Tretjak

by Max Landorff

  The discussion about the value of knowledge was an old one. From Socrates – ‘I know that I know nothing’ – to Heisenberg, who discovered that knowledge about a certain course of events inevitably leads to ignorance about another. Tretjak had always been convinced that the blind accumulation of ever more knowledge eventually caused one to lose one’s direction, to become confused and disorientated. Some physicists were already working on the concept of anti-knowledge, along the lines of antimatter. Surrounded by the quiet of the Jedlitschka farm, rummaging through endless files on the internet, Tretjak suddenly felt his chest tightening again, felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He was wondering whether he was actually already accumulating anti-knowledge, this dangerous stuff which would take him deeper and deeper into the darkness instead of leading him towards the light. Not only in this particular case, but in general. Maybe it would be better to remove the cover from his suitcases and to sink them in the nearby Mörlbacher pond.

  He got up and started some breathing exercises. Two years ago, when the panic attacks had started, Stefan Treysa had sent him to see a specialist. The breathing technique which he had been taught there essentially consisted of imagining that the air needed to breathe was not all around you but in an open barrel a few meters away. One had to suck it in by inhaling powerfully, if possible in a constant stream. And it was the same in the other direction: one had to imagine ‘watering’ a tree that was standing a few meters away, with the air one was breathing out.

  He wasn’t doing too well with concentrating. And then Mrs Jedlitschka came around the corner to ask whether he wanted a cup of coffee. He declined rather gruffly, broke off the exercises and, when the farmer’s wife had disappeared, popped two of his tablets in his mouth and washed them down with the remainder of the apple juice. Stefan Treysa had said that he should take care that these tablets didn’t become his constant companions.

  Tretjak’s eyes came to rest on his papers. Inspector Maler. He is going to focus on me, he has nothing else – so he thought, maybe he is going to search the apartment. What could he do to keep him away, to use him for his own ends? The Fixer never gave in. Of course, he had accumulated information about Maler in the past few days, all collected in a file on his laptop named Jack of Hearts. Standing up, he leant over the table and wrote the words on the piece of paper. He quickly added the name of the minister of the interior and the district commissioner. A wasp was circling the apple juice and then landed on the piece of paper.

  Suddenly Tretjak had to smile. The police... the police were really harmless, why was he getting nervous about them? He was starting to display the behaviour he normally induced in others. Tretjak took the piece of paper, shooed away the wasp and scrunched it up. He would play with the Jack of Hearts when the time was right. Maybe he hadn’t had enough sleep last night, he thought. He should have never let himself get drawn into a long discussion with Lichtinger. It might have been 20 emails which had gone back and forth, the exchange ending long after midnight. And Tretjak had poured himself a couple of vodkas to go with it, two for sure, maybe even three.

  From early on, they had carried on their most important discussions in writing, back then of course on real paper, handed over in envelopes. Like the moves in correspondence chess.

  His friend, the sceptic; his friend, the hesitant; his friend, the more fearful of the two of them. But Lichtinger had also been the more original thinker – the newer, more unashamed, more unexpected thoughts had usually come from him.

  Last night he had started very carefully, had felt his way forwards rather slowly. The question which Lichtinger had pondered was: how much had Tretjak trespassed in his life through what he did? Tretjak had pursued a false lead for a while. He had assumed that Lichtinger was searching for a motive, revenge, for example. Suddenly he understood: Lichtinger was introducing a new thought. For him the guild of this world was not what concerned him. His friend, the priest. And then the question appeared on his computer screen in digital flashes of light:

  Have you ever considered that you might be dealing with a power which has no name, no address, no form?

  And even while he was thinking of a mocking reply the next mail arrived: It is like the global formula, that the physicists are desperately searching for.

  What an honour. You think I have picked an argument with God? Tretjak typed.

  No, came the answer. Not with God. With Evil.

  Tretjak had sat in his office, on the packed suitcases, the laptop and the vodka in front of him. He had suddenly known exactly what he wanted to answer. And that’s what he wrote.

  End of discussion, Joseph. I don’t have time for this. Good night.

  Lichtinger had still sent him another two long messages. He had written about cases of people being possessed, of attempts at exorcism, of crimes which could never be solved, and he pointed to the conspicuous role of blood in both the murder of Kerkhoff and Kufner – in the first case there had been almost a complete absence of blood and in the other an abundance. He knew Tretjak was reading the mails. And when he didn’t get an answer he wrote one final one.

  Gabriel, I know that in your world all this doesn’t exist. But let your old friend tell you something, and I am deadly serious: for the Church this is not a question of faith. We know that Hell exists. I pray for you.

  Tretjak scrunched up the paper, on which he had written hell. When this matter had been sorted out, he was going to have another lengthy conversation about this point with Lichtinger.

  The manufacturer of Tavor had vaguely mentioned the possibility of losing touch with reality as a possible side effect of taking the medication over long periods of time. Much later Tretjak would ask himself whether it had been the fault of the tablets that his instinct for seeking out the really important points had left him so completely, and that he had instead lost himself in so many thoughts – without seeing the essential questions.

  Tretjak looked at his watch. He still had time for a cup of coffee with Mrs Jedlitschka in her parlour. Then he would get going. He had a date. He smiled when he felt below the belt of his jeans to make sure his swimming trunks were there. He had received a text message from Ms Neustadt yesterday:

  Can you let go of the controls for once? I too want to show you something. For that I need only one star: the sun. And four hours of your time, in the afternoon. What do you think?

  He had suggested this afternoon and she had agreed promptly: 2pm. Parking lot of the Icking Riding School. Wear your swimming trunks underneath your clothes.

  Icking was not far from the Jedlitschka Farm. The route led from Lake Starnberg to the Isar Valley in an almost straight line on small roads over gentle hills. Tretjak was in a good mood, and nervous again, but for a much more pleasant reason. When he entered the village from the hill above he got a message on his mobile. He assumed it was from Ms Neustadt, maybe saying she was late. He decided he would turn off the phone later. For now he looked at the display. To his surprise, he had received only a photograph. Sender unknown. What he saw in the picture, however, was familiar to him. It was an image of his own office, taken from inside it, obviously today. The computer had already been removed, that could be seen clearly. On the Van Eek table stood the vase with the many-coloured roses, which had been sent under such mysterious circumstances.

  Tretjak became annoyed, following the instructions of this navigational system. Icking stretched over a long hill. Beautiful villas, old farmhouses, two schools, one church. At the bottom, already in the forest and near the Isar dam, was the riding school. In the parking lot stood a big Mercedes, a parked horse box – and an older green Golf, with a fairly big, military-grey dinghy balancing on its roof. Ms Neustadt was leaning against this vehicle. Brown Bermuda shorts, white tee-shirt, straw hat. When she saw Tretjak’s car, she waved.

  County of Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen, Upper Reaches of the Isar River, 3pm

  She let her fingers wander down his spine. And up again. Step by step, from one vertebra to the next, until they
reached the neck. It was not a determined movement, but a hesitant one, a tender one. He was lying on his stomach, his arms folded under his head, his face turned away from her. She lay on her side beside him, resting on her elbow. His swimming trunks were black, his hair was black, his skin tanned, the colour of a Southern European, she thought.

  Just now she had kissed him, in the middle of a sentence on the power of water, and how it could grind stones... It had been one of these sentences, which you utter just to say something, anything, sometimes simply in order not to say something else. Her first boyfriend had once described her accordingly: ‘You wrap yourself in words, you hide behind sentences.’ She had been 15 at the time and had become very angry. But from that day forward, she realised that she had an instinct for such sentences. The kiss had been soft, very soft. And now there was only the sound of the flowing water. The Isar in its upper reaches was a rapid river and could flow really noisily.

  Fiona Neustadt had brought along two towels, with big red and white stripes, which she had spread out on the gravel not ten metres from the water’s edge – this nice gravel of round and flat polished stones. The dinghy with the two paddles and the bag with the bottles inside it were pulled up beside them, and their clothes lay on the big air hose facing the sun. The green water with the white caps was still far too cold to swim in at this time of year. It never really reached a very pleasant temperature, but now it was 14 degrees Celsius max. They had only freshened up and cooled their feet in the water.

  She had already told Gabriel Tretjak a lot about herself as they had paddled the dinghy on the river. It had been a pretty picture she had painted, like an old picture postcard. She had spoken of herself as a little girl who goes down the river in exactly the same dinghy with her father, who leads the dinghy to water at the same spot near the Tattenkofer bridge. And exactly here, in the great bend and before the tributary of the Loisach channel, they stop for a break and the little girl jumps on shore. The mother appears in the picture, in her flowery dress, and their white bungalow at the edge of the forest, and a dog named Aki, a salt-and-pepper-coloured schnauzer, who later gets run over by a truck. It’s these kind of paintings, Fiona Neustadt thought, always these kind of paintings one shares, when one is about to fall in love.

  The man who had sat opposite her in the dinghy for an hour had been a patient listener. Or at least he had mastered the art of appearing to listen. Sometimes she got the impression that his perspective turned inward. After all that was not surprising since the man had quite a few problems. She wondered how she would have interpreted this inward look if she hadn’t known about these problems. Maybe it would have made her suspicious.

  Her hand was now stroking his neck. He turned on his back to face her, squinting against the sun. She kissed him again. Again the kiss was soft, but this time it lingered longer, and his hands were soft as well, so soft in fact that she hardly noticed how they were progressing underneath the material of her white bikini. The beach they were lying on was a great wide shingle bank which could be seen from all around, especially from across the river. She felt her nipples harden, and she felt something hard in his trunks. But she also felt that something was taking hold of her, which she hated: her body was beginning to contract as if it had been thrown into ice-cold water, her pulse had shifted entirely into her wrist, where it was hammering from the inside against the walls of her veins, and the air she breathed tasted of iron. She knew that state from her childhood, and it always came when she had suppressed a wish – another run on the merry-go-round for example – later simply when she was particularly excited. Twice in her life she had fainted in this state.

  She let go of him, got up and walked with well-practiced steps barefoot over the stones towards the river. She bent down, and held her wrist under the flowing water for a while. Then she turned around. Tretjak had sat up. A good-looking man on a red-and-white striped towel.

  ‘I am not going to tell my friends about you,’ she shouted against the roar. ‘They’re going to tell me off. A successful businessman with a BMW, 15 years older, that’s not on!’

  He laughed and shouted back: ‘But I’m a good badminton player!’

  ‘That’s what you say!’

  Later, when they had pulled the dinghy out of the water near the dam in Icking and were letting out the air by stamping on the tubes, she asked him about his parents, his childhood. She was interested to see what pictures he was going to paint. But he didn’t do her that favour. ‘It’s not the stuff for so beautiful a moment,’ he only said. Then he kissed her and shouldered the heavy wet pile of plastic. It had to be carried at least another kilometre, steeply uphill through the forest to the parking lot of the riding school. She had told him that when she was a child her family had only had one car and that therefore her mother had waited for them there.

  In the car he asked her: ‘Do you have any plans for tomorrow evening? We could grab a bite to eat.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Oh, I thought, we might do that now... I am hungry...’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I am busy tonight. There is something... I have to...’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she interrupted. ‘Osteria?’

  For a moment he was surprised, then he smiled.

  She said: ‘I checked off the monthly bills. So many cheques.’

  At the beginning of their little excursion, she had revealed that the tax inspection was complete, everything was in order, and that he was going to receive a report in the next few weeks. She found the timing of this statement to be perfect, because it added to the relaxation. Not only for him but for her as well. Tretjak was a man with all sorts of connections after all, and if he felt pressured he might begin to think about poking around in the affairs of the Inland Revenue to take control of his inspection. That would have made everything unnecessarily difficult.

  ‘I want to go to another restaurant tomorrow, not to the Osteria,’ she said, while Tretjak turned onto Highway Number Eleven. She pulled her straw hat low over her face.

  Munich, St-Anna-Platz, 6pm

  The message on her voicemail this morning was the last thing she needed right now. It was the electronic female voice of a messaging service: the message it conveyed was from Gabriel Tretjak, and it asked whether it would be at all possible for her to make an exception and stand in for her mother, who was still away, and come to clean the flat. It had become rather dirty due to a small accident. The key to the flat could be picked up at the Italian restaurant at the St-Anna-Platz. Of course everything would be paid for generously and in addition to the normal remuneration. A sincere request, warm greetings, Mr Tretjak.

  Carolina Lanner had a small café in Agnes Street, a good location, in the middle of Schwabing. Ten tables inside, three small ones outside. She served homemade cakes, fresh sandwiches and a soup of the day she prepared herself at home. ‘Homemade’ meant that Carolina baked, prepared, cooked. The café opened at 8am and closed at 6pm. Carolina arrived at six in the morning and never left before nine at night for six days a week; they only closed on Sundays. In a good month, she made 2,000 euros, in a bad one only 500. She had a student, who occasionally helped out for a couple of hours, but she couldn’t afford more staff.

  Only her mother helped out, whenever she could. Her mother was always there when she needed her. A life without her mother? Unthinkable. She was not the type to ponder what kind of relationship she had with her mother. She also didn’t mind that she was starting to look like her mother. Mother was Mother and she was her daughter. That’s it. And she couldn’t imagine not drinking her first cup of coffee of the day with her mother in her café. And with that cup they ate a piece of homemade cake, one piece each, sometimes two.

  It was now almost a week since her mother had left for Argentina. The first time she had called, her mother had seemed blissfully happy. Her cup had literally overflowed, and she had said again and again: ‘Carolina, I’m at home.’ And then her mother had started to cry, at least that’s what Carolina thought, and she
had started to cry as well, of that she was sure. In the end they had agreed that they wouldn’t speak again on the phone because it was much too expensive. And that Carolina was going to meet her at the airport, when her mother returned on Sunday.

  Just after 6pm she locked the door of her café. She walked down the Agnes Street towards the underground. It had not been a bad day, she had sold 22 pieces of blackcurrent cake, 24 bacon sandwiches and 12 cheese rolls. She changed trains once to get to St-Anna-Platz. As arranged, the key to Tretjak’s flat was waiting for her in an envelope at the bar of the Italian restaurant. Her brown coat was much too warm. She was sweating. The sun was still powerful on this early evening in Munich.

  Carolina Lanner was not the kind of woman who pondered where her life was leading her. Que sera, sera. But tonight there were a few thoughts swirling through her head. Maybe she should also go to Argentina one of these days. It was, after all, her native country, even though she had no recollection of it. She only spoke Spanish with her mother. She was definitely looking forward to the stories her mother would have to tell. The most important thing now, however, was not to run into this man, this Gabriel Tretjak. He had been so strange on the phone. First he organises this trip, and then he seems so cold. Hopefully I’ll be gone quickly, Carolina thought, when she unlocked Gabriel Tretjak’s flat at 6.22pm.

  Munich, Restaurant Osteria, 8pm

  When the Volvo turned into Schelling Street, the image of the puppet flashed up in her mind’s eye again. She was hanging on Paul Tretjak’s strings. Nothing more, nothing less. She didn’t mind. She was happy to follow a script.