Pavlik only had two friends in the Department, André and Niko. Aaron had been surprised that Sandra never invited Niko over, and didn’t want the children to meet him.
It was only when Sandra said, ‘Every time he’s on duty with Ulf, I sit by the phone and pray that it won’t ring,’ that Aaron understood what it was. Niko had no family, it didn’t occur to him that his colleague would leave a wife and children behind.
A ship looking for its iceberg.
‘And? Is anyone waiting for me at home?’ Aaron said and knew at that moment that she had wounded her friend. Because they were her family. And if anything happened to her, it would be as bad for Sandra as if she had lost her children or her husband.
Aaron threw her arms around Sandra and noticed that she was trembling; she was trembling herself and left that evening without really having become reconciled. Two days of radio silence, Aaron was hurt. Then one morning by the coffee machine Pavlik said: ‘Sandra asks if you’d like to come for dinner with Kvist. Say seven?’
Aaron brought a bottle of limoncello. Niko had even bought a bunch of flowers. They talked a lot of nonsense and laughed as a storm brewed, and it was as if they had sat like that many times before.
The men were still playing Scalextric with the twins. After the warm summer rain Sandra and Aaron sat together on the porch swing in the garden, listened to the raindrops on the leaves of the trees and sipped limoncello. The wet grass tickled their bare feet; they said nothing, but they were together.
Sandra said: ‘Let’s do this more often.’
*
The shooting competition begins. Fricke joins the others. Demirci bends down to Aaron. ‘Thank you.’
‘Make sure you join the lads. They’re expecting you to shoot as well. You’ll come last, with a depressing result. Pretend to be seriously upset.’
For the next three quarters of an hour Aaron and Sandra are the only ones not at the shooting stand. Sandra holds her hand in silence, keeping her thoughts to herself.
For a confident marksman, fifty metres would be the maximum competition distance shooting with a pistol. Here they’re firing at eighty. Ten shots with their strong hand, ten with their weak one. Aaron can identify the members of the old squad by their frequency. Butz: a clockwork mechanism, accurate to the millisecond, sober. Dobeck: a quick shot, followed by a more hesitant one, undecided as always. Fricke: nine easy shots in a row. Both times he pauses before the last one. He wants to get the bullet into the hole made by the first one: that’s his grand finale. After his second sequence a whisper runs around the room. He’s done it, with his left hand. Pavlik: relaxed, controlled, a precision marksman.
Demirci: cramped, unrhythmic. ‘Damn it all!’
Laughter. Niko: ten, quick as a sewing machine.
Of course he’ll win.
Pavlik bends down to Aaron. ‘Your turn.’
‘Are you drunk?’ Sandra growls.
‘Only one. I want my fifty Euros back.’
Aaron gets to her feet. ‘All fine.’
Pavlik leads her to the stand.
She says quietly: ‘Number six.’
Everything falls suddenly silent. Aaron feels all eyes on her. In the sixth lane she stands in firing position at the shooting stall. Her fingers find the notch precisely in the middle, the notch where André had rested the grip of his Heckler & Koch because his life was slipping away from him like sand; sad, lovely, lost André, who was undercover for so long that in the end he didn’t know which world he belonged to, and no one could save him, not even Aaron.
Pavlik lays her left hand on the pistol.
My Browning.
He whispers: ‘I picked it up for you.’
The grip is warm and soft, and has been waiting for her. She feels the weight. Only one bullet, in the barrel. She knows this lane like the back of her hand. She stamps twice with her heel, listens to the echo, corrects her stance by moving five centimetres to the left. She stands facing the target head-on, her feet a shoulder-width apart, her right foot set slightly back. She straightens the arm holding the pistol and bends her other elbow slightly to minimize the kick.
She breathes half in, half out.
Eighty metres.
Don’t see, know.
When her finger touches the trigger, Aaron knows that she’s going to hit the bull’s eye. But in the fraction of a second between that idea and reaching the pressure point, light flashes in front of her. She is standing, half breathing in, half breathing out, in an endless corridor in Barcelona, and wondering whether she will hear a shot or just an empty click. Aaron is so caught up in that sudden, hyper-intense memory that she falters. A dull roar rolls in, as distant as if through a soundproofed window, until the window flies open and there she is right in the midst of the yelling, whistling, trampling of the men around her. Again she is catapulted into the corridor. She is holding Nina Deraux’s Walther, she sees Token-Eyes and pulls the trigger. Token-Eyes bends his knees, turns around, drops the Glock. Red mist issues from his mouth.
And then? What did I do then?
Aaron hopes, her heart thumping, that the pictures will continue and guide her to the hall where Niko is fighting for his life, but that door stays shut.
Pavlik takes her in his arms. ‘Perfect.’
No. Just off. A nine, scraped the ten.
She murmurs: ‘Anyone can lie to me. Anyone but you.’
The music begins again. Aaron can’t breathe.
‘Have a Little Faith in Me’ by John Hiatt.
Niko takes her hand. ‘Come on.’
She allows herself to be led away, she belongs here, nowhere else, she kicks open the door to her inner room, chucks the truth inside, shuts the door and dances with him.
Aaron loves Niko’s movements, his hands, his skin, his constant certainty. Niko’s father was Finnish. He taught him the meaning of sisu, an untranslatable word that contains many others: strength of will, perseverance, resolution, boldness, a fighting spirit even in hopeless situations.
Someone had to stop André. Only the people from Internal Affairs learned what had happened in Prague, where Niko had tracked down and killed his friend.
His statement ended up in the safe. No one ever asked Niko or mentioned André’s name again.
Only once, when he was drunk and desperate, did he whisper: ‘Ruthlessness is sisu as well.’
But he’s not like that.
He breathes into her hair. ‘Since you’ve been gone, I’ve been blind.’
10
They drive to the Hotel Jupiter. Niko follows Kleff and Rogge. Aaron knows that he is keeping a distance of only two metres so that other cars can’t push in. They don’t speak. She concentrates on the windscreen wipers. Every time they stop at the lights she hears the faint scrape of Niko’s shirt collar as he looks backwards because he doesn’t trust the mirrors and wants to check if they’re being followed.
He takes her to her room and comes in with her.
He kicks the door shut with his heel and tries to kiss her. But she can’t allow that, because then she would be lost.
‘I need to ask you something.’
His disappointment draws him away from her like a wave.
‘What exactly happened in Barcelona?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the warehouse. I can’t remember.’ She has been afraid of this for so long. But she needs to know once and for all.
He says nothing.
‘Please tell me.’
‘My body wasn’t responding. You tried to pull me up. It didn’t work. Holm fired. We were sitting ducks. Blood ran down your arm. I thought that was it for me. I wanted you to let go of me.’
‘Why didn’t I fight Holm?’
‘He was a machine.’
‘So was I.’
Aaron can’t make sense of Niko’s words, they dash around madly in her head. I wanted live that you I give you when don’t believe if I had been your place in the tunnel.
The floor shakes. Niko
catches her.
The door to the library of her perfect memory was always open to her. Pictures, moments, thoughts, feelings, everything in its place. Aaron has spent many hours there. Sometimes she was almost happy, often sad. But it was her life and she was able to look at it.
One morning she woke up, and a fire had broken out in the library. Since then she has had to watch as it gradually devoured all the images, all the memories of the time before she was blinded, every sensation that she had ever had, every precious moment, leaving only the facts as if in a police record. When her mother died, and her father. What school she went to. How many people she has killed.
Soon she couldn’t imagine any colours but red, and numbers turned into pure arithmetic. A double-barrelled revolver in a calf holster, two weeks in Marrakech, two rooms in Schöneberg. Four seconds to disassemble the Browning. Five years between the basement and the underground car park in Moscow, five since her eyes opened. Her lane, number six. Seven means not being able to wait for something. But she had forgotten what numbers look like, tried to draw a two in the air, a four, five, six, seven. Couldn’t do it.
She went to a neurologist, her initial fear was that she suffered from dementia. He gave her an appointment at a clinic. They tested her powers of concentration, her receptiveness, her sense of orientation. The doctor said: ‘I wish I had a bit of what you’ve got.’ They considered a thyroid function problem, made a magnetic resonance image of her brain, examined her cerebrospinal fluid. All perfect. She was dismissed with the words: ‘Maybe what you need is a course of psychoanalysis.’
To talk about what? Cowardice? Shame? Dishonour?
For days and nights Aaron desperately wrote down everything that she could still remember and didn’t want to lose. She filled page after page in Braille; she’s still working on that chronicle even today. But the entries became further apart and shorter and gradually came to seem more and more pointless. Because as soon as a memory exists only as a copy and the original has been destroyed in the library, it becomes the narrative of a total stranger. As if Aaron hadn’t experienced what is there, and only this strangeness.
And how was she supposed to describe ice flowers, hoarfrost on meadows? The light from the gas lamps in Chamissoplatz, the flickering sky over Chella, the view across the sea in the morning? The wonderful scenes of her childhood and the place in the forest where she had her first kiss, vanished along with the sound of the voices of her mother and father, the tune of the toy clock that lay under the Christmas tree when she was a child, the faces of the people she had loved, her own face, which exists now only in a single photograph, until everything is destroyed and burned and only cold ash remains, to be blown into the void by the wind.
There are things that the flames have spared. The red of cayenne pepper, drinking coffee with the fat landlady, Mary-Sue, in Berlin, Superman and Superwoman with her neighbours’ little boy, Marlowe, Scrabble in Lichterfelde, limoncello with Sandra on the porch swing. Every day she remembers those things are a gift.
But the basement in Spandau is part of it as well, and Boenisch’s voice, Runge’s fingernails. She will always remember those. She is not granted the mercy of forgetting that.
And that one last day in Barcelona. It is like a painting that she’s been sitting and staring at for five years, day and night. Aaron knows every detail. That a thin spider lives in the basin in the bathroom above which she cleans her pistol, a spider that she leaves alive, that the scar on her collarbone is itchy, that the little boy in the lobby has dirty fingernails and when Jordi smiles he gets two dimples that she likes, that the seats of the Daimler smell of leather-oil and her heart on the journey south is a stormy sea.
The Sagrada Familia.
She could go back to the hotel and list them: the contents of the minibar; Niko’s Colt, which is lying in the room-safe with the barrel facing strangely towards her, and she corrects that when she puts the Browning next to it, because if necessary, and that’s always possible, you must be able to reach for the grip and not the barrel; in the lift, the restaurant menu, merluza a la marinera, twenty-one Euros and ten cents; a judder at each floor, because of an imbalance in the winch; a hint of a heavy aftershave that she finds unpleasant; a tiny patch of rust in the back inside corner on the left.
She could go back ten times and it still wouldn’t be enough.
That the taxi they sit behind at the traffic light on Carrer de Mallorca has a scratch on the top of the boot and licence number 343, that in Token-Eyes’ face she can see all the people he has killed, who mean less to him than the dirt on his shoe.
That when her eyes and Holm’s met in the tunnel she knows she should have said to Niko: ‘I love you.’
Love at last sight.
But when she woke up in the clinic she didn’t know what had happened in the warehouse. Until this evening. Until the flash in the firing range, when she was standing in this corridor again and shooting Token-Eyes in the neck.
It could be a beginning.
But the most important thing is missing.
Niko. The hall. Her flight.
The repellent stench of coffee is all that is left. That’s why she forces herself to drink coffee again: perhaps it will help her to remember at last.
In the middle of the furious blaze Aaron clings to the fact that the missing minutes are of great importance, that she needs to understand why she acted as she did, because that knowledge can save her, because the pictures will go speeding backwards and it will be as if the fire had never raged. That everyone will be back in his place, once and for all. And Aaron will be standing high on a mountain-top, and will see her life below her like a broad landscape in which she knows every stone and everything that lies beneath.
‘Go.’ She has fought so hard for that one word that her whole body is in pain.
Niko lets go of her. ‘So I never meant anything to you.’
‘No.’
Between them there is always the truth, never a lie.
Alone. She turns out the light. Why? She hears the hiss of the air conditioning, the television next to it, feels the window-sill shaking beneath her feet that night in Wiesbaden, when the drunk in the street shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Come on, then, jump,’ and she wanted to let go, but the hope of getting back those minutes in Barcelona was stronger than the longing to be shattered into pieces.
She takes one of the other pills that she hates, so that she can finally forget.
*
Aaron is in a plane. She is wearing a pair of dark glasses, even though she isn’t blind. All her dead sit in the rows in front of her and behind her; not one is missing, not even the ones whose deaths she was unable to prevent. Her schoolfriend Ben who fell through the ice and drowned, the woman in the Hotel Aralsk, the waitress in Delmenhorst, the barman in Brussels, the child in Cork, the shoe-shine man in Tangier, the taxi driver in Helsinki, Alina, Jordi, Ruben, Josue, Melanie Breuer, André.
The florist Eva Askamp.
And strangely, too, the school class from Zoo and two teachers, Aaron is trying to understand why.
It starts snowing. Fat flakes drift through the plane, soon so dense that the faces dissolve in a white swirl. Aaron’s feet are bare. She touches the stilettos of the woman in the seat next to her. The woman atomizes into snow, which then becomes a ball and rolls down the central aisle.
Someone calls: ‘Pass it! Too dumb to wank!’
Aaron’s father joins her. His face is blackened, as it was during the storming of the Landshut.
She grips his hand. ‘Where have you been?’
‘With my own.’
‘How many are there?’
He says nothing.
‘Can’t you count them?’ she asks anxiously.
His eyes bulge from his blackened face. ‘You never ask about mine and I’ll never ask about yours.’
She hears the voice of Captain Schumann: ‘Fasten your seat belts. We’re making an unplanned stop in Tegel, you can expect some turbulence.’<
br />
The plane rolls out of the prison sports ground. It has stopped snowing. Aaron presses a bag of hot chestnuts against her chest. She walks through the rows of her dead and her father’s dead, which she sees as well, so many, all looking away. All but André.
He chucks her a comic, Daredevil, Blind Justice. Aaron’s hand burns like fire, she drops the comic.
Her father is waiting at the foot of the gangway. He takes her dark glasses off and says: ‘You don’t need those any more.’
He hands her a heavy suitcase.
She wishes her father could stay with her. But he is staring up at the entrance, where Souhaila Andrawes is making the victory sign.
The plane takes off. She walks with the suitcase through Block Six. Three doors open for her. At the last air-lock she sets the suitcase down and opens it. It contains Runge’s souvenirs. She puts on the pearl necklace. She leaves the suitcase behind and walks on, and there is no one here apart from her and Ludger Holm and Boenisch, who are in the cell and don’t notice her.
There is a white camellia on the bed. Holm’s torso is naked and covered in tattoos. She closes her eyes, she doesn’t want to see them.
The men’s voices are a whisper in the night.
‘Can I choose the woman?’
‘Whichever you like.’
‘And then it will be Aaron’s turn?’
‘It will be her turn.’
‘And will you meet her?’
‘Oh yes. She will see again, but she will wish she was blind.’
Aaron feels Niko’s breath, his hip against hers. He opens the door to the room where she sat facing Boenisch. It is enormous, infinite, without walls. There is a dance floor in the middle, and Niko gently rocks Aaron, while the music flows from him like a reassuring fire.
She sees his smile, his ginger hair with the stubborn cow-lick, his blade-sharp nose, his eyes, always sad and happy at the same time. He holds her tight. Aaron notices that her feet no longer touch the floor. She flies away with Nico, sees below her the prison, a fortress built of nothing but light, sees Boenisch and Holm looking up at her.
In the Dark Page 11