“Everything OK with you?” asks Kris.
Tamara nods as if she understands what he says.
They drive north along the autobahn and leave the Berliner Ring. Ten minutes later they take the first exit into a forest path. Wolf turns the headlights off and carries on at a walking pace. Tamara lowers the window. The distant hum of the autobahn fills the car. Wolf stops in a clearing. The engine ticks on. They have left Kris’s car in Kreuzberg, and plan to pick it up on the way back. They think they’ve planned everything thoroughly. Ten minutes pass. Tamara knows that one of them has to give the sign or else nothing will happen.
“Fine, then let’s get going,” says Kris.
They get out and walk to the trunk. They stare at the sleeping bag.
“I don’t want to,” says Tamara.
“Who does?” says Kris wearily, pulling out one of the spades. He walks a few yards from the car and starts digging. Wolf hands Tamara the flashlight.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Someone has to light what we’re doing,” says Wolf, taking one of the spades. “Or don’t you want to do that either?”
T
HEY’RE BUSY DIGGING
the grave when Wolf suddenly realizes it’s not right. They are working back to back, the earth is rich and heavy, they’re sweating as they’ve never sweated before.
“It’s not right.”
For a moment Kris thinks Wolf was talking to Tamara, who is crouching on the edge of the hole and illuminating them with the flashlight. Then Wolf stops digging. Kris turns around and sees Wolf’s face in the beam. Dirt sticks to his sweaty skin, and for a few seconds Kris thinks he can see fear in his brother’s pupils. Wolf raises his free hand to shield himself against the glare and asks Tamara to lower the flashlight. Tamara directs the light toward the hole. Wolf stares at the handle of the spade and repeats that it isn’t right.
One part of Kris knows exactly what he means, another part doesn’t want to know, because it’s clearly too late for that now. They’ve been digging in that damned soil for over an hour, and have already disappeared up to their necks in the hole. Kris insisted that they dig the grave at least six feet deep, because otherwise animals could catch the scent and dig up the corpse.
You can’t just stop halfway
, Kris thinks and says, “It’s really a bit late for that now.”
“She isn’t even in the ground yet,” Wolf observes.
Kris really wants to thump his little brother. Wolf senses it and quickly goes on:
“We have no idea who this woman is and why she had to die. And if you’re entirely honest, we have no idea what we’re doing here either. If we bury her now, then …”
His hands move helplessly through the air.
“… then she’ll just disappear, and that’s not right.”
“It’s fine by me,” says Tamara. “I don’t want to put Jenni in danger.”
“And what about you?” Wolf asks his brother.
Kris feels no moral impulse. A woman has died, none of them knew her, none of them is responsible for her death. He doesn’t think the woman died because they set up the agency, that’s just silly. This grave here in the forest is the solution to a problem that could screw up their whole lives. As soon as the corpse has disappeared, this problem will disappear from their lives as well. At least that’s what Kris hopes.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” says Wolf, looking over at the car as if the corpse could hear every word. “It’s unethical.”
Kris walks over to him.
“Wolf, this killer took a photograph of Father.”
“I know.”
“He took one of Jenni as well. He was near her, do you understand?
And then we’ve still got Frauke’s mother. He’s threatening us, doesn’t that make you think?”
“Yes, but—”
“Wolf, whatever we do, this woman stays dead, and we’re still alive. We’re the ones who are being threatened. If we don’t do what he tells us, we’ll put other people in danger. Those are the simple facts. We’re just reacting.”
“That’s exactly it,” says Wolf. “I think we’re reacting wrongly.”
“And how should we be reacting, in your opinion?”
Wolf sticks the spade in the earth, twice.
“Not like this.”
Not like this
isn’t the kind of answer that puts your mind at rest, when you’re standing in a freshly dug grave with a corpse in your trunk. Kris is glad that he and Wolf aren’t alone right now. Tamara acts as a buffer.
“Do me a favor, little brother,” says Kris. “Pull yourself together and let’s get this over with. As soon as we’re home we can talk about everything. Your whining isn’t going to get us anywhere right now.”
Wolf doesn’t react, he just looks at Kris. Tamara steps in.
“Wolf?” she says, nearly in a whisper, as if she didn’t want to startle them with her voice. “Hey, Wolf, who’s the corpse?”
“No idea, how should I know?”
“Have you taken a good look at her?”
“Of course I did. Why do you ask?”
“Does she remind you of anyone?”
“Tamara, stop it.”
“I’m just asking.”
“And I’m asking you to stop.”
“Then say it.”
“That’s silly.”
“Even if it’s silly, I want to hear it from you, please.”
“She isn’t Erin, OK. I know that.”
“And you still think we should behave ethically and not bury her here?”
Wolf maintains eye contact until Tamara looks away. Kris knows how much his brother hates rhetorical questions. Particularly when they come from Tamara. It reveals what she thinks of Wolf, and thinks he’s capable of.
“I don’t know what you want to hear,” he says, “but I know that whatever’s happening, it has nothing to do with Erin.”
With these words he leans the spade on the edge of the trench and climbs out. Kris can’t believe it. He remains behind like an idiot set on pause, holding his spade in his hand. Wolf sits down in the car. For a few seconds he is lit by the inside light, then the driver’s door slams shut and his face disappears once more in darkness.
“Shit,” says Tamara.
Kris tightens his grip on the handle, the pressure’s too much, he doesn’t know what to do with his anger; he wants to slough it off and shovel it out of the grave. Of course he can’t do that, so he climbs out of the trench and follows Wolf to the car. He wrenches the driver’s door open and sees Wolf’s shocked face. Kris grabs him by the T-shirt and drags him out like a disobedient dog. The blows come automatically. Kris can’t control them, and if he’s honest he doesn’t want to. His arm goes up, his arm comes down, Wolf hasn’t a chance. He tries to stay on his feet, and staggers, he slips on some leaves and falls over. Kris drags Wolf behind him to the grave.
The weird thing is that the brothers don’t exchange a word. It all happens in a scary silence, as if it were a flashback of a flashback, from which all sound had been erased over time. At least that’s how it feels to Kris. He doesn’t hear the wheezing and the dull blows. Everything seems to be wrapped in thick cotton wool. Later Kris will learn that Wolf was trying to talk to him the whole time, and that Tamara was screaming at him to stop.
Later isn’t now.
Kris hauls his brother to the trench to make him get back to work; that’s all he’s concerned about. He is so gripped by fury that he doesn’t see the shadow until it’s too late. The spade hits him on the back of the head, and the explosion makes his consciousness vanish in a blinding void.
I
T’S A FEW MINUTES
before midnight when they turn into the driveway of the villa. Kris is still unsteady on his feet, Tamara and Wolf help him out, and support him as he climbs the steps. Wolf’s nose has stopped bleeding, his left eye is swollen, and dark stains can be seen on the front of his T-shirt.
Frauke’s car is in its place, and there’s a light somewhere on the
ground floor. Although Tamara is furious with her best friend, she can’t deny a feeling of relief at the sight of the car. Kris expresses it:
“At least we know where she is now.”
Frauke is sitting on the sofa in the living room, and looks up when they come in. Tamara meets her eye and asks herself where her strong friend has disappeared to. Frauke looks small and fragile, but her voice has stayed the same, demanding and precise.
“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.
W
OLF 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.