Intrigo Read online

  Seconds passed.

  Ewa? I thought. It was the first thought that usually set the conditions of life right again. I remembered Graues.

  Remembered my return home three and a half years ago.

  Remembered the police interrogations. Inspector Mort’s green shirt with rings of sweat under the arms.

  The talks with good friends and social workers.

  The months at the hospital and the move out of the apartment. My new job and resumption of the translations. The failed affair with Maureen. The failed trip with B.

  Where was I?

  An ant crawled across my neck. The gulls were screeching. Where?

  A minute or more must have passed before I suddenly regained consciousness, and what restored me was the cough.

  As clear as if she had been lying there in the sand beside me, once again I heard Ewa’s cough from Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and it felt . . . yes, I think that it must be the feeling you get when you are shot to death. Or when the power is turned on in the electric chair.

  I survived. Closed my eyes and took the cider bottle out of my plastic bag. Took a substantial gulp and, still without opening my eyes, lit a cigarette.

  While I smoked it, I lay there without moving. Started slowly calming myself down, and in order to occupy my brain with something neutral I tried to think about the arbitrary mechanisms of memory.

  Or was there no arbitrariness? Is memory – or forgetfulness, I mean of course – the only truly effective medicine against life?

  I think so. Believed it while I lay there in my hollow in the sand in any event, and there is actually nothing that has given me reason to change my understanding since then.

  Forgetfulness.

  At any rate, after a few minutes I had recovered. I made my way over the edge to spy over towards the Cherry Orchard. The house was concealed for the most part by the pines, but the red Mercedes was still there, and from the chimney that stuck up above the trees came a faint wisp of smoke, which was immediately scattered by the wind.

  I looked at my watch. Two thirty. I sank back down in the sand again. Formulated two questions:

  Did they intend to spend the night there?

  At what time would it be sufficiently dark for me to venture over?

  While I consumed a little more of my provisions, I decided that much depended on the location of the sundial itself, and that in any event I had to make my way up and locate it in daylight. Having to sneak around and search for it in the dark seemed anything but inviting.

  An hour or so later I knew what I needed to know. The sundial was a truly doubtful affair, exactly as had been suggested in Rein’s text – an oversized, sprawling bronze sculpture placed in lonely majesty in the middle of the large lawn. The distance to the house was a good twenty metres, and I assessed that it ought to be a rather risk-free enterprise to sneak over and dig under the cover of darkness. The Mercedes was still there; I had glimpsed a couple of people, just in passing, but it was clear that they preferred to stay indoors, despite the weather. Or to avoid being seen at least. I myself was mostly lying on my stomach with my head sticking up between two tufts of grass, and in that way had very good oversight of what was going on over in the Cherry Orchard.

  Which was not very much. And nothing particularly exciting. While I lay there and waited for darkness to fall, I had time to smoke almost twenty cigarettes, which is more than my entire normal daily consumption, and my provisions were used up long before twilight.

  But there was also a growing sense of calm. A rest and a recovery in those uneventful hours on the shore, which I think I needed and which I also stored in me and could benefit from later. After my memory-less minute and the shocking awakening my nervous tension levelled out, the discomfort in my body was subdued, and when I carefully started to approach the house just after eight thirty, I did not feel particularly worried. There were lights on in the windows on the ground floor, but the glow did not reach very far out on the lawn, and I understood that for any observer from inside, the sundial would presumably not even be outlined against the shoreline and the surrounding dark trees.

  Crouched down, I snuck across the grass. Came up to the sundial that rested on a metre-high brick base. I groped in the loose earth around its foot with my hand. I had not bothered to bring along a spade; I knew that Rein hardly had reason to dig particularly deep, and after only a minute or so of searching I came across what I was looking for.

  It was a rather small, flat package. Just as he had written, it was wrapped in a piece of canvas; it was perhaps fifty by twenty centimetres in size and a couple of centimetres thick. I brushed it off, evened out the dirt a little around the base and then slipped back in among the trees and down towards the shore. Just as I came up over the bank, the moon broke through a cloud and placed a carpet of glittering silver across the whole bay.

  I understood that this was yet another one of those signs.

  The return to A. took an hour and a half. My state of mind was still concentrated and neutral. Rein’s package was beside me on the passenger seat and now and then I glanced at it, without it producing any excitement or many thoughts in my head.

  And when later – after having returned the car and keys in the customary manner at the Hertz office – I had a few drinks at Vlissingen, I recall that a couple of times I also left it completely unguarded on my table while I made a trip to the bar or the toilet.

  Perhaps it was a question of – if not challenging – then in any event giving fate a chance. To intervene before it was too late, that is.

  No such thing happened, however. Fate was not on duty that evening. I came home to the apartment sometime around midnight, and after having cleaned Beatrice’s litter box and given her food, I dropped the rather dirty document down behind the top row of books on the bookshelf. Also decided to let it lie there for a few days, in order to give myself at least a hypothetical chance to still leave things alone.

  Clearly my afternoon sleep out by the sea had not been sufficient, because I remember that I barely managed to get my clothes off before I fell into bed.

  Certain days it can feel as if you are a different person when you go to bed, compared with who you were when you got up. I know that I managed to think – before I fell asleep on this exhausted evening – that this had been just such a day.

  After she drove away I returned to bed. Stayed there awhile and tried to read further in the two books I had going, but had a hard time finding the right level of concentration. Instead I got up again and took a long, hot shower, while I thought about how I would get the day to pass . . . it occurs to me that I’ve already brought up these small doings, but here they are in their right context.

  By and by I decided to hike along the river; I clearly felt the need for movement and the weather was considerably better than it had been during my excursion up to the grotto a few days earlier. I didn’t bother to trouble the kitchen staff about any provisions this time; there was plenty of development along the river and I would surely find both shops and cafes that were open.

  It was a lovely day. For over four hours I wandered along the rushing river. Took short breaks now and then, sat on some stone and observed the spectacular nature and the fishermen who were standing here and there out in the rapid water with their precision rods. Altogether I walked perhaps five kilometres upstream, where I also found a little cafe with an adjoining souvenir shop. I ate a sandwich and drank two beers, thirsty from the exertion and the warm weather. Bought a couple of postcards too and conversed a little with the owner, a chubby, cheerful Tyrolean who had travelled a bit and even, it turned out, visited my home town for a few hours in the early eighties.

  I returned to Graues and had dinner at Gasthof number three, walked around awhile and browsed in shops, and when I stepped in through the door of the hotel it was already seven o’clock in the evening. Madame H greeted me as usual from the reception desk, asked if I had had a pleasant day, and I answered that it had been very rewarding
.

  ‘Has my wife come back?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  She shook her head and perhaps there was a little crack there in her smile. Perhaps she could not help noticing that we spent an unusual amount of time apart, my wife and I. However, I nodded completely unperturbed and took the key that she pushed out on the polished marble counter.

  But when I came up to the room something burst anyway. Without warning I was struck by very severe stomach pains; they cut like knives in my abdomen, above all in the region right below the navel, and then came the nausea. I went into the bathroom, sank down on my knees in front of the toilet seat, and soon I had emptied out of me all I had eaten the whole day.

  Afterwards I staggered back into the room and collapsed on the bed in exhaustion. Through the balcony doors, which were cracked open, I heard the bells in the little chapel on the slope below strike seven thirty. Two feeble strokes that seemed to hang there over the valley for an almost unreasonably long time.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think about nothing.

  In the evening of the next day – which was a Saturday – I told Madame H that my wife was missing, and it was after high mass on Sunday that the police came into the picture.

  It happened in the form of the very placid Herr Ahrenmeyer, a lean man in his sixties, who was acting police chief in Graues. In the winter he would have a couple of men to help when the stream of tourists was at its peak, but during the rest of the year the crime rate in the area was so low that – in any event according to Madame H – you might just as well do without uniforms altogether. There was something unspoken between her and Ahrenmeyer, but what it stemmed from was never clear to me. Perhaps it was failed love; they seemed to be approximately the same age.

  We sat out on the balcony and he took notes in his black clothbound notebook while he smoked a pipe and now and then expressed his regret and warm sympathy. His greatest worry without a doubt was that Ewa disappeared within his district and not somewhere else, but he was broad-minded enough to grasp that my suffering was greater than his.

  He asked no questions whatsoever that did not concern Ewa’s or the Audi’s appearance, or the time when she took off, and when he left me after barely twenty minutes, it was with a promise to have a missing person announcement sent out at once. He also promised to immediately return the photograph I had loaned him, just as soon as he had it copied.

  It was not until three days later that Inspector Mort showed up, and I do not know if Ahrenmeyer sent for him, or if an assessment was made higher up within the police corps. He was of decidedly heavier calibre in any case. Short and burly with black, thinning and pomaded hair. And ice-cold grey eyes. I remember thinking that if you were born with such eyes, you are probably predestined to become a policeman sooner or later.

  This time the interview took place inside the police station in Graues. Over a wobbly Masonite table and with a tape recorder rolling. I recall it quite well.

  ‘Tell me what you think!’ he started.

  I did not have time to answer.

  ‘Do you know where she is, or what?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘There must be a reason for your wife to simply take off. Do you want to deny that?’

  ‘Yes. Something must have happened to her . . .’

  ‘What is that?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. He pointed at the tape recorder.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Can you make any suggestions?’

  ‘No.’

  He leant towards me so that I could smell his bad breath. He was sweating profusely too for some reason, even though he had hung his jacket over the back of the chair and was only in shirtsleeves.

  ‘You had quarrelled, right?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘No. Why would we have quarrelled?’

  He let out a laugh that sounded more like a bark.

  ‘Frau Handska at the hotel reports that you spent almost all your time apart.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘We have somewhat different interests.’

  ‘Kiss my arse.’

  There was a pause while we each lit a cigarette.

  ‘Did you have any reason to get your wife out of the way?’

  I recall that it was right there that the smoke got in my throat, it should have been with the very first puff, that is. The coughing fit that followed was so severe that finally he stood up, came around the table and started pounding me on the back.

  I realize that my sudden indisposition hardly earned me any bonus points, but at the same time I felt a kind of anger taking form inside me.

  ‘Thanks. What are you implying?’

  ‘Implying?’

  He went back to his chair and sat down.

  ‘You’re implying that I have something to do with my wife’s disappearance.’

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  For a brief moment I could not decide if he was an idiot or if he assumed that I was one. Or if this was simply some kind of regulation tactic. I did not say anything.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ he requested after half a minute of silence.

  ‘I planned to hike along the river and Ewa would rather take an outing in the car,’ I said. ‘When you’ve been married as long as we have, you allow one another that freedom.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘At least if you have an ounce of common sense.’

  ‘And you think you do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you don’t know where she intended to go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Certain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And so it went. For over an hour we sat and wrangled over the tape recorder in the rapeseed-yellow detention room. Without warning he suddenly turned off the recorder, wriggled into his jacket and explained that that would have to be enough for now.

  Sure enough, he came back a few days later, the same morning that I left Graues to return home by air via Geneva. I was in a bit of a hurry and our conversation was now limited to less than fifteen minutes, but his tactics had not changed appreciably. The same clumsy attempts to take me by surprise with insinuating, rude questions . . . the same ice-cold gaze, the same sweaty shirt – or in any event a similar one – and when he left me alone, I truly felt happy to be rid of him.

  No tips regarding my missing wife had streamed in during the days I stayed at the hotel. I never went up into the mountains again, and I didn’t hear from Mauritz Winckler. Not then and not afterwards.

  After a two-and-a-half-hour taxi drive I arrived on the afternoon of 30 August at the airport in Geneva, and a little later I would board the regular evening plane. The whole trip was paid for by the consulate, something which – as I understood – is standard practice in cases like this.

  The first period after my homecoming passed without any major intermezzos. Ewa’s and my socializing had been limited to a small circle of four or five persons, and to start with they showed up with such regularity that I suspected that they had agreed on a schedule. Not until towards the end of September did the visits assume more reasonable proportions, and I could start getting accustomed to – and adapting myself to – the solitude.

  As for our own police department, I was kept continuously informed of how the search for Ewa progressed. For a time there was even an inspector assigned to the case full-time; I would stop by the station once a week – on Friday afternoons after work – to hear the latest news, which every time was limited to new guesses and hypotheses. At the start of October the inspector had other assignments, and we decided they could just as well be in touch if there was anything more specific to report.

  Which there never was.

  It was in the middle of the same month – October – that I also made my first attempt to look up Mauritz Winckler. In the greatest secrecy, naturally.

  After some telephone calls I understood that he had moved for good and e
vidently was living in some other European country. Which one no one knew, and I was not particularly eager to find out either.

  November having arrived, the majority had probably started seriously assuming that Ewa would not come back. A new girl was hired at her old job, and Frau Loewe, Ewa’s mother, with whom both of us had an extraordinarily bad relationship, was in touch and wondered if we shouldn’t arrange some kind of memorial service. I explained that it was not customary to bury missing persons and that I was not interested.

  It was almost exactly a week after this conversation that I had my breakdown. It happened, quite without prelude, sometime between three and four o’clock the night before a Tuesday. The witching hour, that is.

  The way I understood it was that I first woke up and after a few blank seconds found myself in the process of falling, or being sucked into a black hole. I fell and fell, the speed was dizzying, the feeling frightful; I tried to describe it on some later occasions, but every time the words have failed me. Over time I have also understood that there aren’t any.

  I was found bloody and scraped, but still with some degree of consciousness, on the pavement below my bedroom window, and it took approximately ten weeks before I could crawl back into the same bed again.

  I would like to maintain that at that point I was a different person.

  For the period of ten or twelve days that followed my outing to the sea, I maintained rather strict routines. I was always there when Frau Moewenroedhe opened the doors to the library; most often I had even been waiting outside on the pavement for a few minutes. We still did not exchange many words – an occasional comment about the weather at most; the early spring held up and in the afternoons through the window at my work table I could see people walking around outside on Moerkerstraat in shirtsleeves and thin, light summer dresses. Even though it was only the middle of March. Inside, among the dust in the reference department, however, the same conditions prevailed year round, and it did not concern me all that much that nature seemed to be a bit out of joint.