A Necessary Action

by Per Wahlöö

  They spoke very little to each other and then only of the present, never of the past or any possible future.

  She was happy and lively and was never irritable. Neither did she ever raise her voice, but once she had wept, quite without cause.

  She came from Königsberg.

  This was more or less what he knew of Barbara Heinemann.

  Otherwise he knew very little.

  The most ridiculous thing of all was that he did not know whether she was dead or alive.

  The evacuation came more quickly than had been expected. It was carried out in haste and confusion, after a stream of orders and counter-orders. Much was hurriedly planned and did not go well. The grey liner which had been the quarters of the Submarine School was torpedoed at the height of Stolpmünde, keeled over and sank with more than five thousand people on board. Exactly how many, no one knew. There were nearly four hundred Women’s Naval Auxiliaries on board, their quarters in the bowels of the ship. One of the torpedoes landed there and all of the girls but two were killed, the others trapped when the watertight doors were closed, drowned like mice in a sealed tin. The name Barbara Heinemann was not on the passenger list, but that was nothing to go by. On the other hand, she had been on special duties on some staff and might well have been put on another ship. Most of these got through, as did the old liner Willi Mohr ended up on. But two others were sunk.

  Though most got through.

  And tens of thousands of people were left ashore.

  It was an insoluble equation.

  And he had not done very much to solve it. At first he had had no opportunity, then he had not devoted sufficient energy to the task, and as time went by it grew too late.

  When he ever thought about the matter, he preferred to think of her trapped behind the hydraulic steel doors, deep down in the great passenger liner, which had turned over and sunk into the ice-cold water. Even if this alternative was not really the most believable. Or was it after all the most logical?

  He did not know, and in time, forgot. Most of it, but not all.

  Nothing more ever happened to him, he met no one else, and when he made casual acquaintances, nothing much ever came of most of them. He had long ago got used to this being the case. If there were a brothel in the vicinity, he perhaps went there, but he usually did not bother.

  And yet he had had Barbara Heinemann with him for ten years. It was her hands and shoulders which haunted him when he was tired and defenceless and could not stop dreaming. But most of all, it was his memories of her physical attitudes which he turned to when he occasionally thought of sex. She was also the one who was his free-pass when it came to that kind of sense of inferiority. No one could possibly possess another person so fundamentally as he had possessed her.

  At least, not physically.

  For a short time, perhaps six months, she had been thrust aside for someone else, a woman who used to come padding bare-footed through his room very early in the morning, when she thought he was asleep. She used to be wearing a dressing-gown, but once he had seen her naked, her body covered with small pearls of glass in the trailing pale beam of a lighthouse. He had resisted her as long as she had been there, but gave way after she had gone.

  A short while ago. Barbara Heinemann had returned, with her bowed head and loosely hanging arms, and now it already seemed that she had never been away.

  Barbara was also the only person who had been able to touch him while he was asleep without the usual consequences. Several times when she had woken first or he had fallen asleep from exhaustion before her, she had woken him. She never said anything on these occasions, but just caressed him awake with her hands.

  Ever since he was very young, he had always disliked people surprising him in his sleep, and he detested anyone touching him. During the early days in the house in Barrio Son Jofre, he had even found it difficult to get used to the cat, which used to creep in under his blanket when it was cold.

  10

  Willi Mohr felt a hand on his shoulder and opened his eyes. He had been dreaming about something, deeply and vaguely, and when he felt the hand, he knew whom he had been dreaming about. It was a large, sunburnt hand, with broad curved nails and a signet ring with a reddish stone in it. A man in a green uniform was leaning over him, shaking him slowly, the middle-aged civil guard with a heavy, sleepy face and a stubby grey moustache. He was holding his carbine in his left hand with the butt on the floor. Willi Mohr violently threw off his hand and sat up.

  ‘You didn’t hear when I knocked,’ the man said apologetically.

  Willi Mohr shook his head and looked at his watch. It was a quarter-past eight. The morning sun was shining outside the open door. Two hours had gone by since he had come home from the previous interrogation.

  ‘Come,’ said the civil guard, slinging on his carbine, ‘let’s go.’

  11

  They walked down the steep crooked alleyway and turned right on to the main road. Then they passed the fork in the road, continued along the Avenida Generalissimo Franco and crossed the square with its pump and three cafés. Willi Mohr, as usual, strode along, light and energetic; it was he who decided the tempo, and the civil guard with a stubby moustache walked on his left, half a stride behind him. Although his rest had been short and uneasy, he did not feel sleepy or thick-headed, and in the clear white sunlight he noticed details along the road with an almost unnatural clarity. He had stopped reflecting, and his movements and actions were mechanical, exactly as if he were following a well-rehearsed schedule. At the Café Central, he stopped and asked the same question as before, the guard shrugged his shoulders and leant his carbine against the edge of the table. They drank their vermouth and walked on, and in some way everything was as it should be. He was on his way to Sergeant Tornilla and they would sit opposite each other in the little windowless room with its portrait and filing-cabinet and green lampshade, and he would be very tired and thirsty and suddenly would be given water and everything would come to an end, so that he could go home and sleep. It was also part of the scene that it was the man with the grey moustache who had come to fetch him, not any other of the civil guards, the small one with the round face, for instance. Just before they got to the straight gravelled road between the olive trees, a fat, shabby woman appeared in a doorway and tugged at the civil guard’s sleeve, his wife presumably, and she embarrassed and worried him. Then he made a sign to the arrested man and followed the woman into the house. This was not part of the schedule, and as a result was a cause of irritation. Willi Mohr felt badly treated and shifted his feet as he stood out on the street listening to the excited voices inside. A small child with a dirty face in a short yellowish garment was standing in the doorway staring at him. After a while, the civil guard came back, lifted up the child, patted its bare backside and gave it a smacking kiss on the cheek. This seemed to cheer him up, for as they walked on, he smiled and said apologetically: ‘Women …’

  The guard-post seemed quiet and peaceful and the striped flag hung immobile in the still air. Willi Mohr looked at his watch and noted that fifty-five minutes had gone by since they had left the house in Barrio Son Jofre. The guard tapped lightly with his knuckles on the door of the interrogation room. Then he opened it slightly, peered in and at once shut it again. He pointed at a narrow wooden bench in the porch and said: ‘Wait.’

  Then he went farther in, opened a side-door and was gone. Willi Mohr sat with his elbows on his knees and waited. He had nothing against waiting and also found a certain pleasure in the fact that he seemed to be the first at the meeting-place. It strengthened his self-confidence and in some way gave him a better starting-point. His brain was functioning a little better now, but he could not draw any lines of direction for the coming conversation or even concentrate on the present or the near future. If he was thinking at all, it was only of an irregular and capricious series of pictures and tableaux. He sat leaning forward, staring down at the smooth concrete, thinking about the stone floor in the house in Barrio Son Jo
fre, and then of the spanner he had clutched in his hand two days ago as Santiago Alemany had stood leaning over the engine of the lorry, his head bare, only a foot or so away from him. When he had got that far, he tried to begin from the beginning again and reconstruct the chain of associations. He could not remember all the links, but anyhow most of them. He had thought about floors in general and then about the metal plates in his quarters in Gotenhafen and the varnished boards in the attic room and about Barbara Heinemann’s feet and pink heels and what they felt like in his hands, and then about another woman and her left breast which had lain in his hand like a small frightened animal, and about a kitten which he had once held when he was small, and the puppy with the black spot over its eye, and the sound when the other puppy, the near-black one, hit the rock wall, and about a man in blue trousers and a black jersey on all fours in front of him, whining and whimpering, trying to creep under a narrow screwed-down table, and about a system of concentric circles in the water, and—the smooth brown curl in Santiago Alemany’s hair, and then he was there. The last part of the chain made him feel so ill that he felt sick and his forehead grew hot. He shook his head roughly, and turned to look at what was going on round him. Which was practically nothing. A telephone had rung twice inside the building and someone must have answered it at once, because each time there was only one signal. A thin pig, evidently belonging to the guard-post, walked past outside the entrance, sniffing with its long black snout along the ground. From the military camp on the other side of the town a few scattered shots could be heard, then a donkey braying and far away there was the rumble of an explosion, presumably from the road works.

  Exactly half an hour had gone by when the civil guard with the grey moustache came out into the porch, bareheaded and with his jacket unbuttoned. He grasped Willi Mohr’s arm, lightly and in a friendly way, and led him the few steps across the porch, opened the door without knocking and pushed him into the interrogation-room.

  Willi stood inside the doorway.

  The door was closed at once and the guard’s footsteps faded away.

  The ceiling light was on and under the green glass shade a coil of grey cigarette smoke was just spreading out and dissolving.

  In the circle of light below sat Sergeant Tornilla writing.

  He had been there all the time.

  He put down his pen, rose and held out his hand. Willi Mohr took it apathetically and thought: You can tell him everything except one thing. One single thing. One single thing.

  Sergeant Tornilla pointed to the bench, but did not repeat all the old phrases, making something of this, as if wishing to emphasize that even a very small joke is spoilt if you use it once too often.

  His uniform looked more perfect and newly-pressed than ever. His white shirt-collar was fresh and he must have shaved at the most an hour ago. He politely continued to stand until the other man had sat down, and then he drew the armchair up, sat down behind the desk, pressed his fingertips together and slowly shook his head.

  ‘You should have taken my advice,’ he said with a sorrowful smile. ‘You should have stayed here at the post. It would have saved a lot of valuable time.’

  Willi Mohr said nothing.

  ‘Excuse me saying so, but you really ought to have washed and changed. And shaved. You’ve eaten, I hope?’

  ‘You’re much too thoughtful.’

  ‘Not at all. On the contrary, it is my fault that you are in this state. I should have made the position clear earlier, and been more definite about you staying here. I can’t think what I was thinking about.’

  He sighed reproachfully and frowned.

  ‘But you’ve slept, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s something.’

  Willi Mohr sat waiting for a cigarette, but he was not given one.

  He could see a corner of the green packet of Bisontes lying in its place behind the telephone. He was so used to being offered cigarettes that quite a long time went by before he thought about using his own. He had a box of Ideales in his pocket but as usual no matches. When he thought about it, he remembered putting them down beside the candle a few hours earlier, as he always used to do before going to bed.

  ‘Could I have a light?’

  ‘Soon,’ said Sergeant Tornilla.

  He smiled, but made no move towards getting out his lighter.

  Instead he went on looking at Willi Mohr, who was waiting with the unlit cigarette between his lips. The only sound in the room was that of flies buzzing round the light and the small dry blows of them hitting the green glass shade.

  A minute went by, perhaps two. The smile slowly died away from Sergeant Tornilla’s mouth and the next time he spoke, his voice was clear and business-like.

  ‘So you left Spain on the second of April on board the yacht Monsoon together with Colonel and Mrs Thorpe and Ramon Alemany?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To sail to Corsica?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you go straight there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You went into another port on the way?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was it called?’

  ‘Port Vendres.’

  ‘Quite right. Port Vendres in France, just north of the border. Why did Colonel Thorpe go into this port?’

  ‘He wanted some spare parts, which he couldn’t get here.’

  ‘You didn’t know you were going to visit this port before you sailed from here, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So it was a surprise for you when Colonel Thorpe did not sail directly to Corsica?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you go ashore in Port Vendres?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Together with Ramon Alemany?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you go ashore for?’

  ‘Nothing special.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. Went into a bar, looked around.’

  ‘Did you go on board any other boat in the harbour?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who did you go to see?’

  ‘No one at all.’

  ‘Were you together the whole time?’

  ‘Yes, more or less all the time.’

  ‘What do you mean by more or less?’

  ‘Ramon Alemany went away for a while, while I was sitting at a bar.’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘A hour perhaps.’

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘He went to see a woman, he said afterwards.’

  ‘What did he say before he went?’

  ‘Nothing. He just vanished and was away for a while.’

  ‘Have you any reason to believe that he was not telling the truth?’

  ‘No, none at all.’

  ‘Was Ramon Alemany interested in women?’

  Willi Mohr took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and rolled it between his fingers.

  ‘Did you hear my question? Was Ramon Alemany interested in women?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He often talked about women.’

  ‘And you then? Weren’t you interested?’

  ‘Not in the same way.’

  ‘How could you sit for hours at a bar without any money?’

  ‘I only drank a glass of mineral water.’

  ‘Was that all you did? In Port Vendres? Drank mineral water?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, and then you went to Corsica?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you have good weather for the trip?’

  ‘Almost too good. We were becalmed and we had to use the auxiliary engine all the way. The Englishman was very dissatisfied.’

  ‘As he was with you?’

  ‘Yes, but this was meanness.’

  ‘And then you got to Ajaccio. How many days were you there?’

  ‘Six or seven, while I w
as on board.’

  ‘And during that time, Ramon Alemany disappeared.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which day?’

  ‘Twenty-first of May.’

  ‘How do you know it was that day exactly?’

  ‘I simply remember what the date was, that’s all.’

  ‘I meant this: it was discovered that he was not on board on the morning of the twenty-second. How did you know that he left the day before and not on the morning of the same day that he was missed?’

  Willi Mohr squeezed his cigarette out between his fingers. He said nothing and stared sullenly and defiantly across the desk.

  ‘You knew his plans of course, didn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  He had been preparing himself for so long for this part of the interrogation that Tornilla’s next question was an anti-climax

  ‘Do you think you were badly treated on board?’

  ‘No, it was all right.’

  ‘Did you get good food?’

  ‘Relatively.’

  ‘Where were your quarters on board?’

  ‘In the fo’c’sle.’

  ‘Together with Ramon Alemany?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was it like in this fo’c’sle?’

  ‘It was a small triangular space below deck with room for a table and two bunks.’

  ‘So it was very cramped there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were the bunks opposite one another?’

  Willi Mohr hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Strange,’ said Sergeant Tornilla.

  He stretched out his hand, took a file from the filing-cabinet, opened it and pushed a paper across the desk.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘Read it out aloud.’

  It was another typed page with a reference number in the top right hand corner. The text was quite short. Willi Mohr cleared his throat and read:

  ‘As requested I have today inspected certain parts on board the pleasure yacht Monsoon, the property of British citizen Colonel Archibald Thorpe, which has been here since 15th August this year. The space where the crew (two in number) had their quarters lies below deck in the front part of the boat. The floor is triangular and measures nine square feet and is partly taken up with a fixed table, three feet long and two feet wide, and two moveable stools. The bunks (two in number) are contained in alcoves, round at both ends, and placed one above the other along the side of the room on the boat’s left side. The exit consists of a hatch in the ceiling up to which there is a ladder which is screwed to the floor about a foot away from the bunks’ head-end (the space narrows towards the foot-end). To get out you have to climb past the upper bunk at the head-end. On the question of which of the two members of the crew had used which bunk, Colonel Thorpe says that he has no idea and that he never visited the space in question except possibly to shout down the hatch. Colonel Thorpe’s wife, Senora Clementine Thorpe, says however that she knows that the man Mohr (German) used the top bunk and the man Alemany (Spanish) used the lower one, and she is certain as she inspected the place several times in the men’s absence. She adds that it was always kept clean while Mohr and Alemany were on board. Police Post. Puerto de Soller, Majorca, Baleares, 15th September. Signed Juan … I can’t make out the signature.’