The Truth and Other Lies (12 page)

Henry went into his study and returned with a vacation photo of Martha and him together in Portugal. The policewoman examined it for a long time as if she wanted to creep inside it. Her pinched face with its narrow eyes under a bushy unibrow made Henry think of an opossum. Maybe he could pair her off with the marten in his roof at some point; it might result in some interesting offspring. The silver streaks in her dark hair seemed to suggest that she was severely over-acidified as a result of professional mistrust.

She passed the photo on to Jenssen and curiously sniffed at the air, which Henry found irritating. Was she somehow checking for molecules of guilt and fear? All dogs can smell fear; some can even smell epilepsy and cancer. Why not guilt? Guilt emissions must linger around everyone who is afraid of discovery or punishment. Fortunately there are not yet any devices finely tuned enough to detect such molecules. But they may yet come.

Henry’s suspicion intensified in the kitchen when the woman bent over the packet containing Martha’s clothes and sniffed it.

“What color is her swimsuit?”

“Blue. What do you smell?” he asked.

“Can we take this with us?” came her reply.

“Will I get them back again? They’re very private things.”

“How often did your wife go swimming in the sea?”

Her habit of not answering Henry’s questions was getting on his nerves. “My wife goes swimming every day. Even in the winter when it snows. She’s a fantastic swimmer. Do you swim too?”

“Do you know the sea here?”

“Only to look at. I don’t go in.”

Jenssen now showed off his nautical knowledge—no doubt a legacy from his ancestors—and described the strong northwesterly currents. There were often shoes washed ashore after swimming accidents, especially plastic shoes; they drifted as far as Greenland, sometimes with a foot still inside. Henry remembered Obradin telling him he occasionally saw ownerless shoes floating in the sea. He suddenly thought of Obradin. Why hadn’t he come to offer his condolences?

“But your wife wasn’t wearing swimming shoes when she went in the water.”

The opossum was pointing at Martha’s swimming shoes with her spindly finger. The blood rose in Henry’s throat when he realized his annoying mistake. He hadn’t been thinking. It was logical that Martha would have gone in the water
wearing
her swimming shoes—why would she leave them on the beach?

“To be honest, I’m surprised at that too,” Henry replied. “My wife
always
wears her rubber sandals when she goes in the water, because of the sharp stones. She has sensitive feet.”

“It’s possible,” put in Jenssen, who had noticed Henry’s stoic use of the present tense, “that her shoes were washed up and then blown over the beach by the wind. That’s why you found them.”

A good explanation. Henry was coming to like the fellow more and more. He decided to take a risk.

“You know all about this kind of thing, Mr. Jenssen. Is it possible that my wife was kidnapped?”

The policeman knit his brows. “Has anyone been in touch?”

Henry shook his head.

“Would you pay a ransom for your wife?” the evil colleague asked.

This question showed that her sense of smell was considerably better developed than her cerebral cortex. Of course he’d pay! No sum would be too large if it would bring back his wife.

“Money’s no object,” Henry replied with emphasis.

“Did your wife leave a farewell letter?”

Oh, these uneducated people! They didn’t know Martha. She wouldn’t have announced her suicide in writing or—worse still—given reasons for it. Everything she did, she did without giving reasons; everything was
l’art pour l’art
for her. Besides, it went against Martha’s fine sense of drama to announce something that then happened in any case.

“No. She didn’t want to say good-bye, definitely not. Not to me, and not to life.”

“Did she suffer from depression? Was she on medication?”

“She laughs a lot and likes eating fish, if that’s what you mean.”

The policeman ran his hand thoughtfully through his butter-yellow hair. He had no sense of humor. “If I may ask a rather straight question—you didn’t have any marital problems, weren’t planning to get divorced, were you? Just a question.”

Henry touched the skin under his right eye. The numb feeling was coming back.

“No way. Never.”

Afterward, Henry showed the two of them through every room in the house. He spoke quietly, answered all their questions, gave a detailed and truthful description of the search for his wife, and of how he’d made dinner for her the evening before—and then burst into tears standing in front of her empty bed.

Henry continued to speak of Martha in the present tense, as if she were still alive. He finished by showing them around the cellar, stables, barn, garden, and chapel. He gave them an old cardboard box for Martha’s clothes and then helped them lift her bicycle into the police car.

Jenssen gave Henry his card.

“Please let me know immediately if you find any trace of my wife,” Henry said as they parted. “No matter what it is.”

After they left, he fetched a heavy mallet from the barn and started to smash up the wall behind Martha’s bed.

There was something not quite right about Henry’s story. Martha hadn’t drowned on the beach. Betty didn’t believe she had returned home from the cliffs. What was clear was that her Subaru was still missing—who knew, maybe it was rusting away at the bottom of the sea with Martha in the driver’s seat. This all meant that Betty herself was mixed up in the affair. Strictly speaking, she was even partly to blame for Martha’s death, because she had stolen her husband from her—or had that been fate? If the car were to be found, there’d be a great many awkward questions. Betty decided to look on the bright side for the time being. Martha’s death had cleared the way for a life with Henry and the baby.

She remembered how Henry had once said that if you make your dreams come true you have to live with them. He’d made happiness sound like a traumatic experience you could never entirely come to terms with. He himself no longer had any dreams, Henry had added; he’d already achieved everything. Apart from that, Henry had revealed hardly anything about himself. He never spoke of his past, as if it were some unsavory thing that had to be hidden away before the guests arrived for dinner. If he spoke at all, he spoke about the time after Betty had met him. She had the feeling that, for each person, Henry chose a past to suit the occasion. He twisted it like a kaleidoscope, always revealing a different aspect of the same thing.

Moreany had proposed to her in his Jaguar in the parking lot outside the office. He spoke frankly of his feelings for her and of the fortune she would inherit when he was no longer around. Betty was surprised and genuinely touched. At the same time she felt another wave of nausea and asked him for some time to think it over, which she later regretted, because there wasn’t anything to think over. They parted with a kiss on the cheek. Moreany walked across the parking lot with a spring in his step; Betty unlocked her rental car to drive to the police. From long-established habit, she glanced up at the fourth floor. Honor Eisendraht was standing at the window.

Honor tore a leaf off the dragon tree and crushed it between her fingers. She had observed the kiss by the Jaguar and now, watching Moreany cross the parking lot on winged feet, she felt a strong desire to flay the skin off her own face. When Honor had started to work for Moreany all those years ago she had been young and desirable. Why, oh why, had she kept quiet all those years in her office chair, serving and waiting until someone younger came along and took everything away from her? It is well known that our worst mistakes are the ones we don’t notice.

Moreany came into the outer office breathing heavily; he must have taken the stairs instead of the lift. Honor wondered whether he really believed that death would make an exception for him and grant him an extra day for this ludicrous exercise.

“Have they found the poor woman?” she asked.

Moreany understood at once who she meant. “No. She must have been caught by a current; they’ll never find her.”

Moreany went into his office. He left the door ajar as usual. Honor could hear paper rustling. She got up from her chair, smoothed her skirt, and stepped into his office. Moreany was rummaging around on his desk; he was still out of breath.

“How’s Mr. Hayden?”

“Amazingly well,” Moreany replied. “
Amazing
.”

“Can I do anything? Shall I prepare a statement for the press?”

Moreany interrupted his search, propping himself up on the desk with both hands. “Honor, that would be wonderful. Please don’t write ‘deceased,’ no details, and put it on my desk.”

“I’ll make some valerian tea.”

“No need to do that. I have to leave again in a second.”

“A Mr. Fasch rang up three times.”

“Who is he?”

“He says he’s an old school friend of Mr. Hayden.”

Honor Eisendraht waited at the window until Moreany had gotten in his car and driven off. She went into his office. After she poured herself a double scotch from the glass decanter that stood on the little black ebony table, she sat down at his desk. “We’ll have to postpone Venice,” Moreany had said to Betty when they’d heard about Martha Hayden’s death. Yes, Honor thought, go to Venice, just you go. There’s a
laguna morta
there. I’ll wait there for you, Betty, you damned whore, and I’ll drown you.”

She drained the glass and began to rifle through the drawers. She removed a blond hair and a big fat fly from the pen groove. Honor was looking for travel documents, plane tickets, or a hotel reservation in Venice. The middle drawer was locked. Honor felt for the key under the leather desk mat and unlocked it. Along with notes and press cuttings, she found an empty pillbox and some cash. Right at the bottom was a yellow A5 envelope, unmarked. It wasn’t sealed. She opened it gingerly. Inside were two MRI images of Moreany’s lumbar vertebrae and histological findings of the tumors that had permeated his vertebral body.

Reports in hand, Honor hurried back into the outer office, shuffled the tarot deck, and turned over the top card. It was the Tower again. Now there was no longer the shadow of a doubt.

At the police station Betty reported her Subaru stolen. As she was filling out the insurance form beneath the searching gaze of the officer on duty, she could feel her breasts ache and the nausea return. She couldn’t remember when she’d last had anything to eat. Moments later she was throwing up sour water in a urinal, because the women’s toilet was occupied. The reason for her nausea was not Moreany’s proposal, nor was it Henry’s absurd story about his wife’s death on the beach. It was clearly the baby in her belly. It wouldn’t be possible to conceal it for much longer. She urgently needed to decide on a plan of action with Henry.

She left the police station through the steel security door and leaned against the sunlit brick wall surrounding the grounds. Mechanically, she took a cigarette from the packet, lit it, and inhaled. The menthol smoke tasted revolting. Betty threw the cigarette onto the street along with the packet and bought herself a newspaper at a kiosk.

Author Henry Hayden’s Wife Drowned
, it said on the bottom of the front page in smallish print. It was just a brief report without a photograph. Betty dug her telephone out of her bag and called Henry. Because she knew he didn’t have an answering machine, she let it ring for a long time. Henry didn’t answer. Betty waited about a minute and then tried again.

———

The brute had bitten him. Henry rinsed the wound in clean water and examined it. The sharp teeth had cut right through to the bone, leaving blue-red holes below his wrist. Downstairs in the kitchen the phone was ringing. Henry ignored it and looked in Martha’s bathroom mirror.

His face was black with dust and wood shavings; cobwebs and mummified larvae hung in his hair. He looked like Indiana Jones without the hat. His left ear was encrusted with blood; his shirt was ripped to shreds; his arms, belly, and legs were studded with splinters of wood.

After opening up the wall behind Martha’s bed in a fit of frustrated pique, he’d gone on a marten hunt armed with a small speargun. It was a completely absurd undertaking—an example of what Freud rightly calls “symptomatic actions,” because they “give expression to something which the agent himself does not suspect in them and which he does not as a rule intend to let others know about, but to keep to himself.” Well, who could be blamed?

Between the roof tiles and the thermal insulation was a narrow crawl space. Henry had climbed through the hole in Martha’s wall into the roof cavity and had crawled on his stomach like a soldier over the rough-hewn planks. He kept pausing, listening, and then working his way forward again. He could smell the animal’s secretions. After a while he heard the patter of curved claws on the wood, cocked the trigger on the speargun, switched off his headlight, and held his breath.

But martens are hunters too. It could see, hear, and smell better than Henry—and this was its territory. The animal could sense danger and didn’t leave its hiding place; its instincts protected it. Animals don’t understand much, but they know everything. Humans make mistakes, because they believe; humans rush headlong toward ruin, because they hope. Animals don’t hope, they don’t look into the future, and they don’t doubt themselves. That’s why the marten didn’t leave its hiding place.

Henry found eggshells, feathers, bones, and pungent-smelling droppings that were still soft and oily. As he squeezed his way on through the labyrinth of old oak beams, long splinters of wood pushed their way into his skin. He ignored the pain. So much the better, he thought. If the filthy brute smells my blood it might make the mistake of coming closer. But the filthy brute did not appear.

At some point Henry realized that he’d lost his bearings. Martha’s room was on the west side of the house; the roof here was a good hundred feet long. He had crawled maybe sixty feet. Wind whistled through a crack from somewhere and blew dried insects up his nose. He had to sneeze and tried to turn over in the tight space. As he was performing this maneuver, he knocked his headlight off, and the battery rolled out of its plastic compartment. When Henry tried to roll onto his back in the dark he accidentally pulled the trigger. With a dull thud the steel spear landed in the beam right next to his ear. It had been driven half a finger deep into the oak. If the spear had hit him in the face, it would have pierced his brain stem. Henry had to laugh. It was ridiculous. A man who manages to shoot himself with a speargun in his own crawl space has earned his place in the Darwin Awards. Henry remained lying there doubled up for a while.