STREBEL

 

It was raining. It always rained when these things happened, though Strebel knew this was just his impression, that the memories were collecting, cramming together into one rainy day. The benefit of rain was fewer rubberneckers, fewer bystanders, and therefore fewer people to come forward later with completely useless information.

Strebel got back in his car and sat for a moment, the rain battering, obscuring. It had just started an hour ago. If the rain had begun earlier, the accident would not have happened. The woman with the dog would have stayed at home. The rain would have washed away the slick, invisible residue of oil that accumulates on tarmac and the car would have driven—skidded—differently.

He could go on. He knew the parents would. Those itchy little ifs, like earwigs, burrowing into their brains. He didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to be involved—essentially this was a traffic incident. But his boss knew very well what it could turn into, given the driver wasn’t Swiss. Given the victims were photogenic children. At least the driver was American, not a Muslim or an illegal immigrant. He was confident he could control the outcome.

The children had been on their way to the Fun Park, they’d been thinking about sweets and rides that tossed them in the air, they’d been happy, excited. Strebel rubbed his face and turned on the engine. He drove to the hospital in Bern. There had been talk of airlifting one of the children—the little girl—to Zurich. But not any more. The traffic was appalling, due to the rain, and he considered putting on the siren. But there was no rush now, no rush at all.

In the parking lot he looked out at the hospital, a rectangular block, as if the building was trying to hide in blandness. It might not be noticed, might not remind people that there was always a bed with their name on it. He thought about what he needed to say. The words always sounded wrong. It was impossible to convey the sorrow he genuinely felt, a sorrow that never abated. A sorrow that made no difference at all. He looked through his notes at the name. The name had to be right. He had to know ahead of time if there was an odd pronunciation or inflection. Sometimes he had to practice with foreign names so that he didn’t stumble. Sophie. Not Sophia. Sophie Leila Koppler. Was that Ley-la or Lie-la? Was it Middle Eastern? He’d have to ask Caspary.

Strebel got out into the rain and let it pummel him. It was better if he looked wet and bedraggled; his sympathy would appear more authentic. Next of kin didn’t need some wide-eyed optimist.

Inside the hospital, the wet soles of his shoes squeaked on the white floor and a drip from his hair ran down the back of his neck. He knew the way to the trauma unit and wished he didn’t. In the lobby, he saw Caspary who pointed to a middle-aged man in a dark blue raincoat, standing by a potted plant.

‘He only just got here,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t know.’

‘Is there anyone else?’ Strebel asked. ‘The mother?’

Caspary shook her head. ‘She died of cancer last year.’

Child and mother, both in one year. Well done, God, Strebel thought and turned to watch a nurse hand Sophie Koppler’s father coffee in a styrofoam cup. He didn’t drink the coffee, but stood with the cup in his hand. When he finally noticed it, he seemed baffled. Who had given him the coffee? And what was he doing here?

I come into people’s lives at the worst possible time, Strebel thought. He started toward Mr Koppler, then turned back to Caspary. ‘Ley-la or Lie-la?’

‘Lie-la.’

Mr Koppler didn’t notice him approach, even though Strebel was walking directly at him. Strebel gently touched his elbow. ‘Please sit down, Mr Koppler.’

Mr Koppler complied, almost spilling the coffee; Strebel took it from him, placed it on the floor.

‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Paul Strebel,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry to tell you that your daughter Sophie has passed away.’

‘Sophie?’ Mr Koppler looked at him, bewildered.

‘There was a car accident.’

‘But she wasn’t in a car.’

‘She was hit by a car. On the side of the road. At the bus stop below Arnau.’

‘Sophie?’

‘Yes. Sophie Leila. Your daughter. She’s been killed.’

‘But she wasn’t in a car. We walked.’

‘Mr Koppler, I’m so sorry, but we need you to identify her body.’

‘She was taking the bus.’

Strebel sat quietly. People in these circumstances attacked him. A woman whose young son had been battered to death by her boyfriend hit Strebel so hard that her ring split his cheek and he needed half a dozen stitches. Or people collapsed; their internal scaffolding gave way and they fell to the ground like detonated buildings. Or, like Mr Koppler, they seemed not to hear, not to comprehend.

‘She wasn’t in a car.’

‘She was waiting at the bus stand with Mattias Scheffer and Markus Emptmann. A driver coming downhill lost control of her car and hit the bus stand,’ Strebel explained in a soft voice. ‘All three children were killed.’

Mr Koppler nodded vaguely, and after a moment he stood and they walked slowly down another corridor to the chapel, where Sophie lay, cleaned of blood and glass, under a white sheet. But you could never imagine she was asleep. This was always when the pretending stopped, all possibility of error eliminated.

‘But how,’ her father said, looking through the glass. ‘She wasn’t in a car.’

* * *

Ingrid was clearing away the dishes. She said, ‘The downstairs toilet is broken again. The plumber promises to come tomorrow, but you know how they are.’

Strebel glanced over at his wife and felt a sudden rush of hatred, like a blast of wind. He wanted to run over and slam her hand into the rubbish disposal and hear her scream, and pull up the mangled appendage, bloody and battered, then say, ‘Look, look at this, blood and bone and gristle. It’s all we are, all that’s ever left.’

In horror he got up and retreated to the living room, then turned on the TV. People were laughing, he had no idea what about. His whole body felt odd, as though his blood was fizzing. His breath wouldn’t quite come, but knotted in his throat. Was he having a heart attack? He checked himself for symptoms but there was no numbness or pain in his left arm, no tightness in his chest—nothing specific, just this internal heat and profound anxiety at the rage he’d just felt against his wife. He sat on the sofa and tried to make sense of the TV. The actors were running around, chasing someone—something? each other?—laughing. A poor imitation of laughter.

‘Paul?’ He heard his name. Initially he thought one of the actors on TV must be named Paul. ‘Paul?’

‘Paul! Is something the matter?’

He looked up at Ingrid. The rage was gone, but its absence only clarified his profound ambivalence. And in this he felt a further confusion. How could feeling nothing be so intense?

* * *

Leaning over, he turned off her light. For many years her bedside lamp had been a source of irritation. Ingrid liked to read in bed, while he preferred to close his eyes straight away. But she would always fall asleep, the light on, the book open on her lap, her lower lip slack as a moron’s. He was never asleep—could not fall asleep until he knew she was. He was a natural insomniac and bedtime was rife with ritual. The fresh glass of water by the bed, the hot shower, the special pillow, the ridiculous lavender sachet under his mattress: the superstitions of the sleepless.

But he liked to pretend to be asleep—a kind of lie to her; he liked the separation, the isolation, and how he could turn thoughts over in his head without interruption; without: ‘Dear, it’s Beatrice’s birthday next week. The twentieth. You haven’t forgotten? I spoke with Caroline and I suggested we buy a new bicycle.’ He knew he was required to participate—his wife, his child, his grandchild. He did his best.

Ingrid shifted position in her sleep, entering her own fiefdom, dreaming voluptuously. No doubt she would need to refer to one of her books on interpretations. Her dreams were never just dreams but omens, premonitions, signs. She did not tell him about them any more. She knew better. But she kept a ‘dream journal’ on her bedside table. On waking she would scribble at wild speed and he often wanted to suggest she take up shorthand. The pen scratched the paper, scratch, scritch, her face intent and closed to him.

Now she was dreaming of her father coming out of a hole in the bed or a red fish that turned into a woman or a flock of white birds trapped in the kitchen. He did not dream, and he’d once made the mistake of telling her this. ‘Everyone dreams, Paul. You just don’t care enough about what your subconscious has to say.’

He turned on his side, slipping delicately out of bed. His rule. If he had not fallen asleep within an hour, he must get up. He felt not the least bit tired, although he knew the tiredness stored itself away, like bales of hay. Tomorrow they would tumble, bury him with exhaustion.

In the kitchen, he heated milk in a small pan. In the dark, quiet world outside, people were committing unspeakable crimes. Unspeakable, but not unthinkable. He sat down, drank the milk. Was Beatrice old enough for a bicycle? Hadn’t she just started walking?

* * *

Ernst Koppler had put nothing of Sophie’s away. Three dolls sat on the dining table, carefully aligned along a Dora the Explorer plastic placemat. Strebel knew vaguely about Dora because of Beatrice. Dora was supposed to be a better role model for little girls than the numerous princesses—Snow White, Cinderella; Dora was independent and proactive. Her ambitions didn’t involve marriage to a handsome prince.

A number of stuffed animals were stationed or abandoned about the room: a penguin on the floor near the sink, a camel on the sofa; something—a cat? a monkey?—with large plastic eyes and pink fur crouched on top of the TV. On the coffee table were two rubber snakes, a green crayon, a yellow sock, a book about a baby elephant, a plastic spoon, a purple ribbon, a mini handbag decorated with pink and gold sequins, a princess crown, a yellow bath duck, a ladybird key ring, a plastic Swiss cow.

Sometimes it took parents years to put their dead child’s possessions away. By then, Strebel had observed, it was too late: the ability to move on had been forfeited. Objects wielded great power. Left out, they became museum pieces, totemic. Artifacts. Packed away, they became memories—the past. Strebel understood the psychology of grief—not that it was complicated. Detectives were required to take sensitization courses. They had to look at houses as potential crime scenes. Mothers who beat their children to death cried just as hard as those whose children had drowned accidentally in the river. Toys, therefore, could become clues, evidence.

But not here. In this house the toys, the casual mess, suggested the expectation of return. We’ll clean up later. Later hung upon the air with the almost visible density of dust. There was a smell of dried apples. Strebel realized this was coming from Mr Koppler. He had not bathed recently, his clothes were the ones he’d worn at the hospital two days ago. He looked like a tramp.

Mr Koppler sat in an armchair. Strebel took the couch. But as he sat something squeaked. He rescued a doll from under his left buttock, and held it, not sure where to put it. Mr Koppler looked at the doll, and Strebel knew he was seeing Sophie talking to it, seeing the little girl babble. Are you hungry, little baby? There, there, Mummy’ll give you a bottle.

The doll held them captive for long moments, before Strebel finally broke the spell. Very carefully, he put it on the coffee table.

‘Mr Koppler, I know this is very difficult for you. I need to go over your movements that morning.’

Mr Koppler shifted his gaze, passing over Strebel to the pink cat-monkey on top of the TV and out the window. He was a man leagues down, on the bottom of the ocean. He could not move against the pressure of the water, could not see because light did not reach such depth.

‘She didn’t want to go. But I work. My own business. A stationers in Interlaken.’

‘Go? Go to the Fun Park?’

‘Yes. They planned it. They asked me. They’re trying to be kind. After Hamida died.’ Mr Koppler’s expressionless face rotated back toward Strebel. ‘They never spoke to me before, those women. Not to Hamida when she was alive. She was one of those immigrants.’

Strebel let a brief silence absorb this memory. Then he continued: ‘The trip was to the Fun Park. With Simone Emptmann and her children, and Vidia Scheffer’s son, Mattias. Correct?’

‘Yes,’ said Koppler. ‘They were all going to take the bus because Vidia’s car wasn’t big enough.’ Mr Koppler rubbed his hands very slowly against the top of his thighs. ‘The baby. Simone’s little girl. Her car seat was the issue, I believe.’

Outside, the sound of a car. The silence slipping backward. Strebel waited. How many times had he done this? Waited for a parent to recount the last hour of a child’s life. The hour when anything else could have happened.

Mr Koppler began again: ‘We left the house at about eight-fifteen. We crossed the Arnau Bridge. She wanted to stop a moment and watch the water in the ravine. She believes fairies live down there. Hamida told her that. We reached the recycling center, the parking lot, at about eight-thirty. Sophie told me again that she didn’t want to go. We talked about it. She—she started to cry. I said I had to go to the shop and she must understand she couldn’t come with me. She’d be bored. She’d… she’d get in the way. I said that. That’s what I said. “You’ll get in the way.” So she agreed. She wanted to help me. That’s how it’s been between us after Hamida, we help each other. I left her and walked back across the bridge. I got in my car and reached the shop at nine-fifteen. In time to open at nine-thirty. It was busy. There was a conference in town and I had a lot of customers. The phone rang several times but I let it go to the voicemail. That’s why. That’s why when the hospital called…’ He let the sentence drop.

There was nothing else. Mr Koppler rubbed his thighs again, sat back in his chair and shut his eyes. Strebel put away his notebook. He glanced again about the room and saw the pink cat-monkey that longed for Sophie’s touch, longed to nestle in her arm when she fell asleep, her soft breath smelling of bubble-gum-flavored toothpaste.

‘She could have come to work with me,’ Mr Koppler said, his eyes open again, tight and small behind thick glasses. ‘She would have been no trouble.’

 

Statement by Mrs Alicia Berger; interviewing officer: Sergeant Teresa Caspary

14 March 2015 14:32

I left my home about twenty past eight to walk William.

[Sgt Caspary asks Mrs Berger to clarify who is William.]

He’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback. They are very large dogs, and some people therefore find them intimidating, but they have excellent dispositions and are easy to train. Being a widow for more than five years now, I have taken William to be my best friend.

I walk with William every morning, weather permitting, at almost the same time and on the same route. He does enjoy his walks, so the weather must be really bad to deter us. And that morning the rain was holding off. It was just a little on the chilly side.

William and I never alter our route. I believe a dog has a natural territory, and by taking the same route I am allowing William to designate and maintain—to patrol—his territory. I must add here that he is always on a leash. I have a humane collar, a harness that goes over his chest and shoulders rather than around his neck. William is beautifully trained and very obedient. I never have to even tug a little on the leash to remind him of his manners. Which is why I find his behavior perplexing.

[Sgt Caspary asks Mrs Berger to describe the route she walks with William.]

Well, we descend from our house on Hillside Crescent to the pedestrian walkway connecting the crescent to Field Road. We follow Field Road south to the footpath leading down to the village green. We then take the footpath as far as the recycling center. It’s very pretty there, overlooking the river ravine, among the trees. We then cut through the recycling center, cross the road at the pedestrian crossing, and go straight home along the Arnau Road.

Shortly after crossing the Arnau Road—

[Sgt Caspary asks Mrs Berger to define ‘shortly.’]

Two minutes. One minute? Say two minutes after crossing the Arnau Road, William suddenly lunged away from me. He’s never done it before, so I wasn’t expecting it. I don’t know why he did it, as if he saw a cat or something, but even then he’s seen cats before and never behaved in such a manner. I was so surprised that he yanked the leash right out of my hand and I saw him run across the street, right in front of a car. There was a terrible crash and I closed my eyes. I think I might even have fainted for a moment as I thought the driver must have hit William because when I opened my eyes I was sitting on the pavement.

I didn’t see what happened. I didn’t see the American woman’s car. I just kept my eyes tight shut. I couldn’t bear to see what was happening to my William.

The noise seemed to just go on and on, though I suppose it was only seconds. I was certain that William was dead and I couldn’t bear it, just couldn’t bear it. When I finally opened my eyes, I saw that the vehicle had hit the bus stand, but my concern was for William. I saw blood on the ground and I just started screaming. I’m so sorry about the children, but William is like a child to me, and I thought the blood was his. I was just reacting to what I saw at the time, not thinking. I just didn’t have the courage to go over. And then I saw Mrs Emptmann running. I know Mrs Emptmann only really by sight from the market and generally seeing her around the village. I can’t explain it but when she started screaming I knew it wasn’t William. I knew it had to be worse. It was the way she was screaming with her mouth open so it looked like a red hole that went down to Hell and she was making the sound of Hell. I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to describe it. And then I saw William. He was on the grass by the recycling center, sniffing the ground, right as rain, not a scratch on him.

‘As if he saw a cat or something.’ Strebel reread that line and closed the file. It was exactly as he’d wanted. A dog chasing a cat. The ‘as if’ and ‘or something’ would be lost and the story would become: Mrs Berger’s dog saw a cat. He knew an accident must have a cause. The dog, therefore.

 

The number had been disconnected due to non-payment. What kind of person didn’t pay the phone bill, Strebel wondered. Someone careless, irresponsible, vague? He drove to her address, a subdivided chalet on the high road above Arnau. It was an unexceptional place. What was she doing here? In this village where people raised children or retired with their knitting. Her file said she was in the middle of a divorce from a British human rights lawyer based in Geneva. Perhaps the divorce explained the phone bill: an argument over money, the unexpected stress of disarticulating a relationship. Was this relevant?

And why Arnau? Why this exile of faux stucco chalets and window boxes? Strebel could find no trace of a connection to this village or canton—anything that might have drawn her here. Americans were very nostalgic, he believed, they loved their ancestry; but Pilgrim Lankester-née-Jones had no roots here, not a trace of Swiss blood. She was misplaced.

When he rang her doorbell and there was no answer, he tried the concierge. A small woman with a wiry nest of gray hair came to the front door. She wore an apron and slippers. He introduced himself, showed her his ID. She peered at it, checked the photo against his face. She did not give her name in return, but he assumed it was Gassner, the name on the concierge’s bell.

‘Are you Mrs Gassner?’

A curt nod.

‘I’m looking for Mrs Lankester, apartment two.’

‘You have come to arrest her.’

‘No,’ Strebel corrected. ‘Just to speak with her. Her phone isn’t working.’

‘I warned her! I said, “They cut you off no mercy.” She didn’t listen, did she? And now look! Americans. They think they know everything. They think the rules don’t apply to them.’

‘Mrs Gassner, do you know when Mrs Lankester will be back?’

‘It’s shocking, what she’s done. Killing those children. I couldn’t live with myself.’

Silently, Strebel begged to differ. People lived with a lot of awful things, some of them very comfortably. ‘Please, Mrs Gassner,’ he said. ‘I’d just like to know when you think she’ll be back.’

‘She left an hour ago. Just carrying on as if nothing has happened.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t ask. Probably shopping. Spending her rich husband’s money. Ex-husband. He divorced her, you know.’

Strebel let this pass with total indifference. ‘Do you think I might wait for her?’

Mrs Gassner did an odd thing: she blushed. And then spoke very quickly, telling him that he absolutely could not, she wouldn’t have it, a respectable building like this. He studied her—the sudden, clumsy discomfort—and noticed that she couldn’t help but twice glance up the stairs. Was someone there?

‘Are you sure Mrs Lankester isn’t in?’

Unconsciously, Mrs Gassner glanced up the stairs again. Christ, she was transparent! Someone was up there, but not Pilgrim Lankester.

‘No, no, no. I told you she has gone out. I saw her myself.’

Strebel imagined Mrs Gassner peering through the curtains. She knew exactly who came and went and when. And who was up there now. She’d probably let whoever it was in. Still, he conjured politeness: ‘Please tell Mrs Lankester to contact me when she gets back. Here is my card.’

‘You have to make her pay,’ Mrs Gassner said with renewed enthusiasm. ‘She must pay. An eye for an eye. It’s your job to make her pay.’

‘Please give her my message.’ He made a point of peering inquisitively over her shoulder and up the stairs. ‘Perhaps she can use your phone.’

When Strebel turned around to walk back to his car, she came out on his heels, ‘Those children, broken and twisted, I can’t bear to think about it, and she just carries on with her fancy life, oh, not so fancy now that the husband left, I can tell you, but he’s still paying the bills.’

Strebel was in the car and Mrs Gassner was up against the window glass: ‘She shouldn’t even be in this country. She’s divorced! He left her. For another woman. They have a child! And yet she’s still here. On what visa? These people are all tramps, camping on our doorstep. Throw them out.’

Strebel started his car. ‘Please give her the message.’

He drove off. Mrs Gassner’s spittle had freckled the window. Before he turned into the main road, he glanced back in his rearview mirror at the chalet. Mrs Gassner stood in the doorway. But above her, he was certain he saw someone in the second floor apartment—just a fleeting glimpse. A man? The figure was gone, it was impossible to tell. Perhaps Mr Gassner was fixing a broken light.

But Strebel’s feeling had a darker texture, which he hesitated to call instinct, and which never failed him. The feeling of what he might find on the other side of a door, in the trunk of a car, in the thick bracken of woods where a murder of crows had gathered.

* * *

It was after nine. Strebel rubbed his eyes, looked around his office. In his youth—before this was his office—the shelves had been stacked with paperwork. A detective might be overwhelmed by the amount of work, but at least he could see that it was there, being done. Now everything was computerized, the records kept in invisible folders in an invisible cabinet.

Strebel considered the virtual world. You could put things there, like files and photographs. And yet they didn’t exist in the traditional interpretation of existing: i.e. something you could spill coffee on. He wanted—did he?—to be part of the modern police force, the bright young sparks who could tap-tap-tap and tell him the weight of water.

But at fifty-five, he remained awed by the landline telephone. How a voice could travel down a wire for thousands of miles. How? Physics didn’t quite explain it. He could recall the first telephone in his village, a heavy, elegant rotary dial.

A few years ago, he and Ingrid had bought a microwave, the latest mod-con. They’d cooked a potato and stared at it like the Christ Child. Look at the little miracle! Hadn’t they even laughed at themselves? But when was a few years ago? He felt a sick lurch when he realized he was thinking of the early eighties.

More than three decades ago. He was a grandfather now.

He tapped on the computer keyboard, opened the folder of the Arnau incident scene. He kept coming back to this case, as if it held some great mystery that he had to uncover. But it was the most mundane of accidents. Everyone involved was ordinary. Even the deaths of the children were ordinary—the ordinary result of an ordinary vehicle traveling at 60kph hitting an ordinary child’s body weighing an ordinary 32kgs.

A little pink backpack. Two shoes, from the two different boys. The dark wine stains of blood. Glass everywhere. The ruptured edifice of the bus stand. The smashed car. The images were all data now, turned into rows and rows of digits by a computer genius in California. He wondered if Ernst Koppler had kissed Sophie goodbye before he said ‘You’ll be in the way.’ If he had held her and pressed his lips to her soft cheek and felt his awkward body fill with love, that great lightsaber love for a child which he would never feel again.

‘I keep losing things. My handbag, the house keys. My gloves,’ Simone Emptmann had said to Strebel that morning, her voice coming to him now as if through a loudspeaker. ‘I keep thinking he’s staying with his grandparents and I can’t remember when I’m supposed to pick him up.’

He was seeing her now in his mind. She’d sat very still in her kitchen. A pretty, uncomplicated woman who now looked as if she’d scalded her head in a pot of boiling water. Her eyes were red, cheeks flushed, the skin under her eyes was swollen and raw. A female relative—a sister? a cousin?—had come to take her little baby for a stroll so she could talk to Strebel without distraction.

‘Earlier in the morning,’ she’d said. ‘That morning. When we were having breakfast. I looked at Markus. The sun was on his face and he was busy eating and didn’t see me and I felt such sadness that my child was leaving me. But it’s what they do; it’s their purpose, to leave you. I don’t think you’re ever ready. Are you? Do you have children, Inspector? You know they’ll grow up and have imperfect lives and people will hurt them and they’ll be unsatisfied and selfish, and so I think maybe by leaving now he’s only known happiness and love. That’s what I tell myself. He’s been spared disappointment.’

She’d folded her hands in her lap neatly, and he thought of little dead birds.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he’d said.

Now, he clicked the file of photographs shut and turned off the computer.

* * *

The office was dark and mostly quiet. Somewhere down the hall, the cleaner was pushing her trolley; one of the wheels squeaked. If something happened—a bomb, for instance—the squeaking would become important. Crucial. Interviewed by fellow police officers, the rubble still smoking behind him, he would strive to recall the squeaking in detail. The pitch, the direction. As he had never heard the squeak before, could this suggest a different cleaner—an interloper, the terrorist—had pushed a cleaning trolley? In the absence of a bomb, the squeaking wheel had no meaning at all.

Detail established truth. The color of the dog. Without detail, truth was a metaphysically unstable idea: too general, too big; cause and effect going all the way back to first dates, to ancestors surviving winter storms, to dinosaurs, to organisms in a puddle.

But detail could also torment. He recalled Simone’s terror, how it peeked out like a flash of red beneath the veneer of disbelief. ‘You vaccinate them, you make them wear helmets on their bikes and seat belts in the car. You find ways to make vegetables tasty and not let them watch too much TV. You do everything right.’

You do everything right. And yet the minutiae of life—she’d forgotten her phone, she’d gone back for it and left the children in the bus stand. ‘Wait here, I’ll be right back,’ she’d told them. The phone—so necessary, just in case—had lured her. She’d had her hand on the car door when she heard the noise. The car crashing, the universe splitting open.

At any moment the mundane might turn lethal.

Strebel began to gather his things but then he realized how much he did not want to go home. He was in something, as if traveling in another country, and did not want Ingrid’s banal intrusion. The broken toilet or the latest idiocy from their son-in-law. He called her again.

‘I’m staying at the office tonight.’

‘But I made you dinner. Trout.’

‘I’m sorry. Put it in the fridge and I’ll have it tomorrow.’

‘Come on, Paul.’

Come on? Come on, what? ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, hoping to sound sincere. No: not even hoping. His apologies to her were mere habit, like washing his hands before a meal. ‘Goodnight,’ he concluded. He didn’t wait for her to say anymore, just hung up. And lay on the sofa.

He thought sleep would be impossible, the sofa was not comfortable, the lights were all on. But he did sleep, waking at dawn to the sound of rubbish lorries in the street below. He had no recollection of falling asleep. Time had jumped forward and the only evidence of how he’d spent the night was the red mark of the sofa’s seam across his cheek.

 

‘It is Detective Chief Inspector Paul Strebel,’ he said through the intercom. ‘I came a few days ago, I tried to phone—’

‘Yes, I’m sorry, it’s disconnected,’ she said. ‘Please come up.’ An American voice, but softly accented. He hadn’t had many dealings with Americans and he was aware of the stereotypes he tended toward, and also his initial suspicion of her character.

Pilgrim Lankester was pretty, even beautiful, standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs. ‘The bill, I forgot to pay it.’ Why? he immediately asked in his head. There would have been many increasingly agitated reminders.

As he moved into the room, he glanced around, taking in the oddly impersonal space. There were no photos or reminders on the fridge, no magazines or mail on the counter; no stack of notices from the phone company littering the tabletop. He thought of a businessman’s hotel room. But the feeling he had wasn’t of transience; rather of tentativeness—someone unable or unwilling to make an impression.

She offered him tea. He studied her as she boiled the kettle, retrieved the cups. Despite the bruises on her face, there was an undercurrent of elegance to her. Well-cut clothes and hair, cheekbones and deep-set eyes: Mrs Lankester was the kind of woman, intimidating in her perfection, whom he saw in Zurich or Geneva stepping out of boutiques or chic little bistros. He could smell her. Faintly almond. Not perfume, but a soap or cream.

Her manners and beauty masked her essential timidity. Most people wouldn’t notice the way she bit her lip before speaking or hesitated mid-sentence. He guessed this behavior was habitual, not the result of trauma from the accident. He recalled she was only thirty-two, five years older than his own daughter. And while Pilgrim Lankester was vastly more sophisticated than Caroline, his daughter was confident, even bawdy. He suspected that Mrs Lankester had married young, and he would find Tom Lankester to be a strong character.

When her hand trembled on the teapot he said, ‘Don’t be afraid.’

‘Of the tea?’

‘No. Of me.’

She thought it was her fault. ‘No,’ he said, firmly, ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

Strebel would have been fine if she hadn’t cried. Crying made her ugly, her eyes puffed and red, her cheeks blotchy. He felt sadness, loneliness coming off her in waves, and this triggered in him what he begged to be a paternal response, but what he knew was lust. ‘Vulnerable women are beautiful,’ a colleague had once remarked, and Strebel had disagreed. In fact, they’d almost had an argument, because Strebel took the line that there was something predatory in finding weak women sexual. He’d been around too many rapists.

But now he felt the urge to touch this young woman, to hold her and comfort her—and he could not pretend the urge was simply protective. He was appalled. And in equal measure, he was stunned by the small hollow at the base of her throat, by the upturn of flesh where her upper lip bowed. It was as if she’d suddenly come into focus; she was clear, so brilliantly, perfectly clear and distinct against the gray, oaty mass of his life. He felt a surge of happiness—of being alive.

Stupidly, he handed her his handkerchief, the clean, pressed one Ingrid gave him every day, though he asked her not to. He was fine with paper tissues.

He should leave. Immediately. He should concoct an emergency. But instead, he asked her to walk with him to the incident scene. Oh, certainly, part of him was saying this request was legitimate—she might remember after all, he might gain a new perspective; but the greater part simply wanted to be beside her. Wanted the smell of her, to observe her excruciating loveliness.

As they walked, Strebel wondered if he could ever leave Ingrid. He’d like to think it would be simple, a matter of a suitcase and a polite goodbye. But they were bound by filaments. Not just magazine subscriptions, not just the burden of bureaucracy—health insurance, life insurance, house insurance, bank accounts, wills, pensions; but connections of habit. There would be inconveniences, petty losses. He’d have to buy a washing machine and do his own laundry. She’d have to ask their useless son-in-law to fix the toilet. But at least Strebel would be able to wear his own gloves. He was annoyed by the endless, small acts of dishonesty.

‘Do you want me to remember? Is that why we’re here?’ Mrs Lankester asked, and her voice reached him, though at first he couldn’t understand. He’d been thinking so intensely in his native tongue, and had to make the switch to English.

He noticed she was clenching and unclenching her hands. She was terrified. ‘You think I’m trying to trick you somehow. I’m sorry for that. But even if you could remember, I’m not sure I would want to hear. Memory is so messy.’

Ingrid would no doubt prescribe therapy of some sort. Psychotherapy, aromatherapy, candles and chanting, perhaps a cleanse or colonic. Strebel imagined the scurrying shamans who prayed on grief and uncertainty, plucking visions from the air and placing them like ripe fruit at the feet of their acolytes. Paying acolytes. How could you trust anyone you paid for a service? A prostitute gave you what you wanted. A therapist gave you what you wanted. What a mistake to believe in the sanctity of memory or dreams. A man might as well believe the romantic murmurings of a call girl.

He stared at the new bus stand. Should he be awed at his countrymen’s ability to reinstall a bus stand within days of its destruction? Or should he fear the haste to paper over tragedy? Then he glanced at Mrs Lankester, sitting next to him, her dark hair and neat form. In a pique, he tore off his gloves, then wondered if this was because he wanted to touch her.

She said something about her husband not liking the gloves she bought him, and Strebel remembered he’d admitted this to her only moments ago. Why had he felt it appropriate to leak some matter of his personal life?

‘Tell me their names,’ she said. The names of the children.

Names? He could name them all, every single one. Even the first child, the little baby who’d gone through the windshield. The rainy night. Rain, but of course. Thirty years ago, his first week on the job. He’d thought it was a doll. ‘Restrain her,’ his captain had said, and it had taken him a minute to realize the order concerned a woman. Restrain the woman who was running and screaming like a wounded animal in the rain toward the broken doll that had been her child.

Strebel looked over again at Mrs Lankester. He could not help himself. Her eyes met his. She was lost, and he would find her.

Distract me, he pleaded silently. From all this.

All this dying.

 

Midmorning and Ingrid was already on line four, wanting to know, ‘Shall I pick you up on the way or do you want to come in your own car?’

‘Just a minute,’ he said, as if professionally distracted. ‘Just a second.’ What was she talking about? He looked about the office, knowing he wouldn’t find the answer. There was no Post-it stuck to his computer. Ingrid sighed in his ear.

‘It’s Beatrice’s birthday party.’

‘Yes, I know. I know. Yes, I’ll see you there. I’m in a meeting right now.’ He hung up. He realized he had no idea when he was supposed to be there.

He called Caroline, hoping she wouldn’t mention it to Ingrid. ‘Oh, Papa,’ she said, just like her mother. ‘Five o’clock.’

She had tied colored balloons to the gatepost. As he neared the house, even through the closed door, Strebel could hear the sound of children screeching like monkeys. Inside, he almost clamped his hands over his ears: the high, intent girly ‘eeeeee’ threaded through a harder boy ‘wwrrrrrrr,’ providing bass.

A boy wearing a wolf mask ran past him, growling. The wolf chased a group of girls, the cupcake pink of their dresses, their constant incautious movement, whirling, kicking, spinning, and the boys amongst them, growling back at the wolf, daring him to come closer. Strebel glimpsed Beatrice, her mouth open with sound, her tongue stained with red juice. She was screaming, and he began to move toward her, to save her or comfort her—the screaming, the red mouth, she was wounded, a beetle on its back— and then he realized in the next beat of his heart that she was screaming with excitement.

‘Papa,’ Caroline said, ambushing him from the side, her arm around his waist. ‘The bike is a brilliant idea. You and Mum are so clever.’

‘Good,’ he nodded and kissed her just above the ear. Her hair seemed blonder than he remembered. Did she dye it? What was wrong with her natural color? She’d been a sweet child, he could never remember any fuss. He’d read her stories and carried her on his shoulders on the way to picnics. She’d broken her arm at school and he’d run like a madman through the emergency room to find her. Now she dyed her hair. Now she was married to a sporadically employed truck driver—a total dunderhead. She’d wanted to be a nurse but she’d failed the exams.

Suddenly he’s six, suddenly he’s thirty. Simone Emptmann’s voice was in his head again. ‘We were running late, we’re always running late. I lose my temper because we’re late for school and the train, for everything, and he’s lost his shoes or needs a pee. We were late that morning. I shouted at him. “Don’t you understand, Mattias? We’re late!” It’s so important to be on time. Because time runs out, you miss the train. Suddenly, you’re standing on the platform, a minute late and the train is gone. Suddenly, he’s six, not a baby, and you get afraid because you know you’ll look again and he’ll be thirty. You never think—never, never, never—that he just won’t be there. At all.’

The noise of the children was like a hive of bees in his head. He smiled anyway at Ingrid who took this as an invitation to come and stand beside him. ‘Do you remember Caroline’s sixth?’

‘Absolutely,’ Strebel said.

‘That dreadful clown who couldn’t do magic tricks. He couldn’t even make balloon animals,’ she said. ‘You almost had a fight with him about his fee. And then it turned out he was filling in for his brother who’d just died of leukemia.’

He had no recollection of the troubled clown. ‘You made a chocolate cake,’ he offered hopefully.

She looked at him. ‘I doubt it. Caroline’s allergic to chocolate.’

Of course. The rashes, the vomiting, the specialist in Bern, and how they’d tried carob as an alternative but it always tasted like clay.

‘Cake time!’ Caroline shouted and the children swarmed into the kitchen, hooting, screaming, growling, surrounding a strawberry pink cake with the focus of cannibals. Caroline reached over and lit the candles. Everyone sang. Strebel heard his own voice droning. Beatrice leaned in and blew. She wore a jeweled clip in her hair that was coming loose from too much play. He noticed for the first time that she was a plain child and she would be a plain woman. He felt sorry for her, for the day she’d understand her lack of beauty; a wild surge of pain seemed to flush from his chest up his neck to his face and he suddenly found it difficult to breathe.

‘I have to go,’ he whispered to Ingrid. He ignored the way she grabbed at his shirt with her fingertips. It was as if he’d snagged it on a branch. He almost ran out into the cold and gathering dark. He got in his car. He drove mindlessly, up valleys and on dark, narrow roads. He hit the lake road, and drove south almost all the way to Interlaken. He thought of continuing on, all the way around. But then he pulled into the parking lot of a Café du Thé overlooking the lake, turned around, and drove the several miles back. Here he took the turn-off uphill, to Arnau. He was there in twenty minutes. He hit the intercom.

‘It is Paul Strebel.’

 

The next time he saw Pilgrim was at the inquest. She wore dark gray and he wished she hadn’t because it suited her. He should have told her to wear the most unflattering things she could find, but even then, she couldn’t undo her beauty. It was a kind of mask, all that people saw. In the same moment, he was startled to remember that he’d slept with her. He’d slept with someone so beautiful, and he had found her beautiful the whole time.

The parents did not look at her, but Strebel knew they were attentive. They wanted to see her stripped and raw: at the very least altered. Disfigured. Two rows behind her sat Alicia Berger, and there was no mistaking her dejection.

The inquest began. Simone Emptmann composed herself, but Strebel saw the bitten nubs of her fingernails. Her husband, Michael, wore a white rose in his lapel. His eyes were red buttons, and he sat without touching his wife. Strebel judged their marriage would last another six months. Blame lay between them, a tar pit into which the past and future slipped. Every recrimination, every disagreement, every hope slid fluttering and squawking into the slurry. Why did you forget the phone? You’re always on that thing.

Vidia and Bobby Scheffer wore black and held hands. Mattias had been their only child, and Vidia was perhaps now past childbearing. Strebel knew they had erected a wooden bench in the field in front of their apartment where Mattias had liked to play. A half-dozen family members surrounded them.

Ernst Koppler was quite alone. He did not take off his coat, and this was smeared and dirty. He had shaved, but not well; there were little nicks of blood all over his cheeks and chin and dried shaving cream on his ear lobes. His thin hair was greasy, carelessly combed. Strebel knew, Mr Koppler knew: no one would love him and he would love no one ever again.

The presiding judge spoke reverently of the great tragedy. He reviewed the evidence. The forensics and eyewitness statements all tallied, all aligned. Vidia Scheffer wept softly. It was exactly as Strebel expected it to be and had worked for it to be: humane and compassionate, detailed and thorough, a finding of no-fault. But it was a whisper in response to the screams locked within the parents.

Later, Pilgrim was waiting outside his office. ‘Come in,’ he said. After they sat down, he smiled delicately. ‘How are you?’

She nodded that she was okay.

‘What will you do now?’

‘Go. Away.’

‘Where?’ And for a wild moment, he wondered if he could go with her. Cairo or Sydney or San Francisco.

‘I have no idea.’

‘America? Home?’ he offered, and she made a little motion with her hand, a kind of question mark.

‘I thought maybe London,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know how…’ and her voice trailed off.

She gathered her handbag and started to stand, and then startled him by sitting again and saying, ‘Would it be possible to see the photographs. From the accident.’

‘No. And even if I could permit—’

She looked at him directly: ‘Paul, please.’

He felt her then, when she had been warm against him, her back curving under his hands, the dizzying scent of her. He felt hot with embarrassment and lust. He longed for her, for hours, days of her. Instead, he got up and left the room. He paused in the corridor. How could it be that he would never kiss her again?

Ten minutes later he came back with a plastic evidence bag. He shut the door behind him. ‘This is completely irregular,’ he said, and felt immediately churlish. He wanted her, he could not have her.

For a long moment she held the bag. ‘Can I open it?’

‘Yes,’ he said and watched her long, delicate fingers press open the seams of the bag. She’d touched him with those fingers, she’d caressed him.

She took out a red dress with white and yellow flowers on it. ‘This was Sophie’s?’

Strebel nodded.

‘Will it be returned to her father?’

‘Now that the inquest is over, yes.’

‘Will it help him?’

‘I doubt it.’

Pilgrim put the dress back in the bag. He took the bag. And then he reached out for her, surprising himself. His hand on her shoulder, along her collarbone. She didn’t look at him but he felt her, the warmth of her through the gray sweater.

There was a crack in the possibility of things. An opening.

But he said, ‘Take care of yourself.’

* * *

A few weeks later he checked up on her. She’d gone. Of course. The system told him she’d left for Tanzania, a flight out of Zurich. He wondered, why Tanzania? And then he leaned back in his chair and covered his face with his hands. Not because he was crying. He felt he might find her somehow. In the dark curtain of his hands some residue of her might remain.

 

May’s green organza draped the fields and the air hummed with bees. Boats were out on the lake.

Sergeant Caspary knocked on his door, ‘I thought you would want to know, sir. The neighbors reported a bad smell and uncollected mail in the letter box at Ernst Koppler’s residence.’

She drove with him to Arnau. The smell, it turned out, was just rubbish. But Mr Koppler was missing.

‘The neighbors?’

‘The woman next door—Elizabeth Schmidt—she phoned it in; she says she can’t remember when she last saw him. Maybe not for a week?’

Strebel and Caspary walked next door.

‘I feel so bad,’ Mrs Schmidt said, welcoming them in. ‘I should have been looking out for him. Bringing him meals, I don’t know. And now—’

‘And now?’ Strebel pressed.

‘He must be dead,’ she whispered. ‘What could he have to live for?’

Caspary sat her down.

‘Am I in trouble?’ she said.

‘No,’ Strebel assured her. ‘But anything you might recall about Mr Koppler—even if it seems unimportant, might help us find him.’

‘Someone told me she’d been a teacher back in her country. His wife. Hamida. She died, too. Last year. You know that of course.’

Strebel nodded.

‘One of those “Stans.” Kurdistan. Uzbekistan. There are so many. I wondered if I should talk to her about it. What she’d taught. Being a teacher myself. But standards are so different there. And there just wasn’t the opportunity, you know, we weren’t drinking tea together over the fence. Even when she had cancer, we didn’t know until she started wearing a scarf. And even that—we thought she was Muslim. So it wasn’t really until she died.’

‘And that was difficult for Mr Koppler.’

She nodded. ‘It wasn’t so much that he was alone with Sophie, but Hamida’s family kicked up a fuss. They had moved away to be with other family in Germany. Stuttgart, I think. They wanted to take Sophie with them. That was the only argument I ever heard. The grandmother—Hamida’s mother—came one day. But Mr Koppler wouldn’t let Sophie go, and the law was on his side. And anyway she didn’t want to go. She loved her father.’

‘How was Mr Koppler after Sophie’s death?’ Caspary asked.

‘He didn’t go to the shop, I know because I went to get some school supplies and it was all closed up. But he did go out on foot, sometimes at odd hours. I don’t know where.’

‘What day was that, when you went by the shop?’

‘Last Tuesday.’

‘Twenty-first of May?’

‘I had lunch with my sister.’

‘When was the last time you definitely saw him, Mr Koppler?’

‘I just can’t be certain. Please understand. He’d been such a regular person. Even after Hamida. Well, he had Sophie, and children need routine. But since the accident. How could anyone be the same?’ She gazed out the window for a moment. ‘He was standing in the road. Only a few days ago. Three days ago. Looking around him. He was there for quite a long time. I thought to go out to him. But you know. What can you do?’

Outside, Caspary offered, ‘Suicide seems likely, sir.’

If only he’d taken her to the office, Strebel was thinking. She’d have been no trouble, no trouble at all.

‘We’re also looking for the car,’ Caspary said.

They walked next door to Koppler’s. Inside it looked exactly as it had when he’d been there—the quiet, patient mess of toys and books. In the garage, flies were eagerly breeding in half a steak. He knew enough about flies: the steak, the rubbish had been there for weeks. The house was filthy.

‘And we found this,’ a patrol officer said, holding up an empty box of rat poison.

‘Is there any evidence of rats?’ Caspary wanted to know.

‘Not that we can see.’

Was that how he’d killed himself, then?

Strebel wandered through the house. Beyond the bathroom, Mr Koppler had a small office where he’d done his accounts. He’d been a meticulous man, but chaos smothered earlier order: unpaid bills, junk mail, sympathy cards.

Yet, placed to the side, a letter: the lower left corner of the envelope carefully aligned with the corner of the desk. Strebel picked it up. Inside he found a small note paper-clipped to another envelope. This second envelope, folded in thirds to fit the first, was addressed to Mrs Gassner. The stamp had been circled in pen: a bright, pretty picture of a giraffe. The postal imprint was smeared but he could make out the letters T-A-N-G-A. Or was the ‘G’ a ‘Z’ and he was reading part of the whole? ‘Tanzania.’

He opened it.

May 21

Dear Mrs Gassner,

As you know I left the phone bill unpaid. Please find enclosed my check for fifty-six francs to cover the outstanding charge plus the reconnection fee for your next tenant. I apologize for this inconvenience.

Yours,

Pilgrim Jones.

The name, the actuality of her, was like a punch in the gut. He shut his eyes, the better to see the glow of her skin, the curve of her breast. He lifted the paper to his nose, imagining the almond smell. He heard Caspary coming up the hall, and shoved it in his pocket.

‘As strong as it gets.’ She held up a bottle of children’s aspirin.

‘I have to make a phone call,’ he said, and went outside, far enough away that he could not be heard. He turned his back to the house, and pressed the phone to his ear. He stood like this for a long time. He thought about the moment Mr Koppler said goodbye to Sophie. Had he kissed her? Something eerily like a prayer formed in Strebel’s mind: please, please let him have kissed her.

Caspary was coming out the door. He pretended to hang up. He pretended to be himself. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I guess we wait for the body. A hiker in the woods. Kids playing where they’re not supposed to.’

* * *

It took Mrs Gassner a matter of seconds to answer the door, as if her hausfrau exterior belied the body of an Olympic sprinter. ‘Inspector,’ she said, looking at him with a spark of curiosity. ‘Please come in.’

He demurred. ‘This will only take a minute.’ He brought out Pilgrim’s letter. ‘We have just found this at Mr Ernst Koppler’s house. I wondered if you might know how it got there.’

‘No.’

‘There’s no criminal intention here, Mrs Gassner, but I feel your help—your honesty—is important. Mr Koppler has gone missing.’ He handed her the letter. She took it, regarded it with great mystery. ‘It’s addressed to you,’ he said. ‘How did it come to be in Mr Koppler’s house?’

For a long minute she debated with herself. Could she concoct an adequate lie? Or might she apportion the truth? Strebel could almost hear her rifling through her options.

At last Mrs Gassner decided: ‘I didn’t know him, only in passing, at the market, the apothecary. I knew he married that Turkish woman.’ Strebel thought to correct her but let it go. ‘She trapped him into marriage. These immigrants are all the same and he was a fool. But the little girl, he didn’t deserve that.’

Strebel was attentive, neutral, and she glanced up, almost imploring: ‘I was doing the right thing, no matter what the law says.’

‘Please, just tell me.’

She nodded. ‘He came, a few days after the accident. At first I didn’t recognize him. He was dirty, unwashed. He said he needed to go upstairs to Mrs Lankester’s apartment. He didn’t want to steal anything or make a mess, he just needed to see where she lived. Myself, I don’t understand what it was about but I didn’t see the harm.’

‘So you gave him the key?’

‘Several times.’

‘And he was here that morning I came by?’

The very faintest movement of her head, just one nod. Strebel felt a surge of protective anger—almost jealousy. He wondered if Pilgrim had known of the violation, and had decided not to tell him. What had Mr Koppler done in there? What had he wanted?

‘And the letter?’

‘After the inquest—you know, it was a travesty to find no fault. Someone, even that Mrs Berger with the dog, should be held to account. This country is becoming too liberal. It started when they gave women the vote.’

Strebel remained impassive. ‘And Miss Jones left without paying the phone bill?’

‘Incredible! I found an envelope under the door with payment for the months remaining on the lease and her key. I went up. The place was empty. I found most of her things in the rubbish in the basement. Bags of clothes. Books, shoes, things like that. She didn’t have much. It was a furnished apartment, you see.’

‘And yet she forgot to pay the phone bill,’ Strebel said, tapping Pilgrim’s letter thoughtfully on his hand.

‘That’s the kind of person she was. Careless.’

‘But she sent you the money.’

Mrs Gassner attempted to sidestep, ‘I notice she has begun calling herself Jones. She must be on the lookout for a new man.’

‘And then you gave this letter to Mr Koppler. Why?’

Now she was silent. And he felt she wasn’t searching for a lie but for the truth—an explanation that made sense, that she could extract from the tangle of her justifications. ‘I saw him,’ she said. ‘He looked terrible, he was suffering. We passed each other on the pavement by the cemetery. I suppose he was visiting his wife, his daughter. Can you imagine? Both in one year? He asked me if I knew where she was. I didn’t see the harm.’

The harm, no one ever saw the harm.

‘When was this?’

‘A few days ago,’ she said, and then, gesturing to the letter, ‘Why were you at Mr Koppler’s house? Has he…? Is he…?’

‘What day?’

‘Three days ago.’

‘Monday?’

‘Yes. Has he… has he—’

‘Gone,’ Strebel finished for her.

‘Gone?’

‘It appears so at this time.’

‘He asked me where she was, that’s all, that’s all,’ Mrs Gassner blurted. ‘Africa. She’s in Africa. On a photographic safari, I’m sure of it. Having fun.’

* * *

On his way back to the precinct Caspary phoned: she’d traced Mr Koppler’s car to Zurich airport. Two days ago he took a Swissair flight to Dar es Salaam.

Strebel took a deep breath.

 

‘Everything all right, sir?’ the pilot asked, even though he was already pulling up the steps.

‘Fine,’ Strebel nodded. ‘Yes, yes, not to worry.’

The pilot gave him a mock salute and shut the door. Strebel backed away from the plane and aimed for a lone tree on the edge of the runway. The propellers revved, bits of dried grass and dust blew up from the blast, and then the plane bumped off to the far end of the runway. Strebel watched it take off. The sound faded and was overtaken by the violent zzzeeeeee of cicadas.

He squinted. His pupils were pinpricks, terrorized by the sun. He was completely alone. Initially, this pleased him. He felt adventurous, a white man in the African bush. And the beauty of the flight from Dar es Salaam was still with him: the blue of the Indian Ocean, the fringe of turquoise suggesting shallows closer to shore, a ruffle of surf along the fringing reef, and the land eclipsed by wild green.

But the heat was absurd.

It hung on him like a great hairy animal, so that he could barely breathe, barely move. He was soaked with sweat—amazed at the speed with which this had happened. He’d been out of the Cessna’s air-conditioned comfort for less than three minutes and he was sweating in places he had completely forgotten about. The sweat collected behind his knees, behind his ears, at his throat. It trickled between his buttocks and into his groin, causing his thighs to rub. He was sure his eyebrows were sweating.

Blanched light, hot and white and unrelenting as a strobe, shot through the tree above him, creating not shade but a patchwork of lighter and darker. It fell messy and uneven on the dry soil at his feet. Where there were ants. A dozen or so, delicately meandering through the leaf litter, fully occupied with their ant tasks.

Christ, even his feet were sweating. He shifted his gaze from the ants to his feet in his sandals, the horny toenails and hair that leapt excited in little tufts from his toes. The feet of a middle-aged man were horrible.

Strebel switched his black leather bag to the other shoulder. A Christmas present from Ingrid. He would have preferred brown leather. He considered that she knew this very well, his penchant for brown leather, his clearly—adamantly!—stated dislike of black leather. She always bought him black leather: gloves, wallet, belt.

The wounds were never mortal.

Never too much to bear.

Peering down to the end of the runway where the short, cut grass yielded to long yellow grass and then to a copse of rough trees, he thought he could discern a white car in the shade. But his distance vision was increasingly bad. Anything past a hundred metres was a blur. He began to walk.

It was miles—ten, twenty, perhaps fifty; the longest airstrip in the world. Was this how it had been for Livingston? His thighs chafing? A stream of sweat down the side of his nose that dripped off his chin and onto his shirt collar? As Strebel neared the trees, he was certain the white blob was indeed a car; but closer still, he felt less assured by the Toyota Corolla, for it was mottled in equal measure by white paint and rust. One wheel was obviously a spare, several sizes too small. In a remote Swiss village, sheep would have been living in this car. But here was the driver—he had the seat tilted all the way back and was fast asleep.

‘Excuse me,’ Strebel said, tapping lightly on the door. The driver made a low moan and opened his mouth. Then his eyes. He stared at the ceiling of the Toyota for a long moment, so long that Strebel’s eyes were also drawn to the spot. But there was nothing there. In a series of movements—was it possible to be so slow and still considered moving?—the driver sat up, yawned, adjusted the seat, sniffed, scratched his neck, lifted his hands so they floated slowly, slowly down onto the steering wheel.

‘Are you a taxi?’ Strebel ventured.

‘Taxi, yes,’ the driver replied, scratching his crotch. ‘You want hoteli?’

‘Yes.’

‘Twenty dollar.’

Strebel got in the back. It looked as if a wild animal had attacked the seat in a fit of pique. Nowhere did the seat retain its integrity, and Strebel was forced to straddle a crevasse in the foam that could swallow a child whole. But what were his options? He glanced out of the window into the white furnace, the grass wavering in the oily heat. What was he doing here? Tanga. Tanga?

The driver started the car and they crept away from the airstrip. Ingrid’s arthritic grandmother could have outpaced them.

* * *

‘This best hoteli.’ It didn’t look like much: a six-floor cement block with obtruding balconies. Strebel handed over the twenty dollars and got out. The driver came after him, talking excitedly. He was a large, bald man with hands the size of Christmas hams. He was shouting now, something in Swahili, and waving the money. Gauging the distance from the taxi to the hotel entrance at about ten feet, Strebel smiled a calm, traffic-stop smile; and, as if on smooth wheels, moved quickly to the door. Inside, he did not look back.

It took a moment for his pupils to dilate. The receptionist was a pretty, smiling girl. She wore a name tag identifying her as Alice. Her skin was perfect—smooth and clear so that it shone like polished wood. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she said in careful English. ‘How may we help you today?’

‘I’m hoping I have the right hotel. A friend of mine is staying here. She recommended it.’

‘What is her name, sir?’

‘Pilgrim Jones.’

Alice eschewed the large gray desktop—blind and silent. She flipped through a battered Guest Registry book. On the wall above hung a notice promising ‘Wi-Fi in every rm!’ Who had drawn the smiley faces? Alice?

She triumphantly closed the book. ‘I remember her! A very pretty lady. She was here for only a few days. And then she went with Mama Gloria.’

‘Mama Gloria?’

‘She is very kind. She is trying to help the AIDS orphans.’

‘I see. That’s good of her. How could I contact Miss Jones?’

Alice thought a moment, then opened a door to a closet-sized office. Inside, a young man hunched over a table of accounts. They conferred.

‘Miss Jones we don’t know. But Mama Gloria. All the drivers know her. We all know her,’ she waved a hand prettily, then pushed a registration form toward him. ‘You are staying with us now? In-suite room is fifty US per night, breakfast included.’

‘I’d like the same room as Pilgrim. If that’s possible.’

Nodding, she selected a key and delivered it to him with a bright smile. However, this changed when she saw his money. She took one twenty and handed the other bills back. ‘Oh, sorry, sir.’

‘What?’

‘These dollars. Pre-millennium we cannot accept.’

‘Why not? They are legal tender. I got them from a bank in Switzerland.’

‘Do you have others? We cannot take these.’

‘I don’t understand. Switzerland is the banking capital of the world.’

She smiled, a lovely smile that he realized was a wall. He could bash his head against it to zero effect.

Strebel rifled through his wallet and found notes that met her requirements. ‘Please be comfortable,’ she said.

In his room—Pilgrim’s room—he removed his clothes. He peeled them, for they stuck like eggshell to the damp, pale egg of his body. He strode hopefully to the shower in the small bathroom—the ‘in-suite.’ There was a single tap. He turned it. The shower head sputtered, emitting a brief, violent jet the color of cola. Strebel wanted to shout and hit it, but there was nothing at hand except his bottle of shampoo.

Then the water came, cold and clear and steady. He stepped into it with deep gratitude that allowed him to comprehend the miracle of a tap. Why had he never considered how few people on the planet had experienced a shower?

* * *

He awoke later, abruptly, a copy of Newsweek stuck to his bare chest. He recalled only lying down, the overexcited squeak of the bed springs. Reading? An article about Sudan. Or was it Somalia? Terrible things, he couldn’t comprehend—even as a policeman. The scale of atrocities frightened him because it implied original sin, rather than tightly contained circles of abuse. In Switzerland, specific excuses could be made: bad parents, mental illness. He had managed to fall asleep, mid-atrocity: gangs of men with mirrored sunglasses and guns committed the most gruesome genocide to court international attention.

Ingrid had recently told him that horror was inconvenient, coming at you on the TV news before dinner. You resent it, she’d said, and you feel bad resenting it, and wonder what you should do to not feel bad. But the only solution is to undergo some kind of fundamental change in how you live your life, to become a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières or a social worker for abused kids. At least stop buying goods made in Chinese sweatshops. It’s so big, she’d continued, so impossible and awkward, and the easiest thing—therefore—is to feed the cat instead or make a note to buy more washing powder. And we always do the easiest thing, don’t we?

She’d said this without looking at him, as if—he thought—she was talking to someone else. In fact, as if she was someone else talking to someone else, not Ingrid and Paul who talked of very little except, occasionally, the dunderhead son-in-law in a concerned, vaguely judgemental way. They never spoke to each other like this. She’d never ask him about his work. Long ago, they’d realized it was no subject for conversation.

After this odd outburst, she’d turned from him and quietly served up the sausages and spätzle.

Now he debated that she had meant something else when she’d said, ‘And we always do the easiest thing, don’t we?’ The don’t we seemed specific rather than general. Seemed to be woman-speak for: I know you have this big moral code that you live by out there, Mr Policeman, but you always do the easiest thing at home.

Recently, he’d noticed she had bunions. She’d had lovely feet when they’d first met. He’d seen that right away, her delicate, neat, high-arched feet in sandals. The elegance of her bare footprints in the Greek sand. Did bunions appear overnight, or grow slowly? And when? And why? What, exactly, were bunions?

He was overdue to contact her. He turned on his phone, but it did not work. He turned on his computer, but could not find a connection. He dressed quickly and went downstairs to ask Alice.

‘I am sorry, sir, the Wi-Fi, it is not working.’

‘Yes, I know. But when do you think it will be working?’

She smiled shyly, nibbled the end of her pen. ‘I think later. Yes, maybe later. Or tomorrow.’ She directed him across the street to a small internet café, but the power was down. He waited as the clerk started a loud petrol generator. By then the server was down.

For a brief period both power and server colluded. ‘Ingrid,’ he wrote with lightning speed. ‘All fine here in Reykjavik, though very, very busy at the conference. Don’t expect to have much time to phone or write. Hope you are well. Love, Paul.’

 

The driver was leaning against the car, waving his arms and smiling as if Strebel was an old friend. Strebel felt trapped. He wanted to pretend he couldn’t see the man, that his attention was diverted—a pressing phone call, for instance. But it was too late for that: the driver was now in front of him, giant hand out for shaking. Strebel shook back.

‘Yes, yes,’ the driver said warmly, then fished Strebel’s twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and pointed at the date. ‘Banks not okay this!’

In a flourish of bonhomie, Strebel swapped the driver’s bill for an acceptable version. The driver beamed, folded it carefully away.

‘Where we go?’ he said, still grinning. ‘Where we go, doctor?’

‘I’m not a doctor,’ Strebel replied, wondering what about him had a medical air. ‘Policeman.’

‘Polici?’ Now the driver wasn’t so sure. He even took a step back.

Strebel shook his head. ‘Not here. Back at home. Switzerland.’

‘Switz? Eh?’

‘Switzerland. Here,’ he pointed to the ground, ‘holiday.’

Was this the sort of holiday policemen took? To a foreign country to engage in some light, off-the-books investigating? He could just as well have gone to Sharm el-Sheikh with a couple of Sergeant Studer novels.

‘German War Graves?’ the driver asked. ‘Amboni Caves? Tongoni Ruins?’

Strebel took this moment to dig around in his bag, but, in fact, he was trying to level with himself. The lies he’d told to come here, the absurd risk to his marriage, his career: these had been battering at his brain since he’d left Switzerland, like flies against a window. And they were getting louder; soon they would be like pigeons, a Hitchcockian rain of them, hitting with terrible, insistent thuds.

He had told his boss he was visiting a sick uncle in Bruges. He had told Ingrid he was in Iceland. He had withheld evidence, the envelope with the little giraffe stamp. Because? Because? Because he wanted it to belong to him, wanted it to be a message from his lover intended for him. A summons: Come, I need to be rescued!

Because of the scent of her.

‘Pangani? Pangani good beach.’ The driver looked expectant.

‘Mama Gloria.’

‘Ah, yes, Mama Gloria!’ The driver clapped his giant hands and opened the back door with a flourish.

‘No,’ Strebel countered. ‘Price first. And I’m sitting in the front.’ He gestured to the ruined back seat. ‘There could be someone lost in there. Are you missing any customers?’

The driver didn’t understand, but peered inside, carefully examining the seat. When this show was over, he stood up and said to Strebel, ‘Twenty.’

‘Five.’

‘Twenty-five.’ The driver smiled.

‘Five,’ Strebel held up his right hand. ‘Five dollars.’

They settled on ten.

‘My name is Mr Tabu,’ the driver said.

‘Paul,’ said Strebel.

As Mr Tabu drove along the shaded avenues, past shops and shacks, Strebel realized he was looking for her, a slim, graceful girl, on a bicycle or walking along the roadside. ‘Pilgrim,’ he would call from the taxi, and she would turn, smile, run to him.

Counter-intuitively, he hoped he didn’t see her, because he was a grown-up, at least in part of his brain. He glanced at the vegetable plots out the windows, gradually replacing the little shops. He was indulging a fantasy. He could not really delude himself that he would find her and they would run off together and be happy. But the yearning felt good, like the transfusion of a young man’s blood. He wanted to be foolish enough to believe in such a romance, just for a moment, to suspend his relentless sense of duty. To be, yes, an old fool, undone, besieged by lust.

The taxi bounded down a dirt road. A pack of mangy dogs barked and chased the Corolla’s bald tires. The road led on through a field of dust-bedraggled corn and dead-ended in the open yard of a cement bungalow. Strebel, so lost in his thoughts, was confused as to where he was.

He got out and went to the door to find a large American woman standing with eyebrows raised as if she had been expecting him. She was overweight in the way Europeans expected Americans to be, from eating too much—fleshy, soft, undisciplined. She was also a smoker, he could tell from the smell of her. He introduced himself politely. ‘I’m a friend of Pilgrim Jones.’

‘Are you now?’

Strebel smiled benignly. ‘I’m hoping to find her. My name is Paul Strebel. Are you Gloria?’

‘No. I’m Bo Derek.’

He assumed that she’d invite him in and they would have a friendly, helpful chat. But her body blocked the door, her weight implied a bullying protection. She was definitely hiding something.

‘I’ve come a long way,’ he said. And gave her another smile.

‘Well, you’re out of luck, cowboy. You’ve just missed her.’

She was a hard-used woman, Strebel thought, like the wives of his father’s generation, left up in the mountains to cope with the ravages of storms and childbirth.

‘May I come in?’

Gloria tilted her head to survey him, then moved aside, ‘Sure.’

Her home was makeshift, as if she’d scavenged the furniture from departing expats. Nothing matched, but it was comfortable enough. He noticed the boxes of toys, the shelf of children’s books. Ah—the AIDS orphans. She offered him a seat but nothing else. He hoped for a glass of ice water. A very large glass. Preferably so large he could climb into it for a long soak.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘I got twelve kids arriving any minute now. So let’s cut to the chase. What’s this about Pilgrim?’

‘I’m trying to find her.’

‘So you said. You’ve just missed her, so I said. Do you want to have the same conversation all over again? I’d rather not.’ She fidgeted, tapped her fingers. She badly wanted a cigarette, Strebel was sure. But there were no packs or ashtrays in evidence. Had she just quit?

‘Pilgrim left Switzerland just over a month ago,’ he pushed on. ‘I have reason to believe she may be in danger.’

‘Here? Danger? From what? Falling mangoes?’

‘A man associated with her has also disappeared.’

Gloria made a shocked expression. ‘“A man associated with her.” What does that mean? Did they rob banks together?’

‘She was involved in a car accident in which the man’s daughter was killed. It’s possible he blames her and wants to harm her.’

‘That’s terrible, just terrible, Detective—is it “Detective”?’

‘Detective Chief Inspector.’

She gave him the look of a deeply impressed woman.

‘How did you know I was a policeman?’

‘Your shit-colored aura.’

Strebel wanted to laugh because he found this genuinely funny. The shit had stuck after all.

‘Long way to come as a policeman,’ she noted.

‘I’m not here in that capacity. As I said, I’m a friend.’ He gave her a neutral smile.

‘I won’t bother to argue that police can’t have friends, although, personally, I think that it’s impossible. So, yeah, I rented her a place out in Raskazone. The peninsula on the south end of the bay. Cutest little cottage.’

‘When was this?’

‘Coupla weeks ago, thereabouts.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘At the club—the Yacht Club. Sounds very grand. But it’s not. Just a nice, clean local place. Yachtees like it. Nice place to swim, cold drinks.’

‘When?’ he repeated.

She exhaled loudly and rolled her eyes. ‘Two, three days ago. She was drinking with Harry Fonseca.’

Interesting, Strebel thought, that she’d given him a name. Harry Fonseca. He was careful not to let her know he’d picked up the hint. ‘How do you know she’s gone? Not just traveling and coming back.’

‘How do I know she’s not traveling and coming back? How do I know if she is? I don’t know anything about her. I didn’t say I know this or that.’ She paused, looked Strebel over again, and went on, ‘Maybe she met some young guy, some hot young buck and she’s gone to Zanzibar with him.’

Strebel refused the bait.

‘You went to the cottage. Why?’

‘Pay the askari. Watchman. End of the month, salary due. I noticed she wasn’t there.’

‘Were you concerned?’

‘Why should I have been? There wasn’t a hex drawn on the wall in blood or anything. Just an empty house.’

Somewhere dogs barked and Gloria stood up. She moved to the window facing the road and looked out expectantly. ‘I think that’s them,’ she said.

‘Them?’

‘My reasons for living.’

‘Just one more question. Please, Gloria.’

She turned back to him, her eyes scanning his shit-colored aura. ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she? The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I’m not surprised you’ve come all this way for her.’

‘No…’ he started to say, to deny. But why bother? There was the sound of a heavy vehicle approaching, a diesel with a missing muffler. He ploughed on: ‘Did you meet anyone called Ernst Koppler?’

But her attention was riveted elsewhere. He saw what she did: a decrepit bus full of children.

‘I don’t know why Pilgrim Jones came.’ She kept her gaze out the window. ‘I don’t know why she left. Or where or how or who. In Tanga people come, they go. It’s why the club doesn’t run tabs. People go and sometimes they go without paying their bills. Pilgrim came, she went. Maybe she’s coming back. I really hope she’s okay. But that’s it, as far as it goes for me. And I’ve never heard of the other fellow—Kaplin?’

‘Koppler.’

‘Koppler, right. No idea about him. We’re done now.’

She was starting out the door. He watched her rushing, suddenly a nimble, glowing woman.

‘Good luck,’ Strebel said. But she wasn’t listening, she was running to the bus, her arms outstretched. He watched for a moment from the doorway, the tentative figures stepping out of the bus. They were all so small, so thin. She crouched down and touched their faces one by one, just a brush of her finger. She was speaking to them in Swahili, the reassuring clucking of a hen, so she didn’t notice Strebel bypass her, get back into the taxi and drive away.

Her performance had been almost perfect, he thought, but for ‘Kaplin.’ She hadn’t misheard. She’d turned away from him as she lied.

 

Mr Tabu collected Strebel promptly at ten the next morning, and they drove to the Yacht Club. ‘Do you know Harry?’ he asked Mr Tabu on the way.

‘Mr Harry, yes, yes. He like the club very much.’ Mr Tabu laughed like a naughty child and then held his thumb to his mouth to suggest the tipping of a bottle.

The club’s entrance was strewn with fallen bougainvillea blossoms, as if a wedding had just passed. Strebel trotted down the long flight of steps, confronting the sweep of the jade-colored bay. He’d almost forgotten about the sea. He had a Swiss ambivalence about it: the sea was an element of which he had no immediate or genetic experience, it frightened him; and yet he fancied the ocean’s fluidity, how it took things somewhere else. Sailors or driftwood or an old plastic jug, lifted and taken to a cove a mile away or across a sea.

The bar was well kept, a bright, open design that welcomed rather than intimidated. It was empty but for a pair of old men and the Tanzanian bartender. Strebel debated how to approach: to slowly lubricate the conversation with alcohol, for clearly the men were drinkers; or to be simple and direct.

It probably wouldn’t make a difference. Tanga was just another small town—a village if you were white, and in villages people didn’t talk to an outsider. In those deep, dead-end mountain valleys of the Jungfrau where he’d started his career, the doors slammed in his face, mouths sealed shut. Eyes focused on a distant col. The dead child, the brutalized wife, the missing husband: no one would tell him a thing.

Strebel sat next to the men, introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Strebel from the Swiss Police, and put the two Swiss ID headshots on the bar. ‘Do you know them?’

One of the old men said, ‘What’s this about?’

‘They’re missing.’

‘Missing?’ said the other.

‘Pretty. She your wife?’ Then looking at Koppler’s picture, added, ‘They run off together? He seems an unlikely choice.’

‘You can never tell with a woman. Joanie went off with you.’

They had a laugh. Strebel offered to buy them a drink, but it was complicated: he had to become a day member and buy a book of chits. Now he understood what Gloria had said about ‘tabs.’

‘Just give us the cash,’ said the one who’d had it off with Joanie. When Strebel handed over ten bucks, he checked the date, slipped the bill in his pocket, shouted, ‘Mohemedi! Naomba Tusker tatu!’

Three beers came. Pink tickets bearing various denominations like Monopoly money were handed over.

‘The girl was here. She took up with Harry. Though not—sadly for Harry—in the way Harry would like to have been, er, taken up,’ Joanie’s swain said. A long, throaty chuckle.

Strebel felt a surprise flinch of jealousy. How, exactly, had she taken up with Harry?

‘And Harry, where could I find him?’ Strebel sipped the beer. He saw the two men glance at each other and shrug in unison.

‘Harry? Hard to say. He’s usually here.’

‘If he’s not here, he could be anywhere.’

‘He’s like that. Breezy fellow.’

‘The woman, Pilgrim,’ Strebel said. ‘I think she might be in some kind of trouble.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘That’s why I’d like to find Harry.’ He wanted to make it clear, Harry wasn’t competition. ‘“Anywhere.” Do you think that’s far?’

One scratched his beard, the other his hair; both looked doubtful. ‘Breezy fellow,’ they said. ‘Hard to say.’

‘When did you last see him?’

The old men exchanged glances as if to give Strebel the impression they were consulting each other, but in fact they were silently corroborating.

‘Come to think of it, I only just realized he isn’t here right now.’

‘Wasn’t he here for Quiz Night?’

‘Come to think of it, I don’t even know what day it is today!’

‘Sorry we can’t be of more help!’

Strebel drank the beer and asked about the weather. They told him the rains would be coming soon, the southern monsoons.

 

‘I’ll pay you,’ he told Alice. ‘I need someone to translate for me.’

She looked unconvinced, carefully examining her neat manicure. Strebel knew she was trying to decide what he wanted—sex? Or a Swahili translator? She suspected the former. All these old white men wanted sex. They were no different from the old black men, the young black men, the German backpackers, the shuffling but surprisingly horny and solvent beggars in the market, the Goan sailors from the harbor. Strebel supposed the constant challenge to her morality exhausted her. She must hear the whores talk in the hotel bar, and know that once they had been the same as her. Girls from villages with few options. Prostitution was a way to make money—more than you did in a hotel reception or shop.

Strebel noted the small silver cross around her neck and suspected that she wore it like garlic against the vampires of his gender. But like garlic, Christ’s power was constrained by human greed. He thought of Pilgrim, a kind of whore, who had given up her freedom and spirit for a wealthy man. And Alice, considering the cost of her manicure and her hair extensions and, very probably, a dress she had seen. She could have these and all she had to do was take her clothes off for this old white man.

Ingrid had never made such compromises. A physiotherapist with a happy childhood and a good family, she’d come to Strebel free and clear, voluptuous, soft, hungry. They both made almost the same salary and they split the bills evenly. They had never fought about money; they had fought very little. Perhaps, early on, she’d resented the hours he worked, the interrupted dinners, the 3 a.m. phone calls.

Perhaps, once or twice, she’d even threatened to leave him. Did he remember? One Christmas when Caroline was little? She’d said he treated the house like a hotel and her like a maid. Something about his clothes on the floor, the unmade bed. From his point of view, what did it matter if the bed wasn’t made? The bared sheets wouldn’t melt in the sun or get dirty from the air. Leave it unmade, he’d said. Or maybe shouted. He took care of the cars—changed the oil, took the snow tires on and off. He kept up his side of things. Putting up bookshelves. Fixing the toilet.

‘I want a translator,’ he said to Alice, summoning up his most paternal manner. Even then she didn’t quite believe him, but she nodded slowly. ‘How much?’

‘It’s important to translate exactly what I say, exactly what is said to me. Okay?’

She nodded again.

‘Someone may be hurt or in danger.’

‘Yes,’ she said, touching her crucifix.

‘I’ll pay you one hundred dollars.’

She looked down at her hands and again he felt her doubt. It was too much money. ‘You are a Christian?’

For a moment he was confused—then he understood: his namesake apostle. And what she was hoping for: reassurance. He considered an answer that was the least lie—the least awkward words to pronounce. ‘I believe in many of Jesus’s teachings.’

Mr Tabu had put a couple of foam pillows in the back of the taxi, an attempt to hide or compensate for the state of the seat. Strebel and Alice dutifully sat on these as Mr Tabu drove them out to the Raskazone peninsula. The road followed the headland for several lazy miles past mansions gently dissolving in the salt air. The ragged road, the overgrown gardens, the cows and goats grazing on the verges: Strebel almost laughed to think how many violations of Swiss law he might tally in a single minute’s drive. He wondered how it made him different from Alice and Mr Tabu, to live somewhere so neat and precise, so tidy and ordered.

For a moment, as they rounded the tip of the peninsula, a foul smell clogged the air, and he saw, to his left, a pipe extending into the sea spewing a brown smear of what could only be raw sewage. Less than half a mile away, back around in the bay, they had passed the public beach.

Now the road surrendered completely to sandy dirt, a narrow track. High security walls alternated with patches of scrub. A few hundred yards later, Mr Tabu stopped. ‘This the house.’

Alice turned to Strebel, testing her importance, ‘He says this is house.’

‘Yes, thank you.’ Strebel smiled appreciatively and got out. The wrought-iron gate was shut but not locked. ‘Hello?’ he called. He felt the emptiness, but said again, louder, ‘Hello? Is anyone here?’ No one answered. So he unlatched the gate and went in. The house in the yard was small and round with a roof of thatched palms. Several large trees with fat red blossoms shaded the front, and beyond them the shelf of land dropped to the dense green fleece of mangroves. Strebel imagined Pilgrim standing here as he did, and how the same sense of peace must have come to her. The wild twittering of yellow birds and the trees and the sea and green mangroves, the white house—the still, hot afternoon which held him softly in a cobweb of time, so that he felt if he went inside he would find a bed, and lie down and sleep until he wasn’t tired anymore. He would lie down and she would come and lie next to him and they would sleep in the heat, just their hands touching, their fingers intertwined.

The house, however, was locked; he should have asked Gloria for a key. He walked around, peering in—though there was nothing to see: a few pieces of old furniture, a basic kitchen, a pretty tiled bathroom, a bed secluded by a large mosquito net. He went back to the car and asked Alice if she could find a neighbor to talk to.

Together they walked down the lane to the big, new house and Alice knocked softly on the gate. A uniformed guard appeared and Alice spoke to him. She relayed to Strebel that the guard had only just started the job and anyway he couldn’t give them names as it was against company policy.

Strebel was about to head back to the car when Alice touched his arm, ‘What about him?’ She pointed to a boy in an oversized white shirt tending two fat brown cows in the scrub.

Alice admired the cows, touching them in a familiar way. Strebel surmised she had been around cows her whole life: a village girl who’d had to learn to wear shoes. She spoke to the boy like a sister, and he admired her instinct for gentleness. Strebel noticed the white shirt. What was the shirt for, he wondered. Dirty, torn in the back. Was it one step above the poverty of having no shirt at all?

Yes, the boy told Alice, he remembered the mzungu lady. She came only with a small suitcase, nothing valuable. She didn’t even have a car. She had a bicycle that looked like the kind you could rent at the market. Sometimes she even walked. He and Alice laughed.

‘Why is that funny?’ Strebel asked.

‘Because white people never walk. We think you can’t, that you are too weak. In my village, we even believed you didn’t have legs.’

Briefly, he recalled a toy Caroline had had—a little plastic bus with plastic people who bobbed up and down when you rolled the bus along the floor. The people were just white heads on round pegs. They looked straight ahead, up-down-up-down.

‘Did she have any visitors?’ he asked, and Alice translated for the boy. He squinted in thought before speaking. ‘The boy says Mama Gloria came sometimes. And there was a taxi with a white man inside. A few days ago only.’

Strebel took out the picture of Koppler. ‘Was this him?’

The boy looked at the picture and Alice translated. ‘He isn’t sure,’ she said, and added with no embarrassment: ‘You all look the same.’

Holding back a laugh, Strebel asked the boy to think again—was the man fat? Thin? Did he have a lot of hair? Or no hair? Did he have glasses? Was he old or maybe young—younger? Maybe, Strebel tripped over the thought Gloria had implanted in his head, maybe a hot young buck to go to Zanzibar with.

The boy studied Koppler. It was hard to tell, he explained, because he didn’t really see the man. The man never got out of the car. On the other hand, he would easily recognize the taxi driver; he was from the boy’s tribe, Usimba.

Alice felt she must note that Usimba were not local people. They were from the middle of the country, near Tabora. And they were a very old tribe. She had read in school how they made paintings on the rocks that scientists said were many thousands of years old, maybe thirty thousand. Strebel nodded as if this interested him.

The boy agreed to speak with Mr Tabu and describe the other driver of the Usimba tribe. Mr Tabu nodded definitively, ‘Yes, yes, I know him.’

Strebel reached for his wallet to pay the boy, but Alice discreetly stayed him. ‘Do not turn him into a beggar. To speak is free, one person to another.’

Mr Tabu drove them to the bus station. A solitary bus trembled and shuddered under a canopy of mango trees.

As soon as Mr Tabu stopped the taxi, a swarm of ticket touts surrounded the car, offering Strebel passage—Morogoro, Dar, Pangani, Arusha, Mombasa. They leered at Alice, for they knew what she was: a pretty young black girl with a middle-aged white man. Malaya, Strebel heard, and he guessed at the meaning from the tone: whore.

He felt her fold herself in, as if she could stack her skeleton more tightly. She crossed her thin, dark wrists over her lap and gazed straight ahead, attempting the look of a duchess, impervious to their lewd chattering. Mr Tabu waved his arms and shouted at them and they sloped back to the shadowed interiors of the ticket offices. He then went off in search of the driver, Mr Peter.

But Mr Peter had taken a holiday; he had gone to see his family near Tabora. Despite this unfortunate news, Mr Tabu looked pleased with himself as he spoke to Alice. She translated: Mr Peter had been able to take this holiday because he had come into some money—a mzungu client who had paid him very well.

‘When?’

Mr Tabu consulted the group. ‘A few days ago.’

‘The thirtieth?’

More discussion. ‘Maybe beginning Wednesday.’

The twenty-ninth.

Strebel had left Zurich for Dar on the twenty-eighth. Today was the second of June. Koppler could still be around.

And the client? Strebel pushed to know—could Mr Tabu show them the photograph of Koppler? Mr Tabu went off with it and after a few minutes returned, tilting his head from side to side. ‘They are not sure,’ he said, through Alice. ‘They saw him only once. They say yes, maybe. They say maybe, maybe.’

‘But they don’t say “No”?’

Mr Tabu concurred, ‘They don’t say “No.”’

‘Do they know anything else?’ Strebel pressed. ‘Where Mr Peter took this man or, when he left, did he take a bus? Or a plane? To where?’

But there was nothing more. Only envy that Mr Peter had been so lucky.

Strebel sat back and felt the sweat along his spine. He knew he’d reached a dead end—unless he traveled to this Usimba place and found Mr Peter’s village. But he would not do that. This was far enough. He suddenly felt sour. He could smell himself, and he was ashamed that Alice could smell him, that she would see the smear of his sweat on the seat, the slow drip of it off his face.

At the opposite end of the bus station, a mother scolded her young child. Strebel could have no idea why she was angry, but he remembered the ways Ingrid had scolded Caroline: when she refused to hold her mother’s hand crossing the road, when she wanted ice cream for supper, when she would inexplicably, inconsolably, lie on the floor and sob. Strebel had been sure that her distress was existential: an inexpressible need that therefore could not be fulfilled. It’s this rage and sorrow we carry in us forever, he’d thought—I need, I need, I need—the need a craving without object, an insatiable hunger that has nothing to do with food. Or love. Or sex. These were merely surrogates. He’d imagined the giant, gaping bill of a baby bird, whom nothing would satisfy, except perhaps to swallow the universe whole.

This thought led him to Ingrid. What if she found him like this, sweating in a taxi in a town on the edge of Africa, concocting an investigation with a young Swahili girl. Concocting, yes, because it wasn’t his business to be here. His work—his duty— stopped with a trial or an inquest; what people made of their lives after that was up to them. And sometimes, yes, he found the separation a little shocking, for he was so embedded, so intimately familiar with the emotional lives of the participants, and then it was over. He felt oddly abandoned, as if a best friend or lover had stopped returning calls. It was too abrupt, the end.

Too abrupt, always, the ‘Take care of yourself.’ Regardless of the softness of their skin or the curve of their dark eyebrows.

As for Pilgrim, he had failed to be objective. Professionally, he was beyond the pale. He had slept with a woman nearly half his age, a witness, vulnerable, traumatized.

If Ingrid found him, somehow, found him here, she would merely pity him. She would see the desperate machinations of a middle-aged man in need of antidepressants and a sports car. She would chide him as she had Caroline: You can’t have ice cream for supper; it’s not the way the world works. He would lie sobbing on the floor and Ingrid would firmly say: You can’t have the pretty girl, you can’t touch her and love her and have breakfast with her. It’s not the way the world works.

‘The hotel,’ Strebel said to Mr Tabu and he was sure he felt Alice flinch. But even to smile reassuringly would be to show his yellowing wolf teeth. So he sighed and let his head fall all the way back against the seat.

 

At first he didn’t understand the sound—that it was knocking. For it began in his dream: a suspect he’d interviewed many years ago, tapping a soda can on the table, a taunting Morse code, for he refused to speak, only to tap-tap-tap, tap-tap, and to smile. Refused to say what had happened to the child, where they might find the body, only tap-tap-tap, and that smile. Strebel opened his eyes and listened to the knocking, let it bring him into the still, hot, dark room in Tanga.

‘Just a minute,’ he said, and grappled with the sheet, pulling it around him. How could it be dark and so insanely hot? His first two nights he’d waited for the cool to seep in, a current of air to drift ashore. Like the cool fingers of a mother on the chest of her fevered child. But, no, the stubborn heat remained. Even on the balcony, he’d felt no relief. He’d seen a beggar down below, curled up in the open arcade of the market. The man had covered himself with a thick blanket and wore a wool hat.

Now he realized the knocking was urgent, a male voice saying, ‘Mistah Strebel! Mistah Strebel!’

‘Who is it?’ he asked, already opening the door.

Mr Tabu stood there, his excited face coated with moonlight. ‘Your friend! They have found him! The police! Come! I take you!’

Strebel’s heart seized. Then he paid attention to the words. Him. They have found him.

They drove through the dark, quiet town. None of the streetlights worked. Kerosene lamps illuminated the interiors of bars, cafés and street-side shops. Strebel was charmed—for the darkness hid the shabbiness, made it fairytale and glimmering, and the sounds were soft: a radio, people laughing, a bicycle bell.

Even the police station was without electricity. Mr Tabu took a flashlight out of his glove compartment. It was a cheap Chinese model with the power of a child’s night light, but sufficient to light their way up the cement steps. Excited voices came from the dark ahead of them. Within moments, they collided in the dark. There was a brief scuffle, a conversation in Swahili, then at last the flashlight took hold of an image. The officer wore a sharply pressed tan uniform.

‘I am Chief Constable Elias Kulunju.’ He held out his hand to Strebel. ‘I am sorry to inform you about the death of one of your countrymen. This man—’ he gestured offhandedly at Mr Tabu, ‘He says you know the deceased.’

‘Yes, possibly,’ Strebel replied, curious as to how Mr Tabu had involved himself to such a degree as to know about dead bodies found by the police. But he had in his mind, then, an image of the drivers sitting under a tree, chatting for hours on end. Taxi drivers were like Google: they knew everything. Some of their information was reliable, but much of it was gossip, speculation, opinion disguised as fact.

Kulunju carried on down the steps. ‘It is unfortunate that our mortuary is without electricity, so we have taken the deceased to the fish factory. They have a generator and have agreed to keep him in their refrigerator. Can we take your taxi? My car—’ he began and then simply shrugged. ‘This country.’

Mr Tabu hurried to open the Corolla’s door. Kulunju glanced distastefully at the back seat before getting in. Strebel sat beside him. Carefully—because he had to check—he said, ‘The body is that of a man. You’re sure?’

‘My knowledge of anatomy is limited. But I am fairly sure men are the same, white or black.’ Strebel wasn’t sure if Kulunju was smiling as he said this.

‘It’s just, there’s a woman missing.’

‘White?’

‘Yes. About thirty. Dark hair.’

There was a long pause. ‘You wazungu and your marital dramas. Do you behave this way in your own countries? Or just when you come to Africa?’ He drew out Africaaaaa to make the point. Then added, ‘No, nothing about a woman.’

The factory was on the outskirts of town. There were fewer lights and the black horizon of buildings became lower and more erratic. Then the darkness yielded suddenly to the blazing security lights that illuminated a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. A security guard approached the taxi, and, seeing Kulunju, snapped a salute and ran to open the gate. Inside the compound, Strebel saw order: neat paths, whitewashed buildings, clipped grass. The business, Kulunju told him, was owned by an Italian and managed by a Greek.

The Greek, a polite young man, stood waiting under the light in a whirling halo of moths and flying ants. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said to Strebel. Strebel gave a polite nod. They went inside. There was only the faintest odor of fish—for it turned out the business was calamari and octopus for export to Europe. The Greek pointed out that the Mediterranean had been bereft of both for nearly two decades, due to overfishing. He led the way through an office and toward a set of high steel doors.

‘We have done our best,’ he said to Strebel. ‘I hope you can appreciate the circumstances.’

The Greek switched on a light, opened the door, and they stepped inside. The cold embraced Strebel and he wanted to sigh with relief. The cold was delicious, pressing against his skin: he could strip off his clothes and stand naked just to feel the coolness on his balls. But instead he followed Kulunju and the Greek back between the shelves of frozen squids. In the very rear of the refrigerator, Koppler lay on a metal table. He was covered to his neck with a white sheet. He was mottled, his skin pale and flaky as pastry. His eyes were covered with packing tape. They had no lids and probably no eyeballs. Strebel considered that his face bore no less expression in death than it had in life.

‘Is this the man you know?’ Kulunju asked.

‘Yes,’ Strebel said. ‘Ernst Koppler. How did you know he was Swiss?’

Kulunju handed over a damp red passport. ‘He was carrying this.’

Strebel studied Koppler. He had begun to rot. ‘Can you tell me where—how he was found?’

Delicately, Kulunju pulled down the sheet to Koppler’s waist. He had been partially eaten by things with small mouths. ‘Fishermen. It’s hard to say how long he had been in the water. Perhaps one day. Not much more. His eyes—small crabs…’ Kulunju paused to make sure Strebel was not about to be sick. ‘Small crabs and other marine animals but also the sea cause such damage.’

‘Did he drown?’ Strebel asked.

Kulunju shook his head, and turned Koppler’s hands palm-up, revealed the deep wounds on his wrists. ‘It appears he committed suicide.’

‘And then jumped in the sea?’

The chief constable shrugged. ‘What would you like me to say? That it is possible, impossible? Sometimes those who kill themselves wish to be found, as a punishment to their families. Others want privacy.’ He replaced the sheet and stood back.

Strebel thought about what would happen now in Switzerland: the forensic team would scour every trace of the Raskazone house, of Gloria’s house and Harry’s house, their cars. He and his team would bring them both in for questioning. And the old boys at the bar. They’d locate Mr Peter in Usimba. The pathologist would decide if the knife wounds were indeed self-inflicted, or if there was evidence of foul play. How long the body had been in the water, and if he’d been alive or dead upon entry. The investigation would be exhaustive. And yet everyone would know from the outset that Koppler had killed himself and had reason. How his body got into the sea—by his own hand or another’s—only mattered as a curiosity. No more: an exercise in efficiency. As if efficiency, like explanation, could ward off the stupid, random wanton cruelty of life.

‘We have arranged for one of the fish trucks to take him to Dar,’ Kulunju said.

‘Thank you,’ Strebel nodded. He saw then that someone had put a jar filled with frangipani blossoms on the floor near the metal leg of the sorting table. He noticed also the makeshift reverence of the room: an effort had been made to clear a place for the table away from the boxes of squid. He noticed the cleanliness of the sheet (where had it come from?). He noticed that someone had combed Koppler’s hair, for it was smooth against his scalp. Care had been taken; strangers had been gentle.

Why did that surprise him so?

Lies had been told, obfuscations proffered, mysteries had dropped before him like little black stones. He would never solve them. There would be no statements. Peter the driver would never be found and no one would explain to him how Koppler ended up in the sea. Mr Tabu, the old men at the bar, the Greek manager, Kulunju—they were without malice. They accepted that life had marooned them here on the edge of the continent.

He could keep looking for Pilgrim, and he would find her—alive, he was certain. Gloria, whatever her conspiracy, had not filled him with dread. He recalled the transformation of her face when she saw the children, how she was almost beautiful.

Pilgrim was safe. Somewhere. But she had not summoned him. Had not phoned. The letter she sent had not been to him. So Strebel rode in the front of the fish truck with the driver. Five hours later, just after dawn, they reached Dar es Salaam, and the Swiss vice-consul met them at the morgue. He offered Strebel the guest room at the Embassy and Strebel accepted. Soon, he was resting on a bed in an air-conditioned room, and if he’d been able to blot out the searing African light, he could have been in a hotel in Belgium or Reykjavik: the mustard-colored bedspread, the high speed Wi-Fi.

There would be questions. The vice-consul, his superintendent, Ingrid. He would answer, but he could not explain.

He shut his eyes. And he felt her move next to him, in her sleep, reaching out for him, with the deepest honesty of her unconscious. ‘Paul,’ she murmured, and he turned so that his body cupped hers. He held her lightly in his arms, ‘I’m here,’ he said. ‘My darling, I’m here.’