It was midday now. She had worked at the bathroom all morning. Once more the porcelain shone sterile and cold; the gleam had been restored to the floor. Herr Hauser now lay in the bath. Kristina had fought Chaos with Method. She had refused to let her terror blind her and she had shaped a strategy for restoring the bathroom to order.
She had begun by hoisting Herr Hauser into the bath, to contain the mess in one area. As she had struggled with him, his exposed skull, cold and clammy with blood and ribbons of remaining tissue, had pressed against her cheek. Kristina had had to run to the toilet bowl to vomit, had taken a few moments to recompose herself, and then had returned to her task. She had stripped Herr Hauser and placed his blood-soaked garments into a plastic bin bag. Then she had taken the shower head down from its cradle and rinsed the blood from him by hand. She had placed a second black plastic bin bag over his head and neck, binding it tight with some parcel tape which she’d found in one of Herr Hauser’s drawers, and had sealed the bag around his shoulders. Then she had carefully removed the shower curtain from its rail and wrapped Herr Hauser’s body in it, again taking some parcel tape and binding the improvised shroud tight.
Kristina had once more been faced with lifting Hauser’s dead weight. She had lugged the body out of the bath and had laid it on the clean floor, and had then set about sanitising the bath. Herr Hauser had always insisted that Kristina use environmentally friendly cleaning materials: vinegar to clean the toilet, that kind of thing. It had made Kristina’s job that much harder, but she hadn’t minded. She loved scrubbing, scouring and polishing. But this task was too much. She had used bleach on the bath, toilet and sink and had washed the floor and wall tiles with a bleach solution. Then she had gone over every surface with an antibacterial spray.
Now she was done. She had not defeated Chaos. She knew this. She had merely deflected it. She had been here the whole morning: it meant that she had let down the other customer who was scheduled in her diary for before lunch on Fridays. It would not even have been so bad if she had only been late for them: she simply hadn’t turned up. It would have a domino effect on an entire day’s clients – then tomorrow’s, and then a whole week’s. A reputation for punctuality and reliability that it had taken four years to build up was gone in four hours. Her cellphone had started to ring just after her next appointment was due and Kristina had been forced to switch it off so that she could concentrate on her task.
Kristina surveyed the bathroom. At least here order had been restored. With the exception of the carefully polythene-shrouded Herr Hauser, who lay untidily on the floor by the tub, the bathroom looked cleaner and shone brighter than ever.
She leaned back against the wall, a cleaning cloth hanging in her rubber-gloved hand, and allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction. It was then that she became aware of someone standing behind her in the bathroom doorway. She turned suddenly and they both gave a start. A tall, slim, dark-haired young man with delicate features and large bewildered blue eyes stared at Kristina, then saw the shower-curtain mummy by the bath. His face blanched grey-white and he made a startled noise before turning and running down the hall towards the door.
Kristina gazed blankly at the now empty doorway for a moment before turning back to the bathroom.
There was a corner she had perhaps missed.
Noon: HafenCity site, by the Speicherstadt, Hamburg
If there was any landscape that defined the city of Hamburg for Fabel, it was this one.
As he drove down Mattenwiete and across the Holzbrucke bridge towards the Elbe, the horizon opened up ahead of him and the elaborate spires and gables of the Speicherstadt pierced a stretched silk sky of unbroken blue.
Speicherstadt means ‘Warehouse City’ and that was exactly what it was: towering ornate red-brick warehouses, row after row, interlaced with cobbled streets and canals, dominating the city’s waterfront. These beautiful nineteenth-century buildings had been the lungs that had breathed life into Hamburg commerce.
For Fabel, there was something about the architecture of the Speicherstadt that summed up his adopted city for him. The architecture was ornate and confident, but always practical and restrained. It was how Germany’s richest city and its people displayed wealth and success: clearly, but with decorum. The Speicherstadt was also a symbol of Hamburg’s independence and its special status as a city-state within Germany. An independence that had, at various times in Hamburg’s history, been more than a little precarious. The statues of Hammonia and Europa, the personifications of Hamburg and Europe as goddesses, stood guard on the stanchions of Brooksbrucke bridge and looked down on Fabel as he crossed into the Speicherstadt.
Until recently the Speicherstadt had been the world’s biggest bonded area, with customs posts at every point of entry. Fabel passed the old customs office to his right, which had found a new life as a trendy coffee shop. Across from the coffee shop, on the other side of the cobbled Kehrwieder Brook, the first warehouse in the Speicherstadt had also found a new role: a snaking queue of tourists and locals were waiting to be admitted to the ‘Hamburg Dungeon’, an idea that Hamburg, along with many other ideas, had imported from Britain. Fabel could never understand the need that others felt to be made afraid, to experience ersatz horrors, when he felt he had had a bellyful of the real thing.
Fabel turned left into Kehrwieder Brook before taking Kibbelsteg, which dissected the Speicherstadt in a straight, unbroken line, and the vast brick warehouses on either side, trimmed and capped with ornate verdigris-tinged bronze, glowed red in the midday sun. Here all kinds of real trades were still carried out. Cradles, suspended from the jutting winches at the tops of the warehouses, hoisted up deep stacks of oriental carpets and, as he passed the Kaffeerosterei, the warm air filled with the Speicherstadt’s trade-mark smell, the rich odour from the coffee roasters preparing the beans for storage.
Fabel drove on and eventually the nineteenth century surrendered to the twenty-first, as he passed under an arching forest of perpetually moving cranes that marked Germany’s biggest building site. Hamburg’s HafenCity.
Hamburg had always been a city of opportunists: of traders and entrepreneurs. The city’s fiercely independent character was founded on its ability to look beyond its own horizons and connect with the wider world. In the Middle Ages, Hamburg’s politicians had always been merchants, businessmen. And, invariably, they would put trade before politics. Nothing had changed.
The HafenCity was a big idea, just as the Speicherstadt had been before it. A bold vision. It would take up to twenty years to complete. One row at a time, the new cathedrals of commerce, all steel and glass and youthful energy, were taking their serried places behind the old: the stately red-brick warehouses of the Speicherstadt. Two visions, born in separate centuries, fused by the heat of the same ambition: to make Hamburg Europe’s leading trading port. The HafenCity was being completed in planned stages. A row of buildings would be built all at the one time, combining luxury apartments with sleek, electronic-age office blocks; once complete, the next row would be started. Yet as high-speed internet connections were plumbed into each shining new building, the smell of the roasting coffee beans would drift in, reminding the brave new twenty-first century world that the old Speicherstadt was still very much part of the city’s life.
Hamburg liked to share its vision of the future, and a thirteen-metre-high observation platform, in the shape of an elevated ship’s bridge, and with the name, in English, HafenCity VIEWPOINT emblazoned against its terracotta-coloured flank, had been erected down by the edge of the Elbe. The viewing platform allowed visitors a 360-degree vista of the future. In one direction they could see where the new Opera House was to be built, its high-tech roof billowing like waves or sails, on top of the old Kaispeicher A storage quay. In the other, their view would arc around and past the new luxury-liner terminal to where the Elbe took a sweep and was spanned by the arched ironwork bridges that connected Hamburg to Harburg. All around the viewing tower the land had been cleared and levelled and lay naked, awaiting its shining new vestments.