Tretjak (26 page)

Gabriel Tretjak walked down Buttermelcher Street in the direction of the Viktualienmarkt. He turned on his mobile. There was a message from Lichtinger. It read:
I've been thinking a lot. I'm sure you have challenged a completely different power. Gabriel, this is about a bigger dimension. You have to think in a different way, totally different. I believe I can help you.

 

When she had got up that morning, the forensic pathologist had briefly considered trying the new restaurant around the corner that day. Filled veal breast, one of her many favourite dishes. It wouldn't be very good for her diet, but she had read somewhere that if one had to sin, then it would be better at lunch time, definitely not in the evening. The anticipated filled veal breast put her in a good mood that morning, which was promising to be a quiet day. But then Maler called.

She asked herself whether these inspectors knew what consequences their calls had. In this case, she had to ruin two of her colleagues' plans to have a quiet weekend, as she needed them for a new post-mortem and the subsequent lab examinations. She had to tell a third colleague to be on stand-by in case he was also needed. She called the office of the public prosecutor and asked permission to exhume three bodies. She called three different cemeteries and told them to instruct their workers to dig up the bodies. She had to do all that herself because her secretary had stayed at home with gastric flu and because everything was quicker when one did it oneself anyway.

Maler had actually asked only one question: whether she, the forensic scientist, could exclude the possibility that the three previous victims, the two professors and the cleaning lady, had been poisoned, just like the newly dead man, the bank employee. No, she couldn't, she had answered quite quickly. She had wondered herself why none of the victims' bodies had displayed any defensive wounds, and had finally come to the conclusion that the extremely professional positioning of the stabs to the livers had led to shock, which had paralysed everything. Had she overlooked something? No, she didn't really blame herself. This is what her profession was like: once one discovered one cause of death, why look for another one? A deadly stab to the liver – who would think that poison also could play a role? What sense was there in that? But Maler was right, she couldn't rule it out. So to work, she thought.

The forensic pathologist liked August Maler. He was one of these men, who became ever rarer these days, where you could see that he argued a point with himself long before he bothered others with it. That gave him a quiet, serene aura. The pathologist liked to work with the inspector, and also with his assistant, who was another quiet one. There were so many hectic types in the police force, and they all became more hectic with time, with a hectic job, in hectic times. Awful.

During their telephone conversation, she had also given Maler the final report from the post-mortem on the bank employee. The man had been killed with a carefully-placed injection of pure heroin, mixed with snake poison. And this time there were signs of a struggle: the bank employee had clearly fought back, and had then been tied up. The man had had to watch, the pathologist said, how the deadly injection was administered. This murder had been a demonstration.

PART 3

 

We were alone only one single time. We played ball. In the meadow with the birch tree. But you don't remember. You have forgotten. It was a big yellow plastic ball with red stars on it. Never again. My father suddenly had to leave. Never again did I have you all to myself. But on that day, I did.

 

She stood behind a projection on a wall, about a hundred metres above the little harbour of Maccagno, and observed the ferry port. Maccagno was not a big town, but had a surprising number of churches. One of them was built on a rock, directly along and above the lakeshore, like a castle. The main street no longer led up around it, but through a tunnel in the rock. One could climb up on a paved path and look down from a sort of terrace in front of the church. A relatively old wall surrounded the terrace.

She saw the ferry cut a straight line through the leaden grey water. The old Alpino. And she saw how Tretjak walked along the wooden planks of the landing dock and stopped next to the railing. He had his hands deep inside his coat pockets. From above, where she stood, she could also see the small Piazza Roma with its palm trees, the few parking places, the pretty bar and the hotel Torre Imperial. It had turned cool in the past few days. That could sometimes happen rather rapidly. The town was preparing for hibernation. The square was empty, and the bar, as well as the hotel, were already illuminated.

She had stood in the living room, she remembered it precisely, in the middle of the living room, and she had seen him sit on the terrace, seen him read the newspaper. She had stood like that for a while, quiet as a mouse, in that ridiculous blue-checkered little dress, much too childish for her age – after all, she was eleven, almost eleven, and her heart had beaten so strongly it could be seen through the material. But then she had gathered all her courage. She remembered the look of her feet in the sandals on the stone slabs, how they made one step after another. Don't stumble, not now... And then she had positioned herself in front of him, and had almost run out of air because of her beating heart. ‘Shall we play ball for a while?'

 

You smelt so good. And you put the newspaper aside and looked at me, and you smiled and said my name. And then you said: ‘All right. We shall.' And then we played, in the meadow with the birch tree, throwing the ball to each other. And the sun was directly behind you; sometimes I couldn't really see you. And I thought, this will never stop, it will never be over. And somehow the little girl was right, wasn't she? Why haven't you recognised me? The sun, back then, was behind you, not me. You could see me. Why haven't you recognised me?

 

She saw how the ferry landed. A man with a bicycle disembarked, a small boy with him. And a woman got off. There we go, she thought, and pulled herself subconsciously closer to the shelter of the wall. She observed how the woman approached Tretjak, put down her bag, and exchanged a few words with him. Then he took the bag, and both walked side by side along the promenade towards the Piazza Roma. They appear to be two totally normal people, she thought up there on her post. Man picks up woman from ferry and takes her to hotel. Nobody would suspect anything else. Not even now, when they checked into the hotel, she thought and smiled. The fact that, on this night, all the rooms had been booked ahead of time and paid for, the fact that all of them were empty except the one that they were being shown to right now – who would have noticed or cared?

 

Every time you were at our home, I stayed close to you. As close as possible, that is. One evening you men sat in the living room, you, my father and two other guys who I didn't know. I was next door in the little television room, you probably didn't even know that it existed. The door was closed and I could hear only the voices. I could hardly understand anything, but that didn't matter. You didn't say much, but I waited for your voice only. The television was on very low, I had stopped watching it altogether, and I lay on the sofa and waited for your voice. Sometimes it was only one word, between the other voices and the clinking of glasses. The smoke of the cigars and cigarettes seeped through the gap under the door, and between my legs I had a pillow, a big blue one. I only wore a tee-shirt and my knickers, and it got warmer and warmer there, and I heard your voice and rubbed myself against the pillow. And I kept on rubbing against the pillow, and then it started, and I almost couldn't breathe, and it was incredibly beautiful. That's something you can be proud of, my first orgasm. Some women never have one their whole lives.

 

Now a corpulent man with an absurd red pointed hat came towards the two figures on the promenade, a kind of German camping tourist, she thought. Left over from the season. The man asked Tretjak something, obviously the way to somewhere, as Tretjak made some signs with his hand before walking on. Charlotte Poland stayed by his side during the brief interruption. This was the right moment to send the prepared text message. Of course, she couldn't hear from up here near the church exactly how the message arrived on Charlotte Poland's phone. But one could almost imagine the beep. At least she saw how the novelist reacted, as she took the mobile from her coat and looked at the display. What an exciting thought: both people down there believed that it was they who determined what happened and what would happen.

 

You don't doubt that, do you, Gabriel, not for a second, do you? You are afraid, I know it, but you think you know what you are afraid of. And you think you know what you have to do.

 

She looked on as the two crossed the main street which separated the lake from the harbour and the promenade from the town itself. As they crossed the Piazza Roma and disappeared into the entrance of the Hotel Torre Imperial. The glass door with the three gold stars on it still swung back and forth for a little while.

 

She had thought of so many possible eventualities. That much, the investigation was to prove later on. She had, for example, succeeded in reprogramming the telephone exchange of the Munich Inland Revenue Branch I so that every call to Fiona Neustadt would automatically be redirected to her mobile phone. She therefore always knew who wanted to speak to Fiona Neustadt and could listen in. She had pretended to be an employee of the telephone company, from the maintenance department. Obviously she had spent a quiet half hour in a room full of monitors and telecommunication devices. The most complicated part had been to redirect all calls from police headquarters which were intended to reach Fiona Neustadt. Redirection meant that none of these calls reached Ms Neustadt. All calls, including those from the mobile phones of the Homicide Squad, went directly to her. Only once had there been a knock on the door. A nice secretary had asked whether she would like a cup of coffee. Even that secretary was interviewed later.

 

She had thought of so many possible eventualities. What she hadn't considered, however, was one of Rainer Gritz's particular characteristics, which was widely known and ridiculed by his colleagues in the Homicide Squad. He hated making telephone calls, tried to avoid them whenever possible. He sent emails, and much preferred going somewhere to have a look himself, to gain many impressions at the same time, as he put it. ‘On the telephone I'm only 20 percent,' he had once told Maler.

Rainer Gritz lived in a district of Munich called Schwanthaler Höhe, alone in a two-room apartment. Two weeks out of the year he cursed the area, when only a few streets away the Oktoberfest rollicked about down on the Theresienwiese. Otherwise he liked living there very much. Not far from his flat ran Landsberger Street, where Munich's Inland Revenue Division I was located. For some time Gritz had had a mind to look up Fiona Neustadt personally, but it had never worked out time-wise so far. Gritz was always the first into the office of the Homicide Squad each morning. When he passed the Inland Revenue building just before seven, it was still completely dark, and when he drove back at some point in the evening, it was dark again. But one morning it worked. It was just before half past eight when he parked in front of the Inland Revenue building. The evening before, they had celebrated the birthday of a colleague from the Vice Squad in a small pub. It had been quite late when he got home.

Rainer Gritz had that certain special feeling quite often, and although he hadn't been with the Homicide Squad for a long time yet, his colleagues already took this special feeling seriously, as it had often proven to be extremely useful. Gritz himself would not have spoken of a feeling, more of a course of events which hadn't been completed. In this case, he wanted to check two contrasting images, which in his mind didn't quite fit together – on the one hand, the woman who, almost theatrically clad in a chic black dress, walked up the hill at the Lago Maggiore beside Gabriel Tretjak to attend the funeral of a murderer. And on the other hand there was the tax inspector with heaps of files in front of her. Gritz wanted to have a look at the conventional side of this contrast. He wanted to see the complete picture of Fiona Neustadt. As the official reason for his visit, he would ask whether he could take a look at the final report on Tretjak's tax inspection.

I'll just walk into the Inland Revenue, Gritz thought. There was indeed no doorman, no central information desk, no receptionist, nothing. Only a large black directory board, on which the names of the officials were listed in white letters.
Neustadt, Room 237, Building II, Tax Affairs
. Gritz took the stairs to the second floor and turned right, into Building II. The linoleum flooring was grey and a bit sticky. The windowless hallway had a white swinging door at the end with matt milky glass. In the passageway to the next hallway he met a woman with a flower pot in her hand. If he had to describe the character of government offices like this one, Gritz thought, he would try with this scene: in places like these, women always walked the hallways holding flower pots in their hands.

Room 237. A white door, with a black sign with two names on it: Neustadt, Pfister. Gritz knocked, briefly waited for an answer, and when he heard nothing, carefully opened the door. A double desk stood in the middle of the room. On the left side sat a bald man with a beard, and on the right sat a woman, maybe 50 years of age, wearing a blouse with a flower pattern, slightly corpulent.

‘I beg your pardon, I'm looking for Ms Neustadt,' Gritz said.

‘Yes,' the woman answered, looking up from her files.

‘Fiona Neustadt?' said Gritz.

‘Yessss!' said the woman, and this time she not only sounded indifferent, but also slightly irritated.

‘There has to be a misunderstanding, I'm looking for another Ms Neustadt,' Gritz said and tried to lend a little more authority to his voice.