Passenger 23 Read online

The rather overweight inspector greeted the caller with an eloquent, ‘Hmm?’ and during the course of the conversation said little more than ‘What?’, ‘No!’, ‘You’re bullshitting me!’ and ‘Tell the arsehole who fucked up to get dressed nice and warm. Why? Because in October it might get fucking cold if he’s lying unconscious outside the station for a few hours once I’m finished with him.’ Kramer hung up.

  ‘Fuck.’

  He loved sounding like an American drug cop. And looking like one too. He wore tatty cowboy boots, jeans with holes in them and a shirt whose red-and-white diamond pattern was reminiscent of dishcloths.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Schwartz said.

  ‘Jensen.’

  ‘What’s he up to?’

  And how can the guy make any trouble? He’s in one of our isolation cells.

  ‘Don’t ask me how, but that bastard’s managed to send Pryga a text.’

  Schwartz nodded. Emotional outbursts like those exhibited by his superior, now tearing his hair out, were alien to him. Apart from an injection of adrenalin right into the chambers of his heart, there was barely anything that could set his pulse racing. Certainly not the news that a con had once again managed to get his hands on drugs, weapons or, like Jensen, a mobile. Prison was better organised than a supermarket, with a larger selection of items and more customer-friendly opening hours. Including Sundays and public holidays.

  ‘Did he warn Pryga?’ he asked Kramer.

  ‘No. The fucker allowed himself a little joke that amounts to the same thing. He was going to let you get caught in the trap.’ The inspector massaged the bags under his eyes, which got larger with every operation. ‘If I wanted to post them they’d have to be sent as a parcel,’ Kramer had recently quipped.

  ‘How so?’ Schwartz asked.

  ‘He texted him that Pryga shouldn’t be shocked if he turned up at the party.’

  ‘Why shocked?’

  ‘Because he’s tripped and broken an incisor. Top left.’

  With his sausage fingers Kramer tapped on the corresponding spot in his mouth.

  Schwartz nodded. He hadn’t credited the pervert with that much creativity.

  He looked at his watch. Just after five p.m.

  Just after ‘too late’.

  ‘Fuck!’ Kramer slapped the computer table in anger. ‘All that preparation – a complete waste of fucking time. We’ve got to call it off.’

  He started clambering into the front seat.

  Schwartz opened his mouth to protest, but knew that Kramer was right. They’d been working towards this day for six months. It had started with a rumour in the community that was so unbelievable they thought for ages it was an urban legend. And yet, as it turned out, ‘bug parties’ weren’t a made-up horror story, but actually existed. They consisted of HIV-infected men having unprotected sex with healthy individuals. For the most part this was consensual – the kick was provided by the risk of infection, and this made such events more of a case for a psychiatrist than the public prosecutor.

  As far as Schwartz was concerned, adults could behave exactly as they wished, so long as everything happened consensually. All that angered him about this was that the insane behaviour of a minority was unnecessarily aggravating the dumb prejudices against AIDS sufferers. For of course bug parties were the absolute exception, whereas the overwhelming majority of infected individuals lived a responsible life, many of them involved in an active battle against the disease and the stigmatisation of its victims.

  A battle to foil the suicidal bug parties.

  Not to mention the psychopathic variants.

  The newest trend in the perverted scene were ‘events’ at which innocents were raped and infected with the virus. Mostly under-aged victims. In front of a paying public. A new attraction at the Berlin funfair of filth which kept its tents open around the clock. Often in elegant houses in middle-class areas where you’d never suspect anything like that might occur.

  Detlev Pryga, a man who in normal life sold plumbing equipment, was popular with the youth welfare office, as he regularly took in the most difficult foster children. Drug addicts, victims of abuse and other problem cases, who’d spent more time inside children’s homes than classrooms. Troubled souls who were perfectly used to exchanging sex in return for somewhere to spend the night. Nobody noticed if they soon vanished again, to be picked up again some time later, dishevelled and ill. The perfect victims, troublemakers who shunned the law and who were rarely believed if they ever sought help.

  Liam, the twelve-year-old boy from the streets, who’d been living in Pryga’s house for a month, would also be thrown back into the gutter very soon after this evening. Before that, however, he was going to be forced to have sex with Kurt Jensen, a forty-three-year-old HIV-infected paedophile, in front of an audience of guests.

  Pryga had met Jensen via relevant chatrooms on the internet, thereby falling into the police’s net.

  The child abuser had now been in custody for two weeks, during which Schwartz had been making preparations to assume Jensen’s identity. This was a relatively simple matter, as there hadn’t been any exchange of photos between him and Pryga. He just had to wear the leather outfit that Pryga had requested for the filming and shave his head, because Jensen had described himself as tall and slim, with green eyes and a bald head. Features which, thanks to the shave and contact lenses, now applied to Martin Schwartz too.

  The most difficult aspect of his disguise was the positive AIDS test that Pryga demanded. Not in advance, but at the party itself. He’d explained that he’d be equipped with a rapid test from an online Dutch pharmacy. All it needed was a drop of blood and the result would be visible on the test strip within three minutes.

  Schwartz knew that this fundamentally insurmountable problem was the reason he’d been the one chosen for this operation. Since the death of his family he’d been regarded in police circles as a ticking time bomb. A thirty-eight-year-old undercover investigator, marching briskly towards retirement age in his profession, and lacking the key thing that kept him and his team alive in emergencies: a sense of fear.

  He’d been examined four times by police psychologists. And four times they’d come to the conclusion that he hadn’t got over his wife’s suicide – let alone the fact that she’d killed their son beforehand. Four times they recommended early retirement, because a man who no longer saw any point in his life would take irresponsible risks in the line of duty.

  They’d been right four times.

  And yet here he was again in the police vehicle, not only because he was the best for the job, but chiefly because no one else would voluntarily have HIV antibodies injected into their bloodstream to manipulate the instant test. Although a special sterilisation process purified the blood serum of pathogens that triggered AIDS, the team doctor refused to declare it one hundred per cent safe, which is why as soon as this was over Schwartz had to start a four-week course of drug therapy, known as post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP for short. Something he’d already been through once before when a junkie in Hasenheide Park jammed a bloody needle into his neck. The instruction leaflet that came with the ‘after pills’, which had to be taken two hours at the latest after the danger of infection, noted that the possible side effects were headache, diarrhoea and vomiting. Schwartz seemed to be more sensitive than other subjects. He may not have been sick or spent longer on the loo than normal, but terrible migraines had driven him to the verge of passing out, even beyond sometimes.

  ‘I’ve got to get cracking,’ he said to Kramer while eyeing the monitor. Nobody had entered the house for ten minutes.

  They’d counted seven guests: five men, two women. All had come by taxi. Handy, if you wanted to avoid your registration number being taken down.

  ‘What if Pryga has made contingency plans and found a replacement for me, just in case I pull out?’ Schwartz asked. In all likelihood the guests were healthy. Certainly not mentally, but physically so. But of course they couldn’t know for certain.
r />   Kramer shook his head. ‘There aren’t so many infected paedophiles prepared to do such a thing. You know how long Pryga had to look for Jensen?’

  Yes, he did.

  All the same. The risk was too great.

  They couldn’t just storm the house either. They wouldn’t be able to provide a valid reason for doing so. The rape was scheduled to take place in the basement. Pryga had dogs that announced the arrival of every visitor. Even if they went at lightning speed they wouldn’t manage to break down the doors and catch the perpetrators in flagrante. And on what suspicion would they arrest those present? It wasn’t a crime to lock oneself into a boiler room and set up a camera beside a mattress. Not even if there was a young boy lying on it with a bare torso.

  ‘We can’t risk a twelve-year-old boy being raped and infected with HIV,’ Schwartz protested.

  ‘I don’t know if I spoke too quickly back then,’ Kramer said, stressing each word very deliberately, as if talking to an imbecile. ‘You’re not going in there. You’ve. Got. All. Your. Teeth.’

  Schwartz rubbed his three-day or seven-day beard. He couldn’t say for sure when he’d last slept at home.

  ‘What about Doctor Malchow?’

  ‘The team doctor?’ Kramer looked at him as if he’d just asked for an adult nappy. ‘Listen, I know you’re a sandwich short of a picnic, but even you can’t be so crazy as to have your teeth sliced off. And even if…’ Kramer broke off, checking his watch. ‘It would take Malchow at least twenty minutes to get here. You’d need another three for the anaesthetic, and five for the operation.’ He pointed to the monitor that showed the front of the house. ‘Who’s to say the party won’t be over in half an hour?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Schwartz said, sitting down exhausted on an upholstered bench that ran along the side of the van.

  ‘We’ll abort then?’ Kramer said.

  Rather than answering, Schwartz felt under his seat. He pulled out his army-green duffle bag that accompanied him on every operation.

  ‘What’s going on?’ the chief asked.

  Schwartz threw the clothes he’d exchanged earlier for his leather gear onto the floor and rummaged around at the bottom of the bag.

  It took him no more than a few seconds to find what he was looking for amongst the cables, rolls of sticky tape, batteries and tools.

  ‘Tell me this is a joke,’ Kramer said when Schwartz asked him for a mirror.

  ‘Forget it,’ Schwartz replied with a shrug. ‘I can manage without one.’

  Then he put the pliers to his upper left incisor.

  2

  Six hours later

  ‘You’re completely insane.’

  ‘Thanks for putting it so gently.’

  ‘No, you really are.’

  The suntanned dentist looked like she wanted to give him a slap. Now she was going to ask him if he thought he was Rambo, just as Kramer, the head of special forces, the two paramedics and half a dozen others had done since the operation finished.

  The dentist, Dr Marlies Fendrich according to the nametag on her hospital coat, sounded under stress as she breathed through her sky-blue, disposable face mask.

  ‘Who do you think you are? Rambo?’

  He smiled, which was a mistake, because it allowed cold air to get to the open nerve. He’d snapped the tooth off just above the jawbone; pain shot through his body each time he touched the stump with his tongue.

  The chair he was on sank back. A wide arc lamp appeared above his head and blinded him.

  ‘Open up!’ the dentist commanded, and he obeyed.

  ‘Do you know how much work it is to reconstruct that tooth?’ he heard her say. She was so close to his face that he could see her pores. Unlike him she set great store by grooming. His last exfoliation had been a year ago, when the two Slovenes dragged him by his face across the service station car park.

  It was never good when your cover was busted.

  ‘You’ve left me with barely a millimetre of tooth to work with, far too little to put a crown on,’ Marlies kept grumbling. ‘We could try an extrusion, that’s to say pull out the root that’s still in the jaw. But better would be a surgical crown-lengthening, then we might get away without an implant. But first the root canal needs to be thoroughly cleansed. After what you did, I imagine you don’t need any anaesthetic if I grind the bone a little…’

  ‘Twelve!’ Martin said, interrupting her verbal torrent.

  ‘What do you mean twelve?’

  ‘That’s how old the boy was they’d chained into a swing. He was wearing a clamp to keep his mouth open so he couldn’t refuse oral sex. I was supposed to infect him with HIV.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ The dentist’s face lost several shades of its holiday tan. Schwartz wondered where she’d been. In the middle of October you needed to go a fair distance to lie in the sun. Or you were just lucky. As he and Nadja once had been, six years ago. Their last trip to Mallorca. They’d been able to celebrate Timmy’s tenth birthday on the beach, and he’d got sunburn. A year later his wife and son were dead and he hadn’t gone on holiday since.

  ‘The perpetrator was expecting a bald man with a missing incisor. What can I say…?’ He rubbed his hairless scalp. ‘My barber is in just as bad a mood as you.’

  The dentist forced a nervous smile. Schwartz could tell that she didn’t know if he was joking.

  ‘Did he, the boy, I mean, was he…?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ he replied. Or at least as fine as a foster child could possibly be, back in a home right after having been freed from the clutches of perverted lunatics. Schwartz had waited until he’d recorded Pryga’s order to ‘give it to the boy in every hole’. The camera in the studs of his leather jacket captured the expectant grins of all the guests, to whom he’d turned before saying ‘toaster’, the agreed signal for the SWAT team to attack. Together with the seemingly positive HIV test and the video from Pryga’s tripod camera, they had enough evidence to put the bastards away for a very, very long time.

  ‘Maybe even two and a half years, with a bit of luck,’ Kramer had said gloomily as he drove Schwartz to the hospital where they gave him his PEP medicine: three pills a day for five weeks. Kramer had to sort out all the paperwork, which is why Martin was obliged to make his own way to the dental clinic, where now, after another two hours’ waiting, he was finally being seen.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the dentist apologised. She had a small face with ears that were slightly too big, and cute freckles on her nose. In another life Schwartz might have considered asking for her telephone number, only to think twice because he was married. The timing was never right. Either you met a pretty woman and had a ring on your finger. Or the ring was off and every pretty woman reminded you of what you’d lost.

  ‘All they told me was that you’d injured yourself in service. That you were just a…’

  ‘A madman?’ Schwartz finished the part of the sentence the dentist hadn’t dared complete.

  ‘Yes. I didn’t know that—’

  ‘It’s alright. Just get the rest of it out and sew it all back together.’

  Dr Fendrich shook her head. ‘It’s not as simple as all that. You must want it reconstructed…’

  ‘No,’ Schwartz said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  ‘But surely you care about being disfigured like—’

  ‘If you knew how few things I care about,’ he said flatly. His mobile vibrated in his trouser pocket. ‘Hold on a sec, please.’

  He had to turn to the side slightly to fish it from his back pocket. Whoever it was calling him, they were withholding their number.

  ‘Listen, there are other patients waiting outside—’ the dentist began another incomplete sentence, turning away in irritation when Schwartz ignored her protest.

  ‘Hello?’

  No answer. Just a loud rustling that reminded him of old modems and the AOL advertisement from the 1990s.

  ‘Hello?’

  He heard the echo of his own voice and was just about to
hang up when there was a clatter on the line, as if someone were playing with dice on a glass table. Then the rustling grew quieter, there were two loud crackles, and all of a sudden he could understand every word. ‘Hello? My name is Gerlinde Dobkowitz. Am I speaking to a Herr Martin Schwartz?’

  He blinked in alarm. People who rang this number had no reason to ask his name. He’d given his private number to a select few, all of whom knew who he was.

  The unfamiliar voice on the phone had a Viennese accent and belonged either to an old woman or a young lady with a serious alcohol problem. Schwartz thought the first more likely, because of her antiquated first name and old-fashioned way of speaking.

  ‘Where did you get my number?’ he asked.

  Even if the woman was from the telephone company, which he didn’t believe, she wouldn’t have addressed him with his real name but with ‘Peter Pax’, the pseudonym he’d registered the number under years ago. It was his favourite alias as it reminded him of Peter Pan.

  ‘Let’s just say I’m a dab hand at research,’ the caller said.

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I’ll tell you that as soon as we meet.’ Gerlinde Dobkowitz gave a hoarse cough. ‘You must come aboard as quickly as you can.’

  ‘Aboard? What are you talking about?’

  Schwartz noticed the dentist give him a searching look as she arranged her instruments on a side table.

  ‘The Sultan of the Seas,’ he heard the old woman say. ‘At the moment we’re sailing somewhere in the English Channel, on our way from Hamburg to Southampton. You have to join us as soon as you can.’

  Schwartz went cold. Earlier, when he’d been standing opposite Pryga, he wasn’t nervous. Not even when he’d given blood for the HIV test in Pryga’s hallway and it had taken more than the three projected minutes for the second line in the window of test strip to appear. Not even when he saw the naked boy in the swing and the fire doors had closed behind him. But now his pulse was racing. And the wound in his mouth throbbed to the rhythm of his heartbeat.

  ‘Hello? Herr Schwartz? You know the ship, don’t you?’ Gerlinde asked.