The night was cold. She walked back to her apartment via the river. The route was dangerous and she did not care. Fear was nothing next to her anger. She had a stun gun in her bag and a five-inch flick-knife under the sleeve of her right arm. She dared every shadow to attack.
Back at her apartment, she considered calling Brigitte. But Brigitte should not be involved. So Ute did not call the woman who had visited her in hospital on the first night when she was still curled, catatonic, bleeding from her vagina and holding keepsake scrapes of her attackers’ flesh beneath her fingernails.
She did not call Detective Holtz again. She removed her clothes and dropped to her exercise mat. She did press-ups to muscle failure, crunches until her abdomen burned, squats with a barbell, and then repeated the routine until she felt nauseated and dizzy.
There was a poster of von Bingen, Germany’s top triathlete, on the living room wall. She looked at it for a long minute.
Then she tugged the poster away. She reached for a pen, and, on the blank reverse, drew a plan.
On the afternoon before the attack, she had been reading a book. Now she took it to the sofa. She sat there, jacket on, door wide, and opened the book at its marker. The page showed three old women sitting around a spinning wheel. The caption read:
Clotho, she spins the thread of life. Lachesis, she measures a length. Atropos, she cuts it.
She knew she was stronger than Brigitte. Her friend would have been damaged for life. Not Ute. She had no fragile belief in right or wrong, or natural order, or her own invulnerability. She had no creator to blame.
She had nothing.
Chapter Thirty-Two
She examined her photographs of the office block over breakfast in a nearby bakery. She returned to her apartment and thought, read and smoked for the first time since she began training for the CTW triathlon. She even tried to write some of her thesis. The words wouldn’t come. That night, she slept fitfully. At 3:00 am, she drank a glass of water, put on her coat, and left the apartment.
She returned at 7:00 am and left again at 8:00 am. Part of her knew she should call Holtz, tell him that she had found the office block and let him arrest the suspects. A nurse had collected sperm. It could be matched with all of the five men.
The train arrived and she got on. Her thoughts were lost in the crowd, in the pictures sweeping by, by her fingertips on the stun gun.
There was a chubby boy on the train. He was about ten years old. He was on his way to school. He saw Ute and smiled. She looked away.
She alighted one stop from her destination and walked the remainder.
Ute emptied the glue into the lock. She put the tube in her pocket and left the alley. On the street, she turned right and entered the perfumery. It was precisely 9:00 am. The shop had no customers. Ute walked to the back of the shop and stood near a staff-only door. She pretended to inspect a moisturizing soap. When an attendant walked by, Ute clutched the woman’s arm. ‘Excuse me, please, but could I have a glass of water?’
The woman’s bright smile faded. ‘Yes, sure.’
She disappeared through the staff door and returned with an espresso cup of water. ‘I’ll have the cup back when you’re finished.’
Ute took two deep breaths, drank the water, and dropped the cup. She swayed. ‘I’m sorry…’
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Perhaps some more water…’ Ute said. She fell into the woman’s arms, leaving her no choice but to steer her into the back room. Ute’s downcast eyes saw linoleum and cleaning buckets. She smelled fresh coffee. The woman dropped her on a chair in a small kitchen. Ute heard the running of a tap, and it was then that she withdrew her stun gun.
The woman turned. She held a mug of fresh water in each hand. When she saw the gun and Ute’s cold eyes, she let the mugs drop. They bounced on the tiles. ‘You own the shop?’ Ute asked.
‘Yes,’ the woman said. She was tearful but her anger kept her alert. ‘What do you want? The takings? We have only been open a few minutes.’
Ute put a finger to her lips. ‘What I have to do today has nothing to do with you or your shop. I need to get into those offices.’ She pointed at the ceiling. ‘How?’
Ute noticed the highlights in the woman’s brown hair, her tan, and the red bandana that was tucked fashionably into the collar of her blouse. Her badge read Sabine Schlesinger. ‘The fire escape.’
‘No,’ Ute said. She pictured her journey that morning, before sunrise, when she had stolen up those iron steps in bare feet, attached the padlock, and felt it click home.
‘There is another way. Out of here, turn left. There’s an interior fire door that opens onto a corridor. Go up the stairs. You realise I must call the police.’
‘Of course,’ Ute said. She did not lower the stun gun. ‘Please do not follow me. This is for your own safety. Evacuate the shop.’
‘What’s going to happen?’
‘Evacuate the shop.’
She walked backwards from the room. In the tiny corridor, there was nobody. She checked on Sabine. Still there.
Ute turned and ran through the fire door, closing it behind her. The corridor was empty. At one end was the door with the lock that she had superglued before entering the shop. She checked its handle. Immovable.
Her one problem was the connecting door. It had a push-down bar on both sides. She had to act quickly.
She removed her shoes and walked up the stairs.
There was an interior door on the first landing. The handle turned. It was a cheap door with a cardboard filling that could not be barricaded.
For a second time, she stepped inside.
The empty office space was huge. The air was stuffy with sunlight. There were sheets of paper, old mugs, filing cabinets, chairs and sheets of plastic.
In the centre were scores of mannequins. Faces blank. Gender-neutral bodies naked and dusty. They hadn’t moved.
Immediately to her left was a walled office. It had an open doorway but no windows. Nearby was the fire-escape that she had padlocked earlier that morning. She came closer. She felt dust on her bare feet. She heard snores.
Inside, it was dull and hot. She counted six sleeping men. They were lying, two half-dressed, four naked, overlapping by foot and hand. Ute had once been afraid of these men. Now she was disgusted. There was a syringe-littered table in one corner. In another, a television and a games console. There was a duvet in the centre. The stench of sweat and semen was nauseating. She did not care who they were. She did not care why they lived this way.
Ute took the can of lighter fluid from her bag. She squirted it onto the duvet. It was a good feeling. She was pissing on these men. Next, she took a match and flicked it into the centre. The duvet erupted. Benthic smoke poured outward in a carpet, making for the door. She did not hurry to withdraw her stun gun. Humans cannot smell while they are asleep. She had checked.
She saw the moustached man who had led her from the club. He was middle-aged and balding, but Ute had always preferred older men. He had drugged her Martini. Later, he had injected her with something as she crouched to re-tie her shoe — scopolamine and morphine, a doctor had told her later. Life had become hazy and slow. Her resistance had fallen away. For passers-by she was a drunk. The man waved them on with a laugh.
She fired the gun. Two darts flew out and embedded in his thigh muscle. They connected to the stun gun with strong, insulated cables. The darts had barbs. They could not be extracted without ripping. There was a second trigger to activate the charge. Quickly, she fired darts into all of the men.