The Dogs Of Riga Part 22

"Then I can't help you any more. You can't come back here either."

Wallander could see she was right. This was his only chance of meeting Baiba Liepa again. If it didn't work, he had no choice but to find his way to the Swedish Emba.s.sy and get help in fleeing the country.

"Do you know where the Swedish Emba.s.sy is in Riga?"

She thought for a moment before answering. "I don't even know if Sweden has an emba.s.sy here," she said.

"There must be a consulate, though?"

"I don't know where."

"It must be in the telephone directory. Write down the Latvian for Swedish Emba.s.sy and Swedish Consulate. There must be a telephone directory in a restaurant. Write the Latvian for telephone directory as well."

She wrote down what he was asking for on a sheet of paper torn out of one of the girl's exercise books, and taught him the correct p.r.o.nunciation for the words.

Two hours later he said goodbye to Vera and her family, and set off. She had given him one of her father's old shirts and a scarf, so that he could change his appearance a bit more. He had no idea if he would ever see them again, and he was already beginning to miss them.

As he walked to the bus stop, he saw the dead cat, lying at his feet like an ominous symbol of what was to come.

When he was on the bus he suddenly had the feeling once again that he was being watched already. There were not many pa.s.sengers going into town in the evening, and he had sat right at the rear of the bus so that he could see everybody's back in front of him. He looked now and then through the filthy back window, but couldn't see a car following them.

Nevertheless, his instinct made him anxious. He couldn't shrug off the feeling that they were tailing him. He tried to work out what to do. He had about a quarter of an hour in which to make up his mind. Where should he get off? How should he go about shaking off the shadows? It seemed an impossible situation, but he suddenly had an idea that was bold enough to have a slight chance of succeeding. He a.s.sumed it wasn't just him they were keeping an eye on. It must be at least as important for them to follow him until he met up with Baiba Liepa, and then to wait for the moment when they could be certain of finding the major's testimony.

He ignored the instructions given him by Vera, and got off the bus outside the Latvia Hotel. Without looking round, he strode into the hotel, marched up to the reception desk, and asked if they had a room for one or possibly two nights. He spoke clearly in English, and when the receptionist said they did indeed have a room, he produced his German pa.s.sport and signed himself in as Gottfried Hegel. He explained that his luggage would be arriving later, and then, in as loud a voice as he dared use without giving the impression he was purposely setting a false trail, he asked to be woken up a few minutes before midnight as he was expecting an important telephone call. He hoped this would give him a start of four hours. As he didn't have any luggage, he accepted the key himself and walked over to the lift. He had been given a room on the fourth floor, and now it was essential for him to act decisively without any hesitation. He tried to remember from his first visit where the back staircase was, and when he got out of the lift on the fourth floor he knew straight away where to go. He went down into the gloom of back staircase and hoped they hadn't had time to put guards round the whole hotel. He went right down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and found his way to the door that opened out on to the rear of the hotel. Just for a moment he was afraid it might not be possible to open the door without a key, but he was lucky. The key was in the lock. He stepped out into the murky back street, stood absolutely still for couple of seconds and looked around. It was deserted, and he couldn't hear any hurried footsteps. He kept close to the walls, turned off into side streets, and didn't stop running until he was at least three blocks from the hotel. He was out of breath by then and withdrew into a doorway while he got his breath back to see if he was being followed. He tried to imagine how, at this very moment in some other part of the city, Baiba Liepa was also trying to shake off the dogs that one of the colonels had put on her tail. He had no doubt she would succeed, because her tutor had been one of the best, the major himself.

He managed to find his way to St Gertrude's church just before 10 p.m. There was no light coming from the church's enormous windows, and he found a nearby yard where he could wait unseen. Somewhere inside the building he could hear people quarrelling, a long, relentless flood of excited words culminating in a loud noise, a scream and then silence. He stamped his feet in order to keep warm, and tried to remember what date it was. From time to time a car drove past in the street outside, and he half expected one of them to stop and for the pa.s.sengers to find him hiding among the dustbins.

The feeling that they already knew where he was kept returning, and he wondered if his attempt to break free by registering at the Latvia Hotel had failed. Had he made a mistake in a.s.suming that Vera wasn't in the pay of the colonels? Perhaps they were waiting for him in the shadows of the churchyard, waiting for the moment when the major's testimony would be revealed? He pushed the thought away. His only alternative would be to flee to the Swedish Emba.s.sy, and he knew he couldn't do that.

The clock in the church tower struck 10 p.m. He emerged from the yard, looked carefully for any sign of life in the street, and hurried over to the little iron gate. Although he opened it extremely carefully, there was a slight squeaking noise. A few street lamps cast a faint glow over the churchyard wall. He stood absolutely still, listening. Not a sound. He cautiously walked along the path to the side door he had used last time to leave the church with Baiba. Once again he had the feeling he was being watched, that his pursuers were somewhere ahead of him, but he continued as far as the church wall, then settled down to wait.

Without a sound, Baiba Liepa appeared by his side, as if she had materialised out of the darkness. He gave a start when he saw her. She whispered something he didn't catch, then led him quickly through the door that was standing ajar, and he realised she had been inside the church, waiting for him. She locked the door with the enormous key, and went over to the altar. It was very dark inside the church, and she led him by the hand as if he were blind, he couldn't understand how she could find her way through the darkness. Behind the sacristy was a windowless storeroom, and a paraffin lamp was standing on a table. That was where she had been waiting for him, her fur coat was lying over a chair, and he was surprised and touched to note that she had placed a photograph of the major next to the lamp. There was also a thermos flask, some apples and a hunk of bread. It was as if she had invited him to the last supper, and he wondered how long it would be before the colonels tracked them down. He wondered about her relationship with the church, whether she had a G.o.d unlike her late husband, and he realised that he knew just as little about her as he once had about her husband.

When they were safely inside the room behind the sacristy, she put her arms round him and hugged him tightly. He could feel she was crying, and that her fury was so great, her hands were like iron claws digging into his back.

"They killed Inese," she whispered. "They killed all of them. I thought you were dead as well. I thought it was all over, and then Vera contacted me."

"It was terrible," Wallander said. "But we mustn't think about that now."

She stared at him in astonishment. "We must always think about that," she said. "If we forget that, we forget we are human."

"I didn't mean that we should forget it," he explained. "I just meant that we have to move on. Mourning prevents us from acting."

She flopped down onto a chair, and he could see she was haggard from pain and exhaustion. He wondered how much longer she would be able to keep going.

The night they spent in the church became the point in Kurt Wallander's life when he felt he had penetrated to the very centre of his own existence. He had never previously looked at his life from an existential point of view. It was possible that at moments of deep depression - when he had seen the body of someone murdered, a child killed in a traffic accident, or a desperate suicide case - he might have been struck by the thought that life is so very short when death strikes. One lives for such a short time, but will be dead forever. But he had become adept at brushing aside such thoughts. He tried to regard life as mainly a practical business, and he doubted his ability to enrich his existence by adjusting his life in accordance with any particular philosophy. Nor had he ever worried about the particular span of time that fate had ordained he should live. One was born at such and such a time, and one died at such and such a time: that was about as far as he had ever got when it came to contemplating his earthly existence. The night he spent with Baiba Liepa in the freezing cold church made him look deeper into himself than he had ever done before. He realised that the world at large bore very little resemblance to Sweden, and that his own problems seemed insignificant compared with the savagery that was characteristic of Baiba Liepa's life. It was as if it was only now he could accept as fact the ma.s.sacre in which Inese had died, only now that it became real. The colonels did exist, Sergeant Zids had fired a murderous volley from a real weapon, bullets that could split open hearts and in a fraction of a second create an abandoned universe. He wondered about how intolerable it must be, always to be afraid. The age of fear, he thought: that is my age, and I have never understood that before, even though I am into my middle years.

She said they were safe in the church, as safe as they could ever be. The vicar had been a close friend of Karlis Liepa, and hadn't hesitated to provide Baiba with a hiding place when she had asked for his help. Wallander told her about his instinctive feeling that they had already tracked him down, and were waiting somewhere in the shadows.

"Why should they wait?" Baiba objected. "For people like that there is no such thing as waiting when it comes to arresting and punishing those who threaten their existence."

Wallander thought she could well be right. At the same time, he was certain the most important thing was the major's testimony: what frightened them was the evidence the major had left behind, not a widow and, as far as they were concerned, a harmless Swedish police officer who had set out on his own private vendetta.

Something else occurred to him. It was so astounding that he decided not to say anything about it to Baiba yet. It had suddenly dawned on him that there could be another reason why their shadows had not revealed themselves and simply arrested them and carted them off to the fortified police headquarters. The more he thought about it during the long night in the church, the more plausible it became. But he said nothing, mainly in order not to subject Baiba to any more strain than was absolutely necessary.

He recognised that her despondency was as much due to the fact that she couldn't understand where Karlis had hidden his testimony as to her shock at the death of Inese and her other friends. She had tried everything she could think of, attempted to put herself inside her husband's mind, but still she hadn't found the answer. She had removed tiles in the bathroom and ripped the upholstery off their furniture, but found nothing except dust and the bones of dead mice.

Wallander tried to help her. They sat opposite each other across the table, she poured out tea, and the light from the paraffin lamp transformed the gloomy room into a warm, intimate room. Wallander would have liked most of all to hug her and share her sorrow, and again he considered the possibility of taking her with him to Sweden, but he knew she wouldn't be able to contemplate that, not yet in any case. She would rather die than abandon hope of finding the testimony her husband must have left behind.

At the same time, however, he also considered the third possibility - the reason why the shadows were not moving in to arrest them. If his suspicions were correct, and he was becoming increasingly convinced they might well be, there was not just an enemy lurking in the shadows, but also the enemy's enemy who was actually standing guard over them. The condor and the lapwing. He still didn't know which of the colonels had which plumage, but perhaps the lapwing was aware of the condor, and wanted to protect its intended prey?

The night in the church was like a journey to an unknown continent, where they would try to find something but didn't know what they were looking for. A brown paper parcel? A suitcase? Wallander was convinced the major was a wise man who knew that a hiding place was useless if it was too cleverly concealed. In order to break into the major's way of thinking, however, he would have to find out more about Baiba Liepa. He asked questions he didn't want to ask, but she insisted that he did so, begging him not to spare her feelings.

With her help he explored their lives in intimate detail. Occasionally they would come to a point where he thought they had cracked it, but then it would transpire that Baiba had already been down that trail and found it was cold. By 4.30 a.m. he was on the point of giving up. He looked wearily into her exhausted face.

"What else is there?" he asked. "What else is there we can do? A hiding place must exist somewhere, must be embodied in some kind of s.p.a.ce. A motionless s.p.a.ce, waterproof, fireproof, theft-proof. Where else is there?"

He forced himself to go on. "Is there a cellar in your block of flats?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"We've already talked about the attic. We've been over every inch of the flat. Your sister's summer cottage. His father's house in Ventspils. Think, Baiba. There must be another possibility."

He could see she was close to breaking point.

"No," she said, "there is nowhere else."

"It doesn't need to be indoors. You said you sometimes used to drive out to the coast. Is there a rock you used to sit on? Where did you pitch your tent?"

"I've told you all that already. I know Karlis would never have hidden anything there."

"Did you really always pitch your tent at exactly the same spot? For eight summers in a row? Maybe you chose a different site on one occasion?"

"We both enjoyed the pleasure of returning to the same place."

She wanted to go on, but he was driving her backwards all the time. It seemed to him the major would never have chosen a place randomly. Wherever it was, it had to be part of their joint past.

He started all over again. The lamp was beginning to run out of paraffin, but Baiba found a church candle. Then they set out on yet another journey through the life she and the major had shared. Wallander was afraid Baiba would collapse with exhaustion, wondered when she had last had any sleep, and tried to cheer her up by trying to appear optimistic, even though he wasn't optimistic at all. He started with the flat they had shared. In spite of everything, was there any possibility at all that she might have overlooked something? After all, a house consists of innumerable cavities.

He dragged her through room after room, and in the end she was so tired she was yelling out her answers.

"There is nowhere!" she screamed. "We had a home, and apart from the summers, that's where we lived. During the day I was at the university, and Karlis went to police headquarters. There is no testimony. Karlis must have thought he was immortal."

Wallander understood that her anger was also directed at her husband. It was a lament that reminded him of the previous year when a Somali refugee had been brutally murdered, and Martinsson had tried to soothe the desperate widow. We are living in the age of the widow, he thought. Our homes are the dwellings of fear and widows ...

He broke off. Baiba could see that he had hit upon a new train of thought.

"What is it?" she whispered.

"Just a minute," he replied, "I've got to think."

Was it possible? He tested it from various angles, and tried to discard it as a pointless exercise. But he couldn't shake it off.

"I'm going to ask you a question," he said slowly, "and I want you to answer straight away, without thinking. Answer without hesitation. If you do start thinking, it's possible your answer might be wrong."

She stared intently at him in the flickering candlelight.

"Is it possible that Karlis might have chosen the most unthinkable of all hiding places?" he asked. "Inside police headquarters?"

He could see a glint come into her eye.

"Yes," she said without hesitation. "He might well have done."

"Why?"

"Karlis was like that. It would fit with his character."

"Where?"

"I don't know."

"His own office is a possibility. Did he ever talk to you about the police headquarters?"

"He hated it. Like a prison. It was a prison."

"Think hard, Baiba. Was there any room in particular he talked about? Somewhere that meant something special to him? That he hated more than any other room? Or somewhere he even liked?"

"The interrogation rooms made him feel sick."

"It's not possible to hide anything there."

"He hated the colonels' offices."

"He couldn't have hidden anything there, either."

She was thinking so hard that she closed her eyes. When she returned from her thoughts and reopened her eyes, she had found the answer.

"Karlis often used to talk about somewhere he called 'The Evil Room'," she said. "He used to say that room contained all the doc.u.ments describing the injustices that afflicted our country. That's where he's hidden his testimony of course - in the midst of the memories of all those who have suffered so agonisingly and so long. He's deposited his papers somewhere in the police headquarters archives."

Wallander looked at her. There was no sign of her former exhaustion.

"Yes," he said. "I think you're right. He's chosen a hiding place hidden inside a hiding place. He's chosen the Chinese puzzle. But how has he coded his testimony so that only you would be able to find it?"

She suddenly started laughing and crying at the same time.

"I know," she sobbed. "Now I can see the way he did it. When we first met, he used to perform card tricks for me. As a young man he had dreamt of becoming an ornithologist, but he also dreamed of becoming a magician. I asked him to teach me some tricks. He refused. It became a sort of game between us. He did show me how to do one of his card tricks, the simplest of all. You split the pack up into two parts, one containing all the black cards and the other all the red cards. Then you ask somebody to pick a card, memorise it, and put it back into the pack. By switching the two halves, you make a red card appear among the black ones, and vice versa. He often used to say that the world was a grey sequence of misery, but I would light up his existence. That's why we always used to look for a red flower among all the blue ones or yellow ones, and we went out of our way to find a green house in among all the white ones. It was a sort of game we used to play in secret. That's what he must have been thinking of when he hid his testimony. I imagine the archives are full of files in different colours. Somewhere or other there'll be one that's different, different in colour or maybe even in size. That's where we'll find what we're looking for."

"The police archives must be enormous," Wallander said.

"Sometimes when he had to go away, he used to put the pack of cards on my pillow with the red card inserted among all the black ones," she said. "I've no doubt there is a file on me in the archives. That's where he'll have inserted his wild card."

It was 5.30 a.m. They hadn't quite reached their destination, but at least they now thought they knew where it was. Wallander stretched out his hand and touched her arm.

"I'd like you to come back to Sweden with me," he said in Swedish.

She stared uncomprehendingly at him.

"I said we'd better get some rest," he explained. "We've got to get away from here before dawn. We don't know where we should be heading, nor do we know how we're going to pull off the biggest trick of all - breaking into the police headquarters. That's why we've got to get some rest."

There was a blanket in a cupboard, rolled up under an old mitre. Baiba spread it out on the floor. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, they clung tightly to each other to keep warm.

"Get some sleep," he said. "I just need to rest. I'll stay awake. I'll wake you up when we have to leave."

He waited for a moment, but got no answer. She was asleep already.

CHAPTER 17.

They left the church shortly before 7 a.m.

Wallander had to help Baiba, who was so exhausted she was barely conscious. It was still dark when they set off. While she was asleep on the floor beside him, he had lain awake and thought about what they should do. He knew he was obliged to have a plan ready. Baiba would hardly be able to help him any more: she had burnt her bridges, and was now as much of an outlaw as he was. From now on he was also her saviour, and it seemed to him as he lay there in the darkness that he was no longer capable of making any plans, he'd run out of ideas.

However, the thought that there might be a third possibility kept him going. He could see that it was extremely risky to rely on any such thing. He might be wrong, in which case they would never be able to evade the major's murderer. But by the time they left the church, he was convinced there was no alternative.

It was a cold morning. They stood completely still in the darkness outside the door. Baiba was clinging on to his arm. Wallander detected an almost inaudible sound in the darkness, as if somebody had changed position and accidentally sc.r.a.ped a foot against the frozen gravel. Here they come, he thought. The dogs will be released now. But nothing happened, everything remained very still, and he led Baiba towards the gate in the churchyard wall. They emerged into the street, and now Wallander was certain their pursuers were close at hand. He thought he could see a shadowy movement in a doorway, and heard a slight creaking noise as the gate opened behind them for a second time. The dogs one of the colonels has on his leash are not especially skilful, he thought ironically. Unless they want us to know they have their eye on us all the time.

Baiba had been brought to her senses again by the cold of the morning. They paused at a street corner, and Wallander knew he had to think of something.

"Do you know anybody who has a car we could borrow?" he asked.

She thought for a while, then shook her head.

His fear suddenly made him feel annoyed. Why was everything so difficult in this country? How would he be able to help her when nothing was normal, nothing was like he was used to?

Then he remembered the car he had stolen the previous day. The chances of it still being where he had left it were small, but it seemed to him that he had nothing to lose by going to find out. They came to a cafe that had opened early, and he hustled Baiba inside, thinking how that would confuse the pack of dogs behind them. They would have to split into two groups, and they must be constantly on their guard in case he and Baiba had already found the proof. That thought put Wallander in a much better mood. There was a possibility he hadn't thought of before. He might be able to lay false trails for their pursuers. He hurried along the street. First of all he must establish if the car was still there.

It was still where he had left it. Without a pause for thought he climbed in behind the wheel, noticing again the smell of fish, joined the electric cables, this time remembering to put the gear lever in neutral first. He pulled up outside the cafe* and left the engine running while he went in to fetch Baiba. She was sitting at a table over a cup of tea, and it occurred to him that he was also hungry, but that would have to wait. She had already paid, and they went straight out to the car.

"How did you manage to get the car?" she asked.

"I'll explain another time," he said. "For the moment just tell me how to get out of Riga."

"Where are we going?"