Crime

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  The policeman stood before the enormous stuffed head of a black buffalo from East Africa. Nordeck was trying to explain the thing with the sheep. “This is how it is,” he said, searching for the right words. “In the last few months, Philipp has killed some sheep. Well, he slit their throats. The farmers caught him at it once and told me about it.”

  “Ah, slit their throats,” said the policeman. “These buffalo weigh more than twenty-five hundred pounds, don’t they?”

  “Yes, they’re pretty dangerous. A lion doesn’t stand a chance against a full-grown specimen.”

  “So, the boy slaughtered sheep, yes?” The detective could hardly tear himself away from the buffalo.

  Nordeck took this to be a good sign. “Of course I paid compensation for the sheep, and we also wanted to have Philipp begin … But somehow we were hoping it would all blow over. We were wrong.” Better leave out the details about the stab wounds and the eyes, thought Nordeck.

  “Why does he do it?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

  “Sounds odd, no?”

  “Yes, it’s odd. We have to do something with him,” Nordeck said again.

  “Looks that way. Do you know what happened today?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, was it another sheep?” asked the detective. He simply couldn’t leave the buffalo alone, and had put his hands on the horns.

  “Yes, one of the farmers called my cell phone a little while ago. He’s found another.”

  The policeman nodded absentmindedly. He was annoyed at having to spend his Friday evening with a sheep killer, but the buffalo wasn’t bad at all. He asked Nordeck if he could go to police headquarters in town on Monday to give a brief statement. He’d had enough of paperwork and wanted to get home.

  “Of course,” said Nordeck.

  The second detective came down the stairs holding an old cigar box with VILLIGER KIEL on it in brownish-yellow lettering.

  “We have to impound this box,” he said.

  Nordeck realized that the policeman’s voice had suddenly taken on an official tone. Even the latex gloves he was wearing somehow conveyed a new formality. “If you think so,” said Nordeck. “What’s in there? Philipp doesn’t even smoke.”

  “I found this box behind a loose tile in the bathroom,” said the policeman. Nordeck was angered by the very idea that there were loose tiles in the house at all. The policeman cautiously opened the box. His colleague and Nordeck leaned forward, then immediately recoiled.

  The box was lined with plastic and divided into two compartments. An eyeball, somewhat compressed and still a little wet, stared out of each compartment. A photograph of a girl was glued to the inside of the lid—Nordeck recognized her immediately: It was Sabine, the daughter of Gerike, the elementary school teacher. She had celebrated her sixteenth birthday the previous day. Philipp had been there, and he had often talked about her before. Nordeck had assumed his son had fallen in love with her. But now he blanched: The girl in the picture had no eyes—they’d been cut out.

  Nordeck, hands trembling, hunted for the teacher’s phone number in his address book. He held the receiver so that the policemen could listen in. Gerike was surprised by the phone call. No, Sabine was not at home. She had gone on directly after the birthday party to visit a friend in Munich. No, she hadn’t yet checked in, but that was nothing unusual.

  Gerike tried to calm Nordeck: “Everything’s okay. Philipp took her to the night train.”

  The police questioned two employees at the train station, they turned Nordeck’s house upside down, and they interviewed everyone who’d been at the birthday party. It all produced nothing about where Sabine might actually be.

  The pathologist examined the eyes in the cigar box. They were sheep’s eyes. And the blood on Philipp’s clothing was animal blood.

  A few hours after Philipp’s arrest, a farmer found another sheep behind his farmyard. He loaded it onto his shoulders and carried it down the village street in the rain all the way to the police station. The animal’s fleece was saturated; it was heavy. Blood and water streamed down over the farmer’s waxed jacket. He threw the carcass down onto the steps of the station house; the wet fleece smacked against the door and left a dark stain on the wood.

  Halfway between the manor house and the village, which consisted of roughly two hundred low houses, a narrow path branched off and led to the abandoned reed-thatched Friesian house on the dike. By day, it was the focal point of children’s games; by night, couples met under the pergola. You could hear the sea from here, and the crying of the gulls.

  The detectives found Sabine’s cell phone in the wet beach grass, and, not far from it, a hair band. Sabine had been wearing it the evening of her birthday, her father said. The area was sealed off and a hundred policemen combed the marshland with their bloodhounds. Crime-scene investigators in their white overalls were summoned and did a search for further evidence, but they found nothing more.

  The army of policemen also attracted the press to Nordeck, and anyone who set foot out on the street got interviewed by them. Almost no one left the house anymore, curtains stayed closed, and even the village tavern remained empty. Only the journalists with their garish computer bags filled the tables in the bar, laptops open, cursing the slow Internet connection and stringing one another along with invented pieces of news.

  It had been raining uninterruptedly for days, at night the mist pressed down heavily on the roofs of the low houses, and even the cattle seemed to be morose. The villagers talked about it all, and they no longer greeted Nordeck when they saw him.

  On the fifth day after Philipp’s arrest, the PR man in the district attorney’s office issued a photograph of Sabine to the newspapers, along with an appeal for information as to her whereabouts. The next day, someone smeared the word murderer in red on the wooden gate to the manor house.

  Philipp was in jail. For the first three days, he said almost nothing, and the few words he did utter were incomprehensible. On the fourth day, he pulled himself together. The police took his statement; he was open and answered their questions. It was only when they tried to talk about the sheep that he hung his head and fell silent. Naturally, the detectives were more interested in Sabine, but Philipp kept repeating his explanation that he’d taken her to the train station. Before that, they’d gone to the house on the dike and talked. “Like friends,” he said. Maybe that was when she’d mislaid her cell phone and the hair band. He had done nothing to her. There was nothing more to be pried out of him. And he didn’t want to speak to the psychiatrist.

  District Attorney Krauther led the interrogations. He slept so badly in the course of those days that his wife told him at breakfast he was grinding his teeth at night. His problem was that nothing had apparently gone on prior to this. Philipp von Nordeck had killed some sheep, but that was no more than property damage, technically speaking, and an offense against animal-protection laws. There had been no claim for financial damages, the sheep had been paid for by his father, and none of the farmers had filed charges. Sabine had not, indeed, arrived at her friend’s in Munich. “But she’s a young girl, and the fact that she hasn’t been heard from could be for any number of innocent reasons,” Krauther said to his wife. The cigar box was no proof, in and of itself, that Philipp had murdered the girl, even if the examining magistrate had accepted the premise of the prosecutor’s application for an arrest warrant thus far. Krauther felt uneasy.

  Because there weren’t many cases out here in the country that raised these sorts of questions, Philipp’s medical examination at least had gone quickly. No results indicating brain malfunction, no disease of the central nervous system, and no anomalies of the chromosomes. But, thought Krauther, he is, of course, absolutely insane.

  When I had my first meeting with the district attorney, it was six days after the arrest, and the review of his remand in custody was due the next day. Krauther looked tired, but he seemed pleased to be able to share his thoughts with s
omebody. “Aberrant behavior,” he said, “has a tendency to escalate rather rapidly. If his victims have thus far been limited to sheep, couldn’t they now be people?”

  Wilfred Rasch established a reputation unchallenged in his lifetime as the doyen of forensic psychiatry. The view that aberrant behavior intensifies over time is one of his scientific theories. But from everything we knew thus far about Philipp’s acts, it struck me as unlikely that we were dealing with such an aberration.

  Before my conversation with Krauther, I had talked to the veterinarian who, on orders from Nordeck, had destroyed the animals’ remains. The police had had better things to do than interview this man, or perhaps quite simply nobody had thought to do so. The vet was a meticulous observer, and the incidents had struck him as so bizarre that he had written a short report on every dead sheep. I gave his notes to the district attorney, who made a rapid survey. Each sheep gave evidence of eighteen stab wounds. Krauther looked at me. The policemen had also mentioned that Philipp had uttered nothing but the word eighteen. So it might have to do with the number itself in some way.

  I said I did not think Philipp exhibited deviant sexual behavior. The pathologist had examined the last sheep, but had found no evidence that Philipp had been sexually aroused by the killing of the animals. There was no sperm and no sign that he had penetrated the sheep.

  “I don’t believe Philipp suffers from perversities,” I said.

  “So then what?”

  “He may very well be schizophrenic,” I said.

  “Schizophrenic?”

  “Yes, there’s something that’s terrifying him.”

  “That may be. But he won’t talk to the psychiatrist,” said Krauther.

  “Nor is he obliged to,” I replied. “It’s very simple, Herr Krauther. You have nothing. You have no corpse and you have no proof of any crime. You don’t even have evidence that might point toward it. You had Philipp von Nordeck locked up because he killed sheep. But the arrest warrant was issued for the killing of Sabine Gerike. Nonsense. The only reason he’s in custody is because you sort of have a bad feeling about things.”

  Krauther knew I was right. And I knew that he knew. Sometimes it’s easier to be a defense attorney than a prosecutor. My task was to be partisan and to stand in front of my clients. Krauther had to remain neutral. And he couldn’t. “If only the girl would show up again,” he said. Krauther was sitting with his back to the window. The rain hit the glass and slicked down it in broad streams. He turned in his office chair and followed my eyes to the outdoors and the gray sky. We sat there for almost five minutes, looking at the rain, and neither of us said a word.

  I spent the night at the Nordecks’; the last time I’d been there was nineteen years ago for Philipp’s christening. During dinner, a windowpane was shattered by a flying stone. Nordeck said it was the fifth time this week, so what was the point of calling the police? But he thought maybe I should get my car and drive it into one of the barns on the farm; otherwise, my tires would be slashed by morning.

  As I was lying in bed sometime around midnight, Philipp’s sister, Victoria, came into the room. She was five, and her pajamas were very jazzy. “Can you bring Philipp home?” she asked. I got up, lifted her onto my shoulders, and took her back to her bedroom. The lintels were high enough to avoid any risk of her bumping her head, one of the few advantages of an old house. I sat down on her bed and pulled the covers up around her.

  “Have you ever had a cold?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Philipp’s got something like a cold in his head. He’s not so well and he needs to get better.”

  “How does he sneeze in his head?” she asked. My example obviously was a bit problematic.

  “You can’t sneeze in your head. Philipp’s just all muddled up. Maybe the same way you are when you’ve had a bad dream.”

  “But when I wake up, everything comes right again.”

  “Exactly. Philipp needs to wake up properly.”

  “Are you going to bring him back here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to try.”

  “Nadine said Philipp did something bad.”

  “Who’s Nadine?”

  “Nadine’s my best friend.”

  “Philipp isn’t bad, Victoria. You need to go to sleep now.”

  Victoria didn’t want to go to sleep. She wasn’t happy that I knew so little, and she was worried about her brother. Then she asked me to tell her a story. I invented one that had no sheep in it and nobody who was sick. When she’d gone to sleep, I fetched my files and my laptop and worked in her room until the morning. She woke up again twice, sat up for a moment, looked at me, and then went back to sleep again. At about 6:00 a.m., I borrowed one of the pairs of rubber boots around in the hall of the manor house and went out into the yard to smoke a cigarette. The air was raw, I was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, and there were only eight hours until the custody hearing.

  The day brought no news of Sabine, either. She’d now been missing for a week. District Attorney Krauther was filing for an extension.

  Most custody hearings are a grim business. The law requires that there be an investigation of whether there is a compelling reason to believe that the person being held in custody has committed a crime. This sounds clear and unambiguous, but is hard to grapple with in reality. At this point, the interviews of witnesses have barely begun, the legal proceedings are just starting, and there is no general overview. The judge may not make things simple for himself; he has to decide about the incarceration of someone who may not be guilty at all. Custody hearings are much less formal than trials; the public is not admitted; judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys don’t wear robes; and in practice it’s a serious conversation about the questions surrounding the prolonging of detention.

  The examining magistrate in the case against Philipp von Nordeck was a young man who had just finished his probationary period. He was nervous and didn’t want to make any mistakes. After a half hour, he said he’d heard the arguments and his decision would be issued departmentally—that is, he wanted to use the fourteen-day grace period to await further evidence. It was unsatisfying all around.

  When I left the court, the rain was still coming down in buckets.

  Sabine was sitting on a wooden bench on the lower deck of the ferry between Kollund and Flensbürg. She had spent a happy, if wet, week with Lars in the seaside resort, which had almost nothing to offer except its beach and a furniture store. Lars was a young construction worker who had the name of his football club tattooed on his back. Sabine had kept the week with him a secret from her parents; her father didn’t like Lars. Her parents trusted her, and anyway, she doubted they would call her on their own account.

  Lars had accompanied her to the boat, and now Sabine was afraid. From the moment she’d boarded the little ferry, the man with the threadbare jacket had been staring at her. He was still looking right at her face, and now he was coming over to where she was. She was about to stand up and move away when the man said, “Are you Sabine Gerike?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “For God’s sake, girl, call home at once. They’re looking for you everywhere. Take a look at the newspaper.”

  Shortly after this, the phone rang in Sabine’s parents’ house, and half an hour later District Attorney Krauther called me. He said Sabine had simply run off with her boyfriend and was expected back that afternoon. Philipp would be released, but he must be placed in psychiatric care. I had just agreed on this with Philipp and his father anyway. Krauther made me promise formally that I would take care of this.

  I collected Philipp from the detention center, which looked like a little jail in a children’s book. Philipp, of course, was overjoyed to be free and to know that Sabine was fine. On the way back to his parents’ house, I asked him if he’d like to go for a walk. We stopped by a path across the fields. The cloudy sky above us was enormous, the rain had stopped, and you could hear the harsh cries of the gulls. We t
alked about his boarding school, his love of motorbikes, and the music he was listening to right now. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he said what he hadn’t wanted to say to the psychiatrist: “I see people and animals as numbers.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When I see an animal, it has a number. For example, the cow over there is a thirty-six. The gull’s a twenty-two. The judge was a fifty-one, and the prosecutor a twenty-three.”

  “Do you think about this?”

  “No, I see it. I see it right away. The same way other people see faces. I don’t ever think about it; it’s just there.”

  “And do I have a number?”

  “Yes, five. A good number.” We both had to laugh. It was the first time since he’d been arrested. We walked on silently side by side.

  “Philipp, what is it with eighteen?”

  He looked at me, startled. “Why eighteen?”

  “You said it to the policewoman, and you killed the sheep with eighteen stab wounds.”

  “No, that’s not right. I killed them first and then I stabbed them six times in each side and then six times in the back. I had to take the eyes out, too. It was hard; the first few times they came apart.” Philipp began to tremble. Then he blurted out, “I’m afraid of Eighteen. It’s the devil. Three times six. Eighteen. Do you get it?”

  I glanced at him questioningly.

  “The apocalypse. The Antichrist. It’s the number of the beast and the number of the devil.” He was almost screaming.

  The number 666 is indeed in the Bible; it appears in the Revelation of Saint John: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.” It was a popular belief that with these words the Evangelist was alluding to the devil.