Tretjak (21 page)

Everything had been explained in that letter. The letter and the body on the train. Both had been delivered free-freight, so to speak. What had been the name of the sleeping car conductor again? Something like some footballer or other... Labadia, that's it. He wanted to deliver breakfast, this Mr Labadia, to Cabin 17, first class, Car 5 of the overnight train from Milan to Munich. Nobody had opened when he knocked, so he used his master key to unlock the door. And called the police a minute later. Maler and Gritz were already waiting on the platform when the train reached Munich's main station.

It had been a peaceful scene, inside Cabin 17. At least at first. Paul Tretjak lay on the bed on his back, face up to the ceiling, eyes closed. The white sheet had been pulled up to his chin. On it lay a big sheet of paper, with blue felt pen writing on it.
I AM DEAD. PLEASE INFORM CID IN MUNICH, INSPECTOR MALER.
On the collapsible night table were the sleeping tablets, Rohypnol, an empty bottle of water, and an envelope, addressed with the same felt pen:
For Gabriel
. Underneath the table, on the floor, stood a white shoebox with no writing on it. When a forensic officer opened it, he flinched. There were several small items in that box. What made the officer jump was the contents of the small jam jar: six eyes were floating in a transparent liquid. Vodka, as the laboratory confirmed later. The other items in the box were: an ice cream scoop, a large kitchen knife, a transparent little bag containing some hair, and a small stack of receipts held together with a paperclip, including one from a petrol station from a lay-by on the motorway near Munich from the 11th May and the copy of an order to a florist for a bouquet of roses delivered to St-Anna-Street. There was also an Ericsson mobile phone, with the images of Tretjak's flat stored on it, the bloody walls, the dead cleaning lady in the bathtub.

 

In front of the church of Santo Stefano, the four men picked up the coffin and shouldered it. The priest went ahead of them, beside a wall, which started to the right of the church. There was an opening in the stone wall, and an open gate. Behind it, steps led downhill about 20 metres to the cemetery. It had been invisible from above, but from here again one had the view across the lake. The men worked up a sweat, carrying the coffin carefully downhill. Finally they stopped at an open grave and placed the coffin on wooden planks laid across the hole. On both sides the belts were in place with which the coffin, at the end of the ceremony, was going to be lowered into the ground.

Paul Tretjak's last journey. He had boarded the train in Milan with the box of evidence under his arm, two packets of sleeping tablets in his pocket – and the letter to his son, typed and printed in his house in Maccagno. That was how he had delivered himself to Munich's CID. The lab confirmed that his DNA was identical with that found on the skin of the three victims. The hair belonged to Mrs Lanner, the ice cream scoop and the knife were the murder weapons. Rainer Gritz was sure that this arrest would be recorded somewhere in criminal history. Now Paul Tretjak's body lay in a wooden box on some planks above the Lago Maggiore, and the priest uttered for him the unavoidable words: ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.'

The son he had hated so much and whom he had damaged so much stood beside it like a stone. His business, his strange market niche in the service sector, was no longer. Discretion had been at the core of it, action behind the scenes. The moment when Gabriel Tretjak had hit the headlines had marked its end: his arrest, the search of his flat, the confiscation of his files. But Rainer Gritz got the impression that the whole story had affected the Fixer in other ways as well, exactly as his father had planned it. Gritz, after all, had read the father's letter often enough and knew that it represented a perpetual thorn in an old wound which maybe otherwise, with the father's death, might have started to heal.

Gabriel
, that's how it had started, one word at the head of the letter, no date, nothing else.
Gabriel, when your mother discovered that she was pregnant, pregnant with you, there was a scene which has haunted me all my life. We sat in an ice cream parlour at the Walterplatz in Bolzano, your mother and I, and we talked about whether the pregnancy should be terminated. There was already one child, as you know...
And then, the father explained to his son that he had regretted for his entire life the decision to bring him into this world. He did that in great detail and in a rather verbose fashion, and while reading it you could sense the sick state of mind of the one who had penned it.
Doghouse
, that's what he had called the house above the lake, and then he wrote that he had thought of nothing but revenge the entire time he had spent there.
But how can you hurt somebody who has no feelings? Or should I rather say, how can you hurt somebody who only knows one emotion, fear? There is nothing that scares you more than to lose control. Certain events, which you can't dominate...

They had had the letter examined by a psychologist. With rather meagre results. The report had spoken of an ‘emotionally agitated state', of ‘a sort of neglected soul', and in the long passages about the crimes committed, the meticulous description of the planning, the expert detected a ‘narcissistically exaggerated sense of self' which was looking for a way to express itself. Rainer Gritz thought of the end of the letter, the last paragraph, which had been added after a slightly bigger break.
This letter, however, uninteresting for the police, and of significance only to you, also contains the doubt as to whether my revenge is truly complete with my death. What do you think, Gabriel?
No signature, nothing else.

At the very beginning of their cooperation, Inspector Maler had told Gritz that one day he was going to experience what many criminal investigators knew: when a case was closed, one was sometimes hit by a strange sensation of loss, and one had to let go of the case internally. ‘It's a little bit like breaking up,' Maler had said. ‘And depending what kind of case it has been, that can be tough.' All those leads they had followed in this case. And the mind games they had played. The sheer number of senseless interrogations they had conducted and written reports on. Gritz thought of the three attempts they had made to talk to a terminally ill man, who was heavily sedated. Doctor Martin Krabbe. That lead had been followed because of something Dimitri Steiner had said. Krabbe had allegedly developed a special method of killing, which had been deployed in this case. Gritz had actually discovered something in Krabbe's research. It was obviously a silent method. With a carefully aimed stab to the liver, inflicted from behind, which was so painful that it led to a state of shock and an interruption of breathing, the murderer was given the chance to take his time to complete the crime, for example with a stab to the heart, this time from the front. Kerkhoff as well as Kufner had displayed these stabs to the liver. When Rainer Gritz had asked him about it, however, Krabbe had only occasionally and slowly opened his eyes, like a turtle, only to close them again. Only once had he whispered something and forced Gritz to bend down to get his ear very close to Krabbe's mouth. But he had not understood anything.

The coffin had been lowered into the grave and the people were filing past it, using a little shovel to throw handfuls of earth on top of it. After this they nodded in Gabriel Tretjak's direction, and some shook his hand. Rainer Gritz caught himself empathising with Tretjak. What would he do now? There was surely enough money put away. Would he withdraw to somewhere and just watch the stars from now on? Would he empty his father's house up here in the mountains himself, and pick up every item with his own hands? Or would he hire somebody to clean out the place?

These were the thoughts going through his mind. And it was probably because of these thoughts that Rainer Gritz saw what happened when Charlotte Poland passed by Tretjak, but also why it didn't really register with him at the time. Poland had not thrown earth onto the coffin, but a rose. And when she paused in front of Gabriel Tretjak, she placed her hand on his upper arm. It was this gesture which was unusual, and which Gritz would remember later on. It was a gesture of familiarity, which should have amazed Gritz, knowing about the relationships between Charlotte Poland, Paul Tretjak and Gabriel Tretjak. It was an almost tender gesture. It was not returned.

Again the bell of the clock tower tolled. The priest blessed the grave and the people present. Then it was over. When Gritz, like the others slightly unsure what to do next, headed up the steps and walked around the church, he noticed that the tractor was gone and that the wooden trestle had been removed from the entrance. The aconite branches were now standing against the wall. At the bend, where the path came out of the forest, Rainer Gritz paused on his way back and observed how the mourners dispersed. He saw that Gabriel Tretjak and Fiona Neustadt did not take the same way as everybody else, but turned behind the church onto a smaller path, which led not downhill but further up. Gritz watched them until they disappeared in the forest. He assumed that this was the most direct route to the father's house. Then the young police officer turned around and looked at his watch. It was just before seven. He wondered whether he should eat some pasta in the village. When he drove here, he had called Maler in the hospital and Maler had given him a recommendation. He recalled that Paul Tretjak had mentioned a restaurant in a conversation, which supposedly served the best ravioli in the world, a small
trattoria
directly on the lake. ‘Who knows,' Maler had said on the phone, ‘maybe he told us about it because he knew that we would have to come back to this place one day...' No, Maler didn't recall the name of the place, Tretjak didn't even know it, he said. He had always called it only by its nickname, ‘the nasty restaurant' or something like that. But you couldn't miss it. Rainer Gritz set off and noticed that he was really hungry.

 

Professor Determination entered the room – that's what he called him. Maler had never met a person who seemed more determined. There was no doubt, no hesitation, only: this is how it's going to be done. Even their first meeting seven years ago had been like that. The professor had sat opposite, had leafed through his medical records, had asked a few questions, and then firmly stated: ‘You are my patient.'

Being his patient meant: you are the man whose old heart I am going to rip out and then transplant a new one in its place. You are the man whose life I am going to save. You only have to do what I tell you. The professor was one of the best heart surgeons in the world. And nothing about him gave the impression that he didn't know this to be a fact.

The professor did not knock before entering. Cowboys don't knock, he always said. Maler had once accompanied him on a cold day to a pub, which was only a few hundred metres away from the hospital. When he asked the professor why he was not wearing a coat, he could have guessed the professor's answer: ‘A cowboy doesn't need a coat.'

Now he was standing at his bedside. Rejection, 1b. The first, lowest category. From 2a on up, it would be grave, the professor said. No reason to worry now, but one had to watch out. And to ask why it was happening now. He had consulted a colleague, the professor said, and they had decided to change the medication. He pulled a small box from the pocket of his white coat and handed it to Maler. ‘Cellcept inhibits immune defence even more. Take this one for the time being.'

‘No,' said Maler, ‘I won't take this.' He knew full well how little the professor appreciated the word ‘no' from the mouth of a patient, and that's why he quickly added: ‘I know Cellcept, I can't tolerate it. The last time I took it, it induced stomach bleeding and I ended up in intensive care. That was two years ago. When I discontinued the medication, I felt better very quickly.'

The professor put the little box back into his pocket. ‘Why don't my colleagues know about that? Sloppiness. I will bring this up at our next meeting. And you are of course not going to take this medication.'

Maler would have loved to be present at such a meeting. The arrogance of the professor towards his medical colleagues was considerable, as Maler had witnessed many times. The surgeon always came first, and then nothing came next for a long, long time.

‘Are you under special pressure at the moment?' the professor asked.

‘I had to catch a serial killer,' said Maler, ‘nothing else.'

‘But that's your job, isn't it?' said the professor. ‘Catching murderers. I mean, is there something else, something out of the ordinary?' He was not a great believer in the psyche. ‘You can't really operate on the psyche, you know.' There was a hint of a smile around his mouth. ‘But there are a variety of studies which prove that in transplant patients there is a connection between extraordinarily stressful situations and the body rejecting the transplanted organ. So, is something up with you?'

‘No, there is nothing,' Maler said. But he knew that this was not the case. He had actually quickly put a slim file into his bag, together with his underpants and his bathrobe, when he got the news that because of the rejection he had to immediately go to the hospital for a few days. The file was on Laura Müller. The woman whose heart he was carrying inside him. After Tretjak had surprised him with the name of the donor, he had gathered information about her. Just a few calls to colleagues, who had logged the accident back then and who had informed the family. The most shattering document was one that Maler had found on the Internet. In a newspaper produced by her school, fellow pupils had remembered Laura Müller. Everyone had written something about Laura, who liked to dance, to listen to jazz, who quite coolly rejected some suitors, who wanted to go abroad, to South America, who wanted children and lots of men, who always laughed and had a boyfriend, the fat but extremely clever Max, whom she loved a lot.