Hour of the Wolf (12 page)

Detectives? he thought. Stupid country bumpkins.

Vera arrived in the afternoon. She had bought some wine and food from the covered market in Keymer Plejn, but they hadn’t seen each other for six days and were forced to start making love out there in the hall. How amazing that there could be such passion. How amazing that such a woman could exist.

They eventually got round to the food and wine. She stayed the whole night, and they made love several times, in various different places, and instead of waking up in the hour of the wolf he fell asleep more or less in the middle of it.

Tired out and satisfied. Full of love and wine and with Vera Miller as close to him as could be.

She stayed until Sunday afternoon. They spent a serious hour talking about their love: about what they ought to do with it, and about their future.

It was the first time.

‘Nobody knows you exist,’ she said. ‘Not Andreas. Not my sister. Not my workmates and friends. You are my secret, but I don’t want it to be like that any more.

He smiled, but made no reply.

‘I want to have you all the time.’

‘Your husband?’ he asked. ‘What do you intend to do about him?’

She looked at him long and hard before answering.

‘I shall deal with that,’ she said. ‘This week. I’ve thought it through, there aren’t any short cuts. I love you.’

‘I love you,’ he replied.

He worked late on Monday. On his way home in the car – just as he was passing the concrete culvert in the ditch – he realized he was singing along to the car radio, and it dawned on him that it was still less than a month since that evening. It was still November, but everything had changed to a far greater extent than he would have believed possible.

It was unreal. Totally unreal. But that was life.

He smiled, still humming away as he took the day’s post out of the letter box. But he stopped only a few seconds later as he sat at the kitchen table and read the letter. As far as he could recall – if he remembered rightly: he had disposed of the others – it was written on exactly the same type of writing paper and was in exactly the same sort of envelope as the two earlier ones. It was handwritten, and no more than half a page long.

Two lives.

You now have two lives on your conscience. I have given you plenty of time to come forward, but you have hidden yourself away like a cowardly cur. The price for my silence is now different. One week (exactly seven days) is available to you for producing 200,000. Used notes. Low values.

I shall get back to you with instructions. Don’t make the same mistake twice, you won’t have another opportunity to buy your freedom. I know who you are, I have incontrovertible evidence against you, and there are limits to my patience.

A friend

He read the message twice. Then he stared out of the window. It was raining, and he suddenly sensed the smell of cold sweat in his nostrils.

THREE

13

Erich Van Veeteren was buried after a simple ceremony on Monday, 30 November. The service took place in a side chapel of the Keymer Church, and in accordance with the wishes of his closest relatives – especially his mother – only a small circle of mourners were present.

Renate had also chosen both the officiating clergyman and the hymns – in accordance with some sort of obscure principles she claimed were important for Erich, but which Van Veeteren had difficulty in believing. Besides, it didn’t really matter as far as he was concerned: if Erich had felt the need for spirituality, it was hardly likely he would have found it within the realm of these high-church ceremonies and under these menacing spires reaching heavenwards, he was convinced of that.

The vicar seemed comparatively young and comparatively lively, and while he spoke and proceeded through the rituals in a broad accent revealing his origins in the offshore islands, Van Veeteren spent most of the time with his eyes closed and his hands clasped in his lap. On his right was his ex-wife, whose presence he found difficult to tolerate even in these circumstances; on his left sat his daughter, whom he loved above everything else on this earth.

Directly in front was the coffin holding the mortal remains of his son.

It was difficult to look at it: perhaps that’s why he kept his eyes closed.

Kept his eyes closed and thought of Erich when he was still alive instead. Or rather, allowed the thoughts to flow freely: and it seemed that his memory picked out images completely at random. Some incidents and memories from Erich’s childhood: reading him stories on a windy beach, he wasn’t at all sure which; visits to the dentist, visits to the skating rink and Wegelen Zoo.

Some from the difficult period much later on: the years when he was a drug addict, the times in prison. The suicide attempt, the long, sleepless nights at the hospital.

Some from their last meeting. Perhaps these were the most important and frequent of all. As these more recent images rolled past, he was also uncomfortably aware of his own egotistical motives – his compulsion to derive something positive from that meeting; but if it is true that every new day carries with it the sum of all the preceding ones, he thought, perhaps he could be excused.

Today, at least. Here, at least, in front of the coffin. He had sat with Erich at the kitchen table at Klagenburg on that final occasion. Erich had come to return an electric drill he’d borrowed, and they had sat down to drink coffee and discuss things in general, he couldn’t recall precisely what. But it had nothing to do with his addiction to this and that, nothing to do with his ability (or inability) to take responsibility for his own life, or with social morality versus private morality. Nothing at all to do with those difficult topics, which had been discussed before at enormous length.

It was just chat, he told himself. Nothing to do with matters of guilt. A conversation between two people, it could have been anybody at all; and it was precisely that, the simplicity and insignificance of what they discussed, which provided the positive outcome of the situation.

Something positive among all the negatives. A faint light in the eternal darkness. He recalled yet again Gortiakov’s walk through the pond carrying a candle in
Nostalghia
. He did that often. Tarkovsky’s
Nostalghia
. . . And now, as he sat there in that ancient cathedral, in front of his son’s coffin, with his eyes closed, with the vicar’s measured litany floating up to the Gothic arches above them, it was as if . . . as if he had achieved a sort of kinship. Perhaps that was too much to expect; but nevertheless a kinship with so many weighty things. With Erich; with his own incomprehensible father who had died long before Van Veeteren had the slightest chance of getting to understand and become reconciled with him; with suffering and with art and with creativity – all possible kinds of creativity – and eventually also with a belief in something beyond this world of ours, and in the visions and ambitions of those who had built the church in which they were sitting . . . With life and death, and the never-ending passage of time. With his daughter Jess, who was leaning heavily on him, and occasionally seemed to be convulsed by a shudder. Kinship.

It works, he thought. The ritual works. The forms overcome doubts. We have learned over the centuries to weave meaning around emptiness and pain. A meaning and a pattern. We have been practising that for a very long time.

The spell was not broken until he processed past the coffin with Jess clinging to his arm – not until he had turned his back on it all and started to leave the chancel. Then he was hit by an ice-cold stab of despair instead; he almost stumbled, and had to cling on to his daughter in order not to fall. He was supporting her, she was supporting him. It seemed a vast distance to Renate on Jess’s other side, and he wondered why he found it necessary to keep her so far away. Why?

And once they were outside the heavy church door, standing in the drizzle, his only thought was: Who killed him? I want to know who it was that killed my son.

Who blew out the flame.

‘I haven’t finished sorting stuff out yet,’ said Marlene Frey. ‘Separating his things from mine, that is. I don’t know what is the usual thing to do in these circumstances. Is there anything you’d like to have?’

Van Veeteren shook his head.

‘Of course not. You lived together. Erich’s things are yours now, naturally.’

They were sitting at a table in Adenaar’s. Marlene Frey was drinking tea, he had a glass of wine. She wasn’t even smoking. He didn’t know why that surprised him, but it did. Erich had started smoking when he was fifteen . . . probably earlier than that, but it was on his fifteenth birthday that he’d caught him at it.

‘Please feel free to come and have a look a couple of days from now, in any case,’ she said. ‘There might be something you’d like as a souvenir.’

‘Photographs?’ it occurred to him. ‘Do you have any photos? I don’t think I have a single one of Erich from the last ten years.’

She smiled fleetingly.

‘Of course. There are some. A few, at least.’

He nodded, and eyed her guiltily.

‘I apologize for not having called round to see you yet. I have . . . There’s been so much to do.’

‘It’s never too late,’ she said. ‘Call in when you have time, and I’ll give you a few pictures. I’m at home in the evenings. Usually, that is – maybe it would be an idea to ring first. We don’t need to make a big thing of it.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We don’t.’

She took a drink of her tea, and he sipped his wine as a sort of half-hearted gesture of agreement. Stole a glance at her and decided that she was good-looking. Pale and tired, of course, but with clean-cut features and eyes that met his without deviating as much as a centimetre. He wondered what she had been through in her life. Had she had the same kind of experiences as Erich? It didn’t seem so: the tribulations always seemed to leave deeper traces on women. She’d been through her fair share, of course, he could see that: but there was nothing in her demeanour that suggested a lack of strength.

Strength to see her through life. Yes, he could see that she had that.

It’s disgraceful, he thought. Disgraceful that I haven’t met her until now. In circumstances like these. Obviously, I ought . . .

But then the
Erich-is-dead
constellation took possession of him with such force that he almost fainted. He gulped down his wine and took out his cigarette-rolling machine.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

She smiled briefly again.

‘Erich smoked.’

They sat in silence while he rolled, then lit up.

‘I ought to give it up,’ he said. ‘Using this thing helps to cut down at least.’

Why the hell am I sitting here, he thought, going on about smoking? What difference does it make if the father of a dead son smokes too much?

She suddenly placed her hand on his arm. His heart missed a beat and he almost choked on his cigarette. She observed his reaction, no doubt, but did nothing to pretend it was an accident. Nothing to gloss over it. Simply left her hand where it was while looking hard at him with probing, slightly quivering eyes.

‘I think I could get to like you,’ she said. ‘It’s a pity things turned out as they did.’

Turned out as they did? he thought. A pity? Talk about understatement . . .

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t have more contact with Erich. Naturally, it ought to—’

‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, interrupting him. ‘He was a bit . . . Well, how should one describe it?’ She shrugged. ‘But I loved him. We had good times together, it was as if being together made us grow up, as it were. And then of course there was that special thing.’

He had forgotten all about that.

‘Er, yes,’ he said. ‘What special thing?’

She let go of his arm and gazed down at her cup for a few seconds. Stirred it slowly with her spoon.

‘I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but the fact is that I’m expecting a child. I’m pregnant, in the third month. Well, that’s how things stand.’

‘Good God!’ he exclaimed, and now the smoke really did spark off a coughing fit.

Early on Tuesday morning he drove Jess out to Sechshafen. He had told both her and Renate about the conversation with Marlene Frey: Jess had phoned her on the Monday evening and arranged to meet her the next time she came to Maardam. With a bit of luck around New Year.

The intention had been that Renate should also accompany them to the airport, but apparently she had woken up with a temperature and what seemed to be tonsillitis. Van Veeteren thanked God for the bacilli, and suspected that Jess didn’t have anything against them either.

She held his hand that morning as well as they crawled through the fog enveloping Landsmoor and Weill: it was a warm hand, and occasionally gave his a hard squeeze. He was aware that the squeezes were indications of daughterly love, and the familiar old anxiety that goes with parting. Stronger than ever on a day like this, of course. Separation from her roots in this flat, north European landscape. From Erich. Perhaps also from him.

‘It’s hard to say goodbye,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s hard.’

‘You never get used to it. But I suppose there’s a point to that as well.’

Parting is a little death, he almost added, but he managed to keep that thought to himself.

‘I don’t like airports,’ she said. ‘I’m always a bit frightened when I’m going to travel somewhere. Erich was the same.’

He nodded. He hadn’t known that, in fact. He wondered how much there was he didn’t know about his children. How much he had missed over the years, and how much could still be repaired or discovered.

‘But I didn’t know him all that well,’ she said after a while. ‘I hope I’ll grow to like Marlene – it feels as if through her he’s left traces of himself behind. I hope to goodness all goes well. It would be awful if . . .’

She didn’t complete the sentence. After a while he noticed that she had started crying, and he gave her hand a long squeeze.

‘It feels better now, at least,’ she said when it had passed. ‘Better than when I came. I’ll never get used to it, but I occasionally feel almost calm now. Or maybe one just feels numb after all the crying. What do you think?’