Intrigo

by Håkan Nesser

  Exactly how one should proceed to make one’s way into a hotel room I have also given some thought to. What do you think, can one perhaps hide there during the day and simply wait for the right hour? Or should I have a separate room at the same hotel – under a false name and in disguise perhaps? (But don’t they always require some form of identification nowadays?)

  Oh well, more on this later. Where the approach is concerned I would prefer to avoid a lot of unnecessary violence and exaggerated loss of blood. The fact is, I think we can decide on this point rather simply: you see, I have a weapon in my possession. It is a reliable Belgian pistol of the Berenger brand, my husband took charge of it several years ago when an old uncle of his died; it is not in any registry and no one knows that we have it. That I have it, I mean, of course. We tested it for fun a few years ago, it works just fine and I also have a couple of boxes of ammunition lying around. I think this without a doubt would be the safest method, there is no possibility to trace the gun to me, and to be prepared for all eventualities I can always bury it out in the woods when it is all over and done with.

  And when? dear Henny. Yes, for my part naturally it is all the same. If you just find the right date and right hotel in the right city – then I am willing to set to work at any time. Provided of course that we have managed to discuss everything and are certain not to have neglected any important detail.

  And provided that we are in agreement where the compensation is concerned. Via lawyer Pumpermann I have given Clara and Henry a vague promise that I am going to be able to buy them out from the house – but as it were I would really like to have a small sum as confirmation of our agreement, because they will probably want some kind of earnest money before Christmas. In any event I have interpreted Pumpermann that way, good Lord, he really is a fellow that must be interpreted, Henny! Shall we say twenty thousand, then we’ll decide what to do with the remaining fee as we approach D-Day?

  Or D-Night, as stated.

  Moving on, how is the weather in Grothenburg? Here in Gobshjem November has been unusually rainy and gloomy. Not even the dogs want to go out any longer; a trip south would undeniably perk up my spirits, but that will probably have to wait, I’m afraid.

  Signed your devoted

  Agnes

  P.S. A terrible thought occurred to me just as I was going to seal the envelope. What if that other woman is with him at the hotel?! How do we guard against something like that?

  One of those evenings.

  Stayed late at the department and corrected papers until after eight. Of thirteen submitted essays I am going to be forced to fail three. All boys. Or men, or whatever you want to call these semi-intellectual pups aged twenty to twenty-two. I don’t know, by the way, how old any of them are. Dietmar, the weakest of them, may well be twenty-five. Piotr looks nineteen at most, with his lopsided fringe and his pimples. Anyway, it would be best if we got them to quit at Christmas. Change to something less demanding in January. Education or psychology perhaps. Or some sort of quantifiable natural science.

  It is raining when I drive home. Wet leaves cover the roadway in the lane between Münstersdorf and the castle, I maintain a low speed and think about Henny. She is truly a strange woman. Has become one, at least; perhaps all this distance was never necessary, all this silence for so many years – but considering what now lies before us it was of course just as well. As if there had been some kind of divine direction right from the start. Or choreography. Although I understand that just these thoughts easily work their way out and demand entry on such a dark and gloomy evening.

  I wonder if anyone noticed her during the funeral. Naturally her presence must have been noted, but was there anyone who started – and continued – to wonder who she was? I wouldn’t think so. There were quite a few of us anyway, and the majority were of course unacquainted with the majority.

  The money arrived this morning. When I made a withdrawal from the ATM at Kleinmarkt, I saw that suddenly twenty thousand euros had been deposited to my account. I must admit that my heart skipped a beat. As if I was suddenly hurled from a fictional world into a real one. From a movie or a dream to a brutal reality.

  Does this mean that the die is cast? That there is no turning back?

  I imagine so. I don’t want to turn back either. Don’t want to back out of this, it is peculiar but the whole thing seems to work like a kind of sensual stimulus for me, and truly that may be needed this rainy autumn.

  Just as I am driving the car into the garage, Tristram Singh shows up in my mind, and once he has dug in I of course can’t be rid of him for the rest of the evening – not during the walk with the dogs and not afterwards, when as usual I sit for an hour in the armchair in front of the fire. I spend an inexplicable amount of time in this piece of furniture – as if I were an eighty-year-old woman who sits and gathers up her memories. But I am only half that old, and something tells me that the most important events in my life have not yet occurred.

  Before I go to bed I read those lines of Barin that I like so much. They may be needed as a counterweight to all the constipated term paper prose I’ve been forced to wade through.

  At the review of Miss Beate Wollinger’s life

  it was found that her heart had beat

  twenty million

  eight hundred and thirteen thousand

  six hundred and sixty-nine beats.

  Four of these were heard by optician’s assistant

  Arnold Mauer one spring evening in Gimsen 1971.

  Claus-Joseph.

  I met him during a demonstration march; I don’t recall what we were demonstrating against, presumably Apartheid. He is one year older than me, owns a Trabant and studies philosophy while waiting to report for his military service. We become a couple, but I don’t love him and we don’t sleep with each other.

  Approximately the same time – I am speaking now of the autumn of 1981 – Henny starts going out with Ansgar. Ansgar is the son of a minister who lost his faith when his wife ran off to Canada with a coloured jazz musician and left him behind in Klubbenhügge with his parish and his only begotten son. Nowadays Ansgar’s father is involved in German Shepherd breeding on a farm towards Bloemenberg. Ansgar is a rather neurotic young man, something which no doubt appeals to Henny’s good heart.

  Henny doesn’t sleep with her Ansgar either, but not because she doesn’t want to – but for some sort of murky religious reasons.

  But we crowd into Claus-Joseph’s Trabant and kiss a bit. Stick our hands down inside each other’s waistbands, rub around and moan a little. It happens that we even make an occasional outing in the car. To Ulming or Westdorf mainly, we prefer the small villages along the winding upper reaches of the Neckar. During these excursions we look at birds with the binoculars Ansgar brings along – both Ansgar and Claus-Joseph are interested in ornithology – and talk politics. Solidarity. Cambodia. The shore starling. South Africa. Henny and I are in our last year at Weiver’s. Ansgar and Claus-Joseph have their entrance exams behind them. They think they know a little more.

  Cat shit, I think. When it is raining it leaks in through the side windows of the Trabant. I often catch myself not being really present.

  Tristram Singh joins our class in January of the last year of high school and he actually only participates in the English classes – where he answers the scattered questions that lecturer Dibble throws out at him, with an accent that seems retrieved from some old British colonial comedy, and which makes laughter stick in our throats.

  But Tristram sits in on the other classes too – unclear why, but he has come here with his parents and his five younger sisters, is going to stay for six months, perhaps a full year, his father is some sort of consul, and Tristram must have something to do, of course.

  He is slightly built and humbly attentive, and has soft bronze-shimmering skin that is hard to take your eyes off – and which suddenly make Claus-Joseph and Ansgar pale into boring Bohemian sausages in shabby sheep casings. Henny uses just this epithet on
e evening after a debate about the red-winged shore swallow and the situation in the Chilean countryside, I don’t know if she is referring to all of Ansgar or only a certain part of him.

  The gentle sorrow in Tristram’s eyes seems a thousand years old, anyway.

  One evening in early February he goes out with us to Vlissingen, a student bar where now and then we drink beer and talk about the nature of art. We are a rather large group this particular evening, someone has a birthday, I’m fairly sure, but Tristram drinks neither wine nor beer – only tea and water. He is sitting between me and Henny and is wearing a yellow-white linen suit, he smells good and a little foreign, and is just as polite and serious in both directions. At quarter past eleven he looks at his watch and explains that unfortunately he has to leave because he promised his mother to be home before twelve. Henny casts a glance at Ansgar by her side, I cast a glance at Claus-Joseph by my side, and then we explain, Henny and I, almost in unison, that we intend to accompany him home.

  It would be much too disloyal to let a mournful young Indian walk alone in the fog through the dark alleys of Grothenburg.

  We need a little air besides.

  Love is a force that is stronger than its actors, Henny says. You cannot control it.

  I don’t know where she read that, and she tries to make it look as if she formulated it herself.

  For adolescent romantics and horny dogs, perhaps, I say. But if you head out and swim in the sea of emotions, it may be hard to find your way back to land, even for a sensible person.

  Certain people can only love money, Henny says.

  When Claus-Joseph and Ansgar are not present we like to talk this way now and then, Henny and I. Sometimes we write it in our papers for Miss Silberstein too; sometimes with successful results, sometimes less successful.

  Wise, Miss Silberstein notes in the margin.

  Or: Big words, little thought.

  ‘Feeling and thought don’t need to be enemies,’ Henny now continues. ‘They can go hand in hand too, you just have to dare to let go a little first.’

  ‘Beautiful people can never understand the nature of love,’ I quote. ‘They are doomed to be objects. And we are both beautiful, aren’t we, Henny?’

  Henny thinks and browses absent-mindedly in the French grammar book. We have tests the following day; we are sitting in my room, should really be studying, the conversation is a digression.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Henny says at last. ‘I am convinced, for example, that Tristram Singh is extraordinarily suited to understand the nature of love.’

  ‘Aha?’ I say.

  ‘Exactly,’ Henny says.

  ‘His skin is like pale copper,’ I say. ‘True, but . . .’

  Henny sits quietly again and looks out the window. It is still February and it has rained three days in a row. The moments grow. Stick firmly to each other in some way, and time comes to a halt from pure weariness.

  ‘I am thinking seriously about breaking up with Ansgar,’ Henny says at last, with a little artificial sigh.

  ‘I dumped Claus-Joseph yesterday,’ I admit, and we both break out in laughter.

  We laugh and laugh; fall into each other’s arms, and can almost not stop ourselves. The tears are running, the French grammar book falls to the floor and we continue until Henny gets a stomach ache and I almost pee my pants.

  ‘Agnes,’ Henny says, ‘you are my blood sister. Nothing is going to be able to separate us.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  To:

  Agnes R.

  Villa Guarda

  Gobshejm

  Grothenburg, 8 December

  Dear Agnes,

  Thanks for your last letter, which made me both happy and worried.

  Made me happy because now I really see that you are embracing our cause with complete seriousness (I definitely think we can use your Belgian pistol, just so long as you are sure it works and know how to handle it) – worried me because your question in the P.S. must of course be taken into serious consideration.

  Because of course it is on all these trips here and there that he sees her. Occasional, hot nights in strange hotel rooms. My God, Agnes, my insides go into revolt when I think about it! Month after month, they’ve probably managed a hundred or more fucks these years, yes, I have started to understand that presumably it has been going on longer than I thought at first. And I am toying with – and rejecting – the thought of telling the girls about their father. Such cheapness! Such a banal betrayal!

  I harbour no interest in her, however. Not the slightest, she may be any tart or any so-called respectable woman at all; her reasons and underlying motives I couldn’t care less about. The cheapness from her side is presumably no less, but I leave her at that; he is the one that must die, not her. I don’t even want to know who she is.

  But how do we manage the problem that she may be on the scene? Thank goodness you brought that up in time, Agnes, under no conditions do I want her also rubbed out – apart from all other complications, a double murder of my husband and his lover would immediately cast all suspicions in my direction. No, he should pay for his actions, she can escape – on that point we don’t need to feel any hesitation.

  On the other hand, we should not exaggerate the difficulties. If you succeed in killing David according to plan, and she happens to be the one who discovers the body – for example – well, such a spice wouldn’t spoil the dish, would it? She must probably have good reason to flee the field in such a situation? Or am I thinking wrong, Agnes? If you were a married man’s lover and you found him dead in a love nest, would you then call the police at once? Reveal your identity and the state of things? I don’t think so. No, the more I think about this, the more certain I am that we have nothing to fear from her. As long as she doesn’t become an eyewitness to the murder itself, I don’t think her possible presence in the wings will play a particularly great role or need be an obstacle to us. And – as we have come so far – it should not be particularly difficult after all to make sure that he is alone when you shoot him, Agnes. Or what? It doesn’t necessarily have to happen in the room either. Perhaps a shot in the back in some alley in the vicinity of the hotel will work just as well? Down into the handbag with the pistol, and then a calm walk away from there; you can shoot prime ministers that way. Yes, I’m only speculating, Agnes, and sometimes I must say that it irks me a little that I’m not the one who gets to hold the gun and give him what he deserves.

  Anyway, consider these details, Agnes, and let me know what you think about it. In any event it is now crucial to find a time and a place that suits us well. I assume that we are not going to go to work until well into the new year, so I have peeked at David’s schedule and understood that he has at least four two- to three-day engagements during January and February. But I will check the dates more carefully and present them in my next letter. Christmas is fast approaching here in Grothenburg, we have the usual family arrangements to get started on; it can’t be denied that I am happy that this is the last time.

  I hope you received the money. How we deal with the remaining eighty thousand I don’t know; I assume that you trust me as much as I trust you, Agnes – it feels as if these nineteen years have passed in another channel, another space in some way, don’t you think so too? I long to see you, but as I said in my last letter, naturally that has to wait for a while.

  But then, dear Agnes, can’t we allow ourselves a week or two and just be together, you and me? A little trip next autumn, perhaps? Two merry widows in the Mediterranean, say that it sounds enticing! I have no problem where childcare for the girls is concerned. My brother (I’m sure you remember Benjamin?) and his family will happily take care of them; they live in Karlsruhe and we exchange cousins with each other occasionally, even if his boys are of course a few years younger.

  But, as I said, Agnes, let us bide our time over Christmas, and then strike in the new year. Enjoy the weeks off (or is it actually a month in the academic world?) and be in touch about ev
erything!

  Signed your devoted

  Henny

  To:

  Henny Delgado

  Pelikaanallé 24

  Grothenburg

  Gobshejm, 10 January

  Dear Henny,

  I apologize for not having written for a while, but I’ve been out of town. A colleague at the department made an offer that I couldn’t turn down a few days before Christmas. Two weeks in New York – his sister works for the UN and has an apartment in Manhattan – I left on Christmas Eve and came back to Gobshejm late yesterday evening, and I truly had a lovely stay over there. A three-room apartment to myself on 74th Street with a view over a frostbitten Central Park. Theatre and film, museums and a little shopping, of course we must take a trip together, Henny, exactly as you suggest. But God knows I prefer a big city . . . Barcelona or Rome perhaps, or why not New York again? Oh well, more on that in due course.

  I’ve been thinking about the thoughts and the risk assessments you presented in your most recent letter, and I agree with you in all essentials. I don’t think we need to plan the deed itself too much in advance either – especially as we cannot be sure if that woman is going to be present or not – but I don’t see this as particularly problematic. The crucial decisions must be made in any event on the scene; it is impossible to foresee exactly what circumstances are going to prevail, we must simply rely on my good judgement and my coolness in the decisive moment. And – I assure you, Henny – I am not going to shake in my boots. If I just find the right opportunity I am going to exploit it. If I find the risk of discovery too great, yes, then I will wait. When all is said and done, shooting another person to death does not take more than a second or two – reaching safety afterwards not that much longer.