The audiences were getting smaller.
It was during the 1980s and 1990s that he had seen the greatest reduction in audience size, when a new generation of performer had come along. Schlager, the bland, schmaltzy form of German pop music, had always been there, its inane presence actually helpful to singers like Cornelius Tamm; its complete lack of substance counterpointing their music, underlining its intellectualism. But then came punk, then rap which gave voice to the disaffection of a new, apolitical generation. And, of course, there had been the irresistible wave of Anglo-American imports. Each had, in its own way, marginalised Cornelius and others like him, pushing them out of the limelight. And off the radio.
But there had always been his concert audiences: the constant faithful followers who had grown older, had matured with him. But the Wall had come down and Germany had become reunited. Protest became redundant. Political lyrics seemed irrelevant.
Now Cornelius performed in cellars and town halls for audiences of fifty or so. There were other performers of his vintage who had simply given up touring and sold their own back catalogue, as Cornelius also did, from their websites.
But Cornelius needed an audience. No matter how small. And he always gave the best performance he could, even when his fans would sicken him with the way they’d make up for their lack of numbers with an excess of enthusiasm. He would look out over a small mass of balding or greying heads and corpulent or haggard faces and go through the motions of reviving the dully depressing memories of their youth.
The audience tonight was no different. Cornelius laughed and joked and sang, playing the same tunes on the same guitar he had played for nearly forty years. Tonight he played in the cellar of an old brewery that sat between two of the canals that wove through Hamburg like the thread that held the city’s fabric together. The audience all sat on benches at the side of long, low tables, drinking beer and grinning inanely as he sang. He did not even have the power to bring an audience to its feet any more.
He did notice one younger face. It was a man in his early thirties, standing over by the bar. He was pale with very dark hair. Cornelius was not sure, but he thought he recognised the young man from somewhere.
Cornelius always finished his performance with the same number. It was his signature piece. Reinhard Mey had ‘Über den Wolken’, Cornelius Tamm had ‘Ewigkeit’. Eternity. At last the audience dragged themselves to their feet, singing along to the song that promised that members of their generation were eternal. That they would triumph. Except they were not, and they had not. They had all surrendered to the banal; the mediocre. Cornelius too.
After he finished his set Cornelius went through the usual routine. It was, of course, humiliating to sit at a table with a case full of CDs for sale, but he engaged in the task with the same practised enthusiasm as he had learned to invest in his performances. More often than not he sold no more than a handful. He was, after all, preaching to the converted who, in most cases, already had all his songs. He had, as the capitalists would say, saturated his market.
Still, he smiled and chatted politely with those who lingered after the performance, talking to strangers as if they were old friends because of their vaguely common chronologies. But, inside, Cornelius Tamm’s soul screamed. He had been the voice of a generation. He had given expression to a special moment in time. He had spoken to and for millions who had raged against the sins of their fathers, against the sins of their own time. And now he sold CDs of his songs from a suitcase in a Hamburg Bierkeller.
It was nearly two in the morning by the time he reversed his van up to the back door and loaded his amplifier and other equipment into the back. As he did so, Cornelius felt every one of his sixty-two years weigh down the equipment. It had been raining while he had been performing and the cobbles in the yard behind the old brewery glistened in the moonlight. One of the bar staff helped him out with the amp, said goodnight and closed the delivery doors, leaving Cornelius in the courtyard alone. He looked up at the moon and the silver-etched edges of the roofs around the courtyard. Somewhere over on Ost-West Strasse a siren whined past. Cornelius thought about Julia lying warm and fresh and young in their bed. About how he did not belong beside her. About how he did not belong anywhere, any more. Cornelius Tamm looked up at the moon from the empty courtyard of an old brewery pub and felt so terribly lonely. He sighed and slammed shut the rear doors of the van.
He gave a jump when he saw the young man with the pale face and dark hair standing there.
‘Hello, Cornelius,’ said the stranger. His arm arced round and Cornelius caught the black blur of something long and heavy-looking. It slammed into his cheek and there was the sound of something cracking and Cornelius felt a white-hot pain explode in the side of his face and down his neck. He hit the ground so fast that his brain did not have time to register his falling. He felt the glossy, rounded top of a cobble against his uninjured cheek and realised that it was sleek not with rain but with his blood.
‘I’m sorry about your face …’ His assailant was now bending over him. ‘But I couldn’t hit you on the head.’ Cornelius felt the sting of a hypodermic needle in his neck and the moonlight faded from the night. ‘That would have damaged your scalp …’
The very first thing that struck Fabel about the view was that he could see the site where they had found the mummified body. It made him think of the nightmare he had had while staying at Grueber’s. The procession of mummies; the firestorm dream. Maybe inherited memories had nothing to do with genetics.
The apartment was, undoubtedly, the best they had seen so far. But somehow Fabel found he could not muster sufficient enthusiasm for it. The estate agent, Frau Haarmeyer, was a tall middle-aged woman with an expensive haircut dyed the same pale sand-coloured blonde that so many middle-aged, middle-class northern German women seemed to favour when their fair hair started to turn grey. Throughout the showing, Frau Haarmeyer managed to convey two sentiments wordlessly: that she clearly believed the apartment was really very much above Fabel and Susanne’s reach, and that this kind of work was really very much beneath her. Although she enthused about the flat and its neighbours in the HafenCity development, there was an undertone that suggested she was simply going through the motions.
Susanne was obviously taken with the apartment and followed the estate agent, listening intently and holding her head angled in her distinctive pose of concentration. Accordingly, Frau Haarmeyer focused her attention on her, largely ignoring Fabel until he wandered off to some corner or other to inspect a particular detail, at which point Frau Haarmeyer would tilt her head to see past Susanne and frown in Fabel’s direction.
At one point he noticed the same kind of frown on Susanne’s brow. Fabel knew that somehow he had to project more interest than he felt. After all, it had been his idea that they should move in together. Susanne had at first been reluctant and it had been his enthusiasm for the notion that had won her round. Yet every apartment they had seen had left him cold when he compared it to the view from and location of his Pöseldorf home. But Fabel knew that, since the violation of his private space, he would never feel the same about the view again. It reminded him of how he had felt when his marriage had failed: that he was being forced into a new life, when all he wanted was to have his old one back. To turn back the clock and repair that which had been shattered.
Susanne did not seem to understand his reluctance; she had even hinted that it was his fear of change, his inability to break away from routines that was holding them back. But it was more than that. Exactly what it was he had yet to define, but something twisted in his gut whenever he thought about giving up his apartment. He had, after all, been lucky to buy where and when he did. But what was more important to Fabel was that it had been in that apartment that he had rebuilt himself after the break-up of his marriage. It was there that he had redefined who Jan Fabel was. He had found his new life.
Frau Haarmeyer led them through to the kitchen. As in the other rooms, the outer wall was all window. The kitchen shone with glass and brushed steel and was filled with a faint, pleasant odour of coffee. Fabel idly wondered if the developers had a special spray to infuse the kitchen with its appealing fragrance, or if it was the phantom aroma of the coffee roasters in the nearby Speicherstadt.
‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ asked Frau Haarmeyer with an enthusiasm that was as fake as her hair colour.
‘Very impressive …’ Susanne shot Fabel a meaningful look.
‘Great,’ he responded with the same degree of conviction as Frau Haarmeyer. He again looked down to the site where they had found the mummified corpse. The archaeological dig had been completed weeks ago and now the developers had moved in. Bright yellow earth-movers and tractors, small and scarab-like from Fabel’s elevated position, moved across the site; the next phase of Hamburg’s vision for the future was being superimposed on a past where a young man had been suffocated and baked to death by the hellish heat of a man-made firestorm.
Fabel felt the dull anxiety of unfinished business. He had promised himself that he would find the family of the mummified man, and he still had to achieve that.
As the estate agent explained, yet again, that they would have a view of the Kaispeicher A with its amazing new opera house and concert hall, and how this was going to be among the most desirable addresses in Hamburg, Fabel’s gaze remained on the building site in the distance and below them. He wondered how an estate agent would market a memento mori as a sales feature of a property.
It was cool outside, but the sun was shining and the sky was a silky pale blue.
‘I really liked that place,’ Susanne said as they walked back to the car. Buried somewhere in the softness of her faint Bavarian accent was a sharp edge. ‘You didn’t say much.’
Fabel explained about the view.
‘Would it really bother you that much?’ asked Susanne in a tone that suggested it should not. ‘It’s better than the memory of … well, that …’
‘The other thing,’ Fabel sought a less subjective reason for rejecting the apartment, ‘is it just seemed so … I don’t know, cold. Soulless. Like living in an office block.’
Susanne sighed. ‘Well, I liked it.’
‘I’m sorry, Susanne. It’s just that with this case still going on, my mind’s not up to dealing with moving.’
‘Listen, Jan, this case has given us one of the main reasons for getting you out of that apartment. We can afford this place. It would mean a new start for us. Together.’
‘I’ll think about it.’ Fabel smiled. ‘I promise.’
Cornelius Tamm woke up in stages.
His first sensation was pain: a great blooming of it in the side of his face and a pounding in his head. Next he became aware of sounds: indistinct and as if in the far distance. A metallic whirring and the sound of air being moved mechanically. Then came a growing awareness that he was not free to move, but the drug that had been administered by his assailant confused his sense of his own body and he could not work out for the moment why his movements were restricted. As the sense of the geography of his body returned, he realised that he was bound to a chair, his hands tied behind him and some kind of gag taped over his mouth. Finally, as his consciousness was at last restored to him in its full pain and horror, Cornelius’s eyes opened and slowly focused on his new environment.
To start with he thought he was sitting in a cave that had glistening grey walls. Then he realised that he was surrounded by curtains of thick, almost opaque plastic sheeting. The chair to which he was bound also rested on a sheet of heavy-duty black polyurethane. He felt a churning between his gut and his chest: it was clear that the sheeting was intended to contain a mess. And that mess would be his blood and flesh as his life was brought to an end. He struggled violently against his bonds. The effort turned up the volume of the pain and a rivulet of blood escaped from the nostril on the side of his face that had been hit. The chair to which he was tied was obviously robustly built, because it hardly moved on its carpet of polyurethane.
Cornelius got the impression that he was in some kind of cellar. Whoever had brought him here had been painstaking in their preparation of the chamber: even the ceiling had been covered with plastic, stretched tight and held in place with strips of black tape. But a single bulb hung from it and Cornelius could see grey plaster around the light fitting. The ceiling was low: too low for it to belong in a room used for normal living or working, and he continued to hear the metallic whirring sound, like an air-conditioning system in a factory.
The curtains of dense plastic parted and a figure entered the small space. Cornelius recognised the young man who had been sitting by the bar during his gig; who had been waiting for him with an iron bar in the courtyard of the brewery pub. He was wearing a pale blue coverall suit with blue plastic overshoes. His black hair was hidden beneath an elasticated plastic shower cap. As he entered, he pulled a surgical mask over his nose and mouth, and when he spoke his voice was slightly muffled.
‘Hello, Cornelius. It has been more than twenty years since I last saw you. You look, if you don’t mind me saying, like crap. I have never understood why men of your age wear their hair in a ponytail. The world has moved on since you were a student, Cornelius. Why haven’t you moved on with it?’ He leaned close, placing his face a few centimetres from his captive’s. ‘Do you recognise me, Cornelius? Yes … it’s me. It’s Franz. I’m back.’
Cornelius felt as if he was going as mad as his tormentor. For a moment he considered the similarity in appearance between the young man and the person he claimed to be. But it was impossible. Franz had been dead twenty years, and the resemblance was only superficial. Still, it had been enough to trigger that feeling of recognition when Cornelius had first noticed him at the gig.
‘You are a nobody, Cornelius. No one cares about your stupid lyrics any more. You even succeeded in making a mess of your marriage. You are the most comprehensive of failures – you have failed as a father, as a husband, as a musician. You betrayed me so that you could turn your back on one life and start another. Is this it? Is this what you have done with the time, the life, that you bought by betraying me?’
Cornelius stared at his tormentor, his eyes wide with terror and awe at the monumentality of the man’s madness. He clearly believed he was who he claimed to be. Then, through the fear and the pain, Cornelius realised that he had seen this person before.
‘At least Gunter tried to do something with his life. At least he used the time he obtained through his treachery in trying to do something positive. But you, Cornelius. You gave me up for nothing … to waste your future on trying to recapture the past. You betrayed me. You and the others.’
The young man squatted down and opened out the velvet roll-pouch on the carpet of black sheeting. He exposed three blades, all forged in the same way from single pieces of glittering steel, but each one a slightly different shape and size.
‘The others were afraid when they died. I ended their lives in fear and pain. But they were not special to me. You were more than a comrade. I called you friend. Your betrayal was the greatest.’
I know who you are! The thought blazed across Cornelius’s brain and he sought to give it voice, but it was stifled into incoherence by the gag taped across his mouth.
‘We are eternal,’ said the young dark-haired man. But Cornelius knew now that his hair was not really dark. ‘The Buddhists believe that each life, each consciousness, is like a single candle flame, but that there is a continuity between each flame. Imagine lighting one candle with the flame of another, then using that flame to light the next, and that to light the next, and on and on for ever. A thousand flames, all passed from one to another across the generations. Each is a different light, each burns in a totally different way. But it is, nevertheless, the same flame.
‘Now, I’m afraid, it is time for me to extinguish your flame. But don’t worry – the pain I give you will mean that you will burn brightest at the end.’
He paused and took the smallest blade from the roll-pouch.
‘I have something very special planned for you, Cornelius. I am going to devote more time and effort to you than I did to all of the others put together. The ancient Aztecs also believed in reincarnation. I don’t know if you are aware of that. They saw the growth of a new crop every year as parallel to the renewal of the soul. The eternal cycle.’ Cornelius could see the madness burning like a black sun in the younger man’s eyes. ‘Each spring they would make a sacrifice, a human sacrifice, to the gods of fertility. They would see serpents shed their skins, crops shed their flowers, and they sought to mirror this in the ritual. You see, they would take the human sacrifice and flay him alive. Cut away all of his skin.
‘Your death is not enough. Your pain is important to me. I’m going to hurt you, Cornelius. I am going to hurt you so terribly …’