Splinter

by Sebastian Fitzek

  He turned to Marc with a compassionate expression.

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  3

  ELEVEN DAYS EARLIER

  Some people suffer from premonitions. They stand beside a road, see a car go by, and stop short. The car is inconspicuous, neither recently washed nor exceptionally dirty. The driver, too, is no different from all the other nameless faces that pass one every day. He’s neither particularly old nor particularly young, isn’t clutching the wheel too tightly or letting go of it in order to use his mobile phone or eat at the same time. Nor is he exceeding the speed limit by more than he needs to in order to keep up with the rest of the traffic. There are no portents of the disaster to come. Yet certain people turn to stare at the receding vehicle for some reason they cannot explain to the police after the event. They do so long before they see the nanny warning the vulnerable children in her care to hold hands when crossing at the lights.

  Marc Lucas was another such ‘Cassandra’, as his wife Sandra had christened him, though his gift was less well developed than his brother’s. Otherwise, he might have been able to prevent the tragedy of six weeks ago – a nightmare that seemed to be repeating itself at this moment.

  ‘Stop, hang on a minute,’ he called to the girl above him.

  The thirteen-year-old was miserably cold. She stood poised on the extreme edge of the five-metre board with both arms hugging her ribs, which showed through the thin material of her swimsuit. Marc wasn’t sure what was making her shiver, the cold or her fear of jumping. It was hard to tell from where he was, down here in the empty swimming pool.

  ‘Fuck you, Luke!’ Julia yelled into her mobile.

  Marc wondered how the scrawny girl had been spotted up there at all. Neukölln’s public baths had been closed for months. Some passerby must have caught sight of her and called the emergency services.

  ‘Fuck you and get lost!’

  She leant over and looked down at the grubby tiles as if selecting a suitable spot to land on. Somewhere between that big puddle and the mound of dead leaves.

  Marc shook his head and put his own mobile to his other ear. ‘No, I’m staying. Wouldn’t miss this for a pension, sweetheart.’

  Hearing a murmur behind him, he glanced up at the fireman in charge, who had stationed himself on the edge of the pool with four colleagues and a jumping mat. The man looked as if he was already regretting having enlisted Marc’s help.

  They’d found his phone number in the pocket of Julia’s jeans, which she had left neatly folded, together with the rest of her clothes, beside the ladder of the diving platform. It was no accident that she was wearing the swimsuit she’d had on when she ran away from home that summer day when her drug-addicted stepfather had been lurking beside the lake yet again, waiting for her.

  Marc looked up once more. Unlike Julia, he had no hair left for the wind to ruffle. Not long after he left school his hair had already receded to such an extent that the barber had advised him to shave it off completely. That was thirteen years ago. Today, when his routine was governed by a hundred cups of coffee a week, it occasionally happened that some unknown woman smiled at him on the Underground – but only if she’d fallen for the lie peddled by men’s magazines, which claimed that bags under the eyes, worry lines, stubbly chins and other signs of degeneration were marks of character.

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ he heard her ask. Her breath steamed furiously. ‘What wouldn’t you miss?’

  November in Berlin was notorious for its sudden cold spells, and Marc wondered which Julia would be more likely to die of, multiple injuries or pneumonia. He himself was quite unsuitably dressed. Not just for the weather, either. None of his friends went around in jeans full of holes and scuffed old trainers. But then, none of them did a job like his.

  ‘If you jump I’ll try to catch you,’ he called.

  ‘Then we’ll both wind up dead.’

  ‘Maybe. But it’s more likely my body will cushion your fall.’

  It was a good sign that Julia had allowed him to climb down into the grimy pool ten minutes ago. She’d threatened to jump at once if the firemen so much as threw a mat into the empty basin.

  ‘You’re still growing, your joints are very supple.’

  He wasn’t sure this was true, given her intake of drugs, but it sounded vaguely plausible.

  ‘Don’t talk crap!’ she yelled back.

  He could now hear her even without a phone.

  ‘Land the wrong way, and you could spend the next forty years unable to move anything but your tongue. Until one of the tubes that drains your body fluids gets clogged up and you die of blood poisoning, thrombosis or a stroke. Is that what you want?’

  ‘What about you? You want to die if I land on top of you?’

  Julia’s husky voice didn’t sound like a thirteen-year-old’s. It was as if the dirt of the streets had coated her vocal cords, which now betrayed her soul’s true age.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Marc replied honestly. An instant later he held his breath: Julia was caught by a gust of wind and swayed forwards. She retained her balance by flailing her arms.

  For the moment.

  This time Marc didn’t turn to look as a groan went up from the crowd behind him. Judging by its volume, the police and the firemen had been joined by a number of interested spectators.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’ve just as much of a reason to jump as you.’

  ‘You’re only talking crap to stop me.’

  ‘Really? How long have you been coming to the “Beach”, Julia?’

  Marc liked the street kids’ name for his Hasenheide office. The Beach. . . It sounded vaguely optimistic, but it suited the human flotsam washed up there daily by the billows of misfortune. Officially, of course, the centre had a different designation, but even local government records had long since ceased to refer to it as the ‘Neukölln Juvenile Advice Bureau’.

  ‘How long have we known each other?’ he persisted.

  ‘Search me.’

  ‘Eighteen months, Julia. Have I ever bullshitted you in all that time?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Did I ever lie to you? Did I ever make an attempt to inform your parents or teachers?’

  She shook her head. At least, he thought he saw her do so from down below. Her jet-black hair flopped around her shoulders.

  ‘Have I ever told anyone where you get the stuff or where you crash?’

  ‘No.’

  Marc knew that, if Julia jumped, he would have to justify himself in that very respect. On the other hand, if he somehow managed to dissuade this crack-addicted teenager from committing suicide, it would be attributable simply and solely to his having gained her trust in the preceding months. He didn’t blame people who failed to understand that – his friends, for example, who still couldn’t grasp why he was wasting his law degree on ‘anti-social elements’, as they called them, instead of cashing in on it with some big law firm.

  ‘You weren’t there,’ Julia said sulkily. ‘Six weeks, you’ve been gone.’

  ‘Look, we’re two different people. I don’t live in your world, but I’ve got problems of my own, and right now they’re so bad, many other men would have topped themselves long ago.’

  Julia flailed her arms again. From down below it looked as if her elbows were grimy, but Marc knew that the dark scabs were from self-inflicted cuts. It wouldn’t be the first time a self-harmer turned serious. Youngsters who slashed themselves with a razor blade, so as at least to feel something, were among his most frequent customers at the ‘Beach’.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked in a low voice.

  Gingerly, he felt the sticking plaster on his neck. It would need changing in two days’ time at most. ‘It doesn’t matter. My shit wouldn’t make yours any better.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  Marc smiled and glanced at his mobile, which was registering an incoming call. Turning, he caught sight of a woman in a black trenchcoat sta
ring at him wide-eyed from the edge of the pool. It seemed that the police psychologist had just turned up and wasn’t entirely happy with his approach. Standing behind her was an elderly gentleman in an expensive-looking pinstripe suit. He gave Marc a friendly wave.

  He decided to ignore them both.

  ‘Remember what I told you the first time you wanted to go back on the stuff because the pains were so bad? Sometimes it feels wrong—’

  ‘—to do the right thing,’ Julia broke in. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve had that crap up to here! But you know something? You’re crazy. Life doesn’t just feel wrong. It is wrong, and your stupid bullshit isn’t going to stop me from. . .’

  Julia took two steps back. All at once, her stance conveyed that she was about to jump.

  The crowd behind Mark groaned again. He ignored another click on the line.

  ‘Okay, okay. . . At least wait a moment, won’t you? I’ve brought you something. . .’

  He fished a tiny iPod out of his jacket pocket, turned it up full and held the earpiece against the microphone of his mobile.

  ‘I hope you’ll be able to hear it,’ he called.

  ‘What is it this time?’ Julia demanded. Her voice had gone husky, as if she guessed what was coming.

  ‘You know. . . The movie isn’t over till the music starts.’

  This time he’d quoted one of her own sayings. On the few occasions she’d attended his surgery voluntarily, she had always insisted on hearing a certain song before leaving. It had become a kind of ritual of theirs.

  ‘Kid Rock,’ he said. The opening was far too quiet and would be inaudible over the mobile in any case, thanks to the wind and the background noise. So Marc did something he’d last done as a teenager: he sang.

  ‘“Roll on, roll on, rollercoaster.”’

  Looking up, he saw Julia shut her eyes. Then she took a little step forwards.

  ‘“We’re one day older and one step closer.”’

  The hysterical cries of alarm behind him increased in volume. Only a few centimetres now separated Julia from the edge of the diving board. Marc sang louder.

  ‘“Roll on, roll on, there’s mountains to climb.”’

  The toes of Julia’s right foot were already peeping over the edge. She still had her eyes shut and the mobile held to her ear.

  ‘“Roll on, we’re. . .”’

  Marc stopped singing just as she was about to bring her left leg forward. In the middle of the chorus. A tremor ran through her body. She froze in mid-movement and opened her eyes in surprise.

  ‘“. . .we’re on borrowed time,”’ she whispered after a long pause. A deathly hush had descended on the pool.

  Marc put his mobile in the pocket of his jeans and caught her eye. ‘You think it’ll be better?’ he called. ‘Where you’re going?’

  ‘Everything’ll be better,’ she shouted back. ‘Everything!’

  She was weeping now.

  ‘Really? I was just wondering if they play your song there too.’

  ‘You’re such an arsehole.’ Julia’s tearful voice had become a hoarse croak.

  ‘Is that likely? I mean, what if you never hear it again?’

  So saying, Marc turned and – to the horror of the spectators – strode uphill towards the shallow end.

  ‘Are you mad?’ he heard someone shout. Another furious comment was drowned by a collective outcry.

  Marc was just hauling himself up the aluminium ladder when he heard the impact on the tiles.

  He didn’t turn to look until he’d climbed out of the basin.

  Julia’s mobile phone lay smashed on the spot where he’d just been standing.

  ‘You’re an arsehole!’ she shouted down at him. ‘Now I’m not only scared of living, I’m scared of dying as well!’

  He nodded to her. She jabbed her middle finger at him. A deep sob shook her thin frame as she sat down on the diving board. Two paramedics were already on their way up to her.

  ‘And you sing like shit!’ she called after him, weeping.

  Marc couldn’t help smiling. He brushed a tear from his cheek.

  ‘The end justifies the means,’ he called back.

  Elbowing his way through the electric storm created by the press hyenas’ flashguns, he tried to evade the woman in the trenchcoat, who was barring his path. Having fully expected a reproachful tirade, he was surprised by her businesslike expression.

  ‘My name is Leana Schmidt,’ she said briskly, putting out her hand. Her shoulder-length brown hair was drawn back so tightly, it looked as if someone was tugging at her plait from behind.

  Marc hesitated for a moment, fingering the plaster on his neck. ‘Shouldn’t you be seeing to Julia?’

  He looked up at the diving board.

  ‘That’s not why I’m here.’

  Their eyes met.

  ‘So what’s it about?’

  ‘It’s your brother. Benjamin was discharged from the psychiatric hospital two days ago.’

  4

  The shiny black Maybach parked at the mouth of the narrow cul-de-sac stood out like a sore thumb in this part of Berlin, and not only because of its exceptional size. Monsters of that order were generally to be seen cruising from one government ministry to another, not through the German capital’s most crime-ridden district.

  Marc had simply walked off when the woman accosted him about his brother and was trying to get away as fast as possible. For one thing, because he had enough on his plate without hearing news of Benny; for another, because he wanted to put some distance between himself and this cheerless place. Besides, it was growing steadily colder.

  He turned up the collar of his leather jacket and rubbed his ears, the most weather-sensitive parts of his body. Their invariable reaction to sub-zero temperatures was a stabbing pain that swiftly spread to his temples if he didn’t get into the warm in double-quick time.

  He was just wondering whether to cross the street and head for the Underground when he heard the squeal of broad-gauge tyres behind him. The driver flashed his lights a couple of times, their halogen glare bouncing off the wet cobbles, but Marc kept to his side of the street and speeded up. If his work in the Berlin streets had taught him anything, it was to avoid responding to strangers for as long as possible.

  The car caught him up and slowed to a walking pace, gliding almost silently along beside him.

  The driver seemed unconcerned that he was on the wrong side of the street. The Maybach was so wide, an oncoming car couldn’t have passed it in any case.

  Marc heard the characteristic hum of an electric window. Then a breathy female voice softly called his name.

  ‘Herr Lucas?’

  The voice sounded friendly and rather feeble, so he risked a sidelong glance and was surprised to see that the speaker was an elderly man. He looked well over sixty, maybe even over seventy. Most voices tend to deepen with age. In his case the opposite had happened.

  Marc was walking on even faster when he recognized the man in the pinstripe suit, the one who had waved to him a few minutes ago from the edge of the pool.

  Fuck it, am I going to be pestered by nutters today?

  ‘Marc Lucas, thirty-two, of 67A Steinmetzstrasse, Schöneberg?’

  The old man was sitting on a fawn leather bench seat with his back to the direction of travel. The limousine’s interior was clearly spacious enough for half a dozen people to sit facing one another.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ Marc asked, without turning his head. He sensed that the stranger with the white hair and thick, bushy eyebrows represented no threat. Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t be the bearer of bad news, and Marc had had more than enough of that in recent weeks.

  The old man cleared his throat. Then, almost inaudibly, he said: ‘The Marc Lucas who killed his pregnant wife?’

  Marc froze, incapable of taking another step. The damp autumn air had transmuted itself into an impermeable glass wall.

  He turned to the car as the rear door swung slowly open. There was a soft, r
hythmical electronic beeping, the kind that warns you your seatbelt isn’t secured.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked when he’d recovered his voice. It sounded as hoarse as that of the stranger in the car.

  ‘How long have Sandra and the baby been dead? Six weeks?’

  Marc’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

  ‘Come on, get in.’

  With an amiable smile, the old man patted the seat beside him.

  ‘I’ll take you to a place where you can turn the clock back.’

  5

  Seen through the Maybach’s tinted windows, the buildings that slid silently past them looked unreal, like the façades of a film set. In the luxury limousine’s soundproofed interior it was hard to imagine that real people actually lived behind those grimy walls, and that the pedestrians on the pavements weren’t extras, not the old man searching dustbins for bottles with a deposit on them, nor the gang of truants overturning a bag-woman’s stolen supermarket trolley. There were also some wholly unremarkable individuals battling their way through the rain, of course, but even they seemed to be living in a lost, parallel world from which Marc had escaped since taking his place in the stranger’s car.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, leaning forward. The hydraulic cushions of the ergonomically designed leather seat promptly adjusted themselves to his new position. In lieu of a reply, the elderly man handed him a business card. It was unusually thick, about as thick as a folded banknote. Marc could have sworn it would smell of some rare wood if he sniffed it.

  ‘Don’t you remember me?’ the stranger asked with another good-natured smile.

  ‘Professor Patrick Bleibtreu?’ Marc murmured to himself, running a fingertip over the black engraved lettering on the linen card. ‘Do we know each other?’

  ‘You emailed my institute about two weeks ago.’

  ‘Just a minute. . .’ Turning the card over, Marc recognized the clinic’s logo. Some ingenious commercial artist had woven the professor’s initials into a figure eight lying on its side – the infinity symbol.