side to side.
“Bang?” he said, with a deep sigh. “What the devil are we going to do with Bang?”
“Excuse me?” said Munster, but it was clear that Van Veeteren was talking to himself now. He continued muttering for a while, holding his spent cigarette vertically between his thumb and his index finger and staring at the column of ash as long as his thumb. Only when a puff of wind blew it away did he give a start and seem to become conscious of the fact that he wasn’t alone in the room.
“OK, this is what we’ll do,” he said, dropping the cigarette end into his glass of water on the balcony floor. “If it works, it works… Munster!”
“Er, yes,” said Munster.
“You take the day off tomorrow and spend your time with
Synn and the kids.”
“What?” said Munster. “Why the…?”
“That’s an order,” said Van Veeteren. “Make sure you’re reachable in the evening, though. I think I’ll need to talk to you then.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to make a little trip,” said Van Veeteren.
“Where to?”
“We’ll see.”
Here we go again, thought Munster. He gritted his teeth and pushed the humility principle to one side. He’s sitting there playing the asshole and being mysterious again, as if he were a gumshoe in some book or film or other! It’s disgusting, really. I don’t understand why I should be expected to put up with such goddamn 2 7 9
“I have my reasons,” said Van Veeteren, as if he’d been able to read Munster’s thoughts. “It’s just that I have an idea, and it’s not one to shout from the rooftops. In fact, if I’m wrong, it’s better for nobody to know about it.”
Munster stood up.
“OK,” he said. “A day off with the family tomorrow. Make sure I’m at home in the evening-anything else?”
“I don’t think so,” said Van Veeteren. “Well, I suppose you could wish me luck. I might need it.”
“Good hunting,” said Munster, leaving Van Veeteren to his fate.
He remained in the armchair for a while, gazing out over the town. He smoked another cigarette and wished he had some thing to wash away the unpleasant taste in his mouth.
Once this case is over, he thought, I won’t want to be reminded of it. Not ever.
Then he sat down at the desk and made two phone calls.
He asked two questions, and received more or less the replies he’d been looking for.
“I’ll be there at around noon,” he said. “No, I can’t tell you what it’s about. It would be such a goddamn disaster if I’m wrong.”
Then he took a shower and went to bed. It was only eleven o’clock, but the earlier he could set off the next day, the better.
I’ll know tomorrow, he thought.
We’ll have him behind bars the day after tomorrow, and I can go home on Saturday.
But before he could go to sleep, thoughts about Beate
Moerk came flooding into his mind, and it was well into the early hours before he finally dozed off.
45
“Evil,” he began, and his voice was deeper now, barely audible in the densely packed air, “is the concept we cannot avoid, the only certainty. A young person might find that hard to grasp, but for those of us who have understood, it becomes steadily clearer. What we can be sure of, what we can rely on absolutely, is evil. It never lets us down. Good… goodness is only a stage set, a backdrop against which the satanic per forms. Nothing else… nothing.”
He coughed. He lit another cigarette, a glowing point trem bling in the darkness.
“When you eventually acquire that insight, it brings with it a certain degree of comfort despite everything. The difficult thing is simply to rid oneself of all the old hopes, all the illu sions and castles in the air that one builds at the beginning. In our case her name was Brigitte, and when she was ten she promised never to hurt me. That was the time she came run ning over the sands; it was a very windy day at the end of May.
Out at Gimsvejr. She flung herself into my arms and hugged me so tightly that I remember having a pain in the back of my neck afterward. We’ll love each other all our lives and never do anything silly to each other-those were her very words. Any thing silly… never do anything silly to each other… ten years old, blond braids. She was the only child we had, and some people said they had never seen such a happy child.
Nobody laughed like she did-she sometimes even woke her self up, laughing in her sleep-who can blame us for having hopes?”
He coughed again.
“She took her final exams in 1981, then went to England and worked there for a year. Was accepted by the university in Aar lach the following year. Met a boy called Maurice-Maurice
Ruhme-yes, we’re there already. I think she knew him slightly from before; he came from Kaalbringen. He was reading medi cine. Came from an upper-class family, very attractive, and he taught her how to use cocaine… he was the first, but I kept him until last.”
The cigarette glowed again.
“They moved in together. Lived together for about a year until he threw her out. By then he had taught her other things… LSD, pure morphine, which he never used himself, and how a young woman can earn money most easily and most effectively. Perhaps she provided for him, perhaps he was her pimp… I don’t know, we never talked about that. Perhaps it hadn’t gone quite as far as that, not then.
“She stayed in Aarlach on her own for another eighteen months. She had no place of her own, but moved around from man to man. And she was going in and out of hospitals and treatment centers. Detoxified, ran away, moved on…”
He swallowed, and she could hear him holding his breath ing in check.
“She lived at home for a short period as well, but then went back. Kept clean for a while, but before long it was the same old story. Eventually she was ensnared by some kind of sect, kept away from drugs but was brought down by other things instead. It was as if she didn’t have the strength, or as if she shied away from any normal sort of life… or perhaps it was no longer enough for her, the everyday, I don’t know. Never theless, after two years she agreed to leave Aarlach and live with us again, but now all that happiness had vanished…
Brigitte… Bitte. She was twenty-four. She was only twenty four, but in fact she was much older than me and my wife. She knew, I think she knew even then that she had burned up her life… she could still do her hair in blond braids, but she had burned up her life. She realized that, but we didn’t. I don’t know, in fact… perhaps there was a faint glimmer of hope left, a possibility of sorting everything out. That’s what we told ourselves, at least, what we had to tell ourselves… the desper ate illusion of vain hope. We believe what we have to believe.
Until we’ve taught ourselves to see reality, that is what we do.
That’s what this damn life looks like. We cling on to whatever is at hand. Anything at all…”
He fell silent. She opened her eyes and saw the cigarette glow illuminate his face, and pulled the blankets more tightly around her. She felt and sensed the extreme hopelessness that came flowing out of him uninterruptedly. Coming in waves, and for a moment it seemed to compress the darkness, making it solid and impermeable even for words and thoughts.
I understand, she tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come out. They stayed deep inside her. Frozen and meaningless.
“I went to see Maurice Ruhme that same fall,” he said, breaking the silence. “One day during the few months she was at home with us again I went to see him. Visited him in that same well-kept apartment she had shared with him, and where he now lived with another woman… a young and beautiful woman who still retained all her
