Tretjak (20 page)

The small funeral cortège, which had gathered behind Paul Tretjak's coffin and which set off slowly, split into two groups. There was a small group of locals, identifiable by their dress. They wore lightweight black trousers and short-sleeved dark shirts on top. The mourners who had come from further afield all were dressed much too warmly, wearing suits and ties, even some hats. The Munich police officer Rainer Gritz belonged to this group.

Rainer Gritz was 33 years old, tall and thin. He had earned his nickname ‘Croco' not so much because of his appearance but because of the tenacity with which he grabbed hold of the files and details of a case and wouldn't let go. Wasn't it strange how life played out sometimes? He had joined the Homicide Squad in Munich just at the time when Inspector Maler came back after his heart transplant. Slowly of course, tentatively, only for a few hours at first, then for half days. Maler had to take things easy, the police had to take care of him. So that became Rainer Gritz's job. Long-winded research, tiresome report-writing, extensive sifting through files – this part of the work became the responsibility of the young officer. And this is how they became an interesting team, the inspector with a new heart, a man with intuition and experience, and the tall thin guy who developed into some sort of super-assistant, working in the background, checking hypotheses, filling in official applications, gathering evidence and buying train tickets. By now Maler was back full-time and there was no mention of taking it easy anymore. But the division of labour had remained in place somehow.

 

They had meant to go to the funeral together, in a way to pay their respects to an unusual case. But Maler had been taken ill yesterday morning, and they had quickly diagnosed that his body was rejecting the new heart. Maler had had to go into the hospital in Grosshadern. It was not a serious rejection, only a Category 1b. By now Rainer Gritz had become a bit of an expert and knew that as long as there was a 1 in front, the rejection was not yet life-threatening. But he had driven to the Lago Maggiore alone, via Lindau on Lake Constance and the San Bernadino Pass.

He had taken his place in the cortège behind the locals and caught himself thinking that one day in the not too distant future he would have to walk at the very front, at the funeral of his mother or father. He loved his parents and hated this thought. Here it was the priest who led the procession, directly behind the tractor, which was huffing and puffing in a not very pious fashion. He also had come from afar, a man whom Gritz had interviewed as part of this case. His name was Joseph Lichtinger. He was wearing his simple black cassock and carried a wooden crosier with a plain brass cross on top. Gabriel Tretjak walked behind the priest. The Fixer, as they had called him in police headquarters ever since Gritz had interviewed the farmer's wife, and had seized the suitcases with Tretjak's data files from the tool shed of the Jedlitschka Farm. Walking beside Gabriel Tretjak was his girlfriend, the tax inspector Fiona Neustadt.

Just before the path led into the forest, which was already showing autumn colours, it reached a difficult spot, a sharp corner, at which the tractor got stuck and the whole vehicle had to backtrack. In the end Gabriel Tretjak himself had to lend a hand and push the wagon to get his father's body around the bend. His face was completely unmoved.

This facial expression had been described by everybody Rainer Gritz had interviewed. Concentrated but not engaged. The manager Peter Schwarz had said that he had met the man only once personally, in a hotel in Sri Lanka. His whole expression had been: you have a problem. You. Not me. ‘Throughout dinner I looked into this face – and at the end of the meal my life was changed completely.' Rainer Gritz could not shake the thought that Peter Schwarz was still trying to come to terms with what had really happened that evening. He had also visited Schwarz's wife Melanie, a former starlet, in her flat in Heidelberg. What kind of a man was this Tretjak? ‘Mainly a man who showed understanding,' was her answer. ‘An attractive man, one who knows what has to be done and then actually does it. He gives one the feeling of being well taken care of.' But then she told him how quickly Tretjak had withdrawn after the job was completed. That had been somehow hard to take. She had written him two more, very personal letters, detailed letters, written by hand. There had been a rather curt response, three lines,
wish you all the best
... ‘Well... I needed a while to comprehend that for him, it was only business. That it hadn't been a friend who had done all this for me, but a professional.' Gritz remembered this Melanie Schwarz well, how she had stood in the door when he left, still a bit unsure in the new town and in her new life.

Even the woman Tretjak was now seeing, who had been his tax inspector at the time, had stated in a long conversation they had had at police headquarters that this was in a way the fundamental principle of his work: stay detached – then interfere. She had said that he had not considered how deep these intrusions were and what feelings they would bring about. She was convinced that he had no appreciation as to what he was creating, a situation that in the end could turn on him.

Your problem. Not mine. That, it was clear, could not apply to the scene unfolding here on the steep path uphill to Santo Stefano. The lives of the man in the coffin and the man who was helping to push the coffin were intertwined, in a way which could only be described as ominous.

Tretjak did what had to be done: identified his father's body in the morgue. Acknowledged the body of evidence. Obtained permission to have him buried in the little cemetery up on the hill. Organised the priest, the tractor. Pushed the coffin when it got stuck. Gabriel Tretjak, Rainer Gritz knew, was not only burying his father. He was burying an enemy. And he was burying – probably for the umpteenth time in his life – his childhood. He was doing this in a very determined fashion, seemingly not looking right or left. The only thing he hadn't done yet was to deliver a eulogy. And somehow Rainer Gritz had the feeling that he wasn't going to do that at all.

 

The small cortège went around another bend and came out of the forest. In front of it, an almost unreal scene unfolded. Gritz looked at a gently sloping meadow with freshly cut grass framed by hydrangea bushes. Below, the dark blue of the lake with the ruin of a castle on an island, and at the horizon the snow-capped mountains. To the left was the stone wall of the church, which one could have mistaken for the wall of a farmhouse if it hadn't been for the church bell which started ringing in that very moment above the heads of the mourners. It was hanging in a small open tower, which consisted of four columns and a flat rectangular roof. The whole thing was not higher than two metres, directly above the entrance of the church, which the cortège had now reached. In front of the entrance, a semi-circle was paved with granite slabs. The young man turned off the motor of the tractor. Somebody cleared his throat in the ensuing silence. Gritz was puzzled that one couldn't see the cemetery. Four men stepped forward and loosened the belts around the coffin, and as if following a silent command, lifted it from the wagon onto a wooden trestle, which had been erected in front of the church entrance. To the left and right of the trestle stood two stone vases with bunches of dark purple aconite. Gritz saw a big gecko dash from one of the arrangements over to and then up the church wall. Just below the window sill, it paused to observe what was happening below. And now Gritz noticed Mrs Poland standing at the edge of the semi-circle, next to a stone tub with a rosebush inside it. Obviously she had not followed the cortège but had come up here earlier. She was wearing dark blue cotton trousers, a simple black blouse and a string of pearls. Big black sunglasses shielded her eyes.

Rainer Gritz had been 18, just about to sit his high school graduation exams, when he had decided to join the police force. When he had announced his decision, his family and friends had all given him the same warning: it's not like in the movies, you have the wrong impression, it is a boring agency full of boring people and dusty offices and dreadful forms and reports. You really couldn't say that about this case, he thought, looking at the well-known writer Charlotte Poland standing over there, a little bit apart from the others in the light of the setting sun. The four thick folders standing on his desk in Munich's police HQ, all properly labelled and now closed, contained so many stories, twists, characters and plots, that there was enough material for a movie.

The affairs of Professor Kufner, for example. During the investigations into his life, the search for motives for his murder in the Hotel Blauer Mondschein in Bolzano, the police had quickly become aware of the questionable way in which the renowned psychologist had looked after his students and patients. One could put it this way: the younger and the prettier the women, the more intensive the training and the therapy. Not an entirely safe passion. In an essay, Kufner had once described the power of sexuality this way:
When two people sleep with one another, they walk through a door into a new room in their lives. And they have no idea, not the faintest, what will happen there
. From Tretjak's confiscated archive files, which he had hidden at the Jedlitschka Farm, one could relatively effortlessly deduce that the Fixer had become involved with Kufner on several occasions, in fact every time that the Professor had got into trouble in yet another new room in his life. The most serious case Gritz had added to the files was the attempted-suicide letter of a 21-year-old patient, with its rounded, child-like handwriting, and words like ‘transcendent love, which was not of this world', ‘fulfilment which was only possible in another world'. Tretjak had started with the parents, a lot of money had changed hands, and in the end the young woman had been dispatched to the United States, to a two-year programme, with a job and therapy in Seattle.

And then there was another letter in the files. This one was in a totally different kind of writing: letters from newspapers, cut out, pasted on. Claiming responsibility for an act of terror, which had killed a bank director called Ernst Kindermann 20 years ago. Sender: Commando Red Star of June. Gritz thought back in horror to the extremely complicated dialogue with the Federal Criminal Investigation Office, the Secret Service and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It had taken quite some time and used up three kilometres of his nerves until finally at least part of the reports of a certain agent called Dieter ‘Dimitri' Steiner had landed on his desk at police headquarters. This agent had pursued a second lead. There had been another theory which the Federal Criminal Investigation Office had put forward, namely that the letter claiming responsibility had been a fake, a clever hoax. That in truth there was no terror cell behind the planting of the bomb under the armoured Mercedes, rather it was a kind of commercial consortium, which had paid a lot of money for Kindermann's assassination. This consortium consisted of Russians who were busy building up their empire amidst the chaos created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kindermann saw a huge opportunity for expansion for his bank's business in the East. Behind the scenes he was forging political alliances for this expansion, but outwardly he was talking about ‘the necessity to end the lawless state within Russia.' Agent Steiner, who had switched sides, was supposed to use his old contacts and informants to find out whether there was anything to this lead. In his reports, the name Gabriel Tretjak had shown up, but only on the periphery and fleetingly. The consortium had reportedly made contact with him once. Back then Tretjak was a young student, maybe too harmless to have been involved. In any case, the investigation had not been carried on any further in that direction.

Rainer Gritz had also filed separately the papers containing the notes Maler had made about his conversation with Dieter Steiner, in which Steiner had discussed Tretjak, but only with regard to the past. Then this Steiner had been murdered just before a planned meeting with Tretjak. But apart from this missed appointment, there had been no more recent connection that could be established between Steiner and Tretjak, and there was nothing linking either of them with the murders in Munich and Bolzano. And furthermore, one secret service agent had explained in an informal conversation with Gritz – the only informal conversation that had taken place between the various authorities in this matter – that the past quite often catches up with turncoats like Steiner. Some score or another, the agent had said, always stayed open and had to be settled, often by death. These murders were difficult to solve. After all, this was the work of professionals.

Father Joseph Lichtinger had started saying Mass, which he was holding outdoors, in front of the entrance to the church. If you could call it Mass. This was not Rainer Gritz's thing. His parents had left the Church before he was born, so he hadn't been baptised, and had had no Holy Communion, no Confirmation, nothing of the sort.

There was no music in front of the church of Santo Stefano, no candles, no sweet smell of incense in the air. The sun stood so low that it was almost blinding the priest. Lichtinger spoke in Latin and in German. He extemporised, there was no book in front of him. The life of the deceased was drawn with broad brush strokes, as he talked about the new home Paul Tretjak had found here on the Lago Maggiore, about the peace he seemed to have found here, with a special emphasis on the ‘seemed'.

‘But the ways of the Lord are mysterious...' – these were the phrases in which Lichtinger cloaked the fact that they were burying a murderer today. He spoke about death being the end of all enmity on earth, about there being only the One left to pronounce a final judgement now. At intervals, those present murmured two prayers, one in German and another, which always repeated the same phrases, in Latin. With a glance to the son, the priest spoke of the heavy burden which sometimes rested on the shoulders of the relatives, and Rainer Gritz had to think of the third letter which he had filed about this case, and which in a way had closed it. Paul Tretjak's letter to his son, which ended with the words:
What do you think, Gabriel?