Despite Van Veeteren’s unfathomability. And it was only in the early stages.
“No,” he said. “Van Veeteren is Van Veeteren.” He glanced over at the grand piano. Why hadn’t anybody appeared? Reinhart had guessed it would be one o’clock, but it was twenty past by now.
“I don’t know,” said Jung. “Anyway, here comes our sole. Yum-yum!”
Forty-five minutes later, Edward Masseck paid his bill and left. He had been all alone from start to finish. Jung had just ordered a second helping of candied walnuts, but they decided to pay and report to their colleagues.
“Hell’s bells!” said Reinhart when he heard that his prey had escaped. “How much did the meals cost?”
“It’s all yours,” said Münster, handing him the bill.
Reinhart stared at the pale blue scrap of paper.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “Stauff and I have been sitting in the car for two hours with half a packet of peanuts between us.”
“It was an excellent meal,” said Jung from the backseat. “Maybe it would be a good idea to try again tomorrow?”
37
Dvořák’s New World Symphony had enveloped him during the last fifty miles or so, and that had been the right choice of music. Over the years he had begun to get a feeling for this kind of thing—the relationship between the task he was involved with, the weather and time of year and music. There were rising and falling movements that needed to be followed, not resisted. Flows and analogies that worked together, harmonized and illuminated one another…. Or however you might like to express it. It was difficult to put such things into words and explain them. Much easier to feel them.
Ah well, everything gets easier as the years go by. But as the years passed he had also become more wary of words. That wasn’t exactly surprising—bearing in mind his usual working environment, in which it was more of the exception than the rule when anybody stuck to the truth.
Language is lying, as somebody said.
Anyway, the New World. And as the skies cleared and the afternoon sun started to dry out the persistent rain that had fallen during the night and morning, he approached his goal. His fears about dizzy spells and lack of judgment in traffic had proven to be unfounded. He had also made frequent stops; sat with coffee and cake in depressing concrete-and-glass roadside cafés, gone for short walks, stretched his legs again and again and even performed gymnastic exercises as recommended in the postoperative program he’d had thrust into his hand on being released from hospital.
He had also been careful to refrain from alcohol and tobacco. He had to get back home again. Preferably, in any case.
His stock of toothpicks had been exhausted long before the Dvořák.
He parked in a little square called Cazarros Plats, and as he looked around for a suitable place to eat, he wondered who Cazarro might have been. He sounded more like a conquistador than a north European statesman, that was for sure.
Wedged between a department store and an undistinguished 1950s local government building was a little Italian restaurant specializing in pizzas and pasta dishes. He decided to give it a try. His meeting with Sister Marianne was at five o’clock, and he didn’t have all the time in the world.
But the food wasn’t the main point anyway. That was a glass of red wine and that longed-for cigarette.
And also the need to concentrate before what was in store. He had made an unnecessary fuss regarding preparations many times in the past, but there was something special about this occasion that had been clear to him from the moment he set off from home. Something he wasn’t able to handle and that he’d given up trying to control a long time ago.
A game in which he was much more of a chip than a punter.
It was not a new sensation, just an example of or a variation on that old deterministic principle, presumably: the unavoidable business of patterns and preordained order in the environment. Of increasing or decreasing entropy.
No, those thoughts about the arbitrary nature of life that he had flirted with the other day were something he now felt no enthusiasm for.
If there really was a creator or a force—or at the very least an all-seeing eye—it must be able to look down from its elevated position and make out the lines, the veins and arteries in time and space. The structures that seem so incomprehensible from our usual worm’s-eye view.
And the mutual connections and consequences of actions. Was there any other possibility? This must be what constituted the categories of a god.
These patterns.
But if there was no higher force—did it really make much difference?
What about Anselm and the proof of God’s existence? Hadn’t he always had trouble in seeing the point of it?
He fumbled in his breast pocket for a toothpick, then remembered the state of affairs and lit a cigarette instead.
Wouldn’t the pattern exist even so, in the same way as DNA spirals and the crystals making up snowflakes have always existed, irrespective of whether there has been anyone or anything to observe them?
What does a fractal care about a camera? he asked himself.
Good questions. Recurring questions. He put down his cigarette, poked listlessly at his fettuccine and took a sip of wine. It was hard to feel really hungry these days, for whatever reason. Whether it was due to the missing piece of bowel or something else.
Justice was another aspect.
Simpler and easier to deal with, he had always thought, even if he had never really needed to put it to the ultimate test. Despite more than thirty years in the force.
The tool of justice. That was how he needed to regard himself, after all, if he was to be really serious about it. It sounded a little high-flown, even a little pathetic; but it wasn’t something he went on about. It was merely an attitude he adopted in order to motivate himself, but it was a damned important one.
When it came to justifying his own existence and the work he did, he sometimes needed to dig deep, that was something he had learned. Deeper and deeper, perhaps—as if with every year that passed the very foundations became coated with a new and thicker layer of mud and dirt stirred up by the underworld in which he spent every working day.
Something like that anyway.
He still hadn’t found an answer to the key question. He had formulated it several years ago in connection with the G file, and it wasn’t especially complicated: Am I prepared to take things into my own hands when the law and the institutions fail?
If he was standing beside a murderer or some other violent criminal, and knew for certain—with 100 percent certainty—that the person was guilty, would it be morally more correct to let him go because of lack of proof rather than ensuring that justice was done?
He inhaled on his cigarette.
There were endless special cases, of course, and it was impossible to oversee the consequences. He had been through it all many times in theory, and perhaps he ought to be grateful that he hadn’t needed to put the theory to the test.
It had been a close thing at times, though. Especially then, seven years ago, in Linden.
And there was nothing to indicate that it would become relevant on this occasion, either.
Or was there?
He looked at his watch and saw that it was high time he paid and set off for her apartment, if he didn’t want the nun to have to wait for him.
The apartment was painted white and tastefully appointed. There was a minimum of furniture; in the living room, which is where she took him, there was only a low couch, two floor cushions and a table, with a bookcase and a prayer bench in a corner. On the walls were a crucifix and two candles in brass holders. And a picture of a church window, probably Chartres Cathedral. That was all.