Splinter Page 9

  For fear of the truth, the whole family shrank from questioning Frank’s Sunday-lunch accounts of the week’s events. His wife sneaked off to the bottle bank with the empties more and more often to prevent the children and her neighbours from catching on, but she never believed her husband had a drink problem, and Marc himself was now no longer so convinced of it.

  Although the doctors subsequently stated that Frank’s delusions were the result of recurrent alcoholic binges, Marc thought the converse more likely. His father had never drunk himself into a world of illusion; having always lived in one, he’d resorted to the bottle only in his lucid moments, when the agonies of self-recognition became too much to bear. Marc had often wondered if anything could be more terrible than the moment when the veil of illusion is drawn aside to reveal the cruel actuality behind it; the moment when your dearest wish is a swift return to your accustomed world. Even when it doesn’t exist.

  Did you go through this too, Dad?

  Marc breathed deeply, clinging to the construction site’s wire-mesh fence like an exhausted long-distance runner. He had seldom felt as close to his father as he did now. Perhaps the doctors had been wrong to say that Frank’s disorder wasn’t hereditary. Perhaps he, Marc Lucas, wasn’t the person he thought. Perhaps he had never been married, never fathered a baby and never visited this Bleibtreu Clinic. Perhaps the voice behind him existed only in his head. . .

  ‘Excuse me?’

  The woman sounded diffident, like a beggar who has been rebuffed too often to hope for even a modest handout. Turning his head, Marc saw at a glance that there was something wrong with the overweight creature. She was licking her upper lip and plucking nervously at her scabby fingers.

  ‘What is it?’ Marc said brusquely. He was in no mood to help out some vagrant.

  She retreated a step, clinging to the wire-mesh fence like him. The dim light made it hard to tell how much of a down-and-out she was. Her dark, shoulder-length hair might have been greasy or simply wet with rain. The same applied to the white quilted jacket that made her corpulent figure look like a Michelin mascot.

  ‘May I ask you a question?’ she asked softly, as if she dreaded the answer. She stepped forwards into the glare of one of the lights mounted on the fence at two-metre intervals to warn of the abyss beyond it. The sight of her puffy face and scratched hands banished any doubts Marc might have had about her mental state. The woman with the double chin and the cheap glasses with sand-coloured frames was either heavily medicated or suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’ Ostentatiously, Marc looked up as though interested in the crane overhead. A light was still on in the deserted cab. If he hadn’t already been feeling dizzy, just gazing up at it would have made him feel queasy.

  ‘Are you in the programme too?’ asked the timid voice beside him.

  What?

  He didn’t turn to face her until she repeated the question. She removed her glasses and rather clumsily wiped the misted lenses with her bare fingers.

  ‘The programme,’ she said again, looking straight at him for the first time. Her dark, beady little eyes lent her face a doll-like appearance. She might have been younger than him, although she looked older. Marc knew only too well what life on the streets could do to a person. He peered around suspiciously. The pavement was deserted. The shops and offices had been closed for hours.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The trial. The experiment.’

  Although his early warning system had been defective since the accident – it had failed him several times in the past few hours – what little remained of it was sufficient to put him on his guard. It was disconcerting enough to be accosted by a down-and-out while staring into a deserted construction site on a rainy night, but the subject she had just raised rendered the situation thoroughly unreal.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Emma.’ Her arm shot out like that of a child whose parents have told her to shake hands nicely with a guest. ‘My name is Emma Ludwig, and. . .’ Her good-natured expression reminded him of his mother. She used to give him the same kindly, rather wistful look in the kitchen at the end of a long, tiring day. He was about to shake hands when the rest of her sentence made him instinctively recoil. ‘. . .and I’ve been waiting for you for days.’

  A car went speeding through a puddle behind her.

  ‘For me?’

  He swallowed hard. A plump raindrop landed on his bare scalp. He brushed it off before it could make its icy way down his neck. He couldn’t remember when he’d last shaved his head, and the feel of the stubble beneath his fingertips made him even sadder. Sandra had liked it when his ‘haircut’ matched his three-day beard.

  ‘You must be mistaking me for someone else,’ he said at length, letting go of the wire-mesh fence. His jeans had become completely sodden in the short time he’d been standing there.

  ‘No, wait,’ she said. ‘Why did you come here? To this hole in the ground, I mean?’

  Marc retreated a step. His perception of some invisible threat intensified with every word this strange woman uttered.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I think I can help you.’

  ‘Why should you think I’m in need of help?’ he said dismissively.

  Her reply took his breath away. ‘Because I’m a patient too.’

  Too? Why too?

  ‘I was in the Bleibtreu programme just like you.’

  Wrong. I didn’t even sign the application form.

  ‘But then I got out. Since then I’ve spent every spare minute here.’ She indicated the construction site and put her glasses on again. ‘Here beside this hole, on the lookout for people who can’t understand where No. 211 has got to.’

  Marc turned to go. He was itching to get away from her even though he had no idea where he could go in the middle of the night, with no car, no money or medication.

  ‘People like you.’

  He wanted to go to Constantin or his old friend Thomas – even, perhaps, to Roswitha, whom he had never met outside office hours but who at least was a familiar face. In the end, however, he went nowhere. He stayed where he was, but not because the woman who called herself Emma Ludwig had offered to help him, nor because she wanted to show him a file that would, she claimed, be of interest to him.

  ‘Please come with me, Dr Lucas. It’s too dangerous for us to be seen together here.’

  He stayed because this woman, if she really existed, knew his name and shared his belief that there used to be a clinic here. That meant there was an outside chance he hadn’t lost his mind. Then at least he wouldn’t be the only one.

  21

  The situation was ridiculous. Confronting him was an unknown woman who sounded like a paranoid conspiracy theorist. She imagined she was being dogged by unseen pursuers from whom they had to escape at once, yet he felt he had to talk to this creature because she was the first person in ages who appeared to recognize him.

  ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘Yes, come on.’

  Emma pulled a snow-white hood over her bedraggled hair and set off. It was only now that Marc noticed that her knee-boots were, surprisingly, far from down-at-heel. She also seemed to be in better physical condition than her obesity suggested. It was an effort to keep up with her, and he soon broke out into a sweat.

  ‘Do we know each other?’ he asked. Emma strode along with her head down, looking like a boxer on his way to the ring. ‘I mean,’ he added rather breathlessly, ‘have we ever met before?’ He was suffering from the effects of lack of medication and felt even wearier and more wrung out than he usually did at this hour. At least his nausea had subsided a little, but that could be down to the MCP drops he’d taken at the beginning of his last taxi ride.

  ‘No, we’ve never met.’

  Emma’s reply reassured and disturbed him in equal measure. On the one hand, it accorded with his own certainty that he’d never seen this woman before. On the other, it
posed the question of how she knew who he was.

  He caught hold of her sleeve and brought her to a stop. ‘What do you know about me?’

  ‘Please can we straighten that out on the way?’

  ‘On the way to where?’

  A car crawled past. Emma swiftly turned to face a shop window displaying women’s shoes that cost more than a laptop – despite the 30 per cent price reduction emblazoned in bold lettering.

  ‘He’s only looking for a parking place,’ said Marc, and she promptly lost interest in a pair of high-heeled Italian sandals.

  ‘Quick, quick!’

  She hurried across the street, taking a bunch of keys from her jacket pocket. When Marc saw what she was rushing towards, his original assumption about her was finally dispelled. Nobody who drove an old Volkswagen Beetle with a divided rear window could be an urban vagrant.

  But he wasn’t interested in going for a drive in this peculiar creature’s car. He wanted some answers.

  ‘Stop, wait.’

  Although he hadn’t raised his voice she must have sensed its latent threat. She turned and saw the mobile in his hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to call the police and—’

  ‘No, don’t!’

  She came back with her hands outstretched defensively, stark panic in her eyes. Marc knew that look of desperation. He’d often seen it in his street kids when they were told their parents were waiting in the room next door.

  ‘Oh yes, I should have done it before, at the “Beach”.’

  He dialled 110 and put his thumb on the key with the green telephone.

  ‘The “Beach”? That’s what you call your Hasenheide office, isn’t it?’

  How does she know that?

  He removed his thumb from the key.

  ‘What else do you know about me?’

  Emma drew a deep breath.

  ‘You’re Dr Marc Lucas, lawyer and social worker, age thirty-two, of Steinmetzstrasse, Schöneberg. Widower, formerly married to Sandra Senner, thirty-three. She lost her life in a car crash. And. . .’

  She opened the passenger door and went round to the driver’s side.

  ‘. . .and you mustn’t call the police, not under any circumstances.’

  The chill had spread from Marc’s sodden trainers to his throbbing temples. He rubbed his ears, but they were as numb as his fingers.

  ‘Why not?’ he demanded.

  ‘Not before I’ve explained what’s happening to you.’

  She opened the driver’s door, got in and wound the window down. The eyes behind her glasses were blurred by raindrops.

  Marc stared at her. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  She gave him a mournful look and started the engine. It wasn’t loud enough to drown her mysterious and disconcerting reply: ‘I can’t remember.’

  She backed out of the parking space with the passenger door open and pulled up right beside him.

  ‘Please get in, Dr Lucas. We’re in great danger.’

  22

  Benny knew he ought to answer Eddy Valka’s call at once.

  At once. Without fail.

  He couldn’t afford to ignore this muted call or his life would end sooner than he’d planned. Very probably tomorrow morning. By midday at the latest, but only if he was in luck and Valka felt like a lie-in.

  He knew what was at stake. They had agreed that he would confirm that the job was done by eleven that night, and it was long past that.

  But there were two reasons why it was impossible for him to put out his hand and take the mobile from the passenger seat.

  The first reason was that, an overwhelming fit of depression was paralysing him inwardly. The second wore a green peaked cap over her chin-length fair hair and was shining a flashlight in his eyes.

  ‘Traffic control. Papers please.’

  He nodded and leant towards the glove compartment, but his brain refused to transmit the requisite impulses to his muscles.

  Many of the thugs he’d got to know through Valka poked fun at his fits of depression. They categorized them as a woman’s disease, a luxury of affluent society peculiar to gays and chicks. He envied their ignorance of the truth. Genuine depression was like a sponge inside your chest that absorbed dark thoughts, getting heavier and heavier until you could physically feel its weight. It began by affecting your breathing and swallowing, but later it paralysed your every movement until you couldn’t even extricate your head from under the bedclothes.

  ‘A bit faster, if you can.’ The young policewoman looked over at her colleague for help, but he was busy checking another car a few metres away.

  Benny knew why she’d plucked him out of the stream of traffic on Brunnenstrasse. He’d been driving much too fast because the radio oracle had distracted him.

  Will I make it?

  He couldn’t understand why he’d reverted to this silly game of Marc’s, tonight of all nights. It had never brought them anything but aggro.

  The rules of the oracle were simple but hard and fast. You asked a question, for instance: Will I ever be rich and famous? Or: What do I have to do so Nicoletta from the tenth grade lets me feel her up at last? Or, like today: Will I make it? Then you turned on the car radio and the lyrics of the first song you heard supplied the answer.

  Many years ago they had let the radio oracle decide whether they should really dump their father’s car in the flooded gravel pit.

  Benny had been fifteen, Marc sixteen, and they should never, of course, have been driving Frank’s estate. But nothing had ever gone wrong before on their nocturnal jaunts through Berlin. No accidents, no police checks, no stains on the seats. Everything went brilliantly. They crashed three parties a night and the girls let their ‘heroes’ paw them on the back seat because they were just the coolest in their gang: the only teenagers with wheels of their own.

  Until one night, around four in the morning, they drove home to find their father’s parking place outside the falafel restaurant occupied – a parking place reserved by local custom for ‘the lawyer’. Unfortunately, some unwitting idiot with Hamburg licence plates had left his environmental hazard exactly where Lucas Sr would be looking for his car in three hours’ time.

  Marc had consequently suggested dumping the Mercedes in the gravel pit before the shit hit the fan and they were packed off to boarding school. So they’d made one more circuit of the block and turned on the car radio just as ‘Sailing’ came on. This allowed only one possible interpretation, especially as they knew Rod Stewart was singing the song and it was a incontrovertible rule that the oracle counted only if you could identify the singer.

  So they’d dumped the car.

  ‘Here they are.’

  Benny had somehow managed to hand his papers through the window without passing the policewoman the crumpled list of names that had also been in the glove compartment.

  While she was suspiciously eyeing his driver’s licence he picked up his vibrating mobile.

  ‘Call you back right away, Eddy,’ he said, but he earned himself an irritable frown for all that.

  ‘Please get out,’ she said.

  Although surly, her voice was far more enthusiastic than Valka’s at the other end of the line: ‘Am I hearing you right?’ His words were overlaid by loud dance music. He was probably propping up the bar in one of the discos or lap-dancing establishments he controlled. ‘Like hell you will!’

  Did this refer to him calling back or was Valka forbidding him to get out of the car? Benny wasn’t sure.

  ‘How long is this going to take?’ he asked, loudly enough for Valka to hear him.

  Valka was totally unimpressed. ‘Done it?’ he asked.

  Benny gave an affirmative cough.

  ‘That’s entirely up to you,’ the policewoman said briskly, and repeated her request that he get out. Valka went on talking too.

  ‘Good, then bring me the proof.’

  ‘Hang on a moment.’

  ‘To hell with that!’


  Benny laid the mobile aside without ringing off. Summoning up all his energy, he hoisted himself out of the car. The dark sponge inside him made every movement torture.

  He shut his eyes and blew into the breathalyser, long and hard.

  ‘You wait here,’ the policewoman said curtly. She went over to the police van, doubtless to run a check on his papers.

  Benny put the mobile to his ear again. ‘Eddy?’

  ‘Are you crazy, you dickhead, keeping me hanging on like this?’

  ‘Listen, there are cops here. I can’t speak now.’

  Valka yelled something unintelligible and the background music abruptly faded. Then he came back on the line. ‘I want proof that you’ve done the job.’

  ‘It’s in my boot.’

  ‘Which brings us to job number two. Get rid of the garbage.’

  ‘No worries, I’ll do that as soon as I’m past this traffic control point.’

  The door of the police van slid back and the blond policewoman emerged.

  ‘And then get out of town.’

  ‘Doing a John Wayne, are you?’ asked Benny.

  ‘I mean it. That’s job number three: Beat it. I never want to see your face in Berlin again.’

  The policewoman came marching over.

  ‘Okay, give me a couple of days.’

  Benny thought of the list. Only two names had been crossed off. Two out of ten.

  ‘You’ve got two hours.’

  ‘That’s not enough.’

  ‘Shit, I think my mobile’s playing up.’ Valka laughed. ‘I thought I heard you say no.’

  ‘I need a bit more time.’

  ‘What for? To pack your sports bag?’

  ‘I. . .’ Benny gulped. He couldn’t possibly tell Valka the truth. ‘I’ve got to say my goodbyes.’

  ‘Who to?’ Valka laughed again, more derisively this time. ‘Don’t mess me about, amigo. I can’t afford to let people think I’ve gone soft. Get that consignment out of Berlin and never come back, understand?’