She remained in a coma for three months. Her brain was dead. The Bear stayed with her for days on end. He held her hand. He kissed her. He told her stories and read out loud from the papers. He brought her flowers arranged in the special way she liked. The life support system hissed and dripped and made electronic noises. People spoke to him. Occasionally he was asked to sign papers. One day they switched her off.
And the Bear's heart was broken.
Beat von Graffenlaub had not slept until nearly dawn. The numbness he had experienced when he first heard of Rudi's death had gradually turned to feelings of pain and guilt and a growing emptiness.
Why had Rudi killed himself? What had happened to him in Ireland? What was Rudi thinking during that brief moment just before he jumped? Did he take long to die? Was there pain? Why had he not talked to someone first? Surely there must have been some hint of what he was contemplating, some sign, some change in behavior.
Was there anything he, Beat von Graffenlaub, wealthy, influential, acclaimed and respected by his peers, could have done – should have done – to preserve the life of his son? Anything? Somehow he knew that there was; there just had to be – but what?
The clock radio woke von Graffenlaub fully. For a few moments he lay there, his eyes still closed, listening to the news. Erika had objected to this early morning habit, but it had been months since they had made love. Erika now slept in the apartment she had created a few doors away. She needed space to cultivate her creativity, she had said. He had not objected. It would have been pointless. The signs of her disenchantment had been present and growing for a couple of years.
He thought back, with a pang, to those early years of closeness and sensuality, when they just had to be together and divorcing Claire was a price well worth paying; dear, stuffy, conventional Claire, now dead. Well, he had paid the price willingly and had pushed from his mind the risks of marrying a woman nearly thirty years his junior. But time had caught up with him. At sixty-one, physically trim and fit through he was, he knew that Erika was slipping away, more probably was lost to him.
He recalled Erika's distinctive, musky odor and could feel hot wetness against his mouth. He could hear the special sounds she made when excited. He felt his erection growing, and he moved to look at the sultry features damp with the sweat of passion – and to enter her.
For the briefest of time Erika's presence remained with him even after he opened his eyes and looked around the room. Then came the full onslaught of grief and loneliness.
Ivo was untroubled by the combined smell of fourteen unwashed bodies sleeping on grubby mattresses on the floor of the small room. One couple had woken half an hour earlier and made love quietly, but for the last ten minutes the only sounds were those of sleep.
He decided to wait a little longer. The Dutchman, van der Grijn, had drunk enough to poleax any normal man for half a day, but he had still managed to stay awake, talking and drinking, until the early hours, before collapsing with a grunt. Ivo, small and slight, was not eager to tangle with the huge heroin courier. Ivo was almost permanently high in a miasma of marijuana. Occasionally he sniffed glue or popped a few pills. He enjoyed, but could rarely afford, cocaine. But he hated heroin.
Heroin had killed the one person he had truly loved. While he was in prison for demonstrating and throwing rocks at policemen in Zurich, little Hilda, fifteen years old, had overdosed in the ladies' rest room of the Zurich Bahnhof; she was found facedown in a toilet bowl. Little Hilda had carried no papers, but she had eventually been identified as a result of the slim volume of Ivo's poems she carried, thirty-six photocopies pages.
'A short book,' said the Zurich policeman after he had shown Hilda's photograph to Ivo in prison. They had been driving to the morgue for the formal identification.
'How long should a book be?' said Ivo. He was pale, but regular prison food had filled out his slight body. Curiously he felt no hostility toward those who had imprisoned him. The policemen and guards were strict but fair.
From the depths of his despair, he swore total revenge on all heroin pushers. And so, at the age of seventeen, Ivo came to live in the Autonomous Youth House in Bern. He became its unofficial guardian. Most of its inhabitants were harmless, rootless youths in search of something other than Switzerland's ordered and disciplined society – the “boredom and air-conditioned misery of capitalism,” as the phrase put it. Some of the visitors were more dangerous, benefitting from official tolerance to push hard drugs and traffic in more lethal wares.
Ivo preyed upon heroin pushers. Operating with the cunning and desperation of one with nothing to lose, he stole their drugs and flushed them down the toilet in bizarre homage to his dead love. When the mood struck him, he informed to the police – in strange, elliptical messages, never in person or by phone, always in writing.
He had lubricated the zipper on his grimy sleeping bag with graphite powder. He slipped out of his bag noiselessly and crept toward the sleeping Dutchman. Within seconds the small packet of glassine envelopes had been removed, and Ivo tiptoed out of the room.
In the toilet he opened each envelope, one by one, and shook the powder into the bowl until the water was filmed with white. He replaced the heroin with powdered glucose and reassembled the packet. He put toilet paper over the powder in the toilet bowl but, worried about noise, did not flush.
He returned to the sleeping room. The Dutchman slumbered on. Ivo returned the doctored packet to the seamed leather jacket. Still no reaction. Reassured, Ivo crept out of the room again and this time risked flushing the toilet. The heroin vanished into the sewers of Bern.
Ivo went into the kitchen, made himself a pot of tea, and lit up the first roach of the day. He sat cross-legged on the kitchen table and stared out of the window into the gray light of false dawn. He hummed to himself and rocked from side to side. He felt good. Hilda would be pleased.
But what about Klaus? Beautiful Klaus, who could make money so easily from a few hours of giving pleasure, who was desired by so many men and women? There had been something about the man who picked Klaus up. It just did not feel right. No reason, just feelings. Ivo had been some little distance away. He had not seen the blond mustache and beard. He had heard conversation and laughter. Then they had walked away from him into the darkness, the blond man's arm around Klaus. The thunk of a car door – an expensive car by the sound – the faint whisper of an engine, then silence. Klaus hand to come back in a couple of hours as he had promised. Ivo had slept alone. Klaus was Ivo's friend.
If only life was like the Lennon song 'Imagine.' If only life was like that. Ivo sang and rocked in time to the music. He would do something tomorrow about Klaus, or maybe the day after that, or maybe Klaus would just turn up.
Just imagine.
The lusts, self-doubt, and sorrows of the night receded with the first sting of the icy cold shower.
Beat von Graffenlaub was a man of rigorous self-discipline and practiced routine. By 0630 he was having breakfast at a small Biedermeier table by a window overlooking the River Aare. He wore a charcoal gray flannel suit, a crisp white handmade shirt, and a black silk tie. His shoes were a tribute to his valet's expertise at military spit polish: they did not shine, they positively glowed. His socks were of light gray silk.
A solitary red rose rested in a slim Waterford crystal vase. At exactly 0655, von Graffenlaub would insert the flower in this buttonhole, don his navy blue cashmere overcoat, and at the stroke of 0700 would leave his house on Junkergasse to stroll toward his offices on Marktgasse. He could cover the short distance between home and office in less than ten brisk minutes, but even after a lifetime of familiarity he took pleasure in walking about the ancient city of Bern. Each morning and evening, time and weather permitting, he made a short detour, lengthening his walk to half an hour and arriving at his office at exactly 0730.
This morning, after he had left Junkergasse, he detoured into the grounds surrounding the fifteenth-century Munster. The terrace between the church and the ramparts was known as the Platform. It overlooked the river, flowing swiftly along below, its waters icy and swollen from the melting snows of winter.
