Radio oracle…
The very words triggered a host of old memories as numerous as the snowflakes that were once more whirling into the car. If he remembered rightly, the last time they’d played it was the night they dumped their father’s car in the flooded gravel pit.
‘Shall I?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Benny called back. He coughed. It might also have been a laugh; Marc couldn’t tell. They were just turning into Heerstrasse.
‘Okay, the question is: “Dear radio oracle, how will everything turn out today?”’
Marc slowed to 50 kph and turned on the radio at random.
A commercial.
‘We don’t have time. Skip it!’
Marc pressed the search button. They landed on some instrumental jazz, then on a classical programme. After that came talking or news broadcasts. They didn’t succeed until the seventh attempt.
‘I know, I know what’s on your mind,’ sang a strikingly high-pitched male voice. ‘And I know it gets tough sometimes.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Benny.
Marc glanced over his shoulder. ‘Know who it is?’
Benny didn’t open his eyes. He shrugged apologetically, the cuts and bruises on his swollen face conveying some idea of the pain he was in.
‘Do you?’ he asked almost inaudibly.
They came to a bridge over the Havel. The tyres skidded on the icy surface, and Marc slowed down, although everything inside him was urging him to head as fast as possible for the hospital, where Benny could be attended to.
And where Sandra was just giving birth to their child?
He almost welcomed this opportunity to occupy his mind with this puerile game. It meant he didn’t have to reflect on the fact that he was on his way to see his late wife giving birth to their child.
‘I’ll think of it in a minute,’ he said as the refrain began.
‘’Cause it’s all right, I think we’re going to make it.’
He dried his face on his sleeve. His skin, his lips, even his tongue seemed to have gone on strike. Not long to go now, though. He could vaguely discern the high-rise building in the distance.
The Senner Clinic marked the boundary between Spandau and Charlottenburg. Most of the buildings in the complex were at most two or three storeys high and almost hidden from Heerstrasse by a dense belt of trees. But the new fourteen-storey hospital block, which also housed a hotel for convalescents and patients’ families, jutted into the sky like a phallus and served as a guide to drivers on their way to open-air concerts in the woods. Here, at the latest, was where they had to turn on their indicators.
‘I think it might just work out this time.’
‘Hear that? Everything’s fine. We’re going to make it.’
All right.
Marc knew it was a silly, irrational, childish superstition but he couldn’t help feeling heartened by the radio oracle’s prediction.
They left Heerstrasse and turned down a private approach road. Notice boards warned drivers to proceed at a walking pace. The outside lights were on already.
‘Okay, but what’s the singer’s name?’ Benny was coughing again, and this time it didn’t sound like laughter.
Had Valka shot him after all?
Fear for his brother dispelled his irrational euphoria.
‘I don’t know,’ Marc said quietly. The road narrowed and came out in a visitors’ car park.
‘Shit, you know what that means.’
Marc nodded mutely. Of course he knew the rules; he’d invented them himself over twenty years ago. The radio oracle didn’t count unless you knew the singer’s name. If you didn’t it brought bad luck.
‘Yes, it’s a bad omen, but I’ll think of it in a minute.’
Criss, Christoph, Chris Jones, Christopher…
It was on the tip of his tongue when a mobile phone beeped in the footwell. He looked down in surprise. ‘Hey, somebody wants you.’
The Nokia’s display was flashing. He bent down and picked it up. A sealed envelope was indicating the receipt of a text message.
‘It fell out of my pocket earlier on,’ said Benny.
Marc gave a start. Then every muscle in his body tensed.
‘What is it?’ Benny asked, but Marc was staring at the phone, transfixed.
It can’t be true. Not this on top of everything else…
Benny had activated the preview function, so Marc had two seconds to read the sender’s name and message:
Where are you, Benny?
Hurry, it’s almost time.
We can’t start without Marc!
Constantin
Marc stared aghast at the rear-view mirror, which dealt him his next shock. All he saw at first was Benny’s hand reaching for the grab handle. Then his face came into view.
Benny made a sudden lunge for the passenger seat, but Marc was too quick for him. He braked hard and the pistol fell to the floor. The car spun round ninety degrees, slithered another half-metre, and came to rest just short of a stop sign.
Reaching down, Marc retrieved the automatic and put the muzzle to his brother’s blood-stained forehead.
65
‘Keep away from me!’ Marc yelled. He almost lost his footing on the icy ground as he got out of the car in his rubber-soled trainers. ‘Stay where you are, you two-timing bastard!’
There was a stench of petrol and the little car’s radiator fan was humming like that of a clogged vacuum cleaner. Marc gave up holding his brother at bay and stumbled up the driveway as fast as he could. It ended in front of a plain, flat-roofed building with two ambulances parked outside. Unlike Bleibtreu’s establishment, the Senner Clinic did not spend its private patients’ money on fancy architecture or interior decoration. Constantin invested it in ultra-modern equipment and well-trained staff, so the entrance differed little at first sight from that of a public hospitaclass="underline" an aluminium reception desk, a kiosk with the obligatory newspaper racks and bookstall, a big noticeboard beside the lifts and, in the background, the entrance to the visitors’ cafeteria.
Where to now? Where should I go?
Turning round, Marc bumped into an empty wheelchair left there by a young male nurse, who was chatting with the commissionaire. He only saved himself from falling over by grabbing the reception desk.
‘Where is he?’ he shouted, brandishing the automatic. The nurse turned pale and shrank back, hugging his clipboard. A commotion broke out behind Marc. He heard shouts, hurried footsteps, raised voices. Doors banged and cold air streamed in from outside, but none of this was happening in his world.
‘Constantin Senner – where’s he hiding?’
The commissionaire, a thickset man with bloodshot eyes and a triple chin, threw up his arms and trundled his swivel chair swiftly backwards as if he could lessen the impact of a bullet if only he put enough distance between himself and this demented gunman. He opened his mouth, trembling, but couldn’t get a word out. He was as silent as the hospital’s endless-loop publicity film, which was running ad infinitum on a plasma screen just above their heads.
‘Where?!’
‘In theatre,’ the commissionaire croaked eventually. He mopped his moist forehead with the sleeve of his cheap blue uniform. ‘Number 3, third floor.’
‘Okay, now call the police, understand? Until then, I won’t… Hey, what’s that?’
Marc broke off and looked up – at his father-in-law. The promotional video depicted Constantin showing a prospective patient’s family around the hospital. He was convincing the happy group – and, by proxy, the viewer – of the advantages of private treatment.
Marc blinked nervously.
The young wife and laughing child were complete strangers to him. Not so the actors playing the husband and grandfather. The latter, who was just admiring an operating theatre, had introduced himself to Marc as Professor Bleibtreu, and the former liked to be shackled to iron bedsteads in cellars. The video suddenly showed a sturdy male orderly pushing a grey-haired patient into the cafeteria in a wheelchair. It wasn’t the first time Marc had seen either man. The one in the wheelchair had passed him a message from his late wife in the guise of a tramp. As for the lanky orderly, his face had seemed familiar to Marc last night, when he refused to let him into ‘The Beach’. He probably knew the actor from other television commercials.