Revolution (7 page)

There was green out
there somewhere but I didn’t see it.

I looked at my
watch and stepped out of hotel Janus and stared at the tramlines of Bremer
Reihe. I crossed empty roads, strode down alleyways and over bridges until I
came to the park I’d walked through the night before.

I made my way
to the Rathaus, the former town hall (not a warren for furry little nibblers
with yellowed buckteeth) and surveyed the evidence; the printouts they feed to
the ever hungry paparazzi. And those paps had been as voracious here as
anywhere else on the planet.

Until the
story had died through lack of probable cause.

There were
three victims, all guys, all dead.

I took out my
notebook and plotted where their bodies had been found and joined the dots from
Binnen Alster to Steindamm to Kurt Schumacher Allee.

There had
been no signs of a struggle, no bullets, no poison in the veins, no needle
tracks and therefore no suspicion of drugs, at least of the intravenous
variety.

And they all
appeared to have been in vigorous health right up until life they did part.

I asked
questions.

People die,
they said. Men die, they shrugged. Even young men.

Sudden Death
Syndrome came up more than once, the heart stopping for no reason.

But each autopsy,
or n
uttenmörder
 as they call it, had failed to
show evidence of
thickening of the heart muscle. There were no
structural faults that would have led to deviant irregularities of cardiac
rhythm. Nothing in the way of weird electrical activity that would have killed
otherwise fit young men stone dead whilst still standing on their feet.

The victims
fitted the profile for SDS I’ll give you that: non-traumatic, non-violent and
unexpected. But like women who find themselves
pregnant with phantom babies, these guys seemed to have possessed bodies with
only phantom life to make them work.

No one knew who
they were because none of them had carried any ID. And with no ID there were no
names, no ages, and no links to possible family or friends - nothing.

A week after the
postmortems the drawers of the mortuary freezer were yanked open only to find
that the three body bags were now flat and empty, which might go some way to
back up the lab’s claims that the tissue and blood samples had reached them
full of nothing but sterile air.

The whole thing
was eventually put down to an employee’s sick practical joke.

The paps got
pissed. A guy got sacked. And the guy was found swinging by the neck at the end
of a piano wire hanging from the middle of Köhlbrand Bridge.

#

"Something
killed my son," his mother said.

"Maybe
it was natural causes," I said.

But she
didn’t believe me.

Neither did
I.

"Why was
he in Hamburg anyway?" I asked.

She sat down
and shrugged. She twisted a lace hanky in her veiny hands then dabbed it at her
eyes.

"He was
always travelling," she said. "It was as if he was looking for
something. For a way back to a place he had hidden deep inside of him.
Somewhere that was secret. He said it was like homesickness for something that
wasn’t there anymore."

"Hamburg?"
I asked. "It’s not exactly the prime holiday destination of the
planet."

But what did
I know?

"My son
wasn’t on holiday," she said. "He was travelling."

So she kept
telling me.

I nosed
around. She was paying. So was her marriage.

I asked about
the dad.

She jumped up
from her armchair like she had been whacked in the spine with an iron bar.

There was
more hand wringing, more hanky twisting, and even more dabbing at the eyes, but
not a tear. She always turned away, sniffed at the right moment then whirled
back with a wane grimace.

"The
father, the father," she wailed with her arms wind-milling all over the
place.

Apparently
she and the kid’s dad were meeting with divorce somewhere over the bridge of
spies.

There had
been fights and tantrums, she said. "None of which were my fault, of
course."

"Of
course," I said nodding my
faux pas
agreement.

Anything for
a quiet life.

You never
disagree with your paymaster. And this paymaster had electric transmissions
zapping all the way to my bank account; no cash, no checks.

Any kind of
checks.

And sometimes
the amounts she owed me didn’t add up; not exactly to the amounts we’d agreed
upon. Even the expenses would be paid a few percent short.

And I wasn’t
a charity.

She put it
down to ethereal problems with commission charges and exchange rates.

I put it down
to another unknown. But whatever it was I just smiled and insisted that,
"those are your problems, lady, not mine. Fix it and fix it quick or it’s
no deal."

And like
magic it would be done.

I couldn’t
figure her out. She was either the grieving mother whose son had died suddenly
and she couldn’t get over it, or she was suffering the kind of paranoid
delusions that natural causes don’t fit.

I didn’t ask.

I asked the
father instead.

#

The father
shut the door in my face.

I didn’t
budge from the stoop and knocked at his door again, only harder.

This time the
door swung wide and knuckles swept the way into a dingy hallway.

In no mood to
tempt fate that dull day I had decided not to wear a stab-proof vest. Besides I
could always duck faster than Sonny Liston if I had to.

I didn’t have
to.

"It was
a heart attack," the father said.

"How can
you tell?" I asked.

"What
else could it be?"

I didn’t tell
him I’d been over that one already.

There wasn’t
even a body; at least not one that belonged to their kid as far as I could
tell.

But I didn’t
say it. Why bother?

The father
wasn’t interested anyway.

Cold-hearted
and pinch faced, he was the complete opposite of the mother. Or was he?

They shared
one thing in common though.

They were
both liars.

The mother’s
grieving didn’t feel genuine and neither did the father’s cold acceptance of his
son’s death.

That is if he
was dead.

And if he
wasn’t dead then why the hell were they trying to convince me that he was?

#

"I’m not
a detective," I said to her.

"But you
know things," she said.

"I’m not
psychic either."

She didn’t
believe me.

"Do you
have any of the things he had with him when he was over there?" I asked
changing the subject.

She had a
million and one of them.

She stomped
up the stairs ahead of me and opened the door to his room like it had been
wired to the mains. She stepped back and I stepped inside. There were boxes and
bags full of his stuff; a ton of it. Where would I start?

She handed me
pictures and I sat on the son’s bed and slid one past the other.

"You
only have black and whites of him?" I asked.

She frowned
and bit her lip.

"We
thought it had a more artistic appeal," she said.

Her smile was
about as genuine as a fake Barbie’s.

"You and
his father?" I asked.

"Yes."

The word
snapped at me like a bite.

"Unusual,"
I said.

As was their
son’s attire in the pictures.

"These
look like they were taken sixty years ago," I said holding up a fan of
little monochrome squares.

"We
thought it would look quaint," she said. Her voice rose sharply on the
last word, like she was slamming the lid shut on Pandora’s Box and nipping the
tail of the monster before it could escape.

"Do you
have any of the things he had with him when he was over there?" I asked.

She stepped
around me and I hunkered down on the floor.

My hands
touched boxes and bags. She opened a door in the back wall.

I stood up.
My knees cracked.

"That’s
all there is," she said. "That’s all they said there was."

"You
don’t know what he left with?" I asked.

"He was
twenty-eight years old," she said. "He didn’t live here. He hadn’t
for years."

"I
see."

Or I didn’t.

There was a
passport with no stamps and a notebook with scribbles full of surreal images.
And they were badly drawn.

I flicked
through the pages.

There were
better drawings at the back made from a cleaner hand, neater. I flipped the
pages back and forth as she hovered over my shoulder.

"Your
son drew these?" I asked.

"Yes."

"All of
them?"

"Yes,
why?" she asked.

I showed her
a drawing from the front, another from the back.

"How do
you account for the difference?" I asked.

"I
can’t," she said with a big plastic grin before she had a chance to
neutralize it with an obligatory look of grief. She didn’t seem to possess a
great repertoire in the emotions department.

"He drew
sometimes," she said. "That’s all I know."

"Only
sometimes?" I asked.

Now it was my
turn to show genuine emotional intelligence. I couldn’t help the way my
eyebrows shot up in disbelief.

There must
have been a hundred pages packed with detailed drawings. What did she mean by
"sometimes"?

She looked at
me. Nope, that’s wrong; she scoped me. She studied me like I was a nematode
dropped onto a slide and drip fed acid just to see how much of a change in
environment I could take. The only difference between me and the worm was I
squirmed on the inside.

"You
could frame this and put it in a gallery," I said, pointing to one of her
kid’s drawings at the back, "but this?"

That broke
her spell.

"I don’t
understand what you’re getting at," she said.

"I’m no
expert," I said, "but if I had to guess, I would say that these were
drawn by two different people. It’s either that or these ones are unimportant
and these, the more detailed ones at the back, are. Maybe he’d drawn something
he saw when he didn’t have a camera handy, or when he couldn’t use one, or when
he was in a place where even a Box Brownie wouldn’t work. You know, like one
that only took pictures in black and white."

Her hand
fluttered to her skinny neck.

"He had
a problem," she said before pressing the bunched hanky to her mouth.

"Is that
how you explain these drawings?"

Monet’s eyes
were giving out at the end of his life. By then he could only paint what his
soul perceived, and his paintings were more beautiful for it.

Perhaps
that’s what had happened to her kid. He only drew what he could perceive in a
certain way; at least a distorted version of it.

The colors were
formless but bright, primary in nature and startling to look at. They were
almost coming off the page at me. It was as if he couldn’t actually see the
thing he was looking at, the thing that was creating so much brightness.

And there was
something else about them, something that clicked within me, something
familiar.

I turned to
look at her just in time to see waterless tears collecting under her eyes.

"This is
why you called me?" I asked holding up a particularly bright image of
green.

She nodded
uncertainly and bit her lip. She wasn’t even looking at the drawling, but at
me, gauging my reaction.

"No,"
she said shaking her head. "I called you because my son has disappeared,
and also because he saw things, things that no one else could."

She looked at
me dead center in the forehead.

"Just
like you," she said.

But I didn’t
want to talk about that. Not to her. Not to a stranger. Besides, this was about
her son, not me.

"He put
it all down in his drawings," she said pacing up and down the floor,
spitting out the words. "Of course his father thought he was mad."