But my present predicament differed from my problems in the past, most of which had been caused by my own impetuosity, in one important respect: I didn’t know what I’d done to unleash the avalanche that was threatening to descend on me.
So the police had turned up at the newspaper office. A logical reaction, on the face of it. It wasn’t just a Hollywood cliché that criminals tend to emulate a dog returning to its vomit. Whenever I hear that some guy has been spotted at a murder scene although its location is known only to the police, I start doing some research into him.
Then there was the wallet. I had searched all my pockets at the hospital hours before. It couldn’t possibly have fallen out of my trouser pocket at the Traunstein villa, especially as I was wearing the white forensics coverall designed to prevent a crime scene from being contaminated by so much as a single fibre from my clothing. Stoya had seen me in this. At best, he might assume that I’d deliberately dropped the wallet there for some reason, but the worst assumption, which made me a suspect, was far more likely.
My brain bore an increasing resemblance to a bag of popcorn in a microwave. Countless thoughts were bouncing around in my head and bursting before I could catch hold of them. Sooner or later I would turn myself in for questioning by the police, but first I had to sort out my ideas. I needed to calm down and discuss things with someone I trusted.
I tried to call Charlie. She didn’t answer her mobile, which was par for the course, and she’d never given me another number – any more than she’d told me her real name.
She normally called me back as soon as she got a chance, but today I lacked the patience to wait until her husband was out of the way. So I tried again, and again I got the anonymous mailbox message.
Where are you, damn it?
I hadn’t spoken to Charlie for days.
Our affair, if you could call it that, had begun on the day when Nicci told me she wanted a divorce. The circumstances of our first meeting were not only absurd but embarrassing.
I could blame it all on the level of alcohol in my blood, which had exceeded a critical limit within only a few hours of the final breakdown of my marriage. My desire to take revenge on all the faithless women in this world probably also played a role. In retrospect, though, I think it was mainly a wish to punish myself that made me enter that place.
While getting undressed in the tiled anteroom and locking up my clothes in a locker, I tried to persuade myself that tonight marked the beginning of a new Zorbach era: a phase of existence during which I would never fall in love again, merely have sex. As soon as I made my way into the bar area, however, I realized I was making an utter fool of myself.
Although this was my first visit to a swingers’ club, I felt as if I’d been there a hundred times before. Everything looked just the way I imagined: brothel-red lighting, furniture that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a pizzeria, and walls adorned with surprisingly innocent pictures of nudes. A sign directed patrons to the sauna, the S&M cellar and the jacuzzi. Immediately beside it was a notice reading: Fuck and the world fucks with you.
Above the bar that occupied the centre of the room was a small television screen positioned so that users of the ‘playing field’ to the right of the counter could watch a porn film while disporting themselves. The latex-covered mattresses were deserted on my first visit, but several couples and single men were seated at the bar. Nearly all were wearing flip-flops and towels around their middles.
I was surprised to note that most of them didn’t look half as bad as I’d expected. One young couple made a very attractive impression. So did the slim blonde who came and sat down beside me, her hair still wet from the shower. I later learned that Charlie had just had enjoyed a threesome with two men and was merely intending to have one for the road before going home to her unsuspecting husband. She saw at once that it was my first time, and she was just as quick to see through the lie I’d concocted in case I bumped into an acquaintance.
Although it was wholly irrational, I felt embarrassed to tell her the truth – probably because I didn’t want such a pretty woman to think I needed to patronize a swingers’ club.
She grinned. ‘So you’re here doing research for your paper. Sure, and I’m a health and safety inspector.’
Although my parents had schooled me early in the facts of life, I was having one hell of a job concentrating on our conversation. Stark naked, Charlie told me she still felt she didn’t really ‘belong’ there, but she was a woman with sexual needs and it was ages since her husband had shown an interest in her. Then she took me on a tour of the premises, showed me the mirror-lined room in which several couples were partner-swapping, and conducted me to the screen behind which some naked men were masturbating as they watched two women making love.
We ourselves didn’t have sex that night, any more than we did at our many subsequent meetings. The platonic relationship we maintained was almost schizophrenic in view of the location of our regular chats. But Charlie insisted on meeting me at the swingers’ club, nowhere else, ‘Because the people here are far more discreet.’
So we met there again and again, chatting with increasing familiarity and becoming intimate in the truest sense of the word. Although not in the way a swinger’s club would have intended.
We talked for hours while the other patrons were copulating. Little by little I discovered that her husband’s cunning intelligence had made him a considerable fortune. I found out how he had taken advantage of this windfall to play the uncouth vulgarian who regularly got paranoically drunk on the world’s most expensive alcoholic beverages. He had changed soon after their marriage, becoming moodier and more aggressive, working himself up into jealous rages and constantly accusing her of cheating on him – even though he’d been the first and only man in her life until a year ago. He even questioned the paternity of their children and threatened to take them away from her if she considered divorcing him. Finally, when he hit her once too often and called her a whore, she resolved to live up to his abusive description and visited the club, Hothouse, for the first time.
It was an act of pure desperation, so she was all the more surprised to discover that she liked this new, permissive environment – an attitude that I had so far failed to develop. And the more often we met, the more I sensed that our conversations would soon be insufficient, which led to a new problem. There came a time when I could no longer ignore the burning sensation in my gut when Charlie was at the club without me. The thing I’d wanted to avoid at all costs happened: I became jealous. Before long, if I wasn’t careful, I would be falling in love.
‘Please try again later,’ said the computerized voice of Charlie’s mailbox when I pressed the redial button a third time.
Angrily, I tossed my mobile on to the passenger seat.
Just when I really need you for once, I thought, and concentrated on the road.
Our many peculiar assignations had turned me into something of a confidant of Charlie’s – I was a psychologist who sporadically broke off his therapy sessions so that his patient could amuse herself on the ‘playing field’ with some sexual partner who had taken her fancy. Meantime, he would nurse a gin and tonic at the bar.
I listened to you for hours. I waited for you.
Today I was the one who needed some advice from her, but I quickly dismissed the idea of driving to the Hothouse to see if she was there.
Damned if I was going to do that.
It wouldn’t be the first time I’d had to cope on my own. All I needed was a place to relax and clear my head. A place where no one would find me for as long as I didn’t want to be found.
In short, I had to take refuge where I’d last gone to ground two years ago, after trying to kill my mother.
73
(11 HOURS 51 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
The first snow began to fall an hour-and-a-half later. A little too soon, in other words. If it had held off for another few minutes, my Volvo’s tyre tracks wouldn’t have shown up so clearly o
n the forest track. However, I doubted whether anyone had tailed me out to Nikolskoë. The wooded, hilly area between Berlin and Potsdam was popular with day-trippers but, fortunately for me, not in winter, as the Pfaueninsel ferry didn’t operate and both restaurants were shut.
I had previously made a detour to my flat and stocked up with canned ravioli and mineral water. My emergency bag, which was now in the boot, also contained a change of underwear, my spare mobile with a prepaid card not registered in my name (I occasionally used it when phoning informants whose lines might be tapped by the police), and my laptop.
How did my wallet land up at the crime scene? For that matter, how did I come to be there myself?
I tried to put off considering the questions to which I needed answers until I’d reached my hideaway. I didn’t succeed, of course.
I was as incapable of ignoring them as I was the flashing light on the answerphone in my flat. Stoya had left several agitated messages requesting me to present myself at police headquarters in person, which made it seem probable that no warrant had yet been issued for my arrest.
A brief call to my wrathful editor proved equally unenlightening.
‘Where the devil are you?’ were Thea’s opening words. She sounded even more caustic than usual.
‘Tell Stoya I’ll look in on him when I’m back in Berlin.’ Before she replied I heard her slam the door between her glassed-in sanctum and the open-plan newsroom, the better to be able to yell at me.
‘Get your arse back here at once, my friend. This isn’t just about you. The paper’s reputation is at stake. You know what people will think if there’s even a sniff of a suspicion that some connection exists between our star reporter and the Eye Collector?’
No wonder his stories are always so well researched. He manufactures the facts himself.
Of course I knew. That was why it was so important for me not to venture into the lion’s den unprepared. I knew from personal experience what would happen once the police closed in on a suspect, especially an ex-detective whose propensity for violence was on record. Despite my attempts at anonymity, I was now a high-profile suspect, because the media, first and foremost the paper that subsequently employed me, had acclaimed me as a hero following the incident on the bridge. I’d found the attention as intolerable as the many hours of questioning to which I’d been subjected by the board of inquiry and the district attorney. And now it was making my life even more problematic.
I parked the car beside a notice board that designated the area a nature reserve and got out.
Pure chance was responsible for my mother’s discovery of the track leading eastwards from the notice board. Having originally intended to go for a walk to Nikolskoë Church, she had felt nauseous whilst driving and pulled up in a hurry. As she recovered from her migraine, she took a closer look at her surroundings. That was when she spotted the abandoned track through the woods. Barely wider than a small car and not marked on any map, its mouth was blocked by a big fallen tree trunk.
There are many beautiful places near water in Berlin – places where you can forget you’re in a city with millions of inhabitants. The only trouble is, such spots are never secluded. The lovelier the lakeshore, the more popular it is with trippers. That day, when my mother followed the track to a tiny, almost untouched stretch of shoreline, she knew she had discovered a rarity, a hidden oasis in the midst of a metropolis. Upon finding the spot, her headache abruptly subsided, and it may have been this that convinced her to keep the hideaway to herself and tell no one but me about it. At the time, we still didn’t know that it wasn’t migraines she suffered from, but polycythaemia, an incurable disease that thickens the blood and occludes the circulation.
The first time she took me there I found that the tree trunk could be rolled aside with little difficulty. Far more obstructive were the luxuriant bramble bushes, encroaching on either side of the track, whose thorns needed treating with respect.
Now I found myself here again many years later. I got out of the car, leaving the headlights on, to see if I could make out anything in the gathering dusk. Myriads of snowflakes were whirling in the dull yellow beams, lending the scene a touch of magic. I surveyed my surroundings carefully.
There was no living creature in sight apart from a wild boar rooting around in the undergrowth some twenty metres away. Even the city’s omnipresent hum of traffic had faded as suddenly as if someone had simply killed the soundtrack.
Okay, get going.
I threw my weight against the wet tree trunk, which detached itself from the ground with a sucking sound, enabling me to roll it aside with ease.
Having satisfied myself that I was still unobserved, I got back into the Volvo and drove it at a walking pace a little way into the woods. Thorns scratched the paintwork like fingernails on a blackboard and clods of dislodged snow fell from a tree, landing on my windscreen. I turned on the wipers. After a few metres I got out to cover my tracks. I rolled the tree trunk back into position and restored the look of the bushes my car had bent aside. I felt sure the secret entrance would escape notice, especially as no one had any reason to look around at this spot because the notice board indicated that the scenic walks, restaurant, church and graveyard were another good kilometre further on. Anyone who stopped here would do so purely by chance, as my mother had.
Back in the car once more, I drove on slowly. After rounding a tight bend in the track I pulled up, got out, and removed my licence plates with a Swiss Army knife. This made my battered Volvo look like a wreck abandoned in the wilds by some irresponsible violator of the environment. A forester would doubtless notify the authorities, but they were unlikely to turn out in this lousy weather. Besides, I didn’t intend to spend the whole winter here. All I needed was a few days’ peace and quiet.
I stowed the licence plates in the boot, took out my emergency bag, and set off along the path. It grew steadily narrower, zigzagging gently downhill, and I had to be careful not to lose my footing. My boots kept slipping on the icy tree roots that made the final stretch resemble a flight of steps. Fortunately, I had remembered to bring a torch, so I was able to see protruding stones and avoid wet fir branches before they lashed me in the face. The path seemed longer than it had on my last visit, but that was probably because of the heavy bag on my shoulder. When I finally stopped and looked at my watch, It was only 6.42 p.m. Getting down to the lake had taken me only a few minutes.
Here it is.
Whenever I reached the lakeshore, I realized how much mental ballast I was toting around.
My hideaway.
The place where I had managed to put the tragedy far enough behind me to lead the relatively normal life I led today. Even in heavy snow and two degrees below freezing, I immediately felt secure.
Nicci would probably have attributed my sudden sense of well-being to magical forces or pagan energy fields, but my own explanation was far more prosaic. Here in this secluded bay, nothing bad had ever happened to me. On the contrary, this was where I had spent some of the happiest times of my life, alone with myself and accountable to no one.
That was why I came here whenever I felt that life was escaping from my grasp. The first time I realised I could use the lake as a bolthole, during my time with the police, I bought an old houseboat and berthed it here.
The beam of my torch picked out the small, box-shaped wooden tub a few metres away. It lay in a narrow inlet densely overgrown with willows whose trailing branches formed a kind of natural port invisible from the open water.
‘Back again,’ I said, putting my things down. It was an old, established ritual initiated by my mother. She had always uttered those words in the days when she was still fit enough to come with me.
Back again...
Though only a murmured greeting, it seemed to reverberate across the water. The lake would soon freeze over, making it even more improbable that anyone would stray near here.
Here to this place I share with no one. My refuge, whose location is known to no on
e, not even my family.
It was, of course, absurdly puerile for a grown man to consider a secret refuge romantic. As a child I had constructed ‘caves’ beneath my bunk bed, using pillows and blankets, and imagined myself to be the only person in the world. I had dreamed of remote islands, of tree-houses high in the branches of mighty oaks. This secluded bay probably reminded me of all the hideaways that had existed only in my boyhood imagination. If I was absolutely honest, my secretiveness about this place had taken on a life of its own.
For a long time I found it plain embarrassing to admit to friends that I would sooner spend the weekend in the wilds, alone with my thoughts, than join them amidst the chanting ranks at football matches in the Olympic Stadium. Later on I simply found it reassuring to have a secret place in which no one would come looking for me if I took a day off work. The first time I felt a burning desire to share my secret was when I met Nicci. I was still in the initial phase of being in love, that period when you miss your partner even though you’re sleeping next to them. I promised her a romantic excursion on which I would take her to ‘my bay’ blindfolded. The houseboat would be torchlit the first time she set eyes on it.
But the plan came to nothing. My Volkswagen Beetle gave up the ghost halfway there and conked out in the middle of an intersection. Just like that, for absolutely no reason, as the call-out mechanic later confirmed with a shrug. He couldn’t find anything wrong, and the old bus, which had never let me down before, sprang to life as soon as he turned the ignition key. Call me an idiot, call me superstitious, but maybe I wasn’t as immune to Nicci’s zany ideas as I always claimed. In any event, I interpreted it as an omen.
It wasn’t to be. I wasn’t meant to bring anyone here.
I drew in a deep breath of cold air and played the beam of my torch over the mottled timber superstructure.