The Ice Queen: A Novel (25 page)

For a moment, neither of them said a word. Kaltensee cleared his throat.

“But you came here to ask me about something,” he said formally. “How can I help you?”

“It’s about Herrmann Schneider.” Pia opened her purse and took out a notebook. “We’re sifting through his estate and have encountered some inconsistencies. Both Goldberg and Schneider seem to have adopted false identities after the war. Schneider isn’t really from Wuppertal, but from Steinort, in East Prussia.”

“Aha.” If Kaltensee was surprised, he didn’t show it.

“When your mother told us that Schneider was a friend of her late husband, you said that was right. But I had the feeling that you wanted to say something more.”

Elard Kaltensee raised his eyebrows. “You’re an astute observer.”

“A basic prerequisite for my job,” said Pia.

Kaltensee took another sip of his Coke. “In my family, there are many secrets,” he said evasively. “My mother keeps quite a few things to herself. For example, to this day she has never told me the name of my biological father, or, as I sometimes suspect, my actual birth date.”

“Why would she do that? What makes you think that?” Pia was surprised.

Kaltensee leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees.

“I can remember things, places, and people I really shouldn’t be able to remember. And it’s not because I possess psychic abilities, but because I must have been a year older when we left East Prussia.”

He rubbed his unshaven cheek as he stared into space. Pia said nothing, waiting for him to go on.

“For fifty years, I never thought much about my origins,” he said after a while. “I had resigned myself to not having a father or a hometown. Many people of my generation share that experience. Fathers didn’t come back from the war; families were torn apart and had to flee. My fate was not unique. But then one day, I got an invitation from our sister university in Krakow to attend a seminar. I didn’t give it much thought but decided to go. One weekend, I took an excursion with a few colleagues to Olsztyn, formerly Allenstein, in order to view the newly opened university. Until that moment, I had felt like an ordinary tourist in Poland, but all of a sudden … I had the strange feeling that I’d seen this railroad bridge and this church before. I could even remember that it must have been wintertime. Without the slightest hesitation, I rented a car and drove east from Olsztyn. It was—”

He broke off, shook his head, and took a deep breath.

“If only I hadn’t done that.”

“Why?”

Elard Kaltensee stood up and went over to the window. When he spoke again, his voice sounded bitter.

“Up to that point, I was a relatively content man with two well-mannered children, occasional love affairs, and a job that was fulfilling. I thought I knew who I was and where I belonged. But after that trip, everything changed. I’ve had the feeling that with regard to important areas of my life, I’m totally fumbling in the dark. And yet I’ve never dared undertake a search in earnest. Now I think I was afraid of learning things that would destroy even more for me.”

“Like what?” Pia asked. Kaltensee turned around to face her, and his expression of undisguised anguish caught her off guard. He was more fragile than was apparent on the surface.

“I assume that you know your parents and grandparents,” he said. “You’ve surely heard the remark ‘You must get that from your father,’ or ‘from your mother,’ or ‘from Oma or Opa.’ Am I right?”

Pia nodded, taken aback by his sudden confiding tone.

“Well, I
never
heard it as a child. Why not? My first assumption was that my mother had probably been raped, like many women were back then. But that would have been no reason not to tell me anything about my origins. Then a much worse suspicion occurred to me. Maybe my father was a Nazi who had some sort of horrendous atrocities on his conscience. Had my mother been to bed with a guy in a black SS uniform who only an hour before had been torturing and executing innocent people?” Elard Kaltensee was talking himself into a fury, almost screaming, and Pia felt spooked when he stopped directly in front of her. Once before she’d been alone with a man who had turned out to be a psychopath. The facade of polite reserve crumbled; Kaltensee’s eyes shone as if from a fever, and he balled his hands into fists.

“For me, there was no other reason for her silence. Can you begin to understand how this thought, this uncertainty about my origins, has tormented me day and night? The more I dwell on it, the more clearly I feel this … this darkness inside me, this compulsion to do things that a normal, well-balanced person would never do. And I ask myself, Why is this so? Where does this impulse come from, this sense of longing? Which gene do I have inside me? That of a mass murderer or that of a rapist? Would it be different if I had been raised in a real family, with a father and a mother who loved me with all my strengths and weaknesses? At last I know what I was missing. I feel this black, disastrous rift running through my whole life. They took away my roots and turned me into a coward who never dared ask any questions.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and went back to the window. There he braced his hands on the windowsill and leaned his forehead on the pane. Pia didn’t move or say a word. There was so much self-loathing, so much despair behind his every word.

“I
hate
them for doing this to me,” he continued in a strained voice. “Sometimes I’ve hated them so much that I even wanted to kill them.”

His final words put Pia on high alert. Kaltensee’s behavior was beyond strange. Could he be mentally ill? What else would prompt someone to utter such openly murderous intentions to a police officer?

“Who are you talking about?” she asked. She’d noticed that he was speaking about “them.” Kaltensee spun around and stared at her as if seeing her for the first time. There was something demented about the glassy look in his bloodshot eyes. What was she going to do if he suddenly jumped on her and tried to strangle her? She had foolishly left her service weapon at home in the cabinet, and nobody knew that she’d come here.

“About those who know,” he replied huskily.

“And who is that?”

He went to the couch and sat down. Suddenly, he seemed to come to his senses; he laughed, as if nothing had happened.

“You haven’t touched your Coke,” he said, crossing his legs. “Would you like some ice cubes?”

Pia didn’t take the bait.

“Who knows about it?” she insisted, although her heart was pounding hard, convinced as she was that a triple murderer was sitting across from her.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he replied calmly, almost cheerfully, and finished off his Diet Coke. “They’re all dead now. Except for my mother.”

*   *   *

Not until she was back sitting in her car did it occur to Pia that she’d forgotten to ask Kaltensee about his opinion on the ominous number and about Robert Watkowiak. She had always been proud of her excellent knowledge of human nature, but with Elard Kaltensee, she’d been totally wrong. She’d taken him for a cultivated, composed, and charming man who had things worked out in his own life and with the world. She hadn’t been prepared for the unexpected delving into the somber depths of his conflicted soul. Pia didn’t know what had scared her more: his violent outburst, the hate behind his words, or his abrupt switch to cheerful normality. “‘Would you like some ice cubes?’” she muttered. “Unbelievable!”

She noticed with annoyance that her leg was trembling when she used the clutch. She lit a cigarette and turned onto the Alte Brücke, which spanned the Main River to Sachsenhausen. Gradually, she began to calm down. Viewed rationally, it was altogether conceivable that Elard Kaltensee had shot his mother’s three friends because they hadn’t wanted to tell him the truth about his origins and he blamed them for his unhappiness. After what she had just witnessed, it seemed conceivable that he could have killed them without giving it a second thought. Maybe he had first spoken with them calmly and objectively and then went ballistic when they refused to tell him anything. Anita Frings had known him well, and she probably hadn’t objected when he took her out of the building in her wheelchair. And unsuspecting, Goldberg and Schneider had let him into their homes. The number 11645 must mean something to Elard Kaltensee as well as to the three people he’d murdered. Possibly it was the date they’d been forced to flee. The longer Pia ruminated about this, the more convincing this whole thing seemed to her.

She drove along the Oppenheimer Road at a walking pace in the direction of Schweizer Platz, staring pensively out the window. It had started to rain, and the wipers scraped across the windshield. On the passenger seat, her cell phone rang.

“Kirchhoff,” she answered.

“We found Robert Watkowiak,” her colleague Ostermann said. “But he’s dead.”

*   *   *

Marleen Ritter lay on her side, her head resting on her hand as she studied the face of her sleeping husband. She should have been mad at him: First, he hadn’t called her in almost twenty-four hours; then he’d showed up reeking of booze and pounced on her without offering any explanation. But she simply couldn’t stay mad at him, especially not now that he was home and snoring peacefully next to her in bed.

She tenderly looked at the etched contours of his profile and his thick, disheveled hair. She was once again amazed that this good-looking, intelligent, wonderful man had fallen in love with her. Thomas could have chosen any woman at all. Yet he had picked her, and that filled her with a warm, deep sense of happiness. In a few months, when the baby came, they would be a real family, and then her Oma would forgive Thomas everything—she was quite sure of it. Whatever had happened between Thomas and her grandmother was the only shadow clouding her happiness, but he was bound to do his utmost to patch things up, because he felt no animosity toward Vera. He moved in his sleep, and Marleen leaned over and pulled the blanket over his nakedness.

“Don’t go.” He reached out for her with his eyes closed. Marleen smiled. She cuddled up to him and stroked his unshaven cheek. He turned over on his side with a groan and put a heavy arm across her.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” he mumbled. “But in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve learned so much that I’ll probably have to rewrite my whole manuscript.”

“What manuscript?” Marleen asked in astonishment. He was quiet for a while, then opened his eyes and looked at her.

“I haven’t been completely honest with you,” he admitted with a remorseful smile. “Maybe because I was ashamed. After Vera threw me out, it was pretty hard for me to get another job. So to make some money, I started writing novels.”

Marleen smelled the stale alcohol on his breath.

“But there’s nothing demeaning about doing that,” she replied. When he smiled like that, he looked good enough to eat.

“Ah well.” He sighed and scratched his ear in embarrassment. “What I’m writing won’t get me the Nobel Prize in Literature. But I do earn six hundred euros per manuscript. I’m writing cheap novels. Romance novels. Broken hearts. You know.”

For a moment, Marleen was speechless. But then she started to laugh.

“You’re laughing at me,” said Thomas, offended.

“Oh, nonsense!” She threw her arms around his waist and giggled. “I love trashy books. Maybe I’ve already read something you wrote.”

“It’s possible.” He grinned. “Anyway, I use a pseudonym.”

“Will you tell me what it is?”

“Only if you make me something delicious to eat. I’m dying of hunger.”

*   *   *

“Can you take over, Pia?” asked Ostermann. “The boss is going to his daughter’s christening today.”

“Sure, no problem. Where do I have to go? Who found him?” Pia had put on her right-turn signal ages ago, but these twits behind her refused to let her in. Finally, a small gap opened up, and she stomped on the gas, forcing the guy behind her to brake, instantly followed by honking in response to her rude maneuver.

“You won’t believe it: a real estate agent. He was showing his daughter’s house to a couple, and there was Watkowiak, plunked down dead in a corner. Not a great way to sell a house.”

“Very funny.” After her experience with Elard Kaltensee, Pia was in no mood for jokes.

“The real estate agent said that the house had stood empty for years. Watkowiak must have broken in to use it as a hideout. It’s in Königstein Old Town. Hauptstrasse Seventy-five.”

“I’m on my way.”

When she passed the main train station, the traffic eased up. Pia slipped in a Robbie Williams CD, for which her colleagues had teased her mercilessly, and drove on the autobahn past the fairgrounds to the sounds of “Feel.” Her musical taste was highly dependent on her mood. Except for jazz and rap, she liked almost everything, and her CD collection ranged from Abba through the Beatles, Madonna, Meat Loaf, and Shania Twain all the way to U2 and ZZ Top. Today she was in the mood for Robbie. At the Main-Taunus Center, she turned onto the B8, and fifteen minutes later she was in Königstein. She knew the narrow, winding streets of the Old Town from her school days, so there was no need to ask directions. As soon as she turned onto Kirchstrasse, she saw two patrol cars and an ambulance parked up the street. Number 75 was between a women’s clothing boutique and a lotto store. The building had obviously been empty for years. With windows and doors nailed shut, peeling plaster, and a damaged roof, it had turned into an ugly eyesore in the heart of Königstein. The agent was still there, a suntanned man in his mid-thirties with a gel hairdo and patent-leather shoes—the very epitome of someone in the real estate profession. It had started to rain, so Pia pulled her gray hoodie over her head.

“I finally had somebody interested in the property, and now this!” he complained to Pia as if it were her fault. “The woman almost had a nervous breakdown when she saw the body.”

“Maybe you should have checked out the place first,” Pia chided the agent. “Who owns the house?”

“A woman client here in Königstein.”

“I’d like her name and address,” said Pia. “Or perhaps you’d like to inform your client yourself about the aborted showing of the house.”