In the Dark

by Andreas Pflüger

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  No answer.

  ‘Pavlik!’

  ‘Fall – back – he’ll try – on the right.’

  She pulls over, metal crunches again. The windscreen with the bullet holes can no longer withstand the pressure and bursts. Splinters whir inside the vehicle hitting her face like shrapnel. Aaron yells at Pavlik: ‘What does the road look like? A bend? Oncoming traffic?’ Not a sound. ‘Please say something or I’ll have to stop! It’s impossible!’ Her desperation drags the vowels out of her words, shredding them.

  ‘A bus – a hundred metres – overtake – now.’

  Aaron switches to the left-hand lane, hears herself touching the Mazda and the Mazda falling back. Shots. She puts her foot to the floor and speeds past a bus that she can’t see.

  Pavlik has two words left: ‘Truck – oncoming.’

  The panicked honking from the lorry driver roars in Aaron’s ears. He can’t avoid her, can’t brake, she can’t go back.

  So this is what it’s like right at the end. I’ve got my life back, but now I’m giving it up on this road. Pavlik is with me. I’m not dying alone. But please, please, God, if you exist, let him get back to Sandra, to his children, tell the ferryman only to take one.

  Remembering in those nanoseconds how she played cowboys and Indians with the twins is an indescribable joy. Remembering how Pavlik barely nodded to her at the end of the second week. ‘You’ve got pretty legs. But the rest isn’t bad either.’ Planning the surprise party for Sandra’s hated fortieth, seeing him grin. ‘Let’s just put a ribbon on your head, that would be her best present.’ Being seventeen and secretly baking star-shaped cinnamon biscuits to cheer up her mother. And how rock-hard they are. Holding her father’s gun for the first time and feeling that this is what she’s meant to do. Sitting with her father in the headmaster’s office after kicking her friend Hatice’s brother – a good head taller than she was – between the legs when he wanted to beat up his sister. Noticing the way her father puts his arm around her. ‘He should thank her: when this kind of thing happens I’ve taught my daughter to kick first between the legs, and only then in the head.’

  Suddenly she hears Holm.

  The most important thing my father taught me was that the will must be greater than the fear.

  She is aware of the wind again, she can tell by the drop in engine noise and the gust of air blowing into the cabin from the side that she has overtaken the bus. Aaron eases off on the accelerator and shoots into such a tight gap that the wing mirror is completely torn off. Behind her, steel bores into steel, like scrap metal being crushed. She knows that the Mazda has crashed against the lorry, which pushes it screeching off the road. She slows down, can’t calibrate her braking on the icy road surface, becomes aware that the car is spinning, faster and faster, the pirouettes of a giant with her perched, a tiny figure, on his shoulder.

  Then the giant stands up.

  ‘Pavlik,’ she whispers and reaches out her hand to him. His jugular vein sends faint Morse code signals beneath her quivering finger.

  Echolocation

  The men are waiting in the corridor of the intensive care ward, so quietly that they can hear the hand of the big wall-clock jumping to six. The door opens.

  Demirci comes out. ‘He’s pulling through.’

  No one says a word. She turns to go back in.

  ‘Good job,’ Fricke says behind her.

  She turns around. ‘You too. All of you.’ Demirci hesitates for a moment. ‘I could tell you now that with immediate effect we’re all going to call each other by our surnames, while still calling each other du, like my predecessor did. If I don’t do it myself, it’s not out of a lack of respect. My grandparents observed the old traditions. I always addressed them formally, and yet we were very close, and they meant a lot to me. Should the time come, I will mourn each of you as if you were family members.’

  It’s only at that moment that Lissek says goodbye.

  Aaron and Sandra are sitting by Pavlik’s bed. He is too weak to talk. Aaron’s eyes are closed. She is in her inner room. She is still listening to the echo of the gunshots. Was she given the punishment that Holm intended for her? He blinded her. For him that was only the first circle of hell. But what could be worse? Niko? If, opening her eyes in Barcelona, she had remembered the warehouse, that’s how it would have been, plunging through a hall of mirrors. But she thought she had abandoned the man she loved to certain death. That was another kind of hell, and part of her was consumed by it. Now she feels no shame, no longing, only hatred. Which will eventually fade away.

  Perhaps.

  Hatred can be a punishment too. Was that what Holm had in mind? Many days and nights will pass before she has an answer.

  Demirci comes in. Sandra gives her husband a kiss. She pulls Aaron’s head to her and strokes her hair so tenderly, so naturally that Aaron knows that if Pavlik hadn’t made it her friend wouldn’t have blamed her, either out loud or in secret.

  ‘Yes,’ Sandra says simply. She goes outside and leaves them alone.

  Demirci sits down beside her, and asks at last: ‘How did you survive all that?’

  She doesn’t open her eyes. ‘I had some help.’

  Demirci puts Pavlik’s hand in Aaron’s.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew the “Lissek manoeuvre”.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks.

  ‘You put Pavlik in charge of negotiations with Sascha, and in that way you diminished my value.’

  ‘I only did that so that you would hear his voice. I hoped it might comfort you.’

  Aaron feels a gratitude that cannot be expressed in words, because no word would be big enough. Pavlik wants to talk, but his tongue feels too big for his mouth.

  ‘Tomorrow. Have a rest.’

  Another echo resounds inside Aaron.

  Wouldn’t you too like to sleep at last?

  Yes, a leaden weariness had filled her like concrete, and was trying to drag her down to the bottom of a black sea above which a desolate sky stood guard. That weariness has gone; it disappeared when the giant stood still and Aaron jumped from his shoulder. Perhaps also because at that moment something happened which she doesn’t want to be aware of now, something she doesn’t want to take into consideration for fear of deceiving herself.

  That’s why her eyes are closed.

  Aaron leaves her inner room.

  ‘What is your earliest memory?’ she asks.

  Startled, Demirci thinks. ‘I was two years old and I crawled over the back of a chair. I still have the scar on my head. I don’t remember the pain, just the sensation of falling.’

  ‘I remember my parents talking to me and me not understanding a word,’ Aaron says. ‘It was very strange.’

  Pavlik joins in with a croak. ‘My father flushing my goldfish down the toilet. You can still see the after-effects of that today.’

  They laugh.

  There’s a quick knock at the door. Aaron hears Helmchen’s voice. ‘Excuse me.’

  Demirci says: ‘No, stay.’

  Helmchen joins Aaron. She takes her hand and puts something on the palm. Aaron feels it with her fingers. A cartridge case. As she wonders what it might signify, Demirci says: ‘Miss Aaron, there’s a request I’d like to ask of you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Come back to the Department.’

  Aaron says nothing.

  ‘Of course I’ll give you some time to think about it.’

  Minutes pass without an answer, and Aaron’s eyes stay closed.

  ‘A blind woman and a one-legged man. Dream team,’ Pavlik groans.

  ‘At least think about it. All the men have pleaded with me. But they didn’t need to. I made up my mind yesterday morning.’

  Aaron opens her eyes.

  ‘Could you turn out the light?’

  She senses Demirci’s perplexity.

  ‘Please.’

  Demirci gets to her feet.

  ‘And on again.’


  Her heart asks her breath to dance.

  ‘I can tell light from darkness.’

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  The next book in the Jenny Aaron series is coming in summer 2018

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  Afterword

  About Andreas Pflüger

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Afterword

  I did as much research as I could. You can read up on a lot of things, but personal conversation, the individual view, is irreplaceable. I would like to thank the mobility trainer Dr Roman Schmeissner, whose commitment to ‘his’ blind patients is exemplary. And also Christa Maria Rupp from the Saarland Association of the Blind and Partially Sighted.

  I met four blind women, and was hugely impressed with all of them. Kerstin Müller-Klein is as much in control of her life as my Jenny Aaron. Ugne Metzer showed me that high heels can be used as a sonar device. Susanne Emmermann holds her own in the accounts department of BVG, the Berlin transport company, and Pamela Papst is a successful defence lawyer who tells her story in the fabulous autobiography Ich sehe das, was ihr nicht seht. [I See What You Can’t].

  Professor Jürgen Kiwit, the senior physician in the Neurosurgery Department at Buch Clinic, was a great help to me, as was the neurologist and psychiatrist Dr Norbert Helbig, who was extremely enlightening on the subject of memory and amnesia.

  Dr Peter Kleinert always had time for me. I’ve fired so many medical questions at him that anyone else would have lost patience long ago.

  Professor Peter Höflich of the Viadrina European University enlightened me on the subject of the European Convention on the Transfer of Convicted Persons.

  My most important specialist adviser is Professor Bernhard A. Sabel, Director of the Institute of Medical Psychology at the University of Magdeburg. He has worked for many years in practical research with blind people. Patients from all over the world come to him for help. His specialist skills and critical notes have been incredibly valuable to me. I was very lucky to be able to read the manuscript of his new book in advance. He is a real inspiration to the visually impaired.

  Professor Sabel provided notes and ideas for the novel, and will continue to advise me in future – Jenny Aaron’s story isn’t over. That means a lot to me.

  Anyone who wants to find out more about FlashSonar, the astonishing form of echolocation used by blind people, can approach the association World Access for the Blind. Daniel Kish has made himself a master of the technique, and his videos on YouTube speak for themselves.

  To anyone who wants to know about the extreme achievements that blind people are capable of, I would recommend three autobiographies. They show that Aaron’s abilities are not fictional.

  Balanceakt: Blind auf die Gipfel der Welt by Andy Holzer.

  My Path Leads to Tibet by Sabriye Tenberken.

  And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II by Jacques Lusseyran.

  From this one I have stolen a sentence that I was unable to resist: ‘Wait till the blind man has seen him.’

  I was also enriched by Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness by John M. Hull, and Oliver Sacks’ A Neurologist’s Notebook.

  There are four quotes from the Hagakure.

  I took some liberties. You will search in vain for a twenty-storey building on Budapester Strasse in Berlin, as you will for Hotel Jupiter on Leipziger Strasse or the Hotel Aralsk in Moscow. The same applies to the two hills near the airfield Flugplatz Finow. But they are my high-rise building, my hotels, my airfield. I hope the men who risked their lives during the storming of the Landshut and the liberation of the hostages would forgive me for giving Jörg Aaron their courage and resolution.

  ‘The Department’ exists only in Aaron’s world, not in reality, however much some politicians might wish it was real. But the working methods of this special unit of my own invention are based on the years of research that began with my first novel, Operation Rubikon.

  Any factual mistakes are mine alone and have nothing to do with my sources.

  There are four close friends that I would like to thank: Murmel Clausen and Hans-Joachim Neubauer for their talent, their critical reading and their advice, and Jürgen Haase for being the first to be able to imagine a blind policewoman as a main character. Hans-Ludwig Zachert, the former head of the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), is, as ever, my consigliere.

  Many thanks to Katrin Kroll from the Eggers Agency, who immediately believed in the novel and gave me a great deal of encouragement. And to Thomas Halupczok, my editor, whose motto could be: ‘The good is the enemy of the better’; a great man. It’s reassuring to know you have a team like Suhrkamp’s behind you. If the company didn’t exist, we’d have to found it. The same applies to Jonathan Landgrebe, whose words helped me at a difficult time.

  The dedication reveals my wife’s contribution to the success of this book. She always supports me in everything and is my first reader. Her keen eye improved a lot of things. I would never part with anything that she doesn’t think is good. May that day never come.

  About Andreas Pflüger

  ANDREAS PFLÜGER is a German screenwriter and author. He has written a number of episodes of the hugely popular German police procedural Tatort. Into The Dark is published in eight languages.

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  An Invitation from the Publisher

  We hope you enjoyed this book. We are an independent publisher dedicated to discovering brilliant books, new authors and great storytelling. Please join us at www.headofzeus.com and become part of our community of book-lovers.

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  First published in Germany as Endgültig in 2016 by Suhrkamp Verlag

  This English translation first published in 2017 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin, 2016

  Translation © Shaun Whiteside, 2017

  The moral right of Andreas Pfluger to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  The moral right of Shaun Whiteside to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (E) 9781786690913

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