1

Berlin

The house that was the venue for the deadly party looked like the kind of place they’d once dreamed of. Detached, with a red-tiled roof and a large front garden behind the white picket fence. Here they would have had barbecues at weekends and in summer put an inflatable pool on the lawn. He’d have invited friends and they’d have chatted to each other about their jobs, their partners’ quirks or just lain on loungers beneath the umbrella, watching the children play.

Nadja and he had looked at just such a house at the time when Timmy was starting school. Four rooms, two bathrooms, a fireplace. With cream-coloured plasterwork and green shutters. Not far from here, on the boundary between Westend and Spandau, and a mere five-minute bike ride to the primary school where Nadja was teaching at the time. A stone’s throw from the sports ground where his son could have played football. Or tennis. Or whatever.

They hadn’t been able to afford it.

Now there was nobody to move house with. Nadja and Timmy were both dead.

And the twelve-year-old boy in the house they were monitoring, which belonged to a man called Detlev Pryga, would be dead soon too if they wasted any more time out here in the black van.

‘I’m going in,’ Martin Schwartz announced. He was sitting inside the windowless rear of the panel van. Having injected himself with a milky fluid, he tossed the used syringe into a plastic bin. Then he stood up from the monitoring console, on its screen the external view of the building. His face was reflected in the vehicle’s tinted panes. I look like a junkie in withdrawal, Martin thought. That was an insult. To every junkie.

He’d lost weight in the past few years, more than you could call healthy. Only his nose was as plump as it had ever been. The Schwartz conk, which for generations all male descendants of the family had been endowed with, and which his late wife had found sexy – the ultimate proof, he thought, that love does make you blind. If anything, his hooter gave him a kindly, trustworthy look. From time to time strangers would nod at him in the street; babies smiled when he bent over a pram (probably because they mistook him for a clown) and women flirted with him quite openly, sometimes even in the presence of their partners.

Well, they certainly wouldn’t be doing that today, not while he was in these clothes. The tight-fitting leather jacket he’d squeezed himself into made unpleasant creaking noises even when he breathed. As he moved to get out it sounded as if he was trying to tie up a huge balloon.

‘Stop, wait!’ said Armin Kramer, who was in charge of the operation and had been sitting opposite him at the computer table for hours.

‘What for?’

‘For—’

Kramer’s mobile rang, preventing him from finishing his sentence.

The rather overweight inspector greeted the caller with an eloquent, ‘Hmm?’ and during the course of the conversation said little more than ‘What?’, ‘No!’, ‘You’re bullshitting me!’ and ‘Tell the arsehole who fucked up to get dressed nice and warm. Why? Because in October it might get fucking cold if he’s lying unconscious outside the station for a few hours once I’m finished with him.’ Kramer hung up.

‘Fuck.’

He loved sounding like an American drug cop. And looking like one too. He wore tatty cowboy boots, jeans with holes in them and a shirt whose red-and-white diamond pattern was reminiscent of dishcloths.

‘What’s the problem?’ Schwartz said.

‘Jensen.’

‘What’s he up to?’

And how can the guy make any trouble? He’s in one of our isolation cells.

‘Don’t ask me how, but that bastard’s managed to send Pryga a text.’

Schwartz nodded. Emotional outbursts like those exhibited by his superior, now tearing his hair out, were alien to him. Apart from an injection of adrenalin right into the chambers of his heart, there was barely anything that could set his pulse racing. Certainly not the news that a con had once again managed to get his hands on drugs, weapons or, like Jensen, a mobile. Prison was better organised than a supermarket, with a larger selection of items and more customer-friendly opening hours. Including Sundays and public holidays.

‘Did he warn Pryga?’ he asked Kramer.

‘No. The fucker allowed himself a little joke that amounts to the same thing. He was going to let you get caught in the trap.’ The inspector massaged the bags under his eyes, which got larger with every operation. ‘If I wanted to post them they’d have to be sent as a parcel,’ Kramer had recently quipped.

‘How so?’ Schwartz asked.

‘He texted him that Pryga shouldn’t be shocked if he turned up at the party.’

‘Why shocked?’

‘Because he’s tripped and broken an incisor. Top left.’

With his sausage fingers Kramer tapped on the corresponding spot in his mouth.

Schwartz nodded. He hadn’t credited the pervert with that much creativity.

He looked at his watch. Just after five p.m.

Just after ‘too late’.

‘Fuck!’ Kramer slapped the computer table in anger. ‘All that preparation – a complete waste of fucking time. We’ve got to call it off.’

He started clambering into the front seat.

Schwartz opened his mouth to protest, but knew that Kramer was right. They’d been working towards this day for six months. It had started with a rumour in the community that was so unbelievable they thought for ages it was an urban legend. And yet, as it turned out, ‘bug parties’ weren’t a made-up horror story, but actually existed. They consisted of HIV-infected men having unprotected sex with healthy individuals. For the most part this was consensual – the kick was provided by the risk of infection, and this made such events more of a case for a psychiatrist than the public prosecutor.

As far as Schwartz was concerned, adults could behave exactly as they wished, so long as everything happened consensually. All that angered him about this was that the insane behaviour of a minority was unnecessarily aggravating the dumb prejudices against AIDS sufferers. For of course bug parties were the absolute exception, whereas the overwhelming majority of infected individuals lived a responsible life, many of them involved in an active battle against the disease and the stigmatisation of its victims.

A battle to foil the suicidal bug parties.

Not to mention the psychopathic variants.

The newest trend in the perverted scene were ‘events’ at which innocents were raped and infected with the virus. Mostly under-aged victims. In front of a paying public. A new attraction at the Berlin funfair of filth which kept its tents open around the clock. Often in elegant houses in middle-class areas where you’d never suspect anything like that might occur.

Detlev Pryga, a man who in normal life sold plumbing equipment, was popular with the youth welfare office, as he regularly took in the most difficult foster children. Drug addicts, victims of abuse and other problem cases, who’d spent more time inside children’s homes than classrooms. Troubled souls who were perfectly used to exchanging sex in return for somewhere to spend the night. Nobody noticed if they soon vanished again, to be picked up again some time later, dishevelled and ill. The perfect victims, troublemakers who shunned the law and who were rarely believed if they ever sought help.

Liam, the twelve-year-old boy from the streets, who’d been living in Pryga’s house for a month, would also be thrown back into the gutter very soon after this evening. Before that, however, he was going to be forced to have sex with Kurt Jensen, a forty-three-year-old HIV-infected paedophile, in front of an audience of guests.

Pryga had met Jensen via relevant chatrooms on the internet, thereby falling into the police’s net.

The child abuser had now been in custody for two weeks, during which Schwartz had been making preparations to assume Jensen’s identity. This was a relatively simple matter, as there hadn’t been any exchange of photos between him and Pryga. He just had to wear the leather outfit that Pryga had requested for the filming and shave his head, because Jensen had described himself as tall and slim, with green eyes and a bald head. Features which, thanks to the shave and contact lenses, now applied to Martin Schwartz too.

The most difficult aspect of his disguise was the positive AIDS test that Pryga demanded. Not in advance, but at the party itself. He’d explained that he’d be equipped with a rapid test from an online Dutch pharmacy. All it needed was a drop of blood and the result would be visible on the test strip within three minutes.

Schwartz knew that this fundamentally insurmountable problem was the reason he’d been the one chosen for this operation. Since the death of his family he’d been regarded in police circles as a ticking time bomb. A thirty-eight-year-old undercover investigator, marching briskly towards retirement age in his profession, and lacking the key thing that kept him and his team alive in emergencies: a sense of fear.

He’d been examined four times by police psychologists. And four times they’d come to the conclusion that he hadn’t got over his wife’s suicide – let alone the fact that she’d killed their son beforehand. Four times they recommended early retirement, because a man who no longer saw any point in his life would take irresponsible risks in the line of duty.

They’d been right four times.

And yet here he was again in the police vehicle, not only because he was the best for the job, but chiefly because no one else would voluntarily have HIV antibodies injected into their bloodstream to manipulate the instant test. Although a special sterilisation process purified the blood serum of pathogens that triggered AIDS, the team doctor refused to declare it one hundred per cent safe, which is why as soon as this was over Schwartz had to start a four-week course of drug therapy, known as post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP for short. Something he’d already been through once before when a junkie in Hasenheide Park jammed a bloody needle into his neck. The instruction leaflet that came with the ‘after pills’, which had to be taken two hours at the latest after the danger of infection, noted that the possible side effects were headache, diarrhoea and vomiting. Schwartz seemed to be more sensitive than other subjects. He may not have been sick or spent longer on the loo than normal, but terrible migraines had driven him to the verge of passing out, even beyond sometimes.

‘I’ve got to get cracking,’ he said to Kramer while eyeing the monitor. Nobody had entered the house for ten minutes.

They’d counted seven guests: five men, two women. All had come by taxi. Handy, if you wanted to avoid your registration number being taken down.

‘What if Pryga has made contingency plans and found a replacement for me, just in case I pull out?’ Schwartz asked. In all likelihood the guests were healthy. Certainly not mentally, but physically so. But of course they couldn’t know for certain.

Kramer shook his head. ‘There aren’t so many infected paedophiles prepared to do such a thing. You know how long Pryga had to look for Jensen?’

Yes, he did.

All the same. The risk was too great.

They couldn’t just storm the house either. They wouldn’t be able to provide a valid reason for doing so. The rape was scheduled to take place in the basement. Pryga had dogs that announced the arrival of every visitor. Even if they went at lightning speed they wouldn’t manage to break down the doors and catch the perpetrators in flagrante. And on what suspicion would they arrest those present? It wasn’t a crime to lock oneself into a boiler room and set up a camera beside a mattress. Not even if there was a young boy lying on it with a bare torso.

‘We can’t risk a twelve-year-old boy being raped and infected with HIV,’ Schwartz protested.

‘I don’t know if I spoke too quickly back then,’ Kramer said, stressing each word very deliberately, as if talking to an imbecile. ‘You’re not going in there. You’ve. Got. All. Your. Teeth.’

Schwartz rubbed his three-day or seven-day beard. He couldn’t say for sure when he’d last slept at home.

‘What about Doctor Malchow?’

‘The team doctor?’ Kramer looked at him as if he’d just asked for an adult nappy. ‘Listen, I know you’re a sandwich short of a picnic, but even you can’t be so crazy as to have your teeth sliced off. And even if…’ Kramer broke off, checking his watch. ‘It would take Malchow at least twenty minutes to get here. You’d need another three for the anaesthetic, and five for the operation.’ He pointed to the monitor that showed the front of the house. ‘Who’s to say the party won’t be over in half an hour?’

‘You’re right,’ Schwartz said, sitting down exhausted on an upholstered bench that ran along the side of the van.

‘We’ll abort then?’ Kramer said.

Rather than answering, Schwartz felt under his seat. He pulled out his army-green duffle bag that accompanied him on every operation.

‘What’s going on?’ the chief asked.

Schwartz threw the clothes he’d exchanged earlier for his leather gear onto the floor and rummaged around at the bottom of the bag.

It took him no more than a few seconds to find what he was looking for amongst the cables, rolls of sticky tape, batteries and tools.

‘Tell me this is a joke,’ Kramer said when Schwartz asked him for a mirror.

‘Forget it,’ Schwartz replied with a shrug. ‘I can manage without one.’

Then he put the pliers to his upper left incisor.