Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
WEDNESDAY 19 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 1
THURSDAY 20 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
FRIDAY 21 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
SATURDAY 22 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
SUNDAY 23 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
MONDAY 24 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
WEDNESDAY 26 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
THURSDAY 27 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
FRIDAY 28 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
SATURDAY 29 OCTOBER 2011
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Simon Urban was born in Hagen in 1975. He studied German literature at the University of Munster, and creative writing at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut in Leipzig, and his short stories have earned him numerous prizes. He lives in Hamburg and currently works as a copywriter for a leading German creative agency.
Katy Derbyshire is a London-born translator and blogger based in Berlin. She has translated contemporary writers including Helene Hegemann, Clemens Meyer, Inka Parei and Dorothee Elmiger.
A partitioned city.
An unidentified body.
A detective who must catch a killer – and safeguard the future of his country.
For my parents
In memory of Günter Schabowski
Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
WEGENER UNDID THE flies of his cords, pulled out his penis with two fingers and relaxed. There was absolute silence for a few seconds and then hot urine splashed on to the dry leaves, coming in spasms; one gush dried up and then came the next, swelling into a steaming arc and then dwindling again. Wegener adjusted his legs wider, counting along. For the tenth, the eleventh, for the twelfth time the thin jet built itself up and shrank away, suddenly interrupted, and then there were only drips.
If you have to leave the crime scene, at least don’t come back with piss on your shoes, Früchtl always used to say – and then never managed it himself. Nobody would have noticed his shoes if he hadn’t said anything beforehand.
Wegener leaned his head back. Stared up into the night. The metal cladding on the pipeline glinted in the moonlight, a silvery strip vanishing between the trees on either side. That strip would glint on and on if you followed it, if you kept the same distance from the pipe and let the moonlight hit the metal at the right angle, through a blurred labyrinth of oak trunks and the concrete pillars of the pipeline viaduct, on and on for kilometres over the rustling leaf-strewn ground to the sector border.
This pipe is still lighting the way to the West, thought Wegener. This pipe is the big fat Ariadne’s thread of socialism. He couldn’t help laughing. The men at the top would sway their heads on their shoulders and say: Superficially, perhaps, but if you look closely you’re sure to notice that this pipe is in fact lighting the way to the East, deep into the Socialist Union, into the Urals, all the way to Siberia even, and that’s a crucial difference – it’s only the gas that goes West, nothing else.
Wegener shook his penis, pushed it back into his trousers and zipped up the fly. In the depths of the forest, the forensics team’s lights flared up, glistening spots dissected by tree trunks, more and more of them, quickly melding into one big spot towards which he was now heading half-blind as if towards the light at the end of a dark tunnel, stumbling over branches and shrubs until it was light enough for a glance down at his shoes: two stains on the right, one on the left.
Lienecke and his team had set up eight spotlights, four on either side of the pipeline, which was no longer glinting silvery but looked mottled and mossy, the largest of the many shabby supply channels slicing East Germany into ever thinner strips. Behind the fluttering tape, the man from the Energy Ministry and his security officers had long since petrified into bored, gawping spectators. Next to them, the generator droned on its trailer, red cables snaking like tracks of dried blood up the hill through the fallen leaves. Lienecke was handing out boxes full of rubbish bags. His assistants began raking leaves and tipping them in the sacks with the diligence of ants, as if the Politburo had just banned dried leaves with immediate effect.
As always when he watched Lienecke and his team at work – diving, climbing, digging, taping, scraping, bagging, sorting, sweeping, scratching – Wegener was glad he had nothing to do with their jigsaw puzzles, glad he could rely on these people who had realized early enough that fortune and misfortune depended on a drop of sweat, sperm or urine on a shoe and that inexhaustible patience was a rare gift which could get you a long way, especially in the German Democratic Republic.
None of the assistants talked as they worked. Lienecke said nothing either. There was only the drone of the generator and the rustling of the leaves. Now and then a branch cracked. The six stolidly rummaging men in their white overalls looked to Wegener like strangely composed animals in a laborious but fruitless search for food. This forensics species communicated via invisible signals, marked out their patch telepathically, possessed a secret choreography, stalked across the forest floor like a lethargic population of albino storks in synchronized slow motion, all in a row, one step per minute.
Wegener turned to the two uniformed men leaning against their Phobos and smoking, showing not the slightest appreciation for Lienecke’s leisurely ballet. The People’s Policemen gazed into the darkness, presumably envying their colleagues who had driven back to HQ more than an hour ago with the hunter and his two drooling mutts, drawing on wonky cigarettes, their noses inverted chimneys blowing the smoke downwards, although the smoke was not to be fooled and rose skywards undeterred.
Wegener squatted down. He grabbed a handful of dry leaves. It hadn’t rained here for days. Maybe even for weeks. The leaf-collectors could hardly reckon on tyre tracks. Footprints were even less likely. All that remained was the eternal hope of unthinkingly spat out chewing gum, paint marks on oak bark, scraps of paper slipped through holes in trouser pockets. Wegener stood up again and leaned against a tree trunk. His watch said quarter past nine. With a bit of luck they’d start packing up here at eleven. Without, some time between one and two.
A detective is distrustful twenty-four hours a day, Früchtl had said, and a distrustful detective stays until it’s all over. A distrustful detective distrusts his colleagues, forensics and the murder victim, because he’s distruster number 1. First and foremost, a distrustful detective distrusts himself. The only thing you can trust in is God, Früchtl had said, and you can’t even trust in Him in this country.
Lienecke’s crew was gradually nearing the pipeline. Bulging sacks piled up next to the generator. The bare forest floor was a wrinkly brown skin rife with rooty veins and holes but bereft of chewing gum and scraps of paper. Lienecke raised his right hand. His men nodded.
These are the pictures that will run around my head in a hamster wheel when I’m ninety, thought Wegener, on a permanent loop in my retirement home bed, once even the last of my synapses have given up the ghost and the saliva drips onto the sheets in threads. While the others are tormented by fever dreams of gorse scrubs and gammon steaks and their old Free German Youth buddies, I’ll see two smoking PPs by a floodlit island in the leaves, on which the Köpenick chapter of the Ku Klux Klan performs slow-motion dancing, stalking, rustling while a dead man dangles in the background. And the nurse will say: ‘There there, Mr Wegener!’ and stroke her gloved hand across my last few grey hairs, almost tenderly, as if her hand didn’t have a glove on at all. ‘It’s all over now, Mr Wegener, that was back then, your forest, your island in the leaves, your ballet, your dead man, the chubby PPs, the man from the Energy Ministry. That’s all behind you now, it played a role in your life for seven or ten days, maybe even a leading role, but not after that. Never, ever again.’
Wegener noticed the tiredness suddenly grabbing hold of him. Wrapping itself stiflingly around his head, a foam mat as thick as a kerbstone, dampening everything, swallowing everything up. He wished he could have slipped right down the rough tree trunk into the dry leaves, curled up and asked Lienecke to turn off the lights, right now, all eight of them.
One of the PPs gave a grunt. Wegener turned around.
Two bright dots flickered across the forest path at a distance, coming closer.
Lienecke raised his head, nodded and looked down again.
His assistants abandoned their digging and delving and adjusted the angle of the front spotlights. One after another, the cones of light shifted towards the pipeline, illuminating a sombre open-air stage: let the show begin. The long, gleaming Phobos Prius came into view. Its oval radiator grille sparkled. Above the car the corpse suddenly shone too. Dissected from the shadow of the gas pipeline, it stood out glaringly against the forest’s black, a limp marionette floating on a single string. This dead man’s turning his back on us all, thought Wegener. He may be hanging on a rope but that doesn’t mean he wants anything to do with the police. His secret’s all his. He’s got no time for nicotine-addicted PPs, Lienecke’s leaf-collecting robots, a dog-tired detective. No one here is interested in the others. Everyone here has his own job staked out: hanging, smoking, staring, searching.
For a second, Wegener was conscious of the element of the bizarre that every crime scene had about it, the unreal combination of stopped time and automated activity, the objectification of a human being, the enforced, random community in which none of those present had ever been interested. The coincidence that ended up with one of them hanging and the others digging, a coincidence that could easily have been arranged the other way around.
In the present combination I’m a Hauptmann with the People’s Police, thought Wegener, and the skinny old man strung up over there with the expensive coat, silk tie, gold watch and knotted-together shoelaces is the victim. Seventy-five or eighty years’ life ended beneath the Main Pipeline North by the shores of the Müggelsee lake, for whatever reason, and the whole drama starts up again – the investigation factory, the questions, the lies, the hunches. There are only ever five possible answers: natural causes, accidental death, suicide, manslaughter, murder. One outcome is just as little use as the next, every result comes too late, only ever satisfying bureaucrats’ ambitions and dulling relatives’ pain but remaining forever inconsequential.
By this time the bouncing rays of light on the forest path had transformed into two headlamps which swept down the slight slope, glided through the hollow and turned in a dazzling arc. The exhaust pipe wheezed. A Wartburg Aktivist, thought Wegener, old but well looked after. The car came to a halt by the generator. The wheezing died down. The ministry delegation gaped. Two aluminium tail fins shimmered, a cloud of rapeseed oil drifted over, that familiar overheated deep-fried stench, and then the headlights went out, the interior light went on, a blond-haired man dug about inside a bag, put something in it, opened the car door, clambered out, greeted the gawping spectators, slammed the door and walked up to Wegener.
‘Dr Sascha Jocicz,’ he said with a slightly breathless voice. ‘Forensic Medicine Mitte, duty pathologist.’
‘Martin Wegener, Köpenick CID,’ said Wegener and had to endure a long, painful handshake.
‘Colonel Wegener?’
‘Captain, Doctor.’
The doctor didn’t smile while squashing strangers’ hands on the job, so Wegener didn’t smile either. Jocicz released him and viewed the pipeline, the dead man, the gleaming Prius, the bags of leaves. His eyes wandered from right to left across the scene, then back again from left to right. Scanning it in, thought Wegener. Jocicz turned around, strode to his Wartburg, snappily opened the lid of the boot, snappily extracted a large metal briefcase, snappily slammed the lid of the boot, checked his hair in the back window and ran a tender hand across his parting.
The man consists almost entirely of straight edges, thought Wegener, a square skull with a square chin. Below that, square shoulders. Legs like steel struts underneath his trousers, presumably. Muscled girders for marching extra snappily.
‘Who’s rattling so late through the night and the wind?’ Lienecke ducked through beneath the crime scene tape.
‘Ah, the Goethe of the forensics department.’ Jocicz held his hand out to Lienecke and both men grabbed hold without moving a muscle in their faces.
‘Evening, Ulf.’
‘Evening, Sascha.’
Wegener wondered who was pressing harder, Ulf or Sascha.
‘Problems with the starter motor?’ Lienecke liberated his hand to scratch his head. The pathologist had won.
‘They can’t get it right. Or not with the winter production series. It’s the second one I’ve had this year. The pinion keeps on breaking.’
‘How much is a starter for a Wartburg?’
‘Too much. But I hear the new Agitator is a whole different matter.’ Jocicz snapped open his metal case and pulled out a white protective suit.
‘You know someone who drives an Agitator?’ asked Wegener, looking up at the sky. A strong wind had caught the tops of the trees. The whole forest started rustling.
‘I even know someone who drives a Phobos Datscha.’
‘Me too,’ said Lienecke. ‘Chairman Moss.’
Jocicz smiled a square smile and climbed into his suit.
‘What are you expecting of the gas consultations with West Germany, Hauptmann Wegener? My mother always says all politicians are criminals. A detective like you ought to have a feeling in his water for that kind of thing.’
‘Your mother’s probably right,’ said Wegener. ‘One thing’s for sure – no one’s going to get arrested in the end.’
‘You’re right there.’
‘Lafontaine will stuff his face with sausages in Weimar,’ said Lienecke, ‘while they spend twelve hours arguing over the price of gas, and then he’ll go home again. In his VW Phaeton with heated seats and a working starter.’
‘Twelve hours isn’t nearly enough.’ Wegener looked over at the dead man now moving slightly in the wind. The rustling in the treetops had grown stronger. Leaves floated through the floodlight like huge golden snowflakes. ‘Who can eat more sausages? Lafontaine or Chairman Moss?’
‘Take a look at Chairman M, the human marsupial. He can beat anyone hands down at sausage-scoffing.’
‘That’s a six-month stretch right there, Sascha.’
‘I said human marsupial, not bacon-belly. Human marsupial only gets you three months.’
Wegener turned and stared out at the darkness, suddenly getting the feeling someone else was there, someone with his eye on him, observing everything. Someone leaning on an oak tree with night-vision goggles and a shotgun microphone. Someone who’d have a lot to tell about what had happened here over the past few hours, and who only wished the search crew would finally end its pointless hunt for clues that didn’t exist, because they’d all been removed long ago. So that the observer of the observers could go home at last too.
I can smell you, thought Wegener, you spies, behind your bushes and walls and masquerades. If there’s one thing I can count on it’s my nose, and you stink, brothers, down from the attics, up from the cellars, out from behind the rubbish skips. I can sniff out your cigarette butts, your bugs, your telephoto lenses, your self-assurance – that most of all.
Wegener was still staring.
Lienecke and the square-edged pathologist were looking at him. Nobody said anything.
Rustling of leaves and droning of the generator, nothing else. Whoever had been standing there now withdrew, soundless, invisible. This would be the moment to kick the PPs in the pants, thought Wegener, then run into the forest with torches until the fleeing shadow might detach itself from some tree trunk, the shadow you never caught anyway but at least you’d know it was really out there.
One of Lienecke’s men called out, bent down, kneeling in the dead leaves. Lienecke put on his glasses and climbed over the fluttering tape.
‘German forests,’ Jocicz said, ‘are a source of joy precisely up to the moment when you have to comb them for fingerprints.’
Wegener stepped up to the tape. ‘Mind if I take a look at your work from close up?’
‘Were you apprenticed to Josef Früchtl?’
‘Thankfully, yes.’
‘Then I can’t say no, can I?’
‘No,’ said Wegener, ‘you can’t.’
Jocicz plucked at his protective suit. ‘There’s another one of these in the case.’
Now the four spotlights on the other side of the pipeline were adjusted as well. The dead man was suddenly backlit, the pipe a dirty bulge of bent metal, welding seams and fat bolt nuts. Awoken by the sudden daylight, moths circled on the air, alive once more. Tomorrow the cold autumn will send you plummeting from the branches in your sleep, thought Wegener as he clambered into the much too large plastic suit. The PPs turned away, smoking on into the darkness.
Jocicz was waiting by the tape. He smiled at the sight of a detective wrapped in cling film, making his square face a little rounder. Jocicz strode off, Wegener following him across the cleared ground, in a semicircle around the right-hand concrete pillar supporting the pipeline. With every step, a little more of the hanged man came into view, now turning hesitantly to his visitors until he finally showed a wrinkled waxy face, a bent beak of a nose, bushy brows, white beard.
Jocicz stopped in front of the dead man and shone his torch down him centimetre by centimetre. Pushed up the trouser legs and examined the pale, hairy calves. Pressed the thumbs of his gloves into the pallid flesh. Photographed the slightly curled hands, the discoloured fingernails, the joints. Eyed the worn-out shoes with their laces tied together, photographed them and said nothing. His movements had lost all their snappiness. Like a cat, he slunk around the limp body, made notes, climbed on a ladder, fingered the back of the corpse’s head, the grey hair, the astounded face, shone his torch into the dead eyes and came down again.
Wegener watched. By the time Jocicz was done the silhouettes of the two PPs were sitting motionless in the car, chins on their chests. The group from the ministry was caught up in discussion. Lienecke’s men had cleared the complete inner cordoned ring of leaves. One of them was loading the sacks onto two covered trailers, the others walking through the woods behind the tape barrier with hand-held lamps. Drunken outsized fireflies, they wouldn’t find anything as long as they weren’t supposed to find anything.
‘If you wouldn’t mind.’ Jocicz had unpacked his friendliest voice. Wegener tried to muster up an interested face despite his tiredness. ‘You did want to get close up.’
Jocicz pushed the folding ladder slightly closer to the pipeline, climbed up on the right-hand row of steps and made a gesture of invitation to follow him on the left-hand side. Wegener tugged a pair of gloves out of a pocket in his protective suit, pulled them on and tested the ladder for balance.
‘Perfectly safe,’ Jocicz called from above.
‘A distrustful detective checks the ladder,’ said Wegener more to himself than anything else, and climbed up until the dead man’s back was forty centimetres away from his face. Now he could see the dark ring eaten into the long neck by the rope. Below them the Phobos Prius waited like a hearse that had been ordered too soon. Two dents in the black roof.
Jocicz looked over the hanging man’s shoulder, his hands feeling, his rubber fingers climbing up the taut rope, clenching into a fist, pulling short and hard on it.
Wegener looked Jocicz straight in the eye. Jocicz held his gaze.
‘An execution,’ said Wegener.
‘That’s what it looks like,’ said Jocicz.
‘Or a staged execution.’
‘That’s possible too.’
‘When?’
‘About forty-eight hours ago,’ said Jocicz. ‘Probably slightly less. Cause of death not strangulation but a broken neck. They put him on the roof of the car and drove off, a metre and a half’s drop: exitus.’
‘OK.’
‘Shoelaces tied together and a hangman’s knot with eight turns, Hauptmann Wegener. A good chance of the shit hitting the fan.’
‘So I noticed.’
‘And the clothes look like he’s a bigwig.’
‘Absolutely.’
Jocicz ran a hand through his hair. A small yellow leaf that had caught in his parting floated down. Wegener noticed that the body smelled. Of sweat, of dull mould and the gradual onset of decay.
‘What are you going to do now?’
Wegener clutched the cold crosspieces of the ladder with both hands. ‘Investigate. I’m the investigating officer.’
‘An investigating officer who can’t arrest anyone.’
‘That doesn’t matter, nobody ever gets arrested anyway,’ said Wegener and climbed slowly back down the ladder.
WEGENER OPENED HIS eyes, closed them again, opened them again. The fan was stuck to the ceiling above him like a round insect with three fat, flat legs. The lazy creature never moved a muscle, never had moved a muscle, presumably never would move a muscle. Perhaps it wasn’t even connected up. Wegener tried to remember whether Karolina had ever got the fan to whirr, in some hot summer or other, to conjure up a bit of a movie atmosphere. He couldn’t think of any occasion. The thing had always just hung dead and cast a slowly migrating shadow across the ceiling. A contorted spider’s shadow.
He felt for his Minsk on the bedside table, pressed the menu button and held the luminous display right in front of his nose: 10:49. One missed call, 09:53, W. B. Office. Borgs had now been waiting an hour for him to call back, two hundred photos of the crime scene spread out in front of him, the witness statement from Hunter Whatshisname in his head, his paunch filled to bursting with the staunch determination that had seen him sweeping files off the desks of his department whenever political tornadoes appeared on the horizon for the past eighteen years. The Borgsian sweeping-off practice was fine by him in this case, Wegener noted.
He turned onto his stomach, pressed his face into the pillow, pulled the cover over his head and calculated how long this whole pipeline thing was likely to keep him busy: realistically, eight hours.
By then C5 would have taken over and slammed a security level on it: classified documents, over and out. Or it’d go straight to Normannenstrasse: State Security, Internal Department. Jocicz could hand over the post-mortem, Lienecke the evidence, he could be rid of the weeks of puzzling, the interrogation of passers-by, horse-riders, mushroom-pickers, pipeline security guards, the arguments with the Energy Ministry over investigations in the restricted zone and all the rest of it. All he’d get instead was a non-disclosure agreement under Special Investigation Status III, a thin yellow sheet of paper with a whole lot of small-print threats ranging from demotion to dismissal to Bautzen special prison. Then everyone who’d been there last night could sign on the dotted line that they didn’t want to either lose their jobs or be sentenced to imprisonment for betraying official secrets and would therefore in future speak or otherwise communicate with no one – including with related persons/spouses and/or the colleagues involved in the aforementioned investigation – on the subject of the aforementioned investigative stages or all accompanying circumstances.
The part about otherwise communicating always made Wegener think of smoke signals. Perhaps because of the Red Indian camps Tobias Kirchhoff had used to organize every summer for the Free German Youth somewhere up in Mecklenburg.
Wegener imagined Jocicz, Lienecke and the forensic guys in a circle around a smoking campfire in Neustrelitz, each of them clutching a blanket in an attempt to otherwise communicate about the man hanging from the pipeline. Jocicz wrote on the evening sky with clouds of smoke: Believe me, men, shoelaces tied together, the hangman’s knot tied eight times – it was them, without a doubt, for God’s sake. And Lienecke, waving his blanket: No doubt about it, we found nothing in the leaves, not the slightest clue, and precisely that is the clue, they’re the only ones who work so neatly! And all the forensics guys with synchronized fanning movements like a Greek chorus: Not the slightest clue, that’s the clue!
Wegener tossed his cover aside, got up with a groan, opened the window a crack and shuffled into the bathroom. The last functioning ceiling lamp sent its sparse light down towards the washbasin. The toilet and bathtub were left behind in green-tiled darkness.
On top of the bathroom cabinet gleamed Karolina’s old deodorant spray, a glittering salmon-pink phallus labelled Action.
The last piece of action in our relationship, Karolina had said at some point, and Wegener had replied: First of all, that was a really bad pun, and second at least this Action never runs out, it waits for you your whole life long, piled up on the shelves of the Konsum supermarket, produced with great solidarity by the Cosmetics and Care Combine. Karolina: Which you’ve never even heard of. Wegener: I prefer to smell like a man. Karolina: I can smell that.
And now he’d been incapable of throwing away an ugly spray can that had been lurking salmon-pink in his bathroom for the past year. That shone every morning in the spotlight of the semi-invalid lamp like a has-been singer on the Eisenhüttenstadt open-air stage belting out that old chestnut about the pain of loss that makes all of us the same.
Wegener propped himself against the basin with both hands and looked in the mirror at a face that had been his for fifty-six years. Despite its beakish nose, receding fair hair and slightly too rounded cheeks, this face of his sometimes appeared good-looking to him. Not today. Today that visage, checked a hundred thousand times, looked lacking in contours, random, out of proportion, rendered ridiculous by red lines across it left behind by the folds of his sheet, a crumpled map marked with a few won and a lot of lost battles. Hauptmann Hanging Cheeks.
Nothing for Karolina to miss, thought Wegener and knew he’d thought the opposite just as often, in front of the same mirror with the same sheet folds across his forehead.
He turned the spray can around so that he couldn’t read the word Action any more and turned on the radio. Jan ‘The Smooch’ Hermann, announced the perma-grinning presenter’s voice, the king of the GDR’s soft-rock swingers, and his new song ‘No Doubt Time Hates Love’. A series of interchangeable chords set in.
Don’t forget, said Früchtl’s voice in his head, men are like wooden floorboards, they get more beautiful as they age. Women are like wooden floorboards under a leaky roof, they get worse and worse until it all falls through.
How I miss your verbal derailments, thought Wegener.
Under the steaming hot shower he attempted to ignore Jan ‘The Smooch’ Hermann’s wailing and imagined the conversation the men from C5 would soon be having with him, including all the obligatory walking on eggshells.
The suspicion that the pipeline murder had not been a private matter dangled as conspicuously in mid-air as the neon Goldkrone ad at Alexanderplatz, the monstrous fear that must never be thought was now spelled out in metre-high neon-lit capitals, flashing green and red, impossible to ignore. So the gentlemen would hunch on Borgs’ blue-upholstered office chairs with carefully controlled funereal faces and reel off instructions learned by rote, driven by the gnawing fear of actually emitting a comprehensible sentence. The language of speechlessness, communication skills à la East Germany. And they’d all keep peeking over at Borgs. And Borgs would sit enthroned in his window nook like a well-fed friar, his hands folded over his pot belly, apparently sleeping but at least permanently mute.
Wegener had experienced Borgs in this kind of competence pickle twice before, on both occasions cases of ‘acts in preparation for attempted escape from the republic’. On both occasions curtailed by ‘accidental death prior to implementation’.
On both occasions, Borgs had transmogrified into a silent monk in the meetings with the special departments, letting the men in grey suits do the talking, listening to the helpless ticker-tape sentences and intricate insinuations and saying nothing. Nameless colonels provided the C5 men with investigation findings, handed over reports and slammed the files shut. Ancient games played according to rules that had never been changed. In the end Borgs had ushered the whole lot of them out with nothing but his friendly bulldog expression. Without having barked a single word.
Walter, you’ve bitten your tongue to the top of the career ladder, thought Wegener and turned off the hot water. Keeping your trap shut is the true art of running a police department. Then he spotted the tick on his right calf. A small black ball that had just taken the first and last shower of its parasitic life.
The shabby chessboard of the police headquarters corridors still always seduced Wegener into adjusting the length of his steps to the pattern. He tried to put the tips of his feet down exactly on the edge of a square, which led to a familiar problem – steps the length of one square were too short, steps across two squares were too long. The alternatives were mincing or striding. Wegener felt like striding. How often did you get an investigation where you could pass the buck to the specialists on the very first day?
With extended steps, he marched up to Borgs’ outer office and celebrated the first victory of the day: the tip of his left shoe landed exactly on the line of the last square and touched the door at the same time. Touché.
Christa Gerdes didn’t go to the effort of looking up from her monitor, preferring to hammer numbers into her old Robotron Kappa with enough emphasis to make her fur hat of a hairdo sway in time, merely folding out a gaunt arm briefly to form a wrinkled signpost straight ahead. Women are like wooden floorboards under a leaky roof, Wegener heard Früchtl murmur, knocked at the open door and saw instantly that he’d been right: the desk in the window alcove was sown with photos of the pipeline, the forest floor, the rope, the dented car roof and a face that looked somehow more alive in the yellowish light of the reading lamp than it had a few hours ago in the city forest.
Wegener took a deep breath and stepped into the boss’s den, the darkroom, the smokehouse. Whatever they called this yellowed room it was all true, and no meeting in here ever lasted longer than fifteen minutes.
‘Martin.’ Borgs squashed out the stump of his cigarillo in a small cardboard tray. Annoyance over the pipeline murder was written all over his round face, a truckload of hassle was headed straight for his department just when everything could have been so good, a quiet October morning completely free of old men killed by bizarre ritual methods. ‘Only four weeks to go till the consultations, Martin. And then this.’
‘We seem to need the hard currency from the gas pretty urgently – ’ Wegener closed the door behind him and pointed at the steaming cardboard tray – ‘if we’re even running out of ashtrays now.’
‘Good old Christa,’ Borgs said proudly and sank back into his chair. ‘When she breaks things it’s always the important ones.’
‘A woman of consequence.’
‘What do you think?’ Borgs folded his hands in front of his pot belly.
‘About hard currency or our man here?’
‘How about a link between the two?’
Wegener dragged one of the blue-upholstered chairs up to the desk and sat down. ‘It all looks as if we’ve got a problem.’
‘Let’s hope it’s not us who has the problem.’ Borgs ran his eyes across the photos. ‘But they’ll have a fit in the ministry at Werderscher Markt when they hear the whole story, believe you me.’
‘Have you informed C5?’
‘All in good time. I’ve only had it on my desk a couple of hours, haven’t I? And I wanted to talk to you first.’
‘Openly?’
‘From man to man. As you can see.’ Borgs lit up a new cigarillo, took a puff and heaved his short, fat legs onto the left-hand corner of his desk. A penny-shaped hole in each sole.
Wegener took off his coat and hung it over the back of his chair.
‘Let’s see what we’ve got,’ said Borgs, smacking his lips and blowing a mouthful of smoke at the ceiling. ‘One deceased male, about eighty. Cause of death: broken neck, hanged from the Main Pipeline North close to the sector border. Suicide ruled out. A crime scene as clean as a mermaid’s backside.’
‘Can’t get cleaner than that,’ said Wegener.
‘Any cleaner is absolutely impossible,’ Borgs confirmed. ‘And slap-bang in the middle of this all-encompassing cleanliness someone leaves leads that clearly say old Stasi cadre have wiped out a supposed traitor. Shoelaces tied together, eightfold hangman’s knot. That’s how the Stasi got rid of their own. Last happened about two decades ago, in the course of the Revitalization of our beloved GDR. Allegedly. No one knows. Just one of those things everyone says when it suits them, behind closed doors. Right. And in a month’s time Oskar Lafontaine’s coming over to rescue our bankrupt old wreck of a state. Provided the wreck of a state behaves itself. Only right now it looks like the wreck of a state’s been a pretty bad boy. What kind of a circus is this, Martin? Who’s taking the piss here?’
Wegener fanned cigarillo smoke away from his face. ‘Those traitor murders, are they just rumours or did they really happen?’
‘Don’t ask me.’ Borgs shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘I’ve never met anyone who knows. But it doesn’t matter. The signs speak their own language either way.’
‘Shoelaces tied together: You can’t run away from us. I get that. But the hangman’s knot?’
‘Eight ties.’ Borgs held up eight short, fat fingers through the smoke. ‘The 8th of February 1950. Founding date of the Ministry for State Security. Call it a reminder of the old ideals, if you like. Of the tradition of brotherhood.’
‘They were sick madmen.’
‘Dangerous sick madmen.’
Wegener coughed. ‘Two possibilities. Our man was with the Stasi, botched something up and they wanted to get rid of him. And make an example of him at the same time. A signal to insiders, if you like. So they revitalize the old method so that everyone in the Stasi knows: This is what happens when you go behind our backs.’
‘Bullshit.’ Borgs shook his head. ‘The man’s eighty if he’s a day! And even if the secret service does still knock people off, which it can’t afford to do under the international agreements, then not like that. And not four weeks before the consultations. One proven violation of the rule-of-law criteria and all the lights go out over here. What’s your second possibility?’
‘Someone’s trying to finger the Stasi by warming up their old methods.’
Borgs smacked his lips, puffed on his cigarillo, smacked his lips again. ‘If I wanted to pin something on the Stasi it’d have to go public, I’d need a scandal. How’s that supposed to work? Who’s going to kick up a fuss? C5 will be taking over tonight. Special Investigation Status. Nothing will get out. And I can’t imagine Uwe Speckmann running straight to the seven-thirty news with the story.’
‘Now that would be a surprise.’
Wegener got up, drew the heavy curtain aside slightly and opened the old double window. Cold air blew into the room, replacing the stench of smoke with the stench of fat. Down on Lechner Allee, a white Phobos II Universal was battling with a parking space, the driver’s bald head poking out of the side window, turning first right and then left, from here an indecisive, skin-coloured bulge. In the middle of the bulge was a plaster. The Universal paused at an angle, gave up and sped off.
‘Maybe it was the men from back then,’ said Wegener.
‘What d’you mean, the men from back then?’
‘Old-school cadre. The ones they say did all that in ’89 and ’90. Men who were in action back in Stangier’s days. Then comes Revitalization, their good old Heinrich takes early retirement, Moss takes the hot seat, Speckmann takes over from Erich Mielke, they get the boot during the reforms and the New Direction. But there’s still some kind of score they have to settle.’
‘Possible in theory,’ grunted Borgs. ‘But twenty-one years is a bloody long time to wait. Why now?’
‘Maybe our shoelace man had a really good hiding place.’
Borgs looked unhappy. ‘And they still go to all that trouble setting the scene? Who’s it supposed to scare nowadays?’
‘Other traitors from back then. No idea. Maybe they only did it for the principle. But it’s all pointless as long as we don’t know whether our old man was with the Stasi or not.’
‘We need to know who our old man is in the first place.’
Wegener sat down again. ‘And what if it’s just about the pipeline? The consultations?’
‘I was thinking that too. Russian Mafiosi. Some crazy old guy who didn’t pay his bribes. But the Russians do things differently.’
‘The Russian method.’
‘For example. What do you make of the dented car roof?’
‘Improvisation. Or another symbol, one only insiders can understand. But why did they take the licence plates away with them?’
‘No idea.’ Borgs slid his legs off the edge of the desk. ‘There’s one thing that’s important: very soon now, Werderscher Markt will be looking very closely at the whole thing. And the Central Committee will stick its nose in personally too. And for us, that means we do exactly what we’re supposed to do. Work to rule. I don’t have to give Kallweit even more of a target just because he wants to wangle more powers for the secret services.’
‘That’s me off the case then.’
‘Almost.’ Borgs the surly bulldog mutated into Borgs the wily bulldog. ‘They found an envelope in the dead man’s coat last night. They’re still looking for prints.’
The wily bulldog shoved all the photos aside, ran his finger across his desktop and stopped at a note. ‘The envelope’s addressed by hand to one Emil Fischer, just the name, no address, no stamp, nothing. Inside was a sheet of paper, a computer printout. Text: Dear neighbours, dear comrades, we’re having a birthday celebration on Saturday, 22.10.2011. We hope its not too noisy. No apostrophe in its. Yours faithfuly, faithfully with a single L, M. Radecker, I. Dedelow, 16th floor.’
‘Then Fischer could be our man,’ said Wegener.
‘Or one of the birthday boys who didn’t manage to put the envelope in Fischer’s letter box.’
‘True.’
‘Maybe someone just broke into Fischer’s letter box, we don’t know. Christa’s looked them up, there’s only one combination of Radecker, Dedelow and Fischer registered in Berlin. At 32, Ludwig-Renn-Strasse.’
Borgs heaved himself out of his seat, waddled to the window, shut it and pulled the curtain straight. ‘You take care of this thing today, maybe you can get an ID on him, a couple of comments from the neighbours, then we won’t be completely empty-handed. And I’d like a detailed report, please, in tip-top form.’
‘Tomorrow evening?’
‘Tomorrow morning at the latest. Then we’ll go on a work to rule until they take the case out of our hands. I’ll get right on to the gentlemen. And if they want to see you too, Martin, and I assume they will, let me give you a little tip.’
‘Keep shtum,’ said Wegener.
‘Learn from Borgs – learn to win.’ The bulldog collapsed satisfied into its seat.
VOSS HAD A smell about him. Up to now, Wegener had only heard that Voss had a smell about him, and now he smelled it. Voss had a smell about him of unwashed Elasta ribbed vests made by the Sigmund Jähn Publicly Owned Company, of untipped Karo cigarettes, of onions, garlic, dental tartar, of obtrusive concern for exact observation of traffic regulations and of something else that Wegener couldn’t identify. Perhaps a last, sad vestige of Florena Sport Deodorant, which had lost the battle against butyric acid, tobacco and various vegetables from the Allium family days ago and was now attempting to evaporate with as little fuss as possible.
‘Sorry about the Navodobro, sir. Sieberg sat on it by accident, and no display can take that.’
‘I’m sure we’ll find the place without it.’
Voss leaned forward as he steered the squad car. His large-pored turnip nose almost on the dashboard, both hands clutching the steering wheel, his eyes screwed up in permanent dim anticipation of malign catastrophe. The seams of his grey police trousers cut into the fat Vossian thighs with the mercilessness of all East German uniform textiles and laced up the Vossian genitalia into a tennis ball-sized lump.
Wegener felt a cold shudder running down his back. It might be weeks before be got that abnormally round genital bulge out of his head. A bulge like that might come to you in your dreams. A bulge like that might even speak to you in your dreams. If that bulge starts telling me stories every night, thought Wegener, I’ll jump off the top of the EastSide onto Alexanderplatz.
‘Not again!’ Voss cast a dark glare at the rows of phenoplast vehicles driving along Liebknecht Ring, keeping to the speed limit, respecting minimum distances. ‘There! On the bridge pillar! Have you noticed what they’ve started scrawling everywhere?’
Wegener looked at Voss.
‘All PPs drive Phobos TTs!’ Voss snorted a few droplets of saliva at the windscreen. ‘What the hell else? What else are we supposed to drive, eh? Maseratis? They should have sprayed it when the Trabi was done away with, the dickheads, at least it would’ve been new back then!’
Wegener tried in vain to wind his window down a little. The handle was broken off directly above the crank.
‘And everyone else drives a Phobos as well!’ said Voss. ‘Apart from the couple of anoraks who can’t bear to get rid of their Trabants. What they ought to write is: Even PPs drive Phobos TTs!’
‘Voss, you go ahead and spray that across all the walls in Köpenick if you like,’ said Wegener. ‘Just don’t get caught.’
‘I’ve never got caught.’ Voss put his left hand between his legs, plucking at the fabric with his forefinger and thumb.
Wegener looked out of the window. The first tower blocks appeared behind the birches rushing past, becoming more frequent, growing into an army of high-rises, an unsorted brigade of boxes. On the right were the gappy teeth of a construction site fence, behind it wasteland, heaps of earth, old tyres.
The sun stayed hidden behind thin scraps of cloud, shining murkily as if through frosted glass. Yellow birch leaves mottled the cracked asphalt, dots in flux, arranged in new patterns over and over by the wind. Then the road took a sharp left turn and the stack of buildings that was Marzahn was suddenly closer than he’d thought, appearing broad, chunky and white in front of the grey sky, a wall towering for miles along the horizon.
Voss groaned.
Wegener tried not to look, guessing he was still occupied with his hand in the groin of his trousers. Voss the Hoss, Borgs had said, he stinks like a horse but he’ll gallop wherever you want.
‘It was a school friend of my brother-in-law, you know,’ sighed Voss, ‘who blessed us with the Phobos. The name, I mean.’
Wegener carried on staring at the growing backdrop of Marzahn. One more glance at Voss the Hoss with his hand down his pants would spoil the whole day before it had even begun properly.
‘It was a kind of a talent contest at the time. A competition. Did you know that, sir?’
Wegener shook his head.
‘They didn’t want a new Trabi, you know, everything was supposed to be different after Revitalization. Or at least have a different name. You could send in suggestions. This school friend of my brother-in-law . . . ’ Voss sounded suddenly relieved. When Wegener looked over he had both hands back on the steering wheel. ‘. . . he looked up Mars in an encyclopaedia. The red planet, you get it, the star of socialism, if you like.’
Wegener took his notepad out of his coat pocket and opened up the page with Christa Gerdes’ sketch on it. Green felt-tip arrows snaked through blue biro blocks to a black cross: 32, Ludwig-Renn-Strasse.
‘I’m really sorry about the Navodobro,’ said Voss.
Wegener rotated the drawing ninety degrees. ‘No problem.’
‘Landsberger Allee. Allee der Kosmonauten on the right.’
‘Left,’ said Wegener. ‘On to Raoul-Wallenberg-Strasse.’
‘Speaking of cosmonauts,’ said Voss and put his foot down too far. ‘This school friend, right, he came across a satellite of Mars in the encyclopaedia, flying around up there somewhere, and that satellite’s called Phobos. And Trabant’s another word for satellite, isn’t it, so he sent in Phobos as his suggestion, with the explanation that if you call the new plastic car Phobos TT then it’d be a Trabant – but not a Trabant. That’s what the TT stands for – Trabant Mark Two. But it’s definitely socialist. ’Cause it spends its whole life circling the planet Mars.’
‘Take the fourth right onto Paul-Dessau-Strasse.’
‘Paul Dessau, Paul Dessau, Paul Dessau,’ said Voss, driving slower with every Paul Dessau, his forehead up to the windscreen, his chin on the steering wheel.
‘Over there, by the stop sign.’
‘Yessir.’
The sun was suddenly back again, reflected from the opened windows of the tower block, a glaring spot of light leaping from pane to pane, skipping cheerfully alongside the police car down Raoul-Wallenberg-Strasse. A hundred thousand wives airing a hundred thousand kitchens, thought Wegener, getting rid of the smell of pea soup, solyanka soup, frozen schnitzel, and then they fetch the Rondo coffee out of the cupboard, make a brew, turn on DFF 5, Inka Bause’s ‘Talk Tough’: You better lose some weight or I’m applying to leave the country! Hey, you ex-West German – stop going on about the good old West! If they’d had Mondos condoms back then you’d never have been born!
‘Paul Dessau,’ said Voss with relief and turned right into the residential area.
‘Ludwig-Renn-Strasse is the second left. Number 32.’
‘Ludwig Renn, Ludwig Renn, Ludwig Renn . . .’ Voss wound to the left, counted down the house numbers, slowed almost to a halt, put on his right indicator, stopped in the parking lane and panted. A bean-shaped print shone on the windscreen where his forehead had been touching it.
Wegener opened the passenger’s door and took a deep breath of fresh air. So this was how good it could smell in Marzahn: of autumn, of mown grass and only a tiny hint of deep-frying.
‘I’ve put on twenty kilos since we’ve had to use rapeseed oil instead of petrol,’ said Voss as he squeezed himself out of the car. ‘Every time I get in the car I get a craving for chips with mayonnaise. This job gets you addicted, sir, absolutely addicted, but you can bet no one at head office is going to give me permission to go to a diet clinic!’
‘You’ve got big bones.’ Wegener slammed his door.
Ludwig-Renn-Strasse was composed of a handful of crumbling high-rises, decrepit Trabis, recycling bins for bottles, and yellow trees. A fat woman in tracksuit bottoms stood on a litter-strewn patch of grass, as motionless as a monument against sport. Two small black dogs scampered around her, led in unpredictable loops through the grass by their noses. One of the dogs crouched down with its legs apart, peed and stared.
Paint peeled from the cladding of the balconies. The last geraniums shone out in a window box; on the next balcony the first Christmas lights flashed, a reindeer sleigh loaded with presents that would never come. Weeds grew between the lopsided paving stones. Would I rather live here or hang dead from a pipeline? Wegener wondered.
‘Used to be a nice area,’ said Voss, ‘round about Revitalization. Look at it now – all old Trabis and maybe a Lada, max.’
‘Number 32,’ said Wegener and looked at the sketch.
‘Probably one of those two over there.’
Voss the Hoss tramped over to the nearest street sign and gesticulated with his front hooves towards the right-hand tower. Wegener walked across the grass, counting the floors of the high-rise. He lost count somewhere in the middle and came to eighteen storeys on his second attempt. Manfred Radecker and Ines Dedelow lived on the sixteenth floor. So Fischer’s flat was almost certainly somewhere in the top third. The expensive coat, the gold watch, the silk tie – nothing about the body went with this address. His worn-out old shoes at the most.