It was nearly dawn, but had it not been for the clock, nobody would have noticed. The snowfall had turned into a blizzard. No light outside, only white mist.
No light inside the room, either. The crystal chandelier seemed not to illuminate anything, merely to draw a shapeless patch on the floor.
Staring at it for too long was likely to bring on horrible thoughts. Both the man and the woman avoided doing that.
It looked too much like a bloodstain.
Apart from the ticking of the grandfather clock and their breathing, there was silence.
The woman was sitting in an armchair, as stiff as a tin soldier, hands clasped on her clenched thighs, features frozen in a grimace that made her look ten years older. She was wearing a kind of uniform, with a knee-length skirt and a white apron, and her hair was gathered in a plait. But for her scowling (or frightened?) expression, she would have been beautiful.
Her name was Helene, and she had been the housekeeper at the villa on the Passer for more than five years. She hadn’t bitten her nails for at least twice as long. That was one of the first lessons she had been taught at the home economics school in Brixen where she had learned the basics of the job. A good housekeeper’s hands, her teachers had said, are her calling card. They must be perfect. Always clean and well cared for. At the start, not biting her nails had been almost as hard as giving up smoking, but then she had got used to it. For years, it hadn’t even occurred to her to go back to her bad old habit.
Until the screaming had started.
What kind of man could let out such screams?
It had taken her no more than a moment to relapse. She had bitten, she had nibbled, and when her teeth had sunk into the raw flesh, she had dropped her hands back down to her lap and twisted her apron nervously.
Then she had started again.
Hands. Mouth. Nails. Teeth. A small pang of pain. Apron.
And then all over again.
Helene had exchanged just one look with the man who stood leaning against the large fireplace nobody ever used. A single look, but it said all there was to say.
His name was Moritz. Early thirties, rings like bruises under his eyes and an automatic in a holster concealed by the jacket of his dark suit. Usually he looked wonderful in that suit. He had paid a fortune for it, but it had been worth it. That was what he would tell himself as he looked in the mirror in the morning and knotted his tie or gave his brilliantined hair a final touch, and it was confirmed by the looks the women he passed in town gave him.
Now, though, in this dawn, with or without his dark suit, Moritz would have felt as twisted and ungainly as a scarecrow. Because, when he had caught his reflection in Helene’s eyes, he had glimpsed something that had terrified him. An expression like so many he had seen since he had become a member of Herr Wegener’s circle. The expression of a victim.
And that was not good.
Not good at all, because Moritz was a simple man who divided the world with the toss of a coin. Victim or executioner? One metre ninety, over ninety kilos, and with a natural tendency to violence, Moritz had never experienced a victim’s fear. Until the moment he had seen himself reflected in Helene’s eyes and he, too, had wondered: What kind of human being can let out such screams? And how long can he keep it up before he goes completely mad? But also: What’s going to happen to us?
That was why he had stopped looking at Helene. Or at the stain on the floor.
Too many questions, far too many questions.
Moritz hated questions. Because you couldn’t break a question’s nose. You couldn’t fire a bullet into a question’s heart (and one into its head, just to be safe) and silence it forever. Questions were like those persistent, disgusting insects with their big, hungry, relentless jaws that could cause even the strongest castle to come crumbling down.
Silence. Moritz wished there could be silence.
He wished he could ignore the screams and disappear for a few minutes. Just long enough to chase away the bad thoughts. He wished he could go out into the garden for a smoke. Or else have a small glass of brandy.
But orders were orders. For someone like Moritz, orders cut the heads off question marks. They marked the boundary between what you could do and what was forbidden.
Orders made everything much simpler, and he was a simple man. They also made disobedience much more exciting. And to be completely honest, that was what had got him into trouble.
So Moritz stood there, motionless and stiff in his dark suit, leaning against the unlit fireplace. Listening to the screams and feeling the weight of the automatic dragging him down to the ground, to the shapeless stain on the floor.
Helene, on the other hand, had a more complex view of the world. Things were not just black and white, obedience and transgression, victims and executioners. There was a whole sea of greys to navigate. It didn’t take much to turn an order into a suggestion, and suggestions weren’t traps, they always offered a way out. Her duty, for example, was to the villa, not to her employer. The villa and her employer were two separate things.
That was a way out.
When she decided she had had enough of the screams, Helene stood up abruptly and left the room, as silent as a ghost.