by Marc Raabe
‘So in 1979 . . . he was eighteen,’ Liz says. ‘And there was never any evidence of what could’ve happened to him? Not the slightest trace?’
Von Braunsfeld looks at her suspiciously. ‘Why?’
‘Because,’ Liz says softly and tries to control the shaking in her voice, ‘I have met him.’
‘That’s impossible,’ von Braunsfeld says brusquely.
‘He’s different. Very different. Half of his face,’ she draws a line through the middle of her own face, ‘is covered in burn scars. But I’m sure it’s him.’
Von Braunsfeld goes pale. ‘You . . . you must be mistaken.’
‘Why? Why must I be mistaken?’
‘Because . . . because he . . .’ von Braunsfeld goes silent.
‘I am sure, Victor, absolutely sure. You know why? Because your son is a sadist, a psychopath. Because he kidnapped and tortured me and I’ll never be able to forget it for my entire life. I will always be able to recognise his face. I can remember every wrinkle. I wish it were different, but his face is burned into my memory.’
Von Braunsfeld goes even paler. He looks as if he’s seen the devil.
‘Do you know where he took me? Where he held me prisoner? In a house in Switzerland, in Wassen. A house that belongs to you.’
‘No,’ von Braunsfeld whispers, horrified. ‘No. No. No.’
‘And the whole time,’ Liz says, ‘the whole time in my prison, I should’ve known. Sure, I recognised the face, I had seen it once before. I just didn’t know where. It’s only when I got away and found out that I was being held prisoner in your house that I knew it; suddenly, I remembered the photo on your fireplace.’
Von Braunsfeld’s eyes glaze over. The glass with the amber liquid slips out of his hand and shatters on the wooden floor. His breathing is loud enough to be audible and he sways hopelessly.
Liz quickly takes two steps towards him and tries to support him. Victor von Braunsfeld collapses into Liz’s arms, almost knocking her over. She struggles to gently lower him to the ground, while her lower back screams in pain.
‘Oh god . . .’ he groans, ‘my blood pressure. I need . . . my drops . . .’
‘Your drops? Where are they?’
‘The stu– study, top drawer of my . . . de– desk,’ von Braunsfeld stammers.
Liz spins around and pulls open the door of the entrance hall. ‘F– first floor.’
As fast as she can, she hurries up the stairs, which lead into a long hall with walls covered in green cloth and several doorways on both sides. Without thinking, she opens one door after another. In the third room, there is a massive antique writing desk. She pushes the leather chair aside and pulls open the top drawer. A brown medicine vial with a white cap rolls across the drawer. ‘Effortil’ is written on the label.
Bingo.
She is about to go back through the door when she sees the chaise longue and freezes in place. A man in a grey trench coat is lying on the dark-grey fabric. He has a cut on his head, and his arms and legs are tied. He appears to be unconscious. His eyes flutter lightly behind round-framed glasses. He is in his late fifties, balding, slim, with thin pale lips. An accountant, Liz thinks, he looks like an accountant. There’s a grey hat on the floor.
Liz’s thoughts run in rapid succession. She slowly backs away. Fear takes hold of her like an old enemy who knows her weak points and shakes her. She tries to find an explanation for why an unconscious man is tied up in Victor von Braunsfeld’s study. But she can’t and it only makes her more afraid.
Even though the man is defenceless and his eyes are closed, she hardly dares to walk by him, as if he could jump up and pounce on her at any moment. She slowly counts to ten in her mind.
Then she opens her eyes and focuses on her destination: the door to the hall.
On tiptoe, she sneaks past the unconscious stranger. She quietly closes the door behind her and hurries down into the living room with the blood-pressure drops firmly in her hand.
When she opens the living room door, she finds von Braunsfeld half lying, half sitting on the floor, leaning against one of the sofas. He feebly reaches his hand out for the medicine. He doesn’t notice how much Liz’s fingers are shaking. Von Braunsfeld unscrews the vial, leans his head back and lets the medicine drip into his mouth.
When he puts the bottle back down, he’s looking down the barrel of the hunting rifle. Liz stares at him, her pupils dilated with fear.
Von Braunsfeld groans. Exhausted, he lets his head sink back again. ‘Listen, Liz, I . . . I can’t do anything about what my son did to you, that . . . I . . .’
‘Who is the man upstairs?’ Liz asks with a shaky voice. The only reason she doesn’t collapse is the rifle in her hands – even if she has no idea how to handle it.
‘The man . . . where?’
‘The unconscious man tied up in your study. Who is he?’
‘I . . . have no idea what you’re talking about,’ von Braunsfeld mutters, confused.
‘Upstairs,’ Liz says with painstaking self-control, ‘there’s a man lying on the chaise longue. Late fifties, glasses, a cut on his head, tied up like a parcel . . .’
Von Braunsfeld looks at her as if she’s lost her mind. He presses his hand against the wooden floor for support and tries to sit up, but he still doesn’t have quite enough strength. ‘Liz, I have no idea what you mean. But please, for god’s sake, put down the gun.’
Liz doesn’t move.
‘Liz, please.’ His skin gradually regains its colour. ‘My dogs might really like you, but they have a keen sense for threatening situations. I don’t want them to tear you to pieces.’
‘What about the man?’ Liz insists.
‘Al? Dex?’ von Braunsfeld calls. ‘Come!’
‘Shut your mouth.’
‘Al! Dex! Come!’
Nothing.
Liz holds her breath, listens and expects to hear the scratching of paws on the highly polished parquet at any second.
But nothing happens.
‘Where are the dogs?’ von Braunsfeld whispers. ‘What have you done with my dogs?’
Liz blinks. ‘Me? Nothing. I didn’t . . .’ She goes silent and stares at von Braunsfeld. The unconscious man, the dogs . . . oh, no.
The old man’s eyes suddenly widen. ‘The man in the study is tied up, you say? And he’s bleeding?’
Liz nods.
‘He’s here,’ von Braunsfeld gasps. ‘I’m sure of it, he’s here.’
‘Who’s here?’ Liz asks.
‘Valerius.’
Liz lowers the rifle. Her neck hairs stand on end.
‘The man, the dogs. It’s him. It can only be him,’ von Braunsfeld whispers.
A single muffled bang penetrates the silence, then another and another, more and more, until the individual sounds turn into a constant assault.
‘What is that?’ Liz looks around anxiously.
‘Hail,’ von Braunsfeld whispers. ‘It’s hail.’
The sound swells into a deafening roar, as if it were raining stones.
‘We have to get out of here immediately,’ von Braunsfeld says. ‘If he is really here, if he’s free, then he will kill me.’
‘What do you mean by that? “If he’s free?” And why the hell would he kill you?’
‘Help me up. I’ll explain later. Now we have to get out of here.’
Liz puts the gun aside, grabs him under the arms and heaves von Braunsfeld to his feet. ‘Can you walk?’
‘I can manage. The drops are already helping. Come on.’ He clutches Liz’s arm with his bony right hand, pulls her into the adjoining conservatory and opens the terrace door. The hail roars like an avalanche. ‘Come on, come on.’
‘Out there?’
‘We’ve got to get to the greenhouse. It’s the shortest way.’
Von Braunsfeld steps through the doorway out into the hail and pulls Liz behind him. On the staircase leading into the garden, pea-sized balls of
ice jump around on the steps. Her head hurts as if it were being hit by a hammer.
With their shoulders hunched, they stumble through the garden. The lawn is covered in a thin layer of ice with individual green blades of grass poking out. A hard blow just above her forehead almost forces her to her knees. Lumps of ice, some of them as large as walnuts, rain down on her.
‘Quick,’ she roars against the noise and protectively holds her arms above her head. She suddenly realises that von Braunsfeld’s rifle is still inside the villa. She curses quietly and hurries onward after him.
Glass suddenly shatters in the distance. Liz looks up.
The greenhouse! Some of the hailstones are now the size of eggs. Another windowpane bursts and the shards rain down into the greenhouse.
‘We can’t go in there,’ Liz yells.
‘Come on, we’ve almost made it.’ Von Braunsfeld pulls on her arm, hurries over to the greenhouse and tries to open the glass door, but it doesn’t budge. ‘It’s stuck. Help me.’
Liz pushes against the door’s metal frame while von Braunsfeld presses his shoulder against the glass as hard as he can. All of a sudden, the door swings open. Von Braunsfeld stumbles into the greenhouse and falls to the ground.
He struggles to get back up and has a strange expression of surprise on his face.
Liz gasps.
Victor von Braunsfeld stands there like a statue and stares down at his stomach. There is a tear in his white shirt and a dark red stain is blossoming around it. In a trance, he pulls a long shard out of his stomach and drops the bloody piece of glass on the ground.
Paralysed with horror, Liz watches the bloodstain grow. The time between her heartbeats stretches into infinity and even the hail seems to be falling more slowly. Von Braunsfeld moves his lips, but nothing comes out; not a word, not a sound. A big lump of ice hits his head with a thud. Time starts moving again.
‘We have to . . . to . . . get to the cellar,’ von Braunsfeld stammers. ‘We’ll be safe down there.’
‘Where?’
‘Under the wooden planks.’
Liz pulls the old man behind her, further into the greenhouse. There is a deafening crash above them and then shards of glass come pouring down. The wooden planks are strewn with broken glass. She crouches down and tries to find an opening between the planks. There! A small square about two centimetres wide. She sticks her index and middle fingers into the opening. A sharp piece of glass cuts painfully into her hand as she hoists up the boards, revealing a grey concrete staircase beneath the floor that leads about three metres down and ends in front of a smooth door with no handle. A keypad is mounted into the wall on the right.
Von Braunsfeld pushes past her. ‘Quick,’ he says and hobbles down the stairs. His hands are shaking so much that he can hardly hit the numbers on the keypad. It’s only on his third attempt that the door swings open. Liz’s heart races as she follows him in. She closes the hatch above them and they step into the dark corridor behind the door. Above them, another glass pane shatters and they hear the muted patter of more glass shards landing on the wooden planks.
‘Pull the door shut, hurry!’ Liz gropes around in vain for a handle and then just grabs the edge of the door and pulls it inward. At the last moment, she pulls her hand out from between the door and the frame to keep her fingers from getting crushed. The door slams at full force against the frame and all sounds of the outside world are cut off. It’s pitch black. The silence roars in her ears as if the hail were still reverberating. She hears von Braunsfeld’s rattling breath beside her.
‘Next to the door,’ he gasps, ‘there’s a light switch.’ Liz’s fingers grope the bare wall like spider legs. She finds the switch and the lights finally go on. The corridor looks like it was cut into the concrete and leads back towards the villa.
‘OK, let’s keep going,’ von Braunsfeld gasps.
Liz looks at his blood-soaked shirt. ‘You need a doctor.’
‘I have to rest. If you go in front of me and I can lean on you a bit, it’ll be quicker.’
Liz goes past him and von Braunsfeld rests his hand on her shoulder. Then they go single file down the corridor, which soon bends to the left and leads gently downwards. After about twenty metres, the smooth concrete walls turn into old, carefully laid brick, with lamps affixed at regular intervals. A cool breeze blows towards them. After another fifteen metres, they are blocked by an old but intact wooden door.
When Liz opens the door, she gasps. There is an old crypt in front of her, an underground vault that’s at least fifteen square metres. A dozen free-standing Romanesque columns support the heavy vaulted ceiling. In a semi-circular niche at the back is a block of stone with a relief around the outside: a sarcophagus.
Entering the columned hall, Liz is startled by a figure behind the stone coffin. It’s only at second glance that she realises that she’s seeing herself in a large, half-opaque mirror that’s standing in the niche behind the sarcophagus. ‘Incredible,’ she whispers.
‘Help me,’ von Braunsfeld says and gestures to the right-hand wall. Positioned between the columns protruding from the sandstone are large red chaises longues. The wall hangings on the stone behind them depict bizarre scenes that look like paintings by Hieronymus Bosch.
Liz grabs von Braunsfeld under the arms and pulls him over to one of the sofas. With a pained groan, von Braunsfeld sits on one of the chaises longues.
‘Is there a telephone here?’ Liz asks. ‘We have to call the police. And an ambulance.’
Von Braunsfeld shakes his head. He presses on his stomach with his left hand. Shiny red liquid oozes between his fingers.
‘And a second exit?’
‘None that we should use.’
‘Where does the second exit lead?’
‘Into the villa cellar,’ von Braunsfeld whispers.
Liz raises her eyebrows. ‘Why, for heaven’s sake, didn’t we go that way to get here?’
‘I was afraid we’d run into him.’
‘Your son?’
Von Braunsfeld nods. ‘Markus, yes.’
‘Are you sure he’s in the house?’
‘The man tied up in my study, the dogs and what he did to you . . . it’s him!’ Von Braunsfeld winces in pain.
‘You’re bleeding to death,’ Liz says softy.
‘I shouldn’t have taken the drops, they’re only making it worse.’
Liz looks at him, concerned, but says nothing in response. ‘Before you said “if he’s free”. What did you mean by that?’
‘Markus,’ von Braunsfeld strains to speak through his teeth, ‘is a . . . a . . .’
‘Psychopath,’ Liz finishes his sentence.
‘He was even unpredictable as a child, impossible to control. Jill was no match for him. He was only ten when I found him on the beach with cigarettes and beer – the others were all sixteen or even older. They knew him already. Every night, he would climb out of the window in the attic when Jill was asleep or drunk. She didn’t even notice when he needed to sneak past her with his stinking clothes in the mornings and give them to the housekeeper. I tried, I tightened the reins, really tried . . .’ He groans and tries to lift his head to look at his wound, but realises that it takes too much strength. ‘When Jill died, it was finally over. Like a planet without a sun. No more gravity. Bam and gone. Out of orbit. I had no alternative, he had . . . behavioural problems. I had to do something. It was no longer bearable. He was no longer bearable.’
‘What do you mean “do something”?’
‘I had him committed to a psychiatric clinic, so that things were calm and he could return to his senses.’
Liz stares at him. ‘You institutionalised him? I thought he was missing.’
‘In a manner of speaking. I didn’t want it to be public. I took him to . . . a Swiss clinic.’
Liz’s mouth hangs open in shock. ‘You locked him away for thirty years in a Swiss clinic?’
Von Braunsfeld shrugs.
&nb
sp; ‘Just because he was no longer “bearable”?’
‘You really have no idea . . .’
‘Now I understand why he wants to kill you.’ Liz says, disgusted.
Von Braunsfeld avoids eye contact.
‘But that’s not all, is it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s not the whole truth.’
‘Truth.’ Von Braunsfeld practically spits the word out. ‘You reporters and your truth.’ His eyes roll back in pain, eyelids twitching.
‘What happened on the night of October 13th, 1979?’
Von Braunsfeld writhes in pain. ‘I don’t quite understand what you mean.’
‘You understood me perfectly,’ Liz whispered. ‘Shortly after that he went “missing”, as you put it. Right?’
Von Braunsfeld’s mouth is a quivering line.
‘Something happened that night. I don’t know what, but that night is the key.’
‘You’re drawing crazy conclusions.’
‘Me? I’m crazy? Your son wanted to kill me. And the most important thing for him was that it happened on October 13th because he wanted to take revenge on Gabriel, my boyfriend. Gabriel Naumann. Does that name mean anything to you?’
‘No, nothing. But maybe you should ask your boyfriend. He probably knows what it’s about.’
‘But I’m asking you.’
Von Braunsfeld shakes his head.
‘Goddamn it, Victor! What have you got left to lose?’
The old man closes his eyes. His head looks like a skull, his skin stretched like translucent parchment over the bone. When his eyes open again, there is a haze over his pupils. They seem to be looking inwards.
‘What, Victor? What happened that night?’
Von Braunsfeld stares into space, all strength and defiance have left his eyes. ‘Markus killed a woman.’
‘He did . . . what?’
‘That night,’ von Braunsfeld muttered, ‘he killed a woman. Quite a young thing, maybe twenty, down here in the crypt. He . . . he’d gone totally mad and he . . . had a knife. He cut her open while she was still alive. Starting between her legs and then moving up.’
‘Good god,’ Liz gasped. Her eyes wander up to the wall-hanging over the chaise longue. A man with a long white beard that might be god is being mobbed by monsters and hideous faces. A gnarled hand pulls on his snow-white hair, a reptile with a bird’s beak pecks at his fingers and a giant eagle thrashes him with a stick. At the very edge is a large toad on its back, its legs spread. A stark-naked man, just as large as the toad, straddles it and is killing it with a club.
