The Professor of Truth Read online

  Which, however, wasn’t quite as empty as I’d thought. As I finished, and was shouldering the shovel to return it to the shed, I became aware of someone standing a few yards away. A man in a long black coat, hands in pockets, and with a black woollen hat pulled down over his brow and ears. I had no idea how long he’d been there. He must have walked up the street when I was busy digging, and the snow had muffled his approach.

  “You’re being a good citizen,” the man said.

  Even in those few words, the American accent was unmistakable, although I could not have identified the region to which it belonged. I was surprised, and then, almost immediately, not surprised. The voice of the man on the phone half an hour earlier, and that of this man standing in the snow, telling me I was a good citizen, were one and the same.

  “People don’t clear the sidewalks anymore,” the man said. “They don’t even consider it. ‘That’s somebody else’s job, what do I pay my taxes for?’ You know what I’m saying? But I come along here and I find not one but two of you, right alongside of one another.”

  I nodded in the direction of Brian’s house. “He beat me to it,” I said. Brian was retired, he had more time on his hands, theoretically.

  “Good citizens, all the same, both of you,” the American said.

  “It doesn’t take much.”

  “It takes more than some people are prepared to give.”

  I was not happy to be having this conversation. I felt it as an intrusion, that it in some way threatened my privacy, even though anybody looking at us would have assumed we were neighbours exchanging a few superficial words about the weather. The American, however, was not a neighbour. He was unknown to me, yet I was already sure that I was not unknown to him, and that our words carried some meaning to which I was not yet privy. A low anger began to simmer inside me.

  “Can I help you in some way?”

  “Yes, I think you can,” he said. “And maybe I can help you.”

  “Who are you?”

  Slowly he took his right hand from the pocket of his coat. It was as if his brain had consciously to instruct the arm to withdraw, bringing the hand with it. The hand was gloveless. It pointed behind me, at the house.

  “I think we should go inside.”

  Of course I could have said no. I could have said, not until you tell me who you are and what you want. But I saw that this would be pointless. There was an order in which things would happen, or they would not happen at all. For me to find out who this man was, I would have to allow him into my home. I did not want this, but it was necessary. Already I knew that it was essential to continue the conversation.

  “This is about the bombing, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Let’s go in,” the American said, and without waiting for a reply, because he knew that he was not going to be refused, he started to move, heading towards the back door, along the path that I had made for him through the snow.

  2

  O MANY YEARS HAD PASSED, YET I WOULD STILL always try to reach the phone whenever it rang. Missing a call when I was out, that was one thing: it was what the answer-machine was for. But I never could get out of my head the notion that the one call I ignored when I was in would be the one that counted, the one that, if only I’d picked up the phone, I might later have thought of as “the breakthrough.” There had been breakthroughs of various sorts, but each one had only ever been from one locked room into another. The years had been like a succession of cells in a vast old prison that refused to release me. Time was my Château d’If. I would scratch away at one wall with the blunt knife of hope, the ragged nails of despair, and then one day the stone would crumble and there’d be enough space to scramble through, so through I’d go, only to be confronted by another wall. Yet still I clutched the blunt knife, and sucked the ragged nails. Even after all the disappointments, I refused to abandon the possibility that I might find out who had murdered my wife and daughter; who had really murdered them. This was why I followed the American inside.

  • • •

  He sat at the kitchen table. I made coffee, not because I was feeling hospitable but because some kind of preparatory ritual seemed necessary before we got down to whatever business it was that had brought him to me. After the nipping cold, the kitchen felt as hot as a laundry. It even looked a little like one as I had clothes drying on the pulley above our heads. I had taken off my gloves and jacket, but left on my boots because I felt that in my socks I would somehow be more vulnerable. The American hadn’t taken his boots off either. He’d removed his coat and laid it across another chair. He kept the woollen hat on, but pushed it back to reveal part of a tall, sloping forehead. He was very thin: the coat had bulked him out greatly. A beard that hardly was a beard flecked his grey, gaunt cheeks. His hands and fingers were long and bony. He wore a dark-blue ribbed jersey with a round neck, out of which his own neck grew like the trunk of a scraggy tree. The eyes were black and intense. He had the look of a man who might recently have returned from a long expedition, in the Antarctic perhaps, on which many things had gone wrong.

  His name was Nilsen. He’d had the grace at least to step aside and let me open my own door and go in first, and I’d turned and told him that if he was coming in he should introduce himself first. “Ted Nilsen,” he said. I put the “Ted” to the back of my mind at once. I didn’t want to be on first-name terms. I wanted some distance between us.

  Nilsen looked around the kitchen but he didn’t speak. He waited. I thought it likely that he had spent many hours of his life not speaking, waiting. In that respect, we were alike. Our feet pooled snowmelt on the linoleum.

  “You telephoned,” I said.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “To see if I was here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You can’t have been far away.”

  “No, not far.”

  He wasn’t too voluble. Just when I felt that I would have to say something else, Nilsen spoke again.

  “I was out at the University this morning.”

  “You wouldn’t have found me there. I’m on sabbatical.”

  “I know that.” He was a man, I sensed, whose whole existence focused on knowing things about other people. “I had a look around, but they were closing the campus. Because of the weather.” He said this as if it were just the prissy kind of attitude you’d expect. “I got the last bus back into town and had a look around there instead. Then I came to see you.”

  Another pause. Then, “A town like this, you get a sense of continuity from the buildings. I went into that old church up by the castle. That must be, what, four hundred years old?”

  “More,” I said. Then, like a grudging tour guide, I added, “The nave dates from the fifteenth century.”

  “Another world,” Nilsen said. He glanced up, as if he were seeing not the clothes pulley but ecclesiastical arches. “I spent some time in that church. It was very quiet. You know the thing I like? When you’re in a place like that, you’re on your own but you’re not alone. You hear occasional footsteps, maybe a hushed conversation, disembodied voices, you’re aware of somebody else in a pew, head bowed, praying. Shared solitude. I like that.”

  I poured the coffee. We both took it black, no sugar. I didn’t offer lunch. I didn’t so much as break open a packet of biscuits.

  “Although in fact I was alone,” Nilsen said. “Just pushed the door and went in and had the place to myself.”

  “Can we get to the point?” I said.

  The dark eyes looked out from under the long forehead. It was like being watched from some shaded observation post. He said—and it wasn’t clear if he was answering or ignoring my question—“It’s important to experience moments of quiet intensity. It helps to clarify things.”

  Perhaps he wanted to be asked what things. If so, I disappointed him. But probably he didn’t need any prompting. He was going to have his say anyway.

  “The point,” he said. “Okay, let’s get to it.”

  The bony fingers of
his right hand made a claw round his coffee cup. He seemed somewhat fascinated that the fingers belonged to him. He did not drink from the cup. He said, “Are you ready to meet your maker?”

  Whatever I was expecting, it was not this. The simmering anger I’d felt outside rose to the boil. I stood up.

  “I don’t know who you are,” I said, “but I seem to have mistaken you for someone else. If all you’re here for is to try to convert me or save me or whatever it is you people do, then you needn’t bother finishing your coffee.”

  Nilsen was not in the least perturbed. “I’m not a missionary,” he said.

  “You can get the hell out, in fact.”

  “It was a question, that’s all. Just give me an answer.”

  The dark eyes stared. It was possible that I had let a madman into my kitchen. I wanted Nilsen to leave. I certainly did not intend to humour him. Yet I found I could not deny him what he wanted.

  “I don’t believe I have a maker,” I said. “But if I’m wrong and there is one, then, yes, I’m ready. There are a few things I’d have to say to him.” And, thinking it would annoy him, I added, “Or her.”

  “Sit down,” Nilsen said. He made me feel like a fractious guest in my own house. “I’m trying to give you some context,” he said. “The thing is, I am ready for my maker. We’ve got a contract, him and me. He’s going to take me to him, but first I’ve got to straighten a few things out.”

  “Oh for God’s sake!” I said. If he heard this as a profanity, if it offended him, he didn’t show it. That face didn’t show much in the way of emotion. For a man who’d found Jesus—I presumed that was the particular maker to whom he referred—he didn’t seem filled with joy and gratitude.

  “I’m dying,” he said.

  “We’re all dying,” I retorted. I was still standing. Out of nowhere a wave of something—not sympathy but perhaps grief or bitterness or exhaustion—washed through me. This happened, still, after twenty-one years. To cover myself I went to the window, as if to check the weather. Snow was falling again, lightly whitening the cleared path. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

  “I have cancer,” Nilsen said. “So I am dying in a certain way and at a certain rate.”

  I turned to face him. “That has nothing to do with me.”

  “Yes it does,” he said, and with a skeletal index finger he pointed very firmly at the other chair. Again I could not resist. I sat down. Nilsen had my attention. I thought, I’ll give him five minutes.

  “It doesn’t make me unique,” Nilsen said. “I know that. There are millions of us. But when some doctor tells you your days are, literally, numbered, you start counting. And you weigh up a lot of stuff. First off you weigh up the chances. Maybe you bitch about the bad hand you’ve been dealt. Me, I never smoked, never drank to excess, ate well, kept fit—so why me? You chase that one around for a day or two, and then you quit. That’s all past, and there’s no profit in it. Then you think about the time you have left. You make a list of things you want to do while you still can. I started to do that and then I threw the list away. I didn’t need a list. Anything I could put on it would be nothing to what I’m going to experience. I’ve got the keys to the kingdom. But like I said, God has a contract with me, so I need to make everything straight before I stand before him. I need to settle my debts. I’ve been doing my rounds.”

  “Then you do have a list,” I said. “A different one.”

  Nilsen sipped from his cup. “Good coffee,” he said. It sounded genuine. That a man in Nilsen’s situation should still appreciate the insignificant things of life did not surprise me. I had my own “situation,” took my own momentary pleasure in tastes, smells, sounds. Maybe that is the most delight there can be—swift, sensual, small—when the roof of your world has fallen in. The difference with Nilsen was that he saw a ladder to some other place ascending from the wreckage, and from the way he was talking celestial light was shining down through the hole. Whereas when I tasted good coffee, that was all I experienced.

  “What kind of cancer?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” There was a brief defensiveness in his voice, then it resumed its controlled calmness. “Let’s say it’s the kind that kills you.”

  This sounded evasive and I did not like it. I had had my fill of evasion over the years.

  “Maybe your maker will pull off a miracle,” I said.

  “He already has,” Nilsen said, “but not in the way you mean. I’ve had the treatment, the chemo, all of that. That’s over. The miracle is that he has promised to save me in the next life.”

  The flat, matter-of-fact way he made this statement was striking. In it was neither sanctimonious whine nor eager, preacherly insistence that I join him on the salvation road. He seemed entirely rational about something entirely irrational.

  “This,” he said, glancing around the room, “all this, is just a prelude.”

  I picked my next words with care. “I’ve been told a lot of things,” I said, “which turned out not to be true.”

  “It’s why I’m here.”

  “That were downright lies, in fact.”

  “I understand.”

  “Would you take off your hat, please?”

  He frowned. “Would I what?”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “A total stranger appears. He may have some information for me, or he may not. How would I know? He tells me he’s dying. How would I know? I’m asking you to take off your hat.”

  “That won’t prove anything.”

  “Perhaps not,” I said. “Nevertheless …”

  Nilsen sighed, then bared his head with a single sweep of one hand. Soft white hair sprouted in uneven patches from his pitted scalp. Until that moment I had not noticed how sparse the eyebrows were. “Satisfied?” Nilsen said, and replaced the hat. He sounded almost hurt that I had doubted him. For a moment I felt that I had the advantage.

  “I don’t recall your name,” I said. “I sat through the trial, I’ve read the documents, the newspaper articles, the books—thousands of pages—but I’ve never seen your name in them. Now you turn up, after all this time, and the only reason you can be here is because you have something to tell me about the bombing. That is the reason, isn’t it?”

  Nilsen inclined his head about a millimetre.

  “Why should I believe you know any more about it than I do?”

  “You don’t recall my name because it isn’t there,” he said. “If you mean ‘Ted Nilsen,’ that is. Even if you don’t …”

  Perhaps I was in the presence of a phantom. People see something and then, afterwards, they are not quite sure what. Maybe they haven’t seen anything. When he was gone and I had washed up his coffee cup, maybe I too would wonder if I’d imagined him. But it also occurred to me that a man who went unrecorded in his line of work—I had no doubt that he worked in intelligence—might be one in possession of the facts that had eluded me for so long, facts that had never been in the rooms I had been in, or not at the same time anyway.

  I waited for Nilsen to continue. He was staring at me but not really at me, and just as I realised that his voice hadn’t so much trailed off as ground to a halt he emitted a small sound, neither a grunt nor a squeak but somewhere in between, and seemed to freeze up entirely. Shock was on his face and I wondered if that was how someone looked just after they’d been shot but before they knew what had happened.

  “Are you in pain?”

  He gasped. “I have something to take,” he said. “Some water …” He was not able to complete the sentence.

  I went to the sink and filled a glass from the cold tap. The snow was thick again, piling up on the outside sill. I took the water to him, and he reached for his coat, brought a foil pack from one of its pockets and broke out a capsule. He swallowed. We let some minutes pass, and the muscles around his mouth began to relax.

  “Prayer is good,” he said, “but the drugs are sometimes better. Quicker, anyway. Prayer takes a little time.”

  He wipe
d his mouth with the back of his hand. If the pain was still there he seemed to have control of it. “You know what defines us?” he said. “Extremes. Not daily normality. What is that? It’s nothing. What defines us is the edge. Extreme pain. Extreme weather. Floods and fires and hurricanes.” He nodded at the window. “Snow and ice. Acts of extreme violence. These things make you conscious of yourself. You only realise what it is to be alive when death is howling at you.”

  There was more urgency in his voice, and less of a drawl. Maybe it was the drug kicking in.

  “Then God takes you home,” I said, “and all is well. Is he one of your extremes?”

  “God? Aha.” Nilsen said this as if I’d been trying to catch him out and might have succeeded had he not been cleverer than I. He drank some coffee. “Tell me, were you even alive before the bomb went off?” he said. “I mean, really alive?”

  The anger surged again inside me. “Yes I was,” I said. “You can keep death and pain. I was alive every day and I knew it. I was in love with my wife and I adored my beautiful daughter.”

  “Extreme love,” he said. “That’s another one. And before that?”

  “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “Haven’t yet. Never gave up on nothing yet.”

  His five minutes were over. Not that he knew it.

  “What about you?” he said. “You don’t give up either, do you?” And, after a pause, “I have brought you something.”

  I thought I would give him another five.

  “You’ve always interested me,” Nilsen said. “You were an awkward fit. You were assessed as not having any allegiance.”

  “Allegiance?” I could equally well have challenged the word “interested” or the word “assessed,” but they surprised me less.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he went on. “Your first allegiance was to your loved ones, we all understood that. But beyond that. Beyond country, even. What was your philosophy, your world view? When you started making a fuss”—he saw me bridle again and made a small concessionary gesture with the palm of one hand—“when you gave us trouble with your questions, it wasn’t clear what boundaries you recognised, or if you recognised any. It wasn’t clear where you would stop. You could have been a unifying force, someone who spoke for all the victims’ families. You bridged the Atlantic with your loss. But you were obstinate. You weren’t prepared to shut up. Not so long ago that enraged me. Who was this guy? Did he think he was smarter than we were? But now, you know what, I respect it. I admire you. In your shoes I would have been the same. I see that now.”