The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (38 page)

“Hans,” I said, and my heart swelled with recognition. “Hans—it’s you.”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded surprised.

I flung my arms around him and clung on. Safe at last. “Unshockable Hans,” I murmured over and over again into the rough wool of his jacket, as though the name itself were a talisman. “Unshockable Hans. At last.”

W
hatever else one might say about Stefan’s cousin Boris, whose dubious career has probably by now culminated in a custodial sentence somewhere, he did commit at least one public-spirited action in his life. It was Boris who, having let himself out of Herr Düster’s house as easily as he had let himself in, slipped into the little alley, intending to make his exit unseen, and had literally fallen over our bicycles, ripping his jeans and laying open the skin of his calf in the process.

Shielded by the alley, he had taken out his flashlight to inspect the damage. He didn’t recognize my bike, but he knew Stefan’s. It had a stupid hooter on it, a rubber thing shaped like the head of Dracula, with fangs agape. It was quite distinctive—I’ve never seen another like it. Stefan had been given it when he was a lot younger and had become attached to it, although it was so goofy-looking that it probably took his cool rating down another notch every time he took the bike out.

Boris was no Sherlock Holmes, but still he was puzzled about the bike. Perhaps another person, having found it, would have assumed that Stefan had simply left it there for reasons of his own, or that it had been stolen for a prank and dumped. But Boris had just been in Herr Düster’s house, and the reason was this: he thought it was Herr Düster who was plucking girls from the streets like an elderly vampire, and he
was determined to find out. Discovering the bicycles only confirmed his worst fears.

He made his way home thoughtfully, mulling the thing over while smoking a series of cigarettes, presumably for their intellect-enhancing qualities. I am still not convinced that he would have gone so far as to notify the police, but when his aunt, Stefan’s mother, called the house an hour later to accuse Boris of harboring her errant son, he put two and two together and for once in his life made four.

Boris, obeying the instincts that would no doubt serve him well in his future encounters with the law, denied any knowledge of Stefan’s whereabouts. Eventually, however, the matter weighed on his mind to the extent that he actually decided to do something about it. Perhaps he could no longer enjoy the bottle of Jägermeister he had filched from his father’s drinks cabinet, or perhaps it was the Jägermeister that did the talking when he rang the police (anonymously, of course) and told them what he had seen.

The police had other things on their minds that evening, but all the same an officer was dispatched to check the scene. As he stood prodding the front wheel of my bicycle (sadly bent under the weight of Boris’s trampling feet) with the toe of his boot, he was summoned by Hilde Koch, who was hovering on her doorstep, terrifying in a hairnet and revolting old Birkenstocks, her nightdress hastily covered by an outdoor coat.

Frau Koch was not interested in abandoned bicycles; she wanted to know what the police were going to do about the noise and nuisance suffered by God-fearing people who were awakened in the middle of the night by a bunch of kids driving a monstrous car with tail fins up and down the street.

The mention of
kids
might have been the thing that caught someone’s attention. It turned out that two policemen sitting in their patrol car down by the station had also seen a large car with tail fins going past, with passengers both in the front and back, but it was definitely being driven by an elderly man. It was probably nothing (such was the prevailing opinion), but a patrol car was sent to check it out. In the deep snow there were virtually no other cars on the road, so it was relatively easy to track Herr Düster’s Mercedes to the Eschweiler Tal.

The two cops in the patrol car were the genial Herr Wachtmeister
Tondorf and a younger man whom I didn’t know; I think his name was Schumacher, like the race driver. Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf wasn’t feeling as genial as usual, being forced to abandon his thermos of coffee to drive up a track in the snow. When they reached Herr Düster’s car, he assumed the “kids” mentioned by Frau Koch had been joyriding, and had abandoned it there. He told Schumacher to get out of the car and take a look.

The younger man started to ask why it had to be
him
, but he saw Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf’s expression, brows drawn together and mustache bristling, and decided to take the line of least resistance. He got out and went to look at the Mercedes. The windows were patchy with condensation so he opened the back door and looked inside.

There was no one in the car. He closed the door, and was wandering around to the rear to look at the license plate when Stefan came running up. He had an odd feverish look about him, two spots of high color standing out on his cheekbones, his face otherwise waxy and pallid.

“You’ve got to come,” he panted.

It took a while for him to persuade the two policemen that he was not an underage joyrider. Sitting in the back of the patrol car with melted snow dripping from his clothes and boots and his voice ragged with excitement, almost bouncing on the seat in his desperation to get away, he did not make a very convincing witness, especially once Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf had recognized him.

“You’re the Breuer boy, aren’t you?” Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf glanced at Schumacher. “The same family as Boris Breuer,” he added significantly.

“He’s my cousin,” said Stefan impatiently.

“Are you sure
he
wasn’t driving this car, young man?” asked Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf sternly.

“Yes!” said Stefan frantically. He was squirming in anguish on the seat.

“Then who was driving the car?” Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf wanted to know.

“Herr Düster,” said Stefan. The two policemen looked at each other.

“Düster? From the Orchheimer Strasse?”

“Yes.” Stefan nodded.

“And you say he has this girl—Pia Kolvenbach?” Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf’s voice was stern.

“Yes.” Stefan realized what Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf was getting at, and suddenly he was confused. “No. I mean …”

But Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf was already reaching for the door handle. “You stay here, young man,” said Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf severely.

“But I want to come with you,” said Stefan instantly. He was rewarded with a very uncompromising stare from Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf.

“You stay in the car. Do I have to lock you in?”

“No,” said Stefan unhappily, subsiding back onto the seat.

The two policemen got out of the car and walked toward Herr Schiller’s car. The door was still yawning open and there was a dusting of snow on the driver’s seat, but no sign of Herr Schiller or anyone else. Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf was still not sure whether he was dealing with juvenile joyriders, a couple of senile old men who had taken it into their heads to go walking in the snowy woods in the middle of the night, or an actual criminal: the person responsible for the disappearances. He thought Stefan was saying anything that came into his head in hopes of staying out of trouble, and of me he had seen no sign; he was not even convinced I was out there. He decided to take a brief look around.

And thus it was that the two policemen found me there in the Eschweiler Tal, not a stone’s throw from the site of the haunted mill, almost catatonic with hypothermia, and hanging on for dear life to—Herr Düster.

Herr Düster was clasping me to the front of his green woolen hunting jacket, crushing me to him so that afterward I had the mark of one of the polished horn buttons on my cheek. He was preventing me from turning around again to look at the charred and loathsome thing lying there on a scorched patch of earth from which all the snow had melted, its blackened claws outstretched as though making one last attempt to grab me. When the policemen reached him, Herr Düster turned his head and looked at them quite levelly.

“Johannes Düster?” said Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf, and Herr Düster inclined his head.

Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf looked at his partner, Schumacher, but Schumacher was not looking at him or at Herr Düster. He had stepped forward to look at what was on the ground, the shriveled and blackened form, and he was vomiting noisily into the snowy bushes.

It was some time after we had gone, Herr Düster and Stefan to the police station and myself to the hospital in Mechernich, that the police discovered the body of Daniella Brandt. Herr Schiller, whom I had thought was my friend, kindly Herr Schiller, who let me have coffee and told me that if something needs to be done you should do it, even if you are afraid—Herr Schiller had carried her in his arms when his car could go no farther in the snow, and placed her body in the low cave that the local people call the Teufelsloch, the Devil’s Hole. I had hated Daniella the day she came to our house and I screamed at her. She had revolted me with her blatant desire to get close to the epicenter of my family’s pain. Now she herself would be the center of attention, her name spoken on every street corner, her family’s anguish unraveled for everyone to examine.

People said afterward that it was unbelievable that a man of his age could carry a child of that size. But great emotions can give us great power, and Herr Schiller was carrying a lot of hate in his heart. They think he meant to burn the body, so that there would be nothing to link him to the crime, just as there was nothing recognizable about those things that bobbed and wallowed in the well under Herr Düster’s house. He had intended that Herr Düster should be blamed for the existence of
those
, were they ever discovered.

No one knows exactly what happened out there in the snow, not even me, and I was the closest to him when the gasoline he had brought for Daniella’s funeral pyre ignited like a bomb and sent him screaming and staggering into my path, a human inferno. Did he lift the gas can to pour its contents onto the corpse on its pall of pure snow, and accidentally drench himself? Did he know he had soaked himself in gasoline, and if so, why did he light a match? No one knows the answers to these questions.

Daniella did not burn; her body was spared that indignity. The policeman who peered into the Teufelsloch, scanning it with his flashlight,
found her on her back with her hands folded across her stomach, as though lying in state. A poisonous scent of gasoline hung over her. Still, she looked as though she were sleeping, but for the deathly pallor of her face: a perfect snow princess, with ice crystals sparkling on her white skin and her light hair. The policeman who found her thought that perhaps some spark of life might still lurk within the coldly beautiful form. It was not until he had pulled aside the collar of her jacket to try for a pulse that he saw it was no use.

I
was drifting in and out of an uncomfortable sleep when my parents arrived at the hospital. My mother burst into the room, closely followed by my father and a harassed-looking doctor in a blue smock.

“Can I please ask you—” the doctor was saying plaintively, but my mother ignored her.

“Pia? Oh my God, Pia!” My mother was all over me like a maternal whirlwind, kissing my forehead and cheeks, touching my hair. “Are you all right,
Schätzchen?”

“I’m fine,” I started to say, but it came out as a croak. Even smiling felt like too much of an effort; my mother’s anxiety was exhausting.

Abruptly she burst into tears. My father laid a tentative hand on her shoulder.

“Kate? She’s all right.”

“She’s
not
all right,” sobbed my mother. “Look at her. Just look what that—that—”

She let out a wail and the doctor’s hands came up in a gesture of protest; there were other patients to think of; if she would just—

I think she would have told my mother to leave, except that a bell was ringing somewhere else, and she had to leave the room herself.

Silently, my father enfolded my mother in his arms. I saw him hug
her to him, rubbing her back, kissing her hair. She was
letting
him, I realized, and even in my exhausted state I felt the first spurt of hope.