Tretjak (19 page)

‘No idea. You'll have to ask my father.'

‘Don't worry,' Maler said, ‘I will. Your father called me yesterday. He wants to meet me and tell me something important about you. We are meeting this afternoon.' Maler paused. Then he said: ‘There are a number of people who want to tell me something about you.'

There was a knock on the door. A woman entered. Irritated, August Maler looked up.

‘Sorry,' she said, ‘but it's important. A call for you.' She held out a phone to him. ‘Do you want to take it in here?'

Maler shook his head and left the room with her. He closed the door behind him.

Tretjak stayed behind alone. He got up and walked around, his eyes on the door.

Three minutes later it opened again and Maler returned. He sat down again, and so did Tretjak.

‘There is a fourth body,' Maler said. ‘Dimitri Steiner, you know him. He was stabbed a few minutes ago in a café in Hamburg. There is not very much more we know now except that he was supposed to meet you there.'

‘That's correct,' Tretjak said. ‘We wanted to talk about old times.'

‘That's no longer going to be possible,' Maler said.

‘At least you don't have to ask me about my alibi for this one,' Gabriel Tretjak said.

 

Mörlbach, Jedlitschka Farm, midnight

The black sky was lit up by stars. He parked the car in a small bend in the road on the edge of the forest so it could not be seen from the Jedlitschka Farm. When he got out, the light inside the car shone briefly onto a newspaper, which was lying on the passenger seat. The headline, in fat black letters underlined in red, shouted:
Cleaner Murdered: Munich Businessman Arrested!
He locked the little Peugeot with the remote key and trudged through the darkness, first following the road at the edge of the forest for about 100 metres, then turning onto a small path to the left into an open field and across the meadow directly towards the farm. His eyes had already become used to the darkness. The Jedlitschka Farm lay peaceful and grey in the pale starlight. Step by step, Joseph Lichtinger got closer and for a moment his brain played a trick on him well known to children. For an instant, he did not see in the outline of the farm the familiar image of a human habitation, but instead recognised, in the mountain of shadows and lines and surfaces, the contours of a large animal. Lichtinger left the path and, following an invisible bend, approached the farm from the back. The key to the observatory was under a brick next to the entrance.

He had been to the observatory only once before, when Tretjak had shown him his new telescope. How many nights had they spent together when they were young, somewhere in the mountains, with ever more sophisticated binoculars and ever more daring conversations and plans...?

Cleaner Murdered: Munich Businessman Arrested!
The sight of that headline had shaken Lichtinger to the core. The sense of shock had not left him all day, it kept reassembling in his thoughts, quickening his pulse. The layout of the
Abendzeitung
newspaper had been revised several times over the years. Typography, column width, the handling of photographs, all that had changed repeatedly. A modern, digital image recognition system, which compared the front page to one from 20 years ago, pixel by pixel, point by point, would not have found one single similarity. But Lichtinger's brain was not a computer.
Bomb Explosion: Bank Manager Dies In His Car!
In Lichtinger's brain, the headline from back then pushed itself in front of the one from today, though the logo of the newspaper was still bright red, the letters still black. In Lichtinger's brain the two headlines combined, danced with each other.

In the beam of the red flashlight, Lichtinger started up the telescope, opened the cupola, took the protective cap off the glass, and switched on the steering mechanism. Then he turned the apparatus to face the region of the Swan Formation, which was already standing high in the sky. He chose the wide lens and a fog filter, and searched the region until a soft object pushed itself into view. Long, thin, white streaks, which looked like fog or mist over a moist meadow. They spread over a huge area. The Veil Nebula, the remnants of a supernova, 1,700 light years away from Earth.

Bomb Explosion: Bank Manager Dies In His Car!
It had been in the time before mobile phones, before emails. The physics student Joseph Lichtinger had lived in the Türkenstrasse, renting a room in the flat of an old man. The knock of Mr Schmidt on his door had woken him, and then Tretjak had stood in front of him in his room, pale, with this newspaper in his hand. Even now, Lichtinger still saw the look in his eyes, his flickering eyes.

 

‘You did it? You really did it?' he had asked Tretjak. They had sat across from each other, he on his bed and Tretjak on the old camel stool.

Again and again Tretjak had shaken his head. ‘No, I haven't done anything. But they think I did it.' And then he had looked at him. ‘Our plan was almost exactly like the way it actually happened.'

‘Our plan, our plan...' Lichtinger was practically paralysed with fear. Yes, they had watched the man, spied on him, observed his life, his habits. Gabriel had repeatedly drawn all kinds of diagrams. Yes, they had talked about a bomb, and yes, Gabriel had found somebody who could build it, but all this was not really serious, it was only... ‘Our plan... Was that really a plan, wasn't it only... Was it?' The eyes of his friend Gabriel had been very black in that moment. And they became blacker by the second – at least that's how it had appeared to him.

 

From the window of his room, one could see the billboard of a cinema. That night it was showing an ancient Yves Montand movie called
The Payment of Fear
. Lichtinger had stared the whole time at the box of Lindt chocolates which was lying on the floor next to his bed. A present from his mother. That can't be the payment, he thought, over and over, like a broken record, that can't be the payment for fear.

The remnants of a supernova are what is left over when a star dies. The death of a star is a pretty brutal affair. It fights this death, rebels, escalates, a glowing fireball getting bigger and bigger while running out of fuel. It devours everything it can get hold of in the universe, but there is not enough, and in the end it collapses. And in one last gigantic explosion, the supernova, as its last breath, exhales or rather spits out bits of matter and dust clouds, which travel through the black nothing, glimmering faintly in memory of its long and bright past.

It was totally silent in the observatory, and the night smelt like summer already. Lichtinger's right eye hovered over the lens, and his hand held the small electronic guidance system with which he moved the telescope slightly backwards and forwards to increase the contrast of the image.

In the days after the headline, Lichtinger had practically not left his room, and had told Mr Schmidt that he was ill. Now and again he had turned on his little transistor radio. The assassination had created an uproar throughout the whole country. He immediately turned it off again. He had felt he was burning up in a fever. He still remembered the smell and the pattern of the blanket under which he had crawled. Tretjak went outside, had gone into town, sleepless, getting more and more nervous, and had shown up almost every hour in Lichtinger's room to report. Lichtinger, however, hadn't been able to take anything in, almost as if he was in shock. Finally the moment had come when Tretjak had deposited the suitcase in the room. Fifty million, he had said, US dollars. The Russians have paid up. If they think we've done it, they might as well pay us for it. Fifty million, Sepp. They belong to us, he had said. You have to hide them, Sepp.

Lichtinger knew that the suitcase no longer contained exactly fifty million and had to smile. He had left $350 behind in the room for Mr Schmidt. And a note that he should sell the rest of his things. And $8,000 he had put in the pocket of his leather jacket, just like that. He had put the suitcase into a storage locker at the train station, and its key into a padded envelope addressed and mailed to Tretjak. Then he had taken the bus to the airport. Munich-Riem it had been back then, almost in the middle of town by comparison. Today's new big airport in the Erdinger Moos was still a building site back then. He took a flight to Atlanta, in the US, because that was the next one available, and from there he flew to Venezuela.

When people go on long trips, they tell stories about them afterwards, they show their photographs, share tips, tell of their experiences. Of the long journey on which the physics student Joseph Lichtinger had embarked that November day more than 20 years ago, no records exist. No letters, no photographs, no tickets, no diary. And he never talked to anybody about it.

The dangerous mountain path in the Andes in Peru, the even more dangerous drug parties in Colombia, the jobs as a drug mule, as a nurse in a clinic, as a bouncer in a brothel... nothing, so it seemed later, had been hard enough or risky enough to push him to his breaking point. Twice he had found himself in a prison cell, once in Lima and the other time in Caracas. Each day he survived, each kilometre he travelled, put more distance between the Joseph Lichtinger from Lower Bavaria he once had been and the person he was now becoming. There was no proof that this year of his life had even happened. Only for the end of that journey was there a witness. Maybe this witness was the one human being he knew best or should know best, but who tonight of all nights, in the observatory at the Jedlitschka Farm, seemed to slip away, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that he did not have the faintest clue who he was really dealing with.

Lichtinger screwed the ocular out of the telescope and stowed it away carefully in the correct box. The cupola closed and obscured the view of the sky. He thought of Tretjak, who was in jail. Would he be able to sleep?

Back then, Tretjak had suddenly appeared, sitting on his bed in a hut in Haiti. Lichtinger had been lying there for days, drugged up to his eyeballs, high on mushrooms of some sort. One put a few drops of the stuff on your tongue and sank into a fog, comparable to the misty remnants of a supernova. There was a big fiesta going on in the little town, with dancing, ritual slaughter, voodoo songs. Lichtinger had no idea how long Tretjak had been sitting there before he had noticed him, or how long he had had to stay there before Lichtinger could actually recognise him.

‘How did you find me?'

‘Pack your things.'

Lichtinger saw that Tretjak was slipping the owner of the hut some money.

Two days later, they were back in Munich. Tretjak took him to a small apartment in the Olympic Village, which he had rented for him.

‘And?' he had asked Lichtinger in the taxi on the way to there. ‘Did you manage to get rid of the bad spirits?'

Lichtinger had taken only a brief look at the apartment and then shaken his head. ‘I don't want to stay here. I am going home.'

‘Home?' Tretjak had asked.

‘To the country. To my parents.'

‘You do that. They were worried sick about you.'

The padded envelope Tretjak had handed him then had been the same one that he had sent Tretjak, and it was still unopened. One could feel the key inside. Back then they didn't routinely open and empty storage lockers after a while.

‘This belongs to us, Sepp. You have to look after it.'

Lichtinger remembered this scene like it was yesterday. This had been the fork in the road. From then on, their paths had diverged. Soon after that Lichtinger started to study theology, and his friend's visits had become less frequent. Their debates about the manipulation of reality had lost their attraction. And the money in the suitcase was never spoken of again. And now, thinking back to the scene, he tried – so many years later – to read one more time Tretjak's face, which he clearly saw in front of him. But he didn't succeed.

He took out a little flask from his jacket pocket and switched on the red flashlight. The liquid contained in the flask appeared to be almost black. He had bought the rabbit from Farmer Sigl. It hadn't been difficult for him to cut the animal's throat. And the blood had immediately flowed with no problem. He had been surprised only at how warm it had been. He opened the flask, looked around the observatory, and then carefully let individual drops of the blood fall to the floor in different spots he had specifically chosen.

PART 2

 

It was a warm, almost hot September day, which was drawing to a close, and the funeral cortège with Paul Tretjak's coffin at its head looked decidedly strange. That was partly due to the vehicle that was transporting that coffin. It was in fact a tiny two-wheel tractor pulling a small wagon. On the front edge of the wagon sat a young fellow who was steering the tractor with what looked like a bicycle. The coffin was sticking out over the back edge of the wagon platform and was held in place with several belts. There were two plain, scarlet red ribbons for decoration. No floral bouquet, presumably because it would have been difficult to attach.

The people who lived in the mountains above the Lago Maggiore were used to whatever they did being done the hard way. As gay and easy as life appeared at the lakeshore, with its slim beach strips,
ristoranti
and boat charterers, it was completely different if one climbed only a few metres up the hill. Many roads and paths were not accessible by car, they were too narrow, too stony, too steep. They constantly had to be patched up, the encroaching thorny bushes cut back. The houses stood on the mountain like small boulders. The delivery of a new oven could take two men all day. In former times they had used donkeys to transport loads – and nowadays the small two-wheeled tractors, which could be used for practically anything.

The small church of Santo Stefano and its cemetery lay above the town of Maccagno and were accessible only on foot. The fit ones took 20 minutes to reach it, but for those in slightly worse condition it might take up to three quarters of an hour. In the summer, funerals took place early in the morning or late in the afternoon.