*
When they turn off the main road into a country lane, Pavlik switches off the headlights. The wind has subsided, and the moon hangs between resting clouds like an inflated pig’s bladder. Its light turns the snow pale blue and glitters in the branches of the hedge that brushes the car. The men arrived a few minutes before; the Fords are parked under the trees, camouflaged with nets, invisible from fifty metres away.
They mutely agree; Pavlik picks up a pair of night goggles and crawls over to Kemper who, similarly equipped, peers down from the top of the hill to the airfield. It lies below them, a pixellated green still life, surrounded by solar panels which hug the lower slopes like the terraces of a snowy rice field. A Soviet fighter regiment was stationed here during the Cold War, and its conning tower still stands. The stout sheds for the fighter planes were built to last for ever, and planes stand in line in front of them; a museum that Pavlik once visited with the twins. They squeezed into an MiG and played dogfights, while he thought this was the real world, his world, but not the world of the other fathers whose children he could see.
The sport and business airfield is off to the north-east. Two low buildings. The closed hangar is big enough for a Gulfstream, but now it’s empty, as Pavlik learned from Germer. There are three propeller planes on the ramp.
‘Which one is it?’
‘The Cessna.’
‘Fuelled?’
‘Yes.’
‘That must be tempting to Holm. Why wait till tomorrow? I’d make off with that plane tonight.’
‘The thought must have entered his head.’
‘The shelters would be a good place for him.’
‘Let’s check them out.’
They can only see part of the car park. ‘Less than ideal,’ Kemper murmurs. ‘We’d have a better view from the hill opposite.’
‘I know,’ Pavlik says, giving no further explanation of his decision.
Kemper leaves it there, he has known Pavlik for long enough. The light is turned off in the office building. A short time later two cars drive away. They take off their night goggles. Pavlik wants to get back to the others, but Kemper rests a hand on his arm.
‘Why is Kvist under surveillance?’
‘Routine.’
‘You never do anything just out of routine.’
‘You have a problem with that?’
‘He got me out of a tight spot in Amsterdam. He’s always ahead of the game. He’s a great guy. And still you dropped him like a hot potato. It’s not just me who thinks that.’
‘Since when have we been a democracy?’
‘Since when have you shit on your comrades?’
Pavlik grabs Kemper’s wrist. He knows that another word will turn him into a man that he never wanted to be, and has never been. He knows since he put his foot down on the accelerator on the freeway and noticed how thin the metal really is, and that it wasn’t him speeding along the tarmac, it was the tarmac speeding under him. His eyes are black as onyx. ‘He will still be my friend when you have long forgotten him,’ he whispers. Kemper’s blood pulses in his hand. Their breath hangs between them in a cloud; they can both still see the words when they have faded away.
Kemper nods. He has understood.
Pavlik’s eyes change colour very slowly; at first it’s just a glimmer over an abyss, the hint of a distant light, then they assume the broken grey of the clouds. At last he lets go of Kemper.
The cloud of breath dissolves.
By one of the Fords Pavlik takes Demirci aside. ‘Do you really want to stay here?’
What he doesn’t say: it would be better if we kept out of each other’s way over the next few hours.
‘My decision stands.’
What she doesn’t say: we will both have to live with that phrase.
They all put on dirty white overalls and smear their faces with camouflage paint. Pavlik divides up the teams: two men each to the tower, the ramp, the car park, the office building. Demirci goes to the hangar with technical support.
‘Krupp, Nowak, come with me. We’ll take a look around.’
They put on helmets and night goggles and hang the equipment over their shoulders. They dart silently down the slope, cut a hole in the fence and blend with the trees. Pavlik, Krupp and Nowak break away from the others. They disappear among the solar panels, just as the wind revives and sweeps the sky clear.
*
The technicians assemble the equipment in the hangar. Krampe asks their positions. ‘SET 1 clear, SET 2 clear.’ Fricke barks in the bushes by the car park: ‘Clear and freezing my balls off.’
‘We’re desperately sorry to learn of your discomfort,’ a voice says from the warm tower.
The video link is established with the Department; Grauder checks in: ‘Nothing new here.’ Automatic reactions. But they help Demirci through the first half hour. Pavlik’s helmet camera sends wobbly images sprinkled with green. Check, secure, carry on. Demirci knows that he doesn’t expect to find Holm. There are many possible hiding places in the surrounding area; remote houses, farms, dense woodland. Anything is better than the airfield. Pavlik is only searching the area because he is bearing in mind a probability of one per cent.
Demirci looks over at Krampe. He sits at his monitor with his eyes shut following the few whispered thoughts of the others. She has come to value his calm professionalism. Krampe is reliable, he finds a solution for every technical problem. The men treat him like a colleague, but call him by his first name. They wouldn’t stand outside his door at night, pour their hearts out or get drunk with him after work. The foundation of their comradeship is the second that decides life and death. Krampe has often been a witness to that second, he has heard it as a quick breath into a throat microphone, a shouted command, the echo of a gunshot, a cry in the ether. But he knows nothing about it.
He laughs quietly to himself, perhaps because Fricke has told a joke. Demirci taps him on the shoulder. Krampe pushes up his right headphone. ‘How long have you been with us?’
‘Eight years.’
‘Then you knew André.’
You could peel Krampe’s silence like an onion, and there would always be a new silence underneath.
‘What was his surname?’
Krampe breathes the silence in and out again.
‘Which bit of the question didn’t you understand?’
‘Neubauer.’
‘What kind of man was he?’
‘Ask Pavlik.’
‘I’m asking you.’
Krampe looks at his two colleagues. They are sitting at the end of the hangar, one of them dozing, one playing with his mobile phone, and they ignore both him and Demirci. He thinks about the answer as if it isn’t as easy as it really is.
After a long pause he says in a quiet, throaty, sad voice: ‘He was a decent bastard, and everyone wanted to be friends with him. But only Pavlik, Kvist and he were the Three Dons. André had no family. Like Kvist, perhaps that was why. There was something about him that people liked. Like Pavlik – although he had other sides to him as well. And a laugh that made people feel good. Once he said to me: “That’s how I’d like you to remember me – as someone who liked to laugh.” We all went to his funeral. By his graveside we swore never to think of him again. He’s the only one whose name isn’t on the plaque.’
‘What happened?’
‘He withdrew into himself. He stopped talking and laughing and lost his temper at the drop of a hat. He didn’t even come to Lissek’s barbecues. He blew his top with one of the lads in the shooting range. I don’t know who, I got it third-hand.’ Krampe hesitates. ‘I’m not usually there when they need to clear things up. I just look after the technical side of things.’
‘That’s as important as everything else,’ Demirci says encouragingly.
‘Perhaps. It doesn’t matter anyway.’
‘And then?’
‘Even Pavlik couldn’t get close to him. And neither could Aaron. André and Aaron liked each other, but there was no
thing sexual. They both spat in the face of death, that was probably it.’ Again he fights for words. ‘André made some counterfeit money disappear. Kvist found out. Pavlik couldn’t believe it. When André was in Prague on an undercover mission, they went to his apartment. They found a hundred thousand fake Euros under the floorboards. Lissek thought of ordering André back on some pretext or other. Except there was nothing that wouldn’t have aroused his suspicion. So he sent Pavlik and Kvist to Prague to sort it out. But Pavlik got drunk. Kvist went on his own, without Lissek’s knowledge. André wanted a grand finale. He got it. Kvist was suspended for three weeks.’
‘Were there witnesses in Prague?’
A shrug. ‘Internal Affairs wouldn’t have closed the file if it hadn’t been as clear as day.’
‘Maybe they just lacked evidence.’
‘What for?’
‘Yes, what for?’ Demirci hears someone say behind her.
She turns around. Pavlik has come back with Krupp and Nowak. A look from him is enough, and Claus Krampe quickly puts his headphones back on.
The three men stand there like a wall.
‘Mr Pavlik, he was your friend, I respect that. But we shouldn’t let ourselves be guided by our emotions.’
‘I agree,’ he says coldly. ‘Aaron abandoned Kvist in Barcelona because he knew they would both die otherwise. Those are the facts, they’re uncontested. It wasn’t Kvist’s decision to hand her over to Holm, it was her own. Maybe you’re of the opinion that a blind woman can’t make her own life decisions, just because she’s dependent on the help of others. I don’t see it that way. You talk about respect? Then let me do the same. Kvist respected her will. She was able to ask that of him.’
‘Then why did you beat him up? What about the .45 you wanted to stick in your mouth?’
‘I had time to think.’
‘And André?’
‘Not for you to judge. You didn’t know him. You weren’t at his graveside. You didn’t grieve with Kvist.’
If it was any quieter you would be able to hear it starting to snow outside.
Demirci whips out her mobile. ‘Helmchen, I need the Internal Affairs report on André Neubauer.’ She stares at Pavlik. ‘I’m aware of that. Get someone put back on duty.’
Pavlik turns away. Exhaustion strays across his face like a shadow. The question he keeps asking himself, the question that wears him down, tortures him, as if someone had been tattooing it on his skin for weeks, day and night, the question of where he knows the name Eva Askamp from, has become so nagging, so agonizing, that it extinguishes all other thoughts like a migraine.
30
‘We liked each other as children. He was one of those wild boys with scabbed knees and a catapult and chocolate around his mouth. That was in Kleinhüderoda in Thuringia, a few randomly scattered houses, you’d need to look it up on the map. I come from the west, from Fürth, you can probably hear it, the Franconian accent sticks to you like chewing gum, my father always said. We had relatives in Thuringia, so we always went there for three weeks in the summer holidays. Klaus showed me how to whistle through my fingers and catch frogs, hunting was in his blood even then. He gave me my first kiss by the carp pool, we were eight at the time, but I still remember very clearly that he tasted of chocolate and vanilla.’
Holm threw all the tools out of the tiny box-room before he pushed Aaron and the women inside and locked the door. Between the bare walls it is so cramped that they have just enough space to sit there pressed against one another, their legs drawn up, their bound hands in their laps. Aaron feels the woman shivering against her shoulder. She has only answered one of her questions: that her name is Vera. Aaron is familiar with two kinds of response when someone encounters death face to face. Some people can’t say a word; their mouths are blocked by fear. Others talk uninterruptedly, they hurry through their lives, want to explain who they are, as long as there is someone who will listen, as long as they still have a voice. There is no point interrupting or consoling them. They need to talk until they are exhausted.
So there is nothing Aaron can do but wait, trapped in a single thought. The single realization. The single truth.
Ilya Nikulin.
He was the father Holm had been looking for.
I was to blame for his suicide.
Vera sobs. ‘At seventeen or eighteen I did my own thing in the holidays, camping with friends, Interrailing, Paris and Rome, I still like travelling. I didn’t hear anything from Klaus, and never thought about him, we’d just been children. I always wanted to be an actress. I haven’t got much confidence, my mother drummed it into me at an early age that I wasn’t anything special. But I applied to the University of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. And they gave me a place. Perhaps by the skin of my teeth, but anyway! My parents were flummoxed. I stood in front of the mirror and said: “You’re going to be the new Meryl Streep, or at least the new Cher!”’
How did Holm know about me and Nikulin? And for how long?
Did he know by the time we were in Barcelona? Yes, he knew by then.
She sees him taking her hand again. ‘I would even have waited two minutes for you.’ That was the message in his eyes. The deep satisfaction at seeing her in front of him at last.
He didn’t sentence his brother to five years in jail because Ruben was able to make that emergency call. I was in a trap, and Sascha let me escape. That was why.
But why didn’t Holm kill me in the tunnel?
Because I couldn’t run away from him. He dazzled me, that was just the start of my punishment, the first circle.
What circle am I in now?
The circle of memory.
In the car he quoted Dante: ‘“There is no greater sorrow than to remember, in our present grief, past happiness.”’ So true. One door after another opens up in Aaron’s library. But she doesn’t find the happiness she hoped for, because she used that up a long time ago. Sandra’s nose wrinkling when she laughs; the little-boy face with which Pavlik scrapes the bowl; Marlowe’s tongue; looking at Niko when he sleeps. ‘La Le Lu’, she hears the tune of the toy clock that her father gave her. ‘Then comes the sandman, quietly up the stairs, to fill you up with lovely dreams, while you sleep unawares.’ With a slight scratch on ‘lovely dreams’.
How many circles of hell are there in the Divine Comedy? Eight, nine, ten? And after that Purgatory, where you atone for your sins.
It’s terribly difficult to join up her thoughts. One trainer said: ‘I’ll take you to the edge. And when you’ve got there, I’ll take you to the edge you didn’t know about.’ Fricke and André were the best at dealing with sleep withdrawal.
They had their methods. For example, they thought about the extra equipment for dream cars they would buy when they were rich. Or the dumbest insults they could come up with: ‘I wish you scabies on your balls, and herpes on your fingers so that you can’t scratch yourself.’ Or they listed places they wanted to avoid: Wank in Bavaria, Fucking in Austria, Bitsch in Switzerland, Hymendorf in Lower Saxony, Shitterton in Dorset, England. Boring in Oregon was probably the winner. Once André drew up a list of the ugliest men with beautiful wives. From A for Aristotle Onassis to Zadok, somebody in the bible; André swore that Zadok was covered with warts but had loads of women anyway. Sooner or later the laughter woke you up.
Vera talks and talks.
‘Soon I noticed that other people were more talented, I’m not blind. Sorry. I found it hard to get bookings, perhaps partly because of my accent. But I still didn’t give up, it was fine for the fringe. I made money as a cleaner, nothing was ever beneath me. One Sunday I crossed over to East Berlin with a friend, my first time even though I’d lived in the city for four years, crazy, isn’t it? But now we’re getting to it: on the Museum Island I turn around and Klaus is standing in front of me. We recognized each other straight away, and believe it or not the knees of his jeans were ripped.’
The kitchen where Aaron ‘looked around’ is, she guesses, about five metres by four. A gas stov
e, no modern appliances, she would be able to negotiate it without difficulty. The house is big. Thirty paces from the kitchen door and down a corridor. Twelve on the left to the box-room they’re crouching in. Her legs have gone to sleep. At least part of her is sleeping. On the other hand Aaron’s head is doing curious things. One half is as heavy as an anvil, the other as light as if it could fly.
‘I know it sounds crazy, but we looked at one another and that was that,’ Vera says. ‘Sixteen years after the kiss by the carp pool. And he felt exactly the same.’
She has probably told this story many times before, wittily, blithely, throwing the words into the air like balls and juggling with them. They are still the same words, except that now they sound as if they are all about to fall on the floor. Still, Vera has to stick to the script, every punchline, every turn of phrase, she mustn’t change a thing so that she doesn’t lose her balance.
‘We talked like crazy, and I had to get back to the west by midnight at the latest. Klaus worked at VEB Robotron. “Just think, we’ve developed the biggest microchip in the world!” he said and laughed. But he wasn’t happy. Three exit applications refused. And he wanted to make one more. I’d never have dreamed of doing anything like that. Outside the “Palace of Tears”, the name given to the border crossing where people tended to cry a lot when they said goodbye, we kissed. It was like a chocolate.’
She stumbles after every second sentence because she senses that she should tell the story in a different voice, but she can’t. She quickly sputters on, as if her heart would stop like a clock if she fell silent.
‘It all happened in a moment. We applied to get married and we were granted permission, it was amazing, Klaus bought Crimean sparkling wine in the Exquisit shop. I commuted between east and west for six months, and then we got married in Alexanderplatz. Beneath a picture of Erich Honecker. You should have seen Klaus’s suit! And I was all in white.’
Aaron listens to what is happening in her own head. The left side is roaring, the right is in silence. Perhaps André, that mad bastard, was right. He was convinced that both halves of the brain could sleep and wake independently of one another, like albatross brains. And then he said such wonderful things as, ‘There’s a hotel in Montevideo where only angels live.’
In the Dark Page 34
