by Håkan Nesser
‘Good,’ said deBries. ‘I’d thought of proposing that myself. I haven’t had any time off since Easter.’
He left together with Bollmert. Reinhart sat in silence, staring at the cassettes which would never be listened to. Not by him, or by anybody else.
‘All that work,’ he muttered, and glared at Moreno. ‘All that blasted work and all that wasted time. If you can answer one question for me, I’ll put a good word in for you to Heller and suggest he gives you a winter holiday.’
‘Shoot,’ said Moreno.
‘What did Keller do to Clausen last Thursday evening? What the hell went on?’
‘I need some time to think about that,’ said Moreno.
‘You can have all afternoon,’ said Reinhart. ‘Go and sit in your office and watch the snow. It makes thinking easier.’
Van Veeteren took out a newly rolled cigarette and lit it.
‘So you know who did it?’ he said.
Reinhart nodded.
‘Yes, I think we’ve found the right man. It’s not a pleasant story, but then it never is. It all started with an accident, more or less. This Pieter Clausen is driving along a dark road at night, hits a young boy and kills him. He drives off, but doesn’t know he’s been seen. He might have stopped to check what happened, that seems likely. He’s on his way home to Boorkhejm, and so is a certain Aron Keller — probably on his scooter. It’s foul weather, heavy rain and strong winds, but he recognizes Clausen. They are near neighbours. Keller decides he’s going to make some money out of what he’s seen… We’re dealing with a very nasty piece of work, I think I can promise you that.’
‘Blackmailers are rarely nice chaps,’ said Van Veeteren.
‘Too right,’ said Reinhart. ‘Anyway, he sends your son out to Dikken that Tuesday to collect the money. I don’t know if you are acquainted with Keller, but he was the probation officer in charge of Erich for a few years… It’s not even clear that Erich was going to be paid for what he did. Keller might well have had some kind of hold on him. Clausen doesn’t know who the blackmailer is, he already has one death on his conscience, and doesn’t want to find himself constantly under threat. He kills Erich, thinking he’s killed the blackmailer.’
He paused. After five seconds which seemed like five years to Reinhart, Van Veeteren nodded and indicated he should continue.
‘Then we have the murder of Vera Miller. Do you want to hear about that as well?’
‘Of course.’
‘I don’t know why Clausen kills her, but it must have something to do with Keller and Erich. Clausen and Vera Miller were having an affair, they’d only started shortly beforehand. Anyway, we were finally beginning to understand what it was all about. You put us onto the blackmail motive, and Aron Keller. The annoying thing is that we were so late in catching on. Something must have happened on Thursday or Friday last week — presumably it was time for Clausen to pay up once and for all. He’d had a loan granted by the Spaarkasse. Withdrew two hundred and twenty thousand in cash — and then he disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘We know what that could imply,’ said Reinhart curtly. ‘It’s not too difficult to guess what might have happened. Aron Keller flew to New York last Saturday. He’s no longer in the hotel where he checked in — we’ve exchanged a few faxes with them. We don’t know where Pieter Clausen is. There’s no trace of him, but it doesn’t look as if he’s done a runner as well. His passport and even his wallet are still in his house. I have only one theory, and that is that… well, that Keller has done him in. Killed him and buried him somewhere. Unfortunately. I’m afraid… I’m afraid you might never come face to face with your son’s murderer.’
Van Veeteren took a swig of beer and looked out of the window. Half a minute passed.
‘What we can hope for is that we find his body in due course,’ said Reinhart, and wondered immediately why he had said that. As if that would be some kind of consolation.
Making contact with the body of the man who has killed your son? Absurd. Macabre.
Van Veeteren said nothing. Reinhart studied his own hands, and searched in vain for something to say.
‘I have a photo of him,’ he said in the end. ‘So you can take a look at him, if you’d like to. And Keller as well, come to that.’
He took two photocopies out of his briefcase and handed them over. The Chief Inspector looked at them for a few moments, frowning, then handed them back.
‘Why would Keller have killed him?’ he asked.
Reinhart shrugged.
‘I don’t know. He must have got the money, otherwise he would hardly have been able to slope off to New York. That’s what I reckon, at least. You can indulge in a bit of speculation, of course. Maybe Clausen discovered his identity somehow or other. Keller is a very odd customer… And he knew that Clausen wouldn’t hesitate to kill. So he played it safe, as simple as that. If Clausen knew who the blackmailer was, Keller must have realized that he was living dangerously.’
Van Veeteren closed his eyes and nodded vaguely. Another half a minute of silence passed. Reinhart abandoned his awkward efforts to find something positive to say, and instead tried to imagine how The Chief Inspector must be feeling. Naturally enough he had been doing that all the time, more or less; but it wasn’t any easier now that he started concentrating on it. Having his son murdered, that was bad enough; and then the murderer being swept out of the way by another evildoer, who in a way was just as guilty of Erich’s death as the man who had actually killed him. Or was that not an acceptable way of looking at it? Did it matter? Did such considerations have any significance when it was your son at the heart of the matter?
He didn’t find an answer. Didn’t come anywhere near finding an answer.
Whatever, no matter how you looked at it, Erich Van Veeteren had been no more than a pawn in a game that had nothing to do with him. What a pointless way to die, Reinhart thought. A completely wasted victim. The only one who could have conceivably benefited from his death was Keller, who presumably raised the price for his black arts once Clausen had another death on his conscience.
What a bloody mess, Reinhart thought for the fiftieth time that day. The choreographer of the nether regions had struck again.
‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Van Veeteren.
‘We’ve issued a Wanted notice in the USA for Keller,’ said Reinhart. ‘Of course. Maybe one of us will have to go over there sooner or late… But it’s a big country. And he’s got enough money to see him through for quite a while.’
Van Veeteren sat up straight and looked out of the window again.
‘It’s snowing hard now,’ he said. ‘Anyway, many thanks. You’ve done all you could. Maybe we can keep in touch — I’d like to know how things go.’
‘Of course,’ said Reinhart.
When he left The Chief Inspector alone at the table, he felt like crying for the first time in twenty years.
35
He spent Wednesday evening and half of Thursday in an old Art Nouveau-style mansion in the Deijkstraat district. Krantze had bought the whole of a private library on the owner’s death: in round figures there were four-and-a-half thousand volumes to be examined, assessed and packed into crates. As usual there were three categories to be considered: books that would be hard to sell and of doubtful value (to be sold off by the kilo); books worthy of a place on the shelves of the antiquarian bookshop that would no doubt find a buyer in due course (no more than two to three hundred in view of available shelf space); and books he would love to see in his own bookcase (five at most — over time he had learned to transform moral questions into unambiguous numbers).
It was no unpleasant task, wandering around this old bourgeois mansion (the family had been lawyers and appeal judges for several generations, if he had read the genealogy correctly), thumbing through old books. He could take as long as he needed — the hereditary gout that now afflicted Krantze prevented him from doing work that could not be carried out while sitting do
wn. Or lying down. Naturally he had first established that there were no scientific tracts from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in the collection, the narrow field that, in the autumn of his life, had become his real passion (and his only one, Van Veeteren had unfortunately been forced to conclude).
When his Wednesday work was finished, he ate a solitary, lugubrious dinner, watched an old De Sica film on Channel 4, and read for a few hours. For the first time since Erich’s death he found that he was able to concentrate on such matters. He didn’t know if it had to do with the latest conversation with Reinhart. Maybe, maybe not. And in that case, why? Before he fell asleep he lay for a long time, recapitulating the grim series of events that had led to the murder of his son. And to that nurse suffering the same fate.
He tried to conjure up the murderer. Noted that he hadn’t in fact been the motor driving the whole business. Rather, he seemed to have been dragged into a situation, an increasingly intense and infernal dilemma that he had tried to solve with every means available to him. He had killed and killed and killed with a sort of desperate, perverted logic.
And nevertheless, in the end, become the victim himself.
No, Reinhart was right. It was not a pleasant story.
That night he dreamt about two things.
Firstly about a visit he’d paid to Erich when he was in prison. It wasn’t an especially eventful dream: he simply sat in Erich’s cell, and Erich lay on the bed. A warder came in with a tray. They drank coffee and ate some kind of soft biscuit without speaking to each other — it was in fact a memory rather than a dream. A memory which perhaps had nothing more to say than what it portrayed: a father visiting his son in prison. An archetype.
He also dreamt about G. About the G file, the only case he had failed to solve over all his years as a police officer. Nothing actually happened in this dream either. G sat in the dock during his trial, wearing his black suit, and gazed at Van Veeteren from the depths of his dark eyes. There was a sardonic smile on his lips. The prosecuting counsel walked back and forth, firing questions at him, but G didn’t answer, simply sat there looking at Van Veeteren in the public gallery with that characteristic mixture of contempt and mockery.
He felt much greater distaste at this short dream sequence, but when he woke up he couldn’t even recall in which order he had dreamt them. Which one had come first. As he ate his breakfast he wondered if they could have somehow been merged into each other, as if in a film — Erich in prison and G in the courtroom — and in that case what the message of such a parallel dream might be.
He didn’t find an answer, perhaps because he didn’t want to. Perhaps because there wasn’t one.
When he had finished packing on the Thursday afternoon, and marked all the boxes, he took his own carrier bag of books to his car, drove to the swimming baths and spent a couple of hours there before returning home to Klagenburg at about six o’clock. There were two messages on the telephone answering machine he had been given as a present by Ulrike. One was from her: she intended visiting him on Friday with a bottle of wine and some morel pate, she announced, and wondered if he could use his own initiative to buy a few small gherkins and whatever other accessories he felt would be appropriate.
The other message was from Mahler, who explained that he intended to set up the chess pieces down at the Society at about nine p.m.
At that moment The Chief Inspector was inclined to give the inventor of the telephone answering machine — whoever that might be — half an acknowledgement.
It was raining when he emerged into the street, but it was pleasantly warm and he took the route through the cemetery as he had planned. The first week after Erich’s funeral he had been there every day, preferably in the evening when darkness had wrapped its comforting blanket around the graves. Now it was three days since the last time. As he approached the spot he slowed down as a sort of sign of respect — it happened without his thinking about it: an automatic, instinctive bodily reaction, it seemed. The open area was deserted at this time of day, gravestones and memorials stood up like even blacker silhouettes in the surrounding darkness. All that could be heard were his own footsteps on the gravel, pigeons cooing, cars accelerating a long way away in another world. He came to the grave. Stood listening, as usual, his hands dug deep into his overcoat pockets. If there was any ever-so-faint message or sign to be perceived at this time of day, it would be a sound: he knew that.
The dead are older than the living, he thought. Irrespective of how old they were when they passed over to the other side, they have experienced something which makes them older than any living thing.
Even a child. Even a son.
In the darkness he was unable to read the little memorial placard that had been installed temporarily until the stone ordered by Renate was in place. He found himself wishing he could read it: he would have liked to see the name and the date, and he made up his mind to visit the grave in daylight the next time.
The rain stopped as he stood there, and after ten minutes he continued on his way.
Left his son for now with the words Sleep well, Erich on his lips.
If possible I’ll come to you in due course.
The Society’s premises in Styckargrand were packed. But Mahler had arrived early and secured one of their usual booths with Durer prints and wrought-iron candelabra. He was sitting there, stroking his beard and writing in a black notebook when Van Veeteren turned up.
‘New poems,’ he explained, closing the book. ‘Or rather, old ones using new words. My language ceased to transcend my brain thirty years ago — besides, I don’t even know what transcend means any longer… And how are you keeping?’
‘KBO,’ said Van Veeteren, easing himself into the booth. ‘Keep buggering on. I sometimes have the impression that I’ll survive all this.’
Mahler nodded and took a cigar out of the breast pocket of his waistcoat.
‘That’s our lot,’ he said. ‘Those the gods hate are made to keep buggering on longest. Ready?’
Van Veeteren nodded, and Mahler started setting up the pieces.
The first game lasted fifty moves, sixty-five minutes and three beers. Van Veeteren accepted a draw, despite the fact that he had one extra pawn, because it was stranded on an outside file.
‘That son of yours,’ said Mahler after stroking his beard for a while. ‘Have they caught the bastard who did it?’
Van Veeteren emptied his glass before answering.
‘Apparently,’ he said. ‘Although it seems as if Nemesis has already put his oar in.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘He seems to be buried somewhere, according to what I’ve heard. It was a blackmailing lark. Erich was just a pawn in the game… No dirty hands in any case, not this time. Oddly enough that consoles me a bit. But I’d have liked to be able to look that doctor in the eye.’
‘Doctor?’ said Mahler.
‘Yes. Their function is to keep people alive, but this one chose a different line. Slaughtered them instead. I’ll tell you the whole story — but some other time, if you don’t mind. I need to put some distance between me and it first.’
Mahler sat and thought things over for a while, then excused himself and went to the loo. Van Veeteren took the opportunity of rolling five cigarettes while he was away. That corresponded to his prescribed daily consumption: but it had gone up a bit during the last month.
What the hell? Five cigarettes or ten? So what?
Mahler returned, carrying new beers.
‘I have a suggestion,’ he said. ‘Let’s do a Fischer.’
‘A Fischer?’ said Van Veeteren. ‘What are you on about?’
‘Come on, you know — the BIG genius’s final contribution to the game of chess: you set up the back line purely by chance… The same at both ends, of course. Then you avoid those bloody silly analyses right through to the twentieth move. The only must is that the king has to be between the rooks.’
‘I’ve heard about that,’ said Van V
eeteren. ‘I’ve read about it. I’ve even studied a game played on that basis — it seemed barmy. It never occurred to me that I’d have to play a game like that… Do you really analyse everything as far ahead as the twentieth move?’
‘Always,’ said Mahler. ‘Well?’
‘If you insist,’ said Van Veeteren.
‘I do insist,’ said Mahler. ‘Cheers.’
He closed his eyes and dug into the box.
‘File?’
‘C,’ said Van Veeteren.
Mahler placed his white rook on c1.
‘Good Lord,’ said Van Veeteren, staring at it.
They continued with the whole back line: only one of the bishops landed in its right place. The kings were on the e file, the queens on g.
‘Fascinating to see the knight in the corner,’ said Mahler. ‘Shall we begin?’
He skipped his usual long session of introductory concentration, and played e2 to e3.
Van Veeteren rested his head on his hands, and stared at the board. Sat there for two minutes without moving a muscle. Then he slammed his fist down on the table and stood up.
‘Bloody hell! I’ll be damned if… Excuse me a moment.’
He wriggled his way out of the booth.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ said Mahler, but he received no answer. The Chief Inspector had already elbowed his way to the telephone in the foyer.
The conversation with Reinhart took almost twenty minutes, and when he came back Mahler had already taken out his notebook again.
‘Sonnets,’ he explained, contemplating his cigar that had gone out. ‘Words and form! We have a totally clear view of the world when we’re fourteen years old, maybe sooner. But then we need another fifty years in order to create a language that can express those impressions. And in the mean time, of course, they’ve faded away… What the hell got into you?’
‘Please excuse me,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘You sometimes get a flash of inspiration even in the autumn of your life. It must have been this daft set-up that sparked it off.’