Borkmann's Point (25 page)

I understand, she tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come
out. They stayed deep inside her. Frozen and meaningless.
“I went to see Maurice Rühme that same fall,” he said,
breaking the silence. “One day during the few months she was
at home with us again I went to see him. Visited him in that
same well-kept apartment she had shared with him, and where
he now lived with another woman...a young and beautiful
woman who still retained all her happiness and never discovered the reason for my visit. He kept her out of the way, and
when I wanted to talk to him about Brigitte, we went out and
sat in a bar. Sat on a peculiar plush velvet sofa and he waved his
arms around and wondered what the devil I wanted; he paid
for the wine and asked me if I wanted money...I think that’s
when he sowed the seeds of his own destruction, but it wasn’t
until he came back here, and the others as well, that I realized
the time was ripe. When I killed him, the pleasure was all the
greater. Somehow deeper and more intense than with Eggers
and Simmel, and that doesn’t surprise me. He was the one who
had started it all off, it was the image of a living Maurice
Rühme who caused the greatest torture during all those sleepless nights before I made up my mind...a living, smiling
Maurice Rühme sitting on that sofa, flailing his arms about and
regretting that Brigitte wasn’t made of sterner stuff. That she
would fall so badly and hurt herself so much...he had never
imagined that, the little rich boy with the strong safety net.”
He fell silent once again and shifted his position on the chair.
“I have to leave you now,” he said. “I’ll tell you about the
others another time. If nothing unexpected happens...”
He remained sitting there for another minute, then she
heard him stand up and open the door. Heard the squeaking
hinges as he closed it again, locked and bolted it, and it was
only after his footsteps had long since faded away that her
tongue loosened again.
“And what about me?” she whispered, and for a moment
she thought her words remained hanging like symbols in the
darkness.
Small, rapidly fading sparks in a black, black night.
Then she wrapped the blankets around her and tried to
close the eyes of her soul.
When he drove out of the parking lot behind The See Warf, it
was no later than half past seven, and the sun had barely risen
over the high coast to the east. A clear day seemed to be in
store, and he was rather looking forward to sitting behind the
wheel for a few hours.
Sitting there and traveling through an autumnal landscape
with glowing colors and the sharp contours of a drypoint
engraving. Perhaps he could pretend that he was an ordinary
person on some mundane errand—on the way to Bochhuisen
to give a lecture on modern management techniques. Checking the sulfur dioxide emissions from some obscure chemical
factory. Meeting a relative at the airport.
Or whatever ordinary folk did.
Sometime in March he had hemmed and hawed and wondered if he ought to change his car, or be satisfied with buying
a better auto stereo system. He’d gradually come around to
the latter option, and as he now crawled along Kaalbringen’s
narrow alleys he was grateful that he had made such a sensible
decision. He would never have been able to afford the extra
few thousand he’d invested in some very exclusive loudspeakers if he’d had to buy a new car as well.
As things were now, the value of his stereo system was far
more than anybody could be expected to give for the rest of his
old Opel, and he preferred it that way.
The car was a means of transport. The music was a luxury.
No doubt about which ought to be given priority.
He selected something Nordic for this morning. Cold, clear
and serene. Sibelius and Grieg. He inserted the CD, and as the
first notes of
Tuonela
enveloped him, he could feel how the
hairs on his arms bristled.
It was dazzlingly beautiful. Like being in Lämminkäinens
cave and the whole mountain echoing with this inspiring
music. For the first time in weeks—indeed, ever since he had
come to Kaalbringen—he managed to exclude the Axman
from his thoughts. Forget him. Just sat there, lost in the
music... inside a dome of crystal-clear sound, as the mists
lifted and disappeared over the extensive, rolling countryside.

After a stop at a mundane and gloomy roadside café on a level
with Urdingen, however, there was a sea change. He realized
that instead of traveling farther away, it was now a question of
coming closer. His starting point was dropping farther and farther behind, his destination looming... rising, falling...as
ever. He had passed the crown of the hill. He would soon be
there. The time was out of joint, and everything would click
into place.

Or fall apart. This damn case!
And although he tried once again to distance himself from
it, to banish it from his mind, it kept popping up in his consciousness, not in the form of thoughts, speculations or conclusions, but as images.
All the way through the “Hall of the Mountain King” and
“Anitra’s Dance” flowed a constant stream of sharp, unretouched photographs. They throbbed their way forward with
a regular and persistent but quite slow rhythm. Like one of
those old film strips from a history lesson at school, it struck
him. There was plenty of time to evaluate each individual
image, although the content was rather different, of course.
Ernst Simmel’s head at an unnatural angle on the pathologist’s marble table, and the latter’s ballpoint pen poking
around inside the open gullet.
The lawyer Klingfort’s trembling double chin when he
gaped in surprise.
The hall carpet soaked in blood in Maurice Rühme’s apartment. And the butcher’s ax, the origin of which they had never
managed to establish.
Louise Meyer, Eggers’s heavily made-up whore, whom he
had spent a whole afternoon trying to interview, but she was
so high that it was totally impossible to get through to her.
The ice-cold eyes of Jean-Claude Rühme, and Inspector
Moerk’s beautiful hair when she entered the room with the
Melnik report in her hand...
Dr. Mandrijn and his wife carting that deformed creature
around the grounds at the Seldon Hospice.
And Laurids Reisin. An imagined and persistent image of
the man who didn’t dare to set foot outside his home.
And the Axman.
The image of the Axman himself. Still blurred in outline
and unidentifiable, but if Van Veeteren really was on the right
track now, it was only a matter of an hour or so before the
image emerged with all the clarity that could be wished for.
A few little checks. Confirmation of a nasty suspicion, and
it would all be over.
Perhaps.
. . .

He was sitting behind his desk, twiddling his mustache. Slim,
in a black suit and with thin hair combed back, he was more
reminiscent of a funeral director than anything else. That was
precisely how Van Veeteren remembered him; in fifteen years
he seemed to have aged by one, or at most two months. There
was no sign of his having been operated on only a week ago.

With a slight, somewhat acid smile he welcomed his visitor
and indicated the visitor’s chair, which was directly in front of
the immaculately tidy desk.

Van Veeteren recalled that the man was reputed to be incapable of opening his mouth without swearing. He turned the
palms of his hands in the direction of the ceiling and tried to
look apologetic.

I came here to see...it’s a rather delicate matter.”
“Like hell it is!” He opened a desk drawer and took out a
brown folder.
“Here you are. You’re welcome to the damn thing!”
Van Veeteren took the folder and wondered for a moment
if he ought to read it there and then, on the visitor’s chair, but
when he looked at the man in black he knew that the matter
was over and done with. Finished! He remembered also that
his host had never been one to indulge in superfluous details—
conversation and that sort of thing. He stood up, shook hands
and left the office.
The whole visit had taken less than two minutes.
People who claim I’m bad tempered ought to meet this
happy guy, thought Van Veeteren as he hurried down the stairs.
He crossed the street and opened his car, then took the
briefcase from the backseat and put the folder inside it. He
looked around. Some fifty yards away, on the corner of
the street, was what appeared to be a café sign.
Just the thing, he thought, and set off for it.

He waited until the waitress had left before opening the folder
on the table in front of him. He leafed through a few pages and
nodded. Leafed some pages backward and nodded again.

Lit a cigarette and started reading from page one.
He didn’t need to keep going for long. Confirmation came
as early as page five; maybe it wasn’t quite what he’d expected,
but dammit, it was confirmation even so. He put the papers
back in the folder and closed it.
Well, I’ll be damned, he thought.
But the motive was far from being clear, of course. What
the hell did the other two have to do with all this? How the
hell...?
Ah, well, it would become clear eventually, no doubt.
He checked his watch. Just turned one.
Thursday, September 30. Chief of Police Bausen’s last day
but one in office. And all of a sudden, the case was on its way
to being solved.
Just as he’d suspected from the start, it was hardly the result
of laborious routine investigations. Just as he’d thought, the
solution had come to him more or less out of the blue. It felt a
little odd, he had to concede; unfair almost, although there
again, it was hardly the first time this kind of thing had happened. He’d seen it all before, and had realized long ago that if
there was any profession in which virtue never got its due
reward, it was that of police officer.
Justice has a certain preference for cops who lounge around
and think, instead of working their butts off, as Reinhart had
once put it.
But what struck him above all else was how reluctantly he
would want to look back on this case in the future. His own
contribution was certainly nothing to be proud of. Quite the
opposite. Something to draw a line under and then forget
immediately, for Christ’s sake.
Not quite as usual, in other words.
Something gnawing away from inside? Or a creeping numbness? A movement going nowhere?
Something like that. That’s roughly what it felt like. Insofar
as she could feel anything at all.
The time that still existed was for the fading rhythms and
needs in her own body. In this deadening darkness day and
night no longer existed; time was split into fragments: She slept
and woke up, stayed awake and fell asleep. It wasn’t possible to
judge how long anything took; it might be day outside, or it
might be night... perhaps she had slept for eight hours, or
was it only twenty minutes? Hunger and thirst cropped up
merely as faint signals from something that didn’t concern
her, but she ate nevertheless from the bowl of bread and fruit
that he replenished now and again. Drank from the bottle of
water.
With her hands chained together, her feet too, her mobility
was greatly restricted, and not just by the room; she lay curled
up under the blankets, almost in the fetal position. The only
times she stood up were when she needed to use the bucket...
crouching down and groping her way forward. The smell from
the bucket had troubled her at first, but soon she no longer
noticed it. The overwhelming smell of soil was the only thing
she was constantly aware of, the thing that struck her the
moment she woke up, that stayed in her consciousness all the
time... soil.
Interrupted only by the pleasant smell of tobacco when he
sat in the chair and told her his story.
The enormous fear she had felt at first had also ebbed away.
It had vanished and been replaced by something else: a heavy
feeling of lethargy and tedium; not hopelessness, perhaps, but
an increasingly strong impression that she was some kind of
vegetable, a being that was gradually fading away and becoming an apathetic, numb body...a body that was increasingly
indifferent to all inner pressures, thoughts and memories. The
all-enveloping darkness was eating its way into her, it seemed,
slowly and relentlessly penetrating her skin... and yet she
realized that this might be her only chance of surviving, her
only chance of not going mad. Simply lying there under the
blankets, maintaining her bodily warmth as much as possible.
Letting the dreams and fantasies come and go as they wished,
without paying too much attention to them... both when
awake and when asleep.
And not hoping for anything. Not trying to imagine or
think about what might be the final outcome. Just lying there.
Just waiting for him to come back and continue his story.
About Heinz Eggers and Ernst Simmel.

“No,” he said, and she could hear him tearing the cellophane
off his new pack of cigarettes. “I don’t know if it was already
over when she came back from Aarlach. Or if there was still a
chance. Of course, it doesn’t make any difference now, afterward, there’s no point in speculating... things turned out the
way they did, and that’s that.”

He lit his cigarette, and the flame from his lighter almost
blinded her.
“She came back, and we didn’t know whether to hope or
have doubts. We did both, of course; you can’t carry on living
in a state of constant despair, not until you’ve achieved that
final insight; but it’s probably still not possible, not even then.
In any case, she refused to live at home with us. We found an
apartment for her in Dünningen. She moved in at the beginning of March; it was only one room and a kitchen, but quite
big, even so. Light and clean, on the fifth floor with a view over
the sea from the balcony. She was still on the sick list and could
only work part-time. Detoxified and attending therapy, so it
should have been OK... she worked afternoons at Henkers.
We discovered later that she couldn’t handle it, but we knew
nothing at the time. We didn’t interfere; didn’t want to give the
impression that we were checking up on her. It had to be on
her terms, not ours, some bloody self-important, know-it-all
social worker had insisted. So we kept in the background,
stayed out of the way...damn pointless, all that. Anyway, she
lived there that spring, and she managed, we thought, but her
income, the money she had to have for the things we thought
she didn’t need anymore, well, that came from guys like Ernst
Simmel. Ernst Simmel...”
He paused and took a deep drag on his cigarette. She
watched the glowing point moving around and suddenly felt
an urge to smoke herself. Perhaps he would have given her one
if she’d asked, but she didn’t dare.
“One evening at the end of April, I drove out to visit her for
some reason or other. I’d hardly been there at all since she’d
moved in. I can’t remember why I went; it can’t have been anything especially important, in any case, and it disappeared from
my head the moment I got there...”
Another pause, and the cigarette glowed again. He
coughed a few times. She leaned her head against the wall and
waited. Waited, and knew.
“I rang the doorbell. It was evidently broken, so I tried the
handle...it wasn’t locked, and I went in. Entered the hall and
looked around. The bedroom door was half open...I heard
noises and couldn’t help looking in. Well, I was able to see him
getting full value for his money...”
“Simmel?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
More silence. He cleared his throat and inhaled again.
Stabbed out the cigarette on the ground, and stamped on the
glowing ash with his foot.
“As I stood in the doorway, our eyes met. She looked
straight at me over the shoulder of that shit...they were
standing pressed up against the wall. I think that if I’d had a
weapon with me at that moment, an ax or a knife or whatever,
I’d have killed him there and then. Or maybe I’d have been too
paralyzed... those eyes of hers, Brigitte’s eyes as she allowed
that man to have his way with her, it was the same look I’d seen
once before. I recognized it immediately; she was seven or
eight then, and it must have been the first time she’d seen
starving, dying children and understood what was involved...
some television report from Africa. It was the same eyes that
had looked at me all those years ago. The same desperation.
The same feeling of helplessness when confronted with the
evil of the world...I went back home and don’t think I slept a
wink for a whole month.”
He paused and lit another cigarette.
“Was it the same year that Simmel moved to Spain?” she
asked, and was surprised to discover how strong her curiosity
was despite everything. To find that she was listening carefully
to his story and that she was affected by it as if the wounds
were her own... that her own predicament and despair were
perhaps no more than a reflection and an example of something far, far greater.
The totality of suffering in the world down the ages?
The overall power of evil?
Or it might just be that damn obstinacy everybody talks
about. My obstinacy and peculiar strength... and the fact that
I always keep putting off having that baby...
Or maybe a bit of both? The same thing?
If that was the case, what the hell did it matter? Her
thoughts wandered off and she could no longer find the
thread. She clenched her fists, but after a few seconds could no
longer feel them. They turned numb and evaporated; in the
same inevitable way as her vain efforts to follow a line of
thought.
“Yes,” he said eventually. “It was that same year. He vanished that same summer...came back last spring, as did the
other two. Surely it has to be a sign when all three suddenly
turn up in Kaalbringen within a few weeks of each other.
Don’t try to tell me that it’s just a coincidence. It was a sign
from Bitte. From Bitte and from Helena, it’s so damn obvious
that you can’t possibly ignore it...Will anybody be able to
understand that?”
There was a sudden sharp edge to his voice. Indignation at
having been wronged. As if it wasn’t in fact he himself who was
behind it all. As if he was not responsible for these murders.
As if...
Merely an instrument.
Something that Wundermaas had said came back to her—
possibly not word for word, but the gist—something about
there being a necessity behind most murders, a compulsion
that was stronger than anything behind other actions; if that
was not the case, they would never take place, never need to be
carried out.
If there was an alternative.
Necessity. Sorrow, determination and necessity...yes, she
understood that this was the way it was.
Sorrow. Determination. Necessity.
She waited for the continuation, but there was none. Only
his heavy breathing that cut through the darkness, and it struck
her that it was this very moment, at this second, when time
had stood still, that he was making up his mind about her own
fate.
“What are you going to do with me?” she whispered.
Maybe it was too early. Maybe she didn’t want to give him
time to think it through.
He didn’t answer. He stood up and backed out through the
door.
Closed it and locked it. Shot the bolts.
Once again she was alone. She listened to his footsteps fading away and huddled up against the wall. Pulled the blankets
over her.
One left, she thought. He has one more to tell me about.
And then?
And then?
If he’d had the ability to see into the future, if only for a few
hours, it is possible that he’d have given lunch a miss without
more ado. And set off for Kaalbringen as quickly as possible.
As it was—with the solution of this long drawn-out
case clearly within reach—he decided instead to indulge himself with a Canaille aux Prunes at Arno’s Cellar, a little seafood restaurant he remembered from the occasion more
than twenty years earlier when he’d spent a week here on a
course.
In any case, he probably needed a few hours to think things
over in peace and quiet; how he directed the final act of this
drama was of some significance—of considerable significance,
in fact. The Axman needed to be arrested as painlessly as possible, and also as far as possible, the question of motives investigated and clarified. And then there was the problem
concerning Inspector Moerk, of course. There were probably
plenty of opportunities to put a foot wrong and, to quote
Bausen, it was a long time since anything had gone well with
this case.
However, he could think of no better companion than a
good meal.
. . .