Tretjak (17 page)

They went outside. The two officers went ahead, then Tretjak, then the inspector directly behind him. Maler said: ‘You've got something there on your neck.'

Tretjak reached for the back of his neck. He felt the leaf of a willow tree. From the banks of the Isar. From this afternoon.

 

Munich, Hotel Splendid, Midnight

He was unashamedly horny. His hands were already between her legs before they had properly said hello. And, as always, Fiona Neustadt attended to his desire. Downstairs, in the hotel lobby, she had briefly gone to the cloakroom to take off her knickers. And she had dug a small bottle of massage oil out of her handbag. She rubbed the liquid into all the places which now fell victim to his fingers.

There were only about four metres from the door of the room to the bed. Over this distance, he had managed to take off her blouse, to roll up her skirt around her hips and to ram himself into her. She was thinking back to this afternoon, to the murmuring of the river. To Tretjak's tenderness. What a difference! Was it because of his age? His experience? Fucking. This word would have not fitted this afternoon. But now it fitted perfectly. Fucking. That's what this guy was doing here. Up and down, in and out. Sweat was appearing on his skin and on hers. She felt her orgasm building, like a thunderstorm in the mountains, quick and intense.

He had ordered her to come to a hotel called Splendid, a cheap little pension on Müller Street. Poor artists, penniless gays stayed here. He had brought along a bottle of red wine, Primitivo; the name fitted the sex they were having. She didn't know anything about red wine, but she liked the taste. Surely it cost one tenth of what Gabriel Tretjak was going to dish out that evening for the wine in the Osteria. How many souls did she have? Fiona Neustadt asked herself later, when they were lying next to each other drinking the red wine. She heard his voice, his pleasant voice, but she was not listening to it. The voice was talking about some book he had read. How many souls? Did she have to take care of them all? Or should she let some wither, on purpose? None of her friends could get to grips with these questions. Most of them had several affairs going on simultaneously, and the others none at all.

Alcohol sometimes made her feel sorry for herself. She had to be careful there. Don't start blubbering now. The sound of the tram reached up to the window from the street below. When she was a child Fiona Neustadt had been quite chubby. The reason for that was that every time she had felt unhappy she had eaten something. She had even been called ‘Little Hamster', because she had stored food in her cheeks before swallowing. Now she sat up and leant over the prick of the man lying beside her talking about some book or other. She took the cock into her mouth and kept it there until he ejaculated.

18 May

Hamburg, Café Paris, 10.45am

On the last day of his rather intense life, Dimitri Steiner was sitting in the Café Paris, regularly looking at his watch with increasing impatience. The café consisted of one single tiled room, domed by an elaborately renovated Art Nouveau ceiling. In former times this had been a butcher's shop. The menu was famous for a number of specialties – steak tartare, for example, prepared to order at the table, lukewarm
salade niçoise
, spicy lamb sausages – but also for its tarts. Today it featured a pear tart.

Dimitri Steiner was already on his second double espresso and had eaten a croissant; in front of him on the table lay the unread newspaper. Gabriel Tretjak was never late, but now it was almost 11 o'clock. This morning he had found Tretjak's greeting in his flat, a cake with nails baked into it. He had put his old gun in his pocket, a Tokarev TT-33, and even strapped his knife-belt around his calf. Just in case. In the course of his life he had met many dangerous people, mad terrorists drugged up to their eyeballs brandishing machine guns, professional killers who looked more like accountants, relaxed and friendly wine-swigging
bon vivants
who could decide people's fates with the snap of a finger. Overall, Dimitri had always known how to take on each of them. But with this Gabriel Tretjak it was different. He could never really make head nor tail of this guy. He lived an urbane kind of life, and had built up a flourishing business. He fixed the lives of rich people, who were too stupid, too timid or too lazy to do that themselves. And the one time when he had got involved with other more powerful forces – at least the one time that Steiner knew about – when he had accepted a commission of a very different kind, this one time Tretjak not only had got away with it, but had also pocketed 50 million US dollars at the same time. Dimitri himself had handed over the suitcase with the money.

He was sitting at the back of the restaurant, leaning on the backrest of the bench, his usual seat – when he reserved a table, they always gave him this one. Just to order something, he decided to ask for a fizzy grape juice and thought of the teetotal inspector from Munich. Because of him, he had slept badly. Had he made a mistake telling him to talk with Krabbe? Was he getting too talkative in his old age? But what could go wrong there? Krabbe was dying. The people he had trained as killers were spread all over the world. And Tretjak knew nothing about what he had written on the menu in the train. Or had the inspector been stupid enough to tell him? He didn't take him to be that stupid.

Dimitri Steiner now reached for his telephone.

‘Senator Service. What can I do for you, Mr Steiner?'

‘I need some information. Could you check whether a Mr Gabriel Tretjak flew this morning from Munich to Hamburg? I am expecting him, but can't reach him and I am a bit worried.'

‘One moment, please, Mr Steiner.'

A pretty young woman in a short black leather skirt crossed the restaurant, passing Dimitri's table on her way to the toilet. While listening to the music in the holding loop, he looked at her ass until she had disappeared through the door.

‘Mr Steiner, are you there? Our records show that Mr Tretjak was booked on LH 051 this morning, but didn't take this flight. Or any other, for that matter. I hope that information is of some help to you.'

The voice of the man on the other end of the Lufthansa special client line sounded young and well-trained. He probably uttered these sentences a hundred times a day. But for Dimitri Steiner, it was the last sentence he heard in his life. Just then, the young woman in the leather skirt was standing right next to his table. With a quick, almost unseen movement, she took from her handbag a stiletto, which looked like a knitting needle, and rammed it directly into Dimitri's heart. Seconds later she had left the beautiful Café Paris through the open glass door.

Dimitri Steiner remained seated upright, leaning against the backrest of the bench, looking into the restaurant. He didn't blink anymore. But nobody noticed that for a while. It was a good 40 minutes before the Hamburg homicide cops closed the café for the day.

 

Munich, Police Headquarters, Morning

The first night in a police cell. Cell No. 226 in Munich's Police Headquarters. Shortly after 9pm, the officer had locked him in. Bed, chair, toilet, sink. Nothing to read, no mobile phone, no computer, no television. At 10pm the ceiling light had gone out, the only light in the room. Suddenly it had been dark. Tretjak had studied in depth how people are affected by sudden and absolute silence. How a person reacts when he is abruptly and totally isolated. Inspector Maler had not spoken a single word to him in the car on the way to the Police HQ. When they arrived, the officer had already been waiting for him. And Maler had just disappeared, without a word, a gesture, nothing.

There are people who crumble in that kind of isolation after only a few hours. They experience a nervous breakdown. It happens more often to people who have spent a lot of strength on controlling their lives and reality. Gabriel Tretjak knew that the police were counting on this effect. And he knew that this was not going to happen to him. Hadn't he always used his strength to fix all aspects of his clients' lives? This time he was, in effect, his own client. Could anybody believe that he would not be able to follow his normal practices in his own case? Of course he was going to stay calm, keep his nerve, of course he would keep to his chosen path even if the end was bitter. He would keep control, especially of himself. This was precisely his profession, his destiny.

He was sensing the doubt, like little bursts of electricity, growing in intensity. What was important now was to resist this sense of unease, this fear. The tablets, which he could normally depend on to take care of that, were not in the cell with him, as he had been ordered to empty all his pockets. He had to find the switch within himself, by which he could turn off the fear. He felt his skin becoming moist – it was cold sweat, dangerous sweat as a doctor had once explained it. He tried to do the breathing exercises Treysa's colleague had taught him. But he noticed straight away that they didn't work this time. The fear was stronger.

Gabriel Tretjak closed his eyes. Norbert Kufner, the professor found murdered in Bolzano, his teacher, had once explained to him the route to internal calmness in situations of total isolation. Kufner had told him about it during one of their special weekends. There had been ten such weekends, just the two of them, and Tretjak had paid a lot of money for them. Kufner had been very expensive.

They had once sat in a windowless room for two whole days. In front of six recording devices simultaneously emitting all sorts of different voices. Kufner wanted to show him that it was possible to hear only what you wanted to hear. And if you didn't want to hear anything, that was possible as well. And he wanted to demonstrate what a particular voice had to say to stand out from the others. What words had to be chosen to instill a certain message.

Now Tretjak was sitting with closed eyes in a darkened room, and trying to remember what Kufner had said about the term ‘double silence'. It had been a long-term investigation undertaken by Russian psychologists, which had posed the question of how certain prisoners had come through decades-long banishment to Siberia without noticeable damage, and how they had managed to find some sort of inner peace. The determining factor had been their ability to reach a sort of ‘double silence'. Their ability to leave the outer, silent, still place and look inwards in search of an inner peace. To cut oneself off from the outside quietness one meditated into the outer silence, so to speak, and thereby became invulnerable. Build yourself a wall, Kufner had said, stone upon stone, until the inner core is totally encased and protected...

Kufner had divided the Self into different ‘Ego-States': there is the Ego of good feelings, and one of bad feelings. There is an Ego of embarrassment. And another of weakness. There is the Ego of decisiveness and there is one of indecision. There is the ego of memories, and those of order and of disorder. All these Egos live together like nation-states, sometimes in harmony, at other times at war with each other. Kufner had explained it all to him in great detail and stressed that everyone was free to decide to which of the states was handed the leadership of the individual's life.

During that night in the cell, Gabriel Tretjak tried to build that wall. He noticed how with each moment that passed it worked better and better, how he became calmer, how his pulse stopped racing. The sweat began to dry. The wall grew higher.

But then another Ego suddenly appeared. A nervous Ego, but also a very lively one. The afternoon at the banks of the Isar. Fiona Neustadt's skin. The question, who was she really thinking about when she kissed him? The question of what he had actually felt when he was with her. An Ego of romantic feelings? Gabriel Tretjak sat on his bed in the cell and thought that he didn't really know. He knew only that this Ego was somehow trying to take hold of him.

 

At one point Tretjak had fallen asleep. When he woke, shortly after 6am, the ceiling light in his cell was already on. He had had a dream. He remembered it, unfortunately. He had never managed to develop a technique for erasing his own dreams. He could happily have done without them. Why were dreams so important, and so unsettling? This time it had been the hospital dream again. In this dream, he was walking along a long corridor in a clinic until he finally reached the ward he was searching for. There was noone to be seen. He knocked on a door and entered. A big room full of beds, eight or ten of them. In them lay very old people, almost corpses. Since he didn't know who he was looking for, he looked into each of the faces. Did any one of them ring a bell? Four or five faces, nothing. But then he stood in front of somebody who he did recognise. He was frightened to his core. That was the central feeling in this dream. The dream never revealed who that person was, lying in the bed, not even whether it was a man or a woman. But the face spoke to him. ‘You have forgotten me. You believe I am dead, but no, as you see, I am not dead,' it seemed to be saying.

Tretjak drank a bit of the tea, but didn't eat any of the brown bread with sausage which an officer had brought on a tray. The fear was back, he sensed it, it flickered. But it was not as intense, which was good.

 

At 9.02am Tretjak entered the interrogation room. Inspector Maler was already there. Maler walked towards him and shook his hand.

‘Good morning, Mr Tretjak.'

‘Good morning, Inspector.'

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?'

‘No, thank you.'

Tretjak sat down on a plastic chair with a scratched backrest. He sat on a red cushion. The thought of all the people who had sat here before him was not a comfortable one. He could have touched the inspector, that's how narrow the table was which separated them. Tretjak knew that it was important that he asked the first question. The question: what had happened in his flat yesterday? In his mind, he was working on how to put it. The question had to have the right tone.

Tretjak did not know that Maler was, in the meantime, seeing him in a different light. Whoever he had spoken to about Gabriel Tretjak, whatever he found out about him, the gist of it was always the same: Tretjak is somebody who manipulates, and he is good at it, perfect, in fact. A master of his profession. Only now did Maler realise that Tretjak was also trying to manipulate him. How had it been in the beginning? Tretjak had denied knowing the murdered Professor Kerkhoff, only to then admit contritely that he hadn't spoken the truth, that he had known him after all, in fact he had known him well. Had he not been taught in some course or other about police interrogation techniques, that the admission of a small weakness creates an atmosphere of trust? And it had worked, he had believed him. Maler, you are getting old, he thought to himself.