Eye Collector, The (30 page)

‘It’s the nicotine patch!’ Dr Roth, the person whose voice I had least expected to hear, sounded as if he had won the lottery.

I switched the phone from one ear to the other in the vague hope of enhancing my comprehension of what he had to tell me.

‘The smoking cure you’re taking contains varenicline, a substance very similar to laburnum, an extremely poisonous plant. In the States, the Federal Aviation Administration has
already banned airline pilots from using it because, like laburnum, it can induce hallucinatory daydreams.’

I felt for the patch on my upper arm.

‘So-called varenic dreams. We’ve found substantial traces of varenicline in your blood, Herr Zorbach. This may account for your nervous condition, and it wouldn’t surprise me
if you perceive colours, smells and light more intensely than normal.’ Dr Roth chuckled. ‘You aren’t having any schizophrenic hallucinations. Simply remove the thing and
you’ll be fine.’

Will I?
I crumpled the patch between my fingers and pressed the red button on my mobile.

I was far from fine. I couldn’t get hold of Frank, the police wanted me for murder, and I’d been told to not worry about my perceptual disorders.

I looked at the window – it was still dark outside. My gaze travelled from the mottled grey lino on the floor to the battery of medical appliances around the bed. I didn’t know what
they were called, but their instruction manuals had to be as thick as phone directories. Then bedside cabinet containing Mother’s old diary caught my eye. It was the one I always read aloud
from when I visited her. She herself would never again be able to open it and wallow in nostalgic memories such as the day we discovered the track to my subsequent hideaway in the Nikolskoë
Forest. I was just about to see if the little, gold-blocked, leather-bound volume was still in the drawer when I spotted what had been disturbing me all the time.

The photograph.

What the...?

It hadn’t been there the last time I visited her. The frame, yes. I had given it to her for Christmas many years ago, together with one of the few snaps of myself that even I liked. Taken
by my father outside our front door, it showed a seven-year-old Alex doing up his shoelaces with an air of intense concentration. The photo had always put me in a melancholy frame of mind because
it was a reminder of a time when being teased in the school playground on account of my cheap sneakers was my greatest cause for concern.

I picked it up.

The picture of me on the stone steps was still in the frame, but it wasn’t as I remembered it. It was a close-up no longer.

I don’t believe this!

I had shrunk to about half my original size. This meant that more of my surroundings were visible and I was...

...no longer alone?

My hands began to shake as I stared at the face of the other boy who had suddenly materialized on the steps beside me and was watching me do up my shoes.

Who are you?
I whispered to myself.
Who on earth are you?

The boy’s face seemed familiar, but he looked younger than me and wasn’t recognizable as one of my friends at the time in question.

What are you doing in my picture?

I turned the frame over, opened the clips that held the cardboard backing in place, and removed the photo.

And how did you get on to my mother’s bedside cabinet?

The boy had flaxen hair. His left eye was covered by a pink plaster of the kind young children are made to wear to cure a squint.

...his left eye...

My bewilderment grew when I discovered the note in pencil on the back:

Grünau, 21.7.(77)

THE EYE COLLECTOR’S SECOND LETTER
EMAILED VIA AN ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT

To: Thea Bergdorf

Subject:... and nothing but the truth!

Dear, purblind Frau Bergdorf,

I must, I’m afraid, continue to address you in this manner because you’re still
blind
to the hidden ‘pieces’ in my
game.

Your eyes will be opened by this second email, which I’m sending you even before the game is over. I hope you’ll be grateful, although I’m assuming that you
check your private account a great deal less regularly than your professional email address. If you did you’d long ago have discovered my first letter and passed it on to the authorities, or
at least published it on your paper’s website.

Well, as I’m sure you can imagine, my own commitments make it hard for me to keep up with everything at this hectic stage in the game. That being so, I’ll come
straight to the point: my motive, which I’m handing you on a plate simply so that you and the miserable lie machine you call a newspaper can inject a little moderation into your malicious
campaign against me in the future. (Wow, I’m sure that was far too long a sentence for someone whose mindless rag normally confines itself to printing sentences in which no commas
occur.)

All I do, I do in order to preserve the only true system of values in the world worth fighting for: the family.

Your paper, which (pardon me) is worth less than the shit on its pages after your readers have used it to line the bottom of their bird cages, condemns me –
me!
– for being a destroyer of families. The opposite is the case. Nothing is closer to my heart than the restoration of the orderly, protective relationships that my brother and I were not
privileged to enjoy.

I think that my little brother suffered most from our father’s lack of love, perhaps because his grave illness rendered him more sensitive than I was. The loss of his
left eye at the age of five affected more than his eyesight. It was almost as if the cancer had eaten into his soul after the eye’s surgical removal had failed to assuage its
hunger.

Mentally more stable than my brother, I found it easier to accept our father’s continual absences, which I sensed even when he wasn’t – for once – away
on a business trip or spending time with his friends.

There came the day when our mother, too, abandoned us – and I mean that in more than a metaphorical sense. Having stowed all her jewellery, cash and papers in the little
sports bag she always took to the gym, she went off and never came back.

Father was furious. ‘What am I supposed to do with you two brats?’ he bellowed. He seemed less annoyed that Mother had skipped out than he was about the fact
she’d neglected to take us with her.

My little brother couldn’t understand at first. He scoured the house in search of our mother for hours on end. He searched the cellar, the attic, the summer house. He
even got into the wardrobe, buried himself sobbing among her clothes, sniffed her perfume, and discovered that she’d taken her favourite blouse with her.

The salmon-coloured silk blouse had suited her. We, her children, had ceased to do so.

That night, when my brother raised the subject of the ‘love test’, I went along with it for the first time. Until then it had never been more than a wild idea, an
unrealistic fantasy entertained by two sad and lonely children. The thing was, my brother had thought up a test that would prove whether or not our parents loved us. It was simple, really: one of
us would have to die.

Hitherto we’d always spoken of drawing lots. The winner would check to see if Mother and Father really wept at the loser’s funeral.

On the day our mother deserted us, however, I suggested another way of testing our father’s love for us.

We would hide!

Not in our tree house or the shack beside the lake, but somewhere we’d never been before.

‘If Daddy still loves us he’ll come looking for us, and the sooner he finds us the more he loves us.’

It was a puerile method such as only a seven-year-old boy and his heartbroken little brother could have devised. But, childishly naive though it was, it displayed a logical
simplicity that still fascinates me today, many years later.

We found a suitable hiding place the following night. Whoever had dumped the old chest freezer in the woods had at least taken the trouble to wash it out with hot water.
Nothing – no smells or labels or scraps of food – gave any indication of what it had contained before we lay down inside it.

We were glad the capacious thing was so close to home. It had been left on the edge of a clearing, beside the path our father took when he went jogging every evening. No one
could have failed to see it, so we weren’t unduly worried when we found we couldn’t open the freezer once we’d pulled the lid down over our heads.

At first we even made jokes about the broken screwdriver with the wooden handle which the previous owner must have left inside the chest, and which kept digging into my
backside. Later, when the air became steadily thinner, it proved as little use to us as the coin in my trouser pocket.

The lid wouldn’t budge because the chest freezer was so old it didn’t yet have a magnetic seal, as modern safety regulations prescribe, but was equipped with a
bolt that could only be opened from the outside.

Our love test had unintentionally become a test of life or death.

‘Daddy will come soon,’ I said.

I said it again and again. At first loudly and with conviction, but then, as I grew tired, ever more faintly. I said it just before I dozed off and immediately after waking
up.

‘Daddy will come soon.’

My little brother heard me say it when he wet himself, when he started crying, and when thirst woke him up again. I also repeated it while he was sleeping his way to
extinction.

‘Daddy will come soon. He loves us, so he’ll come looking and find us.’

But that was a lie. Daddy didn’t come.

Not for twenty-four hours. Not for thirty-six or forty hours.

We were eventually released by a forester.

After forty-five hours seven minutes.

By that time my brother had suffocated. I was told later that my father thought Mummy had changed her mind and come back to fetch us, so he blithely went drinking with friends
instead of looking for us.

I still can’t rid myself of the notion that he might have downed a cold beer at the precise moment when my brother, mad with thirst, ripped the plaster off his empty eye
socket and started chewing it. Never a night goes by but I dream of gazing at that hole in the head of my lifeless brother, who was doomed to die simply because his father had failed the love
test.

My grandparents, to whom the juvenile welfare department entrusted me when my physical condition improved, confessed how worried they had been that the dearth of oxygen in the
chest freezer might have inflicted permanent damage on me. Grandpa, a village vet who continued to practise in old age, believed that contact with fellow creatures in need of help would do me good,
so he took me with him to his surgery, allowed me to assist him, and initiated me by degrees into the secrets of veterinary medicine, which are still of use to me today. For instance, how to gauge
the amount of ketamine to administer in relation to an animal’s age, weight and condition so as to ensure that anaesthesia remains stable during an operation. How to fit the mask over a St
Bernard’s muzzle before you cut its stomach open. Or how to remove a cat’s cancerous eye. Grandpa praised me for my skill and my eagerness to learn.

And, since my grandparents never discovered the remains of the stray village cats – neither those I buried alive nor the ones I stuffed into sacks before pouring petrol
over them – they eventually stopped worrying about the sodden bedclothes in which I regularly woke up.

‘It’s no wonder, considering all that boy went through,’
they kept telling themselves.

They were excellent foster parents.

Kind.

Elderly.

And unsuspecting.

(59 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

ALEXANDER ZORBACH

They had waited until I disappeared into my mother’s room and watched me for a while through the crack in the bathroom door, which was ajar, presumably to satisfy
themselves that I was alone and unarmed. At last, when I was distracted by the photo and holding the frame in both hands, they made their move. Two uniformed policemen, the younger one with a
moustache, the older less muscular but with surprise on his side, rushed out and grabbed me from behind.

They needn’t have pinned me to the floor or plasticuffed my wrists; I’d intended to give myself up in any case.

Scholle was waiting in front of the lifts with a broad grin on his face. ‘Oh sure,’ he said sarcastically when they marched me up to him, ‘of course you meant to turn yourself
in.’

I wondered why the hospital corridor hadn’t been cleared before my arrest. Although there were few people about at that early hour – only one scared nurse flitted past us –
what would have happened if I’d really been the Eye Collector? What if I’d resisted or taken hostages? Even more puzzling was the fact that these cops didn’t look the kind
you’d choose to employ to capture a violent criminal.

Scholle briefly checked my cuffs. Then he and I and the uniformed policemen got into a goods elevator.

‘Minus one?’ I said, when Scholle pressed the relevant button. ‘Are you taking me out through the basement?’

The youngster with the moustache stared indifferently at the bare concrete lift shaft gliding past. The older man, who was casually chewing gum, looked straight through me. Only Scholle
responded to my question.