The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (12 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

There are things I suddenly remember in inexplicable detail.  One distant morning Charles Vincent was sitting in a café in the middle of Berne, drinking cocoa from a patterned cup.  Under the table was a suitcase of materials he had prepared.  It was five to nine, twenty-five minutes after the hour when a messenger was to have collected the case on his way to Milan.

             
At nine Vincent rose up and carried the suitcase carefully to a public phone booth.  At the other end of the line someone told him about an accident on a highway on the other side of the Rhine.  Traffic to and from the city would be held up for at least two hours.

             
"I'll take care of it," Vincent said and hung up.  He was in a mood of sensual intoxication combined with complete clarity of mind.  He hailed a cab in the middle of Münsterstraße and drove to the railway station.

             
A uniformed railway attendant helped him load the suitcase onto a shelf at the front of a second class carriage.  It was too big and two passengers almost knocked it off as they went up the iron step.  Vincent was not afraid.  He had every confidence in the intelligence of the mechanism he had created.  He sat down with a book near the middle of the carriage, and by the time the train reached the Italian border had managed to read one hundred and sixty pages.  At Chiasso two Italian border policemen came on for a routine check.  One of them tugged the handle of the case, pulled it off the shelf and tried to open its copper locks.  "Whose case is this?" his colleague called down the aisle.  Several of the passengers remembered Vincent.  They looked at him as he put the book down and acknowledged them with a smile.  The policeman advanced between the seats. 

             
"La chiave, per favore; the key, please."  Vincent took care to display the degree of concern appropriate for such occasions: friendly and relaxed. 

             
He thrust his hand into his pocket and said, "Prego." 

             
The policeman smiled in a friendly manner:  "Ah, Italiano?" 

             
Vincent did not hesitate.  He instantly felt as if the ground passing beneath the wheels had been his since his birth. 

             
"Si," he pronounced the only other word he knew in that language.  "Si."

             
"Well, then, everything's all right," the policeman waved his hand.  His colleague put the suitcase back on the shelf.  Vincent thanked them politely and immersed himself in his book.  At the next stop, Lecco, he got off the train, hired a car and disappeared somewhere on the coast of the lake.

             
I would not be recounting all this were it not for the fact that I missed Charles Vincent and mostly his way of moving through life without anything sticking.  His greatness lay in his character, which was now gone.  If he had been there, in my place, he would not have paid attention to anything other than his own needs, and as a result perhaps would have put together whatever was required to organize his life here, to implement the mission with his singular precision.  Above all, he probably would not have been particularly stirred by the woman's tacit offer.  He would have considered it, and even accepted it, on the basis of the clear, unequivocal payment that he exacted from every contact with the world.

             
But he no longer existed and I was on my own, feeling a sudden compassion percolating through me for a wonderful and silly proposal.  It was like a heroic death for a principle which has been completely discredited.  I also knew, more clearly even than the compassion I felt, that from now on I could not ignore Anton. 

             
I went to the office at dawn and studied my copy of the letter.  The words and sentences had lost their enigmatic, romantic quality and I could relate them to the dark world of merciless vows and deadly commitment.  I could ask myself what was meant by, "…grant your Christian forgiveness to Yvonne," and, "…protect Michel from ignorance as well as from knowledge."  What were the rainy days which the doctor saw on the horizon and what would happen when "the blind opened their eyes"?

             
This last phrase had to be clarified if only to arrest a certain sense of moral inferiority beginning to develop within me.  I somehow compared the love which had surrounded the doctor with my aloofness, the healing nature of his occupations with the destructive nature of mine, the positive clarity of his character with the uncertainty of my own.  What could soothe me more than to discover a few embarrassing skeletons hidden in his cupboard, sins for which blindness was served best?

             
I went outside, to a morning that was too hot.  The stones of the courtyard burned beneath my soles.  Cars loaded with new refugees crowded the road that climbed up from the plain.  To walk through that furnace was an appalling prospect which would have deterred even the strongest will.  I escaped to the strip of shade next to the repair-shop supervisor.  My shirt was already clinging to my skin and my face was drenched with sweat. 

             
"No one's to touch the command car now that I've repaired it," the supervisor said.

             
I did not argue.  I just mentioned Scheckler's name.  His lips moved as he read the list of vehicles under repair which hung on the wall. 

             
"If you promise to get back quickly," he grumbled.  "I can let you have a few men to go with you."

             
"One - a driver - will be enough..."

             
He did not wait to hear, but hurried to the door and called to one of the tire-repairers, who raced over to the armory and came back with five rifles.  Outside, the command car's engine was already running and five soldiers jumped in over the sides as it crossed the courtyard slowly.  The supervisor beckoned the driver down to him, then whispered something into his ear.  When I jumped into the front seat the driver was back in his place, smiling and ready with his foot on the pedal. 

             
"Hold tight," he shouted and sped out into the road.

             
Just like the last time I had gone with soldiers to the house of a local inhabitant, passersby followed us with suspicious eyes.  I was tense, even worried.  Everything was happening too quickly, and I was teetering on the edge of control.  Some of the soldiers began to sing a song they had picked up from the radio, others whooped with joy and made inviting gestures at women and girls.  Men brandished their fists in response.  Children yelled curses.

             
I recognized the opening of the alley into which the old man and the blind girl had entered.  We drove in. The driver maneuvered the car along yellow walls between which washing, dripping with tepid water, had been hung.  Sewage water flowed along a narrow channel.  The old man was sitting beside a wide open cellar door, like a mouse hole, near the base of a house.  The driver stopped.  The windows all opened at once.  The old man hastily dragged his stool into the cellar.  He tottered down the stairs, the nape of his neck stiff with the effort. 

             
"What are you hiding in there?" the driver shouted at him.  The soldiers jumped out of the vehicle. 

             
"Call them back," I ordered.  They laughed.

             
We went down three wide, generous stairs.  The old man was standing on the threshold, his lined face staring at us.  Suddenly he bowed deeply, almost mockingly.  The soldiers hesitated for a moment and I used the opportunity to give him my hand.  He took it absently, as if it were some superfluous object.  His skin was dry and his clothes stank.  The space in front of him was dark and emitted the terrible stench of rooms never aired.  The soldiers backed away to the door.

             
"Good morning," I said, "may the blessing of Allah be upon you..."

             
The old man smiled.  "T'fadal," he croaked, "and may the blessing of Allah be upon you too."  A strong beam of white light struck his face, suddenly giving it the terrified look of a trapped bat.  Somewhere behind the source of light were the voices of the soldiers. 

             
"Put the light out," I ordered.  They diverted the beam to the ceiling, illuminating the whole cellar, which was small and sealed like a seashell.

             
But the old man leaped after the beam of light and began to jump up and down, casting a theatre of shadows onto the walls.  For a moment I thought he had been gripped by madness or the mischievousness of old people.  But then the beam moved at random and everything became clear: he wanted to distract our attention from the girl.

             
Close up, she seemed more human.  She was lying on a mattress in a corner, propped up against a mound of cushions and covered with a fringed blanket, possibly a carpet.  Her eyes were wide open.

             
The old man hobbled over to her head.  I advanced as well.  Her large body radiated heat and a surprisingly pleasant smell of young flesh. 

             
"Can you hear me?" I asked gently.  With astonishing vitality, the girl nodded her head.  Her unseeing eyes did not have that cloudiness one usually finds in blind people.  The thought of some knowledge hidden behind them was a logical and likely possibility. 

             
"The doctor," I began, "Dr. Khamis..."

             
"Allah yerahmo," she said in a soft voice, "May Allah have mercy on him."  Her white hand was on top of the blanket.  Did the doctor usually hold it in his?  Behind my back, the soldiers were getting restless.  One went outside, another poked around in a niche in the wall, among a pile of rags.  The three who were left came forward. 

             
Someone said, "I bet she's lying on a mountain of money.  They always get women to guard their money."

             
"Go away," the old man screamed in fright, "go away."

             
"Go outside," I requested, "wait for me outside."

             
"You can't give us orders," a soldier shouted from the niche, "and anyway, what did we come for?"  I could hear his voice as the girl might, rough and echoing.  I could guess what would happen next.  The mild serenity there had been on her face changed into the first tiny wrinkles of distress.  Her neck reddened and distended, her jaw dropped, her mouth opened and a long, high-pitched sound issued forth.

             
It was unlike a scream I had ever heard, a monotonous scraping in complete contrast with the gentle voice in which she had spoken beforehand.  The soldiers recoiled.  One of them swore, while others grimaced in revulsion.  All eyes turned to the old man, whose anxious look had turned to amused indifference.

             
The girl continued shrieking incessantly, inhaling in a way that enabled her to continue. From outside came the sound of feet and voices.  Another soldier rushed in and locked the door behind him.

             
"What's happening?" he asked.  "Half the street's outside already..."

             
Someone from outside tried to open the door.  There was a momentary lull, then a hail of pounding and another lull, while those outside consulted.  The next round of thumping focused on the weak point near the lock.

              Those were the last moments before it all began to happen.  I was to regret my hope of yesterday that something would happen.  The doctor's fate was forgotten.  Amazingly, it was something of Vincent which came to life within me, enabling me to stay cool in the face of the screeching girl, the growing crowd outside the door, the old man, the soldiers and, principally, my own nerves.  All my energy, all my consciousness and memories concentrated on the idea that there had to be a way out of any situation, provided one did not lose one's head.

             
The door gave way.  A throng stood outside, stopped by an invisible line stretching across the threshold.  The people at the back pushed them in and craned their necks.  Slowly, inch by inch, the cellar was conquered by a creature without a body or a face, only one enormous mouth and innumerable legs and arms which moved forward in a terrifying wave.

             
'Play for time,' I heard a distant voice in my mind. 

             
Aloud I said to the soldiers, "Stay close together and don't provoke them."

             
They disregarded my orders.  One touched his gun and clattered the slide as a warning signal.  The mob was too excited to be afraid.  They responded by advancing almost to the middle of the room.  One young man in a white T-shirt held a crowbar, and another, wearing a bathrobe, shouted to the girl, "They won't do anything to you.  We're here." 

             
A man in a peaked cap shouted at me, "Go to your whores in Tel Aviv," and a woman dressed in black cried:  "Kill them, like they killed my husband." 

             
The soldiers backed away, spitting out curses and complaining loudly, not yet charged with the fear that the situation called for.  Behind them the blind girl continued her screeching.  In front of the crowd a small square of concrete became no man's land. One soldier aimed his rifle at the belly of the young man with the crowbar.