Eternal jf-3

by Craig Russel

  Fabel felt the dull anxiety of unfinished business. He had promised himself that he would find the family of the mummified man, and he still had to achieve that.

  As the estate agent explained, yet again, that they would have a view of the Kaispeicher A with its amazing new opera house and concert hall, and how this was going to be among the most desirable addresses in Hamburg, Fabel’s gaze remained on the building site in the distance and below them. He wondered how an estate agent would market a memento mori as a sales feature of a property.

  It was cool outside, but the sun was shining and the sky was a silky pale blue.

  ‘I really liked that place,’ Susanne said as they walked back to the car. Buried somewhere in the softness of her faint Bavarian accent was a sharp edge. ‘You didn’t say much.’

  Fabel explained about the view.

  ‘Would it really bother you that much?’ asked Susanne in a tone that suggested it should not. ‘It’s better than the memory of… well, that…’

  ‘The other thing,’ Fabel sought a less subjective reason for rejecting the apartment, ‘is it just seemed so… I don’t know, cold. Soulless. Like living in an office block.’

  Susanne sighed. ‘Well, I liked it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Susanne. It’s just that with this case still going on, my mind’s not up to dealing with moving.’

  ‘Listen, Jan, this case has given us one of the main reasons for getting you out of that apartment. We can afford this place. It would mean a new start for us. Together.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ Fabel smiled. ‘I promise.’

  11 a.m.

  Cornelius Tamm woke up in stages.

  His first sensation was pain: a great blooming of it in the side of his face and a pounding in his head. Next he became aware of sounds: indistinct and as if in the far distance. A metallic whirring and the sound of air being moved mechanically. Then came a growing awareness that he was not free to move, but the drug that had been administered by his assailant confused his sense of his own body and he could not work out for the moment why his movements were restricted. As the sense of the geography of his body returned, he realised that he was bound to a chair, his hands tied behind him and some kind of gag taped over his mouth. Finally, as his consciousness was at last restored to him in its full pain and horror, Cornelius’s eyes opened and slowly focused on his new environment.

  To start with he thought he was sitting in a cave that had glistening grey walls. Then he realised that he was surrounded by curtains of thick, almost opaque plastic sheeting. The chair to which he was bound also rested on a sheet of heavy-duty black polyurethane. He felt a churning between his gut and his chest: it was clear that the sheeting was intended to contain a mess. And that mess would be his blood and flesh as his life was brought to an end. He struggled violently against his bonds. The effort turned up the volume of the pain and a rivulet of blood escaped from the nostril on the side of his face that had been hit. The chair to which he was tied was obviously robustly built, because it hardly moved on its carpet of polyurethane.

  Cornelius got the impression that he was in some kind of cellar. Whoever had brought him here had been painstaking in their preparation of the chamber: even the ceiling had been covered with plastic, stretched tight and held in place with strips of black tape. But a single bulb hung from it and Cornelius could see grey plaster around the light fitting. The ceiling was low: too low for it to belong in a room used for normal living or working, and he continued to hear the metallic whirring sound, like an air-conditioning system in a factory.

  The curtains of dense plastic parted and a figure entered the small space. Cornelius recognised the young man who had been sitting by the bar during his gig; who had been waiting for him with an iron bar in the courtyard of the brewery pub. He was wearing a pale blue coverall suit with blue plastic overshoes. His black hair was hidden beneath an elasticated plastic shower cap. As he entered, he pulled a surgical mask over his nose and mouth, and when he spoke his voice was slightly muffled.

  ‘Hello, Cornelius. It has been more than twenty years since I last saw you. You look, if you don’t mind me saying, like crap. I have never understood why men of your age wear their hair in a ponytail. The world has moved on since you were a student, Cornelius. Why haven’t you moved on with it?’ He leaned close, placing his face a few centimetres from his captive’s. ‘Do you recognise me, Cornelius? Yes… it’s me. It’s Franz. I’m back.’

  Cornelius felt as if he was going as mad as his tormentor. For a moment he considered the similarity in appearance between the young man and the person he claimed to be. But it was impossible. Franz had been dead twenty years, and the resemblance was only superficial. Still, it had been enough to trigger that feeling of recognition when Cornelius had first noticed him at the gig.

  ‘You are a nobody, Cornelius. No one cares about your stupid lyrics any more. You even succeeded in making a mess of your marriage. You are the most comprehensive of failures – you have failed as a father, as a husband, as a musician. You betrayed me so that you could turn your back on one life and start another. Is this it? Is this what you have done with the time, the life, that you bought by betraying me?’

  Cornelius stared at his tormentor, his eyes wide with terror and awe at the monumentality of the man’s madness. He clearly believed he was who he claimed to be. Then, through the fear and the pain, Cornelius realised that he had seen this person before.

  ‘At least Gunter tried to do something with his life. At least he used the time he obtained through his treachery in trying to do something positive. But you, Cornelius. You gave me up for nothing… to waste your future on trying to recapture the past. You betrayed me. You and the others.’

  The young man squatted down and opened out the velvet roll-pouch on the carpet of black sheeting. He exposed three blades, all forged in the same way from single pieces of glittering steel, but each one a slightly different shape and size.

  ‘The others were afraid when they died. I ended their lives in fear and pain. But they were not special to me. You were more than a comrade. I called you friend. Your betrayal was the greatest.’

  I know who you are! The thought blazed across Cornelius’s brain and he sought to give it voice, but it was stifled into incoherence by the gag taped across his mouth.

  ‘We are eternal,’ said the young dark-haired man. But Cornelius knew now that his hair was not really dark. ‘The Buddhists believe that each life, each consciousness, is like a single candle flame, but that there is a continuity between each flame. Imagine lighting one candle with the flame of another, then using that flame to light the next, and that to light the next, and on and on for ever. A thousand flames, all passed from one to another across the generations. Each is a different light, each burns in a totally different way. But it is, nevertheless, the same flame.

  ‘Now, I’m afraid, it is time for me to extinguish your flame. But don’t worry – the pain I give you will mean that you will burn brightest at the end.’

  He paused and took the smallest blade from the roll-pouch.

  ‘I have something very special planned for you, Cornelius. I am going to devote more time and effort to you than I did to all of the others put together. The ancient Aztecs also believed in reincarnation. I don’t know if you are aware of that. They saw the growth of a new crop every year as parallel to the renewal of the soul. The eternal cycle.’ Cornelius could see the madness burning like a black sun in the younger man’s eyes. ‘Each spring they would make a sacrifice, a human sacrifice, to the gods of fertility. They would see serpents shed their skins, crops shed their flowers, and they sought to mirror this in the ritual. You see, they would take the human sacrifice and flay him alive. Cut away all of his skin.

  ‘Your death is not enough. Your pain is important to me. I’m going to hurt you, Cornelius. I am going to hurt you so terribly…’

  13.

  Twenty-Five Days After the First Murder: Monday, 12 September 2005.

&
nbsp; 3.00 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

  Fabel spent the greater part of the day collating and analysing the information that the team had gathered, disseminating it, redirecting investigative routes and reallocating resources.

  Anna Wolff had taken a photograph of Paul Scheibe into The Firehouse and the black barman had said that Scheibe could have been the older man with whom Hauser had met. But he could not be sure. Fabel was alone in his office when Markus Ullrich, the BKA man, knocked on his door. He was not wearing his trade-mark smile.

  ‘Herr Fabel… I wonder if I could have a word with you and Frau Klee – in private…’

  ‘I’m going to Cologne,’ said Maria after Ullrich had finished. ‘This was no bloody accident.’

  ‘Like hell you are,’ said Fabel. Only he, Ullrich and Maria were in the conference room. ‘It’s up to the Cologne police to investigate this. And it may have escaped your notice, but we are in the middle of our own investigation.’

  ‘The Cologne police don’t know Vitrenko.’ Maria’s expression had hardened. ‘They clearly believe that this was an accident. An accident and one hell of a coincidence.’

  Ullrich held up his hand. ‘They’re not stupid, Frau Senior Commissar. What I said is that the evidence suggests it was an accident. A high-speed blow-out on the autobahn. Believe me, I have left the Cologne police in absolutely no doubt about the significance of Herr Turchenko’s death. And, as I told you, they are already involved in the Vitrenko investigation.’

  Fabel remembered sitting in the Presidium canteen, only two weeks before, chatting to Turchenko about Ukraine’s renaissance. Now Turchenko was dead and his GSG9 bodyguard, who had been travelling with him, was lying in a coma in a Cologne hospital.

  ‘Okay,’ said Maria. ‘I will see this case out. But as soon as we nail this bastard I am going to Cologne to follow up this Turchenko thing.’

  ‘With the greatest respect,’ said Ullrich, ‘your involvement with our investigation has already led to the disappearance of one witness. You would be well advised to stay out of this.’

  Maria ignored the BKA man. ‘As I said, Chef, I am going to Cologne to follow this up as soon as this case is over. I have leave due and I will take it. If you order me not to go I will resign and go anyway. Whatever you say, I am going.’

  Fabel sighed. ‘We’ll talk about this later, Maria. But right now I need you focused one hundred per cent on the business at hand.’

  Maria nodded curtly.

  ‘In the meantime,’ said Fabel. ‘I have to see someone about a different matter.’

  6.00 p.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg

  Beate held the door ajar, anchored to its frame by the security chain. She had seen who it was through the fish-eye lens peephole, but she still did not want to let her guard down until she knew what he was doing there, without an appointment, in the evening. Both the chain and the door lens were new security measures that she had installed since she had heard of Hauser’s and Griebel’s murders. She would not even have answered the door had it not been for the fact that she had read of another murder that had taken place yesterday: a third victim who had absolutely nothing to do with the group. Maybe it had all just been coincidence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the young dark-haired man said earnestly. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. It’s just that I had to see you. I don’t know how to describe what’s happening to me… I think it must be my rebirth… you know, the way you said it has to happen… I have been having all these dreams.’

  ‘It is too late. Phone me tomorrow and I will make you a new appointment.’

  ‘Please,’ said the young man. ‘I think our last session must have stimulated them. I know I am on the verge of a breakthrough, and it’s driving me nuts. I really need your help. I don’t mind paying extra for it being after normal hours…’

  Beate examined the earnest young man and sighed. Pushing the door closed, she slid the security chain free of its housing and reopened it to let him in.

  ‘Thanks, I’m really sorry about the inconvenience. And please excuse this…’ he said as he entered Beate’s apartment, indicating the large holdall he carried in his right hand. ‘I was on my way to the gym…’

  7.30 p.m.: Hammerbrook, Hamburg

  Heinz Dorfmann was lean and fit-looking, but each of his seventy-nine years had left its mark on him, Fabel found on examining the older man more closely. He had seen the photograph of him together with Karl Heymann: two youths smiling out of a monochrome past. Yet Fabel had seen the corpse of Heymann only a few weeks before: the body of a sixteen-year-old boy; a face bound to an eternal, desiccated youth. Herr Dorfmann excused himself while he went into the small kitchen of his apartment.

  ‘My wife died seven years ago,’ he said, as if to explain why he had to perform the duty of fetching the coffee himself.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Herr Dorfmann’ said Fabel. As the older man poured the coffee, Fabel took in the room. It was clean and tidy, and to start with Fabel had thought it had not been decorated since the 1970s or early 1980s. But then he realised that it was simply that it had been redecorated in the same style, the same tonal beiges and off-whites over the decades. It always fascinated Fabel, the way older people often became stuck in a particular period: as if that one time defined who they were, or marked when it was that they stopped noticing the world changing around them.

  The shelves were filled with books about Hamburg: street plans, photographic studies of the city, history books, reference books of Hamburger Platt, the form of Low German unique to the city, as well as English dictionaries and other language reference books. An embossed copper plaque depicting the Hammaburg fortress, used on the city’s coat of arms, sat on one of the shelves, mounted on a teak shield.

  ‘You were a tour guide, I believe, Herr Dorfmann?’

  ‘I was a teacher for twenty years. English. Then I became a tour guide. To begin with I worked for the city and then as a freelancer. Because I speak English so well, most of the time I looked after groups from Canada, America and Great Britain, as well as tours from within Germany. It wasn’t like a job for me. I love my city and I enjoyed helping people discover it. I retired over ten years ago, but I still do part-time work at the Rathaus… taking tourists around the city chambers. You wanted to ask me about Karl Heymann?’ Herr Dorfmann poured the coffee. ‘I tell you, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time.’

  ‘You knew him well?’ Fabel showed him the photograph of the two teenage boys, smiling uncertainly at the camera.

  ‘My goodness.’ Dorfmann smiled. ‘Where on earth did you get that? Karl’s sister took it. I remember posing for that photograph as though it were only yesterday. It was a bright sunny day. Summer of forty-three. One of the hottest I can remember.’ He looked up. ‘Yes, I knew Karl Heymann. He was my friend. We were neighbours and he was in my class at school. Karl was a bright lad. He used to think about things too much at a time when it didn’t pay to think. I also knew his sister Margot – she was a few years older than Karl and always clucked around him like a mother hen. She was a beautiful girl and all the boys were in love with her. Margot absolutely doted on Karl… after he disappeared, she always claimed that he had got away from Germany. That he had taken a job on a freighter to avoid being conscripted. I met her after the war and she told me that Karl had gone to America and was doing very well. She said that Karl had always talked about doing that before the war.’

  ‘Did you believe her?’

  Herr Dorfmann shrugged. ‘That’s what she told me. I wanted to believe it. But we all knew that Karl had gone missing after the night of the firestorm. So many people had. And it was on that night that I saw him for the last time. That night belonged to the dead, Herr Fabel, not to the living. Afterwards, I always just assumed he was one of the dead. Another name on a note pinned to a wall. There were thousands of them, you know. Thousands and thousands – countless pieces of paper with names on them, sometimes with a photograph, asking if anyone had seen them,
stuck to the ruins of a house or apartment block, telling them where to find their families. Do you remember they did the same thing when those terrorists attacked the towers in New York? Walls covered with notes and pictures? It was like that, but ten times as many.’

  ‘You say you saw Karl that night? The night of the twenty-seventh of July?’

  ‘We lived on the same street. It was just around the corner from here. We were close friends. Not best friends, but close. Karl was a quiet lad. Sensitive. Anyway, we had arranged to head over to the other side of the Alster and were about to take a tram into town together. But we didn’t go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We were about to get on the tram when Karl suddenly grabbed my sleeve. He said he thought he should stay close to home. I asked why and he didn’t have a reason. More of a gut feeling, I suppose. Anyway, we didn’t go. We went home and got our bicycles. He was right. It was a night to be close to home.’

  ‘Were you with Karl when the bombing started?’

  Heinz Dorfmann smiled a sad, uncertain smile and for the first time Fabel could detect the ghost of the youth in the photograph with Heymann. ‘As I said, it was a wonderful summer. I remember how tanned we were.’ He tilted his head up, as if towards the phantom of a long-extinguished sun. ‘So bright, so hot. So dry. The British knew that. They knew it and used it to their advantage. They knew they were setting light to a tinderbox.

  ‘We had become used to the raids. The British had been bombing Bremen and Hamburg during nineteen forty-one but they weren’t able to launch significant raids. The planes had to turn back after only a minute or so over the city. What was more, Hamburg had been well prepared: we had been encouraged to convert and fortify our cellars into bomb shelters. And then there were the huge public shelters. They were massive and could take up to four hundred people easily. The shelters had been built with two-metre-thick concrete and were probably the most bombproof shelters in any European city. They may have protected us from the blasts, but they didn’t protect us from the heat.