The Carnival Master jf-4

by Craig Russell

  Something, someone passed across the window. Tansu gave a small laugh. She was imagining things. She could have sworn it had been… No, that was mad. The light went out. Tansu picked up her radio. No. There was nothing to report. What she had thought she had seen didn’t make sense. Andrea was probably just turning in, hoping to put Women’s Karneval Night behind her. Tansu decided to check it out anyway.

  The street was still thronging with people and Tansu dodged round clumps of revellers to reach the entry of Andrea’s apartment building. She buzzed up and waited a minute for a reply that didn’t come. She was just about to buzz again when a group of partygoers came down the stairs. Tansu caught the door before it swung shut behind them and made her way up the stairwell.

  Tansu knocked on the door. No answer. She knocked louder.

  ‘Andrea!’ she called through the closed door. ‘Andrea! It’s Commissar Bakrac from the Criminal Police. Let me in!’

  Again no response, but this time Tansu heard sounds from inside the apartment. Her heart began to pound: what if she had really seen what she thought she’d seen at the window? She unholstered her service automatic, clicked off the safety and held it pointed to the ceiling. ‘Andrea… I think you are in danger. I’m coming in.’ Tansu stepped back and took a deep breath. She swung her boot at the door. Then again. The lock splintered and the door flew open. She could see along the apartment’s hall but the rooms off it lay in darkness. She debated about taking precious seconds to call for back-up. But Andrea could be dead by then. She edged along the hall, her back pressed against the wall. She knocked a hanging photograph from its hook and it crashed onto the floor. Tansu glanced down and saw that it was a picture of a young woman: pretty, with long brownish hair and a floaty summer dress. Vera, before she had made a mess of her body with weightlifting and steroids. Before she had become Andrea. Before that bastard Ludeke had screwed her up.

  ‘Andrea?’ Tansu swung into the door frame of the first room, sweeping the darkness with her gun. Nothing. But she had heard Andrea in the apartment. She had heard someone. She stepped quickly back into the hall. The door to the next room was closed. She reached forward for the handle, but the door swung suddenly open and a figure took two strides into the hall and slammed straight into Tansu. The Clown’s sudden appearance stunned her for the fraction of a second it took him to grab the wrist of her gun hand. She staggered back but the Clown’s grip remained vice-tight. He slammed her hand hard against the door jamb again and again until her grip yielded and her gun clattered to the floor. Tansu swung her free fist at the Clown’s painted head but he blocked it with a rock-hard forearm. She struggled fruitlessly to free her other hand. The Clown snatched her by the throat and rammed her against the wall with terrific force. The impact winded Tansu and she struggled to refill her airways. The Clown slammed his fist into her belly, just below the diaphragm, robbing her of the meagre air she had clawed back into her protesting lungs.

  The Clown let go of her throat for a moment and Tansu felt something being looped around her neck. And as he tightened the ligature, all Tansu could do was stare into his face.

  His grotesque clown face.

  4.

  Fabel and Scholz ran along the corridor and took the lift to the car pool.

  ‘It’s going to be like driving through sludge,’ explained Scholz. ‘We’ll take one of the big MEK vans and go with lights and sirens. Hopefully the Red Sea’ll part for us.’ Scholz tried again to raise Tansu. Nothing. ‘There are units in the area on their way as well. You knew, didn’t you? How did you know?’

  ‘About Ansgar? The porn was all wrong. There are two types of vorarephile – the ones who fantasise about eating another human being and the ones who fantasise about being eaten. Those are much more common. All the DVDs we seized from Hoeffer’s place were about women eating men. And now we have the connection between the rape and the murders. Not a link. Cause and effect. I just hope we get there in time…’

  5.

  Tansu punched and kicked at her attacker, but she knew that her strength was failing. She focused all her concentration, all her effort into one decisive action. She jabbed the straightened fingers of her free hand into the Clown’s eye. He clutched his eye and the pressure around her throat eased. She swung her foot and hit the clown in the belly. He staggered back and Tansu aimed a kick at his groin but caught the top of his thigh. She tore the ligature from her neck. A man’s tie, just as she’d expected. She threw herself along the hall’s floor and reached for where her gun had fallen. Suddenly she felt as if the building had collapsed on her and realised that the Clown had thrown himself onto her back, winding her for a second time. He spun her round and clasped his hands around her throat. But he didn’t squeeze. Instead he yielded to the pressure of the muzzle of Tansu’s service automatic, jammed into the flesh beneath his jaw.

  ‘Just give me a fucking excuse,’ Tansu said through tight-clenched teeth. ‘After what you’ve done to all those women. Where’s Andrea?’

  There was the sound of boots running up the stairs and the door of the apartment flew open. Uniformed officers poured into the cramped hall and grabbed the Clown, forcing him to the floor and handcuffing his hands behind his back.

  Tansu stood up and composed herself. ‘I asked you, where is Andrea?’

  ‘That is Andrea…’ Tansu turned to see Fabel and Scholz in the hall. She looked down at the Clown. The male physique. The hard-set jaw.

  ‘I don’t believe it…’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Scholz. ‘That’s why we didn’t find any semen at the murder scenes.’

  ‘She killed all those women?’

  ‘All of them. But the first woman she killed was herself. Vera Reinartz.’

  They stood back as the uniformed officers hauled Andrea to her feet. She stared at them with empty eyes, the only expression her painted smile. The officers led her out of the flat.

  ‘That was the connection between the rape and the murders. Like I said to Benni: cause and effect. Ludeke raped Andrea and subjected her to his perversion, biting her repeatedly. She hated herself, or rather herself as Vera, and she mimicked Ludeke’s attack on her. Except she took it further. She took flesh from each victim and ate it. A little extra twist she picked up after her encounter with Ansgar Hoeffer.’

  ‘It was Jan who figured it out,’ said Scholz. ‘We came rushing to your rescue, but from what I hear you didn’t need rescuing.’

  ‘It was a close call,’ said Tansu, rubbing her throat.

  ‘You need to see a doctor?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘No – I need to see a barman. But I suppose we’ll have to get some paperwork sorted out first.’

  6.

  The bar was small, bustling and noisy. It was exactly what Fabel needed. It was three in the morning and the party was still in full swing. Scholz, Fabel and Tansu had to lean forward and shout to be heard above the noise.

  Andrea had been processed and was in the cells. Scholz had arranged for a psychiatric assessment to be done as soon as possible. Which wasn’t going to be the following day. Even psychiatrists took time off to go insane during Karneval, apparently. Fabel and Scholz explained to Tansu about the wound to Ansgar’s buttock and his sexual compulsion to be eaten; how A la Carte, with its reputation for catering for clients’ more unusual needs had recruited Andrea and how Ansgar had become a client for one disfiguring night.

  Now Andrea sat in her cell silent, answering no questions, responding to nothing. Fabel thought it was possible that maybe she didn’t even know what she had done. They had found a diary in her apartment: the usual egomaniacal ravings, but they suggested that the Clown saw himself as male, and as totally distinct from Andrea’s personality. Just as Andrea had forced her third-person, past-tense existence as Vera Reinartz from her identity.

  ‘What, multiple personality?’ asked Tansu. ‘I thought that was all fake.’

  ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder is the proper name for it,’ said Fabel. ‘And the Americans are great
believers in it. But you’re right, it’s not accepted to the same extent by psychiatrists outside the US. My guess is, though, that Andrea is going to try to use it as a defence to avoid prison. Maybe the dumb act in the cells is exactly that, an act.’

  They sat at a corner of the bar and Fabel found his Stange glass filled regularly with Kolsch beer without being asked. He grinned at the raucous songs in a dialect he didn’t understand and he realised, joyfully, that he was very probably drunk. Tansu was next to him at the bar and every time she leaned into him to make herself heard he could feel the warmth of her body.

  ‘Benni said you had Andrea sussed,’ said Tansu. ‘How?’

  ‘A combination of things. Like what you said about the Kolsch Virgin being a man,’ said Fabel. ‘Karneval is all about becoming someone else, about letting out what you’ve locked up inside. There was something about Andrea that bothered me from the start. I was in the cathedral and a tourist asked me why there was a rhinoceros in one of the stained-glass windows. Amongst all those metaphors of resurrection, a symbol of strength and righteous wrath. That’s what Andrea built herself to be. Andrea murdered those women because they reminded her of herself, as Vera. She killed Vera as an identity legally, then proceeded to kill her over and over again in the flesh. Oh, and the last clue was the very large slice of backside that Ansgar Hoeffer was missing. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work it out from there.’

  They stopped discussing the case and Fabel felt himself slide further into a pleasant state of drunkenness. It was difficult to hear over the noise in the pub and their conversation became limited. Another group from the Police Presidium joined them and the consensus was that they should all move on somewhere else. Fabel spotted Scholz disappearing through the pub door with a pretty young woman dressed as a nun.

  ‘Simone Schilling,’ explained Tansu. ‘Our forensics chief…’

  Fabel allowed himself to be carried out of the pub and into the street by the current of bodies. The streets were thronging with partygoers and Fabel suddenly realised he had become separated from the police group and was cast adrift in an ocean of revellers. The night air made him feel even more drunk and he felt some of his old anxiety about losing control.

  ‘I thought we’d lost you…’ He turned to see Tansu beside him. ‘I think we’d better find somewhere quieter. But first, there is a Women’s Karneval Night custom that I insist on – I demand a kiss…’

  ‘Well,’ said Fabel grinning, ‘if it’s the law…’ He leaned forward to give Tansu a chaste kiss on the cheek, but she held his face between her hands and pulled him towards her. He felt her tongue in his mouth.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  24-28 February

  1.

  The light was on and Maria woke up cold and sore. The chills and aches in her body combined like a string section playing a continuous glissando, but then the still not fully-healed wound on her head from The Nose’s pistol-whipping took centre stage. For a moment she thought that they had switched the refrigeration back on, then she realised it was just her body’s reaction to the abuse it had suffered. For Maria the cold no longer meant death; it meant she could still feel. It meant life.

  But they’ve broken my mind, she thought to herself calmly. She knew there was something different about the way she thought; the way she felt. She lay and thought of Maria Klee as if she were someone she knew rather than someone she was. Maybe Maria Klee was dead, but whoever or whatever was left was determined to survive. She knew, lying bruised and broken in an empty cold store, that her only strategy for survival was to separate herself from her own flesh: to focus her mind and use whatever internal resources she had left on thinking her way out of this situation.

  Maria dragged herself to her feet, wrapping the blanket around her body and moving across to the cold store heavy door. She pressed the side of her head against the cold steel, but it was too thick to conduct any sounds from the room beyond. She made a circuit of the meat locker, seeking out anything that might be useful as a weapon. There was nothing. And even if she had found something, she doubted that an improvised weapon would have given her any kind of chance against The Nose and his handgun. She returned to the mattress and sat contemplating her situation. They were feeding her. That meant that, for some reason, Vitrenko was keeping her alive, but perhaps only for a matter of days. She gingerly touched the raised ridge on her head to remind herself that there seemed to be little other consideration for her welfare. She was in a hostage situation. She could not have been kept in more appropriate surroundings: she was just a lump of meat being preserved until she could be put to some profitable use.

  The next meal was brought in by Olga Sarapenko. The one after that by The Nose. Perhaps they spelled each other, taking shifts. If she was going to make an attempt to escape, it would be that bitch Sarapenko she would go for. Maria knew that she could never succeed against the Nose. And even fully fit she didn’t know if she would have been a match for Olga Sarapenko. But one thing that her years in the Murder Commission had taught her was that anyone could kill anyone else. It wasn’t about strength. It was about murderous intent. About knowing no boundaries.

  Maria knew that even if Vitrenko intended to use her as a bargaining chip, there was still no way he would let her survive. And when she became surplus to his needs he would kill her in a manner that would fit his perverted sense of natural justice. It would be messy, it would be slow, and it would be painful. She brought her thoughts back to her immediate situation. She would escape Vitrenko and the fate he had planned for her, either by getting herself free or by dying in the attempt. She would escape either in flesh or in spirit.

  Her plan began to take form.

  There was a chance that either The Nose or Olga Sarapenko was alone in the building. The charade of a surveillance operation had been for her benefit. No… that wasn’t right. There had been another point to the exercise: Vitrenko had suspected betrayal and had put Molokov under electronic surveillance. Molokov had been marked for death long before Maria had entered the picture. Vitrenko had said that Buslenko’s mission had been genuine but had been betrayed. Perhaps Olga Sarapenko really had been part of the operation.

  She had seen no other guard. When Sarapenko or The Nose had brought food there had been no sounds of activity outside when the door had been opened. The worst case might be that The Nose would be out there when Sarapenko came in. Maria played and replayed scenarios in her head, running through all the possible ways she could take Sarapenko down. But they would be ready for almost every scenario. Sarapenko or The Nose would anticipate her hiding beside the door, pretending to be ill or dead, or her launching a sudden attack. She had to think of the extraordinary, the unexpected. It would have to be when Olga Sarapenko came in with the meal. Maria was bitterly aware of the irony that food had been the one thing she had avoided and now its delivery offered her the only chance of survival. She thought about all the times she had made herself vomit to void her body of food. How she had perfected the technique. It was then that the idea started to take shape.

  She reckoned she would have about four or five hours until the next meal. Time that she had to spend wisely.

  2.

  Fabel blinked at the light that cut slices across the room from between the blinds. His head hurt and his mouth felt thick and furry. He eased himself up onto his elbows. He was alone in a wide, low bed. There was the smell of coffee in the air, but a richer, darker aroma than he was used to. He stared at the poster on the wall opposite him. It was of a landscape that looked as if it belonged to another planet: slender rock towers capped with darker conical stone. A setting or rising sun had painted the towers red-gold and windows had been carved into some, giving the impression that elves or some alien race lived in them.

  ‘Cappadocia,’ said Tansu as she came in from the kitchen. She was wearing a silk robe which clung to her curves. ‘The Fairy Chimneys. You ever been to Turkey?’ She sat on the edge of the bed and handed him a coffee.


  ‘Thanks,’ said Fabel. ‘No… I’ve never been. Listen, Tansu…’

  She smiled and held her fingers to his lips. ‘Drink your coffee. You’ll feel better. Hangover?’

  ‘A little… I’m not used to drinking so much.’

  ‘That’s the thing about Karneval – you can let go a little.’ She stood up decisively. ‘I’m going to take a shower. Help yourself to breakfast.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Fabel. ‘I’d better get on my way soon. I thought I’d buy something for my daughter. A souvenir from Cologne.’

  ‘You married?’ said Tansu in a way that suggested it didn’t matter to her one way or the other.

  ‘Divorced.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky to find a store open. There might be a couple on Hohestrasse.’

  The daylight was cold and bright and turned the throbbing in Fabel’s head up a notch or two. When he got back to the hotel, he found the reception staff were all wearing bright red wigs and false noses. He allowed himself the curmudgeonly thought that these people never knew when to stop. He wanted to be home. Back in Hamburg. He wanted to talk to Susanne and put everything behind him. Including Tansu. But first he had to find Maria and bring her home too.

  He showered and changed into a fresh cashmere roll-neck and cord trousers. His sports jacket smelled of cigarette smoke and he hung it up outside his wardrobe to air, pulling his coat on before going out again. He tried phoning Susanne at her office but, when he got her voicemail, he decided not to leave a message. He rang Scholz on his mobile: Scholz told Fabel they should meet at the Presidium and have lunch in the canteen. Taxis would be difficult so Scholz would send a patrol car to pick Fabel up.