Tretjak (15 page)

On the telephone, Tretjak had put forward the tax inspection as a pretext and asked whether he could deposit some files temporarily at the farm, ‘just to be on the safe side.' The Inland Revenue didn't have to know everything, did they? Mrs Jedlitschka had immediately mentioned a chamber at the back of the tool shed, and her voice had exuded pride. In this case she was obviously happy to be his ally. Farmers didn't like the Inland Revenue.

She had now reached Tretjak, shook his hand, and said with an eye on the suitcases: ‘Quite a bit of stuff that you have to hide here.'

The chamber was a wooden crate behind the big Ferguson tractor. To the right there was a stack of tyres of different sizes. To the left, long poles were leaning against the wall, extensions for tools, propeller shafts for machines, a whiffletree for a trailer. The Fixer's suitcases found their place in the corner behind the pile of tyres and were covered up with an old black silo sheet. ‘I still have to do some work, Mrs Jedlitschka, may I...'

‘Of course,' the farmer's wife smiled. ‘Go ahead, I'll bring the apple juice.'

 

Minutes later Tretjak was sitting at the wooden table in the shadow of his observatory at the back of the tool shed, his laptop in front of him, as well as a pile of white paper, a pen and a carafe of homemade apple juice. It was completely quiet. To a stranger the scene might have appeared peaceful, but this word was totally inappropriate to describe Tretjak's state of mind. He was in fact very unsettled, and had the feeling of being faced with something ominous that was brewing up, that he was running out of time. He knew he had to do something. He had to shake off this strange paralysis which had taken hold of him. Hadn't that been his strength all along? To act faster than the others? To always be one step ahead of them? Somehow he had fallen behind, which he had to change, and fast.

He took a piece of paper from the pile and placed it horizontally in front of him. On it he wrote four words next to each other:
money-box
,
father
,
Kerkhoff
and
Kufner
. From each of these words he drew an arrow downwards. At the end of the arrow underneath
money-box
he noted:
Dimitri
. Tomorrow morning he was going to meet him in Hamburg. And he was going to lean on him: was everything that was happening around Tretjak somehow connected to their mutual past? Was it connected with the suitcase full of money, which was now being stored in the attic of the vicarage? One could only get to Dimitri one of two ways: with money or with violence. Tretjak was going to take money with him to the meeting, stacks of money, in neat bundles. Dimitri was one of these people who could be seduced with cash. The other card, violence, Tretjak had to play in a different way. He had to make it crystal clear how far his connections reached, which circles he could access. That had already been taken care of. When Dimitri awoke tomorrow morning in his flat overlooking the harbour, he would find, to his surprise, a nicely-wrapped little parcel on his living room table. It would contain a piece of cake, his favourite: apple strudel. And a card with the message:
To be enjoyed with care. Cordially, GT
. Dimitri was going to poke around in the cake and find a few nails; big, shiny builders' nails. He was a professional, he would understand what the message meant: I can gain access to your flat at night without you noticing. I know what you like. And I can turn nasty.

Below the name
Dimitri
Tretjak wrote tomorrow's date and
Hamburg, 10.30am
. And he added another name with a question mark:
Lichtinger?
Then he drew a circle around these words.

Underneath the arrow below
father
he wrote:
Today, 8pm, Osteria, Mrs X
. His father was up to something, that much was clear. But his father was a miserable worm, who was no match for the Fixer. He had to be taught that lesson. He was not behind the murder of the scientists. But maybe he was being used by somebody, was part of that somebody's plan. Which meant that somebody knew about their past. Who was that somebody? Was that somebody part of that past? Yesterday he had sent his father a curt message:
Make sure that this woman is at the Osteria tomorrow night. And supply her with good answers to my questions
. He had only written these two sentences, not even really written but typed as a text message on his mobile – and still he had felt sick to the stomach. The same way he had felt when he had to write to his father as a child.

Twice his mother had made him write such a letter. He had sat at the table, and he had not wanted nor been able to write, and the tears had run down his cheeks onto the paper. Angry tears about his mother, who had good reasons to hate this man; his mother, who was ill and still tried to make excuses for this man by saying: ‘He is going to be so happy to hear from you. He is not so well himself. He only behaved this way because couldn't help himself, you know...' Both times Tretjak had eventually squeezed a few sentences from his brain, and both times he had afterwards gone to the bathroom and thrown up.

He now drew a circle around the notes about the meeting tonight. Following an instinct, he reached for two new pieces of white paper. As before, he turned them horizontally and wrote one word on each of them. Then he placed them next to each other on the table, above the one he had been working on before.
Inspector Maler
was written on one. And
hell
on the other.

In the meantime, the sun had passed the dome of the observatory and shone onto the table. Tretjak opened an umbrella. Back in the shade, he turned on his laptop. Last night, while packing, he had transferred the most important data from the big computer to the laptop. He now forced himself to gather everything he had filed in the past under the names
Kerkhoff
and
Kufner
and integrated the information into a single designated folder, to make it easier to find any possible clues. He did so reluctantly, as he was actually too nervous, but he was so used to precise working practices that he quickly got into the task. More and more windows opened on the screen, words were highlighted, paragraphs copied and pasted.

The discussion about the value of knowledge was an old one. From Socrates – ‘I know that I know nothing' – to Heisenberg, who discovered that knowledge about a certain course of events inevitably leads to ignorance about another. Tretjak had always been convinced that the blind accumulation of ever more knowledge eventually caused one to lose one's direction, to become confused and disorientated. Some physicists were already working on the concept of anti-knowledge, along the lines of antimatter. Surrounded by the quiet of the Jedlitschka farm, rummaging through endless files on the internet, Tretjak suddenly felt his chest tightening again, felt as if he couldn't breathe. He was wondering whether he was actually already accumulating anti-knowledge, this dangerous stuff which would take him deeper and deeper into the darkness instead of leading him towards the light. Not only in this particular case, but in general. Maybe it would be better to remove the cover from his suitcases and to sink them in the nearby Mörlbacher pond.

He got up and started some breathing exercises. Two years ago, when the panic attacks had started, Stefan Treysa had sent him to see a specialist. The breathing technique which he had been taught there essentially consisted of imagining that the air needed to breathe was not all around you but in an open barrel a few meters away. One had to suck it in by inhaling powerfully, if possible in a constant stream. And it was the same in the other direction: one had to imagine ‘watering' a tree that was standing a few meters away, with the air one was breathing out.

He wasn't doing too well with concentrating. And then Mrs Jedlitschka came around the corner to ask whether he wanted a cup of coffee. He declined rather gruffly, broke off the exercises and, when the farmer's wife had disappeared, popped two of his tablets in his mouth and washed them down with the remainder of the apple juice. Stefan Treysa had said that he should take care that these tablets didn't become his constant companions.

Tretjak's eyes came to rest on his papers.
Inspector Maler
. He is going to focus on me, he has nothing else – so he thought, maybe he is going to search the apartment. What could he do to keep him away, to use him for his own ends? The Fixer never gave in. Of course, he had accumulated information about Maler in the past few days, all collected in a file on his laptop named
Jack of Hearts
. Standing up, he leant over the table and wrote the words on the piece of paper. He quickly added the name of the minister of the interior and the district commissioner. A wasp was circling the apple juice and then landed on the piece of paper.

Suddenly Tretjak had to smile. The police... the police were really harmless, why was he getting nervous about them? He was starting to display the behaviour he normally induced in others. Tretjak took the piece of paper, shooed away the wasp and scrunched it up. He would play with the Jack of Hearts when the time was right. Maybe he hadn't had enough sleep last night, he thought. He should have never let himself get drawn into a long discussion with Lichtinger. It might have been 20 emails which had gone back and forth, the exchange ending long after midnight. And Tretjak had poured himself a couple of vodkas to go with it, two for sure, maybe even three.

From early on, they had carried on their most important discussions in writing, back then of course on real paper, handed over in envelopes. Like the moves in correspondence chess.

His friend, the sceptic; his friend, the hesitant; his friend, the more fearful of the two of them. But Lichtinger had also been the more original thinker – the newer, more unashamed, more unexpected thoughts had usually come from him.

Last night he had started very carefully, had felt his way forwards rather slowly. The question which Lichtinger had pondered was: how much had Tretjak trespassed in his life through what he did? Tretjak had pursued a false lead for a while. He had assumed that Lichtinger was searching for a motive, revenge, for example. Suddenly he understood: Lichtinger was introducing a new thought. For him the guild of this world was not what concerned him. His friend, the priest. And then the question appeared on his computer screen in digital flashes of light:

Have you ever considered that you might be dealing with a power which has no name, no address, no form?

And even while he was thinking of a mocking reply the next mail arrived:
It is like the global formula, that the physicists are desperately searching for.

What an honour. You think I have picked an argument with God?
Tretjak typed.

No
, came the answer.
Not with God. With Evil.

Tretjak had sat in his office, on the packed suitcases, the laptop and the vodka in front of him. He had suddenly known exactly what he wanted to answer. And that's what he wrote.

End of discussion, Joseph. I don't have time for this. Good night.

Lichtinger had still sent him another two long messages. He had written about cases of people being possessed, of attempts at exorcism, of crimes which could never be solved, and he pointed to the conspicuous role of blood in both the murder of Kerkhoff and Kufner – in the first case there had been almost a complete absence of blood and in the other an abundance. He knew Tretjak was reading the mails. And when he didn't get an answer he wrote one final one.

Gabriel, I know that in your world all this doesn't exist. But let your old friend tell you something, and I am deadly serious: for the Church this is not a question of faith. We know that Hell exists. I pray for you.

Tretjak scrunched up the paper, on which he had written
hell
. When this matter had been sorted out, he was going to have another lengthy conversation about this point with Lichtinger.

The manufacturer of Tavor had vaguely mentioned the possibility of losing touch with reality as a possible side effect of taking the medication over long periods of time. Much later Tretjak would ask himself whether it had been the fault of the tablets that his instinct for seeking out the really important points had left him so completely, and that he had instead lost himself in so many thoughts – without seeing the essential questions.

 

Tretjak looked at his watch. He still had time for a cup of coffee with Mrs Jedlitschka in her parlour. Then he would get going. He had a date. He smiled when he felt below the belt of his jeans to make sure his swimming trunks were there. He had received a text message from Ms Neustadt yesterday:

Can you let go of the controls for once? I too want to show you something. For that I need only one star: the sun. And four hours of your time, in the afternoon. What do you think?

He had suggested this afternoon and she had agreed promptly:
2pm. Parking lot of the Icking Riding School. Wear your swimming trunks underneath your clothes.

Icking was not far from the Jedlitschka Farm. The route led from Lake Starnberg to the Isar Valley in an almost straight line on small roads over gentle hills. Tretjak was in a good mood, and nervous again, but for a much more pleasant reason. When he entered the village from the hill above he got a message on his mobile. He assumed it was from Ms Neustadt, maybe saying she was late. He decided he would turn off the phone later. For now he looked at the display. To his surprise, he had received only a photograph. Sender unknown. What he saw in the picture, however, was familiar to him. It was an image of his own office, taken from inside it, obviously today. The computer had already been removed, that could be seen clearly. On the Van Eek table stood the vase with the many-coloured roses, which had been sent under such mysterious circumstances.

Tretjak became annoyed, following the instructions of this navigational system. Icking stretched over a long hill. Beautiful villas, old farmhouses, two schools, one church. At the bottom, already in the forest and near the Isar dam, was the riding school. In the parking lot stood a big Mercedes, a parked horse box – and an older green Golf, with a fairly big, military-grey dinghy balancing on its roof. Ms Neustadt was leaning against this vehicle. Brown Bermuda shorts, white tee-shirt, straw hat. When she saw Tretjak's car, she waved.