The Truth and Other Lies

10

Gisbert Fasch had also seen the news of Henry’s wife’s fatal swimming accident. There was no mention of her name; there wasn’t even a photograph of her. In death as in life she wasn’t granted a title of her own; even postmortem she remained the wife of.

For four hours now he’d been sitting in his hot and stuffy car, squashing creepy-crawlies as they made their way over the roof. Shadowing your opponent is always so exciting in books and films; in real life it turns time into moldy old cheese. You sit there producing carbon dioxide; the minutes drag on forever; you want to sleep, but you can’t, because you can never be sure that something noteworthy isn’t about to happen, and in your misery you turn to squashing insects.

Fasch fanned himself with the newspaper he’d already read to death and looked up at Henry’s property on the hill. His eyes were watering from so much surveillance. In an English lifestyle magazine he’d come across a large-format photograph of Henry’s living room, showing the master of the house on his Chesterfield sofa together with his wife and dog. Fasch had studied the photo for a long time, looking for hidden clues to location. The woman at Henry’s side looked educated and pleasant, with a remote, saintly air about her. In the picture she was wearing lined boots and a reversible tweed poncho. Henry, quite the old trophy-gatherer, lay sprawled on the sofa with an arm around her shoulder. In the background, somewhat blurred, a picture window, dark wooden shelves full of books, a fireplace — how absolutely essential — and to the side a black dog sitting upright like a Spanish grandee. It was such a total cliché, this living room, so utterly tasteful, exactly what he would have expected of someone like Hayden, who disguised his malign personality with refined junk and the mammals to match. Made you puke.

Fasch had by now completed the crossword, including all subsidiary rivers and Nordic divinities; the roof of the car was a sea of bloody stains. Every now and then a slight breeze blew through the open side window, bringing with it the smell of cut grass, and making the little photo of his mother, Amalie, swing on the rearview mirror.

On the backseat lay his old briefcase. It had now acquired the weight of a twenty-week-old infant and contained everything ever written by and about Henry Hayden. Fasch no longer left the bag for a second. Several times during the last weeks he had woken up screaming because he’d dreamed he’d lost it.

The information Fasch had managed to gather about Henry so far allowed for a reliable reconstruction of the first eleven and the last nine years of his life. In between was still a gaping hole of almost twenty-five years. There are blind spots and dark matter in everyone’s biographies — among them, things people prefer to leave out because they are embarrassing or simply unimportant. But suppressing a time span of twenty-five years is too much to go unnoticed. His entire youth was missing.

Henry had led a secret life — somewhere and somehow. That in itself was an achievement, for vanishing is an art. It means renunciation and abstention. Renouncing home, family, and friends, language and familiar habits. And whom do you tell? Whom do you share it with? Even Dr. Mengele, who had to change his hiding place several times over, left clues and a diary. Keeping silent goes against human nature, it said at the beginning of Frank Ellis. Clearly a hidden reference to Henry’s secret biography.

Suddenly, then, he reemerges and starts publishing novels. Just like that. Without a first shot, without practice, without a mistake. All novels tell you something about their authors, no matter how cleverly they try to conceal themselves. Whether Hayden had actually written his novels himself or had simply stolen them, Gisbert Fasch believed they were just teeming with clues; it was only a question of finding the key to decipher them.

Henry’s car came along the avenue of poplars at high speed, a cloud of dust in its wake. Fasch threw his half-drunk paper cup of tea out the window, switched on the engine, and put his foot to the floor. He had trouble tailing the car, because he was an unpracticed driver. The worn tires on his sixteen-year-old Peugeot skidded on the curves; the car lurched from side to side, making hysterical noises.

By the time he’d gone about three miles and come to a fork in the road at which one took a right for the freeway and a left for the coastal road, he’d already lost Henry. Judging by the speed at which Henry had set off, he was in quite a hurry. People in a hurry take the freeway, you’d think. Fasch hesitated briefly and turned left.

Henry had indeed chosen the narrow, winding coastal road, because he wanted to make the most of his last opportunity to drive the Maserati flat-out. He was expecting the police to detain him on the spot, so he’d taken with him a small travel toothbrush, his reading glasses, and a paperback edition of Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, in case there was nothing to read in the cell; word has it that being held in custody is much more unpleasant than the prison term after sentencing.

It was about twenty-five miles from his property to the Institute of Forensic Medicine; he would get there over an hour early. Henry thought of his dog. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to kill it with the spade. Who was to look after Poncho if he didn’t return? He’d wanted to uncover the old well in the summer and have the stained-glass windows in the chapel restored. But now everything would go to wrack and ruin, or be auctioned off or razed to the ground by bulldozers.

Presumably the police divers had recovered Martha’s corpse from the Subaru. In that case the homicide squad already knew that the car belonged to Betty and were doubtless tapping his phone. That would explain why Betty had been so persistent in trying to get hold of him. She was cooperating with the police, so as not to be punished for Martha’s murder — and who could blame her? Henry would have done the same if he’d been in her shoes. After all, Betty’s pragmatism was the thing Henry really valued about her. It would be difficult now to pronounce Martha’s death a swimming accident, but what were lawyers for? They get paid to come up with explanations. Henry was able to afford the best lawyers, and since O. J. Simpson’s acquittal, nothing seemed impossible.

Henry could see his pursuer in the rearview mirror. The red car came nearer, then remained at a distance of about two hundred yards. He couldn’t make out how many people were sitting in the car, especially with the sunlight reflecting off its windshield. The police would hardly send such amateurs after him. Henry slowed down; the car behind him slowed down too. As soon as he put on speed again, the red car closed up. Maybe it was tourists or those bird lovers who came to the coast at this time of year to watch the mating flights of the seabirds. Alternatively, Henry thought, his pursuer might be a mere figment of his conscience; after all, the world is full of perils for anyone with a sense of foreboding.

Henry accelerated; the little car fell a long way behind. After rounding a bend concealed by high bushes, he slammed on the brakes, put on his sunglasses, got out of the car, and waited for his pursuer. Sea spray settled on his sunglasses like a veil. The coast dropped away here, falling some hundred feet, and hefty concrete blocks were set in front of the precipice to prevent accidents. The wind howled up between the cliffs; clouds drove shadows over the coastal road. Henry saw seagulls circling overhead. Half a minute passed, then he heard the car coming. It rounded the bend at high speed, its tires screeching.

Fasch saw Henry standing in front of his car. It was him all right. He stood there nonchalantly, his hands in his trouser pockets. His hair was still thick, his shoulders broad; he was wearing a checked English cashmere jacket with leather patches on the elbows just like in the showy portrait photo that ruined the covers of all his books.

With the impact on the concrete block, the windshield shattered into a million fractals. His face crashed through the glass and then back again. Everything slowed down and began to rotate. In the center of this revolving world, Fasch saw the photo of his mother, Amalie, hanging motionless while, all around it, everything moved. He wondered when he’d last called her and what he should give her for her seventieth birthday. Then there was an implosion in his chest and something pushed in on him from the sides and grew hot.

The Peugeot ended up lying on its roof. A shower of glass pelted down onto the road. Henry sprinted the hundred feet to the remains of the car. He nearly tripped over the fat brown briefcase that was lying in the road. Paper came fluttering out of it. The wrecked car hissed like a wounded dragon. A mixture of fluids flowed out of its gaping metal jaws and down the road. The roof was in shreds; one door and all the windows were gone; the rear right wheel was still turning. Henry took off his jacket — first things first — and knelt down in the iridescent pool to look inside the smashed-up car. First he saw the arm, the fingers on the hand twitching, and then the man, lying twisted and whimpering on the backseat. He was still alive, but he didn’t know a lot about driving.

Henry took hold of the arm and pulled. The man groaned. Henry let go, crawled into the wrecked car as far as he could, clasped the man around his bloody chest, and pulled him out. With no resistance to speak of, the body slid onto the road. The eyes were open, but the man didn’t seem to understand; his face was already beginning to swell; a trickle of blood ran out of his ear. Sticking out of the right-hand side of his chest was the broken-off shaft of a headrest. Henry put his ear to the open mouth of the injured man and heard his gurgling breathing.

Henry grasped the shaft in his chest and pulled it out; the ribs cracked. He listened again. After a few breaths the gurgling grew fainter; the man’s chest rose and fell quickly. There was now a lot of blood gushing out of the wound. Henry ripped a strip of cloth from his favorite shirt and pushed it into the hole in the man’s chest with his finger, the way you might fill a pipe.

At the five-mile marker, only a short distance from the junction where the forest track led off to the left toward the cliffs, Henry took a right in the direction of town. Fasch was lying on the backseat, his head on the briefcase, which Henry had been considerate enough to rescue. A bloodstain was spreading around the bag on the soft napa leather. Fasch’s legs were raised up and sticking out of the back window. He was whimpering softly, but was not conscious. The traffic was growing heavier. Henry was in complete control of the car at every overtaking maneuver — it has to be said that he was driving the race of his life — and he reached the hospital in under twenty minutes.

An ambulance was parked outside the emergency department with its rear doors open. A paramedic in fluorescent orange was sitting on a gurney reading a newspaper as Henry rolled up the ramp tooting his horn. “I’ve got an injured man!” Henry called out of the car window.

Stoically and without a single superfluous movement, the paramedic folded his newspaper. He saw a dozen injured people every day, dead people and dying people, delirious drunks, weeping mothers — and not for one damn minute was he left in peace to read his newspaper. Without a word he helped heave the unconscious man onto a gurney and push him into emergency.

Tired, and uncertain whether or not he could still be of any use, Henry got back in his car and wondered whether he should call Jenssen to cancel his appointment at forensics. He was now dreading the thought of seeing Martha’s body again. It would have begun to decompose. All the same, he did want to see her face, to touch it. He quite simply owed it to her. No doubt her expression would reflect the horror of the final moment, when she had realized her mistake. For all her synesthetic sixth sense and her great knowledge of human nature, she’d been wrong about him. Wrong out of love for him, until the cowardly moment he’d come up from behind and pushed her into the black water. It had been murder, even if it had been a mistake. Who else but he would see the disappointment on her face?

There was a knock on the window. A young doctor was standing at the car. Henry got out again.

“Are you injured?”

Henry looked down. It was only now that he noticed his stained trousers, and remembered ripping a strip off his favorite shirt. Its sleeves were stained with congealed blood.

“The blood’s from the other man. Is he still alive?”

The doctor nodded. “There’s a fair amount broken, including his skull, and he’s lost a lot of blood, but he’ll pull through. Did you bring him here?”

——

He was given a glass of water. In the doctor’s room in the emergency department, Henry washed the blood off his hands and described where the accident had happened and what he’d seen and done. He didn’t mention the fact that he’d lain in wait for his pursuer around the corner — why should he? On a table Henry saw half-full cups, and partly eaten salami sandwiches, abandoned in the rush to help others.

“Did you pull anything out of his chest?”

“Yes, there was a piece of metal in it — it was bubbling terribly. I thought it might get in the way of his breathing.”

“He has a collapsed lung; he would have suffocated.”

“Then it was the right thing to do?”

“You saved his life.”

Henry produced his ID. A statement was drawn up, which Henry signed. A pretty nurse brought his jacket from the car. Her white smock suited her fantastically well. Why is it, Henry wondered, that men love women in uniform?

“The police will be in touch with you, Mr. Hayden.”

“I daresay they will.”

He looked at the clock. Time was running short; too much was happening. He could still make his appointment at forensics, because he’d set off early. But should he drive to his own arrest in this state?

“You don’t happen to have a pair of trousers and a clean shirt for me, do you?” The doctor disappeared briefly into the room next door and returned with trousers and a shirt. “These are the consultant’s; the shirt’s mine.” They both fit, although the trousers were a little tight. “Just send everything back to the hospital afterward.”

As Henry was walking along the gray corridor of the emergency department, the nurse came running after him. She was bringing him his jacket for the second time.

“You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

“And you?”

“If I could write like you I certainly wouldn’t be a nurse. My condolences, Mr. Hayden.”

“What for?”

“Your wife. I saw it in the newspaper. Can I take a photo of us?”

“Another time. When I’m wearing something appropriate.”

Henry put his jacket on after he got back in the car. He unwound the blood-encrusted bandage on his wrist and dropped it onto the floorboard. He examined the wound where the marten had bitten him. The skin around it was reddened and slightly swollen. For a moment he considered going back to emergency to have the scratch looked at, but then he rejected the idea. It was too ridiculous. Just now he’d pulled a stake out of a stranger’s chest; there was his dead wife lying in forensics, and he had life imprisonment to look forward to. When Henry set off, his memory of the accident was already fading, like a dream that is blotted out when you wake up.

He had no concrete notion of what awaited him. He would make no confession when he was arrested, but wait and see what charges were brought against him. A defendant should say little in court. Or, better still, keep silent. You can lie too. An accused person enjoys the rare privilege of being allowed to lie. Besides, you’re the center of attention. It’s no rare thing for criminals in the dock to feel a sense of endorsement and a genuine interest in them and their mucked-up lives for the first time. Some of them are so taken with this that they confess more than is necessary, for the sole purpose of having people listen to them. It is possible that people of this type would never have become criminals if they’d been given a taste of the precious elixir of recognition a little earlier. The victims of a crime, the bereaved, wait to be acknowledged in vain, for it is well known that the reward for suffering consists in evading punishment. Recognition is rarely just.

Henry had all the time in the world now. He would spend the rest of his life waiting and remembering. Maybe he’d even write a book and become a better person. He would also, of course, have his regrets.

The Institute of Forensic Medicine was a gray roughcast building, plain and functional, without any kind of ornamentation at all. Jenssen was sitting on the front steps with a plastic coffee cup in his hand, leafing through a thin folder. When he caught sight of Henry, he put the cup down on the steps and walked toward him with an outstretched hand. His eyes took in the Maserati, then Henry’s shoes.

“What happened?”

Henry examined his blood-smeared shoes. There you are, he thought, you forgot about them. That’s how quickly it happens.

“A road accident in front of me. It’s not my blood. Shall we go in?”

Jenssen refrained from asking any more questions. A thoroughly agreeable trait of character. “You don’t have to do this,” he said to Henry on the stairs. “We could just wait for the results from the DNA analysis instead.”

“Of course we could. But I’d like to see my wife. I’m grateful to you for calling me up straightaway. Does she look terrible?”

“I haven’t seen her yet either. To be honest, I’ve never seen a drowned body.” Jenssen scratched himself. “But there’s a first time for everything, eh?”

That’s what you want in a police officer, Henry thought. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about human nature, and yet he remains a decent guy, sympathetic, open to basic emotions and not indifferent to other people’s suffering.

“Where’s your charming colleague who looks a bit like…”

“An opossum?” Jenssen laughed loudly. Henry nodded. “She really is the spitting image of an opossum. She never comes to forensics. She says it stinks too much for her.”

Jenssen realized this was less than professional, and he became serious again. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Maybe later,” Henry replied. “Let’s get it over and done with.”

Jenssen let Henry go on ahead. Henry suspected that Jenssen’s exceptionally polite treatment of him had little to do with respect and a lot to do with his investigative techniques. A locked door opened with a buzz, they crossed a corridor where a vending machine was humming and stopped in front of a sheet of glass. Behind the glass sat a woman who was scowling. No wonder — it would put you in a bad mood, sitting in that glass box all day long, being stared at like a monkey. The corridor smelled of cleaning agent and instant coffee, and there was something else unidentifiable in the air, rising up from the basement.

Henry signed another form, cast a glance back toward the daylight coming in from the window, and passed through blue double doors. A flight of stairs led down to the basement to a changing room where Jenssen handed Henry green plastic overshoes and overalls. As Henry was putting on the overalls, he noticed the other man observing him. But he wasn’t going to make it that easy for him.

“What happened to your wrist?”

A delayed question, Henry thought. So Jenssen had noticed the wound earlier on. The question came later, as a surprise. Part of his tactics, Henry thought; I must make a note of that.

“Something bit me.”

Henry followed Jenssen into the Hades of the morgue. The smell of putrefying flesh was intense. This is the place where death delights to help the living read an inscription on the wall. Jenssen laid a hand on Henry’s shoulder.

“May I give you some advice?”

“By all means.”

“You might as well start breathing through your nose now.”

No previous knowledge is required to know how death smells. There’s no smell like it. When you enter a morgue you can’t shake a sense of grim foreboding.

No corpse is beautiful. First Henry saw the feet. The toes were black and swollen. The corpse lay, oddly bulky, on the farthest of four big, clean, stainless-steel tables under a vertical light. The chest was already open. The head lay on a plastic block; something dark covered the face. At the table stood a woman of about fifty with short hair and stained overalls, who was putting something soft — we don’t want to know what — into a steel dish. The forensic pathologist had adopted the somber air of the autopsy room to delight in helping death in this place. A few paces from the autopsy table, Jenssen paused again and held Henry back.

“Just a moment, please.”

He hurried on ahead and spoke to the pathologist in a low voice. Henry saw her quick glance, then she nodded, took a green cloth, and laid it over the open chest of the corpse. Now Henry noticed the swollen hand sticking out at one side from beneath the cloth. The crisp, black skin on the fingers had cracked open. Flaps of skin had peeled off and hung down at the sides. Parts of the bone could be seen. The ring finger was missing.

Jenssen came back and stood between Henry and the corpse. He had grown noticeably paler.

“You must excuse us, we weren’t quite sure when you were coming. You can see for yourself, they’ve already started the postmortem, and the face is…” Jenssen couldn’t find the words to complete his sentence. “It’s better if you don’t see it.”

“Please, I want to see my wife.”

Jenssen stepped aside and Henry walked past him to the table. The pathologist pushed something that looked like a spatula under the torso. The skull had been sawed open, the brain lay in a dish beside it. The face had been pulled down from the forehead like that of a furry animal that’s been skinned. The severed ring finger lay in a little dish next to the brain, a gold ring gleaming on it. The pathologist reached into the corpse’s copper-green hair with her latex gloves and, with an unsentimental tug, pulled the face back over the skull.

“Your wife drowned,” the pathologist explained.

My wife? Henry thought. The face of the drowned body looked like a quattro stagioni pizza topped with seasonal ingredients such as you might dig into at the Italian restaurant on the corner. A doughy black tongue bulged out of the mouth; the eyes had sunk to shriveled olives; the nose had opened out like an artichoke, exposing two black holes. None of it resembled Martha. Her features weren’t even remotely recognizable. This face, dehumanized by rot, belonged to a stranger, as did the rest of the bulky body.

Although he was already quite sure, Henry also had a look at the cracked-up finger in the dish. The ring it wore was broad and less beautiful than the one that Henry had slipped onto Martha’s finger in the clerk’s office. A DNA test was hardly necessary. It wasn’t her.

Henry turned away, shaking his head. “That’s not my wife.”

Jenssen nodded in agreement, as if Henry had just said it really was Martha. “You’re right. It doesn’t look like your wife anymore, but it is.”

Jesus Christ, Henry thought, if I say the truth, no one believes me. “What did she have on?” he asked, knowing quite well that this might be a major blunder.

“She was fully clothed.”

“Then how can it be my wife? I found her clothes on the beach. And besides, my wife’s petite, and this lady here”—Henry pointed at the corpse—“is massive. And the ring on the finger there isn’t Martha’s wedding ring.”

Jenssen glanced in his folder. “There’s nothing here about a ring.”

He leafed through the pages, as if the missing clue might be there. Then he looked across at the pathologist.

“The ring was concealed under the epidermis on the palm,” she remarked matter-of-factly.

Henry held up his hand to show his wedding ring.

“I chose our rings; they’re identical and narrower than that one. We had our names engraved on them. Her ring ought to have my name on it.”

For the first time in years he pulled off his ring — it hurt a little — and handed it to Jenssen, who looked at the inscription of Martha’s name on the inside, and then went over to the table and bent over the finger in the dish.

The pathologist took some pincers and pulled the ring off the bone tissue. Not a nice noise. She rinsed the ring in clean water and passed it to Jenssen. To look at the inside, Jenssen had to hold the ring right up to his eye. It can’t have smelled good. There was no inscription. Shame and irritation at having notified Henry in such a premature and unprofessional way made Jenssen blush. “Damn!” he stammered, “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t mention it.” Henry took the opportunity to reward the detective’s kindheartedness. Anyone can make a mistake, after all. “Do you know what, Jenssen?” he said, putting his hand on his shoulder. “You’ve convinced me that my wife’s still alive and I’m grateful to you for that. Would you like a coffee?”

Everything was up in the air again. No one suspected him; no one was going to arrest him. He didn’t need the toothbrush or the book, and he would drive home a free man. Like sunshine piercing the clouds after a storm, artificial light fell from the ceiling of the autopsy room onto the lady lying open on the table. Henry felt sympathy for the dead woman. What was it that had driven the poor thing into the water? Had she been tired of life, or fatally ill? Did she have children? Who was waiting for her now, in vain?

It later turned out that the dead woman was a retired police officer who’d fallen off a bridge trying to take a photo of a seagull.

Henry treated Jenssen to a coffee from the vending machine in the corridor. They stood next to each other for a while without speaking, sipping from their plastic cups.

“Sometimes people disappear,” Jenssen said after quite some time. He took a gulp of coffee and scrunched up the cup in his fist. “And some return.”

Henry flinched. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, just recently we had a guy turn up — he’d been gone fourteen years, no mean feat, completely vanished, because, he says, his children got on his nerves.”

Jenssen giggled. Henry remained serious. A man who knows how hard it is to disappear doesn’t find that kind of thing funny.

“It’s ten years now since he was pronounced dead, his wife has married the man next door, and now the mongrel comes back and wants his wife to pay him his life insurance. He’s even brought charges against her — can you believe it?”

Henry could understand the man perfectly, but he didn’t reply. Jenssen took a piece of paper out of his folder and handed it to him. It had clearly been torn from a book. Four words from a line of printed text were visible.

“We found this in your wife’s jacket.”

Henry put on his reading glasses that he’d brought with him especially for his stay in custody. A message had been scribbled over the scrap of print in a ballpoint pen that had pierced the paper in several places; the writing surface had evidently been soft. The hand was rounded, feminine.

“It says: If I can do anything and there’s a phone number.” He gave the scrap of paper back to Jenssen. “That’s not Martha’s writing.”

“We rang up. The number belongs to a certain Sonja Reens.”

Henry saw the young woman before him, standing in Martha’s parka by the sea, huddled up with cold.

“She’s the daughter of Elenor Reens, our mayor. I met her on the beach when I was looking for my wife.”

“That’s right. She sends her regards and asked how you were.”

“And?” Henry asked. “How am I?”

“I don’t want to begin to imagine,” Jenssen replied and pointed at the scrap of paper in Henry’s hand. “Do the words seem familiar to you?”

Henry read the printed words out loud: “Always alone than never.” He didn’t have the shimmer of an idea what this crap was supposed to mean.

“Doesn’t ring any bells?”

Triumph flared in Jenssen’s eyes as if he’d just landed on the Planet of the Apes. An inner voice told Henry it would be better if he did know the phrase, so he decided — as so often — to play the odds and make a wild guess. We don’t, incidentally, make use of our hidden talent for guesswork half often enough. Beyond comprehension and consciousness, an army of anonymous neurons is working things out for us. Electric charges are transformed into memories; deep down inside us, knowledge emerges and generates the visions of the unconscious. You just have to trust them.

“It’s mine. The phrase is mine.”

Jenssen was as surprised as he was disappointed. “Bingo,” he said appreciatively. “I recognized it straightaway too and looked it up. Bottom of page one hundred and two. Only ‘better’ is missing. ‘Better always alone than never.’ It’s from your novel, Mr. Hayden. Aggravating Circumstances. I think it’s your best book.”

“Very impressive,” Henry murmured with admiration. “Just goes to show how valuable an attentive reader is.”