by Marc Raabe
Gabriel stares at the guns pointed at him. The Baghira in his hand weighs a ton. ‘Have I understood this correctly? Yuri wants this film at all costs?’
‘You said it.’
Gabriel smiles bitterly. ‘Guns have one major disadvantage if you want something at all costs.’
Koslowski stares at him, confused.
‘They’re deadly,’ Gabriel says.
Koslowski shifts his weight from his left to his right foot, as if to set his brain in motion.
‘So, what do you think?’ Gabriel says quietly. ‘If I have the film and it’s hidden in a secure place, how is Yuri supposed to find it if you shoot me now?’
Koslowski blinks. His forehead wrinkles and then he slowly and silently points his gun at Gabriel’s knee and grins. Blood runs over his thick upper lip and reddens his teeth. The other man keeps his gun pointed squarely at Gabriel’s head. ‘So there you have it,’ Koslowski declares.
‘That is not the question,’ Gabriel says. The exertion is making him sweat and he tries to focus on that so that they can’t see how nervous he is. ‘The question is more, how important is this film to you? After all, what do you think will happen if you shoot me in the knee?’
Koslowski stares at the Baghira pointed at him. The barrel of the gun is trembling in Gabriel’s hand. ‘You’re afraid,’ he mumbles and smiles meanly. The trembling gets worse.
‘Yes,’ Gabriel says. ‘And that’s exactly why I am going to shoot.’
Koslowski’s grin disintegrates.
Gabriel takes a half step forward. The two men don’t move a centimetre.
‘Your time is up,’ Koslowski repeats. His breath smells like smoke. ‘Give me the film.’
Gabriel takes a step towards Koslowski and presses the barrel of the Baghira against his left eye. Koslowski’s finger trembles on the trigger, but he doesn’t move. Gabriel puts more pressure on his eye. Despite himself, the Pole backs away, leaving the door free. Gabriel walks through the door and into the hall. With slow, focused steps, he goes backwards towards the stairwell with his gun still pointed at the men.
‘Sooner or later,’ Koslowski cries, ‘I’ll get you.’
‘I’ll recognise you by the bandages on your nose,’ Gabriel says.
Koslowski furiously spits a mix of blood and saliva onto the hallway carpet. At that very moment, Gabriel storms down the stairs. Noisy steps charge down the hall. As he rushes out the back door of Caesar’s, his movements are amazingly confident. It won’t be like this for long, he thinks, soon the adrenalin will subside.
He sprints to the nearest metro station. On the stairs, he releases the magazine from the Baghira and throws it into a bin. He discards the gun itself in another rubbish bin on the train platform and feels like he’s removed the poison from a snakebite. He boards the arriving train and sits on one of the colourfully patterned seats. The square lights above the doors flash to indicate that the doors are closing. The wheels grind against the track and the train starts moving.
Shit!
How the hell did Yuri find him? And what film is he after?
Gabriel thinks of the night at the house on Kadettenweg, the living room with the heavy wooden ceiling beams and the abandoned furniture, the photos on the mantel and the safe behind the picture. The safe was open and empty, so someone who had been there before him was in possession of its contents. But who could it be, and what did Yuri want with the film? And what did the house there have to do with anything? When it came to that address, Yuri had reacted as if the building were a part of his body.
Frustrated, Gabriel puts his hands in his trouser pockets. His cold fingers feel the mobile and he thinks of Liz.
The train brakes screech and a mother gets on with a buggy. The child inside has a bubblegum-pink dummy in her mouth and huge eyes.
Gabriel automatically wonders how old she is. He gets choked up at the sight of her. How many months along is Liz now? He clenches his fists in his pockets. Come on, think! What is your next step?
He can’t go back to Caesar’s, that’s for sure. His hideout is blown and next time Yuri will send men who can’t be so easily persuaded. The only problem is that everything he owns other than the mobile is at Caesar’s, including the money.
Gabriel groans. He needs new clothes, since the ones he’s wearing are covered in blood and filth, but without any money, he’s in no position to find a place to stay, let alone get food and clothing. He closes his eyes. The rumbling of the train calms the chaos of his mind.
David, he thinks. I have to go to David.
You’re incorrigible, Luke!
I just need some money.
He has never helped you. Why should he help you now?
He’s my brother.
Family! the voice mocks. You mean blood is thicker than water and all that?
Gabriel doesn’t answer.
And does it also count when that blood was shed by your own hand?
I want you to disappear!
Gabriel opens his eyes and stares at the flaming red horizon between the buildings. It looks as if someone has ignited the sky.
Chapter 41
Andermatt, Switzerland – 25 September, 7.12 p.m.
Liz sits on the wooden bench at the local police station like a worn-out mannequin. She is wrapped in a scratchy Swiss army blanket and wants nothing more than a warm bed and to close her eyes, knowing that nothing else can be done for her. But the longer she listens to the muffled voices behind the glass, the more her desperation grows. Even if both of the local police officers behind the window think that she hears nothing – she actually understands every word. Now they’re both laughing, they’re talking about cars, as the shorter one compulsively turns his BMW key between his fingers.
She doesn’t know where to look and just stares out in front of her. The sun has fallen like a stone behind the mountains and dusk hovers over Andermatt. Her feet are numb and every single muscle in her body burns.
She managed to fight her way through the trees for a full half an hour. The slope became increasingly steep and the sharp stones and branches hurt her feet so badly that she was in tears. So, she left the cover of the trees, made her way to the road and down the serpentine path. On the smooth asphalt, she progressed much faster. To calm herself, she began counting her steps. Every time a car drove by, she threw herself into the bushes and dropped to the ground. Each time, she prayed that the vehicle would keep moving and that he wasn’t behind the wheel. She couldn’t bear it if he saw a bit of her absurd black dress in the bushes, stopped and brought her back to her prison – or something even worse.
An eternity later, a white, onion-shaped steeple appeared behind a bend. Train tracks cut through the mountain landscape.
It was the village of Wassen.
Liz walked into town like a gothic bride. She had cut a slit in the voluminous, ill-fitting black haute-couture dress, so that her pregnant belly could fit in it. The black silk, which was sheer in some places, was dirty and had pulled threads from branches or thorns getting caught in the fabric. Her bare feet were covered in filth and her greasy red hair was sticking out in all directions. In the Middle Ages, she would have been burned at the stake as a witch. In the twenty-first century, she seemed like a lunatic, freshly escaped from the asylum.
As she walked past the first houses in the village, she could see from the corner of her eye that she was being stared at through the curtains. She kept going, step by step, as she had done in her cell. The soft tapping of her feet against the asphalt sounded like a metronome that guided her heart and mind to just keep going.
The first person that approached her was a woman holding the hand of a little girl around five years old. The child was the spitting image of her mother, with wide-set eyes and long blond hair, which was braided neatly down the back of her head.
Liz shook with relief. ‘Please help me,’ she begged. ‘I need the police.’
The woman stayed planted at a safe distance and looked at Liz with her mo
uth hanging open. ‘What . . . what happened to you?’
Liz swallowed, slowly shook her head and repeated: ‘Please, I would just like to go to the police.’
The girl looked up at Liz from below and pulled hard on her mother’s hand. The woman’s eyes drifted down to Liz’s round stomach. Then she nodded. ‘Come on, I’ll take you to the train station. You need to go one stop. The police station for the area is in Andermatt.’
‘Thank you,’ Liz nodded and followed behind the neatly dressed Swiss woman. She felt like a filthy vagrant in the eyes of the villagers. The daughter kept turning back to look at her. There was a mixture of disgust and confusion in her expression. Liz couldn’t blame her. With difficulty, she smiled back at her. ‘Nice fringe you’ve got there,’ she said softly.
The girl looked up, her eyebrows raised in confusion.
‘Your hair,’ Liz said, gesturing to the top of the girl’s forehead.
The girl pushed her hand away, as if Liz were some sort of leper, and turned away.
‘We say bangs, not fringe,’ the mother said.
Bangs. Liz didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The village train station was a simple building with six mullioned windows and a pointed roof with a single train platform behind it.
The woman, whose name she didn’t even know, checked the timetable for her. ‘The train will be here in ten minutes.’ She looked at Liz, uncertain. The girl pulled on her hand again. ‘Do you have any money?’
Liz shook her head. The woman gave her twenty Swiss francs, smiled a bit less stiffly this time and shot her daughter an angry look. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘Will you manage it alone? I think my daughter . . .’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Liz said. ‘You’ve helped me a lot.’
The train entered the station, its brakes bringing the carriages to such a screeching halt that Liz had to cover her ears. Every sound seemed to pierce deep inside her, as if she no longer had any filter from the outside world.
She stepped on the train in a trance. It hadn’t once even crossed her mind that he might think she was going to get away by train.
When the landscape started moving around her and the repetitive sound of the wheels turning crept into her consciousness, she began to cry again. Every fibre of her body ached and she was dizzy with hunger.
She absently stared out the window; the scenery sped past in long blurring strips. When the Swiss railway guard asked her for her ticket, she desperately looked for the twenty-franc note that the woman had given her. The money was gone. Apparently, she had lost it on the platform. ‘I . . . I had it earlier,’ she stammered, ‘I just . . . excuse me.’ She swallowed and tried to pull herself together. ‘I’m sorry. Please help me. I was kidnapped. I . . . have to go to the police.’
In Andermatt, two police officers were already waiting for her. The guard gratefully handed her over to their custody – a confused pregnant woman without a valid ticket and incoherent delusions of being kidnapped.
Liz was relieved. At first.
At the station, she collapsed and then was given a Swiss army blanket. She finally had something to eat and drink and was permitted to wash up the best she could in the WC. When she saw her reflection in the mirror, she jumped. Not again, she thought. Don’t start wailing again, damn it!
Then came the questions.
‘Could you please tell us your name again?’
‘Anders. Liz Anders, from Berlin. I’m a journalist.’
‘And you were actually kidnapped in Berlin, and then someone brought you here to Switzerland?’
Liz nodded.
‘Why did the kidnapper go to such trouble?’
‘How should I know? Ask the man who did it.’
‘You mean . . . this Val.’
‘God, yes,’ Liz snapped, nearly in tears. ‘For the third time!’
‘Are you sure that your description is accurate?’
‘After giving you the exact same description three times, does it sound like I’m not sure?’
The two officers exchanged glances. The shorter of the two, who was one of the officers that had picked her up at the train station, cleared his throat. ‘No, please don’t misunderstand, but it all sounds a bit . . . well, yeah . . . a man with half his face disfigured and the other half . . . what did you say?’
‘Beautiful, I said, exceptionally attractive,’ Liz muttered weakly. ‘Like a model for shaving cream or something.’
‘You know, I believe you, that is, just . . . it all sounds a bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . . . that is . . .’
‘Well, I can’t change it. It all sounds quite ludicrous, that may well be. But it is the truth. It happened. Please! Send a patrol car to the house if you don’t believe me.’
Another exchanged glance. The taller of the two men sighed. ‘Could you please give us the directions again?’
‘The road past the church out of Wassen, continue along the stream the whole way, around 7,200 steps. Then bear right up the slope. I don’t remember how many steps that was, I ran between the trees. But the house is at the end of the street. A bungalow, right on the rocks. Surrounded by a dry stone wall with a wrought-iron gate. The front entrance has double doors made of dark brown wood. There are no other houses there. You should probably be able to find that, right?’
‘And you’re sure you mean that house?’
Liz glared at him. ‘How sure do you need me to be?’
The tall officer raised his eyebrows, placed the pen in his notebook and stood up. ‘Well, then let’s go.’
After a phone call and forty minutes of waiting, Liz looks at her feet. The phone rings in the office. The short officer puts down the car keys and picks up the phone. Liz’s eyes are glued to the window. Suddenly, she recognises her own reflection in the glass and is shocked.
‘Police, Canton of Uri, this is Schechtler,’ the officer says.
He listens for a moment, then he nods, waves his colleague over and puts it on speaker.
‘As you suspected,’ the voice on the speakerphone crackles, ‘this is the house. No doubt about it.’
Liz straightens up, blood charging through every last vein.
‘And? What did you find?’
‘Well, pretty abandoned upstairs. The housekeeper let us in, she’s a bit eccentric, but no wonder when you don’t see a single soul all day.’
The housekeeper?
Liz jumps up. Her entire body protests against the sudden movement. She stares through the window, flails about with her hands, gesturing as if she’s hitting someone over the head.
The officer gestures for her to sit back down. ‘What’s the housekeeper’s name?’
‘Yvette Baerfuss, thirty-nine years old. She’s been working for the family for fourteen years. Comes from Lucerne. The people in the area know her.’
For fourteen years? Liz’s eyes widen. Fourteen? This cannot be! She opens the door and whispers breathlessly: ‘What did she look like? Ask about a wound on her head.’
The officer angrily furrows his brow and gives Liz a withering look. ‘How, uh, did she look?’
‘How she looked? Well, a bit worse for the wear. Maybe if she was younger, I’d –’
‘Man,’ the short one says, ‘I don’t want to know if you’d sleep with her. I want to know what she looks like. Did you notice anything particular about her or . . .’
The tall officer snorts.
‘Oh, uh . . . well, grey or blue eyes, shoulder-length blond hair, I think . . . she was wearing a headscarf . . . slim, medium height . . . her breasts were a bit more, in relation to, I mean . . .’
The tall one mimes huge tits with his hands and shakes with laughter.
The short one rolls his eyes. ‘Did you notice anything else, you genius? Injuries or anything?’
‘Injuries? Where?’
‘No idea. Anywhere.’
For a moment, there is silence.
‘Nope. There was nothing,’
the voice says.
The short one covers the mouthpiece, looks grouchily at the tall one and gestures to Liz with his chin. ‘If you’re done laughing, then you can throw her out, in the hall.’
Liz stares at him in disbelief. ‘You mean to tell me they found nothing?’ She is suddenly a pale as a ghost. ‘Please listen! He’s there, I know it! You just have to go in. She’s covering for him.’
The short one turns his back to her and gestures for her to go back out in the hall.
‘Please,’ Liz begs. ‘Now they know I’m here. If you don’t find him, then –’ her voice suddenly fails her.
The tall officer gently pushes her out. ‘Please, calm down. Don’t worry, you’re safe here.’ Then he tries to close the door, but something is jammed and the door remains open a crack.
Liz sits on the bench. Her heart starts beating uncontrollably and her hands are shaking. Control! She thinks. Stay in control. She closes her eyes and tries to calculate. If it’s 7,200 steps away, how long would that take by car? How quickly will he get here?
‘Are you waiting inside now, in the house?’ she hears the short one ask behind the glass window.
The voice on the speaker snorts. ‘You know who owns the place, right?’
‘I didn’t ask who it belongs to, I asked if you were waiting inside, Christ.’
‘All right, all right. Yes.’
‘OK, so have you asked?’
‘It was a bit of an effort, but I think I’ve set the right tone with her . . .’
The tall one grins and sways his hips rhythmically. The short one looks at him angrily until he stops.
‘It’s a pretty simple shack for such a moneybags. Really surprised me.’
‘Did you see everything?’
‘Every room. But there was nothing to do with a kidnapping or anything.’
Liz stares at the two policemen behind the glass, then her eyes anxiously drift over to the door of the station, as if it could spring open at any moment and Val would be standing there. His face appears in her mind, torn apart like raw flesh. With all of her strength, she tries to force him out of her thoughts, but he is everywhere. Pull yourself together, damn it, and start thinking!