Van Veeteren sighed.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we do. I’d bet quite a large beer on him having murdered all of them — and tried to kill Reinhart as well. But proof! What proof have we got, for God’s sake? If we can’t match those fingerprints, or if he doesn’t give up and confess — well, we’re in a bit of a mess, aren’t we?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Münster, looking out at the sunshine. ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about that as well. And it’s not all cut and dried even if they do find his fingerprints on the book. We have to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt. .’
‘I know,’ grunted Van Veeteren. ‘Perhaps I haven’t mentioned it, but I was also a police officer in the distant past.’
Münster produced a sheet of paper.
‘We’ve started looking into his background. We haven’t got much yet, but there will be more — Krause and Moreno are dealing with that.’
Van Veeteren took the sheet of paper and read it without speaking. When he had finished he dropped it on the table and muttered to himself for a while. Took out his cigarette machine and started filling it with tobacco.
‘What shall we do?’ wondered Münster after half a minute.
Van Veeteren looked up. Closed the lid of his machine and put it in his pocket.
‘I want all the information about him that you can find,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow morning. We’ll wait until then, and I’ll make a plan. You can tell Heller that I shall be working full time from now on, in the highest salary bracket.’
‘That you-’
‘You heard.’
Münster tried another wry smile.
‘But I have no intention of sitting here while I’m doing it.’
‘I thought not,’ said Münster. ‘It’s pretty good weather out there.’
Van Veeteren stood up and looked out of the window.
‘It’s even better in Athens,’ he said, and left the room.
ATHENS, KEFALONIA, MAARDAM
MARCH 2001
48
The hotel was called Ormos and was in an alley leading out into Syntagma Square.
Only a stone’s throw from the Grande Bretagne, where he had stayed once in the distant past. So many years had passed since then, so much water and life and pain had flowed under the dark bridges. There wasn’t much left now.
Not much at all.
He had started telephoning Vasilis before he left Maardam, without receiving an answer, and he continued doing so all the first afternoon and evening.
In the end, shortly after ten o’clock, the phone was answered by a woman called Dea — presumably his new wife. As far as he could understand, that is — she spoke only Greek, so he restricted himself to basic information. Vasilis was in Thessaloniki and wasn’t expected back for another three or four days. No, it wasn’t a conference: his mother was ill. But it wasn’t all that bad — she wasn’t on her deathbed.
Yes, he had said, Wednesday or Thursday.
He asked for his telephone number and was given two: one to his mobile, and the other to his mother’s house, where he was staying. The mobile was apparently dodgy, she hadn’t got through to it earlier in the day, despite several attempts. Dea.
Or Thea.
He thanked her and hung up. He suddenly remembered that Vasilis had said she had red hair. Could Greeks have red hair? Odd, he thought. Damned odd. He smiled at the thought, and began rubbing the wound on his throat. It wasn’t irritating him any longer, but rubbing it had become a habit. He still had the sticking plaster on his hand — he could probably do without it now, but it could stay where it was. He didn’t fancy the idea of having to stare at a wound every time he looked at his hands.
He smoked a few cigarettes after the phone call. Sat on the wicker chair on the tiny balcony and breathed in petrol fumes from the road below together with the tobacco smoke. He recalled the smell from the first time he was here, in July twenty years ago, a few years before the stay at the Grande Bretagne. It had been hard, almost impossible to breathe during the unbearably hot afternoons.
It was rather better now. The temperature was probably around twelve to fifteen degrees: his lungs would no doubt adjust to the atmosphere, and he wouldn’t even notice the fumes. Everything becomes a habit sooner or later, he thought.
Everything.
Anyway, he was going to have to stay in Athens for a week. More or less. That was an unforeseen snag, but he had no desire to change his plans on that account. Everything would have to go ahead as he had planned, and as soon as he made contact with Vasilis he was bound receive the assistance he needed: they had that sort of relationship, and there was no reason to doubt that.
He went indoors and tried the mobile number. Despite what Dea had said, he had an answer after only three rings. Vasilis’s husky voice, restaurant noises in the background, somebody playing a bouzouki.
‘My friend! A voice from the past! Where are you?’
‘In Athens, and in deep shit. I need help with something.’
‘No problem, my friend! What do you want?’
‘A gun.’
Silence at the other end. Only the background noise of the restaurant and the bouzouki for five seconds.
‘A gun? What the fuck happened, my friend?’
‘We can talk about that when you come back home. When?’
More silence.
‘Wednesday. I promise you Wednesday, my friend! But what the hell. .?’
He gave Vasilis his own mobile number, but not that of the hotel.
‘Take care!’
‘I will.’
Now his throat really was itching.
To be on the safe side, he changed his hotel on the Monday. You never knew. That damned bookseller and that woman. He moved into a third-class boarding house out at Lykabettos, paid in advance and didn’t need to show his passport. Lay on his bed for hours, thinking about Mersault in Camus’s The Outsider. Felt neither hungry nor thirsty.
He had no desire to get up and sit by the window, looking at passing girls. Like Mersault. Even if there had been any in the narrow alley. Even if it had been overflowing with pussy.
He thought about his mother instead.
Thought about a Greek saying. A Greek man loves himself and his mother all his life. His wife for six months.
Anger had begun to boil up inside him; and disgust. He kept it hidden, but it bubbled away inexorably and made the room rotate slowly whenever he closed his eyes. The noise from the street and the rest of the building was also distorted when his eyes were closed, sounds became oppressive and insistent, seemed to join forces with the movement of the room and forced themselves inside him. Even so, he found it difficult not to keep his eyes closed. It was somehow alluring.
A sort of battle. A wrestling match with his mother, his anger and his disgust. Eyes closed. It was a blind struggle, with the noise and the rotation of the room its way of expressing itself. His mobile was switched off. At one point as darkness began to fall with incredible speed, he went out to the bathroom in the corridor and tried to be sick. But he failed. He lay on the bed again, ripped the sticking plaster off the back of his hand and contemplated the ravaged skin.
He waited until it was completely dark, then went out into the town.
Came back after midnight, slightly drunk on ouzo and cheap retsina. No food — there was no space inside him for food. Apart from a few olives and a lump of feta cheese one of the taverna owners had offered him without charge. He smoked another ten or twelve cigarettes while lying on the bed, and fell asleep, feeling sweaty and rather sick, at turned three.
There was a sort of emptiness that he soon felt unable to fill any longer.
He dreamed about the fire, and his mother. About how he sucked her nipples for the last time on the day of his twelfth birthday. I have no milk any more, and you’re a man now. Never forget that you are a man, and that no woman shall deny you anything you want — not even your mother. Believe me when I say this.