‘Where are you going?’ I heard Alina call as I went back to the entrance that led to the street. I was obeying an urge to do something rather than following a definite plan when I opened my mobile and used the display’s feeble glow to illuminate the board on which old firms’ nameplates were mounted.
The uppermost and biggest bore the name Köpenicker Textilfabrik. The other enamel plaques had either been wrenched off or were so scratched and grimy, the lettering that had originally listed the individual departments was almost indecipherable: Printing, Design, Administration, Sales...
I rested my palm against the cold metal.
Think, Zorbach, think. He wants you to look for the children. It’s a game, and a game isn’t a game unless every player has a chance of winning. If he’s giving you clues, it’s only to level the odds.
Why should he lure you here?
To humiliate you? To see you fail at the very last minute?
Or perhaps he’s left you another clue?
I stepped aside and shone the display on one of those obligatory notices forbidding unauthorized access to a prohibited area.
Another lead?
‘Danger – No Entry,’ I read aloud.
Most appropriate...
My eye lighted on a second warning just below the first: ‘Cellar 77 completely flooded!’
I shouted so loudly, TomTom started barking in the yard.
Cellar 77!
Was that the answer? Was it another ploy?
I had a sudden, vivid recollection of the photo as I dashed back to Alina.
Grünau 21.7 (77)
From that point on, everything was terrifyingly straightforward.
10
(ONE MINUTE TO THE DEADLINE)
TOBIAS TRAUNSTEIN
He was swimming. Treading water. Dying.
Toby had never given any serious thought to death until the last couple of days. Why would he? He’d only just turned nine, after all. ‘You’ve got your whole life ahead of you,’ his grandfather used to say whenever they came to Sunday lunch.
Wrong, Grandpa, I’ve got nothing ahead of me any more. My head’s already nudging the roof of this iron coffin. I’ve only got a tiny space left to breathe in, and even that is gradually filling up with water.
He wept and spat out the first few drops of water that had found their way into his mouth. Pouring in through every chink in the metal compartment, seeping up through the floor and in through the seams in the sides, the water had converged from all directions to form a reservoir whose surface had now reached the roof. A deep, dark, ice-cold reservoir in which Toby was on the verge of drowning.
I’ll suffocate, he thought. It was like that time beneath the gym mattress, but this was completely different. Although he’d wept then too, he’d known in his heart of hearts that Herr Kerner would come and rescue him. Except that this wasn’t a gym and his father wasn’t a PE teacher who would haul the mattress off him so he could breathe again. His father was...
... a write-off. Dad’s never been there for me, so why should he show up now? Mum, more like.
Yes, Mum was bound to be looking for him. Like when he and Lea forgot the time while out toboganning and Mum had come running through the woods to meet them, worried sick.
Toby, she’d kept calling. Lea, Toby...
He’d been half pleased and half ashamed. Although it had naturally saddened him that Mum had cried on his account, at least he knew how much she loved him.
Toby? Hello? Where are you, Toby? He seemed to have heard someone calling him earlier, before the water (which isn’t caldo in the least, but molto freddo) finally woke him up. Could Mum be coming?
Yes, Mum. Not Dad. Stuff Dad and his lectures at the dinner table and his lousy Italian. Most of all, stuff his job, which always prevents him from playing with me in the garden. Dad won’t come, but Mum...
His lips sucked in the last of the air between the surface and the metal roof. Then the water level rose another millimetre and his head became entirely submerged. He knew he was drowning, but he was still hopeful that Mum would find him soon.
9
(INSIDE THE FINAL MINUTE)
PHILIPP STOYA
(DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT, HOMICIDE, ON BOARD THE CONTAINER SHIP) ‘What’s behind there?’ Stoya thumped the steel door with his fist.
‘You mustn’t open that,’ said the ship’s captain.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s a bulkhead door. Open it and we’ll be in trouble.’
Stoya gripped the rotary valve. He strained at it with all his might but failed to budge it so much as a millimetre.
‘Hey, what are you doing? Didn’t you hear what I said?’ the captain protested loudly when Stoya asked the task force commander if he had any C4 explosive. ‘I’ll lose my job if you open it.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s why we’re stuck here. The old tub’s leaking like a sieve.’ The captain indicated the bulkhead door. ‘That compartment’s neck-deep in water. Your dogs were only barking at some water rats, take it from me.’
8
ALEXANDER ZORBACH
As a rule, we only question our mistakes, never our successes. If something goes well we take it as our God-given right. We grieve if we lose money or are ditched by those we love, but we wonder why they stay with us as seldom as we wonder how we passed an examination. In my opinion, however, we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our undeserved successes. Unless we question those, they lull us into a state of complacency and we can never repeat them.
I forgot my own maxim when the last minute of the ultimatum came.
The entrance to Building 77, which was in the second inner courtyard, could not be missed. Alina took the lead for the first time, because it was pitch-dark inside the former warehouse. The only eyes that might have seen anything were TomTom’s.
And so we performed a kind of weird Polish dance in which I, with my hands resting on Alina’s shoulders from behind, entered a stairwell redolent of lubricating oil and stagnant water. I prayed that my sense of time had deceived me, and that we still had a few minutes’ grace, just as I also prayed to an invisible power that I had not become the plaything of a madman who was luring me into the void for his own malicious amusement.
In the end I had no more time, not even another second, in which to reflect on the insanity I was living through. It was my own eyes, not TomTom’s, that spotted the first sign of life.
Red, glowing, circular.
A little button on the wall – the kind you look for when the light goes out on the stairs in a block of flats.
The LED was on, which proved that the building had power.
‘Someone’s been here.’ I felt Alina’s shoulder muscles tense beneath my hand as I said it.
What happened when I pressed the button resembled an explosion.
Light!
Here of all places, in Building 77, 217 Grünauer Strasse, someone had screwed in the fuses.
Or installed a generator. Like before, at the bungalow...
‘What happened?’ Alina asked. The sudden illumination had been so bright, even she must have detected the difference.
‘We’re in the entrance to an old warehouse,’ I told her. ‘Stairs on the right, goods lift on the left.’
And straight ahead...
‘Where are you going?’
I can’t recall if I answered Alina before or after I depressed the handle and wrenched the door open.
Perhaps I didn’t say anything at all. All I can remember is my own cry of joy when the heavy, bulky door detached itself from the rubber seal with a sucking sound and I looked into the eyes that were gazing out at me.
From inside an old American refrigerator.
‘Mum?’ said the soft, childish voice that went with the eyes.
Behind me, Alina uttered a groan of relief. My eyes filled with tears.
Charlie’s dead – murdered by the madman who shut you up in there.
‘I’m not
your Mum, but I’m here to help you.’
Her dark, fearful eyes regarded me in silence. I held out my hand, which was promptly grasped by her own little hands.
She was such a featherweight, I could easily lift her out of her prison with one arm.
Out of the Eye Collector’s hiding place.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘you’re safe now.’ I checked her pulse.
Weak but regular.
‘But someone else needs your help now.’
She nodded shyly. She knew what I meant.
‘Lea,’ I said, trying to conceal the despair in my voice, ‘have you any idea where your brother is?’
7
‘In the lift?’
‘Mmm.’ Lea nodded timidly. ‘Where’s Mum?’
‘Later, Lea.’
We’ll both weep for Charlie later. First I must rescue your brother.
‘I heard it going down,’ she said.
I stroked her head, which was moist with sweat, and turned to look at the goods lift behind me.
Down? Please not, please don’t let it have gone down into the cellar.
I had a vision of the notice in the entrance to the outer courtyard: Danger – No Entry. Cellar of Warehouse 77 completely flooded.
From then on, everything seemed to speed up. First I tried to wrench the lift doors apart with my bare hands. Luckily, I didn’t waste more than ten seconds on that fruitless endeavour. I recalled seeing an iron bar protruding from a mound of rubbish we’d climbed over on our way there, but there was a danger I would fail to find it quickly enough in the darkness outside.
I undid TomTom’s harness and jammed the metal handle in the crack between the doors. The aluminium gave, but it was strong enough to enable me to widen the crack until I could insert my fingers, then my foot. Next, I wedged one knee and my shoulder in the gap. The doors were evidently programmed to open when obstructed, but I couldn’t afford to indulge my sense of relief. Least of all when I looked down the lift shaft.
Oh no... I could see the top of the goods lift a couple of metres below me. Which meant that it really had descended into the cellar when the ultimatum expired.
Into the flooded cellar!
Wedging the doors open with the dog’s harness, I jumped down the shaft and landed so awkwardly I nearly fell on my face.
Oh Jesus!
The top of the lift was awash.
One minute? Two minutes? How long could a child hold its breath underwater?
I soon spotted the source of the water. It was coming from the hatch some bright manufacturer had installed for technicians and emergencies, though he’d certainly never imagined a child would drown inside his lift.
Above me I could hear Alina summoning help on my mobile. I opened the hatch with ease.
Too late, I’m too late! I thought, although all things considered, everything had gone surprisingly smoothly until now.
Too smoothly!
Water was welling up through the hatch, black as Indian ink.
‘Toby?’ I called – nonsensically. I plunged my arm into the dark void below me and gasped when the water closed around it like an icy sleeve.
There’s no point. It’s all been in vain.
Feverishly, I racked my brains for some other way.
But there wasn’t one. I had no choice.
So I hyperventilated briefly at the thought of what I was about to do. Then I sucked as much air as possible into my lungs and lowered myself into the icy water feet first.
6
There comes a point at which the intensity of cold is measured, not in degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, but in pain. Immersing myself in the icy void, my skin was pierced by countless millions of the finest needles, and the further I sank the deeper they were driven into my body. The shock was so extreme, all I could think about for a moment was myself and my own survival. Then, before I finally touched down on the floor of the goods lift, I struck my shin on something hard.
Toby?
I stretched out my arms and opened my eyes in the hope of feeling or seeing the boy. No such luck.
What happens to someone when they’re drowning? Do they drift to the surface? Do they sink? Or do they float halfway like a fish?
All my questions went unanswered and I could feel myself running out of air.
Even though you’ve only been underwater for a few seconds.
My God, I thought, it’s no use, not any more.
I felt I would burst. My blood, the air remaining in my lungs – everything seemed to be pressing against the confines of my body from within. And then came the most wonderful sensation ever, because at last...
... at last I’d touched something.
I sank to the floor by expelling a little air from my lungs and inwardly rejoiced because I hadn’t been mistaken.
Hair, ears, a mouth – yes, yes, yes, it really is a face.
I grasped the boy’s head and pulled him towards me, and for the first time for many, many hours my hopes outweighed my fears.
Perhaps it hasn’t all been in vain. Perhaps we’ll make it after all...
Get out of here!
All I wanted, now that I’d found Toby at last, was to escape. But with hope came a renewed feeling of exhaustion. I’d been deprived of sleep, threatened with torture and subjected to the worst ordeal I’d ever undergone in my life. And now the little energy I still possessed was being sapped by the temperature of the water surrounding me. I couldn’t tell if the boy in my weary arms was still alive, but I could certainly feel my own pulse slowing.
Badumm, badumm, badumm...
The interval between my heartbeats was increasing.
We must get out of here. Out into the light and air.
I clasped Toby in a rather inefficient headlock and pushed off the floor of the lift with my feet.
5
Black. Dark. Nothing.
The light overhead – damnation, was it ever up there? – had gone out so suddenly, I almost let go of the boy in shock. The water had become an opaque, oily film. I no longer knew where to make for.
Where the devil is the light? Where’s the hatch?
Up, down, left, right. Those words had lost their meaning. I was completely disoriented.
My panic had reached the ne plus ultra of intensity. That may have been the reason for my sudden calm. My tension subsided as if a critical threshold had been crossed, releasing a safety valve.
Or is that what it’s like when you’re drowning? I myself had written an article on the subject. It had transpired from interviews with survivors of drowning that, although the moment when the water pours into your lungs is frightening in the extreme, your fear gives way to a feeling of intoxication.
I would soon experience that for myself, I knew. I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to open my mouth and draw a deep, deep breath.
That sweet, irresistible sensation. Like an addiction, a lethal drug to which one willingly surrenders.
Just as I felt my hands begin to lose their grip on the boy’s body, my leg caught in the rope.
A rope? Where in God’s name did a rope suddenly appear from?
I tugged at it with my free hand and was surprised when it didn’t give. I was past thinking clearly in any case, so it didn’t occur to me to wonder if it was attached to the floor or the ceiling, even though this might spell the crucial difference between life and death. Why? Because that dictated the direction in which I ought to haul myself. Myself and Toby Traunstein, whose body seemed to be growing heavier and more inanimate by the second.
I kicked out like a diver, except that I was wearing heavy boots, not flippers, and they were weighing me down.
Really down?
One-handed, I hauled myself gradually up the rope.
Up? Or down?
Am I hauling myself in the wrong direction? To my death?
I opened my eyes. I didn’t expect to see anything down there in the inky darkness, but my head felt as if it would burst and it was an absurd ref
lex rather than a conscious decision, almost as if I were trying to equalize the pressure through my eyes or filter oxygen out of the brackish water. I was all the more surprised when I actually saw something.
Light!
Yes, up there at the end of the rope I saw a faint ray of light.
The weirdos were right all along, was my last thought before the rope slipped through my fingers. This is how it ends. We fight our way through a cold, dark void, but when it’s all over we see a light at the end of the tunnel.
I smiled and breathed in. Deeply.
4
(55 MINUTES AFTER THE DEADLINE)
ALINA GREGORIEV
‘Can you please tell me what’s going on?’ Alina asked. The man who was dressing her hand had neither introduced himself nor said anything at all.
‘Sorry, not authorized to,’ he replied. His surprisingly high-pitched voice sounded far too reedy for his body.
All she had felt so far was the paramedic’s hand on hers, but that was generally sufficient to enable a blind person to gauge a person’s body weight. When wanting to form an initial impression of a someone’s stature, Alina grasped their wrist for a moment. At present, though, nothing could have mattered less to her than the physical appearance of the overweight man who was preventing her from leaving the ambulance.
‘Relax, I’m not done with you yet.’
She yielded to the pressure of his hands as he forced her back on the stretcher.
‘To hell with me, what about the others?’
What about Zorbach and the boy?
Alina didn’t know whether to be angry or grateful to be spared the sight of Stoya’s men when they finally hurried to her aid in Building 77. The pictures in her head, her memories of those terrible minutes beside the goods lift, consisted almost entirely of sounds and smells.
She had heard the lift doors close again, heard the aluminium handle Zorbach had jammed between them slip out with a loud, grating sound and fall to the floor. Her residual sight told her that the light had gone out. Lea, suppressing her sobs like the brave little girl she was, confirmed this. Meanwhile, down in the lift shaft, Zorbach had been utterly helpless – trapped without tools or light in a place which Alina could picture only through the medium of omnipresent smells: stagnant water and mildewed masonry, refuse and excrement.