JF04 - The Carnival Master (10 page)

Ansgar had never married. He had never met anyone who would have understood his
particular
needs. And those needs would have eventually emerged. There had been women, but again he had kept his behaviour within the range of that which should be expected. For the other needs, for his true needs, there had been the women he had paid. And he had had to pay well. But Ansgar’s lack of a normal romantic life had meant he had no wife. The closest he had to a child was Adam, whom he was training. Adam was nineteen, eager and hardworking. Ansgar found in Adam someone to whom he could pass on the sacred knowledge of the
chef de cuisine
.

Ansgar had set the machinery of the kitchen in motion for luncheon. Each member of staff undertaking their preparatory roles. He took Adam to one side, taking this time to induct his protégé in yet another level of the culinary arts.

‘I want you to prepare the
Wildschweinschinken
. It goes on the menu this lunchtime.’

‘Yes,
Chef
,’ said Adam eagerly. Ansgar had previously allowed him to prepare the leg of wild boar. He had carefully mixed the coating of herbs, spices and mustards, exactly to Ansgar’s otherwise secret
recipe, and had rubbed them into the boar flesh. That had been a month ago, and the wild pig’s leg had been marinating and curing in the big storage refrigerator since then. Adam brought the boar ham from the fridge and placed it on the carving board.

‘We will carve this slice by slice only as and when an order comes in,’ said Ansgar. ‘But I want you to practise carving a couple of slices from it. Also, I intend to serve it with a salad. I want you to suggest something appropriate.’

Adam frowned. ‘Well …’

‘No, not yet. First I want you to carve the meat. Examine its texture, its consistency.’

Adam nodded and, holding the leg with the carving fork, placed his blade against it.

‘Wait,’ said Ansgar patiently. ‘I want you to think more about your cut. Not just how thick or thin to carve the slices. I want you to think about the beast this meat came from. Close your eyes and picture it.’

Adam looked embarrassed for a moment, then closed his eyes.

‘Can you see it?’

‘Yes. A wild boar.’

‘Okay. Now I want you to think about where it foraged for food in the forest. About its shape, about the speed with which it could run. I want you to visualise that for a moment. Can you see it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. Now open your eyes and carve. Then, without thinking any more about it, I want you to tell me what salad I should serve it with.’

Adam shaved a perfect flake of ham from the joint, placed it on a plate and looked at Ansgar, beaming. ‘It should be served with wild mushroom, fennel, orange and rocket salad.’

‘Do you see? Do you see what happens when you think beyond the food, beyond the meat … to the living flesh? Do that, and you will be a great cook, Adam. Do that, and you will always understand the true nature of the food that you serve.’

With that, Ansgar stole a glance across the kitchen at Ekatherina.

Fabel wanted to buy a polo-neck sweater so he headed down to the Alsterhaus department store on Jungfernstieg, next to the Alster lake. Shopping in the Alsterhaus was a luxury he afforded himself perhaps a little too frequently, but he enjoyed browsing in its halls and treating himself to a morsel or two from the cheese bistro on the store’s top floor. He had decided to walk into town and the promise of a fine morning had been fulfilled: the blanket of grey had broken up and the sky was a cold, bright blue.

As he approached Jungfernstieg, he heard music. Fabel noticed a group of about a dozen men and women harmonising in a language that you didn’t need to understand to know that this was a song about pain and sorrow. The choir stood on the wide pavement a few metres from the deco-arched entrance to the Alsterhaus. Three men of Slavic appearance, like fishermen in a stream, were trying to hook the attention of passers-by. One of them approached Fabel.

‘We’re collecting signatures, sir. I wonder if I might trouble you for a moment.’

‘I’m afraid I’m—’

‘I’m sorry, sir, I won’t keep you. But do you know
anything about the Holodomor?’ The Slav held him with a steady, inquisitive gaze. Fabel noticed the man’s eyes. Piercing blue, and cold; like the winter-morning sky above them. He felt a lurch in his gut as he thought of another Slav he had known who had piercingly bright eyes.

‘Are you Ukrainian?’ Fabel asked.

‘Yes, I am.’ The Slav smiled. ‘The Holodomor was the deliberate genocide of my people, carried out by the Soviet Union and Stalin. Between seven and ten million Ukrainians died. One quarter of the Ukrainian population. Starved to death by the Soviets between nineteen thirty-two and thirty-three.’ He flicked open the folder he had been holding beneath his clipboard. It was filled with grainy black-and-white photographs of human misery: emaciated children, bodies lying in the street, huge communal grave pits being filled with stick-like bodies. The images were redolent of those that Fabel had grown to associate with the Holocaust. ‘At one point, twenty-five thousand Ukrainians were dying every day. And practically no one outside Ukraine knows about the Holodomor. Even in Ukraine it was only after independence that we spoke about it openly. Russia still refuses to acknowledge that the Holodomor was an act of deliberate genocide. They say it was the result of incompetent collectivisation by Stalin’s commissars.’

‘And you dispute this?’ said Fabel. He looked at his watch to check how much time he had before he was due to meet Susanne on the top floor of the Alsterhaus.

‘It’s a downright lie,’ continued the Slav, undeterred. ‘People starved to death all over the Soviet Union because of Stalin’s insane collectivisation mania.
That’s true. But in nineteen twenty-seven we had started to Ukrainianise our country. We made Ukrainian, not Russian, our official language. Stalin saw us as a threat, so he tried to exterminate us by starving us. More than twenty-five per cent of the Ukrainian population were wiped out. Please, your signature will help us have this crime recognised for what it is: genocide. We need the German and British and other governments to do what Spain has already done and formally recognise the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m not saying that I won’t support your claim, but I can’t sign this until I know more about what happened. I need to find out more about it for myself.’

‘I understand.’ The man handed Fabel a leaflet. ‘This tells you where you can get more information. Not just from our organisation. But please, sir, when you have read all of this, please visit our website and add your name to our list there.’

When Fabel looked up from the leaflet the Ukrainian was already hooking another shopper from the stream on the pavement.

Fabel made his way up to the top floor of the Alsterhaus. Susanne wasn’t there when he arrived, so he bought a coffee and sat in the café by the escalators and with a view of their agreed meeting place. He looked for a moment at the leaflet he had been handed by the Ukrainian. Fabel hadn’t come across the name ‘Holodomor’ before, but he had heard of the great starvation in the nineteen-thirties. In the nineteen-eighties, the Ukrainian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo had cited the Holodomor as part of the reason he had turned cannibal. Chikatilo’s brother had been murdered and eaten by starving
villagers, but all that had been before Chikatilo’s birth. One detail that the campaigners, quite understandably, had chosen to omit from the leaflet was that the Holodomor had resulted in mass cannibalism. The Soviet authorities had set up special tribunals to try and execute people found to have consumed human flesh. Distraught parents had had to find secret burial places when a child died because it was so common for the corpse to be dug up as meat. Worse still, there had been many instances of parents killing and eating their own children. Even today in Ukraine, there was an unusually high number of serial murders involving cannibalism.

But for Fabel, Ukraine had only one significance: that it had been the dark cradle out of which Vasyl Vitrenko had crawled. It was maybe this thought that prompted Fabel to take out his mobile and call Maria Klee. The phone rang a few times, then the tone changed as his call was redirected to her cellphone. Her voice sounded flat and dull as she answered.

‘Maria? It’s Jan. I thought I’d give you a ring to see how you are doing. Is this a bad time?’ Fabel had had the idea that Maria hadn’t ventured out from her apartment much during her sick leave. He took her not being at home as a positive sign.

‘Oh, I’m fine …’ Maria sounded taken aback. ‘I’m just doing some shopping. How are you?’

‘I’m okay. Shopping too, in the Alsterhaus. How’s therapy going?’ Fabel winced at his own clumsiness. There was a short pause at the other end of the phone.

‘Fine. Making progress. I’ll be back at work soon. It won’t be the same without you.’

‘Is that good or bad?’ Fabel’s laugh sounded fake.

‘Bad.’ No laugh. ‘Jan … I think I might give it up too.’

‘Maria, you’re an excellent police officer. You still have a great future to look forward to.’ Fabel heard himself repeat what had been said to him so many times by his own superiors. ‘But it’s your decision. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last couple of years, it’s that if you feel you have to do something, don’t wait. Do it.’

‘That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. Recently … well, with all of the things that have happened …’ There was something about Maria’s voice – a detachedness, a remoteness – that emphasised for Fabel every centimetre of empty air it traversed on the crest of a microwave. It was the voice of someone lost and Fabel felt panic rise in his chest.

‘Maria … why don’t I come over later and see you? I think it would be good to talk …’

‘I would like that … but not now, Jan. I’m not ready to see anyone from work. I think … you know, with my therapy and everything … Actually, Dr Minks has said it would be better for me to avoid contact with colleagues for a while.’

‘Oh? I understand,’ Fabel said, although he didn’t. ‘Maybe soon.’

They said goodbye and Fabel hung up. When he looked up he saw that Susanne had arrived and was scanning the Alsterhaus for him.

Maria switched off her cellphone before slipping it back into her jacket pocket. She hadn’t actually told Fabel a lie, but what she had done was effectively lying by omission.

The furnishings were typical budget hotel. She took her clothes from her suitcase and folded them into the cheap laminated chest of drawers, moving, as always, with economical precision. After Maria had unpacked, and with the same economy of movement, she hung up her jacket on a hanger, walked through to the small dimly lit en-suite bathroom, knelt down by the toilet bowl and inserted her long, manicured index finger into her mouth. Her vomiting was almost instantaneous. The first few times she had done this it had taken a long time: eye-watering, unproductive retching before she finally threw up. But now she had refined the action to a hair-trigger mechanism, allowing her to void her stomach with speed and ease. She stood up, rinsed her mouth at the washbasin and returned to the bedroom.

She went across to the window and swung it open. There was a lot of activity in the street below. Voices that were not German reached up to her: Turkish,
Parsi, Russian. Ukrainian. This part of the city merged and mingled cultures rather than stitched them together in a patchwork. The hotel had six storeys and Maria’s room was on the top floor; she looked out over rooftops huddled under the dark and heavy winter sky. Directly across was an apartment with a rooftop terrace. All the lights were on and Maria could see a woman cleaning the apartment. She was youngish with a mass of dark hair and a voluptuous figure. Maria speculated that the woman was Turkish. It looked to Maria as if she was singing as she vacuumed. Maria had no idea if the woman lived in the apartment or was merely a cleaner, but whatever her status or situation she looked to Maria as if she was someone totally comfortable with who, where and what she was. Maria felt a pang of jealousy and looked away.

It was sunny in faraway Hamburg, she thought as she gazed at the massive dark spires of Cologne Cathedral piercing the sullen sky.

It was Susanne’s deliberate cheerfulness that got to Fabel the most. He knew that she was doing her best not to let her anger with him reach boiling point again. Susanne was from Munich and culturally oriented towards the South and the Mediterranean. Fabel often envied her ability to let her emotions boil over and in doing so extinguish the flame beneath them. Fabel, on the other hand, was aware of his doubly northern mixed heritage. He kept a lid on things. Like a pressure cooker.

‘What’s that?’ Susanne asked, pointing to the leaflet on the table. Fabel explained briefly about
the encounter with the Ukrainian protester on Jungfernstieg outside the Alsterhaus.

‘Oh … yes, I saw them. Didn’t know they were Ukrainians, though. You know me, I just barge on through anybody I think is trying to sell me something.’

‘It would have to be Ukrainians,’ said Fabel gloomily. ‘Why is it that so many Ukrainians have such striking eyes? You know, very pale, bright blue and green?’

‘Genetics, probably. Didn’t you tell me once that Ukrainians have a lot of Viking blood?’

‘Mmm …’ Fabel was clearly still struggling to wrap himself around jumbled, random thoughts. ‘It’s just something I’ve noticed. And of course …’ He stopped himself.

‘Vitrenko?’ said Susanne with a sigh. ‘Jan, I thought you’d laid that ghost to rest.’

‘I have. It’s just that he came to mind. You know, with meeting that Ukrainian outside.’ Sensing the potential for another argument, he dropped the subject and spoke instead of his forthcoming weekend trip to see his mother, and how it was a pity that Susanne, whom his mother had always liked, couldn’t come.

But all the time he spoke, something about the conversation he’d had with Maria nagged at him. He made a promise to himself to go and see her when he got back from his mother’s. No matter what Dr Minks had said.