“And in any case it’s a really stupid way of killing yourself,” Kris added.
“Then that leaves us with an accident—”
“Accident my ass,” said Wolf. “Frauke wasn’t as stupid as that, she wouldn’t go running out on the ice.”
Gerald waited for a better explanation. Wolf didn’t think of giving him any kind of explanation at all. Gerald expected something at least from Tamara. She sat on the sofa, hidden under a blanket, unreachable. So he turned back to Kris.
“I brought you the things we found in her coat.”
He set a transparent plastic bag down on the table. House keys, wallet, two phones, odds and ends. The plastic bag had condensation on the inside, as if Frauke’s things were breathing. Tamara emerged from under the blanket, Wolf leaned over the table.
“And this was on the ice,” said Gerald, setting a second plastic bag down next to it. “Do you recognize the knife?”
Kris shook his head. Wolf picked it up.
“Never seen it,” he said.
“Tamara?”
Tamara shook her head too. She couldn’t take her eyes off the two phones in the other plastic bag.
“The knife isn’t ours,” she said.
“It was near the hole in the ice. Frauke’s fingerprints are on the handle and the blade. Even if it wasn’t her knife, she definitely held it in her hand.”
Gerald looked from one to the other.
“So if you have something to say to me, please do it now.”
Pause, silence.
“Are you being threatened?”
“No one’s threatening us,” Kris replied.
“And what about that corpse?”
“Which corpse?” Kris asked.
“And what about the killer who wants you to apologize on his behalf?”
Gerald wouldn’t let go.
“I mean, did that really all come from Frauke’s imagination?”
Kris laid his head on one side. Tamara was glad that Gerald hadn’t homed in on her.
“Do you believe her now that she’s dead?” asked Kris.
Gerald just looked at him, then lowered his eyes and changed the subject.
“Why did she have two cell phones?”
“One is private,” said Kris, “the other is business. We all have two phones.”
“I see.”
He got to his feet. Tamara saw that there was more he wanted to say. Gerald changed his mind and left the villa without saying goodbye to them.
That’s not a good sign
, thought Tamara. The front door clicked shut. Wolf took the phones out of the plastic bag.
“She must have been here in the night,” he said. “She must have sneaked in and grabbed your damned phone.”
Wolf handed the blue cell phone to Kris. It was wet, and when Kris flipped it open, a few drops of water fell on the table.
“Why would she do that?” he asked.
“Some subtle form of revenge,” Wolf supposed. “Don’t ask me, that woman was always a mystery to me.”
“All women are mysteries to you,” said Tamara.
They looked at each other for a moment. And everything was there, pain was there, and the past, and despair.
Is it really true?
It’s really true
.
Kris tried to turn on the phone. Nothing happened. He set it down on the table and rubbed his face with both hands.
“Frauke would never have avenged herself,” he said. “It wasn’t her style.”
“Just as it wasn’t her style to run out on a frozen lake and drown in it,” Tamara added. “That was never an accident. I don’t believe it.”
She looked at Wolf.
“You said yourself a moment ago that she’d never have been so stupid.”
“Yes, but she was dumb enough to rat on us,” Wolf objected.
Tamara nudged him in the shoulder.
“Don’t say that. Frauke wasn’t dumb.”
“I don’t understand why she stole it,” says Kris, tapping his phone as if the phone could give him an answer. “I really haven’t the faintest clue.”
Tamara sees the radiant blue sky in the black paint of the coffin lid. She thinks that if she leans far enough forward and looks down at the coffin, it would be like something in a fairy tale. It wouldn’t be her reflection looking back, but Frauke, and then they could talk to one another as if nothing had happened.
Frauke’s father stands at the head of the coffin, and beside him is her mother, who was allowed to leave the private hospital for the funeral. Tamara shook her hand when she said hello.
I knew Frauke better than you
, she wanted to say.
Frauke’s mother ignored her. She avoids any eye contact. She either looks pointedly over her shoulder or stares at the coffin as if she could see her dead daughter through the wood.
What we’re doing here is wrong
, Tamara thinks,
Kris was right
.
As teenagers they had sworn they would never end up six feet under. They wanted to have their ashes scattered on the Lietzensee, so that they would always be together, even in death. Frauke’s father wasn’t interested in any of that. He insisted that Frauke was to be buried in the City Cemetery in Zehlendorf. And when Kris started arguing with him, Gerd Lewin said, “I need a place where I know my daughter is safe and where I can always go and visit her, don’t you understand that?”
Tamara understood. Whatever connection there might have been between the two, Frauke’s father wasn’t going to let his daughter go that easily. Kris didn’t want to understand. He refused to come to the funeral, and went off to the shed after breakfast, then came into the sitting room with several loads of wood and stacked them next to the fireplace. Wolf remarked that it wasn’t all that cold any more, to which Kris replied that they should go to the funeral, and in the meantime he would keep the fire going.
Perhaps that’s the best way of saying goodbye
, Tamara thinks and looks at her hand, which is solidly and securely in Wolf’s. She misses Wolf, even
though he’s standing next to her. She misses Kris. And Frauke. Right now she would like to have everyone who has ever been close to her right next to her, and hold them tight. She also wishes she had stayed with Kris in the villa. She wishes so many things, but none of them happens. No one speaks. No one leaves the cemetery. The minutes drag on. No one thinks of fulfilling a single one of her wishes. Tamara starts to cry. She thought there were no tears left. Wolf puts an arm around her shoulders. Someone hands her a tissue. It’s going to be a long morning.
K
RIS WAS ON HIS WAY
back from jogging when he found out. He walked into the villa and was surprised by the silence. First he looked in the kitchen, then in the living room. On the way upstairs he heard crying.
Tamara and Wolf were on the floor in the corridor. Wolf was sitting down, Tamara had rolled herself up in a ball, her head in Wolf’s lap. Kris didn’t say a word. A floorboard creaked under his foot. Wolf looked up and looked at him.
Don’t
, Kris wanted to say to him,
please, whatever you want to say, keep it to yourself
.
“She’s dead,” said Wolf.
Kris wanted to turn around and go, but he couldn’t move from the spot. Wolf shrugged as if he was perplexed, and repeated, “She’s dead, Kris, she’s just dead.”
Tamara’s weeping sounded like an insect that’s caught in a jar, looking in vain for a way out.
Now Kris is sitting by the fire wearing his shorts, feeding the flames as if his life depended on it. His hair sticks to his head. Sweat drips on to the carpet and leaves dark trails. His back is wet. To his right is a bottle of water, little bubbles have formed on the inside of it, the water is piss-warm.
Kris is glad he said no to the funeral. He knows it’s wrong.
Every few minutes he leans forward and puts on another log. The fire is almost silent, it only crackles every now and then, sending up white sparks.
If only everything were as simple as a fire that needs to be fed, we’d all sit by fires and sink into a state of bliss
, Kris thinks and takes a sip from the bottle of water.
He knows what he’s doing here.
When they were children, he and Wolf spent their summer holidays with their grandparents on Lake Starnberg. In the summer when Kris was eight and Wolf was six, their grandfather died in a car accident. It was their first contact with death. They experienced their grandmother’s grief, they saw their parents crying and later stood forlornly beside all the other mourners in the cemetery and had no idea how to behave. At the time, Kris swore he would never go to another funeral.
The same night their grandmother came into the spare bedroom that he and Wolf shared during the holidays. She had two candles and explained that even the dead need light to guide them.
“If your grandfather sees the light, he won’t be afraid, and he’ll know how much you love him.”
The brothers watched wide-eyed as their grandmother handed each of them a candle, lit it, and then left the room again.
Years later they laughed about that night, but at the time they had been baffled, and each of them sat on their bed with a candle, not daring to move. How would they sleep now? What if the candles went out? Would their grandfather get lost in the dark?
Their grandmother was so immersed in her grief that she had forgotten to give them candle holders. So they spent the night with their backs against the wall and their eyes fixed on the candles in their hands. They talked about their grandfather for a while, until they grew tired. Wolf nodded off and was woken by the hot wax running over his hands. Kris, on the other hand, barely dared to blink and stared at the candle flame as if it were his grandfather’s life-light. He thought that if he kept the flame alive overnight, their grandfather would be back at the breakfast table tomorrow morning.
At about three o’clock Wolf gave up, blew out the candle, and lay down to sleep.
Kris kept going. At dawn he heard their grandmother getting out of bed. He heard the waking birds, the sounds of the first tram from the nearby stop, and the rush of the blood in his ears. When his candle was no more than a tiny stump, and about to burn his fingers, their grandmother called to them. They were to get up, breakfast was ready.
Wolf started awake and saw Kris sitting on the bed with the flickering candle stump in the palm of his hand. Kris still remembers his little brother staring at the snuffed candle on his bedside table and wondering
whether he should quickly light it again. Of course at that moment their grandmother came in.
Wolf admitted, sobbing, that he was sorry but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t stay awake. His grandmother reassured him and told him it hadn’t been intended that way. She was about to say more, when Kris screamed. It was both a cry of pain and of relief. The candle in his hand had burned down, the wick had settled like a red-hot needle on the palm of his hand. Kris had persevered.
Although their grandfather wasn’t at the breakfast table the next day, Kris was proud of himself. He felt like a protector. And that’s why he’s sitting by the fire this Thursday. A candle isn’t enough. Frauke should be sent on her way with a roaring fire. That’s why Kris is keeping the fire alive. To be with Frauke, to give her protection, wherever she is now.
The days before the funeral were a vacuum. Since they found the dead woman on the wall, all their commissions have been postponed. So far no one has thought of going back to work. They have hoisted their drawbridges and disappeared into themselves. Wolf sank into melancholy, and Kris wasn’t sure who his brother was grieving for more—for Frauke or for himself and the misfortune that seemed to follow him like a shadow. Tamara did what Tamara always does when there’s a crisis. She set up her base on the sofa and read one novel after the other, as if the outside world had been reduced to printer’s ink and white paper.
They barely spoke, they lived past one another.
Kris was the only one to move forward. The fact that Frauke had been in the villa to take his cell phone the night before her death wouldn’t leave him in peace. As his phone had stopped working, the next day Kris drove to Charlottenburg to the head office of his provider, to find out about his incoming and outgoing calls.
The area depressed him. Five years ago the Ernst-Reuter-Platz had still been really lively, when the Kiepert bookstore still occupied the whole corner. Now the place is like a playground for yuppies and flaneurs having their frappuccinos and chocolate chip cookies before popping in to Manufaktum to buy overpriced presents that look as if they’d been cobbled together before the Second World War.
The provider’s offices are on the top floor. A member of the staff kept Kris waiting for ten minutes before sitting down at his notebook and printing out a list of all incoming and outgoing calls over the last
thirty days. Then he asked Kris if there was anything else he could do for him.
“Just one little thing,” said Kris, getting stonewalled. The staff member absolutely refused to track Meybach’s number.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I’d end up in a hell of a mess. And anyway he’s with another network.”
Kris thanked him for the list and left. His suspicion had been confirmed. Frauke had taken his phone to get Meybach’s number. Of course Frauke could have gotten it from the files in her office upstairs, but in that case she would probably have risked bumping into one of the others.
We could have talked
.
Frauke had done exactly what Kris should have done long ago. She had gone on the attack. She had called Meybach at 11:45 on Saturday night, and he had called her back at 10:23 the next morning. Shortly afterwards she drowned. But that wasn’t nearly enough information for Kris.
On Gneisenaustrasse he headed straight for the office of his former boss, ignoring everyone’s
excuse me
s.
“What are you doing here?” said Bernd Jost-Degen when he saw him.
“We need to talk,” said Kris and closed the door behind him. Before his ex-boss could protest, Kris said, “I know you need five minutes to talk to your friend from the press office. It’ll take him three minutes to get through to his man in the police, and he won’t need more than a minute to find out what name this phone number is registered to.”
Kris put the piece of paper with the number on the desk.