He then recalled that moment of certainty, that sense that he had finally snared his quarry, that instance of clarity when it was time to arrest and put the charges to them. Surveying the banality of his surroundings Peters knew today, instinctively, this was not yet ‘Christopher’s’ time.
Siberia was back once more and Heike was shivering as the unforgiving wind from the Urals whipped against her while she stood there as a martyr to her fashion sense in the penetrating cold. The only other living things moving along Berliner Strasse was a scavenging mongrel snorting around the bins outside the shops and a balding, ascetic looking postman dragging a yellow coloured trolley from the end door of the complex in the opposite direction of a dog. Peters tried to guess where exactly any of the bored and freezing marksmen crouching in the bushes on the other side of Berliner Strasse had aimed their red-eye gun sites. The cold-flushed exposed bald pate? The little ‘Bundespost’ bugle sewn into the breast pocket of his overcoat? The flattened crotch that suggested either castration or the tightest trunks in central Europe?
‘Whatever you do don’t go postal!’ Peters whispered down the mobile to the sharp-shooters’ team leader. There was a short burst of sniggering down the crackled line, it was the last thing Peters heard for the next two to three minutes.
Berliner Strasse’s mid-morning torpor was suddenly shaken by a dull, reverberating thud followed by the ripping squeal of glass exploding and then a discordant symphony of house and car alarms wailing and whining. Temporarily deafened Peters could only feel his heart pounding in his chest, his feet pedalling forward as he dived on top of Heike in a belly-flop long jump over the journalist. When he looked up Peters felt Heike’s body beneath him writhing while above the stunned postal worker, frozen in shock, put his right hand behind the back of his head and then brought it back in front of the detective to reveal a medal of blood in the middle of his palm, as if the bald ‘Bundespost’ employee was offering up stigmata.
Peters glanced up to the right where the second floor flat right above where the seedy pub used to be, papers billowing in the air, a column of acrid smoke seeping out into the unforgiving morning air, the window of the corner bar shattered, the old boys staggering forward, chess pieces strewn across the pavement along with smashed bottles, beer glasses and ashtrays.
When Peters got to his feet the postman had fainted and Heike was golfishing at him, all around them armed men and women in green and mustard coloured uniforms running towards the shops, halting traffic, escorting shopkeepers from their businesses; not in slow motion but rather in a velocity made surreal by the muffled temporary silence of Peters’ consciousness. Heike was prodding him in the chest not so much in protest but rather her feeling the re-assurance of human, tangible touch. While above them the charred confetti falling from floor 2 was blending in now with a sudden flurry of pollution flecked grey snowflakes descending through the Berlin sky.
‘It looks like Christmas Heike and I can hear bells ringing in my ears,’ Peter shouted out when his hearing finally returned. For a few seconds he was back in Taceles amid the ear-drum splitting feedback of Vomitorium, trying to be heard above the seething din.
He felt a short sting on his left cheek as Heike swung at him and screamed:
‘Fuck you Martin. Fuck you and your radio silence!’
Uniforms were entering the building out of which poured shaken pensioners and young mothers clutching children in their arms. Peters grappled with Heike and almost struck her back.
‘He’s playing games with all of us Heike. We’re all on the same side here. Don’t forget that,’ he yelled pushing her back onto the pavement.
In front of him stood a breathless Angi, her eyes wide open boring into Peters’.
‘When you two stop rowing I think there’s something you need to see Captain inside the building.’ Peters guessed the collective shock coursing through his team had prompted Angi’s uncharacteristic recalcitrance.
‘Show me,’ Peters replied sheepishly staring now at Heike who was lighting up, stamping her foot, cursing him barely under her breath. He went closer to her and said almost apologetically: ‘If there’s anything in there of interest I can withhold I’ll keep it for you. That much I promise.’
Heike turned her back on him, still shaking, staring at the gathering crowd staring back towards the scene of the explosion, some holding up mobile phones in the middle of the road to film the mini-chaos engulfing this quiet backwater in Wedding.
‘Someone should stay with her,’ Angi said as they stepped over the still unconscious postman, Peters signalling to the uniforms to help him out.
‘You go back to Wams when she disappears. That’s where she’s going, to convince her editor she’s closest person to ‘Christopher’ on earth,’ he told Angi.
Alone, he entered the apartment block and climbed up the undamaged staircase towards the second floor and the blasted open door of flat 2B. Inside lying prostrate between two uniform cops, one blanched with horror, the other trying to take photographs, was the latest target of ‘Christopher’s’ campaign, a pot-bellied man in his sixties with surprisingly long greasy grey hair tied back in a pony-tail. The dead man was dressed in a Levis suit of quarter length jacket and jeans, a stained T-shirt and fluffy Mickey Mouse slippers. Almost of all his body remained intact apart from the far right side of his face which was peppered with smouldering pin-pricks filled with what looked like metal filings and a single nail embedded deep into one of his eyes out of which streamed a red congealing delta of blood.
‘He didn’t die that quickly,’ Peters muttered out of earshot of the two uniforms. ‘He designed it to make him suffer a bit. Broadening the battlefield are you “Christopher”? So be it Tavarich.’
Right beside the victim’s head lay a split open black video box which contained a series of melted circuits and wires and a half burnt postcard from Sri Lanka. Peters picked it up, making sure he used a tissue around his fingers and turned over a fire-scarred palm tree and beach scene. There was no stamp but rather a simple scrawled message on it: ‘A present from paradise.’
Eighteen
Gustav Husak’s last revenge felt like Play Dough but without the smell. Semtex had been one of Czechoslovakia’s few export successes in the time of communism. Invented in the year of his birth Peters later saw at first hand its lethal effects. He remembered a rain sodden miserable November two years after the Velvet Revolution when he had been taken to the wreckage of an old police friend’s car outside his driveway in a quiet, neatly kept cul-de-sac on the eastern fringes of Belfast. Peters had asked to survey the scene just hours after the explosion that killed one of his closest contacts in Special Branch. The memory of that miserable mini-destruction site drove him and his agents on to counter the threat of Husak’s dubious gift to the world.
They eventually devised an odourless substance similar to the explosive that Peters managed to get his informers to replace with the real thing hidden in countless supposedly secret little arsenals across Greater Belfast. Some bombs definitely stopped going off. A few rocket launchers failed to trigger too. So when Angi Domath mentioned ‘Semtex’ in their briefing later that morning after the Wedding bomb Peters felt his blood chilling and it was Stannheim who was, naturally, the first to detect his fear.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Peters’ boss whispered as Angi carried out a verbal deconstruction of the device that had killed ‘Christopher’s’ third target.
‘Just some nasty blasts from the past,’ he replied to Stannheim. ‘When I hear that word I’m back in Belfast during the dark days.’
Husak’s exports kept turning up all over the world even after he and his henchmen had been miraculously toppled from power just after the Turn in Berlin back in ‘89. They were still killing Peters’ friends almost ten years later. Now for the first time since his last tour of duty in Northern Ireland, in the same year his father finally checked out of ‘Terminal One’, he was confronted again by this old toxic foe.
&n
bsp; When Angi had finished her briefing on how the bomb had been built Peters marched to the top of the murder room in Kottbusser Strasse and took charge.
‘Well as Angi has explained it seems our “Christopher” isn’t just a competent swordsman with a powerful batting arm. Our man has dabbled in the black arts of bomb making too. Which only confirms what we already knew – here lies a specialist soldier buried somewhere deep in Berlin.’
Bauer had been busy taking notes, trying to appear assiduous and a little less arrogant now that Riedel was busy undercover in ‘Boyz R Us.’
‘Sir, if I may. Access to that kind of stuff would have been extremely unusual. We are talking about a limited number of specialist units. I have some old contacts in the NVA I could look up. They might pin point who these units are.’
Peters nodded and told Bauer to get going immediately.
‘The rest of you start checking the files, find out if anyone has been done with explosives offences over the last 15 years or so. Keep examining lines on homophobic attacks as well. And will someone please come up with an ID job on who our film stars are.’
Stannheim shot up his hand again: ‘Captain Peters! Have you put an ID to our friend with the nail in his eye?’
‘Yes. We found a passport in the name of Eric Tisch. 64 years old. Single with a lot of entry visa stamps from Thailand on its pages. We’re doing a cross reference on him now to see if he appears anywhere. So far we’ve nothing from the apartment to link him to our two friends but I’m still certain they’re connected.’
‘As for our media management campaign you and I should have a coffee in “Anna’s” later. Maybe you can bring your WAMS’ friend along.’
The old man having fired his parting shot for the day skulked back into his glass cubicle, shut the door tight and dropped the blinds. He wouldn’t surface again until the pub was opened. The boss knew “Christopher” was running rings around us, Peters thought but dared not speak out loud. Stannheim was clearly taking it personally.
‘Angi you do the running check on Tisch and see if anything interesting crops up. I’m going to call Riedel.’
Riedel was barely audible above the mixed din of trance music and the sound of human grunting inside Blucher’s shop; even though it wasn’t yet lunchtime ‘Boyz R Us’ sounded busy.
‘Go outside, Riedel. I can’t hear you in there,’ Peters shouted down the line.
‘But it’s packed in here. What if things go missing?’
Peters was tickled by the idea of Riedel as Blucher’s first line of defence against larceny.
‘You can frisk them if any come out.’
‘Is there anything you wanted, sir?’ Rield asked impatiently as Peters heard the heavy door of the sex centre swish open. Once he was sure Riedel was outside Peters continued.
‘Look Riedel. Is there any re-appearance of any of those old guys who were chatting the other day in the shop about one of their lot being missing?
‘No, why?’
‘Because they might know who’s who. If any of them return ring me on my handy immediately. I’ll come over with the cavalry and take them in for questioning. OK? It’s vital you let me know and try to keep them in there.’ Peters heard Riedel sniggering.
‘That won’t be hard they usually spend an hour in those booths watching the films. I should know, I have to wipe them down afterwards.’
The thought of Riedel wearing a pair of marigolds cleaning up the pools of mess left by the clientele of Lothar Blucher brightened up what was otherwise turning out to be another taxing day. Peters then heard a very loud ‘fuck’ on the line.
‘Riedel, what is it? What’s going on?’
Again another ‘fuck’.
‘Riedel, would you kindly tell me what is up?
‘The old guys you just mentioned. The ones hanging ‘round those pictures of the boys. I’ve just seen one on a TV screen across the street. There’s an electrical shop just over the road. He was in here a couple of days ago, just after those men appeared on the ‘Net.’
Panic was taking hold of Peters now but he tried to sound as firm and commanding as possible.
‘Riedel. Listen to me. Keep a look out for anyone else you spotted talking to him. His name is Tisch. Listen out for anyone mentioning Tisch. And Riedel this is an unbreakable order: don’t open a single package that arrives with the mail.’
Nineteen
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Wedding day
What is it they say about terrorism? That it is an act of advertising. The ultimate in the transmission of messages. I have no doubt that by the time you read this what you witnessed in Wedding this morning will be all over the network news. You have lost control of the story Fraulein Numann. For that I am sorry but all the same you have nobody to blame but yourself.
She had thought about pressing ‘reply’ in the vain hope that he might write back immediately but Heike guessed ‘Christopher’ was back on the move again, all too aware of how easily mobiles and mails could pin point someone, anywhere on the planet.
He was taunting her now. She had had complete control of the story and she had blown it. ‘Christopher’ was no longer her property any more. He was being beamed into every living room, the subject of radio chat shows, the fixation of internet paranoia, the raw material (already) of a screen writer hatching a plot to sell to commissioning editors. So why had Heike Numann agreed to lunch with the man who had handed ‘Christopher’ over to the wider world?
They were sitting facing other, Peters leaning back on the right wall, throwing back a glass of Sale E Tabbachi’s house red. For several minutes since she came and sat down they had said nothing. The restaurant as always was full of journalists many of whom were Heike’s rivals from other sections of the Springer building around the corner.
A print out of ‘Christopher’s’ latest communiqué lay spread out splattered with wine that had dripped from the bottom of Peters’ glass.
‘Struggle first and now terrorism. This guy really thinks he’s at war. Why is that Martin? What are you holding back from me?’
Judging by Peters’ chastised-boy demeanour when she came into Sale Heike sensed she could exploit his need to atone.
‘Ok Heike. Here’s something you won’t read in BZ tomorrow unless of course he walks into their office and personally spills his guts. He was once a soldier. Probably still thinks he is.’
‘Hence the bomb’, she said smiling and poured herself a glass of the supple, light red from the carafe.
‘And the sword.’ Peters said.
‘The sword?’ Heike asked pretending not to be perplexed.
‘That was the give-away. It’s a specialist present for a Special Forces soldier. He was in the NVA, an elite unit that the SUVs honoured with the presentation of a sword. The guy’s got military form from the old days.’
Peters mouthed to her: ‘All that’s off the record.’
‘Don’t worry Martin I never expose my sources. Anything else?’ she said as the waiter laid down two plates of loose leaf salad which Peters started poking at unenthusiastically.
‘Yes but I reckon it’ll be out before Sunday. The latest victim is called Eric Tisch and he has form. My boss nearly had a heart attack when I told him what it was.’ Peters said.
‘Which was?’
‘Which was that Eric Tisch, originally from Cologne but living in Berlin since the early 1990s had two convictions for abusing children, specifically young boys. He spent time in jail over in the west before coming to Berlin, probably to escape local media attention in the Rhineland where he was known,’ Peters added as he tried to attract the attention of a waiter for another carafe.
‘Shit!’ Heike said.
Indeed it was shit. A bucket of shit which he was now wading into head first.
‘Yep. Comes to Berlin to start a new life of depravity and ends up with a nail embedded into his eye. I’ll bet the other gentlemen we were introduce
d to on film are of the same kidney.’
‘So he’s killing paedophiles and you have to catch him. That’s going to make you really popular Martin,’ Heike said, sniggering, visibly enjoying the detective’s discomfort.
‘Stannheim won’t leave “Anna’s” since I told him. The poor man can’t cope with the fact that we’ve a caped crusader in our midst. You’ve got to help out.’
Heike pointed at herself sarcastically.
‘Me? You want me to help you out after denying me the greatest scoop of my career? ‘
‘You can have all that stuff about “Christopher” being a soldier, the sword, the lot. And Tisch’s background if the opposition doesn’t get to it first. But you have got to explain that this guy is out of control and likely to kill anyone that will get in his way. Like this morning in Wedding. There were women and children in that apartment block. He mentions terrorism, well he gets on like a terrorist, someone prepared to kill innocent civilians if they are in the firing line and that is definitely quotable.’
The first course was being taken away, the second carafe of wine delivered to the table with fresh glasses, when Heike finally replied after an unbearably long period of silent contemplation.
‘I suppose you would only go to Littbarski anyway and plead your case if I said no.’
‘So that’s a Yes. There just one more thing...’
The Swinging Detective Page 10