The Child (17 page)

‘You were tired. It was a difficult birth.’

Sophie ran her free hand through her hair, staring down at the flagstones. Her voice was thick with tears.

‘I can hardly remember his smile or his gummy little eyes or anything else. It’s all faded, like the sound of him crying. Even his smell is gradually fading too. Remember that expensive French baby oil we bought? Perhaps that’s why I refused to believe it. He smelled so alive the last time I held him. And now …’

Stern suddenly grasped what his revelations had done to her. She had evidently cherished an irrational hope all these years, and now it had been dashed.

Leaning forward and looking into her eyes, he saw that her tears had ceased to flow. He released her hand at once. Had he held it any longer, he would have felt like a rapist. Their brief moment of intimacy was over.

Neither of them spoke for a while. Then Stern turned and left the mother of his son alone in the kitchen. In search of Simon, Carina and a place to sleep, he made his way quietly downstairs. He could hear cold, rain-laden gusts of wind spattering the windows. They seemed to herald a stormy night to come.

The guest room was on the lower ground floor. Stern took off his shoes and lay down fully dressed between Simon and Carina, who were already sleeping so soundly that they hadn’t heard him come in. They were lying beneath a thin bedspread on opposite sides of the big double bed, like an old married couple who had quarrelled and given each other a wide berth before going to sleep.

Stern was grateful for this, which enabled him to squeeze in between them. Carina tended to roam around a bed while sleeping. Another five minutes, and she would have been bound to entwine herself with Simon and take up the whole of the mattress.

Although the heating was on, Stern shivered as his mind’s eye recalled the day’s horrific images.

The body in the freezer. Tiefensee. The graveyard. And, again and again, the sight of Felix dying
.

He turned over on his side and looked at Carina, whose bare shoulder was peeping out from under the covers. He felt tempted to reach out and touch it. Slight though it was, he felt that even the most fleeting contact would give him a sense of security. Her abundant curly hair was spread out on the pillow like a fan. She was also lying on her side.

He smiled. This was just how he had seen her for the first time: one arm extended, knees drawn up and eyes closed. It was three years since he had yielded to a sudden impulse on the way home to his empty house and turned into the car park of a furniture store. While walking round the bed department he thought he’d caught sight of a remarkably pretty, lifelike mannequin lying on one of the beds. Then Carina opened her eyes and smiled at him. ‘Should I buy it?’ she asked. An hour later he had helped her to carry the new mattress up to her top-floor flat in Prenzlauer Berg.

Another memory surfaced in his mind: his reason for dumping Carina three years ago. Lying awake beside her after sex, he had experienced how it would feel to forget – how a passionate embrace could expel those tormenting images from his mind and leave him living in the present alone. Just as he had a moment ago, he had withdrawn his outstretched hand because he felt guilty. He had no right to embark on a new life in which his memories of Felix would sooner or later fade like old photographs on a mantelpiece.

The next day he had taken advantage of some trivial disagreement to terminate their affair before it was too late. Before he lost himself in her.

Those and a thousand other thoughts kept Stern awake for another half-hour. Then exhaustion finally, irresistibly, drew him down into the darkness of a dreamless sleep. He was as oblivious of Carina tossing and turning beside him as he was of the earnest gaze focused on the nape of his neck.

Simon waited a little longer. Then, reassured by the lawyer’s regular breathing, he cautiously folded back the bedspread and, retrieving his wig from the floor, tiptoed out of the room.

Something went smash. The sound had to get through two doors, a staircase and some twenty metres of air before, much diminished in volume, it reached the guest room. Stern groaned and stirred. He had only perceived it subconsciously. What really woke him was a constricted sensation. In the depths of some dream or other, Carina had draped her arm over him.

Still dazed after his far too brief respite, Stern extricated himself from her unintentional embrace. He stretched, his stiff back digging into the mattress, and suddenly froze. Something was wrong. It didn’t take him long to discover what had changed in the darkened room.

He swung round, jumped out of bed and hurried into the adjoining bathroom. Simon wasn’t there – he’d gone.

Stern wrenched the door open and ran upstairs in his stockinged feet. He had no idea how long he’d slept for. It was dark outside. No light was coming in through the lattice windows, but that could mean anything so late in the year: early evening, midnight, half past four in the morning … His eyes were becoming accustomed to the prevailing gloom. Simultaneously, signs of life typical of a sleeping household were infiltrating his consciousness: radiators creaking, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room, the hum of the fridge.

The fridge
.

Spinning round, he saw light at the end of the passage. It was coming from under the kitchen door.

‘Simon?’ he called. Soft enough not to wake anyone upstairs, loud enough to be heard by whoever was lying in wait behind the door. He stole along the passage, trying to identify the sounds coming from under the door.

Stern wished Borchert was with him. Andi would probably have dashed in without a second thought. It was only with considerable hesitation that he cautiously turned the handle and went in. His heart raced – with relief.

‘I’m sorry.’ Simon was crouching down, swabbing the milk-splashed flagstones with a tea towel. He looked up at Stern with an apprehensive expression and got to his feet. ‘I was thirsty. The mug slipped through my fingers.’

‘Not to worry.’ Stern gave a wry smile, trying to banish the tension from his face. ‘Come here.’ He put his arm round the boy and hugged him gently. ‘Did something startle you?’

‘Yes.’

‘A gust of wind?’

‘No.’

‘What, then?’

‘The photo.’

Stern came closer and looked into Simon’s eyes. ‘What photo?’

‘This one.’

Carefully avoiding the milk on the floor, Simon shut the fridge’s stainless steel door. The kitchen abruptly went as dark as the passage outside. Stern turned on the ceiling light above the island.

‘It reminded me of something,’ said Simon.

The snapshot he removed from the door of the freezer compartment must have been taken at least four years earlier. It showed Sophie’s husband smiling rather nervously at the camera as he strove to keep his baby daughters’ heads above the surface of the soapy water in a plastic bathtub.

‘What about it?’ asked Stern.

‘Tomorrow morning, on the bridge. It’s about a baby.’ The photo in his hand started to tremble.

‘Did you dream this, Simon?’

‘Mm.’ The boy nodded.

Click. Click
.

Stern looked up at the ceiling light, red specks dappling his retinas, as Simon continued.

‘But I didn’t remember it until I saw the photo. It gave me such a start, I dropped the mug.’

Stern looked down again. The shape of the milky puddle reminded him of a map of Iceland. Very appropriate, given the sudden chill that had come over him.

‘Do you know what they are going to do with the baby?’ he asked. ‘On this bridge, I mean?’

Simon nodded wearily. The sodden tea towel slipped from his grasp.

‘Sell it,’ he said. ‘They plan to sell it.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

Stern took his eyes off the road long enough to glance sideways at Borchert, who was just pulling on a Bayern Munich football shirt.

‘Why not? I look good in it.’

His passenger, who was already sweating, grunted and wound his window down. Stern was also grateful for the cool morning air now streaming into the car at sixty kph. He estimated his net sleep intake in the last twenty-four hours at less than forty minutes. This morning he had only just managed to shower and beg a getaway car from his ex-wife in time to pick up Borchert at the Victory Column roundabout. Contrary to expectations, Sophie had surrendered her car keys without demur. She had even permitted Carina and Simon to remain at her Köpenick home until Stern discovered if his plan was working.

‘Listen.’ He raised his voice to make himself heard above the whistle of the headwind. ‘We’re sitting in one of the world’s most ubiquitous small cars. What’s more, it’s metallic silver, the most popular bodywork colour on the planet. In other words, we couldn’t find a less conspicuous mode of transport. Must you really ruin our camouflage by wearing
that
?’

‘Take it easy.’ Borchert’s window was sticking. He wound it up again. ‘Look over there on the left.’

They were just driving past the Philharmonie concert hall. On the opposite pavement, in front of the Berlin State Library, a bunch of young men were trooping in the direction of Potsdamer Platz. All were in full football gear.

‘There’s a big Bundesliga match this afternoon,’ Borchert explained. ‘Hertha versus Bayern. Now turn your head to the left again.’

Stern complied. He felt something moist imprint itself on his right cheek.

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘You need some protective colouring too. It looks great.’ Chuckling, Borchert angled the rear-view mirror so that Stern could see the Bayern Munich logo.

‘The Olympic Stadium is a total sell-out – at least thirty-five thousand fans are expected from outside the city. Some of them have already got here and are rampaging around the streets, as you can see. A lawyer’s three-piece suit may be OK when you’re sitting in this car, but out there …’ Borchert pointed through the windscreen at Potsdamer Strasse. ‘Out there on a day like this, there’s no better camouflage.’

Nuts. Totally nuts
, thought Stern. He snatched a glance at the back seat. Andi must have cleaned out a fan shop. Everything was there from scarves to tracksuit bottoms and goalkeepers’ gloves. No one would expect to see them in that get-up, far less recognize them, least of all with several thousand lookalikes roaming the capital.

‘But I don’t know if they’ll let us in looking like that.’ Stern turned into Kurfürstenstrasse and slowed down.

‘In where?’

He brought Borchert up to date. According to Simon, the meeting would take place tomorrow morning on some bridge in Berlin – a meeting at which a baby was to be sold. Stern surmised that the voice was the dealer who had now been warned that he was to be murdered in the course of that transaction, like his accomplices in previous years.

‘We have to find someone able to tell us who traffics in babies. Through them we’ll find the bridge and the voice. But for that we’ll have to go into certain establishments …’

He felt sick when he realized what he was admitting to himself. If the boy with the birthmark had some connection with Felix – if that boy actually existed – his fate was linked with the boss of a criminal operation that trafficked in children: a sadist being hunted by an avenger with whom Simon identified himself in his dreams.

Stern wondered yet again whether this crazy scenario could have a rational explanation – whether Felix had been exchanged or possibly even resuscitated. And, yet again, he was compelled to rule out all rational attempts to explain it. Felix had been the only male infant in the neonatal ward, had lain dead in Sophie’s arms for half an hour before she gave him up, had had a birthmark resembling a map of Italy on his left shoulder. Stern himself had caught a last glimpse of Felix in his coffin before it was entrusted to the flames for cremation. No matter which way you looked at it, the possibility that his son was still alive was about as plausible as a young boy’s knowledge of murders committed long before his birth.

‘Hello, anyone at home?’

Borchert had evidently asked a question, not that he’d heard it.

‘I asked how long Sophie was alone in that bathroom.’

Stern stared at him in perplexity. ‘At the hospital, you mean?’

When she fled into the bathroom with Felix?

‘Yes. I could hear your brain grinding away like the engine of this old banger, so I wondered if you’d thought of that too.’

Of what? That Sophie may have something to do with it?

‘You’re off your trolley. That’s crazy.’

‘No crazier than looking for a baby that may only exist in a little boy’s imagination.’

‘What do you think happened in the bathroom?’ Barely able to control his anger, Stern wondered why he was reacting to this theory so aggressively. ‘The bathroom door – the
only
door – was locked. You think she had a second, stillborn baby in there and quickly tattooed a map of Italy on its shoulder?’

‘OK, OK, forget it.’ Borchert raised his hands in surrender. ‘Let’s just look for this baby.’ He peered out of the window. ‘Hey, how come we’re cruising?’

He turned to look at a prostitute teetering apathetically along the pavement on legs like toothpicks. The stretch between Kurfürsten-, Lützow-and Potsdamer Strasse had long been one of Berlin’s most notorious red light districts. Most of the girls had caught hepatitis by the age of twelve or thirteen and were busy passing it on to their clients. Unprotected sex was more cheaply obtainable here than anywhere else.