‘Okay…’ he drawled when Marc was finished at last. ‘In that case, I’ve only one question for you.’
‘Which is?’
‘Got any left?’
‘Any what?’
‘Any of the stuff you’ve been taking.’
Stoya rose and signalled to a young uniformed cop who had just come in.
‘Look, I know it sounds absurd…’ Marc began, but the inspector raised his hand with an indulgent smile.
‘No, no, don’t worry, I hear this sort of thing every day.’
Marc got up too. ‘Please, can’t you send an officer to my place to check it out?’
The young cop was now standing just behind him, awaiting instructions. He smelt of warm sleep and cheap cologne. He’d probably been taking a nap in a broom cupboard and freshened himself up with aftershave.
‘I don’t have time for this nonsense, not now of all times.’
‘Okay, then at least check my identity. Then I’ll know if I’m really insane or the victim of a criminal offence.’
Stoya picked up his mug and walked to the door. ‘I’ve already done that.’
‘Done what?’
The young cop tried, overzealously, to hustle him towards the door. Marc could feel his warm breath on the back of his neck.
‘I checked your statement. My colleague here will attend to you from now on.’
Stoya opened the door to the passage. A babble of voices drifted into the room. ‘I have to save the lives of two children. Afraid I don’t have time for shoplifters.’
‘Shoplifters?’ Marc repeated in bewilderment. He shook off the young cop’s hand.
‘Chemists don’t like it when people fail to pay for their medication.’
‘No, that was a misunderstanding. I made a point of leaving the man my credit card.’
‘Which was invalid.’
‘But I’m not here about that, damn it!’
‘All right, I’ll give it to you straight: I know what medication you’re taking. The complainant says you asked for a psychiatric drug of the strongest possible kind.’
‘What?’ Marc’s hand went to his neck. ‘No, no, no. I needed something for a splinter in my neck. I’m not crazy.’
‘The splinter you acquired in a car crash?’
‘Yes.’
‘A car crash that killed your wife?’
Marc groaned aloud.
‘Who now refuses to let you into your flat?’
Marc fell silent. They’d come to the end of the conversation he’d previously conducted with himself.
‘And you’re telling me you aren’t crazy?’ Stoya nodded to his colleague and strode off without a backward glance.
‘Okay, let’s go.’
This time Marc didn’t have the energy to shake off the young cop’s hand as he was steered along the passage – away from the senior officers’ ground-floor offices and upstairs to the rooms he had so often seen from the inside as a youth.
He bowed his head, wondering where else the billows of insanity would wash him up tonight, now that they had already swept away his car, his pills, his personal contacts and his money. He had even forfeited the trust of the police. He longed for a trapdoor to open and swallow him up – send him plummeting down, away from this unreal reality and into a black hole of oblivion.
But that happened only in dreams. In cruel actuality there were no secret passages to a better world, no heavensent rope ladders to a tree-house in which you could hide from the devil and come to rest. Miracles didn’t happen in the harsh, neon-lit reality of a big-city police station.
Or did they?
Just as he had a few hours ago, when staring into the crater of the building site, Marc couldn’t believe his eyes as he was shepherded through the reception area.
How was it possible?
He had told no one where he wanted to go, yet barring his path was the one person he’d longed to have at his side here and now, in this hopeless situation.
28
Before his first encounter with Constantin at the Senner family home, Sandra had warned him against the impulse to salute which her father evoked in most of his fellow men. ‘He walks into a room, and 50 per cent of those present stop talking. The other 50 per cent resist an urge to jump up and break into spontaneous applause.’
She’d had to shout those few words, which characterized Constantin so aptly, to make herself heard above the rock music blaring from the car radio. She was eighteen, exactly seven months older than Marc, and already in possession of a driving licence.
His memories of that sweltering summer’s day were shrouded in a pale-blue haze but as vivid as if he’d had to memorize every detail for an exam. It was the day on which she proposed to introduce him to her parents for the first time. Him, a good-for-nothing youth whom she’d met at a New Romantics concert in Zehlendorf. Marc would never normally have strayed into such an upmarket district, but the school authorities had instituted a competition for best band, and one of the venues was the assembly hall of Sandra’s Westend high school. They’d all thought at first that the blond, pony-tailed girl in trainers was making fun of him, but after the concert she’d left her place in the front row and gone backstage to talk shop with him. She not only knew all the bands they imitated, she even went to their concerts and listened to heavier music than Marc himself. What he found far more surprising was her boyish behaviour. She drank beer from the bottle, belched after taking a long swig and borrowed his Labello heedless of the risk of infection, although he couldn’t detect any cold sores on her lips.
They ended up arranging to meet the following weekend at the Koma, a heavy-metal disco in Reinickendorf. Although Marc didn’t believe the ‘Westend dolly bird’ would really turn up, he bought fifty Labellos in every available flavour just in case – just to see the look on her face if she asked to borrow a lipsalve again and he produced his assortment all at once. It didn’t come to that because he’d forgotten about the body search at the door. The Koma’s tattooed bouncer looked nauseated as he fished one ‘lipstick’ after another out of Marc’s jacket pockets. He eventually – and disgustedly – let ‘the little queer’ in, but without his Labellos.
Marc did get his first kiss, but not until much later. Sandra kept him dangling for so long he was worried she had another secret admirer. But then, from one day to the next, she seized the initiative and, on his birthday, ‘had it off’ with him – as she put it, smirking – in his parents’ bedroom.
‘Your father’s going to loathe me,’ he prophesied three months later during the drive to Sandra’s family home in Sakrow. ‘One look at the knot and he’ll know I never wear a tie. One question and he’ll discover why he’s never met my dad at a Bar Association balclass="underline" because he only represents petty criminals and antisocial elements, not stockbrokers or surgeons. And-’
‘-and he’ll shave your nuts with a Bunsen burner if he finds out you’ve been banging Daddy’s little darling for the last month,’ Sandra amplified, flashing him a saucy grin that exposed her anterior molars. So saying, she yanked at the handbrake and jumped out of the car in her bare feet. That was just what Marc had fallen in love with: the antithesis between her angelic face and upper-class background and the bawdy remarks which, coming from her, sounded so enchanting.
‘I wouldn’t put it past you to tell him.’
‘I won’t have to,’ she retorted with a laugh. ‘He’s like you: a very perceptive person. He’ll sense what we were up to in the shower half an hour ago.’
Back then, as they strolled hand in hand up the neatly raked gravel drive, he could never have imagined that Sandra’s father would one day loom so large in his life. There had certainly been no indication of it after their first chilly encounter that summer evening.
‘How did you find me?’ Marc asked, looking around for the first time. The ground plan of the police station reminded him of a modern polytechnic. They were standing in a low-ceilinged entrance hall flanked by two massive staircases that led to the upper floors, though these harboured more offices, interview rooms and a number of spacious assembly areas, not classrooms.