“Yes, yes,” Benno said. “Right now?”
“Right now. Then I’ll talk to you.”
“But I don’t know if you can tell me anything at all.”
“Risk.” Her teeth were as white as china and gleamed slightly bluish.
Benno reached for his wallet and took out three one-hundred mark bills, which he had withdrawn in the morning. Walczak put them in her purse.
“Good,” she said, sitting down opposite him. “What do you want?”
“When did you see Irina for the last time?”
“We weren’t friends.”
“But you knew her.”
“We worked together. And then she stopped coming one day. She wasn’t here legally.”
“And you never asked yourself what became of her?”
Walczak shook her head. “It was September. Or maybe October. In 1987.”
“Did she ever mention that she met a man here?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? Who was he?”
A smile crossed Walczak’s face, and Benno could now see the freckles under her makeup. “He was married.”
“Do you know where he came from?”
She shook her head, and a faint smell of hairspray reached Benno. His stomach started to turn. “What did he look like? Did he ever come to the restaurant?”
Walczak nodded. “He was tall, maybe as old as you. Or a little older.”
“Did he come from Lübeck?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think so.”
Benno swallowed. “As I said, my son found Rasmus—Voytek. And . . . I cannot explain everything, but it could be that your friend got into trouble in our village.”
“You live where Irina was found? Do you want to pin anything on me?”
“No, no,” Benno assured her. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”
“For your newspaper?”
“No, not anymore. Just to make sure that nothing is going to happen to my son.”
Ania Walczak seemed to think about this. “No story?”
He shook his head.
She leaned forward, her bangles scraping across the table.
“I think Irina’s friend was a . . . man of the church.”
“A pastor?” Benno sank back in his chair. “Was he tall? A bit bulky? Thin hair?”
She nodded. “Yes, that could have been him. I only saw him once, I think. But he was tall and not thin. Irina liked him.”
“Do you know what kind of car he drove? Maybe his name?”
She shook her head. “He was married. Irina was very discreet.”
Benno sighed. His hands were sweaty, and he wanted nothing more than to lie down, to darken the windows and hide from the world around him.
“Are we done?” Ania Walczak asked.
“Yes, I think so. Thank you,” Benno stammered. “But why didn’t you tell the police? About the affair?”
Walczak grinned. “I’m not here legally. Just like Irina. I don’t want any trouble. It could be that he is coming back. That he might try to kill me.”
“And why did you tell me?”
She shrugged. “You’re not the police.”
Benno nodded. “Can I call you maybe, if I have more questions?”
She nodded, stood up, and smiled.
“Good luck.” Then she added with a straight face, “No story. I read the newspapers.”
“No story,” Benno assured her again. He could hardly look at the bright walls and lights anymore, but he forced himself to watch Irina’s colleague until she had left the cafe. But the only thing he saw in his mind was Pastor Cornelius’ head bandage and his crooked smile.
20
Hanne led him to a worn, green sofa, which stood in the break room of the library.
“Just lie down,” she said. “You look pale. Goes nicely with the couch.”
Benno tried to smile.
“I’ll come back later.”
To keep out the harsh light, he took off his coat and pulled it over his face. Within minutes he was asleep.
On waking, the room was completely dark. He sat up quickly and listened. He could not see the face of his clock. His head was free of pain, but it felt as though all its interior walls had collapsed like aging concrete and been removed by an excavator.
“Finally awake?”
He spun around and saw Hanne sitting in an armchair behind him. At least, he saw her silhouette there. “What time is it?” he asked. “I have to go home.”
“After eight. Do you want to call first?”
“Yes, yes. No, or maybe yes.” He sank back on the sofa. The conversations of the morning and afternoon returned in small shreds, mixed and mingled in his ears until he could hear nothing else. “The pastor . . . he was Irina’s friend. Her lover.”
“Your pastor? The Baptist?”
“Yes,” Benno said in the darkness. He could make out a table and several chairs now, and Hanne’s face and hands seemed slightly brighter than her clothes. “Is everyone gone?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And they think it’s normal that you stay behind with some strange guy?”
“I told them you were my half brother. Terminal disease. Only a few months to live.”
“You did not.”
“Sure did.”
There was a rustling, and a few seconds later, she knelt on the floor beside him. Benno did not resist, lay very still and let Hanne have her way.
A deer jumped out onto the road and froze, getting larger and larger, almost filling the whole windscreen, but before the car came to a stop, it galloped back in the direction from which it had come.
It all felt very new and wrong, as if someone had taken apart the parts of his life and glued them back together at will. The car did not feel like his family’s anymore, but like the car in which he drove to meet his lover. Lübeck no longer meant afternoons in the office, but a jumble of excuses, lies, and bad conscience. Whatever he believed to be reality in Lübeck—that Cornelius had been Irina’s lover, and that Rasmus had belonged to the now dead waitress—appeared laughable in Strathleven. An obscene fantasy.
And Tim? He was a stranger who lived in a village full of strangers, and Carolin had become someone he could barely recognize. Nothing around him seemed recognizable anymore, and when he looked in the rearview mirror, he no longer recognized himself.
What should he do with Walczak’s information? Ask the pastor to confess? In front of his wife and children? Should he go to Gruber, and tell on Cornelius?
First the pastor killed his lover—maybe she had wanted to be more than a lover, maybe she had come to Strathleven to confront him—and then he dragged her into a field and let the children find the body and ask him for help. That he hadn’t wanted to mention the children in the police report seemed obvious now. Not because he wanted to protect them, but because he didn’t want them to testify against him. Even if the children had seen or found something strange, no one would ask.
The dog. Rasmus made no sense. Why had he been in the village for so long? Irina had died last summer, the body had not been decomposed. Yet Rasmus had appeared already the previous winter in Strathleven.
Irina was murdered in the summer. If no one had seen her in Lübeck during the months prior, and Rasmus had been in Strathleven since at least December, there could be a simple explanation.
But what had she done for nine or ten months in Strathleven?
Tim was already in bed, but Carolin was still sitting with a magazine and a glass of wine in the living room. Already in the hall, where it smelled of wet dog, he could feel that their conversation would not be peaceful.
He deserved it. But that made it even harder. Benno put his bag down in the hallway, and hung up his coat. Then he went into the kitchen, took a glass from the cupboard and poured himself some of the cheap red wine. The bottle was half empty.
“Hey,” he said when he finally stepped into the living room.
Carolin sat down
her glass on the table and turned her head in his direction. It seemed to take her a big effort.
“Where were you?”
Benno looked at his clock. It was half past ten. No party in Berlin had begun before ten o’clock. He sat down opposite Carolin and tried a partial truth. He could not even remember which handball or hockey club had played tonight.
“I made some inquiries.”
He could see that she had expected something different, and that she had already devised a strategy for that ‘something different.’ Her answer was delayed.
“And why didn’t you call? I called the newsroom, and they had no idea where you were. Margit told me that you hadn’t even shown up in the office.”
Benno sighed. He should have called the newsroom to establish an alibi.
“They haven’t fired you, right?”
“Margit probably would have told you.”
“And what kind of research did you do?”
“You weren’t at a peace rally. Cornelius’ kids blabbed. You were protesting against abortion. Together with Pastor Thomas.”
Carolin looked at him in silence, seemed to want to say something. Her lips were stained with wine. But eventually she took her half-empty glass, stood up and walked out of the room.
Benno remained in his armchair. What would he tell Carolin? That he had paid a waitress three hundred marks to talk about her dead colleague? That the pastor had maybe killed a woman and stabbed her with knives and forks? That there was a king in the village, but no one wanted to talk about him?
Suddenly he felt a hand on his head and the next moment Carolin said, “I should have told you.”
His initial alarm gave way to tenderness, and he grabbed her hand and pulled Carolin down to him. “It was because of the murder,” he said. “And because people constantly stare at Tim. I was worried.”
“Because of the murder? What in the world does that have to do with us?” She sat down on his lap, pressed herself against him.
“I don’t know yet,” he said, “but . . .” He broke off. Could he tell Carolin about Rasmus? Of his suspicions against the pastor? “But I wasn’t even mentioned in the police report. They messed up everything.”
“Who cares if you’re in the police report?” It was not an accusation, but astonishment. “Her killer is long gone. Does it still upset you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell you anything, because, because . . .”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I don’t trust the police. And I don’t want to drag Tim into this.”
Carolin stared at him. “Then simply stop it. You can’t undo the murder.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and then said incoherently, “Manfred jerked off on our car. The old one, the Beetle.”
“What?” She punched his shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugged, and warmed himself in her sudden attention. How long this moment would last, he didn’t know, but he felt so guilty that he completely devoted himself to it.
“Did he do it on Heintz’ car too?”
“I think he doesn’t like Fords.”
His affair with Hanne made this moment even sweeter, because he had not earned it, would never be able to earn it again. And the affair wasn’t over yet; two hours ago, Hanne had opened his zipper. He was guilty, and that guilt made him suspicious of Carolin, yet it also made him fall in love with her again. What had happened in Lauenburg? His own escapade made Carolin’s lies and omissions look more serious, made her unfaithfulness seem likely. What if she had fallen back into old patterns? If she was looking for love and encouragement in men’s restrooms and in the rear seats of cars? The more this uncertainty plagued him, the more he loved Carolin, the tighter he held her. “Maybe we should move away from Strathleven,” he whispered. “We can go anywhere.”
“Where to?” She nibbled gently on his ear.
“No idea. To Lake Constance, Munich or Wiesbaden.”
“Not a city.”
“Hinteruppermeadowharborarbor.”
“I’d love to go to Hinteruppermeadowharborarbor,” she purred. “But we already live there. I like it here.”
“Me too,” he said. “But the people here are so strange.”
“I think it’s beautiful here. Tim likes it too.”
“That’s what worries me.”
She pulled away from him, looked at him with slightly narrowed eyes. “It worries you that my son has settled in here?”
“No, no.” He tried to laugh and could feel Carolin’s body stiffen.
“But the crown. They bring him gifts, stare at him strangely.”
“That scared me too, but they probably just think that he’s something special. And it’s nice for him not to be viewed as sick.”
Benno sighed. She was right, Tim enjoyed the attention. But he also ran through the streets with a dead woman’s dog, and the pastor had known and killed Rasmus’ owner.
He didn’t want to destroy the peace, but he could no longer hold back. He grabbed his bag and pulled out the photo of Irina and Rasmus. “Look,” he said, and handed it to Carolin.
She looked at it closely. “Who is that?”
“The woman I found last summer. Look at the dog. I only discovered the photo this week.”
Carolin held it close to her face. “Looks like Rasmus. Is that what you mean?”
“I’m certain it’s Rasmus.”
Carolin looked very serious for a moment, then she laughed uproariously. “Is that why you’re so strange? Because Rasmus looks like this dog? He is a mutt, thousands of dogs look like him. And his eye doesn’t even look black.”
“But Rasmus was here in the village. He was probably shot here.” Benno could not longer hide his agitation. “I found the dead woman. We have her dog. He was called Voytek.”
“How do you know that?”
Benno noticed that he had made a mistake, but it was too late to keep his meeting with Ania Walczak secret. “I spoke with her former colleague.”
“Why? You’re not the police.”
“This,” he held up the photo, “scared me.”
“But that’s just coincidence. And didn’t the farmer say that Rasmus roamed the village for a long time? This may not have been her dog. The woman died in the summer.” Her cheeks were flushed, her back completely straight. Now she stood up and walked back to the couch. “Is that why you come home so late? Because you’re spying on the dead? Was her colleague at least pretty?”
Benno decided to ignore the question. “She hadn’t seen Irina Sobieski since last winter. Irina just stopped coming to work.”
“And? Did she abandon her dog here and then get killed half a year later? That’s nonsense.” Her voice was suddenly very loud. “What were you really doing in Lübeck?”
“What?” Benno did his best to sound completely unconcerned. But he was sure that he only achieved the opposite effect.
“You stink of perfume. Is that colleague your girlfriend?”
“That’s absurd.”
“What is it? Magie Noir? Opium?”
“No idea. Probably whatever Margit always wears.” He couldn’t tell her about Hanne, not even mention her as a friend. “I’m worried about what’s happening here.”
“You smell like Margit, even though you weren’t even in the office? And you care about a dog who resembles Rasmus? Just go to the police. Show them the photo. Explain that you smell like perfume, that you come home late for no good reason, that you don’t see your son before he’s going to sleep, because you care about him so much.”
You’re right, he wanted to say. I have a mistress in Lübeck, I have deceived you, and will probably do it again, and yes, it has to do with you, but that’s no excuse, and I’m really worried, and the pastor is not who he to pretends to be, and it would be better if you no longer went to church and stayed away from him. But please, please, just move away with me. We still have some money in the bank, and we can still move away. I can drive a
cab until I find something better, and you can teach sports again, and we will move into a small backwater village where there is no death, and I love you, I really love you, even if I just saw another woman and still smell of her perfume. Let us move away together.
Instead he said, “Rasmus belonged to the dead woman. And whoever killed her, certainly knows that Tim has her dog.”
“That’s totally insane.” Her mouth was open, she wasn’t finished with him yet, but she stopped suddenly.
Benno had heard it too, and together they jumped up and ran into the hallway. There was Tim sitting on the stairs, with shaggy hair and bare feet. He looked heartbroken. “Do I have to give back Rasmus?”
21
It was twenty-five kilometers to Wengsten. At eight o’clock in the morning Benno stood at the entrance of the branch office of the Traveland county archives and asked for the death registers.
“Who are you looking for?” the attendant asked.
“I don’t know exactly.” Then he told the woman which years he was interested in.
“Before 1878, we don’t have anything,” she said.
“Then only the others,” Benno said.
“It will take two days. We don’t store them here.”
He nodded. “But I can search them?”
She looked at him sharply. “But you mustn’t copy anything. You will need to fill out an application to get permission.”
Last night Benno had pushed the sofa into his study, and set up his sleeping quarters there. Carolin had not protested. The couch wasn’t comfortable, but at least he had some peace there. Still, he was tired and didn’t want to think about his marriage or the future.
In the newsroom, advertising customers had to be called in the afternoon before the next issue went to print. No one seemed to have noticed his absence yesterday. Although he had gone to Wengsten to confirm his suspicions, they now appeared absurd. It was so much easier to attribute all events to an unfortunate coincidence. So much easier to ignore Walczak’s story, and to laugh at the strange behavior of Strathleven’s citizens.
At four o’clock he was done with his work. Music sounded from a portable radio. Someone had bought cake and left it on the kitchen table.
Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames Page 18