When he turned out the light, the tablets were starting to take effect. His left foot pressed on the clutch, his right made cautious braking movements. Over those convulsive motions, against which he fought in vain, he went to sleep.
The handbrake was as firm as if it were cemented in. He had to creep further into the car, supporting himself with one knee on the driver’s seat; but the lever wouldn’t move a millimeter, not even when he tried to pull it up with both hands. The button that was supposed to release it wouldn’t move either, it felt as if it were made of stone. Then suddenly there was no button, and the pressure of his thumb disappeared into the void. It all took seconds, and his pulse was racing. Now sweat-drenched, rough hands grabbed him by the arm. There was a struggle. Leskov was as strong as a bear, but otherwise he was a faceless opponent. Suddenly, the car started rolling – actually it was more of a slide, the horror of which lay in its silence. The battle was done, and they tipped over into blind white, as if in slow motion.
Then again he felt his right hand knocking out the gear. He made that quick, violent movement over and over again. It was as if he were nothing but that arm and that hand. Again the car began to roll, then Leskov pulled up the handbrake; the crunching noise had an endless echo that seemed to fill the whole parking lot and the whole gorge. This time he had a face, a face with wide-open, fearful eyes that turned into a triumphant face with a look of contempt. Leskov’s face jerked close to him and became a close-up; in the end it was a face with a wide, curling moustache that quickly turned into a grimace of scorn.
29
When Perlmann awoke, drenched in sweat and still quite dazed, it was half-past eight, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky as it had done on the previous two days, so that behind his numbness he managed to think for a tiny moment that it was only Friday morning and everything was still all right. Once it had slipped away, the illusion could not be repeated, and he walked slowly and unsteadily to the bathroom. Yesterday, showering had seemed to him like something that was no longer the fraudster’s due. This morning, after a night in which quite other things had passed through his mind, that feeling seemed obsolete, almost laughable. Under all that water the numbness fled, and the returning dream images gradually lost their power.
Nothing has happened yet
, he thought again and again.
I still have thirty hours left.
His hunger repelled him. He really didn’t want to eat anything ever again. But that vexatious feeling had to be removed, so he ordered breakfast, even though the idea of meeting a waiter now was disagreeable. As he mechanically stuffed croissants down himself and drank cup after cup of coffee, it slowly dawned on him that there was one additional possibility he hadn’t thought of in the course of the previous night. He could stage a car accident in which he killed himself and dragged Leskov to his death as well.
Initially, he didn’t dare imagine how that might happen in any detail; at first the important thing was to resist the thought in its abstract form. He felt his breath racing, and saw his hand trembling slightly as he lit a cigarette. And yet he was amazed how little resistance that new thought encountered within him. It was, after all, a murder. But that struck him as oddly irrelevant. The main thing was that everything then would be darkness and total silence. He smoked in long, deep drags as he plunged into that idea. The longer he lingered with it, the more drawn into it he became. All the weariness that had grown within him over the past few days seemed quite naturally to have been invested in that imagined silence. And not only that: suddenly he felt as if all he had done during those months since Agnes’s death was wait for that silence to arrive. Certainly, there was a murder bound up with it. But the thought of Leskov remained pallid, the after-effect of the pills paralyzed his imagination, and behind Perlmann’s heavy lids one single thought formed over and over again:
I will not have to live with this murder for so much as a second. So not for a second of my life will I be a murderer.
He felt that this was a piece of sophistry, an outrageous false conclusion, but he didn’t have the will to disentangle it, and clung to the truth that those two sentences bore on their surface.
He wrote a circular in which he informed his colleagues that Vassily had plainly found a way to come here, at least for a few days, and that he would be arriving tomorrow afternoon. So the first session on his, Perlmann’s, text would not, as planned, take place on Monday afternoon after the reception at the town hall, but not until Tuesday morning, as he intended to collect Leskov from the airport on Monday. He wrote quickly and without hesitation, and afterwards, when he put his money and credit cards in his pocket, and the road map in his jacket and went downstairs, he was both pleased and horrified by the businesslike manner, the cold-bloodedness, even, that had taken hold of him.
He asked Signora Morelli to copy the circular and put it in the pigeonholes. Then he told her of Leskov’s imminent arrival and reserved a room for him, spelling out his name. Finally, he asked her to call for a taxi.
On that sunny, warm morning they were all sitting on the terrace. Perlmann put on his sunglasses, greeted them with a curt wave and without slowing his pace, and walked down the steps. He had just – he thought as he waited by the road – felt strangely unassailable when, a bit like a ghost, he had walked like the others. Admittedly, he had avoided looking at Evelyn Mistral. But that, it seemed to him then, had actually been unnecessary; because from now on she was far away from him, in another time. That, in fact, was what made him so calm and unassailable: by deciding to drive to his death he had stepped out of the usual time that one shared with others, and in which one was entwined with them, and was now moving in a private time of his own, in which the clocks moved identically, but which otherwise ran unconnectedly alongside the other time
. Only now that I have left the time of the others have I succeeded in delineating myself from them. That is the price.
The new time, he thought in the taxi, was more abstract than the other one, and more static. It didn’t flow, but consisted in an arid succession of moments which one had to live through, or rather, deal with. A lack of present, he was puzzled to note as he looked out through the open car window at the smooth, gleaming water, was suddenly no longer a problem. In the new time, which would last until some point tomorrow afternoon, before disappearing from the world along with his consciousness, present did not exist even as a possibility, so that one couldn’t miss it either. All that existed now was this: coolly calculating and sticking to his schedule in the planning and execution of his intention. Perlmann wound up the window, asked the driver to turn off the radio and leaned back in the tatty seat whose broken springs stuck into his back. He didn’t open his eyes until the taxi stopped under the yellowed plane trees in front of the station.
On Monday evening, when he had waited with Kirsten on the platform, he had been thankful of that meaningless, shrill ringing noise. It had freed them both for a while from the embarrassment of being together in silence. In his mind’s eye Perlmann saw Kirsten’s liberated laughter as she held her hands over her eyes. Today the penetrating, endless sound rendered him defenseless, and he went back outside to the plane trees.
He would leave a piece of paper with Kirsten’s phone number on the desk, so that they didn’t need to rummage for it in his belongings. That was quite natural. After all, Kirsten hadn’t been in Konstanz for as much as three months. Which of his colleagues would call her? In all likelihood von Levetzov would take on the task. Such bad tidings were, if possible, best passed on in the mother tongue, and Ruge would take a backseat. But how would his colleagues find out in the first place?
The carabinieri would have to find something in Perlmann’s wallet to show that he had been staying at the Miramare. Unless the car went up in flames. It was the first time that Perlmann thought of the possibility of burning to death at the wheel, and he started perspiring with terror at the idea that the flames might engulf him when he wasn’t even dead, perhaps only unconscious. He was relieved that the sound of the arriving train tore him away from that idea.
The rhythmical knocking of the wheels did him good; it gave him the feeling that everything was still in suspension. He was free and could at any time revoke his desperate decision. He would have loved to be carried along by that knocking for ever, and was annoyed that he had taken a slow train that stopped at every station. When the knocking started again after a halt, and grew faster again, he managed to escape for a few minutes into the thought that things weren’t that bad, it was just a text, after all, a few written pages – that couldn’t possibly be a reason to put a violent end to everything. But then, when the train stopped again, he was seized once more with horror at the idea of having to live through the discovery of his plagiarism and the ostracism that it would entail, minute by minute, hour by hour, until the end of his life. When an old woman in a black crocheted headscarf sat down opposite him in Nervi, made a friendly remark and gave him a maternal smile, he got up without a word and went to another compartment where the seats were free.
The worst of it was that because it was supposed to look like an accident he couldn’t sort anything out before his death. There were people he would have liked to say something to. Kirsten above all, even though the right sentences wouldn’t come to mind. He would have liked to see Hanna again, too. He owed her an explanation for that sudden ghostly phone call in which he hadn’t asked her a single thing about her own life. He tried to imagine what she must look like now. He saw that flat face in front of him, framed in her blonde hair with the single dark strand, but her face remained frozen in the past, and refused to develop through the three decades that had passed in the meantime.
He would have liked to walk through his bright Frankfurt apartment again, sit down at his desk for one last time and look, for one last time, at Agnes’s photographs. And then his diaries. He wished he still had the chance to destroy them. This way, Kirsten would find them now. He tried in vain to remember what was actually in them. He fervently hoped he was mistaken, but when he stepped on to the platform in Genoa, he had the oppressive feeling that he was leaving behind a big pile of kitsch.
He went out into the station portico, had to put off a number of taxi drivers and finally found a quiet corner. He would take the smallest car they had, one with a short hood and no crumple zones. So that it would happen quickly and he could be sure that it would work. Suddenly, he felt he was having an attack of diarrhea and ran to the toilet. It was a false alarm. His heart was pounding in his throat when he went back to the car rental company’s counter. He stopped in a corner and forced himself to breathe calmly. Renting the car, in itself, didn’t force him into anything. He could always bring it back as if nothing had happened. He had to utter that thought out loud to himself a few times, slowly and with great concentration, before he managed to contain his excitement, and he had a sense that he could be sure of his voice.
The counters of all three companies were closed. He hadn’t expected that, and he hadn’t noticed before, even though they were all right in front of his nose as he stepped out. For a few minutes he just stood there, his hands in his trouser pockets, and gazed into the void. Then he slowly walked over to the timetable and checked when the next train left for Santa Margherita. On the way to the platform he paused abruptly, bit his lip and then walked back to the taxis.
‘Here you are, after all,’ grinned the driver he had turned away before.
Perlmann slammed the car door shut. ‘To the airport,’ he said in a tone that made the driver turn round and look at him in amazement before he drove off.
‘I’m sorry, Signore,’ said the Avis lady, with bright make-up and a red dress, ‘but we just have one car free, a big Lancia. All the others are out until the middle of the week. There’s a big industrial fair in the city.’
‘If that’s the case,’ Perlmann said irritably, fighting down his mounting hysteria, ‘then why is your counter at the station closed, and why are the other companies here closed as well?’
‘That, Signore, I can’t tell you,’ the hostess snapped back and turned her attention to her computer.
Perlmann looked at his watch: half-past eleven. In five hours it would be dusk, and it could take a long time before he had found a suitable location.
‘All right, I’ll take it,’ he said.
The hostess took her time before starting to fill in the form. How long did he want to rent the car for?
The question took Perlmann aback, as if he had been asked something obscene. That he was being asked for information that extended beyond his death and was hence without any significance for him once again made him keenly aware how deep the gulf had become between his private time, which was about to come to an end, and public time, the time of contracts and money, that would go on for ever.
‘For two days,’ he said hoarsely.
Would he be bringing it back tomorrow evening?
It was far too long before he finally, without any reason and with the feeling of saying something completely random, opted for a ‘yes’, and the hostess was visibly surprised at how little this customer, who had seemed so arrogant only a few moments before, seemed to know about his own plans.
What insurance did he want to take out? Did he want to include fully comprehensive cover?
‘The usual,’ Perlmann said tonelessly.
‘I’m sorry?’ the hostess asked, not trying to conceal her impatience.
‘The usual,’ Perlmann repeated with forced firmness, and had the feeling that she must be able to see how his face was burning. In the worst case, then, the police would be able to get to the hotel via his licence and Avis, he thought, when the hostess finally entered his local address.
As he walked towards the exit he stopped in front of the monitor showing the arriving flights. The last one currently on the list was coming from Paris and was supposed to be landing at five to three. It didn’t matter in the slightest, he said to himself, where Leskov’s flight came from. There was, of course, no direct flight to here, but it really couldn’t have mattered less where Leskov changed. And the plane that he took tomorrow wouldn’t necessarily be a daily flight. Nonetheless, Perlmann stopped, smoked, and stared fixedly at the flickering screen. And when he had stamped out his second cigarette and looked up again, the flight was there: AZ 00423, 15.05 from Frankfurt.