The Elegant Lie

…

The stranger was only a hundred paces from the fence when Dasch snapped out of his trance. He turned to the guard and whispered, ‘Let him in!’

The guard set off at a run towards the gate. There was a creak of metal and then more hurried footsteps as the guard set out towards the stranger.

Garlinsky stopped. He stood there waiting as the guard approached, his face still hidden in shadow. He appeared to be completely bald, almost as if there was no flesh at all but only a skull, softly reflecting the moonlight.

Carter felt an instinctive hostility towards the man, primitive and dark, rising from some nameless vortex of emotions deep inside him.

The guard came to a stop in front of Garlinsky and the two of them spoke in voices too faint for Carter to hear. Then they made their way towards the gate.

As Garlinsky passed in front of them, Carter caught a glimpse of the man’s narrow cheekbones, thin lips and sharply angled jaw. There was a drawn, pinched quality to his expression, which Carter likened to the faces of men he had known around the docks, who slept in the hulks of old ships and lived off greasy po’ boy sandwiches handed out of the back doors of diners and made up from the food left behind by paying customers. The harshness of the lives they lived was tattooed on the faces of these men, and they had no way to hide it.

Dasch rested his hand on Carter’s shoulder. ‘I’ll see to this,’ he said. ‘You go and find Teresa.’

‘Where is she?’

‘The last I saw of her, she was heading for the dining room.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Carter, remembering what Wilby had said about doing whatever it took to find out who Garlinsky really was. ‘You might need some help.’

‘That time may come,’ said Dasch, ‘but it will not be tonight. Just make sure Teresa is doing all right.’

Before Carter could ask what he meant by that, Dasch began walking towards the office, where the guard had brought Garlinsky. Already the lights had been turned on, and there was the crunching sound of footsteps treading cautiously on broken glass.

Carter found his way to the dining room, a flimsily built structure connected to the office by a narrow corridor. The room was lit by bulbs in dusty metal shades, whose conical shapes threw spreading pools of light upon two long wooden tables at which the workers could sit and eat their lunches. A sink for washing dishes stood in the corner, with drawers on either side of it and, on a shelf above it, a stack of enamelled cups and plates, the rims all chipped and rusty.

On the walls hung tattered posters advertising tourism in the Rhineland. They all seemed to date from before the war. In one, taken from high ground far above the river, the Remagen bridge spanned the murky water, flanked at either end by grey stone towers. Nothing remained of it now but those two towers, the bridge itself having been wrecked by the Germans themselves in 1945 as they attempted, unsuccessfully, to stop American forces from crossing the river. In other posters, their colours faded like the ribbons on cemetery wreaths, girls in the feathered hats and white-aproned dresses of traditional Rhineland costume clutched bouquets of flowers and smiled into the sun.

At the end of one of the tables sat Teresa. With one hand, she held a bundled dish towel to the side of her head. With the other, she covered her eyes, shielding them from the light bulb glowing just above her head.

‘Too much champagne?’ asked Carter.

As soon as she heard his voice, Teresa straightened up and scowled at him. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

‘Your father sent me here to see if you were doing all right.’

‘You can tell him I’m fine,’ she replied.

Carter pointed at the dish towel. ‘Do you need some more ice for that thing?’

She lifted the bundle of cloth, revealing that the side that had been pressed against her head was soaked with blood.

Carter gasped. ‘What the hell happened?’ he asked. ‘Did your father do this to you?’

‘It was an accident,’ she told him.

Instinctively, he stepped towards her. ‘Let me take a look.’

‘Leave me alone!’ she snapped. ‘It’s just a little cut.’

Carter halted in his tracks. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I think you might need stitches.’

Her face turned suddenly ashen. ‘Is it really that bad?’ she asked.

‘Just let me take a look,’ he pleaded with her.

This time, she did not protest.

Gently, Carter moved aside some strands of hair that had become tangled in the clotted blood.

She breathed in sharply with the pain.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

The cut was about an inch long, not deep but cleanly done, as if it had been made with a knife.

Carter went over to the sink, pulled open one of the drawers and removed a clean dish towel. Then he turned on the tap, soaked the cloth, squeezed out some of the water and gave it to Teresa. ‘Give me that,’ he said, holding out his hand for the cloth that had been soaked in blood.

‘Will it need stitches?’ she asked.

‘I think you might be OK,’ he replied.

‘Good.’ She pressed the clean cloth to her head. ‘I don’t want to see any doctors.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want to have to explain to them what happened.’

‘Then explain it to me, at least.’

‘I was walking past the window of the office when my father threw the chair through the window.’

‘And it hit you?’

‘No! Only a little piece of glass. He didn’t mean to do it. People don’t understand.’

‘You make it sound like this has happened before.’

‘It is an occupational hazard of working with my father.’

‘What is?’ asked Carter.

‘Sooner or later, everyone gets hurt.’

‘And what about him?’

‘He has already been hurt enough,’ she muttered.

There it is again, thought Carter, this past no one will speak about. Now would have been the time to press her about where she had come from and what she had lived through to make her the person she was, the time to push past all of her sarcastic answers until he arrived at the truth. But Carter couldn’t bring himself to do it. Neither could he hide from himself that the reason for his hesitation lay in the fact that he would probably have succeeded, but only by exploiting the pain that she was in. None of that should have mattered. He had been taught never to feel sympathy, never to forget what he was there to do.

But one single fact had overwhelmed the brutal logic of his trade. Carter could no longer deny feeling drawn to her in ways that were both irresistible and frightening to him, because he could not control where his emotions were leading him. From the moment Carter had first laid eyes on Teresa, he had sensed the presence of the barricades this woman had built to keep the world at bay, even if he still didn’t know why. He had grasped at once this fragile illusion of strength, because it was no different from his own. To hunt her down inside that labyrinth of secrets, destroying what held her world together, would have been the greatest act of cruelty in a career which had been filled with cruelties.

So Carter let the moment pass, trusting that the opportunity might come again. But the true meaning of what had just happened did not escape him. From now on, Carter realised, he would not only be lying to everyone around him. He would also be lying to himself.

‘Why is it so quiet out there?’ asked Teresa.

‘Garlinsky is here,’ replied Carter.

‘Since when?’

‘He just arrived.’

‘What does he look like?’

‘You mean you haven’t seen him?’

‘Nobody has seen him,’ said Teresa. ‘Not even my father. All he has heard is a voice on the phone. That’s why my father is so frightened of Garlinsky. He wasn’t even sure the man was real.’

‘He is flesh and blood all right,’ said Carter, ‘and that is one more reason to be scared.’

‘You’d better see what’s going on,’ said Teresa, ‘before my father smashes anything he might have missed the first time.’

‘Are you going to be all right?’ he asked.

‘Go!’ She waved him away.

Carter turned to leave.

‘And I’m sorry,’ she muttered, so quietly that Carter almost missed what she had said.

Carter looked back over his shoulder. ‘Sorry for what?’ he asked.

‘For thinking you were like the others.’

Carter stared at her, afraid that she could tell what he was thinking. It would have been better, he wanted to say, if you had just kept hating me.