She hears that he wants to sob and can’t.
‘What was it that killed her? I don’t mean your bullet, I’m not blaming you for the ricochet. What really killed her?’
‘My ambition,’ she whispers.
Bright orange muzzle flashes. Aaron flies into the underground car park at the Hotel Aralsk.
*
The hitman is chasing her through the rows of parked cars. He is fast, an intelligent predator. If she lifts her head for a second he fires. She has a graze wound on her temple, blood is running down her face. There are only four cartridges in her spare magazine, twelve in the magazine of his Glock, even though he has inundated her with a hail of bullets. She dives over a car bonnet, shooting at him as she does so. A bullet catches her mid-leap. Aaron is hurled to the ground. Doesn’t feel a thing. She sees him leaving his cover. No rush. He thinks she is dead or unable to move. When she brings up the Browning she takes him by surprise. Her shot is pure recklessness: she aimed at his gun hand. The Glock clatters to the floor. Aaron hears a shout, but not his, she is too dazed to identify it. In a reflex action she fires again, this time aiming at the belly. The man looks startled and falls to his knees. Aaron forces herself to her feet and touches the entry wound in her waist, then the one in her back, and ascertains that the bullet has passed smoothly through. She walks over to the man, bends down and crawls. Stands up again, in excruciating pain, and kicks the Glock away. Only then does she see the woman. She is lying by the entrance to the hotel, motionless, a hole on the side where her heart is, a fountain bubbles.
The man kneels in front of Aaron, presses both hands to his belly, breathes as Niko will breathe in Barcelona. There is a pleading expression on the man’s face. She looks down at him, more ruthless than ever before or after, and fires her last bullet between his eyes.
*
The memory is like a birthmark.
Holm says: ‘Every time I heard Natalya’s voice I also heard my father’s. You’re not allowed to do that. I don’t know if she reciprocated my feelings, I don’t know what I was more afraid of: her doing so, or me only imagining that she did. Our most tender contact was a kiss on the cheek. I’ve never been so intimately connected with a woman. Many years passed. I didn’t think about her constantly, not for every second of every day, as people do in trashy novels, but sometimes I would be standing in a lift, sitting in a car, lying in bed, and the knowledge that I wasn’t allowed to desire her stopped the world and made me furious. Eleven years ago, in the winter, I had a routine matter to sort out. I shot a man who got in our way, in a florist’s shop. When he fell, he pulled a pot to the ground with him. It was a white camellia. It lay next to the man, blood flowed from his mouth on to a petal. I stood there for a long time. The owner ran away, I didn’t care that he was about to call the police. I suddenly knew I had to make a decision. Wait until I was led away, or confess my love to Natalya. There was no third way.’ He keeps finding new pebbles. ‘Have you ever told a man what you feel for him?’
Too late. In the tunnel it was too late.
‘No.’
‘Why?’
She can’t reply.
‘You’re ashamed now because you knew that the man whose capacity to love you refused to recognise was prepared to die just so that he could show his feelings. And yet I was cowardly. The Samurai said that lovers are the boldest people. Bushi no nasake. You know what that means.’
‘The tenderness of the warrior.’
‘I loved, sincerely, but I lacked the courage to reveal myself only in death. You, meanwhile, were perfectly willing to do just that. And I respect that. I couldn’t muster that supreme self-control. Just as I lacked the courage to face Natalya.’ In the silence a pebble skips ten times before sinking. ‘I wrote her the only letter I have ever written in my life. It’s hard to put words on paper that you have never been able to utter in real life. You know them all, and yet each one is a stranger to you. If I wasn’t hoping in vain, she would come to St Petersburg, run away with me and leave everything behind her. I crept away from my father like a thief. I didn’t say goodbye to my brother either. I had given him everything I could. I took nothing with me but clothes. I waited in St Petersburg for three days and nights. I stood on the bank of the Neva, I saw a big bridge opening for a ship decked with Chinese lanterns, and I waited. I ran down alleyways where strangers were hugging, and I waited. I whispered her name in the darkness of my hotel room and I waited. By the end of the third night I knew she wasn’t coming. Again I stood by the Neva. Everything within me was extinguished, and I no longer had a home. Was it like that when you woke up in Barcelona and looked in vain for the world?’
‘Yes.’
‘Four men appeared on the riverbank. They wanted to kill me. When I saw their corpses drifting in the river I came to my senses. Who had sent those men?’
‘Nikulin.’
‘My father. He had intercepted my letter to Natalya, she had never received it. He had been suspicious of me for all those years. I had never been free and I didn’t know it. That night you shot Natalya. My phone rang, and I shattered all the mirrors with my while my father was doing the same. I flew to Moscow to show him what cruelties I was capable of. But sad-eyed Fyodor had signed his statement, and the arrest warrant against my father had been issued. There was a technical problem with the plane, so I turned up half an hour late. But I saw him being led to the street in handcuffs. Our eyes met. He could read the message in mine. How did he die?’
‘He took his own life in custody. He unscrewed the overflow pipe from his sink, broke a splinter from it and slashed his wrists.’
‘Didn’t that strike you as strange? He had half the judiciary in his pocket, he could easily have got himself acquitted. Suicide? Is that the type of thing he would have done, even if we take into account the death of his Natashenka? No, nothing could ever have swayed that man. After you returned from Russia you were given a medal and a post in the Department. What for? Shooting a woman more loved than you have ever been. For breaking my heart. Otherwise you have achieved nothing. It wasn’t you who brought down Ilya Nikulin’s empire. I did. I paid two warders in the Butyrka prison to kill him. They let him bleed to death and watched, and I had them tell me what it was like. You should have done that with Boenisch. Believe me, it would have been more satisfying than a shot to the head in the underground car park. It was the last time I touched any of my father’s money. I know about all his accounts that no one ever found. There’s two billion dollars in Riyadh alone. I would sooner chop one of my hands off than lay a hand on a single cent. Hold out your hands.’
She is frozen, trapped in a cocoon of fear.
‘Do you really think that’s going to be your punishment?’
Quivering, she holds them out to him.
Holm cuts through her bonds. She hears him unbuttoning his shirt. Pausing. ‘I wanted to show you something. Let your fingers stroke the white camellia on my heart. The camellia I planted on Natalya’s grave. But now I don’t want your hand to touch my chest again, I couldn’t bear it.’
Neither could she. But not out of revulsion.
‘I’ve been tormented for so long by the question of whether Natalya would have followed me if she had read the letter. Whether she would still be alive if I had held her in my arms in St Petersburg that night when you went to the Hotel Aralsk. Whether I was right to kill my father too, or whether he bore no responsibility.’ Pebbles skip in an endless chain. ‘Did you hold Natalya in your arms? Did she say anything else? Did she say my name?’
Then Aaron understood. Holm’s need for her to remember after all this time is just as great as hers. That’s why he told her his story and didn’t kill her long ago. So that she will get her memory back. So that she will redeem him. Because he clings desperately to the hope that the woman he loved was thinking of him as she died.
But she doesn’t know if that was so. The last image she has from the underground car park is the shot she fired between the hitman’s eyes.
‘I don’t remember,’ she whispers.
‘Let me help you, I know what’s blocking you!’ Words like ashes. ‘I have thought ceaselessly about the punishment to inflict on you. I could fire my gun close to your ears so that your eardrums would burst, leaving you deaf and blind, locked for ever in a body that would be your lonely prison cell. I considered cutting out your tongue as well. But wouldn’t that still be too little? What if I killed everyone who meant anything to you? Even all those you had a good word for, the woman who cleans your flat, the usher in your favourite cinema? Even now I’m still not sure. Whatever seems appropriate.’
If Aaron had the strength to scream, she would.
‘But your worst punishment has been decided. Recently when I planted a white camellia on the grave in Moscow, I promised Natalya: during the time I grant you, you are to live with the fact that the only man you have ever loved is responsible for your blinding.’
He isn’t the one skipping stones across the water, she is. She stands by the shore, near a huge pile of stones. Each one she picks up is so heavy that it couldn’t possibly skip over the waves. And yet it does.
‘What do you mean by that?’ she whispers.
‘Think very hard.’
Suddenly Aaron is no longer standing on the shore, but on the mountain she dreamed about because once and for all she would be free up there. But a chasm gapes below her. The stones start sliding, her memory drags her with it like an avalanche. In one great whirl she plunges into the void and screams.
She is holding Niko in her arms. He is choking on his blood, coughing it up, pulling her towards him with the last of his strength.
‘We were going to share. He promised he wouldn’t do anything to you. Let me go. You have to.’
As she speeds along the freeway, it never occurs to her to summon help for him.
‘You fled because you wanted me to kill him,’ Holm says.
She plunges into the neon light under the Plaça de les Drassanes. Holm effortlessly brings his Audi up alongside Aaron’s car. They look at one another. A moment that has lasted longer than the whole of time. Now that the shockwave is breaking against her heart she knows that in the second before the flash that sent her world up in smoke she didn’t regret never telling Niko that she loved him.
Her last thought was: I let Boenisch live. But not you.
35
The snowy road disappears into the forest. He is standing by the open tailgate of the transporter, with the flat spare tyre in front of him. He knows his only chance is to stop a passing car, and he also knows that there is no one on the road in this godforsaken place at this time of night. He looks at his watch. Four precious minutes have passed already. He left his phone in Berlin, because they could have located him with it. The stolen SUV is in the place in the forest where he crawled through the undergrowth and ran to the clearing. Too far, half an hour on foot. That was how he ran out of options. It isn’t the wind that’s making him shiver, or the cold. It’s his despair, and also the knowledge that he made a bad decision when he took the transporter to avoid attracting attention when they arrived at the farm.
Headlights.
They shimmer over the hilltop, quickly drilling two holes in the blackness. How relieved he is. He goes and stands in the road and raises one hand. The other one is ready to draw his Makarov if the car doesn’t stop.
That won’t be necessary.
Before the driver stops and gets out, Kvist knows who he is.
*
Nothing distracts Pavlik. No grief, no fury, no memory. His right hand also hovers over his gun, the Walther. The silent forest curves towards him, absorbs him, lets him feel its calm.
‘You should never have sent flowers to my wife.’
‘I knew you would work that one out sooner or later.’
‘Anything else you want to say?’
‘You can run away from something for ever. But you take with you the one mistake that you have made.’ Kvist holds his head lowered, his voice barely louder than the wind.
Pavlik is not deceived.
‘In Kabul I killed an innocent man. Jörg Aaron called me a criminal.’
‘Accurate enough.’
‘I forgot it. But that Pashtun had a son. He was an interpreter for the American embassy in Kabul. During an attack he saved the life of the CIA station chief. That put him in danger, so he got a visa to the USA. The American paid off his debt by telling him who killed his father, and where to find me. He wanted to take his blood vengeance. I shouldn’t have stuck my knife in his throat. But in his eyes I saw that other man, the one in Kabul. His son, still breathing, would have been a permanent accusation against me. I got rid of his body.’
Pavlik doesn’t need a measuring tape to know that he is standing exactly a metre away from the Ford on the left, with the door closed, a body’s length behind the front axle. He thinks about how he whacked – broke? – Kvist’s ribs. The wind is behind him, whirling the snow over the road, blowing grainy sleet against Kvist’s trouser-legs.
‘Why didn’t I confess to you, or to André? What would you have thought? That Jörg Aaron was right. I could have claimed self-defence. But even then I would have had to admit my guilt. To myself. I stopped sleeping after that, I lost my bearings completely. As if the world was made of glass. I wasn’t even sure that I was still alive.’
He speaks slowly, as if every word is an incredible effort. But Pavlik knows that Kvist is trying to gain time to play out the battle in his mind. Pavlik does the same.
Not pistols, please. I wouldn’t stand a chance.
‘A Romanian introduced me to betting on sports. Second Chinese football league, kickboxing championships in Malaysia and Indonesia, that kind of thing. The adrenalin helped for a while. But then I lost. Eventually I was so far in the red that I couldn’t see a way out. I started paying in counterfeit money.’
‘And André found out,’ Pavlik says.
‘I was supposed to hand myself in. Before he came back from Prague. You can’t imagine how glad I was that you got drunk, otherwise I would have had to kill you as well. I laid André’s head in my lap and closed his eyes. But I didn’t stop gambling. As if someone else had died in Prague along with André. That one died when you asked my forgiveness for not being with me. He died later in Barcelona and then again this morning in a lift; you wouldn’t believe how many times you can die.’
‘I give you my word: today will be the last time.’
‘I started losing more and more. The guys made it clear to me what it meant to have debts with them. But they knew of a solution. They put me in touch with Holm, who came up with the idea of the Chagall. He gave me his word that nothing would happen to Jenny.’
Pavlik can hardly bear to hear her name on Kvist’s lips. He sees him relaxing his muscles. A tiny stretch of the shoulders, the neck. His left hand hangs down, seemingly slack, but his fingers are splayed. So casually that most people would have ignored it.
But how long have Holm and Kvist known each other?
‘In Barcelona I inhaled my own blood. I told Jenny who I was. That’s why she abandoned me. When I woke up in hospital I was sure it was over. It was a liberation. But nothing happened. I didn’t understand it. I went to her room, and her father was there. No one spoke. I thought she she was covering for me. I was so overwhelmed that I fell to my knees in the corridor. I have lived in fear of you and Holm for five years. I have lived in shame.’
Pavlik will never forgive himself for not having realized.
‘Eventually I pretended to myself we were quits. He hadn’t got any money in Barcelona, and I’d taken two bullets. But last winter he was suddenly standing in front of me, and said he wanted to transfer his brother to Tegel. He needed a pen-pal for him, nothing more than that. It sounded fair. I had known Eva Askamp’s husband; another gambler. I remembered his wife, and the fact that she couldn’t cope after he died. She agreed to do it for a ridiculously small sum of money.’
‘Weren’t you
surprised at someone like Holm contacting you about a pen-pal? He could have asked hundreds of other people,’ Pavlik says mockingly.
‘Yes. I preferred not to think about it. It was only when Boenisch got involved that I understood. That was Holm’s punishment for me: putting the woman I loved at his mercy. Last night I discovered the truth: that she’s lost her memory, that since then she’s been torturing herself about abandoning me like that. When I left the hotel a man asked me the time and I knocked him down.’
Kvist’s voice is getting quieter and quieter, the words a faint drip. Pavlik knows why. He is supposed to have to concentrate, understand, be distracted.
‘I let her go to the coach not because she pleaded with me, but because I hoped she would remember.’
‘You’ve got a tongue in your head.’
‘I wanted to say something. But when her eyes looked for me and she felt for my hand I saw what I had done to her, and my voice died in my throat.’ His fingers vibrate above the Makarov. ‘Bosch told me about the hiding place. Take me there. Let’s rescue her, that’s all I ask.’
‘I’m never turning my back on you again. You’ll pay for both her and André here and now, in this snow.’
‘I want to explain. I want to see her one last time.’
‘She says hi.’
‘Without my help you won’t know where she is.’
‘I can’t believe I just called you my friend. You’re nobody, you’ve never had honour, you’ve never existed.’
‘You never beat me in training.’
‘Correct: that was just training.’
‘See you, Don Pavlik.’
‘See you, coward.’
By the time the Makarov has leaped into Kvist’s hand, Pavlik has rolled under the Ford and drawn his Walther. He fires three times in quick succession, but Kvist has already dived out of the headlights into the darkness. Pavlik’s eyes dart around the road. No. He must have chosen the shortest trajectory and disappeared into the undergrowth on the right. There’s nothing he can do with the Ford. Pavlik has the immobilizer and Kvist knows that theft-proof electronics means the vehicle can’t be hot-wired.
In the Dark Page 40
