The Accident Read Online Free PDF

you blind, or just pretending? You could tell a mile off that he was the murderous kind. That dream of his, or rather his nightmare, about the Hague Tribunal showed that.”
    The researcher wanted to butt in to say that these days a lot of people were scared of The Hague – Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Montenegrins. You might say that the whole Balkans went in fear and trembling. But he restrained himself.
    Lulu Blumb went on to say that neither the dream about the court summons nor the second one, which people generally called inexplicable, enigmatic and so forth, held any mystery for her. She said that the researcher no doubt knew about the funereal building, a cross between a mausoleum and a motel, at which a person knocks and looks for someone, who later turns out to be a young woman who is locked inside, turned to stone or murdered by some means.
    The inquiry stated that Besfort Y. had had this dream one week before his death. Logically, he should have had this dream later, after killing Rovena. But as the researcher might be aware (and might well know better than she did) such displacements are quite common in dreams. The dream showed most of all that Besfort had already resolved to kill Rovena.
    The researcher listened to the pianist with the same calm curiosity, both when he believed her and when he didn’t. This woman had a special talent, perhaps granted to her by music, for evoking the atmosphere of events, especially imagined events. For instance, whenever she described the final dream, she never forgot to mention the building’s midnight glow, which was a reflection of the plaster, or perhaps of despair.
    Her description of the other incident on the morning of 17 May caused in the researcher’s mind an intoxicating frisson, whenever she mentioned it, that he could never shake off.
    Dozens, hundreds of times, he imagined Besfort Y. walking through the rain and mist, holding the shape of a woman tight against himself – whether real or not, nobody knew.
    As if ensnared by this scene, he was scarcely able to move on to ask, “So what happened later, in your opinion?”
    Lulu Blumb, also caught in her own trap, seemed unwilling to answer. As he silently rehearsed the questions to himself, he thought he saw her scowl even before he spoke. “Who knows what happened next,” she said aloud. Tell me what happened next, Miss Blumb, he said to himself. “We know that she was accompanying him to the airport, but did not plan to travel herself. So we know that everything that could possibly have happened took place in the taxi between the hotel and the airport terminal. In fact something did happen, but it involved the entire taxi and all of the people inside. It is like imagining, at a time when two countries are at war, some catastrophe striking the entire planet . . . perhaps you think imagining a murder is the same as committing one. Sometimes that is how it seems to me. But this time we are trying to work out the murderer’s plan, even though it was not carried out by him, but by some external force. The possibilities of such a thing happening after they left the hotel are limited. Only if they stopped somewhere along the road, at some small building or secluded place . . . ‘Driver, please stop here. We have to do something at that chapel over there . . .’”
    Lulu Blumb sighed, implying that they were thinking on entirely different lines and would never agree on anything.
    “But you can still tell me the motive for the murder,” the researcher said aloud, certain that she would merely fold her arms.
    The pianist did not get angry, but suddenly drew close to him and said gently that she had wanted to talk about this for a long time, but nobody would listen to her. She had talked about the late-night phone calls, about the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service, and his terror of the Hague Tribunal. But the investigators did not want to know. Obviously they were scared. Besfort Y. had been a danger to anyone who