Besfort’s behaviour afterwards? Why would he drag a stiffened corpse, or a replica, into a taxi? Where would he take it and how would he get rid of it, with or without the driver’s help?
This took Lulu aback, but only for a moment. Of course the driver might have been involved. But this was a secondary matter. The important thing was to find out what happened to Rovena. Liza Blumberg believed that Rovena was murdered away from the hotel, and that Besfort Y., whether with assistance or not, had disposed of the body. But he needed that body, or something in the shape of Rovena, at the moment of leaving the hotel. They had stayed there two nights, so when the time came to search for the vanished woman, the first person to ask would be her lover or partner, call him what you like. His reply was easy to imagine: he and his girlfriend had both left the hotel early in the morning. She had accompanied him to the airport as usual, and had then disappeared on the way back. Everything would be simple and convincing, except that he needed something: a body, a shape.
Under her interviewers’ increasingly despondent gaze, Lulu Blumb elaborated her theory. Besfort Y. needed a shape or simulacrum of Rovena, the woman whom he had destroyed, body and soul.
He must have brooded for a long time over his alibi. And who or what would be a suitable substitute for the dead woman? What at first seemed frightening or impossible was simpler on close examination. He could easily find a more or less similar woman, at least of the same height, and bring her to the hotel. Or, if not a woman, something mute, without memory, and so without danger, such as a dummy, of the kind sold in every sex shop. Before dawn, in the gloom of the hotel lobby, it would be hard for a drowsy porter to notice that the woman emerging from the lift, in the close embrace of her lover, was different…
The interviewers grew weary and began to show their impatience. This happened with the first interviewer, the second and the fourth. Liza came to expect this, and so at her first meeting with the researcher, when the time came to talk about this day (the morning with its rain and wind that gave the hotel lobby an even more desolate air as Besfort Y. carried the simulacrum of his girlfriend to the taxi), she gave a guilty smile and spoke quickly, trying in vain to avoid uttering the word “dummy” and mumbling it under her breath.
This word changed everything. The researcher was visibly shaken.
“You mentioned an imitation, a dummy, if I am not mistaken.”
The guilty smile on Lulu’s face froze into a grin. “If you don’t like the word, forget it. I meant something in Rovena’s place, something artificial, sort of contrived.”
“Miss Blumberg, there is no reason why you should dodge the issue. Did you say the word ‘dummy’ or not. The word you used was
Liza Blumb wanted to apologise for her German, but the researcher had grabbed hold of her hand. She was scared. She expected to hear insults from him, of the kind the others had thought but left unsaid. Instead, to her amazement, without releasing her hand, he said softly, “My dear lady.”
It was her turn to wonder if he had really said these words, or if her ears were deceiving her.
His eyes looked hollow, as if their gaze were turned back into his skull.
7
In fact, the researcher’s mind was thrown into total disarray. Here was the solution to the riddle he had been pursuing for so long. He wanted to say: “Miss Blumberg, you have given me the key to the mystery,” but he lacked the energy to speak.
The secret appeared suddenly out of the surrounding mist. What the driver had seen in the rear-view mirror had been nothing but an imitation. His human passenger had tried to kiss a replica. Or the replica, the person.
This was the crux. The other questions – where Rovena had been killed, if there had really been a murder, and why (the NATO secrets, the most likely motive), where they had dumped her or her body and what was done later with the dummy – these were all secondary considerations.
“Oh God,” he said aloud. Now he remembered that somewhere in his inquiry there really had been mention of a doll. A female doll torn apart by dogs.
That was where the explanation lay, nowhere else. This was the secret that had baffled them all. And those disconcerting words, as if coming from a universe made of plastic:
A doll had been behind everything, a soulless object that would serve to get Besfort out of the hotel. Then the story would continue on the autobahn to the airport. “Stop at this service area so I can throw this thing away.” Or: “Take these euros and get rid of it for me.”
Neither of these things happened, because of the kiss. It was this incident that startled the driver and brought the story to an abrupt close. Instead of throwing out the doll, they had all of them overturned.
He banged his fists on his temples. But what about the police? The first transcript had mentioned this very thing, the dummy, found alongside Besfort Y.’s body.
The researcher was in no hurry to call himself an idiot. The truth was still incomplete, but in essence he had found it. Of course, some details did not fit. There were discrepancies: the living bodies and the plastic did not match. There were differences of interpretation, and confusions of past and future. But these were temporary. It was like a group portrait: a pair of lovers, a doll, an impossible kiss and a murder. These ingredients would not assemble themselves into one picture. This was understandable: such mismatches between the conception of a murder and its enactment were familiar. Sometimes a murder and its victim would not come together, as if they had confused their schedules, until eventually they found each other.
The researcher strove to reduce what had happened to its simplest elements, as if it were an after-dinner story. Shortly after the taxi had left the hotel, the driver noticed that his passenger, muffled in her overcoat and scarf, seemed more like a doll than a living woman. After his initial surprise, mixed with a kind of superstitious fear, he pulled himself together. Weren’t there plenty of crazy people who travelled with broken violoncellos, brandy stills or tortoises, all painstakingly wrapped? So he was not unnerved at all, and even remained calm when the plastic creature appeared to show signs of life. This was an illusion, produced by the bends in the road, or because he was tired. Only when his passenger tried to kiss the doll did the taxi driver snap.
The researcher imagined different scenarios, as he was accustomed to doing for every crime. In the first, the driver was paid in advance to throw a doll into the road. In the next, more serious scenario, it was not a doll but a corpse that was to be thrown out, of course for a larger sum of money. In both versions, the strange passenger tried to kiss the figure beside him, a doll or a corpse, and that was when disaster struck.
The final and gravest version involved the taxi driver’s complicity in the murder. On the way to the airport, he and Besfort were to turn off into a waste clearing, to bury the body. It was Besfort’s attempt at a farewell kiss that caused the catastrophe.
8
It was early Sunday morning when, to the sound of Easter bells, he set off sleepily for the taxi driver’s apartment. The city was ashen after winter. There’s no hope, he thought, without being able to say of what.
The woman who opened the door glowered at him, but the taxi driver said he had been expecting him. He was now much readier to talk than before.
Everybody wants to unburden themselves, the researcher said to himself. But they passed all their burdens to him.
“I will only ask you one thing,” he said in a low voice. “Please be even more precise than before.”
The driver sighed. He listened to the researcher, his eyes steady. Then he hung his head for a long time. “Was it a living woman or a doll?”
He repeated what the researcher said in a low voice, as if talking to himself. “Your questions get more difficult all the time.”
The researcher looked at him gratefully. He had not shouted, what’s all this crazy stuff, what the hell are you driving at? He had simply said that the question was a difficult one.
Slowly, as before, he described that grim morning with its incessant sleet, the taxi engine running as he waited
