Margaret Fabel shook her head, smiling reproachfully. ‘Sometimes, Jan, knowledge isn’t the answer to everything. That painting is what you think it is when you look at it. Not what its history makes it. That was another thing about you. You always had to know things. Find things out. You becoming a policeman isn’t really the great mystery you think it is.’
Fabel looked again at the painting. Not night, day. Not police, an armed militia. A few days ago he would have said that it had more to do with Breidenbach, the young MEK trooper, than with Fabel. But Breidenbach had died defining what it meant to be a policeman: placing himself in harm’s way to protect the ordinary citizen. They changed the subject and talked about Fabel’s brother Lex for a while, and how his restaurant on the island of Sylt was doing its best business for years. Then Fabel’s mother asked about Susanne.
‘She’s fine,’ said Fabel.
‘Is everything all right between you two?’
‘Why shouldn’t it be?’
‘I don’t know…’ She frowned. Fabel noticed the deepening creases in her brow. Age had crept up on his mother without him noticing. ‘It’s just that you don’t talk about Susanne so much these days. I do hope everything is all right. She’s a lovely person, Jan. You’re lucky to have found her.’
Fabel put his cup down. ‘Do you remember that case I was involved with last year? The one that took such a terrible toll on Maria Klee?’
Margaret Fabel nodded.
‘There was a terrorist connection to the case. I got involved in investigating anarchist and radical groups that had kind of faded into the background. Raking up the past, I suppose you’d call it.’
‘But what has this to do with Susanne?’
‘I was sent a file. Background information more than anything. One of the photographs was of a guy called Christian Wohlmut. It was taken about nineteen-ninety, when German domestic terrorism was on its last legs. Wohlmut wanted to breathe new life into it. He sent parcel and letter bombs to US interests in Germany. Amateur stuff and most were intercepted or failed to go off. But one was professional enough to maim a young secretarial worker in an American oil company’s office in Munich. That’s where Wohlmut was based. Munich. And that’s where Susanne studied.’
‘It’s a big city, Jan,’ said his mother. But her frown indicated that she was already ahead of him.
‘There was a girl in the photograph with Wohlmut. It was blurred and she was only ever described as “unknown female”.’
‘Susanne?’ Fabel’s mother put her cup back in the saucer. ‘No! You can’t believe that Susanne could ever have been involved with terrorism?’
Fabel shrugged and took another sip of tea. He had forgotten the sugar at the bottom and got a mouthful of nauseous sweetness. ‘I don’t know what her involvement with Wohlmut was. But I do know she’s very defensive, almost secretive, about her student days. And there was some guy in her past who she says was manipulative and domineering. It was I who suggested we should move in together… Susanne was wary at first because of some bad experience she’d had.’
‘And you think it was this terrorist, Wohlmut?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So what if it was? What does that matter now? If she didn’t actually do anything wrong – I mean, break the law?’
‘But that’s exactly it, Mutti… I’ll never know for sure that she wasn’t actively involved.’
‘You’re not seriously thinking about confronting her with this?’
‘She knows something’s wrong. She keeps on at me to find out what it is. Things aren’t so good between us and she knows I’m stalling over moving in together.’
‘Susanne works with the police, Jan. If her political views in the past were so radical, I don’t see her doing that.’
‘People change, Mutti.’
‘Then accept her for who she is now Jan. Unless…’
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless you are simply using this as an excuse for you to get out of the relationship.’
‘It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve got to know. I have to know what the truth is.’
‘Like I said, Jan,’ his mother smiled at him in the same way she had when he had been ‘such a serious little boy’ and she had sought to reassure him about something, ‘knowledge isn’t always the answer to everything.’
3.
The British had bombed Cologne to a pile of rubble. So much so that there had been a serious suggestion at the end of the war that the city shouldn’t be rebuilt. Just moved. But the cathedral had remained standing to remind everyone that this was Germany’s oldest city and deserved a new life. So they had rebuilt Cologne. Unfortunately, whole chunks of the city were brought back to an artificial and sterile form of life. Chorweiler was a perfect example of the kind of place architects and city planners at dinner parties would boast about creating, but would never themselves contemplate living in.
When Maria thought about Slavko and his countrymen, she couldn’t believe that they thought that Chorweiler, with its towering clumps of multi-storey apartment blocks, was really the end of the rainbow. Chorweiler lay to the far north of the city and Maria reckoned that Viktor would start his Saturday pick-up run here and work his way back toward the city centre. She was pretty sure she had worked out which of the high-rises contained Slavko’s flat and she parked the Saxo some distance down the street from the block and sat with the engine switched off.
Contrary to its depiction in American movies, surveillance from a car was not always the best way of keeping tabs on someone’s movements. Most of the time people would walk by a car and not notice anyone sitting in it, but once they did they would notice every time they passed. Maria was dressed in her grungy clothes and she had slumped slightly in the driver’s seat so that her head did not project above the headrest. Her main disadvantage was that she had no photograph of her surveillance target. She didn’t even have much of a description of Viktor from Slavko to go on. At about eleven-thirty an Audi pulled up and a big-built man of about forty went into the apartment building. Maria noted down the time and the make, model and licence number of the car. She had brought a small digital camera with a half-decent zoom, and she took a photograph of the man as he went into the building, then again as he came out with a younger man. Maria could tell that this was not her man and she didn’t follow the Audi when he drove off. She settled back down. The clothes she had bought were too big for her, but they were warm and comfortable. More importantly, the body she hated became lost in their bagginess.
It was about twenty past noon when Viktor pulled up. Maria was in no doubt that this was Viktor. He had ‘organised crime, lower echelons’ written all over him – his clothes, his car. It sometimes felt as if Vasyl Vitrenko and his lieutenants were spectres, without form. It had only been at the very end of a long and detailed investigation that Fabel and Maria had actually come face to face with Vitrenko, and then only for a few deadly minutes. It was through people like Viktor that the Vitrenko organisation had form and visibility. Conspicuous visibility as far as Viktor was concerned. He was a large man, over two metres in height. He wore a long black leather coat that strained to contain his massive shoulders and his hair was dyed bright blond. The vehicle he double-parked outside the apartment block was a vast 1960s American ocean liner of a car. Maria took several photographs and made her notes. She guessed that Viktor would not be in the apartment building long, so she turned the key in the ignition of her own car and readied herself.
As it happened, Viktor was in the building for nearly half an hour. A delivery van came along the street and could not pass Viktor’s Chrysler and the driver blasted his horn several times impatiently. When Viktor did eventually emerge, carrying a package bound in black plastic, the driver leaned from his cab window and berated the Ukrainian loudly. Viktor ignored him completely, walked round the Chrysler, opened the cavernous trunk and dropped the package in. Then, in the same unhurried manner, he walked over to the delivery van, wrenched the door open, pulled the driver from his cabin and head-butted him with such force that the back of the man’s head slammed into the side of the van and he slid unconscious onto the road. Viktor calmly took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood that had splashed on his face, walked back to the car and drove off to where the narrow residential street joined the main road, the Weichselring, that looped around Chorweiler like a restraining lasso.