They made it up to the edge of the forest before she suddenly stopped and looked up at the moon.
“Quanto è bello.”
The Italian woman seemed to hesitate for an instant, but when Erik gave her a little nudge in the back, she complied after all, continuing into the darkness.
A
s they walked side by side on the narrow forest path, she began to ask questions about the ankh in her bright voice. How had it looked? Had he inspected it? Then she asked several times whether he had found anything else he hadn’t told the police about down there in the mine. Even if Erik had wanted to, he couldn’t answer any longer, because his throat had constricted as it always did when he was this close.
He fumbled for the Italian woman’s hand in the dark and felt how he managed to graze her fingers. But then she quickened her steps, and soon the hill leveled onto the strip of beach by the lake.
T
he white water lilies covered the silky smooth surface out to the end of the T-shaped dock. Usually they were done blooming by September, but this year the petals were still there, with their slippery stems firmly rooted in mud and sludge.
Erik placed a bare foot on the damp planks of the dock, and he had gone out a bit before he noticed that the Italian woman didn’t intend to follow him. He continued by himself out to the metal ladder down into the dark water. There he turned around.
Elena was still standing on the beach with her arms crossed as he began to take off all his clothes. He couldn’t make out her expression.
“So—you want to see the ankh, Elena?” he called to her. “If you really want to see it, you have to come and swim with me.” Then Erik
turned, naked, out toward the water. He stood there for a long time and let her get a good look.
“Signor Hall …”
The whisper sounded very close. But now his body was already in motion, and the surface of the water rushed toward him.
H
e didn’t know how long he would sink; the liquor made his body feel like an armored suit of lead.
Then his arms made a first instinctive stroke, and then another, and then he exploded up through the surface of the water. Erik rolled over to float on his back and opened his eyes. After he’d blinked a few times, he realized that that really was the Italian woman standing naked out by the ladder, with a black bandage around her snow-white upper arm.
She raised her arms from her chiseled waist and the triangle between her legs. Elena dove quickly off the edge of the dock and did the crawl stroke past him out to the middle of the lake.
Not until he got a cold swallow of water did Erik notice that his mouth was hanging open. He tried to swim up to her, to get hold of her body, but he soon had to give up, and then it was as though everything slowed down.
The Italian woman swam out of reach on her back, and there they were, drifting around slowly in the lake. Neither of them said anything, and she didn’t seem to be in any hurry. They just lay there, floating, under a distant moon, a minute sliver away from being full. Her breasts floated weightless on the water, and she didn’t seem to care when he looked.
But then everything started to move again, and Elena was the one who got out first. She took one of the towels and wrapped it around herself. Then she walked over to the grassy spot by the edge of the woods above the beach.
Erik hurried to follow her. Once he had plowed through the lukewarm water up to the ladder and managed to get his feet to take the
three steps up, he had to take another look to make sure that the Italian woman was actually still sitting there.
There was a row of wet spots from his footsteps on the planks of the dock up toward the grass, and soon he would be there. Erik sank down into a crouch next to Elena and made another attempt to clasp his arm around her shoulders. She moved backward rapidly, and there was something sharp about her voice as she said, “You promised me an ankh.”
“Yes, yes,” he mumbled and tried once again to get hold of her.
“So first you will go and get it.”
Her eyes shone black under her long lashes and after one more clumsy attempt, he realized that he had no choice other than to get up again.
B
are-chested, with a towel around his hips, he staggered up toward the cottage. When he came back down the path after some time, he had another opened bottle of wine with him. Erik waved it in greeting, but when he approached the Italian woman, he realized that the gesture had been meaningless. Her eyes had already riveted themselves onto the object he was carrying in his other hand: an ivory-colored cross with an eye.
“Bentornata,”
she mumbled.
Erik released the ankh into her outstretched hands.
A
nd so they sat there, a short distance from each other, above the lake’s water lilies, the beach, and the dock. The Italian woman was still naked under Erik’s towel, and she inspected the ankh while he swigged wine.
At some point, he made an attempt to move the bottle to her lips, but she moved away quickly without even needing to look up.
It took such a fucking long time—he couldn’t understand what the little Italian was doing. She rotated the shaft, turn after turn, as though she were pretending that she could read those winding inscriptions.
At times he thought he even heard her mumbling a few syllables, but when he looked at her lips her mouth appeared to be closed.
“It’s my ankh, you know. I found it,” Erik said in a low voice.
Elena turned in his direction, and he could have sworn that she showed her teeth like a beast of prey. Nothing was left of the Italian woman’s ingratiating manner; her perfect face was closed and cold.
“You know, I have one other little secret …”
Erik moved closer.
“Another little secret that I found down there. That only I know about.”
She lifted her eyes from the ankh.
“But it will cost you more. A kiss. It’s gonna cost you a kiss to see it.”
The Italian had time to laugh before she covered her mouth.
“A kiss,” he said thickly. “A ki …”
And in one sweeping movement, Erik laid his arm over the Italian woman’s shoulders and pressed her face to his mouth. But then he felt a sharp elbow in his stomach and lost his breath, and she was free again.
“Just a little kiss,” Erik tried once more.
“Where?”
he heard the Italian woman ask.
No more ingratiating voice; it was sharp, cunning, pointed. His mouth chomped a few times, empty, a sour taste, a sick feeling. Suddenly all that dark stuff came pouring up through him and buried everything in its way:
“It will cost you, do you understand, you cunt?!”
He heaved himself up onto her; it was such a violent movement that he surprised himself. He pressed his lips to hers, forced open her mouth, and shoved in his tongue. But it wasn’t until Erik had swung himself up so he was sitting on the Italian woman’s chest and had pressed her arms down into the grass with his knees that he realized that this was how it would have to be.
“Pezzo di merda!”
He got a good grip on her mouth with one hand, and with the other he determinedly pulled the towel from her breasts. For a split second, Erik lost control of one of the Italian woman’s hands, and although he half managed to block the blow, her smack made his cheek burn like fire. How could that little hand hit so hard?
Now he completely lost his cool; he could smell the stench of that fucking mine and see the photographer with her ponytail and her cunty pictures.
Once again Erik forced the Italian woman’s arms to the ground, and he moved his crotch up toward her mouth. But just as he managed to loosen the towel from his own hips, it was as though his head broke. An intensely piercing noise; a circular saw of shrill tones that cut right through his forehead.
He rolled heavily to the side and held his ears, as though that could stop the pain. Sharp nails digging and rooting inside his head, it was as though … Then he noticed that the pain disappeared when he rolled away from the Italian woman and, blinking, he fumbled again for her escaping body.
S
omewhere a glass shattered.
A
lthough he had actually managed to sit up just before she took aim, Erik Hall never saw the broken bottle whizzing toward him.
He would also never know that the force behind the Italian woman’s blow was so great that the razor-sharp edge of glass cut through his temple as though it were made of butter and that it then ripped a bloody ravine through his right eyeball and the right side of his brain, until it sank, trembling, into the inside of his nasal bone.
A gentle breeze blew through the tops of the pines above the supine body. A few soft lapping waves, and then, closer and closer, the sound of a stuttering car motor.
D
on had just managed to force his Renault to a bumpy stop outside Erik Hall’s summer cottage when the roar of a motorcycle ripped the night apart. In his rearview mirror, he saw the red light flicker away just above the asphalt before it disappeared in the dark, on its way south.
The roar of the motorcycle diminished to a far-off hum, but Don had always had a great sense for sounds, and what he heard now was a large, horizontally opposed boxer engine with a low center of gravity. A vibrationless two-cylinder four-stroker, which at 8,000 rpm could give a max speed of more than 250 kilometers per hour. A machine made by Germans. A BMW.
He straightened his knees to get rid of the stiffness and try to move on to other thoughts—but his inner calculator was already rolling.
Bayerische Motoren Werke. The company that had manufactured the first working turbojet motor. Mounted into a Swallow, a Messerschmitt ME 262, on July 18, 1942. The test flight in Niedersachsen in 1944, and from 1945 onward thrown into the last desperate defense of the very heart of the disease: Stuttgart, Ulm, Munich, Innsbruck,
Salzburg. The last superior weapon aside from the V-2 rocket. It was …
Don banged his wrist on the door frame, and the sudden pain stopped the babbling of his memory. Then he heaved himself out of the driver’s seat and slammed the fussy door behind him. Clapped the flakes of rust from his hands and looked over toward Erik Hall’s fence.
He didn’t really know what he thought the diver’s cottage would look like, but he hadn’t counted on it being completely dark. It was only … yes, it was eleven o’clock, and the sunporch was lit only by the moon.
But it would be unusual if the diver were asleep. The last week’s phone calls from Erik Hall had come at night several times, when the diver woke him up with some new, incoherent theory about his strange ankh.
He could knock, in any case.
Knocking at doors unexpectedly, that’s what people do in the country,
Don thought.
H
e let his hand slide along the rails of the fence on his way up to the gates. Someone had put a lot of love into the cottage; you could see that even in this darkness. Don lifted the hasp and gave a shove, and the gate opened, rustling against the gravel.
Now that the motorcycle was gone, he could hear only a quiet rush, and rainwater dripping into a barrel from a drainpipe. Don had run into the thunderstorm on his way up, but it seemed to have left this area a long time ago, and it was remarkably warm for evening.
He walked up the gravel path through the moonlight and caught sight of his reflection in the windows of the sunporch. He tried knocking when he had gone up the steps, but there was no answer from within the cottage. He leaned his forehead against the glass pane in the door and peered in.
Don knocked again; not hesitantly this time but rather a solid pounding that Hall wouldn’t be able to avoid hearing, if indeed he
was in there, somewhere in the dark of the cottage. But no answer: only the whispering of the wind through the leaves and the dripping noise from the overflowing rainwater barrel at the corner of the house. He had almost given up when he quite spontaneously tried to push down the handle. There was a creak as the unlocked door swung open.
Don remained standing hesitantly on the stairs for a second, but then he took a step onto the sunporch, into its scent of red wine and burned candles.
“Anyone there?”
The Mora clock ticked quietly.
“Hello?”
Don stood there in the dark for a second, wavering.
Then he felt that he had traveled way too far to just turn around, and he knocked hard on the interior door. But still only silence, except for the pendulum’s monotonous rhythm in the old clock.
He continued to call out as he walked through a parlor with pink velvet easy chairs. Then he came to a long, narrow room with a view to the back of the house.
When he turned around he caught sight of another doorway, which turned out to lead to the kitchen. There he saw the orange light of the coffeemaker shining. So the diver couldn’t be too far away, after all.
There were two glasses, candles, and a few bottles of wine on the table in front of the wooden bench. When Don turned on the porcelain lamp, he saw that one of the bottles was still half full.
And then his heart fluttered as he caught sight of a tall, thin figure in the window. Not until he moved one hand did he realize that the blurry figure was he himself.
He’d always had a hook nose, a real
yidishe noz
that stuck out from his face like a broken-off hanger. He had bought his aviator glasses a few years ago, when the sharpness of his vision began to disappear, and that must have been about the same time that his hair had become thin and peppered with gray. He had been a bit stooped
since his teenage years, but he couldn’t remember when he’d become so thin, or when the skin on his hands had become so yellowed. The corduroy jacket didn’t help; in fact, it intensified the tired forward, downward, curve of his shoulders; and the only thing he might possibly have been satisfied with, his new Dr. Martens boots, weren’t even visible in his reflection in the window.
Then there was a clatter from the refrigerator, over by the stove, and Don’s heart racheted up in pace even though he soon realized that it was only the refrigerator’s compressor chugging to life.