Sebastian Fitzek has worked as a journalist and author for radio and TV stations all around Europe, and is now head of programming at RTL, Berlin’s leading radio station. His first and subsequent novels have become huge bestsellers in Germany, and he is currently working on his fifth.
Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Corvus,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Originally published in German as Der Augensammler in 2010 by Droemer Knaur.
Copyright © Sebastian Fitzek, 2010
Translation copyright © John Brownjohn, 2012
The moral right of Sebastian Fitzek to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The moral right of John Brownjohn to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Trade paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 369 7
E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 370 3
Printed in Great Britain
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In memory of Rüdiger Kreklau.
It’s the fantasists who change the world,
not the bean counters.
Playing is experimenting with chance.
Novalis
It’s the end where I begin.
The Script
CONTENTS
EPILOGUE
FINAL CHAPTER
83
82
81
80
79
78
77
76
75
74
73
72
71
70
69
68
67
66
65
64
63
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59
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41
40
39
38
37
36
35
34
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32
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30
29
28
27
26
25
24
23
22
21
20
19
18
17
16
15
14
13
12
11
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
PROLOGUE
1
EPILOGUE
ALEXANDER ZORBACH
Some stories are like fish hooks, prickly with lethal barbs that embed themselves ever deeper and more inextricably in the minds of the audience, compelling them to keep listening. My name for such a tale is perpetuum morbile, a narrative with no beginning or end because it tells of death everlasting.
Stories of this kind are sometimes recounted by unscrupulous souls who revel in the look of horror in their listeners’ eyes and the nightmarish visions that will haunt them later on, leaving them staring up at the ceiling and unable to sleep.
A perpetuum morbile can occasionally be found between the covers of a book, in which case it can be avoided by shutting the volume in question. And that’s my advice to you right now: Don’t read on!
I’ve no idea how you got hold of this story. I only know that it wasn’t meant for you. An account of such horrors should not be allowed to fall into the hands of anyone. Not even your own worst enemy.
Believe me, I speak from experience. I couldn’t shut my eyes or lay the book aside. Why not? Because the story of a man whose tears oozed down his cheeks like drops of blood – the story of a man who embraced a contorted lump of human flesh that had breathed and lived and loved only minutes earlier – is no novel or film script. It it not a figment of the imagination.
It is my destiny.
My life.
There is a man in this tale who was forced to realize, just when the agony within his mind reached its peak, that the process of dying had only just begun. And that man is me.
FINAL CHAPTER
THE END
‘Rock a bye baby on the tree top,
when the wind blows the cradle will rock...’
‘Tell her to put a sock in it!’
‘When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle, and all.’
‘Tell her to stop singing that goddamned song at once!’
‘Yes, yes, I know what I’m doing,’ I told the commander of the mobile police unit, via a tiny radio mic that the technician had pinned to my shirt a few minutes earlier. ‘Keep yelling at me like that and I’ll dump the goddamned earpiece, understand?’
I was nearing the middle of the bridge over the A100. The city expressway was eleven metres below us. It had been shut in both directions to safeguard passing motorists, rather than for the sake of the mentally disturbed woman standing several metres from me.
‘Angélique?’ I called. I knew from the quick briefing I’d received at our temporary command post that she was thirty-seven years old, had twice been convicted of attempted baby-snatching, and had spent at least seven of the last ten years in a secure mental institution. A month ago, unfortunately, some sympathetic psychologist had decided that, in his expert opinion, she should be reintegrated into society.
And dropped us in the shit. Thanks a bunch, doctor!
‘I’ll come a bit closer if you don’t mind,’ I said, raising my arms. No reaction. She was leaning against the rusty railing with her arms cradled across her chest. Now and then she swayed far enough forwards for her elbows to briefly hang over the edge.
I was trembling with cold as well as tension. Although the temperature was surprisingly mild for December, the wind chill made Berlin feel like Yakutsk. Three minutes’ exposure to that icy blast and my ears were almost falling off.
‘Hello? Angélique?’
Gravel crunched beneath my boots. She turned her head and looked at me for the first time. By degrees, as if in slow motion.
‘My name is Alexander Zorbach. I’d like a word with you.’
Because it’s my job. I’m the police negotiator on duty today.
‘Isn’t he lovely?’ she said in the same sing-song voice she’d used for the lullaby. Rock a bye baby... ‘Isn’t my baby adorable?’
> I nodded, although I was too far away to make out what she was clasping to her scrawny chest. It could have been a bolster or a rag doll, but no such luck. Our thermal imaging camera had confirmed that the thing in her arms was warm and alive. I still couldn’t see it, but I could hear it.
The six-month-old baby was crying. Rather feebly, but crying nonetheless.
That was the good news.
The bad news was, it had only minutes to live.
Even if this mentally deranged creature didn’t throw it off the bridge.
Damn it, Angélique, you picked the wrong baby this time – in every possible way.
I made another attempt to engage her in conversation. ‘What’s the little mite’s name?’ I asked.
A bungled abortion had left her unable to have children. It had also robbed her of her reason. This was the third time she’d taken someone else’s baby and tried to pass it off as her own, only to be discovered not far from the hospital. Today it had taken only half an hour for the barefooted woman with a whimpering baby to be spotted on the bridge by a motorcycle courier.
‘He doesn’t have a name yet,’ she said. Her self-delusion was so far advanced that she firmly believed the child in her arms to be her own flesh and blood. I knew it was pointless to try to disabuse her. I certainly wouldn’t achieve in seven minutes what seven years of intensive therapy had failed to do. But that wasn’t what I had in mind.
‘How about “Hans”?’ I suggested. I was now no more than ten metres away.
‘Hans?’ She withdrew one arm from the bundle and folded back the blanket. To my relief, the baby started to cry again. ‘Hans sounds nice,’ she said absently, stepping back a little. She wasn’t as near the rail now. ‘Like Lucky Hans in the fairy tale.’
‘Yes,’ I said, taking another cautious step towards her.
Nine metres.
‘Or,’ I added, ‘like the Hans in the other fairy tale.’
She turned to me with an enquiring look. ‘What other fairy tale?’
‘The one about the nymph called Undine.’
It was more of a saga than a fairy tale, actually, but that was irrelevant under the circumstances.
‘Undine?’ The corners of her mouth turned down. ‘I don’t know it.’
‘No? I’ll tell you it, then. It’s a great story.’
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ the unit commander bellowed in my right ear. I ignored him.
Eight metres. I was edging into the penalty area step by step.
‘Undine was a godlike creature, a water nymph more beautiful than any woman alive. She fell hopelessly in love with a knight named Hans.’
‘Hear that, my pet? You’re a knight!’
The baby responded with a loud cry.
So he’s still breathing. Thank God for that.
‘Yes,’ I went on, ‘but Sir Hans was so handsome that all the women ran after him. Sadly, he fell in love with someone else and left Undine in the lurch.’
Seven metres.
I waited until I heard the baby give another cry. ‘Undine’s father, the sea-god Poseidon, was so angry with Hans that he laid a curse on him.’
Angélique stopped rocking the baby. ‘A curse?’
‘Yes. From then on, Hans could no longer breathe without thinking. He had to concentrate all the time.’
I drew cold air into my lungs and expelled it noisily as I spoke.
‘He had to breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.’
My chest rose and fell demonstratively.
‘If he forgot to do this, even for a moment, he would die.’
Six metres.
‘How does the story end?’ Angélique asked suspiciously, when I’d got to within a car’s length of her. She seemed less put out by my proximity than by the turn the story had taken.
‘Hans made every effort to avoid falling asleep. He struggled with his weariness, but in the end he couldn’t keep his eyes open.’
‘He died?’ she asked dully. Every spark of joy had left her haggard face.
‘Yes, because by falling asleep he’d automatically forgotten to breathe. And that signed his death warrant.’
There was a click in my ear, but this time the unit commander kept his mouth shut. There was nothing to be heard but a distant hum of traffic. A flock of big, black birds soared over us, heading east.
‘That’s not a nice fairy tale.’ Angélique edged forwards a little, clutching the baby tightly to her and rocking it with her entire body.
I put out my hand and came closer still.
‘No, it isn’t. And it isn’t really a fairy tale, either.’
‘What do you mean?’
I paused, waiting for some sign of life from the baby, but there was nothing to be heard. Just silence. My mouth had gone dry.
‘It’s true,’ I told her.
‘True?’
She shook her head – vigorously, as if she already guessed what was coming.
‘Angélique, please listen to me. The baby in your arms is suffering from Undine’s Curse, a disease named after the story I just told you.’
‘No!’
Yes.
The tragic thing was, I hadn’t told her a tactical lie. Undine’s Curse was a rare disorder of the central nervous system. Children suffering from it died of asphyxia unless they deliberately concentrated on breathing. It was a grave, life-threatening illness. In Tim’s case (the baby’s real name) his respiratory activity when awake was sufficient to supply his body with oxygen. He needed ventilating only when asleep.
‘But he’s my baby,’ Angélique protested in her lullaby voice.
Rock a bye baby...
‘See how peacefully he’s sleeping in my arms.’
Oh God, no. She was right. The baby wasn’t making a sound.
... on the tree top...
‘Yes, he’s your baby, Angélique,’ I said urgently, taking another step towards her. ‘No one disputes that, but he mustn’t fall asleep, you hear? If he does, he’ll die like Sir Hans in the fairy tale.’
‘No, no, no!’ She shook her head defiantly. ‘My baby hasn’t been naughty. He isn’t under a curse.’
‘Of course not, but he’s sick. Please give me your little boy so the doctors can make him well.’
I was now so close to her, I caught the rank, sweetish smell of her unwashed hair and the effluvium of mental and physical decay that clung to every thread of her cheap tracksuit.
She turned towards me, giving me my first good view of the baby. Of its tiny, slightly flushed, sleeping face. I stared at Angélique in alarm. And that was when I lost my head.
‘Jesus. No. Don’t!’ the unit commander’s voice yelled in my ear, but by then I was past listening to him. ‘Put it away!’
I’m citing his words and the ones that follow from the transcript sitting before me, written by the chairman of the board of inquiry.
At this remove, seven years after the day that wrecked my life, I’m no longer certain I really saw it.
It.
That something in her expression. A look of unadulterated, despairing self-knowledge. I was sure of it at the time, though.
Call it premonition. Intuition. Clairvoyance. Whatever it was, I sensed it with every fibre of my being. The moment Angélique turned towards me, she became aware of her mental disorder. She recognized herself. Knew that she was sick. Knew that the baby wasn’t hers. Knew that, once I got hold of it, I would never give it back.
‘Don’t, man! Don’t do anything stupid!’
I’d had enough experience as an amateur boxer to know what to focus on in order to guess what an opponent would do next: the shoulders. And Angélique’s shoulders moved in a direction that allowed only one interpretation, confirmed by the fact that she slowly opened her arms at the same time.
Three metres. Only another three fucking metres.
She was going to throw the baby off the bridge.
‘Drop your gun. I repeat: Drop it at once.’
That
was why I ignored the voice in my ear and aimed straight at her forehead.
And squeezed the trigger.
Usually, that’s the moment when I wake up yelling. Then comes a fleeting, euphoric sense of relief that it was just a bad dream. It lasts only until I put out my hand and feel that the other half of the bed is empty – until it occurs to me that this chain of events actually happened. It deprived me of my job, my family, and my ability to sleep through the night without being woken by nightmares.
Since firing that shot I have lived in fear. A cold, clear, all-pervading kind of fear: the concentrate from which my dreams derive their sustenance.
I killed a human being on that bridge.
Much as I try to convince myself that I saved another life by so doing, the equation doesn’t add up. What if I was wrong? What if Angélique never meant to harm the child? What if she opened her arms in order to hand it over – opened them at the very instant my bullet pierced her skull so swiftly that her brain had no time to transmit an impulse to her arms and open them still wider? So swiftly that I was able to catch the baby before it fell from her lifeless grasp?
In other words, what if I killed an innocent woman on that bridge?
If so, I would some day have to pay for my mistake. That much was certain.
I knew it. All I failed to realize was that the day would come so soon.
83
My son and I were paying another visit to the nicest place in Berlin for a child to die in, or so it was said.
‘Really? The helicopter?’ I said, jerking my chin at the open cardboard box I was carrying down the long corridor. ‘Have you thought about it carefully? After all, it’s a Captain Jack chopper with power-boost.’
Julian nodded eagerly as he dragged the bulging Ikea carrier bag over the lino.
I’d offered to help him more than once, but he insisted on towing the heavy bag through the hospital unaided. Typical of the ‘I can manage by myself’ fantasies to which all youngsters sooner or later succumb, usually between their ‘Don’t leave me alone’ and ‘Give me some space’ phases.
All I could do without injuring his pride was walk a bit slower.
‘I don’t need the chopper any more,’ Julian said firmly. He started coughing. It sounded at first as if he’d briefly choked on something, but the coughing grew harsher.