People wearing robes and slippers meandered through the lobby, eyeing me curiously. Every thirty minutes, I went back to the reception desk and repeated my questions about Theo’s condition. Always with the same result: no further details were available, and I couldn’t be allowed upstairs. I could only wait for Frau von der Pahlen to come down to the lobby, perhaps to get a drink from the coffee machine, as many patients’ relatives did. Then, I was told, I could talk to her.
Darkness fell. The woman at the reception desk was relieved by a doorman, who produced a thermos bottle and switched on a little television set. I got some coffee from the coffee machine. The lobby was empty. It was very quiet. I gazed at the tall glass walls and through them at palm trees and cactuses and behind those the twinkling lights of the island’s capital city, and I felt a strange peacefulness. Above me, people were sleeping, some of whom didn’t know whether they’d survive the night. I stretched out on the bench. My leaden weariness almost felt good.
When I awoke, a young nurse was sitting in the doorman’s place. The TV was off, the thermos bottle had vanished. Dawn was breaking outside. When I requested information about Theo, the girl immediately reached for the telephone, asked questions, and listened to the answers, which poured out of the receiver in a stream of high-speed Spanish. After she hung up, she explained to me in English that Theodor Hast had already been transferred to the central hospital on the neighboring island; the transfer had taken place the previous evening. As far as she understood, Theo would undergo a few final tests and then take a direct flight back to Germany from the airport on the other island, probably in the course of that very afternoon.
I thanked her and drove home. I figured Theo’s condition must be at least stable. Getting his head cracked open, half drowning, and then spending an hour in cold water — that was enough for circulatory collapse and severe hypothermia. In that condition, you could die if you didn’t get help. But Theo had been helped, he’d turned the corner, and he’d be back on his feet soon. In Germany. Only when I was driving their luggage to the airport did I completely grasp the fact that I’d never see Theo and Jola again, that they’d literally vanished into thin air.
The woman working the check-in counter hesitated a long time and kept asking me to repeat what had happened. A diving accident. Air ambulance back to Germany. She compared the names on the tickets with those on the identity documents several times. Finally she nodded. She promised that the baggage would be delivered to the Berlin address. We put the tickets and papers in the document pockets of the two suitcases. I watched them bump along the conveyor belt and disappear through a rubber curtain into the belly of the airport.
That evening I sat on the terrace with a bottle of wine and read Jola’s diary straight through. In the end, I knew the meaning of fear. I lay awake in bed for hours, waiting for the roar of engines and the slamming of car doors and the voices of broad-shouldered Spaniards, informing me that I was under arrest for the attempted murder of Theo Hast. At last, in the early morning hours, it occurred to me that three days had already passed and nobody had come to my house.
Around noon I drove back to the airport to pick up my new clients. Not out of a sense of duty, but because I had no earthly idea what else to do with myself. While we were still in the van, I informed Nancy and Martin that my assistant, who normally helped me run the diving school, had suddenly been taken ill, and that therefore there would probably be organizational issues. Nancy and Martin looked unperturbed by this warning. Like most tourists, they were in a holiday mood, and it didn’t seem to them that anything in the world could spoil their diving enjoyment. They found the Casa Raya enchanting.
The following Tuesday we were joined by Ralph, a regular client and experienced diver who’d been coming to me for years. Starting Friday, I also had a family of first-time divers, including children, so that I had to work in two shifts. I warned everybody about organizational problems. There weren’t any. In the evenings, I’d drive home as early as possible to fill diving cylinders and wash out equipment. I answered e-mails and did the bookkeeping. I worked late into the night. Sometime after the weekend, I went to my bank’s website and found that a payment in the amount of fourteen thousand euros had been credited to my account. In re: “Diving instruction for casting Lotte Hass.” I stared so long at this entry that my online session was ended for security reasons.
I thought constantly about Jola and her plan. I kept looking in her diary. As long as I could admire Jola, I wasn’t afraid of her. On one occasion, I dialed her cell phone number. It no longer existed. After making that effort, I was soaked with sweat, like a marathon runner. From Jola’s Facebook page I learned that a new season of Up and Down was in the works. About Theo I learned nothing.
Christmas passed without anything happening. On New Year’s Eve, I had clients and went to bed before midnight. The New Year was 2012. A number like any other. After breakfast on New Year’s morning, I sat around for a while. Exactly fourteen years had passed since the day I left Germany and began my new life on the island. Fourteen years. An unimaginable span of time. I thought about the day of the murder attempt, or more precisely, about a very specific moment in that day, and an instantaneous feeling of gratitude flooded through me. All at once, that second appeared to me as the most important moment of my life. I had hesitated, looked at Theo’s unconscious face, and thought about Jola. And then I had decided. I hadn’t let Theo sink to the bottom of the sea; instead, I’d saved his life. Gratitude for that decision drove tears into my eyes. I sat there with my empty coffee cup in front of me and wept. Afterward I could breathe, freely and deeply. Something had changed. I needed only to think back on that hesitation to feel that I’d become someone else. I no longer understood why I’d found “Stay out of it” such an appealing motto fourteen years before. Now it repelled me. When I climbed into the van to go diving, I felt better. In a fundamental way.
January was, as always, a slow time. Who goes on vacation right after New Year’s? Only a few retirees, singles, and freelancers. On the first Saturday of the year, a single new client arrived. Her name was Katja, and she was a criminal defense lawyer, a specialist in such major felonies as murder, homicide, and rape. We hit it off from the start. On the first evening, I invited her to dinner. On the second evening, we made love. She was over forty and correspondingly avid. She sucked my cock for a long time. In the end, she straddled me and rode me like an experienced jockey to the finish line. On the third evening, we signed a contract that bound her to secrecy and stipulated her consultation fee as equivalent to the costs of completing an Advanced Open Water Diver course and obtaining nitrox certification.
I told her the whole story. As I spoke, I had to control myself to keep from blubbering. Only then did I realize how much the previous weeks had exhausted me. The silence. The waiting. The questions. I couldn’t take any more. I described to Katja how Jola’s plan kept turning through my mind in an endless loop, how I couldn’t stop questioning what had happened, how my obsession was eating me up inside. She said she was a lawyer, not a psychiatrist, and I should pull myself together. I gave her the diary. She read it so fast that it looked as though she was just superficially flipping through the pages.