He knows he’s heard or read that woman’s name somewhere before. He finds nothing on the INPOL database.
When and where? When and where? It’s driving him crazy.
Almost as much as the certainty that on this day which is about to dawn, something awaits him that will test him more than anything ever has before.
He can’t express it. But he knows.
Pavlik feels Sandra standing behind him even though he didn’t hear her come out. She puts a blanket around his shoulders, just as he starts to get goosebumps.
‘Did she get to the hotel all right?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Alone?’
‘You know she doesn’t take a single step alone.’
‘I don’t mean that.’
Niko’s name is in Pavlik’s silence, Sandra’s fear in her whisper. ‘Whatever happens, you’ll protect her.’
12
Aaron wakes up. Light. Light. Light. The world is nothing but light. Her gaze flies through the white infinity, further and further, aimlessly, millions of kilometres in a flash. The light surrounds Aaron and is inside her at the same time, it fills her completely, streams through her like a mighty river. Aaron swims in that light, she is carried by the river.
She is light as a feather, she drifts along.
That’s how it once was.
A month ago she came out of the cinema in Wiesbaden after the late show. On the pavement she was surrounded by shouting and laughter. Aaron sensed the energy of a lot of people, she was jostled, suddenly engulfed in a surge of people and pushed forwards, shoved around by party-goers. In the end she was able to break free. The group moved on, laughing.
Aaron no longer knew right from left, she turned round and bumped into a man. She asked, her voice quivering, if he knew the way to the bus stop.
The man didn’t reply. He held her tightly for a moment. Or for hours, she doesn’t know. Then he disappeared.
When Aaron opened her eyes the next morning, there was light everywhere. That gleam, the surging river. She was very excited and went to see an ophthalmologist, in the sudden hope that it might be an early sign of her eyesight returning. But he said she wasn’t seeing white, just as before she wasn’t seeing black. She wasn’t seeing anything. Her brain was just producing colours. There are blind people whose worlds are grey, blue, even green or purple. With some it changes according to their mood, in others not. The cause is unknown. He was sorry. Ophthalmology wasn’t an exact science.
In fact the light grew weaker after a few days. It had left her and turned into a washed-out curtain swelling in front of a window behind which there was nothing but endless night. One evening when she was going to bed there were flashes behind that curtain, and each one blackened a thread of the cloth. She watched until she fell asleep. When she woke up she was staring into the darkness as if the light had never existed.
Aaron called the BKA and reported in sick. She bought a ticket for the Neroberg funicular. During her time in the Department her official trips to Wiesbaden had always consisted of plane, taxi, meeting. Her colleagues from the BKA thought a trip on the old hydraulic railway was worthwhile; the view at the top was unrivalled.
She never found the free time. But since she’s been in Wiesbaden the bench by the Greek temple has been her favourite place. She sits there and imagines a view which, on a clear day, extends all the way to Frankfurt.
That morning Aaron heard pigeons fluttering and children laughing. She felt cold. Her hands buried deep into her coat pockets; in her left was something small and hard.
She wondered.
But all of a sudden she knew what it was.
A coffee bean.
Suddenly she caught the smell of that man who had stopped her in the street outside the cinema. Camellia blossom. The realization that it had been Holm left Aaron as crumpled as a sheet of paper.
He had found her and could kill her at any moment.
She sat there shaking for a long time.
*
A month after going blind, she had visited a mobility trainer, but he told her he couldn’t work with her yet. He only took on clients who had been blind for at least a year. He called it the ‘year of mourning’. It was necessary, he said, to work through the shock of something incomprehensible and irrevocable happening. The loss of her eyesight had been as definitive as the death of a loved one.
Aaron was to take time to grieve. When she had done that she could call him again.
Two other trainers also refused, for similar reasons. Her father found the fourth. She doesn’t know what he had said to the man. But he took her on. Normally the training takes eight weeks. She did it in four. In her free time she practised her sense of balance, she did yoga and tai chi, she tortured herself with her body, which had become alien to her. Sometimes she touched it to check that it belonged to her and not to someone else.
In the fourth week her father died. She didn’t take that year of mourning either. She started karate again. First on her own, because it was so ridiculous that she would have been ashamed if anyone had seen her clumsy movements, her reflexes, which weren’t worthy of the name.
Later, when the fire flared up in the library of her memory, Aaron wondered desperately if it had been started by her impatience. Was the loss of her memories the price for her refusal to mourn?
‘You have to go through four phases,’ the doctor had said in the clinic. Shock. Denial. Depression. Acceptance. She thought she had accepted her fate. But she had only pretended to do so. In the face of the fire she admitted to herself for the first time that she had never really tried to understand what had happened to her. She had never made peace with her old life. She still carried it around with her. Basically it had become an unbearable burden, and secretly she longed to cast that burden off at last.
Max Frisch says in his novel Gantenbein that everyone sooner or later invents a story which he sees as his own life.
Aaron too had to invent a completely new life so as not to be swept away.
The first step was the hardest: to admit to herself that she is blind, and that this means something other than not being able to see. That was the first time she buried her old life and wept for it and became the woman she is, and also wept for her father.
Since that morning on the Neroberg, where pigeons fluttered and children laughed and she found the coffee bean in her coat pocket, she has known why she didn’t take her time.
But what does Holm want to take revenge for? For the fact that she put his brother in jail? After five years? Aaron racked her brains. In Barcelona she had killed Nina Deraux, Token-Eyes’ girlfriend. She considered the possibility that Deraux was pregnant not by him but by Holm. But as part of the autopsy a DNA test had been carried out on the foetus, identifying Token-Eyes as the father. The hatred with which his brother had looked at her in the tunnel was etched on her retina for ever. Why did Holm come after her on the freeway? The money? Certainly not. Money means nothing to Holm. The car somersaulted, she lay blind and helpless in the wreck. Holm could have stopped. It would have been easy for him to take the bag and disappear. He wasn’t interested.
He became the master of her dreams.
Once he had a Mohican like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and said with a grin: ‘You’re too slow.’
Another time she saw herself as a seven-year-old girl with Ben, her best friend. The pond in the forest was frozen. Her mother had reminded her time and again not to walk on thin ice under any circumstances. But it drew her like an enormous bar of whole-nut chocolate that she needed to unwrap. And Ben was brave because she was brave. Hand in hand they flew across the white mirror; the blades of their skates drew cries of joy from the ice. Until Ben screamed and became so heavy that she had to let go of him. He sank into a black hole, reappeared and stretched his cold hand towards her. But she only touched his fingertips. He escaped her, and his tears were the last thing she saw.
In the dream she recognized that Ben was alive. He was Holm and
wanted to bring her to justice because she hadn’t saved him. She asked herself day and night: why did Holm hate her so much?
He was back, and for the last four weeks she had done nothing but wait for the moment when she would stand in front of him again.
He alone will decide when.
How could I have beene so naïve as to fly to Berlin?
But perhaps that’s exactly what I wanted.
Now, at six o’clock in the morning in the Hotel Jupiter, she is ready. If Pavlik had thrown the pack of cigarettes on the roof terrace, she would have caught it. And if she had been standing in the sixth lane…
Don’t be presumptuous. You’re handicapped. You can’t compete with Holm. And he won’t give you a second chance. If you get a chance at all.
She goes into the bathroom and looks in the mirror and imagines her face as she does every morning. She always sees herself in one particular photograph. She’s posing, legs wide, on Sandra and Pavlik’s terrace, wearing one of the twins’ cowboy hats, drawing two toy revolvers from their holsters and laughing. That photograph is the only memory of her face. It will never age, and is frozen for all time in that moment on the terrace.
In every Shintō shrine there is a mirror. If you look into it, you’re supposed to recognize yourself. Your own courage. Your own fear.
What you are.
Aaron has to pursue her own fate. The Department can’t protect her, however many men they have. She will be alone when she faces Holm, with nothing but the light within her. But it draws the energy out of her body, lures her, tries to seduce her into falling into it. How Aaron wishes she could take some kind of pill that would give her a boost. Instead she stands under the shower, cold, hot, cold again. A thousand needle-points sharpen her thoughts. She will begin today by shaking off the two men who took over from Kleff and Rogge. Aaron is convinced that Pavlik has chosen the best, so it’s good practice.
She knows her destination.
The camellia has already been sold.
When she steps out of the shower, she leaves the water turned on full. She brushes her teeth; she’s known since yesterday where the buttons for the radio are, and turns on some music. Comes out of the bathroom, feels for the slit screw beneath the handle with which the door can be opened from the outside, and turns it shut with a coin.
She gets dressed. Clicks her tongue quietly. Receives the echo of the connecting door to the next room, which can be combined with hers to form a suite as required. Presumably it’s free; Pavlik will have seen to that.
She opens the door with a hair-grip from her handbag. Listens. If she was wrong and woke someone up she’d look pretty ridiculous.
Silence. No breathing.
Good.
She puts her phone and a few banknotes into her jeans pocket, slips on her coat and takes the hotel Bible out of the bedside table drawer. She clicks again. When Aaron is extremely focused, she can locate objects with a thickness of at least two centimetres. She finds the standard lamp. Feels her way to it; there’s a glass table beside it.
Aaron grips the lamp, takes a deep breath, smashes its metal foot against the table and drops the lamp on the floor.
Immediately there’s a knock on the door. ‘Aaron? Yes, are you OK?’
She knows who it is: Peschel. He has a habit of starting most of his sentences with ‘yes’. Peschel is constantly eating sweets, never puts on weight and has three children by three different women.
He’s the best bodyguard in the Department.
Thanks, Pavlik.
‘Yes, if you don’t open up, we’ll have to come in. Aaron.’
She picks up her pumps, darts with the hotel Bible and the folded telescoping stick into the next room, quietly closes the connecting door and calculates fifteen seconds until they sense that something isn’t right. Another five till they act.
The knocking gets louder. ‘Come on, say something!’
Aaron counts in silence. After twenty seconds the door crashes off its hinges. She has to assume that both men have stormed into her room, creeps outside into the corridor and turns to the left.
No one calls after her. Good.
She relaxes her shoulder, makes herself as light as possible, the thick carpet pile is her best ally. In one hand she holds the stick and her pumps, in the other the Bible.
What could happen?
There’s an obstacle in front of me. I stumble over it and make a noise. Unlikely. What could be in my way at this time of night?
She knows the corridor branches off after eighty paces, approaches the spot unhurriedly, at a relaxed trot, two steps, one metre, silently. She hears very quiet knocking on her bathroom door, reads the men’s thoughts: Aaron is in the shower, she’s got the radio on – that’s why she can’t hear them. They see the shattered glass table, the lamp. But: fourteenth floor, the hotel façade is smooth, the window undamaged, no one could have entered the room unobserved.
In such situations they’ve been instructed to apply Ockham’s Razor: if you have several possibilities, always go for the simplest one.
Peschel knows Aaron: he’ll say, she’s great, but when she goes crazy, stuff gets broken. She’s under pressure, she needed some air, so she took it out on the table.
It would be very embarrassing to get into the bathroom, find yourself standing in front of a naked Aaron and have to stammer, ‘S-sorry.’
That won’t put them off for ever, of course. They stand still for another thirty seconds. Then one of them pushes down the handle and notices that the door is bolted. Why should I have done that, if I’m on my own? They’ll break down the door.
Aaron finds the turning precisely, sticks to the right and after twenty metres she finds the lift. Feels for the button and presses it. Puts on her pumps.
What could happen?
First: the lift takes an eternity.
Second: it goes up, not down.
Splintering wood. The two men have lost their patience sooner than she thought, and broken down her bedroom door. Now they know. She gives them ten seconds to get to the lift.
Damn, where is he?
There.
The door opens. She jumps into the lift. Which button is the ground floor? The bottom one? No. The hotel doesn’t have an underground car park, it has a spa in the basement.
Running feet.
She pushes the button second from the bottom. The door closes so gently that Peschel’s fists are still drumming against it when the lift finally goes down. ‘Yes, what is this crap?’ Aaron hears his muffled roar.
One of them will call the lift, the other takes the stairs.
Eighty seconds, tops.
Tight. Very tight.
The lift is quick, thank God. Still it seems to her to take a painfully long time before it finally stops. What happens next is crucial. If she gets out and this isn’t the lobby but a different floor, she can forget her plan.
She stands in front of the light sensor. Quiet classical music, a phone ringing, the click of a keyboard, suitcase wheels on marble. Relieved, she sets the Bible down in the doorway to stop the lift from going up. Aaron follows the sound of the suitcase, snaps the stick open, holds it like a pencil and swings it around as if in a training video for mobility instructors.
There’s something in her way. Aaron reaches out her hand. Leather, a group of chairs. She reaches her hand along it and around the barrier, sends her stick dancing again; there’s nothing in her way.
She taps against the metal edge of the revolving door.
Now comes the hardest bit.
Aaron has to vanish.
In less than fifty seconds.
13
She is enveloped in damp and cold. Exhaust fumes mingle with snowy air. The city yawns, rolls over, doesn’t want to wake up quite yet. She dozes amidst the whoosh-whoosh of a street-sweeping machine, the weary needles of diesel engines, the crunch of car tyres, the rumble of the suitcase disappearing into the distance.
Everything is slow.
Onl
y Aaron is quick.
She clicks her tongue, it takes her four steps to get to the kerbside, almost slips, finds her balance and steps out of the sound shadows of the parked cars. Aaron likes streets with dense traffic. The stream of vehicles helps her find her bearings. When the first one stops and that continues from car to car until they’re all at a standstill, she knows where the traffic light is.
That’s better than having to cross a quiet street, with the risk of someone hurtling out of a turning or a side-road, while you stand helplessly in the middle of the carriageway and pray.
But here, on Leipziger Strasse, it’s too far to the next lights. At this time of day the distances between the cars are variable. She has a window of between two and five seconds. That’s impossible to calculate, and she has to get to the other side at a hell of a rate.
Aaron knows: on the four-lane street it takes her seven steps to get to the middle.
The second virtue: Yu. Courage.
She sprints off with her stick stretched out in front of her.
See me! Please! Keep your eyes wide open!
No beeping horns. Luckily she caught the perfect moment. Aaron stands on the dividing strip, her heart a punch press.
Aaron concentrates on the moment and runs again. This time cars have to break and skid: one brushes her stick, almost knocks it out of her hand. She runs into the light and imagines that the cars are made of light as well.
Only light, weightless. Light can’t hurt her.
She is accompanied by a chorus of honking horns. But she makes it, she’s on the other side.
I’ve still got at least twenty seconds! It’s enough!
Euphorically she uses her stick to find the gap between two parked vehicles, where she will find refuge. In her mind’s eye she sees the men charging out of the Jupiter, scouring the pavement and giving up, grinding their teeth.
In the Dark Page 13