Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  * * *

  When Xin heard that the elderly Chinese couple in front of him intended to book one of the Grand Hyatt’s finest and most expensive suites, he felt a warm glow of pleasure. Not because of any sudden spasm of altruism, but because the suite was on the seventh floor. Right where he wanted to be.

  The husband put his thumb on the scanplate. A young receptionist offered to show the couple up to their room, and they strolled across to the lift together. Xin fell in behind them. As they stood there waiting for the lift, the wife turned to look at him, her curiosity as strong as an elastic band tugging her head around. She looked in bemusement at the tumble of hair over his shoulders, and in bafflement at his holospecs. She eyed the toes of his snakeskin boots dubiously, visibly nervous at the thought of having to share a hotel with the likes of him. Her husband stuck to her side, short and stocky, and stared at the gap where the lift doors met until they opened. They went into the lift together. Nobody asked whether he was with the group. The young receptionist smiled warmly at him, and he smiled back, just as warmly.

  ‘Seventh floor as well?’ she asked, in English just to be on the safe side.

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said.

  Next to him, the Chinese woman stiffened, horribly sure now that he was living on the same floor.

  * * *

  Tu tore back the bedclothes but his phone wasn’t there, any more than it had been on the desk or on either of the night-stands. He rummaged through sheets, flung pillows aside, grabbed fistfuls of linen and damask, slid his fingers in between the mattress and the frame.

  Nothing.

  Who had he called last? Who had he been meaning to call?

  The airport. At least, he had wanted to, but then he had decided to call later. He had even had the thing in his hand.

  And he’d put it down.

  He swept his eyes over the desk again, the chairs, armchair, carpeting. Incredible, he was getting old! What had he been doing just before? He saw himself standing there, his phone in his right hand, while there was something in his left hand too, something just below waist height—

  Aha, of course!

  * * *

  Seventh floor.

  The Chinese wife pushed herself brusquely past the young receptionist to get out of the lift, as though she feared that Xin might bite her at the last moment. Her husband, though, had a sudden access of Western etiquette, and took a step back to let the young woman go first, smiling broadly at her. Xin waited until the group was out of sight. The hotel corridors stretched around a sunny atrium space, four sides of a square, with the guest rooms along the front edges. He looked at the wall map. He was glad to see the receptionist and the Chinese couple had set off in the opposite direction from the rooms which Tu had taken.

  He was alone.

  The carpet muffled his steps. He passed a club lounge, turned into the next corridor, stopped, recalled Tu’s room numbers.

  712, 717, 727.

  712 was to his left. He walked on quickly, counting up. 717, also locked. His coat swung out around him as he stopped still, dead in the middle of the corridor. 727 was ajar.

  Tu? Jericho? Yoyo?

  One of the three of them would soon regret not having locked up.

  * * *

  Yoyo saw the gyrocopter first.

  ‘Where?’ Jericho yelped.

  ‘I think it’s headed this way.’ She ran to the edge of the skyport and stood there, hopping from one leg to the other. ‘Oh, shit! The cops. It’s the cops!’

  Jericho had been chatting with the skycab pilot, but now he shaded his eyes with his hand. Yoyo was right. It was a police gyrocopter, coming closer, like the one he had seen above the Brandenburg Gate a few hours ago.

  ‘They could be here for any one of a thousand reasons.’

  Yoyo hared across to him. ‘Tian will screw it all up.’

  ‘Nothing’s screwed up yet.’ Jericho nodded towards the skycab. ‘We’ll get in. That way at least they won’t see you leaping about up here.’

  * * *

  ‘Ha!’ Tu called out.

  He’d gone to have a pee, of course! And while he’d been peeing, guiding the stream with his left hand and holding the phone in his right, he’d had a momentary brainfart and had almost shaken the last drop off his phone and talked to his dick. Mankind at the mercy of communication technology. He felt outraged. A fellow should at least to be able to go to the toilet without having to communicate. There were limits. Nothing should make a man mix up his wedding tackle and his telephone.

  So he had put the thing to one side – the phone that is – and had attended to the call of nature. The bathroom was inside the main suite, like a room within a room, with two doors, opposite one another. You could go into it from the bedroom and from the front lobby. Tu slid back the glass door by the bed and looked first at the toilet. The phone was lying there on top of the cistern.

  Little bastard, he thought. Now to get out of here.

  * * *

  Xin went into the open room and looked about. A short front lobby led into a brightly lit larger room, obviously the suite. Directly to his right was a frosted glass door, closed. He could hear steps from behind it, and tuneless whistling. There was someone in the bathroom.

  His hand slid under his emerald-green coat.

  * * *

  The gyrocopter settled down.

  Yoyo squirmed back into her seat as though she wanted to melt into the upholstery. Jericho risked a glance outside. Two uniformed officers got out of the ultralight craft, went to the hotel clerk at the terminal and talked to him.

  ‘What are they after this time?’ grumbled the pilot, in German-accented English, and craned his neck inquisitively. ‘Even up in the air they don’t leave you alone.’

  ‘It’s good that they keep an eye on things though,’ Yoyo trilled cheerfully.

  Jericho looked askance at her. He expected the hotel clerk to point across at them at any moment. If the patrol had brought photos with them, then they were sunk. The man gesticulated, pointed inside the terminal to the lifts.

  Jericho held his breath.

  He saw the policemen exchange a few words, then one of them looked across at the skycab. For a moment it seemed that he was looking straight at Jericho. Then he glanced away, and the two officers vanished beneath the terminal roof.

  ‘Let’s just hope that Tu doesn’t walk right into them,’ Yoyo hissed.

  * * *

  The steps came closer. He heard something clatter. A silhouette appeared behind the frosted glass and stopped there, right in front of the bathroom door.

  Xin readied his weapon.

  He yanked the door open and grabbed the man behind it, shoving him against the wall at the back, then pulled the door closed behind him and pressed the muzzle of the gun against the man’s temple.

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ he said.

  * * *

  ‘What did you say?’ one of the policemen asked.

  The other pointed forward. ‘I think 727 is open.’

  ‘So it is.’

  ‘I reckon we needn’t think much more about which room to start with, wouldn’t you say?’

  They had taken the lift down from the flight deck to the seventh floor and set out in search of the rooms which the Chinese mogul had taken. His picture had been stored in the airport databases, and was on their phones now, so they had a pretty good idea of what he looked like. On the other hand, they had no idea which of the three rooms he might be in.

  ‘We should have shown that guy on the roof Tu’s picture.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’ his colleague whispered back.

  ‘Just because.’

  The other officer gnawed at his lip. They had only asked where the rooms were.

  ‘I don’t know. What can the guy on rooftop duty tell us?’

  They could see a little way through the open door of 727 and into the hallway.

  ‘Whatever,’ the other man whispered. ‘It’s too late anyway.’

/>   * * *

  Xin listened.

  His left hand was over the fat man’s mouth – he could feel sweat pearling under his fingers – and his gun was still pressed against his forehead. He would have liked the chance to ask a few questions, but now the situation had changed. Men just in front of the door to the room, at least two of them, trying to keep their voices down. They were doomed to failure there – Xin had ears like a beast of prey. As far as he was concerned, the two of them were not whispering but bellowing like drunks at a summer barbecue.

  Right at this moment, they were very interested in room 727.

  A muffled sound broke free from the man in front of him, a grunt from somewhere deep in the ribcage. Xin shook his head, a warning, and—

  * * *

  Tu held his breath. He stood there frozen like a statue, his eyes wide. The slightest mistake and things would be over for him, that much was clear.

  Over and done with.

  * * *

  The police officers looked at one another. They readied their weapons, then one of them pointed to the door of the room and nodded.

  In we go, he said wordlessly.

  * * *

  Xin ran through his options.

  He could warn his victim: say one word, and you’re dead! Then he’d hide in the small toilet cabin next to the shower, and hope that the man was scared enough not to betray his presence. This was risky. It would be even riskier to take him hostage. How would he get a hostage out of the Grand Hyatt? He didn’t know who those men out there were. Since they were trying not to make any noise, they were probably security, maybe police.

  Or maybe Jericho?

  There were two doors to this bathroom. Both were drawn shut. All he could do was hope that the men would look first at the bedroom behind, and then come into the bathroom through that door. This would give him the chance to slip away unnoticed through the door to the hallway. But in order to do that—

  Lightning-fast, without letting go of his gun, he placed his hands on either side of the fat man’s head, and with a practised movement broke his neck. The man’s body slumped. Xin caught him as he dropped, and slid him silently down to the floor.

  * * *

  The policemen crept along the short corridor. A mirror to their left cast their reflections back at them for company. On the right they saw a frosted glass door, which must lead to the bathroom. One of the two stopped, and looked at his colleague questioningly.

  The other man hesitated, shook his head and pointed forward.

  Slowly, they paced on.

  * * *

  Tu could breathe again.

  When he had left his room and seen two uniformed officers in the corridor, his heart had sunk in his chest, right down to the threadbare seat of his trousers. Without even daring to shut the door behind himself, he had watched the policemen slow their stride at room 727, where they stopped and talked, too quiet for him to hear. They had their backs to him the whole time – although it was certainly him they were after, and there he stood, not ten metres from them, rooted to the spot as though paralysed, so that all they would have needed to do was turn round and scoop him up in their net.

  But they hadn’t turned round.

  For some reason, all their attention was on Yoyo’s room. And suddenly Tu knew why. The door was ajar. He understood it at the moment when the two policemen went inside, and he realised how outrageously lucky he had been.

  Why had Yoyo left her door open? Hurry? Bad habits?

  Who cared.

  Quietly, he shut 717, tiptoed down the corridor past the lounge on the left and found the lifts. He pressed his thumb to the scanplate and looked up at the display.

  All the lifts were downstairs.

  * * *

  Xin strained his senses, following the men. There were two of them, just as he had conjectured, and right now they were going into the bedroom, where their footsteps parted ways.

  He glanced down at the dead body in hotel livery, its head at an unnatural angle on the broken neck. The man’s right hand still held the little bottle of shampoo that he had been about to put under the mirror. At the same moment, Xin remembered that he had seen a room-service trolley in the corridor. Not making a sound, he slid open the bathroom door to the front hall, slipped out and pulled it closed behind him. He spotted a uniformed arm and shoulder in the room, hoped that they had not left another officer in front of the door, and slipped out of the room, quiet as a cat.

  * * *

  Tu hopped from toe to toe, snorting, peering about. He spread his fingers out, then clenched his fists.

  Come along, come along, he thought. Blasted lift! Just bring me up to the damn roof.

  The levels were ticking by painfully slowly on the display. Two cabins were headed up. One was stopped on five, the other on six, right below him. For a moment Tu felt murderous rage at the people getting in and out of the lifts down there. They were taking up his time. He hated them with all his heart.

  Come on there, he thought. Come on!

  * * *

  Room 727.

  The policemen approached the glass door that led straight from the double bed to the bathroom. For a moment they paused there, listening for noises from inside, but all was quiet.

  At last one of them plucked up his nerve.

  * * *

  They must be finding the body about now.

  Pacing with care, Xin approached the turn in the corridor that led on to the lifts. He stayed calm. The police had not seen him going out. He had shut the glass door behind himself, ever attentive to detail. There was nothing to show that whoever had murdered the hotel employee had been in the bathroom just a few seconds before.

  No need to hurry.

  * * *

  Seven!

  Tu could have sworn that the lift had crept up those last few metres. Finally the gleaming steel doors swept apart, letting out a horde of young folk, expensively dressed. He shoved his way brusquely through them, put his thumb to the scanplate and pressed Skyport. The doors slid shut.

  * * *

  Xin rounded the corner. Hotel guests came towards him the other way. He saw one of the lifts just closing, headed for the next one, pressed the sensor and waited.

  Seconds later he was on his way down to the lobby.

  * * *

  ‘There you are at last!’ Yoyo called.

  Tu rushed from the terminal, leaning forward as he ran as though trying to outrun his own legs. He tumbled into the cabin, slumped down into the seat across from them and signalled to the pilot.

  ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ Jericho observed, while the cab swung its jets downward.

  ‘Two.’ Tu held up his index and middle finger to make the point, then realised he had just made a V for victory and grinned. ‘They didn’t see me though.’

  ‘Idiot,’ Yoyo spat at him, softly.

  ‘Well, do please excuse me.’

  ‘Don’t do anything like that again! Owen and I were sweating bullets.’

  They lifted off. The police gyrocopter dwindled away behind them on the landing platform, then the pilot accelerated and left Potsdamer Platz behind. Tu looked out of the window, indignant.

  ‘Feel free to keep sweating,’ he said. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet.’

  ‘What were the cops doing down there?’

  ‘They went into your room. Speaking of which, you left it open.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘That’s odd.’ Tu shrugged. ‘Well, maybe it was room service.’

  ‘Whatever. They won’t find anything there. I didn’t leave anything behind.’

  ‘Didn’t forget anything?’

  ‘Forget?’ Yoyo stared at him. ‘Is this really you, asking me, whether I forgot anything?’

  Tu cleared his throat several times in a row, took out his phone and called the airport. Of course you forgot something, Jericho thought to himself. Same as we all forgot something. Fingerprints, hair, DNA. While his friend was on the phone, h
e wondered whether it might not have been smarter after all to let the local authorities know what was gong on. Tu seemed to share Yoyo’s antipathy to the police, but Germany was not China. So far Germany had no obvious interests at stake in this drama that they were all living through. In the meantime, they had begun to act more and more like the outlaws. Although they weren’t the ones who had committed the crimes, it must seem that they were up to their necks in guilt.

  Tu snapped his phone shut and looked at Jericho for an age, while the skycab raced towards the airport.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said.

  ‘Forget what?’

  ‘You’re wondering whether we shouldn’t just give ourselves up.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jericho sighed.

  ‘I do, though. Until we know what’s in this dossier, and we’ve spoken to the delightful Edda Hoff one more time, we won’t trust any intelligence agency in the world.’ Tu pointed to his own temple, twirling his finger meaningfully. ‘Except this one.’

  * * *

  The massacre in the Pergamon Museum had thrown police headquarters into an uproar that made a hornets’ nest look quiet. And now this as well – a dead Indonesian room-service worker, a man with no record of misbehaviour, who spoke hardly any German, whose whole job was to dole out soap, toilet paper and bedtime sweets. The risks of such a job were grumbling guests or messy rooms, not a broken neck when the body lotion began to run out.

  Setting aside the two dead police from the museum for a moment, several people had some obscure connection with this new death. A murdered restaurateur from South Africa, who had taken another man with him as he died, killing the mystery man with a pencil – suggesting that he had skills mostly lacking in the restaurant business. Then his black wife, who had been shot in her car and then driven halfway across town. There was the driver to consider as well, a white man, blond, who had clearly been trying to help Donner in the museum but who had become a target in turn, drawing fire from Donner’s killer, another mystery man, tall with white hair, a bristling moustache, wearing a suit and spectacles. Then there was a Chinese industrialist, head of a Shanghai technology enterprise, who had himself claimed to be a policeman and had stolen Donner’s glass eye, helped by a young Chinese woman. Then last of all the Indonesian man, whose role in life had been to make sure that guests were never left lacking in the bathroom and that they always found a little treat on their pillow at bedtime.