The Return (5 page)

9

She’d failed to catch on from the first indication. A few lines she’d read in one of the evening papers while traveling from the airport in a taxi. Anybody might have overlooked it.

Then it became more worrying. When she’d finished unpacking and taken her two tablets, she turned her attention to the daily papers that Mrs. Pudecka had left in two neat piles on the kitchen table, as usual. She lay back in the Biedermeier armchair in front of the fire and started to work her way slowly through them, one by one; that was when the suspicion began to nag at her. Of course, it was pure fantasy at the moment—a whimsical idea, something of that sort, prompted and set in motion by her bad conscience, no doubt. The vague feeling of guilt that naturally had no justification but was nevertheless always with her, deep down, more or less insistent, but never totally absent. She wished it had been otherwise. That it could have made up its mind to be completely—absolutely and very definitely—absent. Once and for all.

But that was not how it was, of course.

She went to the kitchen. Made another cup of tea, took some of the newspapers to the bedroom and started working through them more systematically. Stretched herself out under the blanket and read, letting her mind wander back through time as she tried to recall dates and events. Dozed off for a few minutes when dusk crept up on her, but was thrust out of a dream in which his face had suddenly appeared before her, in sharp detail.

His totally silent and expressionless face with those unfathomable eyes.

She stretched out a hand and switched on the lamp.

Could it be him?

She looked at the clock. Half past six. In any event it was too late to set off in the car this evening. The flight had tired her out, as usual. Nobody could expect her to sort things out immediately, but she was also aware that it was not something she could sweep under the carpet and hope it would stay there. There were some things you simply couldn’t skirt around. There was such a thing as duty.

She took a shower and spent a few hours in front of the television. Phoned Liesen to tell her that she was back home, but didn’t say a word about her misgivings. Of course not. Liesen was one of the people who knew nothing about it; there had never been any reason to tell her.

No compelling reason.

They didn’t mention a word about it on the news. That wasn’t so odd, when you came to think about it; over two weeks had passed, and of course there were other more important things to keep citizens informed about. Presumably it had all begun to fade away and disappear from people’s minds, and she suspected that if she didn’t intervene, the whole business would soon be forgotten.

She sighed uneasily. Wouldn’t that be best? For it to be forgotten? Surely there was no rhyme or reason why the past should be raked over again? Think of the unpleasantness that might be stirred up. Would he never tire of following her like a…like a, what is it they say nowadays? A poltergeist? Something like that, in any case.

But there was that vague stirring of conscience. That slight, nagging feeling of guilt. That is what it was really about, and would she ever be rid of it if she kept out of it this time as well? A good question, to be sure. Even if she looked on the positive side she could hardly have more than ten or twelve years left, and sooner or later she would find herself standing in front of that wall.

Facing her maker, that is. In which case it might be a good idea to be on solid ground.

Yes, indeed. She sighed, stood up and switched off the television. She would have to follow this up.

But there again, there was nothing, nothing at all, in fact, to suggest that it really might be him. Not the slightest detail.

No doubt it was just her nerves getting the better of her.

She set off early the next morning. She had woken up at half past five, another of those inevitable curses that old age brings with it. Got up, had breakfast and driven the car out of the garage before seven.

There was not much traffic; once she had wriggled her way out of town and reached the hills, she was more or less alone on the road. It was a lovely morning, with a thin layer of mist that slowly dispersed as the sun broke through. She stopped at the picturesque inn between Geerlach and Würpatz and drank a cup of coffee. Pulled herself together and tried to keep her thoughts and the nagging worry under control as she leafed through the morning papers. There wasn’t a word. Not in any of them.

She drove straight through Linzhuisen without stopping and arrived at the house soon after half past nine. Got out and walked up to the door. Managed to open it with a little difficulty, and then it was not many minutes before she realized that her worst fears could very well be true.

It was far from certain, of course, but having come this far she clearly had no alternative but to contact the police.

She did that shortly afterward; from the telegraph station in Linzhuisen, to be exact, and the call was logged in to Maardam at 10:03 by the duty officer, Police Constable Pieter Willock.

Ten minutes later Detective Inspector Rooth marched into Inspector Münster’s office without knocking and announced with ill-concealed excitement:

“I think we’ve got him.”

10

Sleep, he thought. That’s all I want.

The hours before he had been admitted were not the orgy of solitude he had imagined, and perhaps it was those telephone calls just as much as What Is In Store that were hounding him and keeping him awake long into the early hours.

Not that they had phoned to bid him farewell—or at least, it hadn’t sounded like that. But if something unexpected were to happen, they would naturally feel better, having spoken to him that final evening.

Renate was first. Beating about the bush as usual: talking about the holiday cottage they had once owned; about books she hadn’t read, but had seen; about her brother and sister-in-law (that awful brother of hers: For some unknown reason he got on rather well with the sister-in-law—in the old days, that is); and it was not until after a quarter of an hour or more that she came around to mentioning the operation.

Was he worried?

Worried? Of course not. No, needless to say she hadn’t expected him to be. Perhaps he could give her a ring when it was all over, in any case?

He had half promised. Anything to prevent her from going on about how they ought to get together again. They had been living apart for almost three years now, and if there was one thing in this life that he didn’t regret, it was the separation from Renate.

Maybe that was sufficient reason to claim that their marriage hadn’t been such a bad thing after all, it suddenly struck him. As a means to an end, that is.

Depressive people should be wary of one another, Reinhart had announced on some occasion or other. The sum often becomes greater than the parts. Much greater.

Then there was Mahler. No sooner had he put the phone down after the first call than he had the old poet on the line.

He must have let slip something about what was in store for him at the club, of course. Presumably while playing chess last Saturday, or the Saturday before. In any case, it was a surprise. Mahler was not exactly a close friend—whatever that means—but it could be that there was more to their companionship in the smoke-filled vaults than he had imagined. Or dared to imagine. He hadn’t thought very deeply about it, needless to say, but the call was a genuine surprise.

“I suppose you’ll have to miss a few matches,” he said. Mahler, that is.

“I’ll soon be back,” Van Veeteren had countered. “Nothing boosts your potency better than a few weeks’ abstinence.”

And Mahler had laughed in that deep voice of his and wished him the best of luck.

Last of all, Jess, of course.

She gave him a big daughterly hug over the miles, but promised to visit him in a few days with grapes, chocolate and grandchildren.

“Not on your life,” he protested. “Drag the kids a couple of hundred miles to gape at a doddery old bastard? I’d frighten the life out of them!”

“Balderdash,” said Jess. “I’ll treat them to an ice cream afterward and they’ll get over it. I know you’re frightened to death of this operation even if you flatly deny it when anybody says so.”

“I flatly deny it,” said Van Veeteren.

She laughed, just like Mahler had done, and then he’d spoken to two three-year-olds in his schoolboy French, and they also threatened to come and gape at him shortly. If he’d understood them rightly. And they seemed to know all about it, he had to admit.

“You’ll get an injection; then you’ll fall asleep,” said one of them.

“They put the dead bodies in the basement,” added the other.

When he had survived that call, it was high time to set off. He left a key with Mrs. Grambowska, two floors down, as usual, and tonight even this white-haired, faithful old servant seemed to exude a strange sort of glow full of sympathy and reconciliation. She took his hand and stroked it tenderly, a gesture the likes of which he had never seen from her in all the years he had known her.

“Good-bye,” she said. “Take care.”

I’ll disappoint them all if I pull through this, he thought as he got into the taxi. Not a bad tip to send him on his way, in fact. Take care! When he was lying on the table, drugged and carved up, he should avoid getting carried away and doing something silly. He must remember that.

He was aware that the only one who hadn’t been in touch was Erich, but of course it was possible that he’d tried earlier in the afternoon. The match with Münster and the visit to Adenaar’s had taken a lot of time, and he’d been at home for only a couple of hours or so. No doubt there were restrictions even on such things as telephone calls when you were in prison.

There were two beds in the pale yellow room that the nurse ushered him into, but the other one was empty and so he was able to lie alone and think his thoughts without distraction.

And they were many and varied. And sufficiently urgent to keep sleep at bay. He used the phone calls to grope his way back through time: It was not a mapped out journey, but his thoughts dragged him along in their wake and before long he had started to remember all the pains and delights his life had afforded him, and he tried to understand what had made him what he had become, and what he was…. If he could be excused such an infantile way of putting it. But in any case, the time seemed to be ripe for reflection; like writing his own epitaph, it struck him—his own obituary, written in advance, with authentic facts. Or questions.

From memory, not in.

Ex memoriam.

Who am I? Who have I been?

Needless to say, no answers came to him, apart from a realization that quite a lot seemed to have followed a pattern. Piloted him in the same inexorable direction in some mysterious way.

His father: that deeply tragic figure (but children are blind to great tragedies, of course), who had such a significant influence on him. Unswervingly and inexorably he had inculcated into his son a certainty that we can never expect the least favor from life. Nothing is permanent; all is transient, arbitrary, coincidental and obscure.

Well, something like that, if he’d understood his father rightly.

His marriage: twenty-five years with Renate. To be sure, it had produced two children and that was the important outcome. One of them was in prison and likely to continue along that path; but there again, Jess and the grandchildren were an unexpectedly healthy branch on the old, sickly tree. There was no denying that.

They put the dead bodies in the basement!

His job: If nothing else had pointed in that direction, thirty-five years of Sisyphean labor in the shady side of life and society must have presented him with the occasional indication that something positive can be achieved.

Yes, there was after all a trace of a pattern.

He thrust his hand down under the stiff blanket and fingered his stomach. There…Somewhere around there is where it was, to the right of his navel, if he had understood it rightly. That was where they were going to cut into him.

He squeezed tentatively. Suddenly felt hungry, as if he had been pressing a button. He had been forbidden to eat anything after six p.m., and it struck him that in fact he hadn’t eaten since twelve. At this very moment his intestine was doubtless locked in a vain struggle to suck the last drop of nutrition from the beer he had drunk at Adenaar’s…. He tried to conjure up the process in his mind’s eye, but the images that shimmered into view were blurred and abstract, way beyond the limits of comprehension.

It must have been at some point in this flickering sequence of incomprehensible images that he lost consciousness. No doubt the dim film show emanating from his intestines lasted for a while longer, but soon things started to become clearer. All at once the images sharpened. The stage was well lit and crystal clear. The operating theater peopled with mysterious figures in green, flitting around without a sound, their concentration hypnotic in its intensity. Only the faint, shrill clang of sharp instruments being whetted or dropped into metal dishes occasionally disturbed the dense, conspiratorial silence.

He lay there, naked and exposed on the cold marble table, and it struck him that it was all over. This wasn’t an operation. This was taking place in the familiar and rather chilly autopsy theater at the Forensic Institute where he’d watched Meusse and his colleagues at work many a time.

He approached the table and the group of enthusiastically cutting and carving figures, and it occurred to him that he couldn’t be the one lying there, that it must be some other poor, unfortunate and totally unknown soul. But there again, maybe not so unknown…There was something familiar about that headless body. It didn’t seem to have any hands either, and no feet, and when he finally managed to force his way past Meusse and that pale, fat assistant whose name he could never remember, it dawned on him that it wasn’t a table they were working at, but a piece of very ordinary woodland, a ditch in fact; and what they were busy with was not an operation or an autopsy—they had just rolled up the body in a big, dirty piece of carpet and were hurrying to force it down into the overgrown ditch where it belonged. Where everything belonged. Now and forevermore.

And then he was the one rolled up inside the carpet, after all. He couldn’t make a sound, could hardly breathe, but he could hear their excited whispers even so. This is a good place to put him! Nobody will ever find him here. He’s a totally unnecessary person. Why should we worry about anybody like that?

And he yelled at them, to bear in mind their moral responsibilities. Yes, that is exactly what he yelled, but of course it didn’t do much good, the carpet was too thick and they were already leaving, and it was extremely difficult to make yourself heard when you didn’t have a head.

The woman shook his arm. He opened his eyes and was just going to yell once more that they should bear in mind their moral responsibilities when he realized that he had woken up.

She said something, and he had the impression that her eyes were full of sympathy. Or something like that, at least.

Am I dead? Van Veeteren wondered. She looked quite angelic, in fact. It was not an impossibility.

But she was holding a telephone receiver. Everything seemed to be bordering on the profane, and then the penny dropped: He hadn’t even been operated on yet. It was morning, and everything was still in store.

“Telephone,” she said again. “A call for the chief inspector.”

She handed him the receiver and walked away. He cleared his throat and tried to sit up.

“Hello?”

“DCI Van Veeteren?”

It was Münster.

“Speaking.”

“Please excuse me for troubling you at the hospital, but you did say that the operation wasn’t until eleven….”

“What time is it now, then?” He searched for a clock on the empty walls, but couldn’t see one.

“Twenty past ten.”

“Oh.”

“I thought I ought to tell you that we know who it is…. You did seem to be a bit interested.”

“You mean the body in the carpet?”

For a fraction of a second he thought he was dreaming again.

“Yes. We’re all quite sure it must be Leopold Verhaven.”

“What?”

For a couple of seconds Van Veeteren’s mind was a blank. A minute expanse of stainless steel from which everything bounced off and had no chance of penetrating.

“What the hell was that you said?”

“Yes, Leopold Verhaven. He’s the one. I take it that you remember him?”

Three seconds passed. The steel melted and allowed the information to penetrate.

“Do nothing!” said Van Veeteren. “I’m on my way.”

He started to climb out of bed, but at that very moment the doors opened and in marched an unexpectedly large squad of personnel dressed in green.

The receiver was left dangling.

“Hello?” said Münster. “Are you still there?”

The nurse picked it up.

“Mr. Van Veeteren has just left for the operating theater,” she explained and replaced the receiver.