“Do you think you could find your way back there?”
“Not from here.”
“But from the Latvia Hotel? From the city center?”
“Yes, I could.”
“I can’t go to the center of town with you, it’s too dangerous. But I don’t think anybody suspects you are here in my apartment. You must take the bus back to the city center on your own. Don’t get off at the stop outside the hotel—use the one before or the one after. Find the church and wait until 10 p.m. Do you remember the back gate in the churchyard you used when you left the church that first time?”
Wallander nodded. He thought he remembered it, even if he wasn’t quite sure.
“Go in through that gate when you’re absolutely certain nobody is looking. Wait there. If it’s at all possible, Baiba will come to you.”
“How did you contact her?”
“I phoned her.”
Wallander looked skeptical.
“The telephone must be bugged.”
“Of course it’s bugged. I called her and said the book she’d ordered had arrived. That meant she knew she should go to a certain bookshop and ask for a certain book. I’d left a note there telling her you had arrived and were in my apartment. Some hours later I went to a store where one of Baiba’s neighbors usually shops. There was a note from Baiba saying she’d try to get to the church tonight.”
“But what if she can’t make it?”
“Then I can’t help you any more. You can’t come back here either.”
Wallander could see she was right. This was his only chance of meeting Baiba Liepa again. If it didn’t work, he had no choice but to find his way to the Swedish embassy and get help in fleeing the country.
“Do you know where the Swedish embassy is in Riga?”
She thought for a moment before answering. “I don’t even know if Sweden has an embassy here,” she said.
“There must be a consulate, though?”
“I don’t know where.”
“It must be in the telephone directory. Write down the Latvian for ‘Swedish embassy’ and ‘Swedish consulate.’ There must be a telephone directory in a restaurant. Write the Latvian for ‘telephone directory’ as well.”
She wrote down what he was asking for on a sheet of paper torn out of one of the girl’s exercise books, and taught him the correct pronunciation for the words.
Two hours later he said goodbye to Vera and her family, and set off. She had given him one of her father’s old shirts and a scarf, so that he could change his appearance a bit more. He had no idea if he would ever see them again, and he was already beginning to miss them.
As he walked to the bus stop, he saw the dead cat, lying at his feet like an ominous symbol of what was to come.
When he was on the bus he suddenly had the feeling once again that he was being watched already. There were not many passengers going into town in the evening, and he had sat right at the rear of the bus so that he could see everybody’s back in front of him. He looked now and then through the filthy back window,
but couldn’t see a car following them.
Nevertheless, his instinct made him anxious. He couldn’t shrug off the feeling that they were tailing him. He tried to work out what to do. He had about a quarter of an hour in which to make up his mind. Where should he get off ? How should he go about shaking off the shadows? It seemed an impossible situation, but he suddenly had an idea that was bold enough to have a slight chance of succeeding. He assumed it wasn’t just him they were keeping an eye on. It must be at least as important for them to follow him until he met up with Baiba Liepa, and then to wait for the moment when they could be certain of finding the major’s testimony.
He ignored the instructions given him by Vera, and got off the bus outside the Latvia Hotel. Without looking around, he strode into the hotel, marched up to the reception desk, and asked if they had a room for one or possibly two nights. He spoke clearly in English, and when the receptionist said they did indeed have a room, he produced his German passport and signed himself in as Gottfried Hegel. He explained that his luggage would be arriving later, and then, in as loud a voice as he dared use without giving the impression he was purposely setting a false trail, he asked to be woken up a few minutes before midnight as he was expecting an important telephone call. He hoped this would give him a start of four hours. As he didn’t have any luggage, he accepted the key himself and walked over to the elevator. He had been given a room on the fourth floor, and now it was essential for him to act decisively without any hesitation. He tried to remember from his first visit where the back staircase was, and when he got out of the elevator on the fourth floor he knew immediately where to go. He went down into the gloom of the back staircase and hoped they hadn’t had time to put guards around the whole hotel. He went right down to the basement and found his way to the door that opened out onto the rear of the hotel. Just for a moment he was afraid it might not be possible to open the door without a key, but he was lucky. The key was in the lock. He stepped out into the murky back street, stood absolutely still for couple of seconds and looked around. It was deserted, and he couldn’t hear any hurried footsteps. He kept close to the walls, turned off onto side streets, and didn’t stop running until he was at least three blocks from the hotel. He was out of breath by then and withdrew into a doorway while he got his breath back to see if he was being followed. He tried to imagine how, at this very moment in some other part of the city, Baiba Liepa was also trying to shake off the dogs that one of the colonels had put on her tail. He had no doubt she would succeed, because her tutor had been one of the best, the major himself.
He managed to find his way to St. Gertrude’s church just before 10 p.m. There was no light coming from the church’s enormous windows, and he found a nearby yard where he could wait unseen. Somewhere inside the building he could hear people quarrelling, a long, relentless flood of excited words culminating in a loud noise, a scream and then silence. He stamped his feet in order to keep warm, and tried to remember what date it was. From time to time a car drove past in the street outside, and he half expected one of them to stop and for the passengers to find him hiding among the dustbins.
The feeling that they already knew where he was kept returning, and he wondered if his attempt to break free by registering at the Latvia Hotel had failed. Had he made a mistake in assuming that Vera wasn’t in the pay of the colonels? Perhaps they were waiting for him in the shadows of the churchyard, waiting for the moment when the major’s testimony would be revealed? He pushed the thought away. His only alternative would be to flee to the Swedish embassy, and he knew he couldn’t do that.
The clock in the church tower struck 10 p.m. He emerged from the yard, looked carefully for any sign of life in the street, and hurried over to the little iron gate. Although he opened it extremely carefully, there was a slight squeaking noise. A few street lamps cast a faint glow over the churchyard wall. He stood absolutely still, listening. Not a sound. He cautiously walked along the path to the side door he had used last time to leave the church with Baiba. Once again he had the feeling he was being watched, that his pursuers were somewhere ahead of him, but he continued as far as the church wall, then settled down to wait.
Without a sound, Baiba Liepa appeared by his side, as if she had materialized out of the darkness. He gave a start when he saw her. She whispered something he didn’t catch, then led him quickly through the door that was standing ajar, and he realized she had been inside the church, waiting for him. She locked the door with the enormous key and went over to the altar. It was very dark inside the church, and she led him by the hand as if he were blind, he couldn’t understand how she could find her way through the darkness. Behind the sacristy was a windowless storeroom, and a kerosene lamp was standing on a table. That was where she had been waiting for him, her fur coat was lying over a chair, and he was surprised and touched to note that she had placed a photograph of the major next to the lamp. There was also a thermos flask, some apples and a hunk of bread. It was as if she had invited him to the last supper, and he wondered how long it would be before the colonels tracked them down. He wondered about her relationship with the church, whether she had a god unlike her late husband, and he realized that he knew just as little about her as he once had about her husband.
When they were safely inside the room behind the sacristy, she put her arms around him and hugged him tightly. He could feel she was crying, and that her fury was so great, her hands were like iron claws digging into his back.
“They killed Inese,” she whispered. “They killed all of them. I thought you were dead as well. I thought it was all over, and then Vera contacted me.”
“It was terrible,” Wallander said. “But we mustn’t think about that now.”
She stared at him in astonishment. “We must always think about that,” she said. “If we forget that, we forget we are human.”
“I didn’t mean that we should forget it,” he explained. “I just meant that we have to move on. Mourning prevents us from acting.”
She flopped down onto a chair, and he could see she was haggard from pain and exhaustion. He wondered how much longer she would be able to keep going.
The night they spent in the church became the point in Kurt Wallander’s life when he felt he had penetrated to the very center of his own existence. He had never previously looked at his life from an existential point of view. It was possible that at moments of deep depression—when he had seen the body of someone murdered, a child killed in a traffic accident, or a desperate suicide case—he might have been struck by the thought that life is so very short when death strikes. One lives for such a short time, but will be dead forever. But he had become adept at brushing aside such thoughts. He tried to regard life as mainly a practical business, and he doubted his ability to enrich his existence by adjusting his life in accordance with any particular philosophy. Nor had he ever worried about the particular span of time that fate had ordained he should live. One was born at such and such a time, and one died at such and such a time: that was about as far as he had ever gotten when it came to contemplating his earthly existence. The night he spent with Baiba Liepa in the freezing cold church made him look deeper into himself than he had ever done before. He realized that the world at large bore very little resemblance to Sweden, and that his own problems seemed insignificant compared with the savagery that was characteristic of Baiba Liepa’s life. It was as if it was only now he could accept as fact the massacre in which Inese had died, only now that it became real. The colonels did exist, Sergeant Zids had fired a murderous volley from a real weapon, bullets that could split open hearts and in a fraction of a second create an abandoned universe. He wondered about how intolerable it must be, always to be afraid. The age of fear, he thought: that is my age, and I have never understood that before, even though I am into my middle years.
She said they were safe in the church, as safe as they could ever be. The vicar had been a close friend of Karlis Liepa, and hadn’t hesitated to provide Baiba with a hiding place when she ha
d asked for his help. Wallander told her about his instinctive feeling that they had already tracked him down, and were waiting somewhere in the shadows.
“Why should they wait?” Baiba objected. “For people like that there is no such thing as waiting when it comes to arresting and punishing those who threaten their existence.”
Wallander thought she could well be right. At the same time, he was certain the most important thing was the major’s testimony: what frightened them was the evidence the major had left behind, not a widow and, as far as they were concerned, a harmless Swedish police officer who had set out on his own private vendetta.
Something else occurred to him. It was so astounding that he decided not to say anything about it to Baiba yet. It had suddenly dawned on him that there could be another reason why their shadows had not revealed themselves and simply arrested them and carted them off to the fortified police headquarters. The more he thought about it during the long night in the church, the more plausible it became. But he said nothing, mainly in order not to subject Baiba to any more strain than was absolutely necessary.
He recognized that her despondency was as much due to the fact that she couldn’t understand where Karlis had hidden his testimony as to her shock at the death of Inese and her other friends. She had tried everything she could think of, attempted to put herself inside her husband’s mind, but still she hadn’t found the answer. She had removed tiles in the bathroom and ripped the upholstery off their furniture, but found nothing except dust and the bones of dead mice.
Wallander tried to help her. They sat opposite each other across the table, she poured out tea, and the light from the kerosene lamp transformed the gloomy room into a warm, intimate room. Wallander would have liked most of all to hug her and share her sorrow, and again he considered the possibility of taking her with him to Sweden, but he knew she wouldn’t be able to contemplate that, not yet in any case. She would rather die than abandon hope of finding the testimony her husband must have left behind.
The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery Page 25