Tretjak

by Max Landorff

  ‘I’m here as a patient for a few days. Nothing serious. Only a few tests. And you? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve been here to see my Dad. Unfortunately it is serious, very serious. To put it bluntly: my father is dying.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Please sit down,’ she said.

  Maler sat down and both were quiet for a moment. Not an easy occasion for pleasant small talk. A young woman wrapped in the pain of mourning, and an inspector wrapped in a blue bathrobe. Maler’s first question didn’t lighten the mood.

  ‘Tell me,’ Maler asked, ‘I don’t want to be nosy, but how does an attractive young woman become a tax inspector?’

  ‘What kind of a question is that?’

  ‘I’m really interested,’ said Maler.

  ‘Why did you become a cop?’ asked Fiona Neustadt.

  ‘OK, I understand. Stupid question. Then I’ll ask something else: How is Mr Tretjak?’

  ‘He has to live with the fact that his father is a serial killer. But otherwise he is fine, I think.’

  ‘It’s nice that you two are a couple now,’ was the inspector’s last attempt.

  Fiona Neustadt took a large gulp of the brandy. She then got up and extended her hand towards him. ‘Inspector, I’ve got to go. Good-bye.’

  She did not see how August Maler returned to his room, to the pills the professor had had send there. But when she had left the hospital, outside in the parking lot in the sun, she asked herself whether she had made a mistake.

  4

  The tablets the professor had given him had worked. In fact, they had worked so well that Inspector Maler needed some time to realise who was standing in front of his bed when he woke the next morning. It was after eight, and his breakfast had been waiting for him on his night stand for two hours. He had not even been conscious of it being brought in.

  Rainer Gritz stood at his bedside, his young companion, whom he had come to trust. Everything was happening in slow motion with Maler, but slowly his body functions were picking up speed. Gritz’s words were also reaching his brain painfully slowly. A new case, a new murder. A bank employee was lying in his flat, poisoned. Some very strange poison, something exotic, Maler understood.

  ‘But Boss,’ said Gritz, ‘that’s not all.’

  And what he said next made Maler wake up rather quickly. There was a connection to the previous series of murders? Charlotte Poland?

  ‘You know, the writer with the disturbed son, the friend of the old Tretjak. She was also at the funeral, I saw her there.’

  Charlotte Poland, Gritz explained, had met the murdered bank employee, officially on totally normal bank business. But his colleague had declared that the banker had been totally beside himself after the appointment.

  ‘I have viewed the tapes of the bank’s CCTV camera,’ said Gritz. ‘You could see him nervously pacing up and down the corridor after she had left. The guy was finished. And you know when this meeting took place? Two hours before the dinner with Gabriel Tretjak in the Osteria at which we arrested him.’

  ‘Have you reached Charlotte Poland already?’

  ‘Yes. She says it was a completely ordinary conversation. She had sought advice about what to do with her money. She didn’t remember any details.’

  When Rainer Gritz left the hospital room, he added: ‘Boss, I don’t like the look on your face.’

  Maler, in the meantime, had sat up in his bed. He thought, well he is right, this Gritz, I don’t like the look on my face either. And then suddenly the inspector had another thought. My God. Maler heaved himself out of bed, went over to the wardrobe, and got his mobile out of his jacket. He pushed a few buttons and then dialled the number of the forensic pathologist.

  5

  Charlotte Poland typed the last sentences of her latest novel into the computer. She was sitting at the small desk of her hotel room in the Tucher Park Hilton in Munich. She had ordered a big pot of tea, Darjeeling, the Risheehat variety. Not one of the common Darjeelings, a pretty expensive one, which the hotel procured especially for her at Dallmayr, Munich’s famous delicatessen. ‘Of course we’ll get you that tea, we’d be delighted,’ the receptionist had said. The aroma of Risheehat was part of writing for her, as well as the minor stomach ache which reliably occurred after consuming the fourth cup. She waited for the pain, she liked it.

  She took another sip from the white porcelain cup and then wrote the very last sentence: In the end, it had been easy. In the end, it was always easy.

  Charlotte Poland was pleased with the idea of how her publisher and lover would react when he read the new book. Of course, she had told him that he had to expect a completely different book this time, a radical, a courageous one. Yes, yes, he had replied, as you wish, he was looking forward to it. ‘Think of your readers, though,’ he had said. ‘They want to read a Poland again, nothing else. There is enough of everything else around, but there is only one Poland.’ The old charmer.

  In the end, it had been easy. In the end, it was always easy. The last sentence of a novel about a brutal female killer. In a way, she thought, the book was not that much different from her earlier books. It also dealt with the magician’s trick of hidden depths, the secret compartment beneath the false bottom of a box, in the life of her protagonist. A woman who notices that nothing is as it seems, who understands that everything around her is lies, fraud and hypocrisy. The only difference in the new novel was the series of logical steps her heroine chose to take as a consequence of that realisation. In the past, her novels had been a declaration of love for hypocrisy: whoever recognises hypocrisy lives wonderfully happily with it ever after. Now that was all turned around. This time her heroine shouted against hypocrisy, this time she destroyed the lie, and the destruction was literal. A woman was seeking the truth, and ran amok. Her motive: fury at the world. Her solution: violent revenge upon the world.

  Charlotte Poland opened the email account on her computer and sent the manuscript to her publisher. The computer registered the time sent as 7.34am. It was 354 pages long, while her other works had all been about 200 pages longer. The truth, she thought, was briefer after all.

  She dialled the number for room service on the hotel telephone and ordered a glass of champagne. A little early, she thought, but a small celebration was in order. Service in the Hilton was good, and the glass of champagne was delivered exactly six and a half minutes later. She gave the waiter a ten-euro tip, and when he had left, she posed in front of the mirror and grinned: cheers, Mrs Poland, to the murderess!

  With the story of the murderess, she had wanted to answer one question in particular: how much guilt can one person stand? How many illegal acts can a conscience tolerate? Conscience – what a word, Poland thought. If you killed a nasty person, wasn’t that a much more moral act than watching him perpetrate his nastiness? It was good that she had done a lot of research for her book, she thought. It was good that she knew what she was writing about.

  ‘My conscience can stand a lot,’ Charlotte Poland said aloud in the direction of her mirror image. ‘My conscience will have to put up with a lot in the future.’

  She finished the champagne. And for a moment she thought of Mr Borbely, the pudgy bank employee. Was anybody sad that this smarmy creature was no longer alive? Well, she thought, he was bound to have had a mother at least. A mother who was suffering now. She checked herself as if to take her temperature. She listened to a voice inside herself – and was content. The end of Mr Borbely didn’t bother her, not a bit. It didn’t even marginally touch her conscience. It bounced off, without leaving any measurable reaction.

  Charlotte Poland had checked into the Hilton for six months. For the time being. How things were going to pan out, she didn’t know. She had a very definite sensation that she didn’t have a future. The hotel seemed the appropriate place for such a sensation. The first three weeks had passed now, and living here was pleasantly easy. The Hilton was in the middle of the English Garden, Munich’s va
st park, and was the ideal place for her to live for various reasons. One could go for a walk whenever one wanted. Early in the morning, in the middle of the night, whenever one couldn’t sleep. She now could distinguish exactly between the various shades of grey and black one encountered in the park, at two o’clock in the middle of the night or four; the grey of the morning just before six o’clock versus the one at half past seven.

  The hotel had to be in Munich, the city where her son lived. But she wanted to be as far away as possible from the borough of Haar in the east of Munich. She drove there every second day, and she needed the distance, the half an hour it took her by car, to gather her strength.

  She had known the Tucher Park Hilton for a long time. A few times she had met her publisher there for sex in the afternoon. Even then she had liked the seclusion, the green, the illusion of a country estate. The publisher had asked her out for a date a few times recently, ‘to take your mind off things’. But Charlotte Poland kept putting him off until another time, and at one point he had intelligently stopped asking. Maybe the flame of passion was not burning as bright anymore, but maybe, she thought, there was another reason as well: maybe another feeling had taken hold of her, an all-consuming one. It was a feeling which it had taken her many sentences and pages in her new novel to describe, because the one or two words which existed for it didn’t seem appropriate. Rage or fury – these words described only a momentary state, something violent, that came on quickly, and then equally quickly dissipated.

  She always went in the morning. She drove through the city and breathed a sigh of relief at every traffic light which turned red because it extended the journey time.

  The borough of Haar. There were many cities with quarters which were identified by one single concept or institution. With Haar, it was the district hospital. Signs pointing in its direction started appearing long before one got close to it. It was not a normal hospital, it was a hospital for the mentally ill. One could also say it was a city of the insane. A wall surrounded the compound, which consisted of various old buildings of elaborate architecture. The enclosed area had been filled in more densely over time with more modern buildings.

  Charlotte Poland always parked outside the compound walls, although she could have driven her car into the grounds. She walked the rest of the way. It was a beautiful route, past big trees. She had to go to House No. 10, from the outside a particularly beautiful old building. Here as well, one could enjoy the illusion of being on a country estate. It housed the particularly tough cases, the pathological ones, human beings which a judge had decided should be locked up for a long time for what they had done, because they constituted a danger to the community.

  For the past three weeks, she had come here every other day. Normally she didn’t see the other patients in House No. 10, since during visiting hours in the morning they were all in their rooms. Only once she had gone to the kitchen to ask for some cutlery and a plate. A big, pale man had stood there, making himself a cup of coffee. He was very friendly, handed her the plastic cutlery and the plate and asked who she was visiting. This was the start of a conversation, and at one point the man had said that it had been hard at the beginning to accept the patients in here, to accept that they were human beings too, just a bit different, a bit more honest. Honest, that’s what he had said. Charlotte Poland had not asked him why he was here. Later on, she had made enquiries with the nurse.

  ‘He likes dead corpses,’ the nurse had said. She did not really understand, Charlotte Poland had said. ‘Well,’ the nurse explained, ‘he dug up corpses in the graveyard and took them home with him. And sometimes that was too exhausting, so he got himself dead bodies in other ways. Do you understand now?’ And then she had added: ‘He once told me why he likes doing that. He wants to get under their skin. Yes, that’s how he put it.’

  A few days later, she had seen the man walking in the park with an elderly woman. She had waited until the woman came out of House N0. 10 alone. She had asked her when she had first noticed something odd about her son. The woman said, quite early on, her son had taken dead animals to bed with him, mice, and then a dead cat. Back then, she had thought and hoped that this would pass one day.

  Lars was in Room N0. 10. House N0. 10, Room N0. 10, the symmetry made it easy to remember. A double room, but he was alone, since the doctors had said that it was out of the question that he could share the room with anyone. And they had told her that they could not allow her to go into the room with her son alone. Or at least they would insist on a straitjacket if she did. Her son was dangerous. Her son could attack her.

  ‘My son won’t hurt me, I know that,’ Charlotte Poland had said.

  ‘You might not be able to judge that correctly,’ had been the doctors’ response.

  ‘And if he harms me, that’s my business. I take complete responsibility, I’ll sign anything.’

  ‘No, we in House No. 10 are responsible. You, at least as far as the law is concerned, have nothing more to do with your son,’ the doctor had said.

  Lars was usually lying on the bed, or sometimes he was sitting on a chair, somehow bent over. Blond and slim, the straitjacket made him look even thinner than he was already.

  ‘Hello, Mama. How nice that you have come. I am glad.’ Those were his words, every time.

  ‘Hello, Lars. I am glad too,’ she said. And then most of the time she asked: ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine, Mama, not bad actually.’

  During her first visits, Lars had asked his mother to talk about the future, about her plans, about trips, about food, about dreams. Lars had loved that ever since he had been a little boy. ‘Mama, tell me...’

  Charlotte Poland had liked it too, even here in Room N0. 10. For a moment she could escape it all that way. But then the doctors had found out about these conversations. And had forbidden them emphatically: ‘Mrs Poland, for your son every concept of the future is absolute poison. Every time he experiences that it is like a new hit of a drug, which pulls him further into his illness. Normally imagination is something good, but with Lars it isn’t. Your son, Mrs Poland, has lost any connection to reality. We all have to try to lead him back into reality.’

  ‘What else should I talk about with my son?’

  ‘Ask him what he is thinking about right now. Ask him what is on his mind right now.’

  Since then, it had always been quiet in Room N0. 10 when Charlotte Poland was visiting her son.

  ‘Tell me about our plans, Mama.’

  ‘No, Lars. The doctors say that’s not good for you. Why don’t you tell me what you are thinking about now, how you are feeling.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lars said.

  And then they were silent, both of them.

  On the morning that she had finished her novel, the senior consultant, the head of House No. 10, asked Charlotte Poland to come to her office. It was located in the house opposite, the administrative building, which did not have a number. She hated these conversations, and the fading effect of the champagne didn’t make things any better. When she got into her car and drove back in the direction of the city, she still had the voice of the senior consultant in her ears. ‘Mrs Poland, the deterioration in your son’s condition is dramatic. There has been a development, a sort of feedback of various negative factors, which we so far haven’t been able to stop. On the one hand, there is the psychiatric diagnosis, his inability to be aware of his own identity. In addition there was excessive drug abuse, which has led to his brain being damaged, which has furthered the symptoms of the dissolution of his sense of self.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do with this information?’ Charlotte Poland had asked.

  ‘You should prepare yourself for the fact that your son will never in his life leave the psychiatric ward. We thought you should know that.’

  In the car, Charlotte Poland searched for a radio channel which played only music. She couldn’t tolerate any more voices or talking. She found something classical. She sensed her rage. About her h
usband, her soon-to-be ex-husband, who had asked after Lars maybe three times since they had separated, a maximum of three times. Rage about the doctors, who had never helped one bit, but who never gave the impression that they felt they had failed in any way.

  Rage about Paul Tretjak. She had really believed this man, that he wanted to do good. A dreamer, a sensitive visionary. When they met by chance at the Lago Maggiore, she had thought that a man with his kind of history could turn around her son’s life. She now realised what kind of man she had been dealing with. A human being who was rotten to the core, who was obsessed with his own self-pity. How could she have been so wrong about this man?

  And the other Tretjak? The son Gabriel, who had been called a monster by his own father? The pretty boy, who considered himself to be a latter-day James Bond? Who supposedly could fix anything, if he only wanted to. Fixer! What a name for a man who had no idea about the abyss in his own family history.

  Charlotte Poland parked the car in the hotel lot. By now it was midday. The air was muggy; there would be a thunderstorm soon for sure. That would be good. She went to the front desk and got her room key. Her favourite receptionist, Helmut Gruber, was on duty. Gruber handed her the key and said: ‘Mr Tretjak was here. He left the message that he was going to be in the English Garden. The man said you knew where.’

  ‘Thank you, Helmut,’ Charlotte Poland said. ‘Yes, I know where.’

  6

  Late on Monday morning, Gabriel Tretjak went to a branch of his bank and arranged a transfer of funds. How much is the life of a human being worth? he asked himself. And immediately tried to forget the question. 50,000 euros. Transferred to Carolina Lanner. Maybe she would find the transfer of money insulting. Especially coming from him. But in Tretjak’s experience, on the whole, money calmed nerves, whatever life threw at you, especially a lot of money. He was sure she was going to keep the money. Tomorrow he was going to send her a text message, but not before tomorrow, when the money would have reached her account. He had already drafted the message: Nothing can bring back your beloved mother. But she would surely be happy if this money supported your café a little. Gabriel Tretjak.