artificial leather
rusty metal
records
tablet boxes
nylon
her stick
cigarette packs
window handles
*
She hears a local train on her right. The rattling breaks off. Pavlik turns off the windscreen wipers. They are in a tunnel.
Innsbrucker Platz.
She lived around the corner from here. Everything in the place was hers. She only took a single piece of furniture to Wiesbaden: the old, cracked leather sofa from the flea market by the Mauerpark, which has its quirks, but is what it is.
The little boy from the flat next door liked the sofa as well. His parents fought a lot. When they did that he would climb over the balcony and in through Aaron’s window. They read comics together and played Superman and Superwoman, and she often thought how nice it would have been to have a little boy like that. Once she was careless, and was cleaning her Browning when he jumped into the room. He was very shocked. She told him it was for firing blanks, but made him solemnly swear he wouldn’t tell anyone. That was her greatest fear: that someone would come out of her real life and do something to someone she was fond of.
Pavlik hasn’t said a word for two minutes. Aaron can distinguish between a hundred different kinds of silence.
And she knows this one very well.
‘What kind of car? For how long?’
‘A blue Phaeton. Since Innsbrucker Platz.’
She is aware of Pavlik taking his foot off the accelerator, the standard manoeuvre: slowing down and forcing the car behind to overtake, seeing if your pursuer falls back to keep his distance.
‘And?’
‘He’s still there.’
‘Do you want to take a look at him?’
‘Yes. Hold on tight.’
The car brakes hard. She is pressed into the seatbelt. Aaron can tell that the Phaeton has to swerve to avoid a collision. Pavlik puts his foot down. Now he’s chasing the other car.
‘Did you get a look at his face?’
‘No. Darkened glass. I’ll try and see what he’s doing.’ He shows why he’s the best driver in the Department. She is slung to the left, to the right, shaken to her bones, grips the strap. So Pavlik’s catching up with the car. ‘Impressive.’
‘What?’
‘He took the Buschkrugallee exit at two hundred, without touching the centre line.’
‘Have you lost him?’
‘We’ve got his number.’
Which will be no help to them. She knows, he knows too.
*
When they enter the little florist’s shop in Rudow, her nose starts tickling. She has a lot of pot plants at home. The first time she paid a visit her carer thought uncertainly that Aaron must choose them for their scent, or select plants that were particularly nice to the touch, but Aaron smiled and said: ‘No, I just like flowers.’ White orchids most of all, and they have no scent whatsoever.
She hears a voice. Young, weary. The words a drawl, torn from dark thoughts.
‘Hello. Can I help you?’
‘Are you Eva Askamp?’
‘Yes?’
Aaron knows that Pavlik is showing his ID. ‘We’d like to talk to you about Sascha Holm.’
The woman’s voice sticks in her throat. ‘Why?’
She’s probably had to explain herself on a regular basis: to committees, to the prison governor in Tegel, to enforcement officers, friends, her family.
And yet our visit has thrown her off course.
‘How did you meet Sascha?’
‘Through an ad in the prison paper.’
‘You read Spanish prison papers?’
‘It was a local one from here.’
‘What did he write?’ Pavlik asks. ‘Poetry?’
‘He said he wanted to meet someone who would understand him and see that he’s not as people think.’
‘Touching.’
Aaron says to Pavlik: ‘Is Miss Askamp pretty?’
‘Yes, very.’ His phone rings. He goes outside.
‘You could have a normal relationship, plans for the future, a love life,’ Aaron says. ‘Instead you choose a multiple murderer? Someone who has no feelings for anyone except his brother, who’s even worse than he is?’
‘He’s not like that. He’s suffered a lot of injustice.’ Her voice is slow, the kind familiar to Aaron from depressives or the psychologically unstable. Everything about her voice is passive and weak.
When she started working for the BKA two years ago she began an intensive study of criminal psychology. She knows how horribly similar the biographies of women who fall in love with murderers tend to be. A defenceless mother, a brutal father. Unconsciously they seek out men who are exactly like him, who exploit them and treat them like dirt. Until they see a convicted criminal as their prince charming. He’s in jail, they’re safe from him. They can control him and flee into a fantasy of love. These women are so desperate to believe that they’ve found happiness at last that they are happy to swap lies for reality.
Eva Askamp should find a different defence for the man.
‘What kind of injustice?’ Aaron asks.
‘Everything.’
No conviction in her voice. She’s learned everything by heart.
‘Where did Sascha grow up?’
Nothing.
Pavlik comes back. ‘I’ll make it easy for you: what’s his brother’s name?’
The woman knocks something over. A vase. She bends down to pick up the pieces. A delaying strategy.
Aaron notices a new smell. She moves her head in that direction. Camellia. She sees herself shaking hands with Holm in Barcelona. He bows to her. She smells the flower in his buttonhole. Warm, bland, like face powder.
‘There’s a camellia somewhere,’ she says to Pavlik. ‘Is it white?’
‘I have no idea what camellias look like.’
‘Miss Askamp?’
‘Yes, white.’
‘I’d like to buy it.’
‘It’s already been sold.’
A child’s quick footsteps. ‘Mum, when are we going home?’
‘In a minute.’
The boy goes off sulking to the back of the shop.
Aaron asks: ‘Have you been married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Separated or widowed?’
‘My husband died two years ago.’
‘You ran the shop together?’
‘So?’
Aaron turns to Pavlik: ‘Is it a good area for something like this?’
‘I don’t think so. There’s a discount store on the corner, they wouldn’t be able to compete with that.’
‘Money problems?’ Aaron asks.
She hears that the woman is on the brink of tears. ‘I don’t know what that has to do with you.’ Bits of china rattle into a bin.
‘I’d be willing to bet that you have a framed photograph of your husband on your bedside table.’
The voice cracks and loses its last foundation. ‘Get out of my shop.’
Door open, snowy air. Aaron turns around again. ‘You’ve made a big mistake. Get your son away from here and don’t tell anyone where you are.’
7
Two unfiltered cigarettes in the car. A snow-plough scratches Morse code signs, two short, two long, two short. Aaron’s thoughts skid as if on a slide.
Pavlik breaks the silence: ‘Ludger Holm.’
‘Yes. He paid the woman to play the part of his brother’s pen-pal in jail. To bring him to Berlin.’
‘Because of Boenisch.’
‘Of course.’
‘How would Holm have found out about you and Boenisch?’
‘It was in all the papers.’
‘You know what that means,’ Pavlik says in a voice that sounds like road salt under boots.
‘Sascha murdered Melanie Breuer in Boenisch’s cell. He’s the man who got hold of Mr Brooks for him.’
‘Who?’
‘Doesn’t matter. B
oenisch was a perfect way of luring me here.’
I’ll only talk to Miss Aaron.
‘That woman you killed in Barcelona—’
‘Nina Deraux.’
‘—she was Sascha’s lover.’
‘And three months pregnant. But it was his brother who came up with the plan. Sascha isn’t clever enough.’
Screeching tyres at a traffic light. She leans her head against Pavlik’s. Senses his calm. How could he leave anything to chance, fail to take everything into account? ‘Now you should say, “I’ll put you on the next flight.”’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t want that.’
‘No.’
‘How many men have you put in place?’
‘Two are keeping an eye on her shop. Opposite side of the street, first floor. Another two are observing her flat.’
‘How many are going to contact me?’
‘Two again. They waited at the airport, followed you and Kvist to Tegel and went from there to the Department.’
‘And are following us.’
‘Thirty metres to the left, a Volvo.’
‘They were the ones who called before.’
‘They chased the Phaeton for a few minutes, but he shook them off.’
Aaron says: ‘I’m their bait.’
‘Is that a problem for you?’ Pavlik asks.
‘No.’
‘I thought not.’
‘Is Eva Askamp’s phone being tapped?’
Pavlik hesitates for two seconds before murmuring, ‘Can’t do it. We’d need legal authorization.’
Aaron holds her breath for a second.
For authorization you have to go down the official route.
She says: ‘Demirci doesn’t know.’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘I tried. Couldn’t persuade them.’
The significance of this makes Aaron shiver. Pavlik does his own thing. The men follow him, always have done. He’s risking his job to protect them.
He puts his arm around her. Something unites them at that moment; not least the things they haven’t said since they’ve seen each other again.
No one will do anything to you as long as I’m there.
You and Sandra are the most important people for me.
We’ve both missed you very much.
‘Does Niko know about this?’
‘No. If Demirci finds out they’ll throw me out. The lads can tell you that I claimed to be working on behalf of Demirci. I’ll bring you to the hotel.’
‘Can’t we go to Jungfernheide first? I need to pay a visit.’
*
‘Here it is,’ Pavlik says.
Standing by a grave that you can’t see, that you just imagine, is nothing. Aaron could be in the Atacama desert, by the Dead Sea, thinking of Marlowe there, and she would be no closer to him and no further away. As near and far from her father and her mother in the cemetery in Sankt Augustin. After a minute’s silence she wants to go back to the car.
On the forest path Pavlik puts an arm around her waist. ‘When I smoked he gave me such a reproachful look. After that I stopped enjoying the cigarette.’
‘Hm, that’s familiar.’
‘I was quite pissed off,’ he recalls. ‘That thing with the Chechen you know about. You and Marlowe were at our house. I was sitting on the porch swing hating the whole world, myself most of all. He jumped into my lap. No idea why, but I stopped thinking about the Chechen after that.’
‘Yes, he was like that.’
Pavlik stumbles, clings to Aaron.
‘What’s up, old man?’
‘You’re one to talk. It’s pitch dark here.’
‘Welcome to the club.’
They drive to Leipziger Strasse. Pavlik has booked a room for her at the Hotel Jupiter. The concrete bunker was a hotel even back in the days of the GDR, it was called the Puschkin back then. It was refurbished after the Wall came down and the façade was renovated, but it remained a monument to socialist ugliness. The Department sometimes uses the building as a place to put up crown witnesses for a few days. There’s only one lift, which is why the rooms can be easily secured.
When Pavlik is about to get out, she holds him back. ‘Will you tell me what you look like?’ She senses that he’s startled, and manages a smile. ‘I mean, five years on.’
‘Still a metre eighty-five. A few more grey hairs, going thin on top these days, but I’m not fussed. An Albanian broke my nose last year, I look like a boxer. Sandra goes on about how I should get it fixed, but balls to that, you can’t fix an ugly man.’
Suddenly Aaron remembers that she once glued photographs of Pavlik and Woody Harrelson up in her locker and scribbled separated at birth. The memory suddenly fills her with happiness. She smiles. ‘So that Harrelson lookalike thing doesn’t cut it these days?’
‘No, that one still works. Except I can’t manage the blue eyes. You know: my eyes are somewhere between stray mutt and mud-wrestler.’
They laugh for a moment. Aaron puts the unexpected memory in her pocket like a sweet.
*
In the hotel lobby Pavlik hands her over to two men from the Department. Aaron doesn’t know them, but that’s hardly surprising. Very few people can stand it for long. If someone’s been here for three years he’s considered a veteran. Aaron was part of it for six years. She would probably have been transferred too in due course, because she was finished, burnt out.
An easy lie to tell.
If she’s honest, she never wanted anything else. Pavlik is exactly the same. The oldest one in the Department, been there for ever. How long can he stay fit enough to keep up with the best of them? And Sandra? She knows the demands that are made of her husband, she faces more and more sleepless nights. One morning, she will tenderly embrace him and whisper: ‘Enough.’ What then? Desk job? Pavlik?
He issues terse instructions to the two men in the lobby. They’re called Kleff and Rogge. They ask the necessary questions calmly and straightforwardly. Aaron can’t imagine faces to match the voices. She did that at first, but in the long run it took up too much of her strength. And she no longer finds it important to do it with people she’s just met.
Fourteenth floor. She goes with them to her room. Pavlik made sure that she got the one at the end of the corridor: it’s the easiest one to guard. Endless fluffy carpet. She counts her steps, wishes she knew already how many there were, where the corridor turns, changes direction, then she wouldn’t have to link arms with the taller of the two men, Rogge.
Her mobility trainer was determined to wean her off step-counting. ‘Imagine a flight of stairs with a lot of steps which you have to take frequently, for example, at your place of work. Let’s say there are seventy. Easy to remember, not a problem. Everything’s fine for a while, you feel confident. One day you’re on the stairs and your phone rings. Or a colleague speaks to you. Or a thought distracts you. What number had you got to? Thirty-seven? Two steps short of the top? You sure? A moment later you’re going to fall. Not convinced? Then let’s take your office. Let’s say you know that it’s exactly twenty steps from there to the toilet. Works perfectly until you find yourself standing in the mop cupboard or the gents’ toilet.’
Not one of the blind people that Aaron knows counts their steps. Just her. In the Department she had become conditioned to doing several things at the same time, even at high speed, and being completely focused on all of them. Memorizing a dossier while she’s mid- conversation; analyzing two problems and controlling her breath at the same time; reading her surroundings, filing away sounds and smells and still concentrating on her body.
She asked her trainer to walk with her through a building that she had already mapped, and give her calculations to do at the same time.
She didn’t get a step wrong.
No, knowing the number of steps is a source of happiness. Twelve from her office in the BKA to interrogation room VIa. Nineteen from the door of the canteen to the till. From the
bed, five steps to her painting. Thirty steps straight on, fifty-six to the left from the bus stop on Marktplatz in Wiesbaden to the Caligari Cinema, where she goes to the late show to watch films she already knows. Seventeen from the main path in the cemetery to her father’s grave. From there, six more to the grave of her mother who left him because he was the reason Aaron joined the police. Light and heavy steps.
The steps of Kleff and Rogge are lithe and springy. But how good are they really? Aaron wants to put it to the test.
She reaches with her free hand for the clicker that she always carries with her. Like a tin frog, it produces a loud clicking noise. Her echo location in places where the sounds are muffled, such as a snowy landscape. Now, in her handbag, it sounds like a shot fired with a silencer.
Rogge swiftly swings his hip to the right and grabs Aaron by the waist. He whirls her around a hundred and eighty degrees until she’s right in front of him and falls on top of her. The ‘Kaperski manoeuvre’. In the half-second that it takes him to perform it, she hears the rasping noise as Kleff pulls his gun from its holster, spinning, kneeling down and holding it at the ready.
Aaron can hardly breathe because she’s got a hundred kilos on top of her. ‘OK. Sorry,’ she manages to say.
Rogge helps her up. ‘Never do that again.’
*
Kleff opens the door with his card. They go in.
‘Hello, Kvist.’
‘Hello, Kleff. Hello, Rogge.’
He doesn’t sound surprised. In Schönefeld it took him no more than five minutes to spot the people shadowing her.
The two men leave her alone with Niko.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Your suitcase was still in the car.’
He comes up to her. Aaron can’t avoid him. She should push Niko aside but doesn’t know what furniture is in the way and she doesn’t want to stumble around in front of him like a blind woman.
‘I thought for a long time about whether I should tell you. But it must be a coincidence. There’s no connection between Boenisch and Sascha Holm.’
‘Both in Block Six! Just a coincidence?’ she exclaims.
‘All the long-term prisoners are in Five or Six.’
‘But they don’t have invented pen-pals!’
He holds her by the arms. ‘Jenny, you’re imagining things.’
She pushes him away and shouts: ‘What gives you the right to treat me like a child?’
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