Eye Collector, The (25 page)

‘Oh, you think that embroils you in a conflict of interests, do you?’ Thea’s lips twisted in a sarcastic smile. ‘Very well, I hereby release you from it. You’re
fired!’ And she turned on her heel.

‘What?!’ Frank jumped up from Zorbach’s chair and hurried after her. ‘Why?’

She didn’t even turn round. ‘Because I can’t tolerate subordinates withholding important information from me. I asked you to tell me at once if Zorbach called you. You ignored
that and went on playing by your own rules. Well, tough.’

‘But this makes no sense,’ Frank exclaimed angrily. ‘You certainly won’t get any information out of me if you fire me.’

‘Oh, you’ve no need to tell
me
a thing.’ She finally came to a halt, but only to point to the reception area, whose automatic doors were just opening.

Two men walked into the newspaper office.

Thea gave Frank an evil smile. ‘I’m sure the police will have more effective ways of extracting the truth from you.’

(6 HOURS 10 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
ALEXANDER ZORBACH

‘Hello, yes?’ The amiable voice at the other end of the line was puzzling in itself, and the background noises sounded even less appropriate to an emergency call
centre. The mélange of alcoholic laughter and discordant singing might have been emanating from a karaoke bar.

‘Turn the music down,’ the man called, as if to confirm that a boisterous party was in progress in the background. Someone actually seemed to have heard him, because the thudding
disco bass abruptly lost some of its volume.

‘Am I through to emergency?’

‘Eh? Emergency? Oh sure, of course!’ The man’s laughter was as long and loud as his speech was slurred. He was quite clearly drunk – certainly not the kind of person you
wanted to answer the phone when you dialled 112.

‘Sorry, I wasn’t expecting your call so soon.’

Expecting it?

‘Are you taking the piss?’ I yelled. ‘I’m standing beside a woman in urgent need of medical assistance, and...’ I broke off. Something had started to vibrate, and
it wasn’t the ventilator.

‘Ah yes, the Murder Game. I get it. Just a minute.’

I heard a rustle of paper. The next moment, he sounded as if he was reading out a prepared text: ‘“I did warn you. You shouldn’t have challenged me, but you insisted on joining
in the game. Very well, listen carefully, here are the rules.”’

‘The rules? What rules?’

The vibration, which had intensified, was now superimposed on a sound that was vaguely reminiscent of a vacuum cleaner.

What’s going on here? What the hell is happening to us?

‘There are always rules in these shitty games, amigo.’

The man on the phone belched softly. ‘Oops, sorry,’ he said with a laugh.

‘Who are you?’ I shouted.

‘Oh, fuck, sorry, I’ve screwed this up. But it was such short notice. Normally I get my instructions at least a week in advance. Just so happens we’re throwing a party and
I’ve already had a couple. That’s why I didn’t catch on at first, comprende?’

No, I don’t. I don’t understand why I’m having to bandy words with a tipsy imbecile when I dialled emergency on behalf of the decomposing woman with whom I and my blind
companion are shut up in a dark cellar.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Okay, but you must promise not to tell anyone, right?

I used to do a lot of this stuff, that’s why my number’s still on the Internet, but these role-playing games get really boring after a while. I only agreed to spout this rubbish
because the guy on the phone promised me a hundred euros.’

Role play?
Oh God, the Eye Collector must have put a call through to a student who thought he could earn a few extra euros by passing on clues to the participants in an interactive
manhunt.

Except that this is no game. Not, at least, for anyone but the Eye Collector himself.

‘The man who gave you money to answer the phone when I dialled this number – what were his instructions?’

‘Well, to read you this email.’

I coughed, suddenly beset by the unpleasant sensation that the air I was breathing had grown thinner.

‘“You still have fifteen minutes’ worth of oxygen,”’ the man read out. The monotonous vacuum-cleaner noise had become an incessant hum. ‘“That’s
how long it will take for the pumps to suck the air out of the cellar. If you haven’t come to solve the riddle on your own, it’ll run out even sooner. But a game isn’t a game
unless the players have a chance of winning. You can turn off the pump and win!”’

He paused. Someone in the background uttered a raucous obscenity.

‘Well, go on.’

‘That’s it.’ He gave a sheepish laugh.

‘What do you mean, that’s it?’

How was I expected to turn off the pump that was transforming our prison into a vacuum chamber when I didn’t even know where it was? I clasped my dry throat.

‘Hey, amigo, don’t tell him I screwed up, will you? Got to go now.’

The music had grown louder again. The man seemed to have moved to another room. He sounded as if he were standing in the middle of a dance floor.

‘No, don’t hang up!’ I yelled above the background noises and the mechanical hum of the suction pump. ‘There must be something else!’

‘No, amigo, honestly there... Hey, just a minute.’

He broke off, and I clamped the old-fashioned receiver to my ear even harder.

‘Hell, I almost missed it. The subject of the email, I mean.’

‘What is it?’ I asked as calmly as I could manage.

Stay calm.
I forced myself to breathe slowly and deeply.
You still have plenty of time,
I tried to tell myself.
Even though Alina and TomTom are also using up oxygen and the
cellar’s capacity is only a few cubic metres, ten minutes is plenty long enough to work out a plan.

‘What’s the subject, damn it?’

I heard a last rustle of paper at the other end of the line. Then the man said something that finally blew my mind.

‘Just three words, amigo:
“Remember your mother!”
’

My mother died in our kitchen on the morning of May 20, shortly after some flour got up her nose while she was baking. Her best friend, Babsi, who happened to be visiting,
yelled at the foreign on-call doctor to examine her nose.

‘She held her nose!’

Babsi repeated this at least a dozen times. Not only when they lifted Mother on to the stretcher and slid her into the ambulance under the neighbours’ wondering gaze, but also to the staff
in the intensive care ward:
‘Why on earth did she hold her nose?’

Babsi thought it obvious that this was what had made the pressure build up in her brain and caused the aneurysm to burst. It wasn’t until much later that a doctor with tired eyes and
projecting teeth informed me that my mother couldn’t have averted the bleed even if she’d sneezed into a handkerchief in the normal way.

‘The cerebral haemorrhage probably occasioned the sneeze reflex. Either that, or it was purely coincidence that she got something up her nose just when the aneurysm burst. Anyhow, it
wasn’t that which caused the stroke.’

How comforting. So my mother wasn’t hooked up to a battery of ultra-modern hospital equipment because she was too stupid to sneeze normally. Her time had come, that’s all. Very
reassuring.

Today, five-and-a-half years after the event, she was in the clinical ward of a private nursing home. Her room resembled a showroom for hi-tech aids to intensive care. The medically correct term
for her condition was apallic syndrome or waking coma. Whenever I visited her I felt tempted to wrench off the clipboard at the foot of her bed, cross out the diagnosis, and substitute
‘deceased’. Because that’s what she was to me:
dead.

My mother may still have experienced phases of waking and sleeping, and her organs hadn’t stopped functioning thanks to an abundance of pills, infusions, tubes and instruments. The doctors
and nurses may well have thought that this constituted living, but to me she had died in our kitchen on May 20 five-and-a-half years ago.

I also knew that she would think the same if her brain were still capable of entertaining a single, lucid idea.

‘Promise me you’ll never let it come to that!’

Her tone on the way back from the nursing home had been almost imploring. We’d paid Granny a visit – an even more harrowing occasion than usual. Granny had apparently chucked her
turds around the dining room (‘See what
I
can do!’) and then tried to eat her own hair. By the time they let us in to see her she was in the seventh heaven, pharmaceutically
speaking, and dribbling the way she used to when dozing in front of
Little Lord Fauntleroy.

‘Dear God, I don’t want to end up like that,’ my mother told me tearfully in the car. Then she extracted a far too ambitious promise from me never to leave her alone in a
situation in which she had ceased to be in command of her senses.

‘I’d sooner they turned off the machines.’ Taking my hand, she gazed deep into my eyes and said it once more: ‘Promise me, Alex. If I ever have an accident and can only
get by with constant help like your Granny, I want you to do your utmost to see that I don’t end up like her, you hear?’

I’d sooner they turned off the machines.

If only she’d signed a living will. If only my father had still been alive to take the decision in my place. If only I myself had had the courage to carry out her last wish.

I’d tried to once. I drove to the sanatorium firmly resolved to switch off the ventilator – and failed miserably. After the tragedy on the bridge I lacked the mental strength to take
another person’s life. And so it was my fault that my mother, once such a robust, vivacious, emancipated woman, who wouldn’t even let a waiter help her into her coat, was dependent on
the whims of the underpaid nursing staff without whose assistance she couldn’t even empty her bowels in the right place.

She wouldn’t have wanted that. She would rather have died, she’d made that absolutely clear to me, but I hadn’t managed to kill her.

And the Eye Collector seemed to be aware of that.

Remember your mother.

He must know me well. He seemed know that I’d spent a long time staring at the ventilator switch with which could I have ended all her sufferings and incurred a murder charge. He knew I
was too weak. In shooting Angélique I’d used up all the courage I would have needed to kill another woman, even though death was her dearest wish.

The Eye Collector was confronting me with an insoluble problem.

A game isn’t a game unless the players have a chance of winning...

He hadn’t challenged me to find the suction pump. If I wanted to save my own life and Alina’s, I must turn off quite another machine: the one within arm’s reach of me, which
was keeping the tormented woman alive.
You can turn off the pump and win...

The ventilator beside the unknown woman’s bed!

I shouted into the phone, telling the student our location and begging him to send help. The words came tumbling out of my mouth as I tried to convince him that this was a deadly serious
situation, not a game, but he merely laughed.

‘Yes, yes, the guy told me you’d come out with something like that,’ he said, and hung up.

I pressed the cradle, dialled 112 again and waited for a ringing tone. In vain.

I wasn’t permitted another call.

The antiquated telephone had been disconnected.

(6 HOURS 4 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

FRANK LAHMANN (TRAINEE JOURNALIST)

‘That’s bullshit,’ said the detective sitting nearest to him. ‘He’s gone in search of a parking violator with a blind witness? You expect me to
believe that?’

Frank was seated at the end of the massive glass-topped table whose edge was buried beneath the inspector’s plump buttocks. He guessed that Thea was waiting for him outside the conference
room and might even be listening at the door. She had been eager to sit in on the interview, but the other policeman had opposed the idea. Although thinner and more sensibly dressed, he looked just
as shattered as his uncouth colleague. Flaky skin and red-rimmed eyes with dark circles round them – Frank was acquainted with those signs of fatigue in himself. They manifested themselves
when you were working against the clock and sleep was a luxury you couldn’t afford. Frank could even recognize the facial side effects of the remedies they took to cope with stress. The guy
named Scholle drowned his lack of sleep in coffee and Red Bull. His dark-suited superior resorted to harder measures. His dilated pupils were as informative as the fact that he kept sniffing
– like Kowalla, the cokehead from the paper’s sports section.

‘Why not just check the info?’ said Frank. ‘Maybe Zorbach’s right. Maybe the guy with the parking ticket is the one you’re looking for.’

He repeated the address in Brunnenstrasse where the man Zorbach thought was the Eye Collector had left his car in a disabled parking space.

‘Check it out. What have you got to lose?’

‘Time,’ said the man who had introduced himself as Philipp Stoya. ‘The deadline’s approaching and I’ve no wish to set eyes on another child’s corpse because I
wasted time checking parking offenders.’

The corners of his mouth quivered as he tried to suppress a yawn. Hurriedly, he fished a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket just in time to sneeze into it several times. A thin trickle of
blood dribbled from his right nostril. The chief investigator seemed to have noticed this, because he tersely excused himself and left the conference room.

That’s great,
Frank thought apprehensively,
leave me on my own with Rambo.

Scholle smiled at him, nothing more. He simply sat perched on the edge of the table, jiggling his right foot as if bouncing a ball, and grinned. Broadly. Amiably. Unmaliciously. Like an old pal.
Saying nothing.

Frank bowed his head and thought hard.

Should I give him the address?

Zorbach had asked him not to do so before he okayed it by phone, but he hadn’t called in for the last ten minutes, nor had he answered the phone when Frank called him just before the
detectives turned up.
The number you require is temporarily unavailable.