Tretjak (23 page)

Fiona Neustadt walked along the long grey corridor of the cancer ward and started to observe herself objectively. As if she was accompanied by cameras. How did she appear, walking along like this? A pretty, young woman, for sure, that's what she was, but could one notice the emotion, the sense of shock at the realisation that she had just said good-bye to a person who meant so much to her? More than that, the person who was most important in her life? He had always seen her the way she really was, he had always appreciated the special core of her. He had known how valuable she was, what she was capable of.

She wished that people would notice this very special mourning she was in, that her pain would show on her face. She was waiting at the lift. She had this gift, of being able to look at herself with extreme detachment, to take a position outside herself and to thereby keep her distance. That's how she never lost control, how she kept an overview. That was maybe her biggest strength, she thought, when the lift arrived. She pressed the button for the ground floor. She still wanted to go to the cafeteria. To drink a schnapps as a toast to him, as she had promised. She always kept her promises.

Her ability to look at herself from the outside went even further, Fiona Neustadt thought, when she got out of the big metallic lift and walked along the long grey corridor in the direction of the cafeteria. Using this method she could split herself incessantly; she was never only one person, and was therefore always stronger than other people. Controlled schizophrenia, she thought, and had to smile.

For example, this morning: for the first time in a long time, she had woken up alone in her flat. And she didn't just get up. She had watched herself doing it. As somebody who loved and desired her. Not Gabriel, or any specific man. Just man as a prototype. She had felt her own looks on her skin, in the bathroom, under the shower as well. She had felt strong by way of this detached self-projection.

Fiona Neustadt stood at the self-service counter of the cafeteria and bought a small bottle of brandy. She took a big water glass and poured in the brandy. Right now she also felt strong. What kind of woman does this so matter of factly, drinking brandy in the hospital's cafeteria? She wanted to sit in a corner, and found a place at the window overlooking the big parking lot. The sun was still shining. What a contrast to the room on the cancer ward.

‘Ms Neustadt?'

She looked up and saw a man in a blue bathrobe, pyjamas and trainers standing in front of her. She needed a moment to recognise him.

‘Inspector! Well hello, what are you doing here?'

‘I'm here as a patient for a few days. Nothing serious. Only a few tests. And you? What are you doing here?'

‘I've been here to see my Dad. Unfortunately it is serious, very serious. To put it bluntly: my father is dying.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.'

‘Please sit down,' she said.

Maler sat down and both were quiet for a moment. Not an easy occasion for pleasant small talk. A young woman wrapped in the pain of mourning, and an inspector wrapped in a blue bathrobe. Maler's first question didn't lighten the mood.

‘Tell me,' Maler asked, ‘I don't want to be nosy, but how does an attractive young woman become a tax inspector?'

‘What kind of a question is that?'

‘I'm really interested,' said Maler.

‘Why did you become a cop?' asked Fiona Neustadt.

‘OK, I understand. Stupid question. Then I'll ask something else: How is Mr Tretjak?'

‘He has to live with the fact that his father is a serial killer. But otherwise he is fine, I think.'

‘It's nice that you two are a couple now,' was the inspector's last attempt.

Fiona Neustadt took a large gulp of the brandy. She then got up and extended her hand towards him. ‘Inspector, I've got to go. Good-bye.'

She did not see how August Maler returned to his room, to the pills the professor had had send there. But when she had left the hospital, outside in the parking lot in the sun, she asked herself whether she had made a mistake.

 

The tablets the professor had given him had worked. In fact, they had worked so well that Inspector Maler needed some time to realise who was standing in front of his bed when he woke the next morning. It was after eight, and his breakfast had been waiting for him on his night stand for two hours. He had not even been conscious of it being brought in.

Rainer Gritz stood at his bedside, his young companion, whom he had come to trust. Everything was happening in slow motion with Maler, but slowly his body functions were picking up speed. Gritz's words were also reaching his brain painfully slowly. A new case, a new murder. A bank employee was lying in his flat, poisoned. Some very strange poison, something exotic, Maler understood.

‘But Boss,' said Gritz, ‘that's not all.'

And what he said next made Maler wake up rather quickly. There was a connection to the previous series of murders? Charlotte Poland?

‘You know, the writer with the disturbed son, the friend of the old Tretjak. She was also at the funeral, I saw her there.'

Charlotte Poland, Gritz explained, had met the murdered bank employee, officially on totally normal bank business. But his colleague had declared that the banker had been totally beside himself after the appointment.

‘I have viewed the tapes of the bank's CCTV camera,' said Gritz. ‘You could see him nervously pacing up and down the corridor after she had left. The guy was finished. And you know when this meeting took place? Two hours before the dinner with Gabriel Tretjak in the Osteria at which we arrested him.'

‘Have you reached Charlotte Poland already?'

‘Yes. She says it was a completely ordinary conversation. She had sought advice about what to do with her money. She didn't remember any details.'

When Rainer Gritz left the hospital room, he added: ‘Boss, I don't like the look on your face.'

Maler, in the meantime, had sat up in his bed. He thought, well he is right, this Gritz, I don't like the look on my face either. And then suddenly the inspector had another thought. My God. Maler heaved himself out of bed, went over to the wardrobe, and got his mobile out of his jacket. He pushed a few buttons and then dialled the number of the forensic pathologist.

 

Charlotte Poland typed the last sentences of her latest novel into the computer. She was sitting at the small desk of her hotel room in the Tucher Park Hilton in Munich. She had ordered a big pot of tea, Darjeeling, the Risheehat variety. Not one of the common Darjeelings, a pretty expensive one, which the hotel procured especially for her at Dallmayr, Munich's famous delicatessen. ‘Of course we'll get you that tea, we'd be delighted,' the receptionist had said. The aroma of Risheehat was part of writing for her, as well as the minor stomach ache which reliably occurred after consuming the fourth cup. She waited for the pain, she liked it.

She took another sip from the white porcelain cup and then wrote the very last sentence:
In the end, it had been easy. In the end, it was always easy.

Charlotte Poland was pleased with the idea of how her publisher and lover would react when he read the new book. Of course, she had told him that he had to expect a completely different book this time, a radical, a courageous one. Yes, yes, he had replied, as you wish, he was looking forward to it. ‘Think of your readers, though,' he had said. ‘They want to read a Poland again, nothing else. There is enough of everything else around, but there is only one Poland.' The old charmer.

In the end, it had been easy. In the end, it was always easy.
The last sentence of a novel about a brutal female killer. In a way, she thought, the book was not that much different from her earlier books. It also dealt with the magician's trick of hidden depths, the secret compartment beneath the false bottom of a box, in the life of her protagonist. A woman who notices that nothing is as it seems, who understands that everything around her is lies, fraud and hypocrisy. The only difference in the new novel was the series of logical steps her heroine chose to take as a consequence of that realisation. In the past, her novels had been a declaration of love for hypocrisy: whoever recognises hypocrisy lives wonderfully happily with it ever after. Now that was all turned around. This time her heroine shouted against hypocrisy, this time she destroyed the lie, and the destruction was literal. A woman was seeking the truth, and ran amok. Her motive: fury at the world. Her solution: violent revenge upon the world.

Charlotte Poland opened the email account on her computer and sent the manuscript to her publisher. The computer registered the time sent as 7.34am. It was 354 pages long, while her other works had all been about 200 pages longer. The truth, she thought, was briefer after all.

She dialled the number for room service on the hotel telephone and ordered a glass of champagne. A little early, she thought, but a small celebration was in order. Service in the Hilton was good, and the glass of champagne was delivered exactly six and a half minutes later. She gave the waiter a ten-euro tip, and when he had left, she posed in front of the mirror and grinned: cheers, Mrs Poland, to the murderess!

With the story of the murderess, she had wanted to answer one question in particular: how much guilt can one person stand? How many illegal acts can a conscience tolerate? Conscience – what a word, Poland thought. If you killed a nasty person, wasn't that a much more moral act than watching him perpetrate his nastiness? It was good that she had done a lot of research for her book, she thought. It was good that she knew what she was writing about.

‘My conscience can stand a lot,' Charlotte Poland said aloud in the direction of her mirror image. ‘My conscience will have to put up with a lot in the future.'

She finished the champagne. And for a moment she thought of Mr Borbely, the pudgy bank employee. Was anybody sad that this smarmy creature was no longer alive? Well, she thought, he was bound to have had a mother at least. A mother who was suffering now. She checked herself as if to take her temperature. She listened to a voice inside herself – and was content. The end of Mr Borbely didn't bother her, not a bit. It didn't even marginally touch her conscience. It bounced off, without leaving any measurable reaction.

 

Charlotte Poland had checked into the Hilton for six months. For the time being. How things were going to pan out, she didn't know. She had a very definite sensation that she didn't have a future. The hotel seemed the appropriate place for such a sensation. The first three weeks had passed now, and living here was pleasantly easy. The Hilton was in the middle of the English Garden, Munich's vast park, and was the ideal place for her to live for various reasons. One could go for a walk whenever one wanted. Early in the morning, in the middle of the night, whenever one couldn't sleep. She now could distinguish exactly between the various shades of grey and black one encountered in the park, at two o'clock in the middle of the night or four; the grey of the morning just before six o'clock versus the one at half past seven.

The hotel had to be in Munich, the city where her son lived. But she wanted to be as far away as possible from the borough of Haar in the east of Munich. She drove there every second day, and she needed the distance, the half an hour it took her by car, to gather her strength.

She had known the Tucher Park Hilton for a long time. A few times she had met her publisher there for sex in the afternoon. Even then she had liked the seclusion, the green, the illusion of a country estate. The publisher had asked her out for a date a few times recently, ‘to take your mind off things'. But Charlotte Poland kept putting him off until another time, and at one point he had intelligently stopped asking. Maybe the flame of passion was not burning as bright anymore, but maybe, she thought, there was another reason as well: maybe another feeling had taken hold of her, an all-consuming one. It was a feeling which it had taken her many sentences and pages in her new novel to describe, because the one or two words which existed for it didn't seem appropriate. Rage or fury – these words described only a momentary state, something violent, that came on quickly, and then equally quickly dissipated.

She always went in the morning. She drove through the city and breathed a sigh of relief at every traffic light which turned red because it extended the journey time.

The borough of Haar. There were many cities with quarters which were identified by one single concept or institution. With Haar, it was the district hospital. Signs pointing in its direction started appearing long before one got close to it. It was not a normal hospital, it was a hospital for the mentally ill. One could also say it was a city of the insane. A wall surrounded the compound, which consisted of various old buildings of elaborate architecture. The enclosed area had been filled in more densely over time with more modern buildings.

Charlotte Poland always parked outside the compound walls, although she could have driven her car into the grounds. She walked the rest of the way. It was a beautiful route, past big trees. She had to go to House No. 10, from the outside a particularly beautiful old building. Here as well, one could enjoy the illusion of being on a country estate. It housed the particularly tough cases, the pathological ones, human beings which a judge had decided should be locked up for a long time for what they had done, because they constituted a danger to the community.

For the past three weeks, she had come here every other day. Normally she didn't see the other patients in House No. 10, since during visiting hours in the morning they were all in their rooms. Only once she had gone to the kitchen to ask for some cutlery and a plate. A big, pale man had stood there, making himself a cup of coffee. He was very friendly, handed her the plastic cutlery and the plate and asked who she was visiting. This was the start of a conversation, and at one point the man had said that it had been hard at the beginning to accept the patients in here, to accept that they were human beings too, just a bit different, a bit more honest. Honest, that's what he had said. Charlotte Poland had not asked him why he was here. Later on, she had made enquiries with the nurse.