Munster shrugged.
“I don’t know. I’m also off the case. It looks as if they don’t want to put any more resources into it. I suppose that’s understandable.”
“Why?”
“I expect they’re scared of stirring things up in the courts again. There could be one hell of a row if he should prove to be innocent, especially in the press and on television.”
Jung scratched the back of his neck.
“What does the chief inspector have to say about it?”
Munster hesitated.
“I don’t know. He’s still on sick leave. But it’s obvious that he’s not sitting at home, twiddling his thumbs.”
“Is it true that he’s got somebody on the hook? There was some talk about that in the canteen yesterday afternoon.
Somebody who might have done it, that is?”
There was no doubting Jung’s curiosity, and it was obvious to Munster that he must have been aching to ask that question from the moment they’d sat down.
“I don’t know, to be honest,” he said. “I was out at Kaustin with him the day after they released him from the hospital. He pottered around at the house for an hour or so, and then he appeared with that look. . you know what he’s like.”
Jung nodded.
“It’s damned amazing,” he said. “We spend several weeks going through that village with a fine-tooth comb- four or five of us-without finding anything of interest at all. Then he drives out there and picks up the trail inside an hour. Astonishing. Do you think it really is possible?”
Munster thought for a few seconds.
“What do you think?” he said.
“No idea,” said Jung. “You’re the one who knows him best.”
That’s true, I suppose, Munster thought. Although he
sometimes had the feeling that the closer to Van Veeteren you got, the more unfathomable he became.
“It’s hard to say,” he said. “He’s certainly on to something, though, no doubt about that. But the last time I saw him he was going on about thin threads. And how long a flabby policeman could be stuck in a spider’s web, that kind of thing.
He didn’t sound all that enthusiastic, but you know what he’s like.”
“I certainly do,” said Jung. “He’s a one-off, that’s for sure.”
There was a clear tone of admiration in Jung’s voice; there was no mistaking it, and Munster suddenly wished he could think of a way of conveying that to the chief inspector. Perhaps it wouldn’t be completely impossible, he thought. Since the cancer operation, he’d had the impression that their coop-eration and level of communication had improved noticeably.
There was more of a feeling of equality and more mutual respect. Or however it ought to be expressed.
Despite Van Veeteren’s unfathomability. And it was only in the early stages.
“No,” he said. “Van Veeteren is Van Veeteren.” He glanced over at the grand piano. Why hadn’t anybody appeared? Reinhart had guessed it would be one o’clock, but it was twenty past by now.
“I don’t know,” said Jung. “Anyway, here comes our sole.
Yum-yum!”
Forty-five minutes later, Edward Masseck paid his bill and left.
He had been all alone from start to finish. Jung had just ordered a second helping of candied walnuts, but they decided to pay and report to their colleagues.
“Hell’s bells!” said Reinhart when he heard that his prey had escaped. “How much did the meals cost?”
“It’s all yours,” said Munster, handing him the bill.
Reinhart stared at the pale blue scrap of paper.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “Stauff and I have been sitting in the car for two hours with half a packet of peanuts between us.”
“It was an excellent meal,” said Jung from the backseat.
“Maybe it would be a good idea to try again tomorrow?”
37
Dvorak’s New World Symphony had enveloped him during the last fifty miles or so, and that had been the right choice of music. Over the years he had begun to get a feeling for this kind of thing-the relationship between the task he was involved with, the weather and time of year and music. There were rising and falling movements that needed to be followed, not resisted. Flows and analogies that worked together, har-monized and illuminated one another. . Or however you might like to express it. It was difficult to put such things into words and explain them. Much easier to feel them.
Ah well, everything gets easier as the years go by. But as the years passed he had also become more wary of words. That wasn’t exactly surprising-bearing in mind his usual working environment, in which it was more of the exception than the rule when anybody stuck to the truth.
Language is lying, as somebody said.
Anyway, the New World. And as the skies cleared and the afternoon sun started to dry out the persistent rain that had fallen during the night and morning, he approached his goal.
His fears about dizzy spells and lack of judgment in traffic had proven to be unfounded. He had also made frequent stops; sat with coffee and cake in depressing concrete-and-glass roadside cafes, gone for short walks, stretched his legs again and again and even performed gymnastic exercises as recommended in the postoperative program he’d had thrust into his hand on being released from hospital.
He had also been careful to refrain from alcohol and
tobacco. He had to get back home again. Preferably, in any case.
His stock of toothpicks had been exhausted long before the Dvorak.
He parked in a little square called Cazarros Plats, and as he looked around for a suitable place to eat, he wondered who Cazarro might have been. He sounded more like a conquista-dor than a north European statesman, that was for sure.
Wedged between a department store and an undistinguished 1950s local government building was a little Italian restaurant specializing in pizzas and pasta dishes. He decided to give it a try. His meeting with Sister Marianne was at five o’clock, and he didn’t have all the time in the world.
But the food wasn’t the main point anyway. That was a glass of red wine and that longed-for cigarette.
And also the need to concentrate before what was in store.
He had made an unnecessary fuss regarding preparations many times in the past, but there was something special about this occasion that had been clear to him from the moment he set off from home. Something he wasn’t able to handle and that he’d given up trying to control a long time ago.
A game in which he was much more of a chip than a
punter.
It was not a new sensation, just an example of or a varia-tion on that old deterministic principle, presumably: the unavoidable business of patterns and preordained order in the environment. Of increasing or decreasing entropy.
No, those thoughts about the arbitrary nature of life that he had flirted with the other day were something he now felt no enthusiasm for.
If there really was a creator or a force-or at the very least an all-seeing eye-it must be able to look down from its elevated position and make out the lines, the veins and arteries in time and space. The structures that seem so incomprehensible from our usual worm’s-eye view.
And the mutual connections and consequences of actions.
