Silberstein had immediately closed his workshop and posted a notice on the door stating that he wouldn’t be back until the following day. Then he’d accompanied Hollner to his home, not far from the harbor in a badly maintained block of apartments. Höllner had a small apartment overlooking the rear courtyard. Silberstein could remember the strong scent of lavender and all the awful watercolors of the Pampas painted by Höllner’s wife. They had talked long into the night about the amazing coincidences, how their paths had crossed in Berlin so many years ago. Höllner was three years younger than Silberstein. He was only nine in 1945, and his memories were fuzzy. But he remembered the man who was fetched by car once a week to give his father a massage. He even remembered thinking that there was something remarkable about it, something remarkable and also a little dangerous, in that a Jew (whose name he didn’t know at that time) was still there in Berlin. And, moreover, a man being protected by no less a person than the terrifying Reichsmarschall Goering. But when he recounted what he remembered about Jacob Silberstein’s appearance and his gait, Silberstein knew that there could have been no misunderstanding: Hollner was talking about his uncle.
The key reference was to an ear, his left ear, that Jacob Silberstein had disfigured as a child, cutting himself on a shattered window pane. Silberstein broke into a sweat when Hollner described the ear he remembered so vividly. There was no doubt at all, and Silberstein was so touched that he felt obliged to embrace Hollner.
Now, lying in his tent, he remembered all that as if it had happened only yesterday. Silberstein checked his watch. 10:15. He changed identity again in his thoughts. Now he was Fernando Hereira. He had landed in Sweden as Hereira. He was an Argentinean citizen on vacation in Sweden. Nothing else. Least of all Aron Silberstein, who arrived in Buenos Aires one spring day in 1953 and had never been back to Europe since. Not until now, when he finally had an opportunity to do what he’d been longing to do all those years.
He dressed, broke camp, and drove back to the main road. He stopped for lunch outside Varberg. His headache had cleared up by now. Two more hours and he’d be in Malmö. The car rental company was next to the train station. That was where he’d gotten the car forty days earlier, and that was where he would return it. No doubt he’d be able to find a hotel nearby. Before then he would have to get rid of the tent and the sleeping bag. He’d dumped the camping stove, saucepans, and plates in a dumpster at a rest stop in Dalarna. He’d thrown all the cutlery into a river he’d driven over. He would keep a lookout for a suitable place to offload the rest of his stuff before he got to Malmö.
He found what he was looking for a few kilometers north of Helsingborg: a dump behind a gas station where he’d stopped to fill up for the last time. He buried the tent and the sleeping bag under the cardboard boxes and plastic bottles that already filled the dump. Then he took out a plastic bag lying at the top of his backpack. It contained a bloodstained shirt. Although he’d been wearing coveralls that he’d burned while still up there in the forest, Molin had managed to cover his shirt in blood. How it had happened was still a mystery. Just as big a mystery as why he hadn’t burned the shirt when he’d disposed of the coveralls.
Deep down, though, he knew the answer. He’d kept the shirt so that he could look at it and convince himself that what had happened was real, not simply a dream. Now he didn’t need it any longer. The time for remembering was in the past. He dug the plastic bag as deep into the dump as he could. As he did so, his mind turned again to Hollner, the pale man that he’d met at La Cabana. Had it not been for him, he wouldn’t be here now, shedding the last physical traces of a journey to Sweden during which he’d taken a person’s life, and sent a final horrific greeting to the equally horrific past by means of some blood-soaked footprints he’d left behind on a wooden floor.
From now on the only traces would be inside his head.
He returned to his car and sat at the wheel without starting the engine. A question was nagging away at the back of his mind. It had been there ever since the night he’d attacked Molin’s house. A question regarding an unexpected discovery he’d made about himself. He had felt frightened on the way to Sweden. He’d spent the whole of the long flight wondering how he would manage to complete the mission he’d set himself. A mission comprising a single task: killing a man. So far in his life he had never been anywhere even close to harming another human being. He hated violence, he was scared stiff of being assaulted himself. But there he was, on his way to another continent to kill a man in cold blood. A man he’d met six or seven times before, when he was twelve years old.