The Accident (2 page)
Three months later, the archivist could not hide his astonishment when the governments of two Balkan countries, one after another, asked to inspect the file on the accident at kilometre marker 17. How could the states of this quarrelsome peninsula, after committing every possible abomination known to this world – murdering, bombing, setting entire populations at each other’s throats and then deporting them – find the time, now that the madness was over, instead of making reparations, to enter into such minor matters as unusual car accidents?
There was no way of knowing why the state of Serbia and Montenegro should take an interest in the accident, but it soon became clear that this country had kept the two victims under surveillance for a long time.
The discovery of this connection was enough to spark the Albanian secret service into action too. Suspicions of a political murder, the kind of allegation fashionable to ridicule, since the fall of communism, as a typical symptom of communist paranoia, suddenly revived in grim earnest.
As usual, the Albanian intelligence officers took a long time to reach a position which the others had already abandoned. However, through contacts with their compatriots in the Albanian communities abroad, they managed to assemble a good deal of material relating to the victims. There were parts of letters, photographs, airline tickets, hotel addresses and bills, which, although only the first fruits of their harvest, provided a mass of information about the couple. The photographs, taken mainly in hotels, at pavement cafés, and a few in a bath, out of which the young woman, naked, stared at the camera with more elation than shame, left the nature of their relationship in no doubt. The hotel bills were clear evidence that they had met in different European cities, where this woman’s friend had happened to go for his work: Strasbourg, Vienna, Rome, Luxembourg.
The photographs confirmed the locations, and the cities were also mentioned in letters, mainly written by the young woman, who liked deciding in which of them she had felt happiest.
The intelligence officers placed their main hope of solving the riddle in these letters, but after reading them they were at first disappointed, then disoriented and finally totally bewildered.
The blatant contradictions led them to interrupt their investigations to interview hotel receptionists, chambermaids, waiters in late-night bars, a girlfriend of the woman, called Shpresa, an Albanian living in Switzerland who the letters stated “knew the truth” and, finally, the taxi driver.
Their testimonies more or less coincided: usually when they met, the couple seemed cheerful, but on occasion the woman had appeared despondent, and once had been seen silently weeping while he had gone out to make a phone call. He too had sometimes looked sad, and then she would try to comfort him, stroking and kissing his hand.
The interviewers put the question: was something on their minds . . . a decision they had to take but couldn’t, some regret, uncertainty, threat? The waiters could not answer this. To their eyes it all seemed normal. Most couples in late-night bars passed from ebullience to silence, and sometimes dejection, and then suddenly brightened up again.
The woman became very beautiful at these times. Her eyes, which until then had idly followed her cigarette smoke, lit up with emotion. Her cheeks too. She acquired an alarming, devastating charm.
Devastating? What could that mean?
“I don’t know how to explain it. I was trying to say the kind of beauty that knocks you flat, as people say. The man also seemed to revive, and would order another whisky. Then they would talk again in their own language until after midnight, and stand up to go upstairs to their room.
“From the way she rose to her feet with a sidelong glance and walked in front with her head slightly bowed, an old-fashioned picture of a beautiful, transgressing woman, you could tell that they were going to make love. These things provide late-night barmen with entertainment, especially at the end of their long hotel shifts.”
None of the other information, gathered in various places, helped the intelligence officers to pin down the facts at all. In the wake of the waiters’ evidence, the dead couple’s letters seemed even less coherent. Sometimes they read like the ordinary correspondence of lovers, even when she complained of his behaviour. Yet sometimes their tone was entirely different, and the terse notes between them suggested that this was a purely routine relationship between a call girl and her client.
The officers could hardly believe their eyes when they read phrases of hers such as “Whatever happens, I will love you all my life,” followed by notes from him on later dates, giving his hotel address and adding, “Everything OK on the same terms as last time?”
This could be interpreted in two ways. He could be referring to the length of their stay – one, two or more nights – but it rather hinted at remuneration. Moreover, now and then the expression “call girl” appeared, and he seemed eager to use it, whether accurately or not.
In her earlier letters she would quote phrases of his that implied he had once written quite normally – about how he had missed her, was impatient to see her, and so forth. The change apparently took place during the final phase of their long association.
Careful calculation revealed that their relationship had lasted some twelve years, and that their estrangement had occurred only in the last fifty-two weeks. The expression “call girl”, like some boundary marker, appeared forty weeks before their deaths.
“I admit that you have given me boundless happiness,” she had written in one of her letters, “but just as often your cruel irritability has made my life a misery.”
She had continually complained of this, and in a letter dated 2000 told him that the only time she had felt totally happy with him had been during the year of the Kosovo War, when he seemed to discharge his nervous tension in an entirely different direction.
“After Serbia was defeated you didn’t seem to know what to do with yourself and you turned on me again.”
This final phrase led the Albanian intelligence officers to believe that they had solved one of the mysteries: the reason for Besfort Y.’s surveillance by the Serbian and Montenegrin secret service. With his many contacts in Strasbourg and Brussels, and inside most of the international human rights organisations, Besfort Y. was naturally the kind of person to be a thorn in the side of Yugoslavia, and might in a way be deemed responsible for its bombing.
It was easy to deduce why this surveillance began at such a late stage, after the war was over. Just at this time, a kind of remorse at the punishment and dismemberment of Yugoslavia led to attempts to revise the facts. Thousands of people were either elated or thrown into despair at the prospect of the bombing being called a mistake.
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.
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 as 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
.