“I’m talking about the flowers, you idiot,” Tamara cuts him off. “How could you leave flowers on her grave? Nobody could be as drunk as that.”
“It wasn’t us,” says Kris.
“Sure, and you didn’t bury her either.”
“Tamara, hang on, it wasn’t us,” Kris repeats, wishing it was all a film. Because in a film the main characters would look at each other in surprise, and then the camera would show the garden again, and then there would be a merciful cut to the next scene, and Wolf wouldn’t say, “Maybe Meybach was watching us and followed us first to the woods and then back here. Maybe that’s why there are flowers there. They’re like …”
“A visiting card?” Tamara finishes his sentence for him.
They fall silent. They watch as Frauke stuffs the lilies in the trash can. When she turns back toward the house, all three turn quickly away from the window so that Frauke won’t think they were watching her.
They’re sitting at the table again. It’s like the night before, except that they’re all waiting for Frauke to speak at last. Frauke goes on ignoring them. The rain drips from the tips of her hair, her breasts are clearly visible through her thin T-shirt. Frauke takes some mineral water from the fridge and drinks it from the bottle.
“Frauke?” Tamara says at last.
Frauke puts the bottle back in the fridge. When she speaks, the fury has gone from her voice, which makes the situation much more threatening.
“I don’t know you any more,” says Frauke. “You’re alien to me. I don’t want to know why you did it. And I’m not interested in how you could put flowers on her grave.”
“We have no—”
“It doesn’t matter, Wolf. I don’t want to hear any explanations from you, I’ve had it up to here with explanations. I’m going to get my things and get out of here now. I need some space away from you. That thing out there should never have been allowed to happen.”
That was it. Frauke leaves the kitchen, and it strikes Kris that Frauke has walked out on them for the third time in twenty-four hours. Wolf mumbles a curse and stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray. Tamara doesn’t react at all. She just looks at the door as if Frauke were going to come back in at any moment.
“I could run after her,” she offers at last.
“I’d be very grateful,” says Kris.
T
AMARA HASN’T A CHANCE
. She stands in the door frame like someone who was looking for their own room and opened the wrong door.
“But that’s nonsense,” she says. “You can’t just run away like that.”
“I can do what I want. Look at me. I’m packing, I’m going, I’m gone.”
Frauke puts the rucksack over her shoulder, then walks so close to her best friend that she has to force herself not to flinch.
“Tammi, finish it, draw a line. Kris and Wolf don’t know what they’re doing any more. They’ll make it even worse if you don’t put the brakes on them. I brought in Gerald, and you kicked me in the ass for that. I’m out of here.”
She pushes past Tamara and leaves the room. Tamara wants to burst into tears.
Draw a line
. She wishes she knew how. She’s disappointed in her friend and runs to the window to call after Frauke. Tamara can’t even open the window.
What am I supposed to say? It’s all been said
. So Tamara watches helplessly as Frauke opens the door, gets into her car and drives off. The gate stays open, the day is the day it has been since Tamara woke
up. She has achieved nothing.
How do you draw a line in a situation like this?
She feels she’s been left in the lurch. Her vision is blurred.
Frustration and panic, I’m going blind out of frustration and panic
. She wipes the tears from her eyes.
Frauke is right, I have to pull on the brake, and I haven’t the faintest idea where the damned brake is
.
Tamara’s thoughts falter; suddenly she understands, it’s an inspiration, she knows where to find the brake.
When Tamara comes into the kitchen a quarter of an hour later, Wolf is sitting at his opened laptop. Kris is standing next to him, holding a bag of ice cubes against the back of his head.
“What are you doing?”
“Sit down, we have to talk,” says Kris.
Tamara sits down facing them.
“How exactly did Meybach contact us?” Kris asks.
“I think we’ve got a very different problem.”
“Frauke will be back, don’t worry.”
“It didn’t look like that to me.”
“Tamara, try to stay on the ball. How did Meybach contact us?”
“He called up and asked us to tell him how we work. His application came in writing. You’ve read it. He asked us to arrange a meeting with Dorothea Haneff by mail. I wrote to her and received a reply the same day.”
“Did you speak to her personally?”
Tamara shakes her head.
“She told me by e-mail what date would work. She also asked for Wolf’s cell phone number, in case she got stuck in some traffic jam somewhere. That was all the contact we had.”
“At least we know now how that bastard got hold of my number,” says Wolf.
Tamara still has no idea what’s going on. Kris explains it to her:
“Wolf and I think we have more information on Meybach than we think. We’ve got an e-mail address
and
a cell phone number that worked until yesterday.”
“So?”
“Tamara, tell me, are we talking in riddles? We want to get that killer, that’s what this is about.”
“You want to do
WHAT
?!”
Tamara gets up from the table.
“You’re completely crazy.”
She can see that the brothers are quite serious.
Guilt. They want to make up for the shit they’ve unleashed, by going on the offensive. And I’ve pulled the brake
. As calmly as possible she says:
“Do you really think he’d give us so much as a clue about where to find him? How can you even think something like that? You’re like two show-offs waving their arms around with nothing to say. Frauke was right, you haven’t got anything under control. Think about it. Anyone can set up an e-mail address in a few minutes and make it disappear again. It’s even easier to get hold of a prepaid cell phone.”
The brothers look at her.
“You could have a point about the two show-offs,” Wolf says.
“Idiot,” says Tamara, unable to keep herself from laughing.
“Even if anyone can set up a new e-mail address or buy a new prepaid phone,” says Kris, “how about we assume that Meybach doesn’t
need
to hide. What would that tell you?”
Tamara doesn’t know how she’s supposed to take that.
“Either he’s a half-wit,” Kris goes on, “or he isn’t afraid of us. And why should he be afraid? We’ve erased his clues, and we’ve taken care of the corpse. So let’s find out who Dorothea Haneff is. You see what I mean? We have to rummage through her past. That’s always the way, you find the perpetrator in the victim’s past. Sooner or later we’ll bump into Meybach, or whatever his real name is. Something in her past will lead us to him. Meybach told me he didn’t want to break with tradition. He talked about the dead woman as if he knew her.”
The brothers look expectantly at Tamara.
“So?” she says. “That doesn’t change anything. Maybe you don’t understand the danger, but the guy scares the living shit out of me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” says Wolf, surprised. “Do you want to let him get away with it?”
“Wolf, please, take a look at us. We’re just a bunch of friends who run an agency. We’re not cops, we’re not secret agents, we’re just completely normal people who’ve crossed paths with a lunatic. The police ought to take care of him. We can’t do it. And I don’t want us to be able to do it. I don’t want that danger.”
“If you’re worried about Jenni—”
“Of course I’m worried about Jenni,” Tamara says, annoyed. “Even though I may not be the mother I should be, I’m concerned about my daughter, OK? Is that appropriate?”
“So what do you suggest?” Kris asks her. “Do you want to run away like Frauke, or wait until the killer phones again and tells us what to do next?”
“Neither, you know that,” Tamara replies.
“What, then?” Kris continues.
She had actually planned to come into the kitchen and put her decision on the table right away. She feels like a traitor.
They’ll never understand
.
Tamara makes an effort and tells them, and with every word the guilt in her voice is clearly audible.
The brothers react simultaneously:
“
YOU DID WHAT
?!”
Kris throws the bag of ice cubes in the sink and runs from the kitchen. Tamara hears him rumbling about in the corridor, and a few moments later he’s standing in the kitchen again.
“Where’s the mini-disk player?”
“Upstairs, I told you I’d sent him the file.”
“How could you do that?”
“Somebody had to put a stop to things.”
Somebody had to put on the brakes
.
Wolf gets up from the table.
“If you weren’t Tamara, I’d punch you in the face.”
He walks past her to the door.
“Where are you going?” asks Kris.
Wolf disappears outside without replying. Tamara looks at her hands.
“We could have talked about that,” says Kris.
“The way we talked about where we were going to bury the corpse?”
Kris sits back down. He rubs the back of his neck. Tamara watches him flinch and goes to stand behind him. She tells him to move his head forward. The swelling on the back of his head is purple and the size of a chicken’s egg.
“You should take that to the emergency room, a doctor needs to have a look at it.”
Kris waves his hand dismissively.
“It’s just a bump.”
Tamara takes the bag out of the sink and fills it with fresh ice cubes. Then they sit facing each other again and wait for Wolf to come back. Tamara has the feeling that she hasn’t achieved anything.
W
OLF CLOSES THE SHED
door behind him and leans against it for a moment before clenching his fists and going ballistic. Planks and canisters go flying through the air, the wheelbarrow takes so many kicks that it tips over in a dented heap, Tamara’s bike loses its rear tire.
How the hell could we fuck it up so badly?
For a quarter of an hour Wolf rages, then leaves the shed with an armful of wood. He’s out of breath, but he feels better. When he comes into the kitchen, Kris is sitting alone at the table.
“Where’s Tammi?”
“In the living room. She’s researching Haneff and Meybach on the internet.”
“How did you persuade her to do that?”
“We had a quiet talk, that’s all it took.”
Wolf sits down.
“We’ve fucked up, haven’t we?”
“We have.”
“We could dig her up again …”
“And then?”
Kris shakes his head.
“Forget it, let’s leave her in peace and wait and see what Tamara comes up with.”
“And Frauke? I’m worried about her.”
“Frauke is Frauke, she’ll calm down in good time. You know her. She runs away quickly, but she comes back just as fast.”
Not exactly my experience
, Wolf thinks and says, “She was so cold. She even packed a rucksack.”
“And didn’t even say bye, I know.”
The brothers look at each other.
“She’ll be back,” Kris says confidently, “believe me.”
Wolf nods and believes him. At that moment no one can know that Kris will soon regret his confidence.
Tamara is sitting on the sofa when the brothers come into the living room.
“Did Meybach reply to your e-mail?” Kris asks.
Tamara shakes her head.
“I put the names through two search engines. No hits for Lars
Meybach, but I now know who Dorothea Haneff was. She was never a widow, because she’s never been married. She’s never lived in Berlin, either. Some classmate of Haneff’s has a homepage, and listed all his fellow pupils with their biographies. Dorothea Haneff was born in Hanover, she graduated from high school and then worked for a construction company there.”
“That’s something,” says Kris. “Let’s check her background.”
“I don’t think so,” says Tamara.
“Why don’t you think so?”
“Because Dorothea Haneff died of a brain tumor three years ago.”
“What?”
Wolf walks around the sofa and looks at the screen.
“Perhaps there’s another Haneff.”
“Wolf, please, a name like that—”
“But why would he give us a false name?”
“Why would he give us anything at all?”
They look at each other; the brothers’ theories have been thrown into disarray. A new question has arisen, and Tamara finally voices it:
“Who’s the woman in our garden?”
Y
OU’VE NEVER THOUGHT
of giving away her real name. Not out of fear, you have no reason to be afraid. Without a name she’s erased, as if she had never existed, and that was the idea behind it. You made her vanish from reality, and Dorothea Haneff had to act as her stand-in. If your father knew, he wouldn’t be very pleased. Dorothea Haneff was the love of his youth. Three years ago your father drove all the way from Berlin to Munich just for the funeral. More than four hundred miles, to say goodbye to a woman who rejected him when he was young. Very dramatic.
The agency’s e-mail reaches you at eleven in the morning. You download the message plus attachment and play it. First there’s nothing, then a rustling sound, then you hear Wolf Marrer’s voice. The seriousness, the fury. You suppress a laugh and erase the file.
Even though it might look to an outsider as if this were all just a game for you, you know better. You’re not a player, you’re a debtor.
And because it’s not a game for you, there are no rules. Everything is possible. We’re talking about life here. We’re being a bit metaphorical, but it suits the way you’re thinking. Anyone who’s aware that there are no rules has taken a step forward. You understood that very early on, but it didn’t really help you sort out your own life. You made mistakes, you made the wrong decisions. Wrong decisions can’t be avoided. Not when you’re twenty-six, and certainly not when you run home through the rain when you’re nine years old, after being raped.