"But if he killed Tessa, he's not a good man, is he?"
"Lara swears it would be impossible. Lara has many letters from him. She can only love hopelessly. She has heard many confessions from him, but not this one, naturally. Markus is very proud of his sins, she says. But he is vain and exaggerates them. He is complicated, maybe a bit psychotic, which is why she loves him."
"But she doesn't know where he is?"
"No."
Justin's straight, unseeing stare had fixed on the deceptive twilight. "Judas didn't kill anyone," he objected. "Judas betrayed."
"But the effect was the same. Judas killed with his treachery."
Another long contemplation of the twilight. "There's a missing character. If Lorbeer betrayed Tessa, who did he betray her to?"
"It was not clear. Maybe the Forces of Darkness. I have only what is in my memory."
"The Forces of Darkness?"
"In the letter he talked of the Forces of Darkness. I hate this terminology. Does he mean KVH? Maybe he knows other forces."
"Did the document mention Arnold?"
"The Abbott had a guide. In the document he is the Saint. The Saint had called out to Lorbeer in the hospital and told him the drug Dypraxa was an instrument of death. The Saint was more cautious than the Abbott because he is a doctor, and more tolerant because he has experience of human wickedness. But the greatest truth is with Emrich. Of this Lorbeer is certain. Emrich knows everything, therefore she is not allowed to speak. The Forces of Darkness are determined to repress the truth. That is why the Abbott had to be killed and the Saint crucified."
"Crucified? Arnold?"
"In Lorbeer's fable the Forces of Darkness dragged Bluhm away and nailed him to a tree."
They fell silent, both in some way ashamed.
"Lara says also that Lorbeer drinks like a Russian," she added, in some kind of mitigation, but Justin was not to be deflected.
"He writes from the desert but he uses a courier service out of Nairobi," he objected.
"The address was typed, the waybill was written by hand, the package was dispatched from the Norfolk Hotel, Nairobi. The sender's name was difficult to read but I think it was McKenzie. Is that Scottish? If the package could not be delivered it should not be returned to Kenya. It should be destroyed."
"The waybill had a number, presumably."
"The waybill was attached to the envelope. When I put the document in the safe for the night I first put it back in the envelope. Naturally the envelope has also disappeared."
"Get back to the courier service. They'll have a copy."
"The courier service has no record of the package. Not in Nairobi, not in Hanover."
"How do I find her?"
"Lara?"
The rain clattered on the tin roof and the orange lights of the city swelled and dwindled in the mist while Birgit tore a sheet of paper from her diary and wrote out a long telephone number.
"She has a house but not for much longer. Otherwise you must inquire at the university, but you must take care because they hate her."
"Was Lorbeer sleeping with Kovacs as well as Emrich?"
"For Lorbeer it would not be unusual. But I believe the quarrel between the women was not about sex but about the molecule." She paused, following his gaze. He was staring into the distance, but there was nothing to see but the far hilltops poking through the mist. "Tessa wrote often that she loved you," she said quietly to his averted face. "Not directly, that was not necessary. She said you were a man of honor and when it was necessary you would be honorable."
She was preparing to leave. He passed her the backpack and between them they strapped Carl into his baby pillion and fixed the plastic cape so that his sleepy head popped through the hole. She stood squat before him.
"So then," she said. "You walk?"
"I walk."
She pulled an envelope from inside her jacket.
"This is all I remember of Lorbeer's novel. I wrote it down for you. My handwriting is very bad but you will decipher it."
"You're very kind." He stuffed the envelope inside his raincoat.
"So have good walking then," she said.
She was going to shake his hand but changed her mind and kissed him on the mouth: one stern, deliberate, necessarily clumsy kiss of affection and farewell while she held the bicycle steady. Then Justin held the bicycle while she buckled her shell helmet under her chin before swinging into the saddle and pedaling away down the hill.
* * *
I walk.
He walked, keeping to the center of the road, one eye for the darkening rhododendron bushes either side of him. Sodium lights burned every fifty meters. He scanned the lack patches between. The night air smelled of apples. He reached the bottom of the hill and approached the parked Mercedes, passing ten yards from its bonnet. No light inside the car. Two men were sitting in the front, but to judge by their motionless silhouettes they were not the same two who had driven up the hill and down again. He kept walking and the car overtook him. He ignored it, but in his imagination the men were not ignoring him. The Mercedes reached a crossroads and turned left. Justin turned right, heading for the glow of the town. A taxi passed and the driver called out to him.
"Thank you, thank you," he called back expansively, "but I prefer to walk."
There was no answering call. He was on a pavement now, keeping to the outer edge.
He made another crossing and entered a brightly lit side street. Dead-eyed young men and women crouched in doorways. Men in leather jackets stood on corners, elbows lifted, talking into cell phones. He made two more crossings and saw his hotel ahead of him.
The lobby was in the usual inescapable evening turmoil. A Japanese delegation was checking in, cameras were flashing, porters piling costly luggage into the only lift. Taking his place in the queue he pulled off his raincoat and slung it over his arm, favoring Birgit's envelope in the inside pocket. The lift descended, he stood back to let the women get in first. He rode to the third floor and was the only one to get out. The vile corridor with its sallow strip-lighting reminded him of the Uhuru Hospital. Television sets blared from every room. His own room was 311 and the door key was a piece of flat plastic with a black arrow printed on it. The din of competing television sets was infuriating him and he had a good mind to complain to somebody. How can I write to Ham with this din going on? He stepped into his room, laid his raincoat over a chair and saw that his own television set was the culprit. The chambermaids must have turned it on while they made up the room, and not bothered to turn it off when they left. He advanced on the set. It was showing the kind of program he particularly detested. A half-dressed singer was howling at full volume into a microphone to the delight of an ecstatic juvenile audience while illuminated snow wandered down the screen.
And that was the last thing Justin saw as the lights went out: snowflakes of light falling down his screen. A blackness descended over him, and he felt himself being punched and suffocated at the same time. Human arms clamped his own arms to his sides, a ball of coarse cloth was stuffed into his mouth. His legs were seized in a rugger tackle and crumpled under him and he decided he was having a heart attack. His theory was confirmed when a second blow crushed his stomach and knocked the last of the wind out of him, because when he tried to yell nothing happened, he had no voice or breath and the ball of cloth was gagging him.
He felt knees on his chest. Something was being tightened round his neck, he thought a noose, and he assumed he was going to be hanged. He had a clear vision of Bluhm nailed to a tree. He smelled male body lotion and had a memory of Woodrow's body odor and he remembered sniffing Woodrow's love letter to see if it smelled of the same stuff. For a rare moment there was no Tessa in his memory. He was lying on the floor on his left side and whatever had crushed his stomach crushed his groin with another awful blow. He was hooded but nobody had hanged him yet, and he was still lying on his side. The gag was making him vomit, but he couldn't get the vomit out of his mouth so it was going down his throat. Hands rolled him onto his back and his arms were stretched out, knuckles in the carpet, palms upward. They're going to crucify me like Arnold. But they weren't crucifying him, or not yet; they were holding his hands down and twisting them at the same time, and the pain was worse than he thought pain could be: in his arms, his chest and all over his legs and groin. Please, he thought. Not my right hand or how will I ever write to Ham? And they must have heard his prayer because the pain ceased and he heard a male voice, north German, maybe Berlin and quite cultured. It was giving an order to turn the swine back on his side and tie his hands behind him, and the order was being obeyed.