The Book of Murder

Eleven

I opened the door to my apartment and picked up the bills that lay on the mat. There were no messages on the answering machine, not even from Luciana. Had she left me in peace at last? Or maybe her silence had a more drastic significance: she no longer felt she could trust me; I’d let her down. She hadn’t managed to convince me, to convert me to her faith, and now she wanted nothing more to do with me. I pictured her shut up in her flat, alone with her obsession, taking refuge in her perfect, familiar circle of fears. I went to my bedroom, switched on the television and checked the news channels, but none seemed to be reporting the fires yet. At two in the morning, exhausted, I turned out the light and slept until almost midday.

When I woke up I went straight down to the bar to read the papers. There was little more coverage than a fortnight ago and I wondered if I was the only one who was interested in the fires. There had in fact been three: two fairly close together in the district of Flores, at more or less the same time (the ones I’d seen from the plane), and another a little later in Montserrat. Again, all three fires were in furniture stores, and they had all been started in the same simple but effective way, with petrol poured under the door and a match. At least now there was a suspect: several witnesses claimed to have seen a Chinese man with a canister of petrol riding away from the scene on a bicycle. I looked in another newspaper. Here too it mentioned a man with oriental features. A separate article made the link with the fires of a fortnight ago and ventured a theory: the man could be working for the Chinese Mafia, setting fire to uninsured furniture stores, thus bankrupting the owners, who had to sell their premises off cheaply to oriental supermarket chains. I laid aside the newspaper with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief. Once again, I thought, local colour had defeated me: what chance did my group of incendiary artists stand against a Chinese on a bicycle? I thought, with a flicker of resistance, that I shouldn’t let myself be cowed by Argentinian reality, that I should learn from the Master and overcome it, but mysteriously something inside me had given up as I read the articles.

The novel I’d planned to write now seemed silly and unsustainable and I wondered whether I shouldn’t abandon the whole idea.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of despondent lethargy, thinking of J much more often than I would have imagined. My kitchen cupboards and fridge were empty and as night fell I forced myself to go out and stock up for the week. When I got back I switched on the television again. This time the fires were in the news and the mysterious Chinese was the celebrity of the moment. On one channel they showed a rough identikit portrait and shots of the various burnt-out premises. On another they were interviewing the owners, who were shaking their heads sadly, pointing to smoke-blackened walls and furniture reduced to ashes. It all now seemed distant, unconnected to me, as if they were no longer my fires, as if reality had been skilfully manipulated to suit the cameras. I changed channels until I found a movie but fell asleep halfway through.

I was woken just before midnight by the insistent, painful stab of the telephone ringing. It was Luciana. She was screaming and it took me a moment to understand her. “What have you got to say now?” she sobbed. “This is what he was planning.” Eventually I grasped that she wanted me to switch on the television. Still holding the phone, I groped for the remote control. All the channels were showing the same news: a horrific fire had spread through an old people’s home on the top floor of a building. The fire had started in an antique shop on the ground floor. “The antique shop,” Luciana screamed. “He set fire to the shop below the home.” The shop window had shattered and flames had engulfed a huge tree in the street outside. The trunk had acted as a wick, the fire running up and spreading to the upper floors of the building. Some of the branches were still in flames, touching the balconies. Firemen had managed to get inside but so far they’d brought out only dead bodies: many of the residents were bedridden and had been suffocated by the smoke.

“They called from the hospital-my grandmother’s dead. I’ve got to go and identify the body because Valentina’s still a minor. But I can’t do it. I can’t!” she screamed desperately. “I can’t cope with another morgue, the corpses, the undertakers. I don’t want to see any more corpses. I can’t go through it all again.” She started crying again, a devastated sobbing that seemed for a moment as if it might turn into a howl.

“I’ll come with you,” I said. “Look, this is what we’re going to do.” I tried to sound practical and authoritative, like a parent talking to a frightened child. “There’s no hurry to identify the body, the main thing is for you to calm down. Take a pill now. Have you got some there?”

“Yes,” she said, between sobs. “I already took one, before calling you.”

“Good. Now take another one, but only one, and wait for me to arrive. Don’t do anything else. Turn off the TV and stay in bed. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I asked if her sister was with her and her voice fell to a whisper.

“I told her. The day I saw you, after she came out of his house. I told her everything but she didn’t believe me. I said Bruno hadn’t believed me and now he was dead. She’s just seen the fire on TV. She was with me when they called from the hospital, we watched them bringing out the bodies, but even now she doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t realise,” her voice faltered, terrified, “she doesn’t realise she’s next.”

“Don’t think about that now. Promise me you won’t think about any of it until I get there. Just try to get some sleep.”

I hung up and sat for a few seconds, eyes riveted on the screen. They’d already brought out fourteen bodies and the count was still rising. I couldn’t believe it either. It was, simply, too monstrous. On the other hand, weren’t all these bodies the perfect screen? The name of Luciana’s grandmother amongst a growing list of dead. No one would look into it as a separate case; her death would remain for ever invisible, merged with the general tragedy. This fire wouldn’t even be considered arson, but an accident, a tragic side effect of the attacks on furniture stores. Maybe the Chinese man would be made to pay, that is if he really existed and they caught him. Was Kloster capable of planning and carrying out such an atrocity? Yes, at least in his novels he was. I could almost hear his contemptuous retort: “So you want to send me to prison because of my books?”

Then I had the fatal, misguided impulse, which I have regretted every single day since-the urge to act, to intervene. I dialled Kloster’s number. He didn’t answer and there was no answering machine. I dressed quickly and hailed a taxi outside my building. We drove through the night, its silence interrupted only by the distant wail of fire engines. Over the radio in the taxi I heard news of more fires, multiplying like a virus across the city, and now and again the morbid repetition of the list of dead at the care home. The taxi dropped me outside Kloster’s house. The windows were shuttered and I could see no light through the slats. I rang the doorbell a couple of times, to no avail. Then I remembered what Luciana had once said about Kloster and his habit of swimming in the evening. I went into the café where she and I had sat two weeks earlier, and asked the waiter if there was a club nearby with a swimming pool. There was, just round the block. I hurried there. Marble steps led up to a revolving door with a brass plaque beside it. Inside I rang the bell at the reception desk and a tired-looking porter appeared. I asked for the swimming pool and he pointed to a sign showing the opening hours: it closed at midnight. I described Kloster and asked if he’d seen him. He nodded and indicated the staircase leading up to the bar and the pool tables. I went up the two flights and found myself in a large smoke-filled room. A crowd of poker players sat in silent concentration at round tables. They glanced up warily when I appeared at the top of the stairs, but soon went back to their cards. It was only then that I realised why the club was still open at midnight: it was a thinly disguised gambling den. At the bar a muted television was tuned to a sports channel. There was a ping-pong table, with the net already taken down, and, beyond it, a few pool tables. At the last one, next to a window looking on to the street, I saw Kloster, playing alone, a glass resting on the edge of the table. I walked over. His hair was swept back and still damp, as if he’d only just come out of the changing room, and his sharp features stood out in the lamplight. He was absorbed in calculating the trajectory of a ball, his chin resting on his cue, and it was only when he moved to a corner of the table and prepared to take his shot that he noticed me.

“What are you doing here? Some field work on games of chance? Or have you come for a game with the boys?”

He looked at me serenely with only mild interest as he applied chalk to the tip of his cue.

“Actually I was looking for you. I thought you’d be at the pool, but they told me you were here.”

“I always come up here after my swim. Especially since discovering this game. I rather looked down on it when I was young. I thought it a game for bar-room show-offs-you know what I mean. But it has interesting metaphors, and its own little philosophy. Have you ever tried to play it seriously?”

I shook my head.

“Essentially it’s geometry, of course. And the most classical kind: action and reaction. The kingdom of causality, you might say. Any spectator can see the obvious trajectory for a shot. That’s how beginners play: thinking only about sinking the next ball, they pick the most direct path. But as soon as you start to understand the game you realise that what really matters is controlling the trajectory of the white after impact. And that’s considerably more difficult. You have to anticipate all the possible ways the balls might strike one another, the chain reactions. Because the true object of the game, the trick, lies not in sinking the ball, but in sinking it and leaving the white free and positioned so that it can strike again. That’s why, of all possible trajectories, professionals sometimes choose the least direct, the most unexpected, because they’re always thinking one shot ahead. They want not just to strike the ball, but to strike and not stop until they’ve sunk them all. It’s geometry, yes, but of a fierce kind.” He moved to where he’d left his glass, took a sip, and looked at me, eyebrows slightly raised. “So what’s the question that was so urgent you came all the way here and couldn’t wait till morning?”

“You haven’t heard about the fire? You don’t know anything?” I scanned his face for any sign of pretence, but Kloster remained unperturbed, as if he really didn’t know what I was talking about.

“I heard there were some fires yesterday, something about furniture showrooms. But I don’t really keep up with the news,” he said.

“A couple of hours ago there was another one-an antique shop below a care home. The home Luciana’s grandmother lived in. They’re still bringing out the bodies. Luciana’s grandmother was one of the first pronounced dead.”

Kloster seemed to take in the information gradually. He stood preoccupied for a moment, as if he were having trouble reconciling it with another train of thought. He laid the cue across the table and I thought I saw his hand shake slightly. He turned to me, his face sombre.

“How many dead?” he asked.

“They still don’t know,” I said. “They’ve found fourteen bodies so far. But it’s likely several more will die in hospital overnight.”

Kloster nodded. He bowed his head and placed his hand over his face like a visor, pressing his temples.

Slowly he paced up and down alongside the table, eyes hidden by his hand. Was he feigning this emotion? He seemed to be genuinely affected by the news, but in a way I couldn’t quite fathom. Eventually he looked up, his gaze distant so that he seemed to be talking to himself.

“A fire,” he said, still apparently struggling with his thoughts. “Fire. Of course. And I can see now why you came all the way here.” He suddenly flashed me a contemptuous look. “You think I left home a couple of hours ago with my swimming things, torched that care home, then came here to do my hundred lengths in perfect calm while the old folks burned to a crisp. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

I shrugged doubtfully. “Luciana saw you a couple of weeks ago, standing outside the home, staring up at the balconies. That’s why she got in touch with me: she thought you were planning something against her grandmother.”

Kloster eyed me, still slightly contemptuous, but now seeming exasperated as well.

“That’s possible. Quite possible. In my novel I had to plot a murder in an old people’s home. I went to several, in different parts of town. I looked at some from outside, making mental notes. But in a couple of them I pretended I needed to put a relative in a home and looked round inside. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to get into those places. I was looking for distinctive features for a particularly ingenious murder. But I was only ever thinking of one murder, one person. Destroying the whole place-such a simple, brutal solution never occurred to me. I have to say, I’m surprised myself every time by the method. Though if you think about it, fire was an obvious choice.”

There was something distracted in the way he spoke now, as if he were addressing a third person. He looked at me, but his eyes darted about, and he started pacing again, as if engaged in a furious inner struggle.

“All those dead-they’re innocent,” he said. “This wasn’t meant to happen. This definitely was not meant to happen. It’s time to stop him. But it’s too late. I wouldn’t know how to.”

He came very close and his expression had changed again: he seemed now to want to show me his naked face, at my mercy, to be judged.

“I’ll ask again: do you believe it was me? Do you believe it was me every time?”

I couldn’t help stepping back. There was something ravaged and terrifying in Kloster’s eyes. A much deeper, darker madness than Luciana’s seemed to burn there.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I no longer know what to believe.”

“Well, you should believe it,” said Kloster darkly. “You should believe it, but for another reason. A few hours ago, before coming here, I started writing that very scene, the murder in the care home. I left a rough draft on my desk. And as you see, it’s happened again. Only the method changes. As if he wanted to stamp his seal. Or make fun of me. A correction of style. It’s happened every time. All I had to do was write. At first I tried to convince myself that they must be coincidences. Very strange coincidences, of course. Too precise. But the dictation…had already begun. I suppose you could say it’s a work in collaboration.”

“In collaboration? With whom?”

Kloster looked at me warily, as if he might have gone too far and was suddenly unsure whether he should go on. Perhaps it was the first time he’d told anyone.

“I hinted at it, the first time we spoke, when I admitted that I didn’t believe the deaths were occurring entirely by chance. But at the time I couldn’t put it into words. It was the only possible explanation but also the one nobody would believe. Not even I fully believed it, until now. Perhaps you still won’t. You may remember, I mentioned the preface to Henry James’s Notebooks.”

“Yes, I remember it perfectly: you said that’s where you got the idea of dictating your novels.”

“There’s something else in the book. Something he reveals in some of the more personal notes, which I never would have suspected of the ironic and cosmopolitan Henry James. He had, or believed he had, a guiding spirit, or ‘guardian angel’. Sometimes he calls him his ‘demon of patience’, at others his ‘daimon’, or the ‘blessed Genius’, or ‘mon bon’. He invokes him, waits for him, sometimes senses him sitting near. He says he can even feel his breath on his cheek. He entrusts himself to this spirit, appeals to him when inspiration fails, waits for him whenever he moves into a new study to write. A guiding spirit that was with him all his life, until he started dictating. This may be what most struck me in the Notebooks: all references to his angel ceased at the moment when another person entered his workroom, when spoken words replaced silent pleas. As if the secret collaboration had been ended for ever. I remember that when I read the invocations of the guardian angel I couldn’t help smiling: I had trouble picturing venerable, distinguished Henry James pleading like a child to an invisible friend. It seemed puerile, if touching, and made me feel as if I’d been snooping and had seen something I shouldn’t have. Yes, I found it laughable and I forgot about it almost immediately. Until I started dictating myself. But unlike James, it was through dictation that I had a visitation of my own. Only it wasn’t a guardian angel.”

He took another sip from his glass and stared into the distance for a moment, before placing the glass back on the edge of the table and looking at me again with the same open expression.

“I think I’ve already told you about that morning: after days of silence, paralysis, I started dictating to Luciana again in a sudden rush, as if transported. As I was dictating to her, someone else was dictating to me in an imperious, brutal whisper that cut through all scruples, all doubts. I wanted the scene ahead of me, the scene at which I’d stopped, to be especially horrific. The bloody but methodical revenge carried out by the Cainites. I’d never written anything like it before; I’d always preferred more civilised, more discreet murders. I thought it wasn’t in my nature, that I’d never be able to do it. But suddenly, all I had to do was listen. Listen to the dark, ferocious whisper that conjured up the knife and the throat with perfect realism. Follow the miraculous connection, the voice that wouldn’t back down before anything, that killed and killed again. Thomas Mann said that, while writing Death in Venice, he had the sensation of moving forward unhindered, the impression, for the first time in his life, of being ‘carried in the air’. I too felt it for the first time. But I can’t say that the voice carrying me was benevolent. Instead it seemed to be dragging me, controlling me, a primitive, superior evil that I had to obey. A voice that I could only just follow, that had taken over everything, that seemed to wield the knife with savage joy, as if saying: “It’s easy, it’s simple, you do this and this and this.” By the time I had finished dictating the scene I was surprised to find that I didn’t have bloody hands. But something of the almost sexual euphoria, of the fit of inspiration, persisted. A remnant of that all-powerful urge. I think it was this terrible combination that made me try to kiss Luciana. I only returned to reality when I realised she was resisting.”

He raised his head slightly and shook it almost imperceptibly, as if he were reproving himself and trying to shake off the memory.

“Later, that night, I reread the pages I had dictated to her. There was no doubt: they were someone else’s. I could never have written anything like them, without error or hesitation. The language was primordial, with a terrible, primitive force that seemed to touch deep evil. I was terrified seeing the words there, fixed on paper, incontrovertible proof that it had been real. I couldn’t work on the novel again; I felt it was fatally contaminated by that other writing. I stopped at the last sentence I had dictated to Luciana before she got up to make coffee. I put it away in a drawer and tried to forget about it, to deny what had happened with rational arguments. Then the series of tragedies: I lost my daughter, I lost my life. I was disconnected from the world, devoid of thought. All I could do was watch the film of Pauli, over and over. I thought I’d never write again. Until, that summer, I went to the beach at Villa Gesell, and saw that body disappear out to sea. It was like a sign written in the water. Anyone would say it was an accident, and that’s what I thought at the time. But I understood what the sign was telling me. I knew the story I had to write. I didn’t know, I never could have imagined, that it was his novel-the beginning of his novel. I returned to Buenos Aires the next day: I just wanted to get started. Suddenly everything seemed clear. I could see the tiny but unmistakable light at the end of the tunnel-the subject of the novel. After all, it wasn’t so different from the story about the Cainites that I’d set aside. Only this one would take place in the present day. There’d be a girl, rather like Luciana. And someone who’d lost a daughter, like me. The girl would have a family just like Luciana’s. For once in a novel I wanted to keep some resemblance to real life, because I felt that the secret source, the wound I needed to prod, was my own. I didn’t want to forget myself, to let myself be swept along, as in my other books, by the flow of my imagination. The subject, of course, was punishment-what constitutes proportionate punishment. An eye for an eye, states the lex talionis. But what if one eye is smaller than the other? I had lost a daughter, but Luciana didn’t have any children. Yet my grief cried out that a daughter wasn’t equivalent to a short-term boyfriend with whom Luciana didn’t even seem to get on. I began writing with rigorous determination, but something seemed to have dried up, died inside me, as if my daughter’s death meant I was banished not only from the human race, but from my own writing. The few lines I managed to scribble each day were unrecognisable. Nothing was right. So, in my own way, I invoked him. I appealed to him night after night, until suddenly I realised I was no longer alone. He had returned. I could feel him once again at my shoulder. And I let him do as he pleased-I let him dictate to me again. He provided the momentum, gave the command, made the tuning fork hum. It was like a gradual thaw, as if the stone I had become had started to ooze. But I was writing again, and I knew exactly to whom I owed it. Inwardly I referred to him as my ‘Sredni Vashtar’. He was invisible, but his monstrous voice was as familiar as the sound of a loved one’s breathing. He was not only real but almost palpable, and I was sure anyone would know which sentences on the page were his. At first, it was almost all of them. But the physical act of writing, like a magical exercise of the muscles, gradually brought back my old skill, some of my old self. He’d made the electricity flow, made the dead man live again. I came back to life. I recovered my old pride, the only one I have, and no longer wanted his company. I went back to my long vigils, to my usual wavering and meandering, to my own imagination. But it wasn’t easy to get rid of him. I could feel him riding on my shoulders, like the Old Man of the Sea. And of course his sentences were always better than mine-primordial, savage, direct. But I managed to reject them one by one, despite the temptation. Eventually I felt I was alone again. And I thought I was free of him at last.”

“When was this?”

“Almost a year later, just before writing the scene with the parents’ death. I pictured them dying at their house by the beach, during their winter holiday, from a carbon monoxide leak from the boiler. That kind of accident happens every year. I didn’t consider any other possibility. When I went back to writing on my own, I realised that some of my bitterness had gone, life had resumed, and I was starting to forget Luciana. The novel was no longer a voodoo doll. My writing had drifted in another direction. The parents in the novel were no longer Luciana’s parents. I could view them artistically and devise the kind of death that best suited them, just like characters in any of my novels. After all, I’d spent a lifetime thinking up murders. So perhaps because I no longer had the same desire for revenge, I imagined a painless end for them, in their sleep, together in the marital bed. I wrote the scene with absolute calmness of spirit. Then, a couple of weeks later, I received Luciana’s letter: her parents really had died. The letter was muddled-really she was begging me to forgive her for suing me, which was what had started it all, but she mentioned her parents’ death as if it were something I would know. And she told me the date of their death: it was the day after I had written the scene. Of course, I was stunned. I looked for news of the case in the papers. All the details were there. The circumstances were slightly different, but it seemed only to be a difference of style: a much more horrible death but, in its way, natural.”

“When you say natural,” I broke in, suddenly remembering what I had thought, what I’d felt I’d glimpsed, in the basement of the newspaper offices, “do you mean…”

“In the most literal sense. There were no boilers or ovens involved, nothing that had anything to do with civilisation. Poison from a plant-a simple, primitive death. I realised immediately that he had devised it. And as you’ll understand, I was shocked. It was one thing sensing his presence in the whispering, in the strange communion of that private dictation or in the blameless lines of a text, but quite another admitting that he existed outside me and could kill in the real world. I didn’t take that step. Though the evidence was there before my eyes, I couldn’t believe that there was a causal connection, that reality had responded to my text. Those past few months, as I said, I had come to feel like myself again. The few lines I managed to set down laboriously every day had gradually restored me to my former self. And my former self had always been sceptical, even contemptuous, of the irrational. I had, after all, studied science at university, and had written entire passages mocking the very idea of religion. I decided to consider the dictation episode as a passing fit, a period of mental disturbance brought on by the loss of my daughter. This was something I could admit: grief had made me temporarily lose my mind. Even so, even though I refused to believe, I was a little shaken, so I left the novel at that point. It remained in a drawer for years. It wasn’t exactly a superstitious fear that I felt, but something more personal: the secret motor, my desire for revenge, had subsided. With the death of Luciana’s parents I had, at last, however monstrous this may sound, achieved reparation. My wound had healed, my flame had died down and, after the first moment of astonishment at the coincidence, I was at peace, if a little guilty, because I couldn’t help feeling that in anticipating and preparing those deaths in my imagination I had, in a mysterious, indirect way, prompted them. In any case, the ratio now seemed right and I almost wrote back to Luciana. Truly I no longer bore her any ill will.”

“But at some point you reopened that drawer.”

Kloster nodded slowly. “Years passed-three, four, I forget how many. I didn’t think about any of it again, and in the meantime wrote other books. Until one day I read a short article in the paper about premonitions in dreams. You know what I mean: one night someone dreams about the death of a loved one and the next day it comes true, as if the dream were really a prediction, an arrow shot at the target. The article was written by a professor of statistics, and the tone was rather mocking. He did a simple sum calculating the probabilities and showed that the likelihood of a premonition in a dream coming true was very low, but not so low that, in a big city like Tokyo or Buenos Aires, the coincidence between two events-person X having the dream and their loved one Y dying-didn’t routinely occur. Of course to the person who has the dream the coincidence is astonishing and they see it as a psychic phenomenon, the manifestation of a supernatural power; but for someone who could look down on an entire city at night and keep count of everyone’s dreams, it would be no more surprising than a bingo-caller hearing someone shout out ‘Bingo’. The article was very persuasive and made me think differently about the scene I’d written and the death of Luciana’s parents. I was rather ashamed of having given in to the fundamentally arrogant and superstitious belief that my writing could have had such an effect on reality. With hindsight, it seemed obvious that it had simply been a coincidence between two unrelated events. That night there must have been an army of writers imagining, as I was, some death or other. It just happened that what I’d imagined subsequently took place. A lottery number in a sea of statistics, assigned to me by chance. I opened the drawer again and reread the novel to where I’d left it. But now I was surprised by something else: it was the best thing I’d ever written. And, stranger still, I couldn’t distinguish between his writing and mine. I could no longer point out which sentences had been dictated to me. The whole text seemed to be both familiar and written by someone else. This had happened before when I’d gone back to some of my books and found passages I didn’t recognise, but what I’m trying to say is that I decided to believe-wanted to believe-that it was me who had written every one of those pages. That all the ideas were mine alone. I wanted to take possession of the book. But really I should say that it took possession of me once again. I couldn’t resist continuing. I realised that there was no doubt it would be my masterpiece, perhaps my only great novel. So you see, I gave in to that other arrogant superstition: wanting to create something ‘great’. Anyway, I returned to it, night after night. Until the time came to imagine the brother’s death.”

“Even when you knew what might happen?”

“In the novel, the process of revenge had to continue,” said Kloster, as if it were too late for regrets. “But I did waver. I had months of doubts, of scruples. As in De Quincey’s tale, I felt the thin line, on the edge of the abyss, between dabbling in murder and becoming a fully fledged murderer. Then I thought I’d found a solution. But I was wrong. I thought if I simply devised a highly improbable death, a set of extreme coincidences, it wouldn’t be replicated in real life. Luciana had once mentioned that while he was at medical school her brother had been on a work placement in the prison service. It was the only thing I knew about him. In addition, I had, as you know, corresponded with a number of prisoners in different jails. I linked the two and imagined a convict in a high security prison pretending to have a seizure so as to be taken to the infirmary. Luciana’s brother, now a junior doctor, would be on duty that night and the convict would stab and kill him while trying to escape. As I wrote the scene, I added a few details, from the little I knew about the inside of prisons, that would make the chain of events seem more believable, yet, subtly, more unlikely. But it happened again. Once again, in a slightly different way; once again, as if it were a version revised by someone bolder, crueller. And, as if it were part of the joke, in an even more bizarre sequence of events. The convict hadn’t tried to escape: his own jailers had opened the door so he could leave to burgle people’s houses. Luciana’s brother no longer worked at the prison but during his time at the infirmary he’d met, of all the wives of all the prisoners, the wife of the most vicious. I first found out about it, as you did, as everybody did, in the papers. That morning I read, and reread in disbelief, the name of Luciana’s brother. Same age, same profession, and from the photo I could see they looked very alike. Yes, it had happened again.”

“And once again there was something savage, primitive, about it,” I said, at last seeing the connection I’d missed. “The man killed him with his bare hands, without using his gun.”

“Exactly. It bore his stamp, I could tell immediately. I was beginning to understand his methods, his preferences: the wild sea waves, the natural poison of fungi, the cruelty of one man attacking another like a beast with claws and teeth, as at the dawn of time. A few days later that policeman, Ramoneda, came to see me and showed me the anonymous letters. They were uncouth but precise, and effective. I almost told him everything, as I’m telling you now. But he had his own theory. He spotted a book by Poe on my bookshelves and started talking about The Tell-Tale Heart, of the desire to confess that he’d seen again and again in murderers. I realised from the way he spoke about Luciana that he suspected her. He asked if I had any samples of her handwriting. I gave him the letter she had sent me a few years earlier, in which she asked for forgiveness. He read it carefully and while he was comparing the handwriting he confided that Luciana had spent time in hospital, with a syndrome known as ‘morbid guilt’. Sufferers secretly feel guilty about some harm they’ve done for which they haven’t been punished. Indirectly, and in different ways, they seek to punish themselves. Ramoneda said Luciana was obsessed with the thought that she’d had something to do with my daughter’s death. Hearing this, so many years later, caused me a sort of belated, bitter joy. I’d wanted her to have to think of Pauli every day of her life, and that wish had also been granted. Ramoneda said nothing more and I was sure that, whatever his suspicions, he’d keep them to himself and not do anything. After all, he had his culprit and pressure from the entire government to close the case and hush up the scandal over the convict’s escape.

“Once he’d left, though, I found myself wondering whether this wasn’t another possible explanation. A rational explanation. I considered each death again in this new light. Luciana could have put some substance in her boyfriend’s coffee: she studied biology, she’d have known what to use that would go undetected in a postmortem and she was there with him every day. And the following year, Luciana could have planted poisonous fungi in the little wood, during the same kind of lightning visit to Villa Gesell that she accused me of. Wasn’t she the one who knew all there was to know about fungi? And finally, Luciana could have written the anonymous letters. She probably knew about her brother’s relationship with that woman. But I had to dismiss this possibility before it went very far: Luciana could never have achieved the insane synchronicity between the dates of the deaths and the progress of my novel.

“Even so, considering another hypothesis, one that came, unexpectedly, from an outside source, made me regain hope that there was room for a rational explanation, even if I couldn’t come up with one. As you see, there was still something stubborn in me. I couldn’t accept, intellectually, that what had already occurred twice might occur again. So I set out to challenge him. I proceeded like a sceptic who deliberately walks under a ladder. I decided to write one more death, to test him. The scientific test of repetition. At least that was how I justified it to myself at the time, but I know there was something else. I don’t mind admitting it now: I didn’t want to stop writing the novel, even though I knew another person might die as a result. Even knowing this, I couldn’t resist. So I started devising the next death. As I said earlier, I visited several care homes and considered several ingenious variants. What I really wanted was a murder that was the opposite of his style. That was anti-thetical to all that he was. Strangely, it was you who gave me the idea, when we spoke about Luciana’s grandmother and you said that it wouldn’t count against me if she died a natural death. As soon as you’d said it, I knew that’s what it had to be. It was simple, perfect-a natural death. And to a certain extent it left me with a clean conscience. I wouldn’t be imagining and writing a murder, but a merciful release for someone who’d been bedridden for years. This afternoon I made up my mind at last to write the first draft. One death. One person.

That’s all I wanted. Do you believe this at least?” Kloster looked me straight in the eye, as if expecting an immediate answer.

“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” I said. “What matters is what Luciana believes. She called me this evening, after the fire. That’s why I’m here. She’s desperate, on the brink of madness, I think. I promised I’d go to see her. But I’d like you to come with me.”

“Me?” Kloster made a face, as if the very idea were distasteful. “I don’t see how it would help. I think it might even make things worse.”

“I want her to hear from you what you’ve just told me. Even only this small part of it: that since her parents’ death, you no longer bear her any ill will. I think that, coming from you, would change everything for her.”

“And then we’d give each other a big Christian hug of reconciliation? That’s rather naive of you, young man. Don’t you see it no longer depends on me? Ten years ago, when I was in despair, my atheism faltered and I prayed. I prayed every night to a dark, unknown god. My prayer was heard and is slowly being answered. It came from me, but I can’t now take it back. Because the punishment, the full punishment, has already been written. It is written.”

“How do you know how much of it has been written? How do you know that a gesture of forgiveness now wouldn’t change everything? If what you’ve told me is taking place as you say, there is one fundamental thing you could do: stop writing. Give it up right now.”

“I could even burn it, but there’s no guarantee it would stop anything. It’s outside me. And I think he’s getting ahead of me now: this time he didn’t wait for the scene to be fully written and finished.”

“So are you saying you refuse to come with me?”

“On the contrary: I said I’d like to stop it, if only I knew how. I’m prepared to try anything you say. But I’m sceptical about the results. We don’t even know if she’d be willing to see me again face to face.”

“Why don’t we ask her? Is there a phone here I can use?”

Kloster indicated the bar and signalled to the barman to let me use the telephone. Reluctantly the barman reached for an old Bakelite phone with a thick spiral cord. I took it to one end of the bar and dialled Luciana’s number, waiting patiently for the dial to return between digits. A sleepy voice answered.

“Luciana?”

“No, it’s Valentina. Luciana’s gone to bed. But she said to wake her if you called.”

There was a click on the line, as the receiver was lifted in another room, and I heard Luciana’s voice, weak and defeated.

“You said you’d come,” she said, only faint reproach in her voice, as if it no longer surprised her to be let down. “I was waiting for you, because I…” Her voice faded to a whisper and she said, as if she had remained stuck at this one thought: “I can’t deal with the coffin.”

“I’m here with Kloster,” I said. “I want to bring him with me, so you can hear what he has to say.”

“Bring Kloster? Here? Now?” In her disbelief, she seemed unable to comprehend the meaning of my words. Or rather, I thought I perceived something helpless and disoriented in her voice, as if she could no longer think coherently and so clung to these questions, before letting them slip from her grasp. Suddenly she laughed bitterly, and for a moment sounded lucid again. “Yes, why not? We can have a chat, the three of us, like old friends. Isn’t it funny? The first time I went to see you I still thought there was a slight hope that I could convince you. I had a plan, something I’d been thinking of doing for years. I just needed your help. I learned from him. I’d planned it all down to the last detail. I thought I could pre-empt it, before it was too late. I didn’t want to die,” she said, pitifully, and she started crying quietly. A moment passed before she spoke, her voice reproachful again: “The only thing I never thought, never could have imagined, was that you would believe him.”

“I don’t believe him,” I said. “I don’t know what to believe. But I think you should listen to what he has to say. If only for a moment.”

There was a long silence, as if Luciana was weighing the implications and dangers of the visit, or for once was seeing everything from another perspective.

“Why not?” she said again, but now she seemed strangely detached, indifferent, as if nothing could touch her any more. Or perhaps (but I only realised this later) she suddenly had a new plan, one in which she no longer needed me, and her sudden acceptance, the unexpected meekness, was her way of setting it in motion. “We can face each other again. Like civilised people. I suppose I’m curious to find out how he convinced you.”

“It would only take a moment. And afterwards I’ll go and sort out the coffin.”

“You’ll sort it out? You’d do that for me?” Her tone suddenly switched to gratitude, so that she sounded like a little girl thankful for a huge, unexpected favour.

“Of course I would. You need to rest.”

“To rest,” she said longingly. “Yes. I’m so tired.” She seemed to drift for a moment, lost in her dark thoughts. “But there’s Valentina. It’s too dangerous for me to go back to sleep-I have to protect Valentina. I’m the only one who can protect her.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to Valentina,” I said, aware of the dishonesty and weakness of the attempt to reassure her. Too much had happened since the last time I’d said something similar.

“I don’t want him to see her,” she whispered. “I don’t want her to see him again.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “And there’s no reason for him to see her.”

“I know what he wants. I know why he’s coming here,” she said, madness in her voice again. “But I want Valentina to be saved, at least.”

“I’ve got to go now,” I said, keen to end the conversation. I was afraid she’d change her mind. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

I hung up and signalled to Kloster that she had agreed. He leaned his cue carefully against the wall and followed me to the stairs without a word.