Sorry, page 10
“Where have you been?”
Tamara is about to ask her the same question when she sees that Frauke isn’t alone. A man is sitting opposite her.
“This is Gerald,” Frauke says. “He’s from the criminal investigations department.”
That’s all it takes. Just a few drops, but Tamara feels them dripping down her thigh. CID. Tamara’s voice sounds crushed as she says she urgently needs to go to the bathroom. Before anyone can object, Tamara has disappeared upstairs, even though there’s a bathroom on the ground floor as well.
“What?”
David’s voice sounds as if he were thousands of miles away. Tamara thinks how curious it is that someone who was so close can be so far away.
“I said—”
“I heard you. Where are you?”
Tamara doesn’t want to tell him she’s locked herself in the bathroom. And she doesn’t want to tell him that she’s sitting in the dark on the closed toilet seat, knees at her chest, arms wrapped around them.
“At home,” she says.
“Tamara, we agreed—”
“I wanted to know if Jenni was OK.”
“She’s fine, why shouldn’t she be?”
“Please go and look.”
“What?”
“Just very quickly, David. Will you please go upstairs and check if she’s really OK? I’ll stay on the line.”
David says nothing. Tamara hears him breathing in, then there’s a rustling sound and footsteps fading away. She waits. She stares at the mirror over the basin, which stares back like a black stain.
If I creep over and peer in, maybe I’ll see myself sitting on the toilet with the receiver pressed to my ear. Maybe I can leave this Tamara behind and start all over again somewhere else.
“She’s asleep,” David says at the other end.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Tamara takes a deep breath, aware that tears are spilling from her eyes.
“Tamara, tell me what on earth’s going on?”
“Couldn’t the two of you go away for a while?”
“What? What do you want?”
“Just go away for a while. A few weeks or something. The weather’s fine and—”
“Tamara, the weather’s awful. It’s the middle of February. Are you on something?”
The tears are flowing now, Tamara sobs. David tries to calm her down, Tamara doesn’t want him to hear her crying. She sniffs and tries to steady herself.
“Fear,” she finally forces herself to say.
“What?”
“I’m frightened, David.”
“What of?”
“There’s so much evil out there.”
“Tamara—”
“Promise me you’ll pay special attention to Jenni over the next few days, promise me that.”
“It’s a promise,” says David, and then there’s a pause that sounds to Tamara like longing and hope, but David destroys the moment by asking her to pull herself together.
“Do you hear me?” he insists.
“I hear you,” says Tamara and tries to imagine the light in David’s house. Light and smells and the knowledge that someone is always there. Before she can ask David what he thinks, what he feels, he’s hung up.
WOLF
WOLF IS IN A BAD WAY. His nose hurts, and his right eye is almost closed. He knows Kris is even worse. The brothers can hardly stand. It doesn’t exactly help that Frauke has dragged a criminal investigator into their house.
“What happened to you?” she asks.
Kris says that isn’t important now.
“I’d be interested to know what someone from CID is doing in our villa.”
Frauke and Gerald glance at one another, as if to agree on what they’re going to say, then Gerald says Frauke called him in.
“I’m not on duty, so relax.”
Wolf really wants to ask how Gerald imagines that happening. Who could relax when he comes home after removing a corpse from the scene of the crime, and finds a cop sitting on the living room sofa. Wolf is torn between flight and fight. He doesn’t know what good it would do him to attack a criminal investigations officer, but at any rate it’s better than putting his tail between his legs and running out of the villa. He’s also surprised that a cop can simply go marching into their house and demand answers. He isn’t even on duty. Before Wolf can ask a question, Frauke says:
“Gerald and I know each other from a computer-programming seminar that I ran two years ago.”
“A little hobby of mine,” Gerald explains, waggling his fingers about as if working on a keyboard.
Kris isn’t having any of it.
“I’m getting my wires crossed a bit here, Frauke,” he says. “What exactly is Gerald doing in our house?”
“I asked him for help.”
“With what?”
“You know very well with what.”
Gerald rubs the back of his head as if he’s embarrassed to find himself in the firing line.
“Why doesn’t one of you tell me what’s going on here?” he says, and doesn’t make it sound like a question.
No one replies. Frauke looks at her hands while Kris takes off his jacket. He lays it over the back of the chair and sits down. Wolf admires his calm. Kris must be completely exhausted. He can see that his brother’s shirt is drenched with sweat at the back. How on earth can he control himself like this? The sound of flushing can be heard from the second floor, then Tamara comes back downstairs. Wolf knows how he must react before Tamara comes into the living room and opens her mouth.
“Frauke, could the two of us talk alone?”
His words sound calm and resolute, as if he knows. Wolf has no idea what he wants to tell Frauke. He sees her hesitate. Her eye wanders from Gerald to Kris as if Wolf weren’t there.
“Please, just for a moment,” he adds.
She’ll never come, she’ll talk about the dead woman, and that’ll be that. The cop will never understand why we wiped away the traces. And why should he? He’ll suspect us, he’ll …
Frauke gets to her feet, walks past Wolf and goes outside. Wolf is so surprised that he just looks after her for a few seconds before he works out that it might not be such a stupid idea to follow her.
Frauke is waiting for him on the veranda. She has lit a cigarette, and is looking at the driveway. Wolf goes and stands next to her. He finds it unsettling that Frauke still can’t look at him. “Why won’t you look at me?”
Frauke blows smoke out through her nose. She turns her head and looks at Wolf, finally, then looks away again. Wolf takes her by the shoulders and turns her around; the cigarette falls from her fingers and rolls over the veranda. Wolf feels Frauke’s warm breath on his face. Cigarettes and mint. Where does the mint come from? He hasn’t been so close to Frauke for ages, and wishes the situation were different. He would like to hug her and erase everything around them with his hug. Sex as medicine.
“What are you doing dragging a cop into our house?”
“Wolf, pull yourself together. Gerald is a friend—”
“He might be your friend, but as far as we’re concerned he’s a cop. I want you to get rid of him, or I’ll throw him out myself.” The corners of her mouth turn down slightly. “What sort of a face is that?” Wolf says. “Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what?”
“Wolf, you can hardly stand upright, and you want to start a fight with Gerald? Have you completely lost it? He’ll wipe the floor with you. Give me that.”
She takes the handkerchief from his hand and dabs fresh blood from his top lip.
“What happened to you?”
Wolf steps back, leaving her hand floating suddenly in the air. The exhaustion makes each of his movements a torture. He doesn’t know what he should say to Frauke.
“We had an argument,” he says at last, and picks the abandoned cigarette up from the floor, takes a drag on it, looks back at the villa. “But that isn’t the problem. What in God’s name have you started here? If the killer learns that you’ve gone to the police, then …”
He looks at the cigarette and doesn’t know what to do next.
“Why did you clear out?”
“Did you take a closer look at the photographs?” Frauke asks back.
“Are you fucking with me? Of course I took a good look at the photographs.”
“Did you notice that every photograph was taken outside? Your father and Jenni. Only the picture of my mother is from the clinic. He was with her, do you understand that? The bastard visited my mother. They were eye to eye. That’s why I’m sorry if I overreacted a bit, but it was too much for me.”
Wolf nods, he understands, he doesn’t know how he would have reacted in her position, but he understands that. Still. You put your mother in danger, he wants to say, and instead says:
“We could have talked.”
“I didn’t want to talk,” says Frauke. “What good would it have done? Don’t you see what’s happening here? We wouldn’t be able to sort it out. A gun’s being held to our head. We aren’t capable of sorting it out. That’s why Gerald has to know everything.”
Frauke walks over to Wolf, her hands rest on his chest, it’s such an intimate moment that Wolf is filled with longing.
So near.
“Please, Wolf, go in and persuade the others that this is the best way.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“Nonsense, we’ll take Gerald to the apartment and—”
“Frauke, I said it’s too late. If you don’t want us all to go down together, then talk to your cop friend and get rid of him. After that we can talk.”
Wolf turns away, leaving Frauke alone on the veranda.
Tamara sits next to Kris on the lounge chair. Kris hands her a glass of red wine and refills Gerald’s glass. The atmosphere is relaxed, even if Wolf has no idea how that’s possible. He sees the swelling on his brother’s knuckles and instinctively touches his own eye. Later he will discover that Kris has sprained his hand.
Kris asks if Wolf would like a glass of wine as well. Wolf nods. Gerald observes that it’s a nice place they have here. He looks at his watch, he crosses his legs, then he points at his own face and says, “Whose path did you cross?”
“Family argument,” says Kris.
“Ah,” says Gerald.
Wolf takes a sip of his wine and tastes nothing. At last Frauke comes in from outside. Wolf doesn’t turn around. Frauke stops next to him and says she’s sorry, but she has to apologize to Gerald.
FRAUKE
GERALD HAS PARKED his car outside the property. He and Frauke stop by the gate. Gerald has no idea what just happened in there. He does know that he shouldn’t just leave like that. He’s always found it hard to interpret silence or sit opposite a complicated woman who stares straight ahead and doesn’t say a word. Frauke isn’t one of those complicated women, so it’s all the more alarming to Gerald that she’s keeping her mouth shut now.
“And you’re sure that I—”
“I’m sure,” she cuts him off.
Gerald looks over at the villa.
“I don’t like his face.”
“Wolf’s OK, he’s just very sensitive.”
Frauke stands on tiptoe and kisses Gerald on the cheek. As she does so, she thinks: When we women say goodbye, we’re very clear about it. Gerald nods as if he’s understood. Frauke sees more than she wants to in his eyes. Three times they have slept together, three times they have told each other it wasn’t a good idea. Frauke finally ended the affair when Gerald started saying he wanted a steady relationship. After that they saw each other less, they remained friends, everything seemed to be sorted out, even if Gerald’s expression now suggests more.
“Give me a call. Any time, promise?”
“Promise.”
Gerald leaves Frauke at the gate and gets into his car. One last wave, then he drives off. Frauke breathes out with relief and doesn’t move from the spot. She’s afraid to go back into the villa. She knows it wasn’t a particularly brilliant move just to run away from the Kreuzberg flat like that. For a while she had simply stood in the street hoping they would follow her. Then she drove to Gerald’s place.
After Frauke has closed the gate, she turns toward the villa and to her surprise sees Kris sitting on the top step of the veranda. Tamara is leaning against the banister next to him, Wolf has put his arm around her shoulders.
They just want to see that Gerald’s really leaving.
But perhaps they also want to see whether I’m really coming back.
Frauke makes an effort and walks toward them.
“How did you get rid of him?” is the first thing Kris asks.
Frauke points to Wolf with a tilt of her chin.
“I said he hit me.”
“You’re kidding me,” says Wolf.
“What else was I supposed to say, after you put on that show on the veranda? It was the best I could think of. Now would you please tell me what you’ve done?”
“We’ve done what was demanded of us, and what you should have done too,” Tamara replies. “But you had to clear out and put us all in danger. Not just us, but Jenni, too.”
Frauke feels as if someone has kicked her feet out from under her. She expected all kinds of things, but not Tamara’s disappointment. She wants to react, she wants to explain herself, as she finally comes back to what Tamara said at the start.
“What do you mean? What should I have done?”
“He wanted us to get rid of the corpse,” says Kris.
“He wanted you to do what?”
“He demanded that, Frauke, he—”
“Kris, he is a bloody murderer. How can you listen to a murderer?”
Her friends look at her in silence. Their eyes look tired and burned out. No one gives Frauke an answer, so she goes on:
“We have to end this here and now, and talk to the police. Do you get that? We have to stop him before he looks for his next victim.”
“And what are you going to tell the police?”
“What happened.”
“And what happened, Frauke? Are you going to tell them how Wolf marched into a deserted apartment to apologize to a woman who was nailed to a wall? Are you going to show them the proof? What proof is there? A letter, an e-mail address, and a cell phone number that probably doesn’t even work any more. What do you think your cop friend will say then? Do you think he’ll make a quick call and the killer will say, Hey, great to hear from you. Hasn’t it occurred to you for a second that this guy might be watching us?”
Frauke can’t help bursting out laughing. Artificial laughter that she remembers from her school days, when embarrassing moments were covered over with hysterical laughter.
“You’ve seen too many movies. Are you trying to tell me that you’ve really apologized on behalf of this pervert? What next? Are you going to give him a discount next time? I could design a new advertisement. Murder your neighbors, friends, and enemies. We’ll find the right apology. I simply don’t believe it, you’ve all lost your minds. A woman was nailed to a wall, and you give me shit like this. What have you done? Have you chopped the corpse into little pieces and flushed it down the toilet?”
Kris looks away, Tamara looks at the floor, only Wolf doesn’t take his eyes off Frauke.
“Wolf, what did you do with the corpse?”
Wolf reaches into his trouser pocket, pulls his hand back out, and looks at it before he throws Frauke the keys. A flash in the air, a tinkle when she catches them. Frauke has no idea what’s going on. Wolf nods toward his car, which is standing next to hers in the driveway, and says:
“She’s lying in the trunk.”
Something in Frauke tears. It’s almost a relief. The ropes that have been holding her upright until now have been snipped. The cramp in her stomach disappears. Frauke leans forward and throws up on the gravel path.
KRIS
THEY AREN’T STANDING in front of the villa any more, they’re sitting in the kitchen. It’s just after one in the morning, and Kris has a throbbing headache. Tamara is wrapped in a blanket, shivering as if the heating weren’t working. Next to Wolf there’s a bowl of water into which he dips a tea towel from time to time, before holding it up to his swollen eye. Frauke is the only one not sitting down; she stands instead with her back resting against the wall. She has been listening to them, and hasn’t interrupted them once. Kris knows Frauke too well. She regrets sending Gerald away.
“So it was your idea not to bury the woman?” she says, turning to Wolf.
“I wouldn’t call it an idea, exactly, but I’m sure you would have done the same if you’d been with us in the forest. But then you just had to clear out like that.”
“I’ve already said I’m sorry. I was in a panic.”
Wolf sticks up his thumb.
“Good excuse. Luckily the three of us weren’t in a panic. Not at all, we were relaxed, and laughing cheerfully away.”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“Wolf isn’t an asshole,” Tamara joins in.
“Then what do you call what he’s doing? I apologize and he makes jokes. Tell me, what d’you call something like that?”
“He doesn’t mean it that way.”
They look at Wolf. It’s quite plain that that’s exactly how he means it. Kris knows his brother is about to say something stupid. Wolf has never had a good sense of when to stop.
“Hasn’t it occurred to you that each one of us bears some of the responsibility?” he asks.
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, people, calm down now,” says Kris. “It won’t get us anywhere—”
“Stay out of this,” says Frauke, props her hands on the table, and leans forward as if she needs to be closer to Wolf for her next few words.
“What did you just say about responsibility?”
“You heard me.”
“Do you mean there might not have been a murder if our agency hadn’t existed?”
