Sorry (13 page)

Frauke is waiting for him on the veranda. She has lit a cigarette, and is looking at the driveway. Wolf goes and stands next to her. He finds it unsettling that Frauke still can’t look at him. “Why won’t you look at me?”

Frauke blows smoke out through her nose. She turns her head and looks at Wolf,
finally
, then looks away again. Wolf takes her by the shoulders and turns her around; the cigarette falls from her fingers and rolls over the veranda. Wolf feels Frauke’s warm breath on his face. Cigarettes and mint.
Where does the mint come from?
He hasn’t been so close to Frauke for ages, and wishes the situation were different. He would like to hug her and erase everything around them with his hug. Sex as medicine.

“What are you doing dragging a cop into our house?”

“Wolf, pull yourself together. Gerald is a friend—”

“He might be
your
friend, but as far as we’re concerned he’s a cop. I want you to get rid of him, or I’ll throw him out myself.” The corners of her mouth turn down slightly. “What sort of a face is that?” Wolf says. “Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t what?”

“Wolf, you can hardly stand upright, and you want to start a fight with Gerald? Have you completely lost it? He’ll wipe the floor with you. Give me that.”

She takes the handkerchief from his hand and dabs fresh blood from his top lip.

“What happened to you?”

Wolf steps back, leaving her hand floating suddenly in the air. The
exhaustion makes each of his movements a torture. He doesn’t know what he should say to Frauke.

“We had an argument,” he says at last, and picks the abandoned cigarette up from the floor, takes a drag on it, looks back at the villa. “But that isn’t the problem. What in God’s name have you started here? If the killer learns that you’ve gone to the police, then …”

He looks at the cigarette and doesn’t know what to do next.

“Why did you clear out?”

“Did you take a closer look at the photographs?” Frauke asks back.

“Are you fucking with me? Of course I took a good look at the photographs.”

“Did you notice that every photograph was taken outside? Your father and Jenni. Only the picture of my mother is from the clinic. He was with her, do you understand that? The bastard visited my mother. They were eye to eye. That’s why I’m sorry if I overreacted a bit, but it was too much for me.”

Wolf nods, he understands, he doesn’t know how he would have reacted in her position, but he understands that. Still.
You put your mother in danger
, he wants to say, and instead says:

“We could have talked.”

“I didn’t want to talk,” says Frauke. “What good would it have done? Don’t you see what’s happening here? We wouldn’t be able to sort it out. A gun’s being held to our head. We aren’t capable of sorting it out. That’s why Gerald has to know everything.”

Frauke walks over to Wolf, her hands rest on his chest, it’s such an intimate moment that Wolf is filled with longing.

So near
.

“Please, Wolf, go in and persuade the others that this is the best way.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“Nonsense, we’ll take Gerald to the apartment and—”

“Frauke, I said it’s too late. If you don’t want us all to go down together, then talk to your cop friend and get rid of him. After that we can talk.”

Wolf turns away, leaving Frauke alone on the veranda.

Tamara sits next to Kris on the lounge chair. Kris hands her a glass of red wine and refills Gerald’s glass. The atmosphere is relaxed, even if Wolf has no idea how that’s possible. He sees the swelling on his brother’s knuckles and instinctively touches his own eye. Later he will discover that Kris has sprained his hand.

Kris asks if Wolf would like a glass of wine as well. Wolf nods. Gerald observes that it’s a nice place they have here. He looks at his watch, he crosses his legs, then he points at his own face and says, “Whose path did you cross?”

“Family argument,” says Kris.

“Ah,” says Gerald.

Wolf takes a sip of his wine and tastes nothing. At last Frauke comes in from outside. Wolf doesn’t turn around. Frauke stops next to him and says she’s sorry, but she has to apologize to Gerald.

G
ERALD HAS PARKED
his car outside the property. He and Frauke stop by the gate. Gerald has no idea what just happened in there. He does know that he shouldn’t just leave like that. He’s always found it hard to interpret silence or sit opposite a complicated woman who stares straight ahead and doesn’t say a word. Frauke isn’t one of those complicated women, so it’s all the more alarming to Gerald that she’s keeping her mouth shut now.

“And you’re sure that I—”

“I’m sure,” she cuts him off.

Gerald looks over at the villa.

“I don’t like his face.”

“Wolf’s OK, he’s just very sensitive.”

Frauke stands on tiptoe and kisses Gerald on the cheek. As she does so, she thinks:
When we women say goodbye, we’re very clear about it
. Gerald nods as if he’s understood. Frauke sees more than she wants to in his eyes. Three times they have slept together, three times they have told each other it wasn’t a good idea. Frauke finally ended the affair when Gerald started saying he wanted a steady relationship. After that they saw each other less, they remained friends, everything seemed to be sorted out, even if Gerald’s expression now suggests more.

“Give me a call. Any time, promise?”

“Promise.”

Gerald leaves Frauke at the gate and gets into his car. One last wave, then he drives off. Frauke breathes out with relief and doesn’t move from the spot. She’s afraid to go back into the villa. She knows it wasn’t a particularly brilliant move just to run away from the Kreuzberg flat like
that. For a while she had simply stood in the street hoping they would follow her. Then she drove to Gerald’s place.

After Frauke has closed the gate, she turns toward the villa and to her surprise sees Kris sitting on the top step of the veranda. Tamara is leaning against the banister next to him, Wolf has put his arm around her shoulders.

They just want to see that Gerald’s really leaving.

But perhaps they also want to see whether I’m really coming back
.

Frauke makes an effort and walks toward them.

“How did you get rid of him?” is the first thing Kris asks.

Frauke points to Wolf with a tilt of her chin.

“I said he hit me.”

“You’re kidding me,” says Wolf.

“What else was I supposed to say, after you put on that show on the veranda? It was the best I could think of. Now would you please tell me what you’ve done?”

“We’ve done what was demanded of us, and what you should have done too,” Tamara replies. “But you had to clear out and put us all in danger. Not just us, but Jenni, too.”

Frauke feels as if someone has kicked her feet out from under her. She expected all kinds of things, but not Tamara’s disappointment. She wants to react, she wants to explain herself, as she finally comes back to what Tamara said at the start.

“What do you mean? What should I have done?”

“He wanted us to get rid of the corpse,” says Kris.

“He wanted you to do
what
?”

“He demanded that, Frauke, he—”

“Kris,
he
is a bloody murderer. How can you listen to a murderer?”

Her friends look at her in silence. Their eyes look tired and burned out. No one gives Frauke an answer, so she goes on:

“We have to end this here and now, and talk to the police. Do you get that? We have to stop him before he looks for his next victim.”

“And what are you going to tell the police?”

“What happened.”

“And
what
happened, Frauke? Are you going to tell them how Wolf marched into a deserted apartment to apologize to a woman who was nailed to a wall? Are you going to show them the proof? What proof is there? A letter, an e-mail address, and a cell phone number that probably doesn’t even work any more. What do you think your cop friend will say
then? Do you think he’ll make a quick call and the killer will say,
Hey, great to hear from you
. Hasn’t it occurred to you for a second that this guy might be watching us?”

Frauke can’t help bursting out laughing. Artificial laughter that she remembers from her school days, when embarrassing moments were covered over with hysterical laughter.

“You’ve seen too many movies. Are you trying to tell me that you’ve really apologized on behalf of this pervert? What next? Are you going to give him a discount next time? I could design a new advertisement.
Murder your neighbors, friends, and enemies. We’ll find the right apology
. I simply don’t believe it, you’ve all lost your minds. A woman was nailed to a wall, and you give me shit like this. What have you done? Have you chopped the corpse into little pieces and flushed it down the toilet?”

Kris looks away, Tamara looks at the floor, only Wolf doesn’t take his eyes off Frauke.

“Wolf, what did you do with the corpse?”

Wolf reaches into his trouser pocket, pulls his hand back out, and looks at it before he throws Frauke the keys. A flash in the air, a tinkle when she catches them. Frauke has no idea what’s going on. Wolf nods toward his car, which is standing next to hers in the driveway, and says:

“She’s lying in the trunk.”

Something in Frauke tears. It’s almost a relief. The ropes that have been holding her upright until now have been snipped. The cramp in her stomach disappears. Frauke leans forward and throws up on the gravel path.

T
HEY AREN’T STANDING
in front of the villa any more, they’re sitting in the kitchen. It’s just after one in the morning, and Kris has a throbbing headache. Tamara is wrapped in a blanket, shivering as if the heating weren’t working. Next to Wolf there’s a bowl of water into which he dips a tea towel from time to time, before holding it up to his swollen eye. Frauke is the only one not sitting down; she stands instead with her back resting against the wall. She has been listening to them, and hasn’t interrupted them once. Kris knows Frauke too well. She regrets sending Gerald away.

“So it was your idea not to bury the woman?” she says, turning to Wolf.

“I wouldn’t call it an idea, exactly, but I’m sure you would have done the same if you’d been with us in the forest. But then you just had to clear out like that.”

“I’ve already said I’m sorry. I was in a panic.”

Wolf sticks up his thumb.

“Good excuse. Luckily the three of us weren’t in a panic. Not at all, we were relaxed, and laughing cheerfully away.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

“Wolf isn’t an asshole,” Tamara joins in.

“Then what do you call what he’s doing? I apologize and he makes jokes. Tell me, what d’you call something like that?”

“He doesn’t mean it that way.”

They look at Wolf. It’s quite plain that that’s exactly how he means it. Kris knows his brother is about to say something stupid. Wolf has never had a good sense of when to stop.

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that each one of us bears some of the responsibility?” he asks.

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on, people, calm down now,” says Kris. “It won’t get us anywhere—”

“Stay out of this,” says Frauke, props her hands on the table, and leans forward as if she needs to be closer to Wolf for her next few words.

“What did you just say about responsibility?”

“You heard me.”

“Do you mean there might not have been a murder if our agency hadn’t existed?”

Wolf leans back and folds his arms.

“You know that’s nonsense,” Frauke goes on, looking at Kris and Tamara. “Could one of you please tell him?”

“He knows,” says Kris.

“That’s not the message I’m getting.”

“You’ll have to live with that.”

“Thanks, Wolf.”

“You’re welcome, Frauke.”

Kris has always known that the two of them should never have slept together. Wolf is subordinate to Frauke, and always feels it keenly in conflict situations.

“You three seem to have planned everything down to the last detail,” says Frauke. “Where do we go from here?”

“We thought we’d listen to what you have to offer,” says Wolf. “Like me, you’re just full of good ideas. You and the CID, me and my ethics. We should pool our resources.”

Yesterday they’d have laughed at that, they’d have looked at each other and exploded with laughter, Kris thinks and says, “We’ll send Meybach the file and put an end to it.”

“And that’ll be that?”

“That’ll be that.”

“Great plan,” says Frauke. “So let’s forget the corpse. We can leave it in the trunk until no one remembers where it went.”

“That’s not funny,” says Tamara.

“Tammi, I’m not trying to be funny. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. And if I can’t tell, then it’s time for me to go to bed. As soon as you have a sensible plan that also includes dead bodies in trunks, we can talk about it. Until then, please leave me alone. I’ve had enough for today.”

Her last glance is meant for Wolf. Perhaps she hopes he’ll contradict her.

“Good night,” says Wolf, without a trace of sarcasm.

“Night,” says Frauke, and goes upstairs.

The silence that falls is calming. They’re sitting in the kitchen, all three so tired that for a while they just stare straight ahead and enjoy the peace.

“You look bad,” Tamara observes eventually.

Kris tries to make a fist of his right hand, but can’t do it, his knuckles are too swollen. Tamara gets a tube of gel from the bathroom and rubs it in. Kris sighs.

“That feels good,” he says.

“And how’s your head?”

Kris shrugs and pulls a face. Wolf says that someone with a skull like his can’t get concussions. Kris thanks him for his remark.

“I didn’t mean to hit you so hard,” says Tamara.

“It was just a joke,” Kris says in a conciliatory voice. “I have a steel plate up there, so don’t worry.”

Wolf points to his eye.

“Can you do something for this, too?”

Tamara fetches ice cubes from the freezer, wraps them in a tea towel, and runs water over it for a moment. Wolf thanks her and presses the ice to the swelling. Tamara leans against the oven and yawns.