The Return (20 page)

35

“Tell me about your illness,” he said.

She lifted the snotty-nosed girl onto her knee and looked somewhat doubtfully at him.

No wonder. His cover story was hardly a masterstroke—a fifty-seven-year-old university lecturer busy writing a dissertation on certain types of hip injuries contracted at birth! What a likely story! He hadn’t even bothered to check any details in advance, just tried to give the impression that his method was statistical. A sociomedical approach, he’d explained. He had equipped himself with a form that wouldn’t have withstood a close examination, of course, but even so—provided he kept it concealed inside the folder he had in front of him—it ought to give the suggestion of professionalism.

Or so he tried to convince himself. Who cares if she was confused, anyway? The main thing was that she answered his questions; she could have as many suspicions as she liked afterward.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“When did it start?”

“When I was born, of course.”

He ticked a box on the form.

“In which year was she confined to bed?”

She thought that one over.

“Nineteen eighty-two, I think. Completely, that is. She spent most of her time in bed before that as well, but I don’t remember her ever walking, or even standing up, after Christmas 1981. I left home in June 1982.”

“Did she ever use a stick?”

She shook her head.

“Never.”

“Did you have much contact with her after you’d moved out?”

“No. What does that have to do with your research?”

He bit his tongue.

“I just want to get a few things about the relationship between you pinned down,” he explained and ticked another box. “So you are saying that she was a total invalid from 1982 until her death?”

“Yes.”

“Where did she spend her last years?”

“In Wappingen. Together with a Sister of Mercy in a little apartment. She had divorced my father—I don’t think she wanted to be a burden on him any longer. Or something of that sort.”

“Did you visit her there?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

She thought for a moment. The girl started whimpering again. Slid down onto the floor and hid away from his gaze.

“Three,” she said. “It’s a long way.”

“And her state?”

“What do you mean?”

“How was she?”

She shrugged.

“The same as usual. A bit happier, perhaps.”

“But confined to bed?”

“Yes, of course.”

Damn, Van Veeteren thought. There’s something that doesn’t add up.

When he emerged into the bright sunshine, he had a short but intense dizzy spell. Was forced to hang on to the iron railing that surrounded the row of houses while he closed his eyes and recovered.

I need a beer, he thought. A beer and a cigarette.

Ten minutes later he had found a table under what looked like a plane tree outside a café. He emptied the tall glass in two swigs and ordered another. Lit a cigarette and leaned back.

Damn! he thought again. What the hell is it that doesn’t add up?

How far could it be to Wappingen?

A hundred and fifty miles? At least.

But if he went to bed early, surely he could raise the strength to drive 150 miles? With stops and rests and all that. It wouldn’t matter if he had to spend the night there. It wasn’t time he was short of nowadays. On the contrary.

He checked the address in his folder.

I’d better ring and arrange a meeting.

Why change my cover story when it seems to be working so well?

Beer number two arrived, and he sucked the froth off it.

What a damned awful story this is, he thought. Have I ever followed a thinner thread?

Just as well that nobody else is involved, thank God for that.

36

“What do we do in here?” wondered Jung.

“We could have a bite to eat, for instance,” said Münster. “Sit down and try to look as if you’re at home here.”

Jung sat down tentatively and looked around the austere premises.

“That won’t be easy,” he said. “But what’s the point? I assume we’re not being allowed to sit here in the town’s most expensive restaurant as a reward for our virtue.”

“Can you see that character in the dark blue suit next to the grand piano?” Münster asked.

“Of course,” said Jung. “I’m not blind.”

“According to Reinhart, he’s one of the top brass in the neo-Nazi movement. His name’s Edward Masseck, incidentally.”

“He doesn’t look like the type.”

“No, he’s an anonymous sort of character, Reinhart says. But he’s well documented. He’s the one behind an awful lot of shit, it seems. Arson in refugee hostels. Riots, desecration of graves, you name it. In any case, he’s sitting there and waiting for a contact from big business, a real big shot. We don’t know who, but when he turns up we’re supposed to let them sit and shuffle paper for a quarter of an hour or so. Then you go and phone from the vestibule while I go and arrest them. Reinhart and a couple of other officers are in two cars just around the corner.”

“I get it,” said Jung. “Why can’t Reinhart do it himself?”

“Masseck knows him,” said Münster. “Anyway, let’s order something to eat. What do you say to some lobster mousse to start with?”

“I had that for breakfast,” said Jung. “But I expect I can force down a bit more.”

“This Verhaven business,” said Jung as they waited for their main course. “How’s it going?”

Münster shrugged.

“I don’t know. I’m also off the case. It looks as if they don’t want to put any more resources into it. I suppose that’s understandable.”

“Why?”

“I expect they’re scared of stirring things up in the courts again. There could be one hell of a row if he should prove to be innocent, especially in the press and on television.”

Jung scratched the back of his neck.

“What does the chief inspector have to say about it?”

Münster hesitated.

“I don’t know. He’s still on sick leave. But it’s obvious that he’s not sitting at home, twiddling his thumbs.”

“Is it true that he’s got somebody on the hook? There was some talk about that in the canteen yesterday afternoon. Somebody who might have done it, that is?”

There was no doubting Jung’s curiosity, and it was obvious to Münster that he must have been aching to ask that question from the moment they’d sat down.

“I don’t know, to be honest,” he said. “I was out at Kaustin with him the day after they released him from the hospital. He pottered around at the house for an hour or so, and then he appeared with that look…you know what he’s like.”

Jung nodded.

“It’s damned amazing,” he said. “We spend several weeks going through that village with a fine-tooth comb—four or five of us—without finding anything of interest at all. Then he drives out there and picks up the trail inside an hour. Astonishing. Do you think it really is possible?”

Münster thought for a few seconds.

“What do you think?” he said.

“No idea,” said Jung. “You’re the one who knows him best.”

That’s true, I suppose, Münster thought. Although he sometimes had the feeling that the closer to Van Veeteren you got, the more unfathomable he became.

“It’s hard to say,” he said. “He’s certainly on to something, though, no doubt about that. But the last time I saw him he was going on about thin threads. And how long a flabby policeman could be stuck in a spider’s web, that kind of thing. He didn’t sound all that enthusiastic, but you know what he’s like.”

“I certainly do,” said Jung. “He’s a one-off, that’s for sure.”

There was a clear tone of admiration in Jung’s voice; there was no mistaking it, and Münster suddenly wished he could think of a way of conveying that to the chief inspector. Perhaps it wouldn’t be completely impossible, he thought. Since the cancer operation, he’d had the impression that their cooperation and level of communication had improved noticeably. There was more of a feeling of equality and more mutual respect. Or however it ought to be expressed.

Despite Van Veeteren’s unfathomability. And it was only in the early stages.

“No,” he said. “Van Veeteren is Van Veeteren.” He glanced over at the grand piano. Why hadn’t anybody appeared? Reinhart had guessed it would be one o’clock, but it was twenty past by now.

“I don’t know,” said Jung. “Anyway, here comes our sole. Yum-yum!”

Forty-five minutes later, Edward Masseck paid his bill and left. He had been all alone from start to finish. Jung had just ordered a second helping of candied walnuts, but they decided to pay and report to their colleagues.

“Hell’s bells!” said Reinhart when he heard that his prey had escaped. “How much did the meals cost?”

“It’s all yours,” said Münster, handing him the bill.

Reinhart stared at the pale blue scrap of paper.

“Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “Stauff and I have been sitting in the car for two hours with half a packet of peanuts between us.”

“It was an excellent meal,” said Jung from the backseat. “Maybe it would be a good idea to try again tomorrow?”

37

Dvořák’s New World Symphony had enveloped him during the last fifty miles or so, and that had been the right choice of music. Over the years he had begun to get a feeling for this kind of thing—the relationship between the task he was involved with, the weather and time of year and music. There were rising and falling movements that needed to be followed, not resisted. Flows and analogies that worked together, harmonized and illuminated one another…. Or however you might like to express it. It was difficult to put such things into words and explain them. Much easier to feel them.

Ah well, everything gets easier as the years go by. But as the years passed he had also become more wary of words. That wasn’t exactly surprising—bearing in mind his usual working environment, in which it was more of the exception than the rule when anybody stuck to the truth.

Language is lying, as somebody said.

Anyway, the New World. And as the skies cleared and the afternoon sun started to dry out the persistent rain that had fallen during the night and morning, he approached his goal. His fears about dizzy spells and lack of judgment in traffic had proven to be unfounded. He had also made frequent stops; sat with coffee and cake in depressing concrete-and-glass roadside cafés, gone for short walks, stretched his legs again and again and even performed gymnastic exercises as recommended in the postoperative program he’d had thrust into his hand on being released from hospital.

He had also been careful to refrain from alcohol and tobacco. He had to get back home again. Preferably, in any case.

His stock of toothpicks had been exhausted long before the Dvořák.

He parked in a little square called Cazarros Plats, and as he looked around for a suitable place to eat, he wondered who Cazarro might have been. He sounded more like a conquistador than a north European statesman, that was for sure.

Wedged between a department store and an undistinguished 1950s local government building was a little Italian restaurant specializing in pizzas and pasta dishes. He decided to give it a try. His meeting with Sister Marianne was at five o’clock, and he didn’t have all the time in the world.

But the food wasn’t the main point anyway. That was a glass of red wine and that longed-for cigarette.

And also the need to concentrate before what was in store. He had made an unnecessary fuss regarding preparations many times in the past, but there was something special about this occasion that had been clear to him from the moment he set off from home. Something he wasn’t able to handle and that he’d given up trying to control a long time ago.

A game in which he was much more of a chip than a punter.

It was not a new sensation, just an example of or a variation on that old deterministic principle, presumably: the unavoidable business of patterns and preordained order in the environment. Of increasing or decreasing entropy.

No, those thoughts about the arbitrary nature of life that he had flirted with the other day were something he now felt no enthusiasm for.

If there really was a creator or a force—or at the very least an all-seeing eye—it must be able to look down from its elevated position and make out the lines, the veins and arteries in time and space. The structures that seem so incomprehensible from our usual worm’s-eye view.

And the mutual connections and consequences of actions. Was there any other possibility? This must be what constituted the categories of a god.

These patterns.

But if there was no higher force—did it really make much difference?

What about Anselm and the proof of God’s existence? Hadn’t he always had trouble in seeing the point of it?

He fumbled in his breast pocket for a toothpick, then remembered the state of affairs and lit a cigarette instead.

Wouldn’t the pattern exist even so, in the same way as DNA spirals and the crystals making up snowflakes have always existed, irrespective of whether there has been anyone or anything to observe them?

What does a fractal care about a camera? he asked himself.

Good questions. Recurring questions. He put down his cigarette, poked listlessly at his fettuccine and took a sip of wine. It was hard to feel really hungry these days, for whatever reason. Whether it was due to the missing piece of bowel or something else.

Justice was another aspect.

Simpler and easier to deal with, he had always thought, even if he had never really needed to put it to the ultimate test. Despite more than thirty years in the force.

The tool of justice. That was how he needed to regard himself, after all, if he was to be really serious about it. It sounded a little high-flown, even a little pathetic; but it wasn’t something he went on about. It was merely an attitude he adopted in order to motivate himself, but it was a damned important one.

When it came to justifying his own existence and the work he did, he sometimes needed to dig deep, that was something he had learned. Deeper and deeper, perhaps—as if with every year that passed the very foundations became coated with a new and thicker layer of mud and dirt stirred up by the underworld in which he spent every working day.

Something like that anyway.

He still hadn’t found an answer to the key question. He had formulated it several years ago in connection with the G file, and it wasn’t especially complicated: Am I prepared to take things into my own hands when the law and the institutions fail?

If he was standing beside a murderer or some other violent criminal, and knew for certain—with 100 percent certainty—that the person was guilty, would it be morally more correct to let him go because of lack of proof rather than ensuring that justice was done?

He inhaled on his cigarette.

There were endless special cases, of course, and it was impossible to oversee the consequences. He had been through it all many times in theory, and perhaps he ought to be grateful that he hadn’t needed to put the theory to the test.

It had been a close thing at times, though. Especially then, seven years ago, in Linden.

And there was nothing to indicate that it would become relevant on this occasion, either.

Or was there?

He looked at his watch and saw that it was high time he paid and set off for her apartment, if he didn’t want the nun to have to wait for him.

The apartment was painted white and tastefully appointed. There was a minimum of furniture; in the living room, which is where she took him, there was only a low couch, two floor cushions and a table, with a bookcase and a prayer bench in a corner. On the walls were a crucifix and two candles in brass holders. And a picture of a church window, probably Chartres Cathedral. That was all.

No television, no armchairs, no knickknacks. The floor was covered by a large dark-colored carpet.

Good, thought Van Veeteren, sitting down on the couch. Nothing but essentials. The essence.

She served tea from an earthernware teapot. Simple cups, without handles. Thin cookies. No sugar, no milk. She didn’t even ask if he wanted any, but he didn’t, in any case.

She was old, at least fifteen years older than Van Veeteren, but she radiated vitality and alertness like an aura. It was clear that he was facing a person who inspired and demanded respect beyond the norm. The familiar feeling of deference came creeping up on him, the kind he sometimes felt when confronted by deeply religious and serene individuals—people who had worked out the answer to questions he himself had barely been able to formulate. A deference that was just as naturally complemented by its opposite, contempt and loathing, when he met the opposite type: submissive and loudly braying sheep, dominated by the herd instinct, the sanctimonious fellow travelers of hypocrisy.

He had sensed her qualities the moment they shook hands; she was a slim, erect woman with serious-looking brown eyes and a high forehead. She sat down opposite him, sinking onto one of the cushions with a graceful movement reminiscent of a curtsy. It struck him that as she squatted there with her legs hidden underneath her in the Asian manner, she could almost have been a twenty-five-year-old Buddhist woman. But in fact she was a Roman Catholic nun, three times as old as that.

“Help yourself,” she said.

He sipped the aromatic tea, groping for the folder he had placed on the floor beside him.

“I think I must ask you to clarify your intentions once more.”

He nodded. It was obvious that to produce the folder and the form would be an insult. Klimke’s razor, that he had justifiably thrown into the face of the chief of police only the other day, now threatened to bring shame upon himself, and nobody else.

“I must apologize,” he said. “My name is indeed Van Veeteren, but I am not who I said I was. I am a detective chief inspector, stationed in Maardam. My visit has to do with a case that I would prefer not to go into in detail. Will you be satisfied with my assurance that I have the best of intentions, but am dealing with a matter wallowing in evil?”

She smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s to do with Anna, if I understood you rightly?”

Van Veeteren nodded.

“She lived here with you for a few years before she died, I think. From 1987 to 1992, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“You cared for her and looked after her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because that is my vocation. That’s the way we work in our order. It’s a way of creating meaning. And love between people. Anna got in touch with us; there are about twenty of us sisters, and I was free at the time.”

He thought for a moment.

“I take it that you became…quite close to her?”

“We meant a lot to each other.”

“Confided in each other?”

“Of course.”

“Can you tell me about her illness?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Was she confined to bed all the time, for instance?”

It was clear to him that she already knew and had considered in advance what the conversation would be about, but perhaps that didn’t matter.

“She improved.”

“Improved?”

She suddenly became more serious.

“Yes, Chief Inspector. She improved. You are doubtless aware that her wounds were not confined to her hips. There is such a thing as a soul as well.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Van Veeteren with unintentional irony. “What on earth are you hinting at?”

She drew a deep breath and straightened her back.

“Irrespective whether or not you are a believer,” she said, “perhaps you can agree that many physical phenomena also have a psychological side. A spiritual dimension.”

She spoke very slowly, as if she had prepared the words in advance and wanted to be certain that none of them escaped his attention.

“Can you explain in a little more detail,” he said.

“Preferably not. It is a matter of trust as well. Not spelled out, but just as binding. I’m sure you understand what I mean.”

“You consider that you are bound by professional secrecy?”

“To some extent, yes.”

He nodded.

“But when the wounds in the soul had healed, her handicap also became less severe, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“How much better did she become? Could she move around? With the aid of a rolling walker or walking sticks, for instance?”

“Yes.”

“Did she go out?”

“I took her out in a wheelchair every day.”

“But she never went out on her own?”

“Not as far as I know.”

He looked past her and out the window.

“Can you tell me what you were doing on June fifth, 1992?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you know what Anna was doing that day?”

She didn’t reply. Looked at him with those calm, brown eyes of hers without an ounce of worry or embarrassment.

“How far is it from here to Ulmentahl?”

“Eighteen miles,” she said with no hesitation.

He drank the rest of his tea and allowed the silence to settle on the low table. It’s remarkable how information can be passed on via silence, he thought. He could have asked important questions now; that would have been the normal procedure, no doubt about that. He would have received no answers, but he was used to reading the nuances in unspoken words. But this was different. There was an infinitely wide gap between this almost stylized situation and the usual unspoken exchanges. For a moment he could feel a dizzy spell coming on again. Possibly not the kind of dizziness due to his operation, but nevertheless a feeling of weakness, a loss of strength and a feeling that he was losing his foothold…Or that there was something about which he was the only person to have total knowledge. And hence the total and unavoidable responsibility.

“Those wounds in her soul…,” he said eventually. “Have you any idea about what caused them?”

“She never told me about it.”

“I have gathered that. But I asked you if you had any idea about it.”

She smiled faintly once more.

“I can’t go into this, Chief Inspector. It doesn’t belong to me anymore.”

He paused for a few seconds.

“Do you believe in divine justice?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“And earthly justice?”

“That too. I am sorry that I am inhibited with regard to what I can tell you, but I think you already know what you need to know. It is not up to me to break my confidence and to speculate. If she had wanted me to have a complete knowledge of everything, she would have told me everything, of course. But she didn’t. If it had been the intention that I should take the matter further, I would have known. But that is not the case.”

“So Nemesis is my role?”

“Perhaps. A profession is also a calling, is that not the case?”

He sighed.

“May I ask you a personal question that has nothing to do with this?”

“Of course. Please do.”

“Do you believe in a God who intervenes?”

She clasped her hands over her knee.

“Certainly,” she said. “I believe that to the greatest possible degree.”

“How does He intervene?”

“In many ways. Through people.”

“And you believe that He is careful when He selects His agents?”