The Carnival Master

by Craig Russell

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. There were a few regulars amongst the customers and one of them said: ‘Well done – that’s the way to deal with trash like that.’

  Andrea kept her smile in place. ‘Could you spell me for a while, Britta?’ she asked the other waitress and strode into the kitchen. Andrea swiftly exited through the back door onto the alley. She sprinted along the narrow lane to where a side street ran at right angles to Eintrachtstrasse, then up to the junction with Cordulastrasse. They were there. The girl still had her head bowed while the little shit berated her loudly about something. Their body language, his aggressive, hers submissive, expressed to the world the whole dynamic of their relationship; and Andrea could see that violence played a part in it. There were hardly any other pedestrians and only a few cars passed along the slushy-wet road, with the sound of waves on a shore. Andrea ducked back around the corner. The cold air turned the skin of her salon-tanned naked arms into gooseflesh. But inside the rage still burned.

  The man was too busy shouting abuse at the girl to notice Andrea blocking his way. He looked startled as she grabbed the front of his coat and dragged him into the side street.

  ‘What did you call me?’ Her face hardened into sinew under the make-up. He didn’t answer and she slammed him hard against the brickwork. ‘I said: what the fuck did you call me?’

  ‘I … I …’ The little shit’s expression betrayed his fear and confusion.

  Andrea looked at his pasty, acne-covered face. Deep inside her, someone opened the door of the blast furnace of her hate. It surged up in her, white-hot. Her forehead slammed into his face and she felt his nose break. She let him go and he stared at her wildly, his face covered in blood. Andrea took advantage of his shock and slammed a boot hard into his groin. Gasping and retching, he sunk to his knees, clutching his crushed testicles. Andrea turned to the girl. She was staring, horrified, at her boyfriend as he keeled over and lay on his side on the pavement. Mouth open, a strangled scream in her throat, her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘You’re worse than him,’ Andrea spoke to the girl in a disgusted tone. ‘You’re worse for playing the victim. For putting up with it. I despise you. I despise all women like you. Why do you let him treat you like that … in public? Have you no self-respect?’

  The girl was still staring at her boyfriend. Shock and fear on her face. Andrea snorted, turned on her heel and strode back towards the café. As she did so, the girl’s shrill screaming rang in her ears: ‘You freak! You sick fucking FREAK!’

  4.

  Maria sat on the edge of the hotel bed and assessed her plan: she knew that the only way to conquer chaos was to have a plan.

  The idea had come to her when Liese had phoned her just after all the trouble with Frank. Liese was an old school friend from Hanover with whom Maria had kept in touch. She knew all about Maria’s problems and had always been supportive. Liese had offered Maria a chance to get away from it all: to come and spend a few days with her in Cologne. Maria had thanked her but had said no. She would need more than a short break in Cologne for what she had planned. Then it had all come together: Liese had phoned Maria and told her that work meant that she had to go to Japan for three months. The opportunity had come up unexpectedly and had caught Liese somewhat on the hop and she was worried about her flat lying empty. Maria would be doing her a favour if she stayed in the flat. Liese knew that Maria needed a change of scene, so the arrangement seemed ideal. But Liese had found it a little strange when Maria asked her to tell only her immediate neighbours about the arrangement, and even then only to give them Maria’s first name.

  ‘I need to be anonymous for a while,’ Maria had explained. The flat was in the Belgian Quarter near one of the gates that were remnants of Cologne’s old city wall. Liese had told Maria that the Dresslers, the only neighbours on the same floor, were a young professional couple without kids who were out at work all day and were also often out in the evening. There were a couple of families on the floor below and on the ground floor there was a younger man whom Liese never really ran into, as well as another young professional couple. It was perfect. But it would not be enough on its own: she would need more than one safe house. In any case, Liese would not be leaving until the end of the week. Maria had decided to check into the budget hotel for a few days. She might even keep the hotel room for a while after she moved into the flat.

  She took her laptop from her briefcase.

  Sitting on the bed, Maria opened up the files she had accessed from the BKA database before she took her sick leave. There had been a limit to what her clearance as a Hamburg Murder Commission detective had allowed her to access and the information was general, but there were enough pieces of the picture to give her a starting point. She had even endured a lunch appointment with a woman she had been at the Landespolizeischule academy with and who was now a hotshot with the BKA Federal Crime Bureau. Maria had noticed the look of alarm on her table companion’s face when she saw how changed Maria was. Maria had been able to establish the existence of a much more detailed dossier on Vitrenko, but then the BKA woman had become reluctant to discuss it further. Maria suspected that she had become concerned about Maria’s state of mind.

  Maria knew she was not well. It had only been after several sessions with Dr Minks that she had come to recognise that her behaviour had become odd; that she had slipped into a world of bizarre rituals and obsessions, one laid over the other and obscuring her view of what was normal in life. Since the stabbing she had struggled most with aphenphosmphobia, a morbid fear of physical contact with other human beings. Since the affair with Frank she had suffered a severe depression and had developed an eating disorder. Now, Maria could barely look at herself in a mirror without a sense of revulsion. But she did look in a mirror often: she would strip naked and stand before a full-length glass for an hour, her self-loathing intense and vast. She would look at herself and despise the flesh of which she was composed. And, most of all, she would stare at her image and wish she could be someone else. Anyone else. It was all part of the mental chaos through which she had to stumble just to get through each day. But enough of the old Maria, the organised, meticulous, efficient Maria had still been there for her to assemble her own detailed dossier before she took her sick leave.

  It had been the day she had heard that the Ukrainian investigator Turchenko had been killed in a road crash that she had decided to gather all the information she could on Vitrenko and his organisation. Turchenko, a quiet, polite, highly intelligent lawyer turned investigator, had passed though Hamburg while on the trail of Vasyl Vitrenko. Turchenko had asked Maria to describe in detail the events that had led up to Vitrenko stabbing her. She had tried to explain to the Ukrainian detective, as she had tried to explain to the counsellors and psychologists after the event, that what had really destroyed any feeling of self-worth that she might have had was the way Vitrenko had not intended to kill her. Instead, he had used his expertise to place the knife where it would leave her hanging onto life by a thread. All Maria had represented to Vitrenko was a delaying tactic. Vitrenko had known that by leaving Maria alive but critically wounded Fabel would have to give up his pursuit. She had been used. Her body had been defiled by Vitrenko just as if she had been raped by him.

  And now Maria couldn’t stand the sight of her own flesh, or the touch of others. The therapy hadn’t helped. Talk. Maria wasn’t someone who believed you could solve things by talking them to death.

  Maria knew that, comprehensive as it was, the information she had compiled was not complete. She felt frustrated at the idea that, right now, there was a secret investigation going on that involved a number of Federal and local law-enforcement agencies. It had been brought to her attention when she had been reprimanded by the BKA in the presence of Fabel and Criminal Director van Heiden. Maria had been photographed by their surveillance operation talking to key figures. She had, they said, seriously compromised the operation. Maria had gained the partial trust of a young Russian prostitute wo
rking the rougher end of the Hamburg trade. Nadja had given Maria information and had disappeared immediately afterwards. The BKA had made a point of highlighting that Maria’s clumsiness had probably cost Nadja her life.

  But she wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. Maria knew that the surveillance operation was probably still active, but this time she would work around it. Large police operations like that always looked at the bigger picture, building connections, establishing command structures, identifying key locations; hundreds of experts working on the detail while the investigative management stood back to see the whole. But the core of Vitrenko’s operations was people trafficking. These weren’t stolen cars, the licence numbers of which could be logged and filed. These were people and at the heart of each statistic lay a human tragedy. That would be Maria’s way in. To start with the victims and work back. And because she was here unofficially – without authority or even legitimacy – she could work with the gloves off. It was something she had to do alone, but she found herself wishing that Anna Wolff was there. Anna was no great lover of rules, but Fabel and Werner were both sticklers for procedure. Anna would be willing to break heads and bend rules; Maria was going to have to work the same way.

  Maria placed her SIG-Sauer service automatic on the bed next to the laptop. And then the other gun: a 9mm Glock 26 Compact. Maria had studied law before becoming a police officer, all set for a high-flying career. The law had been everything to her, the thread that held the fabric of society together, that gave order to the world. In obtaining this other gun she had, for the first time in her life, broken the law. Maria was still a police officer. It would be her training and skills that would lead her to Vitrenko. But then … then, if she were to get that far alive, it would be the Glock in her hand. Maria had no intention of arresting him.

  She went through the files on her computer again. The Farmers’ Market: that was what the organised sale of humans from Ukraine, Russia, Poland and elsewhere in the East was called. Not a title invented by the investigators, but the name given it by the criminals who organised it. A fitting title for the sale of people as meat. She opened up a spreadsheet document on which she had plotted all the salient points of the investigation. It was a view of a torn spider’s web: as many connections missing as there were present. There was practically nothing for Maria to go on. Vitrenko’s organisation was supremely well constructed: layers of management and production, just like any corporate structure, but engineered in such a way that each level operated without knowledge of who was on the tier above or below. Even on the same organisational level, ‘cells’ often operated without knowledge of each other. Each cell was led by a pakhan, or boss, who took his orders from a ‘brigadier’ who ran as many as ten pakhans. The foot soldiers never knew who the ‘brigadier’ was who transmitted their orders to them through their pakhan. Added to this was the use of freelance specialists who were not full-time members of the organisation and who were often not Ukrainian or Russian. In this way, the Ukrainian Mafia had a completely different form from the Italian Mafia. It was also infinitely more difficult to investigate and prosecute than its Italian counterpart.

  But Maria didn’t need to find evidence. She wasn’t interested in building a case. All she wanted to do was find Vitrenko.

  Maria laid another file next to the other items. A face looked out from a military service photograph. Colonel Vasyl Vitrenko, formerly of the Berkut counter-terrorist Spetsnaz. Maria had stared at this face so often, so intensely, that it should have lost its power to churn her gut. It hadn’t. Every time she looked at the bright green Ukrainian eyes, the high, broad cheekbones and wide forehead framed by thick butter-blond hair, she felt a twinge in her chest, just below the breastbone. Where her scar was.

  Of course, Vitrenko would probably look nothing like that now. Turchenko, the investigator who had been killed on his way to Cologne, had been certain that Vitrenko would have changed his appearance radically, probably by cosmetic surgery.

  ‘But you can’t change those,’ Maria said to the photograph. ‘You can’t change your eyes.’

  5.

  The bar was dimly lit and Annett Louisan played in the background. The décor was conspicuously trendy, the clientele well heeled and the drinks expensive. Oliver realised that this was going to cost him a fortune before they had even left the bar. He sat on a bar stool, leaning on the counter, drinking a cocktail made with white rum and looking at his reflection in the smoked-glass mirror behind the bar. He smiled a knowing smile to himself. Things were never what they seemed to be; people were never who they seemed to be. Oliver was handsome; his clothes were as trendy and expensive as any in the bar; he certainly was intelligent, highly educated; he was a respected professional with an excellent income; and since he’d arrived in the bar he had caught the eye of several attractive women. If anyone knew that he was here to meet a professional companion, they would have found it difficult to understand. But Oliver understood. And he was quite comfortable with the reasons why he found himself in a situation like this. His needs were so specific.

  He reflected on this for a moment as Annett Louisan held a particularly breathy note in the background. Oliver had never had to spend anguished hours trying to isolate some subliminally erotic encounter that would explain his ‘predilection’. It was all so classically Freudian: involving, as it did, a female cousin, a particularly languorous summer by the sea, and a singular moment in which his understanding of what it was to be a creature of flesh had been born.

  Oliver’s cousin Sylvia was two years older than him. She had always been there somewhere in the background of the family landscape but, because his uncle and aunt lived far out in the country near the coast, she had not figured much in his early consciousness. Oliver’s first real awareness of Sylvia had been an awareness of her curves; when he’d been fourteen and she sixteen. Sylvia’s figure had been full but not fat: she was voluptuous but firm, sturdily, lithely athletic. She was the daughter of Oliver’s mother’s brother, but she had borne no resemblance to their side of the family: she had had her mother’s red-blonde hair and freckled skin. Sylvia had always been an outdoor girl. Adventurous, robust; but even at sixteen too charged with feminine sexuality ever to be considered a tomboy. Despite her being naturally pale, Sylvia’s complexion had been burnished a light gold-bronze and the freckles darkened by long summers under the seaside sun. More than anything else, Oliver remembered her figure: perfectly rounded breasts and, most of all, her big, beautiful, glorious bottom.

  There had been a group of them that day, including Oliver’s younger brother and sister and Sylvia’s three giggling, stupid sisters. Oliver had been annoyed that so many other younger children had come along. Instinct told him that he needed to be alone with Sylvia, without telling him what he actually should do if they did find themselves alone.

  It had all happened during a family holiday far up in northern Germany: a shoulder of land near Stufhusen separated the exposed western shore from the Wattenmeer mudflats and a broad, sweep of golden sand scythed into the North Sea and sparkled under a cloudless sky. It was an idyll for a child: an environment almost empty of people and consequently without the interference of grown-ups, the houses scattered across the low, flat landscape.

  There was, perfectly for children hungry for adventure, one source of menace. At the far end of the beach an old house with a vast thatched roof stood elevated on the dyke. This was where the ‘Old Nazi’ lived: a cantankerous old man whose rejection of contact with his neighbours bordered on being a hermit. He was certainly old enough to have been in the war – and in the Nazi Party – but the epithet of ‘the Old Nazi’ had been given him by one of Sylvia’s younger sisters after overhearing her parents describing the recluse as such. From this unsubstantiated snippet, the children had built an entire history for the old man, including a rationale for his anti-social attitude: he was, they had worked out, hiding from Nazi-hunters who had scoured the globe for him, from Sweden to Brazil. He sat sullenly, they had
decided, under a tattered and dusty photograph of Adolf Hitler and waited for the Israeli snatch-squad to break down his door and whisk him off, drugged and in a cargo crate with a Tel-Aviv dispatch note on it. The old man himself did not seem to represent that much of a threat, but the danger lay in his dogs: two snarling, barking beasts, one an Alsatian, the other a Dobermann, who kept anyone who wandered too close to the house at bay.

  All this mystery and menace, of course, gave the old house at the far end of the beach an irresistible attraction for the children, who would taunt ‘the Old Nazi’ and his dogs with their presence. After the incident on the beach, there had been accusations that ‘the Old Nazi’ had deliberately let his dogs loose, commanding them to attack, probably in the same way he had ordered his men on the Russian Front. The truth was a little more prosaic.

  There was a small nick in the dyke, where a finger of sand penetrated the rough reeds and grass and offered a little shelter from the brisk sea breeze. The smaller children had been playing down by the water, building sandcastles. Sylvia’s nascent feminine intuition had clearly picked up on Oliver’s interest in her body, and she had been doing her best to taunt him with it. She had encouraged him to come and splash around in the water. He had been reluctant at first but she had made a pout that had given him a tingle down below. The water made Sylvia’s T-shirt cling revealingly to her breasts and the white cotton shorts cleaved to her ample backside. After a few minutes she complained that it was too cold and ran back to the nick in the dyke. It had taken Oliver a while to follow as he waited for his erection to subside even a little. In the end he had walked, his hands clasped in front of his groin as casually as he could manage, to join Sylvia. She was sitting, leaning back on her elbows and arching her back as she let the sun play on her face. Oliver looked at her, savouring every curve, every swell of firm flesh. She turned to him and looked down at his groin. Wordlessly, she placed her hand on where his erection protested against its confinement by his shorts.