Six hours later
‘You’re completely insane.’
‘Thanks for putting it so gently.’
‘No, you really are.’
The suntanned dentist looked like she wanted to give him a slap. Now she was going to ask him if he thought he was Rambo, just as Kramer, the head of special forces, the two paramedics and half a dozen others had done since the operation finished.
The dentist, Dr Marlies Fendrich according to the nametag on her hospital coat, sounded under stress as she breathed through her sky-blue, disposable face mask.
‘Who do you think you are? Rambo?’
He smiled, which was a mistake, because it allowed cold air to get to the open nerve. He’d snapped the tooth off just above the jawbone; pain shot through his body each time he touched the stump with his tongue.
The chair he was on sank back. A wide arc lamp appeared above his head and blinded him.
‘Open up!’ the dentist commanded, and he obeyed.
‘Do you know how much work it is to reconstruct that tooth?’ he heard her say. She was so close to his face that he could see her pores. Unlike him she set great store by grooming. His last exfoliation had been a year ago, when the two Slovenes dragged him by his face across the service station car park.
It was never good when your cover was busted.
‘You’ve left me with barely a millimetre of tooth to work with, far too little to put a crown on,’ Marlies kept grumbling. ‘We could try an extrusion, that’s to say pull out the root that’s still in the jaw. But better would be a surgical crown-lengthening, then we might get away without an implant. But first the root canal needs to be thoroughly cleansed. After what you did, I imagine you don’t need any anaesthetic if I grind the bone a little…’
‘Twelve!’ Martin said, interrupting her verbal torrent.
‘What do you mean twelve?’
‘That’s how old the boy was they’d chained into a swing. He was wearing a clamp to keep his mouth open so he couldn’t refuse oral sex. I was supposed to infect him with HIV.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ The dentist’s face lost several shades of its holiday tan. Schwartz wondered where she’d been. In the middle of October you needed to go a fair distance to lie in the sun. Or you were just lucky. As he and Nadja once had been, six years ago. Their last trip to Mallorca. They’d been able to celebrate Timmy’s tenth birthday on the beach, and he’d got sunburn. A year later his wife and son were dead and he hadn’t gone on holiday since.
‘The perpetrator was expecting a bald man with a missing incisor. What can I say…?’ He rubbed his hairless scalp. ‘My barber is in just as bad a mood as you.’
The dentist forced a nervous smile. Schwartz could tell that she didn’t know if he was joking.
‘Did he, the boy, I mean, was he…?’
‘He’s fine,’ he replied. Or at least as fine as a foster child could possibly be, back in a home right after having been freed from the clutches of perverted lunatics. Schwartz had waited until he’d recorded Pryga’s order to ‘give it to the boy in every hole’. The camera in the studs of his leather jacket captured the expectant grins of all the guests, to whom he’d turned before saying ‘toaster’, the agreed signal for the SWAT team to attack. Together with the seemingly positive HIV test and the video from Pryga’s tripod camera, they had enough evidence to put the bastards away for a very, very long time.
‘Maybe even two and a half years, with a bit of luck,’ Kramer had said gloomily as he drove Schwartz to the hospital where they gave him his PEP medicine: three pills a day for five weeks. Kramer had to sort out all the paperwork, which is why Martin was obliged to make his own way to the dental clinic, where now, after another two hours’ waiting, he was finally being seen.
‘I’m sorry,’ the dentist apologised. She had a small face with ears that were slightly too big, and cute freckles on her nose. In another life Schwartz might have considered asking for her telephone number, only to think twice because he was married. The timing was never right. Either you met a pretty woman and had a ring on your finger. Or the ring was off and every pretty woman reminded you of what you’d lost.
‘All they told me was that you’d injured yourself in service. That you were just a…’
‘A madman?’ Schwartz finished the part of the sentence the dentist hadn’t dared complete.
‘Yes. I didn’t know that—’
‘It’s alright. Just get the rest of it out and sew it all back together.’
Dr Fendrich shook her head. ‘It’s not as simple as all that. You must want it reconstructed…’
‘No,’ Schwartz said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
‘But surely you care about being disfigured like—’
‘If you knew how few things I care about,’ he said flatly. His mobile vibrated in his trouser pocket. ‘Hold on a sec, please.’
He had to turn to the side slightly to fish it from his back pocket. Whoever it was calling him, they were withholding their number.
‘Listen, there are other patients waiting outside—’ the dentist began another incomplete sentence, turning away in irritation when Schwartz ignored her protest.
‘Hello?’
No answer. Just a loud rustling that reminded him of old modems and the AOL advertisement from the 1990s.
‘Hello?’
He heard the echo of his own voice and was just about to hang up when there was a clatter on the line, as if someone were playing with dice on a glass table. Then the rustling grew quieter, there were two loud crackles, and all of a sudden he could understand every word. ‘Hello? My name is Gerlinde Dobkowitz. Am I speaking to a Herr Martin Schwartz?’
He blinked in alarm. People who rang this number had no reason to ask his name. He’d given his private number to a select few, all of whom knew who he was.
The unfamiliar voice on the phone had a Viennese accent and belonged either to an old woman or a young lady with a serious alcohol problem. Schwartz thought the first more likely, because of her antiquated first name and old-fashioned way of speaking.
‘Where did you get my number?’ he asked.
Even if the woman was from the telephone company, which he didn’t believe, she wouldn’t have addressed him with his real name but with ‘Peter Pax’, the pseudonym he’d registered the number under years ago. It was his favourite alias as it reminded him of Peter Pan.
‘Let’s just say I’m a dab hand at research,’ the caller said.
‘What do you want from me?’
‘I’ll tell you that as soon as we meet.’ Gerlinde Dobkowitz gave a hoarse cough. ‘You must come aboard as quickly as you can.’
‘Aboard? What are you talking about?’
Schwartz noticed the dentist give him a searching look as she arranged her instruments on a side table.
‘The Sultan of the Seas,’ he heard the old woman say. ‘At the moment we’re sailing somewhere in the English Channel, on our way from Hamburg to Southampton. You have to join us as soon as you can.’
Schwartz went cold. Earlier, when he’d been standing opposite Pryga, he wasn’t nervous. Not even when he’d given blood for the HIV test in Pryga’s hallway and it had taken more than the three projected minutes for the second line in the window of test strip to appear. Not even when he saw the naked boy in the swing and the fire doors had closed behind him. But now his pulse was racing. And the wound in his mouth throbbed to the rhythm of his heartbeat.
‘Hello? Herr Schwartz? You know the ship, don’t you?’ Gerlinde asked.
‘Yes.’
Certainly.
Of course he did.
It was the cruise liner on which, five years ago, during the third night of the transatlantic crossing, his wife had climbed over the railings of her balcony cabin, and leaped fifty metres into the depths. Just after she’d held a chloroform-soaked cloth over Timmy’s sleepy face and then tossed him overboard.