‘I couldn’t do anything about it,’ he said and attempted a smile. ‘I’m sorry, but I really couldn’t do anything about it.’
‘Any accidents?’ the woman asked in an unforgiving tone and straightened her fashionable glasses.
Perlmann took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was forced off the road and drove into a crash barrier. The right side of the car is damaged.’
‘Were the police called?’
‘No,’ he said, and quickly cut off her next question, ‘the other car had disappeared even before I stopped.’
‘You should have called the police anyway,’ she said curtly and took a form out of the drawer. ‘Where was that?’
He gave the correct details and signed.
‘Half a million excess,’ she said, glancing at the insurance details. ‘It will come off your card, along with the rest.’
Perlmann picked up the suitcase and went up to the bar. There was a different waiter there today, and otherwise only a girl in sneakers eating an ice-cream sundae and glancing often at her watch. Only gradually did he realize how relieved he was to be rid of the car. The sky had darkened, and the airport hall was bathed in a gloomy November light. He liked the sobriety that lay in that light. He grew calmer and, as he took slow, long drags on his cigarette, he kept thinking: It’s over. Over. On Saturday they would all be leaving: Leskov on Sunday morning. In four days’ time, at this hour of day, he himself would be on his flight home, and in the evening he would be in his familiar apartment. Exhaustion made way for quiet confidence. He paid and, hands in his trouser pockets, strolled over to the stairs that led up to the viewing area. He wanted to see the runway by the water and imagine his plane flying in a great loop out over the sea as it rose to ever higher altitudes.
‘Your case, Signore.’ The girl in the sneakers had come running. Perlmann took the suitcase from her, and struggled to hide his feelings.
‘Oh, yes, thank you very much, that’s very kind of you.’
The girl returned to her ice cream. He was filled with helpless fury, and stopped on the stairs with a blank expression on his face. A few moments ago, with his hands in his pockets, he had felt strangely light and free, unreally free, in fact. But he hadn’t tried to know why that should be; with no plan in mind, he had simply, thoughtlessly pursued the impulse of leaving everything that had happened over the last few days, everything that was part of it, behind him along with the car. It had been like the first unimpeded breath of air after a near-suffocation. And now the suitcase holding Leskov’s text, a ludicrous amount of blotting paper, the black notebook and the ridiculous props from the town hall hung leaden from his arm. He felt as if the whole nightmare of the past few days were contained in compact form in that suitcase, engraved with his initials.
He stepped on to the terrace and leaned against the balustrade. A Lufthansa plane was heading for take-off. He looked at his watch. My plane. As it roared into the air, just at the moment when the back tires lost contact with the runway he had the feeling that he could bear it no longer. That must be the end of notes and texts and translations and copies and lies and false leads and secrecy. It had to stop now. It had to stop. Right now. Now.
His foot brushed the suitcase. As if in a trance he stuck both hands in his jacket pockets, lowered his head and strode to the door, trousers flapping. He almost collided with the girl in sneakers. ‘Mio padre!’ Then she slipped past him through the door and started running to the parapet. Perlmann gave up. Slowly he followed her. When she turned round and, with a laugh, pointed to the case, he raised a hand in thanks. The Lufthansa plane disappeared into the low cloud.
Leskov’s address, which the anonymous sender couldn’t possibly know, wasn’t the only problem, Perlmann thought on the train. There were, for Leskov, only three places where he could have left the text: Moscow, Frankfurt or the plane. And there was simply no way to explain how the sheets might have ended up in that condition in an airport building or an aeroplane. And how so many of them should have vanished without trace.
If you added these two points together, Leskov was left with only a single hypothesis: someone who knew his address independently of the text had done something strange with the pages under the open sky, and was now sending them to him out of a guilty conscience. And on that day there was only one person who had been outside with him, and who could have had access to his suitcase: Philipp Perlmann, who had known his address for a long time. When Leskov ran through the drive in his mind, he would quickly see that there were, in fact, two places where it could have happened: the gas station and the roadside stop shortly afterwards. The shortness of the time in both cases could mean only one thing: Perlmann hadn’t done anything unknown or inexplicable with the text – he had simply thrown it away.
But why, for God’s sake? What harm could it do him? What did he have to fear from a text that he didn’t even know? He had the first version, and possibly he’d just read it. Then there was… yes, exactly, then there was only one condition under which the second version could have constituted a threat to him: if he had presented the first version, in translated form, of course, as his own text.
At this point Leskov’s thoughts would become very, very wary, and he would ensure that they came slowly. It was irrational to throw away the menacing text, when its author, who could reveal his act of plagiarism much more quickly and directly, was sitting next to him in the car. That was only rational if – the tunnel.
There was no question of Perlmann sending the text to St Petersburg. There was only one thing for it: to throw it away a second time. Throw the carefully preserved, ‘restored’ text, into a garbage bin, like before. Or quietly let it somehow lose itself. Perlmann glanced at the initials beside the lock on the suitcase. Then, when Santa Margherita was announced over the loudspeaker, he took out the certificate, the medal and the black notebook. He left the suitcase on the seat in the empty compartment and quickly walked to the front, to the carriage door. The wheels squeaked on the rails. Someone beside him opened the door. You know what this text means to me. The blacklists still exist, and I’m on several of them. Perlmann ran back, picked up the case and got out.
Leskov would be sitting beside Maria in the office, leaning forward and staring, his hands between his knees, at the screen. Perlmann wouldn’t immediately know what it was about this sight that alarmed him. Only in the elevator would he understand: his translation, the fraudulent text, was still stored downstairs in the computer. Certainly, Maria had no reason to put it on the screen in Leskov’s presence. But such a thing could easily happen inadvertently. In all likelihood she’d given the group their own folder. A couple of mistyped keys and Leskov would read: the personal past as linguistic creation. The title would electrify him, and he would lean still further forward to read the first few sentences. Who’s this text by? would be his excited question. Maria might be distracted, or tired, or scattered, and already it would have happened. There would no longer be an innocuous explanation to give Leskov. Now, a full three days after his arrival – not to mention the conversation about the missing text – his mind would start working.