“And what does Spain have to do with all this?” The journalist stopped his droning, and addressed this question directly to Mark. “That’s the second time the wailing women have mentioned Spain.”
Mark too had picked up a phrase: “In that funereal land of Spain …”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“Sounds like it has something to do with the death of the poor guy,” the journalist said. “According to what I heard a few minutes ago, he really did make a trip to Spain. But whether that has any connection with his murder, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Same here,” Mark admitted.
“It seems to me he went there to keep — or maybe to break — a promise. Do you think so too?”
“I really don’t know,” Mark replied. “As a matter of fact, he was a member of a delegation of the CNFR….”
The journalist tried to make out the words that went with the lamentations of the bereaved, but the cool mountain breeze blew them away, and the effort made the young man’s bony face look even more angular.
“In that funereal land of Spain?… Did you hear that? They said it again. It reminds me of that poem we had to learn at school, the ‘Ballad of Ago Ymer.’ Now, if I remember correctly, Ago was wilting away in a prison when he ‘received a piece of sad news’ or ‘had a funereal dream,’ I can’t quite recall….”
Mark drifted off, as discreetly as he could, to get out of range of the unstoppable chatterer.
As a matter of fact, though, much the same thought had occurred to Mark. Marian’s family must have heard of his trip to Spain, and they must have found it inexplicable, or at least puzzling. And since Spain played a role in the old “Ballad of Ago Ymer,” they must have connected Marian’s travel to the verses that had been handed on down the generations and had kept their truth for that very reason. In years to come, when they would tell the tale of Marian’s death to their own grandchildren, they might well say, He went to a distant land called Spain, and there he had a dream foretelling his own death….
The coffin was now being carried to the grave, and the crowd drew back all in one, like an ebbing wave.
Father Gjon gave a short oration, which he ended with the hope that the Albanians’ troubled souls would at long last be visited by the peace of the Lord. Then the coffin was lowered into the grave. It was being covered with earth when Tom Kola, the longest-standing employee of the Arts Center, who sometimes stood in for the announcer or else acted the clown, shouted out, in a voice strangled by emotion, “Okay, Marian!”
Nobody understood the meaning of this interjection. It could have seemed a disrespectful joke at the expense of the deceased, except that Tom’s eyes were red from weeping.
The funeral feast was laid out for the mourners when they came back from the cemetery to the house of Marian Shkreli’s elder brother. The murderer did not turn up there either, and the two policemen, who now knew that they had come for nothing, sat at the end of the table, looking embarrassed. The murderer had clearly wanted to respect the ritual of execution to the letter, by firing a single shot, but he hadn’t had the guts to take the old rules any further. That’s what was said around the table.
“Just look over there” the head of music whispered in Mark’s ear as they went into the guest room for coffee.
Mark looked where his friend was pointing, and what he saw astounded him. On the wall facing the door, over the fireplace, there hung the dead man’s white shirt, with the “Boss” logo clearly visible. It was the old custom. It had two screamingly obvious bloodstains on it, one almost circular in shape, the other a meandering streak, like a mountain stream.
“I never imagined things could go that far,” Mark’s friend said softly. “The dead man’s shirt hung out, just as it would have been four hundred years ago.”
Mark opened his mouth to utter a response, but immediately shut it again, as if he was afraid that the sound it would make would come from another world.
Toward four in the afternoon, the friends of the slain man got back into the coaches to go home. Some were impressed by all the ritual; others, on the contrary, didn’t try to hide their disappointment. There had been no request for a bessa for the murderer, and obviously no such offer had been made spontaneously. The murderer had undoubtedly observed some of the rules of the Kanun, but he’d turned a blind eye to many others. The dead man’s family were tarred with the same brush. Someone declared, “Better to have no Kanun than to have the Kanun messed with!” Others took a different line and would have been content with an approximate application of the old rules, with a haphazard kind of tradition. Could you ask for more from something that had been dead and buried for fifty years?
That’s how the conversation went in the coaches taking them all back down from Black Rock. People who thought these squabbles about ancient customs absurd kept their voices low as they chatted side by side. The fuss would drag on and on, they said, as it had with other Albanian lunacies of recent times. They reckoned that everyone involved was just play-acting, even without knowing it. Sure, they hung the dead man’s shirt over the hearth, but it was a fair bet they had no idea of the real meaning of this old custom. And even if some of them had remembered, where could they still find people who knew how to read the messages from the dead that the bloodstains were supposed to contain?
Mark looked distractedly at the desolate wayside scenery. A sparse layer of fresh snow was making puny efforts to blanket the ground. On the way up to Black Rock he had scrutinized the landscape for a cave entrance or a cleft that might have been the way into the notorious deep storage depot. But now, because of the snow, he had no chance of making out anything of the sort.
He guessed that the head of the music section, who was sitting next to him, was thinking along exactly the same lines.
“I’ve often thought of what you told me,” Mark said, “about the head of state coming up here one night, to go through secret papers”
His friend nodded and then said, as if lost in thought, “All of them dive down deep to try to find something.”
“All of them?” Mark repeated. Yes, that must be so. Some use a bloody shirt, others have recourse to ruses of various kinds, but they are all trying to get down to the bottom of it all, to the crime at the wellspring. Just like Oedipus.
The story of Oedipus, when it came to Mark’s mind, always made him feel weary, for the poor king’s tangle of troubles seemed as though it would never end. But no one had delved any deeper than he to discover the source and origin of his sinning. So deep, in fact, that he went right back to his mother’s womb. Which is where he finally found his perdition. Go fuck your mother! That vulgar curse, uttered a thousand times, surely existed in every one of the Balkan tongues. Go back up your mother’s cunt! …
Mark shook his head to dispel the drowsiness fogging his mind. Inside the coach, arguments had flared up anew. If the opposition wants to exploit this murder, my friend, then you can be sure the government will do likewise! The two sides have been copying each other like a pair of monkeys for a good long while. If one of them claims that the Kanun has just been used as a screen for the crime — then the other will, too. You can’t rule that out, someone agreed. Woe betide the Kanunl … You should say, Woe betide Marian!
Well, yes, the real victim is certainly Marian, Mark thought. The poor man would have been utterly distraught to see the farce that was being made of his tragedy. But in circumstances like these, you can’t be sure of anything. In his last extremity, he probably had renounced the trendsetter’s mentality and manners that he’d adopted with his expensive shirts, loud ties, bouquets, and jolly “Okays.” He probably had repented, and wanted to see his own blood debt taken back, tragically, the way it had been in ancient times.
Mark gave a deep sigh.
Black Rock had now dissolved in the far distance. But that did not prevent Mark imagining its reeling dance in the fog. And there was no one left who could say what it meant.
COUNTER-CHAPTER
5
MARK WAS AWAKENED all of a sudden by a disagreeable sensation. It resembled the kind of allergic itch that sleep does not soothe but only heightens. And that was how it turned out. After he had had his eyes open for a little while, the itching faded into a mere tickle.
It wasn’t yet midnight, but Mark was not especially surprised by his sudden awakening after only an hour’s sleep. It seemed quite natural, and it occurred to him that it was lucky he’d woken up, since he had so much to do. It would be great to use the quiet hours of the night to get things done, like slackers do, or people who like to make you think they’re work zealots.
So he jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes, and went out. As he walked to the office, he felt icy cold. He knew there was a thick file of matters pending waiting for him, but he couldn’t recall what they were. The walk to work seemed longer than usual, but that didn’t surprise him either. Nor was he at all struck by the sign on the door. Instead of “Arts Center,” it read “Police Station.”
The night porter nodded a sleepy greeting. Mark bounded up the stairs, threw his office door open, and fell into the seat at his desk. The pending file was right there. A thick file. Dull gray. Whole pages of it came back to him all at once with a clarity of detail that left him astounded at his own power of recall. Of course, he had read the sheets over and over; he had thought about them so many times that he knew a fair number almost by heart.
Three men suspected of the holdup at the bank had been arrested two days earlier and were still maintaining their innocence. They freely admitted to being not entirely clean, but they insisted they had had nothing to do with this particular heist. They even took offense at being accused of such a vulgar crime. They could just about accept being suspected of an art theft, but as for robbing a bank …
Then they confessed to other misdemeanors. For instance, they said they had tried to rape an aunt of theirs, and also to make off with various works of art….
“To hell with it, peccadilloes of that sort are chicken feed compared to the horrors that are going on in the country! You should put your time and energy into running down the big-time gangsters who run the government and parliament! They’ve got close ties with all sorts of mobsters, and with the Russian mafia too! Those are the people you should put in leg irons, not us! Anyway, there’s no hurry, seeing as we’re talking about old crimes.”
“Time waits for no crime,” Mark declared. He had questioned one of the guards of the former prime minister dozens of times, and he never could get anything at all out of a man who had been supposed to look after a leader who was killed, or else killed himself, twenty years earlier.
“I don’t know what went on on the first floor of the residence,” the man always replied. “My job was to look after the three doors on the ground floor, and I can swear to you that no one came in or went out.”
“And who looked after the basement level?”
“The cellar? You mean the secret tunnel, the one that led to the house of the Comrade, the residence of the Great Guide? Are you really as ignorant as that, or are you just pretending? The tunnel had no guard because nobody would have dared spy on a passage leading to the house of the Guide. The reinforced door had a handle and bolt on one side only, on the Comrade’s side, so that he alone could open it when he felt like it.”
“Oh, I see. You mean that it was like the door that keeps Death from us, a one-way door you can only go through this way, and not that?”
“Yes, that’s just how it was.”
Mark felt weary in advance as he realized he wouldn’t get anything more out of the man tonight, or any night. The case was as dead as the other one about the queen with rope marks around her neck. Between her two suicide attempts, she had made two confessions that contradicted each other entirely. In the first set of avowals, she had said unambiguously that her husband, Oedipus Rex, had never been her son. In the second confession, she admitted to having married her son, despite having known for many years that he had killed his own father. She had promised to explain everything at the next interrogation, but in the small hours of the appointed day, she managed at last to hang herself.
Files and yet more files, he thought. Instead of slowly getting clearer, the mysteries just thicken. The trial of Tantalus was now 102,000 years old, and the truth of it had been lost forever. Fortunately, investigations are done more quickly nowadays, but some of them could be awfully complicated: for instance, all the fuss the local Greens had been making over the killing of a house snake was far from calming down. The chief of police had poured oil on the fire when he had exclaimed without thinking, “We havent got enough time to look after people, so why should we rack our brains over the death of a reptile?” The local press took it up with a few articles, and then investigators came down from Tirana, accompanied by a lawyer representing the Center for the Protection of Endangered Species, based in Munich. By all recognized definitions, the Balkan house snake belonged on the list of such species. Harsh punishment was demanded for such abuse. The defendants stood firm: they had neither killed nor abused the beast. It had died on its own, or, to be precise, it had frozen to death. Its carcass could be inspected at the morgue; they could do an autopsy if they wanted. It was in December, when snakes do freeze to death unless they are in the right conditions. Those said conditions had gone into decline — not just for snakes, but for the whole town. There were electricity cuts, and firewood was scarce. They weren’t even able to heat the children’s bedroom, so how could they manage to keep a snake warm?
You only had to dig a hole in the ground and put the snake in it, to hibernate. It would have slept through the winter, like all reptiles.
Well, you see, we didn’t think of that. But anyway, the poor thing couldn’t have known how to curl up underground, like his brothers. He was a house snake, a real rarity, as you yourselves said….
And the rumors about … er, the stories about … your daughter, they’re just vacuous gossip, I suppose? But even groundless chatter of that sort could have made somebody want to get rid of a snake, couldn’t it?
Each time he got to this point in the investigation, Mark thought of the frozen snakes cut in two by the spades of the sappers clearing a way to the deep storage depot of the National Archives.
He was tempted to turn his mind to files dealing with less scandalous cases: a man wounded on the high plateau in a boundary dispute; a case of extortion and threats inside the town hall itself; the discovery of a prostitution ring strongly suspected of being based in Vlorë, the port nearest to Otranto…. But, for God knows what reason, he couldn’t get the deep storage business out of his mind. Week after week he had kept on interrogating the only worker to have been arrested after the archive store had been closed. The others had slipped from his grasp. But the one they had shed hardly any light on the business. He just made it seem more mysterious.
“But you were actually present when the newly appointed head of state arrived late at night?”
“Sure, I was there.”
“You must have been surprised to see him turn up like that, in the middle of the night, without any ceremony or fanfare, all alone with his two bodyguards?”
“Sure, it was unexpected, Your Worship.”
“Especially as that particular April day had been very wearying for the head of state. The meeting of the Politburo that had given him supreme power had just finished. Urgent matters awaited his attention; the files were already on his desk. The whole country was still reeling from the late dictator’s funeral. Europe had its eye on Albania, waiting to see what path it would follow. In the army, in the Sigurimi, among the malcontents, the mood was dark and deathly, and all sorts of rumors were spreading like wildfire. Most of them gave guesses about the composition of the next government. Other questions also required immediate answers. But in the midst of all this, the man took his two guards on a seven-hour drive, to trek up a mountain path all the way to your cavern. Bizarre, wasn’t it?”
“It sure was, Your H
onor.”
“Presidents are not in the general habit of rushing through the night to consult the Secret Archives, are they? Especially not in the first hours of holding office, right?”
“No, they’re not, Officer.”
“So it must have made you curious. More than curious. What was this man looking for in such haste? Or should I say, in such a fluster? I suspect you wondered, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know how to explain. Of course, I admit that it puzzled me, but, to be honest, it didn’t plunge me into the kind of anxiety you seem to imagine. I thought it must be one of the things that are ordinary for people belonging to higher circles. And that’s all.”
“All the same, once you became aware of the puzzling nature of the event, you must have paid attention, and you did, didn’t you? So whether you like it or not, you tracked the comings and goings of your august visitor.”
“Of course.”
“So can you tell us what they were, precisely?”
“The ones where I was actually present, you mean?”
“Of course, the ones you observed … Do you mean there were other things happening that you didn’t actually see?”
“Of course there were…. Neither I nor anyone else could have observed what he did in the Bat Room.”
“The Bat Room, I understand, has the highest security rating in the entire deep storage depot?”
“That’s right. We call it the Bat Room because a bat once got into it. Up to that time, in fact, the room had no name.”
“Please go on…. If I understand you correctly, the head of state, once he got into the deep storage facility, asked to be taken to that room?”
“Quite so.”
“Without even stopping at the office of the director of the archives? Without even saying ‘Good evening, Comrade’ to you?”