The Truth and Other Lies (25 page)

Fasch felt for the switch to raise the head end of his electric bed a little. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you for this room and all that you’ve done for me.” Henry wanted to reply, but Gisbert waved him aside. “There was a woman killed recently who edited your novels, Jenssen tells me. He’s trying to find a link between my accident, your wife’s death, and the death of this other woman.”

“There is no link.”

“I can well believe it. But he thinks there is. When the police start looking, they always find something. I had a brown briefcase in the car. In it was everything I’d collected to do with you. This picture”—Fasch placed his hand on the photo—“was in the brown briefcase with my documents. Jenssen returned it to me and claims not to have found any bag. It’s my belief the police have everything.”

“What did you collect about me?”

“Your past. Legal documents concerning your parents, all the children’s homes, and then everything about your career as a writer. Whatever I could find.”

“What for?” asked Henry without a trace of indignation in his voice.

Fasch bent his upper body even farther forward. The splints on his legs cracked softly. “To destroy you, Henry. Because I was envious. Because I was a pathetic little loser out for revenge. Because I’d done nothing with my life, because I wanted to be like you, because everyone wants to be
something
, has to
do
something. I was so lonely that I spent the last years living with Miss Wong, a woman made of silicon.” Fasch coughed, laughing, and reached for the water. Henry got up and handed it to him. Fasch drained the glass.

“I was so terribly envious of your success. Envy is worse than cancer. I’ve suffered, if that’s any consolation to you. I wanted to harm you and to prove”—he had trouble getting out the last grain of truth—“that you hadn’t written the novels yourself. Can you forgive me?”

Fasch sank back onto the bed. Now it was out. He closed his eyes in exhaustion and counted silently to three. But he wasn’t speeding into the bend toward Henry; he saw only soothing darkness. When he opened his eyes, Henry was standing at the window looking out over the park.

“Was Miss Wong pretty at least?” he asked.

“Pretty? She was
fantastic
. And her IQ was off the graph! Not anymore though—she got burned.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh, forget it. We hadn’t had anything to say to each other for a long time. Speaking of which, I still have to pay off a loan on her.” During the fit of laughter that followed, a plug of catarrh came loose in Gisbert’s affected lung tissue and got into his windpipe. He turned blue. Henry rang for the nurse. The young woman with the pageboy haircut rushed into the room, put an oxygen mask on Fasch, and lowered the electric bed again.

“You’re supposed to lie flat, Mr. Fasch,” the woman scolded her private patient, and she smoothed his bedclothes. Henry looked at her shapely bottom as she bent over the bed. She must have noticed his gaze, because she stood up and smoothed her smock. “Do you need anything else, Mr. Fasch?” Before Fasch could reply, she cast a glance of curiosity at Henry and walked to the door.

The two men waited in silence until she had left. “Every time she comes in I have a near-death experience. Miss Wong was a country bumpkin compared with her,” said Fasch and sighed. “But at least she listened.”

“Gisbert,” said Henry, sitting down again on the chair at his bedside. “What do you know about me?”

The area of low pressure originated somewhere over the North Atlantic to the west of the Faroes. Unusually for the time of year, there were rising columns of warm air, and, because of the falling atmospheric pressure, cooler air was being sucked in. The first gusts of wind were getting up. Millions of tons of superfine water droplets were rising, turning into ice crystals and beginning to rotate counterclockwise. The low-pressure area drifted eastward with increasing speed. Only an hour later the meteorological service for shipping transmitted the first gale warning to the Scottish coastal radio stations.

In the garden of his property Henry had positioned himself next to a sweeping branch of the cherry tree and was pointing the 85 millimeter lens of his Canon toward the open barn door. He swatted the midges out of his face and waited. The figure inside the barn wasn’t moving; it seemed to be standing in its own shadow. Nor was the body transparent. There were even individual fields of light reflected on it. As usual, half the face was missing. Henry pressed the shutter release yet again. As expected, the camera display showed a shot of the barn door and nothing else.

Henry had been sure right from the start that figments of the imagination couldn’t be photographed, not even with state-of-the-art digital cameras, for the very reason that they are just figments. Only recently he had learned in the
Forensic Journal
that amputees who suffer from phantom pains feel relief when they wear a prosthesis. The brain accepts the artificial limb and stops sending pain alerts; it seems content with makeshift solutions.

He had acted on this admittedly rather simpleminded train of thought by taking photographs of his hallucination in order to convince himself of its nonexistence. If my brain will just grasp what I already know, he thought, maybe these hallucinations will stop.

Meanwhile Poncho was dozing in the shade like a railroad-crossing attendant after a hearty lunch. Now and again he opened one eye, in case something happened to pass by after all, and then shut it again. In his world there was nothing makeshift—only pleasant and unpleasant things. Henry placed the camera on the tripod, set the delay to ten seconds, and turned around. He closed his eyes and waited with his back to the barn until he heard the sound of the shutter releasing.

Onboard the
Drina
, Obradin heard the gale warning on his mobile radio transceiver as he started up the new diesel engine. The barometer showed a fall in pressure of three hectopascals in the past hour. The cold front was already moving over the Shetland Islands. The storm with hurricane-force gusts was heading for the southern North Sea. In the course of the coming night it would smash into the coast. Shipping to and from Stavanger had already been suspended. The diesel started up, emitting a gray cloud of soot, and began to run steadily. Obradin checked the oil pressure and laid his hand on the side of the boat. The Volvo engine barely made the wood vibrate. A fabulous engine, thought Obradin, but no way had his wife won it in the lottery.

Meanwhile Jenssen was attaching a nylon rope to a concrete post and carefully lowering himself over the reinforced roadside. He rested on a rock ledge, from which he was able to climb down farther until he reached the crevice that held the brown object he’d seen from the road. He lay down on his belly and looked into the dark hollow. On the gleaming leathery surface he could make out a metal fitting that looked like tarnished brass, and on it a handle. Triumphantly Jenssen stuck his muscular arm into the crevice; he couldn’t quite reach the handle. He sat up, took off a trainer and sock, and tried to get hold of the bag with his foot. That too failed, because his calf was too fat for the narrow crevice. Above him he could hear the sound of a car driving around the bend where Fasch had come to grief. Cursing, Jenssen began to look for a stick. The sparse vegetation around the crevice yielded nothing, but he could see a dried-up bush about fifteen feet away whose withered boughs seemed to be the right length. He wound the rope around his belly, pulled on it to check the tension, then swung out along the rock face.

———

Henry’s phone rang. Honor Eisendraht’s voice was husky with excitement. “We’ve found your manuscript, Mr. Hayden, we’ve found it!”

Henry put the Canon on the ground. “Where?”

“On this little memory stick in Betty’s office. Imagine. The police only opened the office again this morning. The stick was in a glass dish on her desk. She digitalized your manuscript page by page. We’re all over the moon—Moreany in particular. He’s making a special trip in to the office.
White Darkness
—is that the title?”

Henry bit his lip, and rubbed an earlobe. “The working title. You’ve saved my life, Honor,” he exulted as best he could. “That’s marvelous news.” With a glance over his shoulder, Henry looked into the barn. The phantom had vanished.

“I’m so happy for you, Mr. Hayden. I’ll get it printed out straightaway if that’s all right with you.”

“No!” Henry yelled. “Wait till I come.” He made a plan. “I’ll come around this evening. As soon as I’ve seen off my visitor here.”

Honor hesitated. “You weren’t thinking of driving in the storm, were you, Mr. Hayden?”

“What storm?”

———

The bag was moving. Carefully Jenssen pulled on the small branch whose bent tip was hooked into the brass fitting. Sweat was pouring into his eyes. He took no notice of an extremely rare lizard climbing over the stones. Then the branch snapped. “Shit!” Jenssen bellowed. “Shit, shit, shit!” The policeman threw the broken stick into the crevice and thumped his fist on the stone. It had taken him a quarter of an hour to tear off that gnarled old bough. Although it was long since dead, it had resisted with every last one of its withered fibers—only to break like cotton candy.

Jenssen removed his shirt and felt the cold air coming off the sea. Dark mountains of clouds were gathering on the horizon. He pressed himself up against the sandy rock once more, pushed his hand into the crevice again, breathed out to gain another centimeter, grasped the handle, and pulled the bag out. It was a lady’s handbag made of artificial leather. The contents were entirely rotten. Dead insects spilled out and crumbled into dust in the wind.

———

Henry unscrewed the can and poured half a liter of Super 98 gasoline into the briefcase containing Gisbert Fasch’s documents. He closed the can again, set it down, struck a match. The wind blew it out. The fourth match was the first to burn properly. With a dull bang the bag ignited and emitted thick black smoke. He watched until the leather darkened; gusts of wind made the fire hiss. The dog had awoken from its railroad-crossing-attendant’s sleep and was dashing about in agitation, barking at the wind.

Clouds were scudding over the roof, and the blackberry bushes were being buffeted. Henry saw that the attic windows were open. The gale would complete the work of destruction that he had begun.
Can you guess how it ends?
Martha’s last question was also a warning and more precisely a vision—that everything that is begun must somehow also come to a close.

———

After the devastating storm tide in January, fifteen years earlier, disaster control had been steadily improved. Back then the hurricane had caught everybody off guard. It had lifted the fishing cutters out of the dock, swirling them up and piling them into grotesque rubbish heaps. It flattened the historic houses on the harbor and plucked chestnut trees like buttercups from outside the parish hall. Torrents of water had surged through the town like a winding sheet, plowing the streets and sweeping away the gravestones from the little cemetery.

The last windows of the main street were being boarded up with chipboard as Henry drove into town. Two hours before sunset it was already dark. Heavy rain had set in with gusts that reached gale forces of seven or eight. Men were having to hold on tight as they threw sandbags from trucks onto front doorsteps. Henry stopped at the roadblock where Elenor Reens was standing, dressed in the uniform of the voluntary fire brigade. He let his window down a little. Rain sprayed into his face.

“Do you need any help?”

“We need all the help we can get.” Elenor pointed down the street. “Help Obradin’s wife board up the windows.”

“Where’s Sonja?”

“She’s too young for you.” Elenor knocked on the roof of the car and waved him through.

Helga was struggling all alone outside the fish shop window. She was small, and her arms were too short and too weak to fasten the heavy sheets of chipboard into position. Henry got out of the car; the rain drenched him instantly. He took hold of the board, turning it out of the wind. “Where’s Obradin?” he yelled. Helga shrugged and shouted something he didn’t understand. After two unsuccessful attempts they pushed the board into the brackets together. Helga snapped the iron bolt shut. Then Henry dragged his barking dog out of the car into the shop. Scared, and small as a pup, it fled into a corner and cowered there. Henry noticed that the fish counter was empty and clean.

“What’s going on? Where’s Obradin?”

“Where do you think? On his mistress!” Helga wiped her face with the back of her hand—hard to tell whether it was rain or tears. “That maniac’s started to drink again. He spends his entire time on that bloody cutter fiddling around with the new engine as if there was nothing else in the world. He’s going to leave me, I can feel it.”

The
Drina
was dancing in a veil of white spray, the mast listing in the swell like a metronome. The masthead lights and sidelights were on, and the motor was running. Henry kept his head down as he ran over the pier, so as not to be blown into the sea. Only two ropes held the cutter to tall wooden posts. Jets of water gushed up between the side of the boat and the pier. Henry reached one of the posts, clung to it, and crawled on all fours over the wooden gangplank to board the pitching and tossing cutter.

Obradin was lying drunk beside the engine. A lot of water had already gotten into the engine room. Henry turned him onto his back.

“Cast off, my friend, we’re setting sail!” Obradin mumbled in a drunken stupor. His lunch with a good deal of onions and salad was sticking to his face and chest.

Henry sat Obradin up, who at once let loose a volcanic belch. He slapped him in the face a few times with the back of his hand. “Don’t be stupid, come ashore. Don’t make your wife unhappy.”

“What does she know about unhappiness? Tell her I’ll be back tomorrow.” More water surged in. Obradin’s eyes closed again. Henry shook him.

“There is no tomorrow, you boozer. The hurricane’s coming; you won’t get back!”