The Eye Collector

by Sebastian Fitzek

  ‘Bullshit,’ she snarled. ‘Of course I went to the fucking police. They fobbed me off with some arsehole who probably didn’t do his paperwork properly.’ She tried in vain to break Scholle’s hold on her arm. ‘And since when is it illegal to work under a pseudonym? Shiatsu is an art, and Alina Grigoriev is my professional name. Jesus, if you’re so bad at researching your facts it’s no wonder you can’t catch the Eye Collector.’

  ‘Wait.’

  Scholle gripped Alina’s arm and dragged her over to cooking hobs, where he cuffed one of her wrists to a tap at the opposite end to me.

  ‘A deadbeat ex-cop and a blind screwball,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Some combination!’

  ‘You’re making a big mistake,’ I said. A moment later I couldn’t even whisper. Scholle had returned to my side of the unit and kicked me in the stomach as hard as he could. Before I could catch my breath I was lying with my chest and stomach pressed against the cold tiled worktop and my face – for God’s keep your head up! – immediately above a glowing hob.

  The last thing I saw before I thought I would be seared to death was Alina wiping her sweaty forehead on the sleeve of her jacket. Although she was standing less than two metres away, she might as well have been in another room altogether for all the difference it made. She could have reached across the hob with her free hand and still failed to touch me even with her fingertips. Besides, Scholle was no novice. He had ruled out any unpleasant surprises by kicking any of the rubbish on the floor that could have been used as a weapon or a missile – old buckets, spatulas, rolls of wire – out of our reach.

  I’ve had it, I thought, wondering if I could endure the heat on my face for a second longer. It got worse.

  ‘All right,’ Scholle said tensely, ‘I’ll ask you one more time: Where have you hidden those children?’

  The distance between my chin and the hob decreased. Scholle’s great paw was forcing my head inexorably downwards.

  ‘I don’t know!’ I gasped. With a hiss, a drop of sweat landed on the incandescent spirals just below my face. They came still closer. I had to shut my eyes before they dried up.

  ‘Where have you hidden them?’

  Oh God, I thought, he’s out of his mind and I can’t do a thing about it.

  My cervical vertebrae creaked. I could sense my strength giving out. I wouldn’t be able to brace my straining neck muscles for much longer. ‘I don’t know,’ I gasped, not knowing whether Scholle could even hear me any more.

  The heat burned like hellfire. My nose was now only a finger’s breadth from the hob. I felt as if the hairs in my nostrils were melting.

  ‘Stop it!’ cried a woman’s voice. Alina’s, I assumed, though my powers of perception had shrunk to the minimum necessary for survival. I thought I also heard her say things like ‘You’re wasting your time’ and ‘You’re torturing the wrong person’, but I wasn’t sure of anything at that moment – not when my lips were about to kiss a glowing hob and all the blood in my body was trying to flow into my head, which seemed to have swollen to twice its normal size. Everything was throbbing: my veins, my ears, my skin, which in my mind’s eye was already peeling off my face.

  With the strength that only despair can generate, I resisted the pressure on the back of my neck, opened my eyes one last time... and tried to cry out.

  Oh God, no, I thought, puzzled by Scholle’s shadow, which was looming ever larger. Don’t, please don’t...

  I hoped – no, I prayed – that Alina wasn’t as mad as I feared, but in vain. She made it clear how insane she was. ‘You want some answers?’ she shouted. ‘It’s me you need to hurt!’

  Scholle just managed to whisper a horrified ‘Shit!’ before she brought her free hand down on a red-hot hob.

  18

  (39 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  ‘What the hell was that?’ asked the older of the two cops stationed outside the entrance to the abandoned hospital kitchen. He tongued his gum to the other side of his rhythmically chomping jaw.

  His youthful colleague froze in mid movement. He’d been about to open the door to the room in which Alexander Zorbach had uttered such a loud, horrific cry.

  ‘Nooooooo...’

  ‘Do you think we should...’

  ‘What?’

  The woman started screaming too. Her voice sounded even louder and more pain-racked than the man’s.

  The moustachioed young cop turned pale.

  ‘... take a look. I reckon we ought to take a look.’

  ‘Listen, youngster, he wasn’t too pleased when I took the blind girl in there – said he didn’t want to be disturbed under any circumstances.’

  Something cut the woman’s scream in half. The piercing higher frequencies died away at once. The darker, throatier sounds persisted awhile longer.

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ the older man said quietly but firmly. ‘What did you think was going on in there? Man, there isn’t another soul in this part of the building.’

  They heard a thud, then Scholle swore at the top of his voice. The young policeman’s hand strayed to the door handle again.

  ‘Go in there now, lad, and it’ll be a life-changing experience. It’s up to you, but take it from me: whatever you decide, nothing will ever be the same again.’

  Another dull thud, followed by groans. Then a sound like a sack being dragged across a stone floor.

  ‘What if you see something you feel duty-bound to report?’ the older man went on. ‘If you do, you’ll make an enemy for life and no one’ll ever want you as a partner.’

  The gum changed sides again.

  ‘Take a leaf out of my book. If you want a break, go upstairs and get yourself a coffee from the machine.’ He laughed. ‘But don’t come back with another blind girl.’

  The youngster nervously clasped the nape of his close-cropped neck. ‘If I don’t report it, I don’t think I’ll be able to look myself in the face.’

  ‘Report what?’

  ‘Well, the shit that’s going on in there.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ The older man cupped his right ear. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  It was true.

  The young cop held his breath and listened for the sounds that had ceased to be audible.

  Silence reigned beyond the door.

  Dead silence, he thought, feeling sick, as his fingers slowly released their grip on the door handle.

  17

  ALINA GRIGORIEV

  ‘Sorry to call you, but I’m rather worried. I was playing hide-and-seek with our son, and the crazy thing is, I can’t find him anywhere.’

  Alina could still hear the woman’s agitated voice, but only faintly, as if it were coming from far away. The pain that occupied the greater part of her consciousness and brought back memories was spreading out inside her like a stream of lava. For a short while she continued to alternate between the agonizing reality in which she smelt the cloying stench of seared flesh – her own flesh – and the dreamworld into which she was sinking ever deeper, in which the helpless husband and father gave his wife a last warning over the phone’s loudspeaker: “Oh my God, how could I have been so blind? It’s too late. Don’t go down into the cellar whatever you do.’

  She felt herself fall to the kitchen’s flagstone floor. Then all that remained of the pain was the light blazing behind her eyes – the light in which she once more saw the last few seconds before the kidnap.

  From a place of concealment behind the cellar door. With the Eye Collector’s eyes!

  ‘You hear me? Don’t go down into the cellar!’

  The last words the husband uttered before his wife’s death faded. Then someone fast-forwarded the film in her head.

  Once more she was forced to undergo the experience of inhabiting someone else’s body, breaking the woman’s neck and dragging her out into the garden, and transferring the child – Only one of them? Where on earth has he hidden the other? – from the garden shed to the boot of the car. She drove up the hill agai
n and watched through binoculars as the husband arrived and collapsed on the lawn beside his murdered wife’s body. Then the director of her nightmare inserted a jump cut and leapfrogged the sequence in which she drove to the bungalow and drank a Coca-Cola. Instead, he showed her an entirely new memory. And here the images no longer formed a homogeneous scene but were juxtaposed almost at random, like a hectic, jump-cut trailer.

  A wheelchair. Leaning back against the headrest, a child’s motionless face. The big, trainer-shod feet of a man who pushes the wheelchair first across some gravel and then up a ramp...

  No, not a ramp. More of a...

  ... gangway. Yes, a ship’s gangway.

  She can make out the water beneath the wooden planks – it shimmers, black as ink. Surrounding her are a host of white flecks and dark shadows. They’re surrogates for objects with which she wasn’t familiar before she was blinded and cannot, therefore, see in her dreams.

  The film fast-forwards again. Now she sees an eye. A brown eye, it blinks once and moves towards a mirror.

  God, I’m seeing his eye. I’m seeing the murderer’s eye, but not in a mirror...

  No, through the magnifying lens of a spyhole in a door.

  The eye disappears when it feels its lashes come into contact with the cold metal door...

  ... heavy and painted white, with a lever handle like the one on her old-fashioned American refrigerator, but very much bigger.

  And then she looks inside. Into the hiding place. She sees the boy lying on the bare floor, knees drawn up in an embryonic position, sees him twitch and gag and clasp his throat. And she suddenly notices that she’s holding a watch in her hand.

  It must be a stopwatch of sorts, because it shows there are only a few seconds left.

  Next, she feels her eyes fill with tears.

  I’m weeping, she thinks, and corrects herself at once. No, that’s not me. I’m not weeping, the Eye Collector is.

  Then she hears herself scream, and this time the voice is her own, not another’s. She bangs on the door and kicks it, but the bulkhead, behind which the last few seconds of the ultimatum are running out, has vanished.

  She lashes out harder, screams louder, and, when she feels the pain flare up once more, opens her eyes.

  The film breaks off. The images have disappeared.

  Alina is back in the familiar, all-devouring dark void of her life.

  16

  (26 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  ALEXANDER ZORBACH

  ‘I’m on my way to you now,’ I shouted into the mobile and flattened my foot. Beside me, Alina groaned aloud because she’d made another attempt to flex her fingers. The untreated skin on her palm looked as if it had been dipped in wax and was already forming blisters.

  ‘Just a minute.’ Stoya sounded utterly flummoxed. ‘Zorbach? Is that you?’

  Yes. That surprises you, doesn’t it?

  I glanced at the rear-view mirror. Frank was absently stroking TomTom’s head. He looked as if he himself couldn’t grasp what had just happened.

  Him bursting through the rear entrance. Alina’s self-mutilation. The fight. Our getaway.

  So much had happened within the space of a few seconds, Frank’s brain would surely take weeks to digest it all. He was still bitterly reproaching himself for having yielded to Stoya’s pressure and sending me the text message that had lured me out of hiding. I couldn’t hold it against him, though. Lying shit that he was, Stoya had promised him I wouldn’t be arrested, just questioned. No one could have foreseen how matters would escalate. Besides, Frank had just atoned for his mistake by rescuing us.

  ‘Where’s Scholle?’ Stoya asked.

  ‘It might be worth looking in the hospital’s former kitchen.’

  I refrained from elaborating. I could, of course, have told him that it had been a mistake to turn my sidekick loose, merely because he wasn’t under suspicion. Frank might not be a criminal, but he was loyal. As soon as he’d gathered that Scholle was to pick me up, he took a cab to the Park Sanatorium. Having originally asked to be dropped at the main entrance, he told the cabby to pull up next to the Toyota they’d passed in a small side street. While paying the man he saw Alina, sans guide dog but cane in hand, making her way slowly along the pavement.

  He called her name, but the wind carried his words away unheard, so he pulled the hood of his coat over his head and became one of the hospital’s faceless visitors. When he got to reception he saw Alina being accosted by an elderly policeman, who walked off with her a moment later. He was surprised, firstly, when the man ushered her into the goods lift. And, secondly, when it descended into the basement.

  The illuminated display read -1.

  Frank took the stairs.

  Construction work. No access, said a sign on the door of the semi-basement. By now, Frank’s surprise had given way to a strong suspicion that something was amiss.

  The door wasn’t locked, presumably for safety reasons. Laurel and Hardy failed to notice him when he turned right and made his way into the big, abandoned kitchen through a rear entrance, which was also open.

  I could have told my former colleague all this, together with the fact that Frank had appeared from nowhere just as Stoya’s sadistic subordinate was trying to brand me on the face with an electric hob. The shadowy figure looming up behind me hadn’t belonged to Scholle; it was Frank, who, armed with an iron bar he’d found on the floor, had taken the big cop by surprise. He hit Scholle at the precise moment when, horrified by Alina’s self-mutilation, the fat detective had momentarily relaxed his grip on my head.

  But there was no time to impart all this information. The ultimatum would expire in twenty-five minutes, and I didn’t want to waste them on a description of how we’d escaped through the emergency exit and made a dash for the Toyota, in which we were now speeding along the urban expressway.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Stoya, clearly at pains to sound as calm as possible.

  ‘On the way to you, but that’s immaterial. Just tell me whether you found the car near some water.’

  ‘What car?’

  ‘Don’t play games – you’re only wasting time. Yes or no. River, canal, lake – whatever. Is there any water in the vicinity?’

  A moment’s hesitation. Then, finally, a curt ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. It’s only a shot in the dark, and don’t ask me where it came from, but...’

  I can hardly believe it myself.

  ‘... you must look for those kids somewhere afloat.’

  ‘Afloat?’

  ‘On board a ship or boat of some kind.’

  That’s if you’re prepared to be guided by a screwball and believe in the accuracy of her most recent ‘memories’.

  ‘I feel sick,’ Alina groaned softly beside me. I lowered the mobile for a moment, but she again declined my offer to drive her back to the hospital.

  ‘Bloody hell, we don’t have time to search every tub in the area,’ I heard Stoya yell as I put the mobile to my ear once more. ‘We’ve less than half an hour. If you throw me off the scent...’

  ‘What scent?’ I cut in. ‘If the hideaway is on water, is it any wonder your dogs haven’t barked yet?’

  No reply. All I could hear was the hum of the traffic I was threading my way through. ‘I can’t guarantee I’m right,’ I said in a further attempt to sway him. ‘I’m not convinced myself, to be honest, but if you’re groping in the dark anyway, where’s the harm?’

  The ensuing lull in the conversation was even longer than the first. After twenty seconds, which to me felt like twenty minutes, I heard Stoya come to a decision. It proved to be a mistake.

  15

  (19 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  PHILIPP STOYA

  (DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT, HOMICIDE)

  Stoya surveyed the poorly-lit parking lot: an expanse of potholed asphalt, a warden’s dilapidated hut with shattered windows, the barrier beside the entrance wrenched off its base. The whole place was strewn with discarded products of the afflu
ent society.

  The waste disposal company, which had gone bust years ago, was just one more proof, thought Stoya, that the German industry was going to the dogs. As you’d expect, a vehicle abandoned here would have remained unnoticed until bulldozers moved in to demolish the incineration plant, complete with its chimney.

  Having previously declined to cooperate, chance was now eagerly working overtime.

  Of all cars, it was nurse Katharina Vanghal’s car on which some young hooligans had chosen to vent their fury after an abortive visit to a disco (the bouncers wouldn’t let them in). They did so just as a bleary-eyed police patrol drove past. This meant that the car, which had meanwhile lost a window and both wing mirrors, became a matter of record. And this, in turn, meant that all the warning lights on the police computer lit up a few hours later, when Vanghal’s car was sought in connection with the Eye Collector.

  ‘How many potential hiding places?’ Stoya had pulled in to the kerb and was questioning the commander of the special task force by radio.

  Recalling what Zorbach had said to him a minute earlier – ‘Yes or no. River, canal, lake-whichever. Is there any water in the vicinity?’ – he almost broke into hysterical laughter. Goddammit, Zorbach, he thought, this is Köpenick, not the Sahara. There’s more water here than dry land. That gives the Eye Collector only ten million places to drown his victims.

  The industrial estate they had been searching, hitherto without success, was situated beside a triangular stretch of open water at the confluence of the Dahme, the Spree and the Teltow Canal. Even the street names had liquid connotations. His present location was the Regattastrasse-Tauchersteig intersection.