Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Nobody wants to pity his parents,’ Tu had said. ‘We want them to protect us for a while, and then at some point we want to leave them alone. The most we can achieve is to understand what they do, and forgive the child we used to be.’

  For all that, Tu deserved pity as well, but he seemed not to need it, unlike her father. She suspected that it had been far worse for him than it had been for Tu. But unlike the bitterness that Hongbing had eaten, Tu’s fate seemed to her—

  ‘Not so bad?’ Tu had laughed. ‘Of course. I’m not even your uncle. I’m an old fart with a young wife. When you look at me, you see who I am, not who I was. There’s no history to chain us together.’

  ‘But we’re – friends?’

  ‘Yes, we’re friends, and if you were a bit more interested in my bank balance and had fewer scruples, we could be lovers. But you can only see Hongbing in one particular way, that’s genetics for you. No place for pity there. It just doesn’t feature. We each have our own genetic destiny, and when we’ve played that role to the full, then perhaps we can see our parents for what they really are, understand them, accept them, respect them, maybe even love them. For what they always were: just people.’

  Oh God, and then dropping in on Jericho late at night. What an embarrassment! She’d been carried away by the intoxicating notion of storming his room, and then she’d crept out without achieving anything, like a silly drunk. It had been a whim, of course, and like all such whims it only made her feel stupidly ashamed. In retrospect, she didn’t even know what she had wanted there.

  Or did she?

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ said Tu.

  They’d fetched the Audi a quarter of an hour ago from the street by the Spree, and now they were parked across from the Institute of Forensic Pathology, Charité Hospital. Tu started the engine and drove up to the barrier at the front gate. He waved his ID out of the window at the guard, told him that the Foreign Office had approved their visit and asked the way to Building O. They drove along past grand red-brick façades. Splendid green lawns beneath spreading leafy boughs called out to them to stop and linger with a loaf of bread, some cheese, a bottle of Chianti, to make the most of every minute before the die was cast and they had to enter Building O. They felt that same yearning for peace and quiet that even the liveliest extrovert feels in a graveyard.

  After driving straight ahead for a long while, then turning twice, they stopped in front of a light, airy, somewhat sterile building with all the charm of a provincial clinic. There were only three police cars parked in the forecourt, with the green Berlin livery and marked Forensics. All this understated modesty unsettled Yoyo, gave her the odd feeling that they weren’t where they needed to be, that the corpses must be somewhere else. She had imagined that in a megalopolis like Berlin, where people died every minute of every day, the Institute of Forensic Pathology had to be a vast hangar-like edifice, but this little low building hardly suggested doctors arguing, inspectors, profilers, all the scenes she knew from the movies. They went up three steps, rang the bell by a glass door and were let through by two women in white coats, one tall, young and rather pretty, the other short and wiry, in her late forties, apple-cheeked and with a no-nonsense haircut. The older woman introduced herself as Dr Marika Voss, and her young companion as Svenja Maas. Tu and Yoyo held out their IDs. Dr Voss glanced at the characters and nodded as though she dealt with Chinese documentation every working day.

  ‘Yes, you have been announced to us,’ she said, in stiffly formal English. ‘Miss Chen Yuyun?’

  Yoyo shook her hand. The doctor looked thoughtful for a moment. Clearly she was doing her best to reconcile Yoyo’s appearance with what she imagined an undercover homicide squad must look like. She glanced across to Svenja Maas and then back again, as though remembering with an effort that there were good-looking people in all walks of life.

  ‘And you are Mister—’

  ‘Superintendent Tu Tian. This is very good of you,’ Tu said amiably. ‘We don’t want to take up too much of your time. Have you already completed the autopsy?’

  ‘You are interested in Andre Donner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We just finished with him a few minutes ago, but not yet with Nyela Donner. She is being examined two tables further on. Do you need to look at her as well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or at the second dead man from the museum? We don’t have his identity yet.’

  Tu frowned.

  ‘Perhaps. Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Good. Please come.’

  Dr Voss looked into a scanner. Another door opened. They entered a corridor, and here for the first time Yoyo smelled that sharp, sweet smell that the people on television always ward off with a bit of balm rubbed under their noses. It was bacterial decay; the smell thickened, from a mere hint to a miasma, as they went downstairs to the autopsy section, and from a miasma to a brackish pool as they entered the lobby to the theatre. A young man with an Arabic look about him was uploading children’s portrait photos to a monitor screen. Yoyo didn’t even want to think about children, here. Nor did she need to, since Dr Voss had just pressed something into her hand. She looked at the little tube, utterly at a loss, and felt her ignorance open up beneath her like a trapdoor.

  ‘For our visitors,’ the doctor said. ‘You know, of course.’

  No, she didn’t know.

  ‘For rubbing under your nose.’ Dr Voss raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘I thought that you would—’

  ‘This is Miss Chen’s first case involving forensic pathology,’ Tu said, taking the tube from Yoyo’s fingers. As though he had done it all his life, he squeezed out two pea-sized blobs of the paste it contained and smeared them under his nostrils. ‘She’s here to get some experience.’

  Dr Voss nodded understandingly.

  ‘You’ve not been paying attention in theory class, Inspector,’ Tu teased her in Chinese, passing Yoyo the tube. She rolled her eyes at him and rubbed a squeeze of the stuff on her upper lip, only to find out the next moment that it was, quite definitely, too much. A minty bomb exploded into her nasal passages, swept through her brain and blasted the smell of decay aside. Svenja Maas watched her with conspiratorial interest, the fellow-feeling of two beautiful people who meet in the company of the less well favoured.

  ‘You get used to it at some point,’ she declared, the voice of experience.

  Yoyo smiled faintly.

  They followed the doctor into the theatre, tiled red and white with frosted glass windows and boxy ceiling lights. Five autopsy tables were lined up next to one another. The first two were empty, but two surgeons were bent over the table in the middle, one of them just lifting the lungs from a yawning gap in the ribcage of the black woman they were working on, while other said something into a microphone. The lungs went onto a scale. Dr Voss led the group past the fourth table, where a large corpse lay under a white sheet, and she stopped at the last. Here too the corpse was covered, but she turned the sheet back and they saw Jan Kees Vogel-aar, alias Andre Donner.

  Yoyo looked at him.

  She hadn’t particularly liked the man, but now that she saw him lying there, a Y-shaped incision freshly sewn up on his torso, she felt sorry. Just as she had felt sorry for Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for Robert de Niro in Heat, Kevin Costner in A Perfect World, Chris Pine in Neighborhood, Emma Watson in Pale Days. All those who had so very nearly made it, but who always failed at the last moment no matter how often you watched the film.

  ‘If you don’t need me,’ Dr Voss said, ‘I’ll leave you with Frau Maas. She assisted in the Donner autopsy and should be able to answer any questions you have.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Tu, switching to Chinese. ‘Let’s get started, Comrade.’

  They leaned down to look at his face, waxy, already tinged with blue. Yoyo tried to remember which side Vogelaar had his glass eye on. Jericho had insisted it was the right side. She wasn’t so sure herself. She could readily have sworn that
it was the left. It was a magnificently well-made eye, and under Vogelaar’s closed lids there was no telling which it might be.

  ‘Not sure?’ Tu frowned.

  ‘No, and that’s Owen’s fault.’ Yoyo looked askance at Svenja Maas, who had stepped back. ‘Let our friend there show you the fellow on the next table.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll keep her off your back.’

  ‘It’ll be all right.’ Yoyo gave a sour smile. ‘There are only two possibilities.’

  She wasn’t getting used to the sight of corpses, or to the idea that people she had barely got to know dropped like flies. But even as she veered between fascination and disgust, an unexpected sense of calm took hold of her, deep and clear, like a mountain lake. Tu turned to Svenja Maas and pointed to the body on table four, still under its sheet.

  ‘Could you please uncover this man for us?’

  Stupid. The trainee doctor stepped round the wrong side of the table. From where she was, she still had a good view of Yoyo. Tu shifted position to block her view.

  ‘Great heavens above,’ he cried out. ‘What happened to his eye?’

  ‘He was attacked with a pencil,’ the trainee doctor said, not without some admiration in her voice. ‘Straight through the bone and into the brain.’

  ‘And how exactly did that happen?’

  Yoyo put two fingers onto Vogelaar’s right eyelid and lifted it. It seemed to have no particular temperature, neither cold nor warm. While Svenja Maas was explaining about angle of entry and pressure, she pressed her middle finger and thumb into the corner of the eye. The eyeball seemed to sit much too firmly in the eye socket, more like a glass marble than soft and slippery, so that for a moment she wasn’t sure that Jericho hadn’t been right after all, and she shoved her fingers deeper into the socket.

  Resistance. Were those muscles? The eye wasn’t coming out, rather it tugged backwards, leaking some kind of fluid, like a cornered animal.

  That wasn’t a glass eye, not on her life.

  ‘The shaft splintered,’ Maas said, walking over to the organ table between the corpse and the wash-basin, where something lay in a transparent plastic bag on a tray. Quickly, Yoyo pulled her fingers out of the socket, just before Maas happened to glance over at her. She thought she heard a squelching sound as she did so, reproachful, tell-tale. Tu hurried to block the sightlines again. Yoyo shuddered. Could the woman have heard something? Had there been anything to hear, or had she just imagined it, expecting an eye socket to squelch as you take your fingers out?

  The surface of the calm lake inside her began to ruffle. There was something sticky on her fingers. Jericho had been wrong! While Tu twinkled at Svenja Maas, asking interested questions about her work, she plunged her fingers into Vogelaar’s left eye socket. Straight away she could feel that this was different. The surface was harder, definitely artificial. She pushed further, flexed her middle finger and thumb. All the while, Tu was asking learned questions about the improvised use of drawing equipment as weapons. Maas pronounced that everything could be a weapon, and stepped to the left. Tu declared that she was absolutely right, and stepped to the right. The pathologists at the middle table were busy with Nyela.

  Yoyo took a deep breath, high on mint rub.

  Now!

  The glass eye popped out, almost trustingly, and nestled into the palm of her hand. She slipped it into her jacket, closed Vogelaar’s sunken eyelid as best she could and saw that she had caused lasting disfigurement. Too late. She quickly pulled the sheet back up over his face and took two steps to Tu’s side.

  ‘There is no doubt any longer about Andre Donner,’ she said in English.

  Tu stopped in the middle of a question.

  ‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘Very good. I think we can go.’

  ‘When will you want my report, Superintendent?’

  ‘What kind of question is that, Inspector! As soon as possible. The director of prosecutions is breathing down our neck.’

  Curtain, applause, Yoyo thought.

  ‘Are you done?’ Svenja Maas looked from one to the other, disgruntled to be so abruptly ignored.

  ‘Yes, we don’t want to discommode you any further.’

  ‘You are not – erm – discommoding me.’

  ‘No, you are right of course, it was a pleasure. Goodbye, and best wishes to Dr Voss.’

  Svenja Maas shrugged and led them out to the lobby, where they said goodbye. Tu marched ahead, sped up on the stairs, and practically raced along the corridor. Yoyo scurried after him. The last of her calm was gone. They didn’t need any authorisation to leave. They went out into the car park and headed for the Audi, when suddenly a commanding voice rang out from the building.

  ‘Mr Tu, Miss Chen!’

  Yoyo froze. Slowly she turned, and saw Dr Marika Voss standing on the steps, her chin raised.

  They’ve noticed, Yoyo thought. We were too slow.

  ‘Please forgive our hasty departure.’ Tu raised his arms apologetically. ‘We wanted to say goodbye, but we couldn’t find you.’

  ‘Was everything as you had hoped?’

  ‘You were extremely helpful!’

  ‘I’m glad of that.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘Well, then, I hope that you make progress with your investigations.’

  ‘Thanks to your help, we shall make great strides.’

  ‘Good day to you.’

  Dr Voss marched back inside, and Yoyo felt as though she had turned to butter in the sunshine. She slid into the Audi, and melted onto the seat.

  ‘Do you have it?’ Tu asked.

  ‘I have it,’ she replied, with the last of her strength.

  * * *

  Svenja Maas wasn’t exactly offended, but she was rather peeved. As she went back into the autopsy theatre she felt a nagging suspicion that the Chinese policeman hadn’t really been interested in her, just in keeping up some Asiatic notion of etiquette. She went to the furthest tables and noticed that his young inspector had put the sheet back up over Donner’s corpse, though not very neatly. She tugged at it irritably, and found that the whole thing was crooked. She turned the sheet down.

  She saw straight away that something was wrong. Vogelaar’s right eye wasn’t looking good, but the left eye was horrible.

  With a dark presentiment, she lifted the lid.

  The glass eye was missing.

  For a moment she flushed hot and cold at the thought that she would be blamed. She had left the eye in its socket, but only because she wanted to take it out later and show it to a prosthetics expert. They had noticed something odd about it. It looked as though it had something inside, maybe some sort of mechanism with which Vogelaar could see, perhaps something else. They hadn’t really considered it significant.

  Obviously they had been wrong.

  Electrified, she ran from the theatre and up the stairs. She found Dr Marika Voss in the corridor.

  ‘Are the Chinese police still here?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘The Chinese?’ Dr Voss raised her eyebrows. ‘No, they just left. Why?’

  ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

  ‘What’s up?’ the older woman demanded.

  ‘They took something with them,’ Maas stammered. Bastards, landing her in it like this!

  ‘With them?’ Voss echoed.

  ‘The eye. The glass eye.’

  The doctor hadn’t been in the team who had examined Donner. She knew nothing about the eye, but she understood all the same that they would be in trouble.

  ‘I’ll call the guards at the gate,’ she said.

  * * *

  The car glided along the main road on the hospital campus, past the stern red-brick buildings, the peaceful lawns and paths, the shady trees.

  ‘Hey,’ Yoyo said, frowning. ‘What’s going on up ahead?’

  Somebody came running out of the guards’ cabin, a man in uniform. He raised his hands as though directing an aeroplane on the runway. At the same time, the barrier began to drop. Obviously the fuss was about them.

  ‘I should
imagine we’ve been found out.’

  ‘Great. Now what?’

  ‘All down to you.’ Tu looked across at her. ‘How do you like Berlin? Do you want to stay?’

  ‘Not at any cost.’

  ‘Thought not,’ he said, accelerated and shot under the barrier, so close that Yoyo was surprised not to hear it scrape across the roof. Behind them, the guard’s yells drifted like pollen on the summer air.

  Hotel Adlon

  The symbol shimmering on the display showed many twisting reptilian necks, all springing from a single body. Nine heads. The symbol of Hydra.

  Xin clapped the phone to his ear.

  ‘We’ve sent you data from several major Berlin hotels,’ said the caller. ‘No luck with the smaller ones. There’s a hell of a lot of them – all Berlin seems to be nothing but hotels. The problem was that working so fast, we couldn’t get into every single computer—’

  ‘Understood. And?’

  ‘No hits.’

  ‘They must be staying somewhere,’ Xin insisted.

  ‘They’re not in any of the international chains. No Chen Yuyun and no Owen Jericho. However, I can give you more details of the warning that reached London yesterday. I’ll send you the text. Do you want to hear it first?’

  ‘Spit it out.’

  Xin listened to the fragmentary sentences that he already knew so well. He considered just how dangerous this fire might be that Yoyo and Jericho had started. It was hardly a fragment by now. They had decrypted almost ninety per cent of the message. All the same, the really important parts, the decisive information, was still missing. And it hadn’t been Jericho, or the girl, who had called Edda Hoff, but a man called Tu. Hoff was number three in the Orley security chain of command, and Xin knew very little about her, other than that she was quite unimaginative and accordingly would never exaggerate, or downplay, a threat.