Tretjak (30 page)

Gritz looked down to the floor. ‘What you will see now will shock you a bit, Mr Tretjak.' He cleared his throat. ‘Frau Krabbe cut out both of her eyes with a knife two weeks ago.'

Tretjak didn't feel anything. He saw the hallway, he saw the doors, he saw the security officer in a pale blue uniform approach at a leisurely pace from the other side of the hallway. ‘Why did she do that?'

‘We don't know. Since then she has been in an aggressive state, in which she is even withdrawing from her conversations with the psychologist. Don't be frightened, she is wearing a black eye patch and she looks different in other ways as well, because of the medication, you know.'

They had started walking, and followed the officers up to the penultimate door. The man unlocked the door and let them enter. He stayed outside and then locked the door behind them.

‘Get lost, Gabriel,' Nora Krabbe said.

Tretjak looked at Gritz in surprise. He hadn't uttered a word yet. Was she really blind?

‘I can smell you,' Nora said, as if she had noticed his surprise. ‘Get lost,' she repeated.

Her hair had been shaved off, presumably because of her eye injury. She appeared swollen in a way, at least ten kilos heavier. The black eye patch over both her eyes made her look helpless. Suddenly she stood up, pulled her shirt over her head, tossed it behind her and grabbed her breasts. With an intentionally distorted childish voice she said: ‘Or would you like to play ball a bit?'

 

When they were outside again in the beautiful park, Tretjak wondered whether the dreadful events were easier to bear when they were decorated with trees and flowers. Police Detective Sergeant Rainer Gritz said he was still wondering about some other things as well, and wanted to ask Tretjak about them. For example, it was still unresolved who had killed Borbely, the bank employee. They were assuming that it was a revenge killing within the drug scene, since they had uncovered Borbely's links to drug dealers. Tretjak was thinking of Charlotte Poland. Of the scene when she had been so desperate, so near collapse, that she had told him everything, including about this Borbely guy. And had finally asked him: ‘Can you help me?'

They had to stop to let a little vehicle pass which swept the paths. Tretjak sensed that Gritz was looking at him quizzically. In the past, he sometimes unintentionally had a traitorous smirk around his mouth, but a few years ago he had consulted an expert on mimicry about how to get rid of it. Thank goodness for that, he thought now.

‘One thing interests me, Mr Tretjak,' said Gritz. ‘You knew
before
the fateful events in Maccagno that your girlfriend was behind the murders. How did you find that out?'

In the pocket of his cashmere coat Tretjak felt the little bottle with his rescue drops. A homeopathic remedy, which Treysa swore by. Tretjak had promised to give the stuff a chance, at least for its placebo effect. But he didn't want to let on in front of Gritz, and left the bottle in his pocket.

‘The letter my father had supposedly written contained a mistake,' he said. ‘An important mistake.'

He explained to Gritz how his father had always described their last meeting to everybody: he, Gabriel, had walked away without turning around.

Gritz nodded: ‘That's what is said in the letter, as if it was an accusation.'

‘But that's not the way it happened,' Tretjak said. ‘He was the one who was standing in the doorway. I was the one who said: “Or is there still some way in which we could change our story?” And he walked away without turning around. He would never have described this scene wrongly to me, even if he blamed me when he told this story to others.'

Gritz stopped and looked at him: ‘But from that you knew only that your father was not the murderer. But you didn't know yet that it was Ms Neustadt, I mean Ms Krabbe.'

Tretjak smiled up to the two-metre man. ‘You figured it out as well, Mr Gritz. Leave me with the comfort that I can be faster and better than the police in certain respects, at least.'

When they were outside the big gate again, Tretjak waved over a taxi from the stand on the other side of the street. He recognised the same driver from before, who in the meantime had obviously advanced to the first position in the waiting queue. The man was wearing a turban.

Tretjak opened the back door of the car and shook Sergeant Gritz's hand to say good-bye.

‘Tell me,' Tretjak asked, ‘what were the strange injuries on her body? She was covered with cuts.'

‘Her
mistakes
. She has said that she is drawing up an account of all the mistakes she made,' Gritz answered. ‘Every mistake is recorded with one cut.' She had done all that in one day, he explained. With a fork. She hadn't been given knives. Now she wasn't given even forks anymore. And she had always been talking about her biggest mistake, Gritz added. ‘Something about a red pointed hat.' He looked at Tretjak enquiringly. ‘Does that mean anything to you?'

Tretjak shook his head. ‘I've no idea what that means.' He got into the taxi and closed the door. Luigi deserved to be left alone.

 

The guy with the red pointed hat, who had briefly caught Nora Krabbe's eye at the ferry dock below, was fundamentally a genial, easy-going man. Luigi was his first name, and that's what everybody in town called him. A tourist he was not. He was the landlord of the inn down at the water's edge, with the large windows through which one could see the Lago Maggiore as a glistening sea during the daytime and as a black nothing at night. It was not an exciting restaurant, but the ravioli was good and so was the wine, especially the Valpolicella. Luigi was convinced that he served the best Valpolicella in the whole lake region. Clear, pure taste, with no blend.

The nice Luigi, whom everybody knew and liked, was, however, only one side of this man. For many years, Luigi had been on the payroll of the Italian secret police. He was a simple informer, but he worked on cases in a grey, morally questionable zone. What exactly he did, probably only he knew. It seemed also to be clear that he had other employers, people who rejected law and order out of principle. In his view, these roles didn't contradict each other, quite the contrary, and Luigi had always fared well with that business philosophy: all is well as long as everyone profits from my work. If they don't profit anymore, then I've got a problem.

He had met Gabriel Tretjak a few years ago. They had had dealings with each other only for a few days, but those days had been intense. There had been a moment back then when Luigi had been afraid, a feeling which only very rarely took hold of him. Tretjak had helped him, and you don't forget that, especially not if you are a man like Luigi. He hadn't hesitated for one second when Tretjak had called last September and asked him for a favour.

Gabriel Tretjak had asked whether he could check around in Maccagno and the surrounding towns. Was there anything out of the ordinary happening, did there seem to be something special in the offing? That was all.

Luigi had understood early in his life that you could talk to a hundred people and not find out anything if they were the wrong ones. And you could talk to three and comprehend everything if they were the right people. This time it had been four people in the end with whom he had spoken. After that, he had been certain that there was indeed something special coming in those autumn days.

There was something big and something small, which Luigi believed might interest Tretjak. The something small was: somebody had booked all the rooms in the Hotel Torre Imperial. And paid in advance. Supposedly because of a class reunion. But nobody knew anything about a party. The something big was: somebody had bought a considerable amount of explosives. In that case, the research had been particularly simple: the man from whom the woman had ordered the explosives was an old school friend of Luigi. They knew each other from the most varied stages of life.

When Luigi had informed Tretjak, he had asked whether there was anything else he could organise for him. He should make sure that the explosive was delivered but would not explode. ‘Sure thing,' Luigi had said, ‘will do.'

It was now late afternoon on the Lago Maggiore. Luigi liked November. The inn was still empty, and it would be more than an hour before the first guests arrived. Not many in this season. Luigi sat alone in the empty restaurant, and the few noises he could hear came only from the kitchen. He opened a bottle of wine, just for himself, his most expensive wine, an Amarone, the big brother of the Valpolicella. He poured himself a glass of the wine and swished it around the sides of the glass, once, twice, again and again. An explosive which was not going to explode. Luigi liked that kind of a job. That kind of thing could happen more often as far as he was concerned. He thought back to the moment when he had given Tretjak the agreed sign at the ferry port to say that everything had been arranged. Then he took a sip of the wonderful Amarone and thought how pleasant life was.

In the end there was always something left over, one final piece of the puzzle. That had been Rainer Gritz's experience in his policeman's life so far: there was always something that still had to be resolved at the end.

This time, the last piece of the puzzle lay in South Tyrol, in a village above Bolzano, a long way up, enclosed by mountains. It was 21 December. There was no snow in Munich. The air had been soft and clear when Gritz got going at seven o'clock that morning. His GPS told him he would reach Bolzano at 11.12am.

August Maler had told him about the man who lived with the eagles. Tretjak Senior had provided that lead. The man with the eagles could clear up the mystery of what had happened between Tretjak's two sons back then, ten years ago. Why the one son had disappeared and the other wouldn't comment on it.

Rainer Gritz had liked puzzles as a child. To put together the full picture bit by bit, that was what thrilled him. He had never told anybody in the police about this childhood passion, not even Maler. It seemed a bit too banal. As a child to play with puzzles, as a grown-up to hunt criminals.

But now, alone in the car, he was allowed to think how the puzzle-principle suited him. To complete something, to tick the box. In this case, it was particularly important to him. Never before had he had to deal with such depravities. Nora Krabbe's diary: one could not imagine anything more horrible. A thoroughly evil young woman who had perpetrated thoroughly evil deeds. And when she could not do evil to the outside world anymore she began to direct the evil against herself. But it wasn't so much the cruelty which Rainer Gritz found hard to take, which didn't let him sleep and tied him to the table in his little kitchen for hours, drinking one peppermint tea after another. It was not the brutality, which sometimes almost drove him mad. It was the sense of uncertainty in this case, which he had never been able to shake: what was reality, what was imagination? What could you believe and what should you believe? This double game of facts and suggestion – in the world of Gabriel Tretjak, all this could co-exist side by side, in fact such a fog was in a way the foundation of his business. In the world of the Detective Sergeant of the Homicide Squad, everything was reduced to the simple question: what was true and what wasn't. Whenever in the course of this investigation one had thought:
that's how it must have happened!
something had changed. Whenever one had thought that one understood this Gabriel Tretjak, something happened which altered everything. The man remained a mysterious, curious figure to him and he would not put anything past him.

There was, for example, the matter of the blood at the farmyard, Tretjak's refuge, where he looked up into the stars. Gritz had the whole farm searched, for all kinds of clues. They found traces of blood in several places, not even dry yet. Gritz had been sure that this lead would solve the case. One day later the result of the forensic investigation was: rabbit blood, from a freshly slaughtered animal. What had that been all about? What was the meaning of that crap?

Or this story with the brothers: Gritz suspected that the meeting of the two brothers ten years ago had actually never taken place. Maybe the mad Nora Krabbe had only persuaded the old Tretjak that it had, to reawaken his wrath against Gabriel. On the other hand, there had been no sign of that brother since that time. Where the hell was he? What was he doing? Had he been murdered? Had he assumed another identity? What was real and what not?

Gritz did not tend to show great emotion, but now at the wheel of his car, pondering everything, he was shaking. Just a few more kilometres, he thought, then closure, tick that box. Finally. Please. Or did that have to remain a wish? Could a puzzle ever be completed if the rules of the game were constantly redrawn?

It was 11.07am when he reached Bolzano. Five minutes quicker than the GPS had calculated, he thought. It had started to snow. His police-issued BMW had winter tyres and he had also brought along the snow chains. The road which led up to the village was marked on the map only as a thin line, but his GPS said he should use it. When he drove up the road, he thought: the GPS doesn't know how wide a BMW can be.

The road up to the village of Jenesien ran through a forest, was very steep and very narrow, and became even steeper and narrower the further he climbed it. It felt like being stuck in a drainpipe. And it was snowing more and more heavily. He turned the wipers up to the highest setting. He didn't listen to music anymore. Three kilometres to go, the navigation system pronounced. The wheels were starting to slip, but the car was still pulling itself upwards. Gritz had called his colleague in South Tyrol to ask whether he knew anything about this eagle-man. The colleague said that he would need to make some enquiries, and had called back the next day. Yes, such a man existed in Jenesien. Had to be a strange kind of a guy. He lived in a remodelled citadel, a little outside the village, on the edge of a forest. He wasn't there for months on end, but at the moment, so the information said that his colleague had received, the guy was in residence. There had been some trouble in the past, because he had gathered some youths around him who were attracted to him. He was rumoured to be a Satanist or something like that, so the colleague said. But that had not turned out to be the case. The community had met with him, and since then there had been no problems between them.