The Oath

by Klaus-Peter Wolf

  Her dominating voice suggested an impending adventure for Rupert. He’d actually been looking forward to a relaxing massage, but he could get that from his wife. Now he was intrigued to find out what techniques a chiropractor had mastered.

  Sweating, he slipped out of his clothes with astonishing speed.

  She sat behind him and gave commands like: ‘Lift your left foot. Now place your legs shoulder-width apart and lift your right foot. So, now lift your knee up to your stomach. Yes. Now bend your back forward as far as you can.’

  Rupert got his head almost down to his knees, his hands barely reaching the floor. All this time he was standing with his back to her, but he didn’t get slapped on the bottom. Instead, she said simply, ‘Thanks. And now please stand up again.’

  Roswitha Wischnewski worked her way up his spine with a probing touch. Rupert sighed with pleasure.

  ‘You’re standing crooked. Your left leg is shorter than your right. That leads to pelvic obliquity, and presumably is causing pain in your sacroiliac joint.’

  She placed her hands over the joint and pressed in exactly the place that had so often tortured Rupert. He groaned.

  The lovemaking he expected didn’t happen. Instead, she bent him so that his spine cracked and he was afraid he’d never walk again. He alternated between wanting to defend himself and simply surrendering to her.

  After she had finished, she asked for forty-five euros and warned that the treatment could initially lead to a worsening of his symptoms. He would probably feel tired over the next twenty-four hours, but then he’d feel better.

  She suggested walking a lot and starting with back muscle training and spinal exercises. She wanted to show him a few more tricks.

  ‘Forty-five euros,’ Rupert thought, paying dutifully. And he hadn’t seen her breasts. What’s the world coming to? Isn’t there wild, uninhibited sex anywhere anymore?

  He would have preferred his Beate’s reiki rituals. He lay down on the bed, she placed her hands on his head, and he frequently fell asleep without finding out how the session continued.

  Rupert’s spine was pulsing when got back into his car.

  Surely all the tourists with kids who left the island that day have been checked, he thought to himself. That can’t be such a big problem. After all, they all registered their arrivals and departures in the hotels and bed and breakfasts and with the local administration. But Yves Stern’s story could still be true. Maybe the mother with the child had been a tourist on a day trip who had left Bensersiel for a trip to Langeoog and had taken the last ferry back in the evening. Then she wouldn’t be registered anywhere.

  Rupert thought about whether he should go home now or stop for a couple of beers at Mittelhaus to avoid Beate and the reiki gang.

  An incoming call brought him back to himself. The speakerphone was on, and Rupert learned from his colleagues in Cuxhaven that their investigations had come to nothing. They had checked all the men who had received pedicures in Cuxhaven and the surrounding area during the last week. All of them were still alive.

  Rupert didn’t know what to do with this finding, but was happy that so many men survived pedicures in Cuxhaven. He sent the information directly to Ann Kathrin’s inbox.

  *

  Odysseus feared that the spirits of the murdered children had returned. Last night he had woken up screaming again and had seen them before him. They had been standing next to his bed and had shaken it.

  Steffi Heymann held the lollipop he’d given her, and was sucking on it. Nicola Billing was sipping on the Coke that they’d shared.

  Children were so easy to get and so easy to dispose of.

  He never, ever wanted to do it again. He fought against it.

  How much he envied those hetero men who could get married and then cheat on their wives as they pleased, had the brothel at their disposal, striptease bars and millions of hours of legal porn on the Internet. They had nothing to fear if they wanted to act out their sexual desires.

  It wasn’t even a problem anymore to be gay. Everything was possible. Everything was accepted. Only his damn sexual orientation would never be recognised. He’d given up hope.

  People would always hate him for what he was. He hated himself for it.

  He’d even tried therapy until the therapist stopped treatment for moral reasons, recommending a different place and stopping just short of notifying the police.

  And the therapist didn’t know everything, by any means. He thought they were talking about fantasies, not about lived experiences. Still, he had had no other choice but to kill that pin-headed intellectual. He couldn’t afford witnesses.

  He had never become part of a scene. He didn’t download any pictures from the Internet. He didn’t make any recordings of his crimes. He didn’t exchange anything. He tried to live an upright, inconspicuous life.

  His fantasies had caught up with him about a year ago. He knew that everything was leading to a repetition of the deed.

  He didn’t want to kill the effeminate boy. He only wanted to be close to him.

  But in the last couple of days this had become increasingly difficult, since all hell had broken loose. He hadn’t paid attention to the newspaper reports about a severed head on Wangerooge initially. He was preoccupied with completely different things, consumed with his own abyss, tied up in the struggle with himself.

  But then he’d heard those names. Heymann. Stern. That reporter, Joachim Faust, was back in the middle of things and reopening the case. Somehow everything was connected with that Ubbo Heide, the detective from back then.

  All of this seemed like a nightmare from a former life.

  Had someone killed those men to remind him of his crimes? What was this about in the first place? Was the murderer also after him?

  He considered this unlikely, but he didn’t want to ignore any possibility. He had to be careful. He was on very thin ice.

  For him Joachim Faust was a rat who’d sunk his teeth into a juicy piece of roast meat. He wouldn’t give up and the Kripo surely wouldn’t either.

  Would he end up in front of a judge after all?

  Everything had been looking so good for him, back then.

  The deck would be shuffled again, and he didn’t want to draw a bad hand. He had to stop the murderer.

  First he had to forget about the baby-faced little boy from Wilhelmshaven. There were more important things. His own disguise.

  He’d get that executioner. It was all leading to a fight.

  He grinned. That wannabe jihadi surely wasn’t used to his way of fighting.

  I’ll get you before you know what I look like, he thought.

  He was good at that. He didn’t need anyone to give him good advice or support him. He was used to living like a lone wolf. Completely autonomous in his own universe.

  He’d come to Gelsenkirchen to get a feel for Ubbo Heide. Somehow it all led back to him. If the murderer showed up here he’d recognise him. He had a sense for things like that. There were victims and there were perpetrators. There was the picture, and those who could see. Just like there were men and women and creatures like him. And he could tell all of them apart.

  But he didn’t have to talk to them for that. He had his antennae and could sense it. He knew exactly who was like he was. Sometimes it was sufficient to spend a short amount of time in the same room with someone to know, or even just to walk past them.

  Others heard a sound and could exactly place it within the scale. That’s a C, that is a high A.

  He recognised offenders, victims and his own kind.

  *

  The bookseller Sabine Piechaczek patiently explained the camera to Frank Weller. She didn’t let it show how irritated she was that a professional photographer seemed so clueless, uninterested in diaphragms, lighting and the sharpness of the lens, shifting directly to automatic instead.

  She found him likeable and forgave him for his ignorance, blaming nervousness, and said, ‘If you’re writing a piece about Ubbo Heide, then
don’t forget to mention that he has an unbelievable number of fans in the Ruhr region. I have ordered more than 120 copies of his book for the reading. People really value its honesty. Finally someone doesn’t just claim to know the truth, but rather is searching for the truth. It’s just good to know.’

  Weller agreed. ‘Yeah, sure,’ and fiddled with the camera, accidentally taking a picture.

  Ubbo Heide was already on stage in his wheelchair and doing a microphone test. It still sounded slightly muffled. Then suddenly there was an echo. But the sound technician was a master of his trade and after a brief period Ubbo Heide’s voice came out of the speakers just like the original, only much louder.

  Many guests were already waiting in the foyer. There was no reserved seating, so many of the audience had come very early to get good seats. The library director, Friedhelm Overkämping, was still holding the door shut. He wanted to have a word with Ubbo Heide . He noticed that Ann Kathrin Klaasen and Frank Weller were taking turns staying close to him, almost acting like bodyguards, and getting between Ubbo Heide and anyone who wanted to greet him.

  Even he had difficulties reaching Ubbo Heide. He could feel Ann Kathrin Klaasen’s gaze checking him out; she would have preferred to pat him down. Then she let him through but stood so close to him that he briefly started when reaching into his pocket for a tissue because his movement seemed to frighten her and she reacted to it by taking a swift step towards him. When she saw the tissue, she stopped and smiled.

  Then the audience streamed into the room and a man immediately tried to get onto the stage. Frank Weller accidentally knocked his legs out from under him, looking as if he had lurched forward very awkwardly and stumbled over the other man. Now the two of them were on the floor together and Friedhelm Overkämping saw that Weller was patting the other person down.

  ‘Hey, Willy,’ cried Ubbo Heide, ‘you here?’

  Wilhelm Kaufmann scrambled up, gave Weller a furious look and walked over to Ubbo Heide. He shook his hand. ‘I read that you were reading here and I wanted to come. Old boy!’ He almost kneeled in front of Ubbo Heide’s wheelchair and the two men hugged.

  Ubbo Heide knew only too well that Wilhelm hadn’t just come to listen to his reading. That was what he officially said out loud to everyone. Then he murmured into Ubbo’s ear, ‘Hey, is it actually true that they sent you Bernhard Heymann’s head?’

  Ubbo nodded. ‘Yeah. And Yves Stern’s.’

  ‘My God, it all comes back so vividly. I absolutely have to talk to you.’

  ‘Yeah. After the reading. I’m staying at the Intercity Hotel,’ said Ubbo Heide. ‘I’m glad that you’re here, Willy. Really!’

  Now Weller was walking around Ubbo Heide on stage, acting as if he were taking pictures of him. In reality he was trying to take snapshots of the audience and capture as many faces as possible.

  He also saw the two detectives from Gelsenkirchen who had been so unhelpful in Büscher’s hotel room. They had obviously decided to come anyway. They stood by the door next to Büscher, looking as if they’d had an accident and were afraid that everyone would smell what had just happened to them.

  Even the journalist Kowalski was present. The man was a head taller than most of the other guests. He worked his way through to Ubbo Heide and presented him with a tin of sweets as a thank you for a truly great interview.

  ‘I know how much you enjoy your sweets. I hope you like mints from Bochum, not just marzipan.’

  Ubbo Heide regarded the pretty tin. He opened it and found white peppermint lozenges. He tried one right away and winked at Kowalski. ‘Fantastic, your mints.’

  Ann Kathrin saw that Weller was uncomfortable. He wasn’t very good in the role of Holger Bloem, completely missing the calm composure with which the professional searched for the best perspectives for his shots. His movements seemed frantic and his cheeks were flushed. He felt that he was not being taken seriously as a photographer, as if everyone else had caught on long ago that he was a cop taking pictures for a possible manhunt. People kept on turning away at the decisive moment or leaning over and disappearing from the field of vision and he felt unable to get important people in the shot.

  Weller felt like he was under fire during the event. He was unbelievably furious that things had not gone according to plan. He would have preferred to lock down the room and record the particulars of all those present. He was irritated that it couldn’t be that easy.

  ‘Why,’ he hissed in Ann Kathrin’s direction, ‘does something terrible always have to happen before we can take action?’

  ‘Something terrible has already happened, Frank,’ she answered. ‘Two people are dead. But it’s possible that none of the people present here had anything to do with it.’

  Weller thought he recognised the man who had been sitting at the bar in the Intercity Hotel. He tried to zoom in closer, but the man — if it was him at all — had taken a seat directly behind Kowalski, and he was at least half covered by the tall man.

  Friedhelm Overkämping welcomed the guests and told them they should know how happy he was to have brought Ubbo Heide, a man who was currently very much at the centre of public interest, to Gelsenkirchen.

  Sabine Piechaczek stopped selling books so as not to disturb the event. They had already sold three stacks of books and were uncertain if they would have enough. She waved to an intern, asking them to go back to the shop and get the books from the window display.

  Carefully, Ubbo Heide began to read. His voice was a little shaky at first, but then it became firm and, within a few sentences, Ubbo had the audience under his spell.

  ‘Sometimes as a young detective I could picture the crime vividly. I could see it just like a movie in my head, but I couldn’t prove it. All too often, the judge would call my mental cinema speculation. The chain of evidence wasn’t convincing enough. Expert witnesses tore it to pieces, lawyers pulverised eyewitness statements. Sometimes I left a court building as a defeated man while the culprit – I’d probably have to say defendant to be legally correct – triumphed. I always felt guilty then and I would wake up from nightmares drenched in sweat because the criminal had struck again, in my nightmares.

  ‘I counted the crime as my own, felt guilty because I hadn’t been meticulous enough in the investigations and hadn’t been convincing enough.’

  Ubbo Heide was repeatedly interrupted by applause. After about an hour Ubbo closed his book and drained a glass of water in a single gulp. He asked the audience to refrain from asking questions. He said he was completely exhausted and needed to leave soon. Everyone understood, but even so, a long line of people who wanted to have their book signed formed.

  Weller seized this fantastic opportunity and was literally fluttering around Ubbo Heide with his camera, taking snapshots of his signing and always getting two or three of the people standing in line into the picture.

  The Gelsenkirchen officer with a crew cut, whose name Weller didn’t know, gave Weller a clear sign that he should photograph a certain person. However, Weller had already taken a couple of pictures of him and didn’t want to be distracted.

  A small, plump woman patted Ubbo Heide’s hand. She looked as though she would have liked to smother him with kisses and beamed at him. ‘Don’t give up, Mr Heide. We need men like you. Please write in my book: For Erika. It would be a great honour for me.’

  Ubbo Heide did as he was asked and even added two hearts.

  *

  Odysseus had found himself in the middle of the room, listening to the reading, and stretching out his antennae. But it had been different this time and he hadn’t been able to tell the hunters from the prey. It was as if he’d lost his knack for it.

  He’d come to find the killer, but now he had the sneaking feeling that the murderer had found him.

  Hadn’t the first two corpses been enough of a message to flush him out, so he’d finally show his face again?

  Who the hell are you, he thought. Who are you? And what do you want from me?

  There w
ere police officers in the room. He’d recognised them immediately. The blundering press photographer on stage was certainly from the Kripo. The woman who was always close to Ubbo Heide was surely someone from his talent pool. He couldn’t say if the bookseller was real or also a cop. Unquestionably, the two guys right next to the entrance were police.

  Not long ago, so many law enforcement officers in one space would have made him nervous. Now he almost felt safe in their presence, and that made him worry. Had he become the hunted in the meantime?

  He’d always sworn that he would never turn himself in, that he’d kill himself before his cover was blown and he was captured. People like him couldn’t expect forgiveness. Neither from the courts nor in prison later.

  Ever since the murder of Nicola Billing he’d been carrying a capsule that he’d purchased in Thailand at great expense. Supposedly it contained a poison stronger than arsenic. One quick bite was enough and he’d slip away from any court on earth.

  A couple of times, during crises, he’d considered using the capsule, and today was one of those days. He felt it’d be better than being decapitated.

  He saw Willy Kaufmann. That was that cop! When he looked in Kaufmann’s direction the air seemed to vibrate, and the intense feeling of old returned.

  He took a deep breath and had the feeling he wasn’t sitting in Gelsenkirchen in the library, but at Flinthörn on Langeoog, barefoot in the sand, enjoying the sea air.

  *

  Sabine Piechaczek helped Weller remove the SD card from the camera after all the paying guests had left the room. She admitted she herself had borrowed the camera, but of course Weller was allowed to keep the card.

  He wanted to pay for it, but she waved him away. She claimed it had been her pleasure and she’d rather have the article he was going to write about Ubbo Heide, so she could present it in her window display along with the new book from Ubbo Heide that so many readers were waiting for.

  Weller promised that and felt bad for pulling the wool over her eyes. Then he went over to the officers from Gelsenkirchen and asked, ‘Who was that guy I was absolutely supposed to photograph?’