The Last Temptation (11 page)

When he had first fantasized about this, he’d known he would need some souvenir to remind himself how well he’d done. He had read books about murderers who had excised

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breasts, removed genitalia, stripped the skin from their victims to clothe themselves. None of this seemed right. They were weirdos and perverts, whereas he was driven by a motive far more pure. But he wanted something, and he needed it to hold meaning for him alone.

He ranged over the indignities he’d been forced to suffer at the hands of the old man. There was no blurring at the edges of his memory. Even commonly repeated tortures failed to merge into one big picture. Every detail of every mortification was pinprick sharp. What could he take that wouldŤ keep his purpose fresh, clear and meaningful? M

Then he’d remembered the shaving. It had happened soon | after his twelfth birthday, a day unmarked by gifts or cards. The only reason he knew it was his birthday was that he’d 1 caught a glimpse of his birth certificate a few months before when the old man had been sorting through some papers. b. Until then, he’d had no date to call his own. He’d never had

so much as a birthday card, never mind presents, cakes and parties. But who could have been invited to any party of his? He had no friends, he had no wider family. As far as he was aware, the only people who even knew his name were the | crew of the Wilhelmina Rosen. >i

He’d known he was born some time in the autumn, because around the turning of the leaves, the litany of rage that poured into his ears would alter. Instead of, ‘You’re eight years old, but you still act like a baby,’ the old man would snarl, ‘You’re nine now, time you learned what it is to take some responsibility.’

Around the time he turned twelve, he’d noticed the changes. He’d grown taller, his shoulders straining the seams of his flannel work shirts. His voice had become unreliable, shifting registers as if he were possessed by a demon. And around his cock, dark wiry hairs had started to sprout. He’d

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imagined this would happen eventually. He’d spent too long living in close confinement with three adult males not to have grasped that at some point his body was going to duplicate theirs. But the reality was simply another source of anxiety. He was leaving childhood behind, without any clear idea of how he could ever become a man.

His grandfather had noticed the changes too. It was hard to imagine how he could be more brutal, yet he seemed to regard it as a challenge to find fresh sources of humiliation. Things had reached a new level of horror when a hawser snapped one morning as they were docking in Hamburg. It had been one of those things that was nobody’s fault, but the old man had decided that someone had to pay the price.

When they’d got back to the apartment, he had ordered the boy to strip. He’d stood shivering in the kitchen, wondering which of the familiar agonies awaited him, while his grandfather had raged through to the bathroom, swearing and insulting him. When the old man had returned, he was carrying his cut-throat razor, the blade open and gleaming like silver in the dimness of the afternoon light. Terror had risen like bile in his throat. Convinced he was going to be castrated at the very least, he’d sprung at the old man, fists flying, desperate to escape whatever lay ahead.

He hadn’t even seen the punch that hit the side of his head like a mallet. All he knew was a moment of crushing pain, then oblivion. When he’d opened his eyes, it was dark. There was a dribble of dried vomit running from his cheek to the floor and a burning pain in his groin that was sufficiently frightening to render insignificant the dull throb in his head. He lay for long minutes, curled on the cold linoleum, afraid to allow his hands to explore for fear of what they might find.

Eventually, he dared. His fingers crept down his stomach,

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tentative and slow. At first, he encountered only the cold, smooth flesh of his stomach. Then, just above the pubic bone, there was a sudden change in texture and a jagged stab of pain that made him suck his breath in sharply. He clenched his jaw and pushed himself up on one elbow. It was too dark to see anything, but he decided he’d risk turning on a light. It might bring even more wrath down on his head, but he couldn’t bear not knowing what had happened to him.

Almost crying with the several pains that movement brought, he managed to get to his knees, where he paused to let a nauseating dizziness pass. Using the table as a prop, he dragged himself to his feet and tottered the few steps to the kitchen light switch. He leaned against the wall and flicked the switch with trembling ringers. Dim yellow light filled the dingy room, and he steeled himself for a glance. ‘

The skin around his genitals was red raw. Every trace of pubic hair had been erased, along with the top layer of skin. There were pinprick scabs of blood where the razor had gone deeper still, but the cruel scraping of the tender skin was the source of the burning pain that coursed through his groin. He’d been more than shaved, he’d been skinned. He’d been reminded forcibly that he wasn’t fit to think of himself as a man. He hated himself then, contempt swallowing him like a black tide.

Looking back now, he realized his panicky rebellion had been a turning point. From then on, his grandfather had been less ready to inflict his tortures. The old man began to keep his distance, relying on the verbal flaying that could still reduce the teenage boy to quivering incompetence. He thought about running away, but where would he run to? The Wilhelmina Rosen was his only world and he doubted his ability to survive in any other. Gradually, as he had emerged into his twenties, he comprehended that there might

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be another way to gain freedom. It had been a painfully slow process, and in the end, he had won.

But that victory still hadn’t been enough. He’d known that before Heinrich Holtz had told his story in the beer garden. What Holtz had given him was a glimpse of how he could finally get his own back He’d given him a way to be a man.

He picked up one of the jars and swirled it round, watching the contents move in a slow danse macabre. He smiled as he unzipped his jeans.

Tadeusz Radecki was far too smart to be nothing more than a gangster. He’d built a legitimate business empire of video rental stores that provided him not only with a justifiable income to keep the tax authorities happy, but also allowed enough leeway in its accounting procedures to permit a serious amount of money laundering. If his business rivals had ever seen his company’s books, they’d have wondered how he could achieve such high rental levels per video and probably fired their own marketing teams out of pique. But that wasn’t going to happen. Tadeusz made sure his public business was above reproach. Not for him the shady back street video stores with their under-the-counter hardcore, or the wraps of drugs that changed hands in the video boxes. It might be his wares they were peddling, but there was no way he wanted any official connection to them.

That afternoon, he’d been visiting his flagship store at the top of the Ku’damm, where they did as much business selling videos as they did renting them out. He’d gone to check out the revamp that the most stylish shopfitters in the city had been carrying out, and he’d been impressed with the result. Clean lines, moody lighting and a coffee bar hi the middle of the shop floor came together to produce the perfect ambience for browsing and spending.

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After the tour of the shop, the manager had taken him up to his office for a celebratory glass of wine. As they’d entered, the TV screen had been showing a news channel. A reporter stood in a street Tadeusz recognized immediately as Friesenstrasse in Kreuzberg. Behind him was the unmistakable four storey building that housed the GeSa, the detention centre where all newly arrested criminals were brought. It wasn’t somewhere Tadeusz was personally familiar with; he knew the street principally because he always bought his reading material at the Hammett crime bookshop there.

The reporter’s mouth was opening and closing soundlessly, his frowning face indicating the seriousness of what he was revealing to the waiting world. Then the picture changed to amateur video footage of a man being hustled out of a car towards the heavy grey door of the GeSa, a uniformed officer on either side of him. Suddenly, a woman ducked under the barrier that prevented cars from driving straight into the yard from the street. The officers on duty in the guard post were caught unawares, only emerging from their booth as the woman ran up behind the prisoner and his escort, waving something in front of her. She stopped a couple of yards away from them, directly behind the prisoner. In an instant, his head blossomed scarlet, like a blob of spaghetti sauce splattered on a kitchen surface. The police officers peeled away from him as he crumpled. They hit the deck with their pale faces turning towards the woman. Even at that range, it was possible to see their eyes stretching wide in panic.

Tadeusz stared at the screen, appalled. He’d only seen the sniper’s victim for a few seconds, and then only in three quarter profile. But he knew who the dead man was. He was aware of the shop manager saying something and he turned away from the screen. ‘Sorry?’ he said.

‘I said, it’s funny how real-life shootings never look half

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as dramatic as the ones we sell.’ He reached for the open bottle of red wine on his desk and poured two glasses.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real-life shooting before,’ Tadeusz lied. ‘I’m quite shocked they’re showing it in all its glory on the early evening news.’ a {>-f^f|v

The manager laughed as he handed a glass to his boss. Tm sure the moral guardians of the nation’s youth will be clogging the TV station switchboard with complaints as we speak. Cheers, Tadeusz. Good decision to choose those guys. They’ve made a great job of the shop floor.’

Tadeusz raised his glass mechanically, reaching for his mobile with his other hand. ‘Yes. Now I need to find a way to justify the expense of doing up the rest of the chain. Excuse me.’ He touched a couple of keys to speed-dial Krasic. ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘We need a meeting. I’ll see you at my place in half an hour.’ He ended the call without waiting for Krasic’s response, then sipped his wine. ‘Lovely stuff, Jurgen, but I’m afraid I’ve got to run. Empires to build, new worlds to conquer — you know how it is.’

Twenty minutes later, he was pacing the floor in front of his TV screen, flipping channels to see if he could find a local news station that was running the footage of Kamal’s assassination. Finally, he caught the tail end of the video and immediately raised the volume. The studio anchorman took up the story. ‘The dead man, whose name has not yet been released, had been arrested in connection with the seven heroin deaths in the city in the past week. Sources close to the investigation say that the woman who fired the fatal shot was the girlfriend of one of the addicts who died after shooting up with contaminated drugs. Already, there are calls for an inquiry into how the woman found out about the arrest before the prisoner had even been taken into formal custody.’ He glanced down at his papers. ‘And now over to our correspondent at the Reichstag,

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where representatives have been debating new measures to combat the spread of BSE …’

Tadeusz hit the mute button. He’d heard all he needed to know. When Krasic finally arrived five minutes late, complaining about the traffic, he launched straight in. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’

‘What do you mean, Tadzio?’ Krasic stalled. It was clear from the troubled look in his eyes that he knew exactly what his boss meant.

‘Fuck it, Darko, don’t play stupid games with me. What possessed you? Having Kama! taken out on the steps of the fucking police station? I thought we were trying to take the limelight off this investigation, not turn it into the lead story across the country? Jesus, you couldn’t have gone for a more public display.’ ‘What else was I supposed to do? There wasn’t enough time to stage a convenient road accident…’ His voice tailed off as he realized what he’d said.

The colour drained from Tadeusz’s face. He looked terrifying in the shadows cast by the subtle lighting of the room. ‘You insensitive bastard,’ he snarled. ‘Don’t think you can divert me away from this fiasco by reminding me of Katerina.’

Krasic turned away and scowled. ‘That’s not what I meant. I just meant that I didn’t have enough time to set something up that would look accidental. So I reckoned if it was going to end up looking like murder, it needed to look like a domestic, not something to do with the business. So I got Marlene to do the dirty. She’s been working for us, shifting product in Mitte for the past couple of years. She’s not a user herself. And she’s smart enough to play the distraught girlfriend, deranged with grief. She’ll get away with next to nothing when it comes to court. And she won’t grass us up. She’s got a six-year-old girl I’ve promised we’ll take care of.

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She knows me well enough to understand what that means. One word out of place and the kid gets taken care of, though not in the way she wants. Boss, it was the only way. It had to be done, and it had to be done like this.’ There was no plea in Krasic’s voice, just a convinced finality.

Tadeusz glared at him. ‘It’s all going to shit,’ he complained. ‘This was supposed to go away. Instead, Kamal’s whole life is going to come under the microscope.’

‘No, boss, you’re wrong. It’s Marlene they’re going to be looking at. Before we’re done, we’ll have turned her into the heroine who rid the city of some vile drug-dealing scum. Like I told you, she’s not a user. Her life looks clean. And we can put up plenty of people who’ll make her sound like Mother fucking Teresa. Photographs of the six-year-old looking lost. Stuff about how she was trying to get her boyfriend off the junk. Besides, now they’ve seen how we dealt with Kamal, nobody else is going to say a thing to the cops. Trust me, Tadzio, it’s for the best.’

‘It had better be, Darko. Because if it all goes to shit, I know exactly who to blame.’