Mike was one of a small group of NY detectives who had special authorization to pursue their cases anywhere in the USA. A few days ago a woman had killed her husband in a flat in the New York suburb of Williamsburg. The woman was in love with a man in Plainfield. They had been seeing each other for a while: a year, maybe a bit less, a bit longer. It was no secret that the woman wanted a divorce and that her husband knew about the man in Plainfield. Her husband was an alcoholic wife basher. Why the woman hadn’t reported him to the police and taken him to court is one of these things which people who are not caught up in such relationships often can’t understand. Every judge in the USA would have granted her a restraining order against the man. These things usually develop over years. Women often hide the abuse; they don’t want their friends to know; they don’t want their relatives to know; their neighbours, colleagues, even their children, although they all usually know only too well what’s going on, but they are all meant to believe and pretend that all is okay.
Of course, not all of these cases end up as murder cases, but this one did. The man was found by one of his mates with a kitchen knife in his throat. He was killed while he was asleep and had been dead for three days. It was a straightforward case which took less than an hour to solve. The police found a scribbled message on the kitchen table: “He had to die. He was pure evil.” They compared the handwriting with the woman’s hand written diary, which they found in a drawer in the kitchen. The comparison left little doubt about what had happened.
When Mike looked into the case he said, “She won’t kill anybody else.” He realised that this woman needed help, not punishment, and decided to go to Plainfield himself and take her into custody instead of passing the job on to the police there. It could take an hour or two, perhaps even three, to go to Plainfield by car, depending on the traffic. Mike didn’t mind sitting in a car, he didn’t mind being stuck in traffic. There was always something he could do with his mind. Mostly he just listened to himself and to the world at large and was amazed by what he heard. Whenever he didn’t know what to do next, he would say to himself, “Time to listen.”
He found the woman where he expected to find her, in the apartment of the man she had been seeing for the past year or so. The place was modestly but tastefully furnished. Comparing this place with the woman’s home in Williamsburg, where her dead husband was found, felt like comparing order with chaos, cleanliness with dirt.
After Mike had identified himself as a police officer, the woman said, “I have been waiting for you. It took you longer than I thought.”
“There was no hurry,” Mike replied.
“True, there was no hurry. I am not running away.” The woman looked at the detective slightly surprised. She asked him to come in the living room. Mike came straight to the point.
“What was the worst he did to you?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Tell me. Please.”
“The worst … The worst took place two days before I killed him. He knocked me unconscious. When I regained my consciousness I found myself undressed on a chair. At first I noticed that my hands and arms were bound against the backrest of the chair. Then I could feel that I had been raped. More than raped. I was sore and there was blood between my legs. I knew what he had done. He enjoyed impaling me with bottles and stuff … My feet were in a bucket. I then realised that my legs and thighs were bound against the chair in such a way that I could not lift my feet out of the bucket. I couldn’t move. I could move my head, that was about all. In another bucket, sitting on the floor in front of me, he was mixing cement, sand and water. He smiled at me. A hateful, dirty smile. He didn’t say a word and I refused to show fear. He loved it when I cried and begged him to stop.
“When the mix in his bucket had the right consistency he poured it into the bucket which had my feet in it. ‘We let it harden,’ he said, ‘and tonight I take you to the bridge and off you go into the river.’”
Mike and the man whom she had been seeing and in whose apartment they were, didn’t interrupt her. She didn’t cry.
“Whatever happens from here on,” she continued, “he will never do this to me or to another woman again.” She didn’t tell how she managed to free herself.
“Has he done it to other women?”
“He boasted that he had made every woman in his life happy by making each one do exactly what he wanted her to do. Even his mother.”
“His mother?”
“Yes, his mother, but thank God he didn’t elaborate.”
Mike turned to the man and said, “Could you make us a cup of coffee please?” The man went into the kitchen. Mike asked the woman, “Why did you use the word ‘impaled’ when you described what he had done to you?”
The woman thought about the question for a second or two before she replied, “It seemed the right word. It still seems the right word. It just appeared from nowhere or somewhere and I used it.”
They both remained silent until the man returned from the kitchen with two cups of coffee. He went back to the kitchen and returned a few seconds later with a third cup of coffee. He said, “There is cheesecake, if you feel like a piece.”
“I love cheesecake,” Mike replied.
The man fetched him a big piece of cake. He put the cake on a plate together with a fork.
Mike looked around. “Am I the only one eating cake?”
The man looked to the woman. She managed to produce an apologetic smile and shook her head. “I think so,” he said.
“Okay.” Mike took the fork, cut off a substantial part of cake and made it disappear in his mouth. He ate it slowly. “Absolutely delicious. Did you make it?” He looked to the woman.
“No, he made it,” she said and looked to the man. Mike could see that in her look was appreciation and love.
He went to a chair beside a table where the man had placed Mike’s cup of coffee. He sat on the chair and ate the cake. It seemed that he fully concentrated on the cake and the man and woman assumed that he was thinking. They would have been surprised if he had told them that he did nothing of that kind. He was listening. He listened to the sound of his mouth as he ate the cake, to the sound of the refrigerator coming from the kitchen, to the distant sound of traffic, the distant sound of a TV or radio, to his breathing, to the man and woman’s breathing, but he also listened to feelings, to the feelings of his feet in his shoes, to the feeling of the fork in his hand, to the sweetness and the consistency of the cake in his mouth … He listened to dozens of sounds and feelings without making an effort to separate them. By the time he had finished eating his cake all the sounds and feelings that he was listening to had united into something for which he had not yet found an adequate word. It was now all one-and-the-same, that’s the best description he has come up with so far. But part of this one-and-the-same was also his alertness that had not been diminished. Had something unusual occurred – a sudden movement, a suspicious sound – he would have reacted without delay.
He placed the empty plate on the table and asked, “What do you want me to do?”
The man said, “Do we have a choice?”
“How much money do you have?”
“Between five and six thousand dollars. Most of it in a bank account.”
“Do you rent this apartment or do you own it?”
“I rent it.”
“You have a choice,” Mike continued. He looked at both of them and asked again, “What do you want me to do?”
“Can we go into the kitchen and talk about it?” the man asked.
“Can I have another piece of cake while I wait?”
“Sure.” The two went into the kitchen and a few seconds later the woman returned with another piece of cheesecake and a fork on a plate.
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome.”
Five minutes later the two returned from the kitchen and the woman said, “We would like to go away, change our identity and start a new life.”
Mike looked at her.
He said nothing.
The man continued. “We would need at least two thousand dollars to leave New York. The rest of what we have we could give you.”
“Okay,” Mike said. “This is not what I am driving at. I don’t want your money. I will give you money and I will give you an address where you can obtain a new identity. The elderly woman there won’t charge you for it. She will help you and explain everything you need to know. She will provide you with an Australian identity. This way you will have no language problems, but the sooner you start talking like an Aussie the better this will be for you.”
Twenty minutes later Mike placed fifty thousand dollars on the table. He had given the two people an address in Brooklyn and asked them never to write down the address, just remember it for the time being. He also asked them not to take anything along, except the clothes they were wearing and the money he had given them. “Leave you car where it is, leave your photos where they are, don’t touch the money in your accounts, leave everything. Leave this apartment naked, so to say. Take public transport and go straight to the address I gave you. The moment you are at that address, your new life starts.”
Before Mike departed he asked them to wrap up the remaining cheesecake for him. When he, the man and woman finally left, the cheesecake in a plastic bag in his left hand, the woman asked him, “Have you helped people like this before?”
“No,” Mike lied. “This is the very first time and will be the only time. Forget my face and forget that this ever happened. Don’t ever talk about it, not even amongst yourselves.”
“Okay,” the man said.
“Thank you,” the woman added.
Before they left Mike had asked, “Can you please wash the plates and forks I used?”
“Of course,” the man replied and Mike watched him washing the plates and forks he had used.
4
Nancy asked, “What is the consequence of the universe expanding at an accelerating speed?”
“Good question.”
“So what do you think?”
“Until a few days ago I would have thought it was impossible,” Tony replied.
“Are you saying you think Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess got it wrong?” Nancy probed.
“That would be almost hilarious, if they got it wrong. Imagine, they received the Nobel Prize in Physics for something that turns out to be bulldust. That would be a lot of money, I believe around half a million or a million dollars, for getting it wrong.”
“These things do happen. But tell me, what do you think about it now, not what you would have thought about it a few days ago?”
“Well, my first thought was: if the universe expands at an accelerating speed, what is going to happen once the speed of the universe has reached the speed of light?”
“Ah! I see. What do you think?”
“Maybe we are then going to have the opposite of the Big Bang, a kind of instant reversal.”
“Are you saying everything crashes together with ever increasing speed, perhaps even within the blink of an eye, and then everything expands and life starts all over again?”
“Kind of, although there won’t be any eyes left to blink.”
“Do you actually believe in the Big Bang?” Nancy asked.
“No, I don’t. The Big Bang is an impossibility. Think about it! A huge explosion out of an infinitely small dot; everybody can see that this lacks credibility.”
“You said your first thought was … What was your second thought?”
“I was wondering, what is going to happen once the ever faster expanding universe has reached the end of infinity?”
“Is there such a thing called the end of infinity?”
“I would say, yes.”
“That would mean there is no infinity.”
“Yes.”
“A contradiction?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe there is then another Big Bang?” Nancy got excited. Tony knew that she was all in favour of witty discussions and speculations. He was happy to continue with this game. They were flying at 36,000 feet above the Atlantic towards Paris.
“Or more likely,” he said, “I would guess, there is going to be a very, very big collision.”
“Do you think at the end of infinity there is huge wall, kind of a border?”
“Could be, we just don’t know. Maybe a few light-years prior to the wall there is a sign saying: SLOW DOWN. YOU HAVE ALMOST REACHED THE END OF INFINITY.” Mike spoke the last two sentences in a very deep voice, like the way he imagined at the age of ten, God would speak.
“A bit like inside a soccer ball,” Nancy laughed and speculated. “At the centre of the ball we had the Big Bang fourteen or fifteen billion years ago. Our universe keeps expanding until it hits the inside wall of the ball. What then?”
“Maybe the ball explodes and frightens the hell out of the soccer players and the spectators.”
“Be serious.”
“Or maybe the walls of the ball are strong enough and the universe bounces back into itself until it becomes again an infinitely small point, a singularity, I think they call it, and the game starts all over again,” Mike speculated.
“What game? The soccer game?”
“No! The … Ah, you sneaky woman.”
“Sorry, this topic is just too much fun. I couldn’t resist. But seriously; this time no jokes. Do you think there could be another Big Bang and the creation of the world and everything could repeat itself for ever and ever, from eternity to eternity.”
“Assuming there has ever been such a bang, it would be nice to think so.”
“I don’t know ….” Nancy, suddenly from one moment to the next, became thoughtful. After a minute or so she continued. “Just let’s assume for a moment that the Big Bang, the creation of the universe, evolution and everything that goes with it, does indeed repeat itself again and again every fifty or hundred or whatever billions of years. Just let’s assume this is how it works. In this case, would you say, everything repeats itself exactly as it has happened before?”
“You mean the same dinosaurs again, the same cities, the same people, the same relationships?”
“Yes. What do you think?”
“I think it’s possible. Hinduism and, I believe, Buddhism seem to believe it. And do you remember when we met I said to you that you seemed familiar. You said that this was not a very original approach.”
Nancy laughed and kissed him before he could continue.
“You win. You win. I think we should ask the stewardess to bring us their best bottle of wine. We have to celebrate our reincarnation.”
They ordered a bottle of Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz, watched a movie, nibbled on a selection of cheeses and were very happy. Tony knew that the topic they had talked about was not finished. Nancy had started it, she had asked the questions and he had answered them, sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously. He knew that she, too, had an opinion and he was waiting for her to return to the topic. She would find a different way of looking at it. After six months of togetherness he thought he knew her pretty well and she knew him pretty well.
Half an hour before their arrival in Paris she said, “I think it could be possible that Reality, reality with a capital R, the way things really are, could be very different. Totally, totally different.”
“Yes…?”
“It’s kind of frightening.”
“What’s on your mind?” Tony could see that Nancy looked concerned, a bit worried.
She didn’t answer and he continued. “It is almost certain that the way things really are is very, very different. People are just guessing. Religions are nothing but guesswork. But you seem to have something specific on your mind, something that you don’t like. What is it?”
“Sometimes the thought occurs to me that there might be no difference between what I see and what I think and that this could mean …”
“Could mean what?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not necessarily
.”
“Well … Not now Tony, not now. This topic makes me feel lonely. It frightens me.”
Tony bent over to her side and hugged her. He knew there was no point in pressuring her. When the time was right she would tell him. He poured the last of the wine into their glasses. Not long afterwards the plane landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport. They were flying first class and left the plane soon after it had touched down.
5
Mike Thompson told his boss that the apartment in Plainfield had been empty. “I suspect they left a few hours, maybe only minutes, prior to my arrival.”
“What makes you think that?”
“There was warm water in a kettle.”
“How did you get in?”
“The door was unlocked.”
“What about the address Christina gave you on the phone?”
“A waste of time. There was no such address.”
“What next?”
“I have arranged for the forensic people to have a close look at the apartment. As soon as I have their report I will add my report and we can enter the details in the database. Sooner or later the two will be picked up somewhere.”
“You’re not in a hurry to close this case?”
“No. She won’t kill anybody else. Whether she ends up in jail a bit earlier or later won’t hurt anybody. But I’m in a hurry with something else.”
“I know.”
“I don’t like it if someone gets killed next to me and I don’t like it at all if I nearly get killed at the same time.”
The woman and the man arrived at the address the detective had asked them to memorise. It was the address of a restaurant. As they entered the restaurant a man in his forties approached them and asked them to follow him. The woman said, “Do you know who we are?” The man replied, “I’ve been waiting for you.”
He let them through the rear exit of the restaurant to a car park. Just before they left the building he gave them two pairs of non-transparent glasses with black rubber shields around their sides, a bit like very old motorbike goggles. They wore the glasses and found themselves in almost total darkness.
An Almighty Conspiracy – A novel, a thriller, four people doing the unexpected Page 2
