The Unlucky Lottery

Whatever, after the conversation with the chief inspector and the shopping at the height of the Saturday rush hour, there was no doubt that he felt switched off – so he could let his brain work away undisturbed in the background, and see if anything came tumbling out.

He looked at his watch. Ten past one. It was a Saturday in November, it was raining, and he had nothing to do except devote himself to his family.

21

During the night between Friday and Saturday Inspector Moreno slept for over twelve hours, and when she woke up at about half past ten on the Saturday morning, it was quite a while before she realized where she was.

And that she was alone.

That the five years with Claus Badher were at an end, and that from now on she only had herself to worry about. It felt strange. Not least the fact that a month had passed since she left him, but only now had the penny dropped that her fate was in her own hands.

As if to check whether those hands were strong enough to carry it, she took them out from under the warm bedcovers and examined them for a while. Didn’t think they looked up to much – but that’s the way it is with women’s hands. Underdeveloped and a bit childlike. There was an enormous difference between them and the large, sinewy equipment with which men were blessed. Usable and good to look at. Now that she came to think about it, she couldn’t recall ever having seen a woman with attractive hands. They were like a chicken’s wings, it struck her – dysfunctional and pathetic. Perhaps there was food for thought in this striking difference – the extent to which it typified something basic when it came to the difference between men and women?

An expression of essential differences? Their hands?

And never the twain shall meet, she thought: but then she suddenly saw in her mind’s eye a black man’s hand on a white woman’s breast, and she concluded that the twain can in fact meet.

By the time she entered the shower she had decided that the hand and the breast in the image she had conjured up were not in any way Claus’s and hers, but Tobose Menakdise’s and Filippa de Booning’s, and she was suddenly back in the middle of the investigation.

You talk about what fills the mind, she seemed to remember somebody saying. But so what? The more thoughts she devoted to the Leverkuhn case and the fewer to Claus, the better, no doubt.

And the healthier it would be for her maltreated spiritual life.

There was always the hope that there might be other alternatives with which to rack her brains. In that spirit she set out after breakfast on a long walk along Willemsgraacht – towards the Lauern lakes and Lohr. Strolled through the light rain and thought about all sorts of things, but mostly about her parents – and her brother in Rome, whom she hadn’t seen for over two years. Her parents lived not quite so far away, down in Groenstadt, but that contact was not everything it might have been either. It was easy to form opinions about the Leverkuhns’ family relationships, but to be honest, her own were not much better.

And then she had a sister, Maud. She had no idea where Maud was – in Hamburg at a guess – nor what state she was in.

Perhaps the anthropologists were right, she thought, and that when the northern European nuclear family had exhausted its role as an economic and social entity, it had also lost its emotional significance.

Emotions were no more than superstructure and empty show. Men and women met, had children, then wandered off in different directions. Heading for wherever it was they were going before they happened to meet, for their various goals. Yes, perhaps that was how you ought to look at it. In any case, there were plenty of examples of this in the animal world, and a human being is basically a biological being, after all.

This last point reminded her that she was also a female, and that this week she was in the middle of her monthly cycle and was going to find it difficult to do without a man. In the long run, at least. What a pity, she thought, what a pity that a human being should be so badly constructed that there was such a long way between brain, heart and sex at times. Or rather, usually.

Always?

The cafe at Czerpinski’s mill was open, and she decided to indulge herself in a cup of tea before returning home. But she would have to be quite quick about it: it was already a quarter to three, and no way did she want to be wandering around in the dark.

She had barely entered the premises before noticing that sitting at one of the tables in the circular room were Benjamin Wauters and Jan Palinski – they didn’t recognize her, or at least showed no indication of having done so, but she realized that it was a sign.

A sign to the effect that there was no point in trying to keep her work at a distance any more.