Hour of the Wolf (33 page)

He walked past three houses and four cars – big, slightly rusty gas guzzlers – and came to number 602. The digits indicated the location – the second house between Sixth and Seventh Avenue, he had read. He mounted the eight steps to the front door and rang the bell. A dog started barking.

Delicate, he thought again. Extremely damned delicate.

The door was opened by a boy in his early teens, with glasses and protruding teeth. He was holding a chocolate sandwich in his hand.

‘I’m looking for Mrs Ponczak,’ said Reinhart.

The boy shouted into the house, and after a while a solidly built woman came puffing and panting down the stairs and greeted him.

‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘I’m Elizabeth Ponczak. What do you want?’

Reinhart explained who he was and was invited into the kitchen. The living room was occupied by the boy and a television set. They sat down at a small, rickety laminated table, and Reinhart began to explain why he was there, as he had planned it. In English, he didn’t know why.

It took several minutes, and all the time the woman sat opposite him, stroking a yellowish-grey cat that had jumped up onto her knee. The barking dog evidently belonged next door: he could occasionally hear it howling or yelping at something or other.

‘I don’t understand what you saying,’ she said when he had finished. ‘Why he want to visit me? We have not had contact in fifteen years. I am sorry, but I can’t help you a sniff.’

Her English was even worse than his, he noted. Perhaps she spoke Polish to Mr Ponczak, if there still was anybody of that name around. He didn’t seem to be at home at the moment, in any case.

Okay, Reinhart thought. That’s that, then.

He hadn’t been speaking the truth. Had she?

He had no way of knowing. As he sat there spinning his tale he had paid special attention to her reactions, but seen no sign that she was hiding or suspecting anything.

If only she weren’t so phlegmatic, he thought in irritation. Fat, sloppy people like this one never had any problem when it came to hiding something. He’d often thought about that in the past. All they needed to do was to sit gaping out into space, just like they always did.

When he came out into the street he recognized that that was an unfair generalization. Unfair and inappropriate. But what the hell, he’d only had one trump card with him over the Atlantic. One miserable little trump card: he’d played it and it hadn’t won him anything at all.

He plodded back to Bloomguard and the car.

‘How did it go?’ asked Bloomguard.

‘Nix, I’m afraid,’ said Reinhart.

He flopped down onto the passenger seat. ‘Can we go somewhere for a coffee? With caffeine.’

‘Of course,’ said Bloomguard, starting the engine. ‘Plan B?’

‘Plan B,’ said Reinhart with a sigh. ‘Four days, as we said, then we drop it. I’ll take as much time as I can cope with. And it’s definite that you can place people at my disposal?’

‘Of course,’ said Bloomguard enthusiastically. ‘You don’t need to sit here sleuthing on your own. We have plenty of resources in this village of ours – there’s a different wind blowing compared with fifteen years ago. Zero tolerance. I was a bit sceptical at first, I admit; but the fact is, it works.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ said Reinhart. ‘But I don’t want to feel like a tourist. And we need to work round the clock, or there’s no point.’

Bloomguard nodded.

‘You’ll get a car for your own use,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to the station and work out a timetable, and you can pick out the times you want to have. Then I’ll look after the rest. Okay, compadre?’

‘No problem,’ said Reinhart.

In fact he delayed his first shift until Sunday. Bloomguard made sure that there was a car with two plain-clothes police officers parked at the junction of 44th Street and Sixth Avenue out in Brooklyn from four o’clock on Saturday. Reinhart spent the afternoon and evening wandering around Lower Manhattan. Soho. Little Italy. Greenwich Village and Chinatown. He eventually ended up in Barnes & Noble. That was more or less inevitable. Sat reading. Drinking coffee and eating brownies, and listening to poetry readings. Bought five books. It was half past nine by the time he left and managed to catch the correct subway train to Columbus Circle. When he came up to street level he found it had started snowing.

I wonder what I’m doing here? he thought. There are over seven million people in this city. How can I imagine that I’ll ever find the right one? There must be better odds on my getting lost and disappearing than on discovering anything.

As he travelled up in the lift he reminded himself that it had in fact been
The Chief Inspector
who had convinced him he would be successful in his quest, but that wasn’t much of a consolation. Not for the moment, at least, in the loneliness of Saturday evening

When he phoned and woke Winnifred up for the second night in succession, she told him it was snowing in Maardam as well.

Moreno met Marianne Kodesca for lunch at the Rote Moor. According to Inspector Rooth the Rote Moor was very much a place for women between the ages of thirty-four-and-a-half and forty-six, who lived on carrots and bean shoots, read
Athena
and had kicked one or more men onto the rubbish dump. Moreno had never set foot inside there, and was quite sure that Rooth hadn’t either.

Fru Kodesca (she had remarried a year ago, to an architect) could only spare forty-five minutes. She had an important meeting. Had nothing to say about her ex-husband.

She had said as much already on the telephone.

They ate Sallad della Piranesi, drank mineral water with a dash of lime, and had a good view of the Market Square, which was covered in snow for the first time since Moreno could remember.

‘Pieter Clausen?’ she said when she thought the preliminaries were over and done with. ‘Can you tell me a bit about him? We need a rather more clear psychological portrait of him, as it were.’

‘Why, has he done something?’ asked Marianne Kodesca, her eyebrows raised to her hairline. ‘Why is he wanted by the police? You really must fill me in.’

She adjusted her rust-red shawl so that the designer label was a little more obvious.

‘It’s not completely clarified as yet,’ said Moreno.

‘Really? But you must know why you want him, surely?’

‘He’s disappeared.’

‘Has something happened to him?’

Moreno put down her knife and fork and wiped her mouth with her napkin.

‘We have certain suspicions about him.’

‘Suspicions?’

‘Yes.’

‘What kind of suspicions?’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t go into details about that.’

‘He’s never displayed any of those kind of tendencies.’

‘What kind of tendencies?’

‘Criminal. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’

‘Do you still meet at all?’ asked Moreno.

Kodesca leaned back and looked at Moreno with a smile that seemed to have been drawn with a pair of compasses on a refrigerator door. She must have toothache, Moreno thought. I don’t like her. I must be careful not to say anything stupid.

‘No, we don’t meet at all.’

‘When did you see him last?’

‘See?’

‘Meet, then. Exchange words . . . However you’d like to put it.’

Fru Kodesca breathed in a cubic metre of air through her nostrils, and thought that one over.

‘August,’ she said, blowing out the air. ‘I haven’t seen him since August.’

Moreno made a note. Not because she needed to, just to tame her aggressions.

‘How would you describe him?’

‘I’d rather not describe him. What are you after?’

‘A rather more detailed picture, that’s all,’ said Moreno. ‘A few more general characteristics, that kind of thing.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as what could happen if he became violent, for instance.’

‘Violent?’

She fished the word up at the end of a very long line, from a different social class.

‘Yes. Did he ever hit you?’

‘Hit me?’

The same long line.

‘If you’d rather come to the police station to conduct this conversation, that’s fine by me,’ said Moreno in a friendly tone. ‘Maybe this isn’t the right kind of milieu?’

‘Hmm,’ said Kodesca. ‘Sorry, I was gobsmacked, pure and simple. What do you take us for? I can imagine Pieter being subjected to something, but that he himself would . . . No, that’s out of the question. Totally out of the question. You can write that down in your little book. Was there anything else?’

‘Do you know if he’d had any new relationships since you divorced?’

‘No,’ said Kodesca, looking out of the window. ‘That’s not my problem any more.’

‘I understand,’ said Moreno. ‘So you have no idea where he might have gone? It’s ten days since he disappeared . . . He hasn’t been in touch with you at all?’

A disapproving wrinkle appeared between fru Kodesca’s right nostril and the corner of her mouth, and made her look five years older at a stroke.

‘I’ve already told you that we have absolutely no contact with each other any more. Have you problems in understanding?’

Yes, thought Moreno. I have problems in understanding how you managed to find yourself a new husband.

But then, perhaps she hadn’t seen Marianne Kodesca from her best side.

Half an hour later she met Jung in his office in the police station.

‘Liz Vrongel,’ said Jung. ‘Disappeared without trace.’

‘Her as well?’ said Moreno.

Jung nodded.

‘But twenty years ago. She was married to Keller for a year . . . Well, ten months if you want to be finicky . . . Then they divorced and she moved to Stamberg. A mixed-up devil, obviously. Took part in all kinds of protest movements, and was kicked out of Greenpeace after she bit a police officer in the face. Joined various sects and is said to have gone to California at the beginning of the eighties. After that the trail goes cold. I don’t know if there’s any point in looking for her.’

Moreno sighed.

‘Presumably not,’ she said. ‘We can start thinking about celebrating Christmas instead and hope Reinhart comes home with something from New York.’

‘Do you think that’s likely?’

‘Not very,’ said Moreno. ‘To be honest.’

‘And what was the former fru Clausen like?’

Moreno wondered how best to put it.

‘A different type from the former fru Keller at any rate,’ she said. ‘Discreet bourgeois fascism, more or less. And not all that discreet, in fact, come to think of it. But she had nothing to offer us, and I don’t think I want to talk to her again.’

‘Rich bitch?’ said Jung.

‘You could say that,’ said Moreno.

Jung checked the time.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘don’t you think we can allow ourselves to go home now? Maureen has started going on about how I ought to get a new job. I’m beginning to agree with her.’

‘What would you become if you did?’ asked Moreno.

‘I don’t really know,’ said Jung, pulling thoughtfully at his lower lip. ‘A cinema usher sounds attractive.’

‘Cinema usher?’

‘Yes. One of those people who show customers to their seats with a little torch, and sell goodies in the intervals.’

‘They don’t exist any more,’ said Moreno.

‘That’s a pity,’ said Jung.

Chief Inspector Reinhart drove himself out to 44th Street in Brooklyn on the Sunday morning. He arrived exactly half an hour late: the night shift had just packed up, but the brown house numbered 602 was not unguarded. Bloomguard had decided to post an extra car there in addition to Reinhart’s – in view of his European colleague’s knowledge of the city that was no doubt a good move.

He parked between 554 and 556, where there was a space, got into the car on the other side of the street – a 3-metre-long Oldsmobile – and greeted the police officer inside it.

Sergeant Pavarotti was small and thin and looked unhappy. Reinhart didn’t know if that was because of his name, or if there was some other reason behind it.

Having to spend a whole Sunday sitting in an old car in Brooklyn, for instance.

‘I’ve considered changing my name lots of times,’ said Pavarotti. ‘I sometimes get to a point where I’d much rather have been called Mussolini. I sing worse than a donkey. How are things in Europe?’

Reinhart explained the situation, then asked if Pavarotti had any special interests.

Baseball and action films, evidently. Reinhart stayed with him for another five minutes, then returned to his own car. He had asked Bloomguard if it wouldn’t look suspicious, sitting behind the wheel of a stationary car for hours on end, but Bloomguard had merely given him a knowing smile and shaken his head.

‘People never look out of the window in the houses out there,’ he had explained. ‘Besides, there are always lots of men sitting alone in their cars – go for a walk round and see for yourself.’

A little later on Reinhart actually did go for a walk around the block, and discovered that it really was true. Oversized cars stood parked on either side of the street, and in every fifth or sixth sat a man chewing gum or smoking. Or digging into a packet of crisps. Most of them were wearing dark glasses, despite the fact that the sun seemed to be further away than the Middle Ages. What’s going on? Reinhart wondered.

It was cold as well, certainly several degrees below freezing, and the same inhospitable wind as yesterday was blowing up from the river.

I don’t understand this society, Reinhart thought. What the hell do people do? What lies are they living that we haven’t discovered yet?

He told Pavarotti to go off for an hour and have a coffee: Pavarotti seemed to doubt if he ought to take an order like that from this dodgy chief inspector, but in the end he did as he was bidden.

Reinhart clambered over the low stone wall surrounding Sunset Park and went to sit down on a bench. There was just as good a view of number 602 from there as from inside the car, and he didn’t think there was any risk of fru Ponczak recognizing him. In his woolly hat, long scarf and old military parka he looked just like any other tramp, or so he told himself: one of those drifters who couldn’t even afford a car to sit in while they were waiting for death to catch up with them.