The Eye Collector

by Sebastian Fitzek

Suddenly alert, the barkeep’s eyes darted from me to Alina and back. I produced my press pass from the hip pocket of my jeans. ‘We’re writing a story about the man.’

  He guffawed loudly, then pointed to Alina. ‘Oh, sure, and the blind girl’s your photographer, right?’

  Unable to think of an appropriate retort in time, I felt caught out. The barkeep seemed unworried.

  ‘I couldn’t care less who you are. Just as long as that bastard in the picture isn’t a pal of yours.’

  ‘No way.’ Alina and I spoke almost simultaneously.

  I put my press pass away and took the phone back. It was moist from the barkeep’s fingers.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you something about that shit in the picture.’

  ‘You know him?’

  The Eye Collector?

  ‘No. But yesterday afternoon, around four, Yasmin came in here. She was hopping mad – cussing and swearing about some arsehole who’d had a spat with Linus. The guy had kicked his guitar case.’

  Wankakikmigit.

  I looked at Alina, who had gone down on one knee and was patting TomTom. She nodded to convey that she was thinking the same as me.

  The time and place both fit. It was the man on the tape.

  ‘Linus’s takings were scattered across the pavement – a whole day’s worth, I reckon. An hour later he came in and spent it all on booze.’ The barkeep nodded at Linus. ‘With obvious results.’

  ‘This girl Yasmin,’ I said, ‘where can I find her?’

  ‘Do I look like an effing social secretary? I don’t keep my customers’ appointments diaries. Sometimes she drops in every day, sometimes not for two or three weeks.’

  Terrific.

  I’d just decided that we’d wasted far too much time barking up the wrong tree when there was a loud smack.

  Everyone in the room gave a start. Everyone but Linus.

  ‘Wankaparkatikki!’ He gave the edge of the pool table another slap with the flat of his hand.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said the barkeep, turning to go. ‘Come on, Linus, I’ll stand you a coffee. There may even be some sausages left in the kitchen.’

  He clearly considered the conversation at an end. Telling Alina to stay put, I followed him into the taproom and barred his path before he reached the counter.

  ‘What did Linus say just then?’

  The old man stared at my hand, which was gripping his shoulder, then looked me in the eye. He didn’t speak until I’d let go of him.

  ‘Linus is still furious with the guy, but not because he kicked his guitar case, nor because he had to spend half an hour looking for his coins in the gutter.’

  ‘So why?’

  ‘Because he’d left his car in a disabled parking space.’

  Wankaparkatikki...

  I massaged my neck, applying pressure to a migraine spot immediately beside the cervical vertebrae – a trick a neurologist had shown me once.

  That took some working out.

  ‘Linus is a good guy, really. His brains may be scrambled but his heart’s in the right place.’

  ‘Tikkikosta!’

  I turned at the sound of Linus’s voice. He was standing in the poolroom doorway, grinning with his fist raised. Alina came into view behind him.

  ‘Tikkikostapulenti!’

  ‘Yes, you’re happy about that, aren’t you? The wanker’s in for a nice, fat parking fine.’ The barkeep formed an O with his thumb and forefinger and made an obscene gesture.

  ‘A fine?’ I said, feeling more and more of a dork at having to get a mentally deranged busker’s gibberish translated by a no less peculiar barkeep. Then I suddenly grasped, without his help, what Linus had just said.

  Tikkikostapulenti!

  The Eye Collector had been given a ticket.

  A ticket that could identify him.

  THE EYE COLLECTOR’S FIRST LETTER EMAILED VIA AN ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT

  To: Thea Bergdorf

  Subject: The truth...

  Dear purblind Frau Bergdorf,

  This email is probably as futile as the frantic efforts of my youthful guests to escape from their allotted hiding place before their time finally runs out.

  I shall inevitably fail in my attempt to wash off the bucket of pigswill your paper empties over me daily. That is as certain as the fact that this email will pass through dozens of hands in the next few hours. Tremulous hands like yours, as jittery as those of the IT technicians who will wind up looking somewhere in Rwanda if they try to trace the account from which I’m sending this. Other hands will be calmer and more professional: those of the psychologists and philologists who will dissect every phrase, every word in this sentence – indeed, even the colon. But please don’t show this letter to Professor Adrian Hohlfort, whom I think is more likely to be recruited into our national football team than successfully track me down. That so-called ‘super profiler’, to quote his job description in the rag you claim to be a newspaper, would even fail to spot that the very first sentence of this email contains a clue. I spoke of children in the plural but only one hiding place – a one-fits-all solution, so to speak. That hiding place has so far remained as far from discovery by the police as my prick from Madonna’s pussy (to descend to the level of your brain-dead journalists). So save yourself the 500 euros an hour Professor Wheelchair would charge for telling you that, by addressing myself to the media in the manner of serial killers like Zodiac, I’m displaying megalomania. I’ve no wish to pour scorn on my pursuers. I need no publicity.

  On the contrary, I want you to stop writing rubbish about me. Take my sobriquet, for a start. Like a starving mongrel, you’ve merely fallen on the most obvious piece of meat I’ve thrown you: the missing eyes. Shame on you and those incompetents in homicide for being so easily deceived! One simple trick, and I’ve been stereotyped as a demented sex maniac. Trophies are of no interest to me. I’m not a collector, I’m a player. And I play fair. As soon as I’ve settled on the participants in my game, marked out the field of play and – metaphorically speaking – blown the whistle, I abide by the rules. Mother, child, deadline, hiding place – I lay down the ground rules that I observe throughout every phase of the game. I guarantee every player a fair chance of bringing the game of hide-and-seek to an end. I lay no false trails, even if my pursuers come too close, nor do I prolong a game no matter how exciting it gets. I’m not impartial, I admit. I do intervene now and then, but always for the benefit of my opponents. You would never understand that without my help. And that’s why I’m writing you this email. As a rejoinder to all the lies you’ve been spreading about me.

  I’m not a lunatic, not a monster or psychopath. I’m carrying out a plan, and my game has a purpose. If you had undergone what I’ve been through, you would agree. You might not approve of my actions, but you would at least be capable of understanding them.

  I bet you’re shaking your head at this moment. ‘What a sicko,’ you’re thinking, but secretly you’re working out your revised advertising rates for the edition with this email splashed across page one. But what if I cite you a motive that puts my actions in a different light? Well, are you still shaking your head, with its lousy hairdo? I bet you aren’t.

  You’d like to believe me, wouldn’t you? You’d like to believe that I’m not just any old sexually motivated psychopath, and that there’s a comprehensible plan underlying all I do.

  For that, dear purblind Frau Bergdorf, would really be a story. You’re itching to know my reasons for reviving the oldest children’s game in the world: hide-and-seek!

  All right, go on. Submit this email to all the incompetents mentioned above and await my next communication. I’ll write you again as soon as I find the time. Don’t worry, I won’t keep you waiting long.

  Not even seven hours. Plus the half day I’ll need to dispose of the bodies.

  42

  (6 HOURS 39 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  ALEXANDER ZORBACH

  The symptoms got
worse the moment we pulled up at some road works, our first red light after a longish succession of greens.

  Fortunately, before smashing the gallery window I had the presence of mind to park the old Toyota in a side street, around the corner from Alina’s block of flats. If I’d left it double-parked outside, the car would have been towed away long ago or confiscated by the police, who would inevitably have established a connection between the vandalized art gallery and myself. After all, I had personally informed Stoya that I would have to pursue my own enquiries if he continued to disregard my evidence. Evidence seen by the eyes of a blind girl.

  I had to admit that my own eyes weren’t too good at present. They were watering so much that the red lights looked fluorescent and beads of cold sweat were breaking out on my forehead. Much as I hoped my steadily worsening state was the first sign of a cold, I was afraid it stemmed from something quite different.

  I called Frank. ‘How long will you need?’ I asked him.

  ‘To check a parking ticket? In the middle of the night?’

  I glanced at the dashboard clock and swore beneath my breath. Eleven-fifty. Only ten minutes to the birthday of my son, who would probably celebrate it with some strange doctor instead of his Dad.

  ‘What do you think?’ Frank went on. ‘It’s the kind of info you can only get from contacts, and mine is asleep at this hour.’

  Mine isn’t, worse luck. Stoya has just put me on the Wanted list and is working flat out to catch me.

  ‘Okay, Frank, I’ll give Stoya another call and try to convince him.’

  ‘No, don’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I may already have what you’re after.’

  The lights turned green, dazzling me for a moment. Someone behind me honked his horn. I opened my eyes again, but it was a while before the gauze obscuring my vision lifted and I could see the road ahead.

  ‘How come?’ I asked.

  How could Frank have traced the owner of a vehicle when he didn’t even know its licence number?

  ‘Research,’ was his laconic reply. Appropriately enough, I could hear the familiar background music of several phones ringing in the open-plan newsroom.

  ‘If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s digging up info. Trust me.’ He lowered his voice. ‘The question is, though, how far can you trust the female Stevie Wonder beside you.’

  I glanced at the rear-view mirror. Alina had got into the back with TomTom as if I were her chauffeur, but right now the distance between us suited me fine.

  ‘Meaning what?’ I asked in a low voice.

  We were driving along a broad avenue, whose name escaped me, in the direction of the urban expressway. Although I still had no definite destination in mind, something told me it was better to remain on the move. Instinctively, no doubt, I was taking a route that led to my houseboat.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t she say something along these lines: that we should look for a detached house with a driveway, and that the Eye Collector parked immediately outside it after the murder?’

  ‘Right.’ Alina’s last vision, which she’d described to me in Frank’s presence, had completely slipped my mind.

  ‘All right. Let’s assume, just for fun, that our psychopath really did drive to a house after the murder – for a celebratory drink, maybe. If so, the likelihood is that he was using the same car that attracted the parking ticket one day later, right?’

  ‘A few too many hypotheses for my taste, but I can see what you’re getting at.’

  Find the house and we find the owner – providing there’s some degree of correspondence between reality and Alina’s surreal fantasies.

  ‘Okay, so far so good. I also assumed that the killer would stick strictly to the speed limit so as not to attract attention. Then, taking my cue from what Alina said, I based my calculations on a window of four minutes maximum. Starting out from the Teufelsberg, the Eye Collector couldn’t have left a traffic-calming zone in that time. The neighbourhood is full of schools and kindergartens, playing fields and sports complexes.’

  ‘Fine, so you’ve narrowed down the relevant area to several square kilometres.’

  ‘To within a radius of five point six kilometres, to be precise, but most of it is agricultural land or woods.’

  I heard a computer keyboard clicking away beneath Frank’s fingers.

  ‘There are also a number of allotments and recreation areas, et cetera. The relevant streets and roads can’t add up to more than the length of a marathon.’

  I laughed. ‘Which you’ve run, of course.’

  ‘Correct.’

  I braked sharply. A pedestrian anxious to catch a bus on the other side of the street had darted out in front of me. Alina grumbled at my driving. TomTom had almost slid off the back seat despite her efforts to prevent him from doing so.

  ‘You’re pulling my leg,’ I said after taking a moment to recover from the shock.

  Frank chuckled. ‘Never heard of Google Earth?’

  Of course.

  I put on speed again and turned the windscreen wipers up a notch, but all they did was smear the glass. Snow was falling in coin-sized flakes, but it wasn’t wet enough to loosen the winter grime. As a result, I could hardly see a thing.

  Very appropriate.

  I felt as if the same worn, old windscreen wipers were working away inside my head.

  The more I strove for clarity, the more indistinct the picture before my eyes. The peculiar hallucinations that had led me to consult Dr Roth didn’t help. Even though he believed they weren’t psychopathological, they impaired my ability to concentrate. I had failed to think of the simplest research tools at my disposal.

  Google Earth, for example.

  ‘Using the satellite map you can find a lost front-door key on your lawn if you zoom in close enough.’ Frank was saying eagerly. He laughed at his own exaggeration. ‘But it gets better. In the office we’ve got—

  ‘Street View. Exactly.’

  For a considerable time now, Google had sent vehicles equipped with special cameras driving along the streets of selected cities so as to give users a 3D view of them all. Far from every city had been covered and hordes of lawyers were grappling with the data protection problems posed by this project, but it was already installed on any iPhone and my newspaper had access to an extensive test programme. This was what Frank was using to look for a house that matched Alina’s description.

  ‘Every street in Berlin, every damned nook and cranny,’ he said euphorically, and I heard more keyboard noises.

  ‘I can view them as if I’m driving along them in person.’

  ‘It’s bound to take hours, though.’

  ‘Not if you’re lucky like us. The residential district in question consists mainly of blocks of flats or middle-class terraces. The Traunstein villa is one of the rare exceptions.’

  ‘So how many?’ I demanded eagerly. ‘How many detached houses have you counted?’

  Glancing at the dashboard, I saw I was exceeding the speed limit by more than 30 kph.

  ‘Twenty-seven, but only nine of them are bungalows with a driveway like the one your new girlfriend described...’

  He paused like someone preparing to deliver the punchline of a long story.

  ‘... and only two of those driveways are equipped with a goddamned basketball hoop!’

  41

  Although the bungalow was probably the lowest building on the entire estate, it was visible from a long way off.

  The road, a cobbled cul de sac, was so out of the way that one of the lamp posts still bore an election poster. Some party activist had forgotten to remove the photo of a pinstriped politico grinning inanely. Ever since September, visitors to the street had been greeted by the meaningless slogan ‘Our Future is Strength’.

  I wondered if there was a law that compelled even the ugliest and most undistinguished politician to have his photo mounted on cardboard, and if there was a single person on our planet wh
ose voting intentions had been swayed by an election poster. I debated the possibility of launching a readers’ opinion poll once all this was over.

  If I’m still in a position to.

  We had left the car around the corner rather than park immediately outside the address Frank had given me. My certainty that we were wasting our time grew stronger the nearer we got to the bungalow.

  ‘I don’t think this is the house you described,’ I said to Alina, who was waiting for TomTom to mark a tree.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s too conspicuous.’ I screwed up my eyes, watching my breath condense right in front of my face.

  For all that, acting conspicuously could often be the best form of camouflage. Not long ago a semi-detached house in a Berlin suburb had been completely emptied in broad daylight by thieves who had simply driven up in a furniture van. Nobody thinks of a robbery when he sees a furniture remover with a plasma TV under his arm.

  And nobody thinks of an empty eye socket when he’s confronted by Father Christmas.

  Alina told TomTom to sit and shuffled from foot to foot, shivering.

  ‘Describe the place,’ she said.

  Describe it? I conducted a brief survey.

  How was I to describe this to a blind girl? It certainly compelled me to revise my preconception that people celebrated Christmas more discreetly in this residential area.

  The one-storey building looked as if it belonged to an affluent ten-year-old orphan who had squandered his inheritance in a store that specialized in Christmas decorations. A string of blue halogen lights ran along the eaves and picked out the drainpipes, up one of which a life-size Santa was attempting to climb in the direction of the chimney. He was dressed in white, the original outfit dating from the time before some advertising genius employed by Coca-Cola took it into his head to colour Father Christmas red.

  But that was the only discreet feature of the decorations. The whole of the front garden was given over to reindeer, illuminated snowmen and the Three Wise Men from the East. Only Jesus and his crib were missing. Though they may have been obscured by the stack of logs beside the double garage, whose doors had been sprayed with artificial snow, like the shutters and the garden gate. Then there was...