Eternal jf-3

by Craig Russel

  ‘My name is Ralf Fischmann. I am thirty-nine years old and I was the chauffeur for Herr Thorsten Wiedler of the Wiedler Industries Group. For performing this duty, I was shot three times, once in the side and twice in the back by the terrorists who kidnapped Herr Wiedler. I cannot understand what my sin was that I deserved to be shot. But, for that matter, I cannot understand what great sin Herr Wiedler has committed to deserve being torn from his family.

  ‘It has been more than two months since I was shot. The doctors started off by being cheerily optimistic and telling me that it was like allowing a bruise to heal. That, when the swelling in my spinal chord went down, who knows? Well, the swelling has gone down now and they don’t sound so optimistic any more. I am a cripple. I will never walk again. I know that already, just as the doctors know it but won’t yet admit it. I am a simple man. I am not stupid, but I was never one for great ambition. All I wanted to do was work hard, provide for my family and be as good a person as I could. Somehow, the way I have lived my life, honestly and modestly, was offensive to someone. So offensive that they deemed it necessary to put bullets in my spine.

  ‘I have been working for Herr Wiedler for three years. He was a good man. I use the past tense because I think it highly unlikely that he is still alive. A good man and a good employer. He came from Cologne and was typically friendly and down-to-earth… he treated all his employees as equals. If you did something wrong, something he was not happy about, he would tell you. By the same token, he would buy you a drink in the pub and talk to you about your family. He was always asking about how my daughter Ingrid and my son Horst were getting along. He knew that Ingrid was a bright little thing and promised me that she would go far.

  ‘The work I did for Herr Wiedler was general driving. I drove him between his home and office every day, and to meetings in Hamburg and all across the Federal Republic. Herr Wiedler hated flying, you see. If we were travelling the length of the country, to Stuttgart or Munich, for example, he would take my mind off the boredom of so much autobahn driving by chatting with me. Sometimes he would do some paperwork in the back of the car, but generally he would sit up front with me and talk. Herr Wiedler really liked to talk. I liked him very much and found him to be the kind of man that, were he not my employer, I would gladly call a friend. I like to think he thought the same way about me.

  ‘On the morning of the fourteenth of November nineteen seventy-seven we were both in the car. I had collected Herr Wiedler, as usual, from his family home in Blankenese. Unlike most other mornings, when I would take Herr Wiedler directly to his office, I had picked him up later in the morning and we were heading directly to Bremen, where Herr Wiedler had a meeting with a client company. This is something that I have puzzled about ever since the kidnapping. I would have understood it better if the ambush had taken place on our normal route to the Wiedler main offices, which were to the north, but they were waiting for us on our way into the city centre where we would join the A1 towards Bremen. I can only conclude from this that the terrorists had someone on the inside of the Wiedler company, or that some of the gang followed us from the Wiedler residence and were in touch with the others via walkie-talkie.

  ‘It was about ten thirty a.m. We were just about to join the autobahn when I saw a black Volkswagen van, stationary but sitting at an angle that suggested it had swerved suddenly. A man in a business suit was waving his arms frantically around his head and there was what looked like a body lying in the middle of the road. It looked to me as if the person on the road had been hit by the van. I pulled over to the side of the road. There was another car behind us and it stopped too. Herr Wiedler and I ran over to the injured person on the road. A young couple got out of the car behind us and followed us. When we got near to the body we saw that it was wearing blue overalls and we could not tell if it was a man or a woman. Then, suddenly, the person on the ground leaped to their feet and we saw that they were wearing a ski mask over their face. I think it was a man, but not a particularly tall man. He had a sub-machine gun. The man in the business suit and smart coat produced a handgun and pointed it at us. We all froze. Herr Wiedler, me and the young couple. Suddenly two more people in blue boiler suits and ski masks leaped out from the VW van. They had sub-machine guns too. I remember thinking that the terrorist who had pretended to be a businessman was the only one who was not wearing a ski mask and I made sure I got a good look at him. He saw this and got very angry and shouted at me and the others to stop looking at him.

  ‘The two masked men from the VW van ran over and grabbed Herr Wiedler and started to rush him over to the van while the other two kept their guns aimed at us. I stepped forward and the man in the overalls raised his gun, so I stopped and kept my hands up. That was all I did. I made no other move and the time for action was past. That is why I do not understand why he shot me. The man in the business suit said I was looking at him again and the next thing I remember was the sound of his gun. I remember thinking then that they must have been using blanks, because there was no way he could have missed me at that range, but I felt no pain, no impact. Nothing. Then I was aware of something wet at my side and running down my leg. I looked down and saw that I was bleeding from a wound just above my hip. I turned away and started to walk back to the car. I wasn’t thinking straight: it must have been the shock. I just remember thinking that I had to get to the car and sit down. Then I heard two more shots and I knew I had been hit in the back. My legs just stopped working and I fell flat on my face. I could hear the woman from the young couple screaming, then a screech of tyres as the van drove off with Herr Wiedler in it. I didn’t see this, because I was face down, but I know that’s what it was.

  ‘The young couple ran over to me and then the woman ran off down the road to get help while the young man stayed with me. It was the strangest sensation. I lay there with my cheek pressed against the road surface and I remember thinking that it felt warmer than I did. I also remember thinking that I had let Herr Wiedler down. That I should have done more. I was going to die anyway, so I should have made it count. Then I started to think about my wife Helga and little Ingrid and Horst and how they were going to have to manage without me. It was then that I got really angry and decided that I was not going to die. As I lay waiting for the ambulance to come, I concentrated hard on staying conscious and the way I did that was by trying to remember every detail of the face of the man who had not been able to hide his face. If he could be caught, I thought, they would get the rest of them.

  ‘It is those details that I was able to give to the police artist. I made him rework the picture over and over again. When he asked me if we had captured a good general likeness of the terrorist, I said he had, but that his job was not over. I told him that we could get it to an exact likeness of the man who shot me. So we did the drawing over and over again. What we finished up with was no artist’s impression. It was a portrait.

  ‘I will be confined to this wheelchair for the rest of my life. Over the last two months I have tried to understand what it is that these people think they can achieve with violence. They say this is a revolution, a rebellion. But a rebellion against what? The time will come when I shall have my reckoning. I may die first, but this tape, and the likeness I helped create of the terrorist who shot me, is my statement.’

  Fabel pressed the Stop button. Now he understood why Ingrid Fischmann had been so motivated to uncover the truth. The voice on the tape had made Fabel feel obligated to find the people who had kidnapped and murdered Thorsten Wiedler and consigned Ralf Fischmann to a short and unhappy butt-end of a life spent in a wheelchair; he could not imagine the pressure that Ingrid, as Fischmann’s daughter, must have felt.

  He opened the file and searched through it for the artist’s impression that Ralf Fischmann had described in the tape. He found it. An electric current coursed through his skin and ruffled the hairs at the nape of his neck. Ralf Fischmann had been right: he had pushed the police artist to a level of detail far beyond the usual bounds of the pi
ctures of suspects that they normally circulated. It was, indeed, a proper portrait.

  Fabel looked hard at a very real face of a very real person. And it was a face he recognised.

  ‘Now I understand, you bastard,’ Fabel said out loud to the face before him. ‘Now I know why you never wanted anyone to take your photograph. The others all had their faces hidden – you were the only one that anyone saw.’

  Fabel laid the image of a young Gunter Griebel down on his desk, rose from his chair and flung the door of his office open.

  1.20 p.m.: Police Presidium, Hamburg

  Werner had assembled the entire team in the main meeting room. Fabel had asked Werner to arrange the meeting so that he could share his discovery about Gunter Griebel. It was now clear that all the victims had been members of Red Franz Muhlhaus’s terror group, The Risen. It was also more than likely that they were all involved in the Thorsten Wiedler kidnap and murder. Fabel was convinced that the motive for these killings lay in that event: but the person most motivated to carry out the murders, Ingrid Fischmann, was herself dead. She had mentioned a brother, as had her father on the tape recording. Fabel had decided to get someone on to tracing her brother and establishing his whereabouts at the times of each murder.

  All of Fabel’s thinking, however, was to be overtaken.

  Most of the Murder Commission team, like Fabel, had been seriously deprived of sleep over the last couple of days, but he could tell that something had blown away all weariness from them. They sat, expectantly, around the cherrywood conference table, while a row of dead, scalpless faces – Hauser, Griebel, Schuler and Scheibe – looked down at them from the inquiry board. They had not had time to obtain an image of the latest victim, Beate Brandt, but Werner had written her name next to the other images: a space prepared for her among the dead, like a freshly dug but still empty grave. Centred above the row of victims, the intense gaze of Red Franz Muhlhaus radiated across the room from the old police photograph.

  ‘What have you got?’ Fabel sat down at the end of the table nearest the door and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands, as if trying to banish the tiredness from them.

  Anna Wolff stood up.

  ‘Well, to start with, we’ve been alerted about a missing-person report. A Cornelius Tamm has been reported missing.’

  ‘The singer?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘That’s the one. A bit before my time, I’m afraid. It’s shown up on our radar because Tamm is a contemporary of the other victims. He went missing three days ago after a gig in Altona. His van hasn’t been found, either.’

  ‘Who’s following it up?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘I’ve got a team on it,’ said Maria Klee. She looked as tired as Fabel felt. ‘Some of the extra officers we’ve had allocated. I’ve told them that they’re probably looking for the next victim.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Fabel. ‘You look shattered.’

  ‘I’m fine… just a headache.’

  ‘What else have we got?’ Fabel turned back to Anna.

  ‘We’ve been trying to work out what this has all been about.’ Anna Wolff smiled. ‘Has Red Franz Muhlhaus, supposedly dead for twenty years, returned from the grave? Well, maybe he has. I checked through all the records we’ve got on Muhlhaus, as well as media stuff from the time.’ Anna paused and flicked through the file that sat before her on the table. ‘Maybe Red Franz has come back to avenge himself. In the form of his son. Muhlhaus was not alone on that railway platform in Nordenham. He had his long-term girlfriend Michaela Schwenn and their ten-year-old son with him. The boy saw it all. Watched his father and mother die.’

  Fabel felt a tingle in the nape of his neck, but said, ‘That doesn’t mean that this son is out for revenge.’

  ‘According to the GSG Nine officers on the scene, Muhlhaus’s dying word was “traitors”. These killings aren’t motiveless psychotic attacks, Chef. This is all about vengeance. A blood feud.’ Anna paused again. There was the hint of a smile playing around the corners of her full red lips.

  ‘Okay…’ Fabel sighed. ‘Let’s hear it. You’ve obviously got a killer blow to deliver…’

  Her smile broadened. She pointed towards the black-and-white photograph of Muhlhaus on the inquiry board.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how some images become icons. How we automatically associate an image with a person and the person with a time and a place, with an idea…’

  Fabel made an impatient face and Anna continued.

  ‘I remember being shocked to see a photograph of Ulrike Meinhof before she became a shaggy-haired, jeans-wearing terrorist. It was of her and her husband at a racecourse. She was dressed as a typical demure nineteen sixties Hausfrau. Before her radicalisation. It got me thinking and I searched for other photographs of Muhlhaus. As you know, they are notoriously thin on the ground. This image we have here is the one that we are familiar with, the one that was used on the wanted posters in the nineteen eighties. It’s black and white but, as you can see, Muhlhaus’s hair is very, very dark. Black. But then I remembered the photographs of Andreas Baader when he was arrested in nineteen seventy-two. With his dark hair dyed ash-blond.’

  Anna took a large glossy print and taped it next to the police photograph. This time the photograph was in full colour. It was of a younger Franz Muhlhaus, without his trade-mark goatee beard. But there was one feature that stood out above all others. His hair. In the police wanted poster Muhlhaus’s hair had been combed severely back from his broad pale brow, but in this photograph it frothed across his forehead and framed his face in thick, tangled ringlets. And it was red. A luxuriant red flecked with golden highlights.

  ‘The nickname “Red Franz” didn’t come from his politics. It was his hair.’ Anna stabbed a finger onto the black-and-white photograph and looked directly at Fabel. ‘Do you see? All the time he was on the run, he hid his distinctive red hair by dying it dark. The BKA got intelligence that Muhlhaus had darkened his hair and they changed the image accordingly. But there’s more… apparently Muhlhaus’s son had the same distinctively coloured hair. And when they were on the run together Muhlhaus dyed his son’s hair too.’

  There was a small silence after Anna stopped speaking. Then Werner gave voice to what they were all thinking.

  ‘Shit. The thing with the scalps and the hair dye.’ He turned to Fabel. ‘Now you’ve got your symbolism.’

  ‘What do we know about what happened to the son?’ Fabel asked Anna.

  ‘Social services won’t release the file until we get a warrant to access the information. I’m already onto it.’

  Fabel stared at the photograph of the young Muhlhaus. He would have been in his late teens or early twenties. It was clearly an amateur photograph, taken outdoors in the sunshine of a long-distant summer. Muhlhaus smiled broadly at the camera, narrowing his pale eyes against the sunlight. A carefree, happy youth. There was nothing written in that face to suggest a future tied to murder and violence. Just as Anna had described the photograph of Ulrike Meinhof. Fabel had always found images such as this fascinating: everyone had a past. Everyone had been someone else once.

  Fabel’s attention focused on the hair that shone red and gold in the summer sun. He had seen hair like that before. He had seen it only hours before.

  ‘Anna…’ He turned round from the inquiry board.

  ‘ Chef?’

  ‘Check out Beate Brandt’s background as a priority. I need to know what relationship, if any, she had with Franz Muhlhaus.’ Fabel turned to Werner. ‘And I need you to check out that address that Franz Brandt gave us. I think we need to have another chat with him.’

  Fabel’s cellphone rang at that moment. It was Frank Grueber, who had been heading up the forensics team at Beate Brandt’s home.

  ‘I take it you’ve found another hair?’ said Fabel.

  ‘We have,’ said Grueber. ‘Our guy is getting poetic. He left it arranged on the pillow next to her body. But that’s not all. We’ve been checking the entire house to see if the kill
er slipped up when entering the house.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And we’ve found traces of something in a desk drawer. In her son’s bedroom-cum-study. It looks as if a quantity of explosives has been stored there.’

  2.10 p.m.: Eimsbuttel, Hamburg

  It had all fallen into place for Fabel as they had sped across Hamburg to the address in Eimsbuttel that Franz Brandt had given Werner.

  Brandt had been cool. Very cool. While Fabel had been questioning him, Brandt had asked Fabel why the killer dyed the hair red. He had already known the reason but had used his mock grief to camouflage his intent as he interrogated the interrogator: trying to find out how much the police knew about his motives. He had even sat with a poster of the other Red Franz, the bog body, on the wall above them and had talked about how ‘Red Franz’ had been his nickname at university.

  It all fitted: the same hair, the same choice of profession, even the same forename. Brandt’s age also fitted. It was Fabel’s guess that Beate Brandt had taken in the ten-year-old Franz after he had witnessed his father and his natural mother die in the gun battle on the platform at Nordenham. Maybe Beate had been motivated by guilt. Whatever the treachery that had been committed, she had been part of it and, despite being brought up as her son, Franz had administered the same ritual justice to her as he had to his other victims.

  They pulled up at the cordon that the MEK unit had set up at the end of the street. The first thing Fabel had arranged was for an MEK weapons support unit to be deployed. Fabel had often wondered if there was ever really a distinction between a terrorist and a serial killer: both killed in volume, both worked to an abstract agenda that was often impossible for others to understand. Brandt, however, had blurred the distinction between them like no other. His crimes of vengeance were carried out with the ritualistic symbolism of a florid psychosis, yet he coolly planted sophisticated bombs to dispose of anyone who presented a threat. And when Brandt had called Fabel on his cellphone to tell him he was sitting on a bomb, he had used voice-altering technology, just in case Fabel recognised his voice from their previous brief encounter down at the HafenCity site.