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“Give it to me!” Micha said breathlessly. “A
“One thing at a time,” A
“Are you calling it a day, study-wise?” Linda asked, peeling onions, wiping her hands on a blue apron. A
Linda took a corner of the apron and wiped away a tear that might have come from peeling onions. “Okay, honey, I hope not too late.”
“Wait,” Magnus said. She was half out the door already. “Here. If you stay for di
He held a bottle of red wine in his outstretched hand, a bottle of good wine, wine so old it was about to turn to vinegar. Valuable wine. A
“Talk to him,” he said. “Maybe it’s easier with a good bottle of wine. Talk to him about my offer. At least try.”
And A
For some reason, she’d thought that everything would be the way it was the first time: that Abel and Micha would be sitting in the back of the café, in the stern of the glass ship; that there would be exactly one empty chair at their table; and that she would walk toward it, a vague, light happiness filling her body. But, of course, nothing is ever as it was the first time. The café was packed. There were even people seated at tables on the terrace, outside in the cold wind, with the collars of their jackets turned up and their hands around cups of tea and coffee in search of a little warmth. And when A
She’d heard shreds of sentences as she’d passed people on her bike—bloody, raw shreds of words that were full of pleasant shivers. She knew why these people were here: to be near the place it had happened. All these people had heard the news. One group came in from the beach across the way, from the other side of the mouth of the little river, and A
A
“Because we always come here, that’s why,” Micha said, but Abel shook his head. “That’s not the only reason,” he said in a low voice. “There’s something else. You … you might think it’s stupid, but … but I wanted to see who’d be here. This is the place where all rumors converge … I bet he’s here, too, because he’s also interested in the rumors.”
“Who?” A
“The murderer,” Abel said, looking out over the sea. They had arrived at the very end of the pier, where a green light attached to a post was guiding the ships home, a light with neither a lighthouse nor a lighthouse keeper attached to it. “They will blame me for this, I’m sure,” Abel said. “And there’s only one way to convince them that it wasn’t me … a better way than phoning bus drivers and train conductors. If I find the real murderer, if I present that murderer to them on a silver tray … understand? Then they will have to believe me. Then they will have to let me go.”
“But nobody’s holding you,” A
He shook his head. “Not yet.” Damocles, she thought, had returned.
He put both arms onto the white metal rail and looked down onto the ice, where countless traces of life had marked the thin layer of snow: footprints of bald coots and ducks, swans and mergansers. And somewhere on the ice, A
“It must be someone who’s somehow co
A
He turned to her abruptly. The ice in his eyes gleamed in the sunshine. “No,” he said. “Don’t do that. Promise me you’ll keep out of this mess. This isn’t a game or a history test. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Thanks,” A
Abel put his hands on her shoulders and looked at her even more intensely, as if he wanted to burn a hole into her. “They’re dead, A
“I do.” She looked down at her feet.
“If you two could stop fighting,” Micha said, “it would be good, because right now we’re supposed to wake the dog with the flute, remember?” She had been busy climbing on the railing but now stood next to them, her cheeks reddened, her pigtails half-undone. Nothing about her suggested the word death.
So A
“I du
Abel nodded; leaned against the green, painted post, on which the light for the ships was attached like a traffic light; and started to roll a cigarette. “We should see if we can do something about that dog,” he said. “He isn’t well. His wounds are deep, and his sleep is even deeper. He had almost given up when they pulled him out of the water …”
A
She put the cool silver to her lips and asked the flute for a simple melody, one without ornamentation, a melody whose text you could read in the air … if you knew it:
There’s a concert hall in Vie
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They’ve been sentenced to death by the blues
She heard Abel humming next to her, and she was pretty sure she’d heard the words before; it was a song from one of Linda’s old LPs, and it was probably on one of Michelle’s cassettes, too … the cryptic, dark poetry of an old Canadian.