They were silent, thinking about it. Finally Ethan said, 'I think I can get a police boat headed in another direction.'
'How?' Malloy asked.
He smiled. 'I'll take care of it, but what we're going to need is a clean car that can get us from the dock into the city.'
'I've got something we can use,' Malloy answered.
'So you put a car at the dock this afternoon,' Ethan told him, 'and I'll take care of the police on the lake.'
'How are we doing for equipment?' Malloy asked.
'We should be good,' Kate said.
'What about a boat?' Malloy said.
'If you're getting the car for the way out, we'll take care of getting to the lake and finding a boat,' Kate told him. 'Boats are easy.'
'Meet at the Neustadt hotel around ten?' Malloy asked.
'We'll probably get there around four, if you don't mind,' Kate said. 'I want to try to get some food down and maybe a couple of hours of sleep before we go out. You know, just in case it turns out to be a long night.'
Fall 1931.
Rahn wrote Elise letters almost every day. He talked about the Languedoc, the sky, and the mountains. He described the lives he had unearthed in some dusty library. He named ruins that had once been cities - so many more than he had been able to show her. He spoke sometimes about the lovers whom history had recorded, always married to others, always yearning for what could never be, and yet staying true to their pledge to the end of their lives. He said that until he had met her, the pain they described had seemed like poetic artifice, a sumptuous emptiness passing itself off as true love. Now he knew what they wrote was genuine. He asked her if there was anything more beautiful than the hope that came each day of getting a letter from her. Was anything more pure than the memory of her kiss at Montségur which he said would stay forever burned into his soul? And yet with those feelings came the gnawing hunger of unsated desire, the feeling of being bullied and beaten and left for dead. Could they not see one another at some point in the future? Could he hope for at least that much?
It did not seem possible to live without her, and yet, he wrote, the days passed somehow. When he was exploring a cave, he would imagine that she smiled upon his endeavour
and that gave him comfort. When he read or reread the accounts of battles or listened to some old man tell yet another story no one had ever recorded, something the old man himself had heard from old men fifty years earlier, he no longer considered how he might fit the thing into his book. Instead, he measured its value by this: would Elise enjoy it?
She had been right to refuse him that night, he said, though without referring specifically to the night in question. He had been wrong to ask her to betray her oath of fidelity, but if she knew how much he had wanted her she might find it in her heart to forgive him. She answered this sort of letter with assurances that she had nothing to forgive. On the contrary, she spent each day regretting what she had said to him that night. All she had ever wanted was to please him, and she knew she had failed him when it would have been so easy - just that once - to give them both what their hearts desired. Though she burned in hell for even thinking it, she wished she had gone with him to his room when he had asked.
He answered this with praise for her virtue. She had risen above her desire. He wished he could be as she was, but the world and his own flesh tore at him. He wanted more than a fantasy on top of a hill. Had they given in to temptation the world itself would have objected, he knew that. The world always did! Right as she was to refuse him, he would endure anything for her touch, her kiss, her surrender. Nor did his feeling lessen with time. It was exactly as she had said it was: the lance never ceased to bleed, the cup was never filled!
Once he wrote about Dante's lovers - those two who had surrendered to temptation and then spent eternity circling one another without ever coming close enough to touch. Those who had resisted temptation, he said, the true lovers, found their reward in eternity! But for an hour with her he would surrender this life and the next, as long as he knew she could be spared divine wrath. . .
The letters became an extended conversation of intoxicated desire and strange theology. They were by turns futile,
desperate, and full of affection. 'I am no Cathar!' Rahn wrote in one letter. 'I am a man of the twentieth century!' In the next he said Elise was Esclarmonde, the light of the world, the bearer of the Grail, the Queen of the Pure Ones. If ever he found the Grail, he would take it at once to her and lay it at her feet...
Elise felt her heart quicken each time she saw his letters. She felt herself giving over to desire when she finished reading his words. It would have been the same sensation, she thought, if she had kissed him goodnight after an evening of courtship. It was the thrill of a young girl who realises,
he loves me!
She inevitably wrote back at first opportunity. She described her garden in the city, her dreams from the night before - especially if he had sat close beside her at the ruins of Montségur. She wrote about the book he was writing. She promised him the world would go mad about it when it was published!
Berlin, she said in one letter, had turned rainy. She was miserable. The city was unbearable with its riots and gunshots and anarchy. She could not imagine any other city in the world supporting so many newspapers, every one of them as certain as the political faction they supported that something was wrong, very wrong in Germany. She had rather climb a mountain in the sunny south searching for the lost Grail of the Cathars. In such a mood, she said, robbed of the opportunity to be with him there, the only solace was to pull his letters out and reread them.
Not once in all their correspondence did either of them mention Bachman. Bachman sometimes brought the letters to her, however. He never asked what was written, and she kept them under lock and key. It would have been easy for him to break into the box where she kept them, but afterwards she would have known he had done it, and by some feat of unimaginable discipline he resisted the temptation. He watched her though. He studied her moods. Once, late at night, after having consumed too much wine, Bachman asked her if she was going to leave him for Rahn. She told him, 'You are my husband, Dieter. I will never leave you.' Other times he asked about her private talks. Had Rahn ever asked her to sleep with him?
'Never,' she said and blushed at her lie.
'Would you have been tempted, if he had?'
'My feelings are my own, Dieter.'
'But you are in love?' Bachman pressed.
'It is not a choice one makes,' she told him. 'It is certainly not like being married to someone. We choose marriage, and we make a sacred vow before God.'
Her one lie to Bachman tainted the purity she felt for her lover, and so she hated her husband for asking and pestering her for every word Rahn had spoken to her. He had kept track it seemed, maybe even had taken notes! She told him honestly that she did not remember some of the conversations. What did it matter, anyway? Nothing happened!
'Are you disappointed that he did not at least try?'
How could she confess such a thing to her husband? How could she take pleasure in her memories when they were all subject to interrogation? She had no glimpse yet of spiritual ecstasy, if that was the goal of a love affair such as this, but this much she knew, despair had become an old friend.
Sometimes Bachman spoke with great affection about her beauty and her goodness. He was lucky to have such a wife. He knew some men who had no wives. As they got older they had nothing at all! He did not want to be like that! He came to her bed once after a fit of adoration. It had been years since they had made love. It had staggered to a close in such an uncertain way she could not remember the last time. Instead of the kisses and courtship of lovers, Bachman told her she could think of
him
- no name given. It was perfectly miserable.
'Does Otto know. . .' began any number of conversations that winter. And she would tell him she was not sure or did not know. He told her to ask him about the matter, usually some piece of politics she knew Rahn would not understand.
Another time he had some new theory he had encountered about the Cathars, he was a voracious reader about the Cathars now, some odd piece of information Rahn might enjoy.
Her solace came one night when she realised that only Rahn could understand what she endured, because he endured it as well. She did not live in Bachman's world when she wrote to her lover or read his letters. She was not married, not rich, not lonely, not virtuous. In the letters his bedazzling smile and tanned handsome face was forever before her, so close it seemed they might kiss. In such a state she could be, for an hour or so, absolutely fearless and free. She could imagine their intimacy in every detail. Later, leaving her room, she inevitably bore the fresh, flushed complexion of a newlywed.
Rahn came back to Germany that spring and sent a note to her to say he was in the city for a few weeks. He wanted to see her. She wrote back to him at his hotel, refusing to see him, begging him to stay away. He came to her door anyway. She sent her maid to tell him she was unable to see him. He tried twice more, demanding she tell him to his face that she had no desire to see him. Alone, waiting to hear how he had taken her refusal, Elise wept. No man would endure such an insult. It was over.
There were no more letters after that. It was a death of sorts, going without his words, living without writing letters in response to wild flights of passion and fancy. Before Otto Rahn had appeared in her life, Elise had been vaguely content and called it happiness for want of a better word. Desire slept in her soundly as she busied herself with life. After meeting him, she felt isolated and the world seemed unbearably cruel. Only when she sat with him in the mountains of her imagination could she find some sort of peace, but once the letters stopped she found it increasingly difficult to see him as he had been on that glorious day on Montségur.
It was not long after that before her entire summer in France
began to fade.
*
Bachman told her one evening over dinner, 'Otto wrote me. Did he tell you?'
'What did he say?' Elise asked. Her heart pounded. It was not desire that quickened her pulse this time. It was fear, though she could not understand why a letter to Bachman should inspire it. Perhaps it wasn't the letter, she decided. Perhaps it was the smug look on Bachman's face.
'I have created a business opportunity for him and he wanted to thank me.'
'What sort of opportunity?'
'I have persuaded some associates of mine to take a ten year lease on
Des Marronniers.
Do you remember it?'
Of course she remembered. That was the hotel where they had had lunch before their descent into the
Grotto de Lombrives.
'I have arranged matters so that Otto will be the owner of record, and he wrote to say he is delighted at the prospect of managing the property.'
'But he is a writer, not a hotel keeper!'
'He's very excited, Elise. I think you ought to be excited as well.'
'And why should I be happy about your ruining a man's life with a shady business deal?'
'Because we are going to spend the summer in Otto's new hotel!'
'You can't be serious.'
'I thought you would be happy!'
Saturday March 8, 2008.
Malloy left the ship at the Alte Rabenstrasse dock and with the help of a city map found an underground station less than a quarter of a mile away. From there he headed back to the Royal Meridien and caught a couple of hours of sleep. Late in the afternoon he went to the courtyard behind
Das
Sternenlicht
and picked up the Toyota Dale had arranged for him to use. The sun was setting, but there was enough light to get a clearer picture of the area now. Like Dale's one dancer bar, the lot itself was a grim piece of work: lined with the backsides of hotbed hotels, sex clubs, three stool bars, strip joints, and adult bookstores. The buildings, however, were actually well made. Directly across from the back of
Das Sternenlicht
, for instance, the upper storeys were made of palatial stone blocks running all the way to the roof. In any other part of town the flats and offices here might have appealed to an affluent set.
There were two passageways into the courtyard. One was adjacent to
Das Sternenlicht
and was not much more than a walkway, though it could fit a small car. The other was large enough to accommodate delivery trucks. There were a few parking spaces in the middle of the square, but most of the parking slots were lined up close to the various buildings.
Heading north by a series of side streets, Malloy passed through St. Pauli's working class neighbourhood. From there he worked his way as far as the Aussenalster. He parked the Toyota on a side street close to the Alte Rabenstrasse dock and walked ten minutes to the underground station. He was back at the Royal Meridien by eight.