In the Dark

by Andreas Pflüger

  Pavlik brakes sharply because a dumper truck has pulled out in front of him without indicating. He hammers on the horn as if it might shut Demirci up.

  ‘To call him a hot-head would be a euphemism,’ she goes on. ‘It seems to have started five years ago, after Barcelona.’

  ‘“Would be”, “seems”, “you would think”’,’ Pavlik mutters.

  ‘If she means so much to him, why isn’t he trying to find something out? It’s against his nature.’

  ‘You’re beating around the bush. That’s against your nature.’

  ‘Do you trust him?’

  ‘He was my friend.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  Demirci has to hold on to the roof handle because Pavlik is swinging the car into the entrance to a car park. He skids into the parking space and gets out. She follows him into the icy wind. The full moon is riding over shreds of cloud. He lights a Lucky Strike with his jet lighter without holding the pack out to her. ‘You’ve known him for four weeks, I’ve known him for ten years. He has never shown fear, not even before Barcelona. Ask my wife. And she can’t stand him.’

  ‘There was just him, Jenny Aaron and Holm. Come on, Pavlik, you don’t think she was a coward as well, do you?’

  ‘Our code doesn’t require us to sacrifice ourselves.’

  ‘It does. And you know that.’ Her next answer plunges like a meteor from the sky and opens up a crater between them. ‘Did it never occur to you that Kvist might be in cahoots with Holm?’

  ‘Hell would freeze over sooner,’ Pavlik spits.

  But his cigarette tastes like a memory he’d locked away in a safe somewhere.

  Three months after Barcelona, Aaron’s father wanted to talk to Butz and Pavlik. Not on the phone. They flew to Sankt Augustin. Jörg Aaron poured them a drink and told them what Kvist had done in Afghanistan. His rage was like a bullet. He was capable of anything. Pavlik wanted to deny it. But what could he use in his defence? Friendship, loyalty, his understanding of people. Jörg Aaron didn’t think in such categories. For him it was an equation with three unknowns: the supposed tip had come from Kvist’s supposed informer. Kvist had made contact with Holm. Kvist had met him on his own in Bruges.

  Butz wiped away the equation and suggested a new one: the informer existed; he had always been reliable. After that meeting in Bruges Kvist wasn’t convinced that Holm had the Chagall, because there was no proof apart from a single photograph. Lissek slept on it and then gave the go-ahead.

  ‘Jenny wanted to go in armed. Kvist talked her out of it,’ Jörg Aaron said.

  ‘We make decisions. Some of them are right,’ Pavlik replied.

  There was still a dreg in the whisky bottle. Aaron’s father distributed it among the glasses. ‘The Minister of the Interior gave it to me for my farewell party. I’ve known a lot of brave men. None of them has been as brave as my daughter. I’m not going to leave it until I know the truth.’

  He was about to raise his glass. But it fell out of his hand and he was dead before it shattered on the ground. Pavlik will never forget the time he and Butz couldn’t bring themselves to call Aaron. And how they looked out of the window and saw her feeling her way along the path with her stick. How they ran downstairs to be there before the paramedics arrived. How Butz took Aaron’s hand and whispered: ‘I’m sorry.’ How Pavlik saw her tears and couldn’t get a word out and couldn’t bear her pain and Butz couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to show himself. How he stole away as if he had never been in this house, as if he had never grieved with her.

  The wind eats away at Pavlik’s cigarette. It is wedged wet and bitter between the two bloodless straight lines of his lips.

  ‘Give me a single reason,’ Demirci says.

  ‘He loves her. That’s why.’

  ‘Holm had assured him that nothing would happen to her.’

  ‘Not Kvist.’

  ‘Just because he’s her friend?’

  The moon rides into a black abyss. More sleepless nights are reflected in Pavlik’s eyes than she has ever had in her life. ‘I told her there was a notch in the gun rest in the sixth lane.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s from André. André and Kvist and me. The “Three Dons”, that was what the others called us. André switched sides. Kvist tracked him down and killed him. Because I couldn’t do it. No friend has ever done me a bigger favour.’

  When Demirci is able to speak again, she says: ‘You call him André, you don’t call him by his last name.’

  The cigarette is whipped from Pavlik’s mouth. ‘It’s what he wanted. He said: “If I step down I don’t want anyone to pretend he barely knew me.” But that’s exactly what happened. It’s the first time in six years that I’ve uttered his name.’

  *

  Bosch doesn’t remember exactly when Holm scoured the valley with the night-view binoculars and chose the lonely farmhouse. But he remembers looking up at the sky outside his sister-in-law’s house and hearing his mother say many years before, ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.’ He doesn’t remember if snow was falling when they left the transporter at the farmhouse and Holm told him and his brother to go inside with the woman who dropped her bucket outside the stable, to see if they were really alone. But he does remember that he had a terrible headache when he rang at his sister-in-law’s door, that he was wearing his good suit, that he was holding a bouquet in one hand and in the other a toy fire engine for Elias. He doesn’t remember what rooms he and Sascha looked at, what furniture was in it, what it smelled like. But he does remember a lamp flickering in his sister-in-law’s stairwell, and hearing a watch ticking, even though it doesn’t really tick. He doesn’t remember if the woman said or did anything that made him furious. But he does remember that his sister-in-law wanted to close the door as quickly as possible, and a mighty noise enveloped him and swept his sister-in-law away like a cobweb. He doesn’t remember how the woman ended up lying on the floor in the kitchen whimpering, how his fists clenched and stung, Sascha leaning against the sink with a cigarette and grinning. But he does remember he wanted to talk to Simone, tell her that everything would be fine, he knows that Elias didn’t look at the toy fire engine and wept and flinched from him. He can’t remember why the woman with the bucket is now lying in a different corner with blood spilling from her nose.

  Suddenly Holm is standing in the room and throwing him in the air like a paper aeroplane. Before Bosch loses consciousness he sees Aaron feeling her way over to the woman, holding her, and he remembers looking down at Simone and Elias, who were silent, he remembers how his sister-in-law screamed and that made him mad and he remembers his watch stopping. But how it happened he can’t remember.

  *

  Aaron runs her hand over the woman’s soapy hair. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t do anything to you any more.’ The woman very slowly calms down.

  Now she’s my responsibility.

  Aaron’s breath is halting. ‘Can you move?’

  ‘I – think – so,’ she hears the woman sobbing. After every word a pause that in Aaron’s first life would have been long enough for her to dismantle her Browning.

  Bosch groans. Aaron helps the woman to her feet. Her hands aren’t tied, but she barely has enough strength to stay standing on her own.

  ‘Put the gun away,’ Holm orders his brother.

  ‘What are we going to do with her?’ Token-Eyes says.

  Aaron looks at him. ‘If you touch her, I’m not going to lift a finger for any new negotiations.’

  ‘I wonder. I’ve got a few ideas.’

  At that moment the scent fills her nostrils.

  ‘How lovely,’ Holm says. ‘You’ve got a camellia.’

  Aaron supports the woman. She is slender, not yet old.

  ‘Where’s your husband?’ Holm asks.

  ‘Hunting in Poland. With a friend.’ The syllables come so thick and fast now that she’s almost babbling.

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘The day
after tomorrow.’

  Aaron imagines Holm’s expression, the certainty that the woman will not lie to him.

  ‘Does he have guns in the house?’

  ‘In the hunting room.’

  ‘She’s just ballast,’ Token-Eyes says.

  ‘Will he call you this evening?’

  ‘No, he’s having an evening with the lads.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you expecting visitors?’

  ‘No.’

  Aaron hears a gas meter clicking. A tap drips. The flame in a boiler comes on. A train in the distance.

  Holm says: ‘Stay here with Miss Aaron. If you touch her, you’ll be digging your own grave behind the house.’ He pulls the woman away from her and takes her with him.

  Something crashes to the floor. ‘Make some food, you piece of shit.’

  Aaron falls to her knees, collects pots, pans and ladles and knocks them together with a sharp clatter while Token-Eyes throws more and more utensils down on the tiles and gloats at what he sees as her helplessness. ‘Blind policewoman plays blind man’s buff. Arsewipe!’

  Holm comes back. ‘A cow in a byre, an earthworm in a dungheap has more brains than you. You’ve just allowed her to take a look around.’

  *

  The country road flies into the headlights. A gritter draws a sluggish line in front of them, is dragged into the rear-view mirror and then magicked away by a sharp bend. Pavlik dashes over the black ice, through an arch of trees; the car holds the lane as if on rails. On a summer day he would enjoy the view across the far-off, flowing hills every time the forest opened up, he would have flipped up the visor of his helmet, the wind in his face, his body merging with the Hayabusa, the clouds mirrored in the windshield, he would speed along the snaking bends beyond the lift lock, would scrape the tarmac with his knee-guards, waste time.

  Since the car park he and Demirci haven’t exchanged a word. It isn’t the kind of silence that’s waiting for someone to break first and thus admit they were in the wrong; not a silence that could have been ended with a cliché, a remark about the weather, something trivial, because that would have meant something disappearing from the world without anyone making too much fuss about it. It’s not that kind of silence. Kvist is the reason for it. What Demirci said cannot be taken back because she meant exactly what she said and any apology would be a lie. A phrase came out of the blue, and while it has not been proven right or wrong the crater it left will remain.

  They reach the village. Christmas garlands still flicker in the windows of Manfred Germer’s house; Santa Claus laughs from his neon-green sled, one reindeer has lost an antler. Germer opens the door as soon as they ring. They sit down with him in his old-fashioned German sitting room. He is an affable, fat man, the kind of person you would meet at a shooting-club party or a campsite, normally joviality personified, a cheerful chap, but right now a bundle of nerves. His wife, a dumpy little thing whose eyes dart from between rolls of fat, asks if they would like anything to drink. Or some Christmas cake, perhaps? No, thank you. She closes the door gently.

  ‘What kind of men are they?’

  ‘Dangerous men,’ Pavlik says. ‘That should be enough.’

  ‘Describe the pilot who chartered the Cessna,’ Demirci says.

  ‘An experienced flyer, you can tell. He looked at the plane and noticed immediately that one of the valves had been leaking. He seemed a bit standoffish. I told a joke, but he just pretended to laugh.’

  ‘What name did he give you?’

  ‘Martin Petzold.’

  ‘Did he show you IDs for his fellow passengers?’

  ‘Copies of their passports. Hans Breuer and Uwe Askamp.’

  Demirci looks over at Pavlik.

  Breuer and Askamp. Holm’s sense of humour.

  ‘And the charter is valid for two days?’ Pavlik asks.

  ‘Yes, a men’s trip away, he said. We often get those, it struck me as perfectly normal.’

  ‘He must have given you a phone number.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a number like that before. Nineteen digits. He said he lived abroad.’

  ‘Did he seem agitated when he postponed the flight?’

  ‘Hm. He was quite abrupt on his mobile.’

  ‘How do you know it was a mobile? Did the number come up?’ Demirci asks.

  ‘No, but a patrol car with a siren went past. But yes, I suppose he might just have had a window open.’

  Pavlik asked promptly: ‘When was that exactly?’

  ‘At seventeen minutes to four. I checked specially after I rang my colleague.’

  Pavlik calls Majowski at Department headquarters. He wants to know where in Brandenburg an emergency police car was on the road at that time of day. He stays on the line.

  ‘What’s the procedure for tomorrow?’ Demirci asks.

  ‘He’s going to call tomorrow morning and say when he’s leaving. I’ll check over the plane with him two hours before they set off.’

  ‘We’ll swap you for one of our men.’

  Germer starts nodding, but his chin stops halfway down and doesn’t make it all the way back up again. Demirci can see that his thoughts are slaloming in all directions. A man has chartered a plane from him under a false name, for himself and two others also with false names. Germer has probably listened to the radio, in the office in the afternoon or on the way home. There was something about a bus hijacking, a hostage-taking in Berlin. Three men escaped, they said, prepared for anything. He thinks about his wife. There are children’s boots in the hall. If he says, ‘Out of the question,’ he will sleep tonight.

  ‘But you don’t want that, do you?’ Demirci asks.

  He wants to nod and shake his head at the same time, tries again and fails once more. ‘I said I’d be there tomorrow, he’s expecting me.’ And he squints towards the door as if he knows his wife is listening behind it.

  ‘Do you have a plan of the airfield?’ Pavlik asks.

  ‘Just a moment.’ Germer gets up and goes outside.

  ‘Two hours,’ Demirci whispers. ‘Presumably Bosch will be coming alone, and the brothers will turn up just before the plane takes off.’

  ‘Yes. We need to get him on his own and make him tell us where the hiding place is. It’s our only chance.’

  They are both thinking: if Aaron is still alive.

  Majowski calls back. ‘At that time there was only one emergency unit on the road. In Freienhagen.’

  ‘They set off from Wannsee just after half-past one. It wouldn’t have taken them more than an hour to get there.’

  ‘Checked that one. There was a serious accident on the freeway just past the edge of the city. A huge traffic jam that didn’t disperse until three. Where are you planning on meeting the guys on the landing approach?’

  ‘I’ll tell them to wait.’ Pavlik hangs up. ‘They were just past Oranienburg, heading for Finow,’ he tells Demirci.

  ‘We could send some men.’

  ‘They’re not there any more. In Holm’s place I’d choose a hideout no more than ten kilometres from the airfield, to be there as quickly as possible tomorrow. No, they’re somewhere very close by.’

  There’s nothing exceptional about his words. But it’s as if there hadn’t been cigarettes cadged among the party balloons, as if there had been nothing between them when she talked about her mother, no gratitude on his part for the touch of her hand as it affectionately rested on his, and hers when he helped the men to mourn the death of their comrades because she hadn’t time – no, she couldn’t – not her concern and not her advice, which was to be so valuable to him. All of that suddenly seems to be lost, as if it had never happened, as if he were once again the man who walked unseeingly past her, not noticing her smile, and she was the woman who hid the fact that she was hurt. They both feel the loss and know that it could stay like this for ever.

  Germer comes back, spreads out a map and describes the last place in the world he wants to be the following morni
ng, each touch of his finger a sleepless hour. ‘There are only two small buildings. This is the car park – this is the way in to my office, where the paperwork is done – then you go along this corridor to the ramp – the plane is parked over there.’

  ‘Does anyone work in the office apart from you?’

  ‘No. There’s just a desk. He knows that too, he’s been there.’ Germer is so tense that his breathing is shallow, his words run away with him. His fingers move back to the car park as if they have a will of their own. ‘This would do, wouldn’t it?’

  No. That would be the worst possible option. Bosch will be extremely nervous a moment before and a moment after getting out of the car; if he expects an attack, then that’s where it will be. If there was an exchange of gunfire, the danger of killing him would be much too great. But if he’s in there and everything seems perfectly normal, he’ll be able to relax a little. That’s the right moment.

  Pavlik stands up and goes to squat down by the sideboard where a model of a propeller plane with Japanese markings has the place of honour. ‘Brilliant. Did you make this?’

  Germer’s pride briefly outweighs his fear. ‘One hundred and ninety hours of work. Cut and painted each individual part myself. The landing gear is retractable.’

  ‘Really? How does that work?’

  Germer shows him, while Pavlik asks in an astonished voice, ‘Can I have a go?’ and Demirci watches them, big boys together. If she didn’t know better, she might think that Pavlik has forgotten what they came for.

  ‘What kind of plane is it?’

  ‘A Yokosuka Ohka, it was just used for kamikaze flights.’

  ‘That must take a lot of patience.’

  ‘And a steady hand.’

  Pavlik smiles. ‘What do you think, Mr Germer – would a person who is capable of making something like that not be relaxed enough to welcome our man, hand him some papers to sign and ask him to go on ahead to the runway because the phone has just rung at that very moment and he needs to sort something out?’

  Germer thinks for a moment. His forced smile doesn’t make it all the way to the corners of his lips. ‘Maybe.’