17Breitner refilled our teacups.

‘Most of our stress is due to a completely distorted idea of what freedom is.’

‘Ah.’

‘It is a misconception that freedom means being able to do whatever you want.’

‘What’s so wrong with that?’

‘It is based on the assumption that we always have to be doing something. That is the main cause of the stress you are experiencing. You are standing outside that door and consider it completely normal to be running through all manner of things in your mind. After all, “thoughts are free”, ha! Yet the problem is exactly this: after those free thoughts gallop away from you, it is very hard to corral them again. But you do not have to be thinking at all. Quite the opposite, you can just not think if you do not want to. Only then are your thoughts truly free.’

‘But I don’t just spend my days thinking,’ I dared to object. ‘What causes me the most bother is what I do.’

‘The same applies. Only once you internalise that you do not have to do what you do not want to do – only then are you truly free.’

I don’t have to do what I don’t want to do. I am free.18

Less than four months later, I would seize this freedom uncompromisingly. I would seize it to not do something I didn’t want to do. Unfortunately, this would mean infringing on someone else’s freedom – taking their life. Yet I didn’t take this mindfulness course to save the world, I did it to save myself.

Mindfulness does not call for us to live and let live. It calls for us to live! And that imperative might affect the less mindful lives of others.

To this day, what still fills me with joy about my first murder is the fact that I was able to take in that moment with love and without judgement. Exactly the way my coach had counselled that very first session. My first murder was spontaneously born out of the moment, out of what I needed. From that perspective, it was a very successful exercise in mindfulness – for me, not for the other guy.

But when I was sitting in that armchair with Breitner and having my second cup of tea, no one was dead yet. I was only there to get a better handle on my professional stress.

‘Tell me about your work. You’re a lawyer?’ Breitner asked.

‘Yes, criminal law.’

‘So you make sure that every person in this country is ensured a fair trial, no matter what they are accused of. That must be very rewarding.’

‘That’s exactly why I originally chose to do this – when I was in law school, during my apprenticeship, and also at 19the beginning of my career. Unfortunately, the reality of a successful criminal defence lawyer is completely different.’

‘How so?’

‘I mainly make sure that arseholes don’t get into the legally appropriate amount of trouble. It might not be as morally worthwhile, but it’s extremely lucrative.’

I told him about starting at DED – the law firm of Von Dresen, Erkel and Dannwitz – right after I was admitted to the bar. DED was a medium-sized law firm focusing on businesses, including any criminal elements. A pack of suits who presented themselves as legitimate yet did nothing all day but find new tax loopholes for filthy-rich clients and handle the cases of people who, despite our best efforts, got stuck with criminal proceedings for tax evasion, white-collar crimes, embezzlement or large-scale fraud. Any newcomer wanting to play in this league was expected to graduate with honours as well as complete several unpaid internships. And even out of the applicants who met these requirements, only one in ten was accepted. To get a job here immediately after the second state examination was considered hitting the jackpot in the job lottery. I got lucky, at least that’s what I thought at the time.

‘You no longer see it that way?’ Breitner asked.

‘Well, over the years things have just turned out a bit differently than I expected when I was first hired.’

‘That sounds like life. What happened?’

In broad strokes, I outlined my career, told him about the shocking starting salary and the shocking working conditions. Six and a half days a week, fourteen hours a day. 20Surrounded every minute by cold-blooded donkeys all chasing the same careerist carrot: to make partner.

I know what I’m talking about. I used to be one of them.

My first client was a guy who’d never been represented by the firm before. The new client assigned to the new lawyer. That client was Dragan Sergowicz, but I didn’t use his name. I just told Breitner that the client was ‘shady’. Though the word ‘shady’ was rather an understatement when it came to Dragan’s lines of business. The red-light district in which he operated, for one, was flashier than a radar trap catching someone doing eighty mph in a thirty zone.

But Dragan’s business was financially successful, and he’d been vouched for by some of DED’s ‘legitimate’ clients, who’d owed him a favour.

At our first meeting, Dragan said his case was about tax evasion. That wasn’t a complete lie, but it also didn’t match the prosecution service’s accusations. He had clobbered the tax administrator responsible for his case into hospital after some follow-up questions Dragan considered too critical. After the administrator had recovered to the point where he could eat solid food and make an official statement, he oddly could no longer remember either any suspicion of tax evasion or Dragan’s visit. He claimed he’d simply had a bad fall.

In the years that followed, Dragan’s two fists were to prove even more effective than my two law degrees.

Dragan was not only a brutal pimp, but also a big drug and arms dealer. When I met him, he did a less than stellar job disguising his lines of work behind a number of semi-legal 21import–export companies. In short: even for my employer’s very broad interpretation of legitimate business, Dragan was a so-called bleurgh-client – one who poured a lot of money into the firm, but one you didn’t exactly want to show off.

Of course, this did not prevent the firm’s partners from teaching me every financial trick in the book I could bill Dragan for.

Dragan became my first professional challenge. I put all my ambition into bringing his company portfolio up to date and thus keeping his activities under the prosecution service’s radar. Like before, his main sources of income were drugs, arms and prostitution, but from then on, I channelled his money through plenty of forwarding companies, franchises or cash-based businesses in which I had acquired a stake for Dragan. In addition, I showed him how to use EU-subsidy fraud to nab money out of non-existent aubergine farms in Bulgaria and how emissions trading allowed for sources of income that were at least as criminal as drug trafficking, but required no one’s bones to be broken – plus, both were state-subsidised. With my help, in just a few years, Dragan had transformed his public image from a brutal drug-dealing pimp to a halfway-respectable businessman.

I perfected all the skills I had never learned during my studies: how to ‘influence’ witnesses, ‘pacify’ prosecutors, bring employees ‘in line’. In short, I got really good at convincing people.

‘And you know why?’ I asked Breitner.

‘Enlighten me.’22

‘At first, because it was in my employment contract. I’m not a bad person, honestly. I really am rather anxious and boring, dutiful too – my sense of duty is perhaps my worst quality. And I’m fully aware that this system I helped set up is no good at all – neither for others nor for myself. Any system that rewards violence, injustice and deceit, but not love, justice and truth simply cannot be good. But I could still be good, at least from inside the system. Out of duty, I’ve devoted years and years to making this system work. Yet I never noticed how it has slowly but surely changed me from a nerdy honours student into the perfect lawyer for organised crime.’

At some point, I just enjoyed mastering the craft. But perfection isn’t everything. Any halfway-decent lawyer can manage saving their client’s arse. At heart, nothing really changed. Even wearing the most expensive suit, Dragan never passed for a legitimate businessman. He was and remained a violent lunatic.

As part of lawyer–client privilege, I’d heard him spout more insane atrocities than Charles Manson might’ve to his confessor. At the same time, I had poured down legal bullshit all over his competitors and any possible witnesses of his crimes, so I really shouldn’t have been quite so surprised that I started to reek too. Well, I never noticed it myself; I had to be told by my odour-sensitive wife first. She was the one who finally realised I couldn’t keep this up.