I send you my greetings.
Captain Gjikondi, of the border region.
Stres looked up from the sheet he was holding and glanced quickly at his deputy, then at the messenger. So it was just as he had imagined: she had run off with a lover.
His recent dreaminess was instantly supplanted by a wave of anger among the most violent he had ever experienced. It was like a blast of wind that choked his breathing, clouded his mind, and probably affected his speech as well. Like a stinging nettle, it allowed no exemptions. Now they’ll find out who Stres really is! They’ll soon see what happens when you try to take him for a ride! He would show them, scoundrels all, and this time the gloves would be off! He was going to make a clean sweep of all that filth and shit! What he was about to do would make those crooks and parasites lose their taste for wasting his time for a hundred years — and he’d do the same to those slimy mourners, those snakes in the grass who’d been boiled in their own venom! He’d put an end to their evil propaganda! To think that he, fearless Stres, had yielded to those crazy hags! Such lies they told, O Lord, such abominations …
Troubled by his own irritation, and realising he had gone too far, Stress suddenly retreated into silence.
“When are they due to arrive?” he asked the messenger after a long pause.
“In two hours, three at most.”
It was only then that Stres noticed that the messenger’s boots were caked with mud to the knees. He took a deep breath. The ideas that had come to him in the graveyard snow three days before seemed very far away.
“Wait for me,” he said, “while I get my cape.”
He went back inside and, donning his long riding cape, told his wife, “The man who brought Doruntine back has been captured.”
“Really?” she said. She could not see his face, for a flap of his cape, like the wing of a great black bird, had come between them and kept their eyes from meeting.
Stres kept his mouth shut all the way, but despite that, as he watched the captain’s stride, especially the way his boots dealt with the puddles, his companion grasped that the police chief was still just as angry and that his indignation could be read in the movement of his legs just as accurately, if not more so, as from his speech.
They had been waiting more than two hours for the carriage that was to bring the prisoner. The floorboards creaked plaintively under Stres’s boots as he paced back and forth, as was his custom, between his work table and the window. His deputy dared not break the silence; and the messenger, whose wet clothes gave off a musty odour, sat slumped in a wooden chair, and snored.
Stres could not help stopping at the window from time to time. As he gazed out at the plain and waited for the carriage to appear, he felt his mind turn slowly numb. The same steady and monotonous rain had been falling since morning, and anyone’s arrival, from whatever quarter, seemed quite inconceivable under its dreary regularity.
He touched the thick paper of the report with his fingers as if to convince himself that the man he was waiting for was really coming. We can’t go any faster, it’s dark, you see. He repeated to himself the delirious prisoner’s words. Don’t be afraid, none of your brothers is still alive …
He’s the one, Stres said to himself. Now he was sure of it. Just as he had imagined. He recalled the moment in the cemetery, that day in the snow when he told himself that it was all lies. Well, it wasn’t all lies, he now thought, his eyes fixed on the chilly expanse. The plain stretched to infinity in the grey rain, and the snow itself had melted or withdrawn into the distance without a trace, as if to help him forget everything that that great day had pumped into the captain’s head.
The dusk was getting thicker. On either side of the road an occasional idler could be seen, no doubt awaiting the arrival of the carriage. News of the arrest had apparently spread.
The messenger, dozing in his corner, made a sound like a groan. The deputy seemed lost in thought. Stres had heard no further mention of that incest theory of his. He must be embarrassed now.
The messenger let out another groan and half opened his eyes. They had a demented look.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Are they here yet?”
No one answered. Stres went to the window for perhaps the hundredth time. The plain was now so gloomy that it was hard to make out anything. But soon the arrival of the carriage was heralded, first by a far-off rumbling, and then by the clatter of its wheels.
“Good Lord! At last,” said Stres’s deputy, shaking the messenger by the shoulder.
Stres ran down the stairs, followed by his aide and the messenger. The carriage was rolling up as they got to the threshold. A few people were following along in the dark. Others could be heard running from farther off. The carriage came to a halt and a man dressed in the uniform of an officer of the prince got off.
“Where is Captain Stres?” he asked.
“I am he,” said Stres.
“I believe you have been informed that—”
“Yes,” Stres interrupted. “I know all about it.”
The man in uniform seemed about to add something, but then turned and headed for the carriage, leaned in through the window and said a few words to the people inside.
“Light a lantern,” someone called out.
The curtain over the carriage window was drawn back, revealing a forest of legs that jiggled about in such a way that you could not tell whether the people attached to them were embracing each other or having a fight.
Stres knew from experience that the way the legs of a criminal or his escort moved told you everything about the rest of the man, and so he understood that the prisoner had been restrained in the severest fashion, with his hands tied behind his back.
“It’s him! It’s him!” whispered the people who had gathered around.
The flickering gleam of the lantern revealed no more than half the face of the man in irons, a face bizarrely streaked with mud. The men who had brought him handed him over to two of Stres’s men, who took hold of him, as the first ones had, by the armpits. The shackled man offered no resistance.
“To the dungeon,” Stres said shortly. “What about you, what do you mean to do now?” he added, addressing the man in uniform, who seemed to be the commander of the small detachment.
“We’re going back at once,” he replied.
Stres stood there until the carriage shook into motion, then turned towards the building. At the very last moment he paused on the threshold. He sensed the presence of people in the half-darkness. In the distance he heard the footsteps of a man running towards them.
“What are you all waiting for, good people?” Stres asked quietly. “Why don’t you go home and go to bed? We have to stay up, it’s part of our job, but why should you stand around here?”
No answer came from the shadows. The light of the lantern flickered briefly as if terrified by those waxy twisted faces, then abandoned them to the darkness.
“Good night,” said Stres, entering the building and, lantern in hand, following his deputy down the staircase that led to the dungeon. The smell of mould choked him. He felt suddenly uneasy.
His aide pushed open the iron door of the dungeon and stood aside to let his chief pass. The prisoner was slumped on a pile of straw. Sensing a presence, he looked up. Stres could just make out his features in the gleam of the lantern. He seemed handsome, even marked as he was by the mud and the blows he had suffered. Stres’s eyes were drawn involuntarily to the man’s lips, and those human lips — cracked in the corners by fever, yet strangely alien to those shackles, those guards, those orders — suggested to Stres more than any other detail that he had before him the man who had made love to Doruntine.