The Gordian Knot - Bernhard Schlink [0]
The Gordian Knot
Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novels The Reader and Homecoming, as well as The Weekend and the collection of short stories Flights of Love and four prizewinning crime novels—The Gordian Knot, Self’s Punishment, Self’s Deception, and Self’s Murder. He lives in Berlin and New York.
ALSO BY BERNHARD SCHLINK
The Reader
Flights of Love: Stories
Homecoming
The Weekend
Self’s Punishment (with Walter Popp)
Self’s Deception
Self’s Murder
A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, DECEMBER 2010
Translation copyright © 2010 by Peter Constantine
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Switzerland as Die gordische Schleife by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich, in 1987. Copyright © 1987 by Bernhard Schlink.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Walter Popp for his consultation on the translation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schlink, Bernhard.
[Gordische Schleife. English]
The Gordian knot / by Bernhard Schlink; translated from the German by Peter Constantine.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74267-4
1. Translators—Fiction. 2. Spy stories. I. Constantine, Peter, 1963– II. Title.
PT2680.L54G6713 2010
833′.914—dc22
2010017488
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Two
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Part Three
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
Part One
1
GEORG WAS DRIVING HOME. He left the highway by Aix and took a back road. From Marseille to Aix there are no tolls, from Aix to Pertuis there is a charge of five francs: that’s a pack of Gauloises.
Georg lit one. The trip to Marseille hadn’t panned out. The head of the translation agency that sent him jobs now and then had had no work for him this time. “I said I’d give you a call if anything came up. Things are a bit slow right now.” Monsieur Maurin had assumed an anxious expression—what he had said might in fact be true. It was his agency, but he lived off jobs from the aircraft factory in Toulon, the Industries Aéronautiques Mermoz. When the joint European venture for a new fighter-helicopter in which Mermoz was involved stalled, there was nothing for Monsieur Maurin to translate. Or else he had once again tried to get better terms and Mermoz was teaching him a lesson. Or the factory had made good its long-standing threat and hired its own translators.
The road rose steeply beyond Aix, and the engine stuttered. Georg broke out in a sweat. This was all he needed! He had bought the old Peugeot only three weeks ago—his parents had come to visit him from Heidelberg and given him the money. “I think you really need a car for your job,” his father had said, and dropped two thousand marks in the box on the kitchen counter in which Georg kept his money. “You know Mother and I like to help all we can. But now that I’m retired and your sister has a baby …”
Then came the questions Georg