Marc’s immediate inclination was to hurl himself at Beardie, who was now struggling to apply the cigar-shaped object to Emma’s upper arm.
But in order to do that he would have to get past Ponytail, who at first glance seemed far less muscular than his colleague. This was deceptive, however. Marc was familiar with the type and knew how dangerous such scrawny youngsters could be. You tended to underestimate them because they looked like victims themselves but they compensated for their lack of muscle with self-destructive fanaticism, lashing out at anyone and anything within range, even when seriously hurt.
‘Don’t give me any aggro,’ said Ponytail. He took a step closer, crushing Emma’s glasses underfoot.
Kneecap! The word flashed through Marc’s mind. He raised his arms in a gesture of surrender – he even smiled faintly, just as he’d been advised to by Khaled, the sixteen-year-old half-Tunisian who proudly came to the ‘Beach’ after every street fight to show off his latest war wounds.
Khaled was right. There really was no better target than the kneecap for felling an opponent and putting him out of action. But you had to follow it up at once, while he was still being transfixed by dazzling yellow shafts of agony. Three or four kicks aimed at the jaw and temples. If you got the angle right you might even be able to drive your quivering victim’s nasal bone into his brain.
‘Go down and you’re a goner. Stay on your feet and you walk away’ was Khaled’s first rule of the street. It was a rule that had governed the lives of Marc and his brother years ago, long before they went their separate ways. And now Marc was about to discover whether it was still valid after all this time.
37
The attack was over as quickly as it had begun. Ponytail’s eyes widened in disbelief, like those of a comic-book character registering boundless amazement. To Marc, though, the fact that his adversary had gone down so easily came as almost more of a surprise than it did to the man himself. He hadn’t laid a finger on him; Emma had. Before he could ask her how she had escaped from her captor’s armlock, she tossed him her car keys.
‘Quick, you’ll have to drive.’
Still rather dazed by Beardie’s blow across her face, she tottered round to the passenger side and flopped down inside the Beetle. ‘I can’t see too well without my glasses.’
Marc stared down in bewilderment at the limp forms of the two male nurses, but not for long this time. He shook off his inertia, and a few heartbeats later he was turning on to a deserted Bülowstrasse. Glancing feverishly in the rear-view mirror, he floored the old banger across the intersection into Nollendorfplatz.
For a while neither of them spoke. Then he couldn’t restrain himself any longer. ‘What did they want with you?’
Emma felt absent-mindedly for her safety belt. She didn’t reply until her trembling hands had clipped it together. ‘Bleibtreu. . .’ she said breathlessly, wiping a skein of saliva off her lower lip. ‘Those were Bleibtreu’s boys. . . They were meant to take me back. . . Back to the clinic. . . to delete the rest of my memories. . .’
The clinic? But it doesn’t exist any more. No. 211 Französische Strasse is just a hole in the ground.
Emma pinched the bridge of her nose, gasping for breath. Every sentence she uttered was punctuated by a pause during which she sucked air noisily into her lungs. ‘They were out to get you too – believe me now? We’re both in the same programme. . . Alone we don’t stand a chance, but together we may shake them off.’
Marc glanced at her. She was looking utterly exhausted but seemed quite lucid, even if she did sound like a deranged conspiracy theorist.
But why is all this happening?
If the programme really existed, what memories of his did they want to obliterate? Or had they already done so?
Even attempting to find answers to these absurd questions verged on insanity, so he changed the subject. ‘How did you do it?’
‘What?’
‘Those men. How did you do it?’
Emma’s snow-white teeth flashed in a smile – partly, no doubt, to relieve the tension. ‘I bit him,’ she said. ‘That made him drop his. . . What would you call this?’ She handed him the cigar-shaped cylinder Beardie had threatened her with. ‘Is it a vaccination gun?’
Marc glanced at it briefly, drove through an amber light on Kurfürstenstrasse, and nodded. Anaesthetic. She had neutralized their attackers with their own weapon.
‘I hope they’re still breathing,’ she said quietly. Judging by the sudden note of uncertainty in her voice, she wanted him to say she’d done the right thing. ‘After all, I was only defending myself.’
He nodded.
The end justifies the means. Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing to get the right result.
Marc slowed as they entered the 30kph zone on the bend by the Esplanade Hotel. He hadn’t a clue where they were going or who his uninvited companion was. The impression she made on him was not only increasingly mysterious but ever more ominous.
‘Who exactly are you?’ he demanded.
She looked at him and hesitated for a moment, then lowered her eyes again. ‘I’ve already told you all I know about myself. They’ve already deprived me of the rest of my memories.’
‘Crap!’
Emma flinched as he thumped the Beetle’s plastic steering wheel. ‘We didn’t meet today by chance.’
She drew a deep breath. ‘No, not by chance. I was waiting for you at the building site, don’t you remember? I’ve never made any secret of it.’ She stared angrily out of the window. ‘I’m on your side – how much more proof do you need? Should I have let Bleibtreu’s people kill me?’
Once Marc had turned into Potsdamer Strasse, Emma unzipped her jacket and took a mobile phone from the inside pocket.
‘Who are you calling now?’ he demanded as he sent the Beetle speeding into the Tiergarten Tunnel. A red X warned him to change lanes.
‘No one.’
She kneaded her forehead with one hand and used the other to press the same key on the mobile repeatedly until she found what she was looking for.
‘Here.’
She switched on the dirty old interior light above their heads and held out the display for Marc to see. He was just overtaking a lone garbage truck, so he could only take a fleeting glance.
‘What is it?’
‘I promised you some proof. See for yourself: she’s alive.’
‘Sandra?’
He stamped on the brake and the Beetle went into a skid. It lurched twice and the suspension creaked alarmingly as he overran a kerb and slithered to a halt in the middle of the tunnel, just opposite an emergency exit.
‘You think this is wise?’ said Emma, who had dropped the phone. She had to wipe some mud off the keyboard before handing it to him.
‘Where did you take this?’ he demanded.
‘I told you: I followed you after you ditched me at the hotel.’ She scratched her peeling hand. ‘I took this outside the police station.’
‘Sandra was at the police station?’
Marc held the phone at an angle because the plastic display was reflecting the light, but he still couldn’t see much. The yellow Volvo Constantin was standing beside might have been photographed any night anywhere. The digital time code was registering the hour at which Marc had been inside the police station, but altering a mobile’s electronic calendar was the easiest thing in the world.
‘That is her, isn’t it?’ said Emma, tapping the phone. Marc couldn’t take his eyes off the figure he saw there. The profile, the blonde hair, the slender finger pointing to something off-screen – they all looked so familiar. On the other hand, everything was so indistinct and ill lit, despite the street light beneath which the car was parked, that he couldn’t be absolutely certain.
‘I got there a bit too late, just as your father-in-law was saying goodbye to her.’
Sandra followed Constantin to the police station? None of it makes any sense.
What reason could there be for father and da
ughter to play such a cruel trick on him? In a cheap soap opera it would all prove to have been a plot designed to discredit him in the eyes of a court and place him and his assets under legal supervision.
Except that I’m the poverty-stricken wretch. It’s Sandra who’ll inherit a lot of money one day.
A chill ran down his spine and his jaw developed a tremor.
Revenge, he thought, feeling colder still. If they’re really trying to destroy me, their only possible motive is revenge.
But what was he supposed to have done to them? What inadvertent, unremembered act on his part would justify the unimaginable nightmares to which they were subjecting him?
Have I done something so heinous that Sandra wants to drive me insane? Something for which she may once have wanted to leave me just before she miscarried?
He was about to restart the engine when another equally alarming thought occurred to him. He leant over, grabbed Emma by the shoulder and looked at her searchingly. ‘That file on me you found at the clinic. . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Did it also contain a photo of my wife?’
‘No.’
‘Was she in the Bleibtreu programme too?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Really? So how did you know it was her?’ He squeezed her shoulder harder.
‘You’re hurting me.’
He merely nodded. ‘What makes you so sure it’s Sandra in the photo?’
Emma squirmed in his grasp. ‘You told me about her, and the man kept calling her Sandra.’
‘Constantin?’
‘If that’s what he’s called.’
She put her hand, which felt pleasantly warm, on his. He relaxed his grip at once.
‘What did he say?’
‘They were arguing, the two of them, that’s the only reason I took the picture. I couldn’t catch what your wife was saying because she didn’t get out and she left the engine running.’
That doesn’t sound like her, Marc said to himself. Sandra was so eco-friendly, she even turned off her engine at the lights. He couldn’t help smiling ruefully. For one thing, because he’d often teased her when the drivers behind them tooted her for not pulling away fast enough; for another, because he realized he’d just been questioning the behaviour of a dead woman.
‘And my father-in-law?’
‘I already told you. He kept repeating the same thing.’
‘Which was?’
Emma stroked her cheek in agitation. The skin around her eyes was somewhat darker than the rest of her face, he noticed. ‘He said something like: “Calm down, Sandra, it’ll all be over in another few hours.”’
All what?
Two motorbikes roared past them in quick succession, using the deserted tunnel as a racetrack. Marc scanned Emma’s face. Even though her eyelids were flickering nervously, he couldn’t detect any sign of insincerity. She was simply on edge.
‘That’s what he said, Marc. Then she drove off in a rage and he climbed the steps – went inside the police station to get you.’
I don’t believe that, it doesn’t make sense – any of it.
Why would Sandra and Constantin gang up on me? Why were they arguing? And what will soon be over?
The more Emma said, the more his jigsaw puzzle of a life disintegrated and the harder he found it to tell who was suffering from severe psychotic delusions, himself or the people around him.
He took another look at the photo of Constantin and his wife. ‘Too bad the licence plate isn’t on it.’
‘Yes, I was in too much of a rush.’
‘Oh, naturally.’ He gave a sarcastic laugh and started the engine.
‘But. . .’ Emma delved into her inside pocket again. This time she brought out a small notepad with the remains of some torn-out pages protruding from the edges ‘. . . maybe this will help.’ She turned the pad over and tapped some numerals scrawled on the cardboard back.
B – Q 1371.
‘I made a note of it instead.’
38
‘What sort of surprise?’ Benny asked quietly, and this time it was he who expected no answer from Valka as he walked slowly along the passage. The way his ear was burning, he might have been on the phone for two hours.
‘She’s waiting for you in the bathroom.’
Benny’s terrible presentiment hardened into certainty. There was someone in his flat.
The bathroom door was ajar. He pushed it open and peered in.
‘Jesus Christ.’ His instinctive reaction was to look away, but he overcame his initial shock and hurried inside.
She was naked, fourteen years old at most, and lying motionless in his bathtub. Her arms were folded behind her head and her wrists imprisoned in the far too tight handcuffs with which she’d been manacled to the shower pipe. Her small breasts were dappled with discoloured patches, some of which looked like bruises, others like burns. Issuing from between her legs, which were shackled together by the ankles, a red stain was spreading across the white enamel.
‘That’s Magda. She comes from Bulgaria.’
‘You filthy, fucking psychopath.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
Benny felt her pulse but could detect nothing.
‘Why? Why did you do it?’ he demanded over the sound of Valka’s laughter.
‘Come, come! I had nothing to do with it. It was an accident. These things happen when my friends indulge in a little horseplay.’
‘Why?’ Benny yelled the word louder still.
He touched her thin face and began to weep, ran his forefinger over her split lips and sensed, with every fibre of his being, the mental and physical torment this girl must have endured in the last few days of her wretched existence.
Valka, by contrast, sounded quite unconcerned.
‘She’s my insurance, just in case you imagine you can somehow pin that muck-raking journalist’s death on me. It won’t be so easy when they find the girl at your place. That is, unless you think the public prosecutor condones serial murder?’
Benny buried his face in his hands, breathing spasmodically. His fingers – the fingers that had just touched Magda – seemed to smell of death. The fact that he knew her name made everything even worse.
‘In half an hour I’m going to call the police,’ Valka went on, ‘so you’d better hit the road as soon as possible. Because, believe me, even if you managed to dispose of the girl in time, you certainly couldn’t get rid of the traces of DNA that have trickled down your plughole.’
With that he hung up, leaving Benny in a mental torment for which there was no relief. He sat down on the edge of the bath and started to tremble all over. Afterwards he couldn’t remember how long he’d sat there. Although it felt like an eternity, only a few minutes might have elapsed before he heard footsteps in the passage.
39
B – Q 1371.
There was only one person he knew who could identify the owner of a car without access to a police computer. Marc felt sure that person wouldn’t be inclined to be helpful, for understandable reasons, and certainly not at this hour, but he had no alternative. He could hardly pay a second visit to the police, least of all armed with a request that would only reinforce their suspicion that he was suffering from a progressive mental disorder.
‘Hello?’
He slowly made his way towards the light issuing into the narrow passage from the bathroom door, which was ajar. Every step intensified his sense of déjà vu, leaving no room for any thought of the real reason he was there.
It had been just the same on his last, unheralded visit. He had walked along the same passage and, a few seconds later, discovered his brother’s motionless form in the bathtub. Except that the front door hadn’t been wide open the way it was now.
‘Benny?’ he heard himself call, and was relieved to detect a sign of life. A shadowy figure loomed up behind the frosted-glass door. It grew bigger, and a moment later it opened.
Marc felt as if an unseen hand had t
urned over the brittle page of an old photo album. The face he saw seemed simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar, like a long-forgotten photograph that bears only a vestigial resemblance to one’s transfigured memory of the past. He had managed to avoid meeting his younger brother when he had testified to the board of examiners. Now, for the first time in years, he was face to face with him.
‘Hello, kid,’ Marc said in a voice he didn’t recognize, hesitant and nervous but striving to sound confident. Rather than replying, Benny stared at him in consternation like the woman who had refused to let him into his own flat a few hours earlier. The woman he still thought was Sandra.
Benny reached blindly behind him and, without taking his eyes off Marc, pulled the bathroom door shut. He didn’t raise a hand in greeting, didn’t even brush aside the dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. The hair Marc had envied even as a boy.
Instead, Benny thrust his fists into the pockets of his metallic-green bomber jacket and stared at Marc with an inscrutable expression.
Despair? Concern? Anger?
Marc was suddenly struck by a horrible thought. It seared his innermost self like a stinging nettle on bare skin.
What if he doesn’t recognize me? Like Sandra?
What if none of this is real? What if it’s all in my imagination: my brother, the passage, the bathroom behind him?
He was involuntarily reminded of a short article in a psychology magazine he’d started to read in his dentist’s waiting room. It was about a patient who consulted a psychiatrist, whom he took to be a product of his own diseased imagination because he firmly believed himself to be the sole survivor of a viral pandemic; the last man on earth, who had taken refuge in an illusory world so as not to die of loneliness. This confronted the psychiatrist with an utterly insoluble problem. How did you convince a patient that he wasn’t suffering from hallucinations – that all he could see and feel actually existed, not only in his self-made imaginary world but in reality?
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