The Ghosts of Altona

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The Ghosts of Altona Page 13

by Craig Russell


  He kept his eyes locked on the doors, but as he drew near, the police officer stepped into his path. Frankenstein snapped his gaze into the cop’s. He could see the uncertainty in the policeman’s eyes, and the fear. Frankenstein was shirtless and shoeless. And he was what he was. The cop was not to know what had happened in the emergency room, but Frankenstein would look just wrong to him. He looked wrong to the world.

  He saw him look at his sweatpants. Prison blue. Unlike the JVA prison guards, the police officer had a pistol on his hip. He would have to be dealt with. Getting the gun from him would be too troublesome: he knew from experience that Hamburg police holsters had an anti-snatch design, allowing only the wearer to draw the weapon.

  Frankenstein shifted course by a fraction of a degree. And headed directly for the cop.

  ‘You’re in the right place.’ He smiled, his teeth small and gappy in the huge mouth. He saw the policeman’s hand drift to his hip and he slashed downwards with the edge of his huge hand. His target had been the cop’s throat but he missed and the blade of his hand smashed into his chin and jaw. The force threw the officer sideways and his shoulder hit the wall, bouncing him off it and back into Frankenstein’s hands. He could hear screams from behind him, near the admissions desk. He held the police officer by the elbows, pinioning his arms to his body and denying him the opportunity to draw his weapon. The side of his jaw was already swelling and his mouth looked twisted. Frankenstein realized he had dislocated his jaw and grinned.

  The cop was stunned, eyes unfocused. That was no good. He had to know. He had to feel everything. Frankenstein shook him violently and his head wobbled for a moment before he locked his eyes once more with his attacker’s.

  ‘You’re in the right place, I told you that. You’re going to need a lot of treatment.’ Frankenstein smiled again. As if he were swinging some stone war club, he tilted his Easter Island head back before ramming it forward, full force, slamming his massive brow into the policeman’s face. He heard bone crack, felt something solid yield beneath his forehead. The screaming behind him increased. He let the policeman drop onto the polished hospital floor, bleeding heavily from his nose and mouth, making a low, half-gargled moaning sound. Frankenstein had to be sure the cop couldn’t draw his weapon when he had his back to him. Drawing his right knee up, he stamped down twice, his heel finding its target of the policeman’s temple. The moaning stopped. All movement stopped.

  Frankenstein left him lying and ran for the door, people scattering as he burst out into the open.

  The air was cool and fresh like water on his skin. He ran as fast as his huge bulk would allow. An ambulance was parked and a man in a red and white emergency service parka looked like he was going to challenge him, so Frankenstein barged into him, knocking him to the ground and stamping on his face with the heel of his shoeless foot.

  There was a large arch that had been the main entrance to the hospital compound when it had first been built. Frankenstein knew there was no point in slowing to a walk – nothing he could do was going to make him inconspicuous, so he ran through the arch and out onto the main road.

  Tangstedter Landstrasse was too busy a thoroughfare for the pick-up, his guardian had told him. Ignoring the traffic, he ran straight across the road, a car screeching to a halt and narrowly missing him. The other side of the road offered the cover of a screen of trees and once behind them he ran parallel to the road before cutting up past some high-rise apartment blocks.

  Behind the apartments, just as he had been told, was a residential area with houses lined along cul-de-sacs. The end of the third cul-de-sac was Frankenstein’s goal.

  ‘Look for a white panel van,’ his guardian had told him. ‘It will have a small black and red FC Sankt Pauli sticker on the rear door. It will be unlocked. Get straight in the back and shut the door behind you. But do not get in if anyone can see you. The street has to be clear.’

  ‘What if they don’t take me to the Klinik Nord?’ Frankenstein had asked.

  ‘Then you’ll be dead,’ his guardian had said.

  *

  The van was there, just as his guardian had promised it would be. Frankenstein was approaching it from the grassed area and would not be seen from the houses. He opened the back door of the van, climbed in and dropped with a resonating metallic thud onto the floor.

  ‘Are you okay?’ A voice came from the front of the van. Frankenstein nodded.

  ‘Any problems?’ the guardian asked.

  ‘A cop. Had to deal with a cop. He could be dead.’

  ‘But no one’s following you now?’

  ‘No. But they’ll be looking soon. They’ll come soon.’

  ‘Then we had better go.’

  In the driver’s seat, Zombie checked the side mirrors for any sign of the police. When there was none, he started the engine and drove off at a relaxed pace. As he did so, he smiled.

  Now. Now, he had his Golem.

  26

  The van had been stopped for several minutes before the back door opened and Zombie pulled back the tarpaulin Frankenstein had used to hide himself. Frankenstein felt sick and his head pulsed with the most intense headache he had ever experienced.

  ‘It’s okay, everything’s clear,’ said Zombie. ‘But get into the house as quickly as possible and wait for me. I’ll park the van at the back and out of sight.’

  Seeing him again, and in the context of the outside world for the first time, Hübner was struck by Zombie’s appearance. In the prison, Herr Mensing – as Frankenstein had then known Zombie – had always worn the same clothes: a white shirt, the too-big collar of which sat like a tie-fastened yoke around the stick of a neck, a blue pullover and grey slacks. The outfit always looked like it had been hung over the back of an unupholstered chair rather than worn on a body. Every time Frankenstein had had a session with him, he had noticed how bird-frail and pale the social therapist looked. To start with, Frankenstein had assumed he was terribly sick, cancer, most likely. But that, he came to realize, was not the ill that ate away at Mensing. The other thing that had struck Hübner was that despite the fact he could have so easily and so quickly crushed the life out of Herr Mensing, there had never been the slightest hint of fear in the social therapist’s eyes.

  Here, outside the prison and dressed in a black parka, jeans and a T-shirt, Zombie looked even smaller, frailer, paler. Between them, Frankenstein realized, they were about the easiest couple of travelling companions for witnesses to take note of and remember.

  So Hübner did as he was told, but as he hurried to the door of the old house, he took in as much of his surroundings as he could. It was all still new and fresh to him: the world without bounds, without walls, gates and locks and he wanted to drink it in. Here, though, it had a bitter taste: the forest seemed to hem them in and crowd in on the house, which itself was old and looked somewhere between a home and a municipal building. All the window shutters had been closed and the house looked grey, dark, unwelcoming. There was a small portico around a heavy, traditional herringbone-pattern wooden door. It was unlocked and yielded to Frankenstein’s touch. He stepped into a dark hallway that was empty of furniture, the floor grey with a patina of dust and what looked like rat or mouse droppings. A heavy-banistered wooden stairway led up into the shadows of the upper floors. He leaned a naked shoulder against the banister and breathed slowly to try to ease the thumping in his head and a profound swell of nausea.

  ‘What is this place?’ he asked when Zombie returned from parking the van in the rear courtyard.

  ‘Somewhere safe, where no one will look for you.’

  ‘But I mean, what was this place?’ Frankenstein’s voice resonated deep and dark in the empty hall.

  ‘It was the old forester’s house. It was owned by the City Parks Department, but they sold it off. My uncle bought it – he was the last forester to live here and the city let him have it at a knock-down price.’

  ‘So where is he? Your uncle?’ Frankenstein’s nausea swelled again.


  ‘Dead. He left me the house. Follow me . . .’

  He led Frankenstein to the back of the hall and unlocked a door. Beyond it stairs descended to a cellar. Zombie started down but Hübner stopped dead, swaying slightly.

  ‘Wait . . . I need a toilet,’ he said between controlled breaths.

  ‘Behind you . . .’ Zombie nodded toward another door off the hallway. Frankenstein only just made it, dropping to his knees in front of the toilet bowl. His massive body convulsed as he vomited, voiding everything in his gut, then retching several times more.

  When he came back out into the hallway, his massive face was as bleached of colour as his guardian’s.

  ‘It’s the after-effects of the drugs, the adrenalin and the shock,’ explained Zombie. ‘It’ll pass. The xylazine in your system should help, it’s actually also used as a nausea suppressant and anti-emetic. Drink this.’ He handed Zombie a bottle of water. ‘And follow me down into the cellar.’

  *

  The strange thing about it was that Frankenstein could see that Zombie had made an effort to make the cellar as comfortable as possible for him. There was a large box filled with provisions, plastic-wrapped blocks of bottles of water and two cool-boxes. The bed was two mattresses dressed in clean, new-looking bed linen. Next to the bed was a pile of paperbacks, some pornographic magazines and two cartons of cigarettes. In one corner sat another box with batteries, toilet roll, and toiletries; in the other sat the cool-boxes. Hübner’s inspection revealed that one cool-box was filled with cartons of fruit juice, and smiled when he saw the other contained enough beer for him to relax with, not enough for him to get drunk. This was carefully calculated hospitality.

  There were clothes neatly folded on the bed: a pair of jeans, four shirts, two sweaters as well as underwear and socks, still in their plastic store packets. A huge pair of boots sat in front of the bed.

  ‘I got all of this stuff on the internet,’ explained Zombie. ‘I didn’t want to arouse suspicion by going in person into a store where it would be obvious they weren’t for me. I hope everything fits.’

  Frankenstein nodded. ‘Thanks.’

  Zombie ran through the house rules. Like everything he had asked of Frankenstein, they were requests, not demands, but he had made it very clear that every rule was there to prevent Frankenstein’s recapture and the consequent collapse of Zombie’s plans.

  With a whole house lying empty, Frankenstein did not understand why he insisted he spend almost all of his time in the cellar. But that was the way Zombie wanted it, so he complied. It was a new experience for Hübner: to have someone whom he respected, whose bidding he was happy to do. Zombie had explained to him that once he had done what he asked of him, he would be given his turn to wreak revenge on those who had wronged him. Zombie would do everything he could to help him but, he had explained, he might not be able to as the police would probably have him by that time.

  ‘You should be comfortable,’ said Zombie. ‘It’s only temporary, but necessary. No one will find you here and without any sightings of you, the police will assume you have escaped the city, perhaps even Germany. The most important thing is that you stay out of sight. Only go up to the hall when you need to use the toilet and even then you’ll need to check there’s no one walking nearby. This house is supposed to be unoccupied. Dark and silent.’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ said Frankenstein. Then, after a moment: ‘They will question you about the escape, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I know that. I’m prepared for it. They’ll question any of the staff at the prison who had regular contact with you. Because I was only there two days a week, it’ll take some time before they get to me.’

  ‘And what you’ve said you want to do – you understand you won’t get away with it. They’ll catch you, eventually. You know that too, don’t you?’

  ‘I know they will,’ said Zombie. ‘In fact that’s what I’m counting on.’

  Part Two

  27

  She had been found. After all these years, she had been found. The thought had haunted him every day and every night since the news had dropped into his world, shattering it. And, tonight, it had echoed its way through a bottle and a half of red wine and an empty stomach.

  Detlev Traxinger drank alone. His partner and business manager Anja Koetzing had left for the evening, having gone through the coming week’s viewings and arrangements for the new exhibition at the end of the month. All through the briefing, Traxinger had sat there nodding, taking in nothing, agreeing to everything. All he could think about was the fact that they had found her, after fifteen years.

  After Anja had left him alone in the studio, he had opened up the wine and assiduously applied himself to the task of getting as seriously drunk as possible as quickly as possible. Now, Traxinger stood in the centre of his vast studio, converted from an old machine works, and felt more alone than he had ever felt, even during the last fifteen years. He stood and drank, willing himself into a drunken oblivion where he might, just might, be able to stop thinking of her.

  They had found her.

  He put the glass down and looked at his hands. They were farm labourer’s hands: big, thick-fingered, clumsy. Not the hands of an artist. It had been God’s joke – God or Fate or Genetics or Nature – to give him the eye and soul of an artist and the ham fists and sausage fingers of a farm labourer. And now, even though he was only forty-one, years of drinking and drug-taking had added an old-man tremor to the clumsy hands.

  What he saw in his artist’s mind, the farmworker’s hands failed to execute. It wasn’t as if the art he generated was bad, and it certainly had attracted both a following and a handsome income; it was just that it never quite matched the perfection of image he had in his mind.

  Traxinger looked up from his hands and stared out through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the converted factory, out over the water of the Elbe that glistened like wet oil paints in the early evening light. A ship drifted by: a dark silhouette against the curtain of a deepening sky. Without seeing it, he watched it slide past and finished the glass of wine in two deep draughts. He was somewhere else, his mind removed from the present. A dark place of broken stones; that night, fifteen years before.

  They had found her.

  He refilled the drained glass, emptying the bottle and opening a new one, preparing for a continuous drift into drunkenness. He left the freshly opened bottle sitting on the studio table, next to carefully arranged paints, linseed and turpentine, and taking the refilled glass with him, made his way through the studio, the entrance hall and the exhibition space. When he reached the storeroom, he unlocked the door, reached in and switched on the lights. Canvases were arranged in double-height, slide-out storage racks. So much work. And so much of that work would never be seen by anyone else. He didn’t even let Anja Koetzing come in here alone.

  He made his way to the far end of the storeroom, past the rows of work that would eventually be displayed, to the last ranks – the work that would never be displayed.

  Setting his wine glass down on the concrete floor, he reached up to the rack on his left, to the canvas stored at the very back, and pulled it out. He tugged at the sheet covering it and it slid free.

  She gazed down at him. Beautiful, cold, cruel, magnificent. It had been the best painting he had done of her, and it caught so much of her essence, but again the thick-fingered farmer’s hands had let down the perfect vision, the complete and faithful recollection of her that lived in his head.

  His secret, hidden muse. His goddess.

  She stared down at him from the canvas, silently mocking the emptiness of the last fifteen years of his life. He reached up to the rack opposite, pulled out a second canvas, and the two pictures sat side by side but a universe apart. The second painting was his self-portrait. His hands hadn’t failed him here: a perfect reflection of hidden stains, marks and scars. His corruption, his venality and the wastefulness of fifteen empty but soiled years returned his gaze with rheumy eyes.


  Traxinger sat down next to his wine glass on the concrete floor and stared at the side-by-side portraits. He started to cry.

  After a while, when his tears and his wine glass had both been drained, he pushed the paintings back into place, locked the storeroom and made his way back through to his studio. It was the only place in his life that had any order, an island of organized thought in an ocean of chaos. But tonight, he would break a rule and get drunk there and sleep on the dust-sheet-draped couch.

  He refilled his glass to the brim and again drained it as if drinking water. The extra alcohol hitting his system muted the feeling that there had been an odd aftertaste, despite it being the same wine as the last bottle.

  He heard a noise behind him.

  28

  Birgit Taubitz watched him sleep. The bastard even did that handsomely. She had met Tobias Albrecht at a Hamburg Senate official dinner, held in the restaurant in the cellar of City Hall. The second she saw him, she loathed him; she also wanted him with a hunger she hadn’t known before. He had been polite, charming and respectful, but she had seen the same hunger, and the same loathing, in his eyes when he looked at her. Two of a kind.

  Tobias was the kind of man that had never known a woman to turn him down, much in the same way that Birgit was the kind of woman who could make a near slave of any man she chose. There were other men more handsome, and other women more beautiful, but they both, in very different ways, had something extra in their looks: a classical, dark wickedness that the good were invariably drawn to. But they had been drawn to each other, and it was the kind of volatile, unstable but delicious chemistry they both knew could not last and would probably end very badly. And it was that very danger that added to the intensity of their lovemaking.

  Birgit had been married to Uwe Taubitz for ten years. She had seen in him the kind of bland, generic appeal that Germans liked in their politicians. To start with, she had seen Taubitz as a potential Chancellor, and he had become Hamburg’s Principal Mayor at only forty-three, but it soon became clear that his political ambitions extended no further than Hamburg’s city limits. Some blandness, it appeared, was more than skin deep.

 

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