‘Yes?’
She handed him a folder.
‘What’s this?’
‘The parking ticket we were told to check.’
‘Well?’
The blonde’s upper lip was trembling with nerves, but her voice was firm. ‘The car is a green VW Passat, year of manufacture 1997.’ Then she named the registered owner.
Stoya’s ears started to buzz and his mouth went dry. Now it was his turn to need a drink badly. ‘Say that again.’
‘It’s registered to a Katharina Vanghal.’
It can’t be.
Stoya looked across the table at Frank Lahmann, whose expression at that moment was just as disconcerted.
This is impossible.
The tortured nurse’s car really had been standing in a disabled parking place the previous afternoon, just as Zorbach had claimed the whole time.
‘You see?’ Frank said triumphantly when the policewoman had closed the door behind her. ‘The Eye Collector went to the blind physiotherapist yesterday afternoon, just as I told you. He was caught on video as he left the building, a piece of information you’ve disregarded for far too long. No idea how the blind girl knows all these things, but I reckon it’s time you started listening to her.’
‘Oh, you do, do you?’ Angrily, Stoya tossed the folder containing the parking ticket onto the table in front of him. ‘You really think I should go chasing after a ghost?’
‘A ghost?’
Stoya uttered a bark of laughter when he saw the surprise in Frank’s eyes.
‘I’ve run a check on her. Nobody took down a statement from an Alina Gregoriev yesterday. None of my men saw her. She was never here, get it?’
Frank had been listening with his mouth open.
‘But that’s not all. The computer knows nothing about her either. Alina Gregoriev isn’t a registered resident of Berlin. There isn’t a physiotherapist of that name anywhere in Germany, so don’t give me any more shit about a blind medium who can see into a person’s past by touching them. If Zorbach isn’t the perpetrator, where does he get all his information?’
Stoya leant both forearms flat on the table and looked the trainee journalist in the eye. ‘And don’t say Alina Gregoriev. The woman doesn’t exist !’
27
(3 HOURS 31 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
ALEXANDER ZORBACH
I could sense it. Alina was in the process of withdrawing into herself. It was apparent from her body language: arms folded on chest, knees clamped tightly together, mouth turned down at the corners. In spite of her butch cowboy boots and patched jeans, she looked like a stubborn little girl as she rejected my advice to drink her coffee while it was still hot. Her face was expressionless.
What is it? What did you discover about yourself that was so awful?
She was visibly clamming up. At the same time, I felt sure she wanted to talk. She needed a safety valve. The question was, which would gain the upper hand: her desire to jettison mental ballast or her fear of self-exposure?
All my experience, both as a police negotiator and as a journalist, had taught me neither to pressure a person caught on the horns of an emotional dilemma nor to give them too long to think. It was a tightrope act.
My best results had come from steering the conversation into supposedly safe channels by asking questions the interviewees could answer in their sleep. Questions they were bound to have been asked a hundred times before.
In Alina’s case, only one question occurred to me: ‘How did it happen?’ I watched her hands, lips and eyes to see if I had got any physical reaction. ‘Say if you don’t want to talk about it, but it would really interest me to know how you lost your eyesight.’
She drew a deep breath, held it, and expelled it in one long exhalation. Then she sighed faintly.
‘It was an accident.’
She opened her eyes and pointed to them. They looked like dull, polished marbles in the dim candlelight. Unzipping her cord jacket, she took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one from the candle.
‘It happened twenty-two years ago. I was three at the time and wanted to build a sandcastle with my new girlfriend from the neighbourhood. We hadn’t been living in California long – being a civil engineer, my father had spent most of his life globe-trotting from one big construction site to another. This time, however, Dad was employed on a huge hydroelectric dam project that would take years to complete, so we’d bought a house for the first time. A typical American clapboard house with a picket fence, driveway and garage.’ She paused. ‘That garage...’ she said, as if to herself.
‘What about it?’
She took a big drag at her cigarette and blew the smoke at the candle, which flickered. ‘The previous owner had used it as a workshop. There was a trestle table, a workbench, tools hanging on the walls, and cans of paint everywhere. My father had intended to clear the place out as soon as possible. But I was too quick for him.’
She swallowed hard.
Now it gets serious. Now we’re entering the red zone, the place where painful memories lie buried.
‘To build our sandcastle we needed a mould for the turrets, so I went to get an old glass jar from the garage. I was a tidy little girl. Tidier than I am now, probably.’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Anyhow, I ran some water into it to rinse it out. And that was a mistake.’
‘Why?’
‘Heaven knows what the previous owner of the house had used it for, but the jar contained some calcium carbide. Luckily there was a loud explosion, or my mother wouldn’t have known so quickly that an accident had happened.’
Alina blinked as if a movie visible to her alone were unfolding behind her eyelids, which were now closed again.
‘Calcium carbide and water produce acetylene, an unstable explosive gas. I might have died if the rescue helicopter hadn’t turned up so promptly. As it was I only lost my eyesight.’ She sketched some inverted commas in the air to accompany the ‘only’. ‘The corneas are damaged. Irreparably.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Shit happens,’ she said tersely, stubbing out her cigarette.
‘Too bad,’ I said softly.
At the age of three, long before she’d had a chance to see all the wonders of this world. It’s understandable she’s bitter.
‘Is that why you had that “hate” tattoo done?’
‘Hate? What gives you that idea?’ she asked in surprise. Then her lips curled in a faint smile. ‘Hang on.’
She stood up, took off her jacket and undid the top three buttons of her blouse.
‘Is this what you mean?’
She sat down again and presented her bare neck for my inspection. The font used was Runic in character, so the letters on her skin spelt the word ‘Fate’, not ‘Hate’. They glistened like wet ink in the warm candlelight.
‘It reads “fate”,’ I said.
‘Depends which way you look at it,’ she said with a smile.
Depends which way you look at it. Au revoir. Be seeing you.
Our language is full of visual turns of phrase, and I wondered if all blind people used them as naturally as Alina. She surprised me once more by turning her back on me. ‘Look again!’
I didn’t understand what she meant at first, but then, as I looked over her shoulder, it positively hit me in the eye.
‘Why, it’s an ambigram,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure if I’d used the correct term. The ambigrams familiar to me, like in the thriller Angels and Demons, were symmetrical pictures that could be inverted 180 degrees but still spelt the same word, the simplest example being the combination of letters ‘WM’. Alina’s tattoo was different, however. I had never before seen anything of the kind. If you stood the line of characters on its head they spelt an entirely new word with an entirely different meaning.
‘Luck,’ I whispered.
She nodded.
Fate or luck, I thought. In real life, it just depends which way you look at it.
‘It’s an asymmetrical ambigr
am, to be precise. You don’t grasp its meaning at first sight, that’s why I had it done. Our eyes aren’t important. I’ll carry the proof of that on my body forever.’
Her big, misty eyes seemed to be focused on my mouth. ‘I don’t think it matters what we see, only what we perceive. That’s what I try to tell myself, at least, but you know what?’ She blinked, but it was no use. The dam had broken and tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘It just doesn’t work!’
‘Alina...’
I tried to take her hand, but she swiftly withdrew it and turned away.
‘It doesn’t matter how often I tell myself that I don’t need my eyes,’ she said in a muffled voice. She drew up her legs, planted her boots on the sofa, and rested her head on her knees like an airline passenger in readiness for a crash. ‘That I don’t need to see the world I live in...’
I tried again. I stroked her back, but she merely curled up even tighter and hunched her shoulders as if my caresses were blows. It was as if she wanted to present as small a target as possible.
‘I can wear trendy gear, go in for make-up and tattoos and tell myself it makes my blindness a little less extreme.’ Her body was shaking. ‘But it doesn’t work that way.’
‘Let me help you.’
‘Help me?’ she cried. ‘How? You’ve no conception of the world I live in. You close your eyes, everything goes dark, and you think, “Ah, so that’s what it’s like to be blind.” But it isn’t!’
‘I realize that.’
‘Like hell you do! Ever had someone grab your arm and propel you across the street against your will because they think a disabled person has to be helped? Ever been infuriated by dropped kerbs installed for the benefit of wheelchair users, with the result that my kind can’t tell where the pavement ends and the road begins? Do people behave as if you aren’t there and talk exclusively to the person you’re with? The answer’s no, am I right?’
She swallowed hard.
‘You act as if you understand, Alex, but the fact is, you’re clueless. Christ, I bet you’ve never even thought twice about the No. 5 Braille dot on your push-button phone. You touch the key daily because it’s on every 5. Phone, pocket calculator, ATM, computer. You make physical contact with my world day after day but you never spare it a single thought, so don’t tell me you understand me and my life.’
She sniffed and wiped the tears from her cheeks with her forearm, breathing heavily. The verbal thunderstorm had dispelled much of her tension. The next time she spoke her voice was subdued once more. She was far from through, though. I felt that the crux of what she had to tell me was still to come.
‘Sometimes when I’m asleep at night, I dream I’m falling down a well. Down and down I go – my descent into the darkness never ends and the darkness becomes darker still. I stretch out my hands to touch the sides of the well, but there aren’t any. They dissolve like my memories of the world before the accident.’
The silence that followed was broken by a log spitting in the stove.
‘They disappear, understand? Everything goes. My memories of light, colours, shapes, faces, objects. The further I fall the more they fade. And you know what the worst of it is?’
It doesn’t stop when you wake up.
‘I shout myself awake and the falling sensation ceases,’ she said, sounding infinitely weary all of a sudden. ‘But only that. Everything else persists. I’m still imprisoned in that black hole, that nothingness. I sit up in bed, trembling, cursing the day I wanted to make a sandcastle and wondering if I still exist at all.’ She turned her head as if trying to look at me. ‘Does the outside world exist?’
I didn’t know what to say, least of all in answer to her next question, which disconcerted me.
‘Do I exist?’ She grasped the hem of her lumberjack shirt and crumpled it like a sheet of paper. ‘Do I, Alex?’
I hesitated, then took her hand and gently prised her fingers open.
‘Of course you do.’
‘Prove it to me. I want to believe it, so please show me.’
She put a hand to my face. Her fingers caressed my chin, traced the line of my lips, lingered briefly on my eyelids.
I experienced one of those rare moments in life when nothing matters but the present. I forgot about the baby on the bridge and my failed marriage. Even the face of Charlie, whose children I aimed to rescue from the Eye Collector’s clutches, disappeared from my mind. Instead, I was pervaded by a sensation I’d almost forgotten.
I had last felt it when seeing Nicci for the first time. Not with my eyes or brain – Alina was mistaken if she believed that they were what perceived the truly important things in life. When you yearn to be so close to another human being you would happily exchange bodies with them, the intellect cuts out and the soul becomes the only sensory organ still in operation.
‘Show me,’ she repeated insistently. ‘Show me I still exist.’
Then she put her lips to mine, and I was surprised to discover how much I’d been wanting her to do just that.
26
(2 HOURS 47 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
FRANK LAHMANN (TRAINEE JOURNALIST)
‘Shared hallucinations,’ said a grumpy voice. It was issuing from the loudspeakers of a telephone located between them on the interview room’s laminated brown table. Professor Hohlfort had been connected from his home in Dahlem. ‘My guess is, you’re suffering from an induced delusional disorder.’
‘But Alina exists,’ Frank protested. He looked at Stoya. ‘I saw the blind girl with my own eyes.’
The phone crackled and the profiler’s next words were preceded by a loud atmospheric hiss. ‘Am I right in thinking, Herr Lahmann, that you’ve been working closely with the wanted man for months?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re stressed? You seldom get more than four hours’ sleep a night?’
This time Frank merely nodded.
‘Well, it has often been found that mentally healthy persons subjected to such pressure will take on their partner’s hallucinations. This phenomenon usually occurs in persons forming part of a clearly defined pecking order – married couples of whom one is the dominant partner, for instance. However, another possible factor might be the professional dependence of a trainee on his mentor.’
‘Are you telling me I’m bananas?’
‘No, Frank. You’ve merely taken on the hallucinations of your father figure, for want of a better term. This is unusual but quite conceivable, given the exceptional strain to which you’ve both been subjected for the last few weeks. After all, you’ve been up against one of the most atrocious serial murderers of recent decades.’
Frank stared at the phone open-mouthed. Was the old fogey being serious?
‘I’m not crazy and neither is my boss.’
‘Well, his medical record says differently, doesn’t it?’
Stoya confirmed Hohlfort’s statement with a regretful shrug. ‘Zorbach and I were colleagues, and there’s little you don’t know about someone when you’ve worked so closely with them for years on end. It’s an open secret that Zorbach has been undergoing psychiatric treatment since that business with the Ondine baby. He isn’t the first ex-cop whose name appears in Dr Roth’s appointments diary, and he certainly won’t be the last.’
Frank shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it.’
The phone emitted another hiss. ‘Show him,’ said Hohlfort.
Frank looked at Stoya enquiringly. The inspector opened a small laptop. Less than twenty seconds later, he angled it so that Frank could see what was on the screen.
‘We found this on Zorbach’s office computer.’
Frank raised his eyebrows and stared at the screen. ‘An email?’ he said.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Eye Collector’s motive
His eyes travelled from the email’s header to its text.
‘He sent it to himself,’ he heard Stoya say. It sounded like a question.
‘He often does that,’ Frank said. ‘It�
�s his way of creating a backup. Other people store important material on a USB stick. Alex sends it to himself. The advantage is, he can access it on any computer in the world.’
‘Interesting,’ said Hohlfort, ‘but can you explain the contents?’
Frank stared at the screen for a while, then shook his head.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Eye Collector’s motive
Why does everyone concentrate on the eyes alone? They’re just a diversion. He’s like a conjurer who sets off an explosion with his right hand so we fail to see the rabbit he’s pulling out of the hat with his left. The families are far more important. He’s merely carrying out a love test!
‘Do you know what he means, Herr Lahmann? What is this love test?’
Stoya had stationed himself behind Frank and was casting a shadow over the screen.
‘No, no idea. He never discussed it with me.’
Hohlfort’s rasping voice issued from the loudspeakers. ‘In that case, I think it’s high time we discussed it with him.’
The inspector returned to his place and shut the laptop. ‘Your boss’s inside knowledge is hard to explain, you know that yourself. He had contact with both the mutilated nurse and the latest victim, Lucia Traunstein, whose mobile he called some hours after her murder. This may be proof of either his innocence or his mental instability. But now it appears he also knows the Eye Collector’s motive. I’ve no idea what this goddamned love test means and I don’t know how deeply involved he really is, but of one thing I’m absolutely certain: I must find him as soon as possible. No matter what.’
Stoya planted both palms on the table and looked down at Frank menacingly. Their faces were so close, Frank could see the droplets of blood that had lodged in the fine hairs in the detective’s nostrils.
‘I’ll find him, Frank, and you’re going to help me. Whether you like it or not.’
25
(2 HOURS 29 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE) ALEXANDER ZORBACH
Just as I felt she was on the point of losing control, she stopped. Just like that. Still astride me, she clasped her hands behind her head and froze.
Eye Collector, The Page 22