Blood Eagle

by Craig Russell

  Werner checked his own sidearm. ‘He won’t get the fucking chance.’

  They got out of the car and followed Sonja on foot. As they passed the parked BMW, Anna and Paul got out and fell in behind them. Sonja, still lugging her grocery bags, swung round and pushed her back against the heavy street door. As she did so, she glanced in the direction of the advancing party without seeming to notice them. They followed her into the cobbled Hof, and Fabel could hear her sandals clicking rapidly as she trotted up the stone steps towards her apartment. As quietly as they could, they followed on. Sonja was at the door, her grocery bags at her feet, fumbling with her keys. It was then she saw them.

  ‘Hans!’ Her scream rang around the courtyard.

  Fabel was shocked to see the terror on Sonja’s face. He realised that she thought they were someone else. He held up his hand in a gesture that would have been more placatory were it not for the clumpy black Walther sub-compact automatic he held in his other hand.

  ‘Sonja … keep calm. We’re police and we only want to talk to Hans …’

  Her terror was now mingled with uncertainty. Fabel and the others ran up the stairs and petite Anna Wolff pushed Sonja backwards so severely that she nearly lost her footing. Anna pinned Sonja against the wall, out of the potential line of fire. Fabel and Paul flattened themselves against the wall on either side of the door. Fabel called out:

  ‘Polizei Hamburg!’ and nodded to Werner who kicked the door just below the lock.

  Fabel, Werner and Paul swept through the apartment, taking turns of two providing cover while the third scanned a room, swinging outstretched arms from side to side as if their guns were flashlights. A kitchen, a living room, a bathroom and two bedrooms all fed off a short hall. The apartment was clean, bright and tidy but cheaply furnished. It was also empty. Fabel slipped his automatic back into the holster under his arm and nodded to Anna Wolff, who smiled at Sonja and led her gently into the apartment. Fabel told Paul to pick up her grocery bags and put them in the kitchen. Solicitously, Anna led Sonja into the living room and sat her down on the couch. Sonja was shaking and looked close to tears. Fabel crouched down before her.

  ‘Sonja, where’s Hans?’

  Sonja shrugged and tears welled up in her nut-brown eyes. ‘I don’t know. He was here when I left this morning. He didn’t say he was going anywhere. He hasn’t been out since that girl got killed. He’s very upset about it.’ The eyes went hard behind the tears. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

  ‘We’re not accusing him of anything. We just need to ask him some questions.’

  The nut-brown eyes still glittered with a mixture of fear and anger.

  ‘Sonja, could you excuse us for a moment.’ Fabel turned to his officers. ‘Anna, Paul … a word. Outside.’

  Once they were out on the landing, Anna Wolff’s and Paul Lindemann’s expressions showed they knew what this was about. Anna Wolff decided to pre-empt Fabel and held up her hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, Chef … there’s no way he could have got past us. We were on him tight.’

  ‘Not tight enough apparently.’ Fabel was struggling to keep a lid on his frustration. ‘Klugmann is the only lead we’ve got, and you’ve let him get away.’ He jabbed a finger at them. ‘You lost him. You find him.’

  ‘Yes Chef,’ they said in unison.

  ‘And start by seeing if any of the neighbours are in.’

  Fabel went back into the living room. He sat down next to Sonja on the couch, leaning his elbows on his knees.

  ‘Are you feeling better now?’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Who did you think we were?’

  Sonja turned to Fabel and blinked. ‘What? What do you mean?’ In that instant he knew she was hiding something.

  ‘I know it’s very alarming to have armed police barge into your home, but you thought we were someone else, didn’t you?’

  Sonja gazed down at her knees.

  ‘Look, Sonja, is Hans in trouble? If he’s in danger, we can help him. Help us find him. As far as we know he hasn’t done anything wrong other than keep information from us. But we need to talk to him.’

  She broke down. Great racking sobs. Fabel put his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know where he is …’ She pointed to a cell phone on the coffee table. ‘That’s his phone … he never goes anywhere without that.’

  She turned to Fabel, her eyes large and round. Fabel remembered what Mahmoot had said about her: nice kid. He picked up the phone and pressed the last-number redial. It was the same number Klugmann had called after he had discovered Monique’s body. He turned the display to Werner who read it and gave Fabel a meaningful look. Fabel slipped the cell phone into his jacket pocket and turned back to Sonja.

  ‘Sonja, who did you think we were?’

  ‘Hans has been doing some business. Foreigners. Russians or Ukrainians, I think. He tried to keep me out of it, but I know these people are dangerous. I think things maybe didn’t go so good with them. For the last couple of days he told me not to answer the door, he would go if anyone came.’ She let out a sob. ‘I thought that’s maybe who you were …’

  ‘You’re safe now, Sonja. There’s going to be a police officer watching the flat from now on … until Hans comes back or until we find him.’

  Ukrainians. Fabel recalled what Mahmoot had said about the new outfit in town. They must be in the frame for the hit on Ulugbay. And Klugmann worked for Ulugbay. But Klugmann was small-fry in what was shaping up to be a big gang war. He smiled reassuringly at Sonja.

  ‘Where do you think he could be? Maybe he just nipped out somewhere?’

  Sonja shrugged again but her expression was one of deep anxiety. ‘He would have told me if he was going out this morning. He knew I was getting lunch …’ She looked over at the shopping bags across the room in the kitchen area. Her bottom lip quivered.

  ‘Don’t worry, love,’ said Fabel, ‘we’ll find him.’ He hoped to God he was right.

  It was all going to hell and he knew his nerves were getting too edgy. He had to focus and stay sharp. Sharp was good; jumpy got you killed. There was a slide bolt on the front door of the flat – he had fucked up the main lock in his haste to get in – and he slipped the bolt over, hoping that they wouldn’t look too closely at the lock when they came to the door, which they inevitably would.

  Klugmann had just made it and no more. He had been worried about Sonja: she had been late back from her shopping and he had been watching for her, angling his body by the window so that the two KriPo detectives – a man and a woman – in the tan BMW wouldn’t see him. Seeing Sonja’s jaunty walk, he had smiled to himself: she was a good kid and he had tried to keep her out of it all. Then he had spotted the two cops who’d interviewed him, Fabel and Meyer, following her. As she passed the BMW, the other two cops had got out too and fallen in behind. It was a bust. He didn’t know what they had got on him, but now was not the time to be hauled in for protracted questioning. He was too close. It had cost too much – in time, in effort, in a life – for him to be taken out of circulation right at the last minute. He had dashed across the room, grabbing his jacket and stuffing his gun into the pocket. He had closed the door behind him swiftly but not hard enough to slam and taken the stairs two at a time. The landlord had used the same doors on each of the apartments. Security depended on the outer door that opened out onto the street and not the doors to the apartments, which technically should really only have been used as interior doors. He had opened his clasp knife and pushed against the lock, leaning in hard with his shoulder. It was a precise craft: enough force to open the door without splintering the flimsy wood. He had heard the piano-string creak of the spring on the main street door downstairs: Sonja was coming in and they would be just a few paces behind her. The door had yielded and he had half fallen into the apartment, closing the door gently behind him. Then he had heard Sonja’s scream, Fabel’s shouts and the sound of movements and voices from the apartment above. He had closed his eyes, lea
ned the back of his head against the door and mouthed the word ‘Fuck’. His cell phone. He had left his cell phone behind. And that meant he had left his life-line behind. He’d have to get to a phone and quick.

  But now all he could do was wait.

  The owner of this apartment was a Yugoslav aged about sixty. Klugmann had assumed he was probably an illegal, but had since found out that he worked for the city as a gardener over at the Sternschanzen-Park, manicuring the flower beds and picking up the used syringes. He was on a permanent day shift that started at eleven. It would be after eight p.m. before the Yugoslav got back. Klugmann had until then to make a break for it.

  There would be a cop on the street all the time now. That would make getting out difficult. The main advantage he had was that they thought he was already out of the building and would be watching for him coming back, not leaving. He sat with his back pressed against the door and scanned the room. Maybe there was something in here he could wear. Make himself look older. The plod outside wouldn’t make the connection. He’d be too busy looking for a young man going in, not an old guy going out. He heard voices in the hall: Fabel was chewing out the surveillance team for having lost him. Klugmann allowed himself a smile. He heard footsteps and pressed himself hard against the door. Knocking: the flat-fisted knock of a policeman. Klugmann breathed slow and even. Another knock.

  ‘Police. Anyone at home?’

  It seemed like an age before he heard their feet scuff on the landing and then make their way echoingly down the stone steps. They knocked on the door downstairs. Klugmann knew that apartment would be empty just now as well. He heard a woman say ‘Shit’, and then the sound of the main door’s spring. Two outside and Fabel and Meyer upstairs. He scanned the apartment again for anything to help him disguise his departure later. And waited.

  Thursday 5 June, 2.45 p.m. Vierlande, outside Hamburg.

  The traffic had been heavy in the city and Fabel was glad he’d allowed himself extra time to negotiate the B5 through the centre and down towards Billbrook. Now the city no longer clung to the roadside and the landscape rolled out like the flat, smooth baize of a billiard table. Fabel had left Klugmann’s cell phone with Maria Klee to have Technical Section get as much information as possible out of it. Anna Wolff and Paul Lindemann were probably still knocking on doors trying to heat up Klugmann’s cold trail. They were good officers, both of them. Klugmann must have pulled a fast one to get past them.

  Just after Bergedorf, Fabel turned south towards Neuengamme. It could have been Holland: a landscape so flat it was as if nature had steam-ironed it, smoothing out every wrinkle. Any potential monotony in the scenery was dispelled by the dense clumps of trees, the red-roofed churches, Dutch-style windmills and meticulously restored and maintained Fachwerk houses with their exposed beams and groomed thatched roofs. The low, green expanse of land was threaded through by the network of dykes and canals that stitched it into a patchwork.

  As he approached Neuengamme, he felt the weak flutter of a dull and imprecise anxiety. For Fabel, this was a land laden with the past. This is where so much good and bad came together for him. It was an intimate thing. For Fabel, all kinds of history merged in this unlikely bump in the Elbe: personal, professional, national.

  As all German children of his generation had had to, Fabel had taken on the burden of his nation’s history when he was about ten: a loss of innocence and a coming to terms. He had asked his father about the things he had heard. About Germany. About themselves. About the Jews. Fabel recalled the sorrow in his father’s eyes as he had struggled to frame for a ten-year-old boy the monumental monstrosity of what had been done in the name of Germany. It had been shortly after that that his father had made the long journey here. To this place with its pretty half-timbered houses and gentle landscape. To Neuengamme.

  More than 55,000 prisoners had been worked to death here, in a camp improvised from a disused brick factory. The British had liberated it, as they had Bergen-Belsen, and with typical Anglo-Saxon efficiency and practicality had handed it back to the German people in 1948, suggesting it would make a good prison. And that’s what it had become. Until 1989, a Holocaust memorial and Vierlande Prison had shared the same site. Eventually, the Hamburg Senat saw the bizarre and bitter irony of continuing to confine human beings on the site of such atrocities in the name of the state, and the Vierlande facility was moved outside the former camp.

  And now Fabel had come to Vierlande to face, for the first time in over a decade, a part of his personal history that he thought he had long since buried.

  The prison officer led Fabel to Dorn’s study. It was a bright, airy room with large colourful posters of German historical landmarks on the wall: Lübeck city gates, Trier’s Porta Nigra, Cologne cathedral. The room was lined with bookshelves and Fabel felt it had more the look of a school library than that of Dorn’s old study at the Universität Hamburg. When Fabel entered, Dorn and a younger man were bent over a reference book. The younger man towered above Dorn and his T-shirt exposed heavily muscled and tattooed arms. His brutish appearance sat incongruously with the intense concentration he was applying to the text. Dorn looked up and saw Fabel, made an excuse to the scholarly thug, who left with the volume and his notebook under his arm.

  ‘Jan …’ Dorn extended his hand. ‘I’m glad you could come. Please, sit down.’

  Time had flecked more white through the trimmed moustache and goatee, and had drawn more deeply around the eyes, but apart from that Mathias Dorn was pretty much as Fabel remembered him back when he had been Fabel’s European History tutor: a small, neat, compact man with porcelain-blue eyes and features that were a little too fine. Fabel took the frail hand.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Herr Professor,’ Fabel lied. For Fabel, Dorn, and the feelings he awoke, belonged in the past. Fabel wished he had stayed there. He sat across the desk from Dorn. There was a photograph on the desk: a young woman of about twenty, with a similar porcelain delicacy to her features. Fabel was involuntarily drawn to the picture, amazed at how unfamiliar the face now seemed.

  ‘I was surprised to find you were here,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Just two days a week.’ Dorn smiled. ‘Enough for me to qualify as “historian in residence”. It’s a strange concept, having a historian in a prison. But there again this prison has a special history of its own. I divide my time between here and the Neuengamme memorial.’

  ‘I meant that I’m surprised that you wanted to work with offenders after …’ Fabel found he had started a sentence he didn’t want, or need, to finish. Dorn read his meaning and smiled.

  ‘It’s actually very rewarding. Some of the inmates have developed a real hunger for history. In a strange way it helps them make sense of their own histories. But I take your meaning. I suppose I did have my own agenda when I applied for the post. I needed to understand, to be around men who kill, I suppose. To … well, to make some kind of sense of what happened.’

  ‘And has it?’

  ‘Has becoming a policeman helped you?’

  ‘I don’t know if that was the reason I became a policeman.’ Again, Fabel lied. They both knew it was the personal history they shared that had led a gifted historian like Fabel to become a murder detective.

  Dorn let it go. ‘I wanted to talk to you about this murder you’re investigating,’ he said.

  ‘Murders,’ corrected Fabel. ‘There’s been another one. The same form of killing as the Kastner girl.’

  ‘My God, that’s awful. It confirms what I thought. That’s why I wanted to see you.’

  ‘Go on. Please, Professor.’

  Dorn picked up a recent copy of Hamburger Morgenpost. It was open at an article on the Kastner murder.

  ‘Like you,’ continued Dorn, ‘I have been, well, forced into taking an interest in the psychotic mind. I hate to say it, but, despite its innate destructiveness, there can sometimes be a form of twisted creativity in it.’ He stabbed a finger at the article. ‘I think you have someone very creative a
s well as very dangerous at work here, Jan. This fellow’s psychosis is certainly very well … informed, I suppose would be the best way of putting it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Dorn laid the paper back on his desk. He held up his hand in a gesture that suggested Fabel should slow down and wait for him to unfold his thesis. It was a gesture with which Fabel had been so accustomed as an eager student.

  ‘Who are we?’ Dorn asked. ‘What are we? The Germans, I mean.’

  Fabel frowned. ‘I don’t understand …’

  ‘The concept of German identity … what is it?’

  Fabel shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘And I don’t care. It’s a question that has caused Germany – caused the world – more grief and destruction than any other.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Dorn. ‘The concept of German identity is a myth. A myth that our little Austrian house-painter amplified into a false history until Germany believed it. One of the most important lessons I have learned as a historian is that only the present exists. Only the present has an immutable, uncompromising form; the past is what we choose to make of it. History is shaped by our present, not the other way around. We have spent the last two centuries reinventing our past: reshaping our identity when all along we don’t have one. The fact is there is no German race. We are a rag-tag of Scandian and Slav, Celt, Italic and Alpine … a mishmash united by a language and a culture, not by ethnicity.’

  ‘What’s your point? What has this to do with these killings?’

  Dorn smiled. ‘Do you believe that the god Tuisto was born from Germany’s soil? And through his three sons fathered the three pure tribes of Germans?’

  ‘Of course not. That’s pure myth.’

  ‘Do you believe in the god Wotan? Or the Norse pantheon of gods, headed by Wotan’s equivalent, Odin?’

  ‘No,’ answered Fabel. ‘Again that’s just mythology. Look, I don’t see that this has anything to do with …’

  Again Dorn held up his hand to stop Fabel. ‘They are myths. Falsehoods. But, as you have already pointed out, believing in myths can be powerful and destructive.’ Dorn swiftly picked up the paper and threw it across to Fabel. ‘And he believes them.’