“He wanted to kill himself,” she said. As if I’d asked a question that required such an answer. My mouth contorted in disgust. Suicides may stuff lead weights in their pockets, but they don’t whack themselves across the head with the big water-pump pliers usually kept in the engine room belowdecks.
“Drive!” I shouted at her. “Drive as fast as you can!”
She dithered a moment and then turned around and ran to the helm stand. The engine sprang to life. A speed of six knots had never been slower. I wrapped Theo in the blanket, gave him oxygen, massaged his limbs. When I was sure I could leave him briefly alone, I crowded next to Jola at the helm stand and made a radio call. Then, when my cell phone finally found a network, I called the hospital. They promised to send a helicopter.
The rest of the return trip seemed endless. While I knelt beside Theo, who gave no more signs of life, my mind kept returning helplessly to how normal he’d seemed underwater. Downright calm and relaxed. As if everything was fine.
I first noticed the coast guard when their Zodiac inflatable boat hove to alongside us. We were still two kilometers from land. Jola turned off the engine. All at once, the Aberdeen was full of people. The situation proved too much for me. I frantically warded off the rescue personnel’s hands. I may even have tried to keep them away from Theo. “No tocar! No se debe mover!” Don’t touch him, don’t move him. My own voice sounded shrill in my ears. Someone pushed me aside. They laid Theo on a stretcher and lifted him over the rail. Jola clambered over behind him. A guy from the rescue service grabbed my arm and tried to get me to leave the boat too. I struck out at him. The Aberdeen. I couldn’t just leave her out there. The Spaniards exchanged a few quick words, pointing to me and shaking their heads. “We be back here!” one of them called out in English. The outboard motor roared and the Zodiac sped away, leaving a wake of white foam behind it.
And suddenly I was alone. I savored the stillness. No people, no birds. A little wind and the lapping of the waves. The fading sound of the outboard motor as the Zodiac, now far off, hurtled landward. I made no move to get the Aberdeen under way again. I simply stood there. Still in my dive suit. I hadn’t even dried my hair. I couldn’t tell whether I was sweating or freezing. The here and now took my breath away, like a pressure of one thousand bars. As though I were lying on the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean. A helicopter rose up above Playa Blanca. It was the last I saw of Jola and Theo.
18
She’d hidden it in such a way that it would pretty much have to be found. Not placed it so obviously that it seemed to have been planted. Nor, however, was it concealed so well that any island police inspector, no matter how dim-witted, could overlook it.
I have hardly any memories of the day after the Wednesday diving expedition. It’s as though that whole Thursday has been expunged. Maybe I slept completely through it. Or spent it staring unseeing out the window, stupefied by the emptiness that surrounded me. On Friday morning I ran out of the house before breakfast, armed with vacuum cleaner and mop pail, as if my life depended on doing the usual post-guest cleaning in the Casa Raya. Normally that would have been Antje’s job. She would have done it on Saturday afternoon, right after Theo and Jola’s departure, so that the house would be ready for the Sunday arrival of our next clients. I, meanwhile, would have taken the day off. But Antje wasn’t there anymore, and I had three free days. I didn’t even dare to think about Sunday. It seemed to me completely implausible that I’d spend part of it waiting in the airport terminal, holding a sign with the names MARTIN & NANCY. That mental image belonged to a universe that no longer existed.
When I stepped into the Casa Raya, I felt as though someone had punched me in the pit of the stomach. They were still there. They’d left the house only briefly to take a stroll by the sea. At least, that was the statement their stuff made. Everything was hanging around as though still warm from contact with them. There were clothes on the floor. Toothbrushes in the bathroom. An open book on the dining-room table. Only the dried coffee dregs in the cups revealed that some time had passed.
I walked around for a while without knowing where to begin. The unmade bed. The remains of a hasty breakfast. Jola’s bikinis hanging over the shower-curtain rod. Tidying up and cleaning had never been my strong points. Most of all, however, I couldn’t bring myself to touch anything. The objects all looked to me like props in an amusement park’s haunted house.
Then my paralysis metamorphosed into a frenzy of activity. Swift as the wind, I gathered up all the clothes that were lying around and threw them into the washing machine. I cleaned out the closets and meticulously distributed their contents between the two wheeled suitcases. I carefully removed Lotte’s photograph from the wall. In the bathroom I packed the toilet kits, never taking longer than a second to decide what belonged to Jola and what to Theo. All at once, things sorted themselves. I washed the dishes, pulled the sheets off the beds, took fresh linens from the bathroom closet, and set about making the beds with the clean sheets. When I lifted up the big double mattress, there it was. On the slats underneath. A black notebook.
I knew immediately what I was looking at. The dates. The handwriting. A few pages torn out and then glued back in. I started reading at random:
What would Lotte have done? When I tried to get up, he put his hands around my throat. I told him to let me go. He tried to shove himself into my mouth. I clenched my teeth. He pressed on my windpipe. My lips opened and I gasped for air.
I dropped the notebook as though it had burned my fingers. Then I picked it up again and laid it on the table. When I’d finished vacuuming and dusting the whole house, cleaning the bathroom, and remaking the beds, when the two suitcases were standing packed and ready at the door, the black notebook was still lying there. The local police inspector would have jumped for joy. The discovery I’d made had been intended for him. If there was one person in the world who wasn’t supposed to get his hands on that notebook, that person was me.
Apparently Jola had figured on never going back to the Casa Raya. Even more certainly, she’d assumed that I would never set foot in it again. Had Theo drowned as planned, she would presumably have waited until I was back on board the Aberdeen and knocked me out with the water-pump pliers too. She’d have taken off my dive suit, maybe arranged a few signs of struggle, and then informed the police by radio. Help! My partner’s been killed! The murderer’s here, right next to me! Twenty-nine north, fourteen west. Please come quick! They would have arrested me while we were still at sea and taken me to the police station for questioning. Jola would have come along as a witness. The suspect: totally distraught. The witness: well prepared. Her statement carefully thought-out and more convincing than mine. Two rivals who have learned to hate each other’s guts in the past ten days come to blows on a boat. Between them is a woman who’s been abused by one of them and is trying to start a new life with the other. A woman too weak to prevent the catastrophe. Jola wouldn’t have accused me; instead she’d have sought, through her tears, to defend me. Confusion and anxiety in perfect balance. And, if possible, in fluent Spanish. It’s all my fault, Señor Comisario. Herr Fiedler was only trying to protect me. He was at his wit’s end, just as I was. I should never have told him about any of that. What would you do if you knew the woman you loved was being beaten by another man? Por favor, if you will, imagine that. What would you do?
I would have remained in custody. The stupid police inspector would have privately expressed his respect for me, man-to-man. Then he would have set to work checking Jola’s statement. He would have asked half the island about our affair. The guests on the Dorset would have been questioned concerning the previous evening’s bitter altercation. Divers would have been sent to look for Theo one hundred meters down and might even, in spite of the current, have found his body. With a bad head wound and scuba divers’ lead weights in his pockets. The police would have searched my house and, it goes without saying, the Casa Raya. And in the end, they would have discovered the rather ostentati
ously hidden diary. Germany would have filed a request for extradition. My trial would have been held there.
In the course of the past few weeks, like a man obsessed, I’ve gone over Jola’s plan again and again. Its complexity. Its refinement. The sheer cold-bloodedness with which she’d developed and then implemented her calculations, one by one, carried along by her conviction that life works like a crime novel: no weak points allowed. Of course, one might believe that only a sick mind would be capable of such painstaking malice. But Jola isn’t crazy. It follows, therefore, by an argumentum e contrario, that what she did was normal. Maybe not strictly so, statistically speaking, but still within the ordinary human spectrum. Even though she did it extraordinarily well.
I called up Bernie. Countless times. At first he hung up, and then he refused to take my calls. When he was finally ready to talk to me, I asked him why he’d backed out of the expedition the night before it was supposed to take place. He told me that as far as he was concerned, I was the one who’d backed out. He said he got a text message from me informing him that I still needed the boat but not the crew, and that I wanted to go on my expedition with Jola and Theo instead. Right away, Bernie said, that had seemed to him like an idea conceived by a madman.
A text from my phone, just as described in Jola’s diary. I found the message in my “Sent” box. She’d mimicked my bad English so well that I wondered for a moment whether I’d written the text myself. On the Dorset, Jola had sat next to me the whole time. Practically on my lap. Of course she’d had access to my telephone. I couldn’t help admiring her ingenuity. It’s said that hostages identify with their captors as a way of coping with their own situation. Maybe believing that Jola’s brilliant is the only way for me to bear the unbearable.
I’ve tried to feel sorry for her. If only a small part of what she says about Theo’s excesses is true, she’s lived through hell on earth. A defense lawyer would say that a woman who’s been brutally and systematically abused over a long period of time finds herself in a permanent state of psychological emergency. He’d arouse the compassion of judge and jury and plead for their recognition of extenuating circumstances. But Jola doesn’t need any extenuating circumstances. She’s not the accused. I don’t feel like pitying her. Nor can I manage to hate her, even though she was prepared to put me behind bars for the rest of my life. Loving her for that would certainly be absurd. Maybe fascination is what you’ve got left when you don’t know how you should feel.
Did she arrive on the island with her plan already formed? Or did she come up with it only after she got here? If so, when? Was it some kind of game at first, and then at a certain point it turned serious? Did Theo’s behavior on the Dorset finally tip the balance? Or was it my refusal to have sex with her by the beach in Mala that got everything rolling? Looking for answers, I’ve read her diary so many times I know some passages by heart.
On Saturday morning, I lined up the van, went over to the Casa, and picked up the two suitcases. I left in good time for the return flight to Berlin that Jola and Theo had booked. Their tickets and identification documents were in my shirt pocket. It was as though I was driving ghosts to the airport. When I passed the spray-painted EVERYTHING IS WILL, I turned my head to the right. The passenger seats were actually empty.
I thought about the past Wednesday, the day of the murder attempt, about how I’d driven the same stretch of road on the way to the hospital. I’d brought the Aberdeen back to her anchorage as quickly as I could and forced myself to off-load at least the most expensive pieces of my equipment. After tearing across the island like a mental case, I was made to wait at the hospital reception desk. Half an eternity had to pass before the hospital was able to confirm that one Theodor Hast had been admitted more than two hours previously. When asked whether I was a relative of the patient, I stupidly answered, “No.” Nobody could tell me anything about his condition. No physician was available for me to talk to. Whether one Jolante von der Pahlen was present in the hospital could not be determined. In any case, no patient with that name had been admitted. When I tried Jola’s number, I got a dial tone. She was refusing my calls. Before long, her cell phone was turned off. There was no reception on Theo’s phone either.
People wearing robes and slippers meandered through the lobby, eyeing me curiously. Every thirty minutes, I went back to the reception desk and repeated my questions about Theo’s condition. Always with the same result: no further details were available, and I couldn’t be allowed upstairs. I could only wait for Frau von der Pahlen to come down to the lobby, perhaps to get a drink from the coffee machine, as many patients’ relatives did. Then, I was told, I could talk to her.
Darkness fell. The woman at the reception desk was relieved by a doorman, who produced a thermos bottle and switched on a little television set. I got some coffee from the coffee machine. The lobby was empty. It was very quiet. I gazed at the tall glass walls and through them at palm trees and cactuses and behind those the twinkling lights of the island’s capital city, and I felt a strange peacefulness. Above me, people were sleeping, some of whom didn’t know whether they’d survive the night. I stretched out on the bench. My leaden weariness almost felt good.
When I awoke, a young nurse was sitting in the doorman’s place. The TV was off, the thermos bottle had vanished. Dawn was breaking outside. When I requested information about Theo, the girl immediately reached for the telephone, asked questions, and listened to the answers, which poured out of the receiver in a stream of high-speed Spanish. After she hung up, she explained to me in English that Theodor Hast had already been transferred to the central hospital on the neighboring island; the transfer had taken place the previous evening. As far as she understood, Theo would undergo a few final tests and then take a direct flight back to Germany from the airport on the other island, probably in the course of that very afternoon.
I thanked her and drove home. I figured Theo’s condition must be at least stable. Getting his head cracked open, half drowning, and then spending an hour in cold water—that was enough for circulatory collapse and severe hypothermia. In that condition, you could die if you didn’t get help. But Theo had been helped, he’d turned the corner, and he’d be back on his feet soon. In Germany. Only when I was driving their luggage to the airport did I completely grasp the fact that I’d never see Theo and Jola again, that they’d literally vanished into thin air.
The woman working the check-in counter hesitated a long time and kept asking me to repeat what had happened. A diving accident. Air ambulance back to Germany. She compared the names on the tickets with those on the identity documents several times. Finally she nodded. She promised that the baggage would be delivered to the Berlin address. We put the tickets and papers in the document pockets of the two suitcases. I watched them bump along the conveyor belt and disappear through a rubber curtain into the belly of the airport.
That evening I sat on the terrace with a bottle of wine and read Jola’s diary straight through. In the end, I knew the meaning of fear. I lay awake in bed for hours, waiting for the roar of engines and the slamming of car doors and the voices of broad-shouldered Spaniards, informing me that I was under arrest for the attempted murder of Theo Hast. At last, in the early morning hours, it occurred to me that three days had already passed and nobody had come to my house.
Around noon I drove back to the airport to pick up my new clients. Not out of a sense of duty, but because I had no earthly idea what else to do with myself. While we were still in the van, I informed Nancy and Martin that my assistant, who normally helped me run the diving school, had suddenly been taken ill, and that therefore there would probably be organizational issues. Nancy and Martin looked unperturbed by this warning. Like most tourists, they were in a holiday mood, and it didn’t seem to them that anything in the world could spoil their diving enjoyment. They found the Casa Raya enchanting.
The following Tuesday we were joined by Ralph, a regular client and experienced diver who’d been coming to me for years. Sta
rting Friday, I also had a family of first-time divers, including children, so that I had to work in two shifts. I warned everybody about organizational problems. There weren’t any. In the evenings, I’d drive home as early as possible to fill diving cylinders and wash out equipment. I answered e-mails and did the bookkeeping. I worked late into the night. Sometime after the weekend, I went to my bank’s website and found that a payment in the amount of fourteen thousand euros had been credited to my account. In re: “Diving instruction for casting Lotte Hass.” I stared so long at this entry that my online session was ended for security reasons.
I thought constantly about Jola and her plan. I kept looking in her diary. As long as I could admire Jola, I wasn’t afraid of her. On one occasion, I dialed her cell phone number. It no longer existed. After making that effort, I was soaked with sweat, like a marathon runner. From Jola’s Facebook page I learned that a new season of Up and Down was in the works. About Theo I learned nothing.
Christmas passed without anything happening. On New Year’s Eve, I had clients and went to bed before midnight. The New Year was 2012. A number like any other. After breakfast on New Year’s morning, I sat around for a while. Exactly fourteen years had passed since the day I left Germany and began my new life on the island. Fourteen years. An unimaginable span of time. I thought about the day of the murder attempt, or more precisely, about a very specific moment in that day, and an instantaneous feeling of gratitude flooded through me. All at once, that second appeared to me as the most important moment of my life. I had hesitated, looked at Theo’s unconscious face, and thought about Jola. And then I had decided. I hadn’t let Theo sink to the bottom of the sea; instead, I’d saved his life. Gratitude for that decision drove tears into my eyes. I sat there with my empty coffee cup in front of me and wept. Afterward I could breathe, freely and deeply. Something had changed. I needed only to think back on that hesitation to feel that I’d become someone else. I no longer understood why I’d found “Stay out of it” such an appealing motto fourteen years before. Now it repelled me. When I climbed into the van to go diving, I felt better. In a fundamental way.