Annelise let go of the baking tray, wiped her hands on her apron, and sat down facing me.
“You have to do it. You have to go.”
“Why?”
“Three reasons,” she said.
“Just three?” I tried to joke.
“First,” she said, “you owe it to Mike. He worked like a dog to finish everything. He defended you all the way, and you know perfectly well it can’t have been easy.”
“Right.”
“Second, you have to do it for yourself. You have to write the words ‘the end.’ Then you’ll feel better.”
I tried to smile. I couldn’t. My mouth was dry.
I extinguished my cigarette. Maybe it was time to quit.
“Third: you owe it to them.”
“Them?”
“Them.”
* * *
The network had brought out the heavy artillery. Posters on street corners, banners, and all the rest of the paraphernalia that Total Asshole had dreamed up for the occasion. On the internet he had launched something called a “viral bombardment” in the manual of guerrilla marketing: to me, it seemed more like a free-falling cluster bomb of bullshit, but who was I to judge?
The sleepy town of Bolzano had witnessed in astonishment the preparations for the premiere of In the Belly of the Beast and the invasion of a host of critics (those with T-shirts under their jackets were TV critics, those with bags under their eyes film critics), reporters (those who bragged a lot were from local papers, those who ate sushi were from the national press, and those who grumbled were Americans), starlets (“Mike?” “Yes, partner?” “Who the hell is Linda Lee?” “She made a couple of socially aware movies.” “With those nuclear warheads she has instead of boobs?” “Take it easy, partner. Linda’s a friend.”) and characters of varying degrees of weirdness who wandered amid porticos and monuments with wild eyes and bewildered expressions. The local population seemed to have taken this madness well, I thought as we headed in a town car with a driver to the cinema that was hosting the event, until my eyes came to rest on a piece of graffiti, in red block capitals, which a diligent municipal employee was trying to wipe off and which said: SALINGER MURDERER.
“Is that another of Total Asshole’s clever ideas?” I asked Mike.
“It may be, partner, it may be. Who was it who said: ‘The important thing is to be talked about’?”
“Comrade Beria, I think. Or maybe it was Walt Disney?”
Mike was dressed with unusual sobriety that evening. A suit and tie that made him look like a stranger to me. He was pretending to be relaxed. But I knew him well. He kept cracking his knuckles. An activity he indulged in only when he was trying hard not to scream.
I knew how he felt. Oh, yes. I hadn’t eaten anything that day, I’d gone though two packets of cigarettes (so much for good intentions), had complained all morning and spent much of the afternoon trying on clothes. In the end, I chose a jacket and tie that made me look thirty years younger, like a schoolboy on the day of his first communion. Annelise had borne all this with patience and stoicism. She was a knockout in her new dress. But I was so nervous I almost didn’t notice.
Clara, on the other hand, was simply excited. The joys of childhood.
She looked at everything with eyes like headlamps and continued bombarding me with questions, while the car with its smoked windows (another flashy idea from the twisted mind of Total Asshole) cut through the crowd in the center of Bolzano. Half of these people had no idea who we were—I kept telling myself—and the other half considered us vultures. In any case, very few of them seemed to be paying any attention to us at all. But my paranoia had reached dangerous levels.
“What does T.A. mean, Mamma?”
Mike and I looked at each other.
“Terribly Astute, sweetheart,” I replied.
“If he’s so astute, why do you and Uncle Mike always make fun of him?”
“Sweetheart,” Annelise cut in, “you remember what we said?”
“‘Be a good girl,’” Clara recited. “‘Papà has to work.’”
“Very good.”
“But this isn’t real work.”
At this point, Mike and I could no longer contain ourselves. Clara had our number. This wasn’t real work.
The reporters were waiting for us along the sidewalk under two very cool, very minimal and very ugly blow-ups of the outline of a mountain. The red smudge that went across it was an artistic depiction of the EC135. Total Asshole had assured me of that. It was down to the genius of a Californian designer who earned thousands of dollars for his consultancy. To me it looked just like a red smear, not even very well drawn, but if a guy had really managed to get himself paid a fortune for that stuff, good for him. You have to appreciate talent when it shows itself.
The car came to a halt.
The driver cleared his throat.
“We have to get out,” Mike said.
“They’ll tear us to pieces.”
“Isn’t that always the case?”
“Can we turn back, partner?”
Before opening the car door, Mike gave me an encouraging wink. Annelise squeezed my hand hard. I returned the squeeze and turned to Clara.
“Give me a good luck charm, honeybun.”
Clara imprinted a kiss on my forehead.
If you happen to see photographs of that evening, you’ll see that yours truly has a kind of washed-out little heart between the eyebrows. It’s my daughter’s lipstick (yes, Annelise had put lipstick on her).
Waiting for us, a gangly guy whose name I didn’t know. There were a few flashes. Mike showed index finger and middle finger in the gesture made famous by Winston Churchill. I limited myself to not zipping away at the speed of light. It has to be said that with Annelise by my side, I looked pretty good. I clenched my fists and my butt.
The inside of the building was packed. A babel of tongues into which we insinuated ourselves while everyone watched us. Slaps on the back, thousand-dollar-a-bottle perfumes mingling with one another to the point of nausea.
Total Asshole had got an artisan in the Val Gardena to put up something like an army of lanterns in the shape of a Rosengarten (even though a Rosengarten had nothing to do with the movie), the light from which was torture to me all the time Mike and I, with Annelise and Clara standing to one side, spent pretending to know the people greeting us.
“Salinger.”
Mr. Smith had hauled his butt out of New York and flown all the way here. I was horrified, even though I should have felt flattered.
He was wearing an impeccable dinner jacket, with a cigar in his breast pocket instead of a handkerchief. His handshake lingered long enough for a couple of flashes. He had put on weight since the last time I’d seen him.
For a moment, I was afraid I’d said that out loud.
“What do you think, son?”
“Amazing.”
He smiled smugly. “Have I introduced Maddie?”
Maddie was a wrinkled little thing in a pastel pink dress, with a Martini in her left hand and her right held out as if she was expecting me to kiss it.
“Maddie?”
“Maddie Grady, New Yorker.”
I felt a tightness in my stomach. And while Mr. Smith withdrew to go and spread charm over the buffet, I spotted Mike (the girl on his arm must be Linda Lee, judging from the abundant bosom overflowing her low-cut dress) putting a hand over his mouth, trying not to seem the amused caveman he was.
“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you in person,” I said. My sarcasm didn’t escape Annelise, who pinched me. Maddie Grady was the journalist who had slaughtered and deboned the first season of Road Crew with all the delicacy of a squadron of nosediving Stukas.
I’d lost a lot of sleep over that article.
“Likewise, Mr. Salinger, believe me.”
“Let me introduce Mike, he—”
“I know McMellan.” The wrinkled little thing gestured in the direction of Mike and his unbridled companion,
as if swatting a fly. “But I didn’t come all the way here for some matured speck and a movie. I came here for you, Mr. Salinger,” she said, leaning on my arm and forcing me to support her. “May I call you Jeremiah?”
“Call me Plissken,” I muttered.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, of course, Mrs. Grady.”
“Miss. But Maddie will be fine, Jeremiah.” She emptied her glass and, as if in a conjuring trick, swiped another one from the tray of a waiter (dressed in the uniform of Dolomite Mountain Rescue, a detail for which I would have cheerfully strangled T.A.). Then she looked through Annelise with her ice-cold little eyes. “Do you mind if I steal your boyfriend, darling?”
“We’re married,” Annelise said, without losing her poise. “But go ahead. It’s his evening, after all.”
“Haven’t you had a drink yet, Jeremiah?”
“I only just got here. And anyway, I prefer to avoid alcohol. The suspense, you know how it is . . .”
“Oh, nonsense, my dear,” she twittered, handing me a Martini. “As my third husband said, there’s nothing a Martian can’t chase away.”
That’s what she called it: a Martian.
Now I really was terrified.
With the authority of a grande dame, Maddie maneuvered me into a discreet little corner, where we pretended we weren’t being watched, even though we both knew (I with dismay, she gloating like a killer whale) that most of those present were already commenting on our private rendezvous.
“Are you really that nervous, Jeremiah?”
“Only as much as I need to be. But a Martian is a Martian.” I clinked my glass against hers.
“I’m sure it’ll be a success. That joker McMellan wouldn’t even show me a small clip.”
“I assume it was Mr. Smith who told him not to.”
“Mr. Smith? Darling, Tom’s my third husband, he’d bark like a dog in front of everybody if I asked him.”
She was drunk, but horribly lucid.
“How does all this make you feel?” she resumed.
I prevaricated. “Is this an interview or is it strictly off the record?”
“That depends on what you say, chéri.”
“I’m a bit dazed, but happy. It’s only right that people, especially people around here, should know what really happened.” I cleared my throat. “There’ve been a lot of rumors about September 15,” I added, making an effort to maintain a neutral, professional tone. “Now it’s time to tell the truth.”
“I’ve made a note of that. But off the record?”
“I’m terrified, Maddie.”
“After what you achieved with the Road Crew series? One of the two most envied enfants prodiges on the East Coast? Terrified by a premiere?”
“People have embellished this story a bit too much. Some of my wounds are still bleeding.” I tried not to notice the light that had come on in Maddie’s eyes. “Luckily, my wife is by my side. Her help has been fundamental, but what happened . . .” My voice broke. “Anyway, you’ll see.”
Maddie emptied her glass without taking her eyes off me. “I’ll see, of course.”
“Now, if . . .”
Maddie held me back. She didn’t have hands, she had claws, which dug into my biceps. “I see your charming little wife is getting a stiff neck from trying to seem uninterested in our little tête à tête, but I want to steal you for another second. I don’t see anyone here from Dolomite Mountain Rescue. Do you have any idea why?”
It was like a punch in the stomach.
The witch knew exactly where to hit, and she aimed well. It wasn’t for nothing that her pen was the most feared on the East Coast and even on the West, to use her own words.
I was saved by the cavalry. A tiny contingent of cavalry three feet tall.
Ignoring Maddie, Clara grabbed my trousers and her little face looked up at me, demanding my attention. “Uncle Mike says we have to go. It’s starting.”
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
I don’t remember what I dreamed, something terrible I suppose, because when I woke the pillow was soaked with tears and I had such a fierce migraine that it almost turned my stomach. I had to close my eyes tight and wait for the world to come back onto its axis.
I had drunk quite a lot after the screening. I remember little or nothing of what happened later.
The end credits, grim and relentless, which concluded with “In memory of the brave men of Dolomite Mountain Rescue,” and the applause, timid at first, then a torrent.
Mike looking around, relieved, while to me the noise seemed like nothing so much as the laughter of the Beast. Annelise brushing me with a kiss, and then leaning over to console Clara, who was in tears, her hair disheveled.
I don’t know if it was the applause or the sight of my daughter sobbing in my wife’s arms that made me go to town on the booze; the fact is that when Maddie Grady put one of her Martians in my hand, I knocked it back in one go.
The rest was all downhill.
I remember the odd fragment of the ride back to Siebenhoch. Stopping outside a hotel in which Mike and Linda Lee were to spend the rest of the night. The road shrouded in darkness, the outline of the chauffeur against the light, Clara sleeping in Annelise’s lap, Annelise replying patiently to my drunken questions—I don’t remember what they were, only the urgency with which I asked them.
The stairs.
The bed.
* * *
Slowly, the spasms of pain in my temples became less intense and I realized I was alone.
It was cold.
I got up, moving like a hundred-year-old. I checked the window. It was locked. There was light, though, coming from the corridor. Maybe Annelise had gone down to the kitchen for a snack, or maybe I was snoring so loudly that she had decided to spend the night on the couch in the study. I felt a pang of remorse.
I tiptoed into the bathroom, rinsed my face, and took a couple of painkillers. I drank a little water. I ruffled my hair in front of the mirror, trying to assume a vaguely presentable air.
The light was on in the study, the door slightly ajar. I knocked.
“Annelise?”
No reply.
I went in. Annelise wasn’t there. The computer on the desk was on, I could see the LED flashing intermittently. I shook the mouse. When the monitor came back on again, I had to hold onto the desk in order not to fall to the floor. I had spent too many hours on the file I found open in front of me not to recognize what it was. The notes I’d made during that downward spiral that had led me from a few words heard by chance at the Visitors’ Center all the way to the entrails of the Bletterbach, by way of Siebenhoch’s ghosts, Brigitte’s death, and Max and Werner’s confessions. The file on the Bletterbach killings. The one I had thrown into the recycle bin on the desktop but which, foolishly, I hadn’t deleted.
Annelise had read it.
Now she knew.
She knew the truth about Kurt, Evi, and Markus. About the man she had called father and the woman she had called mother. About what had happened to Oscar Grünwald. About the justice of the forefathers.
About my broken promises.
“Annelise?” I called out.
It was almost an entreaty.
No answer.
The house was shrouded in silence. I went downstairs, barefoot. My ears were plugged up, everything was muffled. The front door was wide open. The wind was blowing hard. There was water on the threshold. It was raining. In the sky, the clouds were a compact sheet of lead. My stomach contracted.
“Annelise?” I moaned.
I don’t know how long I would have stayed there, paralyzed, if Clara’s sleepy voice hadn’t shaken me.
“Papà?”
“Go to bed, sweetheart.”
“What’s happening, Papà?”
I expelled all the air I had in my lungs, took a deep breath, then turned. I had to be reassuring. I had to be strong. I smiled and Clara smiled back.
“Everything’s fine,
ten letters.”
“Are you all right, Papà?”
“I have a bit of a stomach ache. I’ll make myself some tea and then go to bed. You should be asleep.”
Clara started playing with a strand of her hair. “Papà?”
“Clara,” I said, “go to bed, please.”
“The door’s open, Papà. The rain’s coming in.”
“To bed.”
I probably said it too aggressively, because her eyes grew bigger. “Where’s Mamma?”
“To bed, sweetheart.”
Clara tugged at the strand of hair, then turned on her heels.
She obeyed. I was alone.
“Annelise?”
I was answered by the dry boom of thunder. I headed for the door. I could feel the cold water under the soles of my feet. I tried not to slip. I looked.
The car wasn’t there.
I can’t remember much of the next few minutes, which I spent overwhelmed by anxiety and a sense of guilt. I only know that I somehow found myself dressed, with my cell phone in my hand and Max’s voice in my ears.
“Calm down, Salinger, calm down and tell me everything from the beginning.”
“Annelise,” I said. “The Bletterbach.”
I don’t know how much Max guessed, but I must have scared him quite a bit because his reply was, “I’ll be right there.”
I hung up. I stood there staring at the phone. I put it down on a cabinet.
I climbed the stairs, trying to slow my breathing.
“Sweetheart?” I said, entering Clara’s room.
She lay curled up under the blankets in a fetal position. She looked much younger than her five years. She had her thumb in her mouth.
“Mamma?” she asked hopefully.
I sat down on the bed, even though every fiber in my body was urging me to start running. “We’re going to fetch her now.”
“Where has she gone?”
“Ops’s.”
“Why?”
I had no answer for that.
“We have to get dressed, Max will be here soon and we have to be ready for him.”
If Clara had questions to ask me, she didn’t ask them. She was silent all the time it took me to dress her.
By the time the headlights of the Forest Rangers’ 4x4 cut through the darkness outside the house, Clara and I were in the doorway, well wrapped up in heavy rainproof coats.
Beneath the Mountain Page 34