The Child (6 page)

He crashed into the chrome-plated chariot sideways on, lost his balance, and made a desperate grab for the nurse’s sleeve but missed. Having briefly supported himself by planting one hand on the patient’s head, he gripped his wrist as he tumbled and eventually fell flat on the mint-green linoleum, but not before pulling out the cannula that connected the old man to his drip.

‘Jesus! Are you OK, Herr Losensky?’ The bearded nurse knelt down beside the wheelchair, looking concerned, but his patient seemed half-amused and waved him away.

‘It’s nothing, nothing. I’ve got a guardian angel.’ The old man reached under his open-necked shirt and pulled out a chain with a cross dangling from it. ‘Better look after our friend there.’

Stern massaged his palms, which he’d bruised on the unyielding floor when trying to break his fall. He ignored the throbbing pains in his knees rather than present an even more pathetic picture.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said apologetically when he had regained his feet. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘That depends,’ the nurse growled. He carefully slid the old man’s sleeve up his arm to the elbow. ‘That cannula will have to be replaced in due course,’ he muttered, looking at the back of the patient’s age-freckled hand, and told him to hold a ball of cotton wool over the puncture mark. Then he examined his bony arm for bruises or blood blisters. Although his hands would have graced a prizefighter, his movements were gentle – almost caressing.

‘Why in such a hurry? Cops after you, or something?’

Stern was relieved that the nurse hadn’t discovered any cause for concern.

‘I’m really sorry, Herr …’ He couldn’t decipher the scratched plastic ID card on the nurse’s gown.

‘Franz Marc. Like the painter, but everyone calls me Picasso because I prefer his pictures.’

‘I see. I do apologize, I was a million miles away.’

‘We’d never have known, would we, Herr Losensky?’

Immediately below Picasso’s earlobes, two luxuriant sideburns ran down his cheeks like strips of Velcro and culminated in a chestnut-brown beard. When he smiled, baring two rows of massive teeth, he looked like a carved wooden nutcracker.

‘I’ll naturally pay for any damage I’ve caused.’

Stern produced his wallet from the breast pocket of his suit.

‘No, no,’ Picasso protested, ‘we don’t do that here.’

‘You misunderstand me. I was going to give you my card.’

‘You can put it back. Can’t he?’ The old man in the wheelchair nodded, cocking one of his bushy eyebrows with a look of amusement. Unlike the hair on his head, which was sparse, they presided over his sunken eyes like two big tufts of steel wool.

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘You just gave us both a nasty shock, and Herr Losensky can’t take too much excitement after his second heart attack. Can you, Frederik?’

The old man shook his head.

‘So a few euro notes won’t be enough to get you off the hook just like that.’

‘What will, then?’ Stern wondered if he was up against two lunatics. He grinned nervously.

‘We want you to bow down in shame.’

Stern was about to tap his forehead and walk off when he saw the joke. Smiling, he bent down and retrieved the black baseball cap he must have knocked off the old man’s head, then gave it back to him.

‘Perfect. Now we’re quits,’ Picasso said with a laugh. His elderly protégé chuckled like a schoolboy.

‘Are you a fan?’ Stern asked as the old man carefully adjusted the cap with both hands. It bore the legend ABBA in gold letters.

‘Of course. Their music is divine.’ Losensky lifted the peak of his cap once more and tucked a strand of snow-white hair beneath it. ‘What’s your favourite ABBA number?’

Stern was rather at a loss. ‘I don’t really know,’ he replied. He wanted to visit Simon Sachs and talk about yesterday’s events with him. He wasn’t in the mood for small talk about a 1970s Swedish pop group.

‘That makes two of us,’ Losensky said with a grin. ‘They’re all good.’

The wheelchair’s brand-new tyres whirred across the shiny floor as Picasso set it in motion again.

‘Who did you want to see?’ he called over his shoulder.

‘I’m looking for Room 217.’

‘Simon?’

Stern caught them up again. ‘Yes, do you know him?’

‘Simon Sachs, our orphan?’ said Picasso. He took another few steps, then paused outside a gunmetal-grey door marked ‘Physiotherapy’. ‘Of course I know him.’

‘Who doesn’t?’ the old man muttered as he was wheeled into a big, light room equipped with wall bars, foam mattresses and sundry keep-fit machines. He sounded almost hurt that the conversation had ceased to revolve around himself.

‘Simon is our little ray of sunshine,’ Picasso said enthusiastically. He brought the wheelchair to a halt beside a massage table. ‘It’s a shame about him. First he has to be taken into care because his mother nearly starves him to death, and now they’ve found a tumour in his skull. A benign one, so the doctors say, because it isn’t forming any metastases. Bah!’

For a moment Stern thought the nurse was going to spit on the floor at his feet.

‘I don’t know what’s so benign about the thing if it goes on growing and ends by occluding his brain.’

The door to an adjoining office opened and an Asian girl in judo gear and tiny orthopedic shoes came in. Losensky obviously fancied her because he started whistling ‘Money, Money, Money’ again, but this time it sounded more reminiscent of a labourer’s wolf-whistling at a pneumatic blonde.

Back outside in the passage, which was rather busier now, Picasso pointed to the second door on the left beside the staff room.

‘That’s it, by the way,’ he told Stern.

‘What?’

‘Room 217. Simon’s got it to himself, but you can’t just waltz in there.’

‘Why not?’ Stern feared the worst. Was the boy so ill you couldn’t enter his room without sterile clothing?

‘You haven’t brought him a present.’

‘Huh?’

‘Visitors always bring flowers or chocolates. Or at a pinch, when the patient’s a boy of ten, a pop magazine or something of the kind. You can’t turn up empty-handed, not when he could be dead a week from now …’

The nurse left his sentence unfinished. Catching sight of something out of the corner of his eye, Stern swung round and located the source of the alarm signal, a flashing red light above a door. Then he hurried after Picasso, who was already on his way to the emergency, and caught him up just outside Room 217.

He had woken up the first time just before four and rung for the nurse. Carina hadn’t come, which troubled him far more than his unremitting nausea. In the mornings this hovered somewhere between his throat and his stomach and could usually be brought under control with forty drops of MCP solution. Only when he woke up too late and the pains in his head had already welded their iron bands around his temples did they sometimes take several days to return to 4 on the scale.

That was how Carina always gauged his general condition. The first thing she asked him for every morning was a number, 1 meaning pain-free and 10 unendurable.

Simon couldn’t remember when he’d last been better than 3. Still, it might happen today if the sad-looking man remained at his bedside a little longer. It was good to see his face again.

‘I’m sorry if I gave you a shock. I only meant to turn the television on.’

‘That’s OK.’ Agitation had given way to relief when it transpired that Simon had pressed the alarm bell by mistake. Having satisfied himself that the boy was all right, Picasso had left him alone with the nervous Stern.

‘Carina likes you,’ said Simon, ‘and I like Carina, so I guess I like you too.’ He drew up his knees, forming an inverted V under the bedclothes. ‘Is it her day off?’

‘Er, no. That’s to say, I don’t know.’ Somewhat awkwardly, Stern pulled a chair up to the only bed in the room and sat down. It struck Simon that he was wearing almost the same clothes as he had when they met at the factory two days ago. His wardrobe evidently contained several copies of the same dark suit.

‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ he asked.

‘Why?’

‘Carina would say you look like something the cat brought in.’

‘I slept badly.’

‘But that’s no reason to look so grim.’

‘It is sometimes.’

‘Oh, I know what’s bothering you.’ Simon reached into the compartment beneath his bedside table and brought out a wig. ‘You never spotted it, did you? It’s all my own hair. They cut it off before Professor Müller started on me with his ink eradicator.’

‘His what?’

The boy deftly clapped his wig over the fluffy down on his head.

‘They treat me like a little kid in here sometimes. Of course I know what chemotherapy is, but the medical director explained it to me like I was a baby. He said there was a big, dark patch inside my head, and the tablets I took would dissolve it. Like ink eradicator, in other words.’

He saw Stern run his eyes over the side table beside his bed.

‘I’ve stopped taking interferon. The doctor said I could manage without it now, but Carina told me the truth.’

‘Which is?’

‘The side effects are too dangerous.’ Simon grinned faintly and raised his wig for a moment. ‘They can’t eradicate the thing without killing me. A month ago I got pneumonia and had to spend some time in intensive care. There was no more chemo or radiotherapy after that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not. At least I don’t get nosebleeds any more, and I only feel sick in the mornings.’ Simon sat up and wedged a bolster behind his back. ‘But now it’s your turn,’ he said, doing his best to sound like one of the grown-ups in the crime series he watched on television. ‘Are you going to take my case?’

Stern laughed, looking likeable for the first time.

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘The thing is, I’m afraid I did something bad, and I don’t want to …’

… die not knowing whether I’m really guilty
, he’d been going to say, but grown-ups always reacted so strangely when he mentioned death. They looked sad and patted his cheek or quickly changed the subject. Simon left it at that because he felt the lawyer had understood in any case.

‘I’ve come to ask you a few questions,’ Stern said.

‘Carry on.’

‘Well, first I’d like to know exactly what you did on your birthday.’

‘My session with Dr Tiefensee, you mean?’

‘Precisely.’ Stern opened a leather-bound notebook and proceeded to write in it with a little ballpoint. ‘I’d like to know all about it. What happened to you there and anything you know about the body.’

‘What body?’ Simon stopped grinning when he saw the look of dismay on Stern’s face.

‘Well, the man whose remains we found. The one you—’

‘Oh, you mean the man I killed with an axe,’ said Simon. He was relieved to have cleared up any misunderstanding. His lawyer still seemed rather perplexed, however, so he tried to explain with his eyes shut. He found that to be the best way of concentrating on the voices in his head and the terrible scenes that became more and more vivid the more often he lapsed into unconsciousness.

The man suffocating in the garage with a plastic bag over his head
.

The child screaming on the hotplate
.

The blood on the walls of the camper van
.

He could bear to think of those scenes only because they were so remote. Decades away.

In another life.

‘But that was only
one
dead body,’ he said quietly, opening his eyes again. ‘I’ve killed lots of people.’

‘Hang on, not so fast. Take it slowly, one thing at a time.’

Stern went to the window and ran his fingers over a drawing stuck to the pane. Using crayons, Simon had drawn a remarkably realistic church with a lush green field in front of it. For some reason he had signed his drawing ‘Pluto’.

Stern turned to face the boy.

‘These unpleasant, er, memories …’ he searched for a better word but failed to find one. ‘Have you always had them?’

‘No, only since my birthday.’ The boy took a carton of apple juice from the bedside table and stuck a straw in it. ‘I’d never had a regression before.’

‘So tell me. How did it go, exactly?’

‘I thought it was fun. The only trouble was, I had to take off my new trainers.’

Stern smiled at Simon in the hope of steering his flow of words into channels of greater interest.

‘The doctor works in a great building. He said it was near the television tower, but I never saw it while we were there.’

‘Did he give you anything to eat or drink during your visit?’

Any medication? Psychiatric drugs?

‘Yes, some warm milk and honey. That was great too. Then I had to lie down on a blue mattress on the floor. Carina was there – she wrapped me up in two blankets. I was really warm and cosy. Only my head was sticking out.’

‘What did the, er, doctor do then?’ Stern hesitated before using the professional title because he felt sure Tiefensee’s qualifications must have been forged or purchased.

‘Nothing, really. I didn’t see him after that.’

‘But he was still in the room?’

‘Yes, of course. He just talked and talked. He had a nice, soft voice like the doctor in the radio series I listen to.’

‘And what did Herr Tiefensee tell you?’

‘He said, “I don’t normally do this with children of your age.”’

What a relief
, Stern thought sarcastically.
So the conman only cons adults as a rule
.

‘But he made an exception because of my illness and Carina.’

Carina
. Stern wrote her name in his notebook and filled in the ‘a’s with his ballpoint. He resolved to question her about her relationship with this charlatan immediately afterwards. Tiefensee couldn’t have been a random choice on her part.

‘He asked me a lot of questions. What were the nicest times I’ve ever had? Where did I like being best? On holiday, with friends, or just mucking around? Then he told me to shut my eyes and imagine myself in the most wonderful place in the world.’

Putting the subject into a somnambulistic state
. Stern gave an involuntary nod as he recalled the keyword he’d encountered several times on the Internet last night. After making his ill-considered call to Sophie he’d sat down at the computer. One single search command had brought up innumerable websites belonging to parapsychological crackpots and obscure freaks, but also some respectable sources that addressed the subject of regression seriously. Most of them pointed out the inherent dangers. While not disputing the possibility of reincarnation as such, several warned of potential damage to the psyche, for example if a regression subject relived a severe trauma from his or her past while under hypnosis.