The Hermit (7 page)

Every Wednesday at 10.15 a.m., including today, he stands on the pavement in front of the broad gate, waiting, his backpack all the way up to his shoulders. Aaz hasn’t uttered a word in fourteen years. One day he simply stopped speaking. He can speak, but as Mónica has explained, he doesn’t. During the first few Wednesdays, Erhard hoped that he would say something. Each time they spent more than two hours together – one hour out and one hour back. Erhard had hoped such proximity would open up the Boy-Man. That he would show Erhard trust. It became a game, a challenge, to get the boy to say something. Erhard could make him smile, he could make him turn his head. Nevertheless, Erhard was defeated every Wednesday. Finally, Erhard grew so irritated that he asked Mónica to find a new driver. He could no longer take it. The problem was that none of the other drivers wished to drive the Boy-Man. Aaz would have to take the bus again.

Mónica offered to pay Erhard double to continue. You don’t need to like him. Just pretend, she’d said. Erhard gave it half a year. He didn’t want her money.

And then something happened.

Erhard heard Aaz speak.

They arrive at their destination. He follows Aaz inside. Mónica clutches the boy’s large hand. They sit at the piano. It’s one of the things they have in common. Aaz loves music. Erhard watches them cuddle like birds. Every other month, though not today, he tunes the piano. Today he just glances around.

It’s not an unhappy home like his own, even though Mónica is the same age and, like him, alone. There are fresh flowers, a fish tank, and ladies’ magazines in a rack beside the sofa, a small chest of drawers with madonnas, and an entire wall of framed portraits showing a little girl in black-and-white ballerina skirts, men in military uniforms out near Calderon Hondo, and two young women on a Vespa in front of an office building. Probably twenty photographs in all. All of them black and white, beautiful, sad. A life passed by. There’s not a single image of her son. Erhard looks around. Not even on the shelf above the TV, or on the chest of drawers beside the madonnas. She conceals the most important parts of her life, just as he does, so she doesn’t have to move forward. Mónica is cool and regal, but not snooty; she’s simply elegant with what she has. The little spoon in the sugar bowl and the flowers that match the curtains.

20

– What do you want? he says, without lifting his eyes from his book on the table or laying his cup down on the saucer. It’s Friday morning, and the three men in shirts are watching Erhard drink his coffee. One is vice police superintendent Bernal.

Bernal slips a sheet of paper on top of Erhard’s book. It’s a newspaper cutting and impossible to tell its origins; not many of the words are legible, the ink is smudged and the paper worn. Still, Erhard spots the words ‘pengepungen’ and ‘bankpakke’. Strange words that he doesn’t instantly recognize.

– What does it say? Bernal asks. – Is that Danish?

– I think so. He would need the rest of the article, which is missing, to understand it, but it appears to be Danish. – Where’s it from? he asks, fearing for some reason that it has something to do with Raúl.

– That’s not something you need to concern yourself with, says Bernal’s colleague, a small man with narrow eyes and an unkempt moustache. He glances around the cafe, where there is only one other person, a dishevelled young man with combed-back hair and screwed-up eyes who seems to have partied all night.

– We need someone who understands Danish.

– So find a tourist guide. There are plenty of those.

– Not as many as there once were. Come on, Jørgensen.

– Tell me what this is all about, then I might help out.

– You owe me a favour after the last time. I could’ve hauled you off to the station.

– Tell me what this is about, Erhard says, noticing that Bernal suddenly seems more tired-looking. Maybe he’s not sleeping enough, maybe he drinks, maybe his kid still has measles.

– Forget him, Bernal, the little man says. He’s the resolute type who’d rather arm-wrestle than offer a hand. – The foreigner can’t help us. He has too many bad memories, he adds, swiftly downing his espresso, eager to go.

Apparently Bernal had told him about Erhard before they arrived at the cafe. About the case with Federico Molino, whose suitcase was found out near Lajares. With his passport and socks and hair wax and tube of lubricant, which the police so smoothly managed to include in court. They ought to have been happy for Erhard’s testimony. But they always seemed to think he knew more than he was telling them. A few officers were bitter. Bernal was the only one who understood that Erhard cultivated his relations to others on the island. He told the truth, but he didn’t tell everything. He didn’t name Raúl Palabras or the former regional president, Emeraldo or Suárez. It’s been more than eight years now. – No thanks, unless you want to arrest me, Erhard says.

Bernal looks at him as if he hopes he’ll change his mind. – Say hello to young Palabras, he says.

The two men leave.

The cafe owner is standing stiffly behind the bar, observing them in the wall mirror. He probably doesn’t have a licence to sell beer. Many of the city’s cafes don’t. Then he glances up and calls out to the young man at the back of the cafe. – Goddamn it, Pesce, don’t put your greasy hair on my table. Go home and get to bed.

When Erhard walks to his car – parked at the end of the queue on High Street – he sees the officers standing on the corner near Paseo Atlántico. He climbs in his car and continues reading Stendahl’s
The Red and the Black
. It’s an unwieldy book, strangely incoherent.

He checks the mirrors. No one’s around. He pulls the bag from his pocket, removes the finger, and tries prying off the ring. But it doesn’t budge. The finger is like a stick marinated in oil; he puts it in the empty slot next to his own ring finger. It’s too big, and it’s the wrong hand, but it resembles a little finger. The hand looks like a hand again. With a finger where it’s supposed to be. He packs it away again. Deep down in his pocket.

He spots the officers saying their goodbyes to one another. Then Bernal saunters over to his taxi. He climbs in.

– Puerto, he says.

Erhard looks at him. – And since we’re heading that way anyway, you’ll ask me to come to the station?

– Maybe, Bernal says.

– It’s not my turn. You see the queue ahead of me?

– Just drive.

Erhard exits the queue, and one of the drivers from Taxinaria shouts at him. Luís. He’s always shouting. Big mouth with no teeth. They drive up the high street, across the city, and out onto FV-1. Neither says a word.

– Does this have anything to do with Bill Haji? Erhard asks. – I’ve told you everything I know.

The policeman grins. – That case is closed. It’s history. His sister wasn’t happy, to put it mildly.

– And it doesn’t have anything to do with the Palabras family?

– Not at all. One of Bernal’s boots, crossed over his knee, bounces to the music emerging from an old John Coltrane tape that Erhard’s had for more than twenty years. – You were out at Cotillo yourself recently. Haven’t you heard the news?

Erhard hasn’t read the newspaper for several days. He shakes his head.

– Don’t you do anything besides read? Haven’t you listened to the news on the radio?

– Not really.

– The short, and true, story is that the car was abandoned out near Cotillo. We don’t know why. It ought to have been in Lisbon, but oops, it’s here now. Someone stole it, then shipped it here. We don’t know who drove it. Since it was standing in water above the bonnet, the motor is dead now of course. The only interesting lead is a newspaper ripped into tatters.

– So what do you want from me?

– You’re going to examine the fragments we’ve got and tell me what they say. It’s probably nothing. Maybe they’re just pieces of a newspaper, meaningless. Right now I’m trying to understand what happened. Between you and me, I’m not getting a whole lot of support from my bosses on this one. And I’m going a little rogue with this newspaper stuff.

They reach the first roundabout leading out of the city. The sun is stuck between two clouds, like an eye that’s been punched.

– Tell me again why you were out on the beach the other day? Bernal asks.

– My friends wanted to watch the lightning.

– Your friends? Raúl Palabras and his girlfriend?

– Yes.

Bernal stares at Erhard, while Erhard gazes ahead at the traffic.

– I haven’t read a Danish newspaper in years, Erhard says.

– Just look at the fragments and tell us what they say. That’s all I ask.

Both the police and the island’s inhabitants call police headquarters in Puerto ‘the Palace’, because it’s located in the ruins of a palace built for the Spanish king at the turn of the twentieth century. Apart from the impressive outer walls and beautiful arches between some smooth columns, however, not much of the royal grandeur remains. The offices, where six or seven men sit sweating behind their computers, resemble that of some building in a sleepy 1960s Copenhagen suburb.

On the way in they pass some metal detectors. Erhard is afraid they’ll body-search him and find the bag with the finger in his pocket, but he ends up just following Bernal down the hallway and into a room that resembles a warehouse or a garage. Bernal closes the door behind them and rummages around on a large shelf; he returns with a big, light-brown box, then slips on rubber gloves.

– Shouldn’t I wear those too?

– It doesn’t matter, Bernal says, glancing momentarily at Erhard’s missing finger. He begins to gather the fragments of newspaper from the box. – The bastards left a little surprise for us on the backseat.

– The bastards, Erhard says. He recognizes the box as the one found on the backseat. Even though it was night time and the only light came from a teetering police lamp.

– We don’t know how the pieces connect, whether they connect at all, or even if it’s worth it for us to sit here putting the puzzle together. Can you read any of it?

Erhard studies the fragments. There are photos, words, some colours. – They must’ve gotten wet. The sheets are stuck together.

– Yes, Bernal says bitterly. – That’s the problem. We can’t tell if it’s just a newspaper, or if there’s a message in it somewhere.

– So what am I supposed to do?

– Read the headlines, the ones in bold. Can you decipher any of that? This one, for example. He points at a large section with a headline and a subhead. It’s very strange seeing so much Danish text gathered in one place. – What’s it say?

– ‘More homeless will die in Copenhagen if the winter is as hard as last year’s. A man froze to death.’

– What does that mean?

– I don’t know. That it’s tough being homeless in a cold country?

Bernal gestures with his hands. – Go on. What about this one?

This fragment is clearer, but it’s stuck to another fragment. – ‘Fathers have no success with appeals.’

– What does that mean?

– I don’t know. That’s what it says.

Bernal looks unhappy. – OK, study the fragments. Tell me if anything seems out of the ordinary.

Erhard rummages through the papers, reading them, then stacking the ones he’s read in a pile. There’s nothing – nothing at all – that captures his attention. They are your typical, not especially interesting articles about Danes and their finances and their children and their institutions and their divorces and their TV programmes. A great deal of what he sees is about the Hell’s Angels. Although it’s been many years since he last read a Danish newspaper, he doesn’t feel it’s much different today. He doesn’t recognize some of the names, but other than that, it’s the usual.

– I don’t think there’s anything, but I don’t know what I’m looking for.

Bernal gets to his feet. – I don’t know what you’re looking for, either. This is a shitty case.

That last bit he practically whispers. He scoops the fragments in great handfuls and tosses them into the box. A urine stench wafts through the room. From another room, behind the shelves, a small child hiccoughs or whimpers. Bernal doesn’t notice.

– I can’t help you unless you tell me what I’m looking for. I need to know more.

Bernal considers at length. Erhard guesses that he’s weighing his words. How much he’s allowed or wishes to say. – Come, he says. – Over here.

They walk around the shelf and into a dark corner. He turns and stops Erhard, who’s right behind him. In the darkness Erhard sees only half of Bernal’s face. – You don’t have a weak stomach, do you?

Erhard shakes his head.

– Do you remember that girl Madeleine?

– Did you find her?

Bernal looks annoyed. – Do you remember her?

Erhard nods.

– Good. We don’t want that kind of case here. Not at all. We’ve done what we can. You need to know that. No one is working at cross purposes here. What happened in Portugal completely destroyed the tourist industry in Praia da Luz, and the police were hung out to dry in the media as a flock of fucking Thomson and Thompsons. The difference here is that no one is missing the child. No crying mothers or fathers, or cute siblings pining for their little brother.

– The child?

Bernal flicks on two wall lamps, then moves to the whiteboard. – The boy, he says, pointing at a photograph.

It’s a large black-and-white photograph, probably a colour photo originally, and difficult to look at. But there is no colour now, only gradations of black, maybe brown or some greenish tint. Crossing through it is a big, black square marked by four light-grey cubes that provide the square with depth. In the centre of the square, as though surrounded by an invisible eggshell, is a tiny human being. One hand is up near its head as if to scratch itself, while the other hand is, almost impossibly, wrapped around its back. The child is covered in pale-grey newspaper fragments.

Erhard has to turn away. His eyes slide towards the whiteboard and more photographs with the same horrible scene. Close-up images of the boy’s mouth, his eyes – which are closed, sunken in a sickened darkness. Photographs of the car, of the backseat where the box rests between seatbelts as if someone had tried to secure it.