The Ghosts of Altona (7 page)

‘Welcome on board . . .’ Fabel stood up and shook hands with the taller man. ‘Your timing is perfect, we’re just about to have a briefing.’

‘It’s an honour to have been selected,’ Bruns said so earnestly that Fabel smiled. ‘I won’t let you down, Herr Principal Chief Criminal Commissar.’

‘
Chef
will do,’ said Fabel. ‘We’ll get you teamed up and operational, but in the meantime it’s a watch and learn set-up. If you have any questions about anything, or any problems crop up, my door is open, as is Principal Chief Commissar Brüggemann’s. Okay?’

‘Yes,
Chef
.’

*

The team was waiting in the briefing room. Fabel’s second family. Like so many other things, so many previously unconsidered elements of his life, it was something to which Fabel had given a lot of thought since the shooting. People abstracted basic instincts into the most unlikely contexts, passions took the strangest forms. For Fabel, his instinct as a father was one of his most powerful and he had extended and abstracted it into a management style. It hadn’t been something conscious or contrived, it was natural; just the way things were with him. He was protective of them, ambitious for them, continuously anxious for them.

The Murder Commission was divided into five teams of two officers each. The senior teams were made up of Chief Commissars: Thomas Glasmacher worked with Dirk Hechtner, Anna Wolff with Henk Hermann. The two Principal Chief Commissars, Fabel and Nicola Brüggemann, oversaw all the investigations on the board and, when there was a particularly high-profile or complicated case, one of them would take personal charge of it. Fabel’s own expertise was being requested more and more by other forces across the Federal Republic. He knew the fifth floor – the Presidial Department where the Police President and the senior management of the Polizei Hamburg had their offices – saw Fabel as a poster boy for the Polizei Hamburg. The truth was he found it tiresome to be dragged away from his beloved Hamburg to help track murderers with twisted agendas in Bavaria or Thüringen.

He started the briefing by introducing the new guy, Sven Bruns, who would eventually be teamed up with a senior officer. There were the expected good-natured jokes about there now being two Frisians on the team and Fabel saw some of the tension ease from Bruns’s earnest expression. He would watch the new detective, Fabel decided. They had agreed a three month probation and Fabel had explained that there would be no disgrace in moving on afterwards: working constantly with murder was something only a few officers could do, and it was often only after experiencing the reality of it that you found out if you were cut out for it the job.

They ran through the incident board. Contrary to what most people believed, murder was almost always a sordid and dirty affair; usually the result of drink- or drug-fuelled violence. In reality there were practically no cool-headed and cold-blooded assassins; even the public’s movie-influenced image of serial killers was skewed from reality. Serial killers were, for the most part, of below average IQ and acting on the most base of instincts, often impulsively, seeking sexual gratification through the torture and death of others. Those killers who were organized and intelligent were almost always disadvantaged by towering egomania or were otherwise deranged. Or there were the Angels of Death: the medical professionals abusing the trust of others and their licensed access to lethal substances simply to watch the light go out of the eyes of their victims. For many, it seemed, there was wonder in Death.

There were four cases current. Three of them were balefully straightforward: an abusive husband had bludgeoned his wife to death; a youth in his late teens had stabbed another outside a bar in the Kiez; an illegal immigrant had been kicked to death by a gang for no other reason than not being German. The three cases were at various stages of completion and Fabel listened to the progress reports on each. As he did so, he found himself wondering about each victim’s leaving of life; whether their experiences had been similar to his.

The fourth inquiry stood apart. Fabel let Anna run through the history of the Monika Krone case.

‘Anna and I are leads on this, but I’ll need some of you for follow-ups,’ said Fabel when she had finished. ‘I’ll allocate once I have the case plan worked up. Anna, when we’re through, could you give me a note of the days you’re off over the next couple of weeks?’

‘Sure. Why?’

‘Just want to make sure I have you with me for a couple of interviews,’ Fabel said. It was a lie and he didn’t feel good about it. It was a lie because there was one interview he specifically didn’t want her to attend.

‘Okay,’ he said to the team. ‘Let’s proceed as normal, but remember we may have more cases on our plate by tomorrow morning.’

‘The march?’ Nicola Brüggemann asked.

‘The march. Hopefully there’ll be as few injuries as possible, and God knows it would be great if it passed off without incident, but I doubt it. All it needs is one knife brought to the party . . .’

11

The café was in the Schanzenviertel, on the ground floor corner of a chunk of solid and previously grand Wilhelmine architecture now dressed at street level in black-painted stucco and graffiti. In the bright spring sunshine, the café’s urban, alternative cool just looked worn, tired and grubby. It suited Zombie perfectly.

Zombie was, as he always was, ten minutes early for his meeting with Alex Schuldhaus, who was perhaps the only remaining voluntary connection Zombie had with the living, and it was a connection maintained purely through necessity.

He always chose to meet Schuldhaus at this café because there were tables outside, which meant there was less chance of anyone smelling his corruption. Zombie also knew – although Schuldhaus didn’t know he knew – that his dealer lived in Bartelsstrasse and the café wasn’t far for him to come. If you could call Schuldhaus a dealer at all: Zombie knew his former fellow student was no organized-crime figure, and hardly a drug pusher in the professional sense. Instead he was someone who provided a tight circle of friends with weed, and very occasionally something a little more legally challenging. But Zombie was a special customer. Someone who paid over the odds for an already expensive commodity: something very special that he knew made Schuldhaus nervous – noticeably nervous – when carrying. It therefore made sense to make their meet as close to his apartment as possible.

Schuldhaus arrived on time. He was dark blond, tall, rangy and good-looking and wore an outfit of jeans and a Hamburg Freezers T-shirt. He had an old-looking canvas rucksack slung over one shoulder. He was the type who at forty dressed the same way he had as a student; who lived broadly the same kind of life. When they had been at university together, Schuldhaus had been popular and had barely acknowledged Zombie. He didn’t hold it against him. Zombie had been the type not to be noticed.

Alex Schuldhaus shook hands with Zombie, a ritual he seemed to insist on following, before sitting down opposite him and ordering a herbal tea. Zombie watched him. His natural liveliness and vigour outshone his nervousness. Schuldhaus smiled a lot. At Zombie, at the waitress, at the world. His perpetual optimism and cheer made him the polar opposite of his customer and Zombie found his vigour nauseating in the same way others would find the presence of a rotting corpse sickening.

‘Hi, Martin.’ The good-natured Schuldhaus used the name Zombie had had in life, and which he still used in his interactions with the living. He frowned. ‘Are you okay? You’ve lost more weight . . .’

‘I’m fine,’ said Zombie. ‘You got the stuff?’

‘I’ve got it.’ Schuldhaus lowered his voice and leaned across the table. ‘But listen, Martin, I don’t know how much longer I can keep getting the quantities you ask for.’

‘Has anything changed? Is there a problem with your supplier?’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that this is a risky business. This stuff is a first-schedule drug.’ Schuldhaus lowered his voice even further. ‘I’m not a criminal, but I could get serious jail time for selling you this.’

‘You get paid for your risk, don’t you? Or are you asking for more, is that it?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not that at all. It’s just you use a hell of a lot of it. Listen, I sell stuff to friends to make them happy. Harmless stuff. But this . . . I mean, look at you, Martin . . . you’re so pale and thin. I hardly recognize you these days. I just don’t want you to end up dead.’

Zombie laughed; so loudly and incongruously heartily that it startled Schuldhaus.

‘What? What’s so funny?’

Zombie shook his head curtly; how could he even begin to explain his living-dead existence? Instead he said, ‘Do you know I died once? My heart stopped beating. They claim they brought me back just in time.’

‘No . . . shit no, I didn’t know that. What happened?’

‘I was stabbed.’ Zombie paused for a moment then, with a dismissive wave of his hand said, ‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time – a street mugging. I was stabbed in the chest.’

‘Shit, I—’

‘None of that’s important,’ Zombie interrupted. ‘The truth is I never did have much of a life. I was the guy no one ever noticed. I was a ghost even back then. But after I was stabbed, as I was dying, I had this . . . this
experience
.’

‘What kind of experience?’

‘I can’t even begin to describe it. It was the most wonderful thing I’ve ever known. In an instant I forgot all of the unhappiness that had gone before. I was truly, completely happy. Happy like you can’t measure in this life. I could suddenly
see
in a way you can’t in this life. All of these colours and textures and dimensions I never knew existed. And I could see inside myself too – all of the people who had come before me, like I was looking straight through my DNA or something. I tell you, it was the most incredible thing you could imagine. There is nothing –
nothing
– in life that could be compared to it. As if the whole universe opened up . . .’ Zombie paused, lost for a moment in the memory. He shook his head and the temporary animation left him and in his usual dull, matter-of-fact way he said, ‘Anyway, that’s why I take this stuff . . . Whatever happened to me back then, it takes me back there. Or at least gives me the feeling of being back there. And besides, dimethyltryptamine doesn’t kill anyone. It’s been around for thousands of years as ayahuasca. You got it?’

Schuldhaus nodded. He sipped his tea and glanced around the other tables.
I’m right
, Zombie thought,
he’s not much of a drug dealer
.

‘Did you get the other stuff I asked for? The xylazine?’ Zombie asked.

‘Eventually. It wasn’t easy to source, because horse tranquillizer isn’t something people normally ask for . . . I mean, it’s not like you can get high on that stuff. The only people who use xylazine as a recreational drug are Puerto Ricans. And they call it the zombie-maker. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

‘I know what I’m doing with it, and what I’m doing is my business. Okay, let’s have it.’

Clumsily, and so guiltily that anyone watching would probably have guessed the illegal nature of the transaction, Schuldhaus slipped a paper packet from his rucksack and slid it across the zinc top of the table. Zombie casually picked up the packet and put it in his pocket. Equally casually, he handed Schuldhaus a wad of euro notes.

‘You should try not to look so guilty,’ he said. ‘I’ll need some more DMT this time next month. You good for that?’

‘I’ll do my best. What about the xylazine?’

‘You’ve given me all I need. Just the DMT next time.’

Their business done, all Zombie could think about was getting away from the nauseatingly vital Schuldhaus; to get out of the sunlight and back into the shadows. But he had his coffee and Schuldhaus had his tea to finish and the latter always seemed to feel the need to chatter. Maybe it made him feel less like he was simply making money from selling a first schedule drug and more like he was doing a favour for a friend.

‘You still living in Altona?’ he asked Zombie to fill a silence. ‘I hope you don’t get caught up with all that shit that’s planned. You know, the march and all the crap that goes with it. Fucking Nazis.’

‘I doubt it. My apartment is well off the main route.’

‘Oh.’

Another silence, then Schuldhaus grabbed onto a passing thought as if he were a drowning man grasping at a lifebelt. ‘Do you remember Monika Krone? From university? The girl who went missing?’

Something sparked in the dullness of Zombie’s eyes. ‘What about her?’

‘They’ve found her body. Who’d have thought, after all these years—’

‘Where?’ Zombie leaned forward. ‘Where did they find her body?’

‘In Altona. Not far from where she went missing. It was in the
Morgenpost
. She’d been buried under a mini-market car park, of all places.’ Schuldhaus shook his head. ‘So what we all suspected all of these years – it’s so sad that we were right. You knew her, right?’

Zombie stared at Schuldhaus for a moment, his expression even more empty than usual, his cold gaze making the amateur pusher feel uneasy. An image of a painfully beautiful face with a pale complexion and emerald green eyes framed in a blaze of auburn-red hair came back to his recall in perfect detail.

‘Not really,’ he said eventually. ‘A little.’

They sat in silence for a minute then Zombie, leaving his coffee largely untouched, stood up and said he had to be somewhere. Schuldhaus was clearly making an effort not to look too relieved.

‘I’ll give you a call next month,’ said Zombie. ‘When I need more.’

*

On his way home, Zombie stopped at the S-Bahn station kiosk and bought a copy of the
Hamburger Morgenpost
.

12

Susanne was there when he got home to the apartment.

One of the many things Fabel loved about Hamburg, his adopted city, was its variety. He often thought of cities having definable personalities, but Hamburg was much more difficult to define than most. If anything, it suffered from multiple personality disorder: a constellation of very different identities clustered together in a small space. There were over a hundred quarters in the city, spread over seven boroughs, and each quarter had its own unique personality and atmosphere. The apartment he shared with Susanne Eckhardt was in Ottensen, in the north-west of Altona. Ottensen had once been a town in its own right, independent of the originally much smaller Altona. Over time it had become incorporated into Altona; Altona in turn being absorbed into Hamburg. Despite this history of aggregation, the quarter – just like the Neuenfelde or Schanzenviertel, Pöseldorf or Sankt Pauli, Bergedorf or Wilhelmsburg – had refused with typical North German stubbornness to surrender anything of its unique identity. It was so distinctive that when he had first moved in with Susanne four years before, having given up his own flat in Pöseldorf, Fabel felt he had moved to a completely different part of the country.