Meyer was taking notes now and as well oiled as I now was, I had warmed to my subject at last.
“Maybe you couldn’t identify your lady. So maybe you should try to identify the Schmuck — I mean the ring on her finger. Did you show it to some dealers? Did you ever put a picture of it in the newspaper?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
Leuenberger colored. “Because we didn’t want to have to deal with a lot of time-wasters claiming it was theirs, when it wasn’t. That’s why not.”
I laughed again. “Dealing with time-wasters is what this job is all about, Inspector. That’s why they pay us. To waste our time. I’m perfectly serious. That’s what police work mostly is. A waste of time. Whenever I hear a copper say, ‘They don’t pay me to waste my time,’ I say, ‘That’s exactly what they do pay you for.’ Inspector, if I were you I’d take that ring to every diamond dealer in this canton. And then the next canton. Ninety-nine percent of your effort will be wasted, of course. But it’s quite possible that one percent of it will be useful. Just see if I’m wrong. It strikes me that you’ve only ever carried out half of this investigation. Most of the real police work has yet to be done. The body and the boat are probably the least important parts of this whole case.”
“Maybe you should reopen the case,” said Meyer.
“Maybe,” said Leuenberger. “I’d have to ask the commissioner. I’m not sure he’d agree. Reopening a case is not something we very often do in Switzerland. People here prefer a quiet life. To reopen a case I would need some real evidence. And to get that, I’d need to justify a budget to my boss. Which I can’t do, right now. Money’s tight here.”
I poured myself another glass of schnapps and laughed again, enjoying the inspector’s very obvious discomfort. Sometimes the only fun of coming from a big city is to make people who come from somewhere small feel even smaller.
“I don’t blame you. And honestly, Inspector. What does it matter? In almost any country outside of Switzerland murder has ceased to be very shocking. And you can take my word for that. From what I’ve heard, murder’s a way of life in Poland. The person who murdered your lady in the lake was a rank amateur by comparison with some of the people I work for.”
“That’s wartime for you, I suppose,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s wartime.” It was clear he had no idea what I was talking about; and I wasn’t much inclined to tell him. I felt ashamed enough of being German as it was.
“All the same,” said Leuenberger, “to say what you say, Captain Gunther, and indeed the way you say it, is to believe in nothing. What about Christianity? What about love your neighbor? What about forgiving our enemies?”
“Oh, I fully intend to forgive them. Just as soon as I’ve kicked them around the room and shot them in the head.”
“You sound like a nihilist.”
“No, I just don’t think that life has very much meaning.”
“To be a nihilist,” he continued, “well — I think a man must feel very alone to believe in absolutely nothing, as you seem to.”
“I don’t mind being alone. Being solitary — that’s an occupational hazard. Men in our profession need to be alone so that we can ignore the roar of our colleagues’ ignorance and stupidity and think for ourselves. But I’m not so crazy about being lonely. There’s a difference between that and solitude. Being lonely makes me feel sorry for myself and I can’t stand that. I end up doing things I shouldn’t do. Like drinking a little too much. Stealing other men’s wives. Trying to stay alive at all costs. And looking for just a little happiness in this life. You know, I often think if I hadn’t been a policeman, I might have been a really good man.”
“Come now, Bernie, you are a good man,” said Meyer. “You’re just trying to shock us.”
“Am I? I wonder, although mostly I wonder about the lady I’m going to see tomorrow. The lady on the lake. Perhaps if she wasn’t made to look so very like temptation I might find that kind of thing easier to resist. Then again, I guess that’s why women are shaped that way. If they were shaped any differently, I guess the human race would be much less successful.”
“There’s a sting in the tail of nearly everything you say, Captain,” observed the inspector.
“I come by it naturally. My own mother was a scorpion. Look, I’ll tell you one more thing about human nature and then I’ll go to bed before I drink too much and say something really cynical. The lady I’m seeing tomorrow certainly won’t thank me if I can’t stand up. She’s keen on good manners. Then again, maybe if I drink enough she won’t notice my nose being red. So, listen. This is some real wisdom for your next book, Paul. Good people are never as good as you probably think they are, and the bad ones aren’t as bad. Not half as bad. On different days we’re all good. And on other days, we’re evil. That’s the story of my life. That’s the story of everyone’s life.”
Forty
Dalia started to undress the minute she came through the door. It was almost as if she didn’t trust herself not to change her mind, or perhaps me not to start talking about Goebbels and the film role that was waiting for her back in Berlin. It worked, too. As soon as she threw off her Borsalino straw hat and her blue linen blazer and started to unbutton the white cotton blouse she was wearing, I felt obliged to come to her immediate assistance; her fingers were just too slow at pushing the buttons through their heavily starched holes. In just a matter of a few minutes I had her bare breasts balanced in my hands, after which it was impossible to think about anything else but her. Time passed quickly after that, as it always does under those circumstances. Anything compressed by desire shrinks a little. Goethe once compiled a list of what you needed to do in order to complement the sense of the beautiful that God had implanted in the human soul; and, to a list that included hearing a little music, reading a little poetry, and seeing a fine picture every day of your life, I would only have added contemplating the naked body of a beautiful woman like Dalia Dresner for a long half hour before making love to her. In fact, I think I might have placed that at the very top of the list.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered as my mouth and fingers took their cue from her very visible pleasure.
I had no intention of stopping, not even when, long behind her, I had finished and was little more than a pelvis pushing spasmodically at the space between her thighs like the last pumps of a dying heart as it attempted to delay the inevitability of our separation.
We lay awhile without moving at all. And finally she said, “Your face looks like a stoplight. What happened to your nose?”
“A wasp stung me.”
Dalia did her best to suppress a giggle. “Does it hurt?”
“Now you’re here, I don’t feel any pain at all.”
“Good. I thought maybe someone had hit you.”
“Who would want to do a thing like that?”
“I can think of someone.”
“Your husband, I suppose. I was afraid he was going to stop you from coming.”
“You were right to worry. I nearly didn’t get here at all. Stefan took my car. His Rolls-Royce is in the shop. Or so he says.”
“How did you get here?”
“I have a motorboat moored to the jetty right outside.”
“I never thought of that.”
“Everyone in and around Zurich has a boat somewhere. That’s the main point of living here. I love boats. As a matter of fact, I’m rather glad that I had to take the boat today. There is roadwork on Seestrasse and the boat was certainly quicker than the car. Less than half an hour. Besides, the lake is lovely at this time of year. The water is a lot smoother than the road right now.”