Intrigo

by Håkan Nesser

  And succeeded quite well, evidently. None of the many writers who now spoke up even hinted that any rumours had been in circulation, either before or after Rein’s death.

  It was a bombshell, as stated, and no one had picked up the odour of the fuse that was burning.

  While I sipped my coffee I studied the various photographs of Otto Gerlach ever so thoroughly. Compared with my memory of him I must say that he was to his advantage in the newspapers. I understood that he, like Mariam Kadhar, must be considerably younger than Rein, and even if it was still hard to accept that a woman like her would need such a man, I actually had even more difficulty comprehending what use she had of her husband. I thought about her slender shoulders again, and I pictured her face with the dark eyes and the thin nostrils. Suddenly I also knew that under different circumstances I could very well have been passionately in love with her.

  Under different circumstances, that is. I want to emphasize that.

  On the way home from Planner’s I went into the PTT office on Falckstraat and acquired both of the phone books for A., and then I spent a good portion of the evening looking up the numbers of the seventy-two tenants out in Wassingen.

  No less than fifty-nine of them were listed, which undeniably was a much higher figure than I had expected. Perhaps it was a good sign, all things considered. If nothing else it would keep me busy for a while, and given the situation I remember that I felt a certain gratitude about that.

  It was hard to find life buoys during this time, to put it simply, and I understood to take advantage of those that were offered. It was also this evening that Beatrice went on the run. When I was going to bring her in from the balcony facing the courtyard, right before I went to bed, she was simply missing. How she set about getting out of there, and what plans she had for her action, were questions I brooded a bit about over the next few days, but when after less than a week she was sitting out there again staring at the pigeons, I understood that she had simply been hiding out in a fold of reality, to which neither I nor any other human had entry.

  Perhaps I envied her a bit too. I know that I felt a rather strong sense of respect, at least.

  It was Gallis Kazantsakis who made me aware of the family chapel, which is at the top of the mountain crest to the southeast. There are said to be 360 similar small whitewashed sanctuaries on the whole island; every family with self-respect has its own, preferably located as close to heaven as possible and not particularly easy to get up to.

  I set off well before sunrise and after an increasingly warm hike I arrived there in an hour and a quarter. I stepped in, lit a candle on the diminutive altar and then sat down in the narrow strip of shade on the west side. The whole island was in my line of sight; the steeply sloping cliffs to the south and west, the slightly more accessible coastlines to the east and north. I noticed several small, sheltered sandy beaches outside the village that I had not seen before; an occasional isolated house too, to which you would have to go by boat, because the road ends over by Hotel Phraxos at the easternmost point on the shore. I decided to investigate who owned these – and other – private homes; there were a large number of them around the island. Perhaps it would be most probable that it was in just one of these secluded places that I would find what I had come here for.

  I thought about time too. The concept of time. Over three years had passed since the events in A., but in this tremendous landscape, this early morning hour, it suddenly felt as if it shrivelled up to almost nothing. What was distant and what was past seemed to grow and draw closer to the brittle present, which for the moment only consisted of my knapsack with provisions and my sweaty body, leaning against the whitewashed wall. The sky, the mountains and the sea – which was already starting to lose its horizon in the haze – were all eternal and unchanging.

  A point in time and space, just as vanishing and arbitrary as the quickly fading braying of donkeys which rolled up across the olive slopes from the village below. All the parallel presence of the flow of time, as Zimjonovich writes about; these were of course not particularly unexpected sensations that struck me, and for that matter perhaps they were something else altogether. As usual I had difficulty with the words, and when the next donkey let out its complaint, I just felt tired and sweaty and proceeded to consume my provisions. I wisely saved one of the water bottles for the journey down, then lit a cigarette and took out my notebook to read through what I had set down in the flickering glow of the oil lamp the previous evening.

  And time continued to shrink.

  My very deepest hope when I started checking off the telephone list was of course that I would suddenly get to hear Ewa’s voice on the other end of the line. It was this vanity that drove me forward, and during the rest of the week I got a response from fifty-seven of the fifty-nine. Thirty-nine of my calls were answered by women, only eighteen by men; if nothing else, confirmation that women talk more on the phone than we men. My tactic was simple – I simply asked to speak with Ewa, explained that I was an old acquaintance, and then in the answers and hesitations I tried to infer whether there seemed to be anything fishy.

  In order to be a bit systematic, I had also introduced a kind of assessment scale, where immediately after the call I marked a minus sign by the relevant name if I considered it to be out of the running, a plus sign if I still thought there might be a possibility, and two pluses if the person in question sounded pressed or strange in any way.

  Two of the women who answered were really named Ewa, and in both cases some confused exchanges arose before the misunderstanding could be explained. It was roughly the same when, after great hesitation, one Herr Weivers put his teenage daughter on the line. When I went through my notes after the last call, they showed that I had made no less than forty-two minus markings, thirteen pluses and only two double pluses.

  Naturally I understood that the method was marred by almost disproportional margins of error, but I decided to direct my continued exertions anyway to the two double pluses – a certain Laurids Reisin and one N. Chomowska – and the thirteen tenants I still had not managed to make contact with. The method – loyalty to the system – is somewhat of a necessity in a holistic world, exactly as Rimley maintains in his book on being and awareness, and I had the sense to lean on just this.

  I wrote down the fifteen names on a new page in my notebook and when, on the Monday of the week after the arrest of Mariam Kadhar and Otto Gerlach, I was once again sitting on the train out to Wassingen, I still felt ever so hopeful. It was now the sixth day that I was occupied with the Wassingen lead, and because I had decided on ten, I could see that in any event I had come more than halfway. I also decided to truly spend the whole week out in the suburb – every day from morning to evening – and if that still did not produce any results, I could at least feel the satisfaction of having done what was in my power, and with good conscience devote the approaching weekend to finding new paths.

  My first action was to knock on doors. Even though it was the middle of the day, there were people at home in ten of the fifteen apartments; my unemployment theory held up, without a doubt. When someone answered I again simply asked to speak with Ewa, and I quickly countered the obligatory shaking of the head or the attempt to close the door in my nose by forcing my way into the hall and showing one of the photographs of her. I explained that I was a private detective and that I was searching for the woman in the picture. For her own good, naturally. There was of course a risk that Maertens’ so-called emissary had already attempted such intrusive behaviour six or seven weeks earlier, but from the reactions I encountered I soon understood that such was not the case. My confidence in Maertens had probably never been lower than on that day.

  In some cases I also tried to hint – without being overly explicit – that some form of reward was possibly beckoning around the corner, but it was actually only with Herr Kaunis – an elderly, noticeably foul-smelling man – that this bait worked a little. Unfortunately, however, it was obvious that he only saw the who
le thing as a chance to get some money for his daily dose of stimulants. Both the apartment and its inhabitant were in a state of far-advanced decline; I gave him five gulden and left him with a strong feeling of depression.

  When I was done, I realized that everything was exactly as usual. Back to zero. No one had reacted to the photograph of Ewa. No one knew who she was, and no one had seen her in the building or in the area whatsoever.

  I remember that for a moment the image of the Lauern reservoir’s impenetrable green surface flashed past in my mind. It was the first time in quite a while, but the force it displayed was strong, without a doubt.

  I went into the cafe. Drank two beers and checked off the names on my list. Rather quickly I was about to lose heart again; a rainstorm had blown in from the west and was not making things any better. While I smoked and browsed back and forth in my pathetic notebook, I felt an insidious fragility starting to sink its claws into me. The need to be alone, away from looks and words, was growing at a corresponding pace, which of course was not a particularly desirable state of mind considering the tasks I had imposed on myself.

  At the same time I knew that I had come to a point where I could simply no longer bear to carry on and confront people. Seen purely logically, it must also be the case that I was starting to become known in the building. I had been in contact with almost all the tenants – even if the majority had only heard my voice on the phone – and it was not at all unreasonable to assume that people were starting to wonder. If Ewa truly was in the building – I did not dare to think about how slight I actually deemed that possibility – it was rather likely that my snooping had come to her knowledge; perhaps in reality the chances of getting to her were shrinking the more I tried.

  In any case, this was what I arrived at inside the cafe; soon I was starting to reflect on how many possibilities I had actually ruined through my clumsy telephone calls and my door-knocking, and gradually I decided that it might be time for a little discretion.

  The ideal thing, I decided, would be to find a position where I could sit undisturbed and, in peace and quiet, watch the front door and the stream of people that came and went, and it did not take long to figure out what must be the best solution to that problem.

  I needed a car. There were simply no other natural places with the entry in the line of sight than a parked car. Sitting down on a bench in the rain, and then sitting there with a newspaper or a book eight hours a day, seemed inconceivable to me, with good grounds.

  I finished the beers and inquired with the girl at the bar again. I thought she must have felt a kind of instinctive maternal sympathy for me, and when I asked whether she knew of any place where I could rent a cheap car for a couple of days, she immediately offered to help. Took a notepad out of her apron pocket and wrote down the address of a petrol station five minutes’ walk from the shopping centre. At the same time advised me that if I said Christa sent me, then I would save a hundred.

  I thanked her and set off. Half an hour later I had paid for four days’ rent in advance for an alarmingly rust-covered Peugeot; the cost was not prohibitive, but I remember that I still wondered whether it was not in parity with the value of the whole car.

  In any event, it worked. At four o’clock the same afternoon I parked outside my apartment on Ferdinand Bolstraat, and the following day I began my surveillance of entry number 36D out in the godforsaken centre of Wassingen.

  I spent three uneventful days out there before something happened. Barely concealed, I sat behind a newspaper with a crackling car radio, cigarettes and a measured dose of whisky as my only company. The position itself was without a doubt optimal; there was never any problem finding a parking place at a distance of fifteen to twenty metres from the entrance, a point from which I had a clear view of everyone who passed out and in. I also kept notes, primarily to keep my doubt penned in and the game alive, of course, but I also think that it was through this that I became aware of a detail that until then I had not included in my calculations.

  It was all explained through a person who in my notes went under the designation M6. Simply expressed: man number 6 (I also had a rudimentary description of him: about sixty, ugly, felt hat, henpecked husband, which was more than sufficient to define him with respect to all the others). What happened – late on Thursday afternoon – was that M6 passed by me and went in through the front door twice. True, with an hour interval, but without having come out at any time in between.

  Because there was only this entry, and I was reluctant to believe that this anaemic gentleman had lowered himself down from a balcony on the far side, the incident stood out – for a confused minute or so before I thought of the solution – as an improbability and a mystery.

  Then I understood. There must be a garage on the basement level.

  I drove around the building, had to search awhile before I found the entrance, but when I did, I undeniably felt very cheap. I also decided to change position the next day.

  For a change, if nothing else.

  And so it was thanks to this circumstance – this little change of parking space outside building 36 in Wassingen Centre – that the thread did not break.

  That the search for my missing wife finally got the breakthrough that I had been waiting for since my arrival in A. over three months ago. It is hard to know in retrospect, of course, but I have a sense anyway that it would have been hard to continue my exertions much longer if that week too had been completely without results.

  The time was a few minutes past five. A grey, persistent downpour had temporarily withdrawn and I sat with the window rolled down and a freshly lit cigarette. The gate to the garage went up and a dark blue Mazda came slowly creeping up the narrow ramp. Just as the car passed me – at a distance of only a metre – the driver turned his head in my direction to check that the exit was clear, in the same way that everyone else had done that entire day. There was never any eye contact, but even so, without worry, I could observe the face almost directly from in front. It was my pursuer.

  For a brief second I could not place him, but then the mental images of him emerged. How he sneaked after me through the Deijkstraa district. How he sat behind me at the library. How he stood and stared down into the water in Reguliergracht. I started the car, turned it around and took off in the direction in which he disappeared.

  With pounding temples, it will not be denied.

  I have always had a hard time appreciating so-called car chases in the world of movies, and my attempt at following the blue Mazda on this leaden grey afternoon hour out in Wassingen now proved that reality scarcely exceeds fiction.

  After less than a minute I had lost him. Saw him disappear towards the expressway that goes into A. while I was squeezed in between a big lorry and an expensive Mercedes, waiting for a green light. I swore and drummed on the steering wheel and smoked frantically, but it barely helped. When the light finally changed, I took off in the same direction of course, but my Peugeot was not in the best shape that day either and I soon understood that it was pointless.

  Because I was on the right road anyway, I continued along the expressway, and despite everything it was with a feeling of mild euphoria that I could sit down at Vlissingen an hour later.

  Even later – surely towards midnight – I returned home to the apartment. In the stairway I discovered a letter that must have escaped me earlier. I opened it as soon as I got inside the door; it was from the prosecutor’s office and explained that I had to appear in court the next day to answer certain questions and receive a witness summons.

  The indictment against Mariam Kadhar and Otto Gerlach had been brought the day before, apparently, and it was understood that the trial would presumably start rolling within a month.

  I drank a little more whisky, even though I already felt the characteristic whirling in my temples. Stood in my dark window and observed the people who were roaming around out there. Trams that rattled past and building facades that stood there in indifferent constancy. I thought back
on the day, and then came some vague thoughts about the varying density of time . . . how certain drawn-out stretches of time run past us completely unnoticed, drained of both meaning and incidents, before we are suddenly cast into swarms of bunched-up happenings. The pure lattice of significances, and presumably it is no doubt the case that events draw events to them, according to the same laws that apply for all types of magnetism.

  In any case, I sensed that these vacuums and these accumulations of condensed time must have a direct counterpart in the hopeless journey through space of meteors and heavenly bodies. These dark sailings.

  And similar, as stated, vague thoughts.

  It was on the morning after this evening that I again heard Beatrice mewing out on the balcony.

  Kerr had a new suit, and from its discreet but indisputable quality one could infer the rise in fortunes that prevailed within the publishing house. He had come on the morning plane and did not even intend to stay overnight. Just a couple of hours of discussions – that is how he explained the purpose of his visit over the phone the evening before.

  We were at ten Bosch, one of the most expensive restaurants in the whole city, and Kerr nonchalantly ordered both d’Yquem and la Fitter. I really did my best to appreciate the caviar and the lukewarm duck breast, but it was still only one o’clock and it has always been hard for me to have an appetite so early in the day.

  It was the book this was about, of course. After record-fast typesetting it was now ready for printing – he had galleys with him, which I did not need to bother reading, however, because they had already been proofread by others, he explained. All in all, there was only one thing missing.