Her voice was very determined. To her credit, she had been the only person not to rest content with the explanations given for the very long interval between the couple’s departure from the hotel and the moment of the accident. She had collected astonishingly precise evidence relating to the morning of 17 May, newspaper articles, weather bulletins and the traffic reports provided by the police for the radio. This precision struck everybody as at least giving her the right to a hearing. Her evidence also recreated with appalling vividness the atmosphere in the lobby of the Miramax Hotel that morning: the chandeliers, whose light grew pale as day dawned, the sleepy night porter, Besfort Y. going to the desk to settle his bill and order a taxi, then returning to the lift, going up to the room and coming back with his girlfriend, whom he held tight as he led her from the door of the lift to the waiting cab. The porter, interrogated dozens of times, always said the same thing: after a sleepless night, twenty minutes before the end of his shift, neither he nor anybody else would be able to clearly recognise a woman, most of whose face was hidden by the raised collar of her raincoat, by her hat and the shoulder of the man to whom she seemed almost bound. Still less could the waiting driver see anything but two vague silhouettes approaching his car through the pelting rain and the wind that changed direction at every moment.
Liza Blumberg insisted that the young woman who entered the taxi was not . . . the normal Rovena. Asked what she meant by this, she replied that the young woman, even if she were Rovena, could only have been her shape, her replica.
At this point she produced the photos taken immediately after the accident, none of which showed the woman’s face. Besfort’s face was clearly visible, with his eyes immobile and a trickle of blood, as if drawn by a pen, on his right temple. But of the young woman who had fallen on her stomach alongside him, only her chestnut hair and her right arm stretched across his body were visible.
The pianist had repeated this story several times to earlier interviewers. To Lulu’s annoyance, they had listened with more sympathy than attention. Her anger forced them to enter into a discussion with her, but they proceeded without enthusiasm. Let us concede the possibility that the murder took place earlier. How would she then explain Besfort’s behaviour afterwards? Why would he drag a stiffened corpse, or a replica, into a taxi? Where would he take it and how would he get rid of it, with or without the driver’s help?
This took Lulu aback, but only for a moment. Of course the driver might have been involved. But this was a secondary matter. The important thing was to find out what happened to Rovena. Liza Blumberg believed that Rovena was murdered away from the hotel, and that Besfort Y., whether with assistance or not, had disposed of the body. But he needed that body, or something in the shape of Rovena, at the moment of leaving the hotel. They had stayed there two nights, so when the time came to search for the vanished woman, the first person to ask would be her lover or partner, call him what you like. His reply was easy to imagine: he and his girlfriend had both left the hotel early in the morning. She had accompanied him to the airport as usual, and had then disappeared on the way back. Everything would be simple and convincing, except that he needed something: a body, a shape.
Under her interviewers’ increasingly despondent gaze, Lulu Blumb elaborated her theory. Besfort Y. needed a shape or simulacrum of Rovena, the woman whom he had destroyed, body and soul.
He must have brooded for a long time over his alibi. And who or what would be a suitable substitute for the dead woman? What at first seemed frightening or impossible was simpler on close examination. He could easily find a more or less similar woman, at least of the same height, and bring her to the hotel. Or, if not a woman, something mute, without memory, and so without danger, such as a dummy, of the kind sold in every sex shop. Before dawn, in the gloom of the hotel lobby, it would be hard for a drowsy porter to notice that the woman emerging from the lift, in the close embrace of her lover, was different . . .
The interviewers grew weary and began to show their impatience. This happened with the first interviewer, the second and the fourth. Liza came to expect this, and so at her first meeting with the researcher, when the time came to talk about this day (the morning with its rain and wind that gave the hotel lobby an even more desolate air as Besfort Y. carried the simulacrum of his girlfriend to the taxi), she gave a guilty smile and spoke quickly, trying in vain to avoid uttering the word “dummy” and mumbling it under her breath.
This word changed everything. The researcher was visibly shaken.
“You mentioned an imitation, a dummy, if I am not mistaken.”
The guilty smile on Lulu’s face froze into a grin. “If you don’t like the word, forget it. I meant something in Rovena’s place, something artificial, sort of contrived.”
“Miss Blumberg, there is no reason why you should dodge the issue. Did you say the word ‘dummy’ or not. The word you used was
ein Mannequin
.”
Liza Blumb wanted to apologise for her German, but the researcher had grabbed hold of her hand. She was scared. She expected to hear insults from him, of the kind the others had thought but left unsaid. Instead, to her amazement, without releasing her hand, he said softly, “My dear lady.”
It was her turn to wonder if he had really said these words, or if her ears were deceiving her.
His eyes looked hollow, as if their gaze were turned back into his skull.
In fact, the researcher’s mind was thrown into total disarray. Here was the solution to the riddle he had been pursuing for so long. He wanted to say: “Miss Blumberg, you have given me the key to the mystery,” but he lacked the energy to speak.
The secret appeared suddenly out of the surrounding mist. What the driver had seen in the rear-view mirror had been nothing but an imitation. His human passenger had tried to kiss a replica. Or the replica, the person.
This was the crux. The other questions – where Rovena had been killed, if there had really been a murder, and why (the NATO secrets, the most likely motive), where they had dumped her or her body and what was done later with the dummy – these were all secondary considerations.
“Oh God,” he said aloud. Now he remembered that somewhere in his inquiry there really had been mention of a doll. A female doll torn apart by dogs.
That was where the explanation lay, nowhere else. This was the secret that had baffled them all. And those disconcerting words, as if coming from a universe made of plastic:
Sie versuchten gerade, sich zu küssen
. They were trying to kiss.
A doll had been behind everything, a soulless object that would serve to get Besfort out of the hotel. Then the story would continue on the autobahn to the airport. “Stop at this service area so I can throw this thing away.” Or: “Take these euros and get rid of it for me.”
Neither of these things happened, because of the kiss. It was this incident that startled the driver and brought the story to an abrupt close. Instead of throwing out the doll, they had all of them overturned.
He banged his fists on his temples. But what about the police? The first transcript had mentioned this very thing, the dummy, found alongside Besfort Y.’s body.
The researcher was in no hurry to call himself an idiot. The truth was still incomplete, but in essence he had found it. Of course, some details did not fit. There were discrepancies: the living bodies and the plastic did not match. There were differences of interpretation, and confusions of past and future. But these were temporary. It was like a group portrait: a pair of lovers, a doll, an impossible kiss and a murder. These ingredients would not assemble themselves into one picture. This was understandable: such mismatches between the conception of a murder and its enactment were familiar. Sometimes a murder and its victim would not come together, as if they had confused their schedules, until eventually they found each other.
The researcher strove to reduce what had happened to its simplest elements, as if it were an after-dinner story. Shortly after the taxi had left the hotel, the driver noticed that his passenger, muffled in her overcoat and scarf, seemed more like a doll than a living woman. After his initial surprise, mixed with a kind of superstitious fear, he pulled himself together. Weren’t there plenty of crazy people who travelled with broken violoncellos, brandy stills or tortoises, all painstakingly wrapped? So he was not unnerved at all, and even remained calm when the plastic creature appeared to show signs of life. This was an illusion, produced by the bends in the road, or because he was tired. Only when his passenger tried to kiss the doll did the taxi driver snap.
The researcher imagined different scenarios, as he was accustomed to doing for every crime. In the first, the driver was paid in advance to throw a doll into the road. In the next, more serious scenario, it was not a doll but a corpse that was to be thrown out, of course for a larger sum of money. In both versions, the strange passenger tried to kiss the figure beside him, a doll or a corpse, and that was when disaster struck.
The final and gravest version involved the taxi driver’s complicity in the murder. On the way to the airport, he and Besfort were to turn off into a waste clearing, to bury the body. It was Besfort’s attempt at a farewell kiss that caused the catastrophe.
It was early Sunday morning when, to the sound of Easter bells, he set off sleepily for the taxi driver’s apartment. The city was ashen after winter. There’s no hope, he thought, without being able to say of what.
The woman who opened the door glowered at him, but the taxi driver said he had been expecting him. He was now much readier to talk than before.
Everybody wants to unburden themselves, the researcher said to himself. But they passed all their burdens to him.
“I will only ask you one thing,” he said in a low voice. “Please be even more precise than before.”
The driver sighed. He listened to the researcher, his eyes steady. Then he hung his head for a long time. “Was it a living woman or a doll?”
He repeated what the researcher said in a low voice, as if talking to himself. “Your questions get more difficult all the time.”
The researcher looked at him gratefully. He had not shouted, what’s all this crazy stuff, what the hell are you driving at? He had simply said that the question was a difficult one.
Slowly, as before, he described that grim morning with its incessant sleet, the taxi engine running as he waited for his two customers. Finally they emerged from the hotel door. Clutching one another, with coat collars upturned, they hurried to the taxi. Without waiting for the driver to get out, the man opened the car’s left-hand door for his girlfriend, and went round to the other side to sit down in the opposite corner, from where he ordered
Flughafen!
in a foreign accent.
As the driver had said so often, the traffic had never been so congested as that day. It crawled forward through the semidarkness of dawn, stopped, started, came to a complete standstill. There were refrigerated trucks, lorries, buses, all drenched in the rain, with the names of firms, shipping agencies, mobile phone numbers, reappearing to the left or right as they filtered through, as if in some nightmare. During his time in the hospital, those inscriptions in strange and frightening languages had haunted him. Words in French, Spanish, Dutch. Half of united Europe and all the Tower of Babel was there.
The researcher’s eyes lost their earlier despondency. You can’t spin the story out indefinitely, he thought. Whether you want to or not, at some stage you will have to answer my question.
He waited as long as he could before repeating it. The driver took a moment of silence to think.
“Yes, that business of the dummy. Whether that woman resembled a doll or not . . . Of course she did. Especially now that you remind me. Sometimes she looked like a dummy, and sometimes he did. As everybody does. Behind car windows with condensation, that’s how most people look, distant, remote, made of wax.”
The researcher felt his temper rise.
“I asked you not to dodge the question,” he suddenly cried, “at least not this one. I begged you, I pleaded on my knees.”
Oh God, he’s started again, thought the man.
The researcher’s voice was hoarse. He almost gasped.
“I gave you a last chance to tell the truth, to get all that fear gnawing you inside out of your system. Tell me, what was that thing that terrified you so much? A man trying to kiss a dummy? Or a doll trying to kiss a man? Or was something missing that made such a thing impossible for either of them? Tell me!”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m not in a position to say. I can’t.”
“Tell me your secret.”
“I can’t. I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to because you’re under suspicion too. Tell me. How were you going to dispose of the body, after the murder? Where were you going to throw the dummy? Don’t try and wriggle out of it! You know everything. You were keeping track of everything. In your mirror. Like a sniffer dog.”
The researcher’s voice subsided again. He had been so excited when he arrived at the apartment, hoping to please the driver too with his discovery. But he hadn’t wanted to know. Mentally, he addressed the doll itself. Nobody wants you, he said to it. Nobody can even see you but me.
Silently he drew from his briefcase the photos of the two victims. Would the gentleman take another look. Notice that the dead woman’s face is not visible anywhere.
The man averted his eyes. He stammered in terror. Why were they pressing only him for this secret? If this victim wasn’t a woman but a doll, why hadn’t the police said anything?
Psychic, the researcher said to himself. This was the same first question that he had put to Liza Blumberg, after which his mind had strangely clouded over. He hadn’t heard her reply.
The driver spoke haltingly. Something inexplicable had happened in his taxi. Something impossible . . . but why were they asking only him to explain?
The researcher interrupted. “You’re the last person who should complain. I’ve asked you a thousand times why you crashed the taxi after seeing a kiss and you won’t give me an answer.”
They both sat in silence, stupefied with exhaustion. You might just as well ask me why I believed Liza Blumb’s story, and I wouldn’t know how to reply, the researcher reflected. We could all ask questions of each other. What right have we got in this pitch-black night to ask about things that are beyond our powers to see?
He was too tired to relate how years ago, at high school, he had been taken to an exhibition of modern art. The students had laughed at pictures of people with three eyes or displaced breasts, or giraffes in the form of bookcases, in flames. Don’t laugh, somebody had told them. One day you’ll understand that the world is more complicated than it appears.
The researcher calmed down again, and his eyes even recovered their earlier tenderness.
“There are other truths, besides those which we think we see,” he said softly. “We don’t know, don’t want to, or can’t know, or perhaps mustn’t . . .” His unfortunate friend was saying that something impossible had happened in his taxi. This was perhaps the essence. Nobody knows the rest. “What happened in your taxi was something different from what you saw. They had been together on the back seat, innocent and guilty, a man and perhaps a woman who had been murdered, dolls, replicas, shapes and spirits, sometimes together and sometimes apart, like those flaming giraffes. What you saw and what I imagined are evidently very far from the truth. It was not for nothing that the ancients suspected the gods of denying us human beings their superior knowledge and wisdom. That is why our human eyes were blind, as usual, to what happened.”
The investigator felt drained, as if after an epileptic convulsion.
The entire incident could have been something else. He would not now be surprised if they were to tell him that his inquiry was as far from the truth as a biography of the pope, a file on a bank loan or the life story of a trafficked woman from the former East, recorded in desolate police offices near airports.
“I will ask one more question,” he said gently. “Let it be the last. I want to know if, as you drove towards the airport, you heard a strange noise, which you might at first have taken to be an engine fault, but was in fact something else. A noise quite unexpected on a motorway, like a galloping horse chasing you all.”
He stood up without waiting for the answer.