Sorry, page 28
The man got to his feet, turned out the light, and went upstairs. He ignored the boy’s screams and entreaties. Karl, he thought, Fanni, he thought and sat for a while in the living room and could think of nothing but his children.
Hours later the man came back. This time he didn’t sit down. “Can I believe you?”
“Why should I lie?”
“I bear the responsibility here, it wouldn’t be a good idea to lie to me.”
“Responsibility for what?”
“Responsibility for your life. For the lives of your friends. Do you know what that means? It’s a burden. I’m an old man. I can’t bear as much as I used to before. Before, none of this would have been a problem, but I have a weak heart. I’m cold and tired. Do you understand?”
The boy didn’t understand.
The man said it didn’t really matter. He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward as if talking to a five-year-old. In a quiet voice he said:
“Let’s start all over again from the beginning. Tell me why you killed my children.”
The boy started crying.
“What did you do to Karl? Where is he? What did you do to Fanni? And why? Speak to me, boy, speak to me.”
The boy closed his eyes tight and said he’d told him everything already, he repeated it again and again.
“I’ve told you everything, I swear it.”
The man just smiled.
Then the boy turned noisy.
“WE’RE A FUCKING AGENCY, OK? WE APOLOGIZE FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T THE BALLS TO DO IT THEMSELVES, DO YOU GET THAT? IS THAT WHY I’M HERE? ARE YOU SOME KIND OF RELIGIOUS FANATIC? DID THE CHURCH SEND YOU?”
“I’m here because of Fanni,” the man said calmly. “I’m here because of Karl. No one sent me.”
The boy’s voice turned into a whisper, the rage was gone, giving way to resignation.
“I’ve said everything there is to say. He told us it was a normal job. I walked into that apartment, and there was the woman’s corpse …”
“Fanni.”
“Yes, for fuck’s sake, Fanni! We just did what he wanted. He threatened us. All of us. And anyway she was dead.”
“I know. I was in the apartment, I saw her.”
The boy shook his head.
“There was no one there but us.”
The man smiled again.
“I’m innocent,” said the boy. “We’re all innocent.”
“No, that’s not how I see it,” said the man.
“If you were innocent, you wouldn’t be here. I am the punishment, do you understand? No? It’s quite simple. Life has a balance of its own. Ask yourself the question again: How could I have managed to bring you here if you were innocent? Equilibrium is everything. You take something, you give something. You can’t just take. Don’t you believe in equilibrium? Don’t you believe in good and evil? I’m good in this case, I know that, but I’m not sure what you are. Are you evil?”
The boy reared up. The nylon tape cut into his neck, it pulled itself tighter around his wrists. The boy didn’t let that stop him. His words were poison.
“I’M FUCKING GOOD, YOU SICK FUCK. YOU TIED ME UP HERE, YOU DRAGGED ME HERE AND TIED ME UP THEY WERE ALREADY DEAD WHEN WE FOUND THEM DON’T YOU GET THAT? YOUR DAUGHTER AND YOUR SON WERE ALREADY DEAD.”
The boy sank back into the chair. His face purple, his breathing heavy. The man saw that this wasn’t going to work for much longer. He told him what he thought. That was how it had always been.
“And how did that just sound? If you ask me, that didn’t sound like good. Good is like a song. It’s melody. That wasn’t a song, I heard no melody. Tell me, do you feel guilty?”
Quiet, meek:
“Yes, of course, of course I feel guilty.”
“Can I just let you go like that?”
“Please, I told you I was sorry.”
“I asked. I can’t let you go like that.”
The boy nodded. There was hope in his face. The man went to the workbench and picked up the pillowcase.
“That’s not necessary,” the boy said quickly and turned his face away.
“It is very necessary, I don’t want you to learn where you can find me. How stupid do you think I am?”
He pulled the pillowcase over the boy’s head. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He told him everything would be fine. He also told him not to worry.
“Stay calm,” said the man, and injected the Isoflurane into the boy’s upper arm.
Less than two minutes have passed since the girl and the brother ran out of the villa. The man feels as if he can control time. Every time he holds his breath, everything outside freezes, and only starts moving again when he breathes out.
The brother kneels on the earth and digs without interruption. When the girl comes out of the shed with no spades, he ignores her and goes on digging. The man knows what the girl is saying. He can read it on her lips. The spades are gone. He could call out to her where she would find the spades. The man has made sure it won’t be easy for them. He wants them to go back to the source. He wants to see them kneeling on the ground and fighting against fate. He wants them to suffer the greatest doubts. And as he sees them digging there, he thinks: It isn’t the guilt that you’re living with, it’s your failure that makes you kneel in the dirt. The man is pleased with this thought. Everything comes to a close. He lifts his hand and puts it to the windowpane as if waving to them. He notices the dirt under his fingernails and brings his hand back down. He shuts his eyes and wonders what it would be like to connect their pain with his. It would be the purest form of all emotions. It would be love.
TAMARA
TAMARA CAN’T BELIEVE THE spades have disappeared. She remembers exactly which wall they were leaning against. She rages through the shed, she overturns the wheelbarrow and is in such a panic that the room seems to quiver in front of her eyes. She looks in the corners, she looks behind the bicycles, she runs back outside.
“The spades are gone!”
Kris doesn’t react, his hands shovel the soil aside. Sweat runs into his eyes, the breath leaves his mouth with a hiss. Tamara can see that he didn’t even notice she had gone. She crouches down beside him. They go on digging.
With every movement her arms get heavier and heavier. Tamara can’t go on. Her fingers are bleeding, her knees hurt. Kris, on the other hand, digs like a machine. He shovels the soil backward, rams his fingers into the dirt again, squats tirelessly in the excavated trench. And as Tamara watches him for a moment she understands what’s wrong with this situation, and feels laughter rising up in her. Pure hysteria.
“He isn’t here,” she says.
Kris carries on. Tamara grabs him by the arm.
“Kris, he isn’t here,” she repeats emphatically. “It’s a bad joke.”
Kris looks at her. At last, Tamara thinks, wishing at the same time that he would go on digging. Something in his eyes. Blank, hard, strange.
“Let go of me.”
“Wolf isn’t here, Meybach’s playing with us. It’s nonsense, just think about it, why should he—”
“Tamara, let go of me, or I’ll break your arm!”
She flinches and lets go of him. Kris goes on digging. He is no longer looking at her. His next words hurt.
“Go into the house if you can’t keep at it.”
Tamara hesitates. She wants to believe it’s just a bad joke, she doesn’t want Kris to take this hope away from her. Wolf walking through the gate and asking what they’re doing. Please. Wolf, calling out from one of the windows to ask what they’re up to. Please, come. In that case it would all be nothing but the black humor of a lunatic, who has made them bury two corpses over the past week.
Nothing more than that.
Tamara gouges her fingers into the earth again and goes on digging.
• • •
“Kris?”
“What?”
“Kris, I …”
The skin is like rubber. The skin is cold and not of this world. Tamara has found the right arm. It’s the hand with the bandage. The hand feels alien and wrong. As if all its bones were broken. No resistance. The wrist looks as if cords have cut into the flesh. Tamara immediately wants to tend to the wound, she wants to wash it and put a bandage on it. Kris reaches for the hand. Tamara starts frantically shoving the soil away from around it. She doesn’t want to but she looks up. Kris has pressed the hand to his face. Soil, dirt, two fingers covering his mouth. Tamara wants to scream, she chokes on the air and coughs, she stares down and keeps digging. A shoulder, she reveals a naked shoulder. She looks for his face, while Kris whimpers beside her, no words, just quiet whimpering.
There’s a pillowcase around Wolf’s head. The fabric is damp from the soil, a washed-out green with an embroidered lily. Kris tries to pull the fabric off Wolf’s head and can’t do it. Tamara leans forward and bites a hole in it with her teeth. She tastes detergent and soil. Kris enlarges the hole, the fabric rips and there is Wolf’s face, and Wolf looks as if he’s sleeping. Not a crumb of soil sullies his face, he is pale, his skin almost transparent. As if he weren’t there, thinks Tamara, and turns away and weeps into her dirty hands and sinks sideways and lies doubled-up in the trench and hears Kris uttering noises that she’s never heard before. Like a wounded animal forced to watch its young being murdered.
Kris carries him into the house. Kris carries him upstairs to the bathroom. He washes him in the tub. He dries him. Then he carries him back downstairs and lays him on the sofa. Kris covers him up. He turns round and looks at Tamara. He just looks at her.
“Kris?” says Tamara. “Kris?”
“I’m here,” says Kris, “I can hear you.”
They sit on the floor by the sofa holding each other tight. The day eats itself. It grows dark around them. For a while Tamara thinks it will stay like that. Forever. She and Kris in an embrace. Hours, days, weeks. Make it years. Wolf on the sofa behind them, inches away, and outside a world that turns and turns and couldn’t care less what happens to them.
• • •
Tamara is woken by the noises from the kitchen. She is lying alone on the floor. It’s light outside. When she sits up her eye falls on the sofa. Wolf is still covered up to his neck, eyes closed, motionless. Tamara puts her hand under the blanket, rests it on his bare chest, and feels nothing under it.
Kris stands in the kitchen by the espresso machine. He has dismantled it into its constituent parts. The surface is a chaos of bolts and gaskets.
“Kris?”
He turns around. There are blue shadows under his eyes. Tamara doesn’t think he’s slept.
“What are you doing?”
Kris looks at the machine as if to see what his hands are doing.
“I wanted to clean it, but then I couldn’t stop. I wanted to really clean it. Every bit, you understand?”
Tamara goes and stands next to him.
“What’s this?” she asks, holding up one of the gaskets.
“No idea,” says Kris, setting down the screwdriver.
They drink tea. They sit at the kitchen table and drink tea in silence. Tamara doesn’t want to ask, but she knows she must. She gives Kris five minutes, then another five, and then she says:
“What do we do now?”
Kris looks across to the living room.
“Kris, we have to do something. We have to go and see Gerald.”
“I know.”
“We have to tell him everything.”
Kris looks at her.
“Do you think I don’t know that?”
They hear the ticking of the clock.
“When?”
“When what?”
“When will we talk to Gerald?”
Kris looks past Tamara again.
“How on earth could he do that?”
For a moment Tamara thinks Kris means Wolf, then she shrugs. How can she answer that? How could anyone answer that?
“I don’t know,” she says.
“We didn’t get in his way, and he broke his word even so …”
Kris says nothing, his hands grip the cup, his thumbs rub the ceramic rim.
“Shall I leave you alone with Wolf?” Tamara asks.
“Why would you do that?”
“I just thought you …”
She falls silent and realizes that she’s projecting. She didn’t have a single moment alone with Frauke. It all happened too quickly. She wishes she’d insisted on seeing Frauke one more time. Alone.
“Go on then,” says Kris.
Tamara goes to Wolf and stays with him for a while.
Later, when she comes upstairs, Kris is standing at his study window looking through the window. Tamara taps against the door frame.
“Am I bothering you?”
“No, it’s fine, come in,” says Kris without turning around. “I was just talking to Gerald. We’re meeting in his office at four.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes.”
For a moment they say nothing.
“Kris? Please look at me.”
Kris turns around.
“If you like I’ll stay with Wolf, you just have to say the word.”
“Please,” he says, “please, stay with Wolf. One of us should keep an eye on him.”
Tamara nods and goes back downstairs. In the kitchen she puts on some water for tea, and her eye falls on the components of the espresso machine. She makes a bet with herself. If I can put that thing back together before Kris comes back, everything will be fine. She waits for the water to boil and studies the parts. As she is pouring the water, she hears Kris coming downstairs. He says he’ll be back by six at the latest.
“I’ll call you when I’m on my way.”
Tamara looks at the clock above the door. It’s three. She strains out the tea leaves and hears Kris driving away from the property. After she has filled a cup with tea, she puts the components of the espresso machine on a tray and takes everything into the living room. She adjusts one of the chairs in such a way that she can see Wolf on the sofa. Then she calmly begins to assemble the espresso machine.
KRIS
KRIS RUNS THROUGH the city until five o’clock, trying to clear his head. He’s glad Tamara doesn’t know how close he and Wolf got to Meybach two days ago. Shortly after five Kris sits down in a park and calls Tamara. He tells her everything’s gone well with Gerald so far. He finds lying easy, it’s always easier to lie when you have nothing to lose.
“He wants to come and see us tomorrow.”
“And Wolf …”
“We’ll take care of Wolf as well,” Kris finishes her thought for her.
Tamara asks him when he’s coming home.
“I need another moment to myself. Otherwise everything OK with you?”
“The espresso machine’s working again.”
“Brilliant.”
“Kris?”
“What?”
“Please come back soon.”
“I promise.”
He hangs up. The second big lie of the day has been easy for him too. He turns off his cell phone. It’s done. He’s unreachable now.
It’s nine in the evening, the restaurants are crowded and spring is a phony summer. Kris doesn’t know what interests him less. He sits in his car opposite Meybach’s apartment and looks at the building. Three hours is enough to find a parking space even on Leonardstrasse. The windows of Meybach’s apartment are dark. Meybach’s neighbor came home at eight. Kris has forgotten what his name is. Thomas or Theo. Kris wonders whether he should speak to him, but then thinks that in this state he’d rather not see anyone. The gun lies in his lap like an insistent erection. He doesn’t know why he’s holding on to it. And he doesn’t know what he’ll do when he’s standing in front of Meybach.
At ten to nine the front door opens and Meybach’s neighbor comes out. He is wearing a tracksuit, and does a few stretching exercises outside the building before jogging off toward the park. Kris knows what Wolf would say now. What on earth are you doing? I thought you had a plan. Kris rests his forehead against the steering wheel and shuts his eyes, then he stirs himself, picks up the gun and stuffs it into his jacket. He has a plan.
• • •
The front door isn’t locked. Kris goes up the stairs, stops by the door to the apartment, and rings the bell. He knows Meybach isn’t there. He rings again. Better safe than sorry. Five minutes later he sits down on the steps and calls the emergency key service. He has written down the number. The key service is around the corner in Kantstrasse. The man says he can be there in ten minutes. Kris tells him the front door is open and he should just come upstairs.
“Which floor?”
“The third. Meybach.”
He comes in seven minutes. Kris tries to look guilty and depressed. The man takes a look at the lock and asks if Kris wants to keep it.
“Costs extra,” he warns.
“Extra’s OK.”
The man takes less than five minutes to crack the lock and open the door.
“The key will stick a bit at first because of the metal filings and stuff, but that’ll go away. If it doesn’t, give me a call and I’ll take care of it. Do you want an invoice?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Kris pays in cash and adds twenty.
“Enjoy the rest of your Sunday,” says the man from the key service. His steps ring out on the stairs. Kris stands in the doorway for a moment before going inside and closing the door behind him.
Whatever happens now, he thinks, Meybach belongs to me.
And he doesn’t come.
And he still doesn’t bloody come.
Kris sits in the dark. He has taken a look around the apartment. He’s taken a flashlight from a drawer. He has found photographs of Meybach and now he understands everything. Twice he’s tempted to call Tamara. To calm her down, to tell her what really happened.
But he decides not to.
The chair is placed in such a way that Kris can see the apartment door. It’s like in one of those thrillers. Guy comes home, and his killer’s sitting there. They talk a bit, then the killer says that’s it. The camera wanders to one of the windows, we hear the shot offscreen, and that really is it. And on a distant soundtrack we hear the thoughts of our main character. The same three sentences over and over.
