‘Russians?’
‘No. Albanians. They get them on the black market and send them by post, anonymously of course, because they haven’t obtained them strictly legally.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Those bastards are scammers. When you order the medicines, they cost less than a third of the normal products, which is why I opted for them. I can’t afford anything else, you see. All my money has gone on alternative therapies. Shamans, gene therapy, miracle healers – I wasted all my savings and hopes on these. But after the first delivery the bastards suddenly demanded more than a thousand euros from me. I don’t have that sort of money.’
‘And so they burgle your house?’
With this question Emma had flicked a switch. Palandt’s good-natured, grandfatherly facial features hardened. His lips turned to lines, then vanished, while his eyes assumed an other-worldly expression. ‘Yes, to collect the cash.’
He raised his right hand and pointed in Emma’s direction. His fingers were shaking like someone with Parkinson’s.
‘The threats were more subtle to begin with,’ he said, upset. His fury at the people who were blackmailing him made him forget his polite choice of words from earlier. ‘Those fucking arseholes continue to send me drugs. The quality keeps on deteriorating. They barely work any more, they just do enough to stop me from kicking the bucket before they get their money.’
Palandt wiped some spittle from his lower lip, then he appeared to notice how tense Emma was. Bewildered and shocked by his sudden mood swing, she was holding her breath.
‘I’m sorry, I got carried away,’ Palandt said, and the anger in him died down as quickly as it had flared up.
Emma wondered whether his illness might have set off a bipolar manic-depressive disorder. Deciding not to underestimate him, she invited Palandt to continue.
‘Well, Frau Stein, what should I say? They are doing all they can to intimidate me. For example they’ll put newspaper cuttings about gruesome murders in a package.’
Or a bloody scalpel.
‘As a warning that my name might appear in print too, do you see? But they’re not sticking to hints any longer. They’re rummaging through my house, threatening to beat me up. I can’t close my door any more, they broke it last time. And they were back there today.’
‘Why don’t you go to the police?’
Palandt sighed feebly. ‘There wouldn’t have been any point up till now. I mean, I don’t know who they are or where they live. Don’t know any names. What could the police do? Keep a round-the-clock watch on the house of a cancer patient? I fear they’ve got better things to do.’
‘How did they get onto you?’
‘I ordered via a Russian website.’
‘And what do you mean by till now?’
‘Pardon?’
‘You said you couldn’t report them till now. What’s changed?’
‘Oh, I see. Yes, the blackmailers made a mistake. They lost a mobile phone.’
Palandt gave a smile of triumph, while Emma’s body temperature rose by several degrees.
‘A mobile phone?’ she echoed.
‘Yes. I found it in the hall. You can get the owner’s number from it, can’t you?’
Emma shrugged. Her right eyelid started to twitch.
Yes, you can. Like a good girl I put in my contact number in case it ever got lost.
She felt sick.
‘Have you informed anyone about the break-in yet?’
To Emma’s relief he shook his head.
‘No. When I found the delivery card I decided to come to you first to pick up my medicines. I’ve got morphine at home, but I’m running out of drops.’
Palandt stood up. ‘Thanks so much for listening to me. And, of course, for the water. And please excuse me again if I gave you a fright by just coming in like that. Oh, would you have a bag by any chance?’
‘A bag?’
Palandt pointed at the torn package.
‘For my medicines. Then I can go back home and examine the phone.’
‘Why?’ Emma asked uneasily.
‘No idea. I’m not really sure yet. In truth I’m not a great fan of the police. But perhaps they can do something if I give them the name of the person whose mobile it is.’
32
Emma had rarely felt so unable to deal with a situation as this one. She wasn’t really tired any more, even though the sleep her neighbour had torn her from had been far too short to be at all restorative. But, just as in Palandt’s house earlier, the fear of being caught had a revitalising effect.
Emma had to prevent her ‘break-in’ from becoming public knowledge. Palandt must under no circumstances call the police. What would it look like if it got out that because of a mental aberration on her part she’d intruded into the house of an old, terminally ill man? Most people already doubted her sanity. Even Philipp had suggested quite openly today that she get some therapy, and her best friend was accusing Emma of having poisoned her.
If her intrusion became known, her reputation would be destroyed for good. And everybody would say that the doctors unwittingly involved in the Rosenhan Experiment would have been better off giving her forced therapy after all. Because she really was a basket case.
‘Are you alright?’ Palandt asked, when she came out of the kitchen with a plastic bag. ‘You look so pale.’
‘What, oh, yes, no, I’m fine. I was just thinking.’
She handed him the bag and he went to the desk while she stayed by the fire.
‘What about?’ her neighbour asked, as the bag rustled each time it swallowed a box of pills.
I didn’t ask him whether he wanted to take his coat off, Emma thought as she stared at his bony back. Suddenly she had an idea.
‘Have you touched it yet?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
Palandt turned to her.
‘The mobile,’ she said. ‘Have you already held it?’
‘I’ll be honest with you, yes. Why?’
‘Well, my husband’s a policeman.’
He didn’t seem fazed by this rather strange answer.
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, Philipp often deals with these sorts of blackmail cases,’ she lied. ‘Usually they’re linked to organised crime.’
Palandt coughed, them said, ‘I can imagine. I bet that those brutes persecuting me are part of an organised gang.’ He put away the last packet and turned to go.
Emma stood in his way. ‘I work as a psychiatrist and sometimes help my husband out when he’s compiling reports, so I know a bit about his work. I’m afraid you’ve just caused a problem for the investigation.’
‘Because of my fingerprints?’ Palandt took off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes.
‘Yes. They’ve got top lawyers, these Mafiosi. They were probably wearing gloves, which is why your prints might be the only ones on the phone.’
‘But that doesn’t matter, because if they trace the number they’ll see it’s not my phone, won’t they?’ Palandt said, but he sounded slightly unsure.
‘If the burglars were so stupid as to use a mobile with a contract. But I’d lay money on it being a prepaid phone.’
‘Oh.’
The floorboards beneath his feet creaked as Palandt put his weight on one leg, then the other. His eyes still looked friendly, but his expression was tense. Standing was clearly uncomfortable for him. ‘Oh well, doesn’t matter. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’ he said, putting his glasses back on and making to leave finally, but she made herself touch his arm.
‘I’d be careful, if I were you.’
He stopped again. ‘Why? What can happen?’
‘Okay. You ring the police, they come by, examine the phone, run a check on the numbers dialled, but can’t prove anything in the end. But because the officers have checked those numbers, you’ve flushed out the rats, Herr Palandt, and ultimately you’ve achieved nothing except for making your medicine dealers even more angry at you.’
>
‘Hmm.’
Her words had hit their target. His head was processing them.
‘Maybe you’re right. I should let it rest; I don’t want any more trouble. Having said that…’ He looked Emma uncertainly in the eye. ‘Dammit! I want it all to stop. They’re bound to come back to fetch the phone, aren’t they? I can’t just carry on, hoping that everything will work out fine on its own.’
‘I understand,’ Emma said, without being able to offer Palandt a solution to his quandary that would get her out of trouble too.
‘Give it to me,’ she suggested, devising a plan even as she was talking.
‘You?’
‘Thanks to my husband I know a little police trick that can tell you if the phone is registered or not. Every manufacturer has a hidden system function.’
That was of course nonsense, a complete pack of lies, but it had the desired effect.
‘You’d do that for me?’
‘Sure.’
I’ll do a few things before you find out who the mobile really belongs to.
She turned to the window, snowflakes were spattering the glass as if it were the windscreen of a moving car. She briefly wondered whether she could ask Palandt to bring the phone to her. But before he could change his mind it would be better if they lost no time.
‘Right then…’ Emma picked at her sweaty and now damp dressing gown. ‘I’ve just got to put on something warm before we go.’
33
Arthur once told her about a weather switch her parents had hidden in the cellar. That was some time after Emma had stopped being afraid of her imaginary companion, not least because he hadn’t appeared to her again in his terrifying helmet. Emma chatted to the voice in the cupboard, in secret so her parents wouldn’t find out.
Ever since that night when she’d seen Arthur for the first time, she’d never entered her parents’ bedroom again. Not even during the day.
Nor did Mama come into her room any more to read her a goodnight story. That stopped the day she lost the baby – for a while Emma blamed herself for this, even though she didn’t know exactly why. Arthur comforted her and said it wasn’t her fault that she wasn’t going to have a baby brother. And he took over the job of reading the goodnight stories. Or at least until one night her father noticed that Emma was talking to the cupboard, and the very next morning arranged an appointment with the child psychiatrist.
After more than twenty sessions her father was pleased that his daughter had abandoned her flights of fancy. In truth, however, Emma felt as if she’d lost a friend. She missed the voice that told her all those funny stories, such as the one about the weather switch that allowed you to change seasons, so that fathers who didn’t want to go the playground with their daughters could switch from sun to sleet.
And because this theory sounded no less plausible than the story of the man with the white beard who managed to deliver millions of presents to all the children in the world in a single night, one day Emma went down into the cellar to look for the legendary switch.
All she found, sadly, was the isolation valve in the boiler room, which is why it turned much colder in the house for a while once she’d successfully turned off the heating.
The weather switch remained undiscovered. Unfortunately. Because even today Emma would love to have something to turn off the early onset of darkness, the frost and especially the biting wind that sunk its sharp teeth into her face the moment she closed the front door and left the protection of the porch.
‘That’s what I call weather,’ Palandt complained ahead of her. She pulled up the collar of her puffer jacket and had trouble keeping pace. Emma couldn’t help feeling respect for her neighbour’s straight back and controlled movement. Cancer or no cancer, Palandt’s former life as an artiste still seemed to be paying off today. Unlike her, he wasn’t shuffling forwards shakily and tentatively, nor did he adopt the cowering posture of a beaten dog against the gusts of snow. He swapped the bag with his medicines from one hand to the other and glanced back over his shoulder. ‘It’s very kind of you. But you don’t have to do this for me.’
Get my mobile back before you identify it? Oh yes, if only you knew just how much I have to do it.
There was no ‘wanting’ to do it, however. It was bad enough that Emma had already exposed herself to the horror of the outside world once today, and she wasn’t thinking of the weather, but the streets, lamps, strangers!
The effect of the diazepam continued to wear off, which meant she was no longer yawning every few seconds, but fear was once more perched on her shoulders.
In every parked car a shadow was lurking on the back seat. The light from the streetlamps illuminated the wrong sections of her route, leaving an entire world full of dangers in the dark. And the only reason the wind driving the snow was blowing so loudly was to swallow all those sounds that could warn her of impending disaster. In fact it was blustering so violently about her unprotected ears (in her hurry Emma hadn’t put on a headscarf this time) that the wind even drowned out the ever-present drone of traffic on Heerstrasse.
They were passing the open drive of a corner house whose owners had wisely scattered grit, when Palandt gave Emma a shock. He turned to her and shouted, ‘Have you been to my place before?’
Emma made the mistake of looking up at him, and so failed to see the snowed-over pothole and tripped. She felt a sharp pain shoot up to her knee, threw her hands up and lost her balance. Then a ring closed around her wrist like a handcuff and brute force pulled her forwards, where she hit something hard that also wrapped itself around her like a collar.
Palandt!
He’d grabbed her arm, yanked her towards him and prevented her from falling.
‘Thanks,’ Emma said, far too quietly for the wind, and far too uncertain about being in the arms of her bony neighbour, whose strength she must have completely underestimated. She felt for the scalpel in her pocket and groaned when she realised that of course she wouldn’t find it in her winter jacket. Now the scalpel was in the washing basket on the steps down to the basement, where she’d thoughtlessly stuffed it in her clammy dressing gown before putting on the puffer jacket.
I’m unarmed, she thought.
And this thought heightened her fear.
‘I think, perhaps, that this wasn’t such a good idea. I’d better go home now,’ was what she wanted to say before turning around and running back.
‘I think… that was close,’ was all she manged to utter.
Emma had tears in her eyes, from pain, fear and of course the weather. She blinked because she was terrified that the water could freeze on her contact lenses.
‘I mean, to my mother’s,’ Palandt said when she’d regained her balance and he let her go, his hands still stretched out protectively, like a father standing beside his child the first time they ride without stabilisers.
‘Did you ever visit my mother when she lived here?’
Emma shook her head.
‘That figures,’ Palandt said, and if Emma wasn’t mistaken he seemed to chuckle quietly, but that too was swallowed by the wind. ‘She’s always been a bit of a loner.’
They walked the rest of the short way side by side in silence, until Emma was standing outside 16a for the second time that day. She went up the covered steps for the second time, and a few moments later saw the inside of the house for the first time in the light. ‘Do excuse me, my place isn’t as cosy as yours,’ Palandt apologised, making to take Emma’s puffer jacket, but she was far too cold.
According to an old mercury thermometer on the wall it was a scant sixteen degrees in the hall. Nor was it better in the other rooms, as Palandt acknowledged.
‘I’m afraid my finances don’t allow me to heat all the rooms day and night. But how about I make us some tea and we sit by the stove in the living room?’
She declined politely but firmly. ‘Have you got the mobile?’
‘Yes, of course. Please wait a minute.’
Palandt put his medicines
on a chest of drawers and went through a door to the left, leading to what she imagined must be the bathroom.
That’s where he’s keeping my mobile?
Emma used his temporary absence to have another look around the hallway.
The post was no longer on the floor by the front door and the coat stand was still empty. As was the stand with the mouthless, eyeless polystyrene head that was presumably for Palandt’s chemotherapy wig.
In the flickering light of the old incandescent bulb hanging bare from the ceiling, the wig stand cast what looked like a living shadow. Emma stepped closer and saw something flash briefly, a shimmer on the otherwise dull surface.
She put out her hand, stroked the rough polystyrene and then looked at her fingers.
No! she cried silently to herself. She hit her chest, rubbed her hand on her thigh, tried again on her coat, but the hair, the long, blonde WOMAN’S HAIR that she’d picked up from the wig stand wouldn’t come off her finger.
‘Everything okay?’ said Palandt behind her, who’d come back out of the bathroom. Emma turned to him, to his bespectacled eyes, his strained smile – and his slim surgeon’s fingers in skin-tight latex gloves, holding a freezer bag.
34
‘I found them in the cupboard under the sink,’ Palandt said, smiling one second, then with watery eyes behind his glasses the next. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sniffling. ‘I always get sentimental when I think of my mother. She’s so far away now.’
He raised his hands and wiggled his fingers in the surgical gloves. ‘Mother always used them to dye her wigs.’
Emma felt like screaming, but fear has its own fingers, which at that moment were slithering around her neck and cutting off her air.
‘Unlike me she likes wearing these hairy things.’
Palandt strode down the hallway to the chipboard chest of drawers, on top of which was the bag. His raincoat crumpled with every step.
Emma recoiled, her hands pressed defensively to her chest, beneath which her heart was galloping with wild hoofbeats. As Palandt was now blocking her way out the front door, she scanned her surroundings for other escape possibilities. Or for weapons to defend against the attack she was anticipating. The coatrack? Too heavy and anyway it was screwed to the wall. The polystyrene head? Useless – too light.
The Package Page 14