‘I kept my promise,’ he said. ‘I got him.’
‘You got him,’ she repeated. ‘But not the other.’
He turned back to see that the vacant chair had been filled. Fabel, in his dream-dulled mind, felt an attenuated shock to see it wasn’t Hanna Dorn at all, but Maria Klee sitting there. Her face was gaunt and bloodless, her smile weak.
‘What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here,’ he protested. ‘These are all-’
‘I know, Jan… but I was invited.’ She was about to say something else when another hollow cheer rose from the assembled guests. The chef had entered carrying an impossibly enormous silver platter capped with a huge silver dome. The chef’s face was hidden, but he was massive, and his huge arms bulged. Nevertheless, it was only the eccentric physics of Fabel’s dream that allowed the chef to carry the dish.
Setting it down as the centrepiece of the table, the chef pulled the dome from the platter. As he did so, Fabel saw a flash of bright emerald eyes and knew that the cook was Vasyl Vitrenko. Maria screamed. Fabel thought he heard Ursula Kastner beside him say: ‘He is the other.’ Fabel gazed mesmerised at the revealed corpse of a young woman lying on her back on the platter, her chest ripped open and the white picket of her ribs prised open and exposed. Her lungs had been torn from the body cavity and thrown over her shoulders. The wings of the Blood Eagle. The ancient Viking sacrificial ritual that had been Vitrenko’s signature. Fabel, like Maria, was now screaming in terror but also found himself applauding with all the other guests. Maria turned to him.
‘I knew he would come,’ she said, suddenly halting her scream. ‘We’ve waited for him to come for so long. But I knew he’d want to say goodbye to you.’
Vitrenko walked around to where Maria was sitting. He held out his hand as if inviting her to dance. Fabel wanted to get up to protest, to defend Maria, but found that he had lost the power of movement. He watched helplessly as Vitrenko led Maria into a shadowy part of the hall. The woman next to Ursula Kastner was bending down and searching for something beneath the table. She sat up, frowning.
‘Lost something?’ asked Fabel. He recognised her as Ingrid Fischmann, the journalist who had been killed by a bomb the year before. She laughed and made a ‘silly me’ face.
‘My foot…’ she said. ‘I had it here a minute ago…’
Fabel woke up.
He lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He shifted his legs beneath the covers, just to prove that he could move. He heard Susanne breathing, slow and regular in her dreamless sleep. He heard the late-night sounds of Poseldorf. The occasional car. A group of people exchanging noisy farewells. He swung his legs round and sat up on the edge of the bed, moving slowly so as not to disturb Susanne. His feet brushed against something. He looked down and saw another pair of feet. Black-booted. Massive. He looked up and saw Vasyl Vitrenko standing before him, his emerald eyes sparkling in the dark.
‘Look what I found,’ said Vitrenko, and held out a woman’s dismembered foot.
Fabel woke up. He sat bolt upright, his face, chest and shoulders cold-damp with sweat. His heart pounded. It took him a moment to satisfy himself that this time he was truly awake. Susanne moaned and turned in the bed but did not waken.
He sat still for a long time but found that, when he laid his head back on the pillow, he couldn’t sleep. So many things now buzzed around his head that he could not pin down what was pushing sleep away from his tired brain. He left Susanne in bed, went through to the kitchen and made himself a cup of Friesian tea. He took his cup through to the living room and sat on the sofa.
He had known as soon as he had got out of bed that he was going to read the file. He had known it all evening but had pretended to himself that he could leave it alone. He picked it up. He started to read.
8.
Oliver loved this time of night. The quiet isolation. Cologne glittering against his picture window. He listened to the slightly melancholic jazz that oozed expensively from his Bang amp; Olufsen system. He leaned back into the soft Italian leather of his chair and sipped at his Scotch and soda, ice tinkling against crystal. It was at this time of night that he could fully contemplate his life: a successful life; a life worth the envy of others; a life expressed through the designer furniture and original art, the twenty-year-old malt and the expensive architecture encasing him. Oliver felt good in his own skin: he had no problems with who he was or what he was.
His feet rested on the coffee table and the notebook computer on his lap. He rubbed his eyes hard with the heels of his hands. Enough was enough: he had spent three hours on the Anthropophagi site. Time in another world. There had been several answers to his personal advertisement and he had replied to them all. But he had committed to nothing. There was no doubt that there were risks in what he was doing: he had always before indulged his little foible through prostitutes. To have a volunteer to submit to it willingly and without reward was something he had only recently considered. But he had hesitated to make any firm arrangements or even to take things onto the next level. Out there in the real world he could cover his tracks. He had never used the same escort agency twice, never the same hotel twice, never anything under his own name. Here on the Internet he had remained without flesh, as insubstantial as a ghost. But placing the ad had changed things. Ironically, here in a universe of codes where flesh was formed from high-resolution pixels, he had become more detectable. He had to tread more carefully.
But visiting the site had served its purpose. An hors d’oeuvre. An electronic appetiser to sharpen his hunger for the main course. The real thing.
Tomorrow night. He had arranged everything for Friday evening. Maybe this was an agency he could deal with again. After all, the company’s name seemed like a positive omen. What could be more fitting than an escort agency called A la Carte?
9.
What struck Fabel right away was that the file wasn’t just about murders that had already occurred: it was also about a murder that was expected. That was of course true of any suspected serial killer, but in this case the Cologne police were not just expecting another murder, they even had a pretty clear idea about the day when it would take place.
Cologne’s big thing was Karneval, the riotous celebration that took place before Lent every year. As a Protestant North German, Fabel found Karneval alien. He was aware of it, obviously, but he had never experienced it other than through the coverage he had seen on television. Even Cologne was a relatively unknown quantity to him: he had been there only a couple of times and never for very long. As he sank deeper into the case in the file, he found himself lost in an environment of unfamiliar landmarks. It struck him how difficult it would be for a unit such as the one proposed by van Heiden and Wagner to function effectively across the whole of Germany. One land, a score of different cultures. And if you considered East and West, two different histories.
Cologne’s Karneval was unique. Further south there were the more traditional forms of Fasching and Fastnacht. In Dusseldorf, Cologne’s great rival, or in Mainz, Karneval took a similar form but never quite matched the anarchic exuberance of the Cologne event. And Karneval in Cologne was much more than a date in the diary: it was part of the Cologne psyche. It defined what it meant to be to be a Cologner.
Fabel had already known about the case. Like all killings of their type, the two murders had all the ingredients of a good and lurid headline. The killer that the Cologne police were hunting struck only during Karneval. There had only been two victims: one the previous year, the first the year before that. But the investigating officer – Senior Commissar Benni Scholz – had recognised the modus of the killer as soon as he had arrived at the second murder scene. He had warned his superiors that another homicide could follow within the same Karneval season, fearing that the killer’s serial offending might escalate. There hadn’t been another murder, but Fabel agreed with the faceless Commissar behind the report that the killer would strike again. This year, during the coming Karneval.