The Child

by Sebastian Fitzek

  The mobile on the passenger seat started ringing. It almost slid through her sweaty fingers when she tried to open it.

  ‘Borchert?’ she said, far louder than necessary.

  ‘Cold.’ Fear seemed to bite her in the throat when she heard the disguised voice.

  ‘Who is that? What do you want?’

  ‘Colder.’

  Half demented with fear and concern for Simon, she strove to collect her thoughts. Endestrasse was coming up on her right. She nearly turned off. The name suited her situation.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked. ‘Is it a game?’

  ‘Warmer.’

  She beat a wild tattoo on the plastic steering wheel with the fingers of her right hand. Could it be? Was this the voice Robert Stern had told her about, and if so, why call her?

  ‘Am I heading in the right direction?’ she asked, horrified, testing her suspicion.

  ‘Warmer.’

  It’s true. The madman wants me to play blind man’s buff.

  ‘OK. I’m going to Potsdam, right?’

  ‘Colder.’

  So I turn off before?

  ‘Here? Down Kyllmannstrasse?’

  ‘Colder.’

  ‘Do I turn left, then?’

  ‘Warmer.’

  She got into the outermost lane, almost overrunning the opposite carriageway.

  ‘Am I nearly there?’

  ‘Warmer.’

  She looked round, but there were at least a dozen different cars and vans behind and ahead of her, not to mention two motorcycles. It was quite impossible to tell which of them was tailing her.

  ‘Grassoweg? Do I go down Grassoweg?’

  The distorted voice gave her another affirmative. Heedless of the oncoming traffic, Carina swung the wheel over and almost collided head-on with a florist’s van. The driver slammed on his brakes and the van skidded, swaying precariously, into the other lane, which happened to be empty. The danger past, Carina sped along the narrow residential street, followed by a furious blare of horns.

  ‘Is it here? In this street?’

  ‘Colder.’

  She took her foot off the gas. The street lighting was so dim, she found it hard to decipher the sign at the next fork.

  ‘Am Kleinen Wannsee?’ she said at length.

  ‘Warmer,’ the voice replied with an approving chuckle – the first time it had betrayed any emotion.

  House number? What’s the house number?

  Carina debated what form her next yes-or-no question should take.

  ‘Over a hundred?’

  ‘Warmer.’

  ‘A hundred and fifty?’

  ‘Colder.’

  It took her another seven goes before she came to a halt outside an imposing, four-storeyed house bearing the number 121.

  15

  The most important rule for winning a hopeless case against a superior adversary was something Stern had learned not at law school but from his father.

  ‘Locate your opponent’s weakness in his strength. Use his greatest asset against him.’ That had been part of the old man’s standard pep talk to Junior B, the local football team of which he was honorary coach.

  Stern was wondering whether those maxims could help him today, when what was at stake was his life, not shooting or passing or marking your man. He analysed the situation while being shepherded out of the living room, barefoot and stripped to the waist. The woman had several advantages. The principal one, a 9mm pistol, she was holding in her hand. Moreover, as far as he could tell, the house was hermetically sealed. The doors and windows of an empty sale property had naturally to be secured against intruders. Even if he took advantage of his distance from the woman and fled along the passage to the back entrance, it was highly unlikely that he would find a door or a window unlocked.

  She’s keeping her distance with a gun aimed at my back and I’m shut in with her. Where’s the weakness in her strength?

  His neck muscles tensed as they always did when he was pondering an insoluble problem. When that happened at his desk it always and unmistakably heralded a migraine. A far more painful fate awaited him here, and he knew it.

  The freshly stripped and polished oak floorboards creaked wearily as he started up the stairs. The music from above became more audible the higher he climbed, but the shuffling footsteps had ceased.

  He’s stopped dancing.

  Stern forbade himself to speculate on what the man was doing instead. In that room. With Simon.

  ‘Keep going,’ the woman barked when he paused and started to turn his head. But he hadn’t seen anything and couldn’t tell from her voice whether she was following him up or had halted at the bottom. All he could see right then was a bright strip of light and some vague shapes, having been dazzled by one of the halogen spotlights that bathed the staircase in an unnaturally white glare, intensified by the bare, cream-coloured walls. He had to blink twice to efface the shadowy shapes dancing in front of his eyes …

  And then, quite suddenly, he spotted the solution. Her weakness. Now about halfway up the curving staircase, he was nearing a very simple means of turning the tables on her. The only problem was, he couldn’t be sure it would work. He could only hope so.

  But he had to risk it, had to try something that might turn out to be his greatest – and, consequently, his last – mistake.

  16

  Carina got out of the car and scanned the building in front of her for signs of life.

  ‘Is this it?’

  She looked up. Painted wheat-yellow, the newly restored late-nineteenth-century house was surmounted by a hexagonal capped roof like a judge’s wig. She could see no lights on any floor. All the blinds and shutters were closed.

  ‘Hot,’ the voice replied. Stiff-legged, she walked unsteadily to the wrought-iron garden gate. To her surprise it was unlocked.

  And now?

  She unzipped the bumbag that formed part of her runner’s outfit. In addition to Simon’s medication, some cash and one or two things Stern had asked her to keep for him, it contained Borchert’s ‘present’: a Röhm RG 70.

  ‘For emergencies,’ he’d told her. ‘Cute little gun. Perfect for a woman’s dainty hand.’

  A feeling of unreality crept over her as she walked up the gravel path. She had never held a gun in her hand before, still less been prepared to use it on someone.

  ‘Is it open?’ she asked when she reached the ornate front door.

  For the first time she got no answer. Cautiously, she exerted pressure on the unyielding wood. It was shut and locked.

  She turned round, but there was no one to be seen in the slumbrous light of the old street lamps. No passer-by. No pursuer. Nothing but the hum of traffic in nearby Königstrasse.

  ‘How do I get in?’ she asked the unknown man at the other end of the line. ‘Around the back?’

  Still no answer. Hoarse breathing, but that was all.

  Looking at the entrance to the underground garage in the right-hand wing of the house, she could see tyre tracks in the wet leaves. ‘The garage?’ she said with her back to the front door. ‘Is that it? Should I try to get in through the garage?’

  The voice remained silent. The breathing had stopped too.

  There’s no time to lose, she told herself. They may be hurting Simon inside there right now, and …

  She tightened her grip on the pistol butt and touched the brass bell push with her left forefinger. She wasn’t a detective or a trained policewoman, and she was fighting a losing battle on this terrain anyway. She couldn’t win. The most she could do was create a diversion.

  ‘I’m going to ring the bell,’ she said into the phone, and pressed the button.

  ‘Colder,’ said a resonant voice in her ear.

  She felt a dazzling explosion right between her eyes, then nothing more.

  17

  Every step was torment, because every step brought him nearer to the possibility of extinction. But he himself was not the issue here. His death would rate no more
than a brief report in the tabloids’ local news section. The far more important tragedy was in progress in the room from which La Traviata continued to blare.

  And it’s all my fault, he thought.

  Feigning a momentary loss of balance, he leaned against the wall on his left.

  ‘What, weak at the knees already?’

  OK, so you’re just behind me. Only a few steps down. You probably don’t want me diving around the corner and out of your field of fire when I get to the top.

  He would have to be very quick, he realized, so he stayed on the left, away from the banisters. Only five steps to go.

  The landing came into view. At the top of the stairs stood a terracotta urn containing an artificial fern. It looked bulkier and heavier the closer he got.

  Another of his father’s pearls of wisdom popped into his head: The simplest tricks are often the most effective. Whether or not his simple plan would succeed depended solely on four little plastic rectangles.

  Another two steps.

  Cautiously, he put out his hand. Like a wounded man whose tight bandage has been removed after several hours, he felt the blood rush into his fingertips. He would have preferred to use his right hand, but that would have been too noticeable.

  One more step.

  Now he could see the entire landing. There was no furniture apart from a mahogany side table with a property brochure lying open on it. No window either. Luckily!

  Stern climbed the last stair as gingerly if it were a crumbling ice floe. He fought the urge to look behind him and held his breath, totally focused on the next few seconds. He even faded out the man’s voice, which was singing along with a Verdi aria.

  Simon can’t be far away.

  ‘Down the passage, third door along on the right. You can hear the party’s in full—’

  The woman never finished her sentence. Spine-chilling in its suddenness, the shrill sound of a doorbell echoed around the bare walls.

  Stern took advantage of this unexpected interruption to turn the tables in a final act of desperation, simply by hitting the shoulder-height row of light switches at the top of the stairs. That was the couple’s Achilles’ heel: they had deprived him of every potential means of escape, but the shutters also shut out any extraneous light. Once he had hit the switches, the ceiling lights would go out and plunge the entire stairwell into total darkness. He would then be able to pull the urn over and send the woman tumbling down the stairs in its company.

  So much for the theory.

  In practice, things looked rather different. Stern realized how wrong he was when he flipped the very first switch. Instead of getting darker, the whole of the gloomy upstairs passage was suddenly bathed in light. Instead of putting out the lights, he’d turned on a row of additional overheads.

  Which made it easy for the woman behind him to take aim and fire with precision.

  18

  There were so many things about the room that Simon found surprising. For a start, the funny noise his trainers made on the shiny floor. When he sat down on the edge of the metal bedstead, he saw in the dim red glow that the whole expanse of parquet was covered with transparent plastic film.

  The man removed the key from the door and went over to a black tripod in the corner. Mounted on it was a small digital camera the lens of which was pointing straight at the bed on which Simon had been invited to sit. The man pressed a button and a little red light appeared beside the lens. Then he went over to the only window, which was covered with thick rubber curtains in army green, and turned on a miniature stereo system.

  ‘Do you like music?’ he asked.

  ‘It depends,’ Simon whispered, but the man in the dressing gown wasn’t listening in any case. He was swaying in time to the music coming from the CD player. Simon wasn’t sure he liked the song. He’d heard something similar in the matron’s office at the children’s home, and it hadn’t appealed to him.

  Meanwhile the man had shut his eyes and was looking dreamy. Simon wanted to get up and go. He’d heard of people like him. A policeman had visited his school one time and showed them pictures of the sort of men they shouldn’t go with, although this one looked quite different somehow.

  The music suddenly increased in volume. Simon coughed. Feeling a bit faint, he leaned back against the bedpost until the sensation subsided. As he did so, he noticed a number of medical instruments on a waist-high glass table beside the bed.

  What is all this?

  He experienced a sudden and quite unjustified pang of fear. This man couldn’t harm him because of tomorrow morning. He would be meeting someone on a bridge at six o’clock. As long as he clung to that thought, he oughtn’t really to feel afraid.

  But when he saw the syringes he couldn’t help it.

  He’d seen syringes before, but only at the hospital and not as big. Another thing that puzzled him was the strip of silvery metal lying on the green cloth between a scalpel and a little saw. It looked like a miniature cycle chain with clothes pegs at either end.

  ‘Come over here.’

  The man must have been dancing by himself for several minutes, lost to the world. His voice sounded friendly. Simon, who had been resting his eyes, sleepily opened them. He looked away at once. The man had dropped his dressing gown around his ankles and was now wearing nothing but the latex gloves.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Simon, thinking of Stern.

  ‘Be kind enough to bring me that thing on the bed.’

  Simon saw what the man was pointing to. He coughed again, feeling even fainter than before, but he picked up what was lying on the stained mattress, which was devoid of bedclothes.

  He got up and walked on wobbly legs to the man, feeling weaker and weaker at every step. His left hand was tingling again. He hoped Stern would come and get him soon.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ the man said breathlessly. He paused in the middle of a pirouette, stretched out the arm in which he’d been holding an invisible partner and patted Simon gently on the shoulder. Once, twice, three times. Then he laughed as if he’d cracked a good joke.

  ‘You’re a nice-looking boy. Did you know that?’

  Simon shook his head.

  ‘Yes, yes, but you could look even nicer.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Yes, trust me.’

  Simon felt the plastic bag wrenched out of his hand. Then he suddenly couldn’t see a thing. He tried to take a breath but couldn’t, the plastic went concave as he sucked it into his open mouth. Summoning up his last reserves of strength, he reached up and tried to tear the bag off his head, but the man seized his wrists, forced them behind his back and bound them together with something. He tried to scream, but he was too short of breath. All he inhaled was a little tuft of hair from his own wig, which had slipped off his head when the man pulled the plastic bag over it.

  ‘There, now you look really nice,’ Simon heard the naked man purr as he was forcibly dragged back to where he’d just been sitting. On the bed.

  ‘Much nicer.’

  Simon lashed out blindly with his feet. Although they occasionally connected with something soft, he quickly sensed that he was the only one sustaining any real damage.

  He was steadily tiring, steadily growing weaker, and his lungs were threatening to burst, so he wasn’t all that surprised by the loud report that abruptly drowned the music.

  The man paused when he heard the shot ring out in the passage. Then he grinned and tore off a long strip of duct tape, intending to wind it round the bag and the boy’s neck. Only then would he have both hands free. And he needed them for what he had in mind.

  19

  When the shot sounded the world around him exploded. The pain that followed was unbearable, but it didn’t make itself felt where he expected. Stern toppled forwards, cracking his head on the urn, although it was more of a reflex action than a physical necessity. He felt sure he’d been shot in the back and would see the exit wound in his stomach before death came. I
nstead, deafened, he found himself coughing his guts up. Every choking breath made him feel like he was on fire inside. After what seemed an eternity, and just before he thought he was going blind, he grasped what had happened.

  Tear gas.

  The pistol hadn’t been loaded with lethal ammunition. The couple might be paedophiles but they weren’t capable of murder. Either that, or they killed in some other way because a straightforward bullet wouldn’t have enhanced their sexual pleasure.

  Stern realized that he was quite wrong when the woman behind him started coughing too.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, but even that was almost inaudible. Her nose was streaming.

  Stern rolled onto his stomach and peered down the stairs. His eyes felt like they’d been bathed in toilet cleaner, but he could just about see the woman a few steps below him. She was doubled up with her fists in her eyes. Like Stern, she hadn’t been wearing a protective mask.

  So she didn’t know what the gun was loaded with, he concluded. The pair of them only acted blasé. They were new to the game. They couldn’t have checked the pistol beforehand, and their premiere had just bombed.

  Stern tried to stand. What happened next was as unintended as the cloud of chlorine gas. He lost his footing. Instead of stepping on to the landing, he went tumbling down the stairs.

  A shaft of agony went through his back as he collided with the woman on the way down. For the second time in quick succession his head hit something hard, presumably a step, and blood spurted from his nose. As he was glissading down the stairs on his stomach, his left leg suddenly became incandescent with pain: his foot had got caught in the banisters and was supporting his entire weight.

  Torn ligaments, severe tendonitis, broken ankle … He was suffering from all three, judging by the intensity of the pain, but he didn’t care. Having gently freed his foot, he could see through a mist of tears that the woman was in a considerably worse state. She wasn’t moving and one of her legs looked unnaturally contorted, as did the rest of her body.