Woman of the Dead (13 page)

Blum takes the packages and stows them in the coffins. She wedges the body parts between the corpses’ legs, ties them in place and hides them. He will be concealed for ever. Blum closes the lids of the coffins and screws them down. No one will ever find him; it was a stroke of genius. There’s no better place for a corpse than a coffin in a graveyard. No one will look for him in the grave of a former teacher or an old lady. No one will suspect a thing. Blum smiles. Exhausted but happy, she pushes the two coffins back into the cool room. Nothing has happened. Everything is all right.

No one has noticed a thing. No one knows that Massimo lay naked beside her. That they kissed each other. The children have no idea, and nor does Karl, who was fast asleep in his armchair. Blum covers him up before going back to the children. She lies down beside them, and smiles when they open their eyes. Mama will look after you. Mama loves you. Now Mama is going to make breakfast for her little mousies. Blum puts her arms round them and gives them a hug. How innocent they are. How small. How far away Schönborn’s body seems. She thinks of the scalpel cutting through his fat.

In a few hours’ time he will disappear underground. In a few hours’ time she and Reza will drive to the cemetery and see him off with all the formalities: wreaths, candles, eulogies for the two dead people sharing their coffins with that bastard. Reza has written the eulogies and Blum will deliver them. She will speak solemnly about the lives of the departed, but she will be thinking of Schönborn. She will accompany him to the grave and watch the bearers lower the coffin. His legs and his head at two in the afternoon, his torso and his arms at four. Two burials and then Schönborn will be history.

Blum will burn his clothes and go to his apartment. In the evening, when the children are asleep, she will unlock the apartment with the key she found in his jacket pocket and wipe away any traces, cleaning everything she touched. And she will look for the photographs, for the evidence that she still doesn’t have, for the photos telling her what Schönborn couldn’t tell her now. Blum must find them and make sure that justice is done. For Mark. For Dunya.

Dunya doesn’t ask what Blum is going to do, what her plans are now that she has found the man. Dunya doesn’t want to know. When Blum brings up the subject she dismisses it. Blum wants to tell her that she can’t do anything, that she doesn’t know how to help, that her hands are tied. She wants to lie, but Dunya waves her lies away, puts her forefinger to her lips and shakes her head. No, please no. Her fear is in her eyes, she has no more words for it, they have all been spoken. Blum is glad not to have to explain. Dunya is grateful too. She offers to go shopping, she wants to make herself useful. With her head lowered, she takes the money that Blum gives her and leaves the house. Bread for breakfast, eggs, orange juice. Everything seems to be in order; the storm is over.

Bread, eggs, orange juice. Blum is still waiting. The children had some yogurt and then went upstairs to Karl. Blum stays where she is, holding the fort, waiting for Dunya. She has been waiting for two hours now. It doesn’t cross her mind that Dunya might not come back. She knows that Dunya feels happy here, that she wants to accept Blum’s help. Blum will make sure that she can stay in the country, she’ll manage it somehow, she’ll pull all the strings she can. But Dunya does not come back.

Dunya has hidden under a stone, thinks Blum, found the most remote cranny of this city. She will go to another place, somewhere she doesn’t know anyone. She wants to be safe, she wants to get away from that voice on Blum’s mobile phone. With a fifty-euro note in her pocket. Blum stops looking out of the window. Dunya has gone. She is only a voice now. A voice telling that story about the cellar. Blum hears it in her head. The story of Ilena, Dunya and Youn. A photographer, a priest, a huntsman, a chef, a clown. Men in masks. A priest, a huntsman, a chef, a clown. Blum is going to find them.

Everything is the same as it always is. The funeral service, the tears, the coffin being lowered into the ground. Blum is back at work for the first time in weeks. Reza is glad of that; he’s been struggling with a temporary assistant who irritated him. He gives Blum a hug and thanks her. Blum is glad too.
It’s good to have you back. This place is nothing without you. Like water without flowers.
Reza is standing there in his dark suit. He drove all night so that he could be back here in time. Blum doesn’t know what he was doing in Bosnia; he doesn’t talk about that, about anyone who is left or whether he was taking money back to his old home. Reza doesn’t say, and Blum doesn’t ask. Reza smiles at her while the priest gives the blessing, a small, almost invisible smile. We’ll make it together, we’re a team. She thinks of all the funerals they’ve arranged together, all the bodies they have prepared, all the burials they have behind them. Reza is a gift. They will wait until all the roses have been dropped into the grave, until all the mourners have said goodbye and the last of them has left the cemetery. They stand there listening to the music, a woodwind quintet, the chatter of old friends saying goodbye. Blum is looking down at the coffin. At Schönborn. And then back at Reza.

He hasn’t noticed a thing, didn’t realise that the coffins were heavier than usual. He is the one person who could have been her downfall – he could have suspected, he could have looked inside one of the coffins. But nothing like that has happened. Nothing has been different about him, no doubts, no speculation. Blum’s life will stay as it is. It almost seems to be a good thing that Schönborn is dead. Blum senses it. She doesn’t think of Mark, she doesn’t want to cry, she is thinking only of the parts of a man’s torso being lowered into the ground. She killed him. She gave him an overdose, she struck him unconscious, she put him in a refrigerator like a piece of meat. Then she butchered him like a pig.

Blum smiles at Reza; this time she smiles with her lips, lifting their corners, only very slightly. She feels no guilt or shame. Only that smile playing on her lips, barely perceptible but obvious all the same, and happy. In her mind, Blum is singing,
The filthy swine is dead
. The wind instruments play an old folk song. In her mind, Blum is dancing. She did the right thing and she has no regrets. Only that he can’t talk now. Can’t tell her who the others are and where she must look for them. She’d do it again without hesitation. She’d do it again. For Dunya. For Mark.

Earth falls into the grave. Blum and Reza watch as the gravedigger fills and seals the grave. It is a delightful sound, the earth on the coffin, the sound it makes when it touches the wood, when it covers what is to remain hidden. No one will ever open that grave again, no one will look for Schönborn down there. Blum’s mind is still dancing, rejoicing in the knowledge that the nightmare has a happy ending. They stay until the end, until the grave is only a mound of earth decorated by flowers. Only then do they go, Reza and Blum, to a bar where they sit drinking in easy companionship. A couple of beers, half an hour. Then she will go; she will embrace Reza and go.
There’s something else I have to do
, she will say. Reza will nod. Blum will walk to the Old Town, she will unlock the door of the building and go upstairs, she will open the studio door and lock it again on the inside. She will search everywhere, every nook and cranny, every hard disk, she will not stop until she has found the photos. Portraits of Ilena, of Dunya, of Youn. She will be wearing gloves, she will wipe everything she touched two days ago, no trace of her will be discovered when he is reported missing. She will delete their first meeting from his diary if he entered it. Blum will make no mistakes; she will leave unseen with the photographs, she will retreat into Mark’s study to look at the pictures. She will see what went on in that cellar. She will look into their faces, and she will cry over them, she knows that. She will hate those men more with every portrait she sees. Blum will finish her beer now, get up and embrace Reza. She will walk to the Old Town and unlock the door.
There’s something else I have to do
.

Karl is better now that he has let the children back into his life. He spends a lot of time with them. The children are like medicine. He and Blum agree on that as they sit side by side on the garden bench, watching them play. Every day, although they don’t know it, they keep the boat from capsizing, they make sure that their mother gets up and goes out into the day, that Karl doesn’t lie down for ever. Mark lives on in their little faces. Blum and Karl comfort themselves with that thought; it stops them giving up.

‘You’re working again. That’s good.’

‘Thank you for helping me with the children, Karl.’

‘It’s the children who help me.’

‘What would I do without you?’

‘Don’t say that. It’s the other way around. What would
I
do without
you
? If you hadn’t asked me to live here, I’d be dying slowly in a care home.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘You know I’m right, Blum.’

‘You belong to us and we love you, Karl.’

‘And who loves you?’

‘The three of you.’

‘But there’s something on your mind.’

‘You mustn’t worry, Karl. I’m fine.’

‘There is something. I know you. It’s to do with that woman.’

‘Oh, Karl.’

‘I know I’m right.’

‘Once a cop …’

‘What is it about her? She left without saying goodbye.’

‘So? Karl, everything’s just fine. Dunya is a friend of mine from the past. She always came and went as she pleased.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘What do you mean, nonsense?’

‘She’s no friend of yours. You hardly know her.’

‘Please drop the subject, Karl.’

‘I can help you.’

‘You can and do help me by looking after the children. I can manage everything else for myself.’

‘There’s something wrong here. I can sense it.’

Blum can imagine Karl as he was before the tick made an old man of him. Unyielding, a bloodsucker himself, the sort who never stops asking questions until the truth comes to light. He was a good police officer, Mark said, he learned all he knew from him. His instinct, his persistence. But she’s not going to tell Karl a thing, she won’t confide in him, won’t put him in danger. Even though Blum knows that he would never judge her or give her away, she bites her tongue. Saying nothing, she leaves him with his dark presentiments. Blum takes his hand and presses it. Karl knows she’s stubborn and that she isn’t going to tell him a thing. He’s known her long enough. He has come to love her for all that she is and all that she isn’t. She will not tell him that she has killed a man, cut him into pieces and buried him. She isn’t going to tell him that the man was probably Mark’s murderer. That there are four more of them out there. She won’t tell him any of that. Only their intertwined fingers matter. Blum’s hand in his must be enough. Karl must trust her.

How glad she is that he’s there. While she goes on investigating, like a woman possessed, looking for those men, Karl cooks for the children, puts them to bed, reads aloud to them. Those men must be somewhere, and somehow or other Blum will find them. Even though she knows less than nothing, she will run them to ground and make them talk. All four of them. But she doesn’t know where to begin, on what continent she must look for them, for these needles in a haystack. Men between thirty and sixty, inconspicuous and friendly; no one in the world would think for a moment that they could do something so perverse. White sheep innocently grazing in a meadow, probably leading a perfectly normal life, probably quite close to Blum. Respectable citizens like Schönborn. Men of good repute, psychopaths, murderers. By now Blum is convinced that they are responsible for Mark’s death. There can be no doubt about it, everything fits.

The man in the suit could be in his mid-fifties. Johannes Schönborn, Edwin’s father, the provincial government deputy, former owner of the hotel in Sölden. Blum simply went to the government building, then up to the second floor, where she asked to see him. No appointment was available, she was told, for another five weeks. She thanked the man and waited outside Schönborn’s office. For an hour she stared at the picture hanging on the wall: a woman with the head of a stag, breasts and a pair of antlers. It was just Blum and the woman with the stag’s head. Schönborn was the only one who could tell her the truth about the presumed brothel in the ‘wellness’ area of the hotel, about potential clients, about Dunya, Youn and Ilena. He must know something, he must have something to do with it. So she followed him when he left his office. He went to a restaurant; she sat down at the bar and observed him. It was lucky that he was eating alone, that the chair opposite him was vacant, was waiting just for her.

Blum is surprised by the man’s aura of calm, the composure with which he continues to eat. It seems almost as if he found her appearance a welcome diversion. A man with nothing to fear, a man who feels safe, who is aware of his power and prepared to use it.

‘I have to ask you about your knocking-shop.’

‘You have to what?’

‘Ask you about your knocking-shop. The brothel in the Annenhof hotel, remember?’

‘I’m not entirely sure that I understand you correctly.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘And I would like to eat my lunch in peace.’

‘That’s fine by me, so long as you tell me what made you do it.’

‘You surely can’t be serious?’

‘Oh yes, I am.’

‘What in the world are you thinking? You disturb my lunch break, and you have the impertinence to spoil my appetite with groundless accusations of something in the past.’

‘As I said, you’re welcome to go on eating.’

‘Have we met?’

‘No, but I could tell everyone here that I used to work for you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘In your wellness centre. I could tell them all that I procured for you. I could make quite a scene of it, and I’m sure some of them would believe me. I’m good at that sort of thing.’

‘Why would you do a thing like that?’