Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

The marten came up from behind him and climbed over his legs. Henry felt its claws in his calves. Its fur was warm and silky-soft as it slid along Henry’s waist to his upper arm. The animal sniffed at him; a whisker tickling his shoulder. The marten had come to inspect its prey. Henry took stock of the situation. If he kept lying there, the marten would eat his corpse and start a family. He made a grab for it and caught its tail; the brute squeaked and bit him. Its sharp teeth pierced the nerve above his wrist. Henry recoiled, let go, went to kick out at the marten, and managed to ram the speargun into his own ear. After the pain had subsided, Henry decided to let things rest for the time being. He closed his eyes and, after a few breaths, fell asleep.

Threads of light were shining through the cracks in the roof. As he awoke, Henry could smell the putrid secretion that the marten had sprayed onto his shirt. The marten had left its mark on him! You’ve no business being here was the meaning of its stinking autograph; you’ve invaded my territory; you can’t get the better of me here.

Henry began his retreat, crawling between the beams. More splinters pushed their way into his skin. It was an eternity before he reached the hole in Martha’s bedroom wall and squeezed through the opening into his own territory. Poncho was lying on Martha’s bed wagging his tail in delight. The faithful soul had waited there for him. The dog sniffed his hand; it could smell the marten. Henry felt a warm rush of gratitude. He hugged the dog. “My friend, my good friend,” he whispered to him, “you know I’m a completely worthless idiot and you still stand by me.” Henry began to pull the splinters out of his skin.

Downstairs the phone was ringing. Henry looked up and listened. The ringing stopped and then started again. It must be Betty. It was time he told her what had really happened on the cliffs.

When he came into the kitchen after showering and bandaging his wrist, the telephone had stopped ringing. Henry saw on the display that Betty had called four times. Uncertain whether to call her back or not, he opened a tin of Premium dog food for Poncho and spread truffle paste on a slice of bread. The phone rang again. Henry saw that it wasn’t Betty and picked it up. The friendly Jenssen gave his name in a matter-of-fact tone.

“We’ve found your wife, Mr. Hayden.”

Martha’s corpse had been found on the coast nearby. Height, weight, and hair color tallied. Jenssen asked with sensitivity whether Henry thought he would be able to come to forensics to identify the dead woman.

The cold embrace of fear choked Henry. After making a note of the address of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, he put the phone down carefully, as if it were made of unfired porcelain, and felt the floor give way beneath him. He clutched a corner of the kitchen island. The room, all the house around him, shot deep down into the earth as if through an invisible shaft. As he gathered speed he became weightless, and, bewildered by the effect of the levitation, he stretched out his arms and came crashing down with his chin on the countertop.

Gisbert Fasch had also seen the news of Henry’s wife’s fatal swimming accident. There was no mention of her name; there wasn’t even a photograph of her. In death as in life she wasn’t granted a title of her own; even postmortem she remained the wife of .

For four hours now he’d been sitting in his hot and stuffy car, squashing creepy-crawlies as they made their way over the roof. Shadowing your opponent is always so exciting in books and films; in real life it turns time into moldy old cheese. You sit there producing carbon dioxide; the minutes drag on forever; you want to sleep, but you can’t, because you can never be sure that something noteworthy isn’t about to happen, and in your misery you turn to squashing insects.

Fasch fanned himself with the newspaper he’d already read to death and looked up at Henry’s property on the hill. His eyes were watering from so much surveillance. In an English lifestyle magazine he’d come across a large-format photograph of Henry’s living room, showing the master of the house on his Chesterfield sofa together with his wife and dog. Fasch had studied the photo for a long time, looking for hidden clues to location. The woman at Henry’s side looked educated and pleasant, with a remote, saintly air about her. In the picture she was wearing lined boots and a reversible tweed poncho. Henry, quite the old trophy-gatherer, lay sprawled on the sofa with an arm around her shoulder. In the background, somewhat blurred, a picture window, dark wooden shelves full of books, a fireplace — how absolutely essential — and to the side a black dog sitting upright like a Spanish grandee. It was such a total cliché, this living room, so utterly tasteful, exactly what he would have expected of someone like Hayden, who disguised his malign personality with refined junk and the mammals to match. Made you puke.

Fasch had by now completed the crossword, including all subsidiary rivers and Nordic divinities; the roof of the car was a sea of bloody stains. Every now and then a slight breeze blew through the open side window, bringing with it the smell of cut grass, and making the little photo of his mother, Amalie, swing on the rearview mirror.

On the backseat lay his old briefcase. It had now acquired the weight of a twenty-week-old infant and contained everything ever written by and about Henry Hayden. Fasch no longer left the bag for a second. Several times during the last weeks he had woken up screaming because he’d dreamed he’d lost it.

The information Fasch had managed to gather about Henry so far allowed for a reliable reconstruction of the first eleven and the last nine years of his life. In between was still a gaping hole of almost twenty-five years. There are blind spots and dark matter in everyone’s biographies — among them, things people prefer to leave out because they are embarrassing or simply unimportant. But suppressing a time span of twenty-five years is too much to go unnoticed. His entire youth was missing.

Henry had led a secret life — somewhere and somehow. That in itself was an achievement, for vanishing is an art. It means renunciation and abstention. Renouncing home, family, and friends, language and familiar habits. And whom do you tell? Whom do you share it with? Even Dr. Mengele, who had to change his hiding place several times over, left clues and a diary. Keeping silent goes against human nature , it said at the beginning of Frank Ellis . Clearly a hidden reference to Henry’s secret biography.

Suddenly, then, he reemerges and starts publishing novels. Just like that. Without a first shot, without practice, without a mistake. All novels tell you something about their authors, no matter how cleverly they try to conceal themselves. Whether Hayden had actually written his novels himself or had simply stolen them, Gisbert Fasch believed they were just teeming with clues; it was only a question of finding the key to decipher them.

Henry’s car came along the avenue of poplars at high speed, a cloud of dust in its wake. Fasch threw his half-drunk paper cup of tea out the window, switched on the engine, and put his foot to the floor. He had trouble tailing the car, because he was an unpracticed driver. The worn tires on his sixteen-year-old Peugeot skidded on the curves; the car lurched from side to side, making hysterical noises.

By the time he’d gone about three miles and come to a fork in the road at which one took a right for the freeway and a left for the coastal road, he’d already lost Henry. Judging by the speed at which Henry had set off, he was in quite a hurry. People in a hurry take the freeway, you’d think. Fasch hesitated briefly and turned left.