Limit

by Frank Schätzing

Vogelaar reached into his jacket pocket and put the memory crystal on a clear spot on the worktable. Xin picked it up in his fingertips and turned it this way and that.

  ‘And you’re sure that this is the right one?’

  ‘Dead sure.’

  ‘I want to go to my husband,’ Nyela said, softly but emphatically. Her eyes looked sore from weeping, but she seemed to be keeping it together.

  ‘Of course,’ Xin murmured. ‘Go to him.’

  He was gazing at the crystal as though under a spell. Vogelaar knew why. Crystals were one of those forms that Xin loved. Their structure and purity fascinated him.

  ‘You’ve got what you wanted,’ he said. ‘I kept my promise.’

  Xin looked up. ‘And I never even gave one.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘I was just talking through the options. It’s really too risky to let the two of you live.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Jan, you disappoint me!’

  ‘You promised to spare Nyela’s life.’

  ‘Either he lets us both live or neither.’ She hugged herself close to Vogelaar’s chest. ‘If he kills you, he can shoot me straight away as well.’

  ‘No, Nyela.’ Vogelaar shook his head. ‘I won’t let that—’

  ‘Do you really believe that I’d just watch this bastard shoot you?’ she hissed, her voice dripping with hate. ‘He’s a monster. How many years he came and went at our home, accepted our drinks, put his feet up on our terrace. Hey, Kenny, do you want a drink? I’ll mix you a drink that will make the flames shoot out of your eyes.’

  ‘Nyela—’

  ‘You leave my husband alone, do you hear me?’ Nyela screamed. ‘Don’t touch him, or I’ll come back from the dead to have my revenge, you miserable wretch, you—’

  Xin’s face clouded with resignation. He turned away, shaking his head, tired.

  ‘Why does nobody listen to me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘As if I had ever minced my words. As if the rules hadn’t been clear from the start.’

  ‘We aren’t here to follow your shitty rules!’

  ‘They’re not shitty,’ Xin sighed. ‘They’re just – rules. A game. You played too. You made wrong moves. You lost. You have to know how to leave the game.’

  Vogelaar looked at him.

  ‘You’ll keep your promise,’ he said quietly.

  ‘One more time, Jan, I never gave you a—’

  ‘I mean the promise you’re about to give.’

  ‘That I’m – about to?’

  ‘Yes. You see, there’s still something you want, Kenny. Something I can give you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about Owen Jericho.’

  Xin spun about. ‘You know where Jericho is?’

  ‘His life for Nyela’s,’ Vogelaar said. ‘And spare me the rest of your threats. If we die, we die without a word. Unless—’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘You promise to spare Nyela. Then I’ll serve you up Jericho on a silver tray.’

  ‘No, Jan!’ Nyela looked at him, pleading. ‘Without you I couldn’t—’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to,’ Vogelaar said calmly. ‘The second promise concerns myself.’

  ‘Your life against whose?’ Xin asked threateningly.

  ‘A girl called Yoyo.’

  Xin stared at him. Then he began to laugh. Softly, almost silently. Then louder. Holding his sides, throwing back his head, hammering his fists against the tall fridge, quivering with hilarity as though he was having a fit.

  ‘Incredible!’ he gasped out. ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Is everything all right, Kenny?’ The bald man furrowed his brow. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘All right?’ spluttered Xin. ‘That girl, Mickey, that detective, the two of them should get a medal! What an achievement! They took those few scraps of text and – incredible, it’s just incredible! They tracked you down, Jan, they—’ He stopped. His eyes opened wide, even more astonished. ‘Did they actually come to warn you?’

  ‘Yes, Kenny,’ Vogelaar said calmly. ‘They warned me.’

  ‘And you’re betraying them?’

  Vogelaar was silent.

  ‘You try to find fault with my morals, you reproach me with some promise I’ve supposedly made, and then you rat out the people who came to save your life.’ Xin nodded as though he had just learned a valuable lesson. ‘Look at that, just look at that. Unredeemed man. What did you tell the two of them about our adventure in Africa?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I’d like to be,’ Vogelaar snarled. ‘In fact I offered them a deal. The dossier, for money. We were just about to make the exchange.’

  ‘That’s priceless,’ chuckled Xin.

  ‘And? What now?’

  ‘Sorry, old friend.’ Xin wiped a tear of laughter from the corner of his eye. ‘Life doesn’t offer all that many surprises, but this – and do you know what’s the best thing about it? I even considered that they might come and find you! Just as you consider the possibility that perhaps next week you’ll be hit by a meteorite, that perhaps there’s a God. I fly off to Berlin in a tearing hurry to prevent something that I never really – never! – thought would actually happen, but life – Jan, my dear Jan! Life is just too wonderful. Too wonderful!’

  ‘Get to the point, Kenny.’

  Xin threw his hands in the air in a gesture that said, let’s all have a drink. A baron among his minions.

  ‘Good!’ he guffawed. ‘Why the hell not!’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s a promise. It means you have my promise! If everything runs on rails, no hiccups, no tricks from you, not even thinking about tricks, not even a wrinkle in the skin – then the two of you can live.’ He came closer and narrowed his eyes. His voice took on that hissing note again. ‘But if, contrary to my expectations, anything from that dossier becomes public, then I promise that Nyela will die by inches, you can’t even begin to imagine how! And you’ll be allowed to watch. You’ll see how I pull her teeth out one by one, see me cut off her fingers and toes, gouge out her eyes, I’ll flay the skin from her back in strips, and all that while Mickey here rapes her over and over again until there’s nothing left for him to fuck but a whimpering lump of bloody meat, and by then she’s still a long way from dead, Jan, a long way, I promise you that, and I’ll keep every one of these promises.’

  Vogelaar felt Xin’s breath on his face, looked into those cold eyes, dark as night, felt Nyela tremble in his arms, heard his heartbeat in the sudden silence. He believed every word that Xin said.

  With a dry crack, the faulty neon tube gave up the ghost.

  ‘Sounds good,’ he said. ‘It’s a deal.’

  Museum Island

  In satellite images of Berlin, the Museum Island in the river Spree stuck out like a wedge, a kilometre and a half long, driven slapdash into the neatly laid parquetry of the city’s boulevards. An ensemble of imposing buildings, linked by broad paths and walkways, housing exhibits from over six thousand years of world history. Visitors could pass from huge halls the size of cathedrals, through quiet cloisters, to great courtyards flooded with light, could get lost in the megalomaniac grandeur of ancient architecture or lose track of time in silent galleries full of more human-scale artworks. At the northern end of the island, the Bode Museum towered above the water like some baroque ocean liner, its columned prow crowned with a great dome, while at the southern end of the whole complex a Classicist façade churned out crowds of visitors in its wake. Most imposing of all was the Pergamon Museum, a vast building like something glimpsed in a dream – if a bewhiskered German patriot of the nineteenth century had nodded off dreaming over a book of Greek myth. A huge, glowering central hall was flanked by two identical wings to either side, colossal rows of pillars marching off to end in Doric temple façades. The ground plan had originally been a U-shape, but in 2015 a fourth wing had been
added, glassed-in, that made the building into a square. Here, as in no other museum on Earth, visitors could walk through millennia of human history, Egyptian, Islamic, Near Eastern and Roman.

  Jericho had often crossed the island during trips to Berlin, taking one of the many bridges that moored it to the city, without ever having set foot in one of the museums. There had never been time. Now, as he hurried along the banks of the Spree, the thought that the time had finally come was not a cheering one. His jackets bulged with all the packets of money which made up Vogelaar’s payment. His Glock was in its holster, invisible to all. He looked like any other tourist, but he felt like the proverbial goose, off to meet the fox for dinner. As long as Vogelaar actually had the dossier, the two of them would make the exchange quite quietly and calmly, cash for information, and be on their way. If he didn’t, there would be trouble in store. The mercenary would want the money by hook or by crook, and he would certainly not rely on a smile and a kind word to get it.

  Jericho felt his ear and slowed his pace.

  The Pergamon Museum’s temple façade seemed to stare at him, each window a watchful eye. In the fourth wing, crowds of culture vultures jostled along the glass hallway, among the last surviving traces of lost empires. He walked on, glancing at his watch. Quarter past eleven. They had agreed on twelve o’clock, but Jericho wanted to get to know the location first. On his right, a long, modern building abutted the rest, its lower storey modelled after the older architecture while the top was a tall, airy colonnade: the James Simon Gallery, entrance to the museum island’s web of walkways. Visitors bustled across to the island in a chattering, sweating throng. Jericho joined the crowd crossing this arm of the Spree and was carried along up a grandiose stairway to the top floor of the gallery. He bought his ticket in a spacious hall lined with terraces and cafés, and followed the signs for the Pergamon Museum.

  His first impression as he entered the southern wing of the museum was that he had walked into nirvana. The only feature in the room which tied it to earthly time and space was the Romanesque arched window towards the river. The exhibits were lifted clean out of any historical context, displayed in a space so huge it could almost be hyperspace, and looked splendid yet lonely at one and the same time, a chilly, hypothetical view of history. Jericho turned right and walked along a kind of street, with walls on either side, its frieze and battlements glowing with rich colour, reading the explanatory captions as he went. The animals in the frieze represented the Babylonian gods, with stately lions for Ishtar, goddess of love and protector of armies, serpentine dragons for Marduk, god of fertility and eternal life, patron of the city of Babylon, and wild bulls for Adad, lord of storms. Nebuchadnezzar II had ordered an inscription for the walls, reading ‘May ye walk in joy upon this Processional Way, oh ye gods.’ He could never have dreamed that the moment would come when groups of Japanese and Korean tourists would mill about in confusion here, losing their bearings amidst the grandeur of the past, hurrying to catch up with the wrong tour guide, confused by identical tabards. There was a model of Babylon in a glass cube, with a truncated pyramid in the middle soaring heavenwards; this was the ziggurat, the temple of Marduk. So that was where the God of the Old Testament had poured out his wrath, onto this surprisingly low tower, where he had confounded their language. Right then. This street had originally led to the ziggurat from the Ishtar Gate, which dominated the next hall, blue and yellow, glorious, shining like the sun, covered like the walls of the Way with the gods’ totem animals. The mass of visitors crowding the Way gave some idea of what it must have been like here at the time of the great processions.

  Rush hour in Babylon.

  Jericho went through the gate of Babylon and emerged 660 years later from a Roman gate that took up the whole wall of the next hall: the Market Gate of Miletus, two storeys high, a showpiece of transitional architecture, halfway between Hellenistic and Roman. He kept a constant lookout for exit routes. So far, it was easy to keep his bearings in the museum. The only thing that might slow him down was the density of the crowd of visitors, moving only at glacial speeds. Next to him, a Korean man was gesticulating furiously, telling his tour guide that he had lost his wife to the Japanese, only to learn that he had ended up with the Japanese. This was the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel, with languages mixing in confusion: the tourist group huddled into a knot. Jericho edged his way around them and escaped to the next hall.

  He knew where he was at once.

  This was where Vogelaar had chosen for the meeting. The room was the size of a hangar, but more than half of it was taken up by the front of a colossal Roman temple. Even the stairway leading up to the colonnades had to be a good twenty metres wide. All around the base of the temple ran a comic strip in marble, twice the height of a man, which the museum signs announced as the famous frieze of the Gigantomachy, showing the story of the Greek gods’ battle against the giants. It was the tale of an attempted coup, making it the perfect place to meet Vogelaar: Zeus had slighted Gaia by imprisoning her monstrous children, the Titans, in Tartarus – a sort of primordial Black Beach Prison. Gaia was determined to free them from the underworld and get rid of the hated father of the gods and all his corrupt crew, so she roused up to rebellion her children who were still at liberty. These were the giants, and Gaia knew that they could not be killed at the hands of a god. The giants were well-known ruffians, and just to make them scarier, they had giant snakes for legs. They leapt at the chance to protect their mother’s honour, and this gave Zeus the pretext to indulge in yet another of his many dalliances with human women – This is just a strategic move, Hera, it’s not how it looks! – and to father Hercules, a mortal, who would be able to sort the giants out. The giants put up a fight, chucking around hilltops and tree-trunks, so Athena rose to the challenge – Anything you can do, I can do better! – and flung whole islands at them, burying one of the ringleaders, Enkelados, under nothing less than Sicily; from that moment on, the giant blew his fiery breath up through Etna, while another, Mimas, was trapped beneath Vesuvius, and Poseidon scored a square hit on a third giant with the island of Kos. Most of them, though, succumbed to Hercules’ poisoned arrows, until the whole serpent-legged brood was exterminated. The frieze told the same old story, of a struggle for power, with the same old weapons. Who were the Fang, who were the Bubi, and who were the colonialists? Who bankrolled whom, and why? Had there been a dossier back then as well, containing the whole story, something like ‘The Truth about the Gigantomachy’ or ‘The Olympus Files’? A dossier like the one that the last surviving giant from Equatorial Guinea claimed to have?

  Jericho’s gaze turned to the stairway.

  There were three entrances to the pillared central hall, where the altar had once stood. Vogelaar had said he’d be waiting there. He climbed the gleaming marble steps, went through the columns and found himself in a large, rectangular space, brightly lit, with another, smaller frieze running around its walls. From up here there was a good view of everything happening down at the bottom of the stairs, as long as you didn’t mind being seen in turn. Further back in the room, and you were safely out of sight.

  Jericho looked at his watch.

  Half past eleven. Time to explore the rest of the museum.

  He left the temple hall the other way and went into the north wing, where he found other examples of Hellenistic architecture. And what if Vogelaar didn’t have a dossier? He paced along the façade of the Mshatta palace, a desert castle from the eighth century. He was increasingly worried that the whole thing might be a trap. Romanesque windows marked the end of the north wing, but he couldn’t have said what he had seen in this part of the museum. As a scouting trip to learn the lie of the land, this was a wash-out. Stone faces stared down at him. He turned left. The way through to the fourth wing of the museum, the glass wing, led between rams and sphinxes, past pharaohs, through the temple gate from Kalabsha and beneath artefacts from the pyramid temple of Sahuré. Suddenly Jericho felt reminded of another glass corrido
r, the one where the ill-fated Grand Cherokee Wang had met Kenny Xin. An omen? With a grating sound, arms lifted, spear-tips were raised, granite fingers closed on the hilts of swords carved from stone. He went on, the daylight flooding in on him. To his right he could look through the windows that covered the whole wall, down to one of the bridges over this arm of the Spree, while to his left the inner courtyard of the museum stretched away. In front of him was an obelisk showing priest-kings gesturing strangely from the backs of glaring beasts, and in the corner was a statue of the weather god Hadad. Here the glass corridor joined the museum’s south wing and completed the circuit, leading back to the Babylonian Processional Way.

  Twenty to twelve.

  He went into the Pergamon hall for the second time, and found it besieged by art students who had parked themselves on the landing with sketch pads and were beginning to turn the glories of antiquity into rough sketches for their own future careers. He started up the steps with a feeling of foreboding. In the inner courtyard with the Telephos frieze, visitors were shuffling from one marble fragment to the next, seeking history’s secrets in the missing arms and noses. Jericho’s head pounded as he paced among the crippled heroes, eavesdropping on a father who was lecturing his offspring in muffled tones, stifling whatever faint glimmer of interest they might ever have had in ancient sculpture. With every date he mentioned, the kids’ frowns grew deeper. The look in their eyes spoke of honest bafflement – why were grownups so keen on broken statuary? How could anyone get through life without arms? Why not just fix the things? Their voices were older than their years as they feigned enthusiasm for smashed thighs, stone stumps and the fragmentary face of a king, without hope of escape.

  Without hope of escape—

  That was it. Up here, he was trapped.

  Pessimist, he scolded himself. They had saved Vogelaar’s life, and furthermore the Telephos hall wasn’t the kitchen at Muntu. The exchange would take place, swift and silent. The worst that could happen would be that the documents didn’t contain what the seller claimed. He tried to relax, but his shoulders had frozen solid with tension. The father was doing his best to enthuse his children for the beauty of a right breast, floating free, which must, he explained, have been part of the lovely goddess Isis. Their eyes darted about, wondering what was lovely or beautiful here. Jericho turned away, glad all over again that he was no longer young.