Taras Buslenko sat in a steam bath in the Lukyanovka district of Kiev. There was only one other bather in the huge, porcelain-tiled steam room: a fat business-type whose paunch hung over his towel. Buslenko looked down at his own body and wondered if he too would end up fat and out of shape. An aged body was something he could never imagine for himself. His physique was hard and sculpted. A weapon. He ran his fingers over his scars. The most recent was the one on his shoulder, puckered with stitches and curved around the ball of muscle as if someone had tried to slice open an apple. The most noticeable was the bullet wound, enlarged by removal surgery, to the left of his stomach. He gave a half-laugh. It was no wonder he could not imagine his body older: the chances of him living that long were remote.
The steam bath was vaulted and Turkish in style. The walls and the floor were finished in ornate tiles and the bath itself had a distinctly Ottoman feel to it. The only things that reminded Buslenko that he was in Ukraine were the large porcelain panels, each identical, that punctuated the patterned tiles. The panels showed a man sitting cross-legged, Turkish fashion, under a tree, his weapons hanging from its branches. The man smoked a pipe and played a bandura. It was a representation of Cossack Mamay, Ukraine’s national hero. Mamay was the legendary – probably mythical – protector of the Ukrainian people. The ultimate patriot.
The fat businessman on the far side gave a weary sigh, rose stiffly and left. After a few minutes three other men entered: a heavy-set middle-aged man and two younger men, both with the same hard, lean, muscled look as Buslenko. The two bodyguards sat near the door on the other side of the steam room. The older man sat down next to Buslenko.
‘You missed him,’ Oleksandr Malarek said, not turning to face Buslenko.
‘If he was there at all, Deputy Interior Minister.’
‘He was there. You know that.’
‘Yes. I know that. Someone was on the take. One of ours. Someone broke my cover and allowed Vitrenko to organise an escape route.’
‘Yes. Someone did,’ Deputy Minister Malarek said without looking at Buslenko. ‘It was Major Samolyuk.’
‘The head of the assault team?’ Peotr Samolyuk had been a Sokil unit commander with fifteen years’ service. Buslenko had always considered him a solid man. ‘Shit. Have you interrogated him? He could be the best lead we’ve got.’
‘Not a lead. A dead end. A very dead end. We found him this morning. He had been tortured and castrated before death. They stuffed his genitals in his mouth.’
‘He was going to talk? But he’d have gone to prison.’
‘We’ll never know. But if he had really been one of Vitrenko’s men they wouldn’t have done that to him. There is no betrayal in Vitrenko’s organisation. They don’t see themselves as criminals, but as a military unit with total loyalty to him. My guess is that Samolyuk took a massive bribe. Maybe he got greedy and asked for more to stay quiet.’
‘Unlikely.’ Buslenko still spoke to Malarek’s profile. A bead of sweat gathered and hung on the tip of the older man’s long nose. ‘No one would be stupid enough to try to menace Vitrenko.’
‘He’s in Germany,’ Malarek said, ignoring Buslenko. The excruciating death of Samolyuk was clearly of no further interest to him.
‘Vitrenko?’
‘Our sources tell us that he is operating from Cologne.’
‘I didn’t think we had sources on Vitrenko,’ said Buslenko.
‘We didn’t. We still don’t, not directly. We have informants who work for Molokov and that’s as close as we can get.’ Malarek wiped the sweat from his fleshy face with the palm of his hand. ‘Vitrenko is selling our people like so much meat, Major Buslenko. He is a traitor of the worst kind. He debases Ukraine by debasing our people. His main centres are Hamburg and Cologne. But he travels back to Ukraine regularly. Part of the intelligence we have gathered is that Vitrenko has had extensive plastic surgery. The photographs we have on file are now useless, according to our sources.’
‘Do you have any information on when he will next be back here? The next time …’
Malarek turned to face Buslenko. ‘There won’t be a next time. Vasyl Vitrenko moves like a ghost. He has so many contacts and informers here that if he does come back, he’ll have evaporated into thin air again before we even know about it. That’s where you come in, Major Buslenko. Vasyl Vitrenko’s reign is an embarrassment to Ukraine. We cannot expect the world to take our new democracy seriously while we are seen as the cradle of the new Mafia. We need Vitrenko stopped. Dead. Do I make myself clear?’
‘You want me to go to Germany without the knowledge or approval of the German government? That’s illegal. Both here and there.’
‘That’s the least of your worries. I want you to take a Skorpion Spetsnaz unit with you. And just to make sure there are no misunderstandings, this is a seek-and-destroy mission. I don’t want you to bring Vitrenko back to face justice. I want you to put him in his grave. I take it I have made my wishes completely unambiguous?’
‘Perfectly. And I assume that if we get caught you will deny all knowledge of us? That we will be left to rot in a German prison?’
Malarek smiled. ‘You and I have never even met. There is something else … I want it done quickly. The longer it takes to organise, the more chance there is for Vitrenko to find out about it. Unfortunately he has more militia in his pocket than I care to think about.’
‘When?’
‘I want you to be ready to go in a week or so. I know that gives you practically no time to select and brief a team, but it also gives Vitrenko less time to compromise it. Can you do it?’
‘I know someone who can help me put a team together. Discreetly. But not just Skorpions. I want a mix of background and skill.’
Malarek shrugged. ‘That’s your thing. I just need to know if you can do it.’
After the Deputy Interior Minister and his bodyguards left, Buslenko sat alone in the steam bath and gazed again across the bath at the image of Cossack Mamay. Mamay stared out somewhat melancholically from his steam-wreathed porcelain panel, giving nothing away about how hard it was to be the Great Protector of the Ukrainian people.
‘This is a big step for you, Jan. I want you to understand that I do appreciate that.’ Roland Bartz sipped the sample of wine, swirled it in his mouth and nodded to the waiter who then filled both men’s glasses. ‘And I understand that resigning as head of a murder squad is a lot more complicated than most job handovers …’
‘But …?’
‘I’ve been waiting a long time now, Jan. I agreed to hang on till you tied up that last case of yours, but I really need someone to take over the foreign accounts now.’
‘I know. I’m sorry for the delay. But, as I told you, I now have an official end date and I’ll be sticking to it. You won’t have to wait any longer.’ Fabel forced a tired smile.
‘You okay?’ Bartz frowned with what Fabel thought was overdone concern. Bartz was the same age as Fabel. They had grown up in Norddeich in East Friesland together, gone to school together. Back then Bartz had been a gangly awkward youth with a bad complexion. Now his skin was bronzed, even in midwinter Hamburg, and his awkwardness had been transformed into urbane sophistication. To start with, Fabel had seen Bartz through childhood’s eyes: recognising the similarities with the boy he’d befriended. But it had quickly become clear to Fabel that the Roland Bartz of today was a different person from Bartz the schoolboy. Fabel knew that Bartz had become a multi-millionaire, but it had only been since their chance encounter and Bartz’s offer of a job – and a way out of the Murder Commission – that Fabel had discovered just how vast his schoolfriend’s wealth was. And now he was getting to know the businessman. Fabel preferred the awkward, spotty youth of his memory.
‘I’m fine,’ said Fabel unconvincingly. ‘Just been a tough day.’
‘Oh?’
Fabel related brief details of his encounter with Georg Aichinger, without giving any information that the press wouldn’t already have by then.
‘God …’ Bartz shook his head in disbelief. ‘Not me, Jan. I could never do that job in a million years. You’re well out of it. But sometimes, to be honest, I don’t know if you feel that way.’
‘I do, Roland. I really do. When I was there today there was a young MEK trooper with me. Just itching to squeeze off a few rounds. You could almost smell the testosterone and gun oil in the air.’ Fabel shook his head. ‘It’s not that I blame him. He’s just a product of the times. What police work’s become. It’s time I got out.’
The restaurant was in Övelgönne and its vast picture windows looked out onto the Elbe. Fabel paused to watch as a massive container ship drifted silently past with unexpected grace. He had been here before with Susanne, on special occasions. The prices made it a special-occasion kind of place, but clearly not for Bartz and his expense account. It had been here that Fabel had had the chance encounter with Bartz that had led to his dramatic decision to change career.
‘It’s time for me to be someone else,’ he said at last.
‘I have to say, Jan,’ said Bartz, ‘you still don’t sound one hundred per cent convinced that you’re making the right move.’
‘Don’t I? Sorry. Being a policeman’s been my life for so long. I’m just adjusting to the idea of putting it all behind me. It is a big step, but I’m ready for it.’
‘I hope you are, Jan. What I’m offering is no sinecure. Admittedly it doesn’t involve the stress or trauma of being a murder detective but I assure you it’s just as demanding … just in a different way. It needs someone with your intelligence and education. Most of all someone with your sense of people. I just worry that you’re having second thoughts.’
‘No second thoughts.’ Fabel hid the lie behind a smile.
‘There’s one thing about the job – a benefit we haven’t discussed – that you should think about.’
‘Oh?’
‘What do you think being an international sales director for a software company means to people? I mean when you meet them at a party or a wedding or in a bar and they ask what you do. You know what it means?’
Fabel shrugged. Bartz paused to take a sip of wine.
‘It means nothing. It’s your job: it’s not you. It doesn’t define you. And people don’t have an opinion about it. But if you say you’re a policeman everyone has an opinion. Say you’re a policeman and a whole lot of prejudices and expectations fall instantly into place. And they don’t just see it as what you do, they see it as what you are. I’m offering you a way out of that, Jan. A chance to be yourself.’
At that moment the waiter arrived with their main courses.
‘Ah …’ Bartz smiled appreciatively. ‘Now that the food’s arrived, we can talk about your future … not your past. Eating and business, Jan. You can’t separate them. We think we’ve come so far, that we’re so much more sophisticated than our ancestors. But there’s still some kind of fundamental intimacy that comes from sharing a meal, don’t you think?’ Fabel smiled. He couldn’t remember Bartz talking so much as a boy. ‘Think of all of the alliances forged, all of the deals done across the centuries, all discussed, bartered and sealed over feasts. It’s something you’ll have to get used to, Jan. You’ll carry out most of your important negotiating across a dining table.’
They spent the rest of the meal discussing a life that somehow Fabel still couldn’t see himself fitting into: a world of travel and meetings, of conferences and entertaining. And, for some reason, he couldn’t get Georg Aichinger’s desperate tirade against the futility of his life out of his head.
Leave it, he thought to himself. Let it lie.
It had still been reasonably early by the time Fabel got home. Bartz had wanted to spend more time together at the bar after the meal, but Fabel explained that he had an early start in the morning. He had a report to write out on the Aichinger incident. Bartz had sighed and said, ‘Never mind …’ but had skilfully communicated a growing impatience with his soon-to-be international sales director.
Susanne had come over to Fabel’s place after work. He hadn’t seen her all that day: she hadn’t been in the Presidium but had instead been working at the psychiatric department of the Institute for Legal Medicine in Eppendorf. He poured them both a glass of wine while he waited for her to come out of the shower. He gazed out of the tall window that looked out over the Alsterpark and the dark glittering shield of the Alster lake beyond it. He loved his apartment. He had landed it through bad luck and good timing: his marriage had collapsed just as the Hamburg property market had hit an all-time low. It had still been a stretch on his Principal Chief Commissar’s salary, but it had been worth it. It had, however, been very much a place for one. His personal and undivided space. Now, with his change of career, had come another change: the decision that he and Susanne should sell their respective apartments, find somewhere new and move in together. Another decision that had seemed so clear at the time yet now lay shrouded in doubt.
Fabel watched the distant moving twinkle of car headlights along the Schöne Aussicht on the distant shore of the Alster. He thought of his meal with Bartz. Of his future. Of the file that lay dumped on the coffee table yet filled the room with its presence. If I pick it up, he thought, I’ll be sucked into it all again. Leave it. Let it lie.
Susanne came into the room and Fabel placed a Hamburger Morgenpost on top of the file. He turned and smiled. Susanne was beautiful. Smart. Sexy. Her long thick hair was wet and hung over the shoulders of her white towelling bathrobe in glossy black kinks. She sat down on the sofa and he handed the glass of wine to her.
‘Tired?’ he asked, sitting down beside her on the sofa.
‘No. Not really.’ She smiled languidly.
‘Oh yes,’ she said and pulled him towards her, allowing the bathrobe to fall open.
Timo had found the book dumped in a skip near the university, behind a house that was being renovated. It was an academic tome, an old copy, and its cover still felt gritty from the skip beneath Timo’s fingertips, but it was similar to the one he used to have. The one he had sold along with so many of his other belongings. He had first read it while he had still been studying philosophy at Hamburg University. It was Émile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method: a treatise on social order; on the need for structures and forms to guide behaviour. Durkheim was considered the father of sociology, but Timo thought with irony how much more appropriate it would have been, given his current situation, if it had been Durkheim’s later work, On the Normality of Crime, that he had uncovered.
Timo shivered in his inadequate jacket and leaned against the wall, gazing across at the store. It was getting dark and the lights in the store came on, turning the windows into warm embers in the January evening. Timo tried to read another page, but the light had faded too much. He sighed. The book had been a piece of his past that had fallen unexpectedly and unbidden into his present. It pained him to look at it: a reminder of a time when he had had hope, when his mind had been sharp and clear and organised. A time before. As if to snap him back to the reality of his current life, the gnawing pain in his gut intensified and the shivers that convulsed his body were not caused by the cold evening alone. He closed the book. He couldn’t take it with him, but he didn’t want to let it go. He didn’t want to let his past go.
Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim had provided the focus for Timo’s studies. Max Weber’s State Monopoly on Physical Force had been the basis for his thesis. Or at least the thesis he had started.
There were too many customers in the store. He’d have to wait. The cold seemed to penetrate his flesh and chill his bones. Weber’s hypothesis was that only the organs of state, the police and the army, should be permitted to use physical force; that otherwise anarchy reigned and the state was unsustainable. Timo had planned to posit, in his thesis, that such a monopoly could also be destructive to the state, as in the case of the Nazis.
A man in a business suit left the store, talking into his cellphone, followed by an older couple. The ache and the craving that burned in Timo’s gut intensified. He slipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket and closed his fingers around the chill, hard steel.
Timo had also planned his thesis to balance this argument with a discussion of the United States, where the Constitution expressly allowed the citizen to bear arms, and therefore the means of independent physical force; consequently denying the state a monopoly on it. Yet the US existed and thrived as a nation.
He looked across the street. A car pulled up and a woman trotted into the store. She re-emerged a few moments later with a carrier bag and drove off. Timo felt a pang of something other than his body’s craving. It was his grief, his mourning of his past-tense self: the disciplined, clear-eyed, organised philosophy student with the world at his feet. But that had been then. Before the drugs.
Timo stepped out of the shadow of the corner, his thin shoulders hunched against the cold, and made his way across to the store, his fingers closing around the gun in his pocket.
After they had made love, Fabel and Susanne sat in the living room of his flat and looked out over the dark water of the Alster and the glittering reflections that played on it. Susanne leaned her head on Fabel’s shoulder and he did his best to disguise the fact that for some reason he didn’t want her there. The feeling surprised him. He felt restless and irritable and had, for a moment, an almost irresistible urge to get into his car and drive out of the city, out of Hamburg, out of Germany. He’d had the feeling before, but he had always put it down to his work; an urge to put the horror and stress of it all as far from him as he could. But wasn’t that exactly what he had achieved? He had only a few weeks left to go and his escape would be complete. So why did he feel so panicky? And why was it, when he was supposed to be relishing a life free of murder, that he could not shake the call of the file he had half-hidden under the copy of the Morgenpost?
‘How was dinner with Roland?’ asked Susanne.
‘Wordy. Bartz likes to chat. I don’t know if he’s that keen on listening but, boy, can he talk.’
‘I thought you liked him.’ There was an edge to Susanne’s voice. Fabel had learned to be careful when talking about his new career with her: recently, any lack of conviction in his tone had been enough to start an argument.
‘I do. I mean, I did when he was a kid. But people change. Roland Bartz is a very different person now. But he’s okay. Just a bit full of himself.’
‘He’s an entrepreneur. It goes with the territory,’ said Susanne. ‘His company wouldn’t be so successful – and he couldn’t offer you the salary he’s offering – if he was riddled with self-doubt. Anyway, you don’t have to love the guy to work with him.’
‘There’s not a problem,’ said Fabel. ‘Honestly. And don’t worry, I’m not having second thoughts about leaving the Polizei Hamburg. I’ve had a bellyful.’ He took a long sip of Pinot Grigio, leaned back against the sofa and closed his eyes. The picture of sad, desperate, insane Georg Aichinger filled his mind. The same image that had haunted him throughout his dinner with Bartz.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Susanne in response to his sigh.
‘I can’t stop thinking about Aichinger. All that crap he talked before he shot himself. About waking up and realising that he wasn’t real. What the hell was all that about?’
‘Depersonalisation. We all get it to a degree at some point. Mainly through stress or overtiredness. In Aichinger’s case, it could be that he was going through something more profound. Maybe even a full-blown dissociative fugue.’
‘I thought that was when people lose their memory. Wake up in a new town with a new identity or lack or identity.’
‘It can be, sometimes. People who suffer a great trauma can go into a dissociative fugue. To forget the bad stuff they dump their entire memory. Without a memory you can’t remember who you are. You adopt a new identity without the biography of your real one.’
‘But Aichinger hadn’t lost his memory.’
‘No. But if he hadn’t killed himself he might have walked out of that door and disappeared. Not just from the world but from himself.’
‘God knows there have been times when I’ve wished I could have disappeared from myself. Standing in front of Aichinger while he blew his brains out was one.’ Fabel smiled bitterly.
‘Well, you are, in a way. As soon as you walk out of the Presidium for the last time and put police work behind you.’
‘Yeah …’ Fabel took another sip of wine. ‘And leave it all to the likes of Breidenbach.’
‘Who?’
‘The new breed.’ Fabel sipped his wine.
Stefan pulled up outside the all-night convenience store attached to the petrol station. He’d been at work until an hour ago. Now he felt good: freshly shaved and showered; wearing a brand-new shirt and his best cologne. He had phoned Lisa and she had agreed he could come and stay the night. This was the only store he knew that stayed open this late and it always had a good range of wines.
He had been seeing Lisa for a couple of months now. She was a great girl. A good laugh. Smart, and pretty with it. They had been drifting along in a casual manner and he genuinely had fun in her company, but Stefan was beginning to think that Lisa had ideas of it becoming a more serious relationship. He didn’t want that. Or at least he thought he didn’t want it. Things were fine as they were and he wasn’t ready to get serious with anyone. Although sometimes the idea didn’t seem so bad. But the fact was that, at the moment, the only thing Stefan had time to be serious about was his career. He had tried to explain to Lisa how important being a policeman was to him. He was up for his Commissar’s exams in a couple of months and he had to get his head down to do some serious study. Not tonight. Tonight was going to be fun. But first he had to pick up the wine.
Stefan knew there was something wrong the instant he walked through the door.
The door chime drew the attention of the two men who were the only others in the store. A thin man with long, lank hair and dirty-looking clothes stood in front of the counter; the middle-aged Turk who ran the store was behind it. The two men were still. Too still, too tense. The young man turned suddenly to face Stefan. Stefan could see the fear in his eyes, the jerky motion as he swung his arm around to point his gun at him. Stefan held his hands away from his body.
‘Easy …’ he said. Stefan’s training kicked in and he did a threat analysis. He took in as much as he could in as short a time as he could. The gun was an early Walther P8. Practically an antique. No, the barrel was too short for a P8: it was a P4, the type used by the Hamburg police after the war. Still, it was old and it didn’t look cared for. Stefan wasn’t entirely sure that it would be in working order, but it was impossible to tell for certain. ‘Just keep calm,’ he said, realising that the young man with the wild eyes and unwashed hair was the most frightened person in the room. Stefan thought back to the way Principal Chief Commissar Fabel had handled the situation in Jenfeld. ‘Just take it easy.’ Stefan saw the shake in the gunman’s arm. The red rims to the wild eyes. A junkie. Desperate. Frightened. And Stefan’s training told him a scared man with a gun is infinitely more dangerous than an angry man with a gun. Stefan did a mental calculation of the chances of the gun jamming and, if it did go off, of the junkie missing his target.
‘Stay where you are!’ the junkie shouted at Stefan.
‘I’m not moving,’ said Stefan calmly.
‘You …’ the junkie called over to the Turkish shopkeeper. ‘Fill a carrier bag with the money from the till.’
The Turk exchanged a look with Stefan. He had served Stefan many times before and knew that he was a policeman. The Turk took what money there was in the till and put it in the bag. The junkie reached over with his free hand without taking his aim off Stefan.
‘Okay. Get out of the way. I’m leaving.’ The junkie tried to inject as much authority as possible into the statement.
‘I can’t let you do that …’ Stefan said quietly.
‘What the fuck do you mean? Get the fuck out of my way.’
‘I can’t do that,’ repeated Stefan. ‘I’m a police officer. I don’t care about the money. I don’t even care about you getting away. But I can’t let you leave with that gun. I can’t let you be a danger to the public.’
‘You’re a Bulle?’ The junkie looked even more agitated. His shake grew worse. ‘A fucking cop?’ He snapped his aim from Stefan to the Turkish shop owner. ‘What about this member of the public? What if I fucking kill him right now because you won’t get out of my way?’
Stefan looked at the Turk. He had raised his hands but Stefan could tell that he was more in control of his fear than the gunman was of his.
‘Then you would prove to me that I can’t let you leave. And I’d have to take you down.’
‘With what? You’re not armed.’
‘Trust me,’ Stefan kept his tone even. ‘You pull that trigger and it’s the last thing you do. I’m a specialist firearms officer. I know about guns. I know about the gun you’re holding. When and where it was made. I can tell from the way you’re holding it that you don’t know what you’re doing. And I know that you won’t get us both before I reach you and snap your neck. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Put the gun down. There’s a way out of this.’
‘Is there?’ The gunman smiled bitterly. ‘I suppose by restoring the monopoly on physical force?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Get out of my way!’ He brought the gun back to bear on Stefan. ‘Why do you have to do this? Why can’t you just walk away? Just this once.’
‘Because it’s what I do. Just give me the gun.’ Stefan took a step forward. ‘Let’s end this.’
‘Okay …’ The gunman’s expression seemed to empty.
Stefan gave a small laugh. He had been wrong. The gun was old. It hadn’t been maintained. But it didn’t jam. And the junkie had been either a better shot than Stefan had thought or had just been lucky. The sound of the shot still rang in the confinement of the store as Stefan looked down at his brand-new shirt. At the hole punched through it. At the bloom that spread as his blood soaked into the fabric. A central mass hit. Almost a perfect shot. Stefan’s legs gave way under him. He sank to his knees.
‘Why couldn’t you just have got out of my way?’ The junkie’s voice was filled with panic and hate in equal measure.
Stefan looked up at the junkie and opened his mouth to say something but found he hadn’t the breath to spare.
‘Why?’ the junkie repeated plaintively and fired again. Then again. And again.
Once more Fabel dreamed of the dead.
Fabel had had the dreams throughout his career. He had learned to resign himself to the sudden waking, the thunder of his pulse in his ears, the cold sweats in the night as part of his mental processes. He accepted that the dreams were the natural byproduct of so many surplus thoughts and emotions circulating in his mind: those that he had learned to suppress as he dealt with the brutality of killers and, most of all, with the pain and misery of their victims. It was something he saw at every murder scene. The story. The history, usually written out in blood, of those last violent, sad moments. Someone had once said to him that we all die alone; that we can leave this world surrounded by people, but death was still the most solitary of acts. Fabel didn’t believe this. The one element of each murder scene that burrowed its way into his brain, malevolently lurking there until he dreamed, had always been the cruelty of a murder victim having to share their last, most intimate moment with their killer. He remembered how he had once come close to smashing his fist into the grinning face of a murder suspect when he had boasted of how his victim, as she had died from the stab wounds he had inflicted, had tried to hold his hand, seeking the only human comfort available to her. The bastard had actually laughed as he talked about it. And Fabel had dreamt of the victim the same night.
Now Fabel dreamed he waited outside a huge hall. For some reason he thought he was perhaps in the Rathaus, Hamburg’s government building. He knew he was being kept waiting for some reason, but that he would soon gain admittance. The heavy doors were swung open by two faceless attendants and he walked into a vast banqueting hall. The table stretched impossibly long and was lined with diners who stood and cheered as he entered. There was a seat for him at the distant end of the table and, as he walked past the other guests, he recognised almost all of them.
Fabel felt a vague sense of surprise that they recognised him. Each of them had, of course, already been dead before he had made their acquaintance. Fabel walked past the applauding victims whose murders he had investigated and took his place at the top of the table. To one side sat Ursula Kastner, who had been murdered four years before and who had visited previous dreams. She smiled with pale, bloodless lips.
‘What is this feast in aid of?’ asked Fabel.
‘It’s your farewell dinner,’ she said, still smiling but using her napkin to dab a thick droplet of blood from the corner of her mouth. ‘You’re leaving us, aren’t you? So we came to say goodbye.’
Fabel nodded. He noticed that the chair to his other side was empty, but he knew that the space was for Hanna Dorn, his murdered girlfriend from his student days. He turned to speak to Ursula Kastner again.
‘I kept my promise,’ he said. ‘I got him.’
‘You got him,’ she repeated. ‘But not the other.’
He turned back to see that the vacant chair had been filled. Fabel, in his dream-dulled mind, felt an attenuated shock to see it wasn’t Hanna Dorn at all, but Maria Klee sitting there. Her face was gaunt and bloodless, her smile weak.
‘What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here,’ he protested. ‘These are all—’
‘I know, Jan … but I was invited.’ She was about to say something else when another hollow cheer rose from the assembled guests. The chef had entered carrying an impossibly enormous silver platter capped with a huge silver dome. The chef’s face was hidden, but he was massive, and his huge arms bulged. Nevertheless, it was only the eccentric physics of Fabel’s dream that allowed the chef to carry the dish.
Setting it down as the centrepiece of the table, the chef pulled the dome from the platter. As he did so, Fabel saw a flash of bright emerald eyes and knew that the cook was Vasyl Vitrenko. Maria screamed. Fabel thought he heard Ursula Kastner beside him say: ‘He is the other.’ Fabel gazed mesmerised at the revealed corpse of a young woman lying on her back on the platter, her chest ripped open and the white picket of her ribs prised open and exposed. Her lungs had been torn from the body cavity and thrown over her shoulders. The wings of the Blood Eagle. The ancient Viking sacrificial ritual that had been Vitrenko’s signature. Fabel, like Maria, was now screaming in terror but also found himself applauding with all the other guests. Maria turned to him.
‘I knew he would come,’ she said, suddenly halting her scream. ‘We’ve waited for him to come for so long. But I knew he’d want to say goodbye to you.’
Vitrenko walked around to where Maria was sitting. He held out his hand as if inviting her to dance. Fabel wanted to get up to protest, to defend Maria, but found that he had lost the power of movement. He watched helplessly as Vitrenko led Maria into a shadowy part of the hall. The woman next to Ursula Kastner was bending down and searching for something beneath the table. She sat up, frowning.
‘Lost something?’ asked Fabel. He recognised her as Ingrid Fischmann, the journalist who had been killed by a bomb the year before. She laughed and made a ‘silly me’ face.
‘My foot …’ she said. ‘I had it here a minute ago …’
Fabel woke up.
He lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He shifted his legs beneath the covers, just to prove that he could move. He heard Susanne breathing, slow and regular in her dreamless sleep. He heard the late-night sounds of Pöseldorf. The occasional car. A group of people exchanging noisy farewells. He swung his legs round and sat up on the edge of the bed, moving slowly so as not to disturb Susanne. His feet brushed against something. He looked down and saw another pair of feet. Black-booted. Massive. He looked up and saw Vasyl Vitrenko standing before him, his emerald eyes sparkling in the dark.
‘Look what I found,’ said Vitrenko, and held out a woman’s dismembered foot.
Fabel woke up. He sat bolt upright, his face, chest and shoulders cold-damp with sweat. His heart pounded. It took him a moment to satisfy himself that this time he was truly awake. Susanne moaned and turned in the bed but did not waken.
He sat still for a long time but found that, when he laid his head back on the pillow, he couldn’t sleep. So many things now buzzed around his head that he could not pin down what was pushing sleep away from his tired brain. He left Susanne in bed, went through to the kitchen and made himself a cup of Friesian tea. He took his cup through to the living room and sat on the sofa.
He had known as soon as he had got out of bed that he was going to read the file. He had known it all evening but had pretended to himself that he could leave it alone. He picked it up. He started to read.
Oliver loved this time of night. The quiet isolation. Cologne glittering against his picture window. He listened to the slightly melancholic jazz that oozed expensively from his Bang & Olufsen system. He leaned back into the soft Italian leather of his chair and sipped at his Scotch and soda, ice tinkling against crystal. It was at this time of night that he could fully contemplate his life: a successful life; a life worth the envy of others; a life expressed through the designer furniture and original art, the twenty-year-old malt and the expensive architecture encasing him. Oliver felt good in his own skin: he had no problems with who he was or what he was.
His feet rested on the coffee table and the notebook computer on his lap. He rubbed his eyes hard with the heels of his hands. Enough was enough: he had spent three hours on the Anthropophagi site. Time in another world. There had been several answers to his personal advertisement and he had replied to them all. But he had committed to nothing. There was no doubt that there were risks in what he was doing: he had always before indulged his little foible through prostitutes. To have a volunteer to submit to it willingly and without reward was something he had only recently considered. But he had hesitated to make any firm arrangements or even to take things onto the next level. Out there in the real world he could cover his tracks. He had never used the same escort agency twice, never the same hotel twice, never anything under his own name. Here on the Internet he had remained without flesh, as insubstantial as a ghost. But placing the ad had changed things. Ironically, here in a universe of codes where flesh was formed from high-resolution pixels, he had become more detectable. He had to tread more carefully.
But visiting the site had served its purpose. An hors d’oeuvre. An electronic appetiser to sharpen his hunger for the main course. The real thing.
Tomorrow night. He had arranged everything for Friday evening. Maybe this was an agency he could deal with again. After all, the company’s name seemed like a positive omen. What could be more fitting than an escort agency called À la Carte?
What struck Fabel right away was that the file wasn’t just about murders that had already occurred: it was also about a murder that was expected. That was of course true of any suspected serial killer, but in this case the Cologne police were not just expecting another murder, they even had a pretty clear idea about the day when it would take place.
Cologne’s big thing was Karneval, the riotous celebration that took place before Lent every year. As a Protestant North German, Fabel found Karneval alien. He was aware of it, obviously, but he had never experienced it other than through the coverage he had seen on television. Even Cologne was a relatively unknown quantity to him: he had been there only a couple of times and never for very long. As he sank deeper into the case in the file, he found himself lost in an environment of unfamiliar landmarks. It struck him how difficult it would be for a unit such as the one proposed by van Heiden and Wagner to function effectively across the whole of Germany. One land, a score of different cultures. And if you considered East and West, two different histories.
Cologne’s Karneval was unique. Further south there were the more traditional forms of Fasching and Fastnacht. In Düsseldorf, Cologne’s great rival, or in Mainz, Karneval took a similar form but never quite matched the anarchic exuberance of the Cologne event. And Karneval in Cologne was much more than a date in the diary: it was part of the Cologne psyche. It defined what it meant to be to be a Cologner.
Fabel had already known about the case. Like all killings of their type, the two murders had all the ingredients of a good and lurid headline. The killer that the Cologne police were hunting struck only during Karneval. There had only been two victims: one the previous year, the first the year before that. But the investigating officer – Senior Commissar Benni Scholz – had recognised the modus of the killer as soon as he had arrived at the second murder scene. He had warned his superiors that another homicide could follow within the same Karneval season, fearing that the killer’s serial offending might escalate. There hadn’t been another murder, but Fabel agreed with the faceless Commissar behind the report that the killer would strike again. This year, during the coming Karneval.
Fabel laid the case files out on the coffee table. Both victims had been in their late twenties, female, single. Their backgrounds showed little commonality. Sabine Jordanski had been a hairdresser. Melissa Schenker had worked from home: some kind of software designer. Where Jordanski had been the life and soul of the party, Schenker had been quiet, reserved and almost reclusive. Jordanski had been native Kölsch, born and bred in the city; Schenker had been an outsider from Kassel who had settled in Cologne three years before. The investigation had revealed no shared friends or acquaintances. No links. Other than the way they had met their deaths.
Both women had been strangled. There was evidence of manual strangulation and then the use of a ligature: the male neckties that had been left around their throats as a signature by the killer. Scholz had explained the possible significance of this signature: Weiberfastnacht was a key date in the Cologne Karneval calendar. Always held on the last Thursday before Lent, Weiberfastnacht was Women’s Karneval Day, when women ruled. Every woman in Cologne had, on Women’s Karneval Day, the right to demand a kiss from any man. It was also a custom that women had the right, if they saw a man wearing a necktie, to cut it in half. It was intended as a symbol of overturning the traditional authority of men over women. In a more enlightened and equal cultural environment, the custom had become a bit of fun and nothing more. But Commissar Scholz expressed his belief that it meant a great deal more to the killer. He suspected that the killer was motivated either by a psychotic misogyny or a sexually motivated resentment of women. Scholz clearly felt that this view explained the post-mortem disfigurement of the bodies: approximately half a kilo of flesh had been excised from the right buttock of both victims. Fabel could see the Cologne officer’s logic, but thought it premature. He suspected that there was more to this killer than met the eye.
Fabel had lost track of time and realised he had been sitting going through the file for a couple of hours by the time Susanne came through, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
‘I woke up and you were gone,’ she said, yawning. ‘What’s wrong? Another one of your bad dreams?’
‘No … no,’ he lied. ‘Just couldn’t sleep, that’s all.’
Susanne saw the file open on the coffee table. The pictures spread out. Dead faces. Forensic reports. ‘Oh … I see. What’s this?’ There was more than a hint of suspicion in her voice.
‘I’ve been asked to look at a case in Cologne. Just to offer an opinion.’
Susanne’s face clouded. ‘You cannot afford to get involved with another case, Jan. Roland Bartz has been more patient than anyone could reasonably expect. He’s not going to wait around for ever. But there again, maybe that’s what you’re hoping for.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know damned well. You’ve dithered and fluttered about like some reluctant virgin. I don’t think you can go through with it. I think that’s what all this is about. You can’t commit to leaving the police.’
‘That’s crap, Susanne. I have committed to it. I’ve resigned. I even turned down an offer from van Heiden and the BKA today.’
‘What offer?’
Fabel stared at Susanne for a moment. Her dark eyes burned in the soft light. He already regretted mentioning it.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘What offer?’
‘They want to create a new unit. A sort of Federal Murder Commission. A unit based here in Hamburg that could take on complex cases elsewhere in Germany. They asked me to set it up and head it.’
Susanne laughed bitterly. ‘Great. Absolutely marvellous. I spend all my time worrying about your state of mind because of the crap you have to deal with here and you’re off discussing how to increase your workload by seeking out cases across Germany.’
‘I told you, I said no.’ Fabel had raised his voice. He took a breath and lowered it. ‘I said no.’
‘What’s the matter, Jan? Did you nearly lose your temper? Did you nearly lose control there?’
‘Susanne …’
‘Don’t you realise that that is your problem? You’re so buttoned up. You were never meant to be a policeman, don’t you see that? If it hadn’t been for the sainted Hanna Dorn being murdered it would never have occurred to you to become one. For the life of me I don’t know why you felt you owed it to her to throw away your future and choose a job that otherwise you would never have considered. Everybody goes on about what a great detective you are. About all the cases you’ve cleared up. But it’s screwed you up. I hear it, Jan. Every other night. The dreams. The nightmares. Don’t you see that you’re as bad as Maria Klee? You witness all of that horror and the crap that people inflict on each other and you screw it down deep inside. And if you don’t stop, you’re going to crack up. Big time.’
‘You see the same things. You delve into their minds, for God’s sake.’
‘But don’t you see that’s different? I chose to be a criminal psychologist. I trained for it. Prepared for it. I took every step towards my career deliberately. I chose it because it was the direction in which my interests and skills took me. Not because I was diverted into it by some northern bloody Lutheran sense of crusade.’ Susanne paused. ‘The difference between you and me is that I can deal with it. I can keep it out of my private life.’
‘I don’t know why we’re having this fight …’ Fabel sat down again. His voice was tired. ‘I keep telling you, I’m finished with the Murder Commission. With the Polizei Hamburg.’
‘We’re having this fight because you won’t commit to anything.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You know what it means, Jan. It was your idea for us to move in together, but we’ve been looking at apartments for months. It doesn’t matter what part of town, what type of apartment, you just walk away shrugging your shoulders. You can’t commit to changing jobs and you can’t commit to me. Why don’t you just admit it?’
‘How many times have I got to say this, Susanne? I turned them down. Flat. And my resignation is final. In five weeks’ time I cease to be a policeman.’ Fabel stood up and placed his hands on Susanne’s shoulders. ‘And I can’t help it if we haven’t seen an apartment that I like. That doesn’t mean I’m not committed to you. You know I am.’
‘Are you?’ She pushed his hands away. ‘Then why have you been so distant? For the last couple of months. I don’t know what it is I’ve said or done, but you’ve been strange with me. Cold.’
‘That’s nonsense …’ said Fabel.
‘Is it?’ Susanne gestured to the case material on the coffee table. ‘And what about this? Is it nonsense that you’re taking on a new case when you’re supposed to be finishing up?’
‘Yes, it is. I told you. I’ve been asked to offer an opinion. That’s all.’
‘And of course you couldn’t say no.’
‘No, I couldn’t. Whether you like it or not, Susanne, I’m a policeman for the next five weeks.’
Susanne turned and went back to bed and Fabel stood silently for a moment, looking at the closed bedroom door. Then he sat down and turned his mind again to a distant city and the deaths of two young women in it.
Fabel suddenly became aware that daylight was beginning to fill his flat and a leaden tiredness his body. He had been reading, comparing, taking notes for over three hours. It remained the assumption of the investigating officer, Scholz, that the two victims had been chosen entirely at random. But Fabel had noticed something as he had examined the morgue photographs of the victims: despite the difference in their heights, both women had slightly pear-shaped figures, with a fleshiness around their bottoms, lower belly and thighs.
Fabel read Scholz’s notes:
There is no evidence of pre-mortem disfigurement. The comparative lack of blood loss from the site suggests that the victims were first strangled with a ligature, and fibres found embedded in the abraded skin on the necks confirm that the ties left at the scenes were the murder weapons. Inconsistent fibres were found on the tie used in the first murder. These fibres were unusual in colour and composition: blue felt. Once the victims were dead, the perpetrator partially stripped them, turned them face down in the pose in which they were found, and then, post-mortem, excised a quantity of flesh from the buttock or upper thigh of the victims. There is clearly a significance in this disfigurement. The perpetrator removes the flesh symbolically. A point of interest is the quantity of flesh removed. It is possible by exact measurement of the excised area to calculate accurately the weight of flesh removed. In the first case, 0.47 kilos were taken, and 0.4 kilos were cut from the second victim. The similarity in weight seems too close to be coincidental and would suggest that the killer has some expertise in measuring quantities. There is also no deviation from or correction of his incisions. These two facts would suggest that he may be someone used to working with quantities of meat and could be involved in butchery or meat rendering as a career. Similarly, he may be a surgeon or otherwise medically qualified.
The quantity of flesh removed may be significant in itself. In each case it has been extremely close to the 0.45 kilogram measure. This equates to one Imperial pound in weight, as used by the British. This is not to say that the killer is a foreign national, more that ‘a pound of flesh’ is intended (as in the Shakespeare play The Merchant of Venice) and therefore is a metaphor for recovering justice from the victims. This could suggest that the killer was known to his victims.
It is clear from the consistency of modus that the perpetrator of the first murder also carried out the second homicide. This, added to the symbolism of the tie left at each scene and the significance of Karneval, and the implied expression of psychosexual hatred of women all point to a serial offender.
Fabel leafed through the file. Weiberfastnacht had another name. Fetter Donnerstag. Fat Thursday. A day devoted to gluttony.
‘No, Herr colleague,’ Fabel said under his breath as he re-examined the scene-of-crime images. ‘Our friend isn’t interested in collecting mementos. He’s hungry. His pound of flesh isn’t a trophy: it’s a meal.’
The phone rang.
They stood and stared at the three clear plastic packages on Anna’s desk: one containing an ancient-looking Walther P4 handgun, the other holding a carrier bag with cash and the third with a large dog-eared book in it. Each of them was sealed and labelled with a blue evidence tag.
‘We found it outside the store,’ said Anna Wolff, indicating the book. She was in charge of the case. ‘Philosophy. That’s what Tschorba studied – at one time, anyway.’
Fabel continued to stare silently at the evidence bags.
Anna ran through what had happened in the convenience store. The Turkish owner had said in his statement that Breidenbach had died bravely; that the young policeman had been determined that the robber would not go out into the street with a handgun. He also stated that he had got the idea to jump Tschorba from Breidenbach, who had told the gunman that he couldn’t take them both. As Timo Tschorba had fired the fatal shots into Breidenbach’s body, the shopkeeper had thrown himself at him. Tschorba was now in the cells, his swollen and bruised face bearing the marks of the encounter with the Turk. Once the shopkeeper had disarmed the junkie, he had rushed over to Breidenbach, but the young policeman was already dead. He admitted that when he had seen that, he had gone back and pistol-whipped Tschorba, who had cried like a child.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Fabel at last. ‘He was there. I mean Breidenbach. He was there at the Aichinger incident. He was the MEK trooper who came up to the apartment with me.’ He shook his head mournfully. ‘I behaved like an arsehole … I treated Breidenbach as if he were less of a policeman than me. Just because he was a tactical weapons specialist. I was wrong. He was a police officer first and foremost.’
Anna went through the statement, including Tschorba’s confession, the ballistics and forensics report and the initial observations from Möller, the pathologist. Fabel took in very little. It was the Murder Commission mantra of dry facts and figures, of times and causes of death, of wounded flesh and rendered fabric. He had heard it so, so many times before. His thoughts still held him on a landing of a block of flats in Jenfeld with a young MEK trooper just starting his career as Fabel was ending his. He found he could not forgive himself for making sweeping judgements about Breidenbach’s motivations and ambitions. Fabel thought about Breidenbach’s youth, about how fit he had been, and then imagined him lying grey and blood-drained on Möller’s stainless steel autopsy table, sliced open, the vestigial warmth from his inner organs dissipating into the cool autopsy-room air.
After Anna’s briefing, he asked Werner to come into his office. This had become an almost daily ritual since Fabel’s resignation: the gradual transfer of responsibility to his friend. It had always been Maria that he had envisaged taking over, but that was simply not going to happen. He updated Werner on the caseload, confirming that Anna and Henk Hermann should see through the Breidenbach murder. When they were finished Fabel switched on his voicemail and took his jacket from behind the door.
‘I’m finishing for the afternoon. Got shopping to do,’ he explained to Werner. He indicated his desk, the files still lying on it from their meeting. ‘Why don’t you do your paperwork there? Might as well get used to it.’
Ansgar busied himself in the kitchen. To an outsider, a restaurant kitchen would seem the definition of chaos: orders shouted over the sound of food sizzling or boiling, cookers and ventilators running at industrial noise levels, staff weaving between each other in a rushed ballet. But for Ansgar, his kitchen was the only place of true order that he knew. The dance of the kitchen staff, the rhythm of pan and oven: he orchestrated it all. No one ever had to wait too long for their order; no dish arrived under- or overcooked. His reputation was that of the artist tempered by the perfectionist.
Ansgar had never married. He had never met anyone who would have understood his particular needs. And those needs would have eventually emerged. There had been women, but again he had kept his behaviour within the range of that which should be expected. For the other needs, for his true needs, there had been the women he had paid. And he had had to pay well. But Ansgar’s lack of a normal romantic life had meant he had no wife. The closest he had to a child was Adam, whom he was training. Adam was nineteen, eager and hardworking. Ansgar found in Adam someone to whom he could pass on the sacred knowledge of the chef de cuisine.
Ansgar had set the machinery of the kitchen in motion for luncheon. Each member of staff undertaking their preparatory roles. He took Adam to one side, taking this time to induct his protégé in yet another level of the culinary arts.
‘I want you to prepare the Wildschweinschinken. It goes on the menu this lunchtime.’
‘Yes, Chef,’ said Adam eagerly. Ansgar had previously allowed him to prepare the leg of wild boar. He had carefully mixed the coating of herbs, spices and mustards, exactly to Ansgar’s otherwise secret recipe, and had rubbed them into the boar flesh. That had been a month ago, and the wild pig’s leg had been marinating and curing in the big storage refrigerator since then. Adam brought the boar ham from the fridge and placed it on the carving board.
‘We will carve this slice by slice only as and when an order comes in,’ said Ansgar. ‘But I want you to practise carving a couple of slices from it. Also, I intend to serve it with a salad. I want you to suggest something appropriate.’
Adam frowned. ‘Well …’
‘No, not yet. First I want you to carve the meat. Examine its texture, its consistency.’
Adam nodded and, holding the leg with the carving fork, placed his blade against it.
‘Wait,’ said Ansgar patiently. ‘I want you to think more about your cut. Not just how thick or thin to carve the slices. I want you to think about the beast this meat came from. Close your eyes and picture it.’
Adam looked embarrassed for a moment, then closed his eyes.
‘Can you see it?’
‘Yes. A wild boar.’
‘Okay. Now I want you to think about where it foraged for food in the forest. About its shape, about the speed with which it could run. I want you to visualise that for a moment. Can you see it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. Now open your eyes and carve. Then, without thinking any more about it, I want you to tell me what salad I should serve it with.’
Adam shaved a perfect flake of ham from the joint, placed it on a plate and looked at Ansgar, beaming. ‘It should be served with wild mushroom, fennel, orange and rocket salad.’
‘Do you see? Do you see what happens when you think beyond the food, beyond the meat … to the living flesh? Do that, and you will be a great cook, Adam. Do that, and you will always understand the true nature of the food that you serve.’
With that, Ansgar stole a glance across the kitchen at Ekatherina.
Fabel wanted to buy a polo-neck sweater so he headed down to the Alsterhaus department store on Jungfernstieg, next to the Alster lake. Shopping in the Alsterhaus was a luxury he afforded himself perhaps a little too frequently, but he enjoyed browsing in its halls and treating himself to a morsel or two from the cheese bistro on the store’s top floor. He had decided to walk into town and the promise of a fine morning had been fulfilled: the blanket of grey had broken up and the sky was a cold, bright blue.
As he approached Jungfernstieg, he heard music. Fabel noticed a group of about a dozen men and women harmonising in a language that you didn’t need to understand to know that this was a song about pain and sorrow. The choir stood on the wide pavement a few metres from the deco-arched entrance to the Alsterhaus. Three men of Slavic appearance, like fishermen in a stream, were trying to hook the attention of passers-by. One of them approached Fabel.
‘We’re collecting signatures, sir. I wonder if I might trouble you for a moment.’
‘I’m afraid I’m—’
‘I’m sorry, sir, I won’t keep you. But do you know anything about the Holodomor?’ The Slav held him with a steady, inquisitive gaze. Fabel noticed the man’s eyes. Piercing blue, and cold; like the winter-morning sky above them. He felt a lurch in his gut as he thought of another Slav he had known who had piercingly bright eyes.
‘Are you Ukrainian?’ Fabel asked.
‘Yes, I am.’ The Slav smiled. ‘The Holodomor was the deliberate genocide of my people, carried out by the Soviet Union and Stalin. Between seven and ten million Ukrainians died. One quarter of the Ukrainian population. Starved to death by the Soviets between nineteen thirty-two and thirty-three.’ He flicked open the folder he had been holding beneath his clipboard. It was filled with grainy black-and-white photographs of human misery: emaciated children, bodies lying in the street, huge communal grave pits being filled with stick-like bodies. The images were redolent of those that Fabel had grown to associate with the Holocaust. ‘At one point, twenty-five thousand Ukrainians were dying every day. And practically no one outside Ukraine knows about the Holodomor. Even in Ukraine it was only after independence that we spoke about it openly. Russia still refuses to acknowledge that the Holodomor was an act of deliberate genocide. They say it was the result of incompetent collectivisation by Stalin’s commissars.’
‘And you dispute this?’ said Fabel. He looked at his watch to check how much time he had before he was due to meet Susanne on the top floor of the Alsterhaus.
‘It’s a downright lie,’ continued the Slav, undeterred. ‘People starved to death all over the Soviet Union because of Stalin’s insane collectivisation mania. That’s true. But in nineteen twenty-seven we had started to Ukrainianise our country. We made Ukrainian, not Russian, our official language. Stalin saw us as a threat, so he tried to exterminate us by starving us. More than twenty-five per cent of the Ukrainian population were wiped out. Please, your signature will help us have this crime recognised for what it is: genocide. We need the German and British and other governments to do what Spain has already done and formally recognise the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m not saying that I won’t support your claim, but I can’t sign this until I know more about what happened. I need to find out more about it for myself.’
‘I understand.’ The man handed Fabel a leaflet. ‘This tells you where you can get more information. Not just from our organisation. But please, sir, when you have read all of this, please visit our website and add your name to our list there.’
When Fabel looked up from the leaflet the Ukrainian was already hooking another shopper from the stream on the pavement.
Fabel made his way up to the top floor of the Alsterhaus. Susanne wasn’t there when he arrived, so he bought a coffee and sat in the café by the escalators and with a view of their agreed meeting place. He looked for a moment at the leaflet he had been handed by the Ukrainian. Fabel hadn’t come across the name ‘Holodomor’ before, but he had heard of the great starvation in the nineteen-thirties. In the nineteen-eighties, the Ukrainian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo had cited the Holodomor as part of the reason he had turned cannibal. Chikatilo’s brother had been murdered and eaten by starving villagers, but all that had been before Chikatilo’s birth. One detail that the campaigners, quite understandably, had chosen to omit from the leaflet was that the Holodomor had resulted in mass cannibalism. The Soviet authorities had set up special tribunals to try and execute people found to have consumed human flesh. Distraught parents had had to find secret burial places when a child died because it was so common for the corpse to be dug up as meat. Worse still, there had been many instances of parents killing and eating their own children. Even today in Ukraine, there was an unusually high number of serial murders involving cannibalism.
But for Fabel, Ukraine had only one significance: that it had been the dark cradle out of which Vasyl Vitrenko had crawled. It was maybe this thought that prompted Fabel to take out his mobile and call Maria Klee. The phone rang a few times, then the tone changed as his call was redirected to her cellphone. Her voice sounded flat and dull as she answered.
‘Maria? It’s Jan. I thought I’d give you a ring to see how you are doing. Is this a bad time?’ Fabel had had the idea that Maria hadn’t ventured out from her apartment much during her sick leave. He took her not being at home as a positive sign.
‘Oh, I’m fine …’ Maria sounded taken aback. ‘I’m just doing some shopping. How are you?’
‘I’m okay. Shopping too, in the Alsterhaus. How’s therapy going?’ Fabel winced at his own clumsiness. There was a short pause at the other end of the phone.
‘Fine. Making progress. I’ll be back at work soon. It won’t be the same without you.’
‘Is that good or bad?’ Fabel’s laugh sounded fake.
‘Bad.’ No laugh. ‘Jan … I think I might give it up too.’
‘Maria, you’re an excellent police officer. You still have a great future to look forward to.’ Fabel heard himself repeat what had been said to him so many times by his own superiors. ‘But it’s your decision. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last couple of years, it’s that if you feel you have to do something, don’t wait. Do it.’
‘That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. Recently … well, with all of the things that have happened …’ There was something about Maria’s voice – a detachedness, a remoteness – that emphasised for Fabel every centimetre of empty air it traversed on the crest of a microwave. It was the voice of someone lost and Fabel felt panic rise in his chest.
‘Maria … why don’t I come over later and see you? I think it would be good to talk …’
‘I would like that … but not now, Jan. I’m not ready to see anyone from work. I think … you know, with my therapy and everything … Actually, Dr Minks has said it would be better for me to avoid contact with colleagues for a while.’
‘Oh? I understand,’ Fabel said, although he didn’t. ‘Maybe soon.’
They said goodbye and Fabel hung up. When he looked up he saw that Susanne had arrived and was scanning the Alsterhaus for him.