The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (13 page)

I found Allen with Isabella in the house, where they were packing up Eleanor’s things. “Yes, I know about the bequest,” he said. “The house is mine though. We’re giving it to Rosario.”

I asked him if his mother ever talked much about Colin Michaels.

“Oh, old Colin,” said Allen. “They were lovers all during my childhood. They had a terrible fight sometime during the seventies. They’d helped create the arts center together, you see. But they couldn’t agree how to run it. The last I heard, Mother was going to pull all her money out of it. She told me she’d been talking to a lawyer in Mexico City. I didn’t believe that she really would. It was just something she used against Colin. Her feud with him had been going on for years. But the arts center really meant something to her. And judging from her will, she really did want almost everything to go into expanding it.”

I didn’t know how to ask for the name of the lawyer, but he gave it to me anyway as he went on, “One of the maids at the motel where my mother was killed says she saw a man with a black mustache and dark hat slipping down the corridor sometime late in the afternoon that day. I thought maybe it could have been my mother’s lawyer, Jorge Salinas, because he has a big black mustache, but his secretary confirmed he’d been in his office all day. It was probably just something the maid made up to make herself sound more interesting.”

When I called Jorge Salinas, he admitted that Mrs. Harrington was his client, and that she had talked to him recently, but he couldn’t tell me about what. They’d had no appointment the day she was murdered, he told me. His records could confirm it.

I pressed further. “I know you can’t tell me what you and Mrs. Harrington discussed. That’s confidential of course. But let me pose it this way, so that you can just answer yes or no. If there was someone who had an interest in keeping El Centro Artistico alive and that person found out that Eleanor Harrington planned to pull her money out of it…”

“This does not sound like a simple yes or no question, but go on.”

“Wouldn’t it have been in that person’s interest, given the will, if Mrs. Harrington died before she could financially withdraw or change her will?”

He was silent.

“Let me put it this way. Given the circumstances, and given what you may know about the people in her life, did Mrs. Harrington’s death come as a complete surprise?”

“No,” he said finally. “No, it did not.”

It was time to go to the police. Delgado was skeptical. “Señor Michaels has an alibi for the time Mrs. Harrington was murdered. He was here in San Andreas, reading to a large crowd, in a program that had been arranged for weeks.”

“Mrs. Harrington left San Andreas at ten in the morning. At a little before two she checked into the motel. You think she died around six. But what if she died earlier, at three? That would have given him four hours to get back to San Andreas.”

“It’s a possibility,” Delgado allowed. “But there are no witnesses.”

“Get a search warrant,” I said. “It can’t do any harm. If Colin is the mystery writer Dora James says he is, he will have made a mistake in his plotting and forgotten some crucial little element. He’s no Agatha Christie.”

At first I thought I’d made a bad mistake. The police searched Colin’s house and car for four hours and found nothing incriminating. No weapon. None of Eleanor’s jewelry. No telltale copy of a will that she was carrying to her lawyer. It was only by chance that one of the cops happened to open the freezer. There, back in the corner, was a false black mustache, that for reasons of vanity or foolishness, Colin had not been able to bring himself to throw away.

The maid identified him and even though he never confessed, insisting that the mustache was a joke left over from Halloween, Colin soon found himself in the courtroom and then in prison, a place he’d always described from the outside. The Harrington Arts Center expanded without him, though apparently he continues to write murder mysteries from prison while appealing his life sentence.

I heard all this from Lucy, who made a fast friend of Dr. Antonia Rodriguez, the doctor at the San Andreas clinic. Lucy visits her regularly, on her way to and from the refugee camp on the Guatemala border, where she now spends three months every year.

QUICKBORN
.

Schlump.

Poppenbüttel.

I stared at a map of Hamburg’s subway system. My destination was one stop beyond Schlump, Marianne had said. Marianne Schnackenbusch was a translator acquaintance I’d run into at the Frankfurt Book Fair a week before. When she heard that we were both translating Gloria de los Angeles’s latest collection of short stories—she into German, I into English—she’d generously told me that I must come to stay with her in Hamburg after the fair. She and her partner Elke had loads of room, and I could stay as long as I liked.

It sounded perfect. I had a brief engagement in Paris first, but after that I was at loose ends. My translation was due at the end of November, and I didn’t have the money to go anywhere splendid to finish it. Certainly I could have stayed in my small attic room in Nicola’s house in London, but in truth I’d been rather avoiding Nicola since the arrival of the Croatian lesbian commune last summer. How was I to know that my blithe offer many years ago to reciprocate their hospitality in Zagreb meant that all six of them would turn up on Nicola’s doorstep in July?

Marianne and Elke’s flat was in an old area of the city called the Schanzenviertel. Leafy streets, tall graceful apartment buildings, graffiti, bikes everywhere, Turkish and Greek shops just opening up. I’d taken a night train from Paris and it was still early.

Marianne embraced me heartily at the door. “Please sit down, sit down and eat. You must be starving, all night on the train. You should have told us when you were coming. We could have picked you up.”

She was a big woman, with a mane of hennaed red-purple hair around a broad, eager face. She was barefoot and wearing a red silk robe. I knew from our brief talks at bookfairs that she was the daughter of a German Communist who had fled to Chile before the war, and a Chilean mother. She had told me that in addition to translating she also was a lecturer at the university in Latin American literature. I could see from the hallway that translation and teaching must pay better in Germany than in Britain: the flat looked enormous and was full of Oriental carpets and big leather sofas and chairs. There were bookshelves up to the tall ceilings.

“She’s a bit overwhelming,” my friend Lucinda in Paris had told me. “A combination of Latin American vivacity and Prussian forcefulness. But she’s generous to a fault; she’ll take care of you well.” Lucinda was as poor as I was and knew the value of visits to people with washer-dryers and fax machines. Lucinda sublet a studio about the size of an elevator carriage, and practiced one of the few literary occupations to pay less than translation: poetry.

Elke was already sitting at the kitchen table, which was spread with a huge number of plates of meats and cheeses and jars of spreads and preserves. She was much frailer-looking than Marianne—and older too—with narrow shoulders, short gray-blonde hair and round small glasses. If you didn’t see her wrinkles, she would remind you of a boyish Bolshevik in a Hollywood film about the Russian Revolution.

“Just coffee for now,” I said.

“No, no,” said Marianne, pushing all manner of things toward me, and settling herself. “No, you must eat. This is so exciting for me, having Gloria’s English translator here. There’s so much I want to talk over with you. I’m enjoying the stories so much; they just go like the breeze.”

I looked across the table in astonishment. We hadn’t had time in Frankfurt to discuss the literary value of Gloria’s work. I had only assumed she felt the same ambivalence I did. “Well, I always find Gloria to be fairly easy to translate,” I said cautiously. “There is a certain…similarity in all her work.”

“Yes,” said Marianne, delicately spreading layers of soft cheese on half a roll and then devouring it in a gulp. “That’s what I enjoy so much, how you can always count on her to write so lusciously. Other writers seem dry next to her, while she is sensual, opulent, rich, and vivid. I just sink into her books like a big feather bed, like a warm bath with perfume.”

“They do tend to have something of a bathetic effect,” I murmured.

“Yes, exactly,” said Marianne, but Elke said, “Cassandra means they’re sentimental drivel, my friend. And I’m afraid I agree.”

“No, she doesn’t mean that,” Marianne said good-humoredly. “After all, Cassandra has translated all Gloria’s books into English.”

Elke fortunately changed the subject. “I must be off soon to work. I wish I could stay and help Marianne show you around the city. But we have some problems at work that are rather worrisome.”

“Not just the usual problems between the bosses and workers,” said Marianne indignantly. “Threats. Terrible threats.”

“But don’t you work in a bird-watching society?” I asked, uncertain if Marianne had given me the right information or if I’d understood it properly.

“Yes, yes,” said Elke. “Well, that’s what it was when it was originally founded. Sort of like your Audubon Society in America, I think. But you can’t watch birds nowadays without seeing how they are threatened by the loss of their habitats and so forth, and that has made some of the members very activist. We are trying to purchase land and writing letters to the politicians, as well as planning a big demonstration in two weeks. And of course some members are nervous about all this activism, which to them is like confrontation with the state.”

“But who is threatening whom?”

“Our whole organization got a threat in the mail, several threats. The first two weeks ago, and another last week, and yesterday one more. It’s about the cause we are working on now, trying to save a stretch of the Elbe River. It used to be that this section, not so far from Hamburg, marked the boundary between East and West Germany, and so it was never developed. If you go there, you see old farms and very little else. But now, with reunification, they want to build on either side, and worse—from our point of view, from the birds’ point of view, that is—they want to dredge the river to make it deeper, and make concrete sides and so forth, for shipping.”

Elke got up. “We don’t want this to happen, of course. There is very little left in Europe of undeveloped land, especially wetlands. So we’re fighting.” She wrapped a scarf several times around her neck and put on her jacket. “And someone doesn’t like it.”

As soon Elke left, Marianne began talking about Gloria’s writing again. “Just now I’m translating the story of the servant girl and the colonel,” she said.

“Oh yes, that one.”

“What a sly sense of humor Gloria has, don’t you think?”

“Well…”

“But that’s what I admire so much about Gloria. She is capable of slyness and subtlety, and also of great exuberance and broad strokes. She has such a large talent.”

“Broad strokes, yes,” I said weakly.

Marianne polished off the rest of the rolls and several more cups of coffee, chattering all the while about Gloria. She then showed me to my room, which was large and light. It overlooked an interior garden where the lindens and ashes were turning gold and yellow. “Here is the desk where you will work,” she said. It was old-fashioned, of walnut, a desk I had always dreamed of, with green blotting paper and a desk lamp with a warm brown paper shade. A tall bookshelf along one wall was filled with novels in French and Spanish. There was a red Turkish rug on the floor and a daybed covered with pillows.

“I hope this is all right,” Marianne said anxiously.

“It’s wonderful!”

“And the best thing is, at night, after you are finished translating your Gloria and I am finished translating my Gloria, we will have long evenings to discuss her.”

But today there was to be no work. Today Marianne had decided to show me the city of Hamburg. She drove me by the university and through parks with lakes and parks with statues. She bought me an expensive lunch at a restaurant just off the Rathaus Square and told me everything she knew about Hamburg’s history, which was quite a lot.

The stories she told me were reflected in the layers of the city: the few timbered buildings with a medieval touch, the tall, narrow buildings along Dutch-looking canals, squeezed in among modern offices in the international style. The city had a grandeur that was more in its substantialness than in any great elegance. It looked like a city where business was done and had always been done. It looked solid, commercial, successful. And yet this air of solidity and permanence was illusory too. For since the Middle Ages, the city had been destroyed over and over by fire, and during the last war the Allied bombings had flattened huge swathes of the city.

The harbor, the heart of Hamburg, where Marianne was taking me now, had been practically destroyed in those bombings. You would not guess it now. Huge container ships from around the world snaked slowly by, escorted by pilot boats. Around them, smaller working and pleasure boats churned up the river water that, on this bright fall day and from this distance, looked blue-green and sparkling. We strolled along the promenade and came to the inner harbor, where Marianne said she had a surprise for me.

“It’s funny,” I said, looking around me at the huge brick warehouses and the multitude of wooden docks. “I’ve never been here, and yet it seems familiar.”

“A dream?”

“No,” I said, suddenly remembering, “It was…it was a language course, on British television, many years ago, when I was first in London. It wasn’t an ordinary language course; it had a continuing plot, and it took place in Hamburg, around the red-light district and the harbor.”

“So you do know German!”

“
Wie Bitte?
” That was the name of the program, which translated as simply, “Please?” or “How’s That Again?”

I admitted, “Actually, I didn’t progress very far with the lessons. I would usually get too caught up in the plot to remember that I was supposed to be listening for grammatical constructs. So then, after fifteen minutes of action, there would be questions—‘What was Peter doing in the red-light district that evening?’ ‘What did Astrid say when the killer pulled out his gun and shoved her in the back of the boat?’—I could never answer them.”