Two

Lazlow stood up, removed his spectacles, sighed, and then began to examine the lenses as if he did not know quite what to say. To Berg, it seemed as if Lazlow found the situation beyond the scope of his experience and that the principles he used in his business life were quite inadequate now. Strangely, he looked smaller than he did in the office—or was this somehow a trick of the light? Berg stood in the doorway and waited for Lazlow to speak while Sbodin, whistling quietly to himself, found a kettle of water and placed it on the stove.

‘I came as soon as I learned,’ Lazlow said—like someone apologising for entering a private party. ‘As soon as I heard what had happened, I thought …’ And his voice trailed off. He turned to look at Sbodin but the investigator was busy with an old-fashioned device for lighting the stove.

Berg sat at the table. When he realised that Lazlow was embarrassed, he felt a sudden hope: could Lazlow speak up on his behalf and clear him of this absurd charge? Would he say that Berg, his employee, was a man dedicated to duty and well-mannered, not at all the sort of person to go round raping women?

‘Let’s all have some coffee,’ Sbodin said. He was yawning and making groaning noises, like a man about to tumble into bed and sleep round the clock. ‘I need something strong to waken me. How about you, Lazlow?’

‘Not for me, thank you,’ Lazlow said, and indicated that the glass of water in front of him was quite sufficient. Then he looked at Berg, sternly, like someone about to deliver a sermon. ‘How did you get yourself into this situation, Berg? When I heard I was quite astonished. It shook me. To be accused of a crime is one thing, but to be accused of a crime so heinous as this is quite another. How did it all happen?’

‘It’s a mistake,’ Berg said. ‘There’s been a terrible mistake.’

‘You’d better make some coffee,’ Sbodin said.

‘What sort of mistake?’ Lazlow asked. ‘How can they make a mistake like this? I don’t understand.’

Berg rose and went to the stove where he began to make coffee. For a moment he had his back to Lazlow and Sbodin and he had the strange feeling that they were whispering together. But when he turned to look he saw that Lazlow was staring at his glass of water and Sbodin was gazing from the window into the back garden. It was a silly thought: what could they possibly have to whisper about anyway?

‘You’d better explain, Berg,’ Lazlow said. ‘My superiors will expect me to make a report. God knows what I’m going to tell them—nothing like this has ever happened before.’

Berg prepared the coffee, poured two cups, and passed one to Sbodin.

‘There’s nothing to explain,’ he said. ‘It’s a mistake, it’s all a mistake.’

Lazlow looked at Sbodin. ‘Is that true?’

Sbodin shrugged. ‘The woman says that he raped her. He denies it. Choose for yourself.’

Lazlow made a strange noise at the back of his throat and removed his spectacles which he folded and placed on the table. He stared at them for a time as though in the transparency of the lenses he expected to find a solution to the problem set by Sbodin. After a time he said, ‘Well, Berg works for me and as his employer I consider it my duty to stand by him. If I failed to give him the support he obviously needs now, I would also have failed in my relationship with him. You do understand that, Mr Sbodin?’

Sbodin nodded his head and said, ‘Admirable.’

Berg, momentarily encouraged by Lazlow’s statement of support, smiled at his superior—but Lazlow looked solemn, fidgeted with his spectacles, and then began to walk up and down the room.

‘On the other hand,’ he said—and Berg felt a sinking sensation at these words—‘On the other hand, I’ve given the situation careful consideration while I’ve been sitting here, and I’m also bound by my duty as a lawful citizen to say that if it proves to be true that Berg raped the woman then I for one would not be surprised.’

Berg spilled some coffee on his hand and felt the liquid burn into his flesh, an exquisite pain.

‘Why wouldn’t you be surprised?’ Sbodin asked.

‘This is such … such a delicate situation, Mr Sbodin. Certainly I’ll tell you why it wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t like the idea of criticising Berg’s character while he’s in the room.’

Sbodin said, ‘I don’t blame you. Would you prefer to tell me in private?’

Berg leaned forward. ‘Mr Lazlow please, I don’t quite understand … Why have you turned against me?’

Lazlow replaced his spectacles and stared at Berg coldly. ‘I wouldn’t say that I’ve turned against you, Berg. But I consider it my duty to tell Mr Sbodin everything I know about you as a person. If it helps him to solve this dreadful crime, then I would be delighted.’

Berg slumped back in his chair: the situation was slipping beyond his reach, he was fumbling around in a maze of motives and intentions, a mapless maze leading nowhere. Why should Lazlow turn cold on him? Why offer a moment of hope and then pull it away again? Did Lazlow honestly believe that he, Berg, was capable of such a deed? Berg stared at his hands; he had bitten his fingernails down as far as he could. What would happen to him if Sbodin proved, beyond any legal doubt, that he had raped the woman? He tried to remember the punishment for rape. Was it five years? Ten? Hard labour? Confinement with a collection of perverts? Death? The prospect terrified him. It was terrifying that it could be proved he had committed a crime of which he was innocent. After all, he was innocent. The dream, the dream he had had only a few hours ago—that was sheer coincidence. If you dreamed of raping someone, and someone was actually raped at the same time, it didn’t follow that you were responsible for it. A coincidence. Odd, yes. But there were a great many inexplicable things in the world.

Sbodin lit a cigarette, but this time did not offer the packet to Berg. ‘I’ll listen to whatever you have to tell me, Mr Lazlow. Naturally, if it helps to put the criminal into prison, I’ll be as delighted as you. In a case like this, any scrap of information is useful.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Lazlow said.

‘It’s of paramount importance that we establish first of all whether Berg is the sort of man capable of rape. Would you say that he is.’

Lazlow thought a moment. While he was silent Berg felt that he was poised on the edge of something terrible; he felt like a man dropping through the sky on a parachute that might not open.

‘Before I answer that question, allow me to summarise my opinion of Berg’s character,’ Lazlow said. ‘I’m not a trained judge of character, of course, but I like to think that my years in a position of some responsibility have sharpened my faculty for assessing people——’

‘No doubt they have,’ Sbodin said, looking at Berg as though expecting some fissure suddenly to reveal itself in the man’s facade, some opening that would crack Berg wide and make it impossible for him not to confess.

‘Let me tell you about Berg. Some time ago we had a vacancy in our office. The position was advertised in various employment bureaux in the district and I suppose because of a shortage of trained clerks locally, the response was very poor. The post was then passed through to our central employment office, more in hope than anything else. Berg saw it and applied. He had been to university, wrote in a legible hand, and was interviewed successfully by a representative in the capital. To cut a long story short, the job was offered to him and he accepted. I thought it strange at the time that someone should want to leave the capital and come as far north as this district.’

‘Oh, very strange,’ Sbodin said.

‘What is even stranger is that he has not really given a satisfactory reason for leaving the capital except that when I asked him he muttered something very vague about wanting a change——’

‘That’s all,’ Berg said, ‘I simply wanted——’

‘Do not interrupt me, Berg. Let me continue. Within a few days it became clear to me that a rather unfortunate appointment had been made. But, in the circumstances, I was willing to make the best of it. However, Berg has demonstrated to me, beyond doubt, that he’s an impetuous, rash, and rather foolish man.’

‘How did you reach this conclusion?’ Sbodin asked. Ominously, he had taken a notebook from his pocket and was writing in shorthand.

‘Simply because he had been given a splendid career opportunity but seemed quite unable to grasp it in both hands. He was impatient to make advancement. He wanted everything too soon. When I tried to help him he refused my assistance. I was fair to him in all ways, I was always available to advise him, but every time I made a concession in his favour he was dissatisfied because he wanted more. You appreciate the nature of our work, Mr Sbodin, and the sheer necessity of a certain amount of secrecy, don’t you? Berg, impetuous as ever, could not understand this need. On his first day, his very first day, he made an unauthorised call to the Site Agent.’

‘The Site Agent,’ Sbodin said, surprised.

‘What the reason behind this was, I still don’t understand. But I suspect that since Berg is both impetuous and ambitious he imagined it might be to his advantage to make himself known to the Agent. Have you heard anything so foolish? Have you?’

Astonished, Berg could only listen. The things he wanted to say, the protestations he wanted to make, lay unformed on a tongue that had suddenly become too dry for speech. Was Lazlow insane? Hadn’t he explained that the telephone call to the Site Agent had been a mistake?

‘Of course,’ Lazlow said, growing red in the face, ‘he tried to excuse himself. He claimed it was a mistake, that he’d picked up the telephone accidentally. Have you heard anything so feeble? As if that isn’t bad enough in itself, he attempted to get information about the Site from my secretary, Miss Selz, and when this failed, he turned his attention to me. Concessions were made to him at every turn. I leaned over backwards to help him, I tried to make him see sense. But he was impertinent, he wanted to make successful headway overnight. Impertinent, stuffed with a sense of his own importance, and much too impatient for his own good—that was my impression of Berg.’

Sbodin closed his notebook. ‘That’s extremely interesting.’

Berg looked at his fingers; the bitten fingernails, the brown stains, the thin sweat between the fingers—they were no longer his hands, there was something strange about them. They were pale, nearly white, like the hands of a dead man. Was that why Lazlow had constantly referred to him in the past tense? As if he no longer existed? Or was the past tense reference only an indication that he had been dismissed from his post? He did not know; at that moment he did not particularly care either. His head was buzzing with what Lazlow had been saying. How was it possible to interpret things the way Lazlow had done? His analysis was crammed with misjudgements, errors of interpretation, blind, silly mistakes. Berg undid the top buttons of his shirt. In the cold house he was sweating.

Lazlow stopped by the window. ‘That is only my opinion Mr Sbodin. True or false, you have it for what it’s worth. Impetuous, full of his own importance, impertinent—does a man like that commit a rape? I don’t know. I don’t know.’ He was shaking his head back and forth, sighing continually as though in sheer despair for the whole of mankind.

Berg banged his hand on the table. To his surprise, he found his eyes blurred with tears. Somewhere out there Lazlow flickered behind the blur, moving back and forward like a fly on the window. ‘You’re wrong, you’re totally wrong! You say I was impatient—but that was only because I was frustrated.’

Sbodin flicked open the notebook. ‘Frustrated, eh?’ he asked, and wrote something down.

‘And you know that I had no intention of calling the Site Agent. It was a mistake. I explained it at the time. I explained all that!’

Lazlow looked at Berg and made a gesture of dismissal.

‘Let us not have another scene, Berg.’

Berg got to his feet in anger. Tears were running over his face and the room, the cold kitchen, seemed to explode within his field of vision. ‘I could tell Mr Sbodin about a very interesting little scene that I witnessed, Lazlow. I could tell him about you and Miss Selz.’

‘Me and Miss Selz?’ Lazlow smiled faintly, half-amused.

Berg turned to Sbodin. ‘Do you know that he makes love to Miss Selz on his office desk? I saw her lying on top of his desk. She was naked and he was——’ He paused; even as he was saying this he knew it sounded ridiculous. Lazlow and Sbodin were looking at each other.

Sbodin said. ‘How did you manage to see this?’

‘Through the keyhole,’ Berg said.

‘Do you often look through keyholes?’

‘No, I don’t, but I happened to see him and Miss Selz together. She was naked, she was lying across his desk, naked.’

Sbodin scribbled something in his notebook. He looked at Lazlow and smiled. ‘What do you have to say to this accusation?’

Lazlow shrugged. ‘Do I need to say anything? Berg is obviously an imaginative man. But is it likely, is it really likely, that I’d make love on my office desk? Apart from the fact that it would be quite uncomfortable, I’m a happily married man and Miss Selz is my own niece.’

‘Your niece?’ Berg asked. ‘But I saw you, I saw both of you. I don’t care if she’s your niece or not, it was obvious what you were doing——’

Sbodin interrupted; ‘I ought to warn you, Berg. You may be going too far. Please think very carefully before you make any more statements about Mr Lazlow. He’s a man of some standing in the district and ridiculous tales like this can only lead to senseless gossip. I understand perfectly why you fabricated this story. You realise the desperation of your position—but stories of that sort aren’t going to help you any. Think again, Berg. Be careful what you say.’

Berg sat down. What was the point of saying anything? Lazlow and Sbodin were against him, both of them, both for some reason bent on his destruction.

‘A malicious thing to say,’ Lazlow said and looked at his watch. ‘A malicious and dangerous lie. You see the kind of man he is, Mr Sbodin.’

Sbodin snapped his notebook shut. He brought the document he had shown Berg before from his pocket and asked, ‘Are you prepared to sign now?’

Berg looked at Sbodin’s eyes and saw reflected in them his own sense of helplessness. He stared at the document Sbodin was offering him; that same flimsy sheet which, if he signed, would testify to his guilt. For a second he felt like signing it, if only to bring this elaborate charade to a close—if only to see what the next move was in the hideous game. He thought of what he had seen through the keyhole: yes, yes, he really had seen Miss Selz sprawled across that desk and Lazlow hovering above her, like a hungry man unable to choose at a sudden feast. He had seen it all; he was certain of it.

‘No, I can’t sign it,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in asking me.’ And he looked at Lazlow in the vague hope that the man might relent and change sides, retracing the damaging statement he had made. But, polishing his spectacles, Lazlow seemed to have lost interest in the proceedings. He looked at his watch, tapped his fingers impatiently and went to the window.

‘You won’t sign it, Berg?’ Sbodin asked.

Berg shook his head.

‘Are you prepared to withdraw the malicious remarks you made about Miss Selz and myself?’ Lazlow asked. Now he was smiling thinly; the situation was entirely in his favour.

‘I know what I saw,’ Berg said.

‘Very well. You leave me without a choice.’ Lazlow pulled on his gloves. ‘I shall recommend your dismissal as from today. And if you imagine that you’ll get any assistance from me, you’re quite mistaken. It seems quite clear to me that you’re the man Mr Sbodin is looking for—why deny it any further?’

Nodding his head to Sbodin, Lazlow walked towards the door. There he stood for a moment glaring at Berg with an expression of indignant reproach as though not only the crime but the man too were quite beyond his understanding. His spectacles glinted. Berg had the sudden impression that the eyes behind the lenses were aflame, burning in the sockets.

‘I don’t think I can add anything more at this stage,’ Lazlow said and opened the door. He moved stiffly. He moved like a man conscious of dragging some dreadful burden.

Sbodin smiled and said, ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

When Lazlow had gone there was a silence. Sbodin folded the document and put it away.

‘I’m beginning to get an impression of the kind of man you are, Berg. Lazlow has always been a good judge of character. If you hadn’t told that ridiculous story against him, he might have been of some help to you. But there’s no chance now. You’re on your own.’

Sbodin looked into his empty cup. ‘Do you believe that you can tell the future from coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup?’

Berg said nothing.

‘According to these, I’m due for a change in my luck. What do you think it could be, Berg? A nice long holiday? Or am I going to prove that you raped this unfortunate girl, once and for all?’

Berg walked up and down the room. It all seemed so damned silly: what had got into Lazlow? What had made Lazlow want to crucify him? Hadn’t he worked hard at the office? Hadn’t he been reasonably patient in the face of so much frustration and bureaucratic hostility? Then why, for God’s sake, should Lazlow—behaving like some wounded creature—turn on him now?

‘Surely you don’t believe what Lazlow said about me?’

Sbodin studied his hands with meticulous care, turning them over and over. After a time he said, ‘I told you, Berg, I simply gather statements. Like the pieces of a jigsaw. When I put them all together I try to see what the picture looks like.’

Berg sighed. The truth about things seemed to him like a bottomless well: you could stand forever at the top and drop stones down into the darkness without once hearing the splash of water. He sat at the window and looked into the garden. A faint wind came up and made the shrubbery move.

‘Let’s go back upstairs,’ Sbodin said.