Once, long ago, when Julian was a baby and being a good father was all I could conceive of, I had sat with him at this very spot. Here, where my agony of mind was rending me apart.
I had cradled his sleeping head against my chest – gently, to prevent him from slipping sideways. Almost the way I was holding Nicci’s lifeless body now.
What dreams we’d had, what plans had once held our little family together, and how quickly I’d succeeded in destroying them all.
I removed the stopwatch from Nicci’s cold fingers and stood up.
We had meant to grow old together, here at the foot of the Rudower Dörferblick, a hill on the outskirts of Berlin, eighty-six metres high and composed of rubble from the ruins of the war-torn German capital. On sunny days it presented a panoramic view of three villages: Bohnsdorf, Schönefeld and Wassmannsdorf. And, of course, of our own house and garden.
I looked down at the body of my murdered wife, then up at the summit of the grassy hill at the foot of which all our hopes had first come into flower and then been blighted forever.
I wasn’t sure if the tears in my eyes were deceiving me, or if I could really make out the figure of a man whose binoculars were reflecting the cold winter sunlight.
THE EYE COLLECTOR’S LAST LETTER, SENT BY EMAIL VIA AN ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT
To: Thea Bergdorf
Subject: Final words...
Dear Frau Bergdorf,
This email will, I think, be the last you receive from me for a long time. I trust you’ll note that I’ve addressed you more respectfully than in my previous letters, though I doubt if your paper will accord me the same respect.
Despite the twins’ release, you probably continue to regard me as a monster deserving of his nickname. It would, however, be mistaken of you to believe that the scene I witnessed through my binoculars left me completely unmoved. I was deeply saddened when I saw Zorbach go to pieces from my vantage point on the hill.
It wrung my heart to see someone I liked so much in such a state – emotionally shattered and looking years older, as if drained of vital energy the instant he took his dead wife in his arms.
Alexander Zorbach was my mentor, the father I never had. He was my role model, and not only in the workplace, where I strove to emulate his enthusiasm and sense of humour. I even tried to resemble him in outward appearance by secretly purchasing the sort of clothes he favoured – clothes in which I was filmed by the gallery’s camera when leaving Alina’s block of flats.
I went to such lengths, just to be close to him, and now he’s ruined everything. Why on earth did he keep his eyes so firmly shut? Didn’t he want to see my innumerable clues, intended to point out the dangers of the game? Intended to warn him not to rush into it without thinking. I wanted to play it, admittedly, but not with him. He had no business taking part in this particular round.
I’m open to reproach, I’m sure, but not for having run the game unfairly. I wrote this to you already, and now you have the proof: I stick to the rules I’ve laid down, and if I do change them, it’s always for the benefit of my countless opponents.
In Zorbach’s case I left it up to him, long before the first round began, whether or not to take the field at all.
The voices on the police radio frequency were produced by a little jamming device I built with the aid of a few components obtainable in any well-stocked electronics mart. Then there was his wallet, which I purloined in the newspaper office and planted at the scene of the crime. It was up to him to interpret the signs. Were they an invitation to bring the Eye Collector to book in order to clear himself of suspicion? Or a warning to attend to what really matters in this life: the family?
Zorbach came to a decision. He put his work before the welfare of his child and set out to hunt me down. He was like all the other fathers whose children I’ve hidden so far. Fathers who had a choice throughout their lives between earning money and whoring around or taking good care of their own flesh and blood. Fathers as self-centred and uncaring as my own, who went boozing with his pals when he might have rescued us from the chest freezer. His selfishness cost my little brother his life and me my sanity – or so, at least, a psychiatrist’s analysis would have it. It is of course noticeable – I freely admit this – that I always reproduce my own and my brother’s attendant circumstances: a mother who needed removing from the field of play at the outset; a father who neglected his offspring; a hiding place in which the air lasted for forty-five hours seven minutes; and a corpse with its left eye missing like my brother’s.
I spent a long time working out how to guarantee a precise deadline, because it would violate the rules of the game if a participant suffocated before my ultimatum expired. It would be equally unfair if one child had more time available than another. My brother had only forty-five hours seven minutes’ worth of air, and there was no way he could have obtained any more. I would have preferred to use a chest freezer myself, but it’s almost impossible, alas, to calculate exactly how long a person will survive in an airtight container. Someone who hyperventilates in a panic will use up air more quickly than someone asleep, and I myself am living proof that two people can survive for different periods of time on the same amount of oxygen. Consequently, the only way I could see of creating almost identical conditions was to extract the air from the hiding place at a time determined by myself. Consider that my attempts to pump the air out of the cellar in the nurse’s bungalow were not overly successful. Anyway, I doubt if Zorbach and Alina would have asphyxiated down there because I hadn’t managed to create a really airtight seal. So I opted for another way of depriving my hideaway of oxygen: I flooded it.
You’re playing a sick, horrific game, I hear you say. A fair game, is my response. Even the victims have a genuine chance, as you can see in the case of little Toby.
He didn’t have to toil away for hours on end. He wouldn’t have died before the ultimatum expired even if he’d remained inside the trolley case and failed to escape from the wooden chest; he would simply have gone to sleep. Nor did I leave him those implements in order to derive a perverse pleasure from his futile exertions. The coin and the screwdriver weren’t burial gifts; because I’d changed the scenario, they were genuine aids to escape instead of the useless implements available to my brother and I. Unfortunately, Toby allowed himself to be unduly alarmed when the lift suddenly descended a few metres, just because he’d tugged at the rope. Had he kept a clear head and hauled himself up it, he might have managed to open the hatch through which Zorbach climbed.
Toby missed his chance. A little later – after forty-five hours seven minutes precisely – the lift descended into the cellar. This proves yet again how magnanimous I am: I didn’t add in the time a healthy person can survive underwater.
‘What about Lea? Why wasn’t she in the lift too? ’ If you ask me that, it shows you haven’t understood a thing. I’m not interested in wiping out an entire family. I survived the love test as a boy, so one child was also permitted to survive this time around. The oxygen in Lea’s refrigerator wouldn’t have run out for ages. She was more likely to die of thirst in there.
I play fair no matter which way you look at it, and I’ve never played fairer than I did with Zorbach.
I warned him. Each of my warnings was a test, I grant you, but doesn’t that apply to every sin in life? Every cigarette packet threatens us with death, yet we’re also aware of the intoxicating effect of its contents. Every warning is a simultaneous temptation. Like Alina, my blind visionary, whom I sent to see Zorbach on his houseboat. His mother betrayed its whereabouts to me. Not personally, of course, because she’s incapable of speech. The diary on her bedside table, from which Zorbach read aloud to her whenever he found the time to visit her, contained a detailed account of the day they happened on the secret path through the woods. I borrowed the book when visiting my grandmother at the sanatorium.
It’s certainly no accident that my granny was transferred from the old folks’ home in which she w
as treated so badly to the sanatorium in which Zorbach’s mother is also a patient to this day. After writing my article, I ensured that she was moved to an institution whose patients received better treatment. It was there at the Park Sanatorium, as I knew from my research, that Katharina Vanghal, the nurse who so badly neglected my grandmother, had been exposed and dismissed on the spot – months before she was re-employed by a negligent personnel manager and left my grandmother to putrefy until her bedsores were open right to the bone. I repaid Vanghal in kind by gaining entry to her house, sedating her, and wrapping her up in plastic film. At the time it was merely a pleasurable, cathartic form of revenge. I had yet to learn that her own putrefaction would eventually acquire significance within the context of my great game.
When Zorbach and Alina asked me to get the parking ticket checked, I sent them to Vanghal’s bungalow. That was the bait. At the same time, I expressly warned Zorbach not to go inside. I even signalled to him with the scrolling electronic sign on the door, which I was able to alter with a simple SMS.
Once again he had a choice: to carry on or give up.
And once again he decided in favour of the game and against his family. Even though his child was sick – even though it was Julian’s birthday – he ventured into the darkened house. Once again he behaved no differently from all the other fathers who desert their children for months on end, forget their birthdays, and leave them to brood on the question that torments them in their lonely beds at night: ‘Does Dad still love me?’
You see how fair I am? I played straight into my pursuers’ hands by revealing my true motive in an email I sent to Zorbach’s computer. I even planted a piece of incriminating evidence on his mother’s bedside table: a photomontage of my brother with a vital clue on the back! Last of all, I put a stop to Scholle’s foul play and sent Zorbach back on to the field.
Why, you ask? The answer is quite simple: yours truly, the Eye Collector, doesn’t want to win. I believe in love – in the love of fathers for their children. By putting them to the test I give them a chance to prove it to me and the world at large. I’m happy only when I lose! That’s why I help my opponents, and why I ensured that Zorbach made a personal appearance at the all-important finale in Grünauer Strasse.
And, once again, it was his choice alone which way to go: forwards to destruction or home to his son, who was hoping for a birthday present from him.
Hohlfort got one thing right: I’m a tester, not a collector. I test the love of fathers for their children. I do it again and again, in the hope of an outcome that differs from the one I experienced myself.
Luck or fate?
That question, which has always intrigued me, will never let me rest after the latest developments.
Was it luck or fate that made Alina bump into me at police headquarters, where she’d gone to make a statement about the Eye Collector only hours after I’d enlisted her professional services as a physiotherapist, having pulled a muscle when dragging the Traunstein woman out into the garden?
What could a blind woman know about the Eye Collector, a man no sighted witness had ever seen?
I had to find that out before she spoke to a detective, so I led her into an empty interview room, where I disguised my voice and pretended to take down her statement. People put their heads round the door from time to time, but to an outsider my ‘interrogation’ must have looked like an entirely normal proceeding.
After that I sent her to Zorbach, my intention being to put him to the test again. His mother’s diary had told me where he went to earth when he wanted to be alone and needed a place to think, and I realized he would go there as soon as I panicked him with the news that the police were looking for him. He could have sent Alina packing and remained in his lonely hideaway. Better still, he could have gone to see Julian and helped to celebrate his eleventh birthday.
For all that, I have to confess that I can sympathize with Zorbach’s bewilderment when Alina disclosed my bizarre ultimatum.
The more I think about it, the surer I am that there must be a logical explanation for all that happened. How about this?
I was tired that day in Alina’s physiotherapy practice. While I was waiting for her to massage me, my eyelids drooped. Perhaps I dozed off, lulled by the gentle strains of her chill-out music. Did I talk in my sleep? Murmur a number?
Forty-five hours seven minutes...
Alina may possibly have read or heard something about the Eye Collector shortly before, and was thinking of it when she stubbed her toe on the urn. The pain overlaid every other sensation and made her forget what her subconscious had picked up.
Forty-five hours seven minutes...
The bizarre ultimatum.
But how could she be so sure that I was the beast everyone was hunting?
Luck or fate?
I’ll admit it. I don’t know. I’m not even sure I’m still in command of my own actions. Did Alina foresee the predestined course of events, or did she only put the idea into my head?
What is certain is that I originally had quite a different plan in mind for Julian. Then along came this blind girl, who kept talking about a game of hide-and-seek during which the child would disappear. To me, this story had a touch of genius. What an analogy! What symbolism! I would kidnap a child during a game of hide-and-seek and continue the game on a new, more existential plane! It would be a game within a game!
I naturally had qualms about selecting Julian as my next victim, right to the very end, but I construed it as an omen when Zorbach rejected his son for the last time and deputised me, of all people, to take him the watch. Julian came running out to meet me when I parked in front of Nicci’s house. He knew me – Zorbach had taken me there for a meal on one occasion – so I certainly wouldn’t have found it hard to get him to talk his mother into a playing a game of hide-and-seek. But I didn’t have to, because – this struck me as rather uncanny, I admit – they were already in the middle of one! Although I suggested he hide in the tool shed where I later anaesthetized him, I can’t rid myself of the idea that he would have chosen that hiding place without my intervention. Or that Nicci would, of her own accord, have uttered precisely the words Alina had attributed to her hours earlier:
“Sorry to call you, but I’m rather worried. I was playing hide-and-seek with our son, and the crazy thing is, I can’t find him anywhere.’
Was this really all predestined, just as Alina envisioned it?
Or was it chance, for what else would a mother have said in such circumstances?
I don’t know what to think, because each alternative seems even more unlikely than the other. The only certainty is that Alina’s last ‘vision’ has given me a good idea. I can’t use the good old lift again, alas, so I was initially at a loss to know where to take Julian. My identity must be public knowledge by now, so a mobile hiding place would seem considerably more logical this time. A ship, but one that will not be found so soon.
I know what you’re thinking, but remember the sticker on the dashboard of my granny’s car: It’s easy to foretell the future when you shape it yourself.
Alina never could see into the past and I doubt if she can genuinely see into the future. But, one way or another, she has helped to create the template for my future activities, and I confess it gives me great pleasure to stick to it for the most part.
Luck or fate?
I don’t know, but isn’t that one of my reasons for playing the game? To discover whether the fathers will manage to alter what I myself have predetermined?
Will Zorbach succeed again? Will he manage to rescue his son now that my future course of action is known to him? Will I manage to diverge from Alina’s predictions and influence my own destiny?
I’m not sure, but I’ll find out.
Time goes by.
The game continues.
Have fun.
Yours,
Frank Lahmann
PROLOGUE
ALEXANDER ZORBACH
Didn’t I warn you? Didn
’t I warn you against stories which, like rusty fish hooks, embed themselves ever deeper in the minds of those compelled to listen to them?
Perpetuum morbile... A story that has never begun and will never end, because it tells of death everlasting.
I strongly advised you not to read on.
These pages – God knows how you gained access to them – were not intended for you. Nor for anyone. Nor even for your worst enemy.
I told you I speak from experience.
Well, now you know it: the story of the man whose tears oozed down his cheeks like drops of blood, the man who embraced a contorted lump of human flesh that had breathed and lived and loved only minutes earlier – the story you have just read is not fiction.
It is my destiny.
My life.
There is a man in this tale who was forced to realize, just when the agony within his mind reached its peak, that the process of dying had only just begun. And that man is me.
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(45 HOURS 7 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
The search has begun...
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I normally begin my acknowledgements by performing a virtual bow to the people who matter most to any author: you, my readers. On this occasion I’d like to mention some of you by name, because I’ve never received so much help from so many of my readers as I did when writing The Eye Collector.
As soon as I tweeted, early in 2009, that a prominent role in my next novel would be played by a blind physiotherapist, I received some responses from blind persons familiar with audiobooks of my work. They offered me help with my research – coupled, in most cases, with the following warning: ‘Books and films purvey so much nonsense about us, please don’t make the same mistakes.’
This warning, which I took very seriously, prompted me to remain in regular contact with blind and partially-sighted persons from the start.
Eye Collector, The Page 29