Amadou shifted from side to side in his chair and grinned. Karimi turned to the lawyer: “Have you at least tried to explain this to him? A tenth of that evidence would send a man to the guillotine.” He turned back to Amadou. “Nobody gives a shit whether you talk or not. Not even the most corrupt line judge in the world would let you off. You can keep your mouth shut or you can talk. The only difference is that if you talk your family will receive a tidy corpse. Think of your mother. No, correction—naturally that’s not the only difference. The other one is that if you talk, you will be allowed to leave the room to take a piss.”
The lawyer, who had sat by silently chewing his nails almost the entire time, protested meekly. Then he asked to be able to talk to his client privately. Karimi pointed to a sofa in the corner where normally the commissars sat while they smoked.
The lawyer could have gone into another room with Amadou. Or he could have asked Karimi, Canisades and Polidorio to stand outside the door. Instead he led Amadou over to the piece of furniture some seven or eight meters away and explained to him in a hushed tone—though still clearly audible to the police—that the evidence was overwhelming and the day very hot. With a raised index finger he added that everything had already been decided before the eyes of Allah. In an earthly court, on the other hand, one could in this case neither improve things nor aggravate them with a statement, only shorten the futile and dishonorable procedure. And a man of honor, like Amadou, and so on. The man wasn’t exactly a star lawyer. He had the face of a farmer and was wearing a poorly fitting black suit with a mustard-colored handkerchief sticking out of the breast pocket like a desperate cry for help. It wasn’t entirely clear to the Commissariat where the man had managed to get hold of Amadou’s family. There was a strong suspicion that he was being paid in kind. Amadou had six or seven sisters.
“Oh, man,” said Canisades with a glance at the desk. He lit up like a little child. “Oh, man. Oh, man.”
Polidorio looked at his watch, took two aspirin out of his pocket and gulped them down dry. With his chin stretched upward he stared for a while at the ceiling fan. The accused still persisted in pantomiming his version: a walk in the desert, sandals, fruit basket, arrest. He squirmed around on the sofa, and as the lawyer repeated his argument for the third or fourth time in the manner of a primary-school teacher, Polidorio suddenly caught sight of a look from the accused that he hadn’t seen before. What was that look? It was the desperate look of a not terribly intelligent man who in this moment, during the monotonous ripples of the flood of words from his lawyer, realized that his life was over, the look of a man who despite the overwhelming burden of evidence must have thought up until a few minutes ago that there was still a chance to avoid the guillotine, a look that was not only desperate but also seemed shocked, a look of a man, thought Polidorio, who—perhaps was innocent.
He paged through the files.
“Where are the fingerprints?”
“What fingerprints?”
“From the weapon.”
Karimi unwrapped the foil from around a chocolate as he shook his head.
“We have forty eyewitnesses,” said Canisades. “And Asiz is on vacation.”
“Can’t almost anyone do it?”
“Who is almost anyone? Can you?” bristled Karimi, who was determined to return by daylight to Tindirma, where he had an appointment with a reporter from Life magazine. “Asiz can’t even do it. When he was a palace guard he spent a week pasting the place up. Then he took four hundred prints, and the only two that were recognizable were from the eight-year-old son of the janitor.”
Polidorio sighed and looked over at the lawyer, who had stopped talking.
Amadou’s head had sunk to half-mast.
6
Shakespeare
A wonderfully funny letter was sent to me signed by a fraternity in Boston, Massachusetts, medical school; the fraternity for doctors had voted me the body on which they would most like to operate.
DYANNE THORNE
HELEN WAS NEVER AWARE of the impression she made. She knew herself only from photos or the mirror. In her own estimation she looked good, even breathtaking in some of the photos. She had her life under control, without being particularly happy or unhappy, and had no troubles with men. At least no more so than her friends. Less, in fact. From the beginning of high school on she’d had seven or eight relationships, all with boys about her age, who were nice, well bred and athletic, boys for whom the intelligence of their girlfriends wasn’t of particular importance and who rarely noticed Helen’s.
Helen didn’t let it bother her. If men wanted to consider themselves intellectually superior, she wasn’t distraught. Most of the relationships didn’t last long, but as fast as they ended new ones formed. A walk across campus in a midriff-baring T-shirt and Helen had three invitations to dinner. The only question that came up from time to time was why the genuinely interesting men never approached her. She couldn’t explain it. She suffered from depression only as often as anyone else, not more. From novels she knew that the most beautiful women were also the least happy. She read a lot.
The first blow to her self-confidence came when, as she was preparing for an exam, she recorded her voice with a tape recorder. Helen listened to the recording for exactly four seconds and subsequently didn’t have the courage to press play a second time. An alien, a Tex Avery cartoon, a talking piece of chewing gum. She knew that one’s own voice could sound strange, but the tones on the tape were more than strange. At first she had even thought it possible that the machine had some sort of technical defect.
The pimply chemistry professor who had lent her the tape recorder explained that resonant bones and cavities in the head were the reason that people perceived their own voices as fuller and more melodious than they really were, and that surprise was a reasonable reaction. He himself had the falsetto voice of a castrato and was unable to keep his gaze away from Helen’s cleavage when he talked to her. She didn’t participate in any further experiments of this sort and put it out of her mind. That was during her first year at Princeton.
Helen gained entrance effortlessly and was awarded a much-sought-after scholarship. But like many first-year students she reacted with fundamental insecurity to being replanted in a world full of strangers and cliquey rituals. In her dormitory she felt more lonely than she ever had in her entire life. She hurled herself into her studies, never broke off even the most boring small talk, and went to pains to find fixed appointments to fill most nights of the week.
Through an acquaintance who was studying English literature, Helen came into contact with an amateur drama club that put on classical plays, rarely anything modern, four or five times a year. Most of the members were students, but two housewives, a former professor who liked to get naked and a young railway trackman were also part of the group. The trackman was considered the secret star. He was twenty-four years old, had the face of a matinee idol, a body like a Greek statue and—his only fault—he could not commit any lines to memory. Not least because of him, Helen spent nearly three years working on dramas of the Elizabethan age.
At first she had only small roles, later she played Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew and the title role in Dorothea Angermann. She wasn’t without talent, and she wouldn’t have been opposed to playing the shining hero once; but the best roles, it seemed to her, were awarded on the basis of experience rather than talent. Whoever had been with the company longest ended up as Desdemona.
And then they put on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It wasn’t so much that they put on the play as they mimicked the movie. The trackman shone as Paul Newman, looked jarringly similar to the role model and hobbled so coolly across the stage on his crutches that his interactions with the prompter came off as an artful part of the production. A stunning black-haired biology student in her senior year played Liz Taylor. Helen was Mae. The bigoted Mae with her bigoted family. They padded her waist to five times its size, powdered her hair gray, painted rosy cheeks beneath her high cheek
bones, put her in a dress the shape and color of a potato, and to serve as the no-necked children they brought in the professor’s grandchildren, who, because in reality they had necks, were wrapped with cervical collars. Their mouths were stuffed with foam rubber and instead of speaking, the children gave consonant-less groans, much to the delight of the audience.
The assistant professor who led the group recorded the premiere on an 8mm camera. It was the first time Helen had been filmed since her first day of primary school, and at the screening of the film she had to leave the room. She went to the bathroom, took a quick glance in the mirror and threw up. She walked stiffly back to the screening room and stared just to the side of the screen for the next hour and half and listened to the monotonous rattle of the projector. The next play on the schedule was Schnitzler’s La Ronde, but before the suspense of who would play what roles was settled, she quit the theater group.
The assistant professor lamented this move. But other than him, nobody else seemed to take great note of it. Just as no one had taken note of what a thoroughly ridiculous and vacuous performance she had given on stage. In accordance with the role, of course—to be honest, in perfect accordance with the role—but played in such a convincing manner that one could scarcely believe it was even acting at all. Such facial expressions, such intonation! And nobody found it remarkable. During the final applause Helen took another look at the screen. The noise level and whistling doubled as Mae, in a grotesque cotton sack dress, took a step forward, stiltedly put her arms around two neckless monsters, and curled her mouth into an appallingly simpering smile. The last image on a rattling, spinning spool of film.
At the small party that followed, Helen drank too much wine, and her final act before she permanently quit the group was to whisper in the ear of the trackman that she was going to lay him that night. She rattled off her address and a time and left without awaiting his reaction. The fact that she had purposefully chosen such dramatic words in order to justify failure didn’t make it any better.
But it was no failure. At one in the morning, fingernails scratched on wood in the dormitory. Paul Newman had in his hand a bouquet of flowers that looked as if he’d stolen them from the cemetery, and he seemed relieved when Helen carelessly threw them in the sink and uncorked a bottle of wine. At dawn he confessed with a gulp that he had a fiancée, earned in response a shrug of the shoulders, and the two of them never saw each other again.
In a white terrycloth bathrobe Helen crept down the hall of the dormitory, climbed two sets of stairs with a heavy head and knocked on the door of her best friend, Michelle Vanderbilt. Or perhaps not her best friend but her oldest friend. Michelle and Helen had known each other since elementary school, and since the first day of their friendship there endured a strong and constant imbalance of power between the two girls.
One of the earliest, most appalling and most exemplary memories: the matter of the canary. Perhaps in the third grade, perhaps even earlier. They were sitting on the floor among all sorts of playthings when they heard a horrible scream from the next room. Michelle’s younger brother. Seconds later a small, yellow ball of feathers came hopping through the doorway to the children’s room. The head hung limply, swinging to the side. Michelle jumped up in a panic, the ball of feathers flitted sideways as if caught in a gust of wind, rolled out into the hallway, getting dangerously close to the staircase. Helen blocked its way. The little brother ran hysterically back and forth. Mrs Vanderbilt slumped in a chair as if she had fainted, stretched out her hands as if to protect herself, and screamed at Michelle and Helen: “Help him! Help him!”
Eight-year-old Helen, who had no pets and who had also never seen the bird outside of its cage before, gingerly picked it up and straightened its little head with her finger. It dropped to the side again. She suggested putting the bird in bed, or splinting its neck with a matchstick. Nobody reacted. Finally she went into the Vanderbilts’ living room and started looking through an encyclopedia. She jumped around from canary birds to medical emergencies, from broken neck and fracture to spinal cord injury. She suggested Michelle either call a doctor or call a friend who also had a bird.
In the end, Mrs Vanderbilt managed to get a veterinarian on the phone, who recommended putting the animal out of its misery. The lady of the house held the receiver out in the air, far from her ear, repeated the doctor’s words loudly, and looked around, seeking help. But no member of the family was capable of doing what was necessary, and so finally Helen took pity on the miserable creature. She swept the bird gently into a plastic bag, put both her knees on the opening, and pounded with a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the three-dimensional sack until it was two-dimensional. Afterward she buried the flattened result in the yard. Mrs Vanderbilt stood crying behind the curtains.
It was a mixture of fear and wonder that Michelle felt for her new friend that day, and that remained the predominant feeling she had about Helen in subsequent years. Occasionally (and especially during puberty), in addition to this feeling of awe, a range of other, alternating feelings came along: lack of comprehension, adoration, rage, jealousy, deliberate coldness, something like compassion… and then back to awe and genuine love—all increased in intensity by the fact that the object of these conflicting feelings never seemed to notice even the slightest difference.
And so the day after the film screening was a special day for Michelle. It was the first and only day on which she saw her friend seem weak. A picture of misery in a white bathrobe shuffled into her room in need of herbal tea and attention. Overwhelmed by the opportunity, Michelle stuck the knife in the wound and twisted it: it happened to everyone, she exclaimed, everyone was appalled by his or her own voice at first, even she, Michelle, had been put off when she recently randomly heard her own voice on a tape. Admittedly, there were also the gesticulations in Helen’s case, and in conjunction with the facial expressions it was actually something that, if she was being honest… when through all the years, this look… and it was the meaning of friendship… but ultimately one got used to it. And for her, personally, now: really not a problem.
In a seminar room Michelle was no great rhetorician, but in private and in intimate conversation she could put together text blocks of formidable scale. Even when in her eyes it was only a trifle (lovesickness, failure, or the house cat being sick would have incited her more), she spoke for nearly two hours straight about what she later referred to as “the tape recorder affair”.
Helen ignored the entire contents of the dispatch and noted only its length. One cannot speak about something for two hours, she told herself, that isn’t a grave problem.
For a few months she used a dictaphone to practice speaking faster and more clearly, without success; simultaneously, in order to exorcize the stiltedness and sluggishness of her gesticulations, she sought out a form of exercise that, she assumed, would run counter to her idea of fun and to what her body might be suited for, and hit upon karate. She registered as one of two women for a course at the university and realized after four weeks that one can change a lot in life, but not certain physiological realities. Helen became stronger and more dexterous, but nothing about the nature of the way she moved changed. She was Mae in a keikogi, Mae doing yoko geri, Mae on the mat. It was a depressing time.
Despite the futility of her efforts, she did not give up on karate. When the course at the university was discontinued, she switched to a professional studio. She was the only woman there, and to her fell the unabated attention of all the other participants, almost exclusively police from a nearby academy.
By the time she finished her studies, she had two abortions behind her, held black belts in two martial arts disciplines, had dated three or four police officers, and had no idea what she should do with her life. Pronounced cheekbones and the first lines around her mouth and eyes gave her face a certain severity, which wasn’t something she’d wanted, but which was also not entirely unbefitting. She wore make-up.
“Listen to your inner voice,” ad
vised Michelle, but in contrast to her friend, Helen could not seem to detect a voice anywhere inside her. A bourgeois existence felt alien to her, and if she had been able to compare the nature and intensity of her feelings with those of other people, something that for most twenty-five-year-olds is either not possible or only possible in a very limited way, she would have to have conceded that she was emotionally cold. Situations others reveled in connoted no more to her than an impressionistic postcard, a litter of kittens or Grace Kelly’s engagement, and an inattentive observer could have taken her for altogether passionless. But her daydreams were fraught with peculiar images. The fireman carrying two stertorous children from a burning building that collapses behind him… the pilot brandishing his cowboy hat as he sits astride an atom bomb dropping into a valley… the crucified Spartacus, lamented by Jean Simmons… please die, my love, die now… she favored heroic subjects.
7
Lundgren
No Chinaman must figure in the story.
RONALD KNOX,
Ten Commandment List for Detective Novelists
AND NOW LUNDGREN had a problem. Lundgren was dead. When they pulled him by his welted shoes from a culvert in eastern Tindirma, the only thing about him that was still recognizable as European was the cut of his clothes. Children out playing had discovered the corpse, four men retrieved it. Nobody knew who the dead man was, nobody knew how he’d got to the oasis or what he wanted there, nobody missed him.
A fresh atrocity visited upon a white person, just three weeks after the massacre in the commune, caused quite a stir among the desert dwellers. With fingertips and wooden sticks they rummaged the pockets of his suit, found nothing of value—found nothing at all… and sealed the fate of his identity by dispatching the corpse back into the culvert.
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