by Nele Neuhaus
“So what did Lars wind up doing?” Tobias asked.
“Not what his old man had hoped.” Felix gave a malicious grin. “Even rich people have problems with their kids. In this case one of them is a moron and the other one told his father to fuck off.”
“Lars has really made a cushy career for himself,” said Jörg. “My mom told me, she heard it from a relative. Investment banking. Big-time money. He’s married with two kids, and he bought a huge villa in Glashütten after he got back from England.”
“I thought he always wanted to study theology and become a pastor,” said Tobias. To his amazement it still hurt to think about his best friend who had disappeared from his life so suddenly.
“Well, I never wanted to be a roofer either.” Felix popped another bottle of beer with the opener on his key chain. “But the army didn’t want me and the police didn’t either, and I gave up on the bakery apprenticeship shortly after … uh … you know…”
He broke off, lowering his eyes in embarrassment.
“And after my accident I could write off my career as a race-car driver,” Jörg hastened to add before the silence got even more awkward. “So I didn’t wind up in the Formula 1, but at the Black Horse instead. You know that my sister married Jagielski, don’t you?”
Tobias nodded. “My father told me.”
“Ah.” Jörg took a swig from the beer bottle. “It seems like none of us got to do what we dreamed of doing.”
“Nathalie did,” Felix countered. “Man, did we ever laugh when she said she wanted to be a famous actress!”
“She always was ambitious,” said Jörg. “The way she used to boss us around. But I never thought she’d turn into such a celebrity.”
“Well, yeah.” Tobias smiled wryly. “Just like I never dreamed I’d learn locksmithing in the joint or study economics.”
His friends hesitated for a moment, embarrassed, but then they laughed. The alcohol was loosening them up. After the fifth bottle of beer Felix turned talkative.
“To this day I blame myself for telling the cops that we’d gone back to your place, man,” he said to Tobias, dropping his hand on his shoulder.
“You guys just told the truth.” Tobias shrugged. “Nobody had any idea what it would all lead to. But it doesn’t matter now. I’m back, and I’m really glad that you guys don’t cross the street when you see me, like most of the people here.”
“Bullshit.” Jörg slapped his other shoulder. “We’re friends, man! Remember how we fixed up that old Opel that my uncle spent a thousand hours restoring? And how we drove the shit out of it? Man, those were the days!”
Tobias remembered, and Felix did too. So now they’d reached the Remember when phase. The party at the Terlindens when the girls got naked and ran around the house wearing Mrs. Terlinden’s furs. Micha’s birthday when the cops showed up. The tests of courage at the cemetery. The trip to Italy with the junior soccer club. The bonfire on St. Martin’s Day that got out of hand because Felix had used a canister of gasoline to get it going. They couldn’t stop laughing and recalling the old days. Jörg had to wipe away tears of laughter.
“Do you guys remember how my sister stole my old man’s key ring and we raced around inside the old airplane hangar? Man, that was cool!”
* * *
Amelie sat at her desk surfing the Web when the doorbell rang. She closed her laptop and jumped up. It was a quarter to eleven. Damn. Had the old lady forgotten her front door key? In her stocking feet she rushed downstairs before the bell rang again and woke the kids up after she’d coaxed them into bed an hour ago. She cast a glance at the little monitor that was connected to cameras on both sides of the front door. The fuzzy black-and-white picture showed a man with blond hair. Amelie tore open the front door and was surprised to see Thies standing there. In all the time she’d known him, he’d never once come to her front door, and he certainly had never rung the bell. Her surprise turned to concern when she saw the condition her friend was in. She had never seen Thies so upset. His hands were fluttering here and there, his eyes were flickering, and he was twitching all over.
“What’s the matter?” Amelie asked softly. “Did something happen?”
Instead of answering, Thies held out a roll of paper that was carefully tied with a wide ribbon. Amelie’s feet were turning into blocks of ice on the cold steps, but she was truly worried about her friend.
“Wouldn’t you like to come inside?”
Thies shook his head vigorously and kept glancing around, as if afraid that he’d been followed.
“You can’t show these pictures to anybody,” he said suddenly in his slightly hoarse-sounding voice. “You have to hide them.”
“Got it,” she said. “I will.”
The headlights of a car crept up the street through the fog and caught them for a moment as the car turned into the Lauterbachs’ driveway. The garage was located only five yards below the stairs Amelie was standing on—alone now, as she suddenly realized. Thies seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. Daniela Lauterbach turned off the engine and climbed out.
“Hello, Amelie!” came her friendly greeting.
“Hello, Dr. Lauterbach,” Amelie replied.
“Why are you standing there on the porch? Did you lock yourself out?”
“I just got home from work,” Amelie said quickly, without quite knowing why she lied to her neighbor.
“All right then. Say hello to your parents. Good night.” Dr. Lauterbach waved and opened the door of the two-car garage with the remote. She went inside and the garage door came down behind her.
“Thies?” Amelie hissed. “Where are you?”
She jumped when he came out from behind the big yew tree next to the front door.
“What’s all this about?” she whispered. “Why—?”
The words stuck in her throat when she saw Thies’s face. In his eyes she saw naked fear—what was he afraid of? Deeply worried, she reached out her hand and touched his arm to calm him. He flinched.
“You have to take good care of those pictures.” The words came out in a stammer, and his eyes were shining feverishly. “Nobody can see those pictures. Not even you! You have to promise me!”
“Okay, okay, I promise. But what—”
Before she could finish her question, Thies had vanished into the foggy night. Amelie stared after him, shaking her head. She couldn’t make any sense out of her friend’s behavior. But that was no surprise—Thies wasn’t like anyone else.
* * *
Cosima lay sound asleep on the couch in the living room; the dog had curled up behind her knees and didn’t raise his head but just lazily wagged the tip of his tail when Bodenstein came in and stopped to take in the peaceful scene. Cosima was snoring quietly, her reading glasses had slipped down her nose, and the book she’d been reading lay on her chest. Normally he would have gone over to wake her with a kiss, cautiously, so as not to frighten her. But the invisible wall that suddenly stood between them held him back. To his astonishment, the usual feeling of tenderness that he felt whenever he saw his wife was now missing. It was high time they had an open confrontation, before the mistrust poisoned their marriage. What he really ought to do right now was grab her by the shoulder and shake her and then demand to know why she’d lied to him. But he was stopped by his cowardly craving for harmony and the fear of learning a truth that he wouldn’t be able to bear. He turned away and went into the kitchen. The dog, driven by greedy hope, jumped off the couch to follow him, which woke up Cosima. She appeared in the kitchen with a sleepy look on her face, as he took a yogurt out of the fridge.
“Hello,” he said.
“I guess I fell asleep,” she replied. He ate the yogurt, watching her discreetly. All at once he saw the wrinkles in her face that he’d never noticed before, the skin starting to sag at her throat, and the puffiness under her tired eyes. She looked like a woman of forty-five. Had the soft-focus lens of his affection disappeared along with his trust?
“Why did you c
all me at the office and not on my cell?” she asked casually as she searched in the fridge for something.
“I don’t remember,” he lied, carefully scraping out the last of the yogurt from the container. “I must have hit the wrong speed-dial number. It wasn’t important.”
“Well, I was just down at the Main-Taunus Center shopping for a few things.” Cosima closed the refrigerator door and yawned. “Kira took care of little Sophie for me. It’s always a little faster if I don’t have to take her along.”
“Hmm, of course.” He set the empty yogurt container down for the dog to lick. For a moment he pondered whether he ought to ask her what she bought, because he didn’t believe a word she’d said. And suddenly it was clear to him that he never would again.
* * *
Amelie hid the roll of pictures in her chest of drawers and sat back down at her laptop. But she could no longer concentrate. It seemed that the pictures were calling softly to her: Look at us! Come on! Take us out!
She turned on her chair and stared at the dresser, wrangling with her conscience. Downstairs car doors slammed and the front door opened.
“We’re back!” her father called. Amelie hurried downstairs to say hello to the people she lived with. Although Barbara and the little tykes had welcomed her kindly, she could never bring herself to think “my family,” much less say it. Then she went back to her room and lay down on the bed. In the next room the toilet flushed. What could be in those pictures? Thies always painted such abstract stuff, except for that cool portrait of her that she’d seen yesterday. But why did he absolutely want to hide these pictures? It seemed to be damned important to him since he’d actually rung her doorbell and asked her not to show them to anybody. And that was really strange.
Amelie waited until peace and quiet returned to the house, then she went over to the chest of drawers and took out the roll. It was pretty heavy, so it must be more than only two or three pictures. And they didn’t smell as strongly of paint as freshly painted ones did. Carefully she untied the many knots in the ribbon that Thies had wrapped around the roll. There were eight pictures in a relatively small format. And they were completely different, not at all Thies’s usual painting style. Very representational and true to life with people that … Amelie froze and looked more closely at the first painting. She felt a tingle at the back of her neck and her heart started beating faster. In front of a big barn with a door wide open two boys were bending over a blond girl lying on the ground, her head in a pool of blood. Another boy with dark curly hair stood by, while a fourth was running with a panic-stricken expression straight toward the observer. And this fourth boy was—Thies! She feverishly began looking at the other paintings.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. The barn with the open door, next to it a somewhat lower stable building, the same people. Thies sat next to the barn, the boy with the dark curls stood at the open door of the stable and watched what was happening inside the stall. One of the boys was raping the blond girl, and the other one was holding her down. Amelie swallowed and turned to the next one. Again the barn, another girl with long black hair and a tight, bright-blue dress, kissing a man. He had his hand on her breast and she had wound one leg around his thigh. The image looked incredibly lifelike. In the rear of the dark barn was the curly-haired boy from the other pictures. The pictures looked almost like photographs. Thies had caught every detail: the colors of the clothes, the necklace on the girl, the text on a T-shirt. Unbelievable! The pictures undoubtedly showed the Sartorius barnyard. And they depicted the events from September 1997. Amelie smoothed out the last picture with both hands and was stunned by what she saw. The house was so quiet that she could hear her pulse pounding in her ears. The picture showed the man who had kissed the black-haired girl, but from the front this time. She knew him. She definitely knew him.
Friday, November 14, 2008
“Good morning.” Gregor Lauterbach nodded to his office manager Ines Schürmann-Liedtke and stepped into his big office in the Cultural Ministry of the state of Hessen on Luisenplatz in Wiesbaden. Today his calendar was totally booked up. For eight o’clock a discussion with his deputy minister was scheduled, and at ten he had to give a speech at the plenum in which he would present the budget proposal for the coming year. At noon an hour was reserved for a brief lunch with representatives of the teachers’ delegation from Wisconsin, the U.S. sister state of Hessen. On his desk the mail lay sorted according to importance in different colored resubmission folders. On top was the folder with the correspondence he had to sign. Lauterbach unbuttoned his jacket and sat down at his desk to take care of the most pressing items. Twenty to eight. The deputy minister would be punctual, he always was.
“Your coffee, sir.” Ines Schürmann-Liedtke came in and set down a cup of steaming coffee.
“Thank you,” he said with a smile. The woman was not only an intelligent and highly efficient office manager, but also a real feast for the eyes: an amply built brunette with big brown eyes and skin like milk and honey. She reminded him a bit of his wife, Daniela. Sometimes he permitted himself lusty daydreams in which Ines played a leading role, but in reality his behavior toward her was always above reproach. He could have replaced the staff in his office two years ago when he took over this position, but he had liked Ines immediately, and she thanked him for saving her job with absolute loyalty and unbelievable diligence.
“You’re looking wonderful again today, Ines,” he said, sipping his coffee. “That shade of green looks magnificent on you.”
“Thank you very much.” She smiled at the compliment, but turned professional at once and read off the list of callers who had asked that he call them back. Lauterbach listened with one ear as he signed the letters Ines had written, nodding or shaking his head. When she was done he handed her the correspondence. She left the office and he devoted himself to the mail that had already been sorted. There were four letters marked PERSONAL and addressed to him, and Ines had not opened those. He slit them open with the letter opener, scanned the first two quickly and put them aside. When he opened the third one, he caught his breath.
If you keep your mouth shut, nothing will happen. If not, the police will find out what you lost that time in the barn when you screwed your underage pupil. Fond greetings from Snow White.
His mouth was suddenly dry as dust. He looked at the second page, which showed a photo of a key ring. Fear crept through his veins, and he broke out in a cold sweat. This was no joke. His thoughts raced. Who had written this? Who could have known about him and his slipup with that girl? And why the hell was this letter arriving now? Gregor Lauterbach felt like his heart was going to jump out of his chest. For eleven long years he’d succeeded in repressing those fateful events. But now it had all come back, so vividly that it seemed like only yesterday. He stood up and went to the window, staring out at Luisenplatz, deserted in the gradually lifting darkness of this dreary November morning. He breathed slowly in and out. Just don’t lose your nerve now! In a desk drawer he found the well-worn notebook in which he’d kept telephone numbers for years. When he picked up the receiver he noticed to his consternation that his hand was shaking.
* * *
The gnarled old oak stood in the front part of the large park, not twenty feet from the wall that surrounded the entire property. She had never noticed the treehouse before, perhaps because in the summertime it had been hidden by the thick foliage of the tree. It wasn’t easy in a miniskirt and stockings to climb up the rickety-looking rungs of the ramshackle ladder, which was slippery from the rain of the past few days. She hoped Thies wouldn’t choose this moment to come out of his studio. He would know at once what she was doing here. Finally she reached the treehouse and crawled into it on all fours. It was a solid box of wood, like the elevated blinds that hunters used in the woods. Amelie straightened up cautiously and looked around, then sat down on the bench and looked out the window in front. Bingo! She dug her iPod out of her jacket pocket and called up the photos she had taken last night. The
perspective matched one hundred percent. From here there was a sweeping view over half the village; the upper part of the Sartorius farm with its barn and cowshed lay directly at her feet. Even with the naked eye every detail was crystal clear. If she assumed that the cherry laurel had been somewhat smaller eleven years ago, then whoever painted the pictures must have watched from this very spot.
Amelie lit a cigarette and braced her feet against the wooden wall. Who had been sitting here? It couldn’t have been Thies, because he was visible in three of the pictures. Had somebody taken photos from up here that Thies had found and made paintings of later? Even more interesting was the question of who the other people in the pictures were. Laura Wagner and Stefanie “Snow White” Schneeberger, that was obvious. And the man who had done it in the barn with Snow White—she knew him too. But who were the three boys? Amelie pondered as she took a drag of her cigarette and considered what she should do with what she’d discovered. The police were out of the question. In the past she’d had nothing but bad experiences with cops; that was one of the reasons she’d been shipped off to her father’s dump of a town, even though she’d heard nothing from him for twelve whole years except on birthdays and Christmas. Alternative two, telling her parents, who would also run to the cops, didn’t make any sense.
A movement in the Sartorius barnyard caught her eye. Tobias went into the barn, and a little later the engine of the old tractor started up with a clatter. He was probably going to spend the somewhat dry day cleaning up some more. What if she showed him the pictures?