You laugh at him.
“From me?”
You tap yourself on the chest as if the idea of protecting someone from you were completely ridiculous. He nods, he means you, you shout over your shoulder, “Hey, you hear that, he wants to protect the girls from me.”
Tanner and his son don’t laugh, Neil Exner smiles wearily, he knows you’re fucking with him, and because he knows this you return his smile for a moment, almost apologetically, before burying your fist so deep in his stomach that you can feel his guts rearranging themselves under the impact. Exner gasps for air, steps sideways, and collapses over the railing. A thread of saliva falls from his mouth and lands in the water. You hold the boy, you straighten him back up, standing close beside him. It all went so fast that none of the passersby noticed. Two friends having an intimate conversation.
“Where’s the merchandise?”
“I …”
Exner coughs.
“… need a promise …”
“There are no promises, you have to trust in faith.”
You force his torso further over the railing so that he can see his reflection.
“Where’s the damned merchandise?”
He raises a pleading hand, he’s had enough. A duck swims up, turns in a circle, and swims away again. Neil Exner takes a key out of his trousers and hands it to you.
“It’s in a safe-deposit box at Kaiserdamm underground station. That’s—”
“I know where that is.”
You put the key in your pocket and let go of Neil Exner. He wipes the saliva from his chin, straightens up, takes a deep breath, one hand on his stomach, one on the railing. He’s as white as a sheet.
“Ragnar?”
You turn round. Tanner is holding his phone up to you.
“It’s David, he knows where the girls are.”
You smile and look at Exner.
“Surprised? Did you really think we’d lose them just because you took their phones? GPS isn’t some obscure terminology anymore, right?”
You hold out your hand, your son steps forward and passes you the plastic bag with the cell phones, you press them against Exner’s chest.
“All you had to do was take the batteries out.”
“If I’d just taken the batteries out we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Clever boy.”
“I’m not a boy.”
“If you’re not a boy, then stop behaving like a boy and forget about the girls. You’re finished here. Have you got that into your head? Good. And say hello from me next time you visit your father.” You’re about to turn away, Exner’s hand grips your elbow, your son wants to intervene, you tell him no with a shake of your head. Exner says, “Please. You’ve got what you wanted, and one of the girls is dead, surely that must be enough.”
At that moment you recognize the Emperor in his eyes. The Emperor on the days when he was weak. You’ve had enough.
“Do you really think the merchandise is my biggest problem? I mean, do I look like someone who’d drive to Hamburg for a few crappy kilos of heroin? Do I look like a drug runner to you? Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“No, but—”
“I’m only letting you go because your grandfather was my friend a long time ago, so don’t push it.”
“But they haven’t done anything!” he blurts out.
“Can you actually hear yourself? Do you hear that whining noise? Have these bitches told you they haven’t done anything? Have they told you my brother had a heart attack or a stroke? Tell me, how old are you, taking some sixteen-year-old girls seriously just because they’re sweet and vulnerable?”
Neil Exner looks past you. You’ve found a sore point. This guy doesn’t think with his head, he thinks with his feelings.
“Look at me.”
He looks at you.
“Would you put your hand in the fire for these girls?”
“I …”
He hesitates, he wants to keep his hand.
“I don’t know,” he says, finishing his sentence.
“If you’re not sure who you’re putting your life on the line for, then keep out of it. Didn’t you learn anything from your grandfather? The only people who beg are the ones with nothing to offer. And now take a look at yourself. You’re begging. It’s over. Go home.”
He lowers his eyes, right, it’s over.
But you haven’t finished with him yet.
“Hey, kid, be honest, can you feel it yet?”
He frowns, he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.
You lean forward until your lips are almost touching his ear.
“Just don’t turn around, Neil Exner, because fate’s fucking you right now.”
With those words you leave him standing there and go back to the car.
Leo holds the door open for you, you sit down, Leo shuts the door and walks around the car. Tanner reaches the phone back and explains that David has found the code for the Range Rover in Oskar’s desk. You speak into the phone.
“David, where are they?”
“They’re on the North Sea, or more specifically they’re in Skagerrak, it’s a stretch of the North Sea between—”
You interrupt him impatiently.
“I know where the fucking Skagerrak is. How long have they been on the water?”
“For about half an hour.”
“Which direction?”
“It’s the ferry to Kristiansand.”
You snap the phone shut and hand it to Tanner, who asks you if you have any idea where the girls are headed. You nod. You don’t know what they plan to do there, but their goal is clear. Back to the roots, you think, and wonder what your next step will be. In this case you’re like Neil Exner. You see every action like a game of chess, you look ahead and calculate your opponent’s move before you start to drive him into the corner. All strategists do that, but not all strategists have death standing beside them.
“We are returning to Berlin,” you say.
Leo starts the car. Tanner wants to know what you should do with Neil Exner. You look over at the riverbank. The Emperor’s grandson has disappeared.
“Let him go. He won’t cause us any more problems.”
Leo puts the car in gear. Your son hands you a mineral water, you drink and ask Tanner to put on some music. Your son asks if he can keep the pistol. You ask him if he knows what kind of gun it is. He knows. He can tell you who made it in Belgium, how much it weighs with and without its magazine, and what its strengths are. He’s only stumped by its weaknesses. You tell him. They’re the same weaknesses that your son has. The gun suits him. You shut your eyes for a while. Berlin awaits, you have to say goodbye to your brother, and then there’s no further delay. The hunt is on.
II
hold my head up everywhere
keep myself right on this train
Kasabian
UNDERDOG
After you wiped out a whole village, Germany went into a total panic. You were the front-page story in Der Spiegel and Stern hired a team of psychologists to prepare a profile of you, while Fokus carried a special piece on the dead of Fennried. Bild wrote: No one came out alive! The Berliner Zeitung matched that with Welcome to the German Slaughterhouse. They all thought it was going to go on like that. You were the terror, you were the scourge. No one could have even guessed that you were approaching the end of your journey.
The hunt after you was stepped up. The press wouldn’t leave the story alone, there was barely a newspaper that wasn’t constantly proclaiming new theories. The nation reacted, the politicians drew conclusions. The special commission was reestablished and expanded by a hundred and fifty policemen after a vote in the Bundestag urged Intensification of measures to find the perpetrator. The new team tried to link the murders on the A4 and in the motel with the murders in Fennried. But what exactly was the link? Never had so much money been invested in a police operation. In vain. Your murders seemed random, none of the victims were connected to one another. Even
the profile produced was no help. They didn’t know what category to put you in—you weren’t a serial killer, you weren’t a mass murderer, and spree killer didn’t fit either. You were somewhere in between, a peculiar creation of hell, killing without an apparent motive. A journalist said on television that your killing would become increasingly terrible in scale because you saw it as a challenge. It’s a mystery to you how anyone could hit upon such an abstruse theory. Taking people’s lives isn’t a competition, after all.
1995. 1997. 2003.
They said the intervals would inevitably get shorter rather than longer. They said there was a pattern, they just couldn’t see it. They had clues: they knew that one corpse wasn’t enough for you, that you sought out isolated places and apparently operated without a motive. They also knew: when the Traveler kills, he really kills, but never children and he never uses a weapon. But what does that say about you? Are you softhearted? Are you a lover of children? Are you afraid of weapons?
At bottom they knew so little about you that you didn’t need to worry. In spite of DNA and fingerprints. All they had were the corpses, and the corpses told them nothing. With every passing week, every month their desperation grew. They knew what you were capable of, but they knew as little about your present as they did about your past, and they had no idea about the boy you’d drowned in a swimming pool, just as they had no idea about your search.
When your son was seven years old he called you up at work once and wanted to know what you were afraid of. He had broken his wrist, and during the night he had dreamt about giant crabs that wanted to cut his arm off. You were speechless for several seconds, because you honestly couldn’t think of anything you’d ever been really afraid of. Until a voice came to you from a long way away. The voice belonged to your grandmother, who had escaped from Russia with her family after the First World War. You adored that woman, she supplied your sister and you with comics, you were allowed to sleep in tents in her garden on summer nights, and at bedtime she always told you weird fairy stories that she had heard in her own childhood, and that couldn’t be found in any book. Your sister wanted adventures with horses and princesses, but you couldn’t get enough of fairy tales and took every story literally. You looked for fallen angels in hollow tree trunks, suspected there was a weeping witch’s eye under every stepping-stone, and crossed your fingers during the seventh chime of the church bell, so that your heart wouldn’t turn to stone. You’d been particularly taken with one of the fairy tales.
The story of depth and darkness.
In every deep there dwells a monster that consists entirely of teeth and eats any soul that comes near it. The sinners and the saints, no one is spared. The monster can survive in ice, it can sleep in a volcano, it is indestructible. Whenever it emerges from the depth, it turns light into darkness. It has no soul, so it knows no remorse. It is never angry. And if something knows no guilt, if it never feels fury and devours every soul that comes near it, it can never be stopped. It is like the depth that swallows the light. And there will always be a depth, no light in the world is strong enough to reach all the way down to the darkest hiding place. The monster is everywhere at home.
And then in every darkness there dwells a demon who was born without a heart and eats other hearts to assuage his insatiable hunger. The demon hides in the shadows, you can find him in the corners of the mouth of a cruel child, and even if you close your eyes out of fear, he lurks behind your lids and stretches his fingers out for your heart. There is always a nook where he can hide. There is always a place of darkness. In this way the demon is like the monster. They are inevitably connected. Wherever the monster turns light to darkness, the demon slips out as if a door has opened. Wherever the demon slips out, he leaves an unfathomable depth, and a new home for the monster is thus created.
The monster and the demon are brothers, but they have never met. They have tried to come together for ages, because only when they come together will they find peace. And they yearn for peace. They are weary of their cruelties, because every eaten heart and every swallowed soul leaves a hollow echo behind, like a stone falling into a well, and nothing else happens. But the well fills up. Unnoticed.
So the monster seeks the demon and the demon seeks the monster.
That was the end of the fairy tale. You have never understood why your grandmother couldn’t tell you whether the brothers ever found each other or not. She was honest, she didn’t know. So you had her tell you this fairy tale over and over again from the beginning, in the hope that a sensible ending might eventually appear. Because even then you knew that stories grow with telling. And perhaps a real ending would sneak its way in. One day. But nothing came. So you decided it was time to take control of this story. You were seven years old and you set off in search of the brothers.
Many people thought you were anxious when they saw you climbing onto a jetty by the lakeside and staring into the water. They were mistaken. You weren’t afraid, it was just curiosity. You kept a lookout for the monster, but the monster didn’t appear. Even when you jumped into the water and sank to the bottom of the lake, nothing came toward you from the depth, and that didn’t make sense to you.
Why would your grandmother lie?
Just as you believed that a monster lurked in every depth, you were sure the demon was waiting hungrily for you in the darkness. The darkness was easier to explore. You didn’t have to climb into a well, there was no need to step into a cave and listen to your own breath. Darkness isn’t like the depth, it’s easier to find. But the darkness disappointed you too, the demon simply wouldn’t show himself. Not in curtained rooms or abandoned cellars, not behind the palms of the hands that you pressed to your eyes until lights exploded in front of them. You lured the demon with your heart, but he didn’t come.
For a whole five years you kept a lookout for the brothers. It was a game and it was reality and the time passed. How were you supposed to know that you were looking in the wrong places? You turned twelve and then thirteen. You were starting to forget the fairy tale, and then, as if the depth had only been waiting, it showed itself to you unexpectedly, when you dragged a boy down to the bottom of a swimming pool. And then you understood the fairy tale. You opened your eyes wide and looked into the depth. The depth looked back and you understood where the monster was hiding.
Five days after Robbie’s death, two days after the Christmas party, you took the bus to your grandmother’s. You wanted to tell her you’d discovered the secret, and now you knew who the monster was and why you weren’t scared of the depth or the darkness. You had understood. Your mouth was full of words.
It’s me, you wanted to say. Grandma, look at me, I’m the monster and now I just have to keep a lookout, then I’ll find my brother in the darkness.
With that insight in mind, you got out of the bus and walked up the street through the thick snowfall. You were about to ring your grandmother’s doorbell, then you hesitated. Even today you can’t figure out what made you hesitate. Maybe it was fear. For someone who doesn’t know fear, it must be puzzling when you encounter the feeling for the first time. You became aware that it would be a big mistake to tell your grandmother about your discovery. Tell her or your parents or anyone. No one would have understood you.
You postponed your visit, crossed the street, and waited for the next bus. You were filled with a calming sense of understanding. As if God had seen his face in a puddle on a particularly horrible day, seen that he was still God and nodded contentedly. This understanding felt good. Somewhere outside your brother was waiting for you in the darkness, and it was up to you to find him.
It is August.
It is 2006.
It is night.
You’ve been in Braunschweig since early afternoon visiting an old friend. You go to the movies with him, then you have dinner at a restaurant before you head back to Hannover. Shortly before you drive onto the Autobahn, a curious rattling sound starts coming from the engine compartment. The car slows and slows and finally
comes to a standstill.
You don’t think about killing for as much as a second, you think about your apartment.
The breakdown service ADAC promises to be with you in an hour, and comes in thirty minutes. In the meantime you’ve tried to locate the problem yourself. You’re not a clueless idiot who just drives your car and fills it up. You tell the ADAC guy what the problem might be. He looks under the hood, takes the voltage of the battery, and says you’re right. The alternator’s probably had it. The tow truck arrives fifteen minutes later. You give the ADAC man the address of your garage, tip him ten euros, and get into a taxi.
It starts raining, it’s been gloomy all day, you’d give anything for a hot bath right now. The railroad station looks deserted, it’s just before eleven, if you’re lucky you’ll get to Hannover before one. You’re looking forward to your apartment, a cup of tea, and perhaps even the late news, if you don’t fall asleep immediately after your bath.
The Intercity train pulls out right in front of your nose.
You stand on the platform and watch the lights disappear. The next train for Hannover will be there in fifty-five minutes. You’re tired and try to imagine spending the wait with a magazine on a bench. You don’t like that prospect. You stand and look at the timetable. In seven minutes there’s an Intercity for Berlin. Without really thinking about it you switch platforms. You’re aware that you’ve got to take part in a conference in the morning. That prospect doesn’t appeal much either.
The Intercity stops with a long sigh. People get out, people get in, and you’re one of them. You’re still not thinking about killing, but you’ve forgotten about your apartment. As if there had never been an apartment.
You’re on the move.
The Intercity has seven second-class coaches, an onboard restaurant, and a first-class carriage bringing up the rear. You get in at the front. There are only five passengers in the coach with you. It’s a weekday. The people are tired, it’s the last train to Berlin.
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