The Child

by Sebastian Fitzek

  The bridge is the key. I must find it.

  He was about to share that thought with Borchert and Carina when Simon’s foot began to twitch uncontrollably.

  10

  ‘Stop!’ Stern shouted to Borchert. ‘Pull over!’

  Still on the motorway, they were just passing the broad expanse of Tempelhof Airport.

  ‘Why, what … Oh, shit!’ Borchert had only glanced over his shoulder, but he realized immediately why he was getting nudged in the back through the seat. Simon was having a fit. Although Stern was bearing down on his leg as hard as he could, it kept lashing out. At the same time, the boy was rolling his eyes like a madman.

  ‘I’ll pull on to the hard shoulder,’ said Borchert, signalling right.

  ‘No, don’t do that!’

  Carina unbuckled her seat belt and climbed over the passenger seat into the back. Stern was concentrating so hard on Simon, he scarcely noticed at first. The boy’s convulsions were steadily intensifying. His lips were blowing frothy bubbles and his head was shaking so violently to and fro that his wig had slipped sideways. ‘Move over,’ said Carina, not waiting for Stern to react, just squeezing in between him and Simon. She ended up half on his lap.

  ‘My bag,’ she hissed. ‘I need my goddamned … thanks.’

  Borchert passed it back to her. She unzipped it, took out another bag about the size of a sponge bag, and rummaged around inside it.

  Stern looked surprised. ‘Why don’t we pull over?’

  ‘Park on the hard shoulder in a stolen car? What do you think?’

  Carina had found a disposable syringe in the medicine bag. She removed the protective cap with her teeth and spat it into the footwell. Then she took out a little glass bottle, shook it and turned it upside down. Finally, she inserted the needle through the seal.

  ‘Let’s keep going, it’s less conspicuous.’

  Borchert nodded. He had ‘borrowed’ the Mercedes estate from the Titanic’s underground car park, and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that its owner had already notified the police.

  ‘Less conspicuous?’ Stern said excitedly. ‘You mean you’re prepared to let the boy die rather than risk arrest?’

  ‘Robert?’ Carina removed the syringe, now full, and held it up in front of his nose.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  She pinned Simon’s head back against the head rest with the flat of her hand and deftly squirted the contents of the syringe into the right-hand side of his mouth. He quietened within seconds, as if she had pulled out an invisible electric plug. His foot stopped twitching, his eyes closed, his breathing steadied. Another minute, and the exhausted boy fell asleep in Carina’s arms.

  ‘This is crazy. It’s got to stop.’ Borchert was still making no attempt to pull up, so Stern had climbed up front, hoping to get to grips with the situation from the passenger seat. ‘Take the next exit. The boy’s in urgent need of medical assistance. He belongs in a hospital, not in this nightmare.’

  ‘Oh yes? Why?’

  ‘Why? Are you blind? You saw him yourself—’

  ‘Know what I hate about you smart-arse lawyers?’ Carina broke in. ‘You’re always shooting your mouth off about things you don’t understand. This was a straightforward epileptic fit. Not nice, but it doesn’t call for intensive care. Simon should have been given his carbamazepine a bit sooner, then he wouldn’t have needed this emergency treatment.’

  ‘What are you talking about? The question isn’t what he had but why he had it. There’s a tumour growing inside his skull. You don’t go running around zoos with that, let alone digging up dead bodies.’

  ‘You’re talking bullshit again. You don’t know the first thing about Simon’s condition. Simon has a frontal lobe tumour, but that doesn’t mean he needs medical supervision 24/7. He gets that only when he’s undergoing chemo or radiotherapy. He spends only two weeks out of six at the hospital. If Professor Müller wasn’t currently re-reassessing him with a view to the possibility of resuming radiotherapy, he’d be living in a normal children’s home.’

  ‘Even that would be better than racing around from one place to the next.’

  Borchert had suggested spending the night at a club belonging to another acquaintance of his, which, he claimed, had a secret back room that would elude the most rigorous police raid.

  ‘Know what Simon would say to us if he was awake?’ Stern said angrily. ‘He’d tell us to leave him alone.’

  Carina shook her head vigorously. ‘On the contrary, he’d say don’t leave me alone. He doesn’t like the nights, I know because he told me. He gets scared, not only at the children’s home but at the hospital as well. You saw how happy he was earlier on. At the zoo, in the car, dancing, and so on.’

  ‘He has also wept, seen dead bodies and had convulsions.’

  ‘He suffers from those anyway. We can alleviate them by being with him when he wakes up. Besides, Robert, you seem to have forgotten something. This is about Simon first and foremost, not about you and Felix. The boy is going to die, and I don’t want him dying in the belief that he’s a murderer, understand? That’s why I got in touch with you. We can’t stop him dying, but we can relieve him of his feelings of guilt. You’ve no idea how sensitive he is. It genuinely torments him to think that he has harmed someone. After all the shit he’s had to take in the course of his brief life, he simply doesn’t deserve that.’

  Stern stared through the windscreen, at a loss as to how to reply. Fundamentally, Carina had come to the same conclusion as he had. Futile though it seemed to run from the police with a cancer-ridden child in the hope of getting to the bottom of his reincarnation fantasies, turning themselves in seemed equally pointless. Engler would question them all for hours and remand them in custody. He certainly wouldn’t believe their story or try to prevent a possible confrontation between two murderers on some bridge or other. Besides, Berlin had more bridges than Venice.

  Whatever crime was committed at 6 a.m. in two days’ time, it would happen unobserved. If they were separated from Simon and his mysterious knowledge, Stern would neither be able to prevent that crime nor ever learn what had happened to Felix in the neonatal ward.

  ‘Can you really look after the boy all right on your own?’ Borchertunexpectedly butted into the conversation, glancing at Carina in the rear-view mirror as he did so.

  ‘There are no cast-iron guarantees, but I’ve got everything with me. Cortisone, his anticonvulsives and, if absolutely necessary, some diazepam suppositories.’

  Stern was watching a motorcyclist ahead of them change lanes every ten seconds. He looked as if he was practising for a slalom race.

  ‘That’s not enough, though,’ he said after a while. He raised his arms and clasped them behind his head.

  ‘Why not?’ Carina demanded from the back seat. ‘He’s got a nurse, a lawyer and a bodyguard at his side 24/7. What more does he need?’

  ‘You’ll soon see.’

  Stern lowered his right arm and signalled to Borchert to leave the motorway at the Köpenick turn-off. Ten minutes later they parked outside a house that he had never, ever meant to visit again.

  11

  When she slapped his face he knew she wouldn’t turn them away. Sophie’s first blow, a half-hearted push in the chest, had been laughably ineffective. This had only infuriated her more, so she prepared to deliver another. He could have turned away and blocked or at least parried it with his arm. Instead, he merely shut his eyes in expectation of the full-blooded slap that stung the left-hand side of his face from his ear to his lower jaw.

  ‘How could you?’ his ex-wife demanded in a muffled voice. He knew she was asking him three questions at once. Why did you take Felix from me when I didn’t want to give him up? Why turn up with this bimbo ten years later? And how could you reopen old wounds by coming here with a dying child?

  He went over to the sink, held a clean tea towel under the cold tap and dabbed his crimson, smarting cheek. The kitchen of this d
etached house in relatively rural Köpenick, with its homely pinewood furniture, made a totally unsuitable venue for an altercation. The carefree, tranquil atmosphere that Sophie and her family had created for themselves was as obvious there as elsewhere.

  No wonder she hadn’t wanted to let him in twenty minutes earlier, when he climbed the brick steps to her veranda. Borchert had dropped them and driven on to find a bolt-hole of his own. Sophie had hesitated only because of the sleeping boy in Stern’s arms and only for a moment, but that was enough. Stern had seized his chance and simply walked in with Carina at his heels.

  ‘The police were here.’ Sophie leaned wearily against the island unit in the middle of the kitchen, which had an array of antique-looking copper saucepans hanging above it. Stern wondered if they were just there for decorative purposes, but the smiling husband in the photo on the fridge looked like an amateur cook who might know how to use them. The couple probably stood at the stove together after a hard day’s work, sampling the gravy and laughingly chasing the twins into the living room when they tried to snaffle a titbit.

  If for that reason alone, leaving him had been the right decision on Sophie’s part. The only time he’d ever tried to give her a culinary treat, even the deep-frozen pizza had been a flop.

  ‘What did you tell them?’ he asked.

  ‘The truth. An Inspector Brandmann questioned me. I really didn’t have a clue where you were or what you’d done. And to be quite honest, Robert, I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Mummy?’

  Sophie turned to see Frieda standing barefoot in the doorway with a doll in her hand. Her faded Snoopy T-shirt hung well below her knees.

  ‘What is it, sweetheart? You should have been in bed ages ago.’

  ‘I was, but I wanted to show Cinderella to Simon.’

  ‘All right, but be quick.’

  ‘She doesn’t have any stockings on!’

  Pouting, the fair-haired little girl held out her favourite doll, bare plastic legs foremost. Sophie opened a drawer and unearthed two woollen socks the size of finger stalls.

  ‘Are these what you’re looking for?’

  ‘Yes!’ Frieda beamed. She took the miniature socks from Sophie and padded out of the kitchen.

  ‘I’ll come and turn the light out in a minute,’ Sophie called after her. The maternal smile promptly vanished and Stern found himself confronted once more by a face as angry as it had been before the interruption. Neither of them spoke for a minute. Then he pointed to the phone on the wall.

  ‘Call the police if you like. I can well understand your not wanting to get involved in my problems, especially if your husband left on a business trip this morning.’

  Sophie put her head on one side and her eyes darkened. ‘You haven’t changed, have you? You still think I can’t cope without male protection.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t know you any more.’

  ‘So why did you come to me, of all people?’

  ‘Because I’m being blackmailed.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Someone who sent me a video of Felix dying.’

  Sophie’s face seemed to go transparent all of a sudden, the blood left it so abruptly.

  ‘Was that it? Was that why you called me in the middle of the night?’

  Stern nodded. He tried to tell her the story as gently as possible: the DVD, the final shots of their baby, and the anonymous voice’s demand. He deliberately omitted the boy with the birthmark, nor did he mention the threat to kill her twins. Unlike him, Sophie had almost succeeded in crossing the threshold into a new life. Renewed doubts about Felix’s death would send her crashing back into a slough of melancholia and self-pity, and the fear that her little daughters might meet a violent end would have the same result. So he lied to her – told her that the voice had sent him the DVD as proof of his own omnipotence and had threatened to murder Simon if he didn’t cooperate.

  ‘Are you really sure …’ she began haltingly. She was about to try again but stopped short when Stern nodded.

  ‘Yes, I saw it with my own eyes.’

  ‘And how? I mean, how did he …’

  ‘The way the doctors said. He simply stopped breathing.’

  A dark, expanding patch appeared on Sophie’s cream silk blouse. It was a moment before he recognized its source as her silent tears.

  ‘Why?’ she sobbed gently. ‘Why didn’t I look in on him more often?’

  Stern went over and took her hand, half expecting a fierce rebuff. She didn’t pull away, but neither did she return the pressure of his fingers.

  ‘You were tired. It was a difficult birth.’

  Sophie ran her free hand through her hair, staring down at the flagstones. Her voice was thick with tears.

  ‘I can hardly remember his smile or his gummy little eyes or anything else. It’s all faded, like the sound of him crying. Even his smell is gradually fading too. Remember that expensive French baby oil we bought? Perhaps that’s why I refused to believe it. He smelled so alive the last time I held him. And now …’

  Stern suddenly grasped what his revelations had done to her. She had evidently cherished an irrational hope all these years, and now it had been dashed.

  Leaning forward and looking into her eyes, he saw that her tears had ceased to flow. He released her hand at once. Had he held it any longer, he would have felt like a rapist. Their brief moment of intimacy was over.

  Neither of them spoke for a while. Then Stern turned and left the mother of his son alone in the kitchen. In search of Simon, Carina and a place to sleep, he made his way quietly downstairs. He could hear cold, rain-laden gusts of wind spattering the windows. They seemed to herald a stormy night to come.

  12

  The guest room was on the lower ground floor. Stern took off his shoes and lay down fully dressed between Simon and Carina, who were already sleeping so soundly that they hadn’t heard him come in. They were lying beneath a thin bedspread on opposite sides of the big double bed, like an old married couple who had quarrelled and given each other a wide berth before going to sleep.

  Stern was grateful for this, which enabled him to squeeze in between them. Carina tended to roam around a bed while sleeping. Another five minutes, and she would have been bound to entwine herself with Simon and take up the whole of the mattress.

  Although the heating was on, Stern shivered as his mind’s eye recalled the day’s horrific images.

  The body in the freezer. Tiefensee. The graveyard. And, again and again, the sight of Felix dying.

  He turned over on his side and looked at Carina, whose bare shoulder was peeping out from under the covers. He felt tempted to reach out and touch it. Slight though it was, he felt that even the most fleeting contact would give him a sense of security. Her abundant curly hair was spread out on the pillow like a fan. She was also lying on her side.

  He smiled. This was just how he had seen her for the first time: one arm extended, knees drawn up and eyes closed. It was three years since he had yielded to a sudden impulse on the way home to his empty house and turned into the car park of a furniture store. While walking round the bed department he thought he’d caught sight of a remarkably pretty, lifelike mannequin lying on one of the beds. Then Carina opened her eyes and smiled at him. ‘Should I buy it?’ she asked. An hour later he had helped her to carry the new mattress up to her top-floor flat in Prenzlauer Berg.

  Another memory surfaced in his mind: his reason for dumping Carina three years ago. Lying awake beside her after sex, he had experienced how it would feel to forget – how a passionate embrace could expel those tormenting images from his mind and leave him living in the present alone. Just as he had a moment ago, he had withdrawn his outstretched hand because he felt guilty. He had no right to embark on a new life in which his memories of Felix would sooner or later fade like old photographs on a mantelpiece.

  The next day he had taken advantage of some trivial disagreement to terminate their affair before it was too late. Before he lost h
imself in her.

  Those and a thousand other thoughts kept Stern awake for another half-hour. Then exhaustion finally, irresistibly, drew him down into the darkness of a dreamless sleep. He was as oblivious of Carina tossing and turning beside him as he was of the earnest gaze focused on the nape of his neck.

  Simon waited a little longer. Then, reassured by the lawyer’s regular breathing, he cautiously folded back the bedspread and, retrieving his wig from the floor, tiptoed out of the room.

  13

  Something went smash. The sound had to get through two doors, a staircase and some twenty metres of air before, much diminished in volume, it reached the guest room. Stern groaned and stirred. He had only perceived it subconsciously. What really woke him was a constricted sensation. In the depths of some dream or other, Carina had draped her arm over him.

  Still dazed after his far too brief respite, Stern extricated himself from her unintentional embrace. He stretched, his stiff back digging into the mattress, and suddenly froze. Something was wrong. It didn’t take him long to discover what had changed in the darkened room.

  He swung round, jumped out of bed and hurried into the adjoining bathroom. Simon wasn’t there – he’d gone.

  Stern wrenched the door open and ran upstairs in his stockinged feet. He had no idea how long he’d slept for. It was dark outside. No light was coming in through the lattice windows, but that could mean anything so late in the year: early evening, midnight, half past four in the morning … His eyes were becoming accustomed to the prevailing gloom. Simultaneously, signs of life typical of a sleeping household were infiltrating his consciousness: radiators creaking, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room, the hum of the fridge.

  The fridge.

  Spinning round, he saw light at the end of the passage. It was coming from under the kitchen door.