The Accident Read Free Page B

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 .

6
    Everywhere in the world events flow noisily on the surface, while their deep currents pull silently, but nowhere is this contrast so striking as in the Balkans.
    Gales sweep the mountains, lashing the tall firs and mighty oaks, and the whole peninsula appears demented.
    Yet what happens deep below in the world of rumours and undercover investigations may also be taken for madness, often of an even more serious kind.
    Or that is what an external observer might have thought of the two secret services as they zealously followed the trail of this case, which was becoming more like a ghost story.
    It was the Serbian agents who showed the first signs of flagging. Their Albanian counterparts, although reluctant to admit it, felt that they had become entangled in this case simply in order not to fall behind their rivals, and could hardly wait to give it up.
    It was some time later, when least expected, that a researcher’s careful hand delved once again into the deep recesses of the archives. The delicacy of this hand