He guessed that the head of the music section, who was sitting next to him, was thinking along exactly the same lines.
“I’ve often thought of what you told me,” Mark said, “about the head of state coming up here one night, to go through secret papers”
His friend nodded and then said, as if lost in thought, “All of them dive down deep to try to find something.”
“All of them?” Mark repeated. Yes, that must be so. Some use a bloody shirt, others have recourse to ruses of various kinds, but they are all trying to get down to the bottom of it all, to the crime at the wellspring. Just like Oedipus.
The story of Oedipus, when it came to Mark’s mind, always made him feel weary, for the poor king’s tangle of troubles seemed as though it would never end. But no one had delved any deeper than he to discover the source and origin of his sinning. So deep, in fact, that he went right back to his mother’s womb. Which is where he finally found his perdition. Go fuck your mother! That vulgar curse, uttered a thousand times, surely existed in every one of the Balkan tongues. Go back up your mother’s cunt! …
Mark shook his head to dispel the drowsiness fogging his mind. Inside the coach, arguments had flared up anew. If the opposition wants to exploit this murder, my friend, then you can be sure the government will do likewise! The two sides have been copying each other like a pair of monkeys for a good long while. If one of them claims that the Kanun has just been used as a screen for the crime — then the other will, too. You can’t rule that out, someone agreed. Woe betide the Kanunl … You should say, Woe betide Marian!
Well, yes, the real victim is certainly Marian, Mark thought. The poor man would have been utterly distraught to see the farce that was being made of his tragedy. But in circumstances like these, you can’t be sure of anything. In his last extremity, he probably had renounced the trendsetter’s mentality and manners that he’d adopted with his expensive shirts, loud ties, bouquets, and jolly “Okays.” He probably had repented, and wanted to see his own blood debt taken back, tragically, the way it had been in ancient times.
Mark gave a deep sigh.
Black Rock had now dissolved in the far distance. But that did not prevent Mark imagining its reeling dance in the fog. And there was no one left who could say what it meant.
COUNTER-CHAPTER 5
MARK WAS AWAKENED all of a sudden by a disagreeable sensation. It resembled the kind of allergic itch that sleep does not soothe but only heightens. And that was how it turned out. After he had had his eyes open for a little while, the itching faded into a mere tickle.
It wasn’t yet midnight, but Mark was not especially surprised by his sudden awakening after only an hour’s sleep. It seemed quite natural, and it occurred to him that it was lucky he’d woken up, since he had so much to do. It would be great to use the quiet hours of the night to get things done, like slackers do, or people who like to make you think they’re work zealots.
So he jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes, and went out. As he walked to the office, he felt icy cold. He knew there was a thick file of matters pending waiting for him, but he couldn’t recall what they were. The walk to work seemed longer than usual, but that didn’t surprise him either. Nor was he at all struck by the sign on the door. Instead of “Arts Center,” it read “Police Station.”
The night porter nodded a sleepy greeting. Mark bounded up the stairs, threw his office door open, and fell into the seat at his desk. The pending file was right there. A thick file. Dull gray. Whole pages of it came back to him all at once with a clarity of detail that left him astounded at his own power of recall. Of course, he had read the sheets over and over; he had thought about them so many times that he knew a fair number almost by heart.
Three men suspected of the holdup at the bank had been arrested two days earlier and were still maintaining their innocence. They freely admitted to being not entirely clean, but they insisted they had had nothing to do with this particular heist. They even took offense at being accused of such a vulgar crime. They could just about accept being suspected of an art theft, but as for robbing a bank …
Then they confessed to other misdemeanors. For instance, they said they had tried to rape an aunt of theirs, and also to make off with various works of art….
“To hell with it, peccadilloes of that sort are chicken feed compared to the horrors that are going on in the country! You should put your time and energy into running down the big-time gangsters who run the government and parliament! They’ve got close ties with all sorts of mobsters, and with the Russian mafia too! Those are the people you should put in leg irons, not us! Anyway, there’s no hurry, seeing as we’re talking about old crimes.”
“Time waits for no crime,” Mark declared. He had questioned one of the guards of the former prime minister dozens of times, and he never could get anything at all out of a man who had been supposed to look after a leader who was killed, or else killed himself, twenty years earlier.
“I don’t know what went on on the first floor of the residence,” the man always replied. “My job was to look after the three doors on the ground floor, and I can swear to you that no one came in or went out.”
“And who looked after the basement level?”
“The cellar? You mean the secret tunnel, the one that led to the house of the Comrade, the residence of the Great Guide? Are you really as ignorant as that, or are you just pretending? The tunnel had no guard because nobody would have dared spy on a passage leading to the house of the Guide. The reinforced door had a handle and bolt on one side only, on the Comrade’s side, so that he alone could open it when he felt like it.”
“Oh, I see. You mean that it was like the door that keeps Death from us, a one-way door you can only go through this way, and not that?”
“Yes, that’s just how it was.”
Mark felt weary in advance as he realized he wouldn’t get anything more out of the man tonight, or any night. The case was as dead as the other one about the queen with rope marks around her neck. Between her two suicide attempts, she had made two confessions that contradicted each other entirely. In the first set of avowals, she had said unambiguously that her husband, Oedipus Rex, had never been her son. In the second confession, she admitted to having married her son, despite having known for many years that he had killed his own father. She had promised to explain everything at the next interrogation, but in the small hours of the appointed day, she managed at last to hang herself.
Files and yet more files, he thought. Instead of slowly getting clearer, the mysteries just thicken. The trial of Tantalus was now 102,000 years old, and the truth of it had been lost forever. Fortunately, investigations are done more quickly nowadays, but some of them could be awfully complicated: for instance, all the fuss the local Greens had been making over the killing of a house snake was far from calming down. The chief of police had poured oil on the fire when he had exclaimed without thinking, “We havent got enough time to look after people, so why should we rack our brains over the death of a reptile?” The local press took it up with a few articles, and then investigators came down from Tirana, accompanied by a lawyer representing the Center for the Protection of Endangered Species, based in Munich. By all recognized definitions, the Balkan house snake belonged on the list of such species. Harsh punishment was demanded for such abuse. The defendants stood firm: they had neither killed nor abused the beast. It had died on its own, or, to be precise, it had frozen to death. Its carcass could be inspected at the morgue; they could do an autopsy if they wanted. It was in December, when snakes do freeze to death unless they are in the right conditions. Those said conditions had gone into decline — not just for snakes, but for the whole town. There were electricity cuts, and firewood was scarce. They weren’t even able to heat the children’s bedroom, so how could they manage to keep a snake warm?