Tretjak (10 page)

‘A glass of water would be very nice,' said Maler. It was really warm outside now. Summer had taken over early this year.

Suddenly there was a loud noise, which came from the second room. When it came again, Maler recognised it as a high-pitched thin voice, which said something like ‘woof'.

Treysa said: ‘Oh yes, in case you are wondering: that sound in there is a parrot, my only colleague. He only says this one word, all day long. But you get used to it, believe me.'

‘Do you know why the parrot says “woof”?' Maler asked, and had to laugh. Treysa smiled. ‘One can only guess. Maybe he had a traumatic experience in his childhood, which involved dogs. But the psychology of parrots is a relatively new discipline. Would you like to meet him?'

‘Not really,' said Maler, ‘to hear him is enough.'

‘Well, inspector, what can I do for you?'

‘It has to do with the lead article of your journal,' said Maler. ‘I mentioned to you on the telephone that I need all the information I can get about the murder victim, this Professor Norbert Kufner.'

‘Dreadful business. I have seen the news on television. They hyped it up, of course. Famous psychiatrist, murdered in luxury hotel. Three networks have already contacted me, asked me to make a statement about Kufner. But I won't, too tabloid for me. Do you know more about the murder now?'

‘No. I hope you understand that I can't divulge any details.'

‘Of course,' said Treysa and refilled the inspector's glass. Then he took two copies of the latest issue of
Psychology Journal
from his drawer, gave one to Maler and put one on the table in front of him. ‘One thing is for sure: Kufner was a very impressive man, really charismatic. Interviewing him was very exciting.'

Maler looked at the cover photograph. It was meant to look diabolical to suit the headline:
Can one reprogramme the soul?
But one could still see the fine, sensitive features. And for a moment Maler fused this image with the other ones of this face, such as the one he had seen in the pathologist's in Bozen. The face without eyes. The autopsy report had indicated that Kufner, like Professor Kerkhoff, had been killed with one precisely aimed stab of the liver. And again the eyes had been scooped out post mortem. There was no doubt: Kerkhoff and Kufner had been murdered by the same person.

Treysa said that he would have to elaborate a bit in order to explain Kufner's significance and the vehement criticism that went with that territory. In the Nineties a group of US therapists had tried out a new way of treating severely depressed patients who were at risk of killing themselves: they hypnotised these patients – mainly women – and persuaded them in this state that they as children had been sexually abused by their fathers. Which in most cases was not true. Of course the fathers were up in arms against the therapists. Successfully: some went to jail, all lost their professional accreditations. None was allowed to continue to work as a therapist.

‘Serves them right,' said Maler. ‘It's not right to just make such dramatically wrong claims, which are totally unfounded.'

‘You are right, of course,' said Maler. ‘Let me, however, add two points. First: the patients believed the stories to be true, even after the therapists were convicted. They were convinced their fathers had abused them. In other words, they had been reprogrammed under hypnosis. And second: the patients were feeling much better than before. There was no doubt about it. The women felt really good to have found somebody responsible for their suffering. Even if that somebody was not really responsible.'

‘And how did Professor Kufner judge the work of the American therapists?' Maler asked.

‘Outwardly he condemned them, of course, and also in our interview. But I didn't really believe him. Because deep down Kufner followed a philosophy which many modern psychotherapists believe in: there is no one truth, only the construct of many personal truths. And that particularly applies to the soul. Let me put it differently: if a patient has panic attacks and receives a plausible explanation for why these attacks occur then this explanation helps him. Is the explanation the truth? Doesn't matter, the main thing is it works.' That had been Professor Kufner's area of research, Treysa said. Kufner had talked about new constructs, which patient and therapist should build together. Kufner, according to Treysa, always talked about
clients
, he didn't like the word patients.

Maler wanted to say something just when the parrot from next door interrupted. Two or three times the word ‘woof' was clearly audible.

Treysa told the story of a dinner with Kufner in Vienna. Kufner's wife had joined them, herself a psychologist. It had been a really nice evening. A beautiful restaurant, wonderful food,
Tafelspitz
(boiled beef, the local speciality) and the superb fluffy desert,
Salzburger Nockerln
. ‘Well, we all had a bit too much to drink. And at one point Mrs Kufner told the story of how her husband had once pacified a particularly irritating friend over coffee and cake.'

‘Pacified?' asked Maler.

‘Sounds odd, doesn't it? But he simply put this exhausting and always much too noisy friend into some kind of trance over coffee. I followed up, of course, and Mrs Kufner said her husband had used certain code words, which he repeated again and again in his conversation with the woman. In a way he reprogrammed a loud woman into a quiet one. If you ask me, Inspector, a commercial winner.' Treysa laughed.

Maler also laughed and then finished his water. ‘Tell me, in your article you are talking about the
extremely controversial
professor of psychiatry. Why was he so controversial? I guess not because of these coffee and cake experiences.'

‘I've already said that Kufner was very charismatic. And he was prone to acting out the genius who changes the world. He once told me: “just imagine you could re-programme all the sick souls in the world...”'

Maler repeated his question: ‘That's why he was so controversial? A new version of the Frankenstein-theme? Only now in psychology?'

‘That's about it. Many of the so-called serious scientists don't like megalomania, especially in others. In addition to that there were always those rumours which circulated about Kufner. Some people said Kufner was very rich. He himself didn't talk about it. But there were persistent rumours that he made his services available to influential bosses of industry. There was even talk of involvement with some secret service or other. There was never any proof. Kufner only laughed when you spoke to him about it.'

The conversation had come to an end, and Treysa accompanied the inspector to the door.

Maler asked: ‘Do you think it possible that somebody murdered/killed Kufner because of his work?

‘You are asking the wrong person there. I'm only the little editor of an even smaller psychology magazine.'

‘How did you become the editor, by the way?'

‘In my case, it was the fact that I was a therapist myself once upon a time, not even a bad one, but nobody liked me. I was too negative for them somehow. That's why I became editor of my own magazine.'

 

*

 

When Inspector Maler had disappeared into the lift, Treysa went back into his office. He had not yet sat down before he picked up his mobile phone and dialled Gabriel Tretjak's number.

‘Hi. The inspector was here just now. He asked me lots of questions about Kufner.'

‘Did he ask you about me?' asked Tretjak.

‘No,' said Treysa.

 

Oberronnberg, Lower Bavaria, 11am

Father Joseph Lichtinger unlocked the little church in Oberronnberg with mixed feelings. It was just after 11 o'clock in the morning and he was almost an hour early for the appointment. But he wanted to collect his thoughts a little bit. He had been to the hospital this morning to visit the old farmer's wife Sigl whose eyes were dimmed by glaucoma, and the mechanic Staiger, who had just had an operation on his gall bladder. And he'd had to administer the final sacraments to a nine-year-old girl. She had been knocked off her bicycle last night at the nasty corner near the station in Neufahrn, where so many accidents had happened already because everybody collided there; the pedestrians coming out of the underpass, the cyclists from the Marktberg, and the lorry drivers using the old commercial road. And little Jacqueline, called Jackie. Lord, be good to her.

In the little church of Oberronnberg regular mass had not been held for a long time. The church had been incorporated into Joseph Lichtinger's congregation of Grisbach and was only opened for special occasions like baptisms, memorial services and now and again an intimate wedding. It was situated at a distance on a hill, with big cornfields in front and the forest behind it. Inside there were ten rows of wooden benches on either side of the aisle and a simple altar at the front. On the wall behind the altar hung the gem of the church: a relatively big, hand-carved oak cross, which was quite famous around here because its Jesus did not appear to be suffering but angry. The little steeple was directly above the altar and the bell rope was wrapped around a brass hook on the wall beside it.

Lichtinger sat down in the front row and lifted his eyes towards the cross. He was of medium height and had an athletic figure, which even the badly-cut black priest's outfit could not obscure completely. In his youth, he had been an active gymnast. Horizontal bar. And he still played football, as a member of the senior team of Grisbach. His most striking feature was his straw blond hair and bright blue eyes, which had always been the cause of much ridicule here at the place of his birth. Joseph Lichtinger was one of four brothers, the youngest, and they all had these eyes and this hair, despite the fact that both their father and mother had brown hair and dark eyes. A good-looking Swede must have passed through the area once upon a time, so the joke went when the four boys entered elementary school in Grisbach. His brothers had been dispersed all over the world. He had initially gone abroad as well, but then he had come back wearing a black suit and white collar. The nickname ‘Swede' had stuck, priest or not.

He had not heard from Gabriel Tretjak for two years and had not seen him... How long ago must that have been? Tretjak had called last night, and the sound of his voice had unsettled Lichtinger.

‘What's up?' he had asked, ‘is there anything wrong... in our affairs?'

‘Maybe,' Tretjak had answered. ‘Possibly. We've got to talk.'

He could come over straight away, Lichtinger had proposed. But Tretjak had declined. He wanted to go stargazing first. At least in that respect nothing had changed. A clear sky had always put an appointment with Tretjak at risk.

Oberronnberg was not a well-lit church, the windows were on the small side and colourfully painted with scenes from the New Testament. They did not let in a lot of light. Maybe it was because of this strange twilight at midday that Father Joseph Lichtinger – the Swede – suddenly became very calm and let his thoughts wander back a long way into his own past. His memories were connected with warm feelings as if he were not remembering himself but another person he had once known well and liked, but now did not know what had become of him. That person had been a physics student back then, and for a brief moment now in the little church he thought he could solve a differential calculus without difficulty despite the fact that this had been over 20 years ago. The lectures had taken place in the southern wing of Munich's Technical University, a concrete building which had been razed in the meantime. At that point he had owned a dark blue racing bike, a
Montarino
with ten gears, a Dunlop Maxplay squash racket, and he had inhabited a student pad in Freimann. He had a girlfriend at the time, Helen, an English girl from Bristol – and a best friend. Gabriel, a guy who had showed up at a lecture on theoretical physics one day, who looked foreign somehow – you would not be surprised to see him at a PKK rally – but who had opened his mouth and spoken with a broad South Tyrolean accent.

He was not a student of the Technical University, but was reading psychology and philosophy at the other Munich university, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. But he was interested in the theory of relativity– the expansion of time, the curvature of space – and quantum mechanics. At some point they happened to be sitting next to each other and immediately started arguing. ‘If I move much faster than you,' Tretjak had said, alluding to the phenomenon of the theory of relativity, ‘then my time passes more slowly than yours and you age faster. Does that also apply if I think faster than you?' It was now clear to Joseph Lichtinger that this particular discussion had never ended: throughout the following two years, it had continued during lectures, in cafes, at nightly parties, while walking along the Isar river... it had not even been interrupted when the two had not been together because they had only used the breaks to gather new ammunition: questions, phenomena, theses. Fundamentally, it had all been about two questions. Can one predict the future if one knows all the facts, the premises? And on the other side of the same coin: how fundamentally can one alter the course of matters, redirect them, if one alters these facts?

They had incorporated every discipline of science into their discussions: like junkies constantly needing a new fix they had read biochemistry, the newest discoveries about the brain, research into human communication... They had placed bets. Can we succeed in manipulating the couple at the window over there into having a flaming row? In most cases it was Tretjak who bet on something like that, carefully observing them first and then taking action. For example, he knocked over a glass of wine, which emptied itself over the dress of an already fidgety woman. Another time he pressured a shy man into a conversation, which annoyed the woman... Then they just sat back and watched.

They had played games. At one point Tretjak had hired a private detective to have him, Lichtinger, watched. They had such fun watching the guy despair because they stage-managed the whole thing, mixing in a bit of quantum mechanics. Tretjak donned a blond wig and the appropriate clothes, turning himself into a copy of Lichtinger, and he arranged for the detective to observe Lichtinger getting off his bike and walking towards the entrance of a building. But at the same time the exact opposite would take place as well: Lichtinger leaving the building and getting on his bike. Tretjak was mainly interested in the end of the game, namely the report of the detective. He was fascinated by how the human brain could rearrange what it had perceived until it appeared logical, until it fitted its own way of looking at the world.