The Gloaming

by Melanie Finn

  ‘I have to make a phone call,’ he said, and went outside, far enough away that he could not be heard. He turned his back to the house, and pressed the phone to his ear. He stood like this for a long time. He thought about the moment Mr Koppler said goodbye to Sophie. Had he kissed her? Something eerily like a prayer formed in Strebel’s mind: please, please let him have kissed her.

  Caspary was coming out the door. He pretended to hang up. He pretended to be himself. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I guess we wait for the body. A hiker in the woods. Kids playing where they’re not supposed to.’

  * * *

  It took Mrs Gassner a matter of seconds to answer the door, as if her hausfrau exterior belied the body of an Olympic sprinter. ‘Inspector,’ she said, looking at him with a spark of curiosity. ‘Please come in.’

  He demurred. ‘This will only take a minute.’ He brought out Pilgrim’s letter. ‘We have just found this at Mr Ernst Koppler’s house. I wondered if you might know how it got there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s no criminal intention here, Mrs Gassner, but I feel your help—your honesty—is important. Mr Koppler has gone missing.’ He handed her the letter. She took it, regarded it with great mystery. ‘It’s addressed to you,’ he said. ‘How did it come to be in Mr Koppler’s house?’

  For a long minute she debated with herself. Could she concoct an adequate lie? Or might she apportion the truth? Strebel could almost hear her rifling through her options.

  At last Mrs Gassner decided: ‘I didn’t know him, only in passing, at the market, the apothecary. I knew he married that Turkish woman.’ Strebel thought to correct her but let it go. ‘She trapped him into marriage. These immigrants are all the same and he was a fool. But the little girl, he didn’t deserve that.’

  Strebel was attentive, neutral, and she glanced up, almost imploring: ‘I was doing the right thing, no matter what the law says.’

  ‘Please, just tell me.’

  She nodded. ‘He came, a few days after the accident. At first I didn’t recognize him. He was dirty, unwashed. He said he needed to go upstairs to Mrs Lankester’s apartment. He didn’t want to steal anything or make a mess, he just needed to see where she lived. Myself, I don’t understand what it was about but I didn’t see the harm.’

  ‘So you gave him the key?’

  ‘Several times.’

  ‘And he was here that morning I came by?’

  The very faintest movement of her head, just one nod. Strebel felt a surge of protective anger—almost jealousy. He wondered if Pilgrim had known of the violation, and had decided not to tell him. What had Mr Koppler done in there? What had he wanted?

  ‘And the letter?’

  ‘After the inquest—you know, it was a travesty to find no fault. Someone, even that Mrs Berger with the dog, should be held to account. This country is becoming too liberal. It started when they gave women the vote.’

  Strebel remained impassive. ‘And Miss Jones left without paying the phone bill?’

  ‘Incredible! I found an envelope under the door with payment for the months remaining on the lease and her key. I went up. The place was empty. I found most of her things in the rubbish in the basement. Bags of clothes. Books, shoes, things like that. She didn’t have much. It was a furnished apartment, you see.’

  ‘And yet she forgot to pay the phone bill,’ Strebel said, tapping Pilgrim’s letter thoughtfully on his hand.

  ‘That’s the kind of person she was. Careless.’

  ‘But she sent you the money.’

  Mrs Gassner attempted to sidestep, ‘I notice she has begun calling herself Jones. She must be on the lookout for a new man.’

  ‘And then you gave this letter to Mr Koppler. Why?’

  Now she was silent. And he felt she wasn’t searching for a lie but for the truth—an explanation that made sense, that she could extract from the tangle of her justifications. ‘I saw him,’ she said. ‘He looked terrible, he was suffering. We passed each other on the pavement by the cemetery. I suppose he was visiting his wife, his daughter. Can you imagine? Both in one year? He asked me if I knew where she was. I didn’t see the harm.’

  The harm, no one ever saw the harm.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A few days ago,’ she said, and then, gesturing to the letter, ‘Why were you at Mr Koppler’s house? Has he…? Is he…?’

  ‘What day?’

  ‘Three days ago.’

  ‘Monday?’

  ‘Yes. Has he… has he—’

  ‘Gone,’ Strebel finished for her.

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘It appears so at this time.’

  ‘He asked me where she was, that’s all, that’s all,’ Mrs Gassner blurted. ‘Africa. She’s in Africa. On a photographic safari, I’m sure of it. Having fun.’

  * * *

  On his way back to the precinct Caspary phoned: she’d traced Mr Koppler’s car to Zurich airport. Two days ago he took a Swissair flight to Dar es Salaam.

  Strebel took a deep breath.

  ‘Everything all right, sir?’ the pilot asked, even though he was already pulling up the steps.

  ‘Fine,’ Strebel nodded. ‘Yes, yes, not to worry.’

  The pilot gave him a mock salute and shut the door. Strebel backed away from the plane and aimed for a lone tree on the edge of the runway. The propellers revved, bits of dried grass and dust blew up from the blast, and then the plane bumped off to the far end of the runway. Strebel watched it take off. The sound faded and was overtaken by the violent zzzeeeeee of cicadas.

  He squinted. His pupils were pinpricks, terrorized by the sun. He was completely alone. Initially, this pleased him. He felt adventurous, a white man in the African bush. And the beauty of the flight from Dar es Salaam was still with him: the blue of the Indian Ocean, the fringe of turquoise suggesting shallows closer to shore, a ruffle of surf along the fringing reef, and the land eclipsed by wild green.

  But the heat was absurd.

  It hung on him like a great hairy animal, so that he could barely breathe, barely move. He was soaked with sweat—amazed at the speed with which this had happened. He’d been out of the Cessna’s air-conditioned comfort for less than three minutes and he was sweating in places he had completely forgotten about. The sweat collected behind his knees, behind his ears, at his throat. It trickled between his buttocks and into his groin, causing his thighs to rub. He was sure his eyebrows were sweating.

  Blanched light, hot and white and unrelenting as a strobe, shot through the tree above him, creating not shade but a patchwork of lighter and darker. It fell messy and uneven on the dry soil at his feet. Where there were ants. A dozen or so, delicately meandering through the leaf litter, fully occupied with their ant tasks.

  Christ, even his feet were sweating. He shifted his gaze from the ants to his feet in his sandals, the horny toenails and hair that leapt excited in little tufts from his toes. The feet of a middle-aged man were horrible.

  Strebel switched his black leather bag to the other shoulder. A Christmas present from Ingrid. He would have preferred brown leather. He considered that she knew this very well, his penchant for brown leather, his clearly—adamantly!—stated dislike of black leather. She always bought him black leather: gloves, wallet, belt.

  The wounds were never mortal.

  Never too much to bear.

  Peering down to the end of the runway where the short, cut grass yielded to long yellow grass and then to a copse of rough trees, he thought he could discern a white car in the shade. But his distance vision was increasingly bad. Anything past a hundred metres was a blur. He began to walk.

  It was miles—ten, twenty, perhaps fifty; the longest airstrip in the world. Was this how it had been for Livingston? His thighs chafing? A stream of sweat down the side of his nose that dripped off his chin and onto his shirt collar? As Strebel neared the trees, he was certain the white blob was indeed a car; but closer still, he felt less assured by the Toyota Corolla, for it was mottled in e
qual measure by white paint and rust. One wheel was obviously a spare, several sizes too small. In a remote Swiss village, sheep would have been living in this car. But here was the driver—he had the seat tilted all the way back and was fast asleep.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Strebel said, tapping lightly on the door. The driver made a low moan and opened his mouth. Then his eyes. He stared at the ceiling of the Toyota for a long moment, so long that Strebel’s eyes were also drawn to the spot. But there was nothing there. In a series of movements—was it possible to be so slow and still considered moving?—the driver sat up, yawned, adjusted the seat, sniffed, scratched his neck, lifted his hands so they floated slowly, slowly down onto the steering wheel.

  ‘Are you a taxi?’ Strebel ventured.

  ‘Taxi, yes,’ the driver replied, scratching his crotch. ‘You want hoteli?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Twenty dollar.’

  Strebel got in the back. It looked as if a wild animal had attacked the seat in a fit of pique. Nowhere did the seat retain its integrity, and Strebel was forced to straddle a crevasse in the foam that could swallow a child whole. But what were his options? He glanced out of the window into the white furnace, the grass wavering in the oily heat. What was he doing here? Tanga. Tanga?

  The driver started the car and they crept away from the airstrip. Ingrid’s arthritic grandmother could have outpaced them.

  * * *

  ‘This best hoteli.’ It didn’t look like much: a six-floor cement block with obtruding balconies. Strebel handed over the twenty dollars and got out. The driver came after him, talking excitedly. He was a large, bald man with hands the size of Christmas hams. He was shouting now, something in Swahili, and waving the money. Gauging the distance from the taxi to the hotel entrance at about ten feet, Strebel smiled a calm, traffic-stop smile; and, as if on smooth wheels, moved quickly to the door. Inside, he did not look back.

  It took a moment for his pupils to dilate. The receptionist was a pretty, smiling girl. She wore a name tag identifying her as Alice. Her skin was perfect—smooth and clear so that it shone like polished wood. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she said in careful English. ‘How may we help you today?’

  ‘I’m hoping I have the right hotel. A friend of mine is staying here. She recommended it.’

  ‘What is her name, sir?’

  ‘Pilgrim Jones.’

  Alice eschewed the large gray desktop—blind and silent. She flipped through a battered Guest Registry book. On the wall above hung a notice promising ‘Wi-Fi in every rm!’ Who had drawn the smiley faces? Alice?

  She triumphantly closed the book. ‘I remember her! A very pretty lady. She was here for only a few days. And then she went with Mama Gloria.’

  ‘Mama Gloria?’

  ‘She is very kind. She is trying to help the AIDS orphans.’

  ‘I see. That’s good of her. How could I contact Miss Jones?’

  Alice thought a moment, then opened a door to a closet-sized office. Inside, a young man hunched over a table of accounts. They conferred.

  ‘Miss Jones we don’t know. But Mama Gloria. All the drivers know her. We all know her,’ she waved a hand prettily, then pushed a registration form toward him. ‘You are staying with us now? In-suite room is fifty US per night, breakfast included.’

  ‘I’d like the same room as Pilgrim. If that’s possible.’

  Nodding, she selected a key and delivered it to him with a bright smile. However, this changed when she saw his money. She took one twenty and handed the other bills back. ‘Oh, sorry, sir.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘These dollars. Pre-millennium we cannot accept.’

  ‘Why not? They are legal tender. I got them from a bank in Switzerland.’

  ‘Do you have others? We cannot take these.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Switzerland is the banking capital of the world.’

  She smiled, a lovely smile that he realized was a wall. He could bash his head against it to zero effect.

  Strebel rifled through his wallet and found notes that met her requirements. ‘Please be comfortable,’ she said.

  In his room—Pilgrim’s room—he removed his clothes. He peeled them, for they stuck like eggshell to the damp, pale egg of his body. He strode hopefully to the shower in the small bathroom—the ‘in-suite.’ There was a single tap. He turned it. The shower head sputtered, emitting a brief, violent jet the color of cola. Strebel wanted to shout and hit it, but there was nothing at hand except his bottle of shampoo.

  Then the water came, cold and clear and steady. He stepped into it with deep gratitude that allowed him to comprehend the miracle of a tap. Why had he never considered how few people on the planet had experienced a shower?

  * * *

  He awoke later, abruptly, a copy of Newsweek stuck to his bare chest. He recalled only lying down, the overexcited squeak of the bed springs. Reading? An article about Sudan. Or was it Somalia? Terrible things, he couldn’t comprehend—even as a policeman. The scale of atrocities frightened him because it implied original sin, rather than tightly contained circles of abuse. In Switzerland, specific excuses could be made: bad parents, mental illness. He had managed to fall asleep, mid-atrocity: gangs of men with mirrored sunglasses and guns committed the most gruesome genocide to court international attention.

  Ingrid had recently told him that horror was inconvenient, coming at you on the TV news before dinner. You resent it, she’d said, and you feel bad resenting it, and wonder what you should do to not feel bad. But the only solution is to undergo some kind of fundamental change in how you live your life, to become a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières or a social worker for abused kids. At least stop buying goods made in Chinese sweatshops. It’s so big, she’d continued, so impossible and awkward, and the easiest thing—therefore—is to feed the cat instead or make a note to buy more washing powder. And we always do the easiest thing, don’t we?

  She’d said this without looking at him, as if—he thought—she was talking to someone else. In fact, as if she was someone else talking to someone else, not Ingrid and Paul who talked of very little except, occasionally, the dunderhead son-in-law in a concerned, vaguely judgemental way. They never spoke to each other like this. She’d never ask him about his work. Long ago, they’d realized it was no subject for conversation.

  After this odd outburst, she’d turned from him and quietly served up the sausages and spätzle.

  Now he debated that she had meant something else when she’d said, ‘And we always do the easiest thing, don’t we?’ The don’t we seemed specific rather than general. Seemed to be woman-speak for: I know you have this big moral code that you live by out there, Mr Policeman, but you always do the easiest thing at home.

  Recently, he’d noticed she had bunions. She’d had lovely feet when they’d first met. He’d seen that right away, her delicate, neat, high-arched feet in sandals. The elegance of her bare footprints in the Greek sand. Did bunions appear overnight, or grow slowly? And when? And why? What, exactly, were bunions?

  He was overdue to contact her. He turned on his phone, but it did not work. He turned on his computer, but could not find a connection. He dressed quickly and went downstairs to ask Alice.

  ‘I am sorry, sir, the Wi-Fi, it is not working.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But when do you think it will be working?’

  She smiled shyly, nibbled the end of her pen. ‘I think later. Yes, maybe later. Or tomorrow.’ She directed him across the street to a small internet café, but the power was down. He waited as the clerk started a loud petrol generator. By then the server was down.

  For a brief period both power and server colluded. ‘Ingrid,’ he wrote with lightning speed. ‘All fine here in Reykjavik, though very, very busy at the conference. Don’t expect to have much time to phone or write. Hope you are well. Love, Paul.’

  The driver was leaning against the car, waving his arms and smiling as if Strebel was an old friend. Strebel felt trapped. He wanted to pretend he co
uldn’t see the man, that his attention was diverted—a pressing phone call, for instance. But it was too late for that: the driver was now in front of him, giant hand out for shaking. Strebel shook back.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the driver said warmly, then fished Strebel’s twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and pointed at the date. ‘Banks not okay this!’

  In a flourish of bonhomie, Strebel swapped the driver’s bill for an acceptable version. The driver beamed, folded it carefully away.

  ‘Where we go?’ he said, still grinning. ‘Where we go, doctor?’

  ‘I’m not a doctor,’ Strebel replied, wondering what about him had a medical air. ‘Policeman.’

  ‘Polici?’ Now the driver wasn’t so sure. He even took a step back.

  Strebel shook his head. ‘Not here. Back at home. Switzerland.’

  ‘Switz? Eh?’

  ‘Switzerland. Here,’ he pointed to the ground, ‘holiday.’

  Was this the sort of holiday policemen took? To a foreign country to engage in some light, off-the-books investigating? He could just as well have gone to Sharm el-Sheikh with a couple of Sergeant Studer novels.

  ‘German War Graves?’ the driver asked. ‘Amboni Caves? Tongoni Ruins?’

  Strebel took this moment to dig around in his bag, but, in fact, he was trying to level with himself. The lies he’d told to come here, the absurd risk to his marriage, his career: these had been battering at his brain since he’d left Switzerland, like flies against a window. And they were getting louder; soon they would be like pigeons, a Hitchcockian rain of them, hitting with terrible, insistent thuds.

  He had told his boss he was visiting a sick uncle in Bruges. He had told Ingrid he was in Iceland. He had withheld evidence, the envelope with the little giraffe stamp. Because? Because? Because he wanted it to belong to him, wanted it to be a message from his lover intended for him. A summons: Come, I need to be rescued!

  Because of the scent of her.

  ‘Pangani? Pangani good beach.’ The driver looked expectant.

  ‘Mama Gloria.’