Zen and the Art of Murder

  The other cars stopped and their colleagues got out. Some nodded, others ignored her. Nobody said a word, but the tension was palpable. A task force on the brink of a raid was a highly explosive combination of adrenaline, fatigue, determination and nerves.

  They grouped around Bermann, who issued instructions in a muffled voice. He repeated Wallmer’s warning. Bonì repeated her observation. Someone giggled wickedly. Then the group dispersed almost without a sound.

  Bermann held Louise back and ordered her to stay behind the others. “You’re just going to use your eyes,” he said. “Nothing else, do you hear me?”

  Ten minutes later the task force and the additional police officers were scattered across the snow-covered area. Alone and in small groups, they waited behind trees, hillocks, bushes. After a while they stopped worrying about remaining quiet. Louise heard voices, coughing and cursing. The buildings were surrounded; nobody was going to escape. So why lie silently in the snow?

  Bonì herself was perched behind a snowdrift beside the narrow track that led to the farm. Although she was freezing, the cold offered one benefit: her shoulder barely ached.

  As she watched the two buildings she thought that Wallmer might be right. If the Asile people were here, they appeared to be waiting. But were they here? No cars, no smoke from the chimneys, no smell of burning wood. The curtains behind the windows were not moving. There was no sign of life anywhere on the farmstead. And yet Louise couldn’t help feeling that people were inside.

  Bermann, amplified by the megaphone, tore into the silence. As on that morning in the Vosges, nothing happened. A few seconds passed, then Bermann’s voice boomed out once more. He was about twenty yards to her left, Wallmer beside him. He cursed. Louise knew that he’d wait three minutes at most before issuing the order to advance.

  Who was inside those buildings? Or were they in fact empty? But if so, where were the Asile people? Had a week been enough time for them to get away?

  Hardly. On the day after the “accident” near Mulhouse their names were put on the wanted list, which would have given them only a tiny window of opportunity to fly out undetected via an EU airport.

  How would Mahler have reacted to the organization being smashed? If he’d been here a week ago, would he have waited until today? Possibly. But they had to assume that Steiner would have warned him by telephone this morning.

  Bonì slipped her hand into the pocket of her anorak and ducked. She’d refilled her supplies in front of her father. He hadn’t said anything and nor had she.

  Louise screwed the cap back on and put the bottle in the snow in front of her. She thrust it in so far with her finger that it was no longer visible. Then she cupped some snow over the top and patted it down.

  So much for Mahler. But what about the others?

  Annegret Schelling was injured in the accident, as was the driver of the Sharan, although presumably not seriously. It was highly unlikely they would have come straight back here. They probably went to see Steiner—together with the pregnant woman. He’d have attended to their wounds. Then Schelling and the driver would have gone underground, either here or somewhere else.

  What about Fröbick and Lebonne? The pregnant woman? Pham? The other children? How many children were yet to be passed on? Last Wednesday Annegret Schelling had said that Pham had eight more sleeps before meeting his new parents. They didn’t know how many other children were with her at the time. Two days prior to that Schelling hadn’t been able to talk to Muller because she’d supposedly been at the pony club with “the children.”

  Since Thursday evening everything had changed. It had become risky to travel through southwest Germany, Alsace or the Vosges with children from the Far East.

  Assuming that not all the children had been delivered by Thursday evening, what would Mahler and his people have done with them after realizing that their cover had been blown? That the children would now be earning them hefty prison sentences rather than a fortune? If Steiner had no concrete information and Jean Berger wasn’t arrested, and if there were no records of the adoptions, it would be difficult to prove that Mahler, Natchaya, Schelling and the others had illegally sold children from the Far East to European parents or pedophiles.

  If the children were with them it would be easier.

  Bonì stood up with difficulty, and momentarily felt dizzy. Then she trudged through the snow to the nearest of the two houses.

  “Hey,” Bermann groused, “stay where you are!”

  The building was about thirty yards away. It would have been easy for Bermann or one of the others to hold her back. But nobody moved.

  “Shit, Luis,” Bermann called out, resignation in his voice. Louise could feel the eyes of her colleagues on her. All conversation had stopped. She wished Lederle were here. He might have explained to Bermann and the others what she was doing and that they could trust her. But it didn’t really matter. She was on double sick leave. It would be a long time before she was better again and could return to work.

  But that was not important now. Only the children mattered. Pham, Areewan. Even Natchaya, who perhaps was only slightly evil.

  She wondered how she would cope if there were dead children in one of the buildings. How she might have been able to prevent it. What had gone wrong when. Whether it was arrogant of her to think she could save the world if she couldn’t even save herself.

  Thirty, thirty-five yards, and yet she felt as if she’d been walking for an eternity. She was passing through a vacuum, a cold, white room where time didn’t exist. Calambert, Taro, Landen, the roshi, Natchaya—they were all there.

  Only Pham was missing.

  Then Bermann entered the room too.

  “I’m here, Luis,” he said, seven feet behind her, gun in hand.

  She walked on. Nothing was happening at the house. Black dots moved in from either side. She could hear voices whispering, “They’re dead.” How could she have prevented it? What had she done wrong? In a moment like this the list of errors was endless. It began with the day she ran in the wrong direction near Munzingen.

  Calambert’s error was to have put a sticker on the rear windshield of the car in which Annette had drifted toward death: IT’S A MAN’S WORLD. If the sticker hadn’t been there he wouldn’t have died. Perhaps it was that simple.

  The sticker had been his mistake. Everything else had been her mistake. Every bottle of booze she’d drunk had been her mistake. And every bottle of booze she hadn’t drunk.

  Then she reached the end of the white room.

  The front door was unlocked. She pushed it open and stepped into a dark, square hallway. All of a sudden Bermann was in front of her. Then Wallmer, Schneider as well as a few others jostled past. At once the hallway was flooded with yellow overhead light. Around her, doors were pushed open. More officers poured in, spreading themselves between the rooms and charging up the stairs at the end of the hallway. Muffled voices calling out orders, warnings. No shots, no screams. Above her the sound of rapid footsteps. Out of the blue she thought of the garden where Pham and Landen were waiting for her. She wondered in what sort of life the two of them and she could have been a family.

  The ground floor was quickly made secure, followed by the upper floor and finally the basement. Nothing. The house was empty.

  She went back out through the front door.

  Bonì was almost at the second building when a police sergeant approached her. He hesitated, then stopped. She walked past him without saying anything. Behind her she could hear footsteps in the snow. Someone was running from the big house. Then she heard Bermann say, “Where?”

  “Top left,” the sergeant said.

  “It’s the Thai girl,” Bermann told her. A voice was talking on his radio. Louise couldn’t understand what she was saying. “Stay where you are,” Bermann said. “I’m on my way.”

  He kept running and she hurried after him. The sergeant overtook her. They entered another square hallway, smaller than the first. The stairs were to the righ
t. Bermann and the sergeant beat Louise to the second floor, then Bermann intercepted her. “OK,” he said. “She’s sitting in there with her sister and a pistol and a corpse.” His right hand gripped her forearm.

  “Who’s the dead person?”

  “No idea. A man.”

  “I’m going in.”

  The pressure of Bermann’s hand intensified. “You’re not going in. You can talk to her, but you’re staying outside.”

  “Fine.” She turned away. Bermann let go and she walked past him. From his expression she could tell that he knew she’d do what she thought was right. Perhaps he didn’t even think that was bad. Perhaps he thought it would clear up some messy issues.

  Nobody was standing outside the room where Natchaya, Areewan and the dead man were. The door was half open, the wall made of wood. The officers had taken up position on the stairs, in the bathroom next door and in the room opposite.

  She stopped a few feet from the door. “Natchaya?”

  When there was no answer, Louise took a step forward. She saw a small right foot, a slim leg in blue jeans. The foot was slowly moving back and forth. Natchaya was sitting on the floor against the opposite wall.

  “I’m coming in,” Bonì announced.

  “OK,” Natchaya said.

  A movement caused Louise to stop. Wallmer was standing to her right by the door to the bathroom. “No!” she begged with a whisper. Bonì pursed her lips without knowing what she intended to convey by that. Taking another step she opened the door wide.

  Natchaya and Areewan were sitting side by side beneath the window, their eyes fixed on her. Natchaya was holding Bonì’s service weapon in her lap, her other hand was on Areewan’s thigh.

  Louise pushed the door behind her, leaving it slightly ajar. Her gaze roamed the room. The red curtain was partially drawn. To her left stood a cupboard, to the right a bed. Otherwise the room was empty. Apart from the man lying on the floor near the external wall. His left eye was shot through. Probably a bullet from her Walther P5. A narrow trickle of blood had formed beside his head. It ran into the middle of the room, creating a small puddle.

  The man was wearing jeans, a sweater, sturdy shoes and an overcoat. His shoes and the cuffs of his trousers were dry. He’d been planning to go outside, then had been shot by Natchaya—or Areewan.

  “Sit beside door,” Natchaya said.

  Bonì obeyed. When she leaned against it, the door clicked shut.

  The sisters stared at her in silence. They looked similar, as if they were twins. Areewan too was strikingly beautiful, in a more childlike way. You could hardly detect the age difference of seven or eight years. Only in their facial expressions did they differ substantially. Natchaya looked calm, whereas Areewan seemed to be on the verge of panic. She was trembling and making high-pitched, barely audible sounds. Louise thought again of dogs. A puppy, abandoned by its mother, beaten by invisible hands. She wondered why comparisons with animals made human suffering so much more striking. Then she said to Areewan, “Hello, I’m Louise.”

  Areewan lowered her eyes. Natchaya said she only spoke Thai. The sisters’ beauty was beginning to beguile Bonì. She felt the urge to touch their faces, their bodies. For an instant she was convinced that this might be a way of conquering her own loneliness.

  “You saved my life,” she said at last. “Why?”

  Natchaya shrugged. “Killing . . . not . . . good.”

  “You killed him.” Bonì jerked her head toward the man.

  Natchaya’s expression remained unchanged. “He . . . wanting . . .” She switched to English. “He wanted to leave.”

  “The country?”

  “The country, me, Areewan.”

  Louise nodded. So the dead man was probably Harald Mahler.

  Natchaya’s right foot had stopped moving. “He said, ‘Go home. Go back to your family. Things have changed now.’ I said, ‘You are our family. It’s too late for things to change.’ He said, ‘Goodbye, my love.’”

  “And so you shot him.”

  “When it’s too late, things cannot change anymore.”

  “Is that a reason to shoot your husband?”

  “He took us into his world. We cannot live in his world without him. Without him we cannot stay, we cannot leave.” Natchaya was speaking with extraordinary patience. A teacher explaining simple things to her pupil. Such as the course of life. Fate. Explaining why life sometimes has to end in a room like this.

  Louise said nothing. Natchaya knew what was awaiting her and Areewan. She would go to prison and be separated from her sister. Areewan would be put in a home, with foster parents, or perhaps be sent back to relatives in Thailand, if there were any relatives. Years would pass before they could be together again. And even then others would determine their fate. Those wanting to help, those who’d sexually abused them. The living as well as the dead.

  Things cannot change anymore. In one way she was right. In another she wasn’t. “The only things you can’t change are those that have already happened. You can change everything else, if you want to.”

  Natchaya simply smiled.

  Bonì stood up, suddenly filled with a bleak anger. Anger at herself, because she was helpless and offering up platitudes. Anger at Natchaya, who looked so determined and seemed to know more fundamental things about life than she did. At least about one part of life.

  She asked if she might open the curtain and the window. Natchaya nodded. As she crossed the room she realized that something was happening between Natchaya, Areewan and herself, but she didn’t know what.

  She opened the curtain and pushed up the window. Cool, white light blinded her, but the sudden cold was agreeable. Outside she could only see Schneider between the two buildings. He was looking toward the forest, but there everything seemed quiet. He appeared a little lost, as if Bermann had forgotten him in the snow.

  Seeing Schneider made Louise remember why she was here. But something was stopping her from asking about Pham, Taro and Annegret Schelling. She felt that at this moment she had to devote herself to Natchaya and Areewan. She imagined that everyone else would have understood by now what was happening between them. Not her. Louise was finding it more and more difficult to understand anything at all. Her mistakes were coming with greater frequency. She’d thought they would find dead children in one of the houses. But they’d found the two sisters and a dead Mahler.

  What was happening in this room?

  Then she thought of the last thing Natchaya had said. We cannot stay, we cannot leave. Where did you go if you couldn’t stay, but couldn’t leave either? What did you do?

  Then she knew.

  She turned around. Her gaze wandered from the pistol in Natchaya’s lap to Areewan, who was now looking at her. “What about your sister, Natchaya? Doesn’t she have the right to decide for herself what she wants? Are you going to decide for her? Like your husband, like all the other men? Are you going to decide if she . . .”

  Natchaya interrupted her. “There were no men. I took Areewan from Thailand to protect her. Now I cannot protect her anymore. Now the men will come.”

  The teacher, the pupil. Everything was so simple, so logical. She wondered if this kind of logic was part of Natchaya’s religion. But which religion did she belong to? Was Thailand Buddhist? Muslim, like Pakistan? Were there Sikhs, Hindus and Christians in Thailand? Did they believe there that it was right to kill people if you couldn’t stay but couldn’t leave either? Did they believe that in certain situations it might be too late to go on living? Was that karma, assuming that Natchaya believed in karma? Or did everything just seem very simple to her, whereas in fact it was much more complicated?

  Natchaya turned away and muttered something to Areewan in Thai. Her voice sounded soothing. Areewan nodded and tried to smile.

  “She’s scared, Natchaya. She doesn’t want to die.”

  Natchaya looked at her again. “Can you protect her?”

  “I’ll make sure she finds a nice family.”

  Na
tchaya nodded. “But can you protect her?”

  Bonì shook her head. “No, of course not.” Her anger returned. She closed the window. Schneider, still standing alone between the buildings, turned and looked up at her.

  “Then the men will come,” Natchaya said. “In this life Areewan and I belong to the men. Maybe in the next life we will belong to ourselves.”

  “Then explain one thing to me,” Louise said. “Why did you marry an asshole like Mahler? Why did you help him?”

  Natchaya hesitated, and said, “Because I am part of the men.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I cannot explain. Maybe you can?”

  Louise tried to keep her composure. “Because you didn’t resist?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Because you didn’t fight?”

  “Yes, maybe.”

  But why? Louise thought. Why didn’t you fight?

  She moved away from the window and sat on the floor beside the four small feet. Areewan froze. Natchaya half closed her eyes. “Shit,” Bonì said. “I don’t understand a single word.” She cursed herself for having started this conversation. Why Natchaya had done whatever it was she had done, all that would come out in the interrogations. There would be time enough for philosophical or psychological discussions then.

  But now there was no time. Now she had to stop Natchaya killing herself and Areewan. And swiftly find out where Pham and the other Asile children were. But the thought remained: you should have fought. You shouldn’t have done to other children what was done to you as a child.

  She looked down at Natchaya’s feet. Above the short socks were gold chains against her brown skin. The color was dull and flaking off in places. Chains from a Thai beach, perhaps a present from her mother, or from a boy. From a time when she wasn’t part of the men. Louise placed her hands on Natchaya’s feet. As so often in the past few days she thought of what Landen had said about how impossible it was to really understand another person. But was it necessary? Perhaps it didn’t always have to be painful. Perhaps there was a way in which you could respect or even love another person without the pain of not understanding them.