In the Dark

by Andreas Pflüger

  He turns himself around so that he can see the edge of the forest. Three metres away, with a ditch in between. If he crawls out from under the car he’ll be serving himself up on a plate. Pavlik rolls out on the other side and, crouching, sprints up the road. One of the bullets that come after him penetrates the left sleeve of his overall, but only nicks his upper arm. Pavlik throws himself into the ditch and listens.

  Breaking twigs. On the left. Kvist withdraws into the forest and waits for him to come after. Pavlik wriggles into the bushes, snakes along the icy ground and calculates his chances. Kvist is eleven years younger than he is, and in better condition. With the pistol he’s in a better position than Pavlik. On the plus side he puts: his eyes, his knowledge as a sharpshooter, which helps him read clues and find his bearings, his experience, Kvist’s ribs.

  In close combat they’re a match for each other. They both prefer the visceral krav maga, and remain suspicious of karate.

  Pavlik reaches a slope. He reads the snow, the fresh, shallow shoeprints. A frozen stream loses itself among pine trees, a thirty-degree slope. Further below, the trees stand like a black wall. Pavlik lowers his breathing and is only aware of his heartbeat. The crunch of the snow is as quiet as the creak of his neck vertebra. Twenty metres downhill.

  He slides into the stream, barely needing to use his legs, and slips silently down. He pauses. Kvist has taken off his jacket, it’s on the ground to his left. His footprints show that he has left the stream.

  But one of the footprints in the snow is too deep. He immediately grasps that Kvist has jumped from there to the other side to put him on the wrong track. Pavlik pulls up his right elbow, parries Kvist’s blow and spins. His legs grip Kvist’s torso and catapult him into the stream with such force that they start sliding. They go skidding down the slope as if on a bobsled, headfirst, Pavlik on his back, Kvist on top of him. They both drop their guns, and pummel each other with quickfire blows. Pavlik’s fists drum on Kvist’s ribs. Kvist presses three fingers together into a spear point to drive them into Pavlik’s eye, but he blocks him with his left hand and brings the ball of his right hand crashing under Kvist’s chin. He feels the jaw breaking. When he is about to bring a hammerfist crashing after it, his heel gets stuck in a tree root. His prosthesis loses its suction and comes off. He loosens his vice-like grip on Kvist. He wants to keep him from grabbing him by the calf, he knows what’s there. But they plunge three metres off the quarry edge.

  Pavlik falls hard on his back. Pain sears like acid through his neural pathways. He loses consciousness for several seconds. When he comes to, he vaguely sees Kvist standing over him, clutching the knife that he jammed into Pavlik’s belly in mid-air.

  ‘You should have listened to me.’

  Pavlik’s voice battles against the thunder of the blood in his head. ‘There’s one more thing I’ve got to say to you.’

  Kvist bends down to hear him more clearly. Pavlik sticks five stiff fingers into his side, so deep that they disappear to the last joint before he twists them. Kvist’s eyeballs bulge.

  He drops to his knees in slow motion. He wants to scream.

  But this time his voice has definitely gone.

  ‘I taught my little sister a lot,’ Pavlik whispers. ‘And she taught me too. That’s called “Mute Hand”. I know you understand me, but you can’t move or speak or breathe. Now show me the meaning of sisu.’

  He watches as Kvist suffocates very slowly. When his face falls silently into the snow, Pavlik wants to go on lying there as well. He reaches clumsily for his phone, but can’t find it. Each thought is a star that fades in an instant. It takes him some time to realize that he must have lost his phone in the fight, somewhere up there. His throat mic is no use to him here, he’s out of range.

  Pavlik crawls towards the rocky wall; he doesn’t know how, but he manages to get there on his one leg. A branch of the root that tore off his prosthesis dangles above him, long enough for him to grab it with both hands, in his belly a fire that rages all the way to the tips of his hair. He pulls himself up, thinks he hasn’t a chance of getting there, but he manages to grab the edge of the quarry wall, and feels around for a rocky overhang. With one last desperate effort he manages to roll himself over the edge. It’s as if the knife were plunging into him a second time. He hears his breath, which feels like someone else’s. He wants to sleep.

  His eyes are already half-closed, when he spots his prosthesis, only half a metre away.

  Move!

  Too far.

  Come on!

  He stretches out as dozily as a sloth, manages to grab the false leg, puts it in place, releases the valve that produces the suction. Feels the shaft hugging the stump.

  Keep going!

  He rummages in the snow and struggles on. He soon abandons the hope of finding his phone or one of the guns. He doesn’t know how long it will take until he sees the road at last, the headlights of the Ford. His belly is now made of ice, and everything else is on fire. He just needs to make it through the ditch.

  I can! I can! I can!

  Pavlik drags himself up on to the transporter that Bosch arrived on and squeezes himself behind the wheel, groaning with pain. Now he’ll discover whether he was right, and Bosch whether entered the address of the hiding place in the satnav because of the damage to his short-term memory. If he is wrong, he won’t have the strength to creep to the Ford and drive off. Then he’ll just sit here and die.

  36

  Aaron knows that Holm has been watching her for an eternity, reading all her thoughts, while she plunged deeper and deeper into the abyss, feeling each of her deaths, sure now that she hasn’t omitted a single one.

  ‘I tried to find out who it was who had done this to me. The BKA shielded you and I couldn’t get to the truth. But I never gave up hope. When I talked to Kvist about the Chagall, I demanded detailed information about the policewoman who was going to set herself up as an art expert. I usually prepared just as meticulously as you do, and insisted on a copy of your files. I can’t describe what it meant to me to read your name and Ilya Nikulin’s, to know my search was over. I’d have to be a writer.’

  Aaron waits for him to finish.

  ‘Originally I had wanted to use a different art theft for my purposes, a still life by Cézanne, which someone unknown had stolen from the Musée d’Orsay a year previously. I had to change my plans because the painting turned up again, and I had opted for the Chagall because of Natalya. The Dream Dancers, that was us, but only as a fantasy, we were never able to embrace, even though we were standing on the high wire. I observed you in Barcelona, I saw the way you pressed up against Kvist and kissed him. I knew straight away that I had made the perfect choice.’

  It’s true. I too was standing alone on the rope. Then I fell, and I’m falling still.

  ‘I stopped in the tunnel. Within me raged a fury that I could barely tame. The fury of having given in to my rage and shot you in the head. From the depths of my soul I hoped you were alive so that I could ask you a question. The car was lying on its roof. I looked inside. You screamed: “My eyes! Where are my eyes?” At that second I decided to be patient and open up the door to your first hell.’

  ‘And I stepped through it,’ she whispers.

  ‘And yet you were loved and you knew it. That’s more than I was ever granted.’

  ‘No, he never felt anything for me, or he wouldn’t have done that to me.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong. Kvist was a gambler, he was desperate, that’s why he got involved in the deal. You were with him in a restaurant in Barcelona. When you got up to go to the bathroom, I saw his eye gliding over the back of your neck. He did the same thing yesterday at the airport when you were smoking and he desired you. I must refuse you that mercy as well.’

  For a moment Aaron thinks she feels a new abyss opening up below her. But however strange, however alien the thought might be that Niko might have loved her, that he has always loved her, it’s reassuring rather than frightening.


  It would mean that he has known of his guilt for five years, and that he was sent to a hell of his own.

  What’s it like there?

  Do you see me every night and scream?

  ‘I have one consolation for you: I’m sure that Pavlik already knows the truth. He is too intelligent not to have found it out. Kvist may have impressive skills, but he isn’t an adversary on Pavlik’s level. Pavlik is a man to whom the oath he swore on the laws of his country means less than the love he feels for you, because it is a kind of love. He will kill Kvist, I have no doubt about that.’

  Yes, then he will do it.

  ‘You have so many certainties, and I have so few. All I have is Natalya’s hand on my cheek and her smile, and how tenderly she uttered the pet name for Vanya, because that was what I was called in Russia, because of my father’s father.’

  It’s as if the oxygen has abruptly been sucked from the flame. She runs through her library as if in a dream, sees that everything is in its place, opens six doors, then the seventh, the last, and finds herself in the underground car park. She rests the woman’s head in her lap, knows that the ricochet from the Browning is responsible for the gushing red fountain. The woman’s eyes are as dull as cracked varnish on an old painting. Aaron takes her hand. It’s hot. The woman is trying to say something.

  After a few minutes, during which she only grips her hand, the woman manages just a single word.

  ‘I will ask you the question once again,’ Holm says. ‘If you refuse me the answer, I will complete your punishment. Bear in mind that I will be able to tell by your voice if you are lying to me.’ She inhales the ashes exhaled by him. ‘Did Natalya say anything else before she died? I’ll count to ten.’

  ‘You don’t need to,’ she whispers. ‘I held her hand until it was as cold as mine. She said “Vanyushka.”’

  Now!

  She leaps to her feet, ready to fight Holm, but her fists meet empty air. She runs twelve paces to the left, then down the corridor to the right. She clicks and clicks. Twenty-three to the hallway. Aaron doesn’t know if Holm is following her, her bare feet drum on the floor, her breathing is so loud that it sounds like a long cry. Stairs. Eight to the landing, sharp bend; Vera miscalculated by a step, Aaron falls, thinks she hears a noise behind her, clicks her tongue, pulls herself up, charges on, dragging her fear with her like a heavy weight. Another five steps, correct this time. Three to the right, click, avoid the standard lamp, open bedroom door. Two flying steps to the bedside table. She pulls it open and gets her hands on the revolver, feels that it’s loaded, cocks it. Legs spread wide, she aims the gun at the door. Never has she yearned more to bring her pulse down.

  She sees herself standing there, shaking, she needs someone else for her fear: the Aaron who only watches.

  The woman with the gun calms down because the other one has freed her from her trembling.

  Not a sound.

  She dives over the bed, kneels and aims the gun.

  Nothing.

  Again she sprints to the door, flies through the door-frame, rolls away, bumps against the wall, aims at the stairs, clicks.

  Not a trace of Holm.

  Suddenly she knows where he is.

  She gets to her feet like a sleepwalker, goes down the stairs to the corridor, to the little box-room. He is still sitting where he was.

  He is talking away from Aaron, his back towards her. ‘Just like you, I tried to find my way for a long time. When Ilya Nikulin asked me my name I thought I had found it. I was lying to myself.’ A hinge snaps open. ‘Isn’t it strange that we began the same journey on the same night? Since executing the man sent by my father, you have followed the Bushidō. As have I, since all those mirrors shattered. My journey is over. I am fulfilling my destiny, I have no grief. Wouldn’t you too like to sleep at last? You may be granted that wish quite soon. A while ago I said something to my brother that he can’t forget. He opened a bag full of paper, and at any minute he will be here to do something that he has been afraid to do all his life. By then I will be dead, and unable to protect you.’ Steel slips from a sheath. ‘You know what you owe me.’

  ‘Yes.’ She puts the revolver to the back of his head.

  Aaron knows that he is plunging the blade of the seppuku knife six centimetres beneath his navel, pulling it to the left, bringing it up beneath his breastbone and severing his aorta. Holm doesn’t make a sound. She feels him trembling. Aaron pulls the trigger and hears his body slumping sideways.

  A car pulls up.

  37

  It was only ten kilometres, but Pavlik couldn’t have driven another metre. He just manages to bring the Ford to a standstill. So much blood. His blenched hands slip from the steering wheel. He wants to get out, he wants to do that so much, but his body lies in the forest and refuses to take orders. His eyes close. Gunshots. Three bullets shatter the windscreen. They don’t hit him. He struggles confusedly to understand. Holm wouldn’t miss, not at that distance.

  It is harder to open his eyes than it is to crawl up the slope. It’s impossible. But he sees Aaron standing in the headlights. She grips a revolver two-handed and fires again. He feels the draught above his head. Pavlik tries to reach for the door handle but misses it, again and again. A bullet pierces the radiator. At last he finds the handle. He lets himself fall against the door so that it swings open.

  ‘Aaron – it’s – me.’

  His voice is so ridiculously quiet that he thinks she couldn’t possibly hear him. But he sees her running away, stopping in front of the car, looking for it, feeling her way along it.

  Then she is with him.

  He weeps, and even that hurts.

  Aaron takes Pavlik’s hand. She knows that cold sweat. She is gripped by terrible fear.

  The voice isn’t his. ‘We have to get out of here.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Stomach. Knife. You’ve got to drive.’

  She freezes.

  He tries to slide across. Fails.

  ‘Wait.’ Aaron feels her way to the passenger side and tries not to think about what Pavlik is asking of her. She opens the door and wraps her arms around his upper body. He groans. She tries to pull him to her, can’t do it, he’s too heavy.

  There. The faint noise of an engine. It can’t be more than a kilometre away, quickly coming closer.

  ‘Apparently you were once with the Department,’ Pavlik murmurs, light years away. ‘I don’t believe it. You were shooting like a blind woman.’

  ‘Don’t blub on me, you great pussy!’ With one last desperate jerk she pulls him to her side. Who was screaming, was it him or her? She lowers the window and prays that the icy wind will somehow keep Pavlik from falling asleep. It takes her a shockingly long time before she’s back on the driver’s side, sitting behind the wheel. She puts the gun in Pavlik’s hand.

  ‘Sharp right,’ he whispers. ‘Not too fast, narrow path, a hundred metres.’

  She changes into first and rests her foot on the accelerator. ‘It took you bloody ages. Great friend you are. Keeping me waiting like that.’ And then she cries too.

  ‘I had – to say – hi to Kvist – from you.’

  The meaning of his words reaches her after a brief delay, like the pain of an injury.

  ‘Slow down – stop. Left, country road, no cars.’ He is getting quieter and quieter, Pavlik’s voice is lost in the throb of the engine as she imagines it’s just idling and she isn’t accelerating to over a hundred kilometres an hour and speeding into a tunnel made of adrenalin.

  ‘Straight on – two – lanes.’

  Wind rushes in on the passenger side, blowing Aaron’s hair into her face. She hears the Colt clatter to the floor, he can’t hold on to it any longer. ‘Can you see him?’

  ‘Behind – us,’ he gasps.

  Shots are fired. The wing mirror on the left shatters.

  ‘He – wants – to – pull – up – beside us – get – into – the middle.’

  *

  I’m paying my debt
by allowing you to leave this house alive. When he got into the car, his brother’s words hammered in his head like a compressor. At the railway embankment, where he waited for the train, they prised open his veins and his blood poured into him while the compressor hammered, hammered, hammered. That was how little value his brother placed on his debts. After being forced to go into the basement for four years, all he got in return was the permission to stay alive? He had endured all kinds of humiliation, all kinds of shame. But only because he knew that his brother was in his debt. When he was eight years old and didn’t run away while his brother stole bread. When he saw him die in that man’s house, and coming back to life. When his brother sentenced him to five years in jail. But the hammering was telling him what he would do as soon as he had the money. Then his brother would pay the real price. Sascha would look at his brother’s corpse as if it were a piece of wood or a stone, a bit of roadkill, rotten seaweed on the beach. He would step into the labyrinth, and this time it will be childishly simple to find his way out. He would wonder why he didn’t do it a long time ago. It was just a door that he kept closed. He would go to the box-room and open it.

  Imagining how he would show her that there are worse things than being blind filled him with such satisfaction that he almost missed hearing the train in time. He made the call and the bag flew from the door. He opened it and saw the money. He knew what he had to check. When Sascha held the banknote against the light in the car the denomination on one side was almost a perfect match for its counterpart on the other. But only almost.

  At that moment the hammering stopped. Because the pictures he saw in his head, the pictures of all the things that would happen in the house were so violent, so terrifying and so wonderful, that all other wishes, even the wish for money, paled in comparison. He drove to the farm.

  And he saw the Ford weaving along the road.

  *

  Aaron rams the Mazda. The car lurches, she tries to straighten up, but how do you do that when you’re blind?