JF03 - Eternal (2 page)

The sky was pale and blank and gazed down on the flat, featureless moor with a cloudless eye.

He walked with pride and dignity. His nakedness did not embarrass him nor demean him: he wore the air and the sun on his skin as if they were royal robes. His thick newly washed and scented hair shone gold in the bright day. Faces he had known for a lifetime lined the route he took, ranged along the edges of the wooden walkway that led over and across the marshy ground, and they cheered to salute his naked procession.

He walked with his attendants beside and behind him: the priest, the chieftain, the priestess and the honour guard. And all along the way, voices were raised in adulation. Among the faces and the voices were those of the women who had been wives to him in the preceding days, some of whom were of noble rank. As, now, was he: his low-born status forgotten, meaningless. This day, this act, elevated him above the stature of a chief or a king. He was, himself, almost a god.

And as he passed, they started to sing. They sang of beginnings and ends; of rebirths; of suns and moons and of seasons renewed. Of the great, wondrous, mysterious cycle. And the rebirth of which they sang most was that which was to be his. A glorious rebirth. He would be renewed. He would be brought again to a better, purer life.

He and his attendants neared the end of the wooden causeway and he saw where they had gathered to one side the hazel branches that would be laid over him and weighted with rocks, so that he would not rise again until his true time had come. They reached the causeway’s end and the sleek obsidian surface of the pool opened out before them and offered up a dark reflection of the bright sky.

Now was the time.

He felt his heart begin to pound in his chest. He stepped from the wooden causeway and perceived the world around him with a vivid keenness: the damp, yielding mulch and hard marsh grass beneath his naked feet; the air and the sun on his skin; the strong hands of his honour guards as they grasped his upper arms tightly. Together, the three men stepped forward and into the pool. They sank to their waists and he felt the cold of the water tingle on his naked legs and on his genitals.

He started to breathe hard and the rhythm of his heart increased even more, as if aware that it would soon be still and was trying to squeeze as many beats as possible into these few, final seconds. He had to believe. He forced himself to believe. It was the only way to keep a step beyond the panic that seemed to be running screaming towards him, racing along the wooden causeway, unheard by and invisible to the onlookers.

The priestess slipped the gown from her body and stepped naked into the pool. She held the sacrificial knife tight in her fist, which in turn she held pressed to her breast. The blade glittered in the bright day. Such a small knife: he had been a warrior and could not equate this ornament with the ending of his life. The priestess stood before him, the water around the tight circle of her waist; dark against her pale skin. She reached up and laid the palm of her hand on his forehead, incanting the words of the ritual. He succumbed, as he knew he must, to the gentle pressure of her hand and he lay back into the water. His head sank slowly and the water pulled a murky, peat-coloured curtain across the light of the day.

The two attendants still held his upper arms firm, and he now felt other hands on his body, on his legs. His eyes were open. All around him the bog swirled dark and thick, as if undecided as to which element it truly belonged: earth or water. His golden hair billowed and writhed around his head, its lustre dimmed by the peaty water.

He held his breath. He knew he should not do so, but instinct told him to hold onto the air in his lungs, the life in his body. His lungs started to scream for more air and, for the first time, he pushed against the priestess’s hand. She pushed back only slightly, but the grips on his arms and legs tightened and he felt himself pushed deeper, until the sunken bracken and stones at the bottom of the pool scraped at his back.

The panic that he had sensed hurtling towards him now caught up with him and screamed that there would be no rebirth, no new beginning. Only death. It was his turn to scream, and his cry exploded
into a huge cluster of bubbles that frothed through the murk and up to the day that he would never again see. The cold brackish water flooded his mouth and throat. It tasted of soil and worms, of roots and decaying vegetation. Of death. It surged into the protesting lungs. He convulsed and writhed but now more hands were upon him, pressing down on him and binding him to his death.

It was then that he felt the kiss of the priestess’s blade on his throat and the swirl of water around him clouded even darker. Redder.

But he had been wrong: there would, after all, be rebirth. However, before he would again come out into the light of day, more than sixteen centuries would pass, and his golden hair would become changed to a burning red.

Only then would he be reborn. As Red Franz.

Nordenham’s main railway station stood elevated on a dyke above the river Weser. It was an October afternoon and a family stood waiting for a train. The large station building, the platform and the latticed ironwork were sharply etched by a late-autumn sun that was bright but lacked any warmth.

They stood – the father, the mother and the child – at the far end of the platform. The father was tall and lean, in his mid-thirties. His longish, thick, almost too-dark hair was brushed severely back from a broad pale brow but rebelled in a fringe of curls that frothed on his coat collar. The black frame of long sideburns, moustache and goatee beard emphasised the paleness of his complexion and the vermilion of his mouth. The mother, too, was tall: only a few centimetres shorter than the man, with grey-blue eyes and long bone-coloured blonde hair that hung straight from under a knitted woollen hat. She wore a tan ankle-length coat and a vast colourful macramé bag hung on long straps from her shoulder. The boy was about ten, but tall for his age, obviously having inherited his parents’ height. Like his
father, he had a pale, sad face under a mop of curling, discordantly black hair.

‘Wait here with the boy,’ the father said firmly but kindly. He pushed back a stray strand of ash-blonde hair that had fallen across the mother’s brow. ‘I’ll approach Piet alone when he arrives. If there’s any sign of trouble, take the boy and get clear of the station.’

The woman nodded determinedly, but a cold bright fear sparkled in her eyes. The man smiled at her and gave her arm a squeeze before moving away from her and the boy. He took up his place in the middle of the platform. A Deutsche Bahn railway worker came out of the maintenance office, dropped down onto the track from the platform, and sauntered diagonally and with complacent arrogance across the rails. A woman in early middle-age, dressed with the expensive tastelessness of the West German bourgeoisie, exited the ticket office and stood about ten metres to the man’s right. The tall, pale man seemed to pay no attention to any of this activity; in reality his eyes followed every move of every individual in the provincial station.

Another figure stepped out of the ticket office and onto the platform. He, too, was a tall, lean man, this time with long blond hair scraped back into a ponytail. His thin, angular face was pock-marked with the ancient scars of a childhood illness. Again, his movements and expression were intended to be casual and disinterested; but, unlike the dark-haired man, there was an intensity, a nervousness, in his eyes and an electric tension in every step he took.

They were now only a metre apart. A broad smile dissolved the dark-haired man’s severe expression like sunshine through clouds.

‘Piet!’ he said enthusiastically but quietly. The blond man did not smile.

‘I told you this was inadvisable,’ said the blond man. His German was tainted with a sibilant Dutch accent. ‘I told you not to come. This was not a good idea at all.’

The dark-haired man did not let the smile fade and shrugged, philosophically. ‘Our whole way of life is inadvisable, Piet, my friend, but it is absolutely necessary. And so is this meeting. God, Piet … it’s great to see you again. Did you bring the money?’

‘There’s been a problem,’ said the Dutchman. The dark-haired man glanced down the platform to the woman and the boy. When he turned back to the Dutchman, the smile had gone.

‘What kind of problem? We need that money to travel. To find and set up a new safe house.’

‘It’s over, Franz,’ said the Dutchman. ‘It’s been over for a long time and we should have accepted that. The others … they feel the same.’

‘The others?’ The dark-haired man snorted. ‘I expect nothing from them. They’re just a bunch of middle-class wankers pretending to be activists. Half-involved and half-afraid. The weak playing at being strong. But you, Piet … I expect more of you.’ He allowed a smile again. ‘Come on, Piet. You can’t give up now. I …
we
need you.’

‘It’s
over
. Can’t you see that, Franz? It’s time to put that life behind us. I just can’t do this any more, Franz. I’ve lost my faith.’ The Dutchman took a few steps back. ‘We’ve lost, Franz. We’ve lost.’ He took another few steps back, opening up the space between them. The Dutchman looked anxiously from right to left and the dark-haired man mirrored his glances, but could see nothing. Nonetheless, he
felt a tightening in his chest. His hand closed around the Makarov nine-millimetre automatic in his coat pocket. The Dutchman spoke again. His eyes were now wild.

‘I’m sorry, Franz … I’m so sorry …’ He turned and began to run.

It all happened within a matter of seconds, yet time itself seemed impossibly stretched.

The Dutchman was shouting something to someone unseen as he ran. The railwayman leaped towards the mother and son, a glittering black automatic in his outstretched hands. The bourgeois housewife dropped down onto one knee with astonishing agility and produced a handgun from inside her coat. She aimed at the tall dark-haired man and screamed at him to place his hands on his head.

He snapped his head around to check the woman and the boy. The woman’s hand was rammed deep in her shoulder bag and the front of the bag burst open and burned as she pulled the trigger of the Heckler Koch MP5 machine pistol that she had hidden inside. Simultaneously, she pushed the boy sideways and down with a violent shove. The burst from the Heckler & Koch ripped angrily at the chest of the fake railway worker’s overalls and tore open his face.

The blonde woman spun round, swinging the machine pistol, still in its ripped and smoking macramé bag, to bear down on the GSG9 cop dressed as a housewife. The policewoman snapped her aim from the man to the woman and fired twice, then twice more. Her shots hit the boy’s mother in the chest, face and forehead and she was dead before her falling body crashed onto the platform.

The man saw the woman die, but there was no
time for grief. He heard the screaming of a dozen GSG9 officers, in helmets and body armour, as they flooded out onto the platform from inside and around the sides of the station building. A group of them were gesturing furiously for the Dutchman to stop running and get out of their line of fire. The policewoman now swung her pistol to bear on the dark-haired man again. He struggled to free his Russian Makarov from his coat pocket and, when he did, he did not aim it at the policewoman or any of the GSG9 troops.

The policewoman’s first bullet ripped into his chest at exactly the same moment that his round smacked into the back of the Dutchman’s head.

Franz Mühlhaus – Red Franz, the notorious anarchist terrorist whose pale face had stared out at frightened West Germans from wanted posters from Kiel to Munich – fell to his knees, his arms hanging at his sides, the Makarov automatic lying limply in his half-open hand and his chin resting on his bloodstained chest.

As he died, he could just see, on the fringes of his failing vision, the pale face, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed in a silent scream, of his son. Somehow, the dying Red Franz Mühlhaus found the breath to utter a single word, thrown out into the world with his final, explosive exhalation.

‘Verräter …’

Traitors.

It was a moment he wanted to hang on to.

His senses reached out into every corner of the land, the sea and the sky around him. He stood on naked feet and felt the texture of the dry sand that abraded his soles and squeezed between his toes. He felt as if this place, this time, was all he could remember of himself. Here, he thought, there was no past, no future, only this perfect moment. Sylt lay long and thin and low in the North Sea, offering no profile to hinder the hastening wind that pushed at the vast sky above, seeking out the more substantial flank of Denmark beyond. As he stood there, the wind protested at his presence by tugging angrily at the fabric of his chinos, snapping the loose tails and collar of his shirt and flapping the broken wing of blond hair that hung over his forehead. It scoured his face and pushed into the creases of his skin as he stood watching the scurry of the clouds across the impossibly huge pale-blue shield of the sky.

Jan Fabel was a man of a little over medium height and in his early forties, but a certain boyishness lingered indistinctly, like a reluctant evictee, in his
appearance, in his lean, angular frame and in the flapping blond hair. His eyes were a pale blue and shone with intelligence and wit, but at that moment were reduced to narrow slits in the folds of the creased face that he presented to the angry wind. His face was tanned and unshaven and, just as the lingering boyishness in his posture hinted at the youth who had preceded him, the silver that sparkled in the gold of his three-day-old stubble prefigured the older man to come.

A woman approached from the dunes behind him: she was as tall as him and was dressed in a shirt and trousers of white linen. She also was barefoot, but carried a pair of low-heeled black sandals in one hand. The wind wrapped itself around her too, pressing and smoothing the white linen sleek against the curves of her body and making wild cables of her long dark hair. Fabel did not see Susanne approach and she stood behind him, dropping the sandals onto the sand and snaking her arms through his arms and around his body. He turned round and kissed her for a long time, before they both turned back to face the sea.