Passenger 23

by Sebastian Fitzek

  Martin had reached the top of the stairs and was checking out the display windows from the balustrade corridor.

  Gucci, Cartier, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Chanel.

  The prices resulted in substantially fewer passengers on this level. Not even a dozen guests were wandering along the dark-red carpet. A family of three with a pram, two veiled women, a few staff members. He turned right to the corridor that led to the Sultan’s very own on-board planetarium. ‘Anouk’s grandfather rang the police?’ he asked Diesel.

  ‘On several occasions. The Annapolis Sentinel, a free local rag, ran a report on it. Shortly after Anouk and Naomi disappeared, Grandpa Justin called them to say they could abandon their search for his granddaughter. He’d chatted to her for half an hour on the phone, he claimed. She’d sounded jolly and was fine.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Jolly.

  Martin couldn’t help think of the horrific injuries Anouk had sustained. Her dead eyes, the expression of her shredded soul. Even if the culprit had forced her to make the call (for whatever perverse reason) there’s no way the girl could have sounded jolly, and certainly not for half an hour.

  ‘Anouk’s grandfather seems to be a very special person,’ he said, thinking of Gerlinde. What a great pair the two of them would make.

  ‘You can say that again. He’s quoted in the article: Naomi’s not worth the bother. The sharks will rip the teeth out of that whore who fucked the cancer into my son’s body. Although whore and fucked are not spelled out in full – prudish Yanks.’ Diesel clicked his tongue. ‘But this is why I was calling you. Don’t you find it strange that a man who hates his daughter-in-law that much should pay for the trip?’

  ‘Was that in the paper too?’ Martin asked, puzzled.

  Justin Lamar paid for the cruise?

  ‘No, it’s what the grandfather claims in his online blog. No joke – he started it up aged eighty-two. The old man updates it every week with new crackpot observations. They range from UFO sightings, human experiments in his home and tips for canine hypnosis.’

  Martin stopped in his tracks when he suddenly saw him there.

  Bonhoeffer!

  As Elena had said, the captain must be on the way to his officers’ meeting, which was being held in the three-hundred-seater ocean planetarium.

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ Martin said quietly. Daniel was walking around twenty metres ahead of him, accompanied by two colleagues in white uniforms.

  ‘Fine, but not before ten, please. You know how I like getting up early. Just not in the morning.’

  Martin was about to hang up when something occurred to him. ‘Hang on a sec, seeing as you’re on the line…’

  ‘You want me to water your plants? Forget it!’

  ‘Please find out how many missing-person cases there have been at sea over the last ten years where more than one person has vanished.’ He asked him to look particularly at cases where children were involved. ‘Not just on the Sultan, but all ships. And then check whether there are any overlaps between passenger and staff lists.’

  Martin heard noises that reminded him of a pinball machine, but was not surprised. Diesel’s office in the radio tower on Potsdamer Platz looked like an amusement arcade, with games of skill and gambling machines in every corner. Quite often Diesel would play them during important meetings or phone conversations.

  ‘Anything else important you found out?’ Martin asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m glad you asked. I almost forgot. Just one more thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you’re a complete idiot. You shouldn’t be on that ship. After Nadja and Timmy’s death the Sultan is the last place on earth you ought to be. And I’m a real arsewipe for having encouraged you to undertake your odyssey.’

  ‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ Martin said, before putting his mobile away.

  He walked faster and caught up with the captain who, as the last person behind three female officers, was just about to close the entrance to the planetarium.

  Martin’s footsteps were muffled by the carpet; Bonhoeffer didn’t hear him coming. The captain suspected nothing as he kicked away the holder of the heavy entrance door. Martin grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back as the door closed slowly.

  ‘Hey, what’s—’ a shocked Bonhoeffer asked.

  He didn’t get any further. The first blow to the stomach took the captain’s breath away. The second broke his nose.

  24

  There was a crunching sound as if the captain’s nasal septum had been put in a nutcracker. Streams of blood poured from Daniel Bonhoeffer’s face.

  He didn’t appear to feel any pain at first; at least he wasn’t screaming. But he collapsed to the ground with both elbows held protectively in front of his face.

  Martin grabbed him by the collar and hauled him like a wet sack into the outer corridor that circled the planetarium, dragging him as far as the lavatories. The captain’s attempts to dig his feet into the carpet were fruitless. Martin pulled him into the gents’ and hurled him against a wall of bright tiles opposite the row of washbasins.

  He checked the urinals and cubicles. All empty, as might be expected given that there wasn’t an official function on and the officers were already in the planetarium for their meeting.

  When he returned to Bonhoeffer he stood beside the captain and gave him a kick.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ he yelled at him.

  ‘I don’t know what—’ Bonhoeffer was holding his nose and mouth with his left hand. Without much success. Dark blood dripped through his fingers and down his chin.

  Martin slowly and menacingly clenched his fist.

  ‘Hey, chill. Stay calm, please. I know you’ve got every reason to be pissed off, but please let me explain my part in all this,’ Bonhoeffer pleaded, sounding as if he were suffering from a serious cold.

  ‘Your part?’ Martin bellowed. ‘Anouk Lamar was raped.’ He had to refrain from taking another swipe at the captain.

  ‘I know, and it’s horrific.’

  Bonhoeffer looked at the smooth wall for something to help pull himself up. A stainless steel hair dryer was out of reach.

  ‘Two mothers. Two children. They disappear. And both times the man in charge on the ship is you.’

  ‘I can see how that might sound a bit suspicious.’

  ‘Sound? It is suspicious. After all, you found Anouk again. You!’

  ‘That’s just a terrible coincidence.’

  Daniel had made it to his feet and was staring at the mirror in horror. He looked like the sole survivor from a terrible accident.

  ‘Coincidence?’ Martin barked. For a split second he was back outside the Warsaw prison from which he’d been released five years ago. He felt just as angry, just as desperate. Just as empty.

  Unwilling to risk the operation, the bastards in charge didn’t tell him about what had happened on the Sultan – while he was struggling to survive in the Polish jail – until his undercover mission was over. When he left the prison, Timmy and Nadja had already been missing for forty-three days.

  ‘Like it was a complete coincidence that you didn’t turn around after my family vanished?’ he screamed into Bonhoeffer’s face.

  The captain briefly closed his eyes like a husband who doesn’t know how to continue in a row with his wife.

  ‘Turn around?’ His voice was squeaking. ‘Didn’t you read the record of proceedings? The Sultan has a stopping distance of two kilometres. It takes an hour and a half to turn this thing around. There was a storm, the waves were several metres high and it was freezing outside. Without a life vest you couldn’t survive in that part of the Atlantic for more than a few minutes. And your family had already been missing for hours.’

  ‘So how do you know when they jumped? I thought the security videos of the hull were accidently recorded over. Did the same happen with Anouk? Did you tamper with all the evidence relating to her case too, to make it look like suicide?’

  ‘No,�
�� Bonhoeffer panted.

  ‘Oh, yes, you did. Now, maybe you didn’t personally abduct the girl and rape her – we’ll see. But you can’t deny you’re a henchman. You’d do anything to keep your job. That includes hushing up a crime if necessary.’ Martin spat on the ground in anger. ‘Well, this time you’ve been unlucky. Now a Passenger 23 has suddenly turned up again, and this time you’re not going to get out of it so easily.’

  He pulled a heap of paper towels from a shell-shaped dispenser beside the basin and tossed them at the captain’s face. ‘Clean yourself up. You’re going to be getting a visit soon.’

  He turned to go.

  ‘Visit? From whom?’

  ‘The coastguards. They’d love to hear all about coincidences.’

  ‘If you do that…’

  ‘What?’ Martin turned around. He looked significantly more enraged than the captain. ‘Are you threatening me, like your boss tried to do yesterday? Are you also going to tell me that you’ll have the girl disappear the moment I lift the lid on all of this?’

  ‘Is that what Yegor said?’ Bonhoeffer went to the washbasin and turned on the tap.

  ‘A bluff,’ Martin said.

  In the mirror the captain looked Martin in the eye. ‘No, it wasn’t. There’s far too much money at stake. The moment the mere flag of a police boat appears on our radar, Anouk will vanish into thin air a second time. Or do you imagine the owner of the fleet is just going to stand back and watch while you wreck a multi-million-dollar deal?’

  ‘What kind of a deal?’

  As Bonhoeffer’s nose refused to stop bleeding, his attempts to wash his face were futile. He grabbed another paper towel and turned to Martin.

  ‘Yegor Kalinin isn’t aboard the ship for fun. He’s planning to sell a large share of his fleet to Vincente Rojas, a large-scale investor from Chile. As we speak they’re in the sauna finalising the details. Sixteen lawyers are standing by, eight shysters on either side. They’ve been clogging up the large conference room on deck 4 for weeks, but I’ve heard they’re just twiddling their thumbs for a thousand dollars an hour, because all the documents are ready to be signed. Apparently they want to wait until we sail into New York, so they have the emblematic view of the Statue of Liberty as they sign the contracts.’

  He threw the blood-soaked paper towel into a hole for rubbish in the basin unit and pulled out another one.

  ‘Look, you’ve got to understand that I’m not a child abuser.’ Bonhoeffer sounded more confident than desperate now, and secretly Martin had to agree with him. During the trial he’d made a comprehensive study of the captain’s criminal profile. Nothing hinted at such tendencies.

  ‘I want to find that bastard who abused Anouk too,’ the captain said. ‘But you’re right: yes, I am a henchman. The ship owner’s got me in his pocket. What can I do?’

  ‘Stop behaving like a whore, for starters!’ Martin shouted.

  ‘You self-righteous arsehole!’ Daniel screamed back. ‘Off you go, then. Deck 13. The Admiral Suite, that’s where you’ll meet Yegor and Vincente. Why don’t you go and clear things up? Tell the investor about our Passenger 23. But don’t expect the girl still to be in Hell’s Kitchen when you go down there with the Chilean.’

  ‘And you’ll make sure of that?’

  Bonhoeffer opened his mouth, sniffed and now looked disappointed rather than angry.

  ‘I swear I’d never do anything to Anouk. I’m afraid to say that Yegor has friends of a completely different calibre on board, employees he’s saved from destitution by offering them a job. They’d hold a lighter to their own eyes if he ordered them to.’

  They stared at each other until Bonhoeffer turned back to the mirror. ‘Please help me. We’ve got five days. In that time we can find out what happened to Anouk. And if we don’t succeed, we can work out a plan for how to get her off the ship alive.’

  Martin shook his head. ‘Either you’re nutty, or so desperate that you can’t see the obvious solution. I’m going to go straight to Anouk, take a video of her as evidence and put it on the net.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘Why ever not? What’s stopping me?’

  ‘Because Yegor would have you exactly where he wants you.’

  Martin frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Why on earth do you think he got you on board? I want you to help me. He wants to frame you for it.’

  ‘Me?’

  The huge ship was pushed upwards by a wave, a sure sign that the Sultan was gathering speed on the open sea.

  ‘Yes. You’re the ideal scapegoat. A self-destructive investigator who hasn’t got over the legally verified suicide of his wife and the death of his son, and who descends into a delusional search which finally drives him insane.’

  ‘Me? A criminal?’ Martin’s incisor started throbbing.

  ‘Yes. He’ll claim the video you want to take is one of the trophies you’ve collected from your victims.’

  ‘But that’s utter madness. How am I supposed to have done anything to the girl? I wasn’t even on board when she disappeared months ago.’

  ‘How can anybody be sure?’ Bonhoeffer asked. For the time being the bleeding had abated, if not stopped altogether, although it was hard to tell given the smears across his face.

  ‘You’re an undercover investigator, Schwartz. A master of disguise. It would be a doddle for you to travel under a fake name. Get a forged passport. Perhaps you’re the killer Gerlinde Dobkowitz writes about in her book.’

  ‘You’re insane,’ Martin said, but then thought he could hear Anouk’s voice whispering his name again. ‘Martin.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Bonhoeffer answered back. ‘But Yegor is. I may be the only one who’s still capable of thinking clearly here. I know why you’re really on board.’

  As a target.

  ‘When I realised how serious Yegor is about covering it all up, I knew I couldn’t solve the problem without outside help. Then Gerlinde Dobkowitz showed me the teddy bear and the idea occurred to me. You’re a psychologist and investigator, and since your loss it’s been in your interest to keep yourself to yourself. I knew I’d be able to use this to convince Yegor to give me more time. Because no matter how much he wants that deal to be concluded, he’s also very keen on catching the scumbag on his ship who sexually abused the girl. I swear that when he gave me the green light to contact you I had no idea he was planning to use you as a scapegoat in case everything went belly-up.’

  ‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying.’

  ‘I know. That’s why you got a call from Gerlinde rather than me.’

  That sentence sounds familiar.

  The ground beneath Martin’s feet trembled once more. Each time the ship rose, for some unfathomable reason the roaring of the air conditioning unit above their heads grew louder.

  ‘What a fucking coward you are!’ he said to Bonhoeffer. ‘If you’re telling the truth, what you’ve just revealed to me is that Yegor Kalinin is about to kill a young girl for reasons of profit and then pin the murder on me while you stand by without lifting a finger.’

  The captain pulled another paper towel from the dispenser and held it beneath the tap. ‘Once more: I want to stop all that from happening. But yes, if I can’t then I’m not going to sacrifice myself for you, Herr Schwartz.’

  He scrunched up the wet towel and threw it unused into the sink. ‘You sued me. You ruined my reputation. I was suspended, almost lost my job – and much more besides. There’s nothing I like about you. If this all goes tits-up then I’m not going to jail for you. And that would be the guaranteed outcome as soon as I turned against Yegor.’

  Martin grabbed his shoulder and pulled the captain towards him. He forced Bonhoeffer to look him in the eye.

  ‘What’s he got on you?’

  Bonhoeffer shook his hand away, then carefully touched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He looked as if he had to come to a decision. As if he were deliberating.

  ‘A vi
deo,’ he said eventually.

  ‘What’s on it?’

  ‘The hull of the Sultan. It’s the tape from the security camera that shows, amongst other things, the balcony cabin your wife was staying in. And which I was supposed to delete for Yegor.’

  Martin felt the Sultan list sideways.

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  Bonhoeffer nodded. ‘I gave him the original and now my fingerprints are on the tape.’

  Martin froze.

  ‘Does it show…’

  … the death of my family?

  The words stuck in his throat.

  The captain nodded. ‘I’ll prove that I don’t want to work against you, but in cooperation,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a copy of the tape. You can watch it.’

  25

  A little puff of grey. The last image of his child, before he vanished forever. No colour, form or contours. Just a small, grey cloud, caught by a camera, its lens dotted with a number of raindrops partly amplifying, partly distorting the picture.

  The first cloud that came away like a shadowy veil from the starboard side of the rear third of the ship must have been Timmy.

  My son!

  Martin was standing so close to the television that he was able to see the individual pixels of what was anyway a pale recording, and he got an inkling of what those people must have felt who saw their relatives leap to their deaths on September 11.

  He recalled a heated discussion as they watched the burning towers – Nadja had said that she couldn’t understand people who committed suicide because they were afraid of death. Was this the same woman who, years later, was supposed to have plummeted into the depths of the ocean, herself now a puff of grey?

  It was as unimaginable as two aeroplanes flying into the World Trade Center one after another.

  But that happened too…

  ‘Do we have another view?’ Martin asked. Bonhoeffer puckered his lips apologetically. They were in the living room of the captain’s suite, the curtains closed and the lights dimmed. Half a minute ago Martin had asked him to stop the DVD at timecode 085622BZ, which was 20.56 and 22 seconds nautical time.