The Truth and Other Lies (26 page)

Henry tried to pull Obradin up. With an effortless arm movement the massive man shoved him away, so that Henry went crashing into the engine. Obradin came to for a second, got to his feet, and clenched his fists. “We’re quits, Henry! You’ve given and you’ve received. I don’t owe you anymore.” Then his eyes rolled up and he collapsed backward, ending up with his head lying in the water.

Grand last words. Henry sized things up. They were quits. Obradin’s death would eliminate that blasted residual risk, the devil in the detail, the thoughtless word, the mere nothing you forget, the trifling mistake that wrecks everything. Obradin would drown and the human factor would drown with him. No one would ever see any link with Betty’s disappearance. Henry only had to leave the boat and let fate do its work. It hadn’t disappointed him yet. But, instead, Henry loosened his belt, tied it around Obradin’s torso, and hauled him off the cutter. We’ll have to regard it as one of those sporadic acts of goodness that Henry thought of as mere interruptions to human wickedness, and that inescapably lead to punishment.

The hurricane raged for two hours. The shipping alert came over the radio transceiver every few minutes:
Violent storm ten to eleven in north veering westerly, Skagerrak west twelve veering northeasterly, decreasing eleven
. Henry lay down in exhaustion next to the snoring Obradin on a cot in the parish hall, where a kind of emergency hospital had been improvised. The outer walls of the building were strengthened with reinforced concrete, and windows and doors secured with aluminum blinds. They could have survived an air raid without even noticing. Occasionally the earth trembled. Otherwise it was as dull as the waiting room of an operating room. Women whispered, men murmured, children wailed, dogs panted, and in between times the monotonous voice blared out from the radio transceiver . . .
Skagerrak west
eleven veering northeasterly, decreasing ten
 . . . It would have been a good moment to die, but he, Henry the Great, did not die—only others did that.

Dressed in her fire brigade uniform, Elenor Reens was distributing coffee and butter cookies. Henry thought of Sonja and his dog. His eyes were drooping. In a blur he saw Elenor with her coffeepot and her goddamned kindness and generosity, her striving for happiness and justice, and that desire for togetherness that he found so incomprehensible. His trousers were soaked and his face was numb. Then he closed his eyes and was entering his parents’ house. He climbed the stairs slowly, the way his father used to. He saw light under the door of the bedroom. He heard a rustling in the room, opened the door, saw the drenched mattress. Little Henry had tried to hide the wet sheets again. Behind his closed eyelids he felt anger. He grabbed hold of the boy, pulled him out from under the bed. “Why are you hiding from me? Why aren’t you in school? Why do you wet the bed every night? Where’s your goddamned mother?”

Here and there splintered rafters still stood out against the cloudless sky, hung with shreds of insulating fiber. The entire roof truss had taken off in the wind. Countless pieces of debris lay strewn about the garden. Timber, branches, leaves, splinters of wood, bricks, uprooted plants, and a great deal of glass. In among all the detritus, Henry found the dead marten. The animal was lying between the bricks with a broken neck. Henry buried it to stop the dog from eating it.

Apart from the odd broken window, the rest of the building was battered but unscathed. His good-byes had been made in installments. First to Martha, then Betty, and now the marten. There was no more reason to stay there. He would sell the house, no doubt at a bad price, but at a profit nevertheless. It was time for a fresh start.

Poncho ran around sniffing, wagging his tail in great excitement. The creative destruction of the gale had released some new and interesting smells. A bombed-out city with its aroma of putrid devastation must be an El Dorado for dogs. The gable wall of the barn had been blown in by the wind; parts of it had fallen onto Martha’s Saab and put dents in the bodywork. The windshield was shattered, and the driver’s door stood open.

“Come on, get in, come and sit with me.”

Henry turned his head to where the voice was coming from. It was Martha’s voice, as clear and gentle as during all the years of their marriage. It had never been loud and it wasn’t loud now. Martha wasn’t sitting in the car, which didn’t really surprise Henry. After all, incorporeal presences can go where they like.

“I’m fed up with playing at being a writer,” he said quietly, but firmly, for hallucinations should be treated with respect, but not mollycoddled. “It was what
you
wanted. I did it for you, I enjoyed doing it, but you no longer exist. I don’t want to be a writer anymore.”

“What are your plans?”

“Nothing definite. Bring all this to an end.”

———

Henry gathered from the local paper that the hurricane had wreaked considerably less havoc than had been feared. Among the insurance companies, the news went down as a red-letter day in the history of natural disaster settlement. One can only congratulate the shareholders. For the most part the storm had affected ordinary people who couldn’t afford expensive insurance policies. A lot of fishing boats, some docks, school buildings, and bridges near the coast were destroyed or damaged. Nothing of any significance to a multinational concern.

Under “Local News,” Henry came across the following announcement: “. . . on the stretch of coastline that was particularly badly hit, volunteer coast guards yesterday discovered the wreck of a car with a dead woman at the wheel. The homicide squad has already begun conducting investigations.”

So they had found her. Henry tried to imagine what poor Jenssen would make of it when he found out who the corpse had once been, and in whose car it was now sitting. He would presumably be astonished. Martha’s decomposition was no doubt quite a bit more advanced than that of the fat drowned female body that Henry had seen in forensics. The storm would be ruled out as a possible cause of the accident.

Henry wasn’t counting on being informed about his wife’s death any time soon. It is well known that the police begin by looking for the most plausible explanation to help them come up with a strategy for solving the crime. Every crime is based on a matrix of invisible connections, but only the culprit has the key to the motive and the sequence of events. The search for a perfectly plausible explanation would take a little while and was bound to lead nowhere, inasmuch as Martha’s death in Betty’s car had been a simple mishap, an unfortunate chain of circumstances. A “mishap” like that is beyond all logical reasoning. Long hours would then be wasted on trying to puzzle things out, amid growing frustration and annoyance. Only then would the investigators come to Henry to ask him for the most precious thing needed to ascertain the truth: the culprit’s knowledge. Henry alone could clear everything up, and he alone was not willing to do so. This gave him plenty of time to prepare himself. He resolved to employ a proven tactic for keeping out of trouble: he would play dumb in a clever way.

Henry spent the days that followed clearing up in his garden. As he had predicted, nothing happened. He received an estimate on the damage to his house, informed the insurance company, and got in touch with an architect. Then Claus Moreany died.

He died in a hospital in Venice. First, though, he married his secretary Honor Eisendraht on his sickbed and bequeathed to her the publishing house and his entire private wealth. She had his body flown home and his grave prepared in the Moreany family mausoleum. The funeral was to take place a week after his death. In the meantime Honor Moreany took provisional charge of the company, until everything to do with the will had been settled. She continued to work from her dragon-tree outer office where the Bisley filing cabinet housed those confidential documents without which no one can run a publishing house. Honor spared no time in giving up her small apartment and moving, together with her budgerigar, into her late husband’s villa, where the first thing she did was to get a pest controller to decontaminate the pantry. Being a methodical person, she immediately began to sort through the tower-high piles of unopened mail, which rose like stalagmites in Moreany’s study. First she sorted it in order of date of receipt, and then she opened all the envelopes one after the other using an Aztec sacrificial knife she had found in one of the drawers of Moreany’s antique bureau.

Two days before the funeral, Henry Hayden put in an appearance at the office. He was wearing a dark suit. He kissed Honor’s hand in greeting and invited her to call him Henry. They drank gunpowder tea and talked for a while about the deceased man. Honor told him how they had spent his last days together in the city of lagoons until his liver failed and he proposed to her in the Ospedale Giovanni e Paolo. Henry sat in Moreany’s Eames chair and listened to her, deeply moved. He was ashamed not to have seen his friend and patron Moreany one last time.

Honor laid her hand on his. “It was so quick and so many awful things have happened, Henry. Things we can’t comprehend. The greatest gift for him was finding your novel again.”

“Have you read it?”

Honor nodded, smiling. “I know you didn’t want me to. Claus printed it out and took it with him to Venice. We read it together. It’s a great book, Henry. It’s great literature.”

“And the end? What did you think of the end?”

There was a longer pause. “That was amazing,” Honor finally replied. “I found it quite by chance in the mail.”

She got up and went over to Moreany’s desk, opened a drawer, and took out a brown envelope. She pulled out a pile of typescript, half a finger thick. Henry recognized the font of Martha’s typewriter.

“It was a very odd feeling reading
this
, Henry.”

She handed Henry the pages. He sat glued to the seat of the Eames chair, his ears burning. It felt as if a hot, wet cloth had been pressed into his face. In Martha’s handwriting on the front page was a—how shall we put it?—a note.

Dear Henry, my darling husband, I’m saving you and saving this ending, because I could never bear to leave you without anything. I don’t know what has happened or what is going to happen today, but the bright colors which shone out of you from the day we first met are now granite-black. I’m frightened for you.

At this point we must pause, because Henry was sobbing so much that with the best will in the world he couldn’t carry on reading.

Whatever it is that drives you to destroy the things you love, I have always felt exempt from your rage. You protect me, you understand me, you let me be myself. You have thrown away this beautiful ending to your novel in order to follow your demon to a shady rendezvous. I shall make sure it gets to you. I shall keep it for you and send it to Moreany. With fondest love, Martha.

We often have the wrong idea about things we’ve never actually seen. When we do finally get to see them, they are often surprisingly familiar. Honor had never seen a grown man cry. Henry cried long and hard, like a child calling for its mother. If Honor hadn’t gently taken the manuscript from him, his tears would have made a watercolor out of it. She left him alone and closed the door to Moreany’s office behind her.

When she had found the last chapter among Moreany’s unopened mail, late in the evening of the night before last, her first thought had been that it was a mistake, especially as Martha’s note was addressed to Henry. But on the envelope, in her exquisite handwriting, Martha had written Moreany’s private address. It couldn’t be a mistake. To Honor’s esoterically broadened intellect, the connection between Martha’s disappearance and this lovingly sinister farewell letter was irrefutable. Martha wrote of ruin and of Henry’s shady rendezvous with his demon; there was something disturbing about her note. Honor would have informed the police if she hadn’t been the director of a publishing house and Henry Hayden its golden idol. The closing chapter of the novel was a blank check and as such it took priority over moral reservations. For that reason, rather than consult the police, Honor Moreany, née Eisendraht, consulted the Arcana of Tarot. The eleventh card fell from the deck—Justice. Well, there you are then. Some doubts are dispelled all by themselves.

———

If it is true that there are funerals at which the mourners make a show of false humility and shocked grief, then it is often the dead themselves who are to blame for this hypocritical playacting: maybe they didn’t keep the best company when they were still alive, or just met the wrong people. Claus Moreany was buried as he had lived. With respect, with pathos, and attended by honest tears. A lot of people had gathered in the little cemetery on this overcast day in early autumn. Some three hundred mourners lined the path from the chapel to the mausoleum, many of them without umbrellas. The coffin was carried past them and at that moment it began to rain.

Within eyeshot of Henry were Jenssen and a few other gentlemen from the police. They were the only ones not dressed in dark clothes, which suggested they had come on official business. Why not? thought Henry. Today’s a good day to talk about death. Between a couple of old plane trees stood Gisbert Fasch. He waved shyly with a crutch when their eyes met. He had put on weight, and hair now covered the shaven side of his head. About an hour later the last mourners placed their flowers on the coffin, then the procession moved toward the cemetery’s exit, where a convoy of vehicles was waiting to shuttle the guests to the wake in the Moreany offices.

“We’ve found your wife,” Jenssen murmured to Henry as he passed him. The heartless nature of this greeting must have become clear to Jenssen the minute he’d spoken, for he fell silent—or perhaps it was Henry’s glare.

“Are you sure you’ve got the right woman this time?” Henry asked.

Jenssen’s superior, the aforementioned genius of case analysis, butted in. “My name is Awner Blum. I’m in charge of the homicide squad and I’d like to apologize for the somewhat brusque manner of my colleague.”

Henry came to a halt. “You really have found my wife?”