‘Easy …’ he said. Stefan’s training kicked in and he did a threat analysis. He took in as much as he could in as short a time as he could. The gun was an early Walther P8. Practically an antique. No, the barrel was too short for a P8: it was a P4, the type used by the Hamburg police after the war. Still, it was old and it didn’t look cared for. Stefan wasn’t entirely sure that it would be in working order, but it was impossible to tell for certain. ‘Just keep calm,’ he said, realising that the young man with the wild eyes and unwashed hair was the most frightened person in the room. Stefan thought back to the way Principal Chief Commissar Fabel had handled the situation in Jenfeld. ‘Just take it easy.’ Stefan saw the shake in the gunman’s arm. The red rims to the wild eyes. A junkie. Desperate. Frightened. And Stefan’s training told him a scared man with a gun is infinitely more dangerous than an angry man with a gun. Stefan did a mental calculation of the chances of the gun jamming and, if it did go off, of the junkie missing his target.
‘Stay where you are!’ the junkie shouted at Stefan.
‘I’m not moving,’ said Stefan calmly.
‘You …’ the junkie called over to the Turkish shopkeeper. ‘Fill a carrier bag with the money from the till.’
The Turk exchanged a look with Stefan. He had served Stefan many times before and knew that he was a policeman. The Turk took what money there was in the till and put it in the bag. The junkie reached over with his free hand without taking his aim off Stefan.
‘Okay. Get out of the way. I’m leaving.’ The junkie tried to inject as much authority as possible into the statement.
‘I can’t let you do that …’ Stefan said quietly.
‘What the fuck do you mean? Get the fuck out of my way.’
‘I can’t do that,’ repeated Stefan. ‘I’m a police officer. I don’t care about the money. I don’t even care about you getting away. But I can’t let you leave with that gun. I can’t let you be a danger to the public.’
‘You’re a Bulle?’ The junkie looked even more agitated. His shake grew worse. ‘A fucking cop?’ He snapped his aim from Stefan to the Turkish shop owner. ‘What about this member of the public? What if I fucking kill him right now because you won’t get out of my way?’
Stefan looked at the Turk. He had raised his hands but Stefan could tell that he was more in control of his fear than the gunman was of his.
‘Then you would prove to me that I can’t let you leave. And I’d have to take you down.’
‘With what? You’re not armed.’
‘Trust me,’ Stefan kept his tone even. ‘You pull that trigger and it’s the last thing you do. I’m a specialist firearms officer. I know about guns. I know about the gun you’re holding. When and where it was made. I can tell from the way you’re holding it that you don’t know what you’re doing. And I know that you won’t get us both before I reach you and snap your neck. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Put the gun down. There’s a way out of this.’
‘Is there?’ The gunman smiled bitterly. ‘I suppose by restoring the monopoly on physical force?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Get out of my way!’ He brought the gun back to bear on Stefan. ‘Why do you have to do this? Why can’t you just walk away? Just this once.’
‘Because it’s what I do. Just give me the gun.’ Stefan took a step forward. ‘Let’s end this.’
‘Okay …’ The gunman’s expression seemed to empty.
Stefan gave a small laugh. He had been wrong. The gun was old. It hadn’t been maintained. But it didn’t jam. And the junkie had been either a better shot than Stefan had thought or had just been lucky. The sound of the shot still rang in the confinement of the store as Stefan looked down at his brand-new shirt. At the hole punched through it. At the bloom that spread as his blood soaked into the fabric. A central mass hit. Almost a perfect shot. Stefan’s legs gave way under him. He sank to his knees.
‘Why couldn’t you just have got out of my way?’ The junkie’s voice was filled with panic and hate in equal measure.
Stefan looked up at the junkie and opened his mouth to say something but found he hadn’t the breath to spare.
‘Why?’ the junkie repeated plaintively and fired again. Then again. And again.
7.
Once more Fabel dreamed of the dead.
Fabel had had the dreams throughout his career. He had learned to resign himself to the sudden waking, the thunder of his pulse in his ears, the cold sweats in the night as part of his mental processes. He accepted that the dreams were the natural byproduct of so many surplus thoughts and emotions circulating in his mind: those that he had learned to suppress as he dealt with the brutality of killers and, most of all, with the pain and misery of their victims. It was something he saw at every murder scene. The story. The history, usually written out in blood, of those last violent, sad moments. Someone had once said to him that we all die alone; that we can leave this world surrounded by people, but death was still the most solitary of acts. Fabel didn’t believe this. The one element of each murder scene that burrowed its way into his brain, malevolently lurking there until he dreamed, had always been the cruelty of a murder victim having to share their last, most intimate moment with their killer. He remembered how he had once come close to smashing his fist into the grinning face of a murder suspect when he had boasted of how his victim, as she had died from the stab wounds he had inflicted, had tried to hold his hand, seeking the only human comfort available to her. The bastard had actually laughed as he talked about it. And Fabel had dreamt of the victim the same night.
Now Fabel dreamed he waited outside a huge hall. For some reason he thought he was perhaps in the Rathaus, Hamburg’s government building. He knew he was being kept waiting for some reason, but that he would soon gain admittance. The heavy doors were swung open by two faceless attendants and he walked into a vast banqueting hall. The table stretched impossibly long and was lined with diners who stood and cheered as he entered. There was a seat for him at the distant end of the table and, as he walked past the other guests, he recognised almost all of them.
Fabel felt a vague sense of surprise that they recognised him. Each of them had, of course, already been dead before he had made their acquaintance. Fabel walked past the applauding victims whose murders he had investigated and took his place at the top of the table. To one side sat Ursula Kastner, who had been murdered four years before and who had visited previous dreams. She smiled with pale, bloodless lips.
‘What is this feast in aid of?’ asked Fabel.
‘It’s your farewell dinner,’ she said, still smiling but using her napkin to dab a thick droplet of blood from the corner of her mouth. ‘You’re leaving us, aren’t you? So we came to say goodbye.’
Fabel nodded. He noticed that the chair to his other side was empty, but he knew that the space was for Hanna Dorn, his murdered girlfriend from his student days. He turned to speak to Ursula Kastner again.
‘I kept my promise,’ he said. ‘I got him.’
‘You got him,’ she repeated. ‘But not the other.’
He turned back to see that the vacant chair had been filled. Fabel, in his dream-dulled mind, felt an attenuated shock to see it wasn’t Hanna Dorn at all, but Maria Klee sitting there. Her face was gaunt and bloodless, her smile weak.
‘What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here,’ he protested. ‘These are all—’
‘I know, Jan … but I was invited.’ She was about to say something else when another hollow cheer rose from the assembled guests. The chef had entered carrying an impossibly enormous silver platter capped with a huge silver dome. The chef’s face was hidden, but he was massive, and his huge arms bulged. Nevertheless, it was only the eccentric physics of Fabel’s dream that allowed the chef to carry the dish.
Setting it down as the centrepiece of the table, the chef pulled the dome from the platter. As he did so, Fabel saw a flash of bright emerald eyes and knew that the cook was Vasyl Vitrenko. Maria
screamed. Fabel thought he heard Ursula Kastner beside him say: ‘He is the other.’ Fabel gazed mesmerised at the revealed corpse of a young woman lying on her back on the platter, her chest ripped open and the white picket of her ribs prised open and exposed. Her lungs had been torn from the body cavity and thrown over her shoulders. The wings of the Blood Eagle. The ancient Viking sacrificial ritual that had been Vitrenko’s signature. Fabel, like Maria, was now screaming in terror but also found himself applauding with all the other guests. Maria turned to him.
‘I knew he would come,’ she said, suddenly halting her scream. ‘We’ve waited for him to come for so long. But I knew he’d want to say goodbye to you.’
Vitrenko walked around to where Maria was sitting. He held out his hand as if inviting her to dance. Fabel wanted to get up to protest, to defend Maria, but found that he had lost the power of movement. He watched helplessly as Vitrenko led Maria into a shadowy part of the hall. The woman next to Ursula Kastner was bending down and searching for something beneath the table. She sat up, frowning.
‘Lost something?’ asked Fabel. He recognised her as Ingrid Fischmann, the journalist who had been killed by a bomb the year before. She laughed and made a ‘silly me’ face.
‘My foot …’ she said. ‘I had it here a minute ago …’
Fabel woke up.
He lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He shifted his legs beneath the covers, just to prove that he could move. He heard Susanne breathing, slow and regular in her dreamless sleep. He heard the late-night sounds of Pöseldorf. The occasional car. A group of people exchanging noisy farewells. He swung his legs round and sat up on the edge of the bed, moving slowly so as not to disturb Susanne. His feet brushed against something. He looked down and saw another pair of feet. Black-booted. Massive. He looked up and saw Vasyl Vitrenko standing before him, his emerald eyes sparkling in the dark.
‘Look what I found,’ said Vitrenko, and held out a woman’s dismembered foot.
Fabel woke up. He sat bolt upright, his face, chest and shoulders cold-damp with sweat. His heart pounded. It took him a moment to satisfy himself that this time he was truly awake. Susanne moaned and turned in the bed but did not waken.
He sat still for a long time but found that, when he laid his head back on the pillow, he couldn’t sleep. So many things now buzzed around his head that he could not pin down what was pushing sleep away from his tired brain. He left Susanne in bed, went through to the kitchen and made himself a cup of Friesian tea. He took his cup through to the living room and sat on the sofa.
He had known as soon as he had got out of bed that he was going to read the file. He had known it all evening but had pretended to himself that he could leave it alone. He picked it up. He started to read.
8.
Oliver loved this time of night. The quiet isolation. Cologne glittering against his picture window. He listened to the slightly melancholic jazz that oozed expensively from his Bang & Olufsen system. He leaned back into the soft Italian leather of his chair and sipped at his Scotch and soda, ice tinkling against crystal. It was at this time of night that he could fully contemplate his life: a successful life; a life worth the envy of others; a life expressed through the designer furniture and original art, the twenty-year-old malt and the expensive architecture encasing him. Oliver felt good in his own skin: he had no problems with who he was or what he was.
His feet rested on the coffee table and the notebook computer on his lap. He rubbed his eyes hard with the heels of his hands. Enough was enough: he had spent three hours on the Anthropophagi site. Time in another world. There had been several answers to his personal advertisement and he had replied to them all. But he had committed to nothing. There was no doubt that there were risks in what he was doing: he had always before indulged his little foible through prostitutes. To have a volunteer to submit to it willingly and without reward was something he had only recently considered. But he had hesitated to make any firm arrangements or even to take things onto the next level. Out there in the real world he could cover his tracks. He had never used the same escort agency twice, never the same hotel twice, never anything under his own name. Here on the Internet he had remained without flesh, as insubstantial as a ghost. But placing the ad had changed things. Ironically, here in a universe of codes where flesh was formed from high-resolution pixels, he had become more detectable. He had to tread more carefully.
But visiting the site had served its purpose. An hors d’oeuvre. An electronic appetiser to sharpen his hunger for the main course. The real thing.
Tomorrow night. He had arranged everything for Friday evening. Maybe this was an agency he could deal with again. After all, the company’s name seemed like a positive omen. What could be more fitting than an escort agency called À la Carte?
9.
What struck Fabel right away was that the file wasn’t just about murders that had already occurred: it was also about a murder that was expected. That was of course true of any suspected serial killer, but in this case the Cologne police were not just expecting another murder, they even had a pretty clear idea about the day when it would take place.
Cologne’s big thing was Karneval, the riotous celebration that took place before Lent every year. As a Protestant North German, Fabel found Karneval alien. He was aware of it, obviously, but he had never experienced it other than through the coverage he had seen on television. Even Cologne was a relatively unknown quantity to him: he had been there only a couple of times and never for very long. As he sank deeper into the case in the file, he found himself lost in an environment of unfamiliar landmarks. It struck him how difficult it would be for a unit such as the one proposed by van Heiden and Wagner to function effectively across the whole of Germany. One land, a score of different cultures. And if you considered East and West, two different histories.
Cologne’s Karneval was unique. Further south there were the more traditional forms of Fasching and Fastnacht. In Düsseldorf, Cologne’s great rival, or in Mainz, Karneval took a similar form but never quite matched the anarchic exuberance of the Cologne event. And Karneval in Cologne was much more than a date in the diary: it was part of the Cologne psyche. It defined what it meant to be to be a Cologner.
Fabel had already known about the case. Like all killings of their type, the two murders had all the ingredients of a good and lurid headline. The killer that the Cologne police were hunting struck only during Karneval. There had only been two victims: one the previous year, the first the year before that. But the investigating officer – Senior Commissar Benni Scholz – had recognised the modus of the killer as soon as he had arrived at the second murder scene. He had warned his superiors that another homicide could follow within the same Karneval season, fearing that the killer’s serial offending might escalate. There hadn’t been another murder, but Fabel agreed with the faceless Commissar behind the report that the killer would strike again. This year, during the coming Karneval.
Fabel laid the case files out on the coffee table. Both victims had been in their late twenties, female, single. Their backgrounds showed little commonality. Sabine Jordanski had been a hairdresser. Melissa Schenker had worked from home: some kind of software designer. Where Jordanski had been the life and soul of the party, Schenker had been quiet, reserved and almost reclusive. Jordanski had been native Kölsch, born and bred in the city; Schenker had been an outsider from Kassel who had settled in Cologne three years before. The investigation had revealed no shared friends or acquaintances. No links. Other than the way they had met their deaths.
Both women had been strangled. There was evidence of manual strangulation and then the use of a ligature: the male neckties that had been left around their throats as a signature by the killer. Scholz had explained the possible significance of this signature: Weiberfastnacht was a key date in the Cologne Karneval calendar. Always held on the last Thursday before Lent, Weiberfastnacht was Women’s Karneval Day, when women ruled. Every woman in Cologne had, on Women’s Karneval Day
, the right to demand a kiss from any man. It was also a custom that women had the right, if they saw a man wearing a necktie, to cut it in half. It was intended as a symbol of overturning the traditional authority of men over women. In a more enlightened and equal cultural environment, the custom had become a bit of fun and nothing more. But Commissar Scholz expressed his belief that it meant a great deal more to the killer. He suspected that the killer was motivated either by a psychotic misogyny or a sexually motivated resentment of women. Scholz clearly felt that this view explained the post-mortem disfigurement of the bodies: approximately half a kilo of flesh had been excised from the right buttock of both victims. Fabel could see the Cologne officer’s logic, but thought it premature. He suspected that there was more to this killer than met the eye.
Fabel had lost track of time and realised he had been sitting going through the file for a couple of hours by the time Susanne came through, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
‘I woke up and you were gone,’ she said, yawning. ‘What’s wrong? Another one of your bad dreams?’
‘No … no,’ he lied. ‘Just couldn’t sleep, that’s all.’
Susanne saw the file open on the coffee table. The pictures spread out. Dead faces. Forensic reports. ‘Oh … I see. What’s this?’ There was more than a hint of suspicion in her voice.
‘I’ve been asked to look at a case in Cologne. Just to offer an opinion.’
Susanne’s face clouded. ‘You cannot afford to get involved with another case, Jan. Roland Bartz has been more patient than anyone could reasonably expect. He’s not going to wait around for ever. But there again, maybe that’s what you’re hoping for.’
The Carnival Master Page 6