Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  “Capiche.”

  “Another reason: after Karimi went into the Salt Quarter with his bulldozers yesterday, there was another little uprising. That’s no good. You know what I mean. More people died there than Amadou had on his conscience. Which for you means: the entire quarter and beyond into the desert, toward Tindirma, the Empty Quarter, the Salt Quarter, the entire area is off limits. Do we understand each other?”

  Canisades nodded solicitously. He couldn’t imagine where the protection for the moronic Amadou had suddenly come from. The thing about having a relative who knew the Secretary of the Interior was obviously nonsense. A filthy goat herder from Tindirma didn’t have any connections to the Secretary of the Interior or his cleaning woman. If he did, he would have said so at the first police interrogation, he would have screamed it in the interrogators’ faces instead of insisting on his innocence for so long. Amadou’s family probably got hold of a little money somewhere. And it was flowing where exactly? Not to Karimi, apparently. Directly to the superintendent? Or maybe it really was someone in the Interior Ministry? Canisades was just annoyed that it had bypassed him. The usual protocol provided for the involvement of all the investigators, and he had been the first one assigned the case. Instead, he had been confronted with the embarrassing papers. He had more than a little desire to capture Amadou and chop off his head. It couldn’t be too difficult. If it had been necessary to take the search away from someone as useless as Karimi, Amadou was probably sitting drunk and naked in the middle of the road to Tindirma singing off-color songs.

  Canisades decided the time had come to look questioningly at the ripped pieces of paper.

  “Childish bullshit,” said the superintendent, brushing the paper into the waste basket and shooing Canisades out with a wave of his hand. Just before the commissar had closed the door behind himself, the superintendent called him back. The superintendent had his notebook in his hand and tapped on something he had jotted down.

  “And that works?”

  “What?”

  “The Virtue Committee. The prostitutes. I’m a family man, as you know, and very pious. I only ask because I have an uncle… so it works?”

  “As I said, we were there just the one time. Or I was.”

  “Please answer! Do the little whores do it for free or what?”

  “They do it for free anyway with anyone of the rank of officer and above.”

  “What?”

  “They always do it for free.” Canisades took two steps back into the room. “It’s normal. We’re the police, after all.”

  “So why the nonsense with the credentials?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t try it out. But Polidorio said they did a better job. They did things they otherwise wouldn’t do.”

  The superintendent stood partly up out of his chair, shoved his fist between his fat ass-cheeks and looked at Canisades.

  “Yeah, that sort of thing.”

  “And this? Like this?”

  “Yeah, that too.”

  “And this way?”

  “Everything. According to Polidorio.”

  “Seriously?” Shaking his head in disbelief, the superintendent looked at Canisades, and then at his notebook with equal disbelief. “The little whores!” Then he waved his visitor away without looking up, jotting down notes and underlining them.

  A short while later the superintendent was called out of his office by a worker who had come to fix two windows, and Canisades, who had been waiting in front of the mailboxes in the hall, slipped into the office and grabbed the scraps of paper from the waste basket and put them in his pocket. One could never be too safe.

  Afterward he called the Sheraton and had himself connected to Mr White, the British journalist, in order to ask him whether he would like to take photos of the imminent arrest of Amadou. And as he was still on the phone the superintendent waddled by again and placed a note on the phone. Canisades covered the mouthpiece of the phone.

  “Forgot. You have to do this, too,” whispered the superintendent. “Because you kept interrupting me. But there’s some fellah whose two sons are missing. Apparently murdered. In the desert. One shot, the other beaten to death. It’s all in the note. The road to Tindirma, the old barn where they used to distill liquor. Just stop by there first. Then Amadou. Capiche?”

  37

  The High Priestess

  I have no feeling for feminine virtues, for a woman’s happiness. Only that which is wild, great, shining appeals to me.

  KAROLINE VON GÜNDERRODE

  “NOT A MINE, because there’s no mine here. Not landmines, because no reasonable person on earth would kidnap a family and threaten them with death over ten or twenty dollars. And to round out the improbable, a fortress beneath which mines were dug is also out,” said Helen with a crooked smile. “Because there are none. Assuming the guy with the scars didn’t tell you any bullshit, which seems to be the case. So the only thing left is a mine as in pencil lead.”

  “Or the coin. Or the book.”

  “Isadora Mine? And her son Aimable-Jean-Jacques? No. I don’t buy that.”

  “What if it’s not the book but something hidden in the book?”

  “I still don’t buy it,” said Helen. “Not because a book can’t be valuable. But because Bassir said mine. Seventy-two hours and I’ll have the mine back. A barely literate idiot who spent hours twisting a letter-opener in your hand wouldn’t say mine if he meant a book. He would say book. Same with the coins. He would say coins if he meant coins. Maybe we’d be better off concentrating on Cetrois.”

  “How can we do that if we don’t even know where to look?”

  Helen stood up with a shrug, went over to the phone and arranged a long-distance call to America. While she was waiting to be connected, Carl gathered up all the things he’d had with him in the desert and placed them on the table in front of him. The empty wallet. The crumpled tissue. The ring of keys. The pencil.

  The pencil was six-sided and coated in a shiny green lacquer. Embossed in gold print at the top of it was 2B. The tip was broken; a thin sliver of wood was peeling away.

  “Forget it,” said Helen.

  “Just a moment,” said the telephone operator.

  Carl put down the pencil and picked up the wallet, examining the empty compartments but finding only grains of sand. He put it back down next to the pencil. He unfolded the tissue out of which sand also trickled, stared at it, then balled it up again. A few minutes went by. Then he stood up, grabbed a breadknife from the kitchen and began to cut the pencil. Helen watched him, shaking her head. As the stub got shorter he pressed it down with the heel of his hand and kept sawing at it with the knife until there was nothing more left than a pile of thin wood shavings and crumbs of graphite that he stared at pensively but which held no secrets.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” said Helen when she saw him tap his finger in the graphite dust and then taste it with the tip of his tongue.

  Suddenly the phone line was dead. Helen banged on the cradle and after the operator also didn’t respond for several minutes she got up and said to Carl: “I have to buy something else. You want to come with me?”

  But Carl didn’t want to go. He sat leaning over the table, his head in his hands. He reached for the tissue again and tried for a second time to unfold it without ripping it to shreds, and held it up to the light as if he might have overlooked some secret markings.

  Helen closed the door behind her with a sigh.

  When she returned with two heavy bags of groceries in her arms, she thought she heard voices. She carefully put down the bags, walked quietly around the bungalow, crouched behind an overgrown bougainvillea and pushed aside a blooming bough so she could peer at the terrace.

  Just a few meters away, Carl was sitting on the ground with his legs crossed, staring intently at something in front of his lower leg. Facing him, turned away from Helen, a long-haired, broad-shouldered woman. Or a long-haired man? Both of them had their heads lowered, and a voice well known to Hel
en said: “That is the Tower. And now the Hermit. And this is the Chariot, the Star… I always find the Star a beautiful card. The star in the unconscious, I’ll explain in a minute what that means. And on the five, that is… the Hanged Man,” said Michelle, quickly removing the card and replacing it with another.

  A questioning look crossed Carl’s face. Apparently he didn’t agree with the switch, and Michelle, who tried to hold the gaze of his coal-black eyes, felt a wave of painful empathy wash over her. She knew what that meant. It meant that she had to be on her guard.

  From the moment this handsome man agreed without hesitation to have his fortune told, from the moment he asked her with unsure gestures to join him on the terrace and offered her a coffee, no, to be honest, from the moment he opened the door to bungalow 581d with a bloodstained bandage on his head and a broken cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, she’d been overwhelmed by the unspeakable sadness in his features. In fact, overwhelmed to such a degree that Michelle Vanderbilt had decided at that moment not to let his life affect hers. She made decisions like that in fractions of a second. Even if not everyone would believe it and even though on the surface, as she well knew, she often seemed the opposite: Michelle was a very resolute person. Strength of will and decisiveness she had inherited from her Italian grandmother; on the other hand, and in apparent contradiction to those traits, she had inherited an exuberant temperament, spontaneity and a typical Italian warmth from her, as well. Cerebral and carnal at the same time. And when the situation demanded it, Michelle was resolute. And made decisions. And from extensive experience she also knew that the best way to navigate the jungle of complexity was with intuition. And her intuition told her from the first moment: be careful. Be careful in the face of a handsome, suffering man with a bandage straight out of a painting and sad eyes, be careful, Michelle Vanderbilt!

  As a result of a short telephone call that she’d had with Helen just after her visit to the commune, she also knew who this man was. This was the man who had suffered some sort of memory loss. What did that mean?

  First of all, it meant that Helen, with her characteristic lack of discrimination, had probably entered a sexual relationship with him, which the man with the provisional name of Carl denied for the time being. Or at least had denied it a few minutes before. Second, it meant that compared to the pain Michelle was dealing with, the prodigious pain of having recently lost four friends in a massacre, an amnesiac, who had lost nothing more than his identity, should be a comparatively happy man. And third, this comparatively happy man could or would, if he wished, take advantage of this difference in their respective levels of pain to his benefit. If Michelle allowed it. But she would not allow it. This decision was made in the first instant. And when a decision had been made, nothing was going to change it.

  “Because otherwise it means, in this combination, ultimately, if you take it literally, with the Tower here, and Death,” said Michelle as she hurriedly laid out the rest of the cards and then stared with wide eyes at the resultant combination, “with Death in the near future… which is normally a transformative process, Death as metamorphosis, as transition… although we… if we, I mean…”

  Michelle watched, bewildered, as Carl took the Hanged Man from her hand and put it back down in its original place.

  “That’s the Hanged Man,” she said, “normally I take it out because if we leave it lying there, when things stay like this, it could also mean that someone really will die… or something… no, somebody… because, when we asked, when we said just now what it was about, and it was about you, right? That means you…”

  “And if you just remove it from the deck nobody dies?”

  “I didn’t say anything about dying! Not necessarily, but hang on… let me think. Just a moment, please. Like I said at the start: they are patterns that are more like force fields, and you can never say it’s like this or it’s like that. It’s just that this card, I mean, Death… and the Fool and the Devil, and Justice here, in this order, the way they are laid out… I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Michelle ran her hands through her hair. She tried to buy time. Looking like a child who was about to start crying, she contemplated the problematic combination. But the cards left little doubt.

  Michelle felt it, and she could feel that Carl also felt it.

  “Anyway, everyone has to die. It’s not like it says when, right?”

  “It is the near future, nearly present. I mean—”

  “And what if I’m already dead?”

  “Let’s start again from the beginning,” said Michelle, her voice trembling. “I want to try to see the whole thing again. There we have the Star, which I always think is good, a good card, that means that you were full of hope at the start… and that’s true. You talked about how you woke up in the barn—”

  “And what if I’m already dead?”

  Helen couldn’t see Michelle’s expression from behind, but she saw her friend’s body stiffen, one hand over the cards, the other on the back of her head, the elbow pointing to the sky.

  A full ten seconds went by. Then Michelle realized what Carl was getting at. Helen suppressed a groan.

  “If you’re already dead!” Michelle shouted excitedly. “Of course! If you’re… you really, you’re really a special person,” she said, tapping her forefinger excitedly on the Hanged Man, which lay directly next to the Tower (that was nearly a ladder, a ladder in a barn!) and Death followed shortly thereafter: Carl’s memory loss. The death of his previous identity.

  Michelle shook her head, stunned. “It’s sometimes crazy how precisely the cards know things! And that you figured it out… I’m not just saying this to flatter you. But I’ll be honest, I knew from the moment you opened the door that you were a very special person. A very special person. And you have a great gift for the cards. The Tower, the Hermit and the Chariot… didn’t you also say something about a car with four people in it? Because these are the external influences. Though the Chariot could mean a search, the search you are on… the search for your identity. And the Hanged Man, I usually remove that, like I said, but it actually only means a reversal, a reimagining of one’s own situation, and the fact that you are in essence the Hanged Man yourself since you’re dangling from the ladder… it’s just crazy.” Her index finger moved with new confidence to the right, into the future. The death of identity, the Fool, the High Priestess and at the end, Justice. The cards no longer had an obvious connection; now concentration was needed.

  Michelle concentrated and said: “The Fool on the seven, that is the self, as you yourself see it… and Justice, that’s the outcome. What does it mean? It means the end of a period of suffering. A new beginning, I would say… though the card is turned the wrong way, so it could mean the opposite, I mean, if we don’t turn it around, and you… no? There are differing schools of thought, I usually turn them around.”

  Michelle looked up at Carl with the trusting look of a child, but he shook his head obstinately.

  “Well, if you don’t want to… so, Justice could also signal the beginning of a period of suffering when it is turned this way, but really it only means the possibility of pain, that is, if you do something wrong. It always depends on you. Tarot shows the outcomes, but you choose which one, I mean… what exactly it means to have the High Priestess on eight and pain…”

  “The High Priestess of pain, obviously that’s me,” said Helen stepping through the bougainvillea onto the terrace and walking past the pair of them into the bungalow. Carl looked up embarrassed, and Michelle sank her head like a little kid who’d been caught playing doctor. She knew what Helen thought of the cards, of divinatory knowledge and spirituality, and it hit her at that exact moment: these were exactly the characteristics of the High Priestess, cleverness and cautiousness—that could transform negatively into rationalism and intellectualism. If the card was upside down. And it was upside down.

  38

  Battle of the Chieftains

  “Allusio
ns, there are allusions in this book,” I thought, “I want my money back.”

  MAREK HAHN

  AS IT HAPPENED, directly following and probably provoked by Helen’s visit to the commune, Michelle had decided to leave this gruesome and violent continent behind for ever. She had scraped together some money from friends to buy a return ticket to America; now she hoped Helen would throw some in as well. Unlike Helen, Michelle had never been interested in material things, and the luggage she had with her consisted almost entirely of spiritual items: an amulet with the tooth of an ouz that Ed Fowler had given her as a parting gift, the tarot cards, her favorite books and in addition, as would soon be revealed, a stack of comic books that Michelle had wrapped in a handkerchief and took with her as they all left together for the beach early that morning.