The Book of Murder Read online

  “It took almost a month, during which time the first conciliation meeting with Luciana took place. The solicitor attended alone as I wanted nothing to do with it. All I cared about was seeing Pauli. At last the order arrived, specifying my visitation schedule. My first day was a Thursday afternoon at five. I telephoned a little before the hour but no one answered. I assumed it was another of Mercedes’s tricks to irk me. I went to the house that had once been my home and rang the doorbell, but no one came. I tried my key but Mercedes had had the lock changed. I saw a light at one of the windows and called out my daughter’s name. No answer. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I went to get a locksmith and the man managed to force open the door. I rushed upstairs and saw Mercedes’s inert body on the bed, a bottle of pills on the bedside table. I didn’t stop to go to her. I was calling Pauli’s name, but there was a deathly silence in the house. She wasn’t in her bedroom or the playroom. Then I saw the light in the bathroom. I went in and drew the shower curtain. Pauli was there, submerged in the bath, white, motionless, her hair floating around her face like seaweed. She’d drowned in twelve inches of water. She could have been dead for hours. I snatched her out of the water. She was cold and slippery. The clothes she was going to wear on her outing with me lay folded on a chair. From somewhere very far away I heard the locksmith shouting: Mercedes was alive and the man was saying we should call an ambulance.”

  “So what had happened? You don’t think she…”

  “According to her statement she started drinking—a couple of glasses of brandy—while she was running Pauli’s bath. She left her in the bath and went to lie down for a while. She said she’d had an exhausting day and fell asleep for a little over an hour. When she woke up she couldn’t hear any sounds of splashing so she rushed to the bathroom. She found her as I did, drowned in the bath. She didn’t try to pull her out. She said she just wanted to kill herself when she saw her like that. She couldn’t stand the thought that it was her fault. So she went back to the bedroom and swallowed all the sleeping pills in the bottle. But there weren’t that many, at least not enough to kill her. And because Mercedes knew when I’d be arriving for my visit, she could count on me finding her in time. And that’s what happened. They pumped her stomach and she was fine.”

  “But there must have been an investigation. Or did they accept her story?”

  “There was an investigation and they believed her story. In the forensic analysis they found that Pauli had a haematoma on the back of her head. According to their reconstruction of events, Pauli had tried to get out of the bath on her own. She must have slipped and banged her head, losing consciousness before sliding under the water. Maybe she cried out as she fell but if you accepted that Mercedes was asleep, you could also accept that Pauli’s cry didn’t wake her. The way in which water had filled the lungs was compatible with Pauli’s having lost consciousness beforehand.”

  “But you accused her?”

  Kloster was silent for a moment, as if my question came from a distant dimension, or was in a foreign Ianguage. He looked at me as if I belonged to a different species.

  “No. When you hold your dead child in your arms, everything changes. And I’d already seen what I could expect from the justice system. But I knew who the real culprit was. And the laws of men would never touch her. During that time I felt as if I weren’t part of the human race. Some time before, for my novel on the Cainites, I’d looked at some ideas on the law, even dictating a few notes on it to Luciana. It was a purely intellectual exercise. First I looked at the ancient law of retaliation, the lex talionis, which is part of the Code of Hammurabi: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand. A law we tend to consider cruel and primitive. But if you look at it another way, it’s on a human scale, with an element of equivalence that’s merciful: it recognises the other as an equal, and limits retribution. Because in fact the first ratio of punishment in the Bible is the one laid down by God as a warning to anyone who would kill Cain—seven to one. Of course, this might be the proportion that God reserves for himself, in his absolute power. It’s always in the interests of the powers that be for punishment to be excessive, unforgettable. Above all, to act as a warning. But also, I wondered, given its source in the highest divinity, the ‘fount of all justice’, could there be something more here than simply the will to crush? Could there even be a kernel of reason in the disproportion? The will, perhaps, to distinguish between attacker and attacked? To ensure that they’re not equal when it comes to the harm done and that the aggressor suffers more than the victim? How would one mete out punishment if one were God? I’d made the notes almost as a game, to prepare for my novel. But now my daughter was dead and the words I’d dictated suddenly made no sense. Because any idea of justice, or reparation, looks forward to the notion of a future and a community of men. But I felt that something inside me was broken for ever. That I no longer belonged to any community or any future. That I stood, howling, outside humanity. When I went over the papers, I also came across the Bible Luciana had lent me and I remembered, as if it were part of another life, someone else’s life, that I had to attend a conciliation meeting because of the letter that had set everything in motion. I called my solicitor and dispensed with his services: as I told him, I wanted nothing more to do with human justice. I attended the meeting myself and returned the Bible to Luciana. The red bookmark was at that page because that’s where I had left it after dictating my notes to her. It wasn’t meant as a threat. I just wanted her to know. Strange, everything that happened afterwards, that series of…of misfortunes, because the punishment I’d imagined for her was in principle very different.”

  He fell silent, as if he couldn’t continue, or had said something he might regret later.

  “But why punish Luciana for your daughter’s death? Wasn’t your wife to blame?”

  “You don’t understand. As I said, Mercedes and I had a pact. And until that time we had respected it. Have you ever played Go?” he asked suddenly.

  I shook my head.

  “Sometimes the game reaches a point at which players are condemned to repeating the same moves indefinitely—the Ko position. Neither player can break the stalemate because if they make any other kind of move they lose the game immediately. That is what my days with Mercedes were like. We’d reached an equilibrium. A Ko position on which Pauli’s life depended. It was a question of time, until Pauli was grown. But Luciana’s letter destroyed everything.”

  “You said that you imagined a punishment for her. What was it?”

  “I just wanted her to remember. To remember, as I did, every day, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, that though she was alive my daughter was dead. I wanted her life to be stopped, as mine was, at that memory. It’s why I went to Villa Gesell that first summer. I knew she’d be there. I couldn’t bear the thought of her spending days in the sun while Pauli was for ever buried in the ground, in that little box where I’d had to leave her. I wanted Luciana to see me, day after day. This was my only plan for revenge. I never dreamed her boyfriend would be so stupid as to go for a swim that morning. I saw him disappear, from the promenade as I was leaving, but I just thought he’d swum out too far. I only found out he’d drowned when I went to have coffee as usual the next morning. I must say I was shocked by his death, but for a different reason. I’d always been an atheist, but I couldn’t help seeing symmetry, a sign from on high, in the coincidence: my daughter had drowned in the bath and that boy had also drowned, even though he was a lifeguard, as if a finger had pushed him under. And wasn’t the sea like a god’s bathtub? In an accidental but magical way—in the old sense of sympathetic magic—the primitive law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth had been observed. As she said to you, we now had one death each. But was this enough? Was the balance truly even? Suddenly the question I’d pondered in an abstract way a few months earlier was before me in real life. I decided to return to Buenos Aires to start a novel—the one I mentioned to you.
I’ve been writing it very slowly, with breaks, alongside all the others, for the past ten years. How would one mete out punishment if one were God? We are not gods, but in his own pages every writer is a god. I’ve devoted myself to writing this secret novel at night. Page by page, it’s my way of praying. But that’s all I’ve done, all I’ve ever really done these past years. I haven’t seen Luciana again.”

  “But she said she saw you at the cemetery the day of her parents’ funeral. Was it a coincidence that you were there that morning?”

  “I’m there every morning. She’d have seen me any other day: I visit my daughter’s grave on my daily walk. And Luciana was the one who saw me. I didn’t find out about her parents’ death until later, when I received that letter, the letter in which she asked me to forgive her. She begged and pleaded, as if I were behind all her misfortunes. Or had the power to prevent them. From the construction of her sentences, I realised that she was already slightly disturbed. Even so, when her brother was murdered, she managed to get the police to believe her. She wanted to blame his murder on me as well. That policeman, Ramoneda, came to see me. He was very apologetic but said he had to follow up every lead, as the case had acquired great importance because of the scandal of the convicts’ being let out to commit robberies. He wanted to know if I’d corresponded with any of the inmates. I explained that, because my novels generally dealt with death and murder, people often thought of them as crime fiction and they were popular with prisoners. I said that over the years I’d received letters from inmates of various prisons, sometimes pointing out mistakes in my books and suggesting their own stories as subjects for future novels. He asked to see the letters so I gave him those I’d kept. He talked about Truman Capote while he was looking at them. He was proud to have read In Cold Blood and be discussing it with me. He showed me the rather bizarre anonymous letters. They read like something written by a scorned mistress. He asked if, as a writer, I could infer anything about the author, male or female. I never dreamed he might be setting a trap, or suspected me of having written them. Up until that moment I thought he simply wanted to know about my correspondence with inmates of that prison. I told him the little I could tell about the person who’d written the letter and that’s when he mentioned Luciana. He’d already made inquiries at her psychiatric clinic and apologised for bringing up something so personal from the distant past. I showed him her letter. He compared the handwriting to that of the anonymous letters. She seemed to be more of a suspect than me. He said he was used to receiving confessions in the most unexpected and strange ways. He mentioned The Tell-Tale Heart by Poe. I think he wanted to show me that he too had read a few books. We chatted for a while about crime writers and he looked around my library. I realised he was hoping I’d give him one of my books, so I did and finally he left. It was the last I heard about both the investigation and Luciana, and I assumed that was the end of it. Until I got your call.”

  He went to the desk, where I’d left the magazine, and replaced it in the drawer. He lowered the window blind and motioned for me to follow him. We returned to his study in silence. The little stack of papers was still on the table, but I didn’t move to pick them up.

  “So is there anything else you’d like to ask?”

  I had lots more questions but I knew he’d be reluctant to answer any of them. I decided to try anyway.

  “She says here that you loathed anything to do with public exposure. I remember myself how you were almost invisible for years. But then suddenly all that changed.”

  Kloster nodded, as if he too had found it surprising.

  “After Pauli died I thought I was going to lose my mind. And I would have if I’d stayed shut up in this house. Interviews, conferences, invitations, they all forced me to shave, get dressed, go out, remember who I once was; to think and act like a normal person. They were my only link with the world out there, where life went on. I did it all because I knew that as soon as I got back here I’d be alone again with just one thought. They were my outings to normality, my way of keeping sane. I was playing a part, of course, but when you’ve lost all will to exist, to persist, playing a part can be the only defence against madness.”

  He indicated for me to follow him. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something else I’d like to show you.”

  We made our way to the corridor where I’d seen the first photograph in the gloom. He flicked the switch and the corridor was lit up. The walls were lined with photos of all sizes, hung very close together, like a ghastly collage, showing the daughter’s image repeated in a multitude of poses. As we walked down the corridor Kloster said simply: “I loved taking photos of her. These are the only ones I managed to save.”

  He opened a door and we entered a small room. The walls were bare and the only furniture was a chair in one corner and a metal filing cabinet with a small oblong machine on top. When Kloster turned off the light in the corridor I realised it was a projector. The wall facing us was lit up, there was a click and Kloster’s daughter appeared, miraculously returned to life. She was crouching in the distance in what looked like a park or garden. She stood up and ran towards the camera, holding a little bunch of flowers. She headed towards us, happy and excited, and as she held out the flowers her childish voice rang out: “These are for you, Daddy.” Someone stretched out a hand to take the flowers and she ran back into the garden. The writer had somehow arranged it so that the scene was on a loop and the child ran towards and away from us endlessly, with the same bunch of flowers, the words sounding more eerie and sinister every time: These are for you,Daddy. I looked round and saw Kloster’s face, partially illuminated by the glare from the wall. He stood rigid, rapt as he watched, eyes fixed and stony like those of a dead man, with only a finger moving mechanically to press the button on the projector.

  “How old was she here?” I asked. Really I just wanted it to stop, to escape from this crypt.

  “Four,” said Kloster. “It’s my last image of her.”

  He turned off the projector and switched on the light. We returned to the library and I felt as if I were re-emerging into fresh air.

  “I spent the first few months after her death shut up in that room. I also started writing my novel in there. I was afraid of forgetting her.”

  Once again we stood facing each other in the middle of the library. He watched me as I put on my coat, gathered up the printed sheets and slipped them back in the folder.

  “You haven’t told me what you intend to do with this. Or do you still believe her rather than me?”

  “From what you’ve said,” I replied hesitantly, “Luciana has no reason to fear any further misfortunes. The series of deaths, so close to her, must have been chance, a run of extremely bad luck. But doesn’t it strike you as unusual?”

  “Not really. If you toss a coin in the air ten times it’s quite likely you’ll get heads or tails three or four times in a row. Luciana could have got tails several times in succession over the past few years. Misfortunes, like gifts, are not fairly distributed. And chance, in the long term, may be a superior way of meting out punishments. That is what Conrad believed: “It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune—the ally of patient Time—that holds an even and scrupulous balance.” But isn’t it paradoxical that I should have to remind you that chance exists? Didn’t you write a novel called The Random Men? Weren’t you the fervent defender of Perec’s building and Calvino’s pack of cards? Weren’t you proud to oppose old–fashioned causality in fiction, the stale determinism of action-reaction? And now suddenly you come here in search of the First Cause, of Laplace’s demon, of an unambiguous explanation of the kind you so despised. You wrote an entire novel about chance, but you obviously never bothered to toss a coin in the air. You don’t know that chance has its forms and runs as well.”

  I said nothing for a moment, holding Kloster’s contemptuous gaze. So not only had he read my unfortunate article but he’d remembered it word for word. Wasn’t he showing me, despit
e himself, unwittingly, his bitter, vindictive nature? But then I too remembered every word of bad reviews and could have repeated a few verbatim. And if it didn’t make me a criminal, how could I use it against Kloster? I felt I had to say something.

  “True, I find classical causality in literature boring, but I can distinguish between my literary views and reality. And I expect that if four of my closest relatives died I too would find it alarming and would start looking for other explanations.”

  “Can you really? Distinguish between your fiction and reality, I mean. For good or ill, that was what I found hardest when I began my novel. “Fiction competes with life,” said Henry James, and it’s true. But if fiction is life, if fiction creates life, it can also create death. I was a corpse after I buried Pauli. And though a corpse can’t aspire to create life, it can still create death.”

  “What do you mean? That there are deaths in your novel too?”

  “There is nothing but deaths.”

  “But aren’t you worried that it’ll start to seem…unbelievable?” I felt silly, and rather contemptible: Kloster’s commitment to verisimilitude in his novels was something I myself had made fun of.

  “You don’t understand. You can’t. It’s enough that I believe it. It’s not for publication. It’s not intended to convince anyone. Let’s just say it’s a personal declaration of faith.”

  “But in your novel,” I insisted, “do you uphold the hypothesis of chance?”

  “No, I don’t. What I’m saying is that you should. Or at least consider it. But I suppose there could be other explanations, for a writer with enough imagination. Even a policeman like Ramoneda was able to conceive of another possibility.”