by Marc Raabe
‘Why should I?’ Valerius says and looks down at Liz, who is not moving, even though her chains leave her a bit of slack.
‘I’ll kill you if anything happens to her.’
‘Kill me . . . ?’ It echoes between the walls of the crypt. ‘Do you think that I’m afraid of that? We’ve gone through it all already, haven’t we? First you shoot your father and save my life. Then you push me into the fire and make me a cripple. Have you ever considered that death could also be a form of salvation for me?’
‘Believe me,’ Gabriel says, ‘when it’s come this far, there is no salvation. All that’s left is to be scared shitless.’
Valerius narrows his eyes. ‘Is that so? Someone like you is afraid?’ He tilts his head then laughs again, cold and soulless. ‘No, Gabriel. After the fear always comes the salvation. I know it. But most people have so much fear for so long that it’s too late. And then the salvation is always too brief. But believe me, it’s still there. You can see it in their eyes at the very end. It was the same with all of them. The little cunt here in the crypt and then the others, and Kristen, that model, and – what was her name, the fat one? Jonas’s mother?
‘But us, Gabriel, we’ve already eaten too much shit and been too afraid already. For people like you and me, there’s hardly any fear left. Death might not be pretty, but death doesn’t matter. For us, there is only salvation.’
‘What do you want from me? To kill me?’
‘I wouldn’t do you the favour! Don’t expect me to be the person to bring you salvation . . .’
‘Fuck your salvation,’ Gabriel says, and the words float through the crypt.
Gabriel’s eyes dart around the room in search of something, anything, that could help him distract Valerius, something that could get him a couple of crucial seconds.
David! Where the hell is David? For the first time in his life, he desperately needs his brother’s help. It’s completely different from when he was in the clinic and held a knife to David’s throat and just relied on him to keep quiet.
Now everything is different.
Do something, little brother. Please!
Suddenly, his eyes rest on the wall of the crypt. There’s a man lying on a chaise longue. His white shirt is soaked through with blood and his vacant eyes are staring at the bottom of a picture filled with grotesque figures that could only exist in a nightmare. His eyes are fixed on some foreign words in the artwork, which Gabriel understands to mean:
Where were you, good Jesus, where were you?
Chapter 54
Berlin – 28 September, 8.09 a.m.
David hobbles as quickly as he can down the marble stairs, Yuri Sarkov’s voice still ringing in his ears. His hands are shaking with a kind of nervous energy. He looks nervously at the time. Ten past eight. Not much longer before von Braunsfeld’s staff will arrive, if they haven’t already. But where the hell is Gabriel? And where is Valerius?
David glances through the open double doors into the living room. Nothing. Just the open door to the terrace.
He hurries to the basement stairs and struggles down them, hesitating when he reaches the bodies of the two dead Dobermans at their foot. The dogs stare out into nothingness with their cold eyes. The door is opened a crack. It’s somewhere behind there.
David tries to climb over the dog carcasses in one step, but his left foot lands in the puddle of blood and nearly slides out from under him.
Quietly cursing to himself, he pushes open the cellar door and can see a dark hallway with many doors in front of him. He tries to get his bearings. Sarkov described the way to him, but it’s suddenly all so unreal that for a brief moment David wonders if he tricked him.
David’s breathing is too loud and sounds like a bellows. He tries to hold it and listen. But there is nothing. He stares into the cellar.
The nervous energy he felt before has now been replaced by a dull, throbbing fear, and he hopes that Sarkov told him the truth. He forces himself to enter the hall and limps forward metre by metre.
His left shoe leaves dark red prints on the floor behind him.
Chapter 55
Berlin – 28 September, 8.09 a.m.
Gabriel stares at the corpse below the picture. The old man must have only died recently, since the crypt doesn’t have that cloying smell of death.
Valerius’s glances feel like pinpricks. Gabriel looks away from the body and back into the mirror, where Valerius’s mismatched eyes are fixed on him. The red point is now shining on the mangled part of his forehead.
‘Who is that?’ Gabriel asks and gestures to the dead man. Valerius closes his disfigured eye, as the other blinks a few times and then looks back at him. He’s blind in one eye, Gabriel thinks. That means he has poor depth perception.
‘Allow me to introduce my esteemed father. Another bastard in love with his secrets, just like your father,’ Valerius says. He looks down at Liz.
Now! Gabriel steps forward. The soles of his shoes slide over the stone.
Valerius looks back up immediately. ‘Stay where you are,’ he shouts. His good hand pushes the knife a little bit further into Liz. ‘For every step you take closer, I will push it deeper into her.’
Liz groans miserably.
Gabriel clenches his teeth. His fists shake from rage and powerlessness. Distract him! Talk to him, Gabriel thinks. ‘In love with his secrets? Just like my father? What is that supposed to mean?’
Valerius snorts with disdain. ‘When did you discover your father’s dirty little secret? When you were eleven? Or even earl-ier? I was ten. God! Shit! He was so careful. It was always late at night. The limousines never parked in front of the house, on the property, but always far enough away from the house. And then down into the crypt to fuck. And I would always crouch back there,’ he gestured to the side with his head, ‘behind the picture. I scratched a hole in the mortar and then crouched back on the other side of the wall. At ten, I’d seen more fucking, arses and cocks than others have in their entire lives.’
‘What a shitty excuse.’
‘Excuse?’ Valerius cries.
Gabriel takes advantage of the outburst to move his feet a few centimetres forward.
This is going too slowly, runs through his head. Much too slowly!
‘I wasn’t suffering,’ Valerius snarls. ‘I wanted to be there! More than anything else. Didn’t you want to be there, too? In the cellar with your father? What would you have done for it? Did you ask? Beg? I did. And him? He said I was lying and locked me up in my room. Imprisoned. He was always good at that. But then he wasn’t so careful, so I could always get out without him noticing . . .’
Centimetre by centimetre, Gabriel makes his way forward.
Where the hell is David?
‘Until my mother found out about it. The mothers always find out. Always. Imagine, your mother finds out that her perfect husband disappears every month into a cellar, puts on a mask and properly fucks some young thing with a few other high-ranking men, while you watch. Sounds like a bad film, right? And it really is. What do you think your mother would’ve done?’
Gabriel’s throat constricts and he can’t answer.
Valerius snorts scornfully. ‘Of course! What could a mother do? She screams and shouts in a shrill voice: “You perverted bastard” and “the boy is only fourteen”, as if that mattered! And then she will leave him and she will move out and take you with her. And what do you think, how would you feel then? Tell me, Gabriel. How would you feel then?’
‘Relieved,’ Gabriel says softly.
‘Relieved? You’ve spent four years standing in front of the open door, peeking through with your heart beating into your throat. You’ve already taken coke, but that was crap by comparison. Nothing felt the way that felt! Your mouth was dry and your trousers had a full-on bulge. And you’ve imagined it a thousand times – standing there in the crypt instead of your fucking father! And you would be relieved?’
Gabriel says nothing. He stares at Valerius, tryi
ng to watch his eyes, so he can work his way forward bit by bit, centimetre by centimetre.
‘Do you know what my father always said?’ Valerius whispers. ‘The truth is that “every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.” That was his favourite quote. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Poison, you understand? That’s how you would have felt! Poisoned.’
An icy shiver runs down Gabriel’s back.
The truth is that every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.
Suddenly he is overcome with a terrible suspicion. ‘You didn’t want to stay with your mother, you wanted to go back,’ he whispers. ‘What did you do?’
Valerius’s eyes light up like gas flames. ‘I didn’t have to do much. I would have never suspected that it was so easy. A snap of the fingers, nothing more. Just cut the brakes in her car and bam! She was dead. That very evening, I stood on my father’s doormat and said: “I’m back.” Then he knew it. He could tell by looking at me.’
‘Didn’t they say she had been drinking?’
Valerius shook his head. ‘No, no. Even better – he said she had been drinking, but that it had been swept under the rug . . . that was his doing! And, of course, Sarkov’s . . .’
Sarkov’s . . .
Sarkov’s . . .
Sarkov’s . . . the name echoes in the silence.
‘Sarkov? Yuri Sarkov?’ Gabriel asks.
Valerius grins bitterly. ‘A man like Victor von Braunsfeld doesn’t get his hands dirty. Sexually, maybe, but not otherwise. That’s why he had Sarkov. Sarkov shovelled the dirt and my father gave him jobs.
Yuri. For Gabriel, it’s as if the curtain has dropped and he still cannot grasp everything that has suddenly appeared in front of him. ‘My god,’ he mutters.
‘God?’ Valerius chuckles. ‘No! My father.’ His expression changes to deadly serious. ‘My father was god and god punished me. Instead of being happy that she was gone, he punished me. She had scolded and despised him. She had left him and taken his son away. And he still loved her, at least in his own way. For four years, he locked me in my room. I was allowed to go to school, but that was all, and even that was only with a chaperone. If anyone asked why, then he said that he was scared of kidnappers. After school, I had to go back to my room, always with one of Sarkov’s men in front of the door.’
‘What happened on the thirteenth?’ Gabriel asks.
‘You want to know what happened on the thirteenth? I’d had enough. More than enough. I had turned eighteen and there was a guard at my door every fucking day. For four years, I never went down into my cellar, into his crypt. I could hear the limousines when they pulled up once a month and I knew I couldn’t be there. Four years of deprivation poisoning the body and mind. So, I summoned all of my courage and threatened him: “either I get to be part of it from now on, or you’ll read about it in the morning paper. And so will your friends.” ’ Valerius’s eyes sparkle. He’s talked himself into a frenzy and his whole body is shaking. ‘And that was it! It was unbelievable! He gave in.’
Gabriel looks at Liz, her lips squeezed together, the tears in her eyes, staring down at Valerius’s arm as the knife moves in rhythm with his words. Gabriel slowly moves forward.
‘I had hit the target, you understand? Can you imagine my excitement? October 13th was my night. Have you seen it? The video?’
Gabriel nods.
‘Everything? Did you see everything?’
‘I have,’ Gabriel says.
‘I knew it. I should have killed you then and there. There shouldn’t have been any witnesses. None!’ Valerius goes silent a moment. ‘And the other films?’ he then asks. ‘Did you see them, too?’
‘Other films?’
Valerius stares at him almost amused. ‘Do you really think,’ he whispers derisively, ‘that was the only film your father made here?’
The sentence echoes under the vaulted ceiling and shocks Gabriel to the core, casting him back to the lab, surrounded by photos, rolls of film, videocassettes and cameras. Of course! How could he be so stupid!
Valerius’s laughter painfully roars in his ears. ‘My father was ultra-careful about that. Once someone had proved their skill with dirty work, he would never let them go. Not even your father. Wolf Naumann! How do you think your father paid for your little suburban house? Your father was only there to immortalise my father’s insatiability on a few celluloid and magnetic strips. How many times do you think he stood there?’ Valerius gestures to the large mirror behind Liz with his chin. ‘And how often do you think he filmed through the glass?’
Gabriel stares into Valerius’s mutilated face in the mirror and sees himself – the way he peeks out over Valerius’s shoulder, so small, so infinitely far away and so pale, with an expression that he’s never seen on himself before.
‘There were dozens of films that my father watched over and over again. And no one knew about them. No one! Not even me. I only found out about them when it was too late. Not even his high-class friends knew that they were being filmed. Had they known, then they probably would have been scared shitless – the lawyers, judges and politicians! After all, they did . . .’ He twists his mouth into a terrifying smile and looks down at Liz, at the blade between her legs.
Gabriel’s heart is racing. Cold sweat covers his body. He tries with all his strength to suppress the horrific images that are rising up.
‘“The average gives the world its substance,” Valerius mutters, “the exceptional its value!” Another one from Oscar Wilde. My father loved that shit. He just didn’t live it. I lived it! Me!’ he roars. The vaulted ceiling echoes.
‘When I rammed that knife into that girl’s cunt, that was it, you know? Her eyes, as I pulled it up and she could look inside of herself, it was extraordinary! More extraordinary than anything he’d ever done, my holy father . . .’
The last word faded away in the crypt. Then the soft clinking of the chains pierces through the silence.
Gabriel didn’t dare look at Liz. He wanted to close his eyes and wish himself into another place, as he had back then, when he was eleven and had wished himself out of the lab. At the same time, he knows that he can’t so much as blink, because the image of the dying girl will be there in the dark behind his closed eyelids.
‘I imagine your father,’ Valerius says. ‘How he stood behind the mirror with his camera and shit himself like all the others did in here. None of those miserable cowards was good for anything. And you know what happened when they were all gone? I watched him in front of me, my father, as he ran around and around the body and heard him say the same thing over and over again, as if he were praying:
‘“You’re taking care of this,” he says.’
‘“What am I taking care of?” I ask and think: What’s the point of that? She’s dead. There’s nothing else to take care of.
‘And he says: “The film. I need the fucking film.”
‘“What film?” I ask him. “What are you talking about?”
‘And he stares at the mirror there and tells me about your father and his fucking camera and that he always filmed everything, including the whole thing with the girl. And that we are all on the film. Without masks. Then I knew what he meant!
‘Have you ever heard your heart beating loud, loud and fast, and then been very still because of it? And then it gets slower, your heart, you can hear it from beat to beat as it calms down.
‘It was a moment like that. The moment before you do something you know will have a meaning for your entire life. I knew it was my moment!
‘So, I went to take care of everything. To take care of the film and your father. It was supposed to be my night. Mine! And then it became yours.’
Gabriel stares at Valerius, his mouth agape. My night? he thinks. My parents are dead, my house burnt down and that was my night? He is so overcome with anger that he thinks he will be devoured by it.
‘You thought I was dead, did
n’t you? Burnt. Charred. That probably would have been better,’ Valerius says and looks down at Liz, lost in thought. The red light rests on the reflection of his forehead. Then he looks up. ‘I know, I know. I should be thankful that I actually made it out of there . . .
‘Did you know there was another small room in the back of the lab with a toilet? I soaked towels in the toilet bowl, splashed water over myself and the door, flushed and splashed again. I even peed on the door to keep it wet and breathed through the ventilation. . .’
Gabriel’s eyes are fixed on Valerius’s face, as he moves his feet forward by the centimetre every moment that Valerius isn’t paying attention.
‘When I crawled out, the house was in ruins. It was still night and there were fire engines and police everywhere. I was lucky and ran off through the garden without anyone seeing me. And then I came back here, home, with all of this.’ Valerius points to his face and prosthetic arm. ‘My father calmed me like a little kitten, gave me a sleeping pill, for the pain and whatever else I needed. One of his friends was there, a doctor. He bandaged me, which just felt so right at that moment. God, I was naive. I was so grateful to him. When I woke up, I was down here. Locked in and chained up.
‘And then he stands in front of me and says: “Where is the film? Do you have the film?”
‘I was still not able to answer him, but I thought: look at me, look at me, can’t you see how I’m suffering? My face, my skin . . . and you are asking about the fucking film?
‘And he roared again: “Where is the film?” Always just: “Where is the film?”
‘Then I knew he was like all the others. He was scared, just scared. Not for me, just for himself.
‘And now you have it. I finally gave him what he wanted all that time. You know what I said to him? I said: “Fuck the film, I won’t give it to you. I have it. I hid it at Mother’s house on Kadettenweg.” Of course, I hadn’t. The goddamned cassette melted in the heat, like everything else in the lab. But I told him I hid it and that’s what he believed.