Where am I? What happened?
Carina felt as if she were in a washing machine in the final phase of its spin cycle. The hard surface beneath her was jolting violently. Now and then she was pitched forwards by some invisible force, only to be flattened a moment later against the equally unyielding back of the seat.
She blinked feverishly, feeling sick. It was only now, as if breathing through her eyes, not her nose, that she registered the all-encompassing stench of alcohol and vomit.
She strained to keep her eyes open but couldn’t see a thing. Nothing, at least, that offered a plausible explanation of what had happened to her.
A thin man with a moustache and a cinnamon-brown side parting was bending over her. He held out a plastic card as though proffering his ID.
‘W-what’sh … what’sh happened to me?’ she tried to say, but her own words sounded even more incomprehensible than those of this stranger with the stern expression. He raised his voice, sounding rather brusque, and this time she grasped what he was saying.
‘Tickets please.’
‘Eh? W-what?’
With an immense effort, Carina turned her head and looked past the conductor at the bench seat opposite. Its only occupant was an elderly woman who stared at her in disgust and rolled her eyes contemptuously before reimmersing herself in a magazine.
‘I, er … I remember being …’
Carina discovered that she herself was the source of the smell. Cheap red wine. Her tracksuit was spattered with it.
I don’t understand.
The last thing she could remember was that horrible voice. Cold …
That plus the certainty that she was falling into an everlasting, dreamless sleep.
But now?
She clasped her throbbing head. To her surprise, she couldn’t detect an injury of any kind. Not even a bump.
‘Better get a move on unless you want to spend the night in a cell.’
As the seconds ticked by, more and more details of her surroundings combined to form a peculiar totality. The scratched windows, the flickering neon tube above her head, the grab handles. She grasped where she was but couldn’t fathom why. She might as well have woken up on an Antarctic ice floe. The S-Bahn carriage in which she was rattling through nocturnal Berlin seemed just as unreal to her.
‘I thought I was dead,’ she said to the conductor, who couldn’t help grinning faintly.
‘No, you only look like it.’
He grabbed her right hand before she could snatch it away and removed something from between her fingers.
‘It was there all the time.’ He checked the stamp on the ticket, which evidently satisfied him.
‘That’s a new one on me. Drank yourself silly, but not too silly to buy a ticket.’
The inspector returned the ticket, advised her to take it a bit easier next weekend, and moved on.
The train slowed down and dived beneath the roof of a dimly illuminated station, the signboards of which were still adorned with its name in Gothic script: S-Bahnhof Grunewald.
We’re only two stations from Wannsee.
Carina got to her feet – the other passengers made way for her as if she had an infectious disease, she noticed – and tottered out on to the platform.
Her head was buzzing like a beehive. The voice must have put a stun gun to it, poured cheap plonk over her and abandoned her on the S-Bahn like a down-and-out.
But why?
The fresh air not only revived her but intensified her anxiety. It didn’t matter what had happened to her. What mattered was what had happened to Simon. And to Robert Stern.
Halfway to the stairs she paused beside the deserted waiting room and let the handful of passengers who had also alighted walk past.
She was feeling just as helpless as she had a good hour ago, when she hadn’t known which way to go to rescue Simon and Robert, except that she was in considerably worse condition. Her skull was splitting, she felt sick, and her stomach was rumbling so much it seemed to be vibrating incessantly. The hand she put to it landed on her plastic bumbag by mistake. Now her fingers were vibrating too. Simultaneously, something started beeping.
She managed to unzip the bag at the second attempt. It surprised her for a moment to find that everything was still there: money, Simon’s medication, even the gun Borchert had given her. Then she took out the beeping personal organizer Robert had asked her to keep for him.
She opened the leather case and stared at the flashing entry. An appointment. The beeping was meant to remind him of an appointment he’d made only on Thursday. At her request.
Carina turned off the alarm, realizing that it couldn’t be a coincidence. The chain of events that had begun on that derelict industrial estate beside the expressway was continuing to take its course. She hugged herself, shivering, and chafed her upper body with her hands as if that could snap the strings with which the invisible puppeteer was guiding her through this lunacy.
After a while she set off, shuffling wearily along. She could make it if she hurried. The place wasn’t far.
26
When the plasticuffs were secured around his wrists in the car park on Clayallee, Stern was reminded of something he’d been told by a client years before: It’s like handing your life to a cloakroom attendant.
Although the female forger hadn’t been wrongfully arrested, like him, Stern had to admit that her description of that initial moment of impotent despair was extremely apt.
‘Why there?’ Engler looked at Stern in the rear-view mirror. ‘Why did you insist on meeting me at a fairground?’
The inspector was seated at the wheel of his unmarked police car, a grey saloon.
‘So I could see if you’d keep to our agreement.’ Stern forced his eyes to stay open. He was longing for merciful oblivion to put an end to all his aches and pains, but it was still too soon for that. ‘I had to be sure you’d come on your own.’ He jerked his head at the big wheel, the flashing lights of which were gradually receding as they drove away. ‘The view from up there is really fantastic.’
He had called Engler from a gondola and told him to turn on his hazard lights. Having located him in the visitors’ car park in that way, he had remained on the wheel for three more turns before deciding to risk it. And, sure enough, no plainclothesmen had jumped him when he got into the inspector’s car.
‘I see.’ Engler nodded approvingly. He broke off for a sudden sneeze. ‘But your fears were groundless,’ he said once his nose had settled down. His cold sounded just as bad as it had been at their very first interview. Incredible to think it was only three days ago.
‘We’re being tracked by GPS,’ he went on hoarsely, ‘so headquarters always knows where we are. Besides, I think you’re an arsehole, not dangerous.’ He grinned at the rear-view mirror. ‘Or at least, not so dangerous I couldn’t cope with you single-handed.’
Stern nodded, looking at his left wrist. The rough edges of the plasticuff were already leaving marks.
‘But why did you want to meet me? We aren’t exactly soulmates.’
‘That’s just it. Always do business with your enemies, my father used to say. They can’t betray you like your friends. Besides, I’m not too keen on Brandmann. I don’t know him.’
‘Smart guy, your father. So what’s this deal of yours?’
‘I’ll give you information that will enable you to arrest at least two criminals: a trafficker in children and the avenger. In other words, the man responsible for those human remains I found.’
Their surroundings grew suddenly darker. No more houses were visible through the car’s streaming windows. They had left the illuminated part of Hüttenweg behind and were driving along a link road that took them across the Grunewald forest.
‘OK, what do you want in return?’
‘No matter what evidence against me you think you’ve got, and no matter what I’m about to tell you, you must put my ex-wife’s children under police protection at once.’
‘Why?’
<
br /> ‘Because I’m being blackmailed. And that brings me to my second request: you must let me go free until six o’clock tomorrow morning.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘Maybe, but not as crazy as these two.’
‘What’s that?’ Engler glanced at the passenger seat. Despite the cuffs, Stern had managed to fish a tiny videotape out of his jacket and toss it across to the policeman.
‘It’s a tape from the estate agent’s bedroom in Wannsee. Take a look at what he and his wife were planning to do to Simon Sachs – if you’ve got the stomach for it.’
‘Is he the one pulling the wires?’
‘The estate agent? No.’
As quickly as he could, Stern told Engler what he’d discovered in the last few hours.
‘A baby is due to be sold tomorrow morning. Simon has a recurrent vision in which he kills the so-called Dealer. In revenge.’
‘And you believe that?’
‘No. If there’s any truth in the story at all, another avenger will appear on the bridge tomorrow morning, and he’ll shoot the Dealer at the first opportunity.’
Engler slowed as he approached the Hüttenweg-Koenigsallee intersection. The lights were red.
‘All right,’ he said warily, ‘let’s assume there’s something in your fantastic theory. How does the boy come to know about it?’
Stern looked to see if they were being followed, but apart from a motorcycle ahead of them, which was disappearing in the direction of the Avus, they were temporarily on their own at the lights.
‘How can your client, Simon Sachs, see into the future as well as the past?’
‘No idea.’
The rain was getting heavier. Engler turned the windscreen wipers up a notch.
‘“No idea” is a bad answer if you want me to let you go. How do I know you aren’t involved yourself?’
As they drove on, Stern was briefly puzzled by a change in the engine note. It sounded as if Engler had filled the tank with low-octane petrol.
‘That’s why you can’t afford to lock me up. I’ll prove it to you tomorrow morning. On the bridge.’
‘What bridge?’
‘I’ll tell you when we’ve got a deal.’
Just a minute. What is that?
Stern leaned forwards. He’d been mistaken. There was nothing wrong with the car’s engine. The motor-mower sound was coming from outside. It was growing louder, too.
‘Does anyone else know about our meeting?’ Engler asked suddenly. He sounded nervous, and his tension transmitted itself to Stern.
‘No, no one,’ he replied.
‘What number was it?’
‘What do you mean?’
Stern felt for the mobile in his jacket pocket. It was still turned on. That meant …
‘The number you called me from. Who does the mobile belong to?’
Engler was sounding more and more edgy. He glanced over his shoulder.
‘The estate agent, why?’
The wiper blades swept the rain aside, momentarily transforming the windscreen into a magnifying glass and enabling Stern to see him clearly.
The motorcyclist. He had doubled back, cut his headlight and was heading straight for them with one arm extended.
The lights turned green. Engler engaged first gear.
Hell and damnation! Andi Borchert expressly warned us all. Any fool can trace a mobile—
Something went bang. And Stern’s train of thought snapped.
27
The three shots sounded innocuous, like the popping of half-ignited firecrackers. But the muffled reports were deceptive. They pierced the windscreen with lethal force and sent safety glass showering inwards like confetti.
Stern couldn’t have said which shot was the first to hit the inspector, whose head slumped forwards on to the steering wheel. The lights were still green. When they changed to amber, the car’s interior light came on. Not that Stern noticed this in his initial state of shock. His brain was far too busy processing a succession of horrific images: the motorcyclist, the shattered windscreen, the inspector’s convulsively twitching fingers.
Stern’s teeth were chattering. He was shivering with shock, pain and panic – and because a sudden gust of rain-laden wind was blowing into his face. He realized only now why the overhead light had come on: the door beside him was open. Someone had wrenched it open.
‘You didn’t keep to the agreement,’ a man’s voice snarled at him out of the darkness. Something cold prodded his temple. It was the muzzle of the motorcyclist’s automatic.
‘Best regards from the voice. You wanted to know whether a person could be reincarnated.’
Stern squeezed his eyelids even tighter together. He knew then that none of the stock descriptions of your last few seconds applied to him. His mind’s eye saw no personal biopic in the face of death, not even a still. Instead, for nanoseconds at a time, he could feel every single cell in his body. He was conscious of the dull thuds with which adrenalin was flowing into the maelstrom of his circulation from the adrenal medulla. He heard his bronchioles dilate and perceived the intensified contractions of his heart like minor explosions beneath his breastbone. His external perceptions underwent a change at the same time. He did not feel the wind as a totality, but as a stream of countless oxygen atoms sandblasted separately on to his skin in company with the raindrops.
He heard himself cry out, more afraid than he had ever been in his life. At the same time, he also experienced every other emotion more intensely than ever before. It was as if someone were trying to prove what emotions he would have been capable of if only he had given life a chance. Then, just before the end, he felt that he was dissolving – that the Robert Stern made up of atoms and molecules was trying to disintegrate into its separate components in order to facilitate the bullet’s penetration of his skull.
And, just as a feeling of profound sadness enveloped him like a cloak, the fatal shot rang out.
The bullet found its intended mark. Right in the middle of the forehead, where it drilled a hole in the skull the size of a fingernail. Blood oozed from it like ketchup from a bottle.
Stern opened his eyes. Incredulously, he clasped his head and felt where the killer had held his gun only moments before; it was still hurting from the pressure of the muzzle. Then he looked at his hand, convinced that he would see, smell and feel blood on his fingertips. Nothing of the kind happened.
At last he looked straight ahead. And heard Engler’s gun fall into the footwell with a thud. Half of the inspector’s face seemed to be steeped in blood. Stern only realized later that this was the reflection of the traffic lights, which had turned red again.
He saved my life! With his last ounce of strength he managed to draw his gun …
For a moment Stern hoped Engler wasn’t too badly wounded after all. The inspector was sitting sideways like a father making sure that everyone’s seat belt was fastened before driving off. He even seemed to be regarding Stern amiably for the first time. Then blood trickled down his chin. He opened his mouth in surprise, blinked for the last time, and fell forwards over the wheel. The hand that had been holding the gun went limp, as did the rest of his body.
Jolted out of his trance-like state by the blare of the horn, Stern regained control of his body. The white noise in his head disappeared and life flowed back into his limbs. So did the pain. He undid his seat belt and slid sideways out of the car. He retrieved Engler’s gun from the footwell and trained it on the long-haired man lying in the gutter; the rider’s eyes were wide with disbelief. The last remnants of his life were seeping out of his head and on to the asphalt. Stern had never seen the clean-shaven face before, yet it somehow looked familiar.
Engler saved my life. Engler, of all people.
He only meant to walk a little way to the cycle path, but he stumbled after a few steps and rolled down an embankment. He landed on his plasticuffed hands and got a mouthful of damp earth and leaves before he found the courage to raise his head and stand up.
I must get away from here.
He swayed, put his weight on the wrong foot by mistake and leaned against a tree, groaning. But not even the fiercest physical pain could displace his rampant fear. Further up the slope a vehicle sped past, but no one got out to help him. Or arrest him. Not yet, but squad cars were bound to be on their way.
They’ll never believe me. I must get away from here.
He groaned again, this time in a fit of mental agony worse than any physical pain he’d experienced. Then he staggered off into the trees. Only two days ago he had hated his messed-up life with all his heart. Now he wanted it back.
28
Eight-seventeen. That meant the skunk was seventeen minutes late, and if there was one thing he detested, it was unpunctuality. And being inconvenienced. That was even worse. What were people thinking of? No one was immortal, yet everyone behaved as if there was a lost property office where you could retrieve the hours of life you’d squandered.
The coffee had gone cold. He tipped it into the sink with an angry splash, furious at the waste. And at himself. He’d known the boy would fail to turn up again, so why had he made any coffee in the first place? It was his own fault.
A spoon tinkled against a cup in the room next door. ‘Would you like some tea for a change?’ he called in a hoarse voice, stubbing out the filterless cigarette that had almost burned down to his fingertips. ‘I’m just putting some more water on.’
‘No thanks.’
Unlike him, his unexpected visitor seemed to have no problem sacrificing minute after wasted minute on the altar of death. Perhaps you had to develop piles – perhaps your teeth had to fall out and your toenails turn yellow – before you would refuse to wait even half an hour for someone to turn up. Or not, as the case may be. That was how long the said visitor had been sitting on his upholstered pinewood bench, the last piece of furniture he and his wife had bought together.
Maria had always been punctual. In fact she usually turned up too early. That was something she had in common with the lung cancer that had killed her. Ironical, considering that, unlike him, she’d never smoked in her life.
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