The Accident Read online

  As the tide of this campaign swelled, it became normal to sling mud at people like Besfort Y. and all those who had worked for the demise of Yugoslavia. His girlfriend’s letter could be interpreted to show that this man, driven by a kind of perverse fury, would not rest in peace until this neighbouring state was crushed, and that his girlfriend, perhaps his inspiration, was just an ordinary hooker.

  Reluctant though they were to admit it, the Albanian intelligence officers suspected that there was an element of truth in what the Serbs said, especially about Besfort Y.’s girlfriend. In an attempt to prove the opposite, the interviewers did their rounds again, visiting the travel agencies, bars, hotel swimming pools and the small apartment where some of the dead woman’s cardboard boxes were still in the cellar.

  This did nothing to dispel the confusion in their minds. They began to genuinely suspect that there had been not one but two women whose identities they had mixed up.

  Or so they would have liked to believe, but to their despair they became more and more convinced that this young woman of such disturbing loveliness, whom they now knew so well from her letters, the testimonies of others and especially from private photographs, merely concealed within herself a second nature.

  5

  The appearance on the scene of the pianist Liza Blumberg, Rovena’s friend, revived the suspicion of murder.

  Any involvement of the Serbian secret service had been ruled out at an early stage. Conceivably, Besfort Y. had been eliminated as someone damaging to Yugoslavia, and with him his girlfriend, who happened to be present at the fatal moment. But it was against all logic for this to happen at such a late date. Besfort Y.’s disappearance would have been useful at the proper time but it served no one’s purpose now that the war was over.

  The rewriting of events required Besfort Y. not to be killed but discredited. His death would not do this, and would even make it more difficult. It is a known fact that it is easier to defame the living than the dead. Besfort Y. could be no exception, still less his girlfriend.

  What was new and surprising in the evidence of Lulu Blumb, as the pianist was known to her circle of friends, was that she linked Rovena’s death not to the Serbian secret service but to her partner. She said that recently there had been a tendency to disguise murders as mishaps, and she firmly believed that Besfort Y. had been determined to get rid of his girlfriend by means of an accident, even if he himself shared her fate.

  At this point every interviewer interrupted the pianist and, with unconcealed sarcasm, said that it was hard to accuse one of these two of murdering the other when they had somersaulted into the gully together, unless one imagined that Besfort Y., as they fell, had seized this moment of confusion to commit the crime!

  “Wait, don’t laugh too soon,” said Lulu Blumb. “I’m not so crazy as to think that.” Then she put forward her own version.

  She was convinced that Besfort Y. had killed his girlfriend. Rovena herself had told her that a few months previously, when they were in Albania and B.Y. had taken her to a shady motel, she had been frightened for her life. Lulu preferred not to go into the reasons why. The intelligence officers were in a better position to discover these. She was a pianist and knew nothing about the dark underside of politics. Besfort Y. had been a complex person. Rovena had once told Lulu about some mysterious phone calls that had come in the small hours. They were about some quarrel with Israel, or over Israel, she couldn’t quite remember. As she said, she had no wish to be involved in arguments of this kind. Even if she had been opposed to the bombing of Yugoslavia, this was not out of firm political conviction but simply a general aversion to war. Meanwhile, the discovery of the nature of the relationship between Rovena and the pianist damaged the latter’s credibility. It was not hard to see, and indeed Lulu herself did not hide it, that the two had been involved in a lengthy affair, which naturally made the pianist jealous of Besfort Y.

  This was the reason why, even after Blumberg’s intervention, the investigators paid little heed to her surmises, and especially not to the later episode, the most bewildering of all, in which the pianist first mentioned a large doll torn apart by dogs and then told them not to take any notice of what she said, because she was tired. The interviewers of course came back to the doll, but the pianist said that she had read about it in reports of the deaths, that she was really very tired, and that the only thing she could tell them was that she was sure it had not been Rovena St. but a totally different woman in the cab.

  Most reports underlined this last phrase, but the interviewers would have refused to believe her and might not have come back to this point, or even to the suspicion of murder in general, if they had not stumbled upon other evidence – this time from “his” side.

  This testimony, apparently the only one of its kind, came from an old college friend of Besfort Y., with whom he had had a conversation on the first floor of the Davidoff Bar in Tirana, one autumn day, a few months before his death.

  According to the witness, Besfort had been in a sombre mood. Asked what the matter was, he at first answered vaguely. He had problems. Later he came back of his own accord to his incomplete reply. He had got badly mixed up … with a young woman.

  Knowing the sort of man he was, the witness had not asked any more questions. Besfort, unusually for him, volunteered a little more. He thought he had made a mistake. The witness had the impression that Besfort considered any relationship with this woman to be a mistake. To his surprise, he used the word “fear”, though whether he was scared of the relationship or of the woman herself, the witness could not tell.

  After a long silence, he repeated that he had gone wrong somewhere. He offered no further explanation, but said that he would try to get out of this mess. He could do it. He became less and less coherent. He believed that when the time came – that is, at the right moment – he would know what to do.

  The tone of his conversation brooked no interruption. Facial expression? Manner? Cold. “Oh no, not like a murderer at all. I would just say cold. Pitiless.”

  The interviewers went back to the suspicions of Liza Blumb, and even to her almost delirious words about a doll found in the bushes, torn by dogs, but the pianist, erratic as ever, or stricken by remorse at having talked so much, refused to cooperate further.

  This did not stop the inquiry proceeding. In fact, now that the pianist was out of the picture, the intelligence officers unexpectedly became all the more keen. Not often had a suspicion of murder led them to examine such minute details to the point that they would forget what they were looking for.

  The analysts sifted through all the information, including the new material gathered during the latest research, with a dedication beyond the call of duty.

  They returned to the first two statements given by the Dutch couple and the driver of the Euromobil truck. Initially they seemed to agree (the taxi’s open doors, the bodies thrown out), but a careful examination showed this not to be the case. According to the couple, the bodies of the victims were still together as they fell through the air, their arms round each other’s necks, as if trying to hold tight to one another. But the truck driver insisted that the bodies were apart as they fell.

  But the evidence of Rovena’s friend Shpresa in Switzerland, who recalled cryptic remarks on the phone, also pointed towards murder.

  Yet this explanation was hardly tenable. Other stubborn facts, mysterious scattered phrases and cryptic remarks on the phone, according to the evidence of Rovena’s friend in Switzerland, roused suspicions of another kind.

  In a letter written less than a year previously, Rovena had said, “You seem so calm now. I preferred your old irritability, that short temper which brought me such unhappiness, to this terrifying reticence.”

  In another note, apparently written quite some time afterwards, she recalled a phone call of the previous evening: “What you said to me last night may have been superficially kind, but was essentially, I don’t know how to put it, frightening, destructive, as cold a
s outer space.”

  At about the same time she admitted to Shpresa that she was extremely unhappy.

  “Because of ‘him’?” asked her friend.

  “Yes,” she said, “but I can’t tell you on the phone. It’s very hard to explain. Perhaps impossible. I’ll try when we meet.”

  But they never met again, and two months later the accident happened.

  Asked by the intelligence officers whether she nevertheless had any particular suspicions, Shpresa replied only after a long silence. Of course she had partly worked it out, if only vaguely. “I’ve got problems with Besfort,” Rovena had said on several other occasions, just generally, as anybody might open a conversation of this kind. When asked what sort of problems, she had replied that they were not easy to explain, and added after a silence: “B. is trying to persuade me we don’t need each other any more.”

  “What sort of talk is that?” Shpresa had asked. When Rovena said nothing, her friend persisted. “And so? Does he want you to split up?”

  “No,” the other woman had said.

  “Then I don’t understand. What does he want?”

  “Something else,” she had replied, taking a different tack.

  “I don’t understand you,” her friend said. “I haven’t understood you for a long time. That friend of yours has always been beyond me, but now you are too.”

  “Perhaps this is something to talk about when we meet again,” Rovena responded, “like we did a few weeks ago.”

  The officers were able to connect the victim’s diary notes and various phrases jotted down for future letters to this enigmatic conversation between the two women.

  “Hope of resurrection?” she noted on a piece of paper with no date. “You are pretending to give me hope that you will again be the person you once were. You write that everything that rises again must first die, as if this were some sort of reassurance. But it just leads me deeper into darkness.”

  On the telephone pad, three months before the accident, she had written alongside the address of a hotel: “Our first meeting … after the void. Strange! He seems to have infected me with his own madness.”

  The intelligence officers could not make anything of this.

  One week before the accident, there was a similar note in her pocket diary: “Friday, Miramax Hotel, our third post-mortem meeting.”

  As if to cling to something tangible and concrete, the officers kept reverting to the last evening in the late-night bar of the Miramax Hotel, reconstructing it hour by hour on the evidence given by the waiters. Their huddled conversation in the dim corner. Her loosened hair. They left after midnight, but he returned after an hour, with that expression of exhausted quiescence worn by men who come back down to the bar after making love, giving their partners time to rest alone.

  Then, at quite a different tempo, there came the glass of Irish whisky, morning, the order for the taxi and the driver’s cruelly stilted phrase: Sie versuchten gerade, sich zu küssen.

  6

  Everywhere in the world events flow noisily on the surface, while their deep currents pull silently, but nowhere is this contrast so striking as in the Balkans.

  Gales sweep the mountains, lashing the tall firs and mighty oaks, and the whole peninsula appears demented.

  Yet what happens deep below in the world of rumours and undercover investigations may also be taken for madness, often of an even more serious kind.

  Or that is what an external observer might have thought of the two secret services as they zealously followed the trail of this case, which was becoming more like a ghost story.

  It was the Serbian agents who showed the first signs of flagging. Their Albanian counterparts, although reluctant to admit it, felt that they had become entangled in this case simply in order not to fall behind their rivals, and could hardly wait to give it up.

  It was some time later, when least expected, that a researcher’s careful hand delved once again into the deep recesses of the archives. The delicacy of this hand with its long, thin, elegant fingers drew attention to the many marks left on the arm by anxious nurses struggling to find a vein to take blood. The researcher unearthed not only the files of the two victims but also hundreds of other statements by witnesses, known and unknown. And so, month by month and year by year, an astonishingly variegated mosaic took shape. Where the secret services of two states had failed, this single researcher almost succeeded in solving the riddle of kilometre marker 17. He did this without funds or resources or powers of constraint, indeed without any motivation of duty or profit, but solely under the pressure of a personal concern never revealed to anybody.

  Just as a galaxy may, from a distance, appear immobile, but to a close observer reveals the terrible convulsions and explosions of light roaring in its depths, so the file of this researcher, whose name was never divulged, displayed, apparently at random, but in fact in an esoteric order, the myriad tiny fragments making up the mosaic. Of course, all the old data was there, mostly enriched with new details. There were the names of hotels, even the numbers of the rooms in which the couple had slept, the evidence of cleaners and barmen. There were bills of all kinds, charges for phone calls, fitness centres, driving lessons, visits to the doctor and prescription receipts. This was not all. There were Besfort Y.’s two dreams, told directly to Rovena, one with a transparent meaning and the other totally impenetrable. Again there were fragments of letters, diaries, subsequent reconstructions of phone conversations, mostly accompanied by suppositions and deductions that at first seemed contradictory but could later be reconciled, only to diverge and merge again in ever more startling ways.

  The woman had grouped together days of happiness with a precision that recalled the weather reports on the evening news, comparing one hotel to another, the intensity of pleasure and the degree of excitement. All these notes were matched to the testimonies of the female staff, who remembered the kind of perfume the young woman wore, the lingerie carelessly discarded at the foot of the bed and the stains on the sheets showing that the couple never took precautions. Equally precise were her records of hours of despondency after angry phone conversations, her complaints and her despair. Between these two states there was a third, perhaps harder to describe, a grey zone, as if shrouded in mist.

  She used this very word “zone” in one of the rare letters she had sent to Shpresa in Switzerland.

  “Our meetings are now in a new zone. It’s no exaggeration to say a different planet. Ruled by different laws. It has a chilly quality, frightening of course, but still I must admit that it has its strange and attractive side … I know that this will surprise you, but I hope to explain when we meet.”

  “But as you know we never saw each other again,” said her correspondent.

  Another letter, still less coherent, was written two weeks before the accident.

  “I feel numb again. He still exerts a hypnotic power over me. The things that at first seemed the most ridiculous to me are now the ones I accept most easily. Last night he said that all this confusion and misunderstanding between us recently was caused by the soul. Now that we have put that aside, we might say we have been saved. It is easier to understand each other through the body. I’m sure you’ll think I’m crazy. I thought so at first. But not later. Anyway, we’ll meet soon and you will see then that I’m right.”

  The researcher worked patiently through this maze for hours on end. It was the soul that caused misunderstanding. The meeting before their death, called post-mortem. Other abstruse phrases. Each one of them in turn seemed the key to unlocking the truth, or sometimes the key that shut it away for ever.

  It was this very meeting, just before their deaths, that was called post. Apart from this extraordinary paradox, the final letter or note written by Besfort Y. and found in the young woman’s handbag on the day of the accident, which began disconcertingly with the words, “OK on the same terms as last time?” and was the very message that had prompted the secret services to step up their investigations into him
, related to this same last meeting at the Miramax Hotel.

  There was a cryptic phone conversation with her friend in Switzerland, which Shpresa had not wanted to talk about at all. She was persuaded to do so after reading what the reports called the “cynical note”, which gave this phone call an intelligible meaning.

  “You say I shouldn’t worry. You tell me these things are unimportant compared to the happiness he brings me. But if I tell you he treats me almost like a prostitute?”

  “He dares to treat you like a prostitute? Do you understand what this means? What am I supposed to make of it?”

  “Of course I know what this means. I’ll say it again. He uses the phrase ‘call girl’, not prostitute, but that’s how he treats me, like a whore.”

  “And you put up with this?”

  “… Yes …”

  “This is beyond me, and to tell the truth you’re driving me crazy more than he is.”

  “You’re right. But you don’t understand the whole truth. Perhaps it’s my fault for trying to explain on the phone. I hope, when we meet …”

  “Listen, Rovena. It’s not hard to understand that if he treats you like a whore, he has his reasons. He wants to humiliate you in every way he can.”

  “Of course he does, but still …”

  “No buts. Humiliation is humiliation.”

  “I was trying to say, perhaps it’s more complicated than that. Do you remember that film we talked about, La Dame aux Camélias? Where that character genuinely loves the woman but, in a flash of anger, to insult her, he leaves a wad of banknotes under her pillow?”

  “Has he gone that far?”

  “No … but wait … this is the sort of thing that happens in love.”

  “Rovena, you’re talking nonsense. People in love have quarrels and lose their temper. But as far as I can gather, he does this on purpose, deliberately.”

  “It’s true. That’s how he behaves. Why?”