You (38 page)

You take the phone away from your ear and stare at it, then you look over at Tanner and say, “How stupid does she think we are?”

Tanner doesn’t react. He knows what a rhetorical question is.

You turn to Leo.

“I want to know everything about this girl Stink. What her real name is, where she lives, who her friends are, and what she has to do with Taja.”

You throw him the phone.

“And put Fabrizio onto the last number, tell him to trace the call and find out where this girl Stink is now. We’ll meet in the office in an hour. Tell Darian to be there too. And as to this …”

You look at the dead boy lying by the pool. You feel nothing but satisfaction.
He who gives nothing gets nothing in return
, you think,
and he who takes must also be able to give
.

“… we’ll deal with it later.”

You avoid looking at Oskar. Your emotions aren’t called for right now. You need to keep a cool head and solve this problem quickly and cleanly before your emotions get involved. And don’t even think about reacting spontaneously again. Watch your every step. You will have enough time later on to mourn Oskar.

An hour later you’re sitting alone in your office while your men wait outside. David was successful. The recordings in Oskar’s house go back ten days. Three of the eight cameras were active during that
time. Living room. Attic. Oskar’s bedroom. Every movement was captured. David spliced the most important scenes together for you and burned them onto a DVD. Now you’re sitting at the monitor of your PC and turning the player on. David said the relevant recordings begin the Wednesday before last. The date appears on the bottom left of the picture.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009.

You see your brother, you see Taja, you hear them arguing, and you can make out every word. You see what happened. You pause and repeat the scene and watch it again. Your brother dies. After that comes Taja’s breakdown. You fast-forward …

Friday, July 3, 2009.

 … and see Taja in the attic, opening the metal case with the gear in it. You see her dragging Oskar’s body out of the living room. Perhaps your brother had started smelling, perhaps she could no longer stand the sight of him. Tanner discovered the freezer that Oskar’s body was stored in.

Why did she put him in there?
you ask yourself and fast-forward through the next few days. You see Taja in the living room, doping up repeatedly, throwing up and tossing and turning in her sleep.

On the night of July 7 four girls turn up and step inside the living room from the terrace. You lean forward and pause the picture.

There you are, Stink
.

She still doesn’t have the blue patch under her eye, she still hasn’t met you. You look at the other girls. You haven’t seen any of them before. Your finger taps the space bar and the picture starts moving again …

Wednesday, July 8, 2009.

 … and Taja shows Stink the merchandise in the attic. They take out the drugs. Nine hours later Stink and one of the girls put the drugs back in the metal case …

Thursday, July 9, 2009.

 … and then in the evening Stink is back in the attic, taking the merchandise out of the metal case and cramming it into a sports bag. That’s where the DVD ends. An edit of seven minutes and twenty-three seconds. Your brother’s death, Taja’s breakdown, the theft of your merchandise. You take the DVD out of the PC and look at it for a moment before breaking it on the edge of the table.

“David?”

He opens the door.

“Who else has seen this?”

“Just me.”

“Good. Wipe the hard drive.”

“I understand.”

“And you can all come in.”

You throw the broken DVD into the wastebasket under your desk and notice how sweaty you are. You know David won’t say a word about the recordings. They all come in. Your son has his hands behind his back and looks like he got called in by the principal. Tanner gets straight to the point.

“What did the cameras get?”

“Let’s talk about that later.”

Tanner looks at David, David holds his gaze, Tanner turns back to you.

“Ragnar, I want to know what those fucking cameras got. He might have been your brother, but he was also my friend. Did Oskar have a heart attack or—”

“Taja killed him.”

“What?”

Tanner jumps up, Darian’s mouth gapes open, he comes a few steps closer, his hands open and close, Leo’s eyes are closed, his jaw is working. David is the only one who doesn’t react. Tanner is speechless.

That’s fine
.

“But …”

“I said we’d talk about it later, that’ll have to do. So do me a favor and sit down.”

Tanner sits down. You don’t like it when people question you. “What have you found?”

Leo hands David a file. David glances into it quickly, takes out a photograph, and snaps the file shut again. He sums it up, “Stink’s real name is Isabell Kramer. She goes to the same school as Taja and took part in a school competition with her girlfriends three months ago. We downloaded the photograph from the school homepage.”

He puts the photograph down on the desk and pushes it over to you.

“From left to right they’re Sunmi Mehlau, Ruth Wassermann, Isabell Kramer, Vanessa Altenburg, and our Taja. All five have been friends since high school.”

You look at the photograph. There they are. Stink, Taja, and the three girls you just saw on the DVD. They’re all giving you the finger. You don’t take it personally; at their age you were no better.

Under the photograph it says “Happy Losers.”

“What sort of competition was it?”

“A poetry slam. They all got up on stage together, joked around the whole time, and had to leave after five minutes.”

“Which of them was waiting on the opposite shore?” you ask your son, who’s standing by the door because no one’s offered him a chair. He looks at the photograph and taps the second girl from the left. It’s the girl who put the drugs back in the metal case with Stink.

“You see the problem?” you ask, and before your son can answer, you go on: “The problem is that you didn’t scare them enough.”

His cheek muscles twitch. The boy can’t stand criticism. He needs your attention like a plant needs light, and you treat him like an employee.

“You’ve got to put that right, do you understand?”

Your son says that he understands. He goes and stands by the door again, legs spread, hands in front of his crotch as if protecting his balls. Tracksuit bottom, tracksuit jacket, running shoes. He reminds you of a bouncer. You notice him glancing at Tanner. Tanner ignores him. He’s your son’s godfather. Tanner helped him out of a few tight spots while he was at school, but those days are over and Tanner has other problems to deal with right now. You can see it in his face. Taja as a murderer. Never. He can’t get it into his head. Unlike you, Tanner likes the kid and doesn’t understand your problem with her. And how could he? Whenever he sees Taja, he sees Taja and you see Majgull.

“What else have you got?”

“We know from the school office that Taja was absent all last week. The other girls have been missing for three days, they weren’t at home either. From the look of Oskar’s living room, it must have been a wild party.”

You say nothing, you know better.

“What’s with the cell number?”

David looks at Leo. Leo says, “It belongs to this girl Stink. Fabrizio located the phone without any difficulty. The girl isn’t in Berlin anymore.”

“What?!”

“When you called the number an hour ago, Stink was sitting on the Alster in Hamburg, in a café called the Treasure Chest. Since Fabrizio located her, he’s been checking the coordinates every ten minutes; she’s still in Hamburg. We got Taja’s cell number off Oskar’s phone and checked it too. Same location. We’re assuming the whole gang’s in Hamburg.”

“And the missing Range Rover?”

David takes over.

“I talked to the garage. Only the Mercedes is being repaired. They think it wouldn’t be a problem to track down the Range Rover. Oskar fitted both cars with tracking devices after the Porsche got jacked last year. As soon as we’ve found the access code for the Range Rover, we can call the tracking device and it’ll text us back its location.”

“Simple as that?”

“Simple as that.”

They wait for your reaction. Even you are waiting for a sensible reaction, your mind has to process all these facts. However hard you try, you can’t see any sense in all of this.

What the hell are they doing?

You want to tell your men to leave you alone, but what comes out of your mouth sounds different, noisy and furious: “ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THAT SOME IDIOTIC SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRLS HAVE GONE TO HAMBURG IN MY BROTHER’S RANGE ROVER WITH FIVE KILOS OF HEROIN AND WE COULDN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT?”

Your voice rebounds in the room. You see your son lowering his head so that he doesn’t have to meet your gaze.

“Perhaps someone’s been helping them,” Tanner says, openly ignoring your fury because it doesn’t get any of you anywhere. You’re grateful to him for that. You breathe, you breathe, your clenched fists relax.

“Yes, perhaps,” you say with Tanner’s calm, and regret your outburst.
You thank Leo and David for the good work they’ve done and ask Tanner who you’ve got in Hamburg.

“As far as I know, the Greeks are fully occupied again. Markus is back in Fuhlsbüttel. Then we’ve got the Dietrichs. Their boss is fresh out of jail.”

“What about Oswald and Bruno?”

Tanner hesitates.

“I’d rather not.”

“Rather not? Why?”

“You know.”

Of course you know. The last time you worked with Oswald and Bruno, a failed delivery turned into a bloodbath. Bruno explained later, there was no other way around it; and Oswald said sometimes you have to do what you have to do. You don’t much care for that kind of esoteric bullshit, but you do know that Oswald and Bruno get results. They are outposts, they enjoy immunity. Their biggest shortcoming is that they’re too violent, which makes them a risk. But they get results.

“Send the picture of the girl to their cell phones and give them the address of the café. With a bit of luck the matter will be sorted out in half an hour.”

They’re standing beside the shop window wondering if there’s something wrong with the colors, or whether it’s their eyes. Everything looked different in the shop. Oswald’s shirt is too pink, Bruno’s T-shirt is too blue. They look like iced lollipops on legs.

“I look like a fucking Smurf,” says Bruno.

“Shit,” says Oswald.

The day started so well. They were about to sit down in Starbucks when Bruno had to stop by the shop window.

“Nothing looks really good in artificial light,” he says.

“Shit,” Oswald says again.

While Bruno is changing his clothes in the bathroom, Oswald orders coffee, mineral water, and brownies. And while Oswald is getting changed, Bruno finds a seat outside and stirs milk into his coffee and tries not to light a cigarette. Since he gave up smoking, he’s felt terribly healthy. He hates fresh air, and the company could be better. Even though everyone claims they’d died out in the mid-nineties, most of the people sitting around him are yuppies—severe–looking women in shiny polyester blouses that are supposed to make them look ten years younger; guys with tousled hair and the look of eternal students, who earn five-figure sums a month and behave as if they’d just got out of bed. Everything changes. Yuppies have a new disguise. They try to look ordinary. They’ve given up putting their wealth on display, because even yuppies get lonely, so they try and look young, lost, and casual. Bruno wonders who they’re actually trying to fool. They can’t change anything about
their behavior—they yell into their phones or sit over their MacBooks and adjust the display every thirty seconds because the sun’s so bright. Bruno feels vindicated. When the light is wrong nothing works. Oswald comes outside wearing his old clothes now, and says he feels like himself again.

“Ditto,” says Bruno.

They drink their coffee, eat the brownies, and stretch their legs. They can’t know that in four minutes they’ll get a call from Tanner. They can’t even guess how quickly any form of light can make way for darkness.

Bruno’s driving today, Oswald’s responsible for everything else—air conditioning, music, snacks, drinks. When Bruno’s the passenger they mostly listen to Steppenwolf and it’s always too hot in the car. Oswald favors a cool breeze, the sound of Ghinzu, and an ice-cold beer in his hand. “Mine” is on at the moment, and even Bruno can’t help smiling. They’re similar in many ways. They have no conscience, they see brutality as a refined kind of sport, and never doubt one another. And they’re learning English together.

“Man, I love that sound.”

“It is strange, but strange is good.”

“It makes my nerves tingle.”

“That’s very nicely said.”

“Thank you.”

For four years Oswald tried to join the fire brigade, but he failed every psychological test. For a while he earned his money as a bodyguard, until one day the Lasser family discovered him. One small job was followed by the next small job, and soon the jobs changed and became too big for Oswald to do on his own. That’s when Bruno arrived on the scene.