‘You okay?’ Bartz frowned with what Fabel thought was overdone concern. Bartz was the same age as Fabel. They had grown up in Norddeich in East Friesland together, gone to school together. Back then Bartz had been a gangly awkward youth with a bad complexion. Now his skin was bronzed, even in midwinter Hamburg, and his awkwardness had been transformed into urbane sophistication. To start with, Fabel had seen Bartz through childhood’s eyes: recognising the similarities with the boy he’d befriended. But it had quickly become clear to Fabel that the Roland Bartz of today was a different person from Bartz the schoolboy. Fabel knew that Bartz had become a multi-millionaire, but it had only been since their chance encounter and Bartz’s offer of a job – and a way out of the Murder Commission – that Fabel had discovered just how vast his schoolfriend’s wealth was. And now he was getting to know the businessman. Fabel preferred the awkward, spotty youth of his memory.
‘I’m fine,’ said Fabel unconvincingly. ‘Just been a tough day.’
‘Oh?’
Fabel related brief details of his encounter with Georg Aichinger, without giving any information that the press wouldn’t already have by then.
‘God…’ Bartz shook his head in disbelief. ‘Not me, Jan. I could never do that job in a million years. You’re well out of it. But sometimes, to be honest, I don’t know if you feel that way.’
‘I do, Roland. I really do. When I was there today there was a young MEK trooper with me. Just itching to squeeze off a few rounds. You could almost smell the testosterone and gun oil in the air.’ Fabel shook his head. ‘It’s not that I blame him. He’s just a product of the times. What police work’s become. It’s time I got out.’
The restaurant was in Ovelgonne and its vast picture windows looked out onto the Elbe. Fabel paused to watch as a massive container ship drifted silently past with unexpected grace. He had been here before with Susanne, on special occasions. The prices made it a special-occasion kind of place, but clearly not for Bartz and his expense account. It had been here that Fabel had had the chance encounter with Bartz that had led to his dramatic decision to change career.
‘It’s time for me to be someone else,’ he said at last.
‘I have to say, Jan,’ said Bartz, ‘you still don’t sound one hundred per cent convinced that you’re making the right move.’
‘Don’t I? Sorry. Being a policeman’s been my life for so long. I’m just adjusting to the idea of putting it all behind me. It is a big step, but I’m ready for it.’
‘I hope you are, Jan. What I’m offering is no sinecure. Admittedly it doesn’t involve the stress or trauma of being a murder detective but I assure you it’s just as demanding… just in a different way. It needs someone with your intelligence and education. Most of all someone with your sense of people. I just worry that you’re having second thoughts.’
‘No second thoughts.’ Fabel hid the lie behind a smile.
‘There’s one thing about the job – a benefit we haven’t discussed – that you should think about.’
‘Oh?’
‘What do you think being an international sales director for a software company means to people? I mean when you meet them at a party or a wedding or in a bar and they ask what you do. You know what it means?’
Fabel shrugged. Bartz paused to take a sip of wine.
‘It means nothing. It’s your job: it’s not you. It doesn’t define you. And people don’t have an opinion about it. But if you say you’re a policeman everyone has an opinion. Say you’re a policeman and a whole lot of prejudices and expectations fall instantly into place. And they don’t just see it as what you do, they see it as what you are. I’m offering you a way out of that, Jan. A chance to be yourself.’
At that moment the waiter arrived with their main courses.
‘Ah…’ Bartz smiled appreciatively. ‘Now that the food’s arrived, we can talk about your future… not your past. Eating and business, Jan. You can’t separate them. We think we’ve come so far, that we’re so much more sophisticated than our ancestors. But there’s still some kind of fundamental intimacy that comes from sharing a meal, don’t you think?’ Fabel smiled. He couldn’t remember Bartz talking so much as a boy. ‘Think of all of the alliances forged, all of the deals done across the centuries, all discussed, bartered and sealed over feasts. It’s something you’ll have to get used to, Jan. You’ll carry out most of your important negotiating across a dining table.’
They spent the rest of the meal discussing a life that somehow Fabel still couldn’t see himself fitting into: a world of travel and meetings, of conferences and entertaining. And, for some reason, he couldn’t get Georg Aichinger’s desperate tirade against the futility of his life out of his head.
3.
Leave it, he thought to himself. Let it lie.
It had still been reasonably early by the time Fabel got home. Bartz had wanted to spend more time together at the bar after the meal, but Fabel explained that he had an early start in the morning. He had a report to write out on the Aichinger incident. Bartz had sighed and said, ‘Never mind…’ but had skilfully communicated a growing impatience with his soon-to-be international sales director.
Susanne had come over to Fabel’s place after work. He hadn’t seen her all that day: she hadn’t been in the Presidium but had instead been working at the psychiatric department of the Institute for Legal Medicine in Eppendorf. He poured them both a glass of wine while he waited for her to come out of the shower. He gazed out of the tall window that looked out over the Alsterpark and the dark glittering shield of the Alster lake beyond it. He loved his apartment. He had landed it through bad luck and good timing: his marriage had collapsed just as the Hamburg property market had hit an all-time low. It had still been a stretch on his Principal Chief Commissar’s salary, but it had been worth it. It had, however, been very much a place for one. His personal and undivided space. Now, with his change of career, had come another change: the decision that he and Susanne should sell their respective apartments, find somewhere new and move in together. Another decision that had seemed so clear at the time yet now lay shrouded in doubt.
Fabel watched the distant moving twinkle of car headlights along the Schone Aussicht on the distant shore of the Alster. He thought of his meal with Bartz. Of his future. Of the file that lay dumped on the coffee table yet filled the room with its presence. If I pick it up, he thought, I’ll be sucked into it all again. Leave it. Let it lie.
Susanne came into the room and Fabel placed a Hamburger Morgenpost on top of the file. He turned and smiled. Susanne was beautiful. Smart. Sexy. Her long thick hair was wet and hung over the shoulders of her white towelling bathrobe in glossy black kinks. She sat down on the sofa and he handed the glass of wine to her.
‘Tired?’ he asked, sitting down beside her on the sofa.
‘No. Not really.’ She smiled languidly.
‘Hungry?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said and pulled him towards her, allowing the bathrobe to fall open.
4.
Timo had found the book dumped in a skip near the university, behind a house that was being renovated. It was an academic tome, an old copy, and its cover still felt gritty from the skip beneath Timo’s fingertips, but it was similar to the one he used to have. The one he had sold along with so many of his other belongings. He had first read it while he had still been studying philosophy at Hamburg University. It was Emile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method: a treatise on social order; on the need for structures and forms to guide behaviour. Durkheim was considered the father of sociology, but Timo thought with irony how much more appropriate it would have been, given his current situation, if it had been Durkheim’s later work, On the Normality of Crime, that he had uncovered.
Timo shivered in his inadequate jacket and leaned against the wall, gazing across at the store. It was getting dark and the lights in the store came on, turning the windows into warm embers in the January evening. Timo tried to read another page, but the light had faded t
oo much. He sighed. The book had been a piece of his past that had fallen unexpectedly and unbidden into his present. It pained him to look at it: a reminder of a time when he had had hope, when his mind had been sharp and clear and organised. A time before. As if to snap him back to the reality of his current life, the gnawing pain in his gut intensified and the shivers that convulsed his body were not caused by the cold evening alone. He closed the book. He couldn’t take it with him, but he didn’t want to let it go. He didn’t want to let his past go.
Max Weber, Ferdinand Tonnies and Emile Durkheim had provided the focus for Timo’s studies. Max Weber’s State Monopoly on Physical Force had been the basis for his thesis. Or at least the thesis he had started.
There were too many customers in the store. He’d have to wait. The cold seemed to penetrate his flesh and chill his bones. Weber’s hypothesis was that only the organs of state, the police and the army, should be permitted to use physical force; that otherwise anarchy reigned and the state was unsustainable. Timo had planned to posit, in his thesis, that such a monopoly could also be destructive to the state, as in the case of the Nazis.
A man in a business suit left the store, talking into his cellphone, followed by an older couple. The ache and the craving that burned in Timo’s gut intensified. He slipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket and closed his fingers around the chill, hard steel.
Timo had also planned his thesis to balance this argument with a discussion of the United States, where the Constitution expressly allowed the citizen to bear arms, and therefore the means of independent physical force; consequently denying the state a monopoly on it. Yet the US existed and thrived as a nation.
He looked across the street. A car pulled up and a woman trotted into the store. She re-emerged a few moments later with a carrier bag and drove off. Timo felt a pang of something other than his body’s craving. It was his grief, his mourning of his past-tense self: the disciplined, clear-eyed, organised philosophy student with the world at his feet. But that had been then. Before the drugs.
Timo stepped out of the shadow of the corner, his thin shoulders hunched against the cold, and made his way across to the store, his fingers closing around the gun in his pocket.
5.
After they had made love, Fabel and Susanne sat in the living room of his flat and looked out over the dark water of the Alster and the glittering reflections that played on it. Susanne leaned her head on Fabel’s shoulder and he did his best to disguise the fact that for some reason he didn’t want her there. The feeling surprised him. He felt restless and irritable and had, for a moment, an almost irresistible urge to get into his car and drive out of the city, out of Hamburg, out of Germany. He’d had the feeling before, but he had always put it down to his work; an urge to put the horror and stress of it all as far from him as he could. But wasn’t that exactly what he had achieved? He had only a few weeks left to go and his escape would be complete. So why did he feel so panicky? And why was it, when he was supposed to be relishing a life free of murder, that he could not shake the call of the file he had half-hidden under the copy of the Morgenpost?
‘How was dinner with Roland?’ asked Susanne.
‘Wordy. Bartz likes to chat. I don’t know if he’s that keen on listening but, boy, can he talk.’
‘I thought you liked him.’ There was an edge to Susanne’s voice. Fabel had learned to be careful when talking about his new career with her: recently, any lack of conviction in his tone had been enough to start an argument.
‘I do. I mean, I did when he was a kid. But people change. Roland Bartz is a very different person now. But he’s okay. Just a bit full of himself.’
‘He’s an entrepreneur. It goes with the territory,’ said Susanne. ‘His company wouldn’t be so successful – and he couldn’t offer you the salary he’s offering – if he was riddled with self-doubt. Anyway, you don’t have to love the guy to work with him.’
‘There’s not a problem,’ said Fabel. ‘Honestly. And don’t worry, I’m not having second thoughts about leaving the Polizei Hamburg. I’ve had a bellyful.’ He took a long sip of Pinot Grigio, leaned back against the sofa and closed his eyes. The picture of sad, desperate, insane Georg Aichinger filled his mind. The same image that had haunted him throughout his dinner with Bartz.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Susanne in response to his sigh.
‘I can’t stop thinking about Aichinger. All that crap he talked before he shot himself. About waking up and realising that he wasn’t real. What the hell was all that about?’
‘Depersonalisation. We all get it to a degree at some point. Mainly through stress or overtiredness. In Aichinger’s case, it could be that he was going through something more profound. Maybe even a full-blown dissociative fugue.’
‘I thought that was when people lose their memory. Wake up in a new town with a new identity or lack or identity.’
‘It can be, sometimes. People who suffer a great trauma can go into a dissociative fugue. To forget the bad stuff they dump their entire memory. Without a memory you can’t remember who you are. You adopt a new identity without the biography of your real one.’
‘But Aichinger hadn’t lost his memory.’
‘No. But if he hadn’t killed himself he might have walked out of that door and disappeared. Not just from the world but from himself.’
‘God knows there have been times when I’ve wished I could have disappeared from myself. Standing in front of Aichinger while he blew his brains out was one.’ Fabel smiled bitterly.
‘Well, you are, in a way. As soon as you walk out of the Presidium for the last time and put police work behind you.’
‘Yeah…’ Fabel took another sip of wine. ‘And leave it all to the likes of Breidenbach.’
‘Who?’
‘The new breed.’ Fabel sipped his wine.
6.
Stefan pulled up outside the all-night convenience store attached to the petrol station. He’d been at work until an hour ago. Now he felt good: freshly shaved and showered; wearing a brand-new shirt and his best cologne. He had phoned Lisa and she had agreed he could come and stay the night. This was the only store he knew that stayed open this late and it always had a good range of wines.
He had been seeing Lisa for a couple of months now. She was a great girl. A good laugh. Smart, and pretty with it. They had been drifting along in a casual manner and he genuinely had fun in her company, but Stefan was beginning to think that Lisa had ideas of it becoming a more serious relationship. He didn’t want that. Or at least he thought he didn’t want it. Things were fine as they were and he wasn’t ready to get serious with anyone. Although sometimes the idea didn’t seem so bad. But the fact was that, at the moment, the only thing Stefan had time to be serious about was his career. He had tried to explain to Lisa how important being a policeman was to him. He was up for his Commissar’s exams in a couple of months and he had to get his head down to do some serious study. Not tonight. Tonight was going to be fun. But first he had to pick up the wine.
Stefan knew there was something wrong the instant he walked through the door.
The door chime drew the attention of the two men who were the only others in the store. A thin man with long, lank hair and dirty-looking clothes stood in front of the counter; the middle-aged Turk who ran the store was behind it. The two men were still. Too still, too tense. The young man turned suddenly to face Stefan. Stefan could see the fear in his eyes, the jerky motion as he swung his arm around to point his gun at him. Stefan held his hands away from his body.
‘Easy…’ he said. Stefan’s training kicked in and he did a threat analysis. He took in as much as he could in as short a time as he could. The gun was an early Walther P8. Practically an antique. No, the barrel was too short for a P8: it was a P4, the type used by the Hamburg police after the war. Still, it was old and it didn’t look cared for. Stefan wasn’t entirely sure that it would be in working order, but it was impossible to tell for certain. ‘Just keep calm,’ h
e said, realising that the young man with the wild eyes and unwashed hair was the most frightened person in the room. Stefan thought back to the way Principal Chief Commissar Fabel had handled the situation in Jenfeld. ‘Just take it easy.’ Stefan saw the shake in the gunman’s arm. The red rims to the wild eyes. A junkie. Desperate. Frightened. And Stefan’s training told him a scared man with a gun is infinitely more dangerous than an angry man with a gun. Stefan did a mental calculation of the chances of the gun jamming and, if it did go off, of the junkie missing his target.
‘Stay where you are!’ the junkie shouted at Stefan.
‘I’m not moving,’ said Stefan calmly.
‘You…’ the junkie called over to the Turkish shopkeeper. ‘Fill a carrier bag with the money from the till.’
The Turk exchanged a look with Stefan. He had served Stefan many times before and knew that he was a policeman. The Turk took what money there was in the till and put it in the bag. The junkie reached over with his free hand without taking his aim off Stefan.
‘Okay. Get out of the way. I’m leaving.’ The junkie tried to inject as much authority as possible into the statement.
‘I can’t let you do that…’ Stefan said quietly.
‘What the fuck do you mean? Get the fuck out of my way.’
‘I can’t do that,’ repeated Stefan. ‘I’m a police officer. I don’t care about the money. I don’t even care about you getting away. But I can’t let you leave with that gun. I can’t let you be a danger to the public.’
‘You’re a Bulle?’ The junkie looked even more agitated. His shake grew worse. ‘A fucking cop?’ He snapped his aim from Stefan to the Turkish shop owner. ‘What about this member of the public? What if I fucking kill him right now because you won’t get out of my way?’
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