by Martin Suter
He glanced in the shoulder bag. Barisha had lain down, but she wasn’t asleep. Her eyes peered up anxiously at him.
Reber turned around and walked along the narrow path back to the car.
In the distance he saw two figures coming his way. He crouched beneath a blooming lilac tree bending heavy and wet over a fence, and spied through the leaves. A tall man and a shorter one. The taller one had East Asian features. The other was Dr Roux.
He crouched down and hurried from his hiding place.
He didn’t know whether they’d seen him and were now following.
Reber’s excess weight was a hindrance, while the bag with Barisha further impeded his progress. If they were after him, he’d have no chance of shaking them off. His only hope was to remain undetected.
He reached the river path. Reber knew his way around, because he’d often come swimming here as a youngster. He crossed the path and climbed down the overgrown embankment. Stumbling and slipping, he headed towards the river, using each bush and willow as cover.
Behind a group of shrubs he got his breath back and noticed that here the earth beneath the river path had been eroded, creating a cave. He climbed in and tried to stifle his panting.
Footsteps approached quickly then went away again. Soon afterwards came more laboured footsteps and a man’s voice, out of breath, exclaimed, ‘Shit!’ His pursuers had passed him.
But they’d soon realise that he couldn’t be so far ahead of them and they’d come back to search the embankment. It wouldn’t be long before they discovered him. Before Barisha fell into their hands.
He opened the bag, took out the tiny elephant and whispered, ‘Wait here. I’ll be back soon.’
Reber slid on his knees deep into the cave and put Barisha down where the roof and floor met.
He crept back to the entrance and peered out. Far ahead he saw the Chinese man. He’d stopped and was waiting for Roux, who’d stopped running and was now sauntering to his companion, hands on hips and head bowed.
Reber put the empty bag on his shoulder, crept out of the cave and, as soon as he was certain that the two men weren’t looking in his direction, slid down the embankment.
Upstream stood willows, their low-hanging boughs tugged by the brown mass of water. Reber hid behind their trunks and spied on his pursuers.
Roux had now caught up with the Chinese man and they were in conversation. The Chinese man pointed in the direction they’d been running in, while he himself started heading in the other direction. Loose-limbed, he sped towards Reber.
Reber crouched as low as he could behind his cover and waited till the man had gone past.
The two had divided up their hunting ground. Reber couldn’t stay where he was; he was too close to where Barisha was hiding. Faced with the choice between the bloodhounds, he chose the slower one and headed in the direction Roux was going.
As far as the weir the vegetation on the embankment was so dense that he could move undetected. But after that it grew more sparse. Reber could see Roux just before the railway bridge and waited until he’d entered the pedestrian underpass by the bridge pier. Then he made a run for it.
Before he could reach his next cover, however, Roux came back out of the narrow tunnel entrance and spotted him.
Reber froze.
Grinning, Roux took his mobile out of his pocket and calmly dialled a number. While he spoke a few words into the phone he moved towards Reber. He put the mobile away and kept walking until he was standing directly above him.
Reber began heading down to the river again.
Roux didn’t follow him. ‘Go ahead!’ he called out. ‘My friend will be here any minute! He was with the Chinese Snow Leopards, the best commando unit in the world!’
Reber stopped again. He’d seen the Chinese man run. He didn’t stand a chance. He started clambering up the embankment; Barisha was safe for the time being.
When he saw the Chinese man trotting towards him in the distance he stopped. It wouldn’t take him five minutes to get whatever information he wanted out of Reber.
At that very moment his mobile rang and, after a brief hesitation, he took it out of his pocket.
The screen said ‘Kaung’. He answered and said softly, ‘In a cave by the river where the allotments are,’ switched off the phone and put it back.
Now he carefully lifted the shoulder bag, as if it contained something valuable, opened the zip and pretended to whisper a few words into it. Then he went down to the riverbank, took off his trainers, tied them together, held them by the laces and entered the water. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d crossed this river, even with the water like this.
‘Hey! Are you off your head?’ Roux called out.
The water was freezing. Reber held the bag by the shoulder strap and let it swim on the surface as he used to do with his clothes when he was going for a long swim in the river.
‘Hey!’ Roux shouted. ‘Heeeey!’
Reber looked back. The Chinese man was running along the river path downstream. Roux followed at a considerable distance.
The river was taking him quickly. He put the shoulder strap around his neck to free up both his arms for swimming.
He had to reach the other side before the weir.
27
The same day
He ought to have slid down the embankment and apprehended Reber before Tseng arrived. Now all he could do was watch him swim away. With the mini elephant and all his hopes and dreams.
That fucking Chinaman and his over-cautiousness!
Exhausted, Roux ran along the river in the pouring rain. Far ahead was Tseng, the only hope of salvaging the fruit of his research.
Half a kilometre below the weir was a pedestrian bridge. Roux crossed it and took the path upstream.
A soaked cyclist came towards him.
‘Did you pass a tall Chinese man?’
The cyclist shrugged.
Roux hurried on, but he couldn’t run any more.
The path led into a small wood, where all of a sudden he heard someone calling his name: ‘Ru!’
He stopped and looked around. Again: ‘Ru! Here!’
The voice was coming from the embankment. ‘Come!’ it called.
Spying Tseng between the trees, Roux climbed down to him.
For more than an hour they searched the riverbank as far as the hydraulic power station, where they stood for a while, staring at the flotsam in the grille. Neither Reber nor Roux’s dwarf elephant were there.
They gave up and went back upstream to the allotments.
The rental car and Reber’s SUV were the only vehicles in the car park. Notes were tucked behind the windscreen wipers of both cars, which read: ‘Next time you’ll be towed away!!!’
The only option left now was to drive off and keep monitoring the SUV via the tracker.
28
The same day
They were about a kilometre away from Reber’s car, watching for movement on the screen. Tseng thought that Reber would wait until the coast was clear and then return to his vehicle. Roux doubted this. Unlike the man from Beijing he didn’t believe that Reber would worry about abandoning his car with all the equipment. For what were a few ultrasound devices when you had a mini elephant?
Tseng also thought it possible that Reber had drowned. But Roux didn’t believe this either; the man was a strong swimmer. Pellegrini had told him that in his youth Reber had been a member of the national squad. You don’t forget how to swim.
But that didn’t mean the mini elephant had survived.
If it hadn’t, it was vital they recovered the corpse as quickly as possible so that the cells were still usable, i.e. clonable.
Nothing was moving on the screen.
From time to time Roux got out to smoke a cigarette. At one point he went to a nearby petrol station and bought sandwiches and mineral water.
It was getting dark. Perhaps Reber was waiting for nightfall to return to his car unobserved.
But when night c
ame the dot on the screen was still motionless.
Around one o’clock Roux suggested they took turns to keep watch. Tseng went first and was going to wake him in two hours. But when he shook Roux awake it was daylight and commuter traffic was on the road. It was seven o’clock.
Tseng pointed at the screen. The dot was moving!
They waited until they were at a safe distance before setting off.
The dot moved slowly out of the city. Past the former industrial district to the current one, where it crossed the railway tracks and came to a stop on the other side.
Roux stopped too.
They waited five, ten, fifteen minutes before driving to the car’s location.
It was full of parked cars and the entrance was blocked by a gate, above which a sign read: ‘Toptow Towing Service’.
The allotmenteers had made good on their threat.
29
13 June 2016
When he was at his second highest level of frustration, Roux was talkative. At his highest, he was silent. He drove the car grimly and without a word through the early morning traffic back to the river, and left it in a car park from which it wouldn’t be towed away.
Grey rain fell from the overcast sky. They shared the yellow umbrella with the car rental firm’s logo and walked past the allotments to the riverbank. The two men wandered slowly along the path, scouring the embankment with their eyes.
An old man in a poncho was standing by his mini greenhouse, pinching out the side shoots of a tomato plant. ‘Lost something?’ he called out to the two men.
Before Tseng could stop him, Roux said, ‘Yesterday a friend of ours went swimming in the river and hasn’t been seen since.’
‘Have you informed the police?’
‘He’s an excellent swimmer.’
‘Upstream or downstream?’ the elderly man asked.
Roux pointed upstream. ‘Up there,’ he said. ‘By the bridge.’
‘Upstream from the whirlpool of death, then,’ the allotmenteer said.
Roux and Tseng didn’t understand.
The man came out of the gate. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
He walked slightly ahead until they reached a point not far from his allotment, where bushes and willows blocked the view of the river. The man walked on until through the vegetation they could see a small platform and a long rescue pole. A sign carried the warning: ‘Only to be used in an emergency!’
‘If he didn’t manage to get ashore before this point then he’s fish food, I don’t care how good a swimmer he is. When the river rises to this level an eddy forms here that refuses to let anything or anyone go. Many a poor soul has drowned in the past. They spin around and around until they’re propelled here. And then this is where you fish them out.’
Roux and Tseng stared at the brown spume from which a piece of driftwood, a car tyre and a mangled shopping trolley kept bobbing up then disappearing again.
‘If I were you, I’d notify the police,’ the old man advised them, before returning to his tomatoes.
The two men kept staring at the eddy. ‘Shit!’ Roux cursed.
Tseng took the rescue pole from the hooks and plunged it into the whirlpool.
The car tyre almost knocked the pole from his hand, then vanished again.
Tseng kept prodding about. The hook at the end of the pole got caught in the shopping trolley. He almost lost his balance and Roux hurried to his assistance. Combining forces they managed to haul their catch ashore.
A knot of twigs and rubbish had got caught round the shaft. Tseng freed it and unravelled it on the platform. The tangle had formed around a pair of worn-out trainers tied together by the laces.
Roux cursed again. ‘His shoes. He took them off before getting into the water.’ He lifted the pole, submerged it as deeply as he could in the eddy and pulled it back up.
‘Hey! Hello!’ a voice called out. ‘Has someone fallen in?’
Roux turned around. On the river path stood a bearded man wearing a yellow raincoat like a roadworker.
‘My dog!’ Roux cried.
The man raised his shoulders and shook his head. ‘Whirlpool of death,’ he shouted. ‘Nothing gets out of there alive. It’s swallowed plenty already. Forget the dog and concentrate on not falling in yourselves!’
Roux ignored the tramp and turned back to the river fall. ‘Thanks!’ he heard Tseng call out in English.
Always polite, this loser.
30
The same day
The more he thought about it, the stranger the whole thing seemed. A friend tried to swim across the river yesterday? In this weather? With the water this high? And hasn’t been seen since? And they’re not telling the police, but searching the riverbank themselves?
Albert Hadorn stood up with a groan. Your back’s going to put you in a wheelchair, his wife had always said. She’d been dead for more than ten years now, while he was still picking snails out of the beds on rainy days.
He carried the brown earthenware dish in which he usually let his potato salad marinate – he was famous for his potato salad – into the hut, filled the kettle and switched it on. The kettle immediately started singing.
Maybe those men had something to do with the two unfamiliar cars in the car park yesterday. One of them bore the logo of a rental company – that would fit the Chinese man. He’d given them a chance, warned them in writing! The rental car had availed itself of this chance and vanished before the tow truck came. The light-grey Land Cruiser, on the other hand, had been nabbed.
Albert counted eighteen snails, a few of which were trying to escape. No doubt word had got around the snail community of the fate awaiting them. He pushed them back with his finger. As ever he’d forgotten to put on his gardening gloves for this task. It was almost impossible to get the slime off your fingers afterwards.
Maybe he ought to call the police.
The kettle beeped. He took it from its base and poured the boiling water over the snails in the bowl. Not especially nice, but better than the methods employed by a few others on the allotments: cutting them with clippers or using salt, sugar or pellets.
He took the bowl outside and tipped the dead snails into the compost. Then he called the police and noted the time.
It took twenty-eight minutes for a patrol car to arrive, its lights flashing and sirens howling! He showed the two officers to the weir, but if the men hadn’t already left before then the sirens would have sent them packing. Unless they had nothing to hide, an assumption he found more unlikely the longer he thought about it.
On the platform by the whirlpool of death lay a broken shopping trolley beside a pair of trainers, tied together by the laces.
He gave the policemen the two car registration numbers, having noted them yesterday for the tow-away service.
One of the officers moved away and spoke into his radio. Albert Hadorn looked at his watch.
It was almost two hours before a river police recovery boat was put out onto the water.
And almost three before they hauled aboard the heavy body of a man in a tracksuit.
A shoulder bag hung around his neck.
Part Three
1
Zürich
12 June 2016
Despite the strange phone call, Kaung had milked Rupashi, but he’d suspected that something bad had happened. The suspicion became a certainty later that evening, when Hans told him at their secret rendezvous that he hadn’t found Reber when he went to pick up the empty Thermos.
Half crazy with worry about Barisha, Kaung spontaneously changed his plans and jumped into Hans’s car.
Brudermatte Farm was in darkness. They’d fetched Hans’s mother, who had a key.
The house looked as if Reber had left in a great hurry. The stable door, which was always locked, stood open. For the first time Frau Huber and her son saw the miniature elephant pen and tiny balls of dung, and wondered what kind of an animal the vet was keeping here.
Kaung retired to the guest room
. He was going to wait for Reber to get back.
He spent the night in meditation and prayer, his hopes fading in the fragrance of his incense sticks.
The following morning he drove back to the circus with Hans and decided to milk Rupashi nonetheless. When he handed Hans the Thermos he made him promise to call if there was any news.
But it was Frau Huber who called, in tears. Two policemen had turned up at the door and told her that Dr Reber had drowned in the Limmat. She was being asked to go to Zürich and identify the body.
That afternoon came the confirmation that it really was Reber. An empty shoulder bag had been found hanging around his neck, which had got caught in the river fall and strangled him. Even though he’d once been a champion swimmer.
Kaung went to Pellegrini’s secretary to ask her what the word ‘allotment’ meant.
‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked.
‘Learn better German.’
He embarked on his hunt for Barisha. In between training and the show he took the train into town and walked from the station to the river.
On the river path he met a homeless man wearing a raincoat like a roadworker and carrying a holdall. He was unsteady on his feet.
‘Please, where is cave?’ Kaung asked.
He had to ask twice before the man understood.
‘No caves here,’ he replied.
Kaung wasn’t satisfied with this answer. ‘You sure?’
‘Piss off,’ the homeless man growled at him.
The following day he had more luck, asking an old man who was working on the allotments. He laughed and said, ‘Caves? They’re all occupied.’
So there were caves.
And he found it the next day, hidden beneath the river path. There were clothes stuffed inside, while dried twigs, grass and leaves lay on the floor. And it smelled of elephant! On the ground he saw dried dung. And tiny elephant prints in the sand! Barisha had been here!
He stayed in the cave until he had to leave to get back to the circus in time.