In the Dark

by Andreas Pflüger

  In her first life the questions were different. Which legend you choose. How much manpower you need. Which weapons.

  The answers always helped you to concentrate on the facts. The best position. The perfect second. The safest lie. Aaron wishes such answers existed now.

  ‘Hi.’ The man they pass isn’t a prisoner. She registers a trace of clean sweat and sun cream. sunbed.

  *

  Ten smells that Aaron likes:

  freshly tarred roads

  country bonfires

  dubbin

  a forest after rain

  peppermint tea in Marrakech

  her skin

  currywurst

  sawdust

  ‘Eau d’Issey’ by Issey Miyake

  hot chestnuts

  *

  The prison administration is in Section II. Aaron feels the star-shaped Wilhelmine monster looming in front of her, the ‘spider’ in which Alfred Döblin has Franz Biberkopf locked up in Berlin Alexanderplatz, the intimidating mass. Red bricks, bullet holes from the war, behind them the streets of cells, arranged in a star shape, level with the first floor the rusty metal net that is supposed to prevent suicides.

  *

  Aaron doesn’t know Director Hans-Peter Maske, who took up the position four years ago. ‘Miss Aaron, Mr Kvist, please sit down.’ He speaks quickly, trying to adopt a routine tone, but the tension can be heard in his voice.

  He tries to adopt the voice he would use for routine matters, but Aaron notices how tense he is. Niko walks her to the lounge area, and she runs her hand over the back of the armchair.

  Aaron runs her fingers along the arm of the chair in the meeting room.

  ‘Can I get you something to drink?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Maske pours himself a cup of coffee. It smells resinous, bitter, almost metallic. Chrysanthemum. When Aaron turns her head to the left, the smell gets stronger.

  Desk job.

  ‘Celebrating something?’

  ‘A promotion. From March I’m going to be in charge of the office for the Execution of Penal Sentences in the Senate.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She doesn’t like his voice. There’s something fake about it, like a smile when you’ve been insulted, or pursed lips concealing bad teeth.

  Maske opens a little plastic container of coffee cream. ‘Of course we’re all very upset about Dr Breuer. Terrible.’

  ‘I’m sure you have an idea what happened?’ Aaron asks.

  Maske’s words assume powerful overtones which immediately make him sound aggressive. ‘It’s not rocket science.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Boenisch will be transferred to the closed psychiatric institute. Where, in my modest opinion, he should have been for the last sixteen years.’

  Aaron is aware that when he gives this answer Maske is facing not her but Niko. She’s familiar with that from many conversations. Some people don’t see her because Aaron doesn’t see them. With others it’s thoughtlessness. There have also been some who have sensed that she notices, and do it on purpose, to hurt her.

  ‘Boenisch has a novel about a serial killer and a film on the same subject. I assume that neither of these come from your library. How could such a thing get through the postal check? Didn’t any of the screws notice?’

  ‘Would it be asking too much to avoid using that term for our prison officers? It’s discriminatory.’

  ‘And would it be asking too much to look at me when you’re talking to me?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He blows into his cup and takes a sip. She imagines that he licks the rim when he’s alone. ‘We’ll try and trace the paper trail.’

  A rub of coarse fabric. Jeans. Next to Aaron, Niko crosses his legs. ‘Mr Maske, could it be that everyone here was thinking: Boenisch is never going to get out of here anyway?’ he asks. ‘So it doesn’t matter what he watches or reads?’

  ‘I can’t tell you what six hundred and fifty-five prison officers think.’

  ‘Officers who have to follow rules. In other areas, the tax office, for example, that mightn’t mean much. But here it does. I don’t know how they’re going to take that at the Senate.’

  Aaron suppresses a smile. Guys like Maske are a red rag to Niko. It might be fun to see what would happen if the director irritated him a little more.

  ‘Polemics won’t get you anywhere with me.’

  ‘Yeah? That’s not the sense I have.’

  Maske brings his cup crashing down.

  ‘You spilled a bit,’ Niko says, topping himself up.

  ‘Is it possible that there was a second man in the cell, who left it unnoticed shortly after recreation began?’

  Aaron’s question is rhetorical. All prisoners wait for the moment when the block is opened. They do deals, they run to weight training or yard exercise, dash around, let off steam, join the seething mass along with the officers.

  Maske’s voice gets a touch higher. ‘Hang on. You’re trying to suggest that there was a second perpetrator?’

  ‘No. I’m trying to say that Boenisch isn’t the perpetrator at all.’

  ‘Please. That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Have you got a witness?’

  Now Aaron has had enough. ‘Mr Maske, when you come home in the evening, and the streets are dry, but in the morning you look out of the window and there is thick snow on the ground, you know that it’s been snowing. Do you need a witness for that?’

  ‘At the time in question there were sixty prisoners on that floor. Perhaps you should question them all,’ Maske replies.

  Of course he knows the rules by which power, and its lack, are distributed among the prisoners. Whoever it was who murdered Melanie Breuer, he will be a man to fear. If there is a witness, he’s not about to say anything.

  Aaron gets to her feet. ‘I want a list of all the prisoners in Block Six. Reasons for their arrest, group behaviour, psychological assessments. By tomorrow, if you would be so kind.’

  Maske’s voice becomes thin and high. ‘Does Miss Aaron have the authority to make sure requests?’

  Niko gets to his feet as well. ‘No. But I’ll talk to my colleagues from Fourth Homicide, who are working on the case. They’ll give you a call.’

  ‘You probably think that because you’re from the Department you can just swan in and do anything you like?’

  Aaron stops by the door. ‘I wonder whether the film and the novel had to pass through a check. Boenisch could just as easily have got them from a prison officer. So I would also like the names of anyone who had contact with him. Or even better: their personal files.’

  It would be really nice to see Maske’s face right now. But it’s just as nice to imagine what his evening’s going to be like.

  Aaron carefully feels her way down the stairs, steps slippery with snow brought in from outside, and she’s grateful for the banister. They step into the cold sun. She tries to imagine a blue sky and can’t remember what blue looks like.

  At twenty-one she graduated best in year, and got nine job offers. She opted for the LKA, the State Office of Criminal Investigation in Berlin. Her special abilities were quickly recognized. Only four years later Aaron had to fight for her life with Nikulin’s hitman in Moscow.

  In that same winter Helmut Runge had a serious car accident. He was revived but died in hospital. In his boot they found the corpse of a woman from Wolfsburg who had been missing for two weeks. Runge was carrying a key to the lockers in Kassel station. In locker number three there was a suitcase containing his momentoes.

  Hair. Jewellery. Underwear. Toenails. Teeth.

  The pearl necklace, his Christmas present for the waitress from Delmenhorst, was in there too – he had killed her on her fortieth birthday. Thirteen murders in all, the first ten years before, the last three after Boenisch was sentenced. The two joggers, to whose buried body parts Boenisch had brought the police, were also among them. But there were no so
uvenirs of the women in Boenisch’s basement.

  It was assumed that the two men had met over the internet, a space that was still outside the law in those days, where one was largely unobserved. There was no proof. Boenisch continued to insist that he had killed the women alone.

  5

  As they drive along the city freeway she doesn’t get a single glance from Niko, at least none penetrating enough for her senses. And still not one single question.

  Thanks.

  Headquarters is on Budapester Strasse in the western part of the city. The Department belongs neither to the LKA nor to the BKA, and it doesn’t appear on any organization chart.

  No one applies to join. You get recruited.

  After the arrest of Ilya Nikulin, Aaron’s phone rang. It quickly became clear to her that the man who had asked her for a meeting in the Ministry of the Interior was familiar with her career from police academy onwards. Every investigation, every judgement, every distinction.

  Her future boss said: ‘We want you.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘It’s our task to go where it would be pointless to deploy any other forces.’

  Witness protection, not even entrusted to the BKA.

  Hostage rescue operations for which fully equipped Special Enforcement Commandos – SEK – would be too conspicuous and too slow. Where the body is the weapon.

  Handing over the ransom money in kidnapping cases.

  High-risk undercover investigations.

  Secret operations for Europol.

  Anti-terrorism through infiltration.

  Precision work.

  ‘Of course we’ll give you time to think.’

  She didn’t need it.

  There isn’t much that Aaron misses. The camaraderie, yes; the solidarity between them, which was so close because no one else understood them. They were there for each other. When a second woman joined them after three years, Aaron spent a lot of time with her, wanting to help her adjust to a life that no one can prepare you for. She talked to the woman for a long time after she had killed for the first time, and knew that there were no words to make it easier.

  She started losing her spirit. You get used to it.

  Her colleague only stayed for a year and then agreed to be transferred. Aaron doesn’t miss the adrenalin. Guns, fine. But it’s a consolation that she will never again have to take a human life.

  Only the one. You or him.

  Niko comes out on the Kaiserdamm, which is actually a detour. Aaron can tell by the fact that it’s uphill. When she collected visitors at Tegel airport she used to go that way too, for the view.

  It didn’t happen often. Her mother, once a year. What was Aaron supposed to talk to her about, if the life she led was confidential? They loved each other. But within an hour they’d told each other everything. After those few days they always parted reassured. Still, Aaron was left with an aching feeling at the airport.

  Every now and again her two remaining schoolfriends came to visit. They thought she worked for the Fraud Squad. But it was good to fish out the old stories. In The Grass Harp by Truman Capote there are two sentences that describe Aaron: ‘I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honours came my way, those were the lovely years.’

  She was pleased most of all to see Mary-Sue, the daughter, the same age as herself, of the guest family Aaron had stayed with for six months in Arizona, in Cayenne, the only town in a seventy-mile radius. There was only one colour there, but it had lots of names: crab-tail red, double-bass red, basketball red, clown’s-nose red, rubber-raft-red, coral-snake red, tongue-red. Dusty, dirty, swirling, magic red.

  There was even ‘inner-pussy red’ and ‘outer-pussy red’, and for a seventeen-year-old bumpkin from the Rhineland that was a real shock. Aaron can’t help smiling when she remembers.

  Blue is gone, but red is still there.

  Cayenne was where she first fell properly in love, of course with the quarterback of the high school team. Did they make out behind the shed at Mr Payne’s drugstore? Or in his room when his parents were away? Or in the desert, driving off into it in his father’s pickup, which always looked as if it was covered with dust? Somewhere. Did she sleep with him, was he the first? Or was that Tim from the parallel class in Sankt Augustin? Were the two boys similar? Of course. Aaron has always liked boys like that, boys who don’t boast even though they could. Who are a bit rebellious but still have manners, who work out and who know the novels of Max Frisch.

  She drove into the city via Kaiserdamm with Mary-Sue from Cayenne as well; that was particularly good fun because it was the first time Mary-Sue had ever been there. Wow! Speer’s ‘Germania’, but the most beautiful axis in Berlin. A wide view across the Tiergarten to the Television Tower, in between the Victory Column with ‘Golden Elsa’ who would be gleaming in the frosty sunlight right now.

  How clearly I can still see it all.

  ‘Sightseeing tour?’ she asks, turning towards him.

  ‘The sky is totally overcast. You can’t see anything.’

  And for that lie I thank you too.

  Aaron’s favourite book by Frisch has always been Gantenbein. A man claims to be blind because he thinks that otherwise he won’t be able to bear his life. As a blind man he doesn’t have to judge anybody, not even himself. That’s his liberation. He leaves other people with their secrets, because they were what tormented him, the impossibility of ignoring them. That way he can be happy.

  On the other hand they expect her to see what sighted people can’t, to sense the truth as she alone can. Listen to the sound of lies. They want her to judge. It isn’t a liberation for her, it’s a lonely prison. But she has one thing in common with Gantenbein: people who have something to hide are afraid of her when they work out that she isn’t blind at all.

  Perhaps in the end Gantenbein’s last words will come true for her as well. Aaron tries to remember when she last had the feeling: ‘I like life.’

  Underground car park, diesel, tyre rubber. The building has twenty storeys, but only four are rented by the Department. The others are divided between estate agents, legal offices, insurance agencies. None of their staff, however long they had been employed there, have any idea what happens on those four floors. From the separate area in the underground car park, which has its own entrance and is exclusively at the disposal of the Department, you have to enter a code beside a steel door to access the special lift.

  He stops on the second floor. ‘You go on ahead,’ she says. ‘I’ll follow you.’ No questions. She takes two more floors. Feels carpeted floor, her pumps are useless. Aaron clicks her fingers, but the sound is too diffuse. She rattles her stick along the doors, finds the right one and opens it a crack.

  All the training halls smell the same.

  Ambition. Rage. Frustration. Humiliation.

  This one smells of something else: the memory of Boenisch’s basement. Fear is good, it keeps you awake. She started learning karate at the age of eighteen, but it was only because of Boenisch that she really learned it.

  Another smell: obsession. Her total will to eliminate any adversary, to be able to control any situation.

  Aaron hears quick commands: ‘Chinkuchi!’ Stabilization of the limbs. ‘Kaishu!’ Hand open. ‘Haishu!’ Hand closed. ‘Yaze Neko!’ Strike, avoid. ‘Chikara!’ Courage.

  By the master’s severe corrections she can tell that the Kata is part of preparation for the second Dan. She herself has a black belt in Gōjū-ryū, the most effective of the four Japanese styles. Aaron has reached the fifth Dan. To get to the next stage will take as many years as the level of each Dan; for the ninth she would have to be as old as her father. No one has the tenth, because it would mean that you can’t make any more progress.

  Or as her father said: ‘If someone has reached the tenth Dan, he’s either spiritually dead or a total idiot.’

  Most Olympic fighters have the third Dan. Aaron passed the test for the fifth a year ago, blind.

  Don’t see,
know.

  Four times a week she trains on the Neroberg in Wiesbaden. None of the guys from the BKA like to fight with her. Admittedly, of all the senses, sight is the most dominant, but the cortex, that high-powered processing machine, has focused on new tasks and updated Aaron’s perceptual abilities. Body warmth, breath, draught, vibration of the floor, instinct.

  Reliable parameters.

  The biggest problem was the lost physical feeling. Even a sighted person can barely stand on one leg for ten seconds with his eyes closed, because the fixed point is missing. For the same reason, many blind people are uncertain in their movements, because they don’t know that it’s worth training their sense of balance. After countless hours Aaron noticed that her balance, which she had always considered perfect, was on a new level.

  She could dance on the tip of one toe.

  Punch to the solar plexus. Elbow block. Splits. Hip rotation. Reverse crescent kick. Outer knife hand. Double strike. Crane. Inner knife hand Tiger.

  The Bushidō says: everything is preordained and has its rightness. The warrior who recognizes this liberates himself. Even from the desire to live at any price.

  The previous evening she bled herself dry on the Neroberg. At ten o’clock she was drinking beer in the men’s changing room. She always showers at home anyway, and she doesn’t learn anything from watching the boys. Then Boenisch snuggled up to the corpse in the spoons position and was happy.

  Aaron is being observed. She feels that it’s Niko, before he pulls her to him. She tries to defend herself, but also, even though it’s only a hug, to lie to herself.

  She can’t.

  No member of the Department has ever left a wounded comrade behind. She’s the only one.

  Aaron broke the seventh virtue of the Bushidō: Chu. Loyalty.

  Now she is a blind Samurai, she has received her punishment.

  She pulls away from Niko. ‘Let’s go down.’

  *

  On the second floor she is overwhelmed by sounds. Telephones, countless footsteps that she can’t assign to anyone. Men whispering, a vacuum cleaner. She likes rooms that she can map, the clear definition of all the sounds: the creak of new carpet, the squeaking of a door in the wind, the quivering of water in a glass, the quiet heartbeat of reflection.