'Before I give you my professional opinion,' said Paulus, 'I had better explain the full extent of my relationship with Simon Balac. I am a homosexual. Bern is an intimate city where people of similar interests and persuasions almost inevitably tend to know one another. The artistic community is comparatively small. I got to know Balac – everyone calls him Balac – well. Nearly five years ago we became lovers.'
'Your being homosexual or even having an affair with Simon Balac is neither here nor there to the police,' said the Bear. 'Your sex life is your business.'
'I'm afraid that is not all there is to it,' said Paulus. 'You see, Balac is a strong personality with what one might call varied… exotic tastes. He has a strong sexual drive, and he likes diversions. In his company one finds oneself swept along, eager to please, willing to try things, to do things that normally one would not contemplate. He is a brilliant artist, and the foibles of such men must be tolerated, or at least that is what I used to tell myself. If I am to be truthful, I was swept up in the sheer sexual excitement of it all, the tasting of forbidden fruit.
'Balac enjoys women sexually as well as men. He enjoys group sex in all its variations. He likes children, sexually mature children but still way below the age of consent. He likes to initiate, to corrupt. He makes it incredibly exciting. He uses stimulants – alcohol, various drugs – and above all his own extraordinary energy and charisma.'
'The von Graffenlaub twins, Rudi and Vreni?' asked Fitzduane.
'And Erika?' added the Bear.
'Yes, yes,' said Paulus.
'Hmm,' said the Bear. 'You'd better tell us all of it. Does Charlie know any of this?'
Paulus shook his head firmly. 'He knows I'm gay, of course, but nothing else. He's a good friend and a kind man. I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t.'
'I'm afraid he'll have to know now,' said the Bear. 'You do understand that, don't you?'
Paulus nodded.
It was midafternoon before they emerged from the museum. While the Bear debated whether to go to satisfy his audibly growling stomach – he had decided he was sick of fish – Fitzduane asked the one question that had been bothering him since von Beck had shown he could walk through walls. 'Is it normal in Switzerland to chop up the core structure of the museum in the interest of artistic expression?'
The Bear laughed. 'Living art,' he said. 'Actually there is an explanation. They were knocking down that section of the museum anyway to make way for a new extension, and they thought it might be fun to let artists take part in the process.'
'Ah,' said Fitzduane.
'No matter how bizarre the event, there is almost always a straightforward explanation. Don't you agree?'
'No,' said Fitzduane.
The Chief Kripo had learned to regard the Project K headquarters as a haven. Only there did he have any thinking time; only there was he relatively free of interference from his political masters wanting progress reports; only there could he escape the profusion of foreign antiterrorist agencies that all wanted a piece of the Hangman, doubtless to skin and stuff and hang on their respective bureaucratic walls; only there did any serious progress seem to be made on the case itself, as opposed to the international hunt, which appeared to have become an enterprise in its own right with the objective almost incidental; only there could he avoid his wife and two mistresses, each of whom blamed his now excessively long absences on some relative advance in his affections for one of the others. It was no picnic being Chief of the Criminal Police in Bern these days.
As luck would have it, the Chief was in the main computer room when Henssen finished the computer runs the Bear had requested. He stared at Henssen's screen. Could this be it? Had they got a real answer at last? Could they ship that albatross of an Irishman back to his bogs? Could they think in terms of no Hangman and a nice steady traditional Bernese two corpses a year? Hell, it was going to be champagne time.
The Chief tried to rein in on his hopes. 'Are you sure? Absolutely sure?'
'Nothing is sure in this life, Chief,' said the Bear, 'except death, a strong Swiss franc, and that the rich get richer.'
'Convince me, convince us.' The Chief included the rest of the Project K team with a sweep of his arm.
Kadar hadn't expected Lodge to be discovered, and he had absolutely no idea how it could have happened. He had been so careful with this personality. He hadn't taken the risks that had characterized his behavior in other guises. How then could it have occurred?
Losing Lodge was worse than the death of a friend. Of course, that was only natural. After all, he was Lodge, wasn't he? There were times he wasn't sure. His Lodge identity represented his one true link with the past, but now he could never use it again. He felt – he searched for a word – orphaned.
Perhaps he was being too negative. His use of a stand-in during the immigration proceedings – a minor actor, now resting permanently under half a meter of concrete in the house in Muri – could give him a way out. The man whose description and photograph they had wasn't Kadar. He could reappear as Lodge and indignantly protest this usurpation of his name. He'd have to do it from another country, or things would get confusing. Still, it could be done. It might work.
No, it was too risky. Well, he'd think about it.
Only two days were left before he was due to leave Bern to commence what he thought of as the ‘active’ phase of the operation. It might be wiser to leave immediately. Then again his plans were made, and he had taken precautions against discovery. It could even work to his advantage.
He checked the temperature probe set into Paul Straub's body. The corpse was defrosting, but too slowly. It would have been handier to have used not water to thaw out Herr Straub, but he wasn't too sure what effect that would have. It was the kind of thing some forensic scientist might pick up. A body destroyed by fire shouldn't really be waterlogged. It shouldn't start off as a block of ice either; it wouldn't burn properly. A scorched outside and entrails cold enough to chill a martini might cause some head scratching.
He turned up the heat. He thought it was rather neat to be using his sauna for the purpose. He could tone up and sweat off some weight while keeping an eye on things. If his experiment with the frozen pig was anything to go by, Straub should be adequately thawed out in about another six to eight hours. That would be just about right. Then he'd be kept in the large Bosch refrigerator, nicely chilled but on call if required. If he wasn't needed, he could be refrozen and kept on hand for a rainy day.
'It's ironic,' said the Bear, 'but what pointed me in the right direction wasn't the computerized power of the Nose or old-fashioned police work; it was our Irishman's intuition.' He looked across at Fitzduane. 'You should have more faith, Hugo.
'Hugo suspected the painter Simon Balac was our man. There was some circumstantial evidence, but it was far from conclusive. Then the computer identified Lodge, and the raid confirmed him, and naturally all our efforts were concentrated in that direction. I had plenty of time on my hands in the hospital, and I wasn't distracted by the details of the hunt.' He glowered around him. 'You people kept me starved of information.'
'For your own good, Heini,' said Charlie von Beck, 'and on doctor's orders.'
'What do doctors know?' growled the Bear. 'Anyway, sparked by Hugo's candidate, I got to thinking about the nature of the Hangman and how he operates, and that led me to an intriguing hypothesis: Could Lodge and Balac be one and the same man?'
'Proof?' said the Chief. 'But why be greedy? At this stage I'll settle for reasons and an hour alone with him in a police cell.'
'Patience. Rubber hoses are un-Swiss. We're supposed to be a logical people. Follow my reasoning, and you'll see how it all fits together. First, let's remember the Hangman's habit of always having a way out. If the authorities
