Sorry (11 page)

“That wasn’t intelligent,” says Kris. “But if it makes you feel better …”

While Tamara binds Wolf’s hand with her scarf, Kris and Frauke look at Meybach’s file. There isn’t much to read. Meybach didn’t apply in writing. A short summary of the situation, nothing more. He was a colleague of Jens Haneff, he said, and the company wanted to apologize to the widow for the fact that her husband died on a business trip.

“He lured us with a sob story,” Frauke said. “Plane crash, widow, guilt.”

“I don’t get it,” says Kris. “What does he want from us?”

“I don’t care what the guy wants,” says Wolf. “Let’s get out of here.”

Kris nods as if he understands, then takes out his phone.

“What are you doing?” Frauke asks.

“Calling him,” Kris replies, holding the folder out to her. “Lars Meybach was kind enough to leave us his cell phone number.”

I
T’S RINGING AT
the other end. Kris switches the phone from one ear to the other. His mouth is dry, and he feels cold sweat under his armpits. After the fourth ring the call is answered.

“Problems?”

“No problems,” says Kris, “just a question. What’s this all about?”

“Ah, that sounds like Kris Marrer, the big brother. I’m very glad we have the chance to speak to each other. I bet you’re the driving force behind the agency.”

“There’s four of us—”

“Yes, but one of you must be the brains behind the operation. Four heads never think alike, one head must be in charge.”

Kris says nothing.

“I cleaned her up,” Meybach goes on. “All that blood and saliva would have destroyed the picture. And cleanliness has always been important to her. I didn’t want to break with tradition. Did you get a good look at her? You can look everywhere, but the answer is always right in front of your eyes. If you look long enough you see everything. Stupidly, people never look properly. But if you really do look, you’ll be amazed at how you could have overlooked the truth.”

Kris has no idea what the guy’s talking about.

“What have we got to do with it?” he asks.

Meybach tells him what they have to do with it. He says it once and repeats it a second time as if Kris had learning difficulties. Kris has to grip his phone harder so that it doesn’t slip from his sweaty hand. At last he hears a click; Meybach has put the phone down. Kris has to force himself to keep holding his phone to his ear. He knows that if he brings it down now he will hurl it to the floor.
Wolf did the right thing when he thumped the wall
. For a whole minute Kris goes on looking out of the window as if Meybach were still on the other end. He doesn’t want to turn round.

How can I tell them?

Kris gulps, switches his phone off, and turns round. They don’t ask, they just look at him.

“He says we should do our job.”

Wolf wipes his mouth and turns away. Tamara frowns as if she doesn’t understand what’s going on. Frauke is the only one who reacts.

“Forget it, you can leave me out of this,” she says and runs out of the kitchen. Her footsteps echo down the corridor, then the door slams behind her.

No one expected that.

“What exactly did he say!” Tamara asks. “Kris, damn it, what exactly did he say?”

“He says we’re to apologize for him,” Kris replies, pointing over her shoulder, “to her.”

They look at him as if he has just walked into the room. He wishes Frauke was still there. Tamara shrinks back into the wall behind her, while Wolf just stands there opening and closing his injured hand as if he had a cramp.

“Say that again,” he says to Kris.

“We’re to apologize to her. For him. He wants us to take on the apology. He wants a recording. Hence the digital recorder. He says he took us on so that we’ll …”

Kris falls silent.

“So that we’ll what?” Wolf presses.

“Take his guilt from him.”

“But … but that’s not how it works,” says Tamara.

“Tell me about it,” says Kris.

Wolf presses the balls of his hands against his eyes. The scarf around his hand looks ridiculous. He reminds Kris of football fans who walk bellowing through the streets on the weekend.

“It’s
my
commission,” says Wolf, lowering his hands, “so I’ll go in. But I’m not doing it for that bastard, OK?”

“OK,” says Kris.

“What shall I say?”

Kris tells him about the piece of paper in the woman’s pocket. He takes the digital recorder from the paper bag and hands it to Wolf.

“After this we will talk,” says Wolf, stepping into the living room.

Tamara and Kris don’t move. They hear Wolf’s footsteps, the crunching of dirt under his shoes. The rustling of paper. A throat being cleared. Silence. And then:

“I need forgiveness, I beg forgiveness for what I had to do,” Wolf says at last. “The pain and the fury are paid for now. It …”

Silence. Tamara looks at Kris, Kris shrugs helplessly, Wolf goes on reading:

“It’s over. Past and present are cleansed. You …”

Wolf breaks off. Tamara wants to go to him. Kris tries to hold her back, she dodges him. Her footsteps echo through the hall.

“
STAY OUTSIDE
!” come the words from the living room.

Tamara stops in the corridor. Wolf goes on talking.

“Past and present are cleansed. You’ve made me what I am. So I will take from you what you took from me. Lars Meybach. PS: Of course—”

A long silence follows, then Wolf comes out of the room. He holds the letter out to Tamara and Kris like a manifesto. A PS is added at the end of the page:

Tamara suddenly explodes with laughter, then she bites her bottom lip and falls silent. Wolf and Kris look at one another. Tamara says quietly:

“We’re not going to do that, are we?”

“Of course we aren’t,” Wolf says, crushing the piece of paper. “We’ll get out of here and find Frauke and … What’s going on? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Kris thinks about the photographs in the paper bag. He can’t stop thinking about how innocently Jenni is kneeling there and tying her shoelaces.
How close did Meybach get to her?
He thinks about his father, about Frauke’s mother. And then there are all the clues that they’ve left here. The blood from Wolf’s wound. The fingerprints.

We can’t simply get out of here. Meybach knows who we are
.

“Kris, please say something,” Tamara pleads.

Kris says what he’s thinking.

H
E KNOWS HOW DANGEROUS
it is to be here, but he goes into the house anyway. He crosses the courtyard to the rear and looks up for
a moment. Above his head the rectangle of sky glows like a window into the void. He lowers his gaze again, his eyes are uneasy. He knows how dangerous it is to be here, and still he goes up the stairs. Hastily, because he’s in a hurry. He is familiar with each individual step. The worn wood of the banister slides away under his hand. He walks to the top floor, and stops by the door. He knows that if the door is locked he will go back down again. He won’t try anything. He will go and—

The door is open.

He steps inside. He walks down the corridor. He looks into the kitchen. How many times has he stood in this kitchen?
Squalid, it’s all squalid
. He walks on down the corridor and steps into the living room and stops. He sees her. On the wall. He sees her and bursts into tears. He walks over to her and touches her face.
Too late
. He is suffering. He feels the pain. He can’t stop touching her face. His heart contracts. His heart pauses, then starts beating again. He turns away, takes a deep breath and looks at her again. The way she hangs there. Her staring eyes. He wants to close them, he must close them. So he steps forward and stretches. Her eyelids feel like parchment.

He leaves the apartment. He feels ancient. He walks through the courtyard and stops in front of the building. Ancient and burned out. He crosses the street. The traffic flows around him, he hears no car horns, he sees no danger. He considers what he should do. He can’t just let it happen. He can’t. He bears responsibility. So he decides to wait till they come back. How does he know they will come back? He just does. He can feel that they aren’t finished with her yet. So he will wait and hope for an answer. Every question has an answer. That’s how it has always been, that’s how it always will be.

H
E TRIES TO TALK TO ME
. He tries to explain himself.

At irregular intervals I turn on the hazards and only stop if the rest area is really deserted. I open the trunk and see him lying there. He can’t see me, I’ve taped his eyes shut. His eyes, his mouth. I don’t want him to look at me; I don’t want to hear his voice. The trunk smells of burnt skin, urine and sweat. It’s a repellent mixture, but I can bear it. I can bear a lot of things.

All he gets from me is water. I explained the rules to him. At first he didn’t listen. I pulled the tape from his mouth, and at once he started screaming. He couldn’t have known where we were. He couldn’t have known that a truck would go thundering past us every ten seconds. But I made good on my threat, taped his mouth back up, shut the trunk, and drove on. For the next three hours he stayed thirsty.

Next time he was silent. I poured water into his mouth. He coughed, he stayed silent, and then he tried to talk to me. I poured in some more water and taped his mouth up again. He tried to move. He has no room to move. He’s wedged in between pillows and blankets. His feet are taped together, his knees, his arms too. He’s a trussed parcel. He can’t even move his head. He no longer really exists.

W
OLF HAS BOTH HANDS
on the steering wheel. His jaw muscles are tense, his eyes fixed on the road. Kris keeps looking back at Tamara, as if to check that she’s still there. Tamara ignores him and looks outside without really seeing anything. When they left the building, she could have sworn that Frauke was sitting waiting for her, smoking impatiently, outside the door. Nothing. Even her car had vanished from the parking lot.

Where on earth are you?

They’ve already tried a few times to reach Frauke on her cell phone. All they get is her voicemail. Nothing makes sense. Tamara feels numb. The noises reach her through a filter, while the daylight is clear and harsh. She closes her eyes, drifts off, and gives a start when Kris opens the door on her side.

“We’re here.”

In the DIY superstore they buy buckets and cleaning materials, a pair of pliers, trash bags, spatulas, and a black plastic tarpaulin. They put a flashlight and three spades in the shopping cart, so that the handles stick out like palisades. They don’t say a word to one another, and look like three strangers walking together through a DIY superstore. Finally Kris puts a sleeping bag in the cart. No one asks what the sleeping bag is for.

Back to the apartment. Up four floors. Through the door, down the corridor. The woman is still hanging on the wall. Everything is unchanged.

And I thought, if we come back …

Tamara starts whimpering quietly.

“Tammi, pull yourself together,” says Kris.

“Her eyes are shut,” says Wolf.

For a few seconds they stare at the dead woman’s closed eyelids.

“Who cares,” says Kris. “Let’s get started.”

• • •

They start with the hands. Wolf holds the woman’s body around the hips and lifts her slightly so that some of her weight is taken off her hands. Kris stretches up and applies the pliers. The brothers are pale and look absent, as if far away.

I want to go there too
, Tamara thinks and flinches when the nail is pulled from the palms with a sucking noise. Kris loses his balance and curses. The nail falls to the ground with a clunk and rolls around on the floor in a semicircle. The corpse’s arms fall and come to rest on Wolf’s back.

“Get a move on,” says Wolf.

The pulling of the second nail sounds like a cork being twisted out of a wine bottle. The dead woman’s head slumps forward, its chin falls on its chest.

“OK,” says Kris, taking a step back.

Wolf lets the corpse slip down until it is sitting with its back against the wall.

“Tammi, could you please give me a hand here?”

They put the woman in the sleeping bag and close it. The zipper sticks twice. Tamara wonders whether she should leave an air hole. Kris asks what she’s doing.

“Nothing,” says Tamara, pulling the zipper all the way.

They lift the sleeping bag. It rustles, and Tamara wishes the radio was on again. They carry the corpse into the corridor and lay it next to the wall so that it isn’t in anyone’s way. Kris and Wolf go back into the living room, spread the plastic sheet, and start scraping off the wallpaper with the spatulas. Tamara is responsible for the kitchen. She wipes Wolf’s blood from the floor and polishes the door handles and everything they’ve touched. She pauses a few times while working and looks into the corridor as if she has heard something.

Tamara doesn’t know how many hours have passed. It’s night. Her legs are stiff, her neck is one big cramp. Her hands hurt, and her fingertips are puckered from the wet cloths.

The brothers carry the sleeping bag downstairs, while Tamara drives Wolf’s car into the courtyard. She doesn’t worry that anyone might see her. She simply functions. When the sleeping bag is stowed in the trunk,
Kris and Wolf take the rubbish and the cleaning materials out of the apartment and distribute them among the trash cans.

“Let’s get out of here,” says Kris.

Wolf drives out of the courtyard and asks a question. Kris replies. Wolf asks again. Kris replies. Tamara is sitting in the back seat, and has no idea what they’re talking about. She does understand the words, but the words produce no meaning. There’s a dull thump behind her temples, there’s a desire to shout at the brothers to shut their mouths. Tamara presses her forehead against the glass of the window and shuts her eyes. Her thoughts keep returning to a single point.
Jenni
. The photograph is in her trouser pocket. Tamara wants to call David. Tamara doesn’t want panic. Tamara
is
panic.