Lynda Plante - Entwined

Grimaldi had accepted the gynecologist's word, and yet sensed that he had not been told the entire truth. When he tried to push for further details, the doctor, without meeting Grimaldi's eyes, said quietly, "Your wife cannot have normal sexual intercourse, and even if insemination were to take place, she could not carry a child. I am sorry."

Though the gynecologist would not discuss his patient's condition with her husband, he had shared her X rays and tests with two colleagues. He did not identify her by name, he simply showed them the appalling X rays and photographs of her genital area. All her organs had been removed, as if her womb had been torn from her belly. The internal scar tissues were even worse than her external scars. Nothing could be done. The entire genital area had been burnt by what the surgeon felt was possibly an early form of chemotherapy.

The colleagues listened in appalled silence. The clitoris had been severed, and the vagina was closed. The crudeness of the stitches and the scar tissue formation had left no opening. The only possible form of intercourse was anal; her urinary tract had been operated on to enable her to pass liquid, and a plastic tube inserted when the infected tract had festered. The anal area was large, denoting that sexual practice had obviously occurred on a regular basis over a period of years, stretching the colon.

The three men examined the X rays. What they had on their screen was a shell of a woman. She had been stripped of her female organs. This was all the more horrible because the butchery had been performed when she was a small child.

The three doctors commented on the resilience of the human body, but did not talk about the patient's present state of mind. They couldn't. Ruda Grimaldi had refused to discuss what had led to her condition, and she never returned to the gynecologist.

Grimaldi knew something of Ruda's past, but she would never tell him her full story. Only Kellerman had known more. Ruda had told Grimaldi the first night she had met him that she couldn't have straight sex. She had told him in her stubborn way: head up, jaw stuck out.

Grimaldi combed his hair. It was strange to think of it now. He hadn't cared, he had no thought of marrying her then. That had come many years later.

He slipped his jacket on, brushing the shoulders with his hands. He had married her, but not out of pity. Ruda hated pity. Grimaldi had married her because by the time she had come back into his life, he was in desperate need of someone. He had been slipping, drinking too much, and his act was falling apart.

He sighed, knowing he was lying to himself. For reasons he couldn't understand, he had married her because he had loved her, and he had believed she loved him. Only many years later did he realize that Ruda loved no one, not even herself. No, that was wrong: She loved her angel, she loved Mamon.

By the time he was dressed and ready to leave the trailer, Grimaldi had made a decision. He had to leave Ruda, but to fight her, making ridiculous demands, wouldn't work; he had to make it a fair split. He determined that after the Kellerman business was sorted out, he would discuss it calmly and realistically with her, and this time he would not back down.

"Luis — come on! You've been ages, that inspector is waiting!" Ruda banged on his door again. "What are you doing in there?"

Grimaldi came out. He smiled, made her turn around, admiring and flattering her. He had not seen her so well dressed in years. He had also not had a drink for more than twenty-four hours, another good sign. He felt good, and teased Ruda: "How come you dress up for a corpse?"

Ruda wrinkled her nose, and hooked her arm in his. "Maybe I need to give myself some confidence! I'm scared."

Grimaldi laughed, and helped her down the steps. Then, because of the mud, he held out his arms and carried her to the waiting police car.

By the time Inspector Heinz and his sergeant had returned to their bogged-down patrol car, they were both reeling from all the statements they had heard from all the people who had known Kellerman. Not one had a nice word to say, everyone seemed rather pleased he was dead. None had been helpful, none had seen Kellerman on the day or night of his death, and everyone had a strong alibi. Torsen was grateful the ex-Mrs. Kellerman had agreed to identify the dead man.

Torsen held open the back door, and Grimaldi helped his wife into the car. She looked very different from the woman Torsen had visited in the trailer. She was in a good mood, laughing with her husband, a strange reaction, thought Torsen, considering she was being taken to a morgue to identify her ex-husband's corpse.

Ruda was determined not to be recognized in the event someone had seen her enter Kellerman's hotel. She had dressed carefully in a flowered dress and a pale gray coat. She had left her hair loose, hiding her face, and with her high heels, she seemed exceptionally tall. Torsen looked at her in the rearview mirror. It was hard to tell her exact age, but he guessed she must be close to forty, if not more. He felt the direct unnerving stare of her dark, strange, amber-colored eyes boring into the back of his head as he tried to back out of the mud-bound parking area.

Ruda wasn't looking at the inspector, but past him, about fifty yards in front of him. Mike, one of their boys, was hurrying toward the canteen, a rain cape over his shoulders, but what freaked Ruda was that he was wearing Tommy Kellerman's leather trilby. She remembered she had forgotten it in the meat trailer. The car suddenly jerked backward free of the mud, turned and headed out of the parking lot. Ruda didn't turn back, she couldn't: Her heart was pounding, her face had drained of color. Grimaldi gripped her hand and squeezed it. He murmured that it was all right, he was there, and there was no need for her to be afraid.

The rain continued to pour throughout their journey to East Berlin. The patrol car's windshield wipers made nerve-wracking screeches on the glass.

Grimaldi and his wife talked quietly to each other, as if they were being chauffeured. They spoke in English, so Torsen could only make out the odd sentence. He wondered what the word "plinth" meant. Rieckert sat next to him in the front seat, thumbing through his notebook in a bored manner.

In an attempt to calm down, Ruda was talking about the new plinths, having tried them out that morning. She was telling Luis she had had a lot of trouble, particularly with Mamon; he seemed loath to go near them, and had acted up badly. Grimaldi said the retrieval of the old plinths was out of the question, they simply couldn't get them back in time for the act. They would tone down the colors. Ruda snapped at him, saying that the smell of fresh paint would be just as disturbing, and that to skip the pièce de résistance of the act would be insanity. They considered asking for more rehearsal time.

They fell silent for a while as they drove through Kreuzberg, passing refurbished jazz cellars, Turkish shops, bedraggled boutiques, and small art galleries. It was the same route the bus followed the night Ruda had murdered Kellerman. Ruda felt a heavy foreboding.

Torsen looked at them through his rearview mirror.

"It was perhaps naive of us to expect that the freedom would unleash some exciting new era overnight. People who have lived in cages get used to them, people in the East are afraid. Financial insecurity spreads panic. People here have been denied creative and critical expression for so long, they suffer from a deep inferiority complex. Under the old regime many cultural institutions were supported. We had good opera houses, two in fact, but now the West holds our purse strings and a number of our theaters have been closed for lack of funds."

The inspector felt obliged to talk, as if giving a guided tour.