As she walked, she hesitantly pressed a finger first against her right and then her left ear canal. She tried opening her mouth wide and yawning, but the whispering and rustling in there still didn’t stop. It had been a long time since her senses had surprised her this way, but she was probably just tired.
When Elena was absolutely certain that she was alone, she sat down in a little ravine between drifts covered with greenish yellow
lyme grass. From here she could see the stripes of black seaweed and the glittering sea.
With a decisive movement she ripped off the edge of the envelope, stuck her hand in, and took out a prepaid phone and the slip of paper with the thirteen-digit German phone number. She set her watch at zero, even though she knew that the receiver would end the call when the allotted time was up.
T
wo crackly rings, and then that voice that had made her anxious since her childhood:
“Ja?”
“
Es ist das Echte.
The symbols are correct.”
“
Eine erfreuliche Nachricht, Elena.”
Good news, very good.
“
Aber
…” But …
“Ja?”
“
Es gab eine Abweichung.
” There was an anomaly.
“
Das wissen wir bereits
,” the voice interrupted. “We already know about it. Don’t worry, our friends have already promised to take care of that.”
Her fingers loosened their grip on the cell phone. Looked at the clock, thirty seconds left.
“And there was something else.”
More crackling. Then the voice came back.
“Elena?”
“Ja?”
“Jetzt zurück nach Hause.”
Come back home.
A quiet click, and all that was left was the sound of the wind and the humming whispers.
S
he slowly took the battery out of the phone and thought about how he had called the place her home. Perhaps it was, but it would never feel like it.
Elena could envision how he had already turned toward the wide window and how the lines alongside his mouth had deepened, if only a bit. And it wasn’t until she saw the image before her that she knew with certainty that she had failed.
She felt the chill of the ankh against her breasts under the leather suit. Elena stood up and brushed off the sand.
S
he threw the prepaid SIM card into a trash can on her way back to the motorcycle. The phone itself she threw over the railing of the Great Belt Bridge just before she reached Fyn.
Now the motorcycle would be able to make use of its lightweight construction with the boxer engine and magnesium rims: only 110 miles left to Flensburg on the German side of the border. Then the E45 Autobahn to Hannover, and then off toward North Rhine–Westphalia. Her body was aching by her upper arm, under the bandage.
T
he arched facade of Falun’s police station was covered with oblong tar-colored stone slabs, and along the curve ran two rows of sound-absorbing windows whose white blinds were pulled down to keep out the rays of the morning sun.
In the corner on the second floor, behind slanted blind slats, was one of four interrogation rooms in the violent crimes division. An open notebook covered with keywords written in messy handwriting was lying on the fake birch veneer in the semidarkness.
In front of the notebook, someone had placed an ancient tape recorder with its record button depressed. But at the moment, its sound meter was only registering the hum of the ventilation system and the monotonous buzzing sounds that were coming from one of the fluorescent light tubes in the ceiling.
Leaning against the back of a chair that was upholstered in black fabric sat a bowed figure with a corduroy jacket, bloodshot eyes, and aviator glasses. Across from him, on the other side of the table, sat a surly Falun policeman with a cold and a mustache. And they had been sitting like this for several hours.
T
hen the Mustache straightened up in order to make another attempt to move forward:
“Perhaps we should start over from the beginning again, then. Why were you at Erik Hall’s house last night?”
Don didn’t even make an effort to try to answer this time. The policeman in front of him was clearly what Bubbe would have called a
shmendrik
, an idiot, and no matter how many times you explained something to this idiot, it seemed totally impossible to get him to understand.
The questions had begun as soon as the police arrived down by the dock in their yellow reflective vests. And maybe his explanation had been muddled at first, considering the amount of morphine he’d swallowed, but now he had repeated his version so many times that the only reason to continue asking questions was that the true version was somehow not good enough.
“You’re not falling asleep, are you?” asked the Mustache.
Don took off his glasses and carefully began to clean them with his handkerchief.
The police had already heard him state that Hall had invited him there to inspect the ankh, which the diver claimed to have found down in the mine. That explained the phone records from the past week, which they seemed to have really become obsessed with. He had also admitted that he had drunk some of the wine, which explained the fingerprints on the glass, and this thing about going into the cottage without permission … was that really a sufficient reason to detain him for so many hours?
Don put his glasses back on his nose again, blinked, and made a face so they slid into place.
“The suspect refuses to answer.”
The Mustache attempted, with difficulty, to make another note in his awful handwriting. Then silence descended once again, the hum of the ventilation system, the buzz from the ceiling, and finally Don had had enough:
“Well, why is anyone anywhere?”
The policeman looked up from his notebook.
“Or if you put it another way …” Don continued, fixing his eyes on a grease spot on the worn uniform, “maybe you could explain why we’re still sitting here?”
The Mustache tapped his pen authoritatively.
“Because you reported a murder …”
Don gave the table a kick, but the policeman just continued stuffily: “And thus far everything is well and good. But when we get there, you’re sitting there with blood on your hands …”
“But I’ve told you that I’m a doctor, and I was trying to examine his injuries.”
“And with a bag on your shoulder, half of the contents of which is narcotic-class drugs and the other half is powerful sedatives. You stink of alcohol and you can hardly talk. The dead man stinks of the same wine. In the kitchen, where you’d been drinking, there are two glasses on the table, and when we check for fingerprints it seems that you’ve been rummaging around in several different parts of the cottage.”
“I didn’t …”
“Then, when we request phone records, Hall has called you several times in the past week and the two of you have had long discussions, and on his computer we find notes about that ankh, where he writes that you’re very interested in learning more. And when we search through the cottage we don’t find any ankh. How does that look, do you think?” When there was no answer, the policeman sighed. Then he paused and blew his nose, and then another few minutes went by under the blinking fluorescent light while he picked the snot residue from his mustache.
Shmendrik.
Don let his memory rewind, and he was once again sitting in the dewy wet grass next to Hall’s body, looking out at the white water lilies on the lake.
He had truly had all the time in the world to wash away every trace
of blood and brain matter from his hands after his bewildered call to the police. But he hadn’t had the energy to move during his entire long wait for the police; instead, he just sat there next to Hall’s battered head in nauseated confusion. Even when he heard the sirens screaming up on the road he hadn’t had the strength to get up. When he had seen all those shadows come running from the edge of the forest, along the path down to the water, he had thought that he would finally be able to rest. But instead he had been hauled up, hooked by a pair of strong arms.
They had lugged him up toward the cottage to a crookedly parked car with flashing lights and pushed him into place on the backseat.
From the garage of the police station, they had taken him into a corridor and to a room that had a bed with a plastic mattress. It wasn’t until Don had discovered that there was no handle on the inside of the door that he realized he was locked up in a cell.
He had lain down and tried to sleep, but just when he’d managed to get his body to relax, the Mustache came back, along with a colleague. They had grabbed hold of his arms again and walked him up several flights of stairs to this interrogation room with its flickering light.
At first they had taken turns asking questions, but during the last hour, it had seemed as though the colleague was beginning to give up. A moment ago, he had excused himself and left the airless room to get coffee.
But the policeman with the mustache wouldn’t leave him alone.
“So, Don … what were you doing at Erik Hall’s house last night, besides taking pills?”
The policeman had picked a worn leather bag up off the floor and put it on the table. He dug through bottles and syringes with one hand while he looked at Don.
“You have, let’s see …”
Then he started to line up the bottles methodically.
“Diazepam, Rohypnol, an unmarked bottle …”
“But I told you …” Now that Don saw his bag so close by, it suddenly became difficult to breathe, and he felt his mouth cement itself closed. Finally he got his speaking under control: “But I told you, I’m a doctor.”
“Apodorm, Ketogan, another unmarked drug, and then these: morphine, Metadate, Xanax, Haldol, Provigil, something with Russian letters, fentanyl …”
“I have the right to prescribe to myself.”
“Spasmophen, Ritalin, Nozinan, Versed, Subutex …”
“You can call the Board of Health and Welfare and …”
“Oxycontin, Serax, Mogadon, morphine, another bottle of diazepam, an unmarked bottle of capsules … ephedrine …”
The policeman finally turned the bag upside down, and a pile of loose blister packs fell out onto the table, followed by some plastic-sealed syringes and a rubber tourniquet.
Then he turned off the tape recorder and let an effective silence descend for a minute before he said, “You know … sooner or later we’ll find the rest of that bottle you used to chop up Erik Hall’s head.”
Don tried to avoid looking at his collection of medicine and dug his nails into his palm to stop it from moving toward the closest bottle of Mogadon.
His heart was pounding so fast again, and why couldn’t that policeman hear how much trouble breathing he was having? This
yentse tsemishnich,
this fucking mess.
He had to stop his whirling memory: Hall’s battered temple, the frayed right frontal lobe, the eye that had slipped out of its socket, and the image of the stiffening blades of grass where the blood had recently dried.
Don looked at the policeman in front of him, who surely only had faint fragments of memories left by now, and who would soon surely need photographs to even be able to remember how the victim looked. For the Mustache, the image had already begun to disintegrate and be erased. For him, sleep would be no problem.
T
here was a knock.
When the door swung open, Don gratefully took a few deep breaths of the rich air that had been let in. The other policeman stood outside; after an hour and a half, he had come back with two steaming mugs of coffee.
But then Don noticed that there was yet another person out there in the corridor. A woman in a beige coat, with blond, upswept hair. It was hard to tell how old she was, but Don would bet on forty-five. The downward lines around her mouth showed that time had left its mark.
The policeman placed the coffee on the table inside the interrogation room, and the Mustache immediately began to slurp from his steaming plastic cup. Then he turned questioningly to the woman out in the corridor.
His colleague cleared his throat. “This is attorney Eva Strand; I ran into her asking questions about this case downstairs. She says that she’s been sent here by the Afzelius law firm in Borlänge.”
He waved the woman in. She took a few steps forward and then stood expectantly in the doorway. The other policeman laid a hand on the Mustache’s shoulder. “The prosecutor is going to make the decision about the petition soon, so it’s really just as well that Titelman has someone, right?”
The Mustache just kept slurping his coffee without giving an answer.
“If there isn’t another one you’d prefer?” said his colleague, and it took a few seconds before Don realized that this question was directed to him.
“Another one … ?”
“Another lawyer you’d rather have?”
Don shook his head wearily. He was still having trouble understanding how he could have ended up here. The woman approached the short end of the table, grabbed the back of a chair, and turned toward the sitting policeman. “If I may … ?”
The Mustache muttered something inaudible, but she sat down
anyway. Then she extended her hand to Don. “Hi. My name is Eva Strand, and I’m an attorney.”
Don shook her hand.
“We heard the news about the murder on the radio, and that someone had already been apprehended. I understand that you are Don Titelman?” He nodded, and it was as though he didn’t want to let go of her warm hand. She let him keep holding it.
“From what I understand, you’ve sat here all morning answering questions? No phone call, nothing to eat, no coffee, nothing?”
Since Don didn’t have the strength to answer, she turned to the Mustache. “Is that how I should interpret the situation?”
“Yes, but …”
“Then I think it would be appropriate to give Don here a little breakfast.”
At first the Mustache just sat still, but when he saw that she was serious, he got up hesitantly.
“And all of this on the table … ?” the attorney said, gesturing toward the collection of medicine.
Now that the policeman had stood up, he seemed to recover some of his confidence.