Текст книги "The Storyteller"
Автор книги: Antonia Michaelis
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 23 страниц)
“‘How could we see that?’ an elderly cat asked crankily. ‘We are blind. Visitors tell us our fabric is beautiful, though. They say that if you look at it for a long time, rainbows spring from its folds. But we have never seen that ourselves.’
“‘Oh, you poor creatures!’ the little queen exclaimed.
“They sat down to take a closer look at the fabric that covered the island; and, indeed, after a while, a rainbow shot up in front of them, gleaming and sparkling in all the colors of the world. A second one followed, and then a third. The rainbows began to swirl into each other, as if they were threads themselves. They danced and spun around; they formed spirals and knots up there, in the clear, cold winter air—blue, green, yellow, orange, pink, red, violet—and everyone got a bit dizzy looking at them.
“‘How beautiful!’ the little queen said finally. ‘Isn’t it so sad the cats are blind?’
“‘Glasses,’ the lighthouse keeper murmured. ‘Maybe they aren’t blind after all; maybe glasses are all they need. I left my own glasses on the ship …’
“‘I’ll go and get them!’ the little queen said. She picked up one of the white cats to carry it with her, for the cats looked so soft and nice, but the cat complained. ‘Come on, you can warm my hands till we reach the ship,’ the little queen said. ‘Like a muff made of white fur.’
“‘If you insist,’ the cat said begrudgingly.
“On the beach, the silver-gray dog with the golden eyes was pacing to and fro nervously.
“‘Just imagine … this fabric can create rainbows!’ the little queen shouted, out of breath. ‘Oh, if only we had clothes made of such fabric!’
“The silver-gray dog just growled. ‘Don’t put that fabric on,’ he said. ‘Little queen, don’t do it! Ever! Whoever wears that cloth sees nothing but rainbows and forgets about danger!’
“‘Oh, you! You just don’t like anything!’ the little queen said. ‘Think of the rose girl … you wanted to bite her when she first joined us!’
“‘I will go and see what the others are doing,’ the silver-gray dog snarled. ‘So we don’t lose them to rainbows.’
“The little queen climbed aboard the ship and put the cat down on the deck, where it curled into a ball on the planks and fell asleep instantly. She looked for the lighthouse keeper’s glasses everywhere, but she couldn’t find them. At last, when she was on her knees searching under one of the benches, someone knocked on the rail very politely. The little queen looked up, and there was a man there, clad from head to toe in glittering white fabric.
“‘Come aboard,’ the little queen said. ‘Is it true that one sees only rainbows when one is wearing that fabric?’
“The man didn’t answer. He plopped down on the bench. ‘Oh, little queen,’ he said. ‘I am so tired! I have come far, far across the water, just to see you.’
“‘To see me?’ the little queen repeated, surprised.
“At that moment, the man reached out and grabbed her, pulling her closer. His grip was strong. The little queen gave a cry of fear and pain. Only now did she see that the man had a blond mustache.
“‘Your diamond heart is more beautiful than all the rainbows in the world,’ he whispered. ‘And it is mine, rightfully mine. For you owe your very existence to me. I am your father.’ His white gown slid to the floor; the little queen saw the blood-red coat he was wearing beneath. And the next second, the red hunter lifted her up, as if she weighed no more than a sheet of paper. But then he stepped on a rose branch the rose girl had lost, and thorns pricked through the sole of his boot. He lost his balance and fell, swearing loudly.
“When he sat up, the little queen saw the silver-gray dog racing toward the ship. The rose girl and the lighthouse keeper were behind him. The red hunter stood up. He had let go of the little queen as he fell, and now she fled into the cabin and slammed the door. Then, there was a terrible noise from outside, on the ship’s deck. Some things fell down, and wood splintered; she heard the heavy breathing of two people and pressed Mrs. Margaret to her breast.
“Finally, she glanced through a crack in the wood of the cabin door. Outside, two bodies were rolling over the planks between toppled-over benches and torn sails. It wasn’t a dog that was fighting with the red hunter. It was a wolf. A big gray wolf. The red hunter sprang to his feet and swung his rapier, from which he cast dangerous, glowing sparkles.
“‘Oh, my sea lion, my dog, my wolf!’ the little queen whispered. ‘He will kill you!’
“But she couldn’t do anything; she was too frightened. And she felt very ashamed of herself.
“She saw that the wolf’s fur was dark with blood in some places. Then the wolf collapsed and lay on the floor very still. The red hunter put his rapier away. He kicked the wolf with his boot one last time, stepped over it, and walked to the rail. Caressing the wood, he smiled contentedly. ‘This could be my ship,’ he said. ‘I will not sail her, though. She is too green. I will take nothing from here but the little queen’s heart. I will cut it from her body with my rapier …’
“The little queen wanted to cry. Now, she thought, I’ll die after all, and I still don’t know anything about death. But then something unexpected happened. The big gray wolf moved. It stood up very slowly, very silently, and approached the red hunter from behind. When it was directly behind him, it stood on its hind legs and laid its paws on the railing, on either side of the red hunter; the red hunter turned his head. In his eyes there was nothing but surprise; there was no time for fear. The wolf sank its teeth into the hunter’s neck.
“The little queen covered her face with her hands. She sat like that, all alone, in the darkness of the cabin, until the rose girl opened the door and took the little queen into her arms.
“‘The red hunter is dead,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t have to be afraid any longer. We were hiding in the folds of the white fabric and didn’t see what happened. Did you?’
“‘I don’t know,’ the little queen replied. ‘I didn’t see anything.’
“Outside on the deck, the white cat blinked at them lazily. She had been asleep until now. The lighthouse keeper raised the sails that hadn’t been torn, and they sailed on. A little while later, the sea lion poked his head out of a wave.
“‘Little queen!’ he said. ‘The black ship still hovers on the horizon! There are more hunters there, more greedy hands. Don’t ever forget that.’ With those words, he dove down, back into the deep water. He left a red trace of blood behind.”
Abel ran his fingers through Micha’s hair. She was sleeping. “I didn’t realize she had fallen asleep,” he whispered. “How long has she been sleeping?”
“About since the rainbows,” Anna replied.
He sighed. “I’ll have to tell the story again.”
“Yes,” Anna said quietly. “Do that. Maybe a different version, though. Without blood and teeth and the cutting out of hearts. Tell her … tell her a version in which she doesn’t look through the door.”
Abel nodded. “But the rose girl was wrong,” he whispered. “It’s wrong not to be afraid.”
“Abel …” Anna began. “You … you didn’t kill him, did you? Rainer?”
He looked up. His eyes were so dark they weren’t blue anymore. Unless it was a shade of blue at night. “No,” he said. “I wish I had.”
He stood and lifted Micha up to carry her to her bed. She looked almost dead, lying in his arms like that. As if someone had cut out her heart with a rapier and left only her body. But her heart was still there … still there dreaming, Anna thought, dreaming of rainbows.
Anna swept up the pieces of broken dishes in the kitchen while Abel undressed the sleeping Micha and got her into her pajamas. She heard him struggle with a sleeve and curse, the way a father curses a frustrating chore—lovingly and without anger in his voice. She shook her head. None of the pieces fit together.
“And now we’ll do something about that wound,” she said when Abel closed the door to Micha’s room. “Do you have tweezers? Disinfectant?”
“Wait for me in the living room,” Abel said. But she followed him and stood at the doorway of the tiny bathroom, watching him pull a cardboard box from the top of a cupboard and search around inside it.
“We could use alcohol,” she began, and Abel gave a start.
“Didn’t I say to wait in the living room?” He hadn’t realized that she’d followed him. Suddenly, he sounded angry, and she didn’t understand why.
She took a step back, out of the bathroom and into the hall. “In case you don’t want me to see my phone number on the mirror,” she said with a smile. “I know it’s there; Micha told me. She couldn’t have called me otherwise.”
He gently pushed her toward the living room and followed, closing the bathroom door behind him.
“Yeah, that,” he said. “That’s a little embarrassing. It’s just that the apartment is such a horrible mess at the moment. Here.” He gave her a pair of tweezers and a small bottle of old disinfectant. “What will you do?”
“I thought I’d drink the disinfectant and stuff the tweezers up my nose,” Anna said. “What do you think I am going to do? Sit down. Those splinters can’t stay in the wound.” She could hear that she sounded like Magnus when he was talking to his patients, who usually replied, “Yes, Doctor Leemann.” And, “Do what you think is right, Doctor Leemann.”
Abel took the tweezers and said, “I can do that myself. We do own a mirror, though that might surprise you. You should go now. Sorry about the number on the mirror … she shouldn’t have called you.”
“Abel.” Anna tried to toughen the Magnus part inside her. “Sit down. There, on the sofa.”
“It’s late, Anna … they’ll be waiting for you at home … in that house where the air is always blue … they’ll be worried.”
“It’s not late. I’ll call them later. Sit down on the sofa.”
Helplessly, he held up his hands and sat down. Anna sat next to him, adjusted a floor lamp that had miraculously survived the fight, and looked at the wound on Abel’s temple. She didn’t understand how cups and plates could break into so many tiny pieces. Maybe if you were pushed into them. Maybe if you were pushed into them again and again. She fished the splinters, one by one, out of his skin and flesh, her mind with thoughts about the past, with the history of the apartment, with Abel and Micha’s story. He was gritting his teeth, swearing under his breath. “Hold still,” Anna said. “You know how lucky you are that nothing happened to that eye?”
“I know somebody else who was damn lucky,” Abel said. “Rainer Lierski. He was damn lucky to walk out of here on his own two feet.”
Then he fell silent. As Anna retrieved splinters, a seemingly never-ending task, like working on an assembly line, she suddenly noticed how close she was to Abel. Unbelievably close, daringly close.
She smiled. “Why do you have a buzz cut?” she asked, just to ask something matter-of-factly.
“The trimmer only does buzz cuts,” Abel replied. “It’s old. I don’t want to waste money on a barber.”
“That’s the only reason?”
“That’s all. Plus, people here leave you alone if you have a buzz cut. And if you’re wearing a Böhse Onkelz sweatshirt. I don’t want any trouble.”
“But … politically … you’re not … you’re not like skinheads?”
“A Nazi?” Abel asked and started to laugh. “I’m not dumb.”
“And … the white cats … the fabric of the white cats … the rainbows …”
“Today is question day,” Abel said. “But with Anna Leemann, it’s always question day, isn’t it? You want to know everything.”
“Yes,” she said. “Everything. About the world.” She sounded like a child again. So what.
“It’s just that it’s not always answering day,” Abel murmured. And, after a while, “The white fabric is exactly what you think, of course. But that’s not what you want to know. You want to know why I’m selling.” He turned his head, and she pulled away the tweezers, which had almost touched his eye. “I don’t take the stuff I sell, Anna.”
“And I’m the queen of Sheba.” Anna laughed.
Abel didn’t laugh. “It’s true. I’m dealing it, that’s all. It brings in cash. Michelle has … I got my contacts through her, a long time ago. It’s always good to have contacts. I can’t afford to take anything. I need a clear head. Because of Micha. You understand? And because of school. I want to pass. It’s hard enough, when I miss so many classes …”
“And when you sleep so much,” Anna said. He picked up their hot chocolate glasses and carried them to the kitchen. When he came back, the glasses were clean and he was carrying a bottle of vodka. He put the glasses on the table in silence and poured. Then he sat down again, taking one of the glasses in both hands, the way Micha had held her hot chocolate. He was sitting farther away from her than he had before. Not that much, though. He didn’t say anything more about a clear head.
“Why do you think I sleep at school? What do you think I do at night that I’m so tired?” he asked seriously. “Tell me what you think. I’m sure everybody thinks something.”
“Well, I … I don’t know,” Anna said, picking up the other glass. “Maybe you’re selling white cat’s fur in the clubs?”
He laughed. “Yeah,” he said, relieved. She didn’t understand his relief. “Well, yeah. But I have legal work, too. If you have contacts … I’m helping out in two bars out here. Sometimes in town, too.”
“You asked Knaake for a job. Our lighthouse keeper.”
Abel nodded. “The lighthouse keeper. Yes. Sometimes it gets to me, and I think I should do something totally different to earn money. Something that doesn’t have anything to do with bars and clubs and … something that’s got to do with thinking. Thinking is something you can do at home, too. I dunno … like maybe I could be a research assistant for someone at the university … that kind of thing … Micha shouldn’t be by herself so much. She doesn’t realize because she’s sleeping, but after what happened today … I don’t know if Lierski’ll come back.” He downed the rest of the vodka in one swig and set the glass back onto the table with a thud. “If he touches Micha, I’ll kill him.”
Anna emptied her glass. She didn’t like vodka. “Could I have another one?” she asked.
While pouring, Abel moved closer, and she wondered whether it happened accidentally. Probably. He seemed too lost in his own thoughts to even notice. “Back then … back then, I couldn’t defend myself against Lierski,” he said. “But now I can. I’m as strong as he is. I …”
Anna reached over to take his right hand, and he pulled it away. “Defend. Yeah, I understand,” she said. “You hurt your wrist. Maybe it’s broken.”
“Oh, come on,” Abel said. “It just got too close to a chair’s leg.”
“Can you move it?”
“The chair’s leg?” Abel tried to laugh. He tried to move the hand. “Sure, I can. Shit. No.”
“You should see a doctor,” Anna said.
“Crap.”
Anna took his hand to gauge the swelling. “Let’s at least put something cold around it. Frozen peas work pretty well.”
“Do I have to eat them?”
“No, you just have to inject them into a vein,” Anna said. How good it felt to laugh! How good it felt to sit on the sofa, to be close to each other, just for a little while, and to laugh. He hadn’t pulled his hand away, not this time. The moment stretched into an eternity, a moment in which nothing happened; their laughs died down, dried out. They just sat there, and that was enough; nobody had to do or say anything …
Anna’s cell phone rang, and Abel started, jumping up as if he’d just remembered something urgent he had to do. It was home. A blue number, full of roses. Anna sighed.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” Linda said, “but where are you?”
“I got kidnapped by a serial killer,” Anna answered. “You can transfer the ransom to Gitta’s account.”
“I see.” Linda was trying hard to sound casual. “When does she plan to release you?”
“Gitta,” Anna said to Abel, “when do you plan to release me? Right now, I think,” she said into the phone. “I’m on my way.”
“Okay …” Linda said, hanging up.
Abel shook his head. “So now I’m Gitta …”
“Should I have told the truth?”
“No. I don’t think at the house of blue air they’d like the fact that Anna Leemann is hanging out with the Polish peddler. By the way, I know exactly three words of Polish.”
“That’s two more than I know,” Anna said. “But that’s not the reason I lied. I thought … I thought you wouldn’t want them to know … but for the record, in the house of blue air, they really wouldn’t mind. They’re not like you think.”
Abel turned to collect the glasses.
“You should go.”
ANNA SPENT ALL OF SUNDAY WONDERING WHETHER she should drive out to Abel’s. To make sure that everything was all right. She would have called, but she didn’t have his number. She finally figured out how Abel had gotten her number—the lighthouse keeper must have given it to him. He had the cell phone number of everybody in his intensive class, just in case of an emergency. Emergency and Anna were the two words Abel had written on the note that Micha had found stuck to the mirror … she almost called Knaake to ask him for Abel’s number.
“Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but Abel Tannatek left his ecstasy in my backpack …”
She put the phone back on the bookshelf. She didn’t call.
Later, she would think, what if she had called, if she had talked to him on that Sunday, if she had … but who cares about later? Later is always too late.
Anna studied for her math exam. She did her homework for literature class, lying on the sofa in the living room, reading some random book, not taking any of it in. She practiced her flute as an afterthought. Music had been her passion, her purpose in life; she shouldn’t neglect it, like a lover she no longer wanted. The flute didn’t seem to take it personally … it lay in her hands, calm and cool as always, seeming to understand why, on that particular Sunday, she played so many wrong notes.
Only Magnus and Linda were surprised.
“Is there something on your mind, bunny?” Magnus asked. “Is it life again? Or something different?”
Anna shook her head and smiled. “It’s life,” she said.
Monday morning, Magnus opened the local newspaper and said, “Chicago.”
“Chicago?” Linda asked with a laugh, pouring more tea. “Are we going on vacation?”
Magnus laid the paper down on the table as Linda instinctively put her hand on the light-blue ceramic butter dish to keep him from knocking it to the floor.
“We don’t need to go to Chicago,” Magnus said. He whistled through his teeth, impressed. “Chicago has come here. Listen to this: ‘Deadly bar brawl. On Sunday morning, after a heated argument at the Admiral, a bar in the woods District of Wieck, Rainer Lierski, forty-one, was found dead between two parked cars. A resident of the area discovered the snow-covered body as he headed to his own car …’ Imagine going out to your car after breakfast and finding a dead body next to it. Jesus Christ!”
“You usually bike to your office,” Linda said.
“Yes, and thank God I do,” Magnus said cheerfully, “with dead bodies popping up in parking lots … ‘Mirko Studier, fifty-two, the owner of the bar, stated that Lierski was a frequent customer. “Lierski liked to pick fights,” says Studier, “always wanted to argue, but I never thought it would end like this. When things started to get violent, I threw him and his three friends out. By the time I closed up for the night, I figured they’d all gone home.” The police are still searching for Lierski’s companions, ages twenty-five to fifty, according to Studier. They are also looking for possible witnesses to the crime and/or anyone in the vicinity of the Admiral between ten o’clock and midnight on Saturday night …’ Hey, they don’t give the ages of the witnesses they’re looking for. What a surprise!”
“Magnus,” Linda said. “This isn’t funny.”
“No … I’m sorry. Of course it isn’t. It’s just this local paper is so ridiculous … Anna? Anna, are you okay?”
Anna nodded. She held her teacup in both hands and pictured Micha’s hands around a cup of hot chocolate and Abel’s hands around a glass of vodka. Abel’s injured wrist. The tiny cuts in his face. The splinters. She closed her eyes for a moment. If he touches Micha, I’ll kill him. Had he really meant it? Had he been at the Admiral? Or had he been close by, at just the right place and time to get hold of Rainer Lierski? She opened her eyes. She felt dizzy. For a second she wished her parents would dissolve into fog, that she was sitting at the table alone. She’d take the newspaper and read the article herself, leave her breakfast untouched, and make a cup of really strong coffee. No. She’d take the whiskey bottle down from the shelf, pour a drink, pace back and forth, get her thoughts in order …
“I’m fine,” she replied and forced herself to finish her yogurt. “That article … I was just thinking … It reminds me of something we’ve been talking about at school … Can I have the paper?”
Magnus refolded the pages and passed them to her, almost knocking over a jar of jam in the process. “Don’t get into ‘a heated argument,’” he joked. “You don’t want it to end up ‘deadly.’”
“Ha-ha,” Anna answered shortly. “I gotta go.”
She couldn’t focus in her literature class that day. She watched Knaake opening and closing his mouth, but she didn’t hear what he was saying; it didn’t get through. It was in this class that she had studied Abel Tannatek, hoping to learn more about him. That seemed like ages ago.
Abel didn’t sleep in class this time. Anna saw how the others were looking at his face, at the black eye and thousand tiny cuts on his temple—a thousand small, single wounds, a field of dark, dried blood. He took his time gathering his things after class; he let the others go first, like he always did. Anna waited for him. She told Frauke that she had to talk to Knaake.
Knaake knew that she didn’t have to talk to him.
He looked from Abel to Anna and back, saw that they needed to talk, shrugged, and said that he was desperate for a cup of coffee; he’d leave the room open, come back later to lock it up.
Anna spread the newspaper on the table and pointed to the article: “Deadly Bar Brawl … Rainer Lierski (41)” … Abel put his hands on the table on either side of the newspaper and leaned over it, reading without looking at Anna. A big gray wolf, she thought, that had its paws to the left and right of its victim, on a ship’s railing—an instant before it kills that victim by breaking his neck with its long teeth.
“Shit,” he finally said, stepping back and covering his face with his hands, taking a deep breath. “Shit.”
When he moved his hands away from his face, she saw that he’d grown pale. “He’s dead,” he said.
Anna nodded.
“And I said I’d kill him.”
She nodded again.
“I would have done it,” Abel whispered. “I would have done it if he’d come back.”
“Did he come back?”
“No.” Abel shook his head. He went over to the window and looked down at the schoolyard on which more snow silently fell. Anna stood next to him. Fifth graders in colorful coats were making a sled run; a small group of smokers was standing near the bike stands—Anna saw Gitta. The lights in the classroom weren’t on. To the people outside, they were invisible, high in their tower.
“I wasn’t there,” Abel said. “I wish I could feel relief … he’s never gonna bother us again. But I wasn’t there.”
“At the Admiral?”
He nodded. He didn’t ask the question that needed to be asked. He didn’t ask, Do you believe me?
“You need an alibi,” Anna said. “I left your apartment on Saturday night, a little after midnight.”
“No,” Abel whispered and turned to her. “You didn’t. It was much earlier.”
“No, it was past midnight,” Anna insisted. “I remember how I looked at my watch and thought, it’s already twelve thirty … and if my parents imagined that I was home earlier, then I guess they were mistaken.”
He shook his head, slowly. “No,” he repeated. “No. My alibi is my business.”
And then he did something absolutely unexpected. He pulled her close and held her for a moment, so tight she thought she could feel every single bone in his body. And somewhere between them, she felt his heart beating, fast and nervous. Hunted. He let go of her before the hug became a real hug, left her standing there, and fled from the tower. Anna balled up the paper and threw it in the wastebasket.
When Linda came home that afternoon, Anna was sitting on a folding chair in the snow-covered garden, listening to the birds. She was wearing her winter coat but no hat, and white snow crystals, which the wind had brought down from the roof, were blooming in her dark hair. The snow had stopped falling at midday; the world was very quiet, apart from the twitter of the birds in the rosebushes.
Linda stood in the doorway for a moment, watching her daughter. Anna was sitting as motionless as a statue, a work of art someone had installed in the garden, like a birdbath maybe, a birdbath in the shape of a seated girl. Linda stepped forward and put a hand on the statue’s shoulder, and the statue jumped and turned back into a girl. And all the robins flew away.
“Have you been sitting here for a long time?” Linda asked.
“I don’t know,” Anna said, looking up. Her lips were blue from the cold. Even her eyebrows were laced with snow crystals.
“Come inside?” Linda asked. She didn’t command; she asked. “Have a cup of coffee with me. Tell me … if you want to … tell me, what happened.”
“Nothing,” Anna said. “Nothing has happened. I’m just thinking … I’m still thinking about that article … Chicago … the man who was beaten to death. I wonder … I wonder how furious you would have to be to kill someone and if you can do it with your fists or … or if one fist is enough, because you can’t use the other one … I wonder how somebody dies then … I mean, even if he’s deserved it …” She got up and followed Linda inside, and Linda took Anna’s coat off with gentle hands.
“You’re ice-cold,” she said. “Anna, this man … he didn’t die from a fistfight. It wasn’t in the paper but … well, I shouldn’t be telling you this, I guess.”
“What—what did he die from then? How come you …?”
Linda turned away and put the kettle on.
“The husband of a colleague of mine works in the forensics department. She told me. I don’t know why they didn’t give this information in the newspaper … maybe the police have their reasons for not saying … but I’ll tell you. He died instantly. He was shot.”
Anna grabbed her mother’s arm and saw the surprise in Linda’s eyes. “Shot? Are you sure?”
Linda nodded. “From behind, she said. A shot in the neck. He didn’t suffer. I just want you to know that.”
Anna looked at her watch. “Oh no. I almost forgot that I promised Gitta to … I have to go, I’m sorry,” she said. “Thanks for the coffee.”
Linda shook her head while Anna put her coat back on. “I haven’t even made the coffee.”
“Then go ahead and make it now,” Anna said. “I won’t be gone long.”
She knew Linda was standing at the window, watching her ride away, watching her teeter as her bike wheels slid in the snow that was turning to ice on the road. Linda had always wanted another child, but it hadn’t worked out. After Anna, all her pregnancies had dissolved into nothingness, each and every one of the possible children shifting from nearly being to not being—too soon for Linda to get used to a presence, but late enough to feel its loss. She feared for Anna, always had—from her first step—and Anna knew it. This made life difficult. Linda tried to conceal her fear, by not controlling Anna, by not asking her where she went, by not ordering her around, by saying she thought it was a great idea to go to England for a year, that it was great she wanted to study in a different city. Though if it had been up to Linda, she would have tucked Anna into a small pocket, lined with soft fabric, next to her heart, where she would be safe and warm and nothing would ever happen to her. Like Abel would have done with Micha, if he could have, Anna thought, surprised by this thought: Abel. You’re just like Linda.
She rang the doorbell three times before he opened. He was wearing a faded T-shirt and his hair was messy—messier than usual—as if he had just gotten out of bed or toweled himself off after showering. Two of the tiny cuts next to his eye had opened and were glistening, wet and red.
“Do you know how to shoot a gun?” Anna asked without any introduction.
“What? No,” Abel said. “Do you need to find someone who does?”
“No. You’re sure you don’t know?” she asked. “And that you don’t have a weapon, either?”
“No!” he repeated. She thought he would step back to let her in. He didn’t. He stepped forward and almost pulled the door closed behind him. He was shivering in his thin T-shirt, she could see. “Why are you asking me this?” he said.
“If you’re telling the truth, you’re safe,” Anna said. “He was shot. Rainer was shot. My mother knows someone in the forensics department. He was shot in the neck; he wasn’t beaten to death.”
Slowly, very slowly, a smile started to broaden on his face.
“Thank God,” he said. “I’ve never been so glad that somebody was shot.”
For a while they were standing there in the cold staircase. Then his smile disappeared. “But I can’t really prove that I don’t know how to shoot a gun,” he said. “Can I? I mean, it’s hard to prove that you can’t do something.”
“Why would you have to prove that?” She nearly started to laugh.
“They will think it was me,” he said in a low voice. “Despite everything.” He glanced back at the apartment.
“Micha?” she asked. “Is she not supposed to hear what we’re talking about? Haven’t you told her …?”
“Micha’s on a field trip with her school.” He folded his arms across his chest, as if this would protect him from the cold. Or possibly, from something else. On his upper-left arm she saw a shiny round red spot, like a burn. It looked new. It looked like a cigarette burn. He saw what she was looking at and put his hand over the wound.
“Abel …” she began, “do we have to stay out here on the landing?”
He shook his head. “No. You have to go home. You don’t belong here. You’ll catch cold.”
“It’s warmer in your apartment.”
“Anna,” he said, his voice even lower than before, and very insistent. “I don’t have time now.” He seemed to be listening for something, straining his ears in the direction of the apartment.
“You’ve got a visitor,” she said.
