When he woke, he knew intuitively that they had already left. He moved around the empty bed, thinking he could recognize her smell, which he knew so well, but then suddenly turned his eyes away, as if afraid of finding something revolting.
It looked like a fine day outside. The prosecutor was nowhere to be found. As for the police chief, Mark ran into him as he was leaving his office.
“I was sure we’d run into each other someday,” the chief said warmly.
Mark was no longer surprised by anything. The idea that the chief had also foreseen and even expected this meeting seemed natural.
“Listen, do you want to come with me? I have to go out of town, and on the way we’ll have all the time you need to tell me about your request.”
Mark was tempted to answer that he had no request to make, but the chief didn’t let him get a word in. As he got into the car, he confided that he had always enjoyed the company of artists. To back this up, he nodded toward a literary review lying on the rear seat. Then he leaned toward the driver, presumably to whisper directions in his ear.
“You won’t be bored,” he told Mark. “Quite the opposite. I think you’ll have a great time.”
Just my luck! Mark thought. I could do without that — watching someone get arrested! This whole business could have begun far more simply — like, with forms to fill out.
“Despite all the work I get loaded with, I do try to find the time to read,” the police chief went on. “Of course, I dont really grasp all the contemporary stuff. You know, in that issue there, for instance, there are some poems … How should I say… Well, I would really like your opinion, at least on one of them, the one that mentions the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg….”
Mark leafed through the magazine until he found the poem. A moment later, he burst out laughing.
“You see!” the police chief exclaimed. “You’re an artist, but even you couldn’t help yourself laughing. That proves there’s something not quite right.”
“That’s true enough,” Mark said.
“Please read me the first two lines. I’d like to hear them said by you.”
Mark began to recite the verse aloud:
I shall come unto you dressed in sackcloth
Wearing Luxembourg as a condom
They guffawed in unison for a while. Then the policeman expressed his fear that the lines might be seen as offensive to the duchy. “We mustn’t forget that tiny Luxembourg is a member-state of the European Union!” Mark shrugged his shoulders. The chief went on: “What I say to myself is this: if you allow someone to refer to Luxembourg or Denmark as condoms, what would you say if someone else wanted to describe you — I mean, your country — as, let’s say, a chamber pot? That would be shocking, wouldn’t it? The land of eagles … a toilet bowl?”
Mark laughed again.
They had left the town and were driving toward the highlands. Mark could barely stop himself asking where they were heading. From time to time he told himself that the farther they got from town, the easier it would be to broach the subject he was anxious to discuss.
At last they came to a halt at the edge of a copse.
“Beautiful scenery, isn’t it?” the police chief said. “I told you you wouldn’t be bored.”
He got out first, and looked around. The driver opened the trunk and took out a blanket and two bottles of water, which he set down beside his boss.
Mark and the policeman sat down as if they were about to have a picnic.
“Marvelous scenery, you must admit,” the chief said again.
Then he took a pair of binoculars from his bag and began to adjust the focus.
“I have to look at something,” he said suddenly as he put the binoculars to his eyes.
What a magnificent police force! No two ways about it! Mark thought, ironically. God alone knew what there could be to observe in these boondocks.
“Do you want a turn?” the other man asked as he offered Mark the binoculars.
Mark took the instrument, placed it on the bridge of his nose, and steered it toward the area that the police chief had been watching. As he turned the focus knob, the mountains raced nearer with frightening speed. He thought he could make out the overgrown bushes that masked what was supposed to be the secret entrance to the deep storage depot of the National Archives. A strange association of ideas brought his girlfriend’s genitals to mind. Then he thought of the head of state making his way into the depot the day after assuming supreme power.
He was intensely eager to learn something more about that whole story. But he restrained himself, remembering he had vowed to ask no questions until he had managed to get the main matter off his chest.
He handed the binoculars back to their owner, and with a slight feeling of guilt repeated the police chief’s own words back to him:
“What a marvelous view! …”
He sensed that he was being looked at sourly. Was the chief so naive as to think no ill? Maybe he ought to interrogate the policeman about some case or other. About the bank holdup, for instance. Or even, so as to seem even more loyal, to ask him if they had any chance, from their vantage point, of seeing the robbers on the move.
He made up his mind to ask that question and waited for the chief to put down the binoculars before speaking.
When his companion lowered his arm, Mark saw that his eyes had gone quite empty, as if their former liveliness had stayed stuck to the viewfinden He must have seen something, Mark thought to himself. Something he would rather not have seen. How else could he account for the policeman’s expression, halfway between weariness and annoyance?
“Unless I’m mistaken, you have something to say to me,” the police chief said at last.
Mark took a deep breath before launching into his subject. The policeman listened without interrupting once. He batted his eyelids several times, then opened them wide before shutting them completely.
“Hmm, so that’s what it’s about,” he mumbled when Mark had finished, then took up the binoculars again.
He looked into the far distance for a moment.
“So that’s what it’s all about,” he repeated, as if he could see in the viewfinder whatever it was that had surprised him.
“I’m not asking for an immediate answer,” said Mark. “I do realize that my request is extremely unusual. I must ask you once again to forgive me.”
“Fine, fine,” the policeman murmured.
Mark wanted to break the ice that had formed between them by moving on to some other topic, something harmless or amusing. He had only worried that the police chief would answer him with a decisive no.
As he racked his brains for a subject that might lighten the atmosphere, maybe something about the NYPD methods featured in the papers recently, or about the training some Albanian policemen were getting in America to learn about those methods, he stumbled onto a quite different tack and came out with the view that humanity, up to the present, had been following a completely wrong path.
The police chief began to listen with rapt attention. I must be crazy, Mark thought, to choose a time like this to start philosophizing!
“Could I look through the binoculars one more time?” he asked point-blank, perhaps to avert a complete rupture between the two of them.
The policeman handed him the glasses.
“If you should happen to see anything suspicious, let me know. Meanwhile, I’ll have a little nap.”
Mark stretched out his hand and took the binoculars. He had never imagined things would proceed in such an ordinary way.
He clapped the instrument to his eyes and directed it once more toward the mountainside. And as before, the mountains swooped first to the left, as if to shake off the snow from their peaks and shoulders, then to the right, and then came to a relative degree of rest. The summits stayed icy sharp, all the same, and the dark streaks etched into their sides seemed to have no intention of reaching an arrangement with the world down below. “If you happen to see anything suspicious, let me know,” Mark mumbled, repeating the policeman’s words like an incantation. As the chief was asleep, that meant that he, Mark, was now deputizing for him. You could tell he was asleep by the change in his breathing and by the regular dilation of his nostrils. Up above, in fact, everything looked suspicious, even the foreign body that had fallen from the sky — the snow.