by Nele Neuhaus
Then the cops showed up. They had found Laura’s body. Because it was raining so hard, he’d had to leave off cleaning up the yard and instead turned his anger to cleaning out his room. He ripped down the stupid posters from the walls and summarily stuffed the contents of the cabinets and all the drawers into blue trash bags. Just get rid of all that crap! Suddenly he was holding a CD in his hand. Time to Say Goodbye by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli. Stefanie had given him the CD because she had kissed him for the first time to this song in June, at the graduation party. He put the CD on, not understanding the empty feeling that abruptly seized him with the first chord, refusing to let him go. He had never before felt so alone and abandoned, not even in prison. There at least he could hope for better days, but now he knew that they would never come. His life was over.
It took a moment before Nadia opened the door and let him in. He’d been afraid that she wasn’t home. He hadn’t come to sleep with her, he hadn’t been thinking of that at all, but when she stood before him, blinking at the bright light, her blond hair loose on her shoulders, so sweet and warm, a flash of sexual desire shot through him with a power he wouldn’t have thought possible.
“What—” she began, but Tobias muffled the rest of her question with a kiss, pulling her close, almost expecting her to resist and push him away. But the opposite happened. She slipped his wet leather jacket from his shoulders, unbuttoned his shirt, and shoved up his T-shirt. The next instant they were lying on the floor and he entered her impetuously, felt her tongue in his mouth and her hands on his ass, inciting him to plunge harder and faster. Much too soon he felt the tidal wave roaring, the heat that made him sweat from every pore. Then it broke over him, so glorious and such a relief that he moaned—a moan that turned to a muted cry. With his heart pounding he lay on top of her for a few seconds and could hardly believe what he had done. He rolled off, lying on his back with his eyes closed, gasping for air like a fish out of water. Her soft laughter made him open his eyes.
“What is it?” he asked in confusion.
“I think we need a little more practice,” she said. With a nimble movement she got to her feet and held out her hand to him. He took it, got up with a groan, and followed her into the bedroom after getting rid of his shoes and jeans. The spirits of the past had vanished. At least for the moment.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
“The police came by my house yesterday.” Tobias blew on the hot coffee that Nadia had poured for him. Last night he hadn’t wanted to bring up that topic, but now he had to tell her about it. “They found Laura’s skeleton at the old airfield in Eschborn. In an underground tank.”
“What?” Nadia, who was just about to take a sip from her cup, stopped short. They were sitting at the gray granite table in the kitchen, where they had sat together last night. It was a little past seven, and it was still pitch dark outside the panoramic window. Nadia had to catch a flight to Hamburg at eight o’clock, where the exterior shots were being filmed for a new episode of the series in which she played the detective superintendent.
“When…” She set down her cup. “I mean … How do they know it’s Laura?”
“No idea.” Tobias shook his head. “They didn’t say much. At first they didn’t want to tell me where they found the skeleton. The cop in charge just said I must know where it was.”
“Oh my God,” Nadia gasped.
“Nadia.” He leaned over and put his hand on hers. “Please tell me if you want me to leave.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I can see that you’re scared of me.”
“What nonsense.”
He let go of her hand, stood up, and turned his back to her. For a moment he struggled with himself. Half the night he had lain awake, listening to her steady breathing and asking himself when she might find him superfluous. He was already apprehensive about the day she would get rid of him with embarrassed excuses, then avoid him, pretending that she wasn’t home. That day was bound to come. He wasn’t the right man for her. He could never fit in with her world, her life.
“It’s not easy to ignore the topic,” he said at last in a hoarse voice. “I was convicted of murder and did ten years in the joint. We can’t simply act as if that never happened and we’re still twenty years old.”
He turned around. “I have no idea who killed Laura and Stefanie. I can’t rule out that it could have been me, but why can’t I remember? And so far I can’t. There’s only this … this black hole. The psychologist at the trial said that the human brain sometimes reacts with a sort of amnesia, like after a bad shock. But don’t you think I would remember something, at least? Like putting Laura in the trunk and driving somewhere? But it’s all a blank. The last thing I remember is Stefanie telling me that she … that she … didn’t love me anymore. And then Felix and Jörg came to the door at some point, and I had drunk so much vodka that I was feeling terrible. Then suddenly the cops were standing there and claiming that I’d killed Laura and Stefanie!”
Nadia sat there studying him with her big jade-green eyes.
“Don’t you see, Nadia?” His tone was pleading. The pain inside him was back, stronger than ever before. Too much was at stake. He didn’t want to get into a relationship with Nadia when he knew that she would only end up disappointed again. “It torments me not to know what really happened. Did I kill them? Or didn’t I?”
“Tobi,” Nadia said softly. “I love you. And have for as long as I can remember. It doesn’t matter to me, even if you did do it.”
Tobias grimaced in despair. She simply didn’t want to understand. He urgently needed someone to believe him. To believe in him. He couldn’t handle living as an outcast; it would destroy him.
“But it matters to me,” he insisted. “I’ve lost ten years of my life. I no longer have a future. Somebody has destroyed me. And I can’t just act like it’s all in the past now.”
“So what do you plan to do?”
“I want to know the truth. Even if it means finding out that I really did do it.”
Nadia pushed back her chair. She came over to him, threw her arms around him, and looked into his eyes.
“I believe you,” she said softly. “And if you want, I’ll help you with everything. Just don’t go back to Altenhain. Please.”
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“Stay here. Or in my house in Ticino in Switzerland. Or in Hamburg.” She smiled, warming to the idea. “That’s it! Come with me now! You’ll like the house. It’s right on the water.”
Tobias hesitated. “I can’t just leave my father alone like that. And my mother needs me too. As soon as she’s feeling better, then maybe.”
“From here you can drive to see your father in Altenhain in fifteen minutes.” Nadia’s big green eyes were close to his. He could smell the scent of her skin, the fragrance of her shampoo. Half the men in Germany dreamed of being asked to move in with Nadia von Bredow. What was stopping him?
“Tobi, please!” She put her hand on his cheek. “I’m worried about you. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. When I think what might have happened if those guys caught you instead of that girl…”
Amelie. He’d forgotten all about her. She was in Altenhain, and somewhere in that village the truth about those terrible events was hiding.
“I’ll be careful,” he reassured her. “Don’t worry.”
“I love you, Tobi.”
“I love you too,” he replied, and took her in his arms.
* * *
“Boss?” Kai Ostermann was standing in the doorway of his office, holding two sheets of paper in his hand.
Bodenstein stopped in his tracks. “What’s up?”
“We just got this fax.” Ostermann handed him the pages and scrutinized Bodenstein’s face; since it revealed nothing, Ostermann refrained from commenting.
“Thanks” was all Bodenstein said, going into his office with his heart pounding. It was the GPS track of Cosima’s cell phone over the past two wee
ks, which he had ordered the day before yesterday from the phone company. For the first time he had used his professional clout to find out something of a personal nature. The urge to know was stronger than his guilty conscience about an action that a malicious officer might interpret as abuse of his position. He sat down at his desk and took a moment to prepare himself. What he read robbed him of any illusion. She had indeed been in Mainz on two different days, and only for about an hour each time. But she had spent the mornings of eight days in Frankfurt. Bodenstein leaned his elbows on the desk, rested his chin on his fists, and paused to think. Then he grabbed the phone and punched in the number of Cosima’s office. Kira Gasthuber, Cosima’s production assistant and jill-of-all-trades, picked up after two rings. Cosima was out of the office for a short time. Why didn’t he try her cell?
So that she won’t lie to me, you nitwit, thought Bodenstein. He was about to hang up when he heard the bright voice of his youngest daughter in the background. All at once an alarm went off in his head. Cosima normally took Sophia everywhere with her. Why had she left the girl at the office today? To his question Kira replied that Cosima hadn’t been out for long, and Sophia was amusing herself as best she could with her and René.
When he hung up, Bodenstein sat for a while at his desk. His thoughts were churning. Five times Cosima’s phone had been tracked to the cellular zone located in the north end of Frankfurt between Glauburgstrasse, Oeder Weg, the Eckenheimer highway, and Eschersheimer Park. On the city map it might look small, but that area contained hundreds of buildings with thousands of apartments. Damn. Where was she? And most importantly, with whom? How would he react if it turned out that she was actually cheating on him? And how come he thought she had a need to cheat on him? Sure, their sex life was no longer as lively as before Sophia was born; the presence of a small child took care of that. But it wasn’t as if Cosima was missing out on anything. Or was she? To his dismay he could no longer remember the last time he had slept with his wife. He thought back. He did remember! It was the night she came home a little tipsy and in a good mood from her friend’s birthday party. Bodenstein got out his day planner and searched for that date. A strange feeling came sneaking up on him that got stronger the farther back he paged. Had he totally forgotten to enter Bernhard’s birthday? No, he hadn’t. Bernhard had celebrated his fiftieth on September 20 at Schloss Johannisberg in the Rheingau. That couldn’t be right! He counted and realized that he hadn’t slept with Cosima in eight weeks. Was he the one to blame if she was unfaithful? There was a knock on the door and Nicola Engel stepped in.
“What’s up?” he asked.
With a frosty expression on her face, she asked, “When were you planning on telling me that Detective Inspector Behnke has been moonlighting against regulations at a bar in Sachsenhausen?”
Damn. It had totally slipped his mind, he was so wrapped up in his own problems. He didn’t ask where she had heard about it, and made no attempt to offer excuses.
“I wanted to talk with him first,” was all he said. “I haven’t had a chance to do that yet.”
“Tonight at six thirty you will. I’ve ordered Behnke to come in, sick or not. See about fixing this situation.”
* * *
His cell phone rang as he was heading for the exit at the customs checkpoint. Lars Terlinden switched his briefcase to the other hand and took the call. All day long he’d been at the beck and call of the board of directors in Zürich. A couple of months ago they’d been celebrating him like the Savior Himself for this very same deal, and now they wanted to crucify him. Damn it, he was no prophet. How was he to know that Dr. Markus Schönhausen’s real name was Matthias Mutzler, that he wasn’t from Potsdam, but from some village in the hills of southern Germany, and a con man of the worst sort? Ultimately it wasn’t Lars’s problem if the legal department of his bank didn’t do their homework. Heads had rolled, and his would be next if he couldn’t figure out a way to make up the loss, which totaled in the hundreds of millions.
“I’ll be at the office in twenty minutes,” he told his secretary as the milky glass pane slid open before him. He was exhausted, burned out; his nerves were shot and he was done with the world. All by the age of thirty. He could only sleep by taking pills, and eating was difficult, but drinking was okay. Lars Terlinden knew that he was well on the way to becoming an alcoholic, but he would worry about that problem later, when this crisis was over. Although there was no end in sight. The world economy was shaky, the biggest banks in the States were going broke. Lehman Brothers was just the beginning. His own employer, still one of the biggest Swiss banks, had let go five thousand workers worldwide in the past year. In the offices and corridors, naked fear about the future was the rule. His phone rang again, so he stuck it in his pocket and ignored it. The news of the collapse of Schönhausen’s real estate empire six weeks ago had come out of the blue; just two days earlier he had met with Schönhausen at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin for dinner. By that time the man had known for a while that bankruptcy was looming, that slippery weasel. At this very moment he was being sought by Interpol because he’d skipped out. After much effort Lars Terlinden had at least succeeded in securitizing a large part of the credit portfolio and selling it to investors, but 350 million euros were gone.
A woman stepped into his path. In a hurry, he tried to go around her, but she resolutely stood her ground and spoke to him. Only then did he recognize his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in eight years.
“Lars!” she implored. “Lars, please wait!”
She looked the same as always. Petite and immaculate, her golden blond hair cut in a perfect pageboy. Light makeup, a pearl necklace on her suntanned décolletage. She smiled meekly, and that instantly made him see red.
“What do you want?” he snapped. “Did your husband send you?”
He never deigned to say the words “my father.”
“No, Lars. Could you stop for a moment? Please.”
He rolled his eyes and did as she asked. As a boy he had adored his mother, even worshipped her. He always missed her terribly whenever she went on trips for a few days or several weeks and he and Thies were left in the housekeeper’s care. He would have forgiven her everything in return for her love, but he never got more than a smile, lovely words, and promises. Only after a very long time did he realize that she could give him nothing more because she had nothing left to give. Christine Terlinden was an empty vessel, a shallow beauty with no personality to speak of, who had made it her life’s work to be the ideal wife for the successful CEO Claudius Terlinden.
“You’re looking good, son. A bit too thin perhaps.” Even now she was true to herself. After all this time she could only come up with this hackneyed phrase. Lars Terlinden had begun to feel contempt for his mother when he realized that all his life she had deceived him.
“What do you want, Mother?” he repeated impatiently.
“Tobias is back from prison,” she told him, lowering her voice. “And the police have found Laura’s skeleton. At the old airfield in Eschborn.”
He clenched his teeth. Suddenly his life raced backward at time-lapse speed. Here in the middle of the arrival hall at Frankfurt Airport he had the horrible feeling of shrinking to a pimply nineteen-year-old with naked fear breathing down his neck. Laura! He would never forget her face, her laugh, her carefree joy that had all come to such an abrupt end. He hadn’t had a chance to speak to Tobias again. His father had made all the decisions for him so fast, banishing him at once to the farm of some acquaintance in deepest Oxfordshire. Think about your future, boy! Stay out of this and keep your mouth shut. Then nothing will happen. Of course he had listened to his father. Had stayed out of it and kept his mouth shut. It was too late by the time he heard about Tobi’s conviction. For eleven years he had done everything he could to avoid thinking about any of it: that awful night, his horror, his fear. For eleven shitty years he had worked almost round the clock just so he could forget. And now his mother came sashaying up in her little fur coat and to
re open the old wounds with her doll-like smile.
“I’m not interested in that anymore, Mother,” he snapped. “It has nothing to do with me.”
“But—” she began, but he didn’t let her finish speaking.
“Leave me alone!” he snarled. “Don’t you get it? I don’t want you to contact me ever again! Just stay away from me, the way you’ve always done.”
With that he turned on his heel and left her standing there. He strode to the escalator that led down to the S-Bahn commuter train station.
* * *
They stood in the garage drinking beer out of the bottle, just like before. Tobias felt uncomfortable, and all the others looked like they did too. Why in the world had he come here? Much to his surprise his old friend Jörg had called that afternoon and invited him over to have a beer along with Felix and a couple of other old pals. In their youth they had often met in the big garage that belonged to Jörg’s uncle to tinker with their motor-assisted bicycles, later with their mopeds, and finally with their cars. Jörg was a gifted auto mechanic who had dreamed since he was a boy of becoming a race-car driver. The garage was just as Tobias remembered it, smelling of motor oil and lacquer, of leather and polish. They sat on the same old workbench, on turned-over beer crates, and on piles of car tires. Nothing around them had changed. Tobias stayed out of the conversation, which had an air of forced camaraderie, no doubt because of his presence. Each of the men had greeted him with a handshake, of course, but the joy of seeing each other again was somewhat constrained. After a while Tobias, Jörg, and Felix found themselves standing together. Felix had become a roofer with his father’s company. Even as a teenager he was powerfully built, and the hard work combined with avid beer consumption over the years had turned him into a colossus. His jovial eyes almost vanished in a layer of fat when he laughed. Tobias was reminded of a raisin bun. Jörg, on the other hand, looked almost the same as he used to, except that his hairline had receded quite a ways.