Giovanni looked at him quizzically when she had gone.
‘A taxi,’ he said. ‘I need a taxi.’ Giovanni reached for the receiver.
Perlmann realized then that he was confused by the fact that he stood there, contrary to his plan, as Giovanni made the call. He held the text limply in his dangling hand, and he held it the way you hold something that you’re going to drop in the gutter at the next possible opportunity. Never again did he want to hold a text in his hand. Never again.
The taxi company took its time, and an unpleasant, silent wait began. It was just to do something that Perlmann looked down at his hand that held the text. And it was a moment before he noticed the small, long card stuck under the paperclip that held the pile of papers together. Even before he knew what it said, something in him began to vibrate. He abruptly bent his arm, brought the card up in front of his eyes and read: 6 copie. Per il gruppo di Perlmann. Distribuire, come sempre. He didn’t understand. I threw away the original a little while ago. But his breathing quickened, he read again, lifted the card and saw the title: mestre non è brutta. Underneath, his name.
For a few seconds he stood there motionless, blind and deaf to his surroundings, wrapped in the beating of his blood. Maria. The call from Genoa. She finished typing up my notes. In spite of the people from Fiat.
It lasted until the thought had found its way to his body. Then Perlmann started running. He collided with the door, twisted his ankle on the steps and lost a shoe, but in spite of the pain and in spite of the cold cobbles he ran as he had never run in his whole life, clutching the rolled-up text in his fist like a relay baton. He got a stitch in his side and started coughing. Good God! I hope I’m thinking the right thing! Now he saw the figure of Signora Morelli walking along the marina. He ran with lungs that threatened to burst. There was no breath left to call out and, at last, when his soft knees refused to support him and he began to stumble, he had caught up with her. He couldn’t get a word out, just bent down breathlessly and coughed, his hands pressed to his ribs because of the stitch.
‘This note here,’ he panted at last, and now he no longer cared that his mouth wasn’t properly obeying him, ‘does this mean that you copied the text six times?’
‘Sì, Dottore,’ she said, and on her face her initial surprise made way for an expression of preparation for self-defense.
‘And those were the copies that you put in my colleagues’ pigeonholes on Saturday morning?’
‘Sì.’
‘And you didn’t copy and distribute any other text?’
‘No, Signor Perlmann,’ she said, now visibly annoyed with this breathless questioning, ‘this is the text that Maria gave me. I haven’t had another one.’
He held the papers up as closely in front of Signora Morelli’s face as if she were half-blind.
‘This text here? This one here? No other one?’
Signora Morelli’s tone changed when Perlmann lowered the pages and she recognized the harbingers of tears in his face.
‘But yes, Dottore,’ she said gently, ‘it was this text here, this one exactly, and only this one. What have I done wrong?’
‘Wrong? Nothing, nothing,’ he stammered between the sobs that he could no longer control, ‘on the contrary, this is… this is my salvation.’
He turned away and searched in vain for a handkerchief. Then he rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket and looked at her again.
‘Many apologies,’ he said quietly and vainly resisted his returning tears. ‘I can’t explain it to you, but I have never felt such relief. It’s… indescribably great. Indescribably so.’
When he took his hand away from his eyes, she was looking at him as if she were seeing him properly for the first time. She smiled and touched his arm. ‘Then you should go and sleep now,’ she said. ‘You look completely exhausted.’
He watched her go until, without turning round, she disappeared down a side street. It was a moment of presence. A redemptive present that he would not have thought possible.
Then, when he walked back very slowly to savor the precious present, he felt as if he were treading on needles each time he set down his ice-cold foot, and a stinging pain in his lungs pierced him from time to time. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more apart from his overwhelming relief. No plagiarism. I haven’t committed plagiarism. No plagiarism. It was like slowly, disbelievingly, emerging from a very great, very dark depth, accompanied by a jumpiness that he thought he could feel in every fibre of his body. Again he read Maria’s instruction on the card. And then twice. It was that text that Signora Morelli had copied, exactly this one and only this one. That was what she said. Did she say it?
When he turned the corner and saw the crooked pines, which were no longer illuminated at this hour, but only stood out against the night sky with their milky greyish green, his relief blew apart, and he felt as if he were being pressed down into the depths again by an incredibly heavy weight. Giovanni must have made the copies himself and distributed them. That’s why she doesn’t know anything about Leskov’s text. An iron claw grabbed him by the chest, and each individual twinge in his foot was genuine torture as he hobbled hastily back, slipped into his lost shoe on the steps and walked, breathing heavily, to the reception desk.
‘On Friday night,’ he gasped, ‘when the football match was on television, I brought you a text. What did you do with it?’
Giovanni glanced down. ‘Erm… nothing,’ he said and took a long drag on his cigarette. Then, when he had expelled all the smoke, he looked at Perlmann uncertainly. ‘It was like this… I wasn’t really concentrating, so to speak, because… You see, there was this equalizer in the ninetieth minute, and then the penalty shoot-out… and afterwards I couldn’t remember exactly what you’d said to me, so I just put the text in your pigeonhole. I’m sorry if that meant something went wrong, but it was so exciting that…’
Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled in slow motion. Then he rested his hand on Giovanni’s. ‘You’ve done the right thing. Exactly the right thing. I’m very glad. La ringrazio. Mille grazie. Grazie.’
A stone fell from Giovanni’s heart. ‘Really? I… You know, I had quite a guilty conscience because of it… Is there anything else I can do for you?’
‘No, nothing,’ Perlmann said with a smile, ‘and once again, many thanks!’
Giovanni made a clumsy movement with his arm, interrupted halfway, which expressed his admiration better than any word or any facial expression could.
Perlmann walked to the elevator, but didn’t wait for it. Instead he started hobbling up the stairs. He took his time. He was too wound up to have been able to turn it into a sentence. But the feeling was there: he could move freely in the hotel again. He wasn’t a cheat.
When the line started crackling he put the phone down. What had he actually wanted to say to her? And in an alarming call at a quarter to two in the morning. And with that heavy tongue. His hand enclosed the red lighter. Now he didn’t need to explain anything to her. He had nothing to apologize for. He could meet his daughter just as he had before. He was back from no-man’s-land. No plagiarism. No plagiarism, and no murder. He repeated the words again and again, loudly and in his thoughts, who knows how many times, until, hollowed out by fatigue, they were no longer the expression of an emotion, but only a mechanical inner echo that grew increasingly sluggish.