The Ghosts of Altona

by Craig Russell

  ‘Hi, Martin.’ The good-natured Schuldhaus used the name Zombie had had in life, and which he still used in his interactions with the living. He frowned. ‘Are you okay? You’ve lost more weight . . .’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Zombie. ‘You got the stuff?’

  ‘I’ve got it.’ Schuldhaus lowered his voice and leaned across the table. ‘But listen, Martin, I don’t know how much longer I can keep getting the quantities you ask for.’

  ‘Has anything changed? Is there a problem with your supplier?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that this is a risky business. This stuff is a first-schedule drug.’ Schuldhaus lowered his voice even further. ‘I’m not a criminal, but I could get serious jail time for selling you this.’

  ‘You get paid for your risk, don’t you? Or are you asking for more, is that it?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s not that at all. It’s just you use a hell of a lot of it. Listen, I sell stuff to friends to make them happy. Harmless stuff. But this . . . I mean, look at you, Martin . . . you’re so pale and thin. I hardly recognize you these days. I just don’t want you to end up dead.’

  Zombie laughed; so loudly and incongruously heartily that it startled Schuldhaus.

  ‘What? What’s so funny?’

  Zombie shook his head curtly; how could he even begin to explain his living-dead existence? Instead he said, ‘Do you know I died once? My heart stopped beating. They claim they brought me back just in time.’

  ‘No . . . shit no, I didn’t know that. What happened?’

  ‘I was stabbed.’ Zombie paused for a moment then, with a dismissive wave of his hand said, ‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time – a street mugging. I was stabbed in the chest.’

  ‘Shit, I—’

  ‘None of that’s important,’ Zombie interrupted. ‘The truth is I never did have much of a life. I was the guy no one ever noticed. I was a ghost even back then. But after I was stabbed, as I was dying, I had this . . . this experience.’

  ‘What kind of experience?’

  ‘I can’t even begin to describe it. It was the most wonderful thing I’ve ever known. In an instant I forgot all of the unhappiness that had gone before. I was truly, completely happy. Happy like you can’t measure in this life. I could suddenly see in a way you can’t in this life. All of these colours and textures and dimensions I never knew existed. And I could see inside myself too – all of the people who had come before me, like I was looking straight through my DNA or something. I tell you, it was the most incredible thing you could imagine. There is nothing – nothing – in life that could be compared to it. As if the whole universe opened up . . .’ Zombie paused, lost for a moment in the memory. He shook his head and the temporary animation left him and in his usual dull, matter-of-fact way he said, ‘Anyway, that’s why I take this stuff . . . Whatever happened to me back then, it takes me back there. Or at least gives me the feeling of being back there. And besides, dimethyltryptamine doesn’t kill anyone. It’s been around for thousands of years as ayahuasca. You got it?’

  Schuldhaus nodded. He sipped his tea and glanced around the other tables. I’m right, Zombie thought, he’s not much of a drug dealer.

  ‘Did you get the other stuff I asked for? The xylazine?’ Zombie asked.

  ‘Eventually. It wasn’t easy to source, because horse tranquillizer isn’t something people normally ask for . . . I mean, it’s not like you can get high on that stuff. The only people who use xylazine as a recreational drug are Puerto Ricans. And they call it the zombie-maker. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘I know what I’m doing with it, and what I’m doing is my business. Okay, let’s have it.’

  Clumsily, and so guiltily that anyone watching would probably have guessed the illegal nature of the transaction, Schuldhaus slipped a paper packet from his rucksack and slid it across the zinc top of the table. Zombie casually picked up the packet and put it in his pocket. Equally casually, he handed Schuldhaus a wad of euro notes.

  ‘You should try not to look so guilty,’ he said. ‘I’ll need some more DMT this time next month. You good for that?’

  ‘I’ll do my best. What about the xylazine?’

  ‘You’ve given me all I need. Just the DMT next time.’

  Their business done, all Zombie could think about was getting away from the nauseatingly vital Schuldhaus; to get out of the sunlight and back into the shadows. But he had his coffee and Schuldhaus had his tea to finish and the latter always seemed to feel the need to chatter. Maybe it made him feel less like he was simply making money from selling a first schedule drug and more like he was doing a favour for a friend.

  ‘You still living in Altona?’ he asked Zombie to fill a silence. ‘I hope you don’t get caught up with all that shit that’s planned. You know, the march and all the crap that goes with it. Fucking Nazis.’

  ‘I doubt it. My apartment is well off the main route.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Another silence, then Schuldhaus grabbed onto a passing thought as if he were a drowning man grasping at a lifebelt. ‘Do you remember Monika Krone? From university? The girl who went missing?’

  Something sparked in the dullness of Zombie’s eyes. ‘What about her?’

  ‘They’ve found her body. Who’d have thought, after all these years—’

  ‘Where?’ Zombie leaned forward. ‘Where did they find her body?’

  ‘In Altona. Not far from where she went missing. It was in the Morgenpost. She’d been buried under a mini-market car park, of all places.’ Schuldhaus shook his head. ‘So what we all suspected all of these years – it’s so sad that we were right. You knew her, right?’

  Zombie stared at Schuldhaus for a moment, his expression even more empty than usual, his cold gaze making the amateur pusher feel uneasy. An image of a painfully beautiful face with a pale complexion and emerald green eyes framed in a blaze of auburn-red hair came back to his recall in perfect detail.

  ‘Not really,’ he said eventually. ‘A little.’

  They sat in silence for a minute then Zombie, leaving his coffee largely untouched, stood up and said he had to be somewhere. Schuldhaus was clearly making an effort not to look too relieved.

  ‘I’ll give you a call next month,’ said Zombie. ‘When I need more.’

  *

  On his way home, Zombie stopped at the S-Bahn station kiosk and bought a copy of the Hamburger Morgenpost.

  12

  Susanne was there when he got home to the apartment.

  One of the many things Fabel loved about Hamburg, his adopted city, was its variety. He often thought of cities having definable personalities, but Hamburg was much more difficult to define than most. If anything, it suffered from multiple personality disorder: a constellation of very different identities clustered together in a small space. There were over a hundred quarters in the city, spread over seven boroughs, and each quarter had its own unique personality and atmosphere. The apartment he shared with Susanne Eckhardt was in Ottensen, in the north-west of Altona. Ottensen had once been a town in its own right, independent of the originally much smaller Altona. Over time it had become incorporated into Altona; Altona in turn being absorbed into Hamburg. Despite this history of aggregation, the quarter – just like the Neuenfelde or Schanzenviertel, Pöseldorf or Sankt Pauli, Bergedorf or Wilhelmsburg – had refused with typical North German stubbornness to surrender anything of its unique identity. It was so distinctive that when he had first moved in with Susanne four years before, having given up his own flat in Pöseldorf, Fabel felt he had moved to a completely different part of the country.

  Fabel and Susanne had been together for eleven years, the last four of which had been in this apartment. When he got back home, feeling more than a little worn-out, he noticed that Susanne also looked like she’d had a long day. Tiredness etched itself on her face more easily now than it used to and tonight it also tinged her speech: Susanne was originally from Munich and Fabel had noticed how her
vowels stretched flatter with fatigue. He had also noticed that she had aged since the shooting: a vague, handsome aging but one Fabel felt bad about, felt responsible for. It was as if his shooting had been a toxic event that had radiated out to contaminate those closest to him. Susanne, his daughter Gabi, his mother. Anna. Each bearing a mark unseen.

  Fabel cooked dinner, which he did often, and they ate in the kitchen, chatting aimlessly and, in Susanne’s case, a little wearily. Tonight was not a night to eat out in Altona. As he had driven home from the Presidium, he had seen more Readiness Police clustered at intersections throughout the Altstadt. Helmeted, carrying riot shields and with black body armour over their coveralls, they looked to Fabel like the ghosts of Breughelian knights prowling Altona’s streets. Storekeepers had pulled down shutters; many had nailed plywood sheets across their windows, as if bracing for the rage of a storm.

  Tonight really was a night to stay indoors.

  As they ate, Fabel and Susanne skimmed over their respective days – his at the Murder Commission and hers as a forensic psychologist at the Institute for Judicial Medicine at Eppendorf – and not for the first time it struck Fabel how odd it was that they talked about death and killing the way a couple of accountants would talk about balance sheets and tax returns. At one time, he would not have discussed work at home; they had had an unspoken rule about that. But things were different now. Fabel was different now, his attitude to life less compartmentalized, so occasionally domestic conversations would turn from everyday inconsequences to the twists of mind and deformities of soul that led people to perform acts of violence.

  ‘You’re sure it’s the same case you worked on back then?’ Susanne asked as she poured them both another glass of wine.

  ‘I’m sure. It’s funny, when I first worked the case, all those years ago, I knew somehow I’d end up back where I started, eventually – that Monika Krone would return to haunt me one day. I knew I’d get back to it. And now I am.’ He shrugged. ‘Strange.’

  ‘Not really. It was your first Commission case and it was left unresolved. It makes sense that you’d be left with a feeling of unfinished business. You working it with Anna?’

  Fabel nodded. When he finished his mouthful of food he asked: ‘Why?’

  ‘How’s she doing? I know you were worried about her.’

  ‘I still am. She’s having difficulty putting what happened behind her, even after all this time.’

  ‘All this time? It’s barely been two years.’

  ‘I’m over it,’ said Fabel without rancour, ‘I don’t know why everyone else can’t be.’

  Susanne put her fork down. A punctuation point. ‘Does everyone else include me? I’m not over it, I’ll tell you that. I think about it every day when you go into work.’

  ‘This is Hamburg, Susanne, not New York. Policemen don’t routinely get shot at here – what happened to me was the wild exception, not the rule. And that’s what Anna has to accept too – she wasn’t prepared for what happened because it’s not something you expect to happen. Anyway, I know you’re not over it and I understand that. But it’s different with Anna and me. We have to work together and I don’t want her judgement clouded. I’ve been biding my time . . . waiting for the moment to be right before talking to her about it. The moment was right today.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I think I got through to her. She opened up to me too. About the shooting, I mean. She feels guilty about it, which I already knew.’

  ‘Do you know something?’ said Susanne. ‘I always thought you had a bit of a thing for her.’

  ‘Anna?’ Fabel said, clearly surprised.

  ‘And I’ve always said I know she has a thing for you.’

  Fabel laughed and shook his head dismissively. They fell silent for a while and ate, Susanne’s tiredness seeming to overwhelm her.

  ‘When do you have your next session?’ she asked.

  Fabel laughed. ‘You mean the “Club of the Living Dead”? Tuesday.’

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t call it that, Jan. It’s not something to be flippant about. Is it helping?’

  ‘It’s not meant to help. Or not at least directly. We’re subjects, not patients. Lorentz’s guinea pigs. His zombie guinea pigs.’ Fabel held up his hands, clawlike, and made a twisted face. Susanne gave him a look and he dropped his hands and expression. ‘I do get something out of it, I suppose. And I guess it’s interesting to others who’ve not had the experience.’ He paused. ‘How come you’ve never asked me?’

  ‘Asked you what?’

  ‘What it was like.’

  ‘What what was like?’

  ‘Being dead.’

  Susanne looked at him for a moment, something glinting through her tiredness. ‘Because you can’t tell me. Because you weren’t dead. I work in neuroscience, Jan, and that means I know what you experienced wasn’t death. Being dead isn’t like anything. Being dead is nothing. Exactly that, nothing. You can’t experience being dead, because there is no experience to be had. What you experienced was dying, not death. The process, not the event.’

  ‘They said I did. That I was clinically dead.’ Fabel affected an expression of mock pride.

  ‘Your heart stopped. You stopped breathing. That isn’t death. Those were two physiological events and like I say, death isn’t a process, it’s a event. You’re only truly, completely dead with brain-stem death, when the last flicker of neural activity stops. They brought you back before you got to that stage. And if you’d got any closer to it I’d be spoon-feeding you your dinner – a couple more minutes of oxygen deprivation and they’d have brought you back brain-damaged. Any longer than that and you would have died. And once you’re dead, you’re dead, there’s no coming back.’

  ‘I’ll tell that to my fellow zombies.’ Fabel smiled. ‘I’m sure they’ll be pleased.’

  *

  Fabel was stacking the dishwasher when he heard the first sirens. Not too close, but not distant enough. He reckoned they were to the east, somewhere towards Altona Altstadt. Two at first, both coming from the same direction, then a wave of them from another. He switched on the radio and caught the news. The storm had broken, after all.

  13

  The rage burned in him as he watched the news. Georg Schmidt sat in his room and watched Altona once again fall victim to hate. The Nazi marchers had followed almost exactly the same route they had in 1932. How could that have been allowed to happen? And just like in 1932, the people of Altona had made their opposition known. Why could no one learn from history? Why did we always repeat the same mistakes?

  The fury within him concentrated itself, clustering around a specific focus. Helmut Wohlmann. Wohlmann was as responsible for this current carnage as he had been for what happened in 1932. He had helped to create the history now doomed to repeat itself.

  Georg Schmidt remembered. It had become a memory stored not in his mind, but in his notebook. Whenever something else came to him, some image from that day, he would add it to his journal. His mind held the pieces, but the notebook held the completed jigsaw. Whenever he needed to remind himself of who he was, what had happened and who was responsible, he read through his notebook.

  And remembered.

  *

  It all happened that day. A bright, fresh day but otherwise seemingly unexceptional. Except it would be exceptional. Sunday 17 July, 1932.

  Later, they would say that everything began that Sunday, that a ball had been set rolling that would crush out eighteen lives during the course of that one day, lead to four innocent men being beheaded a year later and more than fifty million lives lost beyond that. What unfolded that day in Altona would provide the excuse for the Prussian Coup and bring about the end of the Weimar Republic. That bright July Sunday had opened the door to the greatest darkness in the history of Germany, of the world.

  *

  It had been another Altona, back then. A cramped, smoky Altona of clustered apartments and terraces, each building with its own small square of yard,
each yard with a fruit tree or vegetable plot. It was an Altona of narrow cobbled streets and fuming chimneys. No grand villas here. The people born here had been raised to toil, if toil could be found. This was the heart of workers’ Hamburg. Staunchly, proudly, resolutely working-class. Red Altona. Little Moscow.

  Georg had been thirteen, but big for his age. His father, like many of the men here, was small, compact, hard-hewn. A man of fifty, Franz Schmidt had become a father late and a widower early. Again like so many in Altona, Georg’s father was unemployed but had been a stevedore at the docks, his hands calloused, thick-fingered and rough from rope work.

  Georg’s father rarely smiled, had little to smile about, but never sought to conceal his pride in his son, who was not only growing tall and broad, but also clever. Nothing seemed to give Franz Schmidt more pleasure than seeing his son come back from the Christianeum library with a book in his hand. Franz Schmidt had been illiterate until adulthood and it had only been when he had joined the KPD that he had found someone to teach him the basics. It was his duty as a Communist, he had been told, to seize the most important capital of all denied the working classes: knowledge and education. But Franz Schmidt had known it was too late for him; that he probably never would have had the makings of a scholar, whatever social dice had been thrown for him. But his son . . . Georg was bright. Georg not only could read well, he ate books up. He lived in them, through them, for them. And Franz felt true pride swell in his breast every time he saw Georg with a book in his hands or when the boy sat reading to his father or telling him all about the latest book he was devouring. The truth was, Franz Schmidt knew, you were only ever given one life. There was no ‘after’, there was no better, simpler, purer, happier existence after physical extinction. The great lie of an afterlife for the hard-working, the loyal, the obedient, was just a device employed by church, state and patricians to enslave the masses. In the meantime, everyone was expected to know their place and accept their lot on the promise of something better to come. Franz was no deep thinker, but he knew he had been handed but the one life and that one life had been blighted. But one hope of an afterlife did gleam bright for Franz Schmidt: his son. He could live on through a son who would achieve things, would have a life that was worth living. Georg, his father knew, would go far in the world and Franz was sad only that the boy’s mother had not lived to see him grown.