The Carnival Master jf-4

by Craig Russell

  ‘So what’s your point?’ Scholz emerged from the kitchen and handed Fabel his coffee.

  ‘These women had the wrong shape for today. They might have wanted to do something about it.’ Fabel started to rummage through the files.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Scholz.

  ‘Gym memberships, diet clubs… any hint that they were considering cosmetic surgery… liposuction, that kind of thing.’

  ‘But there was nothing really wrong with them…’ Scholz joined the search. ‘I mean, their shapes weren’t that unusually heavy around the backside.’

  ‘You would be amazed at what lengths women are prepared to go to over the slightest flaw.’

  Ten minutes later they had assembled a selection of options, all for Sabine Jordanski. She went to a private gym twice a week, took regular beauty treatments at the salon, went swimming every Wednesday when she had the afternoon off. There was nothing at all for Melissa Schenker.

  ‘There has to be something.’ Fabel ran his hands through his hair.

  ‘Maybe Melissa Schenker wasn’t so obsessed with her shape,’ said Scholz. ‘She spent her life in her own little electronic universe where what she looked like didn’t matter. A world without form.’

  ‘Okay.’ Fabel read more of Melissa’s file. ‘What’s this… The Lords of Misrule?’

  ‘Her biggest hit. A role-playing computer game she developed. Very complicated. Apparently she was working on a sequel to it when she died.’

  There was an image of the game’s cover. Three mythological types – a warrior, a priestess and some kind of warlock – stood on a mountain, a fantasy landscape swirling around them.

  ‘ The Lords of Misrule…’ Fabel read the English title aloud again. ‘The world turned upside down. The Days of Chaos. The Fool Made King. It’s all very Karneval. Maybe this is where our connection lies. Melissa spent so much of her time in an electronic world, maybe that’s where she crossed paths with our killer and Sabine Jordanski.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  6-9 February

  1.

  Ansgar lay in Ekatherina’s bed and watched her sleep contentedly. Their lovemaking had been dramatic, violent, almost frenzied. Ekatherina had clearly taken it as the release of Ansgar’s pent-up passion for her. She was, of course, in part correct: he had been totally consumed by her flesh and had stood breathless before her nakedness, but what she hadn’t realised was that it had been only part of his passion that had been released.

  The sex had been good for him. Or at least as good as any normal sexual activity could be for him. But, as he lay in the half-dark, looking at the shadowy sweep of Ekatherina’s hip, he felt the frustration of someone who had enjoyed an appetising starter yet had been denied the main course. But that first step had been taken. They were now intimate. Perhaps, just perhaps, in time he might be able to fulfil his darkest fantasy with her.

  It was Sunday morning and Ansgar’s day off. Ekatherina left for her shift. She told him he could spend the day in her apartment and they would have Sunday night together. When she returned after her shift, tired, flushed from the heat of the kitchen and her skin shiny with sweat, Ekatherina said she would shower before coming to bed. Ansgar told her not to bother and the passion of the night before returned, redoubled.

  They breakfasted the next morning on orange juice, coffee and bread rolls filled with a meat paste that Ekatherina said had come all the way from Ukraine. Sitting there at Ekatherina’s breakfast table, Ansgar felt suddenly melancholy. He saw himself as if through the window of the flat: sitting with a pretty girl several years his junior, breakfasting together like a normal contented couple. What pained him most was the fact that at that exact moment he was contented.

  They agreed to arrive separately at work and to keep their daytime relationship professional, but Ansgar could tell that Ekatherina was going to have very great difficulty in keeping this new romance to herself. He kissed her goodbye and headed up to the wholesalers on An der Munze to pick up some stuff they were low on in the restaurant.

  The gloom of the last few days had lifted and the winter sun hung bright and low in the sky. Ansgar felt good. It seemed impossible for the darkness within him to surface into the brightness of the day, added to which he had, for the first time in years, a sense of normality. Of living a life as others lived theirs.

  Ansgar took a taxi across the Zoobrucke and picked up his car. He was very fussy about where he sourced his meat for the restaurant and never bought main ingredients from the wholesalers, but he did stock up on everything else there. It was handy for the restaurant and they always delivered his orders accurately and on time, which was important to Ansgar and his unyielding desire for order in his kitchen.

  He took a flatbed trolley and loaded it up with cleaning materials, hand-wash, surface-wipes and other non-food items for the wholesalers to deliver. Then he headed for the drinks section. Ansgar always bought his wine directly from vintners along the Rhine and from several small vineyards in France, but he used the wholesalers to stock up on beers and spirits.

  He saw her. He just happened to glance into the food section and she was there. He froze for a second, then shrank back behind one of the ceiling-high stacks of shelves. She hadn’t spotted him. Ansgar had only caught the briefest glimpse, but there was no doubt it was her. He recognised the bright blonde hair, the intense red lipstick, the deep tan even in February. Most of all he recognised her from her build: broad-shouldered and dense, as she had effortlessly pushed a heavily laden cart towards the checkout.

  Another trade customer muttered complainingly behind Ansgar, who responded by pulling his trolley closer into the shelves and allowing them to pass. His heart pounded. He had always dreaded this moment. He had hoped it would never come. Yet he thrilled at the thought. He had hoped that she had left Cologne in the time since he had last encountered her. It had been so long ago. And in total the experience had lasted no more than a few minutes. But she had seen. She had seen his true nature.

  2.

  Maria found that now when she woke up each morning she felt disconnected from herself; from reality. It frightened her to feel that she was watching herself as if she were a character in a film, or some distant figure in a landscape. She knew she wasn’t well, and not like before. It was as if something was broken inside her. It frightened her to think that she was now capable of almost anything; that she was more or less prepared to do all that the Ukrainians asked of her. Yet something held her back.

  Maria had been with them for three days now. They met each morning, early, at the small former meat-packing plant which Buslenko had rented in the Raderberg area of the city. Maria continued to spend her nights at the cheap hotel and drove down each morning. Something warned her to keep the location of Liese’s apartment secret and she decided not to move into it for a few days. Where Buslenko and Sarapenko slept was unknown to Maria, and she didn’t ask. For a two-man operation, the Ukrainians seemed extremely well equipped. It highlighted to Maria how inept her attempts and how half-baked her planning had been. Buslenko and Sarapenko had brought masses of electronic equipment, as well as two weapons bags. Maria reckoned that her involvement in the illegal movement of guns and military hardware into Germany was in itself enough to guarantee her a prison term.

  The strange thing was that she was now physically stronger than she had been for months. Since she had started to eat normally again, her frame had begun to fill out and her limbs no longer felt leaden. Her resolve, like her hunger, had returned. The way to make up for Slavko’s death was to kill Vitrenko. The way to make up for everything was to kill Vitrenko.

  ‘We’ve set up twenty-four-hour surveillance on Molokov,’ Buslenko explained.

  ‘How? There’s only the two… the three of us…’

  ‘Molokov’s got a place out in Cologne’s leafy suburbs, between Lindenthal and Braunsfeld. It’s a huge villa that’s supposed to be owned by a Russian importer-exporter called Bogdanov. Whether he exists or is just an
alias for Molokov or Vitrenko we don’t know. We have set up remote cameras outside his villa – it’s on the edge of the park and the street is lined with trees so it wasn’t too hard.’ Buslenko grinned. ‘I worked for the City of Cologne’s Parks Department for a day. Anyway, they’re safe and undetectable but not as close as we’d like. Ideally, I’d like to get a listening device or camera into his place, but that’s impossible.’

  Olga Sarapenko had helped Buslenko set up a bank of three monitors. She tuned them in and different views of a large modern villa appeared on the screens. Olga adjusted the zoom and focus on each with a joystick.

  ‘Even if we could get a device inside,’ continued Buslenko, ‘it’s a safe bet that Molokov has his house electronically swept every couple of days.’ Buslenko laughed bitterly. ‘That’s the problem with being on our side of the fence. Molokov’s electronic hardware isn’t restricted by government budgets. I’ll bet his kit is far superior to ours.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Maria, ‘I didn’t come to Cologne for Molokov.’

  ‘Believe me, Maria, nor did we.’

  ‘What can I contribute here?’ she asked, with a sigh. ‘Why did you make yourselves known to me? God knows there was no way I was going to get anywhere near Vitrenko. It would probably have been easier and more secure for you to operate invisibly. I really don’t see what I can bring to the table.’

  ‘We left three dead behind us in Ukraine,’ said Olga Sarapenko. ‘What you mean to us is an extra pair of eyes. And an extra gun if we need it.’

  ‘But your true value to us, Maria,’ said Buslenko, ‘is the connection you offer. The potential access to intelligence that we can’t get at ourselves. There’s a dossier on Vitrenko. In fact there are two, but one of them, the more comprehensive one, is held by your Federal Crime Bureau on a secure computer. Hard copies are on very restricted circulation. The Federal Crime Bureau task force dedicated to Vitrenko obviously has access to inside information. We only had sight of the Ukrainian version which misses out key intelligence.’

  ‘Vasyl Vitrenko is obsessive about security.’ Olga Sarapenko took over. ‘He is driven mad by the idea that he can’t get at the dossier. He suspects that the informer is on Molokov’s side of the operation, maybe even Molokov himself. But he can’t prove it. We want you to try to get us a copy of the Vitrenko Dossier. The full one. If we can identify the informer, we can pressure him into setting Vitrenko up. It gives us someone on the inside whose survival would depend on us taking Vitrenko out of the picture.’

  ‘But I don’t have access to the Vitrenko Dossier. In fact I’m probably the last person they’d allow to see it.’

  ‘But you have access codes and passwords for the BKA computer system,’ said Buslenko. ‘That would be a starting point. It’s not practical to think that we can carry out a complex mission like this in just a few days. It could be that the best thing for you to do is to go back to Hamburg in a few weeks and ideally resume your duties with the Murder Commission. The information you can obtain for us is of much more value to us than your presence here,’ Buslenko explained.

  ‘I’m here to see this through. To see Vitrenko get what he deserves,’ Maria said defiantly. She was willing to do almost anything to bring down Vitrenko, but Buslenko was asking her to access government files on behalf of a foreign military unit operating illegally in the Federal Republic. It would be a betrayal of her office. It would probably be espionage.

  ‘I understand your hunger for revenge,’ Buslenko explained. ‘But this is not a Hollywood western. Your value to us is to pass on to us everything that the German authorities know about Vitrenko’s operation. I’m sure you’ll find a way,’ Buslenko said, not unkindly. ‘In the meantime, you may stay here with us and help us set up our surveillance of Molokov.’

  Maria took her shifts watching the monitors, logging the activities: who visited the Molokov villa, when they arrived, when they left, the licence numbers of the cars that came and went. Always waiting for the arrival of anyone who could have been Vitrenko. Although she refused to supply the Ukrainians with the access codes they needed, she did share what intelligence she had been able to gather. She felt that this, in some way, could be regarded as the legitimate exchange of information between law-enforcement agencies.

  Their situation, Buslenko explained, was like two hunters in the forest at the same time. It was up to Buslenko, Sarapenko and Maria to make sure they got to the game before the BKA Federal Crime Bureau, and without detection. All he wanted the access codes for was to pinpoint where the other hunter lay hidden in the forest. Maria knew it was only a matter of time before Buslenko became more insistent.

  It was on the third day of sitting at the monitors that Maria noticed a huge black Lexus pull up at the villa’s gates. It was admitted immediately. Buslenko’s surveillance camera was set up so far from the house that it was difficult to see clearly the men who got out of the vehicle. But the final figure sent a chill through Maria.

  ‘Olga!’

  Sarapenko ran over. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Him…’ Maria felt her throat tighten, as if the name would choke her if she said it out loud. ‘It’s him.’

  ‘How can you tell? It’s just a shape from this distance.’

  ‘That’s him, I know it. The last time I saw him he was just a shape in the distance, like now, only then he was running across a field. Where’s Buslenko?’

  ‘He’s collecting some stuff. Our contact here… it’s best if you don’t know.’

  ‘Get hold of him on his cellphone. Tell him we’ve found our target and he is in Molokov’s place right now.’ Maria watched the figure on the monitor. At last. At last she had him in her sights. It gave her an enormous sense of power to know that she was watching him and he was unaware of her observation. The dark, indistinct figure whose identity Maria knew with absolute certainty turned to speak to one of his heavies, then disappeared into the villa.

  Maria watched with a cold, hard expression of violent hatred as Vasyl Vitrenko disappeared from view.

  ‘Now,’ she said in a voice not much louder than a whisper. ‘Now I’ve got you.’

  3.

  The television flickered mutely in the corner of the hotel room. A row of Funkenmariechen dancing girls in red-and-white microskirted versions of eighteenth-century Prussian military uniforms, complete with tri-cornered hats, performed a clumpily synchronised chorus-line high kick to unheard music. In the background the Elferrat, the Karneval Council of Eleven, presided with forced jollity over the proceedings. Karneval was beginning to build up to its Rose Monday climax. Fabel lay on his hotel bed, gazed blankly at the screen and reflected on the fact that the Karneval Cannibal too was probably building up for showtime on Women’s Karneval Night. Fabel had just finished talking to Susanne on the phone; it hadn’t gone well. After he had been unable to give her a clear idea about when he’d be back in Hamburg, they had fallen into a silence. Susanne had ended it by saying she would talk to him whenever he got back and had then hung up.

  He stared at the silent TV, not taking in the grinning dancing girls who sidestepped their way in unison off the stage and were replaced by a man dressed in a barrel who delivered a comic monologue.

  Fabel switched on his bedside lamp and picked up the file on Vera Reinartz, the girl who had been beaten and raped on Women’s Karneval Night in 1999. There was a photograph of Vera, taken with a couple of fellow medical students. She was a smallish, mousy-haired girl but pretty. She stood uncertainly at the edge of the group, clearly uncomfortable at having her photograph taken. The second photograph had been taken on a sunny day in a park or garden. Her light-coloured summer dress revealed her figure: slim but slightly pear-shaped with a fleshiness around the hips. Just like the Karneval Cannibal’s victims. Again, she had the look of someone who didn’t like to be the focus of attention.

  Fabel went through Vera’s statement, doctors’ reports and the stark hospital photographs, the vividness of her bruises and the rawness of the ab
rasions and cuts on her face and neck emphasised by the severe lighting. Fabel couldn’t recognise the swollen mass of bruised flesh as the girl in the earlier photographs. There were images of the wounds on her body. Including bite marks. Bite marks were by no mean unusual in rape cases, but Fabel felt that Scholz had been far too dismissive of a potential link with the murders. Tansu Bakrac clearly struggled to assert herself in the shadow of Scholz’s seemingly relaxed but highly personal leadership.

  Again Fabel reflected on the unknown city outside his hotel window, with its strange customs, its Karneval, its dancing girls and costumed clowns. Its killer stalking women on the one night of the year when they were supposed to be free of male tyranny. And Maria, putting herself in mortal danger by stumbling around in the dark. And that made him think about his appointment. The one he had made for the next day. The one Scholz mustn’t know about.

  Tansu had added a lot of background information on Vera Reinartz. She had been bright; brighter than her peers and destined for a significant career in medicine. She had the kind of intellect that tended to be steered into specialism or research. She had had boyfriends but the medical examination had confirmed her own statement that she had been a virgin. Where are you now, Vera? Fabel thought to himself as he read. How could you just disappear?

  Fabel breakfasted well. He had muesli with fruit and yoghurt, a couple of bread rolls with Leberwurst and a soft-boiled egg with fruit juice and coffee. He left the hotel early but did not head for the Police Presidium. It was the first opportunity Fabel had had since he had arrived in Cologne: Scholz had to go to a Karneval police committee meeting that would go on all morning. To start with, Fabel had assumed it was a strategy meeting to discuss the massive but delicate task of policing Cologne’s Karneval.