The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (19 page)

I noticed a pile of photographs on the wooden coffee table between us. They were turned over, and a few had words on the back. As if Helga had been sorting them or filing them when I came.

Helga clearly wasn’t talking, so I decided to get on with it. “I thought at first it might be Silje and Tom who wrote the article of apology, since they seemed somehow to know about another article, perhaps the one Pekka really wrote. But I somehow doubt that if they’d killed him, they could have been cool enough to send a fax afterward. They didn’t easily have access to the office. They didn’t know Pekka’s style of writing. Most important, they seem to lack sangfroid. It’s hard for them to hide their feelings.”

“I wanted Pekka to go out not as hated as he had been,” said Helga softly. “It’s a shame the newspaper never printed it.”

“So you admit you wrote the apology. Did you also lock him in the sauna?”

She was cool as ice. “Why don’t you think Marion did it?”

“Because Marion wouldn’t lie.”

“I think you have too high an opinion of her,” Helga said. She reached between us to the table and began to turn over the photographs. “I just had these developed. They’re a little murky, but I didn’t want to use a flash. Fortunately it was still light enough after midnight to get a decent picture. Well, perhaps decent is the wrong word.”

The snapshots showed a man and a woman in a variety of graphic sexual positions. The sauna was in the background. They were on and around a bench set slightly back in the birch trees. None of the positions looked coerced. Marion’s blond head was easy to make out; so was Pekka’s black ponytail.

“Pekka’s excuse was that he was drunk, of course,” said Helga rather tiredly. “It often was.”

“Did you confront them?”

“No. I saw him go into the sauna after Marion had left. I saw him open it with the key she’d given him. He left the key in the lock.”

She stopped, and I knew this was the nearest she’d get to admitting she had turned the key herself. She seemed flattened, dream-like, almost ghostly in the darkened room. A sliver of hot brightness outlined the windows, but inside all was dim.

“Was it the next morning you told Marion you had photographs?” I asked, as if I were just making conversation.

“We talked. She realized I knew she’d had sex with my husband.”

“She didn’t know he’d been murdered at that point, I would imagine,” I went on, as casually as before. “I suspect she tried to play on your sympathies by telling you he’d forced her to have sex with him. You pretended to believe her and then you told the police she’d confessed it all to you. She was trapped at that point.”

“I think she’ll get off if she sticks to her story,” said Helga dispassionately. She began to put the photographs back into their envelope. “I don’t plan to show the photographs to anyone unless I have to. The little slut,” she said suddenly, and her eyes flashed. “But then, he always had that effect on women. You wanted to despise him; you thought you did despise him. And yet you found him attractive and compelling all the same.”

It was eerie how calm she was again. “I still don’t understand some things,” I said. “Luisa told me she saw you and Pekka leave the playing field together, and that he was laughing.”

“Yes, he had given a copy of his article about the conference to Silje and Tom, just to torment them. Then he wanted to fax it. We went to the office together. I read it and was horrified. I persuaded Pekka to let me fix some typos and so on. I said I’d fax it. He said fine; he was really quite drunk. He wandered away. I didn’t fax his article. I ripped it up. When I went back to our room, he wasn’t there. That’s when I went looking for him.”

“And the camera?”

“I’ve had a camera in my pocket the whole conference,” she said without amusement. “For the fun, candid shots I was supposed to be taking.”

“Are you sorry?”

“That he’s dead? I don’t know the answer to that yet.”

“You’re not planning to flee the country?” I gestured to the suitcase.

“What a thought!” For the first time Helga seemed to wake up a little. “No, I’m going to that little house in the country that my grandparents built. That one you and I went to once, all those years ago. If you want to tell the police anything I’ve told you, go ahead. I’ll be there.”

She didn’t know what I’d do, I realized. And neither did I. When I told Mayumi later, I said, “Let’s wait and see what happens to Marion first. If she’s really in danger…”

“You’re loyal to your lovers, I can see,” said Mayumi.

“I used to think that feminism made us loyal to each other,” I said. “It’s still my fantasy.”

“Tell me about your fantasies.”

“Turn off the light first.”

Weeks later, I heard from Luisa, who had finally left Finland, that the charges against Marion had been dropped. The prosecutor’s office found no evidence of malicious intent. Pekka was a womanizer, it was well known. He had tried to force Marion against her will; she had responded by locking him in the sauna. She hadn’t known of his heart condition.

Luisa also sent along an article about herself written by the new literary critic at the
Sanomat
, our pale depressed friend from the FinnAir flight. Of course it was in Finnish, but Luisa assured me it was nothing but praise. Her favorite kind of critical review.

Both the clipping and the letter came to me in a parcel otherwise filled with Luisa’s new novel in manuscript,
Diary of a First Love in Montevideo
. They were delivered to me at Mayumi’s old wooden house in Kyoto, where I have been for several months, gathering travel notes for Archie’s articles and practicing positions more graphic than anything Marion and Pekka ever tried.

I will set to work translating immediately. Nothing in Luisa’s novel corresponds to the truth of her life as I know it. But it is still an extraordinarily cool and melancholy account of love thwarted, shamed and, finally, destroyed.

“
ABBY’S DEAD
?”

Around me the conversation stopped. My friend Eloise had handed me the phone in the middle of a dinner to welcome our mutual friend Joke, the Human Pretzel, back to Holland. Joke had just returned from a year in Beijing studying advanced acrobatics.

“Abby can’t be dead.”

Rachel, Abby’s lover, had tracked me down in Amsterdam, where I was taking a break from the English winter. Not that it’s any warmer in Amsterdam but the Dutch seem to know how to get through the cold wet season in a cozier fashion. Now she was telling me the gruesome details and asking me to come help her sort out papers.

“Yes, of course I’ll come to Brussels. Tomorrow.”

“Your friend Abby from London?” asked Eloise. It was Eloise’s dinner table and Eloise’s flat in the hotel she managed near the Vondel Park. Long ago she’d been a Women’s Studies professor in the States, but she’d come to Amsterdam to write her novel and had never gone home.

“Yes. She’s been living in Brussels for a few years. Was living.”

“How’d it happen?” asked Joke. She looked very small across the table; I’d forgotten how small she was, more like a twelve-year-old boy than a thirty-year-old woman, though her white-blonde crewcut and French-striped shirt also helped with the effect.

“She was leaving the Gare Midi in Brussels when someone in a hurry drove his car into her. Hit and run. They haven’t found him.”

It could have happened to anyone. It could have happened to me. I was always dashing across streets without looking properly around me. When Abby and I had been young and in love, we had never paid the slightest attention to traffic. We’d believed ourselves invincible.

“I never look out for where I’m going,” said Joke, shaken.

“Me either,” said Eloise. She was a slow-moving, dreamy person, the sort you fear might harm herself unintentionally with a sharp object or be mugged in broad daylight.

“Now you, Eloise, I’d worry about,” I said, turning back to dessert. “Joke, on the other hand—she’d probably just do a double back flip over the hood of the car.”

People in shock often make such flippant remarks. And my friends laughed. Still, none of us could quite finish our apple cake.

Lesbians live in Belgium of course, because lesbians live everywhere. They live alone and they live with friends, and they live with their partners of six years, as Abby had lived with Rachel. It’s not illegal to be a lesbian in Belgium, but that’s because legally you don’t exist. You exist as a taxpayer, and as a worker and consumer participating in the Belgian economy; but as for deciding who should get your money after you’re dead, you don’t really have a choice. In the eyes of the law you’re single, unattached except through blood. Only family members can inherit. And lesbians are never, can never be, family to each other.

“If I had any idea that the will we made wasn’t valid in Belgium,” Rachel said, “I never would have moved here. We paid a British solicitor to draw it up for us with power-of-attorney, everything. It’s useless.”

“But surely you could challenge the Belgian law. You’re American citizens, you’re just in Belgium for…” I hesitated. I had no clear idea why they were in Brussels. I knew that Abby had inherited some money from an aunt of hers about a year ago, and that, without talking much about it, she’d begun to live a very different lifestyle.

“And how would I pay the lawyer?” Rachel said bitterly. “Our money was in a joint account, and that account is now closed. Closed to me anyway. Wide open for Abby’s legal heir.”

We were in their apartment off the Avenue Louise, a luxurious flat that I’d never been to before. When I first knew Abby in the seventies, she was just another young American in London, squatting in abandoned houses, working for free at the women’s bookstore. Her passion even then had been for collecting books and manuscripts, the odd bit of correspondence. She had eventually gotten a job in one of the antiquarian book shops near the British Museum where she specialized in firsts by twentieth-century women authors. Our affair was brief; our friendship had lasted years. We used to get together for cappuccinos on Coptic Street, a tradition that continued after she moved to Belgium last year, because she came back frequently to London. So I’d never seen this Brussels flat before and was suitably impressed.

“Take a good look,” said Rachel as she showed me around. “I won’t be living here much longer. Abby’s brother will be here to take possession tomorrow and unfortunately the security box at the bank, which I’m now barred from opening, has a complete inventory.”

“But Rachel, surely he’ll let you keep living here. Surely he’ll…”

I trailed off when I saw the expression on her face. “Abby’s family hated the fact that she was a lesbian; that’s why she came to London in the first place. Even though her parents are dead, her brother still has the same feelings, plus he was furious that their aunt left her this place. Now’s his chance to get it back. Do you think he’s going to let me have anything?”

When Abby first got together with Rachel, all her friends had been surprised. Little scruffy, streetwise Abby with her New York accent, five-foot-two, a mop of unruly brown hair that hid her eyes but not her pugnacious chin. Ratty sweaters, jeans from the boy’s department, boots whose rhinestones were mostly gone. How had Abby gone and fallen in love with a Long Island housewife with a shiny black pageboy and a closetful of clothes? Looking now at Rachel, face wrinkled and sagging, eyes red from tears and lack of sleep, black hair shot with white and pulled back into a careless ponytail, I realized she was well over fifty. Rachel had left her husband of twenty-five years for Abby. She’d never had a job outside the home. Her ex-husband wouldn’t provide for her, and she had no marketable skills. She’d followed Abby first to London and then to Brussels, and lost contact with whatever community she’d had in Long Island. Now, in addition to losing Abby, she was about to lose her home, her income, and her financial future.

“Not that I especially want to live in Brussels,” Rachel said, leading the way to an elaborately carved wooden secretary. “If I knew where to go and what to do, I’d be out of here in a flash.”

She stood looking at two framed photos of Abby on the desk. One was of Abby at eight or nine, with missing teeth in a wide grin; the other was of Abby from a few years ago, still tough and impish.

“I didn’t ask you to come Brussels just to hold my hand, Cassandra,” she said finally. “I thought you might be able to help me figure out what some of these papers might refer to. You knew Abby for a long time; you might have some idea what she was up to in London and Amsterdam.”

I looked at the pieces of paper on the desk. Bills of sale, mostly, with the price in pounds or guilders. But what the objects purchased were was somewhat unclear. Not many of the receipts had names at the top. Only a small handful, in fact. A few were printed with the name of a London bookshop on Coptic Street, the one where Abby had once worked, and the others were stamped Antikvaariat Sophie, Keizersgracht, Amsterdam. An antikvaariat is a second-hand bookstore.

“They must be receipts for books that Abby bought,” I said.

“I thought that at first myself,” said Rachel, “but then I wondered, Where are these books? Abby had been getting rid of her collection over the last six months. She certainly wasn’t buying new books.”

I looked at the receipts again and calculated the rate of the pound and the guilder. Some were for modest amounts, a few were sizable, and two of the Dutch ones were astronomical. Whatever Abby had bought at the Antikvaariat Sophie, it had cost her many hundreds of dollars.

“I asked myself, Was it drugs?” Rachel said. “But Abby seems the last person to have gotten into drugs.”

“Nor do drug dealers usually give receipts.”

Rachel dug farther into one of the drawers and came up with an envelope of cash. “I found this too. It’s enough to live on for perhaps three months.” She held it out to me. “But I want you to use some of it, Cassandra, to help me.”

“How?”

“You know Amsterdam, you have friends there”—she sounded wistful—“Could you go to this used bookstore, and find out what Abby was buying? Maybe it’s valuable. I can’t go myself—I’ve got to be here when Abby’s brother arrives tomorrow.”