‘The Armenian was inside for murder. Who did he kill?’
‘A guy in charge of a chain of amusement arcades. The Cologne police assumed he’d been money laundering for the Mafia, but they couldn’t prove it.’
‘I bet you’ve got a punchline coming up.’
She smiles tightly. ‘The Armenian’s father died a year to the day after his son killed the arcades boss. The death certificate said it was a heart attack, but there was no autopsy.’
Pavlik reflects for a second. ‘Holm killed the Armenian’s father first, without leaving any clues.’
‘That’s it. The date was a message.’
‘But only so that his son could leave jail, and Holm was able to liquidate him at the cemetery.’
‘Correct.’
‘Do you know any details?’
‘No, but I’m sure the cops in Cologne do.’
‘What was the prisoner’s name?’
‘Artur Bedrossian.’
Pavlik calls Fricke and tells him to contact the Cologne police. ‘I want details on weather conditions, visibility, precise distance, number of shots fired, number of hits, angles, lab reports. I’ll tell you later.’
‘I have another punchline for you,’ Demirci says. ‘Shortly before he died, Bedrossian had attacked and injured a prison warder. He was under arrest and wouldn’t have been allowed out. But the director of the institution personally intervened to make sure that he was allowed to go to the funeral. Guess who that was.’
‘I’m not good at guessing.’
‘Hans-Peter Maske. He’s been in charge of Tegel Prison for four years.’
Pavlik is thunderstruck.
‘What do we know about him?’ Demirci asks.
‘I’ve had dealings with him from time to time. He makes huge waves at the bows, but there’s only a pedalo following behind. He knows the right people and farted his way easily to the top. Word is that he’ll soon be taking over the Prisons Department in the Senate. Then he’ll make himself even more important.’
‘Sounds as if I’d like him,’ Demirci smiles.
‘Even his dog doesn’t like him.’
She turns serious again. ‘Eight hours ago I told him I wanted the personal files of all the prison warders that Sascha has dealt with over the last month. I said it was urgent. But he’s ducking out of it. All I’ve had from him so far is an email from his secretary saying that Mr Maske will prepare the documents with the, quote, necessary care, which unfortunately takes some time. Perhaps you’d like to motivate him a bit.’
‘Office organization is a secret vice of mine.’
24
They’ve left Oranienburg behind. Holm drives the car along the country road, heading north. The few vehicles coming towards them already have their lights on. Their pale beams flicker along dirty, frozen walls of snow and the bare trunks of the mountain pines that stand densely packed on either side of the road. Gusts of wind sweep the tree-tops. Crows flap about in the ditch and pick at a dead fox.
Sascha is sitting next to his brother. They haven’t exchanged a word since he burned the money. Sascha is so furious that he could rip out the dashboard.
For five years he listed the things he wanted to have once he got out: two women in Lisbon every day. A red Corvette. A house with enormous windows. Ice cubes in whisky glasses. A Glock 33. Somebody pleading on a lonely road, an empty magazine, a white cloth to wipe the blood away. A black Corvette, a silver, yellow, gold one.
Five million as if it was scrap paper. His brother has always done things that Sascha didn’t understand. He’s more of a stranger to him than this other man, Bosch, whose blubbing at the sight of the charred money bag still nauseates him.
The secrets that his brother bears within him are countless. Sascha never knew why he took that road and not another one. Why they had stayed in one place and not another. Why his brother left, why he came back. Why he saw one person’s death as important and allowed another one to live.
Even though his brother never said as much, Sascha knows what he expects from him: to burn down the house that he has never left. But he can’t do that. The worst thing his father did to him was to keep on forcing him down the basement steps day after day and making him lie down on the mattress.
There he dreams his way into his brother’s head. He creeps inside as if into a rabbit hutch and looks along the infinite twists and turns for the path that led his brother to freedom but didn’t do the same for him. But the search always ends up in the mirrored maze of his own head, and in every mirror Sascha sees himself lying on that mattress.
He wanted to shatter those mirrors. He wanted to smash them to pieces with his fists. He wanted to break splinters from them and poke his own eyes out. But the mirrors are indestructible.
His father made them that way.
And his brother let him do it.
Again and again Sascha planned to kill him in his sleep. His brother knows. And yet he often slept beside him. His hands now lie calmly on the wheel, even though the Glock Sascha’s brother gave him is still in the belt of his trousers.
The Glock and a box of Lucky Strike. That was all he was given. He wants to light one but he lacks the courage, because his brother can’t stand cigarette smoke.
He would bend the devil himself to his will.
Sascha has a thousand reasons for hating his brother. For head-butting him in front of Aaron and throwing him into the dirt like an animal. He could rip out the dashboard for that alone. He would spit on his brother’s corpse.
Sascha has never doubted that his brother will allow him his revenge on Aaron. The first gift he would get from him. He has imagined unwrapping it countless times. But his brother took it away.
What does Aaron mean to his brother?
Sascha doesn’t dare to ask. Whatever answer he got, if he got one at all, Sascha would reach for the Glock. And then he would be dead.
He needs to think of something else immediately.
That tart in Boenisch’s cell. Her dress, with the buttons done up to the top. Her throat, which felt like an Aero bar beneath his fingers. Her suffocation and how long it took. The bag he had to use because he was running out of time, the plastic she sucked in as he imagined who might be doing it.
Her struggling, wriggling, groaning.
But minutes later he would have needed another one.
Five million.
Why did his brother do that? To torment him? Because money means something to Sascha and nothing to him? No. His brother never does anything for him.
Even though Sascha can’t explain it, he remembers the note that an Italian gave him after a week in jail in Barcelona, his brother’s note.
There was only one sentence on it: It is the start of your journey.
All of a sudden he knows.
The thought is so powerful that the electric signal which sends it through the contact points in his brain is too weak at first to enter his consciousness. But with a brief delay it finally gets there: his brother has decided that their paths should part. Barcelona was itself a farewell. His brother is liberating him, and he wants him to take with him only what he had when he was eight years old. The thing that is branded into his flesh. The thing he has never talked about. The thing that is clenched in his fist. That and the Glock and a pack of cigarettes.
That sudden awareness explodes like a grenade in his head and turns bone splinters into projectiles that shred his mind.
His brother is going away for ever. For many nights he has lain awake and dreamed about it. For many nights he thought he knew exactly what he would feel, without any hope of it ever coming to pass.
But now it’s true. A sob rises up in Sascha, a heartrending whimper. He feels his brother’s eye on him and turns his head towards the window so that his brother can’t see what is happening to him, can’t see that he is shaking, gripped by terrible fear.
Everything blurs: the shadows of the trees in the last light, the dirty snow flying past like ashes, marker po
sts, pylons, road signs, crows.
He doesn’t know where the salty taste on his tongue comes from. He doesn’t know, because he has never cried before.
Suddenly he feels his brother’s hand on his cheek.
Sascha wants to push it away, he wants to pull his arm from its socket. But all he can do is tremble, whimper, weep.
His brother strokes him gently, touching him like that for the first time ever, letting him know that he understands.
Something hits the transporter, which swings off and almost skids into the ditch. His brother grips the wheel with both hands and brings it back to the road. He takes his speed right down. The car is driving roughly, as if it’s dragging something behind it. There’s a farm road on the right. He turns into it and only stops when the road is out of range.
His brother gets out. Sascha stands where he is and fights back the tears as if struggling against a giant.
He reaches for the Glock to reassure himself.
He clutches the grip and can’t feel it.
*
Holm has bound her hands and feet and thrown her coatless and shoeless into the stinking cargo area. She lies on the icy metal in her thin dress and knows that Bosch isn’t going to let her catch him off guard again.
Aaron wishes there was a meditation that made you insensitive to the cold. Like many sharpshooters Pavlik never shivers, but he doesn’t know why. She cursed the winter in the forest by the Mill. In hollows in the snow, rigid wooden lean-tos, among rocks that belonged to the north wind. Sometimes she was so cold that she threw up. When she couldn’t bear it any longer she moved, even though it threatened her camouflage. It was a mercy to be able to do press-ups and sit-ups and short, quick steps on the spot. It worked for a few minutes, and then the beast leaped at her once again.
To distract her, Pavlik once reminded her of the motorcycle holiday they had gone on through Arizona and Nevada with Sandra and the twins. Three crazy weeks on Harleys, through the most searing heat she had ever experienced.
Quivering, abused, bound, she lies on the mattress in the transporter and sees flickering images as if in a cartoon.
One twin on the pillion of her big Electra Glide, the other behind Pavlik, the piled-up luggage reflected in the mirror. Dried-up riverbeds, scars cut in infinity, clotted yellow, green, red and purple boulders. Forests of cactus.
Aaron is amazed by yellow and green and purple as if she has never forgotten those colours. And the faded blue of the sky. And the powdery vapour trail of a jet fighter. And the creamy beige of her Harley.
It’s so hot that they are sweating even in the airstream. They drink water from canisters. The powerful engine hammers beneath her backside, potato-potato-potato, her whole body vibrates, a boy’s hands tightly grip her hips, constantly pinching her with excitement.
Sandra overtakes, riding freehand, laughing as she speeds by. She has a pirate bandana on her head, and is so tanned that Aaron is struck by the dazzlingly white strip on her shoulder where her top has slipped down.
She lies half-dead on the mattress and is grateful.
They are sitting outside a diner, pouring iced water over their heads, eating bloody steaks with chilli. The bike stands sink into the melting tarmac, the wind sings in the phone lines and plays on the highway with its silver thorn-bushes; their fries are seasoned with sand.
In Cayenne they visit Mary-Sue, who can’t get her head around it. ‘Are you fuckin’ crazy – Arizona in July?’
For days they carry on through this oven. They come up with words for it. Cannelloni heat, tar-barrel heat, fuel depot fire heat, supernova heat. They want to go to Las Vegas. The sun set ages ago, but it’s still stuck like glue to Aaron. The sky is scattered with stars that look like grains of sand on skin after swimming. In the Bellagio she has a ten-minute ice-cold shower.
In the transporter, her teeth immediately start chattering again. She doesn’t want to remember the air-conditioned casino where she feels freezing cold, or the fifty dollars she wins on a one-armed bandit while drinking beer from a pitcher swimming with ice cubes, or the banana splits with pink marshmallows that she buys for everyone.
She remembers the storm that night, and standing at the window of Sandra and Pavlik’s hotel room watching a sea of lights drifting by. The five of them cuddle on the king-size bed zapping away before lingering on a film of the Hindenburg disaster, the mighty airship melting like cellophane; they imagine the screams as the silent pictures of the catastrophe disappear in a mirage.
The door flies open. Aaron is grabbed and pulled from the mattress by her feet. Her head crashes from the loading sill on to the bumper. The pain chisels her skull open.
Holm cuts through her shackles.
‘We’ve got a flat.’
*
Aaron kneels barefoot in the snow. Her body is numb. She hears a rushing sound. Very close. A river. Token-Eyes throws the big wheel-brace into her ribs. ‘Here you go, you sack of shit. Don’t fuck it up or I’ll use it to smash your head in.’
Aaron picks up the wheel-brace. Can’t hold it. Sticks her fingers under her armpits to warm them up.
‘Let me do it,’ Bosch says, ‘it’ll be quicker.’
‘You’ve made yourself look stupid enough already,’ Holm says.
As she waits for the blood to return to her hands, she tries to think. It’s so hard. She has to struggle against a profound feeling of weariness, because her kidneys have been pumping out huge quantities of adrenalin today. And yet she knows that she’s going to need a lot more of the precious substance – a whole ocean – if she’s to escape death.
Aaron wonders why Holm allows Token-Eyes to torture her. He had made it unmistakably clear to his brother that he’s not allowing him take his revenge. And now he’s granting Token-Eyes that satisfaction. Is it his way of apologizing to him for knocking him out a little while ago? For burning the money? No, Holm never apologizes, not even in such a perverse way.
I’m not cruel for cruelty’s sake.
That’s true. Everything he does follows a kind of logic. Something must have happened between the brothers. Aaron can hear it in Token-Eyes’ voice. As hate-filled as it sounds, it has an undertow of grief, of loss. And it’s not the loss of the five million that darkens his words.
The fact that Holm destroyed the money still takes Aaron’s breath away. If he were another man she would think he was crazy. But from the very beginning she had no doubt that that wasn’t the key issue for him. He despises people who think possessions have significance. Aaron’s attempt to burn the money was merely helplessness. Holm showed her how ridiculous that was, how stupid. Certainly he has often owned a fortune and thrown one away. He was teaching Aaron and his brother a lesson.
Holm proved to them that only someone who can stand the smoke should light a fire.
But he said: ‘We’ll get another five million.’
Why? Because he can.
‘I’ll give you thirty seconds,’ Token-Eyes hisses. ‘If you don’t get a move on, I’ll break your nose.’
She concentrates on the rushing sound, to her right. There’s something new, too, a deep rumble, a stamping sound, getting louder. A ship. A barge.
During the nights in the Mill Pavlik and she had time to teach each other things. He never achieved real mastery in karate. Pavlik prefers the fighting style of the Israeli special units, which is just as effective but less philosophical. Aaron taught him the breathing exercises of the Gōjū-ryū, initiated him into the secrets of acupuncture and showed him meditation techniques.
In return Pavlik taught her sharpshooting skills.
He taught her to gauge distances. If it were summer, she would say: the ship is six hundred metres away. But in winter sound moves more slowly because of the low temperature.
Four hundred metres.
No, she has to take the wind into account. It blows her hair into her face, it’s coming from the river.
Five hundred.
Just to be sure Aaron holds her breath
for a moment. Her hearing is so sensitive that even her breathing puts the sound out of focus.
The ship is big, she can tell that by the loud noise of the engine, perhaps a convoy. That means the waterway is wide. The Havel or the Spree.
Token-Eyes says with gloating anticipation: ‘Time’s up.’
The cold separates her from her body. It moves without any intervention on her part. Her hands clumsily tap the wheel-brace against the wheel rim. Again, again.
‘How pitiful, the blind whore,’ Token-Eyes says mockingly.
He isn’t aware that Aaron is using the wheel-brace as an echo-sounding device. There are trees between her and the river, tall and slender. She suspects they are mountain pines, the palm trees of Brandenburg. They are no longer very deep and dense, Aaron can hear the great expanse opening up behind them. She assumes that the terrain is uneven, with humps and hollows covered thickly with snow, clumps of trees and shrubs.
Her plan is desperate. But perhaps it’s her last chance to escape. And she has a trump card in the pocket of her dress that Holm knows nothing about. It’s the little metal clicker with which she put Kleff and Rogge to the test in the hotel corridor.
Was that really only yesterday?
She fits the wrench over the first bolt, rests heavily on it and holds on to the roof of the vehicle to shift the jammed screw with her weight. After she has bobbed up and down a few times she succeeds. She undoes the others in the same way. The ship is slowly getting closer.
Three hundred metres. But how far is it to the bank?
‘The blind man doesn’t see the impossible.’
Says Gantenbein in Frisch’s book.
‘Interesting,’ Holm observes. ‘Miss Aaron is going to a lot of trouble to convince us that she’s reached her limit. But this silly business of changing the wheel is so undemanding that she’s bored. Blind people as talented and ambitious as she is have abilities beyond anything we can imagine. Andy Holzer, for example, climbs the steepest rock faces in the Dolomites, and of course Aaron knows him. Or Zoltan Torey. He could dismantle a differential and put it back together gear-wheel by gear-wheel. I have no doubt that Miss Aaron could do that as well if the task was put in front of her.’
In the Dark Page 27