Splinter

  73

  It was quite deliberate. Benny vaulted the balustrade like an exhausted hurdler, right leg leading and arms waving as if bidding farewell to the leafless weeping willow in the hospital grounds, which topped the three-storey block by several metres. He flung out his chest and arched his back, looking for a moment like a skydiver just before his parachute opens. Then his left foot caught in the rail.

  The ice-sheathed metal uprights trembled. Benny appeared to have tried to turn in mid-air and reach back with his right arm. Marc’s suspicion was confirmed: it was no accident. Benny had checked his progress in an attempt to prevent himself from falling and clutched the handrail at the last moment.

  But why?

  Stars danced before Marc’s eyes as he tottered out into the sleet-filled darkness.

  Benny’s hand had slipped off the handrail, but he had at least caught hold of an upright. He was now hanging by one arm, legs kicking. He tried to get another handhold, but the metal uprights were so icy his hands kept losing their grip.

  He wants to haul himself up again. He’s had second thoughts.

  Marc hurried to his aid, slithering rather than walking in his rubber-soled trainers. Meanwhile, Benny’s fingers had completely lost their grip on the upright. He was now clinging to a narrow ledge with both hands.

  By the time Marc reached him, he was hanging by his fingertips.

  Marc leant over the balustrade. Looking down, he realized why Benny had checked his fall.

  It’s too high.

  He had picked the wrong place to jump.

  ‘Brain-dead, but the heart must go on beating. Do it the way I showed you.’

  It was doubtful if his organs would have survived intact, even after a fall from three floors up, but here the drop was far greater. In front of this east wing Constantin had had a pit excavated for an annexe, an underground garage or a swimming pool for convalescent patients. Its exact purpose was unclear from up here, but not the effect of a fall from this height.

  Benny will smash himself to pieces.

  Especially as the bottom of the pit was sheathed in steel mats. No shrubs, no grass, no soil. There was nothing down there to break his fall.

  ‘Shit,’ Benny hissed between his teeth. He made no attempt to move for fear of slipping off. His fingers were numb and bloodless. He wouldn’t be able to hang on for much longer.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ said Marc. He couldn’t do anything from his side of the balustrade, so he climbed over the handrail and balanced on the narrow ledge Benny was clinging to. His rubber soles could get little purchase on the wet stone.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, grabbing hold of his brother’s sleeve with one hand and hanging on to an upright with the other. ‘I’ve got you,’ he lied. He was weak and exhausted and aching all over. He could scarcely hang on himself, let alone haul his brother back over the balustrade.

  ‘Shit,’ said Benny. ‘I’m too stupid even to die.’ Marc gave him an agonized smile. ‘I’ll manage,’ he lied again.

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Fuck that.’

  ‘Let go of me or we’ll both be done for.’

  Marc’s fingers slipped on the smooth material of the wet bomber jacket, but he quickly recovered his grip. For the moment.

  He looked down in search of help, but the hospital grounds were deserted in this weather. An ambulance with a red cross on its white roof was uselessly parked fifty metres away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he heard his brother say as he continued to stare at the roof of the ambulance. A sudden thought occurred to him. It was so absurd and so utterly inappropriate he couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘Cross!’

  ‘What?’ said Benny.

  ‘The radio oracle. The singer’s name was Christopher Cross.’

  Benny looked up with a feeble smile. All at once he ceased to look like someone clinging to a ledge for dear life. Although every muscle in his body was taut as a bowstring, he seemed to be at peace – resigned to the inevitable.

  ‘Let go of me,’ he asked for the last time.

  All right.

  Marc nodded.

  Then, summoning up all his strength, he gripped his brother by both arms. Although he himself was now unsupported, he managed to raise him at least a few centimetres. Not as much as he would have liked, but he simply couldn’t do any better – he didn’t have the strength left.

  It wasn’t ideal, nor did it eliminate every element of risk, but in the end, at the very last moment, just as he thrust himself and his brother away from the ledge and plunged to the ground, an inner voice told him that his plan would work.

  74

  TODAY

  The fire on the hearth had not lost its magnetic attraction. Marc could scarcely tear his eyes away from it while Haberland was talking, and the flames seemed if anything even brighter now.

  He had kept Haberland covered at first, but when the old man took absolutely no notice and continued his account with ever greater insistence, he put the automatic on the coffee table and ended up forgetting all about it. Now that Haberland had finished and was looking at him expectantly, Marc felt simultaneously relieved and apprehensive.

  That’s how it happened. That’s just how it was.

  Haberland’s descriptions were so vivid that the memories had unfolded in his mind’s eye like a film.

  ‘May I have a glass of water, please?’ he asked hoarsely. It must have been hours since he’d had anything to drink, and his throat felt raw and dusty. Strangely enough, many other negative sensations had receded far into the background. The dislocated shoulder, cracked ribs and loose teeth were transmitting only muted signals to his brain.

  Haberland showed no sign of having heard Marc’s request. ‘So you accept that you really experienced all those things?’

  Marc nodded with an effort. Haberland leant forward with an air of interest.

  ‘In that case, what leads you to believe you may have lost your mind?’

  ‘Please, you’ve got to tell me. I don’t know what’s happening to me.’

  Marc stared past him at the bright, leaping flames in the fireplace, then at the window. It seemed to be still as dark outside as it had been when he arrived.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ he asked in a low, almost detached voice. He couldn’t help thinking of the first thing Haberland had said to him that night.

  ‘I really wish you’d come sooner. Time’s running out.’

  ‘Were you just another of Constantin’s play-actors?’

  ‘No,’ Haberland said with an amiable smile. ‘On the contrary, Emma and I were the only ones not in the know. Benny only brought you out here so that I could look at your injuries. He also wanted to gain time and say goodbye to me.’

  He took a big wad of notes from his inside pocket and showed them to Marc for a moment before putting them back.

  ‘I think Benny didn’t like it at all when I found there was no wound beneath your dressing.’ Haberland’s smile broadened. ‘Didn’t you notice how nervous he was when you drove off with him after our walk beside the lake? Your brother was very much afraid I’d given your memory a helping hand. But I knew nothing of the conspiracy.’

  Marc digested this, then shook his head sceptically. ‘I

  don’t believe that. If you weren’t implicated in it, how do you have such a detailed knowledge of what I’ve been through in the last few hours?’

  ‘Hours?’ Haberland queried. He glanced at the little digital clock on his desk.

  11.04. Precisely the time at which they’d visited him yesterday.

  Marc blinked in bewilderment. ‘Has it stopped?’ he asked. Haberland shook his head.

  But. . . That’s impossible, it can’t be. . .

  He tried to get up but failed to extricate himself from the soft, yielding sofa cushions. His arms had gone to sleep – the blood didn’t appear to be circulating properly. He turned towards the door.

  ‘How did I get here? And how. . .’ He looked down at his useless ar
ms, which he couldn’t move of his own volition. ‘How could I have survived the fall?’

  A ten-metre drop? On to steel mats? Without medical attention?

  Haberland gave another amiable smile. ‘You’re starting to ask the right questions at last. I told you you’d find all the answers by yourself.’

  ‘Have you ever heard a story and wished afterwards that you’d never found out the ending?’

  Marc was overcome by a sudden urge to tear away the invisible cobwebs on his skin: dusty threads that cocooned his mind as well as his body and concealed the truth he so badly wanted to fathom. The truth embodied in a single question: ‘Do I exist?’

  Haberland smiled again and folded his hands. A log collapsed on the hearth, sending up a shower of fiery red sparks. At last he said: ‘Yes, beyond a doubt. Where Benny’s experiences were concerned, I had to improvise a little. I reconstructed them from the conversations you and your brother had in the last few hours, so some of them may have been misrepresented, but everything I told you about yourself really happened to you. You’re real enough.’

  He paused. Then he said quietly: ‘Unlike me.’

  The room was invaded by an icy draught just as it had been yesterday, when Benny went out on the veranda to smoke a cigarette.

  The memory of his brother brought tears to Marc’s eyes.

  ‘You know what they say about the last few seconds before death?’ Haberland asked, rubbing his scarred wrists.

  Marc nodded. ‘The whole of your life is supposed to pass in review before your mind’s eye – or parts of it, at least. Experiences that have left a lasting impression on your psyche. Passing an exam, getting married, the birth of a child. Negative experiences too, though. . .’

  He broke off.

  Like a car crash?

  ‘Of course,’ Haberland went on, ‘no one has ever crossed the threshold and returned, but many people who have been resuscitated claim that their near-death experience consisted in talking with people who meant a great deal to them.’

  Like Sandra, Constantin, Benny and. . .

  The professor nodded, as if he could read Marc’s thoughts. ‘Scientists have ascertained that all they are, these final moments and the dazzling light towards which one appears to be moving, is a biochemical disturbance in the dying brain.’

  The fire flared up even more brightly than before. Marc’s eyes were smarting. Everything around him seemed to become clearer, practically transparent.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m just a memory.’

  The professor rose from his wing chair. All of a sudden, Marc no longer felt the leaden inertia that had kept him on the sofa until now. He got to his feet effortlessly.

  ‘Come, Tarzan.’ Taking an old knitted cardigan from the tea trolley, Haberland bent over his dog. The weary animal raised its head and stretched, then crawled out of its wicker basket beside the window.

  Marc looked first at the fire and then at the professor, who was patting his dog’s head.

  ‘So it was all for nothing?’ he asked. ‘All the suffering?’

  Haberland looked up.

  Should I have let Benny fall after all?

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t see into the future, no one can. I can only tell you what’s already present in your memory.’

  Marc nodded. The film was at an end. The last reel had fallen off its spindle.

  ‘But then, you know what I think.’

  It can never be right to do the wrong thing.

  The floorboards creaked faintly as Haberland shuffled over to the veranda door with his dog in tow. From behind, they looked tired but contented.

  It was growing lighter outside. To Marc, the scent of wood smoke from the fireplace seemed suddenly more intense, but that might just have been his imagination – just another biochemical disturbance in his brain, like the image of the professor, who turned with his hand on the door handle.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a stroll.’

  LOCAL NEWS

  THE END AND THE MEANS

  Today, at the Senner Clinic in Berlin-Charlottenburg, doctors turned off the life-support system of a man whose fate has aroused widespread public sympathy.

  Mystery still surrounds the circumstances in which Marc Lucas and his brother Benjamin fell from the roof of the hospital where Marc died after lying in a coma for ten days. His death, which occurred at 11.04 a.m. today, resulted from the severe internal injuries he sustained.

  By an ironical quirk of fate, or so it seems, his death saved two human lives. Had he not hit the ground first, he would not have broken his brother’s fall. Benjamin Lucas suffered numerous fractures but survived without any internal injuries. This enabled him to donate the left lobe of his liver to a newborn child – none other than the dead man’s son, who was suffering from a fatal liver condition and had been delivered only minutes before his father’s ultimately fatal fall.

  Because of the mysterious circumstances, surrounding the case, it is now under review by the district attorney’s office. There are many indications that it may have involved suicide for the purpose of an illegal organ donation, particularly as the hospital’s medical director is Constantin Senner, the father of Sandra Lucas, the dead man’s wife. An operating theatre had been prepared and a team of surgeons was standing by in readiness to carry out the transplant, a difficult operation on a newborn child. Moreover, the baby had been on a waiting list for donor organs for weeks beforehand.

  It is also rumoured that another surgical team had been standing by to operate on Marc Lucas, who is said to have needed a liver transplant himself. This would seem to corroborate the district attorney’s suicide theory, because Benjamin Lucas could never have donated both halves of his liver and survived. On the other hand, if he had wanted to save the lives of his brother and the unborn child, why did he jump in company with Marc Lucas?

  An unnamed source in the district attorney’s office doubts that charges will be brought. ‘Establishing the facts in a family drama of this kind is always difficult. Constantin Senner could undoubtedly be struck off the medical register for unethical conduct, but he intended in any case to cease practising and sell his hospital because of financial problems.’

  It is doubtful, therefore, whether the underlying circumstances will ever be entirely clarified. Marc Lucas will probably take most of the truth to the grave with him. As for his brother, who is now out of intensive care, he has invoked his right of refusal to testify. He does at least appear to have made a good recovery from his living-donor operation, which is permissible between relatives and when only part of an organ is involved. If any blame attaches to Sandra Lucas, on the other hand, she may have been sufficiently punished. Not only has she lost her husband, but it is still uncertain whether her brother-in-law’s lobus sinister, or left lobe of the liver, will be accepted or rejected by her child’s body. The baby is doing well, all things considered, but it is still far too early for a definite prognosis.

  Ken Sukowsky

  ‘BOSS OF THE BOUNCERS’ ON TRIAL

  Berlin – The trial opens today of Eduard Valka, head of the criminal organization that controls the city’s nightclub and disco doormen. He stands accused, in addition to other charges, of procuring the murder of Magda H., an underage prostitute from Bulgaria, and of conspiracy to murder a journalist employed by this newspaper, who was conducting research into Valka’s criminal activities. In view of the evidence against him, which the district attorney’s office describes as overwhelming, an early verdict is expected.

  MANY YEARS LATER

  Sunlight slanted down through the barred windows, projecting an elongated trelliswork of shadows on to the floor. Although the patient’s room was regularly cleaned and aired, the minuscule motes of dust dancing in the sun’s rays lent them the appearance of a spotlight.

  ‘She’s not responding,’ said the doctor in charge. A peppermint – a vain attempt to disguise the stale cigarette smoke on his breath – glinted between h
is teeth as he spoke.

  ‘How long has she been like this?’ asked Marc Lucas. He propped the unwieldy cardboard tube, which he’d had to bring all this way, against the foot of the bed.

  ‘For ages.’

  The doctor stepped aside and cast a judicial glance at the drip that was giving the old lady an electrolytic infusion. The plastic container was still full.

  ‘I wasn’t even working here when she was admitted, but according to her record her psychosis was already very pronounced.’

  ‘Hm,’ Marc grunted. He took her hand, which was lying on the starched bedspread. It felt rough and heavy.

  ‘Who sent her here?’ he asked.

  ‘Her mother was still alive then. If you ask me, the court should have appointed a legal guardian far sooner. The situation was too much for the poor woman. Her first mistake was to begin by putting her daughter in the Bleibtreu Clinic. You know the old story?’

  Marc pretended he was hearing it for the first time.

  ‘No? It made quite a splash in the press. Anyway, her paranoid episodes, some of which were schizoid, got worse in there. At the start of her treatment she thought she was an interpreter, although she didn’t speak a single foreign language. Then she believed herself to be taking part in a secret amnesia experiment – the Bleibtreu Clinic was actually conducting one, but only with the aid of volunteers. Having overheard a conversation between two doctors and jumped to the wrong conclusion, she felt threatened and ran away. She was recaptured, fortunately, and her mother at last managed to ensure that she was confined in a secure and respectable hospital.’

  The doctor crunched up his peppermint with a satisfied air. The idea that his hospital had been preferred to a private institution evidently pleased him.