Heroin had killed the one person he had truly loved. While he was in prison for demonstrating and throwing rocks at policemen in Zurich, little Hilda, fifteen years old, had overdosed in the ladies' rest room of the Zurich Bahnhof; she was found facedown in a toilet bowl. Little Hilda had carried no papers, but she had eventually been identified as a result of the slim volume of Ivo's poems she carried, thirty-six photocopies pages.
"A short book," said the Zurich policeman after he had shown Hilda's photograph to Ivo in prison. They had been driving to the morgue for the formal identification.
"How long should a book be?" said Ivo. He was pale, but regular prison food had filled out his slight body. Curiously he felt no hostility toward those who had imprisoned him. The policemen and guards were strict but fair.
From the depths of his despair, he swore total revenge on all heroin pushers. And so, at the age of seventeen, Ivo came to live in the Autonomous Youth House in Bern. He became its unofficial guardian. Most of its inhabitants were harmless, rootless youths in search of something other than Switzerland's ordered and disciplined society — the “boredom and air-conditioned misery of capitalism,” as the phrase put it. Some of the visitors were more dangerous, benefitting from official tolerance to push hard drugs and traffic in more lethal wares.
Ivo preyed upon heroin pushers. Operating with the cunning and desperation of one with nothing to lose, he stole their drugs and flushed them down the toilet in bizarre homage to his dead love. When the mood struck him, he informed to the police — in strange, elliptical messages, never in person or by phone, always in writing.
He had lubricated the zipper on his grimy sleeping bag with graphite powder. He slipped out of his bag noiselessly and crept toward the sleeping Dutchman. Within seconds the small packet of glassine envelopes had been removed, and Ivo tiptoed out of the room.
In the toilet he opened each envelope, one by one, and shook the powder into the bowl until the water was filmed with white. He replaced the heroin with powdered glucose and reassembled the packet. He put toilet paper over the powder in the toilet bowl but, worried about noise, did not flush.
He returned to the sleeping room. The Dutchman slumbered on. Ivo returned the doctored packet to the seamed leather jacket. Still no reaction. Reassured, Ivo crept out of the room again and this time risked flushing the toilet. The heroin vanished into the sewers of Bern.
Ivo went into the kitchen, made himself a pot of tea, and lit up the first roach of the day. He sat cross-legged on the kitchen table and stared out of the window into the gray light of false dawn. He hummed to himself and rocked from side to side. He felt good. Hilda would be pleased.
But what about Klaus? Beautiful Klaus, who could make money so easily from a few hours of giving pleasure, who was desired by so many men and women? There had been something about the man who picked Klaus up. It just did not feel right. No reason, just feelings. Ivo had been some little distance away. He had not seen the blond mustache and beard. He had heard conversation and laughter. Then they had walked away from him into the darkness, the blond man's arm around Klaus. The thunk of a car door — an expensive car by the sound — the faint whisper of an engine, then silence. Klaus hand to come back in a couple of hours as he had promised. Ivo had slept alone. Klaus was Ivo's friend.
If only life was like the Lennon song "Imagine." If only life was like that. Ivo sang and rocked in time to the music. He would do something tomorrow about Klaus, or maybe the day after that, or maybe Klaus would just turn up.
Just imagine.
* * * * *
The lusts, self-doubt, and sorrows of the night receded with the first sting of the icy cold shower.
Beat von Graffenlaub was a man of rigorous self-discipline and practiced routine. By 0630 he was having breakfast at a small Biedermeier table by a window overlooking the River Aare. He wore a charcoal gray flannel suit, a crisp white handmade shirt, and a black silk tie. His shoes were a tribute to his valet's expertise at military spit polish: they did not shine, they positively glowed. His socks were of light gray silk.
A solitary red rose rested in a slim Waterford crystal vase. At exactly 0655, von Graffenlaub would insert the flower in this buttonhole, don his navy blue cashmere overcoat, and at the stroke of 0700 would leave his house on Junkergasse to stroll toward his offices on Marktgasse. He could cover the short distance between home and office in less than ten brisk minutes, but even after a lifetime of familiarity he took pleasure in walking about the ancient city of Bern. Each morning and evening, time and weather permitting, he made a short detour, lengthening his walk to half an hour and arriving at his office at exactly 0730.
This morning, after he had left Junkergasse, he detoured into the grounds surrounding the fifteenth-century Münster. The terrace between the church and the ramparts was known as the Platform. It overlooked the river, flowing swiftly along below, its waters icy and swollen from the melting snows of winter.
Von Graffenlaub rested his outstretched arms on the low wall that bordered the river side of the terrace and breathed in and out deeply. The cool morning air felt pure and clean in his lungs. In the distance he could see the snowcapped mountains of the Bernese Oberland.
He looked up the river toward the Kirchenfeldbrücke, the elegant nineteenth-century iron bridge that linked the old medieval city with the more newly developed residential district of Kirchenfeld. His gaze followed the flow of the river to the old waterworks below. A flurry of activity caught his attention.
Two police cars, an ambulance, and several unmarked vehicles were parked by the water's edge. As he watched, uniformed police dragged what looked like a body from the river. He could see the pale white dot of the body's face before it was covered by a blanket. The face filled his vision. It was that of his dead son. He turned away. Nausea swept through him, and his skin felt clammy. He threw up over the parapet, and a spasm of shivering shook his body.
* * * * *
A noose hung from a hook in the corner of the Chief Kripo's office. Buisard had brought it back from a police chief's conference in the United States. It was a souvenir, he had said, an exact replica of a hangman's noose, as used before technology — in the shape of the electric chair and gas chamber and lethal injection — took over in most of the civilized world.
Maybe next time he'll bring back an electric chair, thought the Bear. Buisard insisted that the hangman's knot had thirteen coils in it, but each time the Bear counted, he could only make it only twelve. He started counting again out of the corner of his eye. According to Pierrepoint, the famous English hangman, it was an inefficient way to hang someone anyhow. More often than not, the large American knot and the standard American five-foot drop resulted in a slow death through strangulation.
Pierrepoint used a variable drop and a simple slip knot located under the angle of the left jaw by a rubber claw washer. After the fall, the knot would finish under the chin and throw the head back, fracturing the spinal column, almost always between the second and third cervical vertebrae. Instant death, or so said the hangman.