‘The world’s intelligence services are interested in our findings, I fully admit. From now on, there’ll be no need to eliminate agents who threaten to defect to the enemy, taking all their knowledge with them. We’ll simply erase the vital information from their minds.’
‘Is that why you’re rolling in money, because you’re funded by the military?’
‘It’s a billion-dollar business, I grant you, and of unparalleled importance to the immediate future. But the pharmaceutical industry has always been like that. It may make a few people wealthy, but it also makes a lot of people healthy or even happy.’
Bleibtreu stared at Marc with the piercing intensity of an interrogator. ‘We’re still at the very beginning, Marc. We’re pioneers – that’s why we’re looking for people like you. Guinea pigs who have had to cope with traumata as severe as yours.’
Marc swallowed hard. He was feeling just as he had six weeks ago, when his father-in-law brought the terrible news to his bedside.
‘She didn’t make it, Luke…’
‘Just think,’ Bleibtreu told him. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if you could wake up in the mornings without your first thought being of your dead wife? Of the baby that never saw the light? You wouldn’t feel guilty any more because you wouldn’t know you’d driven the car into a tree. You’d be able to go back to work, socialize with friends and laugh your head off at some comedy film because the splinter in your neck wouldn’t be a perpetual reminder that you escaped with a scratch whereas Sandra was hurled though the windscreen and bled to death at the crash scene.’
Marc ostentatiously unbuckled his seatbelt and reached for the door handle.
‘Kindly let me out.’
‘But Marc…’
‘At once!’
Very gently, Bleibtreu put a hand on his knee. ‘I wasn’t being deliberately provocative. I was merely repeating what you yourself wrote in your email to us.’
‘I was at the end of my tether.’
‘You still are. I heard you at the swimming pool. You said you were contemplating suicide.’
Bleibtreu removed his hand, but Marc could still feel its weight on his knee.
‘I can offer you something better.’
The glasses clinked again, like a couple of ghosts derisively toasting each other. Marc noticed only now that his back was wet with sweat despite the pleasant temperature in the car’s air-conditioned interior. Nervously, he fingered the dressing on his neck. This time he left his hand on the plaster over the itching wound.
‘Speaking purely hypothetically,’ he said in a hoarse voice, ‘this experiment of yours – what form would it take?’
6
Eddy Valka’s shop smelt of cat’s piss and roses. Not an unusual combination to anyone reasonably well-acquainted with him. All that surprised Benny was that Valka had wanted to see him so soon. He’d only been out two days, and the ultimatum didn’t expire until next week.
‘What is this, a proposal of marriage?’ He laughed and rubbed his left shoulder, which those two knuckleheads had almost dislocated when throwing him into the boot. He’d have got in of his own free will. You didn’t object when Valka wanted a word with you. Not for long, anyway.
Valka threw him a quick glance, then redevoted himself to the long-stemmed roses lying on the counter in front of him. Picking them up one by one, he assessed their length, trimmed them with secateurs and inserted them in a galvanized bucket.
‘You’ll have to ask my parents’ permission first.’
‘Your parents are dead,’ Valka said in an expressionless voice, decapitating another rose. He evidently disliked its colour. ‘Did you know that cut flowers should be dunked in boiling water when they droop?’ He clicked the secateurs warningly at a Blue Chartreuse that was preparing to jump up on the counter.
‘Head first or stem first?’ Benny quipped.
He watched the cat scamper off to join its siblings under a radiator. Nobody knew why Valka put up with them. He didn’t like animals. He didn’t like any living creatures, if the truth be told. He had opened the florist’s only because he could hardly declare his true sources of income to the tax inspector. And also because he didn’t want his tame rose-sellers – the poor devils who hawked their wares around the city’s bars and pubs at night – to buy their stuff elsewhere. If Valka controlled a business, he controlled it a hundred per cent.
Benny looked around for somewhere to park himself, but the stuffy little shop wasn’t equipped to accommodate waiting customers. In fact, it didn’t seem interested in attracting customers at all, being far too remote from Köpenick’s main shopping streets and bang next door to a boxing gym whose burly habitués weren’t exactly a florist’s preferred clientele.
‘Great name, by the way,’ said Benny, glancing at the grimy shop window, on which a semi-circle of self-adhesive letters spelt out the word ROSENKRIEG – ‘Rose War’ – in mirror writing. ‘Very apt.’
Valka gave a gratified nod. ‘You’re the first person to notice.’
His was a Czech surname meaning ‘war’. As the uncrowned king of East Berlin’s nightclub-bouncer fraternity, Eddy Valka was inordinately proud of it. He wiped his hands on a green rubber apron and looked Benny in the eye for the first time.
‘You’re looking better than you used to. Not as flabby. Been working out?’
Benny nodded.
‘Well, I’m damned, that funny farm seems to have done you good. How come they let you out so soon?’
‘They reassess you every couple of months. It’s regulations.’
‘I see.’
Valka extracted an exceptionally long-stemmed rose from the bucket and sniffed it appreciatively.
‘So the shrinks thought you’d ceased to be a danger to the public?’
‘Yes, once my beloved brother had finally withdrawn his statement.’ Benny fingered the frond of a yucca palm beside him. ‘They released me after that.’
‘They could always have consulted me,’ said Valka.
Benny couldn’t help grinning. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure you’d make a trustworthy sponsor in the eyes of the law.’
The corners of Valka’s mouth turned down. He looked affronted. ‘Nobody’s better qualified than me to testify that you wouldn’t hurt a fly. How long have we known each other?’
‘Getting on for twenty years,’ Benny replied, wondering when Valka would get to the point. This meeting had to be more than just a chat about old times.
‘Christ, my current girlfriend wasn’t even born then.’ Valka’s smile went out like a light. ‘We didn’t want you in with us to start with, Benny. You were just too soft.’
Another rose lost its head.
‘And that’s precisely what I’d have told the shrinks who locked you up. I’d have told them that my former associate is an HSP.’
Benny smiled. It was very rare for someone to know the technical term for his disorder. But Eddy Valka was one of those people who you couldn’t judge by appearances. His bulldog features, bullet head and crooked teeth made him look like the archetypal roughneck. In reality, he had graduated from school and had even studied psychology for four terms before discovering that he wanted to be the cause of his fellow men’s nightmares, not the solution to them.
‘Who told you that?’ Benny asked.
‘Well, I often wondered what was wrong with you. Why you were so different from your brother, who never ducked a fight.’
Valka tugged at a jammed drawer beneath the counter and opened it with difficulty.
‘I mean, I never saw you with a girl, so I thought you were gay or something. But then I came across this.’
He produced a newspaper article. ‘HSP,’ he read aloud. ‘Highly Sensitive Person. Generally described as someone suffering from a pathological hypersensitive disorder. Such individuals are considerably more sensitive to their environment than normal test subjects. They sense, feel, see, taste and smell everything far more intensely.’