The Ghosts of Altona (3 page)

Fabel, without bodily sensation, to whom a body now seemed an unnatural and distant concept, could somehow sense that he had started to move, and that he was accelerating to a great speed. The light and colours around him became distorted and stretched and he became aware that he was travelling through a tunnel of no substance. A bright light, that would have dazzled had he still had eyes, seemed to fill everything. Jan Fabel felt a euphoria he had never before experienced. A deep, profound, total, indescribable joy.

In that same instant, and without a sense of motion, he found himself elevated above and looking down on Grosse Brunnenstrasse. The rain-damp road glistened and sparkled with overlapping blue flashes from the cluster of police cars and the ambulance that had pulled up outside the apartment building. There was sudden activity as a group of paramedics and police burst out of the main entrance and rushed a wheeled stretcher over to the open doors of the ambulance. An Emergency Service doctor trotted alongside the stretcher, leaning across it and working on the body of a blond man in his late forties. An oxygen mask obscured the patient’s face, his shirt had been ripped open and the bright white of the wound pads bloomed dark red as he bled out. Fabel observed the scene with dispassion, disinterest: the body on the trolley had been his, but he now had nothing to do with it, had no further use for it. He watched as they loaded the trolley into the ambulance and Anna Wolff, who had been running behind, clambered in after it.

He remembered, as if remembering a story, how he had once been in the business of investigating deaths, had attended countless murder scenes, and he now wondered vaguely how many of the dead had looked down on him with the same dispassionate curiosity while he had stood over their remains.

Fabel drifted up, further above the scene. He was now high above Altona and was surprised to see how close Schalthoff’s apartment had been to his own in Ottensen. Higher. He now saw the whole of Altona and beyond, his sense of sight sharper, further-reaching and more detailed than it had been in life. His vision took in everything around him, in all directions. He was now above the Palmaille and he could see all Hamburg. So much water. Hamburg’s element glistered in the night: the lakes of the Binnen and Aussen Alsters; the dark serpent writhe of the River Elbe through the city; the deep harbours of Finkenwerder. He watched the lights glittering along the Reeperbahn, across Sankt Pauli. He could see in all directions at the same time and the whole dark city – from Blankenese to Altengamme; Sinstorf to Wohldorf – sparkled with hard, sharp obsidian clarity.

Fabel understood why he was here, temporarily back from that other place that wasn’t a place or a time. He had loved this city so much. He had come to say goodbye.

Suddenly, his view extended even further, reaching out across the low, dark, velvet land beyond the city and taking in the scattered small constellations of illuminated towns and villages.

Again there was a sense of rapid and accelerating motion, of colour and light. Hamburg was no longer below him. Once more, nothing of the world he had known remained. He knew he was back in that place where the laws of physics were completely altered and again Time rushed by and Time stood still. The moment he occupied was both fleeting and eternal.

He was accelerating towards the light that was more than a light. It was the purest white, yet he could distinguish every colour that combined in it. He moved ever faster, yet as he travelled, his entire life played out for him. All of it, every encounter, every sight, sound, smell, touch. He rewitnessed everything he had ever done, everyone he had ever known, every wrong and every right.

As the light grew close, Jan Fabel again felt the most profound joy. It suffused him, filled his being. Dying was beautiful. The most beautiful part of life, he realized, was its end.

His father was waiting for him. His grandparents.

Paul Lindemann, the young officer he had lost to a gunman’s bullet and who had haunted his dreams ever since, was there too; but unlike in the dreams, Paul’s forehead was unblemished by a bullet wound. Fabel saw little Timo Voss, whose knowing smile made Fabel feel that it was he who was the child and Timo the carrier of great wisdom. There were countless others long gone and Fabel recognized some of them as those he had come to know so well, but only after their deaths: the victims of the murders he had investigated. They all welcomed him, and without speaking – without the machinery of speech – Fabel told them how happy he was to have joined them. And all the time the light that was more than a light grew brighter, warmer, more joyous.

*

Something burst deep inside him: a hot, burning intense explosion. A vast shadow, like the beat of some broad dark wing, flickered across the light.

‘What is happening?’ he asked his father.

‘It’s not time yet. Don’t worry, son. It’s just that it’s not your time yet . . .’

Another burst. This time it came with a surge of intense, searing pain. The light around him dimmed once more. Those who waited for him became shades.

Again. Another searing pain.

Everything around him was gone. A dark rushing. A falling back into the world.

He was back in Hamburg.

Once more Jan Fabel looked down on his body. He knew where he was: the Emergency Room of the Asklepios Hospital in Altona. From somewhere near the ceiling, he watched as a team of four worked on his body. Three stood back as the fourth applied the defibrillator paddles to his chest.

Another burst of dark energy and pain as the current arced up and reconnected him to his body.

The scene he looked down on dulled. The superhuman clarity and range of his vision were gone. The peace and joy he had felt dimmed.

Jan Fabel sank back into the darkness of life.

Part One

Two years later

3

His first thought when he woke was that his wife had left the curtains open, as she preferred to do. His second was that the night sky beyond the window must have been clear of cloud, because a toppled slab of grey-white moonlight lay angled across the carpet beyond his bed. His waking had been into confusion and he raised himself on one elbow and took in the moonlit room, analysing an unfamiliar geometry of shadows, trying to remember if he knew this room, where it was, what he was doing in it.

He struggled to make sense of the dark rectangle in the shadows on the far wall. A painting? And out of the darkness next to his bed, numbers glowed a malevolent red: 01:44. What was this place?

The panic fell from him. He remembered.
I remember it all. I remember everything and I remember that I will soon forget
.

The glowing numbers came from a clock. That’s how clocks were made, now. The painting on the wall wasn’t a painting but a television set. These days, they could make them as thin as a picture frame.

These days.

He remembered everything. He remembered that his wife could not have left the curtains open because she had died twenty years before. Her face at age thirty, fifty, seventy returned clear in his recall.

He remembered who he was, Georg Schmidt, retired bookseller from Ottensen.

He remembered that he should have died so long ago; that he was old, so very old, and the great weight of his age pulled at him as he eased himself up into a sitting position. He had been dreaming. His dream had been that he was young again and inhabited a world of weaker gravity, where movements were careless, automatic and without thought. Then he realized he hadn’t dreamt that: it had been yesterday and he had been awake. His unravelling mind had deceived him into believing he was young again, took fragments of memories and turned them inside out, making him believe the past was the present. He remembered that too: that the palace of memories he had built over nearly a century of life was crumbling, falling in on itself.

And he remembered that moments like this, times in the here-and-now, were becoming rarer, less frequent, less sustained. He had to cling on to each such moment. He had to cling to them because he had an important task to complete before the last threads of his memory finally unwound.

He focused. He brought every part of his mind into that single moment; seized his clarity of thought and clung on to it. He knew where he was: the Alte Mühle Seniors’ Home in Altona. Where they kept the old hidden from the young, and today hidden from yesterday.

I am Georg Schmidt, he told himself. I am Georg Schmidt and was there in 1932. I saw it all happen but no one would believe me. I am Georg Schmidt, I live in the Alte Mühle old people’s home and my only friend here is Helmut Wohlmann. I am Georg Schmidt and I play chequers with my friend Helmut Wohlmann every evening and we talk about the old days.

I am Georg Schmidt and I will soon be dead. But, before I die, I must kill Helmut Wohlmann.

4

Frankenstein sat in the cell, in the dark, the night-time ritual sounds of confined men and their keepers resounding through the concrete, steel and brick of the prison. He sat unmoving, a massive, malevolent shadow; something yet darker in the darkness. He had the cell to himself, isolated both from those who would do him harm and those whom he would harm.

Jochen Hübner knew he was a monster. He saw his monstrosity reflected in the mirror, in the expressions of those he caught looking at him; a flash of unease or fear in quickly averted eyes. He was a walking nightmare. The stuff of Gothic tales.

And like most Gothic monsters, he was man-made. Or at least in part man-made. The truth he had learned was that you become that which others hold you to be, that which others tell you you are. Nature may have shaped him, but it had been people who had defined him. A tiny abnormality within – the smallest of growths on the smallest of glands – had been mirrored in huge abnormality without. It had made him monstrous to others, an object to be feared. Mankind had made him: indirectly through its fear and loathing of his appearance, directly through its botched medical science, trying to cure one problem and creating another.

They called him Frankenstein. All called him it behind his back; few had been foolish enough to call him that to his face. Hübner knew that in the book and the movies Frankenstein was the creator, not the creation, but people were stupid. In any case, the insult had no sting: he
was
Frankenstein’s monster. He relished the fear in the eyes of others when they saw him. Especially the fear in the eyes of women. He would never have women’s love, would never want women’s love, but he could have their fear and their pain. Feed on it. It had been the feeding on it that had brought him to this place.

But soon he would be out of here; he would be free and amongst the women. Amongst their sweet, sweet fear and pain. He would drink it like wine.

Escape had been an obsession when he had first been sent here to Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel, it had consumed him and he spent every waking hour looking for weaknesses and flaws in the prison’s security, scheming and planning flight. But then, as time had passed and he had seen that escape was impossible, the obsession had faded to a concept he carried around with him like a concealed rope ladder, ready to take out and unravel when the opportunity arose.

But it never did.

Even the concept, the idea of escape, had started to fade and he had turned his attentions to becoming master of his new and inevitable reality. Frankenstein set about intimidating and dominating the other inmates, even some of the guards, his size and brutal appearance often enough in themselves to maintain his status. And when more than psychology was needed, he had proven himself capable of a viciousness that shocked even these hardened men of violence. He adapted, but never fully accepted.

He had become involved in activities, had begun to read several hours a day, had even started to take part in social therapy sessions in the faint hope that feigned reform might shorten his term. And it was at the social therapy sessions, in the most unlikely of settings and in the most unlikely of forms, that he found the means of escape. His guardian.

In each social therapy session, one discrete element at a time, it had all been explained to him. The opportunity, the means, the risk. And the risk was huge: before he got his liberty, he would have to pass through a portal more secure than any prison gate. He would have to die, or at least be brought to the very edge of death. And once there, he had to be brought back to life, to consciousness. It had to be timed precisely, to the second; any delay meant he might not be revived, or revived into a brain-damaged, useless state.

It was an acceptable risk: death or moronism was preferable to spending the rest of his life here; both would render him insensible to his surroundings. He knew that if he stayed here any longer, there was no doubt that he would kill one of the others and remove even the remotest possibility of release, or one of the others, or a group of the others, would find the guts to kill him.

He sat and thought of all these things and imagined himself dead. If the plan didn’t work and he died, at least there would be peace.

The sounds of prison night-time routine subsided and he turned his attention inward, to his body, his being. He focused on his breathing, counting each breath, fixing his mind on the simplest mechanism of life. One of the social therapy team had taught him meditation skills: a strategy for taking time out from rage. But that was not what he used them for: instead he used meditation to focus all that he was, concentrate the darkness, make denser the malevolence within him. And, most of all, he trained himself to become awake; not to stir from sleep, but to snap out of it in a heartbeat.

He counted his breaths.

When he had his chance, he would have to become fully alert in an instant. He would have to be capable of acting with speed and accuracy the moment they revived him; success depended on him catching them unawares.

Then, and only then, would he be able to feed on the fear of women – and avenge himself on the man who put him here.