She is back in the cargo area of the transporter.
There’s someone else there. Probably Bosch. Aaron tries to speak. Her dry mouth opens. ‘Cigarette. Please.’ She sounds like a hundred-year-old woman on her death bed.
‘I don’t smoke.’
She knows the voice. But it’s impossible. It’s the voice of a man who drowned in front of her eyes.
‘We were both dead. What did you see?’
If she answers, it will mean admitting that he’s alive. She can’t do that.
‘I saw myself dying,’ the voice says. ‘It was beautiful. At first I was disappointed when I came to and was drifting in the river. I was sweating. Were you?’
She wants to be unconscious again.
A knock, then a metallic scrape: the window of the driver’s cabin. The voice says: ‘Give me a cigarette.’
She can’t feel her hands and feet. That means she’s been tied up. She hears a match striking. The cigarette is put between her lips. She doesn’t want to draw on it, it would be further proof of the existence of the man she saw dying. But she notices that the filter is being crushed, she’s sucking so hard on it.
‘I’ve studied you in detail, but I’ve underestimated you. I should have known better. You were able to escape from Boenisch’s basement even though you were blind there too. In spite of your injuries, you felled a man weighing a hundred and thirty kilos with a rusty nail. And an hour ago you killed me.’
Again he lets her take a drag on the Chesterfield.
‘We have a lot of things in common. We were both in a basement.’
‘Did you have a nail too?’ She can’t believe she’s really talking to him. She knows he can sense her craving, and is grateful to him for the next drag on the cigarette.
‘Your nail was just a tool that fulfilled its purpose. But why did you stop halfway rather than going for retribution? Boenisch was lying defenceless in front of you. You could have let him bleed to death.’
Aaron says nothing.
‘I didn’t stop halfway. That was why I was able to escape the basement for ever and you weren’t. I’ll ask you again later. We’ll explore the meaning of retribution in greater detail.’
‘Maybe I’d have become like you. That would be worse than my basement.’
‘I can bear that burden. It’s a greater burden not having fulfilled my destiny. That unites us too. You know the nagging emptiness, the fear that everything since we were born, everything we did, hoped and suffered, was in vain if we died for no reason. But I will redeem you. Because you are my destiny, and I am yours.’
The next drag tastes bitter. She turns her head away.
‘You know what it’s like when you crave something but you never satisfy that craving. Your nausea proves your weakness to you. But I can draw on this cigarette, which tastes of your lips. I could smoke a thousand or ten thousand and stop again straight away without remembering the taste. I gave my father what he deserved. Leaving after that was much easier than sticking a rusty nail in somebody’s neck.’
‘Why did you take your brother with you when you went? He doesn’t mean a thing to you.’
‘Really? You think so?’
‘Can I have another drag?’
He allows her a lungful of smoke. She tries to ignore the fact that he was holding the cigarette between his lips.
‘It was winter. We walked along snowy roads, slept in huts in the forest. No pain is greater than remembering happy times when you are in a state of misery. But what happy time did we have to remember? After a month the money ran out. Have you ever stolen anything?’
She doesn’t reply, but she sees herself in Munich one cold February. The Department wants them to be able to move inconspicuously in any setting. Aaron was to learn how to survive in a strange city as a homeless person without a cent, and had to prove it for a whole week. Two days before she began she wasn’t allowed to eat or wash. She was forbidden to ask for a bowl of soup at the station mission; they checked up on that. She tried to beg, but dirty and ragged as she was no one gave her anything. Eventually she was so hungry that she stole a loaf of bread from a shop. Aaron was beaten black and blue by the owner’s son and couldn’t defend herself because it would have blown her cover. But worse than that was the shame.
‘Stealing is easy when you’re hungry,’ Holm continues. ‘I just took what we needed. I left Sascha standing outside the shops, and always thought he would be gone by the time I came back. I didn’t know if I’d have been relieved. I had to pay a debt, but he could have released me from it by running away. He didn’t. He ate the bread I had stolen, and lay down beside me to sleep without a word. After a while I saw a woman coming out of a pub. I told her I wanted her little car, and that she was to give me her handbag. She screamed for help. I hit her with my fist and she was quiet. I had never sat at the wheel of a car before. But I drove as if I’d never done anything else. It was then that I realized that I can do something as easily as if I’m doing it for the thousandth time. When did you realize that?’
‘The first time I fired a gun,’ she answers reluctantly, only because she hopes that he will ask Bosch for another cigarette if he talks to her.
‘Yes, I can believe that. What was the model?’
‘A 9 mm Starfire.’
‘Perfect pistol for a little girl. In my case it was a Tokarev TT, a Red Army service weapon, nickel-plated. The design was borrowed from the Browning Hi Power, as I’m sure you know. Isn’t there a certain irony in the fact that you took that gun with you when you flew to Barcelona?’
Suddenly Aaron’s ribcage feels as if it’s made of concrete.
‘Oh, that was easy. I followed you and Kvist to your training session with your Catalan colleagues. Kvist is a virtuoso gunman, he’s very quick, a master. But he couldn’t be compared with you. Anyone who hasn’t seen you shooting doesn’t know the meaning of perfection.’ He knocks on the window again. ‘Bosch, another cigarette.’
He gives her a first, second, third drag.
‘Sascha and I came to Hamburg. There were squatters living on a street near the harbour. They gave us a bed, shared their food with us, asked no questions. They hated the state. That was as strange to me in those days as it is today, even though I’m familiar enough with the feeling as such. I’ve hated three people in my life: my father, you and myself.’
‘Why me?’
‘But those squatters also believed in something, a kind of justice. Night after night they talked of a world I knew nothing about. I read their books. I can pick up a fat book, flick through it page by page in two hours and remember every sentence for ever. Of course you know that. We both enjoy listening to the constant chorus of knowledge in our heads, the beauty and clarity of sentences and thoughts, in the certainty that we will understand their meaning. I met Marx, Habermas, Marcuse, Adorno, Dussel and others. These were philosophies of liberation, but they wanted to liberate society, not themselves. That was why I set those books aside. I was more interested in the structuralists, even though they didn’t answer the most important question: what gives structure to your world and mine?’
‘Violence.’
‘We both discovered that early on. Have you read John Locke?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s the philosopher I despise more than any other; he doubted that man could distinguish between good and evil. You and I are the proof to the contrary. Even though it’s true that most people persist in ignorance.’
‘You claim to know the difference between good and evil? A man who has committed dozens of murders?’
The cigarette is right in front of her mouth. The smoke curls into her nose. But Holm pulls his hand away. ‘How many people have you killed?’ he asks.
‘I’ve always had a reason.’
‘And I haven’t?’
‘Why did you shoot the teacher? That murder was completely pointless.’
‘Was it?’
‘You were well aware that Demirci wouldn’t let me go even if
you executed ten of them. You knew that his death was of no significance to the success of your plan. So why did you do it?’
For a long time all she can hear is the sound of the engine, the knocking of a cracked mudguard, the rattle of a hook.
‘I killed him so that you could ask me that question. It was inevitable, that’s dialectics,’ Holm replies at last. ‘The question deserves a more thorough answer. But not yet. Only at the right time.’
Aaron hates herself for the gratitude with which she draws on the cigarette. She says: ‘I only killed to save my life or other people’s. The ability to feel compassion distinguishes us from animals. I can do that, you can’t.’
‘Did you ever have a pet, a dog, perhaps? No, you wouldn’t want to be around an animal that was submissive to you. More like a cat. Did you have a cat?’
‘Yes.’
‘After Boenisch’s basement?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many times that cat consoled you when it sensed that you were battling with your demons. Wasn’t that compassion?’
She wants to scratch his eyes out because every word is true.
‘As far as I’m concerned: I took off your wet things and put an overall on you. I put your coat over you and saved you from freezing.’
‘To kill me whenever you feel like it.’
The fact that he has seen her naked drives her mad.
‘Not when I feel like it. You’ll learn that.’
‘There’s nothing I could learn from you. What would it be? Letting your legs dangle in a stream of blood? Palming murder off as dialectics? Ignoring the pleas of a human being like chatter at a party? There’s nothing.’
‘Oh there is, you’ll see.’ He allows her a drag. ‘I also read the metaphysicians and the scholars. They believed that we are guilty from birth, I liked that. But they were slaves to their religion, which is why I refused to respect them. I cannot kneel before a God who has so little concern for me that he could throw me into a basement. How could I ask such a God to forgive my sins when he is himself sin? What do you believe in?’
‘In what I see.’
‘I have never experienced friendship, but I’ve heard that a shared sense of humour is an important basis for it. Are you friends with Mr Pavlik?’
She doesn’t reply.
‘As I thought. And with his wife too?’
Bastard.
‘Then I’m surprised that you haven’t asked whether my reference to his wife and child might not have been a little game.’
‘Because I know.’
‘How?’
‘I can sense that they’re alive.’
‘You can do that?’
‘In case you think I could teach you, I can’t. You would have to know what it means to be alive.’
‘And you’re saying I don’t?’
‘Just as I’m saying you don’t have either morality or the ability to feel compassion.’
‘Patience. Men with clubs came and cleared the house in the harbour. They had sworn the same oath as you, but they were strangers to compassion, or else they wouldn’t have taken a girl I liked because she slept with me without asking about my sadness, and thrown her against the wall like a stone. They wouldn’t have kicked in all the teeth of a boy who had read Sascha bedtime stories. The men would have claimed they were obeying orders. How many orders like that did they obey? How often were they cruel and heartless without wasting a thought on the matter?’
Not once.
But I will never justify myself to you.
‘I wish I’d been able to help them both, but I had to escape with Sascha or they would have taken him away from me. At the back door a policeman blocked our path. He was little more than a child, you could see from his eyes that his heart was pounding. I took the club off him, used it as the others had taught me to, and thought about the girl and the boy. He fell dead at my feet, his unfinished face stared at me. I ran away with Sascha and hid in a shed for a long time and saw that cop going down. I was right to kill my father. This was different. I’ve forgotten most of them, but I remember the one in that house. Never tell me again that I don’t know the difference between good and evil.’
The transporter stops, the window opens. ‘Where do we go now?’ Token-Eyes asks.
‘Wait. Look for a suitable place off the road,’ Holm says. ‘Bosch, give me the box.’ He closes the window, lights a Chesterfield, puts it between her lips and leaves it there. ‘Who was your first?’
‘A drug dealer.’
‘What did you know about him?’
‘That he had rammed a knife in my belly.’
‘As little as that. But how long after that was it before you could sleep again, how often did you see his face? I’m sure it’s in front of your eyes right now. “It’s like falling through the mirror, no one knows more than that when he wakes up again, like falling through all the mirrors in the universe, and afterwards, a little later, the world reassembles itself as if nothing had happened.” But we both know better, don’t we?’
That’s from Gantenbein.
Holm is talking again already. ‘The cleared house belonged to a wealthy man. Apparently he had plans. It occurred to me that the villas of people like that could be useful. It was as easy as pie. I sent Sascha to see them. He rang on the door, said he was lost and asked if he could call his big brother. If they let him in, he would check carefully to see if they were alone. He gave them the phone number of the café I was waiting in. The name he mentioned was the code and told me whether I could go into action. I came and took any money that was in the house. If I wanted a car, there was one in the garage. Sometimes I had to hit someone, but it meant nothing more than shooing away a wasp. Have you beaten and hurt other people to get answers? Just be quiet. Lenin said: “The one thing worse than being blind is refusing to see.”’
Aaron explores Holm’s voice. According to the theory of acupuncture there are twelve meridians in the human body, the streams of the life energy Qi. The index finger that she jabbed between his sixth and seventh ribs was aimed at a special kyusho point on the liver meridian.
Dianxue. The Touch of Death.
As to whether it worked, time will tell.
The symptoms were: laboured breathing, visual and auditory disturbances, problems with balance and then a circulatory collapse.
But it’s much too early for that.
You can expect it to take about five hours, you have to be patient.
If I’m still here.
His voice is calm. ‘They were dead. And already they’re checking your breath again. I’ve never seen anyone who breathes as perfectly as you do. The yogis believe that each human being is assigned only a predetermined number of breaths for a whole lifetime. They slow down their breathing to delay death. Do you think that’s an option?’
‘Do you want me to give you yoga lessons?’
He laughs a hard, bitter laugh that dissolves like a pebble swallowed up by a crevasse. ‘I never stayed for a long time in any place with Sascha, we moved around. It was a year since I washed our father’s blood off me in a stream, but my brother still hadn’t said a word. I broke into houses a few times. The owners of two of them were on holiday. We lived there for a while. There were expensive television sets and expensive brandy and books that had been put on the shelves unread. I indulged myself enormously. I let the days pass without counting them. I had become a petty criminal, like the ones you must have had to deal with when you were starting out in the police. Wasn’t their despair at being locked up like background noise at a party you? If they’d arrested me back then, I’d have been a scribbled signature on an annoying police file. They would have known nothing about the void within me, so great that I thought my heartbeat felt like the dripping of a tap. I had a library in my head, but it was only a pile of letters. I didn’t yet know my way.’
The cigarette butt is wet and cold. He takes it from her lips and wipes spittle from the corner of her mouth as if she were a child.
&n
bsp; ‘One night when we were sleeping in a car yet again, my head exploded. I was lying in the road, and four men who had decided to beat me senseless with baseball bats were standing around me and Sascha. They were considering whether to kill us or not. In fact all they really wanted was the expensive car. But there was an animal living within them that was eating its way through their intestines. That beast also rages in my brother. For a long time I thought he would defeat it. I had to admit that I don’t have that power. Killing one, two, three or ten doesn’t satisfy Sascha. The beast is insatiable. It is his nature.’
‘You say you can’t bow down before a God. And yet it doesn’t bother you in the slightest that your brother bows before you? Why? Because you see yourself as a God?’
‘How do you define God? Can I change the course of the tides, the paths of the heavenly bodies, the wind? No. Can I send plagues, make miracles happen? No. But am I the master over life and death in my world? Yes. And in yours as well. It is true that my brother kneels before me. I could forgive him his sins. But he doesn’t ask me to. He simply doesn’t know what sin is.’
‘Have you ever knelt?’
‘I have. That night, before the men with baseball bats. For my brother’s sake. I begged. I pleaded with them so intensely not to kill him that I fainted from despair. When I came to they had left with the car and Sascha was sitting in the gutter. I crept over to him and pressed him to me and couldn’t feel his heart. He said the first words he had uttered to me since we had left: “Let me go back to the basement.”’
Minutes pass.
She could almost believe he had disappeared.
‘The next day Sascha rang on the doorbell of a villa. When I grabbed the woman by the throat, her husband appeared behind me and stuck a knife in my back. I was lying in front of him. He looked down at me with ice in his eyes. Our fate, Sascha’s and mine, was sealed. But that wasn’t the worst thing. When I lay there waiting for death, my brother looked—’ He breaks off and tries to find the words he needs.
In the Dark Page 30