The Child

by Sebastian Fitzek

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, my husband isn’t here at present.’

  ‘I see.’

  They had left the supermarket and were on their way back to the car. Stern had to concentrate hard, or her words would have been drowned by the traffic in Potsdamer Strasse and the noises on the line. The connection was poor.

  ‘But you have what we’re looking for?’ she asked.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Ten,’ said Stern, thinking of Simon.

  ‘That would suit. You do know we’re looking for a child’s bed?’

  ‘Yes, so I read.’

  ‘Good. When can you deliver?’

  ‘Any time. Today, even.’

  They passed the grey junction box on which the prostitute had sat waiting for customers. The scrawny creature had disappeared. She was probably on the passenger seat of some car in a side street.

  ‘Fine. Then I suggest we meet to discuss terms at four this afternoon. You know the Madison on Mexikoplatz?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stern said mechanically, although he’d never heard of the place. ‘Hello, are you still there?’ Receiving no answer, he handed the phone back.

  ‘Well?’ Borchert asked eagerly, but it was a moment before Stern could compose himself enough to reply. He drew several deep breaths.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually, in a kind of daze. ‘It sounded like a normal phone conversation. All we really talked about was a bed.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I sensed all the time that something else was at stake.’ Stern repeated the conversation almost word for word.

  ‘You see?’ said Borchert.

  ‘No, I don’t see at all,’ Stern lied. The fact was, his view of the world in which he lived had just undergone a radical change. At the supermarket Borchert had raised a curtain and enabled him to see the dark side of life behind the stage. That was where people removed their carefully cultivated masks of morality and conscience to reveal the true faces beneath.

  Stern wasn’t naive. He was a lawyer. Of course he was acquainted with evil, but until now it had hidden itself behind writs, judgements and statutes. He could no longer view an abomination of this kind, which threatened to swallow him like a black hole, through the neutralizing filter of a professional brief. He would have to make out the bill for this case himself, and he felt sure the hourly rate would break his emotional budget.

  Borchert opened the driver’s door and was about to get in, but Stern stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘Where did you get your information?’

  The big man scratched his head without removing his cap, then took it off. ‘I already told you.’

  ‘Come off it! Shooting adult porn is far from the same as knowing all about the latest trends in child abuse.’

  Borchert’s face darkened. He got into the car.

  ‘I’ll ask you again: How come you’re so well up on the subject?’ Stern got in beside him.

  ‘Believe me, you don’t want to know.’ Borchert turned on the ignition and glanced in the rear-view mirror. His neck was mottled with red patches. Then he looked at Stern with his lips pursed in resignation. ‘All right. We’d better pay a visit to Harry.’

  ‘Who’s Harry?’

  ‘One of my sources. He’ll give us a reference.’

  Borchert pulled out of the parking space. He kept to the speed limit rather than get pulled up for a minor violation.

  ‘A reference? What the hell do you mean?’

  Borchert looked genuinely surprised. ‘You don’t think you can breeze into that café this afternoon without some form of proof that you’re one of them?’

  Stern swallowed hard. One of them … Nervously, he took hold of one end of his Bayern Munich scarf and tugged, heedless of its increasing pressure on his throat. The thought of having to demonstrate membership of a community of perverts had taken his breath away as it was.

  4

  Hundreds of tourists drove daily through the district where Harry led a miserable existence. They passed within a few metres of his abode, tired after their journey but filled with nervous anticipation at the prospect of what Berlin had to offer them in the next few days. Eager to plunge into the city’s night life, visit the Reichstag building or simply luxuriate at their hotel, they certainly had no plans to make an excursion to the eleven grimy square metres where Harry was waiting for death.

  His camper van was situated immediately beneath the flyover, a kilometre at most from Schönefeld Airport. Stern was afraid the suspension of Sophie’s Corolla wouldn’t withstand the potholes when they turned on to the track that led to it.

  Borchert eventually saw sense. They parked just short of a sagging wire-mesh fence and covered the last stretch on foot. For the first time, Stern was grateful for the boots Borchert had compelled him to wear. The rain, which had started again, was turning the ground into a quagmire.

  ‘Where is it?’ All Stern could see was a chaotic rubbish dump flanked by two massive ferroconcrete columns. The sound of cars thundering past overhead was almost as intolerable as the smell. A throat-catching amalgam of dog shit, rotting food and stagnant water, it grew stronger the further they went.

  ‘Keep going, it’s straight ahead.’ Borchert hunched his shoulders. He had left his scarf and cap in the car, like Stern, and the rain was spattering the back of his neck.

  Stern still hadn’t spotted the nicotine-yellow camper van when a man in a scruffy bathrobe suddenly emerged from behind a mound of old tyres. Somewhat taller but considerably thinner than Borchert, he had clearly failed to notice his uninvited visitors, because he fumbled with his crotch, belched loudly, and urinated over a broken-down armchair with his head tilted back. The rain blew into his face as he stared up at the underside of the flyover.

  ‘You’re up early, Harry.’

  The man swung round. Although they were still three or four car lengths from him, there was no mistaking the look of terror inspired by Borchert’s sudden appearance.

  ‘Shit!’ Harry promptly forgot about his morning toilette. He fled around the corner in his worn-out slippers and made it to the open door of his mobile home, but even if he’d managed to shut it and lock himself in, Borchert would have found that flimsy obstacle child’s play. He could have pushed the whole vehicle back to the main road single-handed. Harry knew this, so he looked suitably intimidated when the two men joined him inside.

  ‘Phew, who’s died in here?’

  Like Borchert, Stern was holding his nose and breathing through his mouth. The carpet must have been yellow when the van was new. Now, the floor and the plastic walls were green with mould. The kitchenette was piled high with chipped plates, dirty plastic mugs and something that might once have been a salami but now resembled an open wound.

  ‘What do you want?’ Harry demanded. He had shrunk back into the furthest corner of the laminated bench seat. Upholstered with old pizza cartons, it obviously served him as a bed.

  ‘Why ask when you know?’ said Borchert, adept at injecting more menace into a single sentence than many a thriller into ninety minutes of screen time.

  ‘What do you mean? I’ve done nothing.’ Harry was breathing fast and trying to make himself as small as possible, whereas Borchert was flexing his shoulders like a boxer.

  Stern longed to get out of there, if only to spare himself the sight of the man’s face. Harry looked as if he’d spent the night face down in a patch of stinging nettles. His forehead, cheeks and neck were covered with what looked like burn blisters. Some of them were scabby, others open and suppurating.

  ‘We’ll go as soon as you give us what we want.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Which of your pals traffics in children?’

  ‘Look, Andi, you know I don’t do that sort of thing any more. I’m out of it.’

  ‘Shut up and listen. What do you know about a baby?’

  ‘What baby?’

  ‘A baby that’s due to be sold tomo
rrow morning – to some sick fuck like you. Heard anything about it on the grapevine?’

  ‘No, I swear. I don’t have anything more to do with that stuff. I’ve got no contacts, no information. Nada, nix. Sorry, I’d tell you if I knew anything, but I don’t. Nobody talks to me since I did time. Paid the price, didn’t I?’

  ‘Don’t talk balls.’

  ‘Honestly, Andi. I’d never lie to you, not you.’ He refocused his cringing gaze on Stern, whose hopes of a quick departure faded accordingly.

  ‘I screwed up. I thought she was sixteen, cross my heart. It’s a long time ago, but nobody believes me. Sometimes they come at night and beat me up. See this?’

  He opened his bathrobe and displayed his chest, which was covered with purple bruises. Stern couldn’t be sure without an X-ray, but he thought he detected at least one fractured rib.

  ‘That was the local yobs. It’s a different bunch each time. Someone told them what I did. They dragged me outside and jumped up and down on me in their boots. Once, they sprayed battery acid in my face.’

  Stern shrank back, overcome with a mixture of disgust and pity, as Harry stuck out his raw, blistered face. Borchert remained unmoved. The man’s tale of woe seemed to have made little impression on him. On the contrary, he smiled at Harry and punched him in the mouth as hard as he could.

  The force of the blow was such that Harry’s head cannoned into the plastic wall and left a dent in it.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Harry whimpered, spitting out a bloodstained tooth.

  ‘Andi, stop it!’ Stern shouted. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Go outside, please.’

  ‘No, I won’t. You’re out of your mind!’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Borchert, drawing his gun. A metallic click told Stern that he’d released the safety catch.

  ‘Get lost. Now.’

  ‘No, I won’t. No matter what he’s done, violence is no solution.’

  ‘Says who?’

  Borchert raised the automatic and levelled it at Stern’s head.

  ‘I won’t tell you again.’

  ‘No! Please don’t go!’ Harry’s eyes flickered to and fro between Borchert and Stern. He looked like someone who realizes, seconds before his execution, that he’s doomed to die.

  Borchert, on the other hand, had flipped again. He had crossed the threshold of his inhibitions just as he had at the Titanic the day before, when charging out of the door. He would obey his instincts despite everything and anyone, Stern included.

  ‘Oh my God, please don’t leave him alone with me!’

  Stern knew that Harry’s imploring, panic-stricken voice would continue to ring in his ears long after Borchert thrust him out of the camper van and locked the door.

  5

  When creatures of the wild display wholly illogical behaviour in a conflict situation, scientists refer to it as a displacement activity. A tern, for example, will start to preen when too stressed to decide whether to defend its brood or fly away. Right then, Robert Stern would have provided a behaviourist with an equally instructive subject for research.

  With his back to the swaying camper van, uncertain whether to intervene, summon help or drive off, he was rummaging in the refuse heap like a man possessed. In search of a defensive weapon, or, so he told himself, a pointed object or metal bar that would enable him to lever open the door behind which Harry had stopped screaming a couple of minutes ago. He’d been able to make out what the man was saying at first. Then the agonized cries had died away to liquid gurgles punctuated by thuds that shook the decrepit mobile home at irregular intervals.

  Stern redoubled his search. He thrust aside an old car battery and wrenched the hose off an ancient washing machine, only to exchange it for a length of wire as useless as the rest of the stinking rubbish. He wouldn’t be able to put a stop to the mayhem in any case – not unless he unearthed a loaded shotgun.

  Despite this, he continued to dig in the refuse until the silence behind him became unbearable. All of a sudden there were no more screams, whimpers or splintering crashes. The roar of passing cars, amplified by the concrete sound box beneath the expressway, had regained its acoustic supremacy.

  Stern turned to see if the mayhem was really over or only temporarily so. While trudging across the muddy ground to the camper van he trod in a pile of unidentifiable filth but pressed on regardless. Although dreading the spectacle that might be awaiting him behind the van’s scratched Plexiglas window, he went right up to it and stood on tiptoe. He almost fell over backwards when the door on his right burst open and Borchert emerged. His carmine red football strip had changed colour and was clinging to his chest, black with sweat. Stern shuddered at the sight of his face. His forehead and pugilist’s nose were sprinkled with tiny droplets that might have been applied by a paint sprayer. He looked as if he’d just redecorated Harry’s unfit-for-human habitation in red.

  ‘He really didn’t know anything,’ he said tersely when he saw Stern. ‘Let’s go.’ He winced with pain and shook his right hand like he had just caught his fingers in a door. From the look of his raw knuckles he might have been punching barbed wire, not Harry.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Stern. ‘Things can’t go on like this. I give up.’ He turned on his heel and walked off as fast as he could.

  ‘Give up on what?’ he heard Borchert call after him.

  ‘This lunacy. It’s got to end. I’m going to turn myself in. What’s more, I’ll tell the police what you just did.’

  ‘Oh? What did I just do?’

  Stern swung round.

  ‘You brutalized a weak, totally defenceless man. I don’t even dare to check if he’s still alive.’

  ‘He is. More’s the pity.’

  ‘You’re crazy, Andi. Even if my son’s life or death is at stake, you can’t go around beating up innocent people.’

  Borchert spat on the muddy ground.

  ‘You’re wrong twice over. For one thing, this isn’t just about your reincarnation palaver. Someone’s selling a baby tomorrow, remember? And secondly, innocence doesn’t come into it. That bastard raped an eleven-year-old girl. He’s the lowest of the low. Flushing him down the toilet would be a waste of good water.’

  ‘He paid for it, he says.’

  ‘Yes, he did four years. But since then?’

  ‘He’s finished. I mean, look at the man. He’s literally rotting away. You didn’t have to beat him up, he’s dying anyway.’

  ‘Not soon enough.’

  Some of the photographs Borchert tossed into the mud at Stern’s feet landed face up. Stern bent over them, only to recoil as if he’d been bitten by a poisonous snake.

  ‘Go on, take a good look. I found them under your friend Harry’s pizza-carton mattress.’

  Stern hardly dared breathe for fear of inhaling the evil that seemed to fill the air around him.

  ‘Well?’ Borchert himself bent down and retrieved one of the polaroids from the mud. The little girl’s staring eyes were protruding from their sockets almost as far as the black rubber bit ball in her mouth.

  ‘Good old Harry, eh? I bet she never made her sixth birthday. And these are just the photos. Shall I go back and get the videos?’

  Stern knew it didn’t matter when the pictures were taken. The very fact that Harry had them in his possession was evidence enough of his continuing activity.

  ‘All the same,’ he wanted to say, but the words refused to cross his lips. He was caught between two worlds: the sick and morbid world of a child abuser and that of Andi Borchert, in which objectives could be attained by violence alone. The third world, his own, had disappeared.

  ‘What now?’ he asked as they made their way back to the car in silence. He could scarcely see the path for the rain in his eyes, but the downpour seemed to have no cleansing or clarifying effect. Instead of washing away the dirt, it drove it ever deeper into his pores.

  ‘Now we calm down and make a plan.’

  Borchert opened the driver’s door and squeezed in be
hind the Corolla’s wheel once more. The weight distribution was so unequal, the car listed dangerously until Stern sat down beside him.

  ‘We’ve still got three hours before your date in Mexikoplatz.’

  Borchert turned on the ignition. The engine gave a couple of violent hiccups and died. ‘Please don’t do this to me.’ He tried again, but without success.

  ‘What about that reference you mentioned?’ To Stern the flooded engine was secondary. Of all the problems that had arisen in the last few hours, it was the only one they could get to grips with. Neither Simon’s visions nor the ‘voice’ could be dealt with simply by opening a bonnet and doing something practical.

  Borchert laughed. ‘We’ve got it.’

  His satisfaction was mainly down to the little car, the engine of which had eventually caught when he tried the starter again and floored the gas pedal.

  ‘These are our reference.’ He patted the photos in his breast pocket, which he had retrieved before following Stern back to the car. ‘You don’t get hold of pictures like these without contacts. Anyone in possession of them has to know someone in the fraternity. Put them in front of the lady you’re meeting. You couldn’t produce a better calling card.’

  Stern buckled his seat belt, then buried his face in his cold hands and tried to feel something other than the nausea raging in his guts.

  ‘I asked you this once before,’ he said when the car had lurched into motion. ‘How come you know these scum so well? How come you’re so well informed?’

  The pegboard at the supermarket. Harry. The pictures.

  ‘You don’t give up, do you? OK, I’ll tell you. It’s because I’m personally involved.’

  Stern stiffened.

  ‘Yes, intimately involved. Want to know what Harry’s surname is?’

  He came out with it before Stern could decide whether he did, in fact, want to know.

  ‘It’s Borchert. Like mine. Harry’s my dear little stepbrother.’

  6

  The café looked the way Stern felt. Empty, deserted, dead. For a while he stood irresolutely outside the door, on which some high school pop group had stuck a crooked poster advertising its next gig. The window on the right bore a sign saying ‘TO LET’ in red and white capitals, and beneath it in smaller letters the email address of an estate agent. Stern peered into the dusty interior. There was little to be seen apart from some long, bare tables with rows of upturned wooden chairs on them.