The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘Julian!’ I shouted again. I was so close to him I could the deadness in his facial expression. He was going to kill me, there were only a few seconds remaining before the end of the rope slid unhindered right through the brake, and I would fall.

‘Franz!’

The elasticated rope was pulled tight and tensed above the drop. My harness was pressing into the small of my back. My descent had stopped, I swayed up and down in the empty air. It was just two or three metres down to Julian, but since I was hanging vertically from the anchor at the top, I dangled over the edge where the track ran. If the rope passed through the brake I would fall past Julian and all the fifty or sixty metres down to the rocks where the waves frothed like the contents of a smashed champagne bottle.

‘Looks like the rope isn’t eighty metres after all,’ said Julian. ‘Sorry — to err is human.’ His face didn’t look as if he was sorry.

It was his endgame now. That end was located twenty centimetres below the brake and his hand. Right now it was the only thing holding me. Owing to the angle and the friction in the brake it wasn’t hard for him to hold me there. On the other hand, he couldn’t do it forever. And when he let go it wouldn’t look like a murder but like an all too common type of climbing accident: the rope was too short.

I nodded. ‘You’re right, Franz...’

He didn’t respond.

‘...it is human to err.’

We studied each other. Him half standing on the track, half sitting on the halter and the rope, me dangling directly above him, over the abyss.

‘Paradox,’ he said at length. ‘That’s a Greek word, isn’t it? Like when Ferdinand is afraid of the dark when it’s bedtime and he wants Daddy to tell him fairy stories until he’s asleep. But he insists that they’re scary stories. Isn’t that a paradox?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Perhaps not.’

‘In any case, you can see the darkness coming, maybe you should tell a scary story now, Nikos. And then maybe you and I won’t be so afraid.’

‘How about we resolve this situation here first?’

He loosened his grip on the rope, let it slip a few centimetres closer to the brake.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the resolution will lie in the story you tell.’

I swallowed. Looked down. A fall of sixty metres doesn’t take long. But you can get through quite a lot of thinking in the time it does take. Unfortunately you also have time to reach a speed of 123.5 kilometres an hour. Would I hit the water, just about survive the fall and drown? Or would I hit the rock and die an instantaneous and pain-free death? I had seen that one close up. The stillness and the absence of drama had been the most striking thing, even in the seconds after he hit the ground, before everybody began to scream and run around. It had turned cold, and yet I could feel the sweat running like molten wax. I had not planned to expose the fake Julian in this way, with my whole life quite literally in his hands. On the other hand it was logical. Indeed, in a way it made everything easier. The ultimatum would be clearer.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Are you ready?’

‘I’m ready.’

‘Once upon a time...’ I took a deep breath. ‘Once upon a time there was a man named Franz who was so jealous that he killed his twin brother Julian, so that he could have the lovely Helena all to himself. He took his brother down to a beach, shot him in the head and threw the body into the sea. But when Franz realised that Helena loved Julian, and only Julian, and that she didn’t want Franz, Franz arranged things in such a way that it looked as though it was him and not Julian who had ended up in the sea with a bullet through the head. Afterwards he chained himself up in a cellar, and when he was found he pretended to be Julian, and to have been there ever since Julian had been reported missing. Everyone believed him, everyone believed he was Julian, and so Franz did get his Helena, and they all lived happily ever after. Satisfied?’

He shook his head but still held on to the rope. ‘You’re not a born storyteller, Nikos.’

‘True.’

‘You have, for example, no proof.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘With proof you wouldn’t have come here alone, and I would have been arrested a long time ago. And I happen to know that you’ve left the police force. These days you spend your time sitting in the National Library reading books, am I right?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I use the Gennadius Library.’

‘So then what’s this visit all about? Is this the old man come to pursue the case that won’t give him any peace because he no longer feels certain he discovered the truth?’

‘It’s true I’m not at peace,’ I said. ‘Though it’s not about this case. But it is not true that I’m here in search of proof, because I already have proof.’

‘You’re lying.’ The knuckles of the hand holding the rope whitened.

‘No,’ I said. ‘When the DNA from the body in the sea matched what we got from Franz during the interrogation, everybody thought that wrapped things up. But of course there was one more possibility. Because identical twins come from the same egg and share a genetic heritage, they also have the same DNA profile. So in theory the body we found could just as well have been Julian as Franz.’