Woman of the Dead (16 page)

Blum is sitting at the breakfast table with the children. There’s a photo in the paper of the cathedral forecourt, cordoned off with police tape. She holds a slice of bread and home-made jam, remembering yesterday. Uma and Nela are undressing, running round the apartment with nothing on.
You get undressed too, Mama, please.
Blum eats her bread and jam. She looks at the girls. How carefree they are, how untroubled. There are moments when they don’t think of their father, when they act as if nothing has happened. But still, they have lost Mark; that is their reality. The head of the man expected to become bishop is only a newspaper story, a crime that shakes this little provincial city, a topic on which the public can wax indignant. But, to her children, it is nothing more than that. Blum smiles, and helps herself to another slice of bread and jam.

She doesn’t know what will happen now. Jaunig’s head will probably be embalmed or frozen, they’ll store it in the Forensic Medicine department and search frantically for his body. The Church will call for a funeral. But Jaunig’s head will stay in the freezer for months, even years. His body won’t be found because the sharks have eaten every last morsel. Nothing will lead back to the cellar or to Blum. No one believed Dunya; they said her story had been dreamt up for the benefit of the police. Nothing will emerge from police investigations. His friends and acquaintances will be questioned, but none of them will be proved guilty. The real murderer will remain unknown.

Blum will stay a little longer, watching the children, and then Karl will take over, while she and Reza attend to their corpse, the hanged man. Hagen used to say: work early in the day keeps troubles away. Hagen and Herta. Schönborn. Jaunig. Four people are dead. Blum breathes deeply in and out. She has a clear conscience, she’d do it all again. She’d even sleep with Massimo. He was there when she needed him. Still, when the phone rings and she sees his name on the display, she wonders whether to pick up. This is the fifth time he’s called. Her hesitation is brief; then she hears his voice.

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘At sea.’

‘Why?’

‘Massimo, please don’t do this.’

‘I miss you.’

‘Don’t you have enough to keep your mind off that at work? It sounds as though all hell has broken loose.’

‘You’re right about that.’

‘What exactly happened?’

‘I don’t know, Blum, but it’s pretty perverted.’

‘I hear they beheaded him.’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Who’d do a thing like that?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘And who, for God’s sake, wants to murder a priest?’

‘That’s what I’m going to find out.’

‘Make sure you do.’

‘I could come round and see you after work.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In the presbytery.’

‘How long for?’

‘Oh, a long time.’

‘I’ll come and find you.’

‘You can’t, Blum, I have to work.’

‘Just for a moment, I just want to see you.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘Well … it’s number five, Domplatz. Phone me when you get here.’

‘What would I do without you?’

Massimo doesn’t send her away from the apartment that was Jaunig’s presbytery. And Blum wants to know what’s going on there, whether anything might lead to Dunya, might give her away. She told Massimo that she misses him. Needs him. Then she got straight into her car. He took her briefly in his arms. Blum wanders round Jaunig’s apartment among men in white overalls. She knows many of the police officers here; they’ve come to barbecues in her garden. She said she had to speak to Massimo, and they let her in at once. She is familiar with the work of crime scene investigators. The number of bodies she has collected for forensics is too high to count. The men in white overalls are looking for traces, taking fingerprints and DNA samples. The whole department is in action, packing up everything that might provide a clue. But they don’t know what they are looking for, she can tell that from Massimo’s face. It is a mystery to them. A priest who has become a murder victim, a man with no enemies, a man who gave himself to the service of God. Who would want to harm him, who would have any reason to burn and behead him, then hang his head on the cathedral door like a memento? All they can do is look for leads, talk to his friends and acquaintances, investigate his life, search for inconsistencies. Guessing nothing untoward, they go through the apartment. Guessing nothing untoward, Massimo kisses her on both cheeks, right then left.
Let’s go and have a quick drink at the wine bar
, he says.
Please let me stay a little longer
, she says.

Blum manages to persuade him. She wants to stay because of Mark, she says. She likes to remember him by the work he did. She sees him in her mind’s eye. Normally he’d have been here, putting evidence in bags, taking fingerprints. Since Jaunig was found yesterday morning Mark would have been working steadily, just as Massimo is now. This case is at the forefront of everyone’s mind: the Church, the politicians and the congregation are all demanding answers. Blum hears them expressing their horror, their fear of a monster in their midst. Jaunig has been executed, and they are looking for the judge who sentenced him to death. They are looking for Blum.

She sits inconspicuously at Jaunig’s desk. We’ll soon be finished here, says Massimo. Blum’s eyes wander round the room, she sees everything that he saw. Herbert Jaunig will never sit here again, he’ll never take a book off that shelf again, never pray again. Never rape again. Blum has made sure of that. She sits there, satisfied, watching. It was right that she didn’t ask Massimo for help. How could he have helped her? He’d have had to go against all his beliefs, lie for her and cover up a crime. She can’t and doesn’t want to make him do that. This is her story, not his. She started it and she will see it through to the end.

After ten minutes Massimo asks her to leave. He accompanies her down the stairs, puts his arms around her and kisses her greedily. His lips are suddenly on hers, his tongue is in her mouth, his body is very close. Blum lets it happen. She doesn’t feel a thing. It’s only his desire, his hands on her, him whispering what he wants. How difficult it is for her to push him away, tell him she can’t, he must understand that she is thinking only of Mark. But she is thinking of Jaunig too. Of the men who took Mark away from her, tore him and his tenderness away. She won’t stop looking, she will find the others as well. The clown, the cook, the huntsman.

He grabbed her by the arm just after she had said goodbye to Massimo. She wanted to sit in the wine bar for a moment and think. About the kiss. About what she had seen in the priest’s apartment. She had embraced Massimo, then gone into the wine bar and ordered a glass of white. A glass of wine before turning her attention to the next man she would take out, her next corpse. She had just taken the first sip of wine when Schönborn was there beside her. His fleshy fingers were grabbing her forearm, announcing that he meant business.

‘What have you done to my son?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘He’s disappeared, I haven’t been able to reach him for days. I want to know what’s going on.’

‘If you touch me again I’ll scream.’

‘I want to know where my son is.’

‘I don’t know your son.’

‘If you don’t tell me what you know, you’ll be sorry.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’m glad I’ve put the wind up you.’

‘This is absurd. What do I have to be afraid of? I’m here because I know something’s wrong. It’s not like Edwin not to be in touch. And you were asking about him. You were asking about the priest as well. That’s not a coincidence.’

‘You’re the one who brought the priest into it, not me.’

‘And now he’s dead.’

‘So you
are
afraid.’

‘Stop that this minute. You pester me while I’m having lunch, you hurl accusations at me, there’s something the matter with you.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I know who you are. You’re an undertaker.’

‘Well done. You’ve done your homework. Blum Funerary Institute, we’re a traditional firm. I can plan your funeral if you pay in advance. I’ll be happy to see to it personally.’

‘You’re going to tell me what you want from me, and what you know about the whereabouts of my son. Then you’re going to tell me why you’re muck-raking through ancient history.’

‘It’s not that ancient. And from where I’m standing, you’re still in the muck.’

‘You’d better pray nothing has happened to my son.’

‘Praying won’t help, believe me.’

‘If you have anything to do with his disappearance, you’ll have me to answer to.’

‘Oh, and will you lock me in a cage too?’

‘I’ll wipe that grin right off your face.’

‘I didn’t think it would be so easy.’

‘I won’t let you out of my sight.’

‘Father and son. The huntsman and the photographer. And the village priest. What a trio. All we need now is the cook and the clown.’

‘As I said, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, but I’m making it my business to find out.’

‘Be my guest.’

‘This isn’t the last you’ll hear from me.’

He turned and walked away. She swallowed the retort that had been on the tip of her tongue. Schönborn’s words went round and round in her head. He knew who she was, he had gone to the trouble of finding that out. Blum wanted to believe that Johannes Schönborn was the huntsman. It would be so simple, so obvious, father and son. While he was talking, she was picturing him on her preparation table; in her mind she was sawing off his arms and legs, taking him apart like the carcass of a deer. Briefly, she believed in his guilt. But now she realises that he had nothing to do with it. Johannes Schönborn was not one of the men in the cellar. His face had given that away. In the restaurant and now here, his astonishment had been genuine, and so had the confusion in his eyes. He really didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about. No idea about the cages, the anaesthetic darts, and the three names, which had meant nothing to him. Old Schönborn was just a worried man who wanted his son back. She decided he would live.

Blum is in the car on the way to the forensic laboratory. A body from the hospital is waiting for her; the autopsy was routine. She parks outside the gate, gets out and waits for the lab assistant to bring her the body. She has been to this place so often. The refrigerators and the bodies stacked in the corridors are all so familiar to her. None of it bothers her, they are only unknown corpses in body bags, prised apart then stitched back together again. She has no emotional connection with these strangers; she is simply providing transport, taking a body from one fridge to the next.

Blum paces up and down the corridor. She thinks of how well the day began, of Jaunig’s study, of the menu lying on his desk. She hopes that her assumption is correct. It is the gut feeling that has been driving her since she left the apartment with Massimo. While she waits, she considers what to do next. Suddenly she is there beside Blum. Blum’s eyes rest briefly on the familiar face, she almost didn’t recognise her under the plastic film. Blum freezes. The ribcage is open and the skin is white. She has drowned. At first Blum can’t get her thoughts in order or understand what she’s seeing. She is lying in the cellar of the forensic laboratory, just like that, on a stretcher because there’s no room for her in a fridge. Blum feels like screaming, but she can’t, because it is suddenly cold, and quiet. Just another corpse, a nameless body that no one has missed. No one knows who she is.

For a long time there is nothing in her mind but Dunya. Blum is unable to react, there’s only Dunya, all that happened, how they met. At first she was only a voice, then a face, then a smile. Blum stares at her. There was nothing she could say to help, nothing that could undo what had happened. Blum forces herself not to cry, to show no emotion. She doesn’t want anyone to realise that she knew the woman, that there was a connection. The mortuary assistant draws Blum away from Dunya, annoyed that she is transfixed by this body. Then he asks whether she is all right, can he help her, would she like a glass of water?

The mortuary assistant answered all her questions. He didn’t know why Blum wanted to know, but he told her all the same. It was probably suicide, or an accident. The autopsy confirms that she drowned. There is nothing to suggest foul play. People were quite often found, he said, in the grid of the Inn power station. A dredger lifts them out of the water along with rubbish and trees. The grid is cleaned of flotsam every few weeks; she was found quite by chance. One more drowned body, probably a homeless person, a woman without papers who doesn’t match the missing person records. Very likely she was drunk and fell in. Or she was tired of life and jumped.
One way or another, dead is dead
, the mortuary assistant said.

Blum is in the hearse with a woman in her mid-fifties, the victim of a coronary thrombosis resulting from a lung transplant; her family have already brought her clothes to the Funerary Institute. Blum is on her way home. She will carefully remove the woman from the body bag, wash her, clean her wounds, stitch her mouth closed and dress her again. She yearns to do the same for Dunya, to tend to her violated body, to show her affection and respect. But Dunya must stay where she is; they will put her in the long-term storage room, where the temperature is lower. Corpses often stay there for months: the people who can’t be identified, murder victims when investigations are ongoing. People like Jaunig. Dunya will probably share a refrigerator with his head. Perpetrator and victim stacked peacefully together. Fate is cruel, and Blum can’t do anything about that. She feels as though she has taken a running jump into a pool emptied of water. She plunges in head first, without stopping to breathe. Blum drives through the city in the hearse, her tears falling quietly.

How many tears we have. If only we could count them, catch them, fill a beaker with them, a bucket. A swimming pool of tears. Then it wouldn’t hurt to dive in head first. Blum hasn’t been able to breathe properly for three days. She does her work, she stays with the children, she tries to go on living. But the sadness is back and it’s crippling. It is hard for Blum to accept that she was unable to help Dunya. She should have watched her more closely, she should have protected her. Blum has failed. If she hadn’t let her go to the supermarket alone, she might still be alive. That idea hurts. From Moldavia to the cellar, from the cellar to the refrigerator.