"That's fine. Have you heard anything at all about the man who's been bothering me?"
"Not boo, ma'am," Deputy Alston said, comfortably enough...but of course he could afford to be comfortable, no one had threatened to hurt him, and quite likely no one would. He stood approximately six-five and probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Might go one-seventy-five, dressed n hung, her father might have added; in Lisbon, Dandy Debusher had been known for such witticisms.
"If Andy hears anything - Deputy Clutterbuck, I mean, he's running things until Sheriff Ridgewick gets back from his honeymoon - I'm sure he'll let you know right away. All you have to do in the meantime is take a few sensible precautions. Doors locked when you're inside, right? Especially after dark."
"Right."
"And keep that phone handy."
"I will."
He gave her a thumbs-up and smiled when she gave it right back. "I'll just go on and get that kitty now. Bet you'll be glad to see the last of it."
"Yes," Lisey said, but what she really wanted to be rid of, at least for the time being, was Deputy Alston. So she could go out to the barn and check under the bed. The one that had spent the last twenty years or so sitting in a whitewashed chicken-pen. The one they had bought ( mein gott) in Germany. In Germany where
8
everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Lisey doesn't remember where she heard this phrase and of course it doesn't matter, but it occurs to her with increasing frequency during their nine months in Bremen: Everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Everything that can, does.
The house on the Bergenstrasse Ring Road is drafty in the fall, cold in the winter, and leaky when the damp and hungover excuse for a spring finally comes. Both showers are balky. The downstairs toilet is a chuckling horror. The landlord makes promises, then stops taking Scott's calls. Finally Scott hires a firm of German lawyers at a paralyzing expense - mostly, he tells Lisey, because he cannot stand to let the sonofabitching landlord get away with it, cannot stand to let him win. The sonofabitching landlord, who sometimes winks at Lisey in a knowing way when Scott isn't looking (she has never dared to tell Scott, who has no sense of humor when it comes to the sonofabitching landlord), does not win. Under threat of legal action, he makes some repairs: the roof stops leaking and the downstairs toilet stops its horrible midnight laughter. He actually replaces the furnace. A blue-eyed miracle. Then he shows up one night, drunk, and screams at Scott in a mixture of German and English, calling Scott the American Communist boiling-potter, a phrase her husband treasures to the end of his days. Scott, far from sober himself (in Germany Scott and sober rarely even exchange postcards), at one point offers the sonofabitching landlord a cigarette and tells him Goinzee on!