The Interpreter (18 page)

‘Then I'll take you back to the factory and you can phone from there for someone to pick you up,' I suggested.

‘The factory will be closed by now!'

‘There must be a guard. We could break a window!' I snapped back, irritated by her quibbles.

Drying her eyes, she nodded. I heard her blowing her nose; her breathing was now almost normal.

I turned the car round in search of a road that ran downhill. It was raining heavily; the headlights served almost no purpose, staining the mist yellow but not shining through it.

‘We can speak French if you prefer,' the girl said suddenly, in perfect French.

I raised my eyes to look in the rear mirror, seeking her out in the dark.

‘French? Are you French?' I asked more cordially, delighted to have a chance to speak my native tongue.

‘No, I'm Romanian. I'm an interpreter.'

At those words, pain blossomed in my stomach, a short-lived cramp clenching my vital organs.

‘An interpreter?' I repeated blankly.

‘What about you? I don't think you're Romanian. Am I right?'

‘No, I'm not Romanian,' I answered absently, and left it at that.

No sooner were we down in the valley than I noticed I had a flat tyre. I found a spare one in the boot, but I didn't feel confident that the car would perform well if it came to a chase. The situation was touch and go; to add to my worries, there was that unintentional hostage. Swearing to myself, I changed the wheel, realising now that instead of going back to the factory I would do better to get myself another car. The girl was watchful, glancing nervously out of the window. Down here on the plain too it was raining heavily, obliging me to reduce my speed. Peering into the darkness, I tried to work out where we were. Beyond a curve in the road I saw the lit sign of a decrepit service station, and slowed down; through the streaming windows I could just make out the figure of a mechanic, seated in front of a television. Two cars were parked under the canopy. I veered off the road and swerved into the muddy forecourt, turned off the engine and twisted round in my seat, switching on the safety light. It was then that I had my first good view of her: she had large, troubled eyes, light skin and an unruly black fringe. Her features were delicate, but she had a cold expression on her face. Something about her made me feel uneasy, as though it were she who had the upper hand. Unable to hold her gaze, I pretended to be scanning the darkness beyond the window.

‘Look, why don't you go and call your friends? Then you can come back and wait for them here in the car.'

She looked at me suspiciously and seemed about to get out, but then hesitated.

‘What about you?' she asked, although she didn't look at me.

‘Don't worry about me. I'll be off – and I'm sorry about the mix-up,' I said, holding my hand out stupidly towards her above the seat. She stared at me thoughtfully, biting her lip, looking now at me, now at the lights in the bar. Clutching her handbag to her, she thrust a shoulder to the door and clambered out; I watched her bedraggled figure disappear into the darkness, then got out myself and went up to the two cars. I hadn't noticed it from the road, but the larger one was raised up on a jack. The other was an old Alfa Romeo; the door was unlocked and I climbed in and sat down in the dry. I wanted to wait for the girl to come back and get into the safety of the car before going to force the mechanic to give me the keys. But there was no sign of her, and I was beginning to lose patience. The rain was hammering down loudly on the metal roofing; beyond the wall of water I could just make out the glass door to the service station. Suddenly, amidst the din of the water crashing from the eaves, I heard a cry. I leapt out of the car and stumbled through the mud, flinging myself into the service station, pistol cocked. The girl was stretched out on the damp sawdust in a state of semi-undress, with the mechanic on top of her, holding her by the wrists. Seeing me, he tried to get to his feet, but got caught up in his trousers and fell back on his knees; his forearms on the ground, he gave me a doltish stare. Without thinking what I was doing, I began to kick him in the face, but instead of defending himself he just lay there motionless, as though impervious to my blows, and that made me more furious than ever. Had the girl not shaken me from my trance-like state with a loud cry, I would have kicked the man to death. As it was, though, I turned my attentions elsewhere, leaving him groping about on the floor, his face covered in blood; I rushed over to the counter and rummaged through the drawers until I came upon the bunch of keys with the Alfa Romeo shield. While I was about it, I thought I might as well make off with the takings into the bargain, together with a wallet lying on a nearby chair. Then I rushed out, dragging the girl behind me, switched on the engine of the Alfa, parked beneath the dripping awning, and set off hell for leather towards Cluj.

My prisoner was now crying harder than ever, pulling her sopping jacket across her chest.

‘My handbag! I've lost my handbag!' she wailed, running her hands desperately over the seats.

Driving was becoming all but impossible; the road was a mass of huge puddles. My wheels sank into the mud and disengaged themselves with loud sucking noises, sending me skidding across the road. I no longer had the faintest idea of where I was, and would drive pointlessly towards any light I saw looming through the wall of water. I'd been driving for almost an hour when I realised that I'd overshot Cluj by quite some distance: we were now on the minor road to Oradea.

The radio was announcing accidents and traffic jams, caused by the monumental downpour that had unleashed itself on the region. The seven o'clock news bulletin also made mention of my latest exploit.

‘The Beast of Bukovina has struck again, this time with the help of a mysterious accomplice. The police found documents and personal effects belonging to a Romanian citizen, a certain Magda Kobori, on the scene of the crime. According to evidence given by the victim, Bellamy is using the woman as a decoy,' said the announcer.

‘This is too dreadful! What sort of a pickle have you got me into now? You're a raving lunatic! Why on God's earth did you attack that man? And now I'm your accomplice! Me, a gangster's moll…' Then her tone changed, becoming almost a murmur:

‘I…I wanted to thank you…' She gave a lengthy sigh and dissolved into tears again, but this time more gently, in a way that I found touching: survivor's tears of sheer relief.

‘So you're the Beast of Bukovina!' she exclaimed incredulously, reverting a little to her former self.

‘Pleased to meet you, young lady! My name is Felix Bellamy. Believe it or not, I'm a peace-loving Swiss citizen who, until recently, practised one of the most trouble-free professions in the world!'

Oradea was awash with swirling water. The river had broken its banks further upstream, sweeping away the electricity pylons. As we approached the centre we sighted a hotel with its lights on, but felt nervous about going in. I told Magda to get out, then drove on for a few metres and left the Alfa in a supermarket carpark. I went back to the hotel and asked for a single room, pretending not to recognise the pretty girl who was registering at the reception desk, complaining about the loss of her luggage in the chaos. A few moments later, she came to knock on my door.

‘It's impossible to make a call; the line is down and won't be mended until tomorrow!' she told me in a state of some alarm. I don't know how I found the courage to pull her into the room; her expression was cold and resentful, as though she expected it. I removed my hand from her arm and took a few steps back.

‘I imagine I owe you something,' she said in a quiet but steely voice.

I felt ridiculous; I lowered my eyes, desperately thinking of something to say.

But it was she who came towards me; I caught her smiling a shopgirl's smile, perfidious yet beckoning. Caressing my sides, she pushed me onto the bed and turned out the light. She dealt with my body's needs briskly and deftly, while revealing none of her own. Then she pulled the mattress onto the ground and went to sleep on the other side of the room, as far away from me as she could.

Each evening of our stormy enforced joint adventure, Magda extracted my pleasure from me almost by force, without waiting for me to ask it of her; she fought off my amorous approaches speedily but effectively in the pitch darkness, with me clinging pointlessly to a body which seemed insensible to my touch. I ran my hands over her as though by so doing I would be able to remember it forever. Rancour at her indifference goaded me to resist, to put a curb on my own senses; but I always yielded to her businesslike expertise. A cloud of unworthy thoughts would float through my mind, and I would make a show of driving them away, only to let them resurface when I was back at the wheel, driving along the flooded roads of the Banat. At times I would be bedevilled by a chilling desire to do her harm, to finish the grim work begun by the mechanic on the sawdust-strewn floor of the service station; on other occasions I would dream obscurely of forging myself an existence by her side. In my unbridled daydreaming I would imagine myself with a grey office in a white corridor in the shoe factory building; Magda and I would live in a house exactly like my own, with roses, and a lake; or perhaps in Constanta, by the sea Roxana had described to me and which I'd never seen. But here my daydreaming would be brought to an abrupt stop by the idea of living with an interpreter: I was haunted by the irrational fear that anyone dedicated to that unhealthy profession could bring me nothing but harm. After all, if I was running amok with every police force in the Carpathians on my heels, whose fault was it but that of an interpreter?

At first light I peered through the shutters to see a dismal expanse of mud: grey houses and office blocks reflected in motionless water. Magda was asleep; my head still full of dreams, in the half-light I thought that the body lying beside me under the covers was that of Irene. My thoughts wandered skywards, lifting me far above that drab hotel, above the town and further still, into an aeroplane, so that the desolate roads I had been driving along were now no more than brownish scribbles in a sea of mossy green. Then, in a flash of clarity amidst the inchoate clouds that were my thoughts, for a moment I saw myself, alone in a strange land, playing the bandit. I looked incredulously at my disaffected body, apparently now cured; I opened my hands and became absorbed in the network of lines I saw there. Were they still my own? I listened nervously to my heartbeat, thinking I detected a new violence in it. Perhaps this recklessness was simply the new form my illness had assumed. In order to escape me, rather than transforming my body, it had transformed itself. Coming up against the dogged resistance of a disordered will, it had tried to attack me in a more cunning fashion; now it was altering my perception of things, seeping into my mind, first squeezing out the less essential substances, those fostering common sense and moderation, then moving on to the juices of consciousness and memory. If, for the moment, I was a mere bandit, perhaps I would soon become an out-and-out assassin, a sadistic torturer.

It was Magda who aroused me from these thoughts; she had woken up suddenly, and wanted to go down to the reception desk to try the phone again. We dressed in haste, in silence, almost without looking at one another. We crouched down behind the half-open door, then went out into the corridor one after the other. I went down first, but on the stairs I heard the porter repeating the number of Magda's room, and her name, in tones of some alarm. I sat down on a step and peered into the foyer: two policemen were positioned by the entrance, while another four were preparing to come up the stairs, taking their pistols out of their holsters as they did so; another was keeping an eye on the lift. A police officer in a black raincoat was glowering at the photo in the newspaper the porter had opened up before him. I beat a hasty retreat in order to warn Magda, then, turning round, noticed a little flight of metal stairs by the lift-shaft, leading into the basement. We crept down the metal stairs; above us we could hear hurried steps, doors banging, policemen shouting. We scrambled through a window, ran through the mud to the supermarket carpark and drove off into the blue yonder, amidst a blare of sirens from fire engines and ambulances which were foundering in the puddles and sending murky ripples eddying around them.

I was driving through a dim blur of flooded fields, the wrecks of floating cars and uprooted pylons, trying to get my bearings, when I heard Magda burst into sudden laughter behind me in the back. I glanced at the rear-view mirror: I thought I caught a glint of ferocity in her eyes, a flash of cruelty.

‘Felix Bellamy, now that I'm the accomplice of the Beast of Bukovina, I want to carry out a robbery of my own! I want to see people falling to their knees in front of me, I want to shoot at windows and glasses and mirrors! I want to smell the scent of fear, of blood, of gunpowder! Stop – I want to come in front!' I heard her shout.

As the road curved steeply down a long hill, we sighted a service station on the outskirts of Salinta; Magda went in first to ask for directions. Several foreign lorry drivers were camping out in the place, immobilised by the bad weather; their vehicles were parked in the space behind the petrol pumps, wheels sunk in the mud. I burst in a few seconds after her, pointing my pistol at their dull-eyed, weary faces.

‘Throw your wallets onto the floor and you won't come to any harm!' I shouted. Magda turned away from the counter and walked around among the tables, translating my threat to our astonished crowd of victims in several languages. I heard her speaking German, English, Italian and Dutch, and realised that she must have looked at the number plates of the lorries before coming in.

That evening, in a hotel in Arad, we read the headlines in the
Jurnalul National
: ‘Country cut in two by floods – traffic at a standstill'. Then, lower down: ‘Bonnie and Clyde of the Carpathians still up to their monkey tricks with the police – Swiss bandit and accomplice sighted at Oradea – petrol station plundered'. I read the entire article and discovered to my fury that I was being held responsible for Radu's death as well: ‘Ravaged body of lorry driver from Chisinau murdered by Swiss thug found in Ukrainian countryside', was how the journalist put it. Below was a passage in italics which I have in my wallet to this day: