The Truth and Other Lies Read online

  Moreany came into the outer office breathing heavily; he must have taken the stairs instead of the lift. Honor wondered whether he really believed that death would make an exception for him and grant him an extra day for this ludicrous exercise.

  “Have they found the poor woman?” she asked.

  Moreany understood at once who she meant. “No. She must have been caught by a current; they’ll never find her.”

  Moreany went into his office. He left the door ajar as usual. Honor could hear paper rustling. She got up from her chair, smoothed her skirt, and stepped into his office. Moreany was rummaging around on his desk; he was still out of breath.

  “How’s Mr. Hayden?”

  “Amazingly well,” Moreany replied. “Amazing.”

  “Can I do anything? Shall I prepare a statement for the press?”

  Moreany interrupted his search, propping himself up on the desk with both hands. “Honor, that would be wonderful. Please don’t write ‘deceased,’ no details, and put it on my desk.”

  “I’ll make some valerian tea.”

  “No need to do that. I have to leave again in a second.”

  “A Mr. Fasch rang up three times.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He says he’s an old school friend of Mr. Hayden.”

  Honor Eisendraht waited at the window until Moreany had gotten in his car and driven off. She went into his office. After she poured herself a double scotch from the glass decanter that stood on the little black ebony table, she sat down at his desk. “We’ll have to postpone Venice,” Moreany had said to Betty when they’d heard about Martha Hayden’s death. Yes, Honor thought, go to Venice, just you go. There’s a laguna morta there. I’ll wait there for you, Betty, you damned whore, and I’ll drown you.”

  She drained the glass and began to rifle through the drawers. She removed a blond hair and a big fat fly from the pen groove. Honor was looking for travel documents, plane tickets, or a hotel reservation in Venice. The middle drawer was locked. Honor felt for the key under the leather desk mat and unlocked it. Along with notes and press cuttings, she found an empty pillbox and some cash. Right at the bottom was a yellow A5 envelope, unmarked. It wasn’t sealed. She opened it gingerly. Inside were two MRI images of Moreany’s lumbar vertebrae and histological findings of the tumors that had permeated his vertebral body.

  Reports in hand, Honor hurried back into the outer office, shuffled the tarot deck, and turned over the top card. It was the Tower again. Now there was no longer the shadow of a doubt.

  At the police station Betty reported her Subaru stolen. As she was filling out the insurance form beneath the searching gaze of the officer on duty, she could feel her breasts ache and the nausea return. She couldn’t remember when she’d last had anything to eat. Moments later she was throwing up sour water in a urinal, because the women’s toilet was occupied. The reason for her nausea was not Moreany’s proposal, nor was it Henry’s absurd story about his wife’s death on the beach. It was clearly the baby in her belly. It wouldn’t be possible to conceal it for much longer. She urgently needed to decide on a plan of action with Henry.

  She left the police station through the steel security door and leaned against the sunlit brick wall surrounding the grounds. Mechanically, she took a cigarette from the packet, lit it, and inhaled. The menthol smoke tasted revolting. Betty threw the cigarette onto the street along with the packet and bought herself a newspaper at a kiosk.

  Author Henry Hayden’s Wife Drowned, it said on the bottom of the front page in smallish print. It was just a brief report without a photograph. Betty dug her telephone out of her bag and called Henry. Because she knew he didn’t have an answering machine, she let it ring for a long time. Henry didn’t answer. Betty waited about a minute and then tried again.

  ———

  The brute had bitten him. Henry rinsed the wound in clean water and examined it. The sharp teeth had cut right through to the bone, leaving blue-red holes below his wrist. Downstairs in the kitchen the phone was ringing. Henry ignored it and looked in Martha’s bathroom mirror.

  His face was black with dust and wood shavings; cobwebs and mummified larvae hung in his hair. He looked like Indiana Jones without the hat. His left ear was encrusted with blood; his shirt was ripped to shreds; his arms, belly, and legs were studded with splinters of wood.

  After opening up the wall behind Martha’s bed in a fit of frustrated pique, he’d gone on a marten hunt armed with a small speargun. It was a completely absurd undertaking—an example of what Freud rightly calls “symptomatic actions,” because they “give expression to something which the agent himself does not suspect in them and which he does not as a rule intend to let others know about, but to keep to himself.” Well, who could be blamed?

  Between the roof tiles and the thermal insulation was a narrow crawl space. Henry had climbed through the hole in Martha’s wall into the roof cavity and had crawled on his stomach like a soldier over the rough-hewn planks. He kept pausing, listening, and then working his way forward again. He could smell the animal’s secretions. After a while he heard the patter of curved claws on the wood, cocked the trigger on the speargun, switched off his headlight, and held his breath.

  But martens are hunters too. It could see, hear, and smell better than Henry—and this was its territory. The animal could sense danger and didn’t leave its hiding place; its instincts protected it. Animals don’t understand much, but they know everything. Humans make mistakes, because they believe; humans rush headlong toward ruin, because they hope. Animals don’t hope, they don’t look into the future, and they don’t doubt themselves. That’s why the marten didn’t leave its hiding place.

  Henry found eggshells, feathers, bones, and pungent-smelling droppings that were still soft and oily. As he squeezed his way on through the labyrinth of old oak beams, long splinters of wood pushed their way into his skin. He ignored the pain. So much the better, he thought. If the filthy brute smells my blood it might make the mistake of coming closer. But the filthy brute did not appear.

  At some point Henry realized that he’d lost his bearings. Martha’s room was on the west side of the house; the roof here was a good hundred feet long. He had crawled maybe sixty feet. Wind whistled through a crack from somewhere and blew dried insects up his nose. He had to sneeze and tried to turn over in the tight space. As he was performing this maneuver, he knocked his headlight off, and the battery rolled out of its plastic compartment. When Henry tried to roll onto his back in the dark he accidentally pulled the trigger. With a dull thud the steel spear landed in the beam right next to his ear. It had been driven half a finger deep into the oak. If the spear had hit him in the face, it would have pierced his brain stem. Henry had to laugh. It was ridiculous. A man who manages to shoot himself with a speargun in his own crawl space has earned his place in the Darwin Awards. Henry remained lying there doubled up for a while.

  The marten came up from behind him and climbed over his legs. Henry felt its claws in his calves. Its fur was warm and silky-soft as it slid along Henry’s waist to his upper arm. The animal sniffed at him; a whisker tickling his shoulder. The marten had come to inspect its prey. Henry took stock of the situation. If he kept lying there, the marten would eat his corpse and start a family. He made a grab for it and caught its tail; the brute squeaked and bit him. Its sharp teeth pierced the nerve above his wrist. Henry recoiled, let go, went to kick out at the marten, and managed to ram the speargun into his own ear. After the pain had subsided, Henry decided to let things rest for the time being. He closed his eyes and, after a few breaths, fell asleep.

  Threads of light were shining through the cracks in the roof. As he awoke, Henry could smell the putrid secretion that the marten had sprayed onto his shirt. The marten had left its mark on him! You’ve no business being here was the meaning of its stinking autograph; you’ve invaded my territory; you can’t get the better of me here.

  Henry began his retreat, crawling between the beams. More splinters pus
hed their way into his skin. It was an eternity before he reached the hole in Martha’s bedroom wall and squeezed through the opening into his own territory. Poncho was lying on Martha’s bed wagging his tail in delight. The faithful soul had waited there for him. The dog sniffed his hand; it could smell the marten. Henry felt a warm rush of gratitude. He hugged the dog. “My friend, my good friend,” he whispered to him, “you know I’m a completely worthless idiot and you still stand by me.” Henry began to pull the splinters out of his skin.

  Downstairs the phone was ringing. Henry looked up and listened. The ringing stopped and then started again. It must be Betty. It was time he told her what had really happened on the cliffs.

  When he came into the kitchen after showering and bandaging his wrist, the telephone had stopped ringing. Henry saw on the display that Betty had called four times. Uncertain whether to call her back or not, he opened a tin of Premium dog food for Poncho and spread truffle paste on a slice of bread. The phone rang again. Henry saw that it wasn’t Betty and picked it up. The friendly Jenssen gave his name in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “We’ve found your wife, Mr. Hayden.”

  Martha’s corpse had been found on the coast nearby. Height, weight, and hair color tallied. Jenssen asked with sensitivity whether Henry thought he would be able to come to forensics to identify the dead woman.

  The cold embrace of fear choked Henry. After making a note of the address of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, he put the phone down carefully, as if it were made of unfired porcelain, and felt the floor give way beneath him. He clutched a corner of the kitchen island. The room, all the house around him, shot deep down into the earth as if through an invisible shaft. As he gathered speed he became weightless, and, bewildered by the effect of the levitation, he stretched out his arms and came crashing down with his chin on the countertop.

  10

  Gisbert Fasch had also seen the news of Henry’s wife’s fatal swimming accident. There was no mention of her name; there wasn’t even a photograph of her. In death as in life she wasn’t granted a title of her own; even postmortem she remained the wife of.

  For four hours now he’d been sitting in his hot and stuffy car, squashing creepy-crawlies as they made their way over the roof. Shadowing your opponent is always so exciting in books and films; in real life it turns time into moldy old cheese. You sit there producing carbon dioxide; the minutes drag on forever; you want to sleep, but you can’t, because you can never be sure that something noteworthy isn’t about to happen, and in your misery you turn to squashing insects.

  Fasch fanned himself with the newspaper he’d already read to death and looked up at Henry’s property on the hill. His eyes were watering from so much surveillance. In an English lifestyle magazine he’d come across a large-format photograph of Henry’s living room, showing the master of the house on his Chesterfield sofa together with his wife and dog. Fasch had studied the photo for a long time, looking for hidden clues to location. The woman at Henry’s side looked educated and pleasant, with a remote, saintly air about her. In the picture she was wearing lined boots and a reversible tweed poncho. Henry, quite the old trophy-gatherer, lay sprawled on the sofa with an arm around her shoulder. In the background, somewhat blurred, a picture window, dark wooden shelves full of books, a fireplace—how absolutely essential—and to the side a black dog sitting upright like a Spanish grandee. It was such a total cliché, this living room, so utterly tasteful, exactly what he would have expected of someone like Hayden, who disguised his malign personality with refined junk and the mammals to match. Made you puke.

  Fasch had by now completed the crossword, including all subsidiary rivers and Nordic divinities; the roof of the car was a sea of bloody stains. Every now and then a slight breeze blew through the open side window, bringing with it the smell of cut grass, and making the little photo of his mother, Amalie, swing on the rearview mirror.

  On the backseat lay his old briefcase. It had now acquired the weight of a twenty-week-old infant and contained everything ever written by and about Henry Hayden. Fasch no longer left the bag for a second. Several times during the last weeks he had woken up screaming because he’d dreamed he’d lost it.

  The information Fasch had managed to gather about Henry so far allowed for a reliable reconstruction of the first eleven and the last nine years of his life. In between was still a gaping hole of almost twenty-five years. There are blind spots and dark matter in everyone’s biographies—among them, things people prefer to leave out because they are embarrassing or simply unimportant. But suppressing a time span of twenty-five years is too much to go unnoticed. His entire youth was missing.

  Henry had led a secret life—somewhere and somehow. That in itself was an achievement, for vanishing is an art. It means renunciation and abstention. Renouncing home, family, and friends, language and familiar habits. And whom do you tell? Whom do you share it with? Even Dr. Mengele, who had to change his hiding place several times over, left clues and a diary. Keeping silent goes against human nature, it said at the beginning of Frank Ellis. Clearly a hidden reference to Henry’s secret biography.

  Suddenly, then, he reemerges and starts publishing novels. Just like that. Without a first shot, without practice, without a mistake. All novels tell you something about their authors, no matter how cleverly they try to conceal themselves. Whether Hayden had actually written his novels himself or had simply stolen them, Gisbert Fasch believed they were just teeming with clues; it was only a question of finding the key to decipher them.

  Henry’s car came along the avenue of poplars at high speed, a cloud of dust in its wake. Fasch threw his half-drunk paper cup of tea out the window, switched on the engine, and put his foot to the floor. He had trouble tailing the car, because he was an unpracticed driver. The worn tires on his sixteen-year-old Peugeot skidded on the curves; the car lurched from side to side, making hysterical noises.

  By the time he’d gone about three miles and come to a fork in the road at which one took a right for the freeway and a left for the coastal road, he’d already lost Henry. Judging by the speed at which Henry had set off, he was in quite a hurry. People in a hurry take the freeway, you’d think. Fasch hesitated briefly and turned left.

  Henry had indeed chosen the narrow, winding coastal road, because he wanted to make the most of his last opportunity to drive the Maserati flat-out. He was expecting the police to detain him on the spot, so he’d taken with him a small travel toothbrush, his reading glasses, and a paperback edition of Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, in case there was nothing to read in the cell; word has it that being held in custody is much more unpleasant than the prison term after sentencing.

  It was about twenty-five miles from his property to the Institute of Forensic Medicine; he would get there over an hour early. Henry thought of his dog. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to kill it with the spade. Who was to look after Poncho if he didn’t return? He’d wanted to uncover the old well in the summer and have the stained-glass windows in the chapel restored. But now everything would go to wrack and ruin, or be auctioned off or razed to the ground by bulldozers.

  Presumably the police divers had recovered Martha’s corpse from the Subaru. In that case the homicide squad already knew that the car belonged to Betty and were doubtless tapping his phone. That would explain why Betty had been so persistent in trying to get hold of him. She was cooperating with the police, so as not to be punished for Martha’s murder—and who could blame her? Henry would have done the same if he’d been in her shoes. After all, Betty’s pragmatism was the thing Henry really valued about her. It would be difficult now to pronounce Martha’s death a swimming accident, but what were lawyers for? They get paid to come up with explanations. Henry was able to afford the best lawyers, and since O. J. Simpson’s acquittal, nothing seemed impossible.

  Henry could see his pursuer in the rearview mirror. The red car came nearer, then remained at a distance of about two hundred yards. He couldn’t make out how many people
were sitting in the car, especially with the sunlight reflecting off its windshield. The police would hardly send such amateurs after him. Henry slowed down; the car behind him slowed down too. As soon as he put on speed again, the red car closed up. Maybe it was tourists or those bird lovers who came to the coast at this time of year to watch the mating flights of the seabirds. Alternatively, Henry thought, his pursuer might be a mere figment of his conscience; after all, the world is full of perils for anyone with a sense of foreboding.

  Henry accelerated; the little car fell a long way behind. After rounding a bend concealed by high bushes, he slammed on the brakes, put on his sunglasses, got out of the car, and waited for his pursuer. Sea spray settled on his sunglasses like a veil. The coast dropped away here, falling some hundred feet, and hefty concrete blocks were set in front of the precipice to prevent accidents. The wind howled up between the cliffs; clouds drove shadows over the coastal road. Henry saw seagulls circling overhead. Half a minute passed, then he heard the car coming. It rounded the bend at high speed, its tires screeching.

  Fasch saw Henry standing in front of his car. It was him all right. He stood there nonchalantly, his hands in his trouser pockets. His hair was still thick, his shoulders broad; he was wearing a checked English cashmere jacket with leather patches on the elbows just like in the showy portrait photo that ruined the covers of all his books.

  With the impact on the concrete block, the windshield shattered into a million fractals. His face crashed through the glass and then back again. Everything slowed down and began to rotate. In the center of this revolving world, Fasch saw the photo of his mother, Amalie, hanging motionless while, all around it, everything moved. He wondered when he’d last called her and what he should give her for her seventieth birthday. Then there was an implosion in his chest and something pushed in on him from the sides and grew hot.