Splinter Read online

  They ended up arranging to meet the following weekend at the Koma, a heavy-metal disco in Reinickendorf. Although Marc didn’t believe the ‘Westend dolly bird’ would really turn up, he bought fifty Labellos in every available flavour just in case – just to see the look on her face if she asked to borrow a lipsalve again and he produced his assortment all at once. It didn’t come to that because he’d forgotten about the body search at the door. The Koma’s tattooed bouncer looked nauseated as he fished one ‘lipstick’ after another out of Marc’s jacket pockets. He eventually – and disgustedly – let ‘the little queer’ in, but without his Labellos.

  Marc did get his first kiss, but not until much later. Sandra kept him dangling for so long he was worried she had another secret admirer. But then, from one day to the next, she seized the initiative and, on his birthday, ‘had it off’ with him – as she put it, smirking – in his parents’ bedroom.

  ‘Your father’s going to loathe me,’ he prophesied three months later during the drive to Sandra’s family home in Sakrow. ‘One look at the knot and he’ll know I never wear a tie. One question and he’ll discover why he’s never met my dad at a Bar Association ball: because he only represents petty criminals and antisocial elements, not stockbrokers or surgeons. And—’

  ‘—and he’ll shave your nuts with a Bunsen burner if he finds out you’ve been banging Daddy’s little darling for the last month,’ Sandra amplified, flashing him a saucy grin that exposed her anterior molars. So saying, she yanked at the handbrake and jumped out of the car in her bare feet. That was just what Marc had fallen in love with: the antithesis between her angelic face and upper-class background and the bawdy remarks which, coming from her, sounded so enchanting.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past you to tell him.’

  ‘I won’t have to,’ she retorted with a laugh. ‘He’s like you: a very perceptive person. He’ll sense what we were up to in the shower half an hour ago.’

  Back then, as they strolled hand in hand up the neatly raked gravel drive, he could never have imagined that Sandra’s father would one day loom so large in his life. There had certainly been no indication of it after their first chilly encounter that summer evening.

  ‘How did you find me?’ Marc asked, looking around for the first time. The ground plan of the police station reminded him of a modern polytechnic. They were standing in a low-ceilinged entrance hall flanked by two massive staircases that led to the upper floors, though these harboured more offices, interview rooms and a number of spacious assembly areas, not classrooms.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Constantin’s air of concern was that of a man who didn’t expect an affirmative answer. As ever, he was wearing a dark suit with a snow-white handkerchief in the breast pocket. And, as ever, he gave no sign of having just put in a twelve-hour stint in the operating theatre.

  Marc felt the hand of the young cop who had been taking him away for questioning detach itself from his shoulder. The instinctive urge to salute was taking effect.

  ‘What’s going on here? What does he want with you?’ Constantin demanded, as if the man wasn’t there. He looked around in search of some superior officer competent enough to answer his questions. At that moment, Stoya emerged from the men’s room. He stopped short and stared at the trio in surprise.

  ‘And who might you be?’ the young cop demanded, trying to inject some authority into his voice. Constantin didn’t deign to answer him, still less stand aside.

  ‘How did you find me?’ Marc repeated. He hadn’t the remotest idea how his father-in-law could have run him to earth.

  ‘How do you think? I had you in my mailbox.’

  Huh?

  ‘But that’s impossible.’ Rather awkwardly, Marc extracted his mobile from the pocket of his jeans. ‘I don’t have your number any more.’

  ‘Are you joking? We spoke together only yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, but someone swiped my SIM card. I don’t know your mobile number by heart and your receptionist at the clinic wouldn’t put me through.’ Marc showed him the blank display. ‘Anyway, the thing doesn’t work.’

  ‘Your SIM card was stolen?’ Constantin asked, sounding puzzled, and took the mobile from him.

  Just then Stoya walked over to them. ‘Is there a problem?’

  Like Constantin, Stoya ignored his colleague and directed the question straight at the senior figure of the three. As in the animal world, so in a police station, alpha males seemed to recognize each other instinctively.

  ‘There is indeed. I’m Professor Constantin Senner, and I wish to know, this instant, what gave you the right to haul my son-in-law into this police station.’

  ‘In the first place, we didn’t haul Herr Lucas—’

  ‘Dr Lucas,’ Constantin broke in.

  ‘Very well, we didn’t haul Dr Lucas in here. He came on a voluntary basis, and—’

  ‘Is that correct?’ Constantin cut the inspector short again. He gave Marc a searching look.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why?’

  Because someone has stolen my identity. Because the miserable remnants of my life have been smashed to smithereens and I need someone to gather up the pieces.

  ‘I needed assistance from someone impartial,’ Marc said, sensing how cryptic that sounded.

  ‘Are you in some kind of trouble?’ Constantin’s leather soles squeaked as he took a step towards him. Unconsciously, Marc ran his forefingers over the cracked skin around his thumbnails.

  ‘I’ll explain when we get out of here.’

  ‘Which may take some time.’ The young cop had summoned up the courage to open his mouth again. ‘We still have to question him about a theft.’

  ‘A theft?’

  Marc fingered the plaster on his neck and sighed. ‘I needed some medication and the chemist wouldn’t accept my credit cards, but that’s immaterial now.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Constantin. ‘You mean you actually took the stuff without paying?’

  ‘Yes, but not deliberately. I simply forgot.’

  ‘You forgot to pay?’

  ‘You’d understand if you knew what’s happened to me today.’

  ‘Then kindly explain. I’m rather confused, to put it mildly, and—’

  ‘Could I have a quick word with you?’ This time it was Stoya who cut in on the surgeon. He indicated a massive concrete column adorned with not one but two ‘No Smoking’ signs. Constantin hesitated for a moment, then followed him, glancing back at Marc twice before he disappeared from view behind the column.

  The inspector and his father-in-law were only three metres away, but the ground-floor acoustics were so bad Marc could only pick up a few scraps of their conversation. Furthermore, the young cop was trying to repair his damaged authority by enlightening Marc on the serious consequences of his theft, which might even constitute credit-card fraud. He was all the more taken aback a minute or two later when Stoya reappeared with Constantin and instructed him to release Marc at once.

  Thirty seconds later Marc was standing outside the precinct gates in the pouring rain, wondering yet again what had happened to him.

  ‘What about the charge?’ he asked his father-in-law.

  ‘I fixed it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Stoya’s a sensible fellow. He’s also got more important things on his plate tonight. I undertook to settle the bill and he understood your circumstances.’

  ‘My circumstances?’

  ‘He now knows what you’ve been through these last few weeks. It’s no wonder you’re a bit forgetful.’

  ‘Forgetful? I saw Sandra today.’

  Marc faced away from the wind. Raindrops drummed on the back of his head. They seemed to have no effect on his father-in-law’s immaculately wavy hair.

  ‘I know, I see her myself. All the time.’ Constantin pressed the remote control on his car key and opened the central locking of a Mercedes saloon double-parked right outside the police station. There were two faint beeps and the warning lights fli
ckered, but he continued to stand on the pavement, brushing away several raindrops that had lodged in his bushy eyebrows.

  ‘I even ran after a woman in the park the other day. She looked like Sandra from behind.’

  He fingered his prominent Adam’s apple and massaged his neck. His voice developed a tremor.

  ‘And yesterday, when a young woman was sitting in my consulting room, I wept, despite myself. She didn’t even resemble her. It was just that she looked at her fingernails while speaking, the way Sandra did when she was nervous.’

  Marc shook his head and drew back. ‘No, you don’t understand. She was real.’

  He stepped out into the road and heard the central locking click shut because too much time had elapsed without anyone getting into the car. Going up to it, he rested both arms on the roof and shut his eyes.

  ‘Grief is driving me mad too, Marc, but it won’t get us anywhere.’

  Marc didn’t look up, didn’t speak. Not even when he felt an arm drape itself around his shoulders.

  ‘You’re probably suffering from post-traumatic shock. Let’s go to the clinic and I’ll give you something.’

  A fat raindrop burst right on Marc’s forehead.

  ‘I know what I saw,’ he whispered, more to himself than to Constantin.

  ‘The way you know your mobile isn’t working?’

  Marc opened his eyes and spun round. For the second time that night he stared incredulously at his phone, which Constantin was holding up for him to see.

  ‘How did you do it?’

  He wiped his wet hands on his jeans and opened the contacts menu.

  This is impossible.

  All the entries were complete.

  ‘You switched it to flight mode by mistake, that’s all. That’s why you couldn’t call anyone.’

  Marc’s hands started trembling. He felt suddenly hypoglycemic, as if he’d just completed a mental forced march.

  Can this really be? Am I so deranged I can’t operate my own phone?

  ‘Let’s go to the clinic,’ Constantin repeated. He unlocked the car again.

  But why did a strange man answer my land line?

  Marc raised his head and watched an ambulance with dirty headlights coming slowly down the street past the police station. He couldn’t see inside, as the side windows were reflecting the street lights.

  ‘Okay,’ he said at length, when the ambulance had driven past. ‘Let’s go. Not to the clinic, though.’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘I want to see if I’ve really lost my mind. And for that I need your help.’

  29

  No Admittance.

  The same doormat, the same old block of flats pervaded by the same stale smells of food, the same sisal runner on the scuffed wooden stairs and the overflowing metal letterboxes in the entrance hall.

  All that had changed in the last few hours was Marc’s general condition. His physical and mental states seemed to be becoming more and more similar – heading for rock bottom. He wondered, as he accompanied his father-in-law up the stairs to his flat, whether his physical discomfort was just a painful concomitant of his hallucinations, or whether the exact opposite applied and his hallucinations were being caused by the steadily worsening pains in his head and limbs.

  ‘Do you have to live in this area?’ asked Constantin, who appeared to be taking the stairs with ease. The surgeon worked out for an hour and a half every other day in the basement of his art nouveau villa, the only part of the house devoid of air-conditioning. He took the view that a work-out wasn’t a work-out unless you wound up sweating like a pig.

  ‘I can well understand why you didn’t want to go on living in your old home, not after. . .’ he said thoughtfully.

  After. . .

  Marc turned to his father-in-law, who was distastefully eyeing a baby buggy parked outside someone’s door.

  ‘But here?’ Constantin shook his head. Even his housekeeper lived in a more exclusive residential area.

  Marc clasped his side to combat the stitch that had suddenly hampered his breathing. ‘There are worse places,’ he panted, and trudged on up the stairs.

  For instance, the Berlin district in which he himself had been raised. Where their neighbour on the balcony below fired his Kalashnikov in the air whenever Galatasaray scored a goal back home in his native Turkey. Marc had seriously considered moving back there after Sandra’s death – back to his roots. Then it struck him that his roots had been severed long ago, the first of them by the death of his father, whose sudden demise had aroused wild speculation in the neighbourhood. ‘Frank Lucas drank himself to death – must have been in debt, and no wonder, with those good-for-nothing sons of his. His old woman probably lifts her elbow as well.’

  At first his mother had tried to enlighten their neighbours on the true circumstances of her husband’s death and tell them about his congenital liver trouble, which had been diagnosed far too late because the doctors had concentrated on his mental state. In a healthy person the amount of alcohol Frank had been drinking towards the end would not have been lethal, but he’d never been healthy. As for Marc’s mother, she never regained her own health. Only a few months after her husband’s death she died of heart failure – in every sense of the term.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Marc asked wearily as he continued to drag himself up the stairs.

  Behind him, Constantin sighed. ‘I thought we’d been through all that. You called me, I went to the police station, and –

  ‘No, I don’t mean that. You’re still speaking to me. I wonder why.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s it.’ His father-in-law was far too intelligent a man for Marc to have to say more.

  Constantin had become the most important person in Marc’s life after his father died, a mentor who had urged him to make the most of his abilities instead of wasting them. It had never been a question of money. All Constantin had done was motivate Marc by introducing him to people who had made something of their lives. But it hadn’t been like that at first.

  ‘You think I should be angry with you?’ Constantin asked, catching him up. ‘You think I should wash my hands of you?’

  ‘You tried to once.’

  Constantin grimaced, and Marc promptly apologized for hitting him below the belt. Six months after their first meeting at the villa, Constantin had taken him aside and shepherded him into the drawing room, leaving Sandra and her mother in the kitchen. Marc thought at first that the ice had finally broken, because Constantin’s manner towards him was friendly for the first time. He even chuckled as he handed Marc an envelope containing the equivalent of €20,000 in crisp new 100-mark notes. Sandra had told Constantin about his father’s financial problems. Frank Lucas’s law firm was already in the red at that stage, so the family’s debts would have been cleared at a stroke.

  ‘Break it off with my daughter and the money’s yours.’

  Marc hadn’t turned a hair. He thanked Constantin politely for his generous offer. Then he went over to the fireplace and, without a moment’s hesitation, tossed the envelope into the flames.

  ‘I thought you’d finally forgiven me for that.’

  ‘I have,’ said Marc. He nodded, leaning against the banisters.

  Back then, Marc had gathered from the hint of a smile on Constantin’s lips that he’d been put to the test. He had passed it with flying colours, even though Constantin hadn’t reckoned with his future son-in-law’s impulsive reaction. From that moment on, the Senner family had been poorer by €20,000 but richer by one new member of the family.

  ‘You were afraid I was only interested in your money.’

  ‘Worse than that. I thought you’d break Sandra’s heart.’

  ‘Well, now I’ve even managed to kill her.’

  By now, they had reached the third floor and were only a few metres away from what Marc had until recently thought of as his own flat.

  ‘Tell me, are you still taking your pills?’ Constantin asked in a worried voice. He had j
ust noticed Marc nervously feeling the back of his neck.

  ‘The immuno-suppressives?’ Marc shook his head. Constantin looked more worried still.

  ‘But you were given enough to last until your checkup next week.’

  ‘I know, but they’re in there.’

  Marc indicated the door of the flat. The overhead light in which the moth had been fluttering around had given up the ghost completely.

  ‘Fine, so let’s go in and get them. Then I’ll take you to the clinic for observation.’

  ‘I’m only too happy to go, but. . .’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Take a look at that.’ Marc pointed to the door. ‘I knew it! I’m not completely deranged.’

  Although the light from the stairwell was dim, he’d seen it at a glance.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The name on the card. It’s still wrong.’

  Constantin went right up to the door. He took his reading glasses from his coat pocket and held them up to his eyes without putting them on.

  ‘Semmler,’ he read slowly.

  What?!

  ‘No, no. . .’

  Marc peered at the card too.

  Shit, what is it this time?

  Constantin struck a match, but Marc already knew his father-in-law was right.

  Semmler. Not Senner.