Lime's Photograph (40 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Wouldn’t they be willing to go to great lengths to make sure it didn’t come to light?” I said. “Would they be willing to murder in order to hang onto their comfortable lifestyles now that the war’s been lost? And peace has settled? I’m afraid that’s what has happened.”

He reached for the bottle again and I felt sick at the sight of his face smeared with snot and blood and the smell of his sour, alcohol-soaked body. I realised that he had pissed himself too. There was a pool at his feet.

“Wouldn’t they go to great lengths?” I said again.

“Even if you were right, it could never be proved. Everything that recorded the brotherly assistance in the struggle against imperialism, fought at the very heart of imperialism, was destroyed before the rabble seized power. In Moscow they’ve closed down those archives. The Russians are shrewder than we are. There are no documents. It’s all gone. Burnt or chopped into tiny pieces. Shredded to nothing and stuffed into big sacks. It’s as if it never happened. Like the Wall. Who knows if we just dreamt that we built it. It’s all in the past, and now give me that bottle for fuck’s sake.”

I wasn’t going to have to prove anything in court, and he had just confirmed what I had said, so I held out the bottle to him, and when he reached for it I grabbed his hand and snapped it backwards so he pitched to the floor in his own piss, and then I emptied the contents of the bottle over him while he howled in pain from his broken fingers.

“Cheers, Lieutenant Colonel,” I said. “When you ring Madrid in a while, say hello to Oscar and tell him that Leica is on his way to take his photograph.”

On the plane to Madrid next morning, I tried to follow Clara’s advice and think everything through, but I thought more about the past than the future. A film played in my mind, episodes from all the years I had known Gloria and Oscar, a stream of good memories, and I wondered if Gloria had been aware of her husband’s double-dealing, or if she had been as much in the dark as I had. Is it possible to keep a double identity hidden from your spouse for so many years? What do we know about one another when it comes down to it? Had Oscar, as I kept on calling him in the film, in effect been using infidelity as a shield when he worked for the Stasi? A cover to conceal his real identity? Was the same true of Lola? Had she felt the earth begin to crumble under her feet when the reporters began to ask questions about her qualifications? She knew that her life was a myth manufactured in Normannenstrasse. And what about Gloria? Was she part of the whole operation? I didn’t know. It was a jungle of mirrors. I didn’t know if I was looking at a true reflection or a reflection of one. It was like the hall of mirrors in Tivoli. You know what you look like, but the mirrors show something quite different. They alter the shape of your body, just as the intelligence services could alter entire lives and identities. A masked ball with no guarantee that you would be any the wiser at midnight when the masks fell, only to reveal new ones. All I knew
was that I wanted to know for certain. I wanted to bury the whole business and Oscar too. But could I, when all was said and done?

Clara had been waiting for me in the hotel room and looked anxious when she saw my face. I had told her everything in detail, slowly and subdued.

“So you beat up an old man?” she had said.

“Yes,” I said with a pang of conscience.

She had put her arms round me and whispered.

“Poor, poor Peter. Poor Peter.”

I had held her at arm’s length and looked her in the eyes.

“Did you know about Oscar?”

“I had my suspicions. We’ve kept an eye on Lola, and so have come across him a couple of times. And we got a tip-off from the British.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I sensed that both my anger and my aggression could easily be turned on her.

“There wasn’t anything concrete to go on. And would you have believed me?” She looked alarmed. She had realised that I had a violent streak and that scared her. As if it wouldn’t take much for me to hit her too. But what do we know about one another when it comes down to it?

Would I have believed her? I wondered on the plane. Probably not. We had made love frantically that night and she had driven me to the airport and now she was on her way back to Copenhagen. I hadn’t promised her that I wouldn’t do anything rash. We had parted with a hug, but made no promises.

“Ring me, and don’t get like those you’re up against,” she had said.

I hadn’t promised anything.

A velvety darkness lay across Madrid as the plane prepared for landing. I thought of ringing first, but instead took a taxi out to Gloria and Oscar’s penthouse flat. I couldn’t bring myself to call him Karl
Heinrich. With Gloria, he was Oscar. As we drove into the city, through the heavy traffic and with the lovely sound of Spanish on the driver’s radio, I didn’t think about what I was going to do. Because I didn’t know. I wondered whether Oscar would be there with Gloria, or if they would both have taken flight, or Gloria would have been left behind on her own. How much did she know? I was certain that the old man in Berlin would have rung straight away. They must have agreed on a kind of signal that meant run for it. Even Oscar, with his self-confident arrogance, would have prepared an escape route. It was part of his training, and also his nature. Being the sly fox that he was, his life must always have had many back doors.

Gloria saw it was me and slapped my face so hard that my whole head rocked, managing to land one more slap before I could get hold of her arms and push her into the flat. I pulled her towards me and held her tight. She was a large woman and there was strength under her ample curves, but I held on to her until she had stopped screaming arsehole, son of a bitch, pimp, ball-less faggot and a whole series of curses from the bountiful Spanish vocabulary. Eventually I could feel her relaxing in my arms and she began to cry. I stood holding her for a while, stroking her lustrous black hair and, when her tears began to abate, I led her into the living room and sat her down on the sofa, poured us both a whisky and lit her cigarette. She was a wreck. Her mascara had run and her face was streaked and haggard. Her elegant, silk blouse was crumpled and her little black skirt had crept right up to the edge of her briefs.

“Why the hell didn’t you ring me, Peter?” she said.

“I was anxious to know if you’d be here. I wanted to see if there’s one or two of you in on this.”

“In on what, you arsehole? The telephone rang yesterday. A man’s voice says something in German. I call Oscar to the phone and his face goes completely white. Then he puts on his coat and leaves. It’s like he’s
seen the devil himself. He turns at the door and says ‘We won’t be seeing one another again. You can thank Peter for that.’ I dash after him, but he gets to the lift first, and when I get down onto the street he’s gone. He’s disappeared before, but I could tell that something was seriously wrong. And we were having one of our good patches. I’ve rung everyone and anyone. Even some of his old flames. He’s gone. He’s emptied our joint account and taken some money from the firm’s account. Where the hell is he? What the hell have you done, Peter?”

She was on the verge of tears again, but took a gulp of her drink instead. I could tell it wasn’t her first that evening. The big, airy room suddenly felt dark and cold, and Gloria seemed to shrink before my eyes.

“I think he’s in Moscow,” I said.

“Moscow? Whatever for? What’s my husband doing in Moscow?”

“He’s not your husband and it’s a long story, Gloria.”

“And might you take the trouble to tell the recent widow the story? Do you really think I believe what you’re saying? We might be old friends, Peter. But what is all this?” she said.

I placed the photograph of Oscar in uniform in front of her and she picked it up and stared at it for a long time while she smoked another cigarette. She was a tough woman and a veteran of the business world’s negotiating tables and exhausting courtroom battles, and the emotional storms she and Oscar had weathered. She wasn’t easily thrown, and she seemed to be pulling herself together, so I told her the story of Karl Heinrich and Lola, and she listened without interrupting, without dramatic outbursts. She revealed her agitation only by smoking one cigarette after another as I described the bigamist’s double life over almost a quarter of a century.

Gloria took it amazingly calmly. Other people might have broken down, but I could see that his betrayal didn’t provoke tears, but the same ice-cold anger that I felt. In many ways we were cut from
the same cloth. I could use violence without guilt, and I could see that Gloria’s legal mind had taken control.

She excused herself politely, left the room and returned looking well groomed. Her mascara was where it should be, she had put on a fresh blouse, her hair was combed and her skirt no longer revealed the edge of her briefs. She returned with a pot of coffee and two cups and put them on the table. She removed our glasses and emptied the ashtray, playing the hostess. I didn’t speak. I could see that her incisive mind was at work. I felt that I knew Gloria. Her life may have been coloured with infidelity to Oscar, but there had never been a single instance of deceit in relation to me. She wasn’t a double person. She was Gloria. Once she had tidied herself up and arranged the room, she sat down opposite me with straight back and an almost formal manner and poured coffee.

“Well that’s quite a story, Peter. What’s your plan?” she asked.

“I’m going to pay Oscar a visit.”

“Where?”

“In Moscow.”

“Indeed,” she said. “I’ve never been to Moscow, but as far as I know, over ten million people live there.”

“I’ll find someone who can find him,” I said.

“OK. And why do you want to find him?”

I sipped my coffee. It was hot and strong like Gloria always made it, the coffee we three had drunk countless times at meetings about our joint business and our joint lives.

It was a good question. Why did I want to find Oscar? To hear from his own mouth why Amelia and Maria Luisa had to die? But was that the whole reason? I chose to be honest with Gloria.

“Yesterday I wanted to find him and kill him. Preferably twice. An eye for an eye. I thought that if I could throttle him, then I’d be released from the prison I’m in. It felt right to be set free through
revenge. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think really I just want to look him in the eye one last time and hear him admit it. But, quite frankly, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just thump him one and leave.”

“Thump him twice,” said Gloria. “One from you and one from me, but let him live.”

“Surely you don’t want him back again!” I exclaimed in amazement.

Gloria sipped her coffee and crossed her long legs and leant forward and spoke as if we were having a perfectly ordinary conversation.

“No, Peter. I don’t. We’ve each had our lovers, Oscar – Karl Heinrich – and I. But we were like hand and glove. There were times when we couldn’t get enough of each other, and I know he didn’t fake it in bed. There’s no doubt that he loved me and I loved him. But there’s one thing the old communist can’t do without. And that’s the sweet life. And I have a plan to take that away from him. The champion of the proletariat will become a proletarian himself. And Oscar won’t be able to cope with that. He loves the sweet life. So just don’t kill him, OK?”

It was an absurd conversation, but it made sense anyway.

“I can’t promise,” I said.

“You’ve got to. Because of everything we’ve shared. So there’s something left from all those years. So it doesn’t all end in the sewer.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Me? I’m a lawyer. I hold the keys of power in this modern society. I’ll close the bank accounts; he can’t get at most of them anyway without my signature. I’ll have the marriage dissolved and then he’ll lose everything we own jointly. I’ll file an action against him for fraud. Tomorrow I’ll cancel credit cards, accounts, the right to transfer money, you can complete the list yourself. I’ll send a bad credit profile all over the world. I’ll inform all our clients and their clients that Oscar’s signature isn’t worth a hundred pesetas. He ran off with some money, but with Oscar’s consumption it’ll be spent in a week.
And that’s even counting the money he’s bound to have put aside. I’m going to do what he can’t bear. I’m going to make him poor and I’m going to disinherit him. I’ll make him a non-person in the global village we live in. I’ll transform him from a Spanish gentleman into an East German loser. And I don’t want you thwarting that revenge, but you’re welcome to kick him hard in the balls from me.”

I couldn’t help smiling. Gloria could be strong medicine, but she had been a fighter all her life, and while she might sit and weep again once I had gone, no man was going to see her on her knees, especially not a man she had loved.

“OK, Gloria. You’re a tough old girl.”

“I am. And I still look good, and when I get my second wind I’ll activate some old lovers. He’s not going to get the better of me. That’s one triumph he’s not going to enjoy. I know him. In a month’s time he’ll be missing me like mad and his current squeeze will get the heave-ho. A double person is no person. Correct or incorrect, Pedro?”

“Correct, Gloria. Will you be all right by yourself? Shall I stay here?” I asked.

She drank the last of her coffee and put the cup down a little too forcefully. She was still fragile, but she straightened herself.

“Either you go now, Pedro. Or you come to bed with me.”

I went over to her and kissed her on the lips, like a brother would, but pulled my head back when her tongue found its way greedily into my mouth.

Gloria smiled and pushed me gently.

“Is it the Danish woman?”

“Maybe.”

“If you find love again, Pedro, welcome it. Don’t be a fool and let it slip away. Love’s the only pure thing in this world. And now be off with you and ring me every day.”

“Gloria, you know I think you’re gorgeous …”

“Hop it, and ring me.”

“You’ll be all right?” I said.

“Either I’ll get drunk or I’ll get on the phone, but that’s none of your business. So be a good boy and clear off!”