"I didn't know."
He said this in a dull and broken tone of which his voice had seemed to me incapable.
"Yes, you did. You knew very well. During that week you were listening to interrogations taped by the Americans. Interrogations of her."
"I didn't know."
"What interests me is what you do know. Everything you know about those days. To the very last word. You were a methodical man. You even kept certain objects that belonged to her, isn't that right? Photos… Everything you know, written down. To help you, I'll ask you questions. Yes, an interrogation, you're quite used to them."
"But I kept nothing! I remember nothing!"
We turned. In the silent respite between two onslaughts of rain the gravel grated beneath footfalls, like the crunch of broken glass.
Vinner's wife seemed not to notice my presence. Upright, with an air of ruffled dignity, she stopped a few yards away from us.
"What is it, Val?"
Her tone of voice and a slight raising of her chin summed up the whole of their life as a couple: sure, I have a husband with a strange past, whose profession is pretty hard to explain to our friends, but my tact and my remote serenity make it all perfectly acceptable.
"I forgot to give your husband this scientific journal which he'll need tomorrow," I announced, taking a magazine from my bag.
She smiled distractedly, as if she had just noticed me in the darkness, and moved away, saying good night to no one in particular. In the middle of the path, beside a little lamp, she bent down to pick up a small plastic spade left there by the children. The fabric of her dressing gown, very fine, like satin, revealed the line of her back, the breadth of her hips. In a quite unreal vision I found myself thinking about the night they would spend together, the nights he always spent beside this beautiful woman's body, their pleasure.
"Don't complicate things," I said to Vinner, moving toward the gate. "I have nothing to lose. But you have a fine life ahead of you. That's worth a few admissions. Tomorrow I'll wait to hear from you. And don't forget that I'm working in tandem, as the marksmen say. If I'm waked up by the police at four a.m., my colleague will be forced to wake you up at four-thirty. Sweet dreams."
He phoned me at nine and proposed that we should meet in two days' time at his office in Saint Petersburg.
In the foyer of my hotel there was a bookshelf squeezed between two plants with broad glossy leaves: from it I took down three or four volumes at random to occupy those two rainy days, to stop me thinking about Vinner. I tried to identify with the characters in these American novels, to believe in the lives of an honest, warmhearted horse breeder, or a naive young woman from the country ensnared by the big city. But in a roundabout way my mind kept returning to our nocturnal conversation. I vaguely envied those authors who knew everything about the slightest mood swings of their heroes, who guessed their intentions, even when "after that, without knowing why, Hank always avoided taking the North Falls Road." I felt I could understand the attraction of these pages, turned by so many hands, all these fictional worlds. It was the comfort of omniscience, the vision of chaos vanquished, pinned down, like a hideous insect in a glass case.
Thinking about Vinner, I did not even know whether, during our conversation in the rain, he had been afraid, had felt guilty, had believed me really prepared to shoot him and his wife. I did not know if the change in his tone of voice was assumed or not. I did not know his order of preference for ways of getting rid of me: the police, a contract killer, an amicable outcome. I did not know if he was particularly perturbed by my appearance. In a nutshell, I had no idea what was going on in his head.
I closed the book and pictured Vinner going back up to his house after my departure, shutting the door, going through all the little rituals of bedtime hygiene, lying down beside his wife. I sensed that these daily gestures verged on madness. But what would be real insanity would in fact be for me to picture Vinner lying beside that beautiful woman's body I had recently glimpsed through the satiny fabric of her dressing gown, to picture him caressing her, to picture them making love. For it was quite possible that everything might happen in precisely that way: the trivial hygiene routine, their bedroom, their bodies. I told myself that a real book should have copied this improbable sequence of real actions. A man learns what Vinner had learned, goes up to his house, washes, goes to bed, draws his wife to him, squeezes her breasts, caresses her thighs, enters her, faithfully following all the small singularities of their sexual ritual.
My two days' wait was spent between this phantasmagoria of imagined actions and snatches of reading and an increasingly clear mental certainty: whatever happened, I would leave without having learned what Vinner, to use the language of the novels filling that hotel bookshelf, felt in his heart of hearts.
He met me in front of the entrance to the building. A third Vinner, I thought, recalling the first one, the charismatic guide to the seaside paradise, then the second, a man in sandals disturbed on a quiet evening at home. And now this businessman in a dark suit who wove together into a single swift sequence a cold smile of greeting, a thrust against the copper of the revolving door, and this warning, expressed as a brief, uncompromising statement: "We will have to leave our bags at the desk. They've installed a metal detector." He was already handing his own to the attendant.
As he walked into his office he made a quick sign with his head in the direction of two men who were in the process of shifting bulky cardboard cartons around. "Sorry about the mess, but we're in the middle of moving offices: I hope their presence won't disturb you." I recognized one of the movers as the reader of newspapers I had seen reflected in a fragment of mirror on the pillar at the restaurant the day we had lunch. The cartons were placed just behind the armchair Vinner offered me. The speed with which he embarked on this meeting smacked of a well-prepared operation. He had doubtless managed to contact our alleged mutual friend in China, or else the man had already returned. Furthermore, over two days he had been able to verify that I was in Destin on my own. Glancing at the cartons, I noticed that some of them were big enough to hold a man's body.
"I owe you something," he said, opening a drawer in his desk. "The journal you gave me so as not to alarm my wife. Here it is back, but with something extra."
Vinner handed me an English newspaper. He had certainly envisaged a theatrical effect but could not have been aware of the force of the shock. There were various articles on the arms traffic controlled by the Russian Mafia. Photos, statistics. And suddenly this headline: "Death of one of the barons of the nuclear network." Very clearly in the photograph I recognized the face of Shakh.
I did not take in Vinner's opening remarks. He was probably asking me if I had known the man in the photograph well. I gave no reply, still blinded by the expression of the eyes, the movement of the lips I sensed behind the immobility of the photo. All the article did was to list the usual components of the criminal web: dubious contracts, the leakage of military technologies from a Russia in decay, exorbitant commissions, rivalries, the settling of accounts, the death of an "arms baron." As I was skimming through these paragraphs I caught up with Vinner's voice. Curiously enough, it sounded the same vaguely contemptuous and triumphant note as the style of the article.
"… a strange character. I only met him once and that was for highly technical reasons. And he could find nothing better to do than talk about the war. His war, that is. It was so beside the point that I almost asked him if he'd driven a tank himself. I thought that would bring him to his senses. And then-"
I noticed that the two men behind my back had stopped their commotion but were still in the room. I interrupted Vinner, "He would have told you he had. First of all in the Leningrad area, then in the battle of Kursk."