Under the Ice

by Gisa Klönne

  Kurt gives him a nod and Manni bites back a curse as he opens the car door. It’s a bloody sauna in there. Why didn’t he think of winding the windows down? His phone begins to buzz and he takes the call without looking at the display.

  ‘You father’s started smoking again,’ his mother’s voice complains. ‘In this weather.’

  ‘I can’t talk now.’

  ‘Can’t you speak to him?’

  ‘You know he never listens to me. Sorry, Mum, I really can’t talk now.’

  Manni throws a Fisherman’s Friend in his mouth, turns the car and puts his foot on the accelerator. Something tells him that it’s going to turn out to be a bloody long, bloody unpleasant day.

  *

  The narrow shop front on Maria Hilf Strasse is only a hundred metres from Judith’s flat, tucked away in a nondescript courtyard. ‘ART 4 U – WE PAINT ANYTHING’, it says above the display window where a dozy black-and-white cat with very yellow eyes is lying amid paint palettes and brushes. The shop looks empty, but the door to the street is wide open and reggae music is coming from a ghetto blaster. It smells of turpentine and oil paint and ever so slightly of cannabis. Judith lets the cat sniff her hand in greeting. After breakfast she had written a report, setting down all she knew about Charlotte. It is an old habit of hers to take stock in this way. She had tried to disregard Berthold’s worries and her own hunches, but it wasn’t easy. Experience has taught her how tenacious a hunch can be. The facts are scant. It looks as if the black-and-white bird really is her best lead.

  Behind an easel, a shimmering turquoise curtain is twitched aside, and a young man with light blond dreadlocks peeps out.

  ‘Be with you in a second. Make yourself comfortable.’ He gestures to a round red metal table and some folding chairs, and disappears again. Judith looks at the colourful jumble of pictures on the wall. Animal portraits, abstract geometric shapes, an Alpine landscape, Cologne cathedral – the artist clearly takes his slogan seriously. Judith leans Charlotte’s loon up against the wall and sits down on one of the chairs. Something is over, she thinks. It’s good to be investigating again. It’s good to be out of the flat. The music stops for a few seconds, then trance-like Jamaican rhythms begin to pour out of the ghetto blaster again. It’s like being in an exotic country where the stranger’s first lesson is to learn to forget time.

  ‘Hi, I’m Piet.’ The man with the dreadlocks puts a tray down on the table and extends a hand covered in silver rings. ‘Cup of tea?’ Without waiting for a reply, he fills two gold-rimmed glasses and pushes one towards her. ‘Green tea with fresh mint – the best thing in this crazy heat. It’s a Moroccan recipe.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Maybe this is what I’m looking for, Judith thinks – an exotic country, another world. Maybe I should have gone abroad instead of spending my last weeks of leave on my roof terrace and by the Rhine, drinking beer and playing boules. She sips the strong, refreshing tea and watches the young man’s slender fingers busy themselves with a packet of a tobacco. The past few months have been tough. She had taken voluntary leave of absence to spend some time in her own personal hell, and whenever she had thought she couldn’t take any more, she had found herself sinking lower still.

  She had sat in a circle of chairs and thought: this has nothing to do with me. These people have nothing to do with me. What’s the point? But she was wrong, of course. Sitting in that circle of chairs she had learnt endurance. She learnt to cry and be angry. She got to know herself. She got to know the others. And one morning she had woken up and found that the grief she had felt for her lost friend had vanished, and with it her despair at the pointlessness of his death, her frantic search for a meaning. Instead she felt something new – something she hadn’t been looking for and certainly hadn’t expected to find; suddenly she was hungry for life.

  Piet lights his cigarette. Judith stretches out her legs and rolls one for herself, then savours the blend of smoke and peppermint on her tongue. I wouldn’t mind staying here, she thinks – chatting to Piet, watching him paint, stroking the cat. She wonders what Charlotte made of Piet – a woman who seems to have spent her adult life alone with her dolls and her sick parents, meekly accepting of her mother and father’s definition of the meaning of life. Berthold is right, she thinks; Charlotte is in danger. How could it be otherwise? She lifts Charlotte’s picture onto her knees so that Piet can see it.

  ‘Did you paint this?’

  He blows smoke up to the ceiling and nods. ‘Strange bird.’

  ‘Great picture. Who did you paint it for?’

  ‘You know her, don’t you? You have her picture.’

  ‘I knew her once. Now I’m looking for her. If we’re talking about the same person.’

  ‘Frau Simonis. She wouldn’t tell me her first name.’

  ‘This woman?’ Judith shows him the photo of Charlotte and her father hiking. ‘She’s older now.’

  The artist takes his time, turning the picture into the light. Then he nods.

  ‘Charlotte Simonis,’ say Judith. ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘I don’t know her.’

  Judith smiles at him. Piet has sensual lips and dreamy eyes. Maybe she should kiss him – or at least ask him if he’d like a game of boules with her. Later, when the heat dies down. Nonsense, she thinks. A young artist with dreadlocks is no kind of solution. She clears her throat and sits up straighter.

  ‘Did you talk to her when she commissioned you to paint this? Did she come here?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But she didn’t say much. Somehow she was just as weird as her bird – kind of shy and mousy. But she had a real thing about this bird. She kept dropping in to make sure I was painting it right – every detail had to be perfect, the copy had to be absolutely identical to the original. She was obsessed about that – made a big deal of it on the phone, even before she came here. She didn’t relax until she could see that everything was turning out the way she wanted.’ He grins. ‘Customers! And you said you’re looking for her?’

  ‘What was the original?’

  Piet’s face darkened. ‘I’m being really dense. That’s why you’ve come.’

  ‘What do you mean? What happened to it?’

  ‘I lost it. That’s not like me, I swear. Your friend was livid. I ended up having to take a hundred euros off the price just to calm her down a bit. And even months later she’d ring every so often and ask if I hadn’t found her postcard.’

  ‘But you hadn’t.’

  ‘No, it was lost for two years. But a few weeks ago my fridge broke and I had to pull it out – and what did I find behind it?’

  ‘The postcard?’

  Piet nods. ‘I tried to get in touch with her straight away. But she’d given me a phone number at the uni, and apparently she didn’t work there any more. They gave me her private number, but no one picked up – and I don’t have her address.’

  Judith doesn’t want to kiss him now; she has other things on her mind. She leans forward and looks Piet in the eye. ‘I need that postcard.’

  ‘Hang on a second. She’s my customer. Here I am talking away and I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘It’s Judith. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you much, because I don’t know a lot myself. But this postcard could help me find my old friend. I think she’s in trouble. Come on, Piet. Let me have a look at it, at least.’

  ‘Are you a detective, or what? You make it sound like a whodunnit.’

  ‘It’s really important.’ She won’t let him look away.

  ‘All right then, just for you.’ Piet vanishes behind the curtain and re-emerges with the postcard which he holds out to Judith. ‘Ontario’, it says above the loon. Piet really has done a good job; the painting looks like a photocopied enlargement of the postcard. ‘Dear Charlotte, One day we’ll make it come true, Terence’, someone has written on the back in bold black ink. Canada, Judith thinks. Charlotte went to Canada to make some dream come true with a bloke called Terence, and this curious bird has something to do with it. Sh
e feels a tingling on her skin, a tingling familiar to her from earlier investigations. It’s a good sign. It’s a warning.

  *

  The look the policewoman gives Tim reminds him of Frau Dolling. Her mouth smiles and her voice is friendly, but her eyes are keen and furtive. Her colleague looks all right, with his Nike trainers, faded jeans and blond chin-length hair, but he just sits there; he hasn’t said a word so far. Tim wishes he could disappear, like a baby clownfish between the tentacles of a sea anemone. When Finding Nemo was on at the cinema, Tim, of course, went to see it. And sure, it was a great film, an exciting film. But he knows from the books he’s read that real clownfish are cleverer than Nemo. Real clownfish don’t leave their host anemones, so they can’t be attacked by predators. Anemones sting; the poison in their tentacles can even harm humans, but it doesn’t bother clownfish, because they’ve grown up with it. In fact, when danger looms, clownfish pinch their host anemones, making them spread their tentacles over them in protection and discharge even more poison. Tim suppresses a sigh. He desperately wishes he had a protective anemone. Even more desperately, he wishes that his friend Jonny would come back from wherever he is – safe and sound, like silly Nemo.

  ‘So you’re friends with Jonny?’ says the policewoman, who was introduced to Jonny as Detective Inspector Bruckner. The headmaster had come to fetch Tim in the middle of a lesson and brought him to this empty classroom because the children in Jonny’s class had said that Jonny and Tim always spent break together.

  ‘There’s no need to be frightened, Tim.’ The policewoman makes eyes like a predatory fish.

  ‘I waited for Jonny this morning,’ says Tim. He knows his voice is too quiet, but there’s nothing he can do about it.

  ‘But he didn’t show up.’

  ‘No.’ He can’t tell this predator woman about Radebeul and give Jonny’s dream away. The policewoman shoots a rather sour look at her colleague and raises questioning eyebrows. He nods almost imperceptibly, props his elbows up on the table and looks at Tim. ‘Was there anyone Jonny didn’t like? Had he got into any fights recently?’

  Tim shakes his head.

  ‘When did you last talk to him?’ The policewoman’s voice cuts between them. No excuses – that’s what that means. We have the power, so do as we tell you. The policeman in jeans makes a gesture as if to brush his colleague away. She purses her lips.

  ‘Friday evening.’ With horror Tim realises that tears shoot into his eyes as he recalls their afternoon at the quarry pond. Dr D. had looked so funny. Tim had given him one of his liver sausage sandwiches. They had dived and lain in the sun, and Tim had shared his latest deep-sea facts with Jonny, and told him about fish that are better at camouflaging themselves than humans. ‘Just wait,’ Jonny had said. ‘They’ll soon leave you alone. Believe me, Tim.’

  ‘Tim?’ the policeman in jeans says, unexpectedly friendly. ‘What happened on Friday?’

  ‘We went swimming,’ Tim whispers, ‘with Dr D.’

  ‘And at the weekend?’

  ‘Jonny was away with his dad.’

  ‘At the Red Indian camp.’

  Tim nods.

  ‘Was he looking forward to it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Believe me, Tim, I’m not lying, they’ll soon leave you alone. It’s as if Jonny were standing next to him, repeating the words. They’ll soon leave you alone. It had sounded so nice – so definite. It had sounded so unlikely. But Tim had believed Jonny all the same. Because he wanted to. Jonny’s optimism was Tim’s sea anemone. But he can’t tell that to the policeman. His nasty colleague would hear it too – so would the headmaster. And the headmaster would tell Jonny’s parents and Tim’s parents and his teachers – and soon Frau Dolling would know and his classmates would get wind of it, and everything would get worse and worse. They’d call him a traitor, a sneak, a toady, a mummy’s boy, an arse-licker. And, this time, there would be no Jonny to come to his rescue. This time Tim would be on his own.

  The policeman’s phone rings. He answers brusquely, but a moment later his body tenses up.

  ‘I’ll come right away,’ he says.

  ‘Have they found Jonny?’ Tim doesn’t know where he gets the courage to ask this. The question is suddenly there and it sounds like a scream.

  The grown-ups look at him in surprise.

  ‘No.’ The policeman in jeans gets up. ‘Bye, Tim. We’ll carry on talking later.’

  *

  At a kiosk Manni buys a litre bottle of Coke and a Snickers. His phone jingles; he stares at the display. His mother again. He rejects her call. He drinks the Coke in long draughts as he drives the official rust bucket back to Königsforst. The cold liquid and sugar combined with his anticipation at what the dog handlers are going to show him give him a refreshing kick. His mood is further improved by the thought that Bruckner is staying at school for the time being. Something about that woman annoys him intensely.

  The sunlight glitters on the dog team vans which are parked on the Sioux camp grounds. Mike, a wiry, sandy-haired dog handler whom Manni knows from karate competitions, comes over as soon as he spots him. Mike’s dog, Tarzan, moves in sync with him as if the two of them were welded together.

  ‘I’ll take you there.’

  They walk in silence, side by side, first on a broad footpath, then on a narrower, uneven bridleway which cuts through the woods. After about twenty minutes they come to an open strip, and it isn’t long before they see their colleagues, sitting on a pile of logs outside a hikers’ shelter. A bird caws overhead and then vanishes into the green canopy with a beating of wings. One of the sniffer dogs yelps. The hum of the motorway can be heard in the distance. Manni plants his right foot on a thick log and looks about him.

  ‘You’ve found something?’

  One of the dog handlers points at the shelter.

  ‘In there. Arco was almost uncontrollable.’

  ‘And what—?’

  ‘Can’t see anything. But something happened in there, and it wasn’t anything nice.’

  ‘Shame Arco can’t talk.’

  ‘He can talk. Just not our language.’

  ‘And what does he say?’

  ‘Dogs can smell stress,’ Mike says. ‘When someone’s really scared, they give off a certain scent – “butyric acid smell”, it’s called.’

  Manni approaches the shelter, a simple square hut, open on the path side, with a low sloping roof and benches along the inside walls. It’s empty.

  ‘OK, show me what you mean.’

  ‘Arco!’

  The Belgian shepherd dog races into the shelter. In a corner of the hut he stops and makes a whimpering sound which soon gives way to a growl. In spite of the stifling heat, Manni breaks out in gooseflesh.

  ‘OK, so there was someone sitting on the bench in the corner feeling scared? And you’re sure Arco hasn’t made a mistake?’

  ‘Dogs have 247 million smell cells. We humans have a bare five million.’

  ‘Maybe it was an exhausted jogger?’

  ‘Arco would react differently then. He only makes a sound like that when he can smell panic. Terror.’

  ‘So it might have been our boy, in danger.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we can’t be sure.’

  ‘I’m afraid the dogs can’t tell us as precisely as that.’

  Someone in panic, Manni thinks. Let’s assume that’s what it was – that it was Jonny Röbel sitting here in this hut. Why was he scared? What happened to him here? Did he call for help? Did anyone hear him? And what about his dog? Manni squats down and peers under the corner bench. Leaves, chewing gum papers, a drink carton, half a rotten apple. No boy, no dog. No blood, as far as he can tell. Manni gets up and leaves the hut, pulling out his phone.

  ‘We need Forensics. And please keep out of the hut from now on.’

  ‘Why do you think we’re waiting outside?’

  ‘OK, off you go, then. Let’s treat this shelter as a crime
scene. Focus on the surroundings. If there’s any sign of the boy or his dog, or of a crime, I want to hear about it. And we’d better send for the other dogs.’

  Manni rings Forensics and puts them in the picture. He spreads out his map on the log pile and gives them directions, describing the most direct access route. For the time being he has forgotten the afternoon heat hanging heavy between the trees; the dog squad, too, are throwing themselves into their work again. Will they find anything? Will Manni soon be turning over the investigation to the murder squad? Before he can resume puzzling over his boss’s caprices, he hears a shout from one of the men. Kurt is kneeling in the undergrowth not far from the shelter, holding Nancy by the collar. Manni sprints over to him. Something is lying in the leaves in front of the dog – something small and furry and nondescript, reeking of decay.

  ‘At first I thought it was just a dead squirrel or a large mouse,’ says Kurt. ‘But it’s something else.’

  Manni takes a stick and turns the furry thing over. Scavengers have clearly been at work on it. The stench intensifies. The lower side of the furry thing is less hairy. Manni bends down closer and feels the Snickers curdling in his belly. The thing has neither head nor arms nor legs. There is a shimmer of blue.

  ‘A tattoo,’ Kurt says matter-of-factly. ‘The blue thing, I mean. Could be a dog licence number.’

  Manni nods. ‘Could be a dog’s ear.’

  ‘Certainly isn’t a mouse. Wire-haired dachshund, did you say? It’s the right size and colour.’

  ‘But Nancy didn’t find anything else – just this . . . ear?’

  Kurt shakes his head. ‘Nothing so far, I’m afraid.’

  He must find out whether Jonny’s dachshund had a tattoo in its ear and, if so, he must take this stinking, half-eaten, furry thing to Karl-Heinz Müller in the Institute of Forensics and ask him to compare the DNA with the hairs in Jonny’s dog basket. Manni thinks of Martina Stadler – of the fear in her eyes. Do you have any idea who might have cut off your son’s dachshund’s ear? An impossible question, until he is absolutely certain that this thing really is part of Jonny’s dog.

  ‘The forensics team should be here any minute.’ Manni straightens up and looks across at the shelter. What the hell happened here? Who would torture a dachshund? Or was it already dead when its ear was cut off? Let’s hope so, Manni thinks. Let’s hope so. Not that it makes much difference, because either way the act of mutilation would have been quite enough to arouse panic and despair in a fourteen-year-old boy who loved his dog more than anything in the world.