The Gordian Knot - Bernhard Schlink [30]
“What’s going on?” Georg asked the man he had followed up the stairs.
“What does it look like? We’re painting.” He was a young man with a cheerful, cheeky face, who had been whistling all the way up the stairs.
“What about the people who had the office here?”
“Monsieur Bulnakov? He’s the one who hired us.” He laughed. “He paid us too.”
“Do you know the landlord or the owner of the building?”
“Oh, are you thinking of renting the place? Monsieur Placard lives on the ground floor.”
Georg knew what Monsieur Placard would say: Monsieur Bulnakov hadn’t left a forwarding address or any other contact information. Saturday afternoon he and some other men had vacated the premises. “He gave me all the furniture. My son and I brought it down to the cellar. Might you be interested in it?”
“In office furniture?” Georg shook his head and left. Like a nightmare, he thought, but like a nightmare it’s gone away.
18
BUT NOW HIS WHOLE LIFE TURNED into a nightmare.
It was at the office that Georg first noticed that everything had changed. The Mermoz job, for which he had been beaten up, had not only been the last in a series, but the very last. No more jobs came. He called Mermoz and asked what the matter was, but was put off. When he called again, he was told in no uncertain terms that Mermoz was no longer interested in his services. All his major accounts began to dry up, one after the other. Within a month his agency was ruined. Not that there weren’t any translation jobs, but there wasn’t even enough work to cover the rent or pay the secretary.
Then his problems with the police began. They had initially accepted that he didn’t know who had attacked him or why. The two officers who took his statement had been pleasant and sympathetic. But a few weeks later two other officers showed up. They wanted to know the exact particulars of the accident, the route he’d taken, what he had in his car. They asked him for his opinion about the attack: If he were going to rob anyone, would he choose to rob someone driving an old Peugeot? Why he had moved from Karlsruhe to Cucuron? What did he do for a living? What had he done for a living in Germany? No, they couldn’t drop the matter. They kept coming back, sometimes two officers, sometimes one, always asking the same questions.
The policeman in Cucuron also had his eye on him. The little town had only one policeman, everybody knew him and he knew everybody. Nobody held it against him when he took it upon himself to have a car towed that someone had left in the middle of the street in a drunken stupor, or if he stopped someone from burning trash in their backyard, or had a door broken down for the bailiff. Can one blame a dentist if he drills and there is pain? And like a dentist, Cucuron’s policeman didn’t inflict pain without good reason.
At first Georg wasn’t particularly concerned when the policeman didn’t return his greeting. I suppose he didn’t see me or didn’t recognize me, he thought, or maybe his mind was elsewhere, or perhaps he mistook me for one of those tourists passing through Cucuron.
One day he was sitting at a table outside the Bar de l’Étang. Gérard and Nadine were with him, and the bartender had come out to sit with them. The other tables were full too, as the morning market was over. He had parked his car where he always did, and where everyone else did too: among the old plane trees by the pond.
“Is that your car?” the policeman asked, towering before Georg and pointing at his yellow Peugeot.
“It is, but …” Georg wanted to reply that he knew well enough it was his car, and ask him what this was all about.
“You can’t leave your car there.”
Georg was more taken aback than outraged. “Why not? Everyone parks there.”
“I repeat, you