Reads Holm’s thoughts: an eye for an eye.
She pulls the necklace from her neck, the pearls dissolve and turn into snowflakes.
Niko lets go of her and Aaron plummets. She falls into the light and screams and screams: ‘I want to be blind again!’
11
Demirci arrives home. Half-past three, it’s hardly worth going to bed. And she had intended to stay at the party only as long as politeness required. She would have disappeared by ten at the latest, quietly and probably unnoticed.
After the shooting competition she changed her mind.
Something had altered.
She certainly couldn’t boast about her performance. But afterwards the men treated her differently. It was as if they were in the same room with her for the first time.
Demirci knew what Aaron meant: that she might be able to issue orders to the men, but they themselves decided who would lead them.
Pavlik.
On the first day of the job her predecessor had wanted to introduce him to her. He said: ‘Your main man.’ But Pavlik walked past them in the corridor without so much as a glance. It was an affront that she doesn’t understand even now. The next day he was friendly and professional, but didn’t explain his early behaviour.
‘Why is he the main man?’
‘You’ll see,’ her predecessor said laconically.
He didn’t feel the need to explain why he had kept on a lower-leg amputee who was approaching fifty. Demirci checked Pavlik’s assessments. He had passed the endurance tests impeccably. Only average marks, but he couldn’t have been expected to end up in the top three in athletics.
She met him at briefings.
Whatever decision Demirci makes, the men look to him. If he scratches his chin they get worried. If he nods slightly they relax. If a wrinkle runs from the bridge of his nose to his hairline, it’s like an alarm signal.
Then Pavlik asks questions. And whether Demirci likes it or not, each one is justified.
Wouldn’t three cars be better? What if there’s a fuse attached to the door? Are we really sure that our man’s cover hasn’t been blown? Why do we still need the hostages?
They can’t breathe freely until Pavlik is satisfied. Demirci finds that hard to accept.
Her career path has been steep, she has gained universal respect. Of course the Department represents a new height that she risks falling from. But she wouldn’t have got the job if she hadn’t been qualified for it.
Is Pavlik putting her in a bad light? No. He’s just asking questions.
At first Demirci thought Pavlik’s prestige was down to his age; some of his comrades could have been his sons. He is the most experienced, without a doubt. But that on its own wouldn’t be enough. In a world in which a man’s qualities are measured in fractions of a second, you constantly have to confirm that status with results.
She studied Pavlik’s file. Basic studies in Maths at Army College; professional soldier, sniper with the paratroopers, training in one-to-one combat. Then police academy, SEK in Berlin.
In 1998 he was used as a precision sniper in the hostage-taking in the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse. Three heavily armed men from a Neo-Nazi group had taken the rabbi and five members of the congregation hostage and barricaded themselves in. They threatened to kill the hostages and themselves and demanded a live broadcast of a statement by the Chancellor on the evening news to the effect that Auschwitz had never existed and the Holocaust was only Zionist propaganda.
Pavlik’s Special Enforcement Team, his SET, was on the roof of a house opposite. After six hours his replacement should have arrived; no one can concentrate perfectly for as long as that. They could only see the outlines of their individual targets, they couldn’t tell the hostages from the hostage-takers. They hadn’t been given licence to fire. They were listening in on the prayer room with a laser microphone. The first hostage was about to be liquidated. Pavlik killed the three Nazis with shots to the head. Not a single hostage was injured.
A week later the Department called.
He’s been with them for eighteen years now. The synagogue and two other missions were recorded in the specialist literature. Last of all a life-saving shot from almost two thousand three hundred metres away. Demirci wouldn’t have thought it possible.
After a few days Pavlik requested a meeting with her. It was important for him to say something about each of the men to her, at least to introduce them to her in a sense. He stressed the need to take their individual characteristics into account. They had different strengths, but also weaknesses that hadn’t been listed in their evaluations, and which had to be compensated for. They were all fully trained, and their physical condition wasn’t a parameter.
He chose words that were strangely analytical and warm-hearted at the same time. He said that empathy was just as important as resolution, and as dangerous as arrogance. That a man with a strong sense of justice and a capacity for fellow-feeling should be matched with a partner whose qualities were obstinacy and impatience. That one should never be sent into action alone, because he couldn’t bear the solitude, and another should always be in a team, because that was where he showed his best.
But it was also important for a married man always to cover an unmarried comrade rather than the other way around. She needed to know all of that.
Empathy as a weakness and also a strength. A wise observation.
Demirci asked Pavlik what his weakness was. He said: ‘Chocolate.’ She got up to shake his hand and say goodbye. She would never forget what happened next. As Pavlik was leaving she turned around and swept the pencil sharpener off her desk with her skirt. Pavlik couldn’t possibly have seen it. But with his back to the desk he reached his hand behind him so quickly that Demirci’s eye couldn’t follow the movement, and caught the sharpener. He put it back in its place, nodded curtly and left.
And all questions were answered.
In her flat in Mitte, Demirci takes the pack of cigarettes from the locked drawer. She lights one, swears it’s her last and knows that she’s lying to herself. She steps out on to the balcony on the thirteenth floor. It smells of fresh snow. The sky is an arch of light above the glittering display of the city.
At two o’clock everyone apart from her and Pavlik had left the party. They sat in the shooting range among the leftovers from the buffet. He drank three or four glasses of schnapps without getting drunk, and asked if she had ever killed a person.
When she didn’t reply he told her how he had once ridden his motorbike along a country road near Beelitz. He had driven into a patch of oil on a bend and come flying off. The bike had come after him like a shot from a cannon and torn off his lower leg before flying across the road at a female cyclist. Pavlik had almost lost consciousness. He had seen a man and a little girl kneeling beside the woman and shouting.
He knew how many people he had killed. It had always been unavoidable, and he could live with it. But even though the accident had been eight years ago, not a day had gone by when he hadn’t thought of that woman. When he had been released from hospital he had gone to see her husband and tell him how terribly sorry he was.
The man had asked him in, but had then sat there in silence, rocking back and forth.
An hour had passed like that. Pavlik would never forget it.
Demirci looks at the block opposite. A television is reflected in a window. A Christmas garland flickers in another. A light comes on in the stairwell. Everyone has his own life, clings tightly to it, takes it for granted. Very few people know that you can’t do that.
Demirci wasn’t aware of it either. Until that day in spring when her mother visited her in Koblenz, where Demirci had her first job as an ambitious police inspector, until the evening in an uncle’s restaurant where, cheeks blazing, she talked about her work and filled her mother with pride, until the discotheque that they walked past on the way home, arm in arm, for the first time as friends, until the shooting of the two drug dealers, until her mother collapsed beside her
and her face was a bloody mask, until she shot the fleeing gunman in the back, until the scream that cut through her like an axe, until she called her father and that whimpering sound, still uncertain whether it emanated from him or from her, until the report certifying that she had acted properly.
That was the only time she had killed anyone. And it was enough.
She could never talk to her father about it. He lives alone in his house of pain. But she told Pavlik. He drank schnapps, asked the right questions: what was the visibility like? How far away was the man? How many times did she fire? Standing or kneeling? Two-handed?
She saw that Pavlik was reassured because she had revealed something that could not be read in any report, that she knows which words are important and how to say them.
Demirci cadged an unfiltered cigarette from him. They sat there for several minutes, confetti on the table, balloons above their heads quivering in the cigarette smoke. They were both watching the sixth lane.
Aaron. What a strange woman. She’s everything that Demirci has heard and read about her. And yet she’s quite different.
She looks for the word.
Unhappy?
No.
Sad.
But not because of her blindness. Demirci isn’t sure that Aaron thinks of it as a handicap.
While they were sitting together at the table, she had concentrated completely on Demirci. But she was checking everything around her at the same time. Aaron always knew who was where, and Demirci hasn’t the faintest idea how she does it. In some mysterious way, and without insulting anyone, she made it clear that she didn’t want her conversation to be disturbed. If a third party was welcome, on the other hand, it only took the tiniest movement, a tilt of the head, the opening of her hand, a smile, and people came to her. Her warmth wasn’t fake, everyone wanted to exchange words with her or touch her.
She guides every conversation, and you don’t even notice it.
Then that shot. Blind, from eighty metres. Demirci studied Aaron. At the moment when she fired, something must have thrown her off balance, or else she would have fired a ten, she has no doubt.
What was it? Boenisch? Holm?
Demirci has learned a lot of Turkish proverbs from her father. Now that the icy air on the balcony of her apartment makes her wide awake, a thought suddenly enters her head: ‘Life is the school, pain is the teacher.’
*
Sandra is sleeping peacefully. The baby lies beside her, with one foot in her hand, she smacks her lips, mutters, dreams with a peacefully crumpled face. Pavlik stands in the doorway and wonders how he can jeopardize this happiness.
The twins are big lads now, going through big changes. They’ve got another month at school in England, and their leaving exams aren’t that far off. They don’t call often, their voices sound almost adult, soon they won’t need him any more.
Until the evening a year and a half ago when Sandra put his hand on her belly and said, ‘Guess what’s in there?’ that was a comfort to Pavlik. That his sons had a father for as long as it really mattered. He keeps that from Sandra, even today. She would never forgive him.
What comfort is the baby to him? If he doesn’t come home tomorrow, his daughter will know him only from her mother’s stories, his photograph will show a stranger. As if her fist had never gripped his thumb, her smell never delighted him, her cries never woken him, as if she had never known him.
He goes into the kitchen where he finds the thermos flask with the strong black coffee that Sandra made for him because she knew he wouldn’t go to bed. Just as she always knows what he wants and needs and what he has done and what he will do.
He steps out on to the snowy terrace, and drinks some coffee. He hears the faint sound of a car. It’s approaching from almost precisely a thousand metres away. That’s the maximum distance from which the faint sound of an engine is audible. South-south-west. Probably somewhere down by the branch canal. He could locate a car horn from two kilometres away; conversations: two hundred metres; cracking twigs: ninety; footsteps: thirty. A sniper has to be able to gauge these things. It’s become so much a part of Pavlik that he doesn’t have to think about it, he just knows.
Equally, he would know at full moon just before the summer solstice that the time in which there is enough light for a sure aim is very short, that with a waxing half-moon you can aim at a target without a telescope no later than midnight, and that a sloping position towards north or south deadens the moonlight. Even when he walks with Sandra through the park late at night, relaxed and unconcerned, he automatically checks that he has the moon behind him because it lights his path and would dazzle any enemy.
On a day off, when he’s on the point of falling asleep in the hammock, he is aware that the powder in a cartridge burns faster in the summer, increasing muzzle velocity, and that he would have to aim very slightly lower than he would in cold weather.
He explained the stars to the twins. They saw the beauty of creation. Pavlik saw the conditions for a textbook shot.
He is ashamed of it.
The coffee cup warms his hand. But the cold doesn’t matter to him, it’s familiar. He could take all his clothes off and stand like that for hours without shivering and feel the snowflakes melting on his body.
Pavlik lights a cigarette, enjoys it, knows that it’s unprofessional. Smoking reduces your night vision. And nicotine withdrawal can reduce concentration if he’s lying for hours in position with his rifle.
He still has the eyes of a brain surgeon. But anyone who has tried to hit a trigger finger the size of a grain of dust knows that a thousandth is what counts.
How much longer?
When he advised Demirci always to send a married man to cover an unmarried one, rather than the other way around, he was thinking about himself. If a colleague suggested anything of the kind, he would say: ‘Oh shut up.’
He hasn’t been short of offers for a while now. Adviser, head of security, super-expert. Anyone who’s been with the Department can take their pick. A quiet desk job, nine to five, nothing that wouldn’t fit between the covers of a file. The money would be crazy. But they’re doing OK. The mortgage is paid off, they’ve inherited a couple of things. Money isn’t an issue.
Sandra isn’t keeping on at him.
He could also become a trainer. The Department has a training centre in Brandenburg, which takes its name from a derelict old windmill.
And God knows, it really is a mill. You’d be a slave driver, and the men would hate you, like you and everyone else hated all your trainers and will go on hating them.
Apart from her.
He remembers her joining them at a very young age. The first woman, the daughter of Jörg Aaron. She was so beautiful and so sad. And she stayed that way. All the boys fell in love with her immediately. Of course she must have been good, otherwise they wouldn’t have taken her on. But everyone wondered how good she was.
He didn’t. Her gait, her expression, her peace, the ease with which she did five things at once were all enough for him. She even poured coffee in silence. She wore her name as casually as she wore torn jeans to a reception.
The others could hardly wait for her to end up in the Mill. They weren’t disappointed. It’s hard to tell men like that apart. Pavlik can still remember her drinking red wine and Coke with the lads. One of them spat an incisor into his glass and asked: ‘Where did you learn to fight like that?’
She said: ‘When my mother was pregnant with me she watched Bruce Lee videos.’
Everyone burst out laughing. But Pavlik saw the fear in her eyes.
At that time he didn’t know anything about Boenisch’s basement; she only told him about that much later, when they were friends. And then she became his little sister, the one he looked after. Always.
He recognized her.
Her hardness, her gentleness and her silence.
Sitting by her bed in Barcelona was like dying. The fact that she broke off contact with him shortly afterwards hit him harder th
an his father’s death. Sandra feels exactly the same. Since then they have never spoken about Aaron. They both thought they couldn’t bear it.
But Pavlik didn’t stop taking care of her and secretly going with her along her path. He knows that Holm lives within her like a demon. That she won’t rest until he is dead.
Two years ago he learned that she had been taken on by the BKA. He has a friend there who is an investigator, Jan Pieper. Pavlik asked him to check Aaron’s computer every now and again. Pieper asked no questions. She had set up a programme on the INPOL system to tell her every time the name Holm cropped up.
So far that hasn’t happened.
But Pavlik knew, just as he knew about her karate training and the fifth Dan, which she reached last year.
Three weeks ago he had to go to Tegel for an interrogation and saw Sascha. He was hanging around with cold eyes, a cold grin on his lips, flicking away a dead cigarette butt. He had three or four prisoners around him, ordering them about with his little finger. He wore their fear like a warm coat.
Pavlik immediately began some investigations and got hold of the letters that Sascha and Eva Askamp had exchanged. It sounded genuine. He wasn’t convinced. Until the psychologist’s corpse was found in Boenisch’s cell and Boenisch only wanted to talk to Aaron.
How can Demirci be so blind not to understand that all of this was about Aaron? If she knew what he was up to she wouldn’t have spent this evening with him. They’d have thrown him out already.
Maybe I want her to make the decision for me.
When he woke up he was still determined not to say anything to Aaron. But after seeing her again, after that happy moment when she hugged him and whispered, ‘I love you,’ he couldn’t do it any more. She had a right to know.
But he has kept one thing to himself: that he knows the name Eva Askamp from somewhere else.
Only a man with an outstanding memory is suited to becoming a sniper or precision marksman. He needs to be constantly scanning the territory in front of him to discover the tiniest changes. Was that cigarette there an hour ago? The gravel, the paper tissue, the sheet of paper, the glass splinter? Pavlik trained himself in that just as hard as he trained his body.
In the Dark Page 12
