Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

“Yes, I’m still here,” Henry replied.

“This detective is from the homicide squad,” Fasch continued. “He wanted to know if it was pure chance that you were at the accident — and why we know each other. I’m afraid you’re in trouble.”

After Henry had sat down at his bedside, Fasch resumed the conversation. “You know I followed you.” The curtains were drawn; books and newspapers were piled up on the bedside table. “You waited for me around the bend, didn’t you?”

Henry’s expression remained amiably vacant. “Why didn’t you brake?” he retorted.

Fasch laughed uncertainly. “You’ve already asked me that. I don’t know. Perhaps because everything has to come to an end at some point. Be that as it may, we’d met before. You won’t remember.” Fasch noticed Henry shift his weight and cross his legs.

“Saint Renata,” Henry said softly. “You had the top bed.”

Touched, Fasch screwed up his eyes. “Only until you came along. But let’s not talk about those dark times.” He reached for the lifestyle magazine photo. “I know you lost your wife.”

Henry nodded.

“I’m sorry. It must be hard for you. She looks so nice and intelligent. Your dog’s well?”

Henry considered the portrait, made no comment on the circle drawn around his head, and laid the picture back on the bed again. “Poncho. He’s in great shape.”

Fasch felt for the switch to raise the head end of his electric bed a little. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you for this room and all that you’ve done for me.” Henry wanted to reply, but Gisbert waved him aside. “There was a woman killed recently who edited your novels, Jenssen tells me. He’s trying to find a link between my accident, your wife’s death, and the death of this other woman.”

“There is no link.”

“I can well believe it. But he thinks there is. When the police start looking, they always find something. I had a brown briefcase in the car. In it was everything I’d collected to do with you. This picture”—Fasch placed his hand on the photo—“was in the brown briefcase with my documents. Jenssen returned it to me and claims not to have found any bag. It’s my belief the police have everything.”

“What did you collect about me?”

“Your past. Legal documents concerning your parents, all the children’s homes, and then everything about your career as a writer. Whatever I could find.”

“What for?” asked Henry without a trace of indignation in his voice.

Fasch bent his upper body even farther forward. The splints on his legs cracked softly. “To destroy you, Henry. Because I was envious. Because I was a pathetic little loser out for revenge. Because I’d done nothing with my life, because I wanted to be like you, because everyone wants to be something , has to do something. I was so lonely that I spent the last years living with Miss Wong, a woman made of silicon.” Fasch coughed, laughing, and reached for the water. Henry got up and handed it to him. Fasch drained the glass.

“I was so terribly envious of your success. Envy is worse than cancer. I’ve suffered, if that’s any consolation to you. I wanted to harm you and to prove”—he had trouble getting out the last grain of truth—“that you hadn’t written the novels yourself. Can you forgive me?”

Fasch sank back onto the bed. Now it was out. He closed his eyes in exhaustion and counted silently to three. But he wasn’t speeding into the bend toward Henry; he saw only soothing darkness. When he opened his eyes, Henry was standing at the window looking out over the park.

“Was Miss Wong pretty at least?” he asked.

“Pretty? She was fantastic . And her IQ was off the graph! Not anymore though — she got burned.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh, forget it. We hadn’t had anything to say to each other for a long time. Speaking of which, I still have to pay off a loan on her.” During the fit of laughter that followed, a plug of catarrh came loose in Gisbert’s affected lung tissue and got into his windpipe. He turned blue. Henry rang for the nurse. The young woman with the pageboy haircut rushed into the room, put an oxygen mask on Fasch, and lowered the electric bed again.

“You’re supposed to lie flat, Mr. Fasch,” the woman scolded her private patient, and she smoothed his bedclothes. Henry looked at her shapely bottom as she bent over the bed. She must have noticed his gaze, because she stood up and smoothed her smock. “Do you need anything else, Mr. Fasch?” Before Fasch could reply, she cast a glance of curiosity at Henry and walked to the door.

The two men waited in silence until she had left. “Every time she comes in I have a near-death experience. Miss Wong was a country bumpkin compared with her,” said Fasch and sighed. “But at least she listened.”

“Gisbert,” said Henry, sitting down again on the chair at his bedside. “What do you know about me?”

The area of low pressure originated somewhere over the North Atlantic to the west of the Faroes. Unusually for the time of year, there were rising columns of warm air, and, because of the falling atmospheric pressure, cooler air was being sucked in. The first gusts of wind were getting up. Millions of tons of superfine water droplets were rising, turning into ice crystals and beginning to rotate counterclockwise. The low-pressure area drifted eastward with increasing speed. Only an hour later the meteorological service for shipping transmitted the first gale warning to the Scottish coastal radio stations.

In the garden of his property Henry had positioned himself next to a sweeping branch of the cherry tree and was pointing the 85 millimeter lens of his Canon toward the open barn door. He swatted the midges out of his face and waited. The figure inside the barn wasn’t moving; it seemed to be standing in its own shadow. Nor was the body transparent. There were even individual fields of light reflected on it. As usual, half the face was missing. Henry pressed the shutter release yet again. As expected, the camera display showed a shot of the barn door and nothing else.

Henry had been sure right from the start that figments of the imagination couldn’t be photographed, not even with state-of-the-art digital cameras, for the very reason that they are just figments. Only recently he had learned in the Forensic Journal that amputees who suffer from phantom pains feel relief when they wear a prosthesis. The brain accepts the artificial limb and stops sending pain alerts; it seems content with makeshift solutions.

He had acted on this admittedly rather simpleminded train of thought by taking photographs of his hallucination in order to convince himself of its nonexistence. If my brain will just grasp what I already know, he thought, maybe these hallucinations will stop.

Meanwhile Poncho was dozing in the shade like a railroad-crossing attendant after a hearty lunch. Now and again he opened one eye, in case something happened to pass by after all, and then shut it again. In his world there was nothing makeshift — only pleasant and unpleasant things. Henry placed the camera on the tripod, set the delay to ten seconds, and turned around. He closed his eyes and waited with his back to the barn until he heard the sound of the shutter releasing.

Onboard the Drina , Obradin heard the gale warning on his mobile radio transceiver as he started up the new diesel engine. The barometer showed a fall in pressure of three hectopascals in the past hour. The cold front was already moving over the Shetland Islands. The storm with hurricane-force gusts was heading for the southern North Sea. In the course of the coming night it would smash into the coast. Shipping to and from Stavanger had already been suspended. The diesel started up, emitting a gray cloud of soot, and began to run steadily. Obradin checked the oil pressure and laid his hand on the side of the boat. The Volvo engine barely made the wood vibrate. A fabulous engine, thought Obradin, but no way had his wife won it in the lottery.