As he made his way out of Grueber’s apartment, Fabel used his cellphone to call Susanne to check how she was. She told him she was fine, but there was a tone of uncertainty that Fabel had never heard before in her voice. He grabbed his jacket and keys and made his way out to the waiting silver and blue marked police car outside.
Part Two
12.
Twenty-Four Days After the First Murder: Sunday, 11 September 2005.
Midnight: Altona, Hamburg
The audiences were getting smaller.
It was during the 1980s and 1990s that he had seen the greatest reduction in audience size, when a new generation of performer had come along. Schlager, the bland, schmaltzy form of German pop music, had always been there, its inane presence actually helpful to singers like Cornelius Tamm; its complete lack of substance counterpointing their music, underlining its intellectualism. But then came punk, then rap which gave voice to the disaffection of a new, apolitical generation. And, of course, there had been the irresistible wave of Anglo-American imports. Each had, in its own way, marginalised Cornelius and others like him, pushing them out of the limelight. And off the radio.
But there had always been his concert audiences: the constant faithful followers who had grown older, had matured with him. But the Wall had come down and Germany had become reunited. Protest became redundant. Political lyrics seemed irrelevant.
Now Cornelius performed in cellars and town halls for audiences of fifty or so. There were other performers of his vintage who had simply given up touring and sold their own back catalogue, as Cornelius also did, from their websites.
But Cornelius needed an audience. No matter how small. And he always gave the best performance he could, even when his fans would sicken him with the way they’d make up for their lack of numbers with an excess of enthusiasm. He would look out over a small mass of balding or greying heads and corpulent or haggard faces and go through the motions of reviving the dully depressing memories of their youth.
The audience tonight was no different. Cornelius laughed and joked and sang, playing the same tunes on the same guitar he had played for nearly forty years. Tonight he played in the cellar of an old brewery that sat between two of the canals that wove through Hamburg like the thread that held the city’s fabric together. The audience all sat on benches at the side of long, low tables, drinking beer and grinning inanely as he sang. He did not even have the power to bring an audience to its feet any more.
He did notice one younger face. It was a man in his early thirties, standing over by the bar. He was pale with very dark hair. Cornelius was not sure, but he thought he recognised the young man from somewhere.
Cornelius always finished his performance with the same number. It was his signature piece. Reinhard Mey had ‘ Uber den Wolken ’, Cornelius Tamm had ‘ Ewigkeit ’. Eternity. At last the audience dragged themselves to their feet, singing along to the song that promised that members of their generation were eternal. That they would triumph. Except they were not, and they had not. They had all surrendered to the banal; the mediocre. Cornelius too.
After he finished his set Cornelius went through the usual routine. It was, of course, humiliating to sit at a table with a case full of CDs for sale, but he engaged in the task with the same practised enthusiasm as he had learned to invest in his performances. More often than not he sold no more than a handful. He was, after all, preaching to the converted who, in most cases, already had all his songs. He had, as the capitalists would say, saturated his market.
Still, he smiled and chatted politely with those who lingered after the performance, talking to strangers as if they were old friends because of their vaguely common chronologies. But, inside, Cornelius Tamm’s soul screamed. He had been the voice of a generation. He had given expression to a special moment in time. He had spoken to and for millions who had raged against the sins of their fathers, against the sins of their own time. And now he sold CDs of his songs from a suitcase in a Hamburg Bierkeller.
It was nearly two in the morning by the time he reversed his van up to the back door and loaded his amplifier and other equipment into the back. As he did so, Cornelius felt every one of his sixty-two years weigh down the equipment. It had been raining while he had been performing and the cobbles in the yard behind the old brewery glistened in the moonlight. One of the bar staff helped him out with the amp, said goodnight and closed the delivery doors, leaving Cornelius in the courtyard alone. He looked up at the moon and the silver-etched edges of the roofs around the courtyard. Somewhere over on Ost-West Strasse a siren whined past. Cornelius thought about Julia lying warm and fresh and young in their bed. About how he did not belong beside her. About how he did not belong anywhere, any more. Cornelius Tamm looked up at the moon from the empty courtyard of an old brewery pub and felt so terribly lonely. He sighed and slammed shut the rear doors of the van.
He gave a jump when he saw the young man with the pale face and dark hair standing there.
‘Hello, Cornelius,’ said the stranger. His arm arced round and Cornelius caught the black blur of something long and heavy-looking. It slammed into his cheek and there was the sound of something cracking and Cornelius felt a white-hot pain explode in the side of his face and down his neck. He hit the ground so fast that his brain did not have time to register his falling. He felt the glossy, rounded top of a cobble against his uninjured cheek and realised that it was sleek not with rain but with his blood.
‘I’m sorry about your face…’ His assailant was now bending over him. ‘But I couldn’t hit you on the head.’ Cornelius felt the sting of a hypodermic needle in his neck and the moonlight faded from the night. ‘That would have damaged your scalp…’
11 a.m.: HafenCity, Hamburg
The very first thing that struck Fabel about the view was that he could see the site where they had found the mummified body. It made him think of the nightmare he had had while staying at Grueber’s. The procession of mummies; the firestorm dream. Maybe inherited memories had nothing to do with genetics.
The apartment was, undoubtedly, the best they had seen so far. But somehow Fabel found he could not muster sufficient enthusiasm for it. The estate agent, Frau Haarmeyer, was a tall middle-aged woman with an expensive haircut dyed the same pale sand-coloured blonde that so many middle-aged, middle-class northern German women seemed to favour when their fair hair started to turn grey. Throughout the showing, Frau Haarmeyer managed to convey two sentiments wordlessly: that she clearly believed the apartment was really very much above Fabel and Susanne’s reach, and that this kind of work was really very much beneath her. Although she enthused about the flat and its neighbours in the HafenCity development, there was an undertone that suggested she was simply going through the motions.
Susanne was obviously taken with the apartment and followed the estate agent, listening intently and holding her head angled in her distinctive pose of concentration. Accordingly, Frau Haarmeyer focused her attention on her, largely ignoring Fabel until he wandered off to some corner or other to inspect a particular detail, at which point Frau Haarmeyer would tilt her head to see past Susanne and frown in Fabel’s direction.
At one point he noticed the same kind of frown on Susanne’s brow. Fabel knew that somehow he had to project more interest than he felt. After all, it had been his idea that they should move in together. Susanne had at first been reluctant and it had been his enthusiasm for the notion that had won her round. Yet every apartment they had seen had left him cold when he compared it to the view from and location of his Poseldorf home. But Fabel knew that, since the violation of his private space, he would never feel the same about the view again. It reminded him of how he had felt when his marriage had failed: that he was being forced into a new life, when all he wanted was to have his old one back. To turn back the clock and repair that which had been shattered.