JF03 - Eternal (36 page)

After Grueber had gone, Fabel sat and studied
the partially reconstructed head. It was as if he were willing it to speak, to flex its fleshless muscles and move the mouth to whisper the name of the monster he was hunting. Grueber himself must have been loaded to afford a place like this. The furnishings were mainly antique and contrasted starkly with the computer and other equipment in the room, which were clearly expensive and state-of-the-art.

The curious mixture of professional and personal items in the study reminded Fabel of the room in which they had found Gunter Griebel’s body, although a great deal more cash had been spent on this environment. Fabel was disturbed by the similarity and for a second his imagination took him to a place he did not want to be: what if the maniac they were hunting was turning his attention on Fabel and his team? In an unbidden and sudden image that formed in his mind, Fabel saw young Frank Grueber bound to his antique leather chair, the top of his head disfigured. He thought of Maria, who had already survived the horror of a knife attack, sleeping upstairs, and of how her experience had caused her to develop a phobia of physical contact. He thought back to how, during the same previous inquiry, Anna had been drugged and abducted. And now there had been the atrocity in his own home.

Fabel felt the urge to grab his keys and rush off to the Presidium, but Grueber had been right: he was too exhausted and too muddled to be of any use to anyone. He would rest up for a couple of hours, maybe even sleep, before going in.

He wandered over to the walnut bookshelves. Fabel had always felt comforted when he was surrounded by books and Grueber’s collection was extensive but not wide-ranging in subject matter.
Archaeology formed the core of his library: the rest of the books covered history from various periods, geology, forensic technologies and methodologies and anatomy. Everything that was not archaeology was a related subject.

Taking a couple of volumes from the shelves, Fabel slumped onto the antique leather chesterfield. The first book that had caught his interest dealt with mummies. It was a large-format book with big glossy colour plates and in it Fabel discovered exactly the same photograph of Cherchen Man that Severts had shown him. Again Fabel felt awe as he looked on the perfectly preserved face of a fifty-five-year-old man who had died three thousand years before Fabel had been born. He read for a minute and then flicked through the book again until he came across the equally striking image of Neu Versen Man: Red Franz. He felt a lurch in his gut when he looked at the skeletonised skull with its shock of thick red hair. It reminded him of the scalps that the killer had been leaving behind at each scene. The book detailed Red Franz’s discovery on Bourtanger Moor, near the small town of Neu Versen, in November 1900. It also offered a hypothesis on the nature of Red Franz’s life and death. How he had, during his lifetime, been wounded in battle. Of how his life had been ended by having his throat cut, perhaps ceremonially, before he was interred in the dark peaty bog of Bourtanger Moor.

Fabel flicked through some more pages. Each colour plate showed a face from the past, preserved in dank bogs or in arid deserts or prepared for the afterlife by the surgeon-priests of whom Grueber had spoken. Fabel tried to read, to focus his attention on something that would take his mind from
everything that had happened over the last twenty-four hours, but his eyelids felt leaden.

He fell asleep.

It had been a while since Fabel had had one of his dreams. And it had been even longer since he had admitted having one to Susanne, who he knew was concerned about the way the stresses and horrors of his working days manifested themselves in the vivid nightmares that haunted his sleep.

He dreamed that he stood on a vast plain. Fabel, who had grown up on the baize-green flatlands of Ostfriesland, knew that this was somewhere else. Somewhere that was as alien as it was possible to be. The grass he stood in came halfway up his calf, but was dry and brittle: bone-coloured. The horizon in the distance was so uncompromisingly flat and sharp that it made his eyes hurt to look at it. Above it a vast sky that sat colourless and leaden was broken only by sickly streaks of rust-coloured clouds.

Fabel turned a slow three hundred and sixty degrees. Everything looked the same: an unbroken, sanity-shredding sameness. He stood and wondered what to do. There was no point in walking, for there was nowhere to walk to and there was no landmark to guide his walking. This was a world without direction, without destination.

Suddenly there were figures in the landscape, moving towards him. They were not together, walking several hundred metres apart like a strung-out camel train crossing a featureless desert.

The first figure drew near. A tall, lean man, dressed in brightly coloured clothes. He had a neatly trimmed beard and longish light brown hair that fingered the air with tangled wisps as he walked. Fabel held out his hand, but the figure did not seem to notice and
instead walked straight past him as if he wasn’t there. As he did so, Fabel noticed that the man’s face was unnaturally thin, his eyelids unevenly pulled down. His bottom lip was twisted, revealing the teeth on one side of his face. Fabel recognised him. He held out his hand to Cherchen Man, who walked on by, blind to Fabel’s presence. The next figure who passed him was a very tall, graceful woman whom Fabel recognized as the Beauty of Loulan.

But as the third figure approached there was a terrible sound. Like thunder but louder than any thunder Fabel had ever heard before. He felt the dry earth shake and crack beneath him, bristling the dry grass, and suddenly, all around him, broken black buildings, like jagged blackened teeth, thrust up out of the ground. The third figure was smaller than the others and was dressed in modern clothes. He drew near: a youth with fine wispy fair hair, wearing a blue serge suit that was too big for him. By the time he had reached Fabel, an ugly black city of angular buildings, as empty as death, had grown all around them. Like the other mummies who had walked past Fabel, the youth’s cheeks were hollow and his eyes were sunken and shadowed. As he walked he held one arm stiffly out before him in the same death-frozen gesture as when Fabel had first seen him, half-buried in the sand of the Elbe waterfront. As he reached Fabel he did not, as the others had done, simply pass by. Instead he tilted his head and looked, with his hollow eyes, up at the vast bleak sky.

Fabel looked up too. The sky darkened as if filled with birds, but he recognised the dull, menacing drone of ancient warplanes. The drone grew louder, deafening, as the planes came overhead. Fabel stood, mute and motionless, watching
the bombs cascade from the sky. A great storm began to rage, the excoriatingly hot air swirled and screamed, and the black buildings now glowed like coals. Yet Fabel and the youth remained untouched by the firestorm raging around them.

For a moment the youth looked blankly at Fabel, with his expressionless, ageless face. Then he turned away and walked the few paces to where the nearest building raged with fire, greedily sucking on the air to feed the great flame that lived within. The youth lay down before the building, which Fabel thought may have been the Nikolaikirche, pulled a red blanket of molten asphalt and embers over himself, and went to sleep, his outstretched arm reaching out to the burning building.

Fabel sat upright, still halfway in his dream, for a few moments straining his ears for the sound of bombers overhead. He looked around and recognised Grueber’s study with its expensive antiques, its walnut bookshelves and the half-finished bust of a long-dead girl from Schleswig-Holstein.

Fabel looked at his watch: it was now six-thirty. He had slept for another two hours. He still felt the lead of exhaustion in his limbs but, hearing movement in the kitchen, he went through to find Maria Klee drinking a coffee.

‘You fit enough to come in with me?’ His question sounded more like a statement than he would have liked. Maria nodded, stood up and took a final sip of her coffee. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the team together. We’re going to go over everything we’ve got. Again. There’s got to be something we’re missing here.’

As he made his way out of Grueber’s apartment,
Fabel used his cellphone to call Susanne to check how she was. She told him she was fine, but there was a tone of uncertainty that Fabel had never heard before in her voice. He grabbed his jacket and keys and made his way out to the waiting silver and blue marked police car outside.

The audiences were getting smaller.

It was during the 1980s and 1990s that he had seen the greatest reduction in audience size, when a new generation of performer had come along.
Schlager
, the bland, schmaltzy form of German pop music, had always been there, its inane presence actually helpful to singers like Cornelius Tamm; its complete lack of substance counterpointing their music, underlining its intellectualism. But then came punk, then rap which gave voice to the disaffection of a new, apolitical generation. And, of course, there had been the irresistible wave of Anglo-American imports. Each had, in its own way, marginalised Cornelius and others like him, pushing them out of the limelight. And off the radio.

But there had always been his concert audiences: the constant faithful followers who had grown older, had matured with him. But the Wall had come down and Germany had become reunited. Protest became redundant. Political lyrics seemed irrelevant.

Now Cornelius performed in cellars and town halls for audiences of fifty or so. There were other performers of his vintage who had simply given up
touring and sold their own back catalogue, as Cornelius also did, from their websites.

But Cornelius needed an audience. No matter how small. And he always gave the best performance he could, even when his fans would sicken him with the way they’d make up for their lack of numbers with an excess of enthusiasm. He would look out over a small mass of balding or greying heads and corpulent or haggard faces and go through the motions of reviving the dully depressing memories of their youth.

The audience tonight was no different. Cornelius laughed and joked and sang, playing the same tunes on the same guitar he had played for nearly forty years. Tonight he played in the cellar of an old brewery that sat between two of the canals that wove through Hamburg like the thread that held the city’s fabric together. The audience all sat on benches at the side of long, low tables, drinking beer and grinning inanely as he sang. He did not even have the power to bring an audience to its feet any more.

He did notice one younger face. It was a man in his early thirties, standing over by the bar. He was pale with very dark hair. Cornelius was not sure, but he thought he recognised the young man from somewhere.

Cornelius always finished his performance with the same number. It was his signature piece. Reinhard Mey had ‘
Über den Wolken
’, Cornelius Tamm had ‘
Ewigkeit
’. Eternity. At last the audience dragged themselves to their feet, singing along to the song that promised that members of their generation were eternal. That they would triumph. Except they were not, and they had not. They had all surrendered to the banal; the mediocre. Cornelius too.

After he finished his set Cornelius went through the usual routine. It was, of course, humiliating to sit at a table with a case full of CDs for sale, but he engaged in the task with the same practised enthusiasm as he had learned to invest in his performances. More often than not he sold no more than a handful. He was, after all, preaching to the converted who, in most cases, already had all his songs. He had, as the capitalists would say, saturated his market.

Still, he smiled and chatted politely with those who lingered after the performance, talking to strangers as if they were old friends because of their vaguely common chronologies. But, inside, Cornelius Tamm’s soul screamed. He had been the voice of a generation. He had given expression to a special moment in time. He had spoken to and for millions who had raged against the sins of their fathers, against the sins of their own time. And now he sold CDs of his songs from a suitcase in a Hamburg
Bierkeller
.

It was nearly two in the morning by the time he reversed his van up to the back door and loaded his amplifier and other equipment into the back. As he did so, Cornelius felt every one of his sixty-two years weigh down the equipment. It had been raining while he had been performing and the cobbles in the yard behind the old brewery glistened in the moonlight. One of the bar staff helped him out with the amp, said goodnight and closed the delivery doors, leaving Cornelius in the courtyard alone. He looked up at the moon and the silver-etched edges of the roofs around the courtyard. Somewhere over on Ost-West Strasse a siren whined past. Cornelius thought about Julia lying warm and fresh and young in their bed. About how he did not belong beside her. About how
he did not belong anywhere, any more. Cornelius Tamm looked up at the moon from the empty courtyard of an old brewery pub and felt so terribly lonely. He sighed and slammed shut the rear doors of the van.

He gave a jump when he saw the young man with the pale face and dark hair standing there.

‘Hello, Cornelius,’ said the stranger. His arm arced round and Cornelius caught the black blur of something long and heavy-looking. It slammed into his cheek and there was the sound of something cracking and Cornelius felt a white-hot pain explode in the side of his face and down his neck. He hit the ground so fast that his brain did not have time to register his falling. He felt the glossy, rounded top of a cobble against his uninjured cheek and realised that it was sleek not with rain but with his blood.

‘I’m sorry about your face …’ His assailant was now bending over him. ‘But I couldn’t hit you on the head.’ Cornelius felt the sting of a hypodermic needle in his neck and the moonlight faded from the night. ‘That would have damaged your scalp …’