Without another word, Guido Hatz has left Britta’s office and climbed back into his Hilux. Now she’s standing in his empty parking spot, as if she must make sure nothing’s there anymore. She raises her head and lets the fine rain tickle her face. She has an urge to spread out her arms and spin around and around on her own axis under the low-hanging sky. It’s glorious to stand out on the street and be a normal person with a normal life. No obsessive thoughts, no pointless questions doing loops inside her head. A boring passerby who stops for a moment and gazes at the sky while the drizzling rain gradually soaks through the layers of her clothing.
Guido Hatz is crazy; therefore, Britta isn’t.
For a while she considers it possible that recent events have absolutely nothing to do with her. A failed terrorist attack, carried out by two idiots who turned a really bad idea into even worse action. A multimillionaire crackpot who drives around in a pickup truck playing the angel. A dead would-be terrorist who takes his own life while behind bars, probably with the help of belt or shoelaces, which, pace Hollywood movies, prisoners in detention are definitely allowed to wear.
When someone once asked Janina how she always managed to be cheerful in these troubled times, she replied, “I just relish the thought that the great majority of things have nothing to do with me.”
Britta peers at her face in the VW bus’s tinted side window. To her surprise, she looks the same as always. The events have left no visible imprint. She likes what she sees. The face is pretty in a way that doesn’t remain in the memory. The clothes expensive, but sending no signal. The blond hair too short to wish to please. Middling tall, middling slim, a woman without burdens or passions, a woman who eats in moderation, loves in moderation, exercises in moderation. A living average, she is, and things will go on that way, a life lived in a straight line, right to the end. While she watches herself, Britta feels her consciousness rise to the surface again after days of lying buried deep inside her, where there’s nothing to be found. Health and happiness lie on the surface, not underground. The deeper a person sinks into herself, the more despair she feels. Britta knows that from her work. Now all she wants to do is to go home and stand under a hot shower, which will cleanse her outwardly and inwardly, will wash off everything that’s been stuck to her since the Leipzig attack. After that—she knows this with certainty—she’ll be free.
When Vera’s asleep, Britta talks to Richard about Hatz. They’re sitting in the living room, each of them holding a glass of wine, and looking out through the picture window. Although there are still some two hours remaining before sundown, it’s almost dark; the drizzle has grown into a heavy downpour. The water plunges down out of a black sky, plants and trees bow under the torrents, and cars drive slowly, pushing little halos before them.
“He came to the practice today. Guido Hatz.”
“Is that so? What did he want?”
“Basically, he said I have a terrible aura and he’s my guardian angel.”
“Typical Guido!”
While Richard laughs, Britta gets annoyed because he calls Hatz by his first name. It sounds affected.
“Furthermore, he thinks I should take a break from work so you can concentrate on busting your butt for Swappie.”
Richard suddenly switches to a serious pose and says, “The next months will be pretty hard, it’s true.”
“Tell me I didn’t really hear that,” says Britta, stunned.
“Wait a second, darling. You’ve worked so hard for several years now, you’ve fed the family and financed the house. Why shouldn’t you take it easy for a change? It would be only right.”
“Come on, don’t you get it?” Britta sounds more aggressive than she means to. “How much I work has absolutely nothing to do with you and Smart Swap.” She gazes at him, appraising him. “Or do you think like him? You think I’m suffering from burnout?”
His hesitation wounds her. He’s supposed to believe she can deal with anything. Always. That’s what he’s there for.
“No,” he says. “I think we have to get a handle on your stomach pains. You must let a doctor examine you. No more putting it off.”
“Have I ever complained?”
“That’s beside the point. You haven’t been yourself for the last few weeks. And you’re gone a lot. Vera constantly has to stay at Janina’s.”
“Did you and Hatz talk about me?”
“No.”
“You really didn’t?”
“No! This has nothing at all to do with Hatz!”
“Have you ever wondered whether he might be crazy?”
Richard looks at her queerly. “You mean you think someone has to be crazy to invest in my ideas?”
Now a quarrel’s in the air, a spat Britta didn’t want. The conversation has taken a completely wrong turn. She gives irony a try: “Right! Only psychopaths believe in Swappie!” She kisses him, which costs a bit of effort. “Anyway, you’ve got to admit, Hatz is a strange bird. Why is he following me? Why is he so concerned about my health?”
“Following you? I thought he was in your office today.”
“Do you know what kind of car Guido Hatz has?”
“Probably lots of cars.”
“A Toyota Hilux.”
“So what?”
“It’s a white pickup.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“Remember our trip to Wiebüttel? The pickup that kept running up behind us.”
“Britta.” Richard puts down his glass so he can take her hands. “That’s just ridiculous.”
“A few days later, he drove past the house. I saw him.”
“Stop it, please!”
“I’m dead certain. You’ll have to cope with the fact that your golden goose is a nutcase. At the very least.”
“Darling, what you’re saying is absurd, can’t you see that?”
“You think it’s normal for him to come and see me in my office?”
“He wanted to meet you. He’s something of an oddball, that’s all.”
“So you think I’m the one who’s nuts, not him?”
“Nobody’s nuts.” Richard tries to stroke her hair, but she evades his hand.
The next morning, she takes her bicycle to work. Despite the argument with Richard, she slept for a few hours during the night and feels rested. She’s still pretty furious with him, however; at the breakfast table, the two of them barely spoke.
In the dental lab, the blond receptionist in the white coat is already at her station. When Britta greets the girl, she merely stares through her. Britta wonders whether she’s sat there the whole night, and whether she’s a human person or a surveillance robot installed by Guido Hatz.
She can tell at a glance that Babak’s not in. The ceiling lights are off, the dot picture lies untouched. She doesn’t bother to get off her bicycle and unlock the door; instead she resumes pedaling at once, past the shops in the Passage—the great majority of them standing empty—and back to Kurt Schumacher Street, where she heads farther downtown. John F. Kennedy Square is a work site yet again, traffic’s been rerouted, and everywhere there are yellow plastic barriers, clattering jackhammers, bellowing workers. As far as Britta knows, a “Sport Is Public” venue will be built in the middle of the intersection, with yoga areas, Nordic walking parcours, and trampolines, but who knows if that’s still the plan. When the CCC took over the city administration too, she stopped following the local news. The monitors on the traffic lights announce the start of a culture festival, “Folks, Rock,” with concerts, panel discussions, and programs for children.
As she passes the Babylon, she casts a quick glance through the window. It’s not Sahid who’s sitting at the counter, but a woman with ash-blond hair. So what, thinks Britta. It’s got nothing to do with me.
Babak’s apartment is on “the Top,” a narrow street that ends at the pedestrian zone. According to Babak, he bought the apartment mostly on account of its address, because he gets a kick out of coming home and thinking, This is the Top. A few years previously, Babak had his apartment painted, and now it’s aglow with freshness and cleanliness, the windows spotless, the plants on the balcony carefully arranged, the awnings colorful and decorative. Under one of them, however, the flower boxes hold only a few withered stalks. Babak doesn’t really know what to do with a balcony.
Britta locks her bike to a lamppost and rings the doorbell. Nothing happens. As she figured. Once Babak decides to sleep, he sleeps: twelve to fourteen hours at a stretch. When Britta rings the third time, she holds her finger on the button until the door buzzer sounds. She hurries to the stairs—the stairwell smells like roasted vegetables—and goes up them two at a time to the fourth floor. Babak’s door is ajar, and just as she’s about to push it, it’s opened from inside.
Incredulous, Britta scrutinizes the half-asleep figure standing in front of her. It’s not Babak, it’s Julietta. She’s wearing gray sweatpants, cut off at the knee, revealing her matchstick-thin legs. Her top is an extra-large black T-shirt that probably once belonged to a man. Britta shuts her eyes, fervently hoping that when she opens them again, Julietta will have disappeared. It doesn’t work. Britta pushes the girl aside and dashes through the entrance hall to the living room, which is more like a huge storeroom. Little has changed since Britta’s last visit, except that the quantity of waste glass, the piles of old newspapers, and the heaps of electronic junk have grown even larger. The mattress in the living room, covered with churned-up bedclothes, is new, as is the little pile next to it: books, writing materials, a cell phone with plugged-in earphones, a few articles of black clothing, and a studded belt that Britta has seen Julietta wearing before. There’s also an ashtray filled with cigarette butts and marijuana roaches, as well as several boxes of pills, which Britta identifies as Ativan. She rushes to the window and flings both casements open, like a mother who comes home from a trip and must confront what her unsupervised daughter’s been up to. Fresh air surges in from outside, surprisingly cool, and bringing a slight scent of autumn.
Julietta has followed her and is leaning in the doorway. “It’s not what you think,” she says.
Britta could have laughed out loud, except she’s too furious to laugh. “Babak’s gay, you silly cow,” she hisses. “Where is he?”
“Sleeping.”
“Not for much longer.”
“Okay,” says Julietta. “I’d better scram.”
She walks over to her mattress, extracts a pair of black jeans from the tangled mass, and pulls them on without removing her cutoffs. Britta gazes at her for a moment and realizes, with some relief, that she’s taking her cigarettes but not her pillboxes. The door of the apartment slams shut so hard that only seconds later, the bedroom door opens and Babak looks out sleepily into the hall. He looks overdressed in his checkered silk pajamas. The room behind him is pitch-dark.
“Coffee?” Without waiting for an answer, Babak shuffles off in the direction of the kitchen.
Britta’s so perplexed that she remains motionless, fists clenched, while two cups are produced from somewhere in the kitchen and quickly rinsed, and shortly thereafter, the espresso machine starts to make noise. Babak reappears and hands her a cup of coffee with a lot of milk and sugar, the way she likes it. He’s thrown on a bathrobe with differently colored checks that suits him as little as the pajamas do. He holds his cup in both hands and leans into the open window. Since there’s no chair to be found anywhere in the room, and since Britta feels no inclination to sit on a cardboard moving box, she simply stays where she is.
“Are you mad?”
Given the situation, the question is a joke. Even though The Bridge has no hard-and-fast rules about where candidates should reside for the duration of the program, it’s obvious that private accommodations at Babak’s or Britta’s would completely contradict the spirit of their method—which requires them to keep their distance, to avoid identification with clients, and most particularly to avoid befriending them. What stuns Britta most is that Babak has told her nothing about his new domestic arrangement. Then again, she’s told him nothing about Guido Hatz, at least not so far, because Hatz is the reason she’s come here in the first place. The harmony between Britta and Babak is so perfect that they even keep secrets from each other simultaneously.
“She was being harassed in the Deutsches Haus,” says Babak.
“By the other candidates?”
“By the other guests.”
“Did she follow instructions and have breakfast in her room?”
“Of course. She didn’t go to the hotel restaurant, she didn’t go to the bar, and she stayed in her room as much as possible. Nevertheless, people were always accosting her, in the elevator, on the stairs, at the reception desk. Once a guy knocked on her door and asked her if she’d like to go out for coffee with him.”
“Shit.” Britta sits on the floor and starts drinking her coffee in tiny sips. It tastes rich, much better than her office coffee.
“We didn’t consider that,” she says.
Any woman who stays alone in a hotel for weeks draws attention, to say nothing of a woman like Julietta. They put her in the Deutsches Haus because that’s where they put all their candidates, the “participants in Bridge Coaching, Self-Discovery, and New Beginnings,” corporate rates applicable, the hotel staff friendly and discreet; there have never been any complaints. But Julietta is the first woman in the program, and Britta has had no experience in that regard.
“One evening, there she was, standing at my door. Sure, I know all the reasons why I shouldn’t have let her in, but she would have had the same problems in any other hotel.”
“And when were you going to tell me about this?”
“Uh, never.” Babak grins. “If you hadn’t barged in here, you would never have found out.” After a pause, he adds, “As a matter of fact, why are you here? What do you want?”
Britta clears her throat. She finishes her coffee. A fluttering in her stomach calls attention to itself. Now it’s her turn to make a confession.
“Shall we go and have breakfast somewhere?”
Minutes later, they’re sitting outside the corner delicatessen, wrapped in fleece blankets and ordering croissants, strawberries, and yet more caffè latte for Britta. She waits until Babak has shoved half a croissant into his mouth and then begins to tell her tale. About the trip to Wiebüttel and the white pickup that kept crowding them. About how the same vehicle drove by their house not long afterward. About the magical, out-of-the-blue investment in Smart Swap, the investor’s mustache, and his appearance in the practice the previous day. About burnout, guardian angels, and the idea of taking some time off.
Babak chews his croissant while Britta speaks, and after she’s finished he swallows it, washes it down with coffee, and remains silent for a while. The expressions on his face range from perplexity to amusement to horror. When he’s reached a consensus with himself regarding a response, he raises his head, looks her straight in the eyes, and says, “And you accuse me of not telling you about Julietta?”
“I wasn’t sure if I was imagining things or not.”
“Since when have we stopped telling each other about things we imagine?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
They look at each other, at first appraisingly, and then affectionately, and it’s as if they have, in this moment, renewed a vow. To tell each other everything, and always to listen to the other’s opinion. Britta puts her hand on Babak’s; he smiles and tolerates the touch for a few seconds before pulling his hand back and hiding it under the table.
“Let’s consider,” he says. “Actually, there’s only one possible explanation.”
“And that would be…?”
“I don’t like saying this, but you were probably right from the start.”
For the first time in her life, Britta’s not happy to have been right. Just the opposite. Babak ignores her scowl and continues unmoved: “Guido Hatz has invested a great deal of money.”
“We already know that.”
“Not only in Swappie. He’s put a lot of cash into an outfit that’s in competition with The Bridge. And now they’re doing their utmost to eliminate us.”
“That’s why he shows up at the office, talks about burnout, and recommends that I close up shop for a while?”
Babak dabs at croissant crumbs with a finger and sticks them into his mouth. “Well, it would be a plausible strategy,” he says. “With the money for Swappie, he drives The Bridge out of the market—and that’s it.”
Now Britta too starts playing with her croissant, which she has yet to bite into. What Babak says sounds logical, but she doesn’t like it, all the same. She much prefers the idea that Hatz is crazy, because in that case, she could simply go on as before.
“Next he’ll threaten you with letting Richard’s company go bust if you insist on keeping The Bridge in business. And if Swappie does well, he hasn’t even lost money. Two birds with one stone.”
“How does he even know what we do?”
Britta is better aware than anyone that this is a stupid question. Any determined person could find out what The Bridge does. They’ve never tried to hide. Legally, The Bridge conducts its activities in a gray area. Assisting suicide is not a crime. The Bridge is not a terrorist organization. Operations are planned and carried out by the implementing entities. Britta and Babak take the laws of reason into account, maintain a low profile, emphasize digital hygiene, limit contact with end clients to a minimum, avoid developing behavior patterns that could make a profiler nervous. Remain inconspicuous, don’t expand. In fact, their contacts with the authorities are limited to tickets for running red lights, as Britta occasionally does on her bicycle, and to their annual tax filing, in which they declare, as prescribed by law, a portion of their revenue as profit, while the rest is reinvested faster than the Revenue Service can say “cash accounting method.”
“The question is, what do we do next?”
Babak is apparently taking pleasure in the role of strategist after spending a week protesting against every move Britta made. She sighs. At the neighboring table, a young woman is staring with bared teeth into her smartphone’s selfie function and using her long fingernails to tidy up her interdental spaces. Diagonally across the street, the cashier in a health food store steps outside and lights herself a cigarette. A group of punks, every one of them over fifty, sporting graying mohawks and accompanied by old dogs, move past and then sit on the ground in front of a coffeehouse. Farther down the street, the bright yellow T-shirts of the Amnesty activists stand out; they’ve built a large booth, where they wait to accost passersby. Britta feels like a visitor to an open-air museum. There are actually still people who act as though you could face this haywire world and retain your composure. As though punk, cigarettes, and Amnesty still meant something.
Babak hasn’t stopped talking: “…something really big,” he’s just said. “Something that will establish our position in the market once and for all.”
“Are you suggesting what I’ve been preaching for days?” asks Britta.
“Hatz has caused a fundamental change in the situation.” Babak raises the empty espresso cup to his lips and tries to slurp up the dregs.
“Well, there’s no question about the right person to carry out a major operation,” says Britta.
“I feel the same way,” says Babak.
“Then we should start discussing possible buyers soon.”
“Maybe it would be good to bring Julietta into the discussions as early as possible.”
“Julietta?” Britta places her glass on the table, as carefully as if it could shatter into pieces at the slightest touch. “I was thinking about Marquardt.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Julietta’s only on Step Three.”
“She’s the best candidate we’ve ever had.”
“We can’t know that yet. Marquardt is as good as finished with the program. He’s reliable, conscientious, free of empathy. He’s our man.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Babak asks her. When she looks down, he grabs her arm. “You took Julietta into the program for exactly this moment. Why are you backing away now?”
Britta mutely shakes her head. She could, if she wished to, utter a series of vague sentences. She could say that she has a bad feeling. That Julietta’s presence makes her uneasy. That the girl smells like trouble. Babak would sweep away such explanations with a simple wave of his hand. And he’d be right.
The truth is that Julietta scares her. But she would never admit that. Not even to herself.
“She’s a woman,” Britta finally says. “We don’t have any experience with women. Women make people nervous.”
“She makes you nervous.”
“She attracts attention wherever she goes.”
“Precisely!” cries Babak. “The media will run her story night and day. Her photograph will spread around the web like an epidemic. With the right planning, she has the stuff to be a superstar. Then it’ll be clear that if The Bridge has such crackerjacks in its program, Hatz or whoever else can take their amateur start-up and pack it in.”
There’s something contagious about Babak’s zeal. It’s great that he can at last feel enthusiasm for the big plan; it’s great that they’re both pulling in the same direction again. Besides, Britta of course knows that he’s right. He leans forward and increases the pressure of his fingers on her arm.
“Marquardt’s a safe bet,” he says. “But Julietta’s the bomb.”