Neither of these things happened, because of the kiss. It was this incident that startled the driver and brought the story to an abrupt close. Instead of throwing out the doll, they had all of them overturned.
He banged his fists on his temples. But what about the police? The first transcript had mentioned this very thing, the dummy, found alongside Besfort Y.’s body.
The researcher was in no hurry to call himself an idiot. The truth was still incomplete, but in essence he had found it. Of course, some details did not fit. There were discrepancies: the living bodies and the plastic did not match. There were differences of interpretation, and confusions of past and future. But these were temporary. It was like a group portrait: a pair of lovers, a doll, an impossible kiss and a murder. These ingredients would not assemble themselves into one picture. This was understandable: such mismatches between the conception of a murder and its enactment were familiar. Sometimes a murder and its victim would not come together, as if they had confused their schedules, until eventually they found each other.
The researcher strove to reduce what had happened to its simplest elements, as if it were an after-dinner story. Shortly after the taxi had left the hotel, the driver noticed that his passenger, muffled in her overcoat and scarf, seemed more like a doll than a living woman. After his initial surprise, mixed with a kind of superstitious fear, he pulled himself together. Weren’t there plenty of crazy people who travelled with broken violoncellos, brandy stills or tortoises, all painstakingly wrapped? So he was not unnerved at all, and even remained calm when the plastic creature appeared to show signs of life. This was an illusion, produced by the bends in the road, or because he was tired. Only when his passenger tried to kiss the doll did the taxi driver snap.
The researcher imagined different scenarios, as he was accustomed to doing for every crime. In the first, the driver was paid in advance to throw a doll into the road. In the next, more serious scenario, it was not a doll but a corpse that was to be thrown out, of course for a larger sum of money. In both versions, the strange passenger tried to kiss the figure beside him, a doll or a corpse, and that was when disaster struck.
The final and gravest version involved the taxi driver’s complicity in the murder. On the way to the airport, he and Besfort were to turn off into a waste clearing, to bury the body. It was Besfort’s attempt at a farewell kiss that caused the catastrophe.
8
It was early Sunday morning when, to the sound of Easter bells, he set off sleepily for the taxi driver’s apartment. The city was ashen after winter. There’s no hope, he thought, without being able to say of what.
The woman who opened the door glowered at him, but the taxi driver said he had been expecting him. He was now much readier to talk than before.
Everybody wants to unburden themselves, the researcher said to himself. But they passed all their burdens to him.
“I will only ask you one thing,” he said in a low voice. “Please be even more precise than before.”
The driver sighed. He listened to the researcher, his eyes steady. Then he hung his head for a long time. “Was it a living woman or a doll?”
He repeated what the researcher said in a low voice, as if talking to himself. “Your questions get more difficult all the time.”
The researcher looked at him gratefully. He had not shouted, what’s all this crazy stuff, what the hell are you driving at? He had simply said that the question was a difficult one.
Slowly, as before, he described that grim morning with its incessant sleet, the taxi engine running as he waited for his two customers. Finally they emerged from the hotel door. Clutching one another, with coat collars upturned, they hurried to the taxi. Without waiting for the driver to get out, the man opened the car’s left-hand door for his girlfriend, and went round to the other side to sit down in the opposite corner, from where he ordered Flughafen! in a foreign accent.
As the driver had said so often, the traffic had never been so congested as that day. It crawled forward through the semidarkness of dawn, stopped, started, came to a complete standstill. There were refrigerated trucks, lorries, buses, all drenched in the rain, with the names of firms, shipping agencies, mobile phone numbers, reappearing to the left or right as they filtered through, as if in some nightmare. During his time in the hospital, those inscriptions in strange and frightening languages had haunted him. Words in French, Spanish, Dutch. Half of united Europe and all the Tower of Babel was there.
The researcher’s eyes lost their earlier despondency. You can’t spin the story out indefinitely, he thought. Whether you want to or not, at some stage you will have to answer my question.
He waited as long as he could before repeating it. The driver took a moment of silence to think.
“Yes, that business of the dummy. Whether that woman resembled a doll or not… Of course she did. Especially now that you remind me. Sometimes she looked like a dummy, and sometimes he did. As everybody does. Behind car windows with condensation, that’s how most people look, distant, remote, made of wax.”
The researcher felt his temper rise.
“I asked you not to dodge the question,” he suddenly cried, “at least not this one. I begged you, I pleaded on my knees.”
Oh God, he’s started again, thought the man.
The researcher’s voice was hoarse. He almost gasped.
“I gave you a last chance to tell the truth, to get all that fear gnawing you inside out of your system. Tell me, what was that thing that terrified you so much? A man trying to kiss a dummy? Or a doll trying to kiss a man? Or was something missing that made such a thing impossible for either of them? Tell me!”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m not in a position to say. I can’t.”
“Tell me your secret.”
“I can’t. I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to because you’re under suspicion too. Tell me. How were you going to dispose of the body, after the murder? Where were you going to throw the dummy? Don’t try and wriggle out of it! You know everything. You were keeping track of everything. In your mirror. Like a sniffer dog.”
The researcher’s voice subsided again. He had been so excited when he arrived at the apartment, hoping to please the driver too with his discovery. But he hadn’t wanted to know. Mentally, he addressed the doll itself. Nobody wants you, he said to it. Nobody can even see you but me.
Silently he drew from his briefcase the photos of the two victims. Would the gentleman take another look. Notice that the dead woman’s face is not visible anywhere.
The man averted his eyes. He stammered in terror. Why were they pressing only him for this secret? If this victim wasn’t a woman but a doll, why hadn’t the police said anything?
Psychic, the researcher said to himself. This was the same first question that he had put to Liza Blumberg, after which his mind had strangely clouded over. He hadn’t heard her reply.
The driver spoke haltingly. Something inexplicable had happened in his taxi. Something impossible… but why were they asking only him to explain?
The researcher interrupted. “You’re the last person who should complain. I’ve asked you a thousand times why you crashed the taxi after seeing a kiss and you won’t give me an answer.”
They both sat in silence, stupefied with exhaustion. You might just as well ask me why I believed Liza Blumb’s story, and I wouldn’t know how to reply, the researcher reflected. We could all ask questions of each other. What right have we got in this pitch-black night to ask about things that are beyond our powers to see?