Standing at the door with his hand on the knob, he continued to ask questions, to no avail. All he heard was a stream of curses. Carl let go of the knob and tried one last time. In the most casual tone he could manage he asked: “When was the last time you saw Cetrois?”
“Huh?”
“Just answer.”
“You want me to piss in your mouth?” She tried to shove her forefinger between his lips.
He jerked his head away.
“Lie down, I’ll sit on your face and piss in your mouth.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Who?”
“Cetrois.”
“Hit me. You can hit me. As hard as you want. I’ll shit on your chest. I’ll suck your brain out through your cock. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Then answer my question.”
“What question?” Tears ran down her ruined child’s face. She fell to her knees yammering. “Give me the stuff. I know you have it.”
He put his hands into the pockets of his shorts and said, emphasizing each word: “Do you know Cetrois?”
She whimpered.
“Do you know where he is?”
“You sick, psycho, piece of shit.”
Why didn’t she just answer? Or if she didn’t know him, why didn’t she just say she didn’t know him? He lifted her chin, pulled one of the brown ampules from his pocket and watched the girl’s reaction.
“Simple question, simple answer. Where. Is. He.”
For a moment she stared at him apathetically. Then she launched herself at him. Her feather-light body bounced off his. He held the hand with the ampule high in the air.
“Answer.”
“Give it to me!” She jumped at his raised arm, swore like a sailor, ripped at his clothes. Finally she tried to climb up him with her eyes fixed on the fist he was holding aloft.
“You can have the stuff… even if you don’t know. But you have to answer. Do you know me?”
“I’ll shit in your mouth.”
“Do you know Cetrois?”
“You sick pig!”
“Where is he? What is he doing?”
Whining like the siren of a fire engine, she hung from his neck. She beat on his back with her little fists. Her breasts were beneath his chin now, the smell of female sweat, despair and vomit. Maybe it was that smell, maybe it was the bodily proximity, maybe it was the way it went without saying that every communication would come to nothing, but he suddenly had the feeling that this woman was closer to him than he would have liked. In the worst-case scenario, she was his lover from another life. Parallel to that and almost simultaneously, he had the feeling that she didn’t know him at all. That she didn’t know anything at all. That she was just crazy, a prostitute with a brain destroyed by drugs, who didn’t know him or a friend and who addressed every potential client as Charly. And begged for stuff. Maybe Charly was the slang term for a client around here? And had she even really said Charly? Had she perhaps said chéri right from the start?
“Give me the morphine,” she yelled, falling to the ground and writhing around in self-humiliation like a three-year-old child.
“You can have it,” he said with a look at the nearly illegible label on the ampule. “Just answer one question. Do you know me?”
She sobbed.
“I have two of them.” He pulled out the other ampule. “If you don’t know me—do you know my friend?”
“You pig.”
“When did you last see Cetrois?”
“You psycho piece of shit. You filthy trash.”
Psycho. For the third time. What was that about? Was it just another curse word for her, or did it have some sort of meaning? Was she in therapy? Was he her psychologist? Or was he a known madman and she one of his victims? No matter how many times he asked, he got just as little answer. As an experiment, he let one ampule drop. Glass shards, a cry of despair. The girl lunged to the ground and licked up the fluid and slivers of glass with her tongue.
“Do you know me now?”
“Fuck your mother!”
“Do you know Cetrois?”
“Give me the other one!”
“Where is he? What is he doing? Why don’t you answer me?”
She ranted and screamed, and it slowly dawned on him that she knew nothing. She didn’t know him, she didn’t know anyone. She had simply addressed him with a random name on the street, and he fell for it like the stupidest mark in the world. With a remnant of sympathy, he threw her some money and left.
“You want to know what Cetrois is doing?” she yelled after him.
He looked at her crouching on the floor. She was pulling glass splinters from her tongue and laughing, blood trickling between her lips.
“You want to know what Cetrois is doing right now? I’ll tell you what he is doing right now. He is standing in the door and refusing to give me my stuff. That I already paid for! I paid for it, you pig! I pissed in your mouth, you piece of shit. I fucked you a hundred times, I’ve had it with your games. It belongs to me! It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine.”
He didn’t believe anything for a moment. His gaze fixed in the distance. Cetrois.
The next second his body collapsed under her weight. She had jumped on him and pulled him to the floor. They rolled around. The second ampule had long since slipped out of his hand. The girl didn’t notice and bit his empty hand. He elbowed her in the face and tried to get away from her. Glass broke beneath his back.
The sounds that came from her were no longer human. Pushing him aside, she began to mop the floor with her tongue, trying to catch the last droplets as they trickled down between the floorboards. Stunned, Carl headed for the hall.
A glance back: bloody misery.
A glance forward: a fist in his face.
He was dragged into the room and slammed up against the wall. A powerful, black body. A full head taller than him, wearing a colorful West African dress, arms as thick as tractor tires. A woman. She bore no resemblance to her emaciated friend, but despite that the professional relationship was immediately clear. The black woman pressed a hand against his throat and screamed: “What did he do to you, my dear? What did he do to you? The evil man!”
She yanked Carl down by his hair and rammed her knee into his face a few times. He felt the wound on the back of his head open up and collapsed. The black woman dropped on top of him; she must have weighed at least a hundred and fifty kilos. The druggy wreck came toward him from the side, wiping blood from her mouth with the back of her hand, and swung a chair leg through the air. The leg caught Carl’s shoulder first, a second time it hit him on the shoulder, then in the face. He tried to turn himself beneath the black woman. His shirt was ripped over his head. A warm taste of iron in his mouth, agile hands in his pockets. He passed out. He awoke in a gutter. It took him nearly an hour to cover the ten-minute walk to the Sheraton.
48
Ockham’s Straight Razor
I like horses, but I’m riding on a mule.
GERHARD BANGEN
HE GAVE NO EXPLANATION, just slipped past Helen into the bungalow, took off his shirt and shorts, and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He stood motionless for nearly twenty minutes beneath the lukewarm water. He dried himself off on his way toward the bed, let the towel fall to the floor and fell lengthwise into bed.
“You can’t be serious,” said Helen. “You didn’t really lose the cartridge, did you?”
“I’m Cetrois.”
“You’re not serious?”
“No. I don’t know.”
She kept asking questions, he answered drowsily and incoherently. He pulled the covers over his head and fell asleep.
When he awoke it was pitch-dark and his heart was racing. It seemed as if he hadn’t slept for even a second. But the clock said it was almost midnight. He felt around with his arm; the other half of the bed was empty. A weak rectangle of light surrounded the door. He found Helen in the next room in the bri
ght glare of the ceiling lamp, her blonde hair pinned up. The telephone and a steaming cup of coffee on the table in front of her. In her hands a notebook that she quickly closed when Carl entered the room. The TV was on with no sound.
They sat silently opposite each other for a while. Then Helen turned the TV off and asked again in a quiet voice whether he had really recovered the cartridge and then lost it again, and Carl said: “I am not Cetrois.”
“How could you just leave the blazer sitting there?”
“I can’t be.”
“Why didn’t you follow the school children?”
“I did follow. But the woman was totally out of her head. She can’t know me, she must have just said any old name.”
“What did the children look like?”
“And she wanted morphine from me.”
“I asked you something.”
“What?”
“What the children looked like.”
“Who cares what they looked like?”
He kept talking and repeated his last few sentences, and though at first he didn’t believe it and he had no explanation for it, there was suddenly a very different tone to Helen’s voice. She kept interrupting him; there was little left of the calm and relaxed manner of the last few days. On the one hand, that seemed understandable in the face of the latest developments. But on the other hand, Carl had the feeling that there must be another explanation for the change in her tone. Her questions came quickly and pointedly, almost as if it was an interrogation, and the only thing she was interested in was how he had found the cartridge and under what circumstances he had lost it again, while Carl kept insisting on trying to return to the episode with the prostitute. For some reason he had assumed that the question of his identity would animate Helen as much as it did him, but that was obviously not the case. How many school children? What were they wearing? Why hadn’t he waited in the Salt Quarter? Empty Quarter, what was the Empty Quarter? First of the purges? What capsules? Two capsules with a seam in the middle? In a pen that said “Szewczuk” on it? And what kind of yellow Mercedes was it again?
“I’m not interested in any of that,” said Carl, worn out. “What I want to know is who I am. I don’t care about the capsules, I don’t care about my supposed family, all I care about is who I am.”
“What I’m interested in is how someone can allow an object that holds the key to his life, his identity and everything else to be stolen by some little kids.” Helen seemed irritated. She was getting loud, and so was Carl, and after they had yelled at each other for a few minutes Helen suggested they separate the two topics, his identity and the cartridge. She considered the cartridge significantly more important… but by all means. As far as she was concerned, identity first.
Carl didn’t answer.
“Your little prostitute,” said Helen. “Go ahead.”
“No, you start.”
Helen turned away, shaking her head, and Carl, who knew he was acting childish, chewed on his lips.
Their shadows sat mutely beside each other on the black TV screen. After a while Carl’s shadow reached for the hand of Helen’s shadow but she pulled her hand away.
“Go ahead.”
“But I’ve said everything now! It’s just that it can’t be. Cetrois went into the desert on a moped. I’m not Cetrois. The girl is mistaken.”
“Or the four men are mistaken.”
“How’s that possible? And you didn’t see this girl.” Carl described his encounter with the drug addict once again, down to the last detail, making sure to vividly emphasize how disturbed she was, and Helen interrupted him and said: “She wanted morphine from you. And you had some with you. Was that a coincidence?”
No answer.
“Did you tell her that you had some, or did she ask?”
“She asked.”
“And what exactly did she ask for?”
“For… stuff. Did I have any stuff. And then I pulled out the ampules and she wanted them. And at that point she said morphine.”
“You didn’t say morphine?”
“No.”
“And did it say morphine on the label in big letters?”
“No. It was written on the ampule, but it was barely legible.”
“She couldn’t have read it.”
“No. But what else could it have been?”
“Cocaine. Cosmetics. Saline.”
“She must have guessed it. She knows her drugs.”
“If I can just recap: this girl, who addressed you on the street as Charly, wanted stuff from you. And you happened to have stuff on you. At which point she said morphine, and what you had happened to be morphine. You don’t seriously think that she doesn’t know you, do you?”
“I—”
“And the fact that she just cursed and swore instead of answering your questions, even though you promised to give her the ampules if she answered. Why would she do that?”
“Because she’s a halfwit.”
“That is one possibility. Another is that the question is halfwitted. I mean, you ask incessantly about yourself and what your name is. You won’t find many people who will simply answer the question ‘what is my name’ with ‘you’re so-and-so’. And then you ask about Cetrois. You ask a hundred times whether she knows Cetrois and where she last saw him—I would call that psycho shit, too. Right? What would you say?… Do you know Helen? Answer. Do you know Helen? Helen Gliese? When did you last see her? Where is she? What is she doing? Answer, little man.”
Carl had buried his head in his crossed arms, and he didn’t lift it now as he groaningly said: “But the four men at the barn. I didn’t mishear them. I listened to exactly what they said, Cetrois went into the desert. Cetrois drove into the desert on the moped. They were far off. But I understood every word.”
“Then tell me exactly what they said.”
“I already told you. That Cetrois drove off into the desert, that they’d found a lot of money… and that they’d bashed in someone’s skull with a jack.”
“Someone?”
“Yes.”
“They said they had bashed someone’s skull in?”
“Some guy.”
“Some guy?”
“Yes.”
“And did they say why they bashed his skull in?”
“No. Or actually yes. When the fourth man showed up they said the guy was in the barn. They wanted him to tell them where Cetrois had gone. But he didn’t tell them… and then the carjack.”
Helen had stood up and was opening cabinets and drawers in the kitchen as she continued to call questions to Carl. She asked about the old fellah and what he’d been wearing, asked about his two sons, the color of the rattan suitcase and the location of the window in the attic of the barn. She asked about the size and shape of the hatch in the floor, the nature of the pulley. The height above the floor, the number of pulley blocks, the length of the chain. The weight of the ladder.
She returned with a paper and pencil, pushed them across the table and said: “Draw the floor plan. The entire barn and the huts… and where exactly the window was upstairs. And the entrance. And where you were lying when you woke up… right. There? You were lying there with your head in this direction? So this is where the crack in the wall was that you were looking through?”
Helen turned the sketch ninety degrees, took the pencil from Carl’s hand and drew a stick figure where Carl had put an X to mark the spot where he’d awoken with the wooden gun on his back. They looked at the map for a while and then added compass points to it.
“And the four men were here?”
She drew four stick figures next to the barn. One of them had a stroke of pencil lead in his hand to indicate the carjack, one was off to the side a little next to a jeep.
“And the jeep came from this direction, right? From Tindirma? And they were following you, so you probably also came from Tindirma. Doesn’t matter. So somewhere between here and the oasis they found the case of money or the loose money that made them stop,
so they weren’t directly behind you, but a ways behind you.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Just a second.”
“None of this changes the fact that I can’t be Cetrois.”
“I think I’ve got it.” Helen looked at the drawing for a while longer. Then she looked at Carl. “You had on a djellaba, right? Over your checkered suit. That you took off when you were fleeing. Did it happen to be white?”
He nodded.
“The four men also had white djellabas on. The old fellah had on a dirty-white djellaba, the dead man under the pulley did too. Let me guess: the guy on the moped was dressed no differently.”
“That’s speculation. But fine, whatever you’re getting at, it won’t work—”
“Just a second. You flee from your pursuers into the barn. You are here and they are here, and now the question is, what do they see? They see from far away someone in a white djellaba go into the barn and then someone comes out on a moped. Black hair, white djellaba, the same way their brothers look. So naturally they think it’s you, Cetrois.”
“That doesn’t work.”
“I wasn’t finished.”
“But it doesn’t work because they beat in my skull. And if they cracked my skull they must have known that it couldn’t have been me on that moped.”
“And how do you know that they cracked your skull?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“They said they cracked somebody’s skull.”
“Right, some guy! But not Cetrois.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.”
A blank, uncomprehending face.
“I don’t know whether you have forgotten,” said Helen, “but you weren’t the only person in the barn with your head smashed in.”
She drew a stick figure in the square of the hatch in the attic floor.
“But I hit him! With the pulley.”
“How do you know that? You said it was six meters or so. The hatch was four or five meters above the floor and the pulley was maybe two meters above the hatch. And the chain ran around several blocks. That would make quite a racket, don’t you think? Or was it silent? No. And how quickly did the pulley block set in motion when you hit it with the ladder?”
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