“I have seen to it that the truth is brought to light,” Bertil answered.
“Yeah, that’s what you did all right,” Gitta said. “And the truth is that you’re sick.” He was still lying on the floor below her—like an injured insect, fallen on its back—and rage boiled up inside her. She lifted her foot—and stopped. “No,” she said, “oh no. You’re not even worth kicking. I hope they throw you out of this school.”
She slammed the door behind her and found herself standing in front of the headmaster and a couple of teachers. “Do it,” she said to them. “Throw him out. Expel him. Save the expense of the paper on which you’d have printed his diploma.”
The headmaster grabbed her arm before she could walk away. “What’s really going on here?” he asked. “Is that story true? And whom are you talking about? Tannatek?”
“Abel?” Gitta asked and snorted. “Abel has expelled himself from school today. You’ll never see him again. Me? I’m talking about Bertil Hagemann.”
On the fourth floor of 18 Amundsen Street, nobody opened the door. Not even Mrs. Ketow came out when Anna passed her door. She’d heard her voice, amid the screaming and shouting of fighting children somewhere in her apartment. Mrs. Ketow had given up on Micha, Anna thought. She’d sailed back to her own island in a gondola beneath a balloon, that faded and worn-out island with its forest of too-orderly shelves and its pastures of colorless, cheerless, and comfortless wall-to-wall carpeting.
Behind the door with Tannatek on the nameplate, everything was very quiet.
Abel didn’t answer his cell phone. She rode back to the city, rode up and down the cobblestone streets, searching without a lead to follow. She didn’t find him. For a moment, she thought he would be sitting on a chair next to Knaake’s bed in the ICU, but nobody was sitting there. Knaake lay still, with his eyes closed, beneath the silent green line of his heartbeat.
“Did you know?” Anna whispered. “About Abel? Was that what you’d found out and wanted to tell me?” And what if something else had happened between the two of them … between Abel and his teacher? No. Oh no, surely not. She refused to imagine it. She left the hospital to get rid of the thought.
She rode out to the Seaside District again, this time to Micha’s elementary school. The schoolyard was empty. Idiot, she scolded herself. She should have come here right away. Now, it was twelve thirty, much too late; he’d picked up Micha long ago. He still didn’t answer the phone.
“They’re on an outing,” she whispered into the thaw, into the air in the abandoned schoolyard. “On the island of Rügen. Or anywhere. They’ll be back. When they were gone last time, they came back. They’ll turn up somewhere, of course they will.”
What had also turned up back then was Marinke’s dead body. What was it Bertil had said? I’m not that suicidal.
She’d kept his number—why? She hesitated. But then she finally called him. The phone rang for a long time, and her knees went all wobbly … she reached his mailbox. She didn’t leave a message. She got back onto her bike and rode home, slowly.
When she parked her bike near the front door, her phone rang.
She grabbed it without looking at the display. “Yes?”
“Anna,” said Bertil. “You called me; I saw your number …”
“Yeah,” she said, relieved, and inhaled the warm air deeply. “I just wanted to know if you, if …” What should she say? If you’re still alive?
“I’m sorry,” Bertil said, “for what I’ve done. Maybe it wasn’t the right way to … I just wanted the truth to be known.”
“I want the truth, too,” Anna said, and suddenly, she felt light, weightless even. “And I know the truth now. I know who didn’t shoot Lierski and Marinke.”
“Excuse me?”
“Was it you?”
“Me? Have you lost your mind completely?”
“That description better suits someone else in this conversation,” she said. “Just tell me if you shot them.”
“Sure, I run around at night shooting people I don’t even know,” Bertil replied with a weird laugh. “Now, that’s logical.”
“How did you know that Marinke was shot at night?”
“I just assumed he was. In daylight, it would have been too hard to shoot someone at the beach of Eldena without a witness, wouldn’t it? But, Anna. I have nothing at all to do with this mess. The only person I know who’s connected to all three of them is Tannatek.”
“Three,” said Anna. “So you know it’s three …”
“Knaake’s accident … it’s all over school. Everyone’s talking about it.”
“He fell through the ice.”
“He did?”
“Bertil.” She nearly laughed. “Isn’t it strange? Everything you do achieves the exact opposite of what you intend. That car ride in the snow, for instance … you wanted to prove to me that I need you to save me, but you made me afraid of you. And now … now I know that Abel hasn’t shot anybody. I wasn’t sure until now, but now I am.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re talking to me at this very moment. Because you’re still alive after what you’ve done.”
She hung up on him and unlocked the front door.
There were voices coming from the living room. She stood there, listening. One of the voices was Linda’s, but the other one didn’t belong. It was the high-pitched voice of a young woman … Anna recognized it, but she couldn’t remember where from. She put away her coat and shoes and followed the voices.
Micha’s teacher with the unpronounceable name was sitting on the sofa, next to Linda.
“Anna,” Linda said. “This is my daughter.”
“I know.” Mrs. Milowicz managed a strained smile. “We’ve already met.”
The hand she reached out to Anna was smooth and cool. “What happened?” Anna asked.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Linda said.
“No!” Anna felt panicked. “I want to know what happened!”
Then she sat down, or rather dropped down into one of the armchairs, and stared at Micha’s teacher. She was so young, so blond, her light green blouse so springlike, and, all of sudden, Anna wondered what Michelle had looked like. She’d never seen a picture of her.
“Why don’t you say something?” Anna asked. “Say something! Please! Where … where are they?”
“Where are who … what?” Mrs. Milowicz asked.
“Micha told her she lives here,” Linda explained. “It sounds like a white lie. Mrs. Milowicz has been asking her for her address so she could speak with Micha’s mother, and this is where she’s ended up.”
“That’s … all?” Anna asked.
Mrs. Milowicz nodded and blew a crumb from her spring-green blouse. “I’m worried about her. Her brother, who seems to take care of her, well he’s … well, he’s a little scary, to be honest. I find him a bit threatening. And the way he shields his little sister from … everyone … from me, for instance … in private, I mean … that is … I don’t know. It’s strange. But you’d know more. You know him. Your mother told me that … he might just make a bad impression … and that my worries are unnecessary.”
Anna looked at Linda. Thank you, she thought. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
The light-green spring blouse wriggled into a light-green spring coat in the front hall. There was even a light-green spring hat made of felt and adorned with a blue flower. Micha’s teacher was pretty in her spring clothes. Anna would’ve liked to have had such a teacher, back then, when she’d been six years old. Not anymore, though, she thought.
“I also planned to talk to Abel’s teacher,” Mrs. Milowicz said. “We had an appointment. But he didn’t show up.”
“No,” said Anna.
And then the door shut behind her, behind the burst of light-green spring.
“Thank you,” Anna said to Linda, aloud now. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”